Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature 2014036278, 9781138792456, 9781315762067

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Queer Victorian Families: An Introduction
PART I: Queervolutions
1 The “Queer-Looking Party” Challenge to Family in Alice
2 Esther Summerson’s Estate: The Queer, Quasi-Monarchical Line of Beauty, Family, and Inheritance in Bleak House
3 Michael Field’s Dramatically Queer Family Dynamics
4 William Sharp’s Neo-Paganism: Queer Identity and the National Family
PART II: Queer Actually
5 A “Strange Family Story”: Count Fosco, His Animal Children, and the “Safe” Patriarch in Wilkie Collins’s: The Woman in White
6 “The right and natural law of things”: Disability and the Form of the Family in the Fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge
7 Two Girls in Love: Romantic Friendship and the Queer Family in Elizabeth Anna Hart’s: The Runaway
PART III: Queer Connections
8 Reading on the Contrary: Cousin Marriage, Mansfield Park, and Wuthering Heights
9 The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville
10 The Victorian Family in Queer Time: Secrets, Sisters, and Lovers in The Woman in White and Fingersmith
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Queer Victorian Families

The Victorians elevated the home and heteronormative family life to an almost secular religion. Yet alongside the middle-class domestic ideal were other families, many of which existed in the literature of the time. Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature is chiefly concerned with these atypical or “queer” families. This collection serves as a corrective against limited definitions of family and is a timely addition to Victorian studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection opens up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. Broad in scope, subjects range from Count Fosco and his animal “children” in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White to male kinship within and across Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and the nexus between disability and loving relationships in the fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge. Queer ­Victorian Families is a wide-ranging and theoretically adventurous exposé of the ­curious ­relations in the literary family tree. Duc Dau is an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellow in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. She is the author of Touching God: Hopkins and Love. Shale Preston is an Honorary Research Fellow in the English Department at Macquarie University, Australia. She is the author of Dickens and the Despised Mother: A Critical Reading of Three Autobiographical Novels.

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature

  1 Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion ‘Our Feverish Contact’ Allan Conrad Christensen

  9 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels Eye of the Ichthyosaur John Glendening

  2 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy Jean Fernandez

10 Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-Century Culture Edited by Katharina Boehm, Anna Farkas, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein

  3 Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry F. Elizabeth Gray   4 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era Lara Baker Whelan   5 Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road American Mobilities Susan L. Roberson   6 Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home Caroline Hellman

11 A Female Poetics of Empire From Eliot to Woolf Julia Kuehn 12 Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture Immersions and Revisitations Edited by Nadine BoehmSchnitker and Susanne Gruss 13 Dickens’ Novels as Poetry Allegory and Literature of the City Jeremy Tambling

  7 The Textual Condition of Nineteenth-Century Literature Josephine Guy and Ian Small

14 Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family Monica Flegel

  8 Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction Novel Ethics Rachel Hollander

15 Queer Victorian Families Curious Relations in Literature Edited by Duc Dau and Shale Preston

Queer Victorian Families Curious Relations in Literature

Edited by Duc Dau and Shale Preston

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Queer Victorian families : curious relations in literature / edited by Duc Dau and Shale Preston. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in nineteenth century literature ; 15) Includes index. 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Families in literature. I. Dau, Duc, editor. II. Preston, Shale, 1965- editor. PR468.F34Q44 2015 820.9’355—dc23 2014036278 ISBN: 978-1-138-79245-6(hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-76206-7(ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Foreword

vii

C l au d i a N e lson



Acknowledgments

xi

Queer Victorian Families: An Introduction

1

D u c Dau an d Sh al e P re sto n

Part I Queervolutions

17

  1 The “Queer-Looking Party” Challenge to Family in Alice

19

L au r a W h i t e

  2 Esther Summerson’s Estate: The Queer, Quasi-Monarchical Line of Beauty, Family, and Inheritance in Bleak House

36

S h a l e P r e s ton

  3 Michael Field’s Dramatically Queer Family Dynamics

57

T r ac y O lve r so n

  4 William Sharp’s Neo-Paganism: Queer Identity and the National Family

77

M i ch a e l S h aw

Part II Queer Actually

97

  5 A “Strange Family Story”: Count Fosco, His Animal Children, and the “Safe” Patriarch in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

99

M o n i ca F l e ge l

vi Contents

  6 “The right and natural law of things”: Disability and the Form of the Family in the Fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge

116

C lare Wal k er Gore

  7 Two Girls in Love: Romantic Friendship and the Queer Family in Elizabeth Anna Hart’s The Runaway

134

E llen B rin k s

Part III Queer Connections

155

  8 Reading on the Contrary: Cousin Marriage, Mansfield Park, and Wuthering Heights

157

Talia S chaffer

  9 The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville

176

A lec M ag net

10 The Victorian Family in Queer Time: Secrets, Sisters, and Lovers in The Woman in White and Fingersmith

195

L au ren N . H offer and Sarah E . Kersh

Contributors Index

211 215

Foreword Claudia Nelson

As Duc Dau and Shale Preston note in their introduction to this volume, understandings of family underwent significant change over the course of the Victorian period. Since that time, scholars’ understandings of the Victorian family have also evolved in important ways. Queer Victorian Families forms part of a cluster of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century examinations of Victorian domesticity characterized by their expansive definitions of family as extending well beyond the nuclear and the biological. The histories in this group of texts also challenge the popular stereotype of Victorian families as more rigidly conceived and conventional than their counterparts today. Scholarship on the Victorian family did not originate in the 1970s, but it burgeoned during that decade, with work such as Jeanne Peterson’s 1970 examination of the Victorian governess as a figure uneasily combining f­amily and non-family roles and Anthony Wohl’s 1978 investigation of workingclass incest focusing on the complexity of the nineteenth-century family. As the social historians of the 1970s pointed out, except among the very poor, Victorian domestic life typically included not only kin but also servants (who, Leonore Davidoff observed in a 1974 article, resembled children and wives in being legally “under the protection and wing of the Master” [406]), and employees such as nurses, tutors, governesses, and paid companions might be performing duties that in other families were arrogated to blood relatives. Moreover, among all classes, the way in which family life was conducted could challenge as well as reinforce propriety. Family-queering topics including incest, domestic violence, baby farming, marital breakdowns, and prostitution often constituted subjects for academic investigation by Victorianists during this decade. Similarly, in the 1980s and 1990s, titles including Steven Ruggles’s Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-­Century England and America (1987) and Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink, and Katherine Holden’s collection The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy (1998) directed attention to the capaciousness of Victorian family structures and to the ways in which family might be constructed, whether legally or extralegally; subsequent work on nineteenth-century adoption and fosterage has furthered this line of inquiry. Later titles such as

 Claudia Nelson Ginger Frost’s Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England (1995), which examines breach of promise cases, and Elizabeth Foyster’s Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660-1857 (2005), highlighted the family’s potential fragility and impermanence. All these titles, together with others too numerous to mention here, form part of a trajectory of scholarship that arguably has been queering Victorian relations for decades. Moreover, as the contributors to this volume so effectively observe, the queering of the Victorian family is a project begun by the Victorians themselves. We may see Victorian representations of family as exploring the tensions between two poles. On the one hand, we have the ideal enshrined by countless nineteenth-century writers and painters but perhaps particularly associated with John Ruskin’s queen in her garden and Coventry Patmore’s angel in her house. This is the stereotype of the happy, stable middle-class home comprised by a prosperous married couple surrounded by their loving children. Servants, if present, hover invisibly in the background, facilitating a comfortable domestic life and relinquishing family ties of their own that might compete with their employers’ interests. Sexual relationships are monogamous and sanctified by the church, the mother serves as the moral center of the household, and the father, an upright and honorable man, has no difficulty providing for his dependents. On the other hand, we have any number of alternative possibilities. Victorian commentators obsessively chronicled the latter, coming up with countless variations that exposed the stereotype as inadequate and vulnerable. Famous queerings of the Victorian family include Charlotte Brontë’s Mr Rochester, who seeks to contract a bigamous marriage with the governess of his ward – or more probably of his illegitimate daughter – a union that compromises both marriage law and status boundaries. They include Christina Rossetti’s Laura and Lizzie, sisters who share not only their home but their bed; after one saves the other from the moral and physical threat presented by a turbulent horde of monstrous and sexualized male creatures, the reader is offered a moral that places sisterhood above all other ties. They include upbeat narratives in which conventional ways of forming families are replaced by alternative modes, and they include anxious narratives about prostitution, venereal disease, homelessness, desertion, incest, violence, and much more besides. All these texts dramatize the gaps perceived by many Victorians not merely between “what ought to be and what was,” to quote the title of a 1974 article by Carl Degler, but, in a more positive light, also between convention and possibility. The chapters in Queer Victorian Families focus predominantly on texts that take this more hopeful approach. In this way, they illustrate the mode dominant in current scholarship – but they also advance this scholarship. The insightful investigations contained in this volume encompass a wide variety of topics: cousin marriage as illuminating a particular understanding of marriage and selfhood; the Alice books as radical attack on ­Victorian

Foreword ix ideas of family; alternative families as a commonplace of Victorian fiction and, as the example of “Michael Field” demonstrates, of Victorian practice; Count Fosco’s queer parenting of his animal children; Scottish neo-­ Paganism as styling a “national family” that challenged rigid gender roles; and sexual dissidence in Bleak House, In Memoriam, Moby-Dick, The Woman in White, and Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian novel Fingersmith. The excellent textual readings that abound in this volume are grounded in a thorough knowledge of the period and help to demonstrate the continued value of queer family scholarship today. I am happy to have been among the first readers of this fine collection. Claudia Nelson Department of English, Texas A&M University Works Cited Davidoff, Leonore. “Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England.” Journal of Social History 7.4 (1974): 406–28. Degler, Carl N. “What Ought To Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the ­Nineteenth Century.” American Historical Review 79.5 (1974): 1467–90.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Claudia Nelson and Talia Schaffer for their sage advice, warm encouragement, and for being such a joy to work with. We are also delighted with the exciting contributions made by the authors to this collection. We are pleased that this collection has found a publisher in Routledge. We extend our thanks in particular to editors Nancy Chen, Joshua Wells, and Emily Ross. We would also like to acknowledge the cogent and helpful input of the four anonymous reviewers of the original book proposal. Duc would like to thank Shale Preston for conceiving the idea of the collection and for sharing in the first-time joys and pangs of bringing a collection into the world. She is grateful to colleagues with whom she has discussed this project, in particular, David Barrie, Rob Cover, Louise D’Arcens, Kieran Dolin, Jo Hawkins, Deborah Lutz, Lesley O’Brien, Frederick Roden, Hila Shachar, Alecia Simmonds, Mandy Treagus, Viv Westbrook, and Tess Williams. Special thanks are reserved for Zoë Hyde. Duc also acknowledges the efforts of her hard-working research assistant, Marina Gerzic. Duc’s contribution was supported by an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award and the UWA ECR Fellowship Support Program. Shale would like to thank Duc Dau for her wonderfully open and adventurous mind, erudition, tenacity and uncompromising brand of excellence. She acknowledges with gratitude the kind assistance of the Document Supply staff at Macquarie University’s library and the ongoing support of the University’s English Department. Special thanks also go to her beautiful dog and “animal child,” Emily, who provided her unconditional love and peerless companionship over the course of the project. Finally, we would like to acknowledge all of the marvellous queer theoretical scholarship that has inspired our journey along the various and often all too curious arms of the Victorian family tree.

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Queer Victorian Families An Introduction Duc Dau and Shale Preston

Queering “the family” or marriage, in the present and for the future, would also enable, perhaps even require, queering the past so as to demonstrate a degree of historical flexibility in forms of intimacy that could become a resource for making change, and that historicist effort is already well underway. —Mary Jean Corbett, Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf1

OF FAMILIES The Fosters, a popular television drama on ABC Family, premiered in 2013, and was executive produced by actor and singer Jennifer Lopez, who took on the project to honor the memory of her mother’s lesbian sister (Lopez). Following in the wake of recent revisions of family formations such as Modern Family (2009–present) and the critically acclaimed comedy-drama film The Kids Are All Right (2010), the show charts the lives of Lena Adams, a school vice-principal, and her partner, Stef Foster, a police officer.2 The Fosters are an interethnic, same-sex couple living in San Diego, raising Stef’s biological son, Brandon, their adopted twins, Jesus and Mariana, as well as the teenage Callie and her younger brother Jude, who have lived in a series of abusive foster homes. The show marks a noticeable improvement from the days when “the family identity produced on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister” (Bersani 203). But reactions to this development in unusual family representations – a blended family headed by a same-sex couple – were not entirely positive. The show was targeted by a conservative group with a family-inspired name, One Million Moms (recalling the admonition, “Think about the children”), who campaigned to stop The Fosters from airing. In a related media release on its website, One Million Moms criticized ABC Family for producing “anti-family” shows. In other words, the group condemned the show for its perceived attack on a conservative Christian definition of family: While foster care and adoption is a wonderful thing and the Bible does teach us to help orphans, this program is attempting to redefine

2  Duc Dau and Shale Preston marriage and family by having two moms raise these children together. One Million Moms is not sure how the explanation will be given on how the biological children were conceived. None of this material is acceptable content for a family show. (One Million Moms) Unreceptive toward same-sex relationships, One Million Moms’ exclusionary definition of family does not include the families of same-sex couples.3 The group censures ABC Family for producing a show about a family that does not conform to an idealized, ahistorical, and heteronormative definition of kinship. Such a kinship structure, to the group’s understanding, has been divinely sanctioned since the dawn of time. Even so, One Million Moms’ argument that the program attempts to redefine marriage and the family, along with the group’s subsequent attempts to stop the show from airing, implies its definition of the ideal family is open to redefinition and is thus inherently unstable. Despite the protestations of One Million Moms, The Fosters aired to critical acclaim and was renewed for a second series. We begin a collection entitled Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature with a discussion of a contemporary TV program because it offers a recent and clearly recognizable example that openly contests the conservative definitions of family that people like members of One Million Moms hold and that readers in general might hold in regard to Victorian families in literature. For Mary Jean Corbett, “Queering ‘the family’ or marriage, in the present and for the future, would also enable, perhaps even require, queering the past” (204). Yet by espousing so-called family TV, conservatives such as One Million Moms seem unaware that the family (or indeed families) has a history and that the very definition of family is open to change. This history of change is exemplified in the word itself. As Davidoff et al. acknowledge, the origin of the word famulus “meant servant, which became familia, a household. For many centuries, the adult male head of that household was not considered part of it. It seems that the heart of the family was the relationships between the dependents it embraced” (8). Even within the Victorian era, the “essence of family” underwent “rapid change,” as Chase and Levenson demonstrate in their study, which focuses on the three decades between 1835 and 1865 (6). “Politics, law, war, and sexuality, these and other pressures deranged the settlement of home,” they argue (6). Moreover, Elizabeth Thiel notes the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act of the 1860s, led by Josephine Butler, who refused to accept working-class women would be serving the needs of “gentlemen” and the selling of girls into prostitution, “often to satisfy ‘gentlemen,’ shook the very foundations of Victorian family ideology” (5). And, of course, there was little social uniformity at the time, as the emergent middle-class ideal of the family (which we will discuss shortly) failed to take hold among the working and upper classes. Queer Victorian Families is intended as a corrective against limited and traditionalist definitions of family and a timely addition to Victorian studies.

Queer Victorian Families  3 The essays will open up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in the literature of the period. As its editors, our motivations for putting together this collection stem from our personal, political, and academic concerns “in the present and for the future.” Our motives, as academics, readers, and consumers of popular culture, are undeniably informed by a combination of queer identities, left-leaning politics, an understanding of academic trends, and an awareness of popular culture. It is obvious to us that popular culture exerts an influence on academic trends. For instance, a successful franchise such as Harry Potter or Twilight will spawn a series of academic books and articles devoted to these and similar texts that will analyze their popularity and cultural significance. Some of these interests in popular culture will have a direct impact on Victorian studies. Contemporary interest in vampires in the last couple of decades has spawned interest in literary Victorian examples of vampires or Victorian influences on contemporary depictions of vampires. Popular culture, like literary culture, offers us a microcosm of society. When texts refrain from, or minimize their portrayal of, an aspect of reality, such as when the queer-friendly teen TV musical Glee (2009–present) resists showing physical affection between same-sex couples as often as it does between different-sex couples, is itself emblematic of prevailing social tensions. Even so, recent advancements in laws around the world allowing for same-sex couples to marry, the increasing representations of non-heteronormative families in popular culture, and a growing number of studies of same-sex people and their families in disciplines across academia have made it viable for researchers of Victorian literature to begin either “queering the ‘family’” or uncovering queer families in the Victorian era. Despite this turn to the queer (or more aptly this queer turn), until now there has been no book devoted to the topic of queer formations of the family in Victorian literature. While similar studies have offered explorations of queer and specifically same-sex relationships by focusing on cultural and literary examples of female friendships and marriages (e.g. Marcus), biographical accounts of women (e.g. Vicinus), or the works of a single author (e.g. Furneaux), the essays in Queer Victorian Families look at literary representations of queer families across multiple authors and genres in British literature. The collection explores kinship relations in several of its manifold and subversive permutations in Victorian literature. Several chapters take on untraditional familial arrangements; some focus on homosexual/­homosocial bonds while others defamiliarize modern understandings of romantic love and marriage between men and women. The volume is interdisciplinary in nature, and the essays engage with some of the latest and most important fields in the academy, including childhood studies, nationalist studies, masculinities, animal studies, and disability studies. They range from explorations of “animal children” in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, to male kinship within and across Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, to disability and the centrality of avuncular and

4  Duc Dau and Shale Preston sibling relationships in the fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge. Also covered are the radical elements of cousin marriages in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, queer relations within and between The Woman in White and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, the subversive dismantling of conventional conceptions of the family in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, a queer reconfiguration of family and the lines of inheritance in Bleak House, literary transvestism and nationalism in Scottish fin de siècle literature, the unorthodox and conflicted family dynamics of “Michael Field” in their personal lives and in their Roman dramas, as well as female same-sex adolescent desires in Elizabeth Anna Hart’s popular children’s book The Runaway. In Queer Victorian Families, differences of one form or another, such as disability and gender presentation, intersect with and are shown to complicate kinship structures. These intersections open up new avenues for understanding neglected types of affections and relationships, and thereby make for thought-provoking explorations of non-normativity within family relations.4 It is clear, then, that we and the contributors of this collection reject claims made by queer theorist Judith Halberstam in her study In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives that the family and reproduction are aligned with middle-class heteronormativity and conservative kinship. According to Halberstam, “Reproductive time and family time are, above all, heteronormative time/space constructs” and, as a result, “it is important to study queer life modes that offer alternatives to family time and family life” (10, 153). Holly Furneaux says of Halbertstam, “As well as presenting an unpalatably prescriptive pattern for queer life (antisociality, antidomesticity, and regret for the increasing number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and transgendered parents who have been unable ‘to resist the appeal of futurity, or refuse the temptation to reproduce’) … [Halberstam] perpetuate[s] the appropriation of the meaning of family by the far right, erasing wider, and historically discernable, formations of kinship” (26). In other words, by maintaining a dichotomy between family and queer life, Halberstam maintains ahistorical notions of families and queer experiences. Halberstam, however, is not alone in holding queer life is irreconcilable with acceptable cultural definitions of families. Anthropologist Kath Weston says in Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, “For years, and in an amazing variety of contexts, claiming a lesbian or gay identity has been portrayed as a rejection of ‘the family’ and a departure from kinship” (22). One might also argue these assumptions fit alongside those that hold single-parent families and other non-normative kinship structures such as polyamorous partnerships and couples Living Apart Together (LAT) to be ineligible for membership within the valorized and lauded family unit that represents the cornerstone of communities and of nations. Like today, families in the Victorian era were believed to be the cornerstone of society because (or if) they helped perpetuate communities and nations through the birth and rearing of children. According to the 1851 Census, “‘Family,’ in

Queer Victorian Families  5 the sense which it has acquired in England, may be considered the social unit of which parishes, towns, counties, and the nation, are composed” (cited in Chase and Levenson 4; emphasis original). We have inherited this definition of family, and so it is no surprise that, despite the shifting and expanding definitions of what constitutes a family, same-sex parents figure heavily in debates on parenting. As Jeffrey Weeks, Brian Heaphy, and Catherine Donovan argue, there are “difficult areas … where society remains most anxious about non-heterosexual ways of life, where the boundaries are still most heavily policed. Parenting … remains on this disputed border” (186). These objections exist because of the insistence on a dichotomy between family and queer life. QUEER VICTORIAN FAMILIES It was the Victorians who elevated the ideal of the home and its attendant heteronormative family life to an almost secular religion. John Ruskin famously declared the home and its family to be the refuge from, and the antidote to, the perils of the public sphere; by the 1870s, the sentimental song “Home, Sweet Home” had become a second national anthem; and Queen Victoria fashioned herself as “Mother” of the British Empire. Middleclass Victorians considered families to be important social institutions for the provision of nurturance, the socialization of children, and the formation of individual identity. Of the mid-Victorians, historian John Burnett asserts they were the most “family-conscious and home-centred” society in English history (98). Indeed, the devotion to the concept of family was so culturally ingrained that the term “home” was given to institutions for unattached children, “fallen” women, and older adults. The word “family” was, and continues to be, culturally tied to notions of home and all that it implies at any one time in history.5 In the field of Victorian literary studies, the growing interest in Victorian family structures is demonstrated by the fact that in recent years, Praeger has published three introductory books on family-related topics: Claudia Nelson’s Family Ties in Victorian England, Ginger S. Frost’s Victorian Childhoods, and Jennifer Phegley’s Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England. In her foreword to this collection, Nelson provides a historical outline of family studies from the 1970s to the 1990s. We add to her list of pioneering studies some recent revisionary scholarship of Victorian families. Notable books published since 2005 include edited collections by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver, Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal, and Natalie McKnight, Fathers in Victorian Fiction; Leonore Davidoff’s Thicker Than Water: Siblings and Their Relations, 1780–1920; Elizabeth Thiel’s The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal; Holly Furneaux’s Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities; Sharon Marcus’s Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and

6  Duc Dau and Shale Preston Marriage in Victorian England; Mary Jean Corbett’s Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest; Charles Hatten’s The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James; and Deborah Cohen’s Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain. Also of note is Neo-­Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, which considers, among other things, alternative forms of kinship in neo-Victorian literature. But what exactly did the Victorians mean by “family”? Certainly, they appeared to have had an elastic understanding of the word. The 1851 Census struggled to define the family: The family, consisting of a head and of dependent members, living in the same dwelling, is, as has been shown in the previous report, variously constituted; but the English family in its essential type is composed of husband, wife, children, and servants, or, less perfectly, but more commonly, of husband, wife and children. (Cited in Egenolf xi) While asserting the English family is “in its essential type” a nuclear family composed of husband, wife, children, and, ideally, servants, the census makes it clear there wasn’t simply one type of family but the existence of families “variously constituted.” Queer Victorian Families is chiefly concerned with the non-standard family that is both alluded to and dismissed in this census definition. Our reasoning has much to do with issues of power relations within family dynamics. We are interested in families that are not privileged, that do not fall within the category of model families, and that are often, at best, accommodated and tolerated rather than embraced within Victorian literature. We also recognize there are levels of exclusion among the marginalized. To use a contemporary example, advocates of same-sex marriage tend to appeal to the socially sanctioned models of monogamous couples and the nuclear family to market their message. Such an enterprise is problematic for members of the LGBT community who do not conform to these standard images of families. This is because the demand for marriage equality, argues Judith Butler, “can lead to new and invidious forms of social hierarchy, to a precipitous foreclosure of the sexual field”; it “exclude[s] from the field of potential legitimation those who are outside of marriage, those who live nonmonogamously, those who live alone, those who are in whatever arrangements they are in that are not the marriage form” (115–16). As we shall see in the next section, the subjects in Queer Victorian Families differ in their variety of possibilities and in the manner by which they are alternative to the ideal family. While some appear less non-normative than do others, they all deviate from the family “in its essential type.” In keeping with the inclusive nature of this collection, our contributors adopt a capacious definition of “queer.” Each has his or her particular take

Queer Victorian Families  7 on the word, but on the whole, we use it in interrelated ways. To begin with, we use the word in the way the Victorians used it, to denote something unusual or strange. By bringing this definition into the present, we move queer away from a medical model of sexual deviance and toward a broader, contemporary designation of cultural deviations. While the word is the subject of considerable critical debate, we adhere to David M. Halperin’s­ influential view that “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers” (62; emphasis original). According to this definition, “queer is treated more as a positionality vis-à-vis the normative, rather than an identity with intrinsic or indispensable properties” (Burrill 163–64). The position occupied by a queer subject makes possible a variety of possibilities to restructure his or her relations with power and desire (62). Halperin’s understanding of queer is fundamentally non-hegemonic and devoid of a specificity that is inexorably yoked to sexuality and identity politics; it moves beyond sexual identity and practice to incorporate broader concerns of the relationship between the subject and power. While we can appreciate understandings of queer that are tied, if only loosely, to sexuality (e.g. Annamarie Jagose’s understanding of the term in Queer Theory), we wish to expand on this in the interests of producing scholarly explorations that are open to the possibilities that emerge when dissonant, non-paradigmatic ideas are permitted expression. Queer therefore applies equally to sexual, romantic, and nonsexual dissonances. Our capacious definition of queer is in keeping with recent edited collections in queer studies. One example is Queering the Non/Human from Ashgate’s Queer Interventions series, which includes fifteen chapters ranging from discussions of starfish to werewolves to necrosexuality. Editors Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird argue: Queer is employed here as a collection of methodologies to unpick binaries and reread gaps, silences and in-between spaces. … Queer functions variously for the contributors as an interpellating gesture that calls on them to resist, reclaim, invent, oppose, defy, make trouble for, open up, enrich, facilitate, disturb, produce, undermine, expose, make visible, critique, reveal, move beyond, transgress, subvert, unsettle, challenge, celebrate, interrogate, counter, provoke and rebel. These are their words. (5) The editors resist collapsing these terms into “a shorter, more seemly and manageable list,” for queer “is anything but seemly or manageable” (5). Another example of a recent collection of essays is Frederick Roden’s Jewish/ Christian/­Queer, the chapters of which move from the gospels to Hitler’s Jewish soldiers to contemporary literature. Roden uses the term queer “broadly to convey dissonance, rather than referring specifically to sexual deviance from some norm” (1). His argument is “the power of ‘queer’ is its breadth” (4).

8  Duc Dau and Shale Preston His volume shows the Jew, the Christian, and the queer to be neighbors; like skin, the slashes in the title reinforce and at the same time form permeable boundaries. Similarly, with Queer Victorian Families, we provide a space for a kind of openness in which to bring the queer and families together. In another collection, Queering the Gothic, William Hughes and Andrew Smith declare difference is central to queerness: “To be queer, when taken outside of the sexual connotation of that term, is to be different” (3). Difference suggests queer is nothing if not relational to the designated non-queer. As Hughes and Smith state: To be queer is to be different, yet it is also to be unavoidably associated with the non-queer, the normative which, though it implicitly represses through the mechanisms of conformist culture, may yet serve as the catalyst to liberation. The two states exist in reciprocal tension. If the queer is to be regarded as the abjected demon of the non-queer, then the reverse may also apply. In queer terms, one may be – horror of horrors – a closet heterosexual, and one’s literary queerness may be subsumed within a conformist conception of genre and expression. One may compromise or may have to compromise: to be queer is to be poised always upon the threshold of the non-queer. (3–4) Diversity, in the definition of queer in these above-mentioned collections, as in ours, is not a weakness but a strength, one that is based on inclusiveness of subject matter, approach, and readership. Needless to say, of course, there is still a strong emphasis in Queer Victorian Families on families structured around same-sex relationships and/ or gender non-conformity. When we combine the term queer with family, we adapt Mary Bernstein’s and Renate Reimann’s definition from their edited collection Queer Families, Queer Politics: Challenging Culture and the State: “we employ the term ‘queer’ families here to signify the diverse family structures formed by those with nonnormative gender behaviors or sexual orientations. The term family refers to groups of individuals who define each other as family and share a strong emotional and/or financial commitment to each other, whether or not they cohabit, are related to by blood, law, or adoption, have children, or are recognized by the law” (3). The fact that songs such as “We are Family,” made famous by Sister Sledge, have become recognizable modern queer anthems suggests same-sex attracted people in the contemporary West understand, and may themselves live out, this elastic definition of family. And just as recent definitions of sexuality have come to encompass ever more inclusive states of intimacy, such as romantic attachment in addition to, or even instead of, sexual attraction (thus leading to relatively new designations such as homo-, bi-, and heteroromantic asexuals), so, too, have recent revisions of the Victorian family. Holly Furneaux says in Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities:

Queer Victorian Families  9 In the period just before the sexologists’ categorizations, I argue, there was a greater flexibility in the thinking of the erotic, less focused on object choice, and better able to articulate desires that expand and expose the limits of what now registers as the sexual. These desires, as they are expressed in Dickens’s work, include the yearning not to reproduce but to parent, a longing to restore and heal damaged bodies, and a range of non- (or not necessarily) genital physical intimacies and tendernesses. (11–12) Speaking of same-sex relationships in the Victorian era, Sharon Marcus makes a salient point: Whether writing of sexual partnerships or asexual friendships, scholars assume that same-sex intimacy was socially unacceptable and severed from the family and marriage, despite mounting evidence that even lesbian relationships enjoyed an unexpected degree of knowing acceptance. No less an eminence than the Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, deferred to his wife Minnie Benson’s wish that her female lover move into the home also occupied by their many children. (31) Several of the essays in Queer Victorian Families demonstrate there was room for the queer family in Victorian literature. From a historical and a political perspective, we argue that conservatives who champion “family values” do not and should not have a monopoly over the definition of family. Families are cultural formations that change over time and differ across culture, and thus kinship is and has always been heterogeneous. While family formations might seem more diverse now than in the past – hence the existence of shows such as The Fosters – families have always been diverse and there have always been queer families. Kinship ties have not always been held together by biology, marriage, or even romantic love. Indeed, they have sometimes been brought together by choice or by circumstance. In this collection, we seek, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, to follow the White Rabbit, not because it worries aloud about being at odds with time but because it takes a watch out of its waistcoat pocket and, in doing so, disrupts her notions of what rabbits should naturally do. Queer Relations is thereby a deliberately denaturalizing project that aims to jump down the rabbit hole not simply for the sake of a “burning” curiosity (6), like Alice, but also to shake the ancient shrines of the “queer little gods” (43) (to quote Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) in a bid to allow multiple examples of queer Victorian families to come into play. CHAPTER OUTLINES There are, of course, multiple queer family trees in terms of Victorian literature, but the particular one we are engaged with has three distinct branches

10  Duc Dau and Shale Preston we have chosen to call the following: “Queervolutions,” “Queer Actually,” and “Queer Connections.” The chapters collected under Part One, “Queervolutions,” work to show how particular Victorian texts (both canonical and non-canonical) destabilize or bring into question contemporary understandings of the Victorian family. The readings of these texts work against the grain of their structure to open up alternative perspectives in relation to the literary representation of the family, be it Esther Summerson’s family in Bleak House or the ancient families depicted in Michael Field’s dramas. Refusing to take an obedient approach, these readings “arise from a careful attention to the ways in which texts disrupt themselves on the inside, fostering expectations of unity, significance and structure, but at the same time setting up signifying processes which disperse, undercut and deconstruct these ideas” (Connor 67). In Chapter One, Laura White assiduously works to show how Lewis ­Carroll’s Alice books radically undo Victorian conceptions of family. In these books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the LookingGlass and What Alice Found There, no normative family emerges and every family relation is distorted into a queer configuration. The replacements for the Victorian upper-middle-class household of parents, children, governess, nurse, and servants, along with familial genealogy, resemblance, affection, and customs, come in four patterns: queer agglomeration, mathematically bound sets, quasi-logical extensions of resemblance, and bizarrely amoral or nightmarish reconfigurations of the adult and the child. Though coded as nonsense, the quasi-families of the Alice books stand as a radical challenge to the Victorian cult of the domestic family. Accordingly, while generations of parents have read the Alice books aloud to their children since their respective publication, this cheery familial historical reading practice is deeply at odds with the dark attitude toward the domestic family inscribed in Carroll’s narratives. In Chapter Two, Shale Preston contests accepted notions about Esther Summerson, the protagonist of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Rather than viewing her sexual orientation as heterosexual, Preston suggests she is primarily same-sex attracted, and rather than viewing her narrative as being aligned with patriarchal imperatives, she suggests it carries an implicitly subversive and disrespectful edge toward her guardian John Jarndyce. As a resistant reading of Bleak House, the essay questions the happy family tableau Esther constructs at the denouement of her narrative, and audaciously claims Esther’s authorial “estate” actually operates under her own exceedingly queer terms of primogeniture and love. Indeed, rather than being viewed as a disenfranchised Victorian “angel of the house” and an object of homosocial exchange (between her husband Allan Woodcourt and Jarndyce), Esther, through the means of her first-person narrative, may be viewed as implicitly challenging the patrilineal power base headed up by Jarndyce. Further, Preston suggests that within Dickens’s narrative, one can trace the outline of an alternative, quasi-monarchical queer family with Esther Summerson at its head as queen, her beautiful beloved friend Ada

Queer Victorian Families  11 as queen consort, and Richard the son they “naturally” share as the heir to Esther’s voluminous authorial estate. In Chapter Three, Tracy Olverson explores the violent and conflicted familial relationships in the Roman dramas of “Michael Field.” Olverson shows how in their own lives and in their work, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper developed decidedly queer family dynamics, designed to challenge and to re-envision conventional notions of family, identity, morality, and desire. Indeed, Michael Field repeatedly represents familial relationships as being fraught with tension, incest, sacrifice, betrayal, and retribution. In focusing on the under-studied Roman dramas, this chapter reveals how these unique collaborators challenged contemporary understandings of the heavily sentimentalized, heteronormative nineteenth-century family unit. In Chapter Four, Michael Shaw discusses the interactions between neoPaganism, cultural nationalism, and queer and gender discourses in fin-desiècle Scotland by focusing on William Sharp/Fiona Macleod’s writings. Shaw suggests a particular form of neo-Paganism developed in Scotland that supported the cultural nationalists’ desire to unify the nation and emphasize its autonomy without jeopardizing its position in the British Empire. Indeed, William Sharp’s work and the Fiona identity itself attempt to recover the margins and destabilize ethnic hierarchies within Britain without fully rejecting the imperial core. Further, such efforts drew strength from forms of neo-Paganism that sought to question paternalistic hierarchies. Turning to the chapters in Part Two, “Queer Actually,” these turn upon the fact that the Victorian family was never a natural, stable unit and could always, in fact, be queered from within. Exploring terrain as diverse and yet as central to the family home as animal “children,” physically challenged but far from undesirous relatives, and the concealment of a runaway girl in the bedroom closet of a fifteen-year-old girl who is clearly enamored with her, these chapters reveal there was inevitably something tucked away in the closet of every Victorian family. Added to this, the fact that the content of these closets was so diverse only serves to underscore the conclusion that there is no such thing as an “unqueer” Victorian family. Indeed, “queer as family” is a term that could well describe the diverse range of true and fictive kinship ties manifested within Victorian literature. In the first chapter of this section, Monica Flegel analyzes Wilkie Collins’s depiction of the villainous Count Fosco and his animal “children” in The Woman in White. While most Victorian literary representations of those who approximate the nuclear family through the keeping of pets are meant to mock familial outsiders such as the bachelor, the spinster, and the childless couple, Flegel suggests Collins’s text uses Fosco’s complicated and perverse version of animal/human domesticity as a means of parodying and challenging normative domesticity. In Chapter Six, Clare Walker Gore argues that in the fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge, the form of the family is queered by the accommodation of disabled characters whose exclusion from the

12  Duc Dau and Shale Preston marriage plot enables the construction of alternative relationships and family structures. Through exploring families based not on conjugal attachments but on sibling bonds, platonic heterosexual relationships, friendship, and adoption, Walker Gore demonstrates the flexibility and capaciousness of these authors’ familial ideals. In so doing, she challenges the idea that the Victorian family was a monolithic institution based on reproductive heterosexuality and therefore necessarily exclusive of disabled and queer experience. In Chapter Seven, Ellen Brinks identifies playful and inclusive attitudes toward non-normative families, passionate girl friendships, and gender queerness through a close reading of The Runaway, Elizabeth Anna Hart’s 1872 novel for girls. Indeed, Hart intensifies the erotic exchanges between her girl protagonists and fashions adolescence as a queer family space. Refusing a trajectory toward heteronormative family roles, the text arguably creates queer temporalities that escape disciplinary imperatives. Concluding with a tableau of two fathers who mirror their daughters’ same-sex-oriented desires, the novel could be said to re-center familial authority in girls and the gratification of their needs, as the girls fashion a future queer home and family for themselves. As to the chapters in Part Three, “Queer Connections,” these are concerned with exploring the queer family linkages that may be traced across and beyond the literature of the Victorian period, be they familial (e.g. consanguineous couplings), statistical (e.g. the marvelous parallels between seemingly incongruous nineteenth-century texts), or temporally coincident (e.g. the obvious kinship between a Victorian and neo-Victorian text). In Chapter Eight, Talia Schaffer pays particular attention to the interrelated nature of the Victorian family. Although today we tend to regard endogamous marriage as incestuous and queer, in the early nineteenth century marrying within the family offered safety, while marrying a stranger was risky and selfish. Accordingly, Schaffer’s chapter argues that both Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park locate satisfying social relations within family marriage, while viewing exogamous marriage as a site of danger. The novelistic tradition of tracing women’s multiple social relationships was far more humane than the violently dehumanizing, exclusive vision of marriage promulgated by Victorian anthropology. In this period it was, in fact, exogamous monogamy that seemed queer. In Chapter Nine, Alec Magnet posits the fundamental kinship of Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, both of which represent same-sex attachments as familial relationships and depict fantasies of spiritual merger and erotic internalization through reading and writing. Rather than positing direct influence, Magnet draws on Wai Chee Dimock’s concept of “statistical kinship,” the mathematical certainty that, given enough people, some will be kin in non-biological but meaningful ways. Identifying that concept as a form of reader relations, Magnet compares it to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s understanding of camp, locating the queerness of these texts especially in the relationships they invite with later readers.

Queer Victorian Families  13 In Chapter Ten, Lauren N. Hoffer and Sarah E. Kersh consider The Woman in White alongside Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian novel Fingersmith in order to demonstrate how these texts unsettle nineteenth- and twentyfirst-century conceptions of the Victorian family. Building on critical conceptions of queer time and erotohistoriography, Hoffer and Kersh argue that Collins’s novel, in its emphasis on secret, illegitimate sisterhoods, and Waters’s Fingersmith, in its recasting of sisterhoods as the erotic relationship between female protagonists, represent queer family structures that are then supported formally through narrative brokenness and queer temporalities. Situated at the nexus of queer and narrative theory, Victorian and postmodern literary studies, as well as adaptation studies, this chapter represents a fitting and timely conclusion to a book that has sought in a variety of ways to both unsettle traditional conceptions of the Victorian family and clear out the closets of the Victorian family home in a bid to uncover and air its hitherto forgotten or neglected garments. To conclude, it is important to state the subtitle of this book, “Curious Relations in Literature,” does not simply employ the term “relations” to playfully refer to Victorian consanguinal (blood) and affinal (by marriage) ties. It also pointedly buttresses the term with the word “curious.” Curious is a word that is frequently used in Victorian texts to describe strange or queer things/occurrences, and it is a word that is used to particularly good effect in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Throughout the Alice books, Alice is continually confronted by strange objects, creatures, circumstances, and transmutational experiences, and her customary way of reacting to them is to describe them as curious. In Chapter Two of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for instance, she cries, “Curiouser and curiouser!” (14) as her body expands in the manner of a telescope and she loses sight of her feet. Similarly, in Chapter Six, she views the Cheshire Cat’s ability to gradually vanish to the point where only its grin is left as exceedingly curious: “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice, “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” (65). The world Alice confronts is certainly queer, but it is no less queer than the world of the Victorian family. The Victorian family may have long gone, but its smile still remains in the form of the literature of the period that lives on. This “afterlife” smile may be disembodied, yet if we care to look at it with fresh eyes we can begin to understand the Victorian family is not all that different, historically “other,”6 or less engaging than the beautifully queer familial arrangements that exist today in the early stages of the twenty-first century. Notes  1. Corbett (204).   2.  The immensely popular Modern Family is one of the first shows, and perhaps the most high profile, to point the spotlight on same-sex and alternative family formations.

14  Duc Dau and Shale Preston   3. “Hollywood is continuing to push an agenda that homosexuality is acceptable when scripture states clearly it is a sin” (One Million Moms).   4.  We acknowledge, however, that owing to space restrictions there are underexplored or neglected topics such as class and race.   5.  For details, see Nelson (6–7), Davidoff et al. (10, 84), and Richards (473).  6. We allude here to the still very relevant question Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich ask in Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century: “why, exactly, has contemporary culture preferred to engage the nineteenth century – not the modern period or the eighteenth century – as its historical ‘other?’” (xv)

Works Cited Bernstein, Mary and Renate Reimann. “Queer Families and the Politics of Visibility.”­ Queer Families, Queer Politics: Challenging Culture and the State. Ed. Mary ­Bernstein and Renate Reimann. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 1–17. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Melbourne: Penguin Group ­(Australia), 2013. Connor, Steven. Charles Dickens. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (1987): 197–222. Burnett, John. A Social History of Housing, 1815–1985. 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 1986. Burrill, Kathryn G. “Queering Bisexuality.” Bisexual Women in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Dawn Atkins. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2002. 160–75. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. London: Routledge, 2004. Chase, Karen, and Michael Levenson. The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Cohen, Deborah. Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Davidoff, Leonore, et al. The Family Story: Blood, Contract, and Intimacy, 1830– 1960. London: Longman, 1999. Davidoff, Leonore. Thicker Than Water: Siblings and Their Relations, 1780–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Egenolf, Susan B. “Introduction.” British Family Life, 1780–1914. Ed. Susan B. Egenolf. Vol. 4. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. ix–vvii. Frost, Ginger S. Victorian Childhoods. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2009. Furneaux, Holly. Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Giffney, Noreen and Myra J. Hird. “Introduction: Queering the Non/Human.” Queering the Non/Human. Ed. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 1–16. Halperin, David M. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hatten, Charles. The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010.

Queer Victorian Families  15 Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Hughes, William and Andrew Smith. “Introduction: Queering the Gothic” Queering the Gothic. Ed. ­William Hughes and Andrew Smith. Manchester: ­Manchester University Press, 2009. 1–10. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1996. Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutleben, eds. Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. Kucich, John and Dianne F. Sadoff. “Introduction.” Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Ed. John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. i–xxx. Lopez, Jennifer. Interview by Ellen DeGeneres. The Ellen DeGeneres Show. WNBC, Warner Brothers Studios, Burbank, 20 March 2014. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Nelson, Claudia. Family Ties in Victorian England. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2007. One Million Moms. “ABC Continues to Produce Anti-Family Programs.” OneMillionMoms.com, n.d. Accessed 20 June 2014. Phegley, Jennifer. Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England, Santa Barbara.: Praeger Publishers, 2011. Richards, Jeffrey. Imperialism and Music: Britain, 1876–1953. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Roden, Frederick. Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk and Claudia C. Klaver, eds. Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Weather in Proust. Ed. Jonathan Goldberg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Thiel, Elizabeth. The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal. New York: Routledge, 2008. Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Weeks, Jeffrey, Brian Heaphy and Catherine Donovan. Same Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments. London: Routledge, 2001. Weston, Kath. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

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Part I

Queervolutions

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1 The “Queer-Looking Party” Challenge to Family in Alice Laura White

“Who cares for you?” said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time). “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” — Lewis Caroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.1

The Alice books – Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1871 – have a been a staple of family reading practices since their publication. Generations of mothers and fathers have read Alice aloud to their children; I have myself to all four of my children. This reading history is at odds, however, with the attitude toward the domestic family inscribed in Carroll’s narratives, for the Alice books radically undo Victorian conceptions of family (and whatever fragments of Victorian domestic ideals modern families continue to model).2 While Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland do begin and end with Alice sitting next to her loving and empathetic elder sister, neither “mother” nor “father” are referenced at any point in her travels or her returns. Throughout both books, Alice refers to her family at home primarily as a discipline-minded but collective “they.” “They” may be largely forgotten while Alice explores her fantasy lands, but the idea of family is not. No normative family emerges, however, and every family relation is distorted into a queer configuration. By queer, I refer to what the Victorians would have understood as such, as people or behaviors or art that ran counter to normative social expectations, particularly – for the purposes of this essay – those elements that were at odds with normative roles of family relationships. While Victorians both tolerated and celebrated the queer (that is, the odd, the non-normative) in eccentric figures such as Edward Lear, primarily because such queer behavior reinforced the national pride Britons have historically taken in common-law protections for the liberty of the individual and in strength of individual character (as most famously enunciated in Mill’s On Liberty), the egregious oddity of such figures also reinforced, by contrast, then-normative social structures, particularly that of the Victorian family. In the case of the Alice books, however, the queer reformations of family do not necessarily reinforce the norm; instead, they often trouble that norm’s placid assumptions. Carroll’s effect – leaving aside the question of his aim – is to damage the ideals of the Victorian family even as he ultimately allows Alice to return to her family’s domestic spaces.

20  Laura White In the dream worlds of both Alice books, the replacements for the ­ ictorian upper-middle-class household of parents, children, governess, V nurse, and servants, as well as for familial genealogy, resemblance, affection, and customs, come in four patterns. First, the Victorian family is replaced by queer agglomerations of unlike and even mutually hostile characters (such as the triad taking its eternal tea, the Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse, or the “queer-looking party” who participate in the mock caucus race). Second, families turn into mathematically bound sets (such as Tweedledee and Tweedledum of Looking-Glass or the Prima, Secunda, and Tertia who replace the Liddell girls in the prefatory poem to Wonderland). Third, or “contrariwise,” familial associations are replaced by quasi-logical extensions of resemblance, as if identity were subject to logical statements, analogies, and Linnaean taxonomies rather than genealogy. For example, from the Dormouse of a fine family, we learn there were “three little sisters” named “Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie,” but this tale soon devolves into an impoverished improvisation, with every new addition built around treacle. They live at the bottom of a well on nothing but treacle, though it made them ill, very ill, and of course they live at the bottom of the well because it was a treacle well, and they were “well in” (Carroll 76).3 They were learning to draw – what? Treacle. This most unpromising narration, in which the trio of sisters is at best an excuse for palpable nonsense, is stopped only when the March Hare and the Hatter put the Dormouse into the teapot. Fourth, Carroll insistently reconfigures the families we witness in his fantasy lands into bizarrely amoral or nightmarish reconfigurations of adult and child (as seen, for instance, when the Walrus and the Carpenter take the infant oysters first for a seaside frolic and then for a meal). The only happy relation between an adult and a child in both books occurs at the end of LookingGlass, when Alice meets the ineffectual but amiable White Knight. Since there are many indications Lewis Carroll saw himself as this figure,4 the helplessness of the White Knight must reveal, among other things, that the real ­Carroll  – unmarried, without children of his own, leading the bachelor life of an Oxford don – had no hopes of making himself an effectual replacement for Alice’s family nor of undoing, albeit as wish fulfillment, the Victorian family as a social establishment. The real Liddell family is mostly kept away from Alice’s thoughts as she undergoes her adventures. Thus all of the displacements of Alice’s “real” family – odd groupings, mathematical sets, obscurely formed family fragments such as the pack of cards, cannibals, and other dark analogues  – never really have much “real” family to displace. Even when the Liddell family appears in a sideways mode, the aim seems less to invoke the sweetness of the family’s home life as to disrupt the bonds between adults and children. For instance, the names of the trio who lived on treacle – Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie – play on the pet names of the three Liddell girls. “Lacie,” for instance, is an anagram of “Alice.” But their emergence here in this mode only magnifies the effect of dismantling family. After all, the

The “Queer-Looking Party” Challenge to Family in Alice  21 paltry existence imagined for the three girls (living at the bottom of a well, ­subsisting only on treacle) is, from a twenty-first-century perspective, not dissimilar to that of Nell and Nagg in Samuel Beckett’s 1957 Endgame, who live in trash cans. And where are the parents, nanny, and governess who should be overseeing this trio, finding them better habitation, varying their diet, and finding them a more satisfactory art tutor?5 In fact, the meagerness of the sisters’ world is underscored by the meagerness of the humor of their tale, especially as the closing joke of “well in” stands as one of Carroll’s worst puns. Alice’s real sisters show up only in this guise, and in the opening dedicatory poem. Admittedly, we do meet a fictional elder sister (perhaps a figure of Lorina, sixteen years old in 1865), who is reading the unidentified book with no pictures that so bores Alice at the start of Wonderland. This sister will be accorded a reverie at the end of the same volume in which she imagines Alice herself as a loving mother of “other little children.” But as this reverie characterizes Alice as “simple and loving” and the Wonderland dream as simply “strange” (127), it is hard to square that with what the reader knows: Alice is more than “simple and loving” and her dream of Wonderland is not fully in accord with either simplicity or love. Since Alice’s consciousness seems to occlude the individual members of her family, we should not be surprised she generally refers to them as “they.” “They” plainly include the governess and nurse, the figures who oversee discipline most closely; in fact, we learn more (implicitly) about Alice’s governess and nurse than about any actual member of her family. This is because Alice often speaks to herself as if she were her own minder, and almost every other character in the book follows suit. For instance, early on, Alice ventriloquizes these absent authority figures: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself … a great girl like you … to go on crying this way!” (21), and we will hear similar remonstrations from the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, the Duchess, Humpty Dumpty, and the Red Queen, among others (typical is the Red Queen’s admonition, “Look up, speak nicely, and don’t twiddle with your fingers all the time” [161]). Moreover, the governess and nurse loom large because Alice herself so often thinks about domestic punishment and threats. She doesn’t exactly dread punishment; rather, she looks upon punishment as one of the givens of life, so common as to be possibly “saved up.” As she muses at the start of Looking-Glass, when she considers punishing the black kitten, You know I’m saving up all your punishments for Wednesday week – Suppose they had saved up all my punishments. … What would they do at the end of a year? I should be sent to prison, I suppose, when the day came. Or – let me see – suppose each punishment was to be going without a dinner: then, when the miserable day came, I should have to go without fifty dinners at once! Well, I shouldn’t mind that much! I’d far rather go without them than eat them. (140)

22  Laura White We can infer the Liddell family, like most Victorian families, was disciplineminded. Alice was frequently punished, and that punishment often took the form of a lost meal. In fact, the weird and hectoring authority figures of both the Wonderland and Looking-Glass worlds are superior to the real authorities of the Liddell home in that they inflict no punishments on Alice other than their bewildering, often disparaging ways of addressing Alice and their abrupt, confrontational behavior.6 The one order to punish Alice, the Queen of Hearts’ last bellow, “Off with her head,” is ignored by everyone in the courtroom, largely because Alice has grown back to her true size. Though the pack of cards fly at her, they cannot damage her any more than can the dead leaves into which they transform. Both Alice books hold to one of the most widespread narrative practices of children’s literature: the ultimate protection of the child protagonist. The one representative of Alice’s family about whom we learn the most is the one figure putatively under her authority and subject to her punishments: her cat Dinah.7 Dinah, naturally a carnivore, represents a threat to whatever fragments of family the Wonderland or Looking-Glass worlds can muster. For instance, on hearing Alice brag about Dinah’s mousing, the little creatures of the pond of tears leave posthaste: “a Canary called out, in a trembling voice, to its children, ‘Come away, my dears! It’s high time you were all in bed!’”(35–36). One of the recurring jokes of the first chapters of Wonderland is how the Imp of the Perverse keeps prompting Alice to bring up Dinah’s hunting and eating habits, for instance when Alice is trying to remember her French so as to address the Mouse: “Perhaps it doesn’t understand English,” thought Alice. I daresay it’s a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.” … So she began again: “Où est ma chatte?” which was the first sentence in her French lesson-book. The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water, and seemed to quiver all over with fright. “Oh, I beg your pardon!” cried Alice hastily, afraid that she had hurt the poor animal’s feelings. “I quite forgot you didn’t like cats.” (26) The Mouse does seem to understand at least first-year French, but Alice has misunderstood. It has leapt out of the water not because it doesn’t like cats but because it thinks the answer to the question “Où est ma chatte” might be “juste derrière vous.” But even though Alice’s recollections of Dinah keep causing her trouble with the creatures of Wonderland, Dinah comes often to the forefront of Alice’s consciousness. Indeed her one worry about her absence from her real family and home is on Dinah’s behalf: “I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time” (24). And at the very end of Through the Looking-Glass, we learn Alice plans to recite “The Walrus and the Carpenter” to Dinah while the cat has breakfast the next morning: “And you can make believe it’s oysters, dear!” (271). Dinah is a carnivore to the last, and Alice endorses, seemingly, the predatory eating of the child-like

The “Queer-Looking Party” Challenge to Family in Alice  23 oysters that had shocked her as cruel when she first heard Tweedledee and Tweedledum recite the poem. Carroll’s denaturing of the familial has its reasons. As a logician and fantasist, he finds through fiction the means to remove Alice from the real Liddell family, an act with its own rewards for the Oxford don who apparently longed for intimate emotional, though not sexual, contact with girls. It is beyond the confines of this chapter to discuss the private family life of Carroll or, rather, Charles Dodgson, the devout Christian, Anglican deacon, unmarried Oxford don, photographer, and the eldest son of a family of eleven children.8 The “queer” formations of grouping and identity in Alice, however, do serve the purpose of separating Alice from her essentially nameless family. More importantly, though coded as nonsense, the queer quasifamilies of the Alice books also stand as a radical challenge to the Victorian cult of the domestic family itself. The many figures in the Alice books who claim peremptory authority – the Queen of Hearts, the Duchess, the Red Queen, Humpty Dumpty – are also figures who seem to embody the authority of nurse, governess, mother, and father but do so in an unstable way. The authority figures never sustain authority. Since they are mostly talking nonsense, Alice is commonly prompted to correct them, even though these corrections fall on deaf ears or she is chastised for making them, usually to her befuddlement. Moral pronouncements from those in charge, such as the Duchess’s “morals” – e.g., “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves” (92) – are notable for their lack of moral content. Nor do the commands of authority figures seem to carry weight. Even the Queen of Hearts’ execution orders are ignored by her subjects, though her playingcard minions do go through the motions of hauling her intended victims off scene. Moreover, in some cases authority is deposed outright (as we see with Humpty Dumpty most notably). And both books close with Alice literally shaking apart the world she has entered, rendering all other authorities as harmless as falling leaves or kittens. Ultimately, the alternate “families” of the Alice books are remarkably untenable, as physically uncomfortable as the nightmare Duchess who pokes Alice with her grotesque chin, as mentally uncomfortable as the White Queen who is in the habit of thinking “six impossible things before breakfast,” (199) and as emotionally uncomfortable as the unwelcome salutation of the Caterpillar: “Who are you?” (47). The narrative is dominated by queer sets of creatures. What family could own as intimate relations the Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse, even though all three seem to be engaging in that most domestic of family rituals, tea? But we should expect such odd congeries in the Wonderland and Looking-Glass worlds. Soon after her fall down the rabbit hole, Alice meets her first “queer-looking party” (29), a group of creatures that shares the lot of having fallen into the pool created by Alice’s tears. It features a duck, a mouse, a lory, an eaglet, a canary, a crab, an ape, and even a dodo, a creature extinct since sometime in the seventeenth century. Later, the jury at the trial of the Jack of Hearts presents another such conglomeration. Judging

24  Laura White by Tenniel’s illustrations, the jury includes a lizard (the unfortunate Bill, last seen as he was booted up the chimney by Alice’s gigantic foot), a dormouse (not the Dormouse, who has been thrown out of court for speaking out of turn of “treacle,” regrettably), a ferret, a squirrel, a frog, a duck, a rat, a hedgehog, a rooster, and a mole.9 The creatures come from the barnyard, the pond, and the woods, and feature birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. Only insects are unrepresented, and there are no domestic pets such as kittens or puppies. Insects will have their own nonsensical conglomeration in “Looking-glass Insects,” yoked by the Gnat into a natural-history exhibition of those insects whose being depends on bad puns (the Rocking-horse-fly, the Snap-dragon-fly, and the Bread-and-butter-fly). Other irrational sets include the Lion and the Unicorn (less odd since sanctioned by the old English nursery rhyme), the Walrus and the Carpenter, and the guests at Alice’s coronation dinner (“some were animals, some birds, and there were even a few flowers among them” [261]). This latter occasion is also graced by the talking leg of mutton and plum pudding, both of whom object to being sliced, again in terms better suited to Alice’s nurse or governess: “‘What impertinence!’ said the Pudding. ‘I wonder how you’d like it, if I were to cut a slice out of you, you creature!’” (263; emphasis original). Even the garden of talking flowers is marked more by type than commonality. Each species of flower has its own personality and class indicators, including the fierce Tiger Lily, the vain Rose, the irritating Daisies, and the vulgar Violets; moreover, the garden’s denizens quarrel incessantly.10 Where groups of creatures seem to belong together, the belonging is less an operation of family than it is of mathematics. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are brothers, but Carroll’s pleasure in their creation emerges not in the jokes on brothership but rather in the jokes on their mirror relation to each other. They are enantiomorphs, related as chiral objects (chirality occurs when mirror images are not identical but are symmetrical, as with hands, feet, gloves, and shoes).11 While they live in the same house, presumably (we do not see it, but from where else come all the “bolsters, blankets, hearth-rugs, table-cloths, dish-covers, and coal-scuttles” that compose their armory? [224]), the signs that lead to their house are almost identical: “To Tweedledum’s House” and “To the House of Tweedledee” (178). One says “nohow” and the other says “contrariwise” and thus cancel each other out. The three gardeners who are trying to paint the roses red are the Two, Five, and Seven of spades, and all the gardeners are spades, all soldiers clubs, all courtiers diamonds, and all members of the royal family hearts. They process two by two, including the royal children: “there were ten of them, and the little dears came jumping merrily along, hand in hand, in couples” (81). Here family and numbers go hand in hand indeed. But the Queen’s anger soon reveals the problem with this familial denotation, for when the three gardeners lie on their faces, quaking in fear, their card backs no longer reveal which set they belong to: “[the Queen] could not tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three of her own children” (82).

The “Queer-Looking Party” Challenge to Family in Alice  25 Since everyone is subject to the Queen’s command, “Off with his head,” the ­difference is immaterial (and, as mentioned before, the threat is never carried out, so the Queen’s authority has no weight). Even the preface to Wonderland begins with mathematical groups rather than with family. The opening poem, despite its lyrical depiction of “the golden afternoon” in which the Wonderland story was first begun, nonetheless reduces the three Liddell sisters to Prima, Secunda, and Tertia rather than their real identities as Lorina, Alice, and Edith. They are both a “merry crew” and a “cruel Three,” in particular a three-against-one: “Yet what can one poor voice avail/Against three tongues together?” (7).12 Carroll also denatures familial associations by replacing them with chains of resemblance. Resemblance is not hereditary but associational. For example, when Alice can’t remember how to recite “How doth the busy little bee,” she concludes her ignorance reveals she really must be Mabel, a fellow child who lives in a “poky little house” with “next to no toys to play with” (23–24). If she is not Mabel, perhaps she is Ada, but no, “I’m sure I’m not Ada … for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all” (24). Because Alice can’t remember the things Alice is supposed to remember, she must be someone else, but finding her identity becomes increasingly problematic as she advances through Wonderland. Because Alice assumes identity is connected to one’s physical being rather than one’s family association, she can’t answer the Caterpillar’s question – “Who are you?” (47) – nor can she defend herself from the charge that her shape and appearance are all wrong, a charge she hears in Looking-Glass from both the talking flowers and from Humpty Dumpty. Admittedly, in the latter case it is Alice’s conformity to the rule that makes her uninviting. Humpty complains: “‘Your face is the same as everybody has – the two eyes, so’ (marking their places in the air with his thumb) ‘nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance – or the mouth at the top – that would be some help’” (219; emphasis original). Family resemblance becomes beyond the point when resemblance has been reduced to such basics of human physiognomy. Alice looks like every human, not particularly like, say, her sisters, mother, or father, and the answer she should make to the Caterpillar’s challenge – “I am Alice Liddell” – goes unsaid. Alice’s identity, shifting as she changes sizes and shapes, is paralleled by the uncertain taxonomic status of Carroll’s creatures. Creatures are amalgams, meant to upset any Linnaean system, such as the Mock Turtle who owes his cow-like head, tail, and hooves to the fact that mock turtle meat was really calves’ brains soaked in an oyster brine, or the Gryphon, a hybrid of lion, eagle, and dragon, or the Bread-and-butterfly, the Snap-dragon-fly, and the Rocking-horse-fly, mentioned before, who infest the chapter on “Looking-Glass Insects.” In fact, almost all the creatures in the Wonderland or Looking-Glass worlds are amalgams, in that they are animals or plants who talk and in some cases wear clothes. Alice’s adventures are instigated,

26  Laura White of course, by her curiosity about the White Rabbit, who is dressed as an English gentleman, down to the watch hanging from a fob in his waistcoat. Even the Jabberwock, that monstrous beast, wears a sort of vest with four buttons, and the Tenniel illustration also shows it too is an amalgam, in this case something between a dragon and a lamprey eel. As we would expect, no amalgamation has a family. When families as such are invoked in the Alice books, we enter nightmares. The main family group in Wonderland is the Heart family, but the elder son is on trial for his life with his father as judge and his mother as the authority who pronounces death sentences. The Duchess’s family seems equally dysfunctional. The “Pig and Pepper” chapter of Wonderland takes us into her kitchen, where the Duchess and the Cook tend to a baby (with pepper, slaps, and flying, heavy saucepans) as the Cheshire-Cat grins his approval of the chaos. Who is mother to this child? The text never says, and the reader hopes it is neither the cook nor the Duchess, given their ministrations.13 The two sing a lullaby: “Speak roughly to your little boy,/And beat him when he sneezes: /He only does it to annoy,/Because he knows it teases” (62). And yet the baby seems to have no special standing to avoid this abuse. Though Alice at first fears for the baby’s well-being, once she takes the baby in hand, she finds it is yet another “queer-shaped little creature … ‘just like a starfish,’ thought Alice” (63). And soon after that, the baby is transformed into a pig and no further maternal care is required. The families that emerge in Carroll’s parodies of improving verse are no better. Since this kind of moralistic poetry was often taught to children like Alice Liddell as recitation material, the object of Carroll’s parody seems to include not only the subject of the originals but also this particular practice of Victorian child-rearing. One extended example of parody that satirizes family bonds as well as poetry recitation occurs in Carroll’s version of “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them,” a didactic poem by Robert Southey that Alice attempts to recite on the Caterpillar’s instruction and, like her earlier attempt at “How doth the little busy bee,” emerges as nonsense. In the original, a young man requests his father explain his vigor, contentment, and cheerfulness; alternate stanzas provide the father’s prudent advice. The poem gives the father the last word, without noting whether or not the son learned from it: I am cheerful, young man, father William replied, Let the cause thy attention engage; In the days of my youth I remember’d my God! And He hath not forgotten my age. (21–24) As material for recitation, Southey’s original implies children do not always learn from their parents, even when they ask for wisdom. A corollary suggests itself: children do not always learn from reciting moralistic verse, even at the direction of parents. It is of interest that Carroll seemed to have thought

The “Queer-Looking Party” Challenge to Family in Alice  27 Alice’s botched version, “You Are Old, Father William,” important or interesting enough to merit four full-page illustrations in his manuscript original, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Certainly Carroll’s Father William is more absurdly athletic than the merely “hale” and “hearty” old man of Southey’s original, and thus the physical comedy involved in an old man’s standing on his head, somersaulting through a door, and balancing an eel on the end of his nose may have provided irresistible subjects for illustration. The pious and temperate man described by Southey becomes in Carroll’s hands a wild but canny grown-up child who does as he pleases, no matter how silly the results, and who seems to enjoy childish pursuits more than work or prayer. In contrast to Southey’s father, who “abus’d not [his] health and [his] vigour at first/That [he] never might need them at last,” Carroll’s old man has supple limbs because he uses a certain commercially available ointment, a box of which he hawks to his son for a shilling: “Allow me to sell you a couple?” (51).14 The father’s supple limbs are matched by his voracious eating, the object of the son’s last answered question: “You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak For anything tougher than suet; Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak – Pray, how did you manage to do it?” (51) Part of the joke is that the son wanted some of the goose for himself. The old man’s answer, however, provides the only wife joke of either book (excepting the general satire about imbalanced marriages provided by the weak card and chess kings married to physically imposing and hectoring wives): “In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law, And argued each case with my wife; And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw Has lasted the rest of my life.” (51) The poem ends with the father threatening to kick his son downstairs as punishment for asking intrusive questions. The Caterpillar is right to conclude Alice’s recitation is “wrong from beginning to end” (52), but only because Alice has mangled the original, not because Alice’s version misrepresents human nature more than does Southey’s. The unfilial son and the wayward father of “You Are Old, Father William” provide a poor model for children and parents. Even worse, perhaps, is the example set in another recited tale, this one related by Tweedledee, of the Walrus and the Carpenter, who take the infant oysters first for a seaside frolic and then for a meal. The oysters are schoolchildren, plainly: “four young Oysters hurried up,/All eager for the treat:/Their coats were brushed, their faces washed, Their shoes were clean and neat –” (216). Yet they are also the main course: “‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,/You’ve had a pleasant run!/Shall we

28  Laura White be trotting home again?’/But answer came there none – /And this was scarcely odd, because/They’d eaten every one” (219). Alice is left to settle the rival merits of a predatory adult who makes play of grief at the oysters’ deaths (the Walrus seems to be weeping into his handkerchief) and the predatory adult who has no misgivings about slaying the young (the  ­Carpenter, who only says, “Cut us another slice,” and “The butter’s spread too thick!” [186–87]). Alice comes to the right answer: “Well! They were both very unpleasant ­characters –” (188), and yet, as mentioned before, by the end of the volume she seems to forget how “unpleasant” this betrayal of the trusting young oysters really was when she plans to recite the poem to Dinah as entertainment for the cat’s repast. Moreover, Alice herself is dangerous to the young. She threatens to pick the little pink daisies in the garden of talking flowers and cannot defend herself against the charge the pigeon makes that she is a serpent, bent on devouring the pigeon’s eggs:15 “‘I’m not a serpent, I tell you,’ says Alice. ‘Well! What are you?’ the pigeon replies, ‘I can see you’re trying to invent something!’” (55). Once again, we note incidentally, Alice has met a creature who speaks to her in the idiom of a punitive governess. Alice’s claim that she’s a little girl meets with the pigeon’s contempt: “A likely story indeed! … I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time, but never one with such a neck as that. … I suppose you’ll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!” (55). Alice must admit she has eaten eggs, “but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.” The pigeon has the last word on Alice’s predatory and family-destroying nature: “I don’t believe it, but if they do, why, then, they’re a new kind of serpent; that’s all I can say” (56). Overall, then, in both Alice books Carroll characterizes the family as an institution formed by accident – one cannot choose one’s family – rather than by the ties of love and affection. Carroll’s satire shows the family as a faceless system of repressive moral oversight, one capable of cruelty, hypocrisy, and stupidity. In one long set piece placed toward the end of Wonderland, Carroll goes further, turning his critique of the Victorian family into a sustained satire against one of the then-most-heralded family entertainments: croquet. It is in this section we discover the most basic problem with Victorian families resides in the people who comprise them. Because even ­Victorian women and children have an innate predisposition to rivalry and rule. The family and the scene of its pleasures (here the croquet ground) inevitably demonstrates why families were not always the site of serene harmony that they were presumed to be by Victorian ideology. A game that came into popularity just years before Carroll invented his first tale concerning Alice, croquet was pitched to a willing Victorian public as a particularly fine game for families, especially for the female members, women and girls. Carroll had himself played croquet in the Deanery garden with the Liddell girls and knew all too well that this putatively family-appropriate game harbored the seeds of temper, violence, and cruelty. However, one can see why people initially thought croquet was a game

The “Queer-Looking Party” Challenge to Family in Alice  29 suitable for ladies and even girls.16 Croquet can be played on any reasonably flat lawn, hitting a ball with a mallet requires hand-eye coordination more than strength, and special outfits are not required. Moreover, ladies do not need to discompose themselves physically to play (as happens necessarily in tennis) because the play requires small, controlled, underhand strokes.17 Nonetheless, there are certain features built into the game’s structure that can bring out less attractive behavior among the players. First, because it is a game played in sequence, players must wait their turn to play, and if there are more than a few players (the ideal is for there to be two teams of two players each, but the game can accommodate as many as eight players), there are longueurs that can create inattention and boredom as well as opportunities for cheating (moving one’s own ball when no one is looking) and, when the game is played by both sexes, flirtations. But more importantly, croquet rewards the player who knocks his opponent’s ball away. In fact, once one player hits another player’s ball, the first player gets to choose between taking two free strokes or hitting the other player’s ball and then taking just one free stroke. To be mean or not to be mean? Since the game in the nineteenth century was played by ordinary mortals, vindictiveness and vicious competition often arose, even in – and perhaps particularly in – family settings. Despite its ease of play, croquet is a cruel game. It was hard (and is still hard, I would argue) to keep enmity at bay in a game of croquet, and temper tantrums and sulking would doubtless have marred more than one game, especially in games that involved children. The only knowledge we have about Alice’s prior experience of croquet tell us she has already had her darker side brought to the fore by the game; she had not only cheated (though she was playing against herself) but had lost her temper and, further, hurt herself by “trying to box her own ears” (18). By the time Alice has entered the lists, flamingo in hand, to compete with the Queen, we are well within the realm of rivalry, cheating, bad temper (even from the flamingo), animal cruelty, anarchy, and orders for execution. Carroll’s depiction of croquet brings competition, chaos, violence, absurdity, and ambition to the fore. First, the scene is prefaced by the card-gardeners arguing among themselves about their fearsome mistake in painting the roses red, a clear indicator that tyranny and unreason rule the garden. ­Second, once the game ensues, we find the equipment is nightmarishly unhelpful. For the mallet, there is a large flexible bird (Carroll’s original version had the mallets as ostriches); for the balls, there are hedgehogs who sometimes unroll and steal away; for the wickets, bending and ambulatory playing cards that sometimes move into positions advantageous to themselves or to the Queen. The ground is furrowed rather than mowed and level, as required by the rules, and the conduct of play is more than indecorous: noisy, quarrelsome, and dishonest. But while Alice complains about the injustice and loudness of the game, her protests reveal she is not dismayed by but rather relishes competition. As she notes, “I should have croqueted the Queen’s hedgehog just now, only

30  Laura White it ran away when it saw mine coming!” (86). Alice is annoyed she can’t compete properly because the game’s conduct is so impossible; she is not annoyed at the prospect of competitive play. Nor does she seem at all sensitive to the possible cruelty of using flamingos and hedgehogs as mallets and balls. She shows no sympathy for her flamingo, even when it turns its head upward with what Carroll terms “such a puzzled expression” (84). In fact, she can’t help laughing at the bird’s appeal. Further, when she sees her hedgehog fighting with another one, her immediate conclusion is that the moment is “an excellent opportunity for croqueting one of them with the other.” She is kept from executing her shot only because her flamingo is trying to escape “in a helpless sort of way … [by flying] up into a tree” (87).18 On the croquet field, Alice and the Queen represent the Victorian child and the Victorian mother as monsters at play. That Alice is almost as competitive as the Queen is shown by the moment when she outfoxes that dreadful figure. The Cat asks, “How do you like the Queen” and Alice, before noticing the Queen is eavesdropping on their conversation, says, “Not at all, she’s so extremely –.” Alice rescues herself by concluding, “likely to win, that it’s hardly worth while finishing the game” (86). The Queen smiles and moves away, smiling to hear she is winning and not minding she is winning by cheating. She has, after all, provided her opponents with a rough and ridgy ground, inadequate and openly rebellious equipment, and moving wickets. The Queen’s focus on individualistic play – she is to win, all others are to lose – is of course the rule in her family and court, and even if there were partners, it would be very difficult to discern them on the ground of play, for instead of the brightly colored balls with matching mallets that identify players and teams, common to traditional play, the hedgehogs are all brown and the flamingos are all pink. Since we have seen how unreasonable the Queen is (she has already sentenced the Two, Five, and Seven of Spades to death for planting the wrong type of rosebush), we know each of her temper fits is occasioned by any moment when she is not advantaged by the play. The point is the structure of croquet requires players to disadvantage others, and only by not really trying or actively trying to lose can an opponent not bring on the Queen’s bloody sense of vengeance. The main difference between Alice’s play and the Queen’s is that Alice doesn’t try to have her competition killed; otherwise, they are playing with an equally focused desire for victory at any cost. Ultimately, Alice’s game of croquet demolishes the Victorian hopes for a family game in which competition can be rendered decorously virtuous. One must accommodate the worst of human nature even when girls and women play in well-kept gardens. Interestingly, one champion of the sport, Walter James Whitmore, author of the 1868 Croquet Tactics, had to acknowledge this reality, for one of his final bits of advice to the ladies taking the field was “whatever you do, never lose your temper” (37). The family entertainment or sport of croquet in Wonderland joins the more incidental but continual indictments of family relationships in both Alice books. All these queer challenges to the normative Victorian family

The “Queer-Looking Party” Challenge to Family in Alice  31 in the Alice books come into being, I would argue, because Carroll cannot write alternate families worth joining, and he is unwilling to inscribe Alice within the Victorian family he cannot join himself. Moreover, the Victorian insistence on the perfections of family bonds seemed to call forth Carroll’s mockery. He was above all a realist, and he knew the Victorian family contained cruelties as well as comforts. It is for this reason the Alice books investigate every which way to form family relations but ultimately describe no relation that can endure. Notes   1. Carroll, Chapter Twelve, “Alice’s Evidence,” The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition.  2. In this refusal to represent an idealized domestic space, Carroll is in keeping with many other authors of Golden Age children’s literature. For every Little Women and The Wind in the Willows that champions the delights of home and hearth, there is a Peter Pan or The Wizard of Oz to show how poorly domestic ideals translate into the “other” land to which the child figure travels. All of Wendy’s housekeeping cannot ward off poison in the guise of nursery medicine, and the replacement family for Dorothy Gale’s Uncle Henry and Aunt Em is a badly assorted crew not dissimilar to the personages at the Tea Party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (admittedly, the MGM film of The Wizard of Oz [1939] tries to mitigate the unfamilial nature of Dorothy’s companions by creating a dream story in which the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion represent Dorothy’s friends at home, the hired hands, but there is no such parallel in Baum’s 1900 text). Childhood fantasies tend to leave parents behind (as in Peter Pan) or elide them altogether (as in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”). In the rare cases when parents come along, as in Johann David Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson or in the Little House series of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the parents are not merely loving and good but heroic and idealized figures.   3. All citations of the Alice books are taken from Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (2000).  4. As Gardner notes, “Most Carrollians agree that Carroll intended the White Knight to represent himself” (234n). He certainly sent a handmade game board to one of his child friends, Olive Butler, in 1892, identifying himself as the White Knight (Gardner 235n). The presupposition is so widespread that Alexander L. Taylor’s study of Carroll takes the identification for granted in its title: The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll).   5. The sisters do have an unnamed someone teaching them to draw, but one of the most unrewarding art subjects imaginable must be the subject they are set: a flat plate of molasses. Nonetheless, in having an art tutor, Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie do resemble the Liddell sisters, who had private art lessons, ultimately with John Ruskin.   6. Alice, however, inflicts punishments or threatens to do so. For instance, she kicks Bill the lizard up the chimney, she threatens the daisies in the Garden of Live Flowers, and she tries to throttle the Red Queen. Alice undergoes physical discomforts (for example, she is crammed into the house of the White Rabbit,

32  Laura White her toes are stepped on during the Lobster Quadrille, and her eardrums are nearly burst by the drums of the Red King’s soldiers), but none of these are ­punishments for misbehavior. In general, Alice tries throughout both narratives to be polite and well behaved, even in the face of the gross misbehavior and discourtesy of others. Her understandable loss of temper at the end of both tales marks the end of each dream-narrative.   7. Alice also sees her feet as creatures subject to her command, like Dinah. Bidding her feet farewell as she explodes in height at the start of “The Pool of Tears,” Alice addresses them as newly separate from her own being: “Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I sha’n’t be able!” (20; emphasis original). Certain these newly independent feet might need a bribe to go the way Alice wants them to go, she envisions sending them Christmas gifts. By this point, the feet have become gentrified and male – at least the right foot has, for the package will be addressed to “Alice’s Right Foot, Esq.” (21). Because her story is a children’s tale, Alice never thinks much about her potentially tragic life were any of her transformations to be permanent. She assumes she will return home to another family Christmas (it is very hard to imagine how the denizens of Wonderland celebrate that holiday).   8. Nonetheless, biographers seem in accord that Dodgson’s early family life was happy, even if conducted with the disciplinary relish common to the Evangelical Victorian middle-class family. Dodgson kept strong ties to his family all his life, and his sense of responsibility for them is attested to by the fact that when his clergyman father died in 1868, Dodgson created an establishment in Surrey for his many unmarried sisters and one unmarried brother. He visited his family frequently on holidays and died in the house he had purchased for his brothers and sisters, “The Chesnuts,” on his last visit in 1898. He gave them all as generous financial support as he could, and he also tended carefully to their interests. For instance, as late as 1895, he tried to get a good job for his brother Edwin, writing unsuccessfully to then-Prime Minister Lord Salisbury (Cohen 484). As an Oxford don, however, Dodgson was insulated from marrying himself; marriage was possible but uncommon, and had he married, he would have had to leave his pleasant rooms in Tom Quad. Further, his decision to rise no further in the church than the deaconate may also have been a way to avoid becoming a country rector, married and with a large family, as his father had been (his stuttering no doubt played a key role as well, since as a deacon rather than as priest he gave infrequent sermons and had no flock of his own to whom to preach).  9. It is legitimate to argue about Carroll’s purpose from Tenniel’s illustrations because of the dictatorial control Carroll exercised over his illustrator (see Hearn, especially pages 12–14). Once he had approved the illustrations, Carroll accorded them great authority. In fact, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the reader is directed twice to the pictures to clear up possible textual puzzles, once in regards to how the King of Hearts managed to wear both a crown and a judge’s wig at the same time and once in regards to what a Gryphon looks like (Hancher 195). In The Nursery “Alice” (1890), Carroll explains the creatures: Let’s try if we can make out all the twelve. There ought to be twelve to make up a jury. I can see the Frog, and the Dormouse, and the Rat and the Ferret,

The “Queer-Looking Party” Challenge to Family in Alice  33 and the Hedgehog, and the Lizard, and the Bantam-Cock, and the Mole, and the Duck, and the Squirrel, and a screaming bird, with a long beak, just behind the Mole. But that only makes eleven: we must find one more creature. Oh, do you see a little white head, coming out from behind the Mole, and just under the Duck’s beak? That makes up the twelve. Mr. Tenniel says the screaming bird is a Storkling (of course you know what that is?) and the little white head is a Mouseling. Isn’t it a little ­darling? What Carroll has added, on Tenniel’s authority, are two baby animals, the Storkling and the Mouseling, and in keeping with the expected audience of The Nursery “Alice”– children no more than five years old – Carroll’s emphasis is on the sweet charm of animal infancy. In the original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, of course, the littlest creatures are often treated with harshness. Bill the Lizard is kicked up the chimney, the Dormouse is thrust into a teapot, and the guinea pigs at the trial are stuffed into sacks and then sat upon by officers of the court. 10. There is also a Larkspur, but it is there primarily so Carroll can extend his oblique critique of John Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens,” with its inapposite use of Tennyson’s Maud. See my “Domestic Queen, Queenly Domestic” (115–17), which builds on Margaret Homans’ treatment of Ruskin and Carroll. 11. The more famous chirality in Through the Looking-Glass references chemical chirality, with the assumption that food in the Looking-Glass world would be mirror versions of real food and thus perhaps their molecules would be enantiomers of real molecules. Since enantiomeric drugs have differing effects, Alice is right to wonder about Looking-Glass milk. As she muses to Dinah, “[P]erhaps Looking-Glass milk isn’t good to drink” (142; see Gardner’s very helpful note on the subject, 144–46n). 12. The children’s cruelty, one should note, is only that of forcing the nice gentleman who was kind enough to take them on a rowing expedition to tell them another story and/or keep telling the story he has begun. Since inventing stories to amuse children was one of the things Carroll most liked to do, there is no actual cruelty involved. 13. The text tells us the Duchess is “nursing a baby” (60) but Carroll evidently means “nursing” in the more general sense of “tending to” rather than the contemporary sense of breastfeeding. Tenniel’s illustration confirms that no breastfeeding is occurring, though he curiously depicts the screaming baby in christening garb. 14. Gardner informs us the price of the box of ointment was originally five shillings in Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (51n). Upon revision of the satire for public consumption, Carroll made the father less rapacious at the expense of his own son. 15. Alice has also frightened her old nurse with a fantasy of predatory attack. At the start of Looking-Glass, we learn “once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, ‘Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyena, and you’re a bone!’” (141). Predator-prey relations are not only the theme of many jokes in both books but also a constituent theme of Alice’s own imagination. 16. As one 1865 booklet puffing croquet explained, Hitherto, while men and boys have had their healthful means of recreation in the open air, the women and girls have been restricted to the less ­exhilarating

34  Laura White sports of indoor life; or, if they ventured out, all the p ­ articipation in the h ­ ealthful out-door amusement and exercise they could indulge in was the tame and unsatisfactory position of mere lookers-on. (How to Play Croquet 6–7, cited in Curry 16) 17. As one guidebook explained to beginners, “Very little practice will show that to hold [the mallet] in one hand and swing it from the side gives the finest blow and is most graceful” (Scudder 28–29; cited in Curry 5). In fact, one can wear elegant clothing to play, so the game can double as something of a fashion review for onlookers and competitors alike. That croquet provided a scene of fashion in which a pastoral setting was peopled with beautifully dressed ladies inevitably drew the attention of painters in the 1860s and early 1870s. Winslow Homer, Édouard Manet, and Pierre Bonnard each have a painting called The Croquet Game; all three feature elegant women playing in a green bower. David Park Curry, who wrote the catalogue for the exhibition in 1994 at Yale University Art Gallery that featured Winslow Homer’s The Croquet Game (1866), examines Homer’s painting and others of his many croquet images (paintings and woodcuts for reproduction in popular magazines) within the context of nineteenthcentury croquet. Curry’s cultural analysis focuses in particular on croquet as a scene of possible romantic dalliance, a common criticism of croquet that does not engage Carroll’s attention particularly, as he has other criticisms to level. Curry notes Homer seems alive to the erotic potential of the game, and posits Homer gave up painting croquet scenes when croquet’s popularity diminished in part because “it [seems] that Homer chose to avoid delving further into the sexual implications of his subject as the game’s reputation began its long decline” (32). 18. Jerome Bump has written about this scene as emblematic of the central horrific secret of the familial relationship between humankind and animals, that while humans feel some familial emotions about animals, they also eat them: “This conflict, repressed at almost every meal, is the chief family secret” (11). Bump associates the “puzzled expression” of the flamingo as it twists up to look in Alice’s face with “Levinas’s statement that the face of the other says, ‘Don’t kill me,’” and goes on to say Alice’s laughter is the “kind of sadistic humor at the expense of animals [which] continues throughout the Alice books” (16). That Carroll was an ardent anti-vivisectionist complicates our understanding of his attitudes toward animals. Does he wish us to see Alice as heartless or the flamingo’s gaze as genuinely funny? And if it is genuinely funny, why is it so?

Works Cited Bump, Jerome. “Family and Animal in the Alice Books.” Professor Jerome Bump webpage. Accessed 2 January 2011. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures Under Ground: A Facsimile. London: The British Library, 2008. ———. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Ed. Martin Gardner. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000. ———. The Nursery “Alice.” London: Macmillan, 2010. Cohen, Morton N. Lewis Carroll. New York: Knopf, 1995.

The “Queer-Looking Party” Challenge to Family in Alice  35 Curry, David Park. Winslow Homer: The Croquet Game. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1984. Hancher, Michael. “Alice’s Audiences.” Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Ed. James Holt McGavran, Jr. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. 190–207. Hearn, Michael Patrick. “Alice’s Other Parent: John Tenniel as Lewis Carroll’s Illustrator.” American Book Collector 4.3 (1983): 11–20. Homans, Margaret. Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. How to Play Croquet. A New Pocket Manual of Complete Instructions For All Players. Illustrated with engravings and diagram, together with all the rules of the game; hints on parlour-croquet, and a glossary of technical terms. Boston: Amsden and Company, 1865. [Scudder, Horace Elisha.] The Game of Croquet; its appointment and laws; with descriptive illustrations. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1865. Southey, Robert. “The Old Man’s Comforts, and How He Gained Them.” Poemhunter.com. Web. Accessed 10 September 2014. Taylor, Alexander L. The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Philadelphia: Dufour Editions, 1963. White, Laura Mooneyham. “Domestic Queen, Queenly Domestic: Queenly Contradictions in Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 32.2 (2007): 110–28. Whitmore, Walter James. Croquet Tactics. London: Horace Cox, 1868.

2 Esther Summerson’s Estate The Queer, Quasi-Monarchical Line of Beauty, Family, and Inheritance in Bleak House1 Shale Preston I think my darling girl is more beautiful than ever. The sorrow that has been in her face – for it is not there now – seems to have purified even its innocent expression, and to have given it a diviner quality. Sometimes, when I raise my eyes and see her, in the black dress that she still wears, teaching my Richard, I feel – it is difficult to express – as if it were good to know that she remembers her dear Esther in her prayers. I call him my Richard! But he says that he has two mamas, and I am one. — Charles Dickens, Bleak House2 Black sheep dwell in every fold. — W. S. Gilbert, “Things Are Seldom What They Seem”

Many words have been written about Charles Dickens’s major work of ­fiction Bleak House but not many words have been expended on two i­mportant questions that hover uncomfortably over the text. Who asked the p ­ rotagonist, Esther Summerson, to write her first-person narrative, and why did they ask her to write it? These questions are particularly important because the very first sentence of Esther’s narrative indicates she was aware it would become part of a larger narrative: “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not very clever” (62). The fact that Esther was writing a “portion” of pages means she had arranged to give her pages to a person for inclusion in a larger text.3 The first sentence, then, appears to belie Esther’s claim in her closing chapter that she did not know, initially at least, who she was writing to: “The few words that I have to add to what I have written, are soon penned; then I, and the unknown friend to whom I write, will part for ever” (932). Accordingly, Esther did not write her narrative in a free and uninhibited manner. Indeed, the person who ­solicited her narrative would have been at the forefront of her mind. Esther might have even given her narrative to this person in i­nstalments so they could read and edit it on an ongoing basis. Further, Esther may have designed her narrative to accord with the person’s particular worldview, and she may have structured it to appeal to their sympathies and foster their ongoing ­support. With all of these considerations in mind, it would appear the most likely person to have asked Esther to write her narrative was her guardian John Jarndyce.4 As to his purpose for asking her to write it, it seems quite probable he may have

Esther Summerson’s Estate  37 wished to bequeath it to the child he takes possession of at the d ­ enouement of Bleak House. The child, Richard, is the son of Jarndyce’s deceased cousin Richard Carstone. If this proposal is accepted, then one can make the ­further ­conjecture that J­ arndyce wished to leave Esther’s narrative to Richard so Richard would come to intimately understand the various threads that fed into the ­circumstances of his birth, including the ­extraordinary evils of Chancery and the depths into which it led his ­biological father. Further, ­Jarndyce may have held out a wish that R ­ ichard would one day s­ ingle-mindedly devote himself to ­gaining and ­writing up a bird’s eye view of all of the c­ ircumstances that fed into his ­existence.5 By this token, the other portion of Bleak House is the text that Richard Carstone wrote as an adult and he is the ­omniscient ­narrator of Bleak House.6 A queer and circuitous form of patrilineal inheritance is thereby established whereby a self–appointed father asks his “daughter” (who was at one stage his fiancée) to write a first-person narrative so he can pass it on to his “son” who is the child of his unfortunate and m ­ isguided dead cousin. However, while Esther’s words are ultimately employed or deployed to support the patrilineal ends of John Jarndyce, there are three areas of her narrative that call this into question. The first is Esther’s c­ omplete ­acceptance of Richard’s wish to claim her as one of his “two mamas”; the second is the tension and rivalry Esther displays toward Jarndyce at the subterranean level of her narrative; and the third is the obsessive way in which Esther refers to Richard’s beautiful mother, Ada, throughout her narrative. Indeed, Esther remarks on Ada so often and so effusively that her professed love for her eventual ­husband Allan Woodcourt seems, at best, unconvincing.7 So while Esther may have ultimately and successfully serviced Jarndyce’s patrilineal imperatives, her authorial “estate” actually operates under her own queer terms of primogeniture and love. Rather than being written as a text Jarndyce can give to his son, it is instead a text she is leaving to the first-born son whom she shares with Ada, and rather than operating as a panegyric on the benevolence of Jarndyce, it is instead a love letter to her beauty, Ada. The following reading of Bleak House is what Steven Connor would call a “disobedient reading” (67). The normal line that critics and commentators take with Bleak House is to assume Esther Summerson is heterosexual in orientation.8 Her marriage to Allan Woodcourt at the denouement of the novel is thereby looked upon as a happy, fulfilling reward. Even critics who perspicaciously question Esther’s domestic thraldom take this stance. Lynn Caine, for instance, asserts: Even with the capitalized “Me” she assigns herself in her final chapter, Esther’s subjugation of herself to domesticity is as unsatisfactory as the fable of the new Bleak House is an antidote to the old one. But the narrative requires other things from Esther than a later novel will require of Miss Wade, a character who ultimately resists assimilation into patriarchal structures. The political discourse in Bleak House demands that Esther, like Mrs Bagnet, will sacrifice her intelligence, capabilities,

38  Shale Preston voice and pen to buttress the still fragile architecture of the symbolic. She is rewarded. Her marriage not only gives her simultaneously a new name and a new legitimacy but is apparently happy and sexually active, as opposed to the future of celibacy which seems inevitable for Jarndyce, Sir Leicester, Boythorne and George. (152) Certainly the narrative does require other things from Esther than it requires of Miss Wade in Little Dorrit but this does not mean Esther does not share Miss Wade’s sexual orientation; nor does it mean Esther fully subscribes to patriarchal structures.9 Rather it means Esther is not as uncompromising as Miss Wade or she has made a choice to “work the system” to her advantage. Just because Esther says she is happy at the end of her narrative and is highly complimentary about her husband and her guardian doesn’t necessarily mean she is entirely happy. So, too, just because Esther mentions she has two daughters doesn’t necessarily mean her marriage is “sexually active.” Finally, just because she gets, or more to the point, is given to her man (Woodcourt) by Jarndyce doesn’t mean she necessarily wanted this.10 Indeed, with a character as complex11 and self-effacing as Esther, it doesn’t pay critical dividends to take her on face value. Moreover, the platitudinous, hurried, and problematic nature of Esther’s final chapter and her earlier allusion to the fairy tale Blue Beard (often spelt Bluebeard) bring all of the traditionally accepted assumptions about Esther’s rosy denouement into question. Richard has two mamas12 Even if one considers the possibility that Esther is trying to bring her ­narrative to a satisfactory and expeditious close, the sketchy denouement to Bleak House poses more questions than it resolves. Why does the son of Esther’s beloved friend Ada say he has “two mamas”? Why does the s­ elf-abnegating Esther have no qualms about accepting and embracing Richard’s filial regard? Why does Esther unselfconsciously write of Ada “teaching my Richard” rather than “teaching her son Richard”? Why would Esther pointedly speak of Ada’s child as “my Richard” but not refer to her own daughters by name? As to the first two questions, it seems fair to ­speculate Esther must have, when the means permitted, given Richard a lot of her time, love, and affection. Accordingly, a strong bond has been forged to the point where Richard was able to quite spontaneously call her one of his mamas, and Esther happily accepted the title in the full and secure knowledge that Ada was not offended. As to the third question, Esther’s use of the possessive pronoun “my” is overdetermined, but one of the p ­ ossible causes could again be put down to the heartfelt attachment she had formed with Richard. However, the last question concerning Esther’s omission of her daughters’ names is particularly troubling in terms of the overall coherence and tonal integrity of her narrative. As the final chapter makes evident, Esther is directly involved in naming Richard:

Esther Summerson’s Estate  39 They gave my darling into my arms, and through many weeks I never left her. The little child who was to have done so much, was born before the turf was planted on its father’s grave. It was a boy; and I, my husband, and my guardian, gave him his father’s name. (932) Unusually for the self-denying Esther, she does not simply interpolate herself into this patrilineal naming convention but quite literally places herself at the helm. Indeed, by putting herself before her husband and her guardian, she takes the lead in ensuring that “her” child inherits his father’s name. However, while Esther wastes no time in naming Richard, she does not or cannot bring herself to refer to her own daughters by name. They are merely mentioned, in the manner of an afterthought, to show they too affirm Jarndyce’s chosen paternal title of guardian: “The children know him by no other name. – I say the children; I have two little daughters” (933). Furthermore, they are only mentioned once again in the famous last paragraph of the novel when Esther reflects upon her husband’s claim that she is prettier than she was before she contracted her disfiguring disease: I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now. But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my ­guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen; and that they can very well do without much beauty in me – even supposing –. (935) It is important to note the phrase “my dearest little pets are very pretty” could also refer to Esther’s “son” Richard because she has earlier in the ­chapter described him as a “pretty boy” (934). If this is the case, then Esther’s daughters, along with not being named, receive next to no a­ ttention in her long and exhaustive first-person narrative. Esther’s narrative therefore appears to reveal an implicit acquiescence to male superiority. Or does it? Following the death of her husband, the grieving and fragile Ada apparently requires Esther’s around-the-clock care. While the details are skirted over, it appears Esther’s lengthy care would have involved more than just holding Ada in her arms for many weeks because Ada gives birth to Richard during that time. Further, Esther must have presumably torn herself away from her “darling girl” (934) for a short period in order to marry Allan Woodcourt, but then immediately returned to her because, as the text makes clear, Ada actually comes to live with Esther and Allan following their marriage: They throve; and by degrees I saw my dear girl pass into my country garden, and walk there with her infant in her arms. I was married then. I was the happiest of the happy. It was at this time that my guardian joined us, and asked Ada when she would come home?

40  Shale Preston “Both houses are your home, my dear,” said he, “but the older Bleak House claims priority. When you and my boy are strong enough to do it, come and take possession of your home.” Ada called him “her dearest cousin, John.” But he said, No, it must be guardian now. He was her guardian hence forth, and the boy’s; and he had an old association with the name. So she called him guardian, and has called him guardian ever since. (932–33) Despite Esther’s happiness, Jarndyce insists on Ada and her son coming to live with him. He also takes possession of Richard in a linguistic sense by calling him “my boy” (932) and refuses to be addressed as anything other than guardian by Ada and her son. Notably, Ada does not agree to come back to Bleak House to “take possession” of it, as Jarndyce puts it. Rather, she simply begins to address her cousin, but before she can say anything further, Jarndyce paternally steps in and swallows her and her son up in much the same way that the Court of Chancery swallowed up the parties and the estate in Jarndyce and Jarndyce. As Esther is writing this seven years since she became the mistress of Bleak House, it means Jarndyce has not proposed marriage to Ada in that time. Accordingly, Ada has received his continuing support and care on the condition she and her son remain with him under terms of filial dependence and piety. Esther makes no comment about her feelings in relation to being deprived of Ada’s company but the immediate proximity of her words – “I was the happiest of the happy” (932) to Jarndyce’s abrupt intervention in her happy home – calls into question the efficacy of Jarndyce’s action. Esther’s happiness lends weight to Sharon Marcus’s argument that within the Victorian era, family and marriage could comfortably sustain and even support romantic friendship: “Marriage rarely ended friendships and many women organised part of their lives around their friend” (40). It is also worth noting Jarndyce’s intervention would have represented an enormous wrench to both Ada and Esther because the new Bleak House where Esther is situated is nowhere near the old Bleak House where Jarndyce intends to house Ada and her son. Indeed, when Esther is first called upon by Jarndyce to see the new Bleak House, it takes her a whole day to travel by stagecoach to the region where the house is situated and it is night before she comes to her journey’s end (510). It is noteworthy that even before Jarndyce has insisted on being called guardian, he has referred to Richard as “my boy” (932). However, while Jarndyce linguistically appropriates Richard, so too does Esther. In ­conveying that Richard calls her one of his mamas, Esther, as we know, delightedly refers to him as “my Richard!” As she has earlier put herself ahead of Jarndyce in naming Richard, a distinct sense of rivalry toward Jarndyce is thereby registered in Esther’s closing chapter. This is, of course, offset by the encomium that she bestows on Jarndyce: To Ada and her pretty boy, he is the fondest father; to me, he is what he has ever been, and what name can I give to that? He is my husband’s

Esther Summerson’s Estate  41 best and dearest friend, he is our children’s darling, he is the object of our deepest love and veneration. Yet while I feel towards him as if he were a superior being, I am so familiar with him, and so easy with him, that I almost wonder at myself. (934) Added to this, the last person she effectively refers to in her narrative is John Jarndyce. However, while Esther may eulogistically opine that J­ arndyce has the most beaming and kindly face that was ever seen,13 the fact remains that, in the end, Jarndyce’s face shines out against a narrative that contains an implicitly subversive and disrespectful edge.14 After all, Esther heads up the conferral of Richard’s name and she explicitly makes it known that Richard quite naturally views her as his co-parent. So while Jarndyce may imperiously remove Richard and his mother Ada from Esther’s home and insist they call him guardian, Esther is, by her own account, his rightful ­parent. Furthermore, in singling out Richard as the only child who receives a name within the families of the two Bleak Houses, Esther structurally aligns her narrative to Richard and implicitly bequeaths her authorial estate to him. He is “her” first-born male and the child she “naturally” shares with her beloved Ada. He is therefore her chosen and named heir. As a co-creator of the cultural artefact that will come to be called Bleak House, Esther then subversively constructs her own alternative, queer family and queer terms of primogeniture. Fatima and Blue Beard Esther’s alternative, queer family and inheritance stratagems owe much to the problematic relationship she has with her guardian. Aside from the ­tension Esther displays toward Jarndyce in her final chapter, there is another point within her narrative that serves to reveal her discomfort with the level of control he exerts in her life. This is the episode when Jarndyce sends Esther (now his fiancée) a letter from Yorkshire entreating her to travel by ­stagecoach at an appointed time to join him in the country. In his ­letter he reassures her in a postscript that she will “not be many hours from Ada” (910). This is because he knows Esther has been making daily visits to see Ada in what Esther describes as “that miserable corner” (881) where she lives with her “very ill” (876) husband Richard. Jarndyce is therefore ­mindful in his letter of Esther’s constant involvement in Ada’s life. However, as mentioned previously, the trip to the country takes Esther many hours and during the trip she spends the whole time wondering “what I could be wanted for at such a distance” (910). Finally, when she arrives, Jarndyce affably suggests Esther must be curious as to why he enjoined her to meet with him: “Full of curiosity, no doubt, little woman, to know why I have brought you here?”

42  Shale Preston “Well, Guardian,” said I, “without thinking myself a Fatima, or you a Blue Beard, I am a little curious about it.” (911) Esther’s mild-mannered allusion to the horrific French fairy tale Blue Beard is more than a little telling and goes a long way toward explaining the curious and vexed dynamic that exists between her and Jarndyce. Esther’s allusion is, of course, only intended to convey her curiosity, but the fact that she casts herself and Jarndyce in the roles of Fatima and Blue Beard, albeit drolly, underscores the extreme power that Jarndyce exerts over her. There are a number of versions of the Bluebeard tale but all of the versions feature a wealthy male, Blue Beard, who marries a young woman named Fatima.15 After the marriage, Blue Beard tells Fatima he is going away for a while and gives her all of the keys to his grand estate, including a key to one room that he expressly forbids her to enter. However, as soon as he goes away, the curious Fatima goes to open the forbidden room with its particular key. There, to her horror, she finds all of the dead bodies of Blue Beard’s previous wives and upon his return, only narrowly avoids becoming a candidate for his next act of homicide. A rich, older man, an estate, a private room, a young woman entrusted with all of the keys to the estate – it certainly sounds a lot like the dynamic between Esther and Jarndyce in Bleak House. As we know, even though Esther is originally told Jarndyce only requires her to be a companion to his ward and cousin, Ada, she soon learns far more is expected of her. To her complete surprise, a maid enters her room and gives her two large bunches of labeled keys. After the maid goes, Esther stands in wonder and feels “quite lost” (118) at the prospect of the immense trust Jarndyce has placed in her. Like Blue Beard, Jarndyce also has a private room. In this room, called the Growlery, he essentially vents his spleen: I was passing through the passages … with my basket of keys on my arm, when Mr Jarndyce called me into a small room next his bedchamber which I found to be in part a little library of books and papers and in part quite a little museum of his boots and shoes, and hat-boxes. “Sit down, my dear,” said Mr Jarndyce. “This, you must know, is the Growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here.” “You must be here very seldom, sir,” said I. “Oh, you don’t know me!” he returned. “When I am deceived or disappointed in – the wind, and it’s Easterly, I take refuge here. The Growlery is the best-used room in the house. You are not aware of half my humours yet. My dear, how you are trembling!” I could not help it; I tried very hard: but being alone with that benevolent presence, and meeting his kind eyes, and feeling so happy, and so honoured there, and my heart so full – I kissed his hand. (144)

Esther Summerson’s Estate  43 Unlike Fatima, Esther is asked to join Jarndyce in his private room but she still goes on to feel fear and earn his displeasure. After Esther’s deeply felt action, the disconcerted Jarndyce walks to the window and frightens Esther by looking as if he might jump out, but then he turns and mildly reproves her for displaying such gratitude: “‘There! There!” he said. “That’s over. Pooh! Don’t be foolish’” (144). Esther promises it won’t happen again and in response, Jarndyce tells her nothing he has done for her has been of any trouble: Why not? I hear of a good little orphan girl without a protector, and I take it into my head to be that protector. She grows up, and more than justifies my good opinion, and I remain her guardian and her friend. What is there in all this? So, so! Now we have cleared off old scores, and I have before me thy pleasant, trusting, trusty face again. (144) After chiding herself, Esther regains her composure. At this, Jarndyce ­manifests his approval and proceeds to act as if the interlude had never occurred. Deception; disappointment; sequestered frustration, depression, and anger; fear; profound gratitude; formal submission; potential s­ elf-harm and abandonment; admonishment; protection; conditional fidelity; the avengement of grievances or injuries; qualified approval and enforced facial composure are all mixed up in this strange interaction in much the same way as the melange of Growlery books, papers, shoes, and hat boxes. Esther, even at this early stage in the narrative, feels an enormous sense of indebtedness to Jarndyce. Without him she would be the shameful waste of space that her godmother, Miss Barbary, had made her feel when she was a child.16 At the same time, however, she is aware he is a man who frequently feels deceived and disappointed (to the point where he needs to set up a room in order to deal with his anger) and he has the potential, if provoked by “­foolish” (144) displays of sincere gratitude, to abandon his obligations and even harm himself.17 Further, she is aware from this interaction, and her previous interaction with him as a child, that he requires her to maintain a countenance of perfect equanimity. Indeed, the very first time Esther meets her guardian (albeit she doesn’t know it is Jarndyce), he vehemently objects to her being upset. Traveling by stagecoach to Reading in order to commence her education at “a first-rate establishment” (69) provided by her guardian, Esther sits opposite a gentleman who takes no notice of her until her tears become too much for him and he explodes: “What the ­de-vil are you crying for?” (70). He then tells her she should desist and “look glad!” (71). The frightened Esther immediately composes herself and tries to tell him of the pain she feels in knowing her aunt’s servant, Mrs Rachael, was not sad to see her go. At this, the gentleman becomes agitated, insinuates Mrs Rachael is a witch, and spends a considerable time “muttering to ­himself in an angry manner, and calling Mrs Rachael names” (71). He then

44  Shale Preston tries to give Esther “a piece of the best plum-cake that can be got for money” and “a gem” of a pie made in France (71). Esther politely refuses, claiming they are too rich for her. The gentleman then exclaims “Floored again!” and throws the gourmet items out the window (71). After this, he doesn’t speak to Esther until they get close to Reading, whereupon he shakes hands with her and tells her as he leaves the coach that she is to be a good, studious girl. Esther registers relief at his departure and claims that, in time, he passed from her mind. As can be seen, Esther’s portrait of Jarndyce is far from benign. ­According to Shuli Barzilai, “Mr. Jarndyce is not a Bluebeard but a fairy godmother” (515). This is debatable but parallels can certainly be drawn between ­Jarndyce and Esther’s godmother, Miss Barbary. Indeed, Jarndyce is not all that d ­ ifferent to Esther’s godmother. Certainly, he is not as cruel and ­withholding as she is, but in his refusal to allow Esther to show her real emotions, he parallels the rigidity of Miss Barbary that led Esther to feel she could never “be unrestrained with her – no, could never even love her as I wished” (63). Like Miss Barbary, who keeps Esther in the dark about her parents and the fact she is her aunt, Jarndyce also consistently keeps Esther in the dark. When she is a child, he doesn’t tell her exactly what his real relationship is to her. It is only when she meets him as an adult that she discovers he was the strange man in the stagecoach six years earlier: “I was certain it was he. I never was so frightened in my life as when I made the discovery, for he caught my glance, and appearing to read my thoughts, gave such a look at the door that I thought we had lost him” (113). ­Jarndyce also keeps Esther in the dark in a host of other ways. Before arriving at Bleak House, she is sent with Ada and Richard to Mrs Jellyby’s place to pass the night. All three are mystified as to why they have been sent to stay there, and no real justification is provided by Jarndyce’s legal representative, Mr Kenge, other than the fact Jarndyce has a high opinion of Mrs Jellyby. Later, however, after the three have arrived at Bleak House and Jarndyce has specifically asked Esther what she thought of Mrs J­ ellyby, it becomes apparent he had an ulterior motive: “Well! I want to know your real thoughts, my dear. I may have sent you there on purpose” (113). So, too, as mentioned previously, she is originally told that she is being brought to Bleak House to be the companion to his ward and cousin Ada but when she arrives, she discovers Jarndyce also wants her to take on the highly responsible role of being his housekeeper. Jarndyce also springs on Esther a range of benevolent gifts. She suddenly receives a maid servant, Charley – “If you please, miss. I’m a present to you, with Mr ­Jarndyce’s love” (389) – and she is given to understand Jarndyce expects her to e­ ducate Charley: “And if you please, miss, Mr Jarndyce’s love, and he thinks you’ll like to teach me now and then” (390). She is never made aware of Jarndyce’s ­less-than-paternal feelings toward her until she is placed in the invidious position of ­receiving Jarndyce’s highly euphemistic written marriage p ­ roposal: “It asked me, would I be the mistress

Esther Summerson’s Estate  45 of Bleak  House”  (666). She  is, without warning, faced with Jarndyce’s ­decision to retract his marriage proposal so he can high-handedly “give” her and the new Bleak House18 to Allan Woodcourt: “Allan,” said my guardian, “take from me a willing gift, the best wife that ever man had. What more can I say for you, than that I know you deserve her! Take with her the little home she brings you. You know what she will make it, Allan; you know what she has made its namesake. Let me share its felicity sometimes, and what do I sacrifice? Nothing, nothing.” (915) This scene, occurring as it does after Esther has been disfigured by disease, perfectly illustrates the following contention by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “in the presence of a woman who can be seen as pitiable or ­contemptible, men are able to exchange power and to confirm each other’s value even in the context of the remaining inequalities in their power. The ­sexually pitiable or contemptible female figure is a solvent that not only ­facilitates the relative democratization that grows up with capitalism and cash exchange, but goes a long way – for the men whom she leaves bonded together – towards palliating its gaps and failures.” (160) Added to being a homosocial object of exchange, Esther has to deal with the fact Jarndyce wants the snobbish and pedigree-obsessed Mrs ­Woodcourt to come and live at Bleak House so she can bear witness to Esther’s ­superior moral “pedigree” (914). Finally, following her marriage to Allan ­Woodcourt, Esther suddenly receives news that Jarndyce wants to remove Ada and little Richard from her marital home so he can protect them as their ­guardian at the original Bleak House. These are just some of the instances in which ­Jarndyce keeps Esther in the dark, springs something (generally life ­changing) on her, and expects her to unflappably rise to the challenge. Like Miss Barbary, he also engenders fear in Esther, and a lot of this fear is tied up with his barely repressed anger and the fact that he might literally abandon her. Finally, just as Miss ­Barbary told Esther that she needed to constantly engage in “­Submission, self-denial [and] diligent work” (65) in order to atone for her illegitimacy, ­Jarndyce expects Esther to always put her sense of duty and obligation before her true feelings. This is most evident when he tells Esther about how he c­ hallenged the clannish Mrs Woodcourt to come and live at Bleak House so she could ­experience first hand the superior nature of Esther’s innate legitimacy: “Now, madam,” said I, “I clearly perceive – and indeed I know, to boot – that your son loves my ward. I am further very sure that my ward loves your son, but will sacrifice her love to a sense of duty and

46  Shale Preston a­ ffection, and will sacrifice it so completely, so entirely, so religiously, that you should never suspect it, though you watched her night and day.” Then I told her all our story – ours – yours and mine. “Now, madam,” said I, “come you, knowing this, and live with us. Come you, and see my child from hour to hour; set what you see, against her ­pedigree, which is this and this” – for I scorned to mince it – “and tell me what is the true legitimacy, when you shall have quite made up your mind on the subject.” (914) However, while Jarndyce may make it clear he expects Esther to always maintain a facade of composure and repress all her natural instincts in the interests of duty and obligation, he does not succeed in repressing her deep, instinctive love for his beautiful cousin Ada. This is one area of her life and her narrative where she cannot and will not engage in self-censorship. The child of the universe Esther’s longing for a beautiful confidant first becomes apparent in the opening chapter of her first-person narrative. Suffering from a profound maternal deficit, she seeks solace in her “patient,” “faithful” (62) doll and relates all of her secrets and observations. This doll, described as her “only friend” (63), has a “beautiful complexion and rosy lips” (62). It is to the doll that she turns, after she has been traumatised by her godmother’s horrendous psychological cruelty: I went to my room, and crept to bed, and laid my doll’s cheek against mine wet with tears; and holding that solitary friend upon my bosom, cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of my sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy, at any time, to anybody’s heart, and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to me. (65) Six “quiet years” (74) later, Esther meets Ada, the living embodiment of the doll,19 and from the moment they meet, Esther only has eyes for Ada. Arriving in London, Esther is introduced to Ada and her distant cousin Richard, but Esther’s focus is immediately on Ada: They both looked up when I came in, and I saw in the young lady, with the fire shining upon her, such a beautiful girl! With such rich golden hair, such soft blue eyes, and such a bright, innocent trusting face! “Miss Ada,” said Mr Kenge, “this is Miss Summerson.” She came to meet me with a smile of welcome and her hand extended, but seemed to change her mind in a moment, and kissed me. (77)

Esther Summerson’s Estate  47 Eclipsed by Ada’s radiance, Richard is quite secondary in this episode and there is never any sense Esther is even remotely interested in Richard romantically.20 Richard, is, of course, only interested in Ada and he is on a different social footing than Esther, owing to his familial connection to Jarndyce, but it is interesting Esther never registers any romantic interest in him and throughout her narrative she quite dispassionately refers to his “handsome” (78) looks.21 Esther also never registers any jealousy in terms of Ada’s beauty. She is only ever delighted when anyone refers to it and she assiduously records every time Ada’s beauty is spoken of. When the Lord Chancellor is introduced to Ada, Esther writes: “That he admired her, and was interested by her, even I could see in a moment” (78; emphasis ­original). When Caddy Jellyby looks at Ada while she is asleep, Esther records her ­feelings – “She is very pretty!” (93) – and also notes Caddy stoops down to kiss Ada (94). Krook’s admiration of Ada’s hair is also another opportunity for Esther to record the way she and Miss Flite are transfixed by Ada’s beauty: “Hi! Here’s lovely hair! I have got three sacks of ladies’ hair below, but none so beautiful and fine as this. What colour, and what texture!” “That’ll do, my good friend!” said Richard, strongly disapproving of his having drawn one of Ada’s tresses through his yellow hand. “You can admire as the rest of us do, without taking that liberty.” The old man darted at him a sudden look, which even called my attention from Ada, who, startled and blushing, was so remarkably beautiful that she seemed to fix the wandering attention of the little old lady herself. (101) Esther is also delighted beyond measure by the aesthetic pleasure Skimpole takes in Ada: In the evening when I was preparing to make tea, and Ada was ­touching the piano in the adjoining room and softly humming a tune to her cousin Richard … he came and sat down on the sofa near me, and so spoke of Ada that I almost loved him. “She is like the morning,” he said. “With that golden hair, those blue eyes, and that fresh bloom on her cheek, she is like the summer morning. The birds here will mistake her for it. We will not call such a lovely young creature as that, who is a joy to all mankind, an orphan. She is the child of the universe.” (122) Esther even records the fact that the vampiric Mr Vholes is not insensible to Ada’s beauty (877). Esther also consistently refers to Ada in the most adoring terms throughout her narrative. Immediately after being introduced to Ada, Esther calls her “my love” (81) and this is reinforced by a range of other terms including “My simple darling” (90); “My darling” (163); “my

48  Shale Preston own” (229); “my dear girl” (482); “my beautiful darling” (669); “my own pet” (742); “my sweet girl” (744); “my beauty” (744); “my love” (744); “my child” (744); “my darling rose” (752), etc.22 Furthermore, Esther savors and seeks to tease out the physical intimacy she shares with Ada: “It was so pretty to have her clinging to me in that way, hiding her face; and to know that she was not crying in sorrow, but in a little glow of joy, and pride, and hope; that I would not help her just yet” (229). Ada’s good opinion means everything to Esther. Nothing, for Esther, could be worse than losing it. This becomes most apparent when Esther refuses to see Ada both during and for a long time after her disfiguring ­illness. Indeed, it is not so much the loss of her looks that worries Esther but rather the prospect her “altered looks” (572) might lead to a change or diminution in Ada’s feelings for her: “I loved my darling so well that I was more concerned for their effects on her than on any one. … I thought would she be wholly prepared? When she first saw me, might she not be a little shocked and disappointed?” (572). The scene when Esther finally brings herself to the point where she can meet with Ada is also one of the most intensely rendered scenes in Dickens’s oeuvre: I did not mean to do it, but I ran upstairs into my room, and hid myself behind the door. There I stood trembling, even when I heard my darling calling as she came upstairs, “Esther, my dear, my love, where are you? Little woman, dear Dame Durden!” She ran in, and was running out again when she saw me. Ah, my angel girl! the old dear look, all love, all fondness, all affection. ­Nothing else in it – no, nothing, nothing! O how happy I was, down upon the floor, with my sweet beautiful girl down upon the floor too, holding my scarred face to her lovely cheek, bathing it with tears and kisses, rocking me to and fro like a child, calling me by every tender name that she could think of, and pressing me to her faithful heart. (573) Esther’s deep need to hold back from seeing Ada and subsequent reunion with her has been read in a variety of ways and some male critics have been particularly unsettled. Geoffrey Carter, for instance, talks of “Esther’s latent sadistic lesbianism” (144) and asserts Dickens confected the postponement and reunion in the interests of arousing his readership: What upsets us here, perhaps, is that in the guise of portraying an ­innocent girl’s sisterly altruism, Dickens is in fact titillating us with a scene of sexual hysteria, set up by weeks of subtly sadistic p ­ ostponement of gratification (144). Another critic, A. E. Dyson, registers considerable unease at Esther “­rejoicing in Ada’s friendship and love” (266). For Dyson,

Esther Summerson’s Estate  49 Many modern readers find the tone of this relationship particularly upsetting, since tenderness and whimsy in private life are currently taboo. Esther’s relationship would be ‘interesting’ if it were labelled lesbian and pursued into sordid fantasies or dismal obsessions, but it is somehow embarrassing as it stands. (266) Dyson also directly links Esther’s relationship with Ada with her u ­ npopularity as a character (264).23 Esther’s need to be constantly with Ada is also very great. When Esther learns Ada has married Richard in secret and has resolved to live with him in his “ill-assorted refuge” (756) at Symond’s Inn, she finds it excruciatingly difficult to leave the distraught and clinging Ada: When that time arrived it was the worst of all, for then my darling completely broke down. She clung round my neck, calling me by every dear name she could think of, and saying what should she do w ­ ithout me! Nor was Richard much better; and as for me, I should have been the worst of the three, if I had not severely said to myself, “Now, Esther, if you do, I’ll never speak to you again!” “Why, I declare,” said I, “I never saw such a wife. I don’t think she loves her husband at all. Here, Richard, take my child, for goodness’ sake.” But I held her tight all the while, and could have wept over her I don’t know how long. (755) After taking her leave, Esther is beset with what can only be called grief24: And when I got downstairs, O how I cried! It almost seemed to me that I had lost my Ada for ever, I was so lonely, and so blank without her, and it was so desolate to be going home with no hope of seeing her there, that I could get no comfort for a little while, as I walked up and down in a dim corner, sobbing and crying. (755) Unable to cope with her emotions, Esther returns to their residence in the evening. Leaving her maid Charley below, she steals upstairs and lingers about their front door25: I listened for a few moments; and in the musty rotting silence of the house, believed that I could hear the murmur of their young voices. I put my lips to the hearse-like panel of the door, as a kiss for my dear, and came quietly down again, thinking that one of these days I would confess to the visit. And it really did me good; for though nobody but Charley and I knew anything about it, I somehow felt as if it had diminished the ­separation between Ada and me, and had brought us together again for those moments. I went back, not quite accustomed

50  Shale Preston yet to the change, but all the better for that hovering about my darling. (756) This scene is particularly troublesome for Geoffrey Carter: “This has to make a modern reader feel very uncomfortable: Esther is listening, tip-toe, outside the wedding chamber on the wedding night! At the best, this is a grotesque interference in other people’s privacy; at the worst, it is voyeurism masquerading as selfless love” (143). Esther’s actions here, however, represent a form of eavesdropping and as eavesdropping “involves the theft of intimate experience” (Locke 127), one could argue Esther effectively wants to steal Richard’s conjugal rights (just as she later appropriates his child). After all, she has earlier that day told him (albeit in jest) Ada doesn’t love him at all. Despite the discomfort it has generated with critics, Esther’s bond with Ada is intense, and it is also reciprocated to a large degree by Ada.26 Taking all of these things into account, it is really quite significant that Esther, through narrative sleight of hand, glides over both her reaction and Ada’s reaction to the prospect of having to live apart in separate “bleak” houses. The summer’s sun In working to bring to light Esther’s queer, idiosyncratic, and arguably quasimonarchical notion of succession, it is important to be mindful of Esther’s family name. According to Gary Watt, Dickens may have given Esther the surname Summerson to specifically allude to a particular line from one of Shakespeare’s history plays. As Watt writes: At the start of Shakespeare’s The Life of Henry the Fifth, the ­Archbishop of Canterbury has the task of establishing the King’s unimpeachable title to the throne of France as a precursor to invasion. He proceeds to discredit the so-called ‘salique law’, which the French allege must bar Henry’s claim, since his claim is based on succession through a female. Canterbury’s technique is to lose his audience in a cloud of historical intricacies and legal technicalities, so that his audience quite forgets any need for Henry to prove a positive title to France. The Archbishop emerges from the fog triumphant, with a line that never fails to raise a laugh. The legitimacy of the King’s claim is, he says, ‘as clear as is the summer’s sun’ (1.2.88). It was to explore this same dramatic contrast between the documentary obscurity of the law and the clarity of daylight that Dickens created the legal fog of Bleak House and created Esther Summerson to triumph over it. (49) If this is the case, then Esther is also linked to the notion of the legitimacy of direct succession through a female. Moreover, as it is traditionally accepted

Esther Summerson’s Estate  51 that in calling his protagonist Esther, Dickens intended to allude to the book of Esther in the Bible, he viewed Esther in the light of a sovereign. As Watt asserts, “Dickens may have been inspired by Queen Esther’s example to ­portray in Esther Summerson something like a new law to counter the old law of chancery, and to do it under the subtle disguise of domesticity” (52). It should also be remembered that Inspector Bucket pointedly claims she is as good as a “Queen” (858), and in considering the question of whether the sins of the fathers had been visited on her, Esther explicitly likens herself to a queen: “I knew I was as innocent of my birth as a queen of hers; and that before my Heavenly Father I should not be punished for birth, nor a queen rewarded for it” (571). In conclusion, Jarndyce may create two Bleak Houses to house two separate families whose members are all hyper-conscious of all he has ­ done for them but there is one estate he can’t quite control and that is the ­authorial estate he could well have solicited from his ward Esther. Much more than a portion of Bleak House, it represents the last will and testament of Esther Summerson,27 and it is as clear as “the summer’s sun” that its chief beneficiary is not Jarndyce’s son Richard but rather Richard II, the son of Queen Esther and her beautiful queen consort, Ada Clare. Notes   1. The title of this chapter alludes to Alan Hollinghurst’s groundbreaking novel The Line of Beauty (2004), which was dubbed the first gay novel to win the Man Booker Prize in its thirty-six-year history. Paralleling Hollinghurst’s protagonist, Nick Guest, Esther displays an enduring obsession with beauty.   2. Dickens (Bleak House 934).   3. According to Steven Connor, Esther’s narrative, like her face, is “scarred by concealment and repression” (83). For Connor, “this complicates the relationship between her language and her meaning by introducing the play of presence and absence and [makes] it harder to accept her narrative as full and self-evident speech” (83–84). Moreover, Connor maintains, “One of the moments when this happens is right at the beginning of Esther’s narrative, with her puzzling reference to ‘my portion of these pages’. … This awareness of being part of a larger discourse seems to be lost to Esther after this point, but here it clearly marks her narrative as a co-operation with, or even an enclosure within another. Indeed it is important to Bleak House that Esther should conceive her world as full, continuous, and integral, but this moment seems to reveal that it is produced out of difference” (84).  4. If one takes these considerations into account, it also explains why so many critics have found Esther’s portrayal highly problematic. As William Axton ­ states, “Although Charles Dickens clearly intended Esther Summerson for the heroine of Bleak House, many readers have found her character ambiguous, if not repugnant. Esther’s portion of the narrative has to them a disingenuous ring. The picture she paints of herself is too good to be true, or at least too good to be credible” (545).

52  Shale Preston   5. In wanting Richard to gain a bird’s eye view, Jarndyce may have hoped to truly set Richard free from the curse of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Unlike his father and mother, who were effectively added to Miss Flite’s cage of birds as “the Wards of Jarndyce” (875), Richard will, through Jarndyce’s aid, soar above the evils of “the ill-fated Chancery suit” (681) and make something of himself in a way his Chancery-obsessed father was never able to do. As Barry McCrea notes, “­Richard’s mistake [was] to think that he [was] made by his imaginary ­genealogical destiny instead of his immediate, material existence” (50).   6. Presumably the person who asked Esther to write her “portion” of the pages was someone who did not for a moment endorse her view that she was not very clever because nearly half of the book is devoted to Esther’s narrative and the final chapter is written by Esther. We cannot presume, however, that the person who asked Esther to pen her narrative was the omniscient narrator or co-narrator of Bleak House. This is because the narrative of the omniscient ­narrator may not have been penned around the same time Esther wrote her narrative. Moreover, the panoramic perspective of the omniscient narrator would suggest this person had invested a great deal of time, thought, imagination, research, and emotional energy into gaining a complete understanding of all of the ­circumstances that lay behind Esther’s narrative. Nevertheless, while we cannot conclude it was the omniscient narrator who asked Esther to make up a c­ onsiderable portion of the pages of the artefact now known as Bleak House, we can conjecture it was ­someone in her immediate circle who wanted her to write her side of the story while she was still young and had a strong recollection of all the contributing events. This person could have been Allan Woodcourt or even Ada Carstone (née Clare) but I am inclined to think it was John ­Jarndyce because of Esther’s ­constant hyperbolic references to his benevolence and the overly constrained (if not to say repressed) tenor of her narrative. In addition, the notion of Esther’s narrative as a future gift fits in with John Jarndyce ­manipulative, behind-the-scenes beneficence. I do not take the sanguine view suggested by Robert ­Newsom (87) and Hilary M. Schor (117) that Esther also wrote the omniscient narrative ­portion of Bleak House.  7. Patricia Ingham speaks of the “contextual unease” Dickens generates by the “extreme” nature of Esther’s explicit passion for Ada: “The measure of excess in the feeling that Esther shows for Ada is the absence of any similar expression of emotion for Woodcourt with whom she is supposed to be deeply in love” (127). There is not the room in this chapter to explore the dynamics between Esther and Allan but the “triumph” (891) Esther feels when Woodcourt declares his love would call into question any reciprocity of desire. It would appear Esther is more attracted to the fact that Woodcourt is attracted to her. This is perhaps why she places Woodcourt’s withered flowers to the lips of the sleeping Ada when she receives Jarndyce’s bloodless marriage proposal. Woodcourt is the only person (aside from the vulgar Guppy) who has shown any romantic interest in her. Ada is her real love object but she knows Ada is in love with Richard: “I saw my beautiful darling, through the open door, lying asleep, and I stole in to kiss her. … I dropped a tear upon her dear face, and another, and another. … I thought about her love for Richard; though, indeed, the flowers had nothing to do with that” (669).

Esther Summerson’s Estate  53  8. Even critics who accurately highlight the lesbian eroticism that lies at the heart of Bleak House and pinpoint the stilted nature of Esther’s interactions with Allan Woodcourt take this circumscribed view. See, for instance, Kimberle L. Brown’s treatment of Esther’s sexuality and scopophilia. Brown claims Esther’s lesbian gaze is purely a conduit through which Dickens can empower characters and potentially readers to work toward social reform (170). Further, despite stressing the hollow absence of communicated desire between Woodcourt and Esther, she asserts the characters are “enamored of each other” (165).   9. Lynn Cain claims Esther Summerson is “the only Dickensian woman to take up the authorial pen” (147). I would dispute this because Miss Wade also goes on to take up the authorial pen to write her confessional text “The History of a ­Self-Tormentor” in Little Dorrit (725–34). It is no ­accident, I believe, that the only two female characters in Dickens’s work that author/ create texts are women who evince strong same-sex desires. I discuss D ­ ickens’s ­fascination with female same-sex intimacy in “Miss Wade’s Torment: The ­Perverse ­Construction of Same-Sex Desire in Little Dorrit.” If we can accept the ­centrality of ­Dickens’s first-person lesbian voices then we can speak of ­Dickens’s lesbianism, but his brand of lesbianism doesn’t lend itself quite so well to “queer-positive” r­ereadings as Proust’s lesbianism. See Elisabeth ­Ladenson’s Proust’s Lesbianism for a fascinating exploration of Proust’s ­representation of lesbians. 10. Natalie Schor claims Bleak House promises a dark version of love that is ­accomplished “in the language of debt, exchange, and property” but which nonetheless holds out the promise “that the self can be exchanged for what the self really wants (in Esther’s case, Allan)” (121). My resistant reading of Esther puts this benign view of homosocial exchange and “women as property” into question. 11. Paul Eggert argues, “Dickens had committed himself to a psychological study deeper, probably, than he had anticipated and more complex, finally, than he could handle” (81). Norman Page corroborates this: “the problem with Esther is that she may be too complex” (73). 12. The title of this section alludes to the highly affirmative and validating late ­twentieth-century children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies. 13. Even these final words concerning Jarndyce have earlier been eclipsed by Esther’s assertion that Ada’s face is dearer to her than any other: “The plain breakfast made a cheerful show, and Caddy was perfectly charming. But when my darling came, I thought – and I think now – that I never had seen such a dear face as my beautiful pet’s” (478). 14. It could even be argued Esther puts herself on a level playing field with ­Jarndyce by claiming he is a “superior being” but expressly noting she is extremely ­familiar and free with him. 15. The most famous surviving version of the tale was written by Charles Perrault. 16. I discuss in detail the severe psychological abuse Miss Barbary directs toward Esther in Chapter Four of Dickens and the Despised Mother: A Critical Reading of Three Autobiographical Novels, 98–131. 17. Esther conveys Jarndyce’s aversion to being thanked in Chapter Six of Bleak House. Rather than being thanked for one act of kindness, he apparently ran away for three months (111). Esther also records that soon after arriving at Bleak

54  Shale Preston House with Ada and Richard, she felt “that if we had been at all ­demonstrative, he would have run away in a moment” (112). 18. These “gifts” come with strings attached, being Jarndyce’s visiting rights in ­perpetuity. 19. Christine Van Boheemen-Saaf claims Ada is “the reincarnation of [Esther’s] long buried doll” (246). 20. This episode in Esther’s narrative is what can only be termed love at first sight. Esther loves Ada’s looks and she also loves the fact that Ada is immediately willing to freely and happily “confide in” her (77). Just like the way Esther felt about her doll, Ada all at once accepts Esther as her “solitary friend” (65) and confidant. 21. Zwerdling claims it is curious Esther is never considered as a possible match for Richard but he doesn’t note she is not manifestly attracted to him (431). John Carey also notes the decided lack of interest Esther displays in men (172–73). Carey claims Esther’s godmother effectively made “adult sexuality terrifying to her” (172). As a consequence she avoided “the contagion of the male” and went through a “homosexual phase” (172). Nevertheless, Carey claims Allan ­Woodcourt guided her into “sexual maturity” (173). 22. Armstrong writes, “Esther’s relentless compulsion to speak of Ada’s beauty and perfection is impossible not to notice and has contributed to a century and a half of irritation with her as narrator” (62). 23. It is “interesting” that both of these critics talk of being “upset” by Dickens’s portrayal of Esther and Ada’s relationship and both link the relationship with lesbianism, even though Dyson (writing in 1969) immediately discounts the ­possibility it could be lesbian in nature. Timothy Peltason also flags the ­possibility of lesbian desire but immediately discounts it: “For all the erotic energy with which Esther invests this episode … it does not seem to be an ­exploration, ­conscious or otherwise, of the possibilities of lesbian desire: at least, not unless lesbian desire is figured regressively as immaturity and narcissism” (680). I d ­ isagree with this dubious statement and take particular exception to the word “narcissism,” given the fact Esther has just survived a life-threatening illness and has been left facially disfigured. 24. For a sensitive reading of this episode see Holly Furneaux (26–34). 25. Oulton claims “Esther ghoulishly listens at the door of their new home” (90). 26. See Furneaux (32) and Edwards Keates (178) for explorations of the deleted passage in Bleak House when Ada envisages a shared life with Esther. 27. Under common law, Esther would have lost the ability to make a will of her own (Schor 123), but she is enabled through her first-person narrative to ­exercise her testamentary freedom (albeit implicit/coded). Her narrative then is ­simultaneously her last will and testament and her estate.

Works Cited Axton, William. “The Trouble with Esther.” Modern Language Quarterly 26.4 (1965): 545–57. Armstrong, Mary A. “Multiplicities of Longing: The Queer Desires of Bleak House and Little Dorrit.” Nineteenth Century Studies 18 (2004): 59–79.

Esther Summerson’s Estate  55 Barzilai, Shuli. “The Bluebeard Barometer: Charles Dickens and Captain Murderer.” Victorian Literature and Culture 32.2 (2004): 505–24. Brown, Kimberle L. “‘When I Kissed Her Cheek’: Theatrics of Sexuality and the Framed Gaze in Esther’s Narration of Bleak House.” Dickens Studies Annual 39 (2008): 149–75. Cain, Lynn. Dickens, Family, Authorship: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Kinship and Creativity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Carey, John. The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. Carter, Geoffrey. “Sexuality and the Victorian Artist: Dickens and Swinburne.” ­Tennessee Studies in Literature 27 (1984): 141–60. Cole, Natalie Bell. “‘Attached to life again’: the ‘Queer Beauty’ of Convalescence in Bleak House.” The Victorian Newsletter Spring (2003): 16–19. Connor, Steven. Charles Dickens. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Ed. J. Hillis Miller. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. ——— Little Dorrit. Ed. John Holloway. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Eggert, Paul. “The Real Esther Summerson.” Dickens Studies Newsletter 11 (1980): 74–81. Furneaux, Holly. “Emotional Intertexts: Female Romantic Friendship and the Anguish of Marriage.” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 14.2 (2009): 25–37. Gilbert, W. S. “Things Are Seldom What They Seem.” 1878. H.M.S. Pinafore. ­songetext.com. Web. Accessed 8 September 2014. Keates, Kim Edwards. “‘Wow! She’s a lesbian. Got to be!’: Re-reading/Re-viewing Dickens and Neo-Victorianism on the BBC.” Dickens and Modernity. Ed. Juliet John. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012. 171–92. Hollinghurst, Alan. The Line of Beauty. London: Picador, 2004. Ingham, Patricia. Dickens, Women and Language. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Ladenson, Elizabeth. Proust’s Lesbianism. Cornell University Press, 1999. Locke, John L. Eavesdropping: An Intimate History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. McCrea, Barry. In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Newman, Lesléa. Heather Has Two Mommies. New York: Alyson Books, 1989. Newsom, Robert. Dickens and the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: Bleak House and the Novel Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Oulton, Carolyn. Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Page, Norman. Bleak House: A Novel of Connections. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Peltason, Timothy. “Esther’s Will” ELH 59.3 (1992): 671–91. Perrault, Charles. “Blue Beard.” The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. London: George G. Harrap & Co, 1922. 35–45. Preston, Shale. Dickens and the Despised Mother: A Critical Reading of Three ­Autobiographical Novels. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. ———. “Miss Wade’s Torment: The Perverse Construction of Same-Sex Desire in Little Dorrit.” Changing the Victorian Subject. Eds. Margaret  Tonkin, Mandy

56  Shale Preston Treagus, Madeleine Seys, and Sharon Crozier-de Rosa.  Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2014. 217–39. Schor, Hilary M. Dickens and the Daughter of the House. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsy. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Van Booheemen-Saaf, Christine. “‘The Universe Makes an Indifferent Parent’: Bleak House and the Victorian Family Romance.” Interpreting Lacan. Ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. 225–57. Watt. Gary. “The Equity of Esther Summerson.” Law and Humanities 3.1 (2009): 45–69. Zwerdling, Alex. “Esther Summerson Rehabilitated.” PMLA 88 (1973): 429–39.

3 Michael Field’s Dramatically Queer Family Dynamics Tracy Olverson

Dwelling on his friendship with the late nineteenth-century writers Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), the writer and critic Logan Pearsall Smith described the quietly attired, rigidly mannered women as “full of grandiose passions, dreadful deeds of lust and horror, incest and assassination, hells of jealousy and great empires tottering to their fall” (87). Pearsall Smith’s vivid description of Bradley and Cooper suggests a delightfully entertaining couple who, despite appearances, seem to have reveled in vivid historical tales of sexual and familial betrayal. In fact, under the pseudonymous identity of “Michael Field,” Bradley and Cooper collaboratively wrote about lustful deeds and hellish jealousies in twenty-seven dramas over a period of almost thirty years. What is more, the immaculately attired Victorian ladies were aunt and niece, a devoted couple who lived the majority of their lives together. This chapter will not only explore the familial context of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship but also the violent and conflicted familial relationships in the Roman dramas of Michael Field. In so doing, I hope to show how in their lives and in their work, Bradley and Cooper developed decidedly queer family dynamics, designed to challenge and reenvision conventional notions of family, identity, morality, and desire. Bradley and Cooper’s relationship was most certainly “queer,” to the extent that their collaboration, their multiple artistic identities, and their intimate, perhaps sexual, relationship challenged heteronormative Victorian conventions. Yet surprisingly little critical attention has been paid to Michael Field’s familial context during the most recent phase of scholarly re-evaluation. Rather, there has been a tendency to locate Bradley and Cooper within an urbane, homosocial, male intellectual community.1 Whilst it is certainly true Bradley and Cooper sought out both male and female intellectual alliances, I think it is worth examining the familial dynamics of this queer couple in greater detail, as in their letters and diaries Bradley and Cooper record the complex dynamics of their own domestic plot. Under the guise of “Michael Field” and from within the security and respectability of the middle-class Cooper household, Bradley and Cooper imaginatively explore the socio-cultural myth of the unitary nuclear family, exposing instances of violent division, personality contests, and emotional isolation.

58  Tracy Olverson Bradley and Cooper delved back into the annals of history in order to find subjects who would challenge and disrupt traditional kinship structures and radically revise sexual relationships. From the highly eroticized female communities of Callirhoë (1884) and Long Ago (1889) to the estranged father-son relationship of The Father’s Tragedy (1885) and the fratricidal betrayals of Attila, My Attila! (1896), Julia Domna (1903), and Borgia (1905), Michael Field repeatedly represented familial relationships as fraught with tension, incest, sacrifice, betrayal, and retribution. Indeed, in a number of tragedies, families struggle to contain the monstrous and villainous personalities within. In focusing on the under-studied Roman dramas, this chapter will thereby reveal how these unique collaborators challenged contemporary understandings of the heavily sentimentalized, heteronormative, nineteenth-century family unit. Despite the seemingly salacious content, Michael Field’s early dramas are informed by Kantian moral philosophy and can be seen as philosophic meditations on contemporary morality, particularly as it relates to the family and the state. There is an ongoing tension in the dramas of Michael Field between the notion of familial loyalty and the concept of patriotism. The virulent patriotism of characters often wins out but to devastating effect for both family and the wider community. In Brutus Ultor (1886) and Julia Domna, for example, Michael Field explores the damage inflicted within and without the family by the immoral and sadistic sons of dissolute mothers. At the core of these two dramas is the notion of parenthood as an essential national moral duty. In order to demonstrate the need for a revision of so-called traditional family dynamics, Michael Field examines some of the most ignominious episodes in ancient Roman history, thereby exposing the unstable classical underpinnings of the modern European nuclear family. Notwithstanding the vivid historical details, it was possible for audiences to draw uncomfortable parallels between the aristocratic families of Michael Field’s dramas and the seemingly respectable bourgeois families of nineteenth-century Britain. It is important to note Michael Field writes about familial conflict during an incredibly volatile period in the history of the middle-class family. Marriage and reproduction may have been the economic and social building blocks for the middle class for much of the nineteenth century, but that did not mean relationships, roles, and definitions of family were stable or resolved. From the 1860s onwards, major studies analyzing the origins, history, and subsequent development of the family and kinship customs were published by the likes of Henry Sumner Maine, Johann Bachofen, and, later, Friedrich Engels. Yet one of the most significant threats to the stability and moral righteousness of the Victorian middle-class family actually came from a legal institution designed to safeguard the family and protect the sanctity of marriage. The mandate of the Divorce Court, when it was established in 1857, was to publicly humiliate and thereby punish those guilty of marital misconduct. But in trial after lurid trial, men and women willingly recanted tales of infidelity, illegitimate children, violence,

Michael Field’s Dramatically Queer Family Dynamics  59 and betrayal. As the Divorce Court was open to the public and its cases widely reported by the increasingly sensationalist press, the conduct of marriage and the integrity of the family became an official public concern.2 The reality, as Martha Vicinus suggests, is “attitudes towards marriage and sexual relations were never homogenous throughout Victoria’s long reign, but the 1880s and 1890s were marked by the public and private discussion of the weakness of marriage, the validity of divorce, and the importance of friendships across gender lines” (290). In A Man’s Place, historian John Tosh has described how the domestication of middle-class men began to break apart in the 1870s and 1880s as men became disenchanted with the pleasures of home and attracted by another, Imperial kind of masculinity that involved adventure and conquest well beyond the bounds of the domesticated nuclear family. By the turn of the century, the Victorian middle-class family was far from the idyllic domestic retreat preached by the likes of John Ruskin and Coventry Patmore a generation earlier. For many British citizens, the late-Victorian nuclear family had an Imperial dimension and its integrity and moral righteousness were, therefore, of both national and international concern. The family, as it had been traditionally conceived and constructed, was a profoundly repressive regime to Bradley and Cooper. They appear to have read and concurred with the anti-matrimonial sentiments of writers like Percy Bysshe Shelley and James Hinton.3 In their joint journal, Works and Days, Edith, never one to mince words, wrote of her disgust over the hypocrisy and cold pragmatism of the wedding of Havelock Ellis to Edith Lees, an openly lesbian writer: “This is a true account of the modern sacrament of Matrimony. It is revolting. ‘Free love, free field,’ is sacreder” (193). Furthermore, both women experienced a high degree of familial interference in their relationship and in their friendships. In a late account of her deceased mother, for example, Edith explained, “She did not understand my need of freedom, she bound and overawed me when I wanted to be free and personal. Such an influence is a crime against me” (cited in Bickle, Fowl 199).4 Interestingly, Bradley and Cooper repeatedly return to the theme of suffocating, over-indulgent maternity and tyrannical fatherhood in their dramatic work. Somewhat ironically, they looked to history in order to provide cautionary tales and find new relational possibilities. Significantly, however, Michael Field did not wish to entirely dismantle the family but to reconceive it and open it up to new alliances, particularly in terms of gender, sexuality, and power dynamics. If queerness represents, to adopt Michael Warner’s epigrammatic formulation, a “resistance to regimes of the normal,” then Michael Field can be positively aligned, I think, with a historically queer outlook (xxvii). And yet this aunt and niece were integral and dutiful family members in the Bradley/Cooper household. Katherine and Edith may have gone on to form their own household later in their lives, but for much of their career and life together, they shared a home with other family members. This point is

60  Tracy Olverson not insignificant, as it is a reminder that queer people do not always occupy a separate social or physical space from their heteronormative relations. Rather, queer lives and queer desires are relational and conditional and not necessarily oppositional or isolationist. Indeed, the Bradley/Cooper home, like many Victorian households, was not simply an intimate, guarded environment; it was also a social space where Katharine and Edith could enact a range of familial and non-familial roles in relative safety and security. Most importantly, it was in the family home that the profoundly queer identity of “Michael Field” came in to being. An Aunt, A Niece, and “Michael Field” As Rachael Morley rightly suggests, critics and biographers have a tendency to find what they want to find in the life (or more accurately lives) and work of Michael Field. Most scholars of Michael Field have found it necessary, if not irresistible, to comment on their unique personal and artistic collaboration. Such impassioned readings demonstrate the extent to which queer pasts and identities are still heavily contested sites of knowledge. However, rather than rehearse much of this excellent work here, I intend to briefly explore Bradley and Cooper’s relationship in terms of their familial context, for the simple reason that Katharine and Edith lived the majority of their lives and career in the Cooper family home. It was not until 1899, when Katharine was fifty and Edith thirty-seven, that the women lived alone in their own home. Consequently, Katharine and Edith were inextricably and immediately involved with their immediate family members as professional writers. As a young woman, Katharine lived in the Cooper family home with Edith, her parents, and Edith’s younger sister Amy. After Katharine’s sister became an invalid following the birth of Amy, Katharine took on the crucial roles of carer, tutor, and companion to the Cooper girls. In other words, Katharine was assigned to the highly predictable role of a maiden aunt. As scholars such as Virginia Blain and Martha Vicinus have so capably shown, without the demands of marriage and maternity, aunts were able to occupy that liminal space in the family that bestowed freedom, autonomy, and respectability as well as the virtues of duty. In its earliest stages, Katharine’s and Edith’s relationship was entirely orthodox and largely in keeping with traditional kinship structures. Indeed, the Census of 1901 revealed there were over a million unmarried women across England and Wales. Katharine’s and Edith’s spinster status was, therefore, by no means unusual or worthy of particular note. And, as Nelson suggests, since the Victorians revered filial love and devotion, any family tie “that held out the promise of the benefits of companionate marriage without its potential drawbacks had considerable appeal” (100). As unmarried, yet related, women, Bradley and Cooper had the love, support,

Michael Field’s Dramatically Queer Family Dynamics  61 and comfort of a family home but without the demands of conventional ­heteronormative family roles and with opportunities for independence and personal fulfilment. This is not to say, however, that family life was without its difficulties and pressures. It was particularly easy to transgress in the role of maiden aunt and to overstep its circumscribed parameters. In a journal account of Easter Sunday, 1896, Edith recalled when her father James prevented Katharine from joining the family holiday celebrations: “We have to sing the Easter hymn in the salon to please Father – Michael [Katharine] cannot join – & when I would rejoin her in the Study I am locked out. She must have suffered abominably – I simply shivered with disquiet – a hopeless anxiety. … But Michael joined me in bed, talked only of The Cup, & took me to her breast & to young joyousness” (cited in Treby 60).5 On this occasion, James’s exertion of patriarchal authority only seems to have fostered an intense intimacy and creative collaboration between Bradley and Cooper. Aunt and niece would not be so easily divided. In a letter to her cousin Fanny Brooks, Katharine also noted the tension between her sister Emma and herself regarding Edith’s aesthetic education, of which Katharine took charge: “It is most painful to me that Lis [Emma] will pursue a harassing policy. Edith has a hunted feeling; & I feel the sweetest human intercourse now granted to me, sorely checked, & broken, by unwise barriers” (cited in Treby 85).6 Emma Cooper appears to have felt a need to mitigate the effects of Katharine’s worldly knowledge and intellectual curiosity on her daughter. Indeed, Sharon Bickle suggests Edith’s mother is “key to the development of Michael Field,” as “Emma’s unexplained distrust of the relationship, and the omnipresent family tensions, produce a conspiratorial attitude” (“Rethinking” 43–44). In one letter Katharine reveals a “conspiratorial attitude” when she concocts a plan to meet Edith in London: But if I told Scott we wd stay with her one week, and go out on the Friday Afternoon she always receives, she wd do just what I told her; and simply trot with us to her art galleries; and leave us to go alone to the British – I should say for study; and not allow her to accompany us. Mother wd be happy about you if you were at Kensington: and I should not attempt any theatres or night excitement. But we will wait. Meanwhile prepare for Weston Many warm clothes; for next week I mean to have you; indeed I shall not come home, till they send you to fetch me. That will bring parents to their senses. (Cited in Bickle, Fowl 130)7 Katharine concludes the letter, “come to me: it is not natural for us to live apart.” There is more than a hint of conspiracy and surveillance here, as other people are drawn in to Katharine’s and Edith’s elaborate plans to spend time alone. What is also interesting is Emma Cooper appears to consider visits to

62  Tracy Olverson the theatre (with its gender-bending, melodramatic environment) as illicit. Edith and Katharine, on the other hand, clearly craved “night excitement” and the exclusive company of one another. There were also other tensions within the family home that required careful management. In a letter from 1885, Edith instructs Katharine, who is again away from home, to “write to Paps – as you love us – He is dangerous” (cited in Bickle, Fowl 134).8 Edith stops short of explaining exactly why James is dangerous, but the suggestion seems to be that Katharine needed to placate “Paps” by writing a loving, personal letter, whether it was sincere or not. Later, when Edith’s father went missing in the mountains near Zurmatt in June 1897, she appears to confirm he was domineering and overbearing. Edith’s entry is worth quoting at length as it offers a glimpse in to the tensions of this most close-knit family: He nearly killed me with nervous fear & anxiety…I dreaded some violent scene, I had a sense of doom growing with the years; no man could be received by us with any comfort or dignity, every friendship was blighted as it rose to growing vigour by his hatred – yet I loved him & love him – we love him, Michael & I, we twain – with an overwhelming force. He created a desert around us & built an altar in our hearts. (Cited in Treby 138)9 Edith’s description of her father as an uncompromising domestic tyrant with a fortress-like mentality suggests she and Bradley were often unable to socialize as they pleased and with whom they pleased. It is, therefore, more than a little ironic that James’s death provided Bradley and Cooper with the opportunity to live as a family on their own terms. In a clearly symbolic act of filial and spousal devotion, Katharine and Edith exchanged rings near the mountain where they believed James had died. Simultaneously, Bradley and Cooper acknowledged their loss, cemented their familial connection, and created a new family dynamic. Yet it would be misleading to suggest the Cooper family was not supportive of Katharine’s and Edith’s relationship or their artistic endeavors. Over time, the Cooper family can be seen to have adjusted to accommodate the choices of Katharine, Edith, and “Michael Field.” In fact it should be noted that other family members, such as Amy Cooper and Francis Brooks, were strong supporters of Bradley’s and Cooper’s relationship, seemingly without reservation and often at considerable personal cost.10 It is interesting to observe critics rarely refer to the potentially incestuous nature of Bradley’s and Cooper’s relationship, perhaps for fear of undermining their collaborative art, or of introducing an element of victimization or exploitation, or sensationalizing their already extraordinary biography.11 Critics are right to be cautious about this issue, as a sexual relationship between the two women cannot be proven beyond any reasonable doubt.

Michael Field’s Dramatically Queer Family Dynamics  63 However, Bradley and Cooper do not need to be saved from the supposed taint of incest. Firstly, the two women evidently reveled in their ebullient and mutually fulfilling bond, and there is no suggestion whatsoever there may have been any form of sexual exploitation or manipulation between Bradley and Cooper. And whilst Foucault may argue in the first volume of History of Sexuality that nothing in the Victorian family was more normative than its obsession with incest (111), we should remember that despite the public agitation toward the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act (1907), there was no law against incest in Britain until 1908. There were also no laws in Victoria’s England against same-sex relationships between women as women were (famously) excluded from the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. As a result, whilst intimate relationships between unmarried women were increasingly considered in negative terms, female same-sex relationships, even within the family, were not illegal, nor were they officially considered immoral. Moreover, in reconfiguring familial relations to suit their own desires and needs, Bradley and Cooper were far from unique. As Nancy Fix Anderson reminds us, Victorian culture and society actively promoted passionate attachments between siblings and other family members, which inevitably led to erotically charged couplings (73). Consequently, there was a cultural space within the Victorian family in which unmarried women like Bradley and Cooper could live erotically charged queer lives. Indeed, just as Bradley and Cooper positively redefined the already liminal public roles of spinster aunt and niece by working together, they can also be seen to have created new relational possibilities by sleeping together and by exploring the full potential of their biological, matrilineal bond. As Blain suggests, “aunts and nieces are positioned through their relationship aslant to the male line, and as Bradley and Cooper demonstrate, are uniquely placed to explore discursive realms beyond the family romance” (241). In other words, from within the bounds of the heteronormative nineteenth-century family unit, Bradley and Cooper can be seen to devise a whole series of queer identities and to explore relational possibilities beyond heterosexual norms.12 Initially, Katharine and Edith conceived of their own relationship as an artistic fraternity. Theirs was a fellowship, a term that held considerable meaning and power for the two women as it was a chosen tie, freely entered into, far removed from familial obligation. Over time, however, they increasingly referred to their relationship and their artistic collaboration in spousal terms. For example, for their first publication, Bradley and Cooper adopted the pseudonym of Arran and Isla Leigh, a deliberately ambiguous coupling that may imply a fraternal connection or a matrimonial one. In their letters to one another, Katharine and Edith chose more intimate terms. In an early exchange, Edith wrote of their “bound sisterhood,” renaming “my darling Sim” as “my dearly loved sister friend” (cited in Bickle, Fowl 18, 39).13 Five years later, Katharine, musing on a poor review, wrote to Edith, “Sweet Wife, the hardships of early married life are beginning: let us bare them

64  Tracy Olverson together bravely, and grow all the dearer to each other for the derision of the world” (148).14 In letters from 1885 onward, Katharine uses a range of intimate terms to refer to Edith such as “Sweet Wife” and “My pretty Spouse” (148, 159).15 In other letters, Edith reciprocates with “My darling Joy” and “My dear Husband” (166, 180).16 These various labels were, in turn, sincere, heartfelt, playful, and mocking. Sharon Marcus suggests “examples of two women using the language of marriage to describe their relationships in the relatively private context of journals and letters abound in the nineteenth century” (200). Furthermore, “female marriage was not simply a private metaphor used by women in same-sex relationships; it was also a term used by the legally married to describe [same-sex] relationships that were conducted openly and discussed naturally in respectable society” (201). In other words, female same-sex unions in this period were effectively ratified and legitimated by middleclass social mores, if not the law. We should also remember the dual life that Bradley and Cooper so coveted did not actually come into being until the death of Edith’s parents and the marriage of Edith’s sister Amy. In 1899, Bradley and Cooper moved to their “marital” home in Richmond, near their very close friends, the artistic couple Charles de Sousy Ricketts and Charles Shannon. Musing on the early days of their career and their intimate friendship with Ricketts and Shannon, Katharine later recalled the discussions of “sex and life and adultery and the wickedness of the existence of relatives; when all things seemed possible, abolition of parents and husbands, duties and ties; when the clay of plastic life stuck to our fingers!”17 This wonderfully suggestive quotation not only implies that, at times, Bradley and Cooper felt deeply oppressed by their familial obligations but also that they believed that they could re-form and mold the plastic ties of family to their own wishes and expectations. However, it was “the wickedness of the existence of relatives” that Michael Field explored in their dramatic art and it is to the dramas that we now turn. Freedom from Family The subjects of many of Michael Field’s dramas are the bloody internecine conflicts of dysfunctional royal families of European history. From ancient Rome to medieval Scotland and early English history, Michael Field explores the internal power dynamics of ruling families. In so doing, Michael Field problematizes and contests notions of history, gender, familial and national cohesion, national character, and identity. And in recognizing the complex social and familial processes that have shaped the past, Michael Field also suggests ancient power structures may continue to exert influence in the present and future. Indeed, Michael Field can be seen to challenge the deafening chorus of Victorian moralists who (often unthinkingly) sought to appropriate and deploy the ancient past for contemporary political purposes.

Michael Field’s Dramatically Queer Family Dynamics  65 In dramas like The Father’s Tragedy, William Rufus, and Loyalty or Love?, the traditional patriarchal-led family, with its obsession with authority and patrilineal rule, appears to foster grotesque, sadistic male characters. Concomitantly, one of the main themes of Michael Field’s early dramas is that of familial treachery; through arranged marriages parents sexually exploit and betray their children and, in turn, children disregard, betray, and even try to kill their parents. Intriguingly, Michael Field also focuses on devastating sibling rivalries, including those between Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth; Scottish King Robert III and the Duke of Albany; William Rufus and his brother Robert Curthose; Carloman and Charlemagne; and the Roman Emperors Caracalla and Geta. Michael Field thereby suggests the concept of primogeniture is particularly destructive. In Michael Field’s dramas, many of the pivotal and dramatic moments of history are driven by fraught family dynamics. Kate Thomas rightly suggests Michael Field is also “obsessed with queer pasts” (327). Indeed, the femaleorientated Greek communities of Callirhoë and Long Ago accommodate a range of queer desires and identifications, including lesbianism, heterosexuality, incestuous desire, sado-masochism, androgyny, and Tiresias’s doubled gender and sexual identity. It would also appear to be the case that, in addition to a fascination for maenads and maidens from Lesbos, Michael Field has a particular interest in dysfunctional male rulers who have predilections toward sadism and tyranny, such as the Duke of Albany, William Rufus, Henry VI Emperor of Germany, Attila, and the Emperors Commodus and Caracalla. Importantly, however, not all of Michael Field’s queer characters can be neatly aligned with a tragic, negative, nihilistic vision of queer sexuality. On the contrary, there are positive and joyful queer characters in the oeuvre of Michael Field, like the pantomime artist Pylades, who positively contributes to his various adoptive families. Conversely, there are malign heterosexual characters who destroy their families because of their inability to restrain a hyper-aggressive male sexuality such as Brutus Ultor’s Sextus Tarquinius. Thomas persuasively argues Bradley and Cooper often considered themselves to be “out of time” and “out of sync,” and she proposes we interpret their temporal disjunctions as a form of “queer time” (332). However, from a theatrical perspective Michael Field’s dramatic work is very much in keeping with the popularity of historical drama in the 1880s and 1890s.18 As scholars like David Mayer and Jeffrey Richards have shown, there was a tremendous appetite amongst the nineteenth-century theatre-going and reading public for classical Greek drama and “toga” plays, the spectacular, melodramatic, historical pageants based in ancient Rome.19 Richards suggests, “plays set in the Roman Empire (Claudian, The Sin of the Cross, Hypatia, Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis) charted the conflict between Christianity and paganism and explored the excesses of Roman tyrants, the absence of democracy and how to remedy it (Junius, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Nero)” (24). Richards also notes the popular success of such plays was directly

66  Tracy Olverson related to the extent to which they conformed to “recognized and approved ideals of femininity and masculinity” (25). The dynamic political history of Imperial Rome offered women writers a particularly rich vein of gendered politics and civic and Imperial ideology to mine for their own socio-political purposes. For instance, the much feted Roman matron, whose qualities included fecundity, the ability to nurture future citizens, and submission to male authority, was repeatedly invoked as the ideal maternal model for Imperial Britain. Women writers like Eliza Lynn Linton and Margaret Oliphant lauded the supposed nobility of these ancient matrons.20 Conversely, Imperial Rome also provided an important context for evaluating contemporary progress, or lack thereof, in terms of women’s social and political rights. For writers like Michael Field, Augusta Webster, and Julia Gowring, the bloody tragedies of ancient families were excellent measures of the lack of progress in terms of women’s rights and freedoms. In Brutus Ultor, Bradley and Cooper can be seen to draw on this contemporary fascination for ancient Rome. For example, in the Preface, Michael Field clearly indicates their interest in accountable, democratic governance is a major theme in the play. Furthermore, Field endorses the values of “noble discipline” and “reverence for Justice” that “this story of the father of the Roman republic” supposedly relates (v). However, Michael Field is a little disingenuous here, as at the heart of this Roman story is a tale of explicit sexual violence based on a hierarchy of oppression and exploitation. In other words, Michael Field intends to expose the brutality of elite Roman life and the obscene gender politics that informed the morality of both Imperial and Republican Rome. At its heart Brutus is a tragic morality play, very much in the style of Thomas Webster’s Appius and Virginia (1627), to which it bears more than a passing resemblance. Michael Field’s innovation is to locate the heavily mythologized character of Lucretia at the center of Roman political events. Derived from ancient sources and Shakespeare’s famous poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594), the character of Lucretia is the wife of Collatinus, a Roman nobleman. Michael Field reveals how Lucretia, a woman unsurpassed in maidenly virtue, is brutally raped by Sextus Tarquinius, a prince of Rome and the cousin of Collatinus. Unwilling to bare the shame of her “offence,” Lucretia commits suicide (III. iii). Her kinsman, Brutus, then parades Lucretia’s dead body in the Roman forum. Brutus, inspired by Lucretia’s exemplary act of self-immolation, uses the self-sacrifice of his kinswoman to inspire a rebellion against the mendacious Tarquins. Overcoming all enemies, including his own treasonous sons, Brutus eventually re-establishes Rome as a republic. The rape of Lucretia is therefore depicted as both a crime against kin and as a crime against the state, which reveals the larger inequitable power dynamics of ancient Rome. As Ian Donaldson suggests, the rape of Lucretia “is a story about public and political behaviour, and about private, sexual behaviour, and about the relationship between these

Michael Field’s Dramatically Queer Family Dynamics  67 two kinds of behaviour. It is a story about the nature of liberty: liberty for the state, and liberty for the individual” (8). The non-normative desire in this drama is Sextus Tarquinius’s desire for Lucretia, the beloved and honored wife of a kinsman. Sextus is drawn to Lucretia as her husband has boasted of his wife’s superior beauty and virtue. But what seems to motivate Sextus’s desire to rape is the notion of (gender) conquest. Sextus declares he “Will suffer not these women to control/The fortunes of the state, or even crush/The private bosom ‘neath their government” (I. v). Here Michael Field emphasizes the notion of private and public governance and shows how these two concepts are intimately related. However, Sextus’s inability to govern his perverse desires only proves he will be a dangerous and dissolute leader. Indeed, Sextus is aware his crime is an act against the political unit of the family and his rape of Lucretia will have severe repercussions on the patrilineal power structures of Rome. Somewhat perversely, in asserting his kingly right to rape a kinswoman, Sextus invokes his mother: My mother, come – imperial – to my aid, Gibe me with cowardice: – “What, Lord of Rome! And shudder at a woman’s chastity?” Thou know’st the trick; it spurned me as a boy – (II. iv) Historically, Tullia Minor, the mother of Sextus, was infamous in preRepublican Rome as she is said to have committed fratricide and parricide as a means of securing her husband’s route to the throne. Tullia is, therefore, the antithesis of a good Roman matron in that she not only covets power but she also denies the notion of patriarchal power in killing and mutilating her own father. Conversely, Lucretia is the very definition of Republican motherhood. She informs her slave girls, “We who are mothers must be diligent,/And live by pious rule, that, in the womb,/Our sons may feel the discipline of law” (I. iii). However, in Brutus, piety does not pay. Rather, the rape of Lucretia enacts a fatal moral dilemma for the chaste matron because Sextus threatens to frame the rape as an act of adultery: “twixt infamy and rape/I’ll learn the odds” (II. iv). Forced to choose between her reputation and her life, Lucretia decides to sacrifice her life so “Lucretia’s spouse/Shall have a reverend name, and Roman wives/Rate by my deed the measure of my love” (III. i). Bickle suggests Field’s Lucretia can be seen as an example of an ancient Roman New Woman in that she demonstrates “the way in which woman, as moral guide and counsellor, can affect issues of political import” (Kicking 14). It is certainly the case that Lucretia’s defiant act of self-sacrifice poses a problem for her male relatives, as Brutus is compelled to execute his sons, abiding by the same patriotic principle of self-sacrifice. Unfortunately, however, Michael Field fails to satisfactorily resolve the issue of Lucretia’s shame and her decision to kill herself. Lucretia’s delegation of her revenge to

68  Tracy Olverson male relatives is neither moving nor especially moral but rather signifies the transfer of power to a closed phallocentric political economy. Brutus’s decision to execute Sextus and his traitorous sons, all in the name of a nationalistic, patriotic ideal, devastates his family and directly bolsters the power and importance of the state. Publius had warned Brutus that “in your home the danger hides” and indeed, the threat against Rome comes from within Brutus’s own family (IV. ii). Ultimately, in Brutus Ultor, Brutus realigns his loyalty and love from family to the state and, in doing so, subordinates his private affections to the will of the government. Whatever moral Bradley and Cooper intended Brutus to deliver, the rape and selfsacrifice of a young woman, all in the name of the public good, was simply not one that liberal commentators and women’s rights campaigners could live with. Despite its good intentions, Brutus was not well received by critics or by the reading public. Michael Field revisits the issue of private desires and public virtue in what has become known as the Pylades trilogy, which focuses on Rome in the Year of the Five Emperors, 192–93AD. The famous ancient pantomime artist Pylades appears in all three of Michael Field’s Imperial dramas as a witness to the power struggles of the ancient Roman court. In the figure of Pylades, Michael Field boldly situates a queer subject at the heart of historical narratives. Pylades, the silent mime, is a transgressive figure, both in terms of his art and his sexuality, but he is far from a dangerous character. Rather, the queer desires Pylades represents can be accommodated within the family, particularly if such desires are not specifically named. In contrast, hyper-aggressive masculinity, revolving as it does around a father-son dyad, is seen to pose a much greater risk to social stability. The trilogy begins with The World At Auction (1898), set during the bloody conclusion of the reign of Pertinax, who is savagely assassinated by members of the Praetorian Guard. With no obvious aristocratic dynasty to fill the power vacuum at the center of Roman politics, “Rome is for sale!” and the Empire is offered to the increasingly powerful merchant class (xx). The wealthy slave-trader Didius Julianus reluctantly makes a bid for the crown at the behest of his covetous, immodest daughter Didia Clara. Clara herself longs to be worshipped as an Emperor and “as a god,” but she lacks civic status and political agency due to her sex (xxxi). Clara’s easy manipulation of her father can be seen to demonstrate the sudden crisis in authority in Rome and the challenge to conventional social organization and power structures. Whilst most of the citizens crave stability and authority in this tumultuous and violent environment, Pylades longs for the excesses of his former patron Commodus: “I long/To have the good times back again – of crime,/ Full feasts and luxury; the palace mine,/My very theatre, torches and gay troops” (xxxiv). Pylades is a Bacchic figure and his presence indicates the potential for licentiousness, chaos, and disorder. Moreover, Pylades is an emancipated character in every sense, who gives “men pleasure openly” and

Michael Field’s Dramatically Queer Family Dynamics  69 who allows “gold-haired women” to “woo me with their smiles,/Their coin, their flatteries, and have their way/Or not, ‘tis all the same” (xlvi). A deliberately provocative figure, Pylades serves as an important reminder that, despite their comparative silence in the historical record, queer characters can be significant historical actors who may feature at pivotal historical moments. Marcia, the former mistress of the murdered Emperor Commodus, warns Pylades that, despite his beauty and his affective art, he must never become “the slave/Of an imperial lust” like herself (xlv). Yet Pylades becomes the beloved object over which father and daughter fight for (sexual) control. Didia Clara seeks to control Pylades’s body and his subversive desires, but Pylades, a devotee of Dionysus, refuses to be controlled by repressive forces. The sexually aggressive, sadistic Clara seeks to punish Pylades when he rejects her proposal of patron-prostitution. Instead, Pylades enjoys the (same-sex) favor of the Emperor Didius and it is Didius who rejects both his wife and his daughter in preference for the protean performance artist. In this fight for Imperial (self) control, it is actually the queer and irreverent character of Pylades who triumphs. After only three months as Emperor, Didius is beheaded by the Roman General Severus for “prostituting” Rome (cxii). Clara is subsequently forced to beg for her life and to marry, as she lacks the protection of a male relative. Only Pylades, the immortal artist, survives the assassination of another Emperor with his integrity and moral vision intact. The fear and loathing of the Roman court is revisited in The Race  of Leaves (1901), which focuses on the earlier reign of the infamously depraved Emperor Commodus (180–92AD). Commodus, the son of the revered ­philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius and his supposedly ignoble wife, F ­ austina, assumed the role of Emperor at the age of eighteen, following the death of his father. Edward Gibbon suggests Commodus “valued nothing in sovereign power, except the unbounded license of indulging his sensual appetites. His hours were spent in a seraglio of three hundred beautiful women, and as many boys, of every rank, and of every province; and, wherever the arts of seduction proved ineffectual, the brutal lover had recourse to violence.” As a consequence, “the monstrous vices of the son have cast a shade on the purity of the father’s virtues” (I. iv). Gibbon attributes Commodus’s slide into ignominy to the moment when Commodus’s sister Lucilla attempts to assassinate her brother with the aid of accomplices. Michael Field takes this episode as their point of departure in the play. Commodus is unfortunate to have ambitious siblings in the form of his sisters Fadilla and Lucilla. Lucilla is deeply jealous of Commodus’s ability to will his desires in to being: “He has his bent/In everything, can ponder till he covets,/ Then shape his own desire. I envy him/His crescent manhood” (viii). Lucilla also envies the status of the Emperor’s wife Crispina. Commodus reassures Lucilla, “This wife/Crispina, holds no place and finds no honour/Where, with my kin, a single regnant woman/Triumphs above all strangers” (x). Commodus’s appeal

70  Tracy Olverson for filial loyalty fails to persuade, for Lucilla soon hatches a plot against her brother. This first act of treason fails and Lucilla is initially imprisoned, only later to be sentenced to death by an increasingly tyrannical Commodus. With the help of the pantomime artist Pylades, Marcia, mistress and concubine of Commodus, attempts to assuage the Emperor’s most vicious tendencies by indulging his passion for sexual role play and f­ antasy. Both Pylades and Marcia, who has a very influential role within the royal household, service the queer desires of Commodus. But for Commodus, the ­border between fantasy and reality becomes blurred when he ­impersonates Hercules and later dons the armor of an Amazon. Marcia warns her lover that This garb Is but disguise, an actor’s make-belief To give you private pleasure: such disguise As Love for lovers puts on trustfully. The Amazon is Amazon to you, Not to the world, the gladiator’s gaze, Or the arena’s laughter. (liii) Marcia’s suggestion that some desires should remain private, hidden from public scrutiny, only antagonizes Commodus. Here private desires and public morals, or body politics and the body politic, converge in the now liminal figure of Commodus. Aggressively maintaining his transvestite identity, Commodus instructs Marcia to don his Imperial robes. But in demanding that Marcia perform his (gendered) Imperial role, Commodus has committed a fatal error. Marcia may appear to be a “servant tricked out in her master’s robes,/A mere false-seeming, a deception,” but her assumption of the vestige of the Emperor reflects the sudden inversion of the power imbalance between them (lxii). Indeed, when Marcia learns Commodus has condemned virtually all of his court to death, she resolves to “take another name of infamy” and to kill Commodus before he can kill her (lxxviii). With the help of Pylades, the concubine overcomes the Emperor. Michael Field concludes the Roman trilogy with a familial drama of epic proportions. Chronologically speaking, Julia Domna follows on from The World At Auction and focuses on the Severan dynasty and the dual reign of the brothers Geta and Caracalla, sons to the noble Julia Domna. The play recalls the decree of Septimus Severus, who pronounced in his will that Geta and Caracalla were to rule as joint Emperors upon his death. Michael Field takes Severus’s command for familial and Imperial unity as the starting point for dramatic action, only to reveal the Imperial family is unable to sustain the principles of equality and harmony. Michael Field focuses attention on the maternal figure of Julia Domna, who is unfortunately positioned as the mediator between her battling sons. Julia is a fascinating character who was famous in the ancient world for her

Michael Field’s Dramatically Queer Family Dynamics  71 prodigious learning, grace, and extraordinary political influence. Field only hints at Julia’s reputation as an adroit politician and intellectual, preferring to represent her in the (propagandist) role of Magna Mater. Julie Langford explains, “in her efforts to preserve the integrity of the Roman Empire, Julia Domna tapped into a fundamental Roman virtue, pietas, which demanded an esteem that bordered on reverence for parents, country, and gods” (1). As Langford suggests, the maternal body of Julia not only engendered and nurtured the future of the Empire in the bodies of her sons but she was also the one element that prevented the dissolution of the entire empire, as her sons’ respect for her matronly virtues initially outweighed their bitter antagonism for each other. In Michael Field’s drama, Julia’s jealous sons clamor for their mother’s love and approval with little thought to the welfare of the Empire and its subjects. As we have learnt from the earlier dramas of Michael Field, the selfish machinations of parents are doomed to fail whilst the simmering jealousies of ambitious siblings often leads to fratricidal betrayals and bloody violence. Michael Field’s Julia takes an unsettling pride in her sons; she calls them, “my womanhood/Grown valiant, my warriors and my gods” (vi). On one level, this can be read as the prideful boast of noble Imperial motherhood. On another level, however, Julia reveals her relationship with her sons to be an inverted power dynamic, as Julia lacks the (patriarchal) authority to permanently subdue her warring sons. When the young men decide to divide the Empire, with Geta ruling the East from Antioch and Caracalla ruling the West from Rome, Julia attempts to reconcile the incompatible brothers by emotionally manipulating the young men to remain in the Imperial Palace: “If you would have me/To move in state between you, both must stay,/My constant props beside me” (xii). It is a fatal familial reconciliation. Pylades has aligned himself with Geta, the beautiful, artistically inclined Emperor of the (feminized) East. But the Roman desire for conquest and domination is far stronger than familial loyalty; in this case, Geta and Pylades will be overcome by the hyper-masculine, militaristic Caracalla, yet another self-proclaimed Hercules. Caracalla is fiercely jealous and possessive of his mother. As her first-born son he claims a connection with her that takes precedence over all other kin: Be indifferent To your sister, to your women, to your son, Indifferent as to the spouse you sat And smiled beside and watched me while I plotted To put him from you. (xxvi) This is a disastrous family dynamic that will only be resolved through bloody violence. When Julia pleads with Caracalla to “be as one,/And rule as one,” she unwittingly gives Caracalla licence to kill Geta (xxviii). Caracalla, incensed by his mother’s unwavering love for her second son, murders

72  Tracy Olverson his brother whilst Julia attempts to shield him. Horrified by Caracalla’s act of fratricide and parricide, an agonized Julia nevertheless declares to a bleating, cloying Caracalla, “My first born; I am with you to the end./I live for you, I kiss you” (xlviii). Julia’s distasteful response actually prevents the dissolution of the Empire as she reassures the new Emperor of her fidelity and love. However, in uniting the state by standing by her bloodthirsty son, Julia effectively validates Caracalla’s murderous hyper-masculinity and his ruthless claim for primogeniture. In a final act of cruelty, Julia is prevented from mourning the death of Geta, as her eldest son has claimed both her body and her emotions for himself. It is a striking feature of Michael Field’s Roman dramas that royal parents frequently fail to produce offspring and citizens of a balanced and moderate character. In Michael Field’s ancient world, familial love can be corrupted by duty and expectation. By comparison, a character like Pylades has no family yet is loyal and freely offers his love to fellow devotees of his art. In stark contrast with popular commentators like Linton and Oliphant, Bradley and Cooper do not see the family as under threat by new external forces such as female independence or increased sexual freedom. Rather, for Michael Field, moral degeneracy begins within the family and can be partly attributed to the historical, inequitable power dynamics between the genders. Indeed, the dramas of Michael Field draw attention to how power is embedded in different layers of family life and how prejudice can be enforced through traditional binaries and conceptual dualisms. Reaching back into the supposedly illustrious past of European history paradoxically enables Bradley and Cooper to challenge contemporary notions of marriage, sexual desire, family, filial loyalty, and duty. To be sure, Michael Field’s speculative biographical and sociopsychological approach constitutes a challenge to conventional, or authorized, Victorian historiography. Bradley and Cooper can also be seen to demonstrate a deep concern over which stories are told and which are not, which narratives are inherited and which are excised. Using notorious examples of family strife and conflict, Bradley and Cooper try to provide an enhanced understanding of their own society in terms of what Victorian culture retained or selectively recalled from ancient models. Consequently, the plays of Michael Field can be seen to constitute a powerful challenge to contemporary notions of familial unity, family values, and the relationship between the family, political power, and the state. In contradistinction to Victorian moralists like Linton and Oliphant, Bradley and Cooper clearly understood the family is not a stable, ancient entity that unconditionally supports its members or the national interest. Rather, Michael Field demonstrates how family life can be riven with conflict and is subject to sometimes violent and sudden change, negotiation, and modification. Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper redefined their own family in line with their passions and creative art. This queer Victorian family demonstrated how familial relations could be dramatically remolded without catastrophic rupture to

Michael Field’s Dramatically Queer Family Dynamics  73 social relations. Moreover, in their dramatic art Michael Field can be seen to propose a redefinition of familial relations along more elastic and egalitarian lines or else risk inter-generational internecine conflict. In this, as with much else, Michael Field was certainly ahead of their time. Notes   1. See, for example, Yopie Prins (“Greek Maenads”) Marion Thain, and Ruth Vanita, who align Michael Field with the urbane homosocial network of Walter Pater.   2. Scholars such as Leonore Davidoff, Claudia Nelson, and Michel Foucault have traced the dissolution between public and private worlds. In Family Secrets Deborah Cohen explores the significance and impact of the Divorce Court on Victorian social mores, especially Chapter Two, “Revelation in the Divorce Court.”   3. Sharon Bickle also suggests the writings of James Hinton may have influenced Bradley and Cooper, as “Hinton’s views on marriage seem to have been uniformly bleak” (Fowl 178).  4. Journal entry by Edith Cooper following the death of Emma Harris Cooper, dated 20 August, 1889.   5. Journal entry by Edith Cooper, dated 5 April, 1896; emphasis original.   6. Letter from Katharine Bradley to Fanny and Francis Brooks, dated 4 August, 1880.   7. Letter 89, from Katharine Bradley to Edith Cooper, dated April 1885; emphasis original.   8. Letter 90, from Edith Cooper to Katharine Bradley, dated April 1885; emphasis original.   9. Journal entry by Edith Cooper, dated 28 June, 1897. 10. Francis Brooks, a talented scholar and cousin of Katharine, appears to have endured a long and painful affection for Katharine as a young man. Amy, on the other hand, was often sent by her parents to accompany Katharine on holidays and journeys in Edith’s stead. 11. Virginia Blain, Sharon Bickle, and Kate Thomas are the critical exceptions here. 12. Yopie Prins also explores the potential of the aunt-niece relationship, or the avunculate, in her compelling chapter “Victorian Spinsters, Victorian Maenads” from Victorian Sappho. 13. ‘Bound Sisterhood,’ cited from letter 11, from Edith Cooper to Katharine Bradley, 24 August, 1880. “My dearly loved sister-friend’ cited from letter 23, from Edith Cooper to Katharine Bradley, 12-14 September, 1880. 14. Letter 99, from Katharine Bradley to Edith Cooper, dated 28 August, 1885. 15. ‘Sweet Wife’ cited from letter 99, from Katharine Bradley to Edith Cooper, 28 August, 1885. ‘My pretty Spouse’ cited from letter 109, from Katharine Bradley to Edith Cooper, October 1885. 16. ‘My darling Joy’ cited from letter 117, from Edith Cooper to Katharine Bradley, 3 October, 1885. ‘My dear husband’ cited in letter 130, from Edith Cooper to Katharine Bradley, September 1886. 17. Thomas Sturge Moore, “Poets and Painters.” Add. MS 61721 BL. 18. As numerous scholars have eloquently argued, Victorian writers and artists used ancient Greek and Roman history for an array of ideological and political ­purposes, including the appropriation of a queer Greek past. For detailed

74  Tracy Olverson ­ iscussion of the complex issue see Scott Bravmann, Linda Dowling, David d ­Halperin, Isobel Hurst, Richard Jenkyns, T.D. Olverson, and Norman Vance. 19. For example, in the Foreword to Playing Out the Empire, Mayer suggests toga dramas “enjoyed unprecedented popularity” on the late Victorian stage (x). Furthermore, Michael Field’s dramas have been labeled as closet dramas by a number of critics. However, it seems more likely Bradley and Cooper intended their dramas to be produced on stage. 20. For a discussion of republican motherhood see Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The M ­ odern Revolt” and Margaret Oliphant’s “The Condition of Women.”

Works Cited Anderson, Nancy F. “The ‘Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill’ Controversy: Incest Anxiety and the Defence of Family Purity in Victorian England.” Journal of British Studies 21:2 (1982): 67–86. Bachofen, J. J. Myth, Religion and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen. Trans. Ralph Mannheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Blain, Virginia. “Michael Field, the Two-Headed Nightingale: Lesbian Text as Palimpsest.” Women’s History Review 5:2 (1996): 239–57. ———. “Thinking Back Through Our Aunts: Harriet Martineau and Tradition in Women’s Writing.” Women: A Cultural Review, 1:3 (1990): 223–39. Bickle, Sharon. Ed. The Fowl and the Pussycat: Love Letters of Michael Field, 1876–1909. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. ———. “Rethinking Michael Field: The Case for the Bodleian Letters.” Michael Field and Their World. Ed. Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson. High Wycombe: The Rivendale Press, 2007. 39–47. ———. “Kicking Against the Pricks”: Michael Field’s Brutus Ultor as Manifesto for the New Woman.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 33:2 (2006): 12–29. Bradley, Katharine. Letters to Edith Cooper 1876–ca.1898. MS Eng.lett.c.148. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Bravmann, Scott. Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture and Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Cohen, Deborah. Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Davidoff, Leonore, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink, and Katharine Holden. The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy 1830-1960. London: Longman, 1999. ———. Davidoff, Leonore, Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Donaldson, Ian. The Rape of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Donoghue, Emma. We Are Michael Field. Bath: Absolute Press, 1998. Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Ehnenn, Jill R. Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness and Late-Victorian ­Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Ed. ­Eleanor Burke Leacock. New York: International Publishers, 1972. Field, Michael. Callirhoë; Fair Rosamund. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1884.

Michael Field’s Dramatically Queer Family Dynamics  75 ———. The Father’s Tragedy; William Rufus; Loyalty or Love. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1885. ———. Brutus Ultor. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1886. ———. Long Ago. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1889. ———. A Question of Memory. London: Elkin Matthews & John Lane, 1893. ———. Attila, My Attila! London: Elkin Matthews, 1896. ———. The World At Auction. London: The Vale Press, 1898. ———. The Race of Leaves. London: The Vale Press, 1901. ———. Julia Domna. London: The Vale Press, 1903. ———. Borgia. London: A.H. Bullen, 1905. ———. Works and Days: From the Journals of Michael Field. Ed. T & D. C. Sturge Moore. London: J. Murray, 1933. Foucault, Michael. The History of Sexuality, Vol.1: The Will to Knowledge. ­Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. London: Allen Lane, 1995. Halperin, David M. How to do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Hurst, Isobel. Women Writers and the Classics: the Feminine of Homer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Jenkyns, Richard. “The Classical Tradition.” A Companion to Victorian Poetry. Ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Anthony H. Harrison. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 229–45. Langford, Julie. Maternal Megalomania: Julia Domna and the Imperial Politics of Motherhood. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013. Linton, Eliza Lynn. “The Modern Revolt of Women.” Macmillan’s 23 (December 1870): 142–49. Maine, Henry Sumner. Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Mayer, David. Foreword. “Playing Out the Empire: Ben Hur and Other Toga Plays and Films.” Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. x–xii. Moore, Thomas Sturge. “Poets and Painters: The Friendship between Michael Field, Miss Bradley and Miss Cooper (The Poets) and Ricketts and Shannon (The Painters). Selections from Their Letters and Journals.” Ed. Ursula Bridge. Vol. 1 of 3. Add. MS 61721. British Library, London. Morley, Rachel. “Talking Collaboratively: Conversations with Michael Field.” Michael Field and Their World. Ed. Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson. High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2007. Nelson, Claudia. Family Ties in Victorian England. Westport: Praeger, 2007. Olverson, T. D. Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2010. Oswald, Ramona Faith, Katherine A. Kuvalanka, Libby Balter Blume, and Dana Berkowitz. “Queering ‘the Family.’” Handbook of Feminist Family Studies. Ed. Sally A. Lloyd, April L. Few, and Katherine R. Allen. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009. 43–56. Prins, Yopie. “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters.” Victorian Sexual Dissidence. Ed. Richard Dellamora. London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 43–81.

76  Tracy Olverson ———. “Sappho Doubled: Michael Field.” Yale Journal of Criticism 8 (1995): 165–86. ———. Victorian Sappho. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Richards, Jeffrey. The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2009. Smith, Logan Pearsall. Reperusals and Recollections. New York: Books for L ­ ibraries, 1968. Stetz Margaret D., Cheryl Wilson. Michael Field and Their World. High Wycombe: The Rivendale Press, 2007. Sturgeon, Mary. Michael Field. London: George Harrap & Co., 1922. Thain, Marion. “Michael Field”: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Thomas, Kate. “‘What Time We Kiss’: Michael Field’s Queer Temporalities.” GLQ 13:2/3 (2007): 327–51. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Treby, Ivor. Uncertain Rain: The Sundry Spells of Michael Field. Bury St. Edmunds: De Blackland Press, 2002. Vanita, Ruth. Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Vicinus, Martha. Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920. London: Virago, 1994. White, Chris. “‘Poets and Lovers Evermore’: The Poetry and Journals of Michael Field.” Sexual Sameness: Textual Difference in Lesbian and Gay Writing. Ed. Joseph Bristow. London: Routledge, 1992. 26–43. Warner, Michael. “Introduction.” Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Ed. Michael Warner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1993. xii–xxxi.

4 William Sharp’s Neo-Paganism Queer Identity and the National Family Michael Shaw

In “The Scots Renascence,” an 1895 essay published in The Evergreen ­magazine that sought to regenerate Scottish cultural nationalism, Sir P ­ atrick Geddes described Robert Louis Stevenson as “our other greatest dead – the foremost son of Edinburgh and Scotland” (132). Here, Geddes represents nationality through the language of family, which he continues to do throughout the essay; for instance, ancient national heroes are described as “our fathers” (139). It is not uncommon for nation-builders to draw from the lexis of the family. Indeed, theorists of nationalism have noted the national community bears close resemblance to familial relations. Anthony D. Smith argues “the ethnic community resembles an extended family, or rather a ‘family of families,’ one which extends over time and space to include many generations and many districts in a specific territory. This sense of extended kinship, of ‘kith and kin,’ attached to a particular ‘homeland,’ underlies the national identities and unity of so many modern nations” (Nationalism 46). The home, blood, and ancestry are shared features that underpin communities consisting of both relatives and nationals. The national family became increasingly important throughout Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century. In this period, several nations looked to their pasts to elaborate and invent myths of origin to bind peoples together, which could be part of an imperial project or used to bolster peripheral nationalisms where peoples sought to (re)gain their cultural or political autonomy. For the latter group, who wanted to authenticate their distinct cultures, returning to the imagery and culture of the pre-Christian past was a common means of validating myths of origin. In Scotland and other Celtic nations, most notably Ireland, cultural nationalists developed a Celtic revival that attempted to establish a collective symbolism for these nations. This revival was largely neo-Pagan. It often involved reviving pre-Christian symbols,1 military figures, and lore that created a “myth of descent” (Smith, Modernism 192) and a heroic past that could animate bonds of kinship. This chapter will examine the form of Scottish neo-Paganism that was developed at the fin-de-siècle. In order to fully understand the form of this myth-making/preserving project, the Scottish movement will be compared to the Irish movement, which shared many features as well as some telling differences. It will be argued that while several nationalists in Ireland

78  Michael Shaw foregrounded militancy in their neo-Pagan collective symbolism, creating a heightened masculine identity to counter English identity, this phenomenon is almost entirely absent in Scotland. For example, although Geddes’s cultural nationalism at times attempted to rekindle a masculine heroic narrative for the nation, he did not seek to encourage “militant nationality,” instead preferring “gentler voices” (“Scots Renascence” 138). These cultural nationalists largely wanted to question notions of overlordship and subservience to equalize the status of Scottish and Celtic cultures with English and Saxon cultures (not against them), which, in turn, drew energy from and supported the interrogation of gender and religious hierarchies. The desire to alter ethnic and national power dynamics was far from dissimilar to queer theory’s attempts to turn “inherited sexual vocabularies … inside out” (Fuss 7). Scottish cultural nationalists seldom formed a counter-masculinity but equalized the masculine and the feminine; they were closely engaged with creating what we would now call queer identity. I argue this queer neo-Paganism was a useful tool in styling a particular form of national family. These features are most clearly represented in the writings and identity of William Sharp (or Fiona Macleod), who collaborated with Geddes on The Evergreen and the Celtic Library, both published by Patrick Geddes & Colleagues.2 While most considerations of “queer” Sharp tend to focus on his contested psychosexual identity crisis (for example, Terry L. Meyers’s The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp), this chapter does not intend to examine or evaluate Sharp’s sexuality. Instead, it seeks to demonstrate Sharp’s concern with dual-sexed identity is, at least partly, a reflection of Scotland’s Celtic Revival, a movement that challenged rigid masculine and feminine roles and was interested in recovering the marginalized. With respect to the way he and his writings interrogated essentialist concepts of gendered identity, we can certainly say he was queer. Although such blurring of male and female identities was a general trend in fin-de-siècle Scottish cultural nationalism, this chapter will largely focus on Sharp’s work, which so clearly embodies it. In his neo-Pagan writings, cultural nationalism and queer identity frequently met. Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Scotland and Ireland The latter half of the nineteenth century was a significant period in the history of Scottish cultural nationalism. In these years, many figures confronted the problem with Scotland’s divided ethnicities, building on works like Sir Walter Scott’s “The Two Drovers.” Scotland was often geographically and culturally represented and understood as half Celtic and half Saxon, a phenomenon that had been encouraged by figures of the Scottish Enlightenment who wanted to imagine themselves (Lowlanders) as industrious, self-reliant individuals of Teuton descent to legitimize their management of

William Sharp’s Neo-Paganism  79 the British “economic and imperialist core” (Kidd 67). They did this partly by building up, and dissociating themselves from, the image of an indolent, backward Highland Celtic identity; it was very much a stadialist narrative. In many ways, this division partly compromised Scottish nationality and inhibited the rise of a Scottish national movement.3 Hostility between the two ethnicities could be marked; for example, it was argued in The Scotsman newspaper that the “inferior” Celt “must be improved by a Lowland intermixture” (“Inquiry” 3). Consequently, many cultural nationalists in Scotland sought to reduce hostility within by reunifying the nation under a common nationality. Robert Louis Stevenson and John Stuart Blackie were key figures in interrogating the perceived differences between Highland and Lowland Scotland and in activating a unified consciousness. This often involved exposing the unfounded notion of the Highlanders as backward people, (re)integrating Highland and Lowland cultures by challenging stadialist arguments that represented more commercialized cultures as superior. In fin-de-siècle Scotland, cultural nationalism largely took the form of Celtic Revivalism, which often tried to style a common Celtic ethnicity for the whole of Scotland, a movement that could unite the nation and loosen its integration into Britain. In the hands of Geddes and his artistic community, Edinburgh became a center of Celtic cultural activity where, earlier in the century, it was largely encoded, even by Walter Scott, as Teutonic. Parallel to this movement, many in Scotland (primarily Liberals and Crofters)4 felt Scotland’s political identity was being compromised by the British state, due to increased centralization to London and the increasing significance of the state from the mid-nineteenth century onward.5 To rectify this, several sought greater political autonomy for Scotland within the United Kingdom, culminating in calls to re-establish the Scottish Parliament, not reconvened until 1999. This movement was not divorced from the cultural nationalist movement; they could work together in delivering Scottish cultural and political autonomy. Geddes was keen to critique political and cultural centralization to London, bemoaning the “encyclopaedic ignorance” of Westminster politicians (Geddes, Letter to R. E. Muirhead). In this respect, the Scottish and Irish movements were very similar. Another common feature of Scotland’s and Ireland’s cultural nationalist movements was their engagement with neo-Paganism. In his 1873 essay “Contemporary Evolution,” St. George Jackson Mivart acknowledges the locality of Pagan customs could support re-emergences of cultural nationalism. He writes, Incipiently resurging Paganism first showed itself politically in a spirit of religious ‘Nationalism’ opposing itself to the cosmopolitan religious conception embodied in the Papacy. Paganism was especially national, and the principle of ‘Nationalism’ in religion when once introduced into Christendom by legislative impediments to the free exercise of the Christian central and controlling power, rapidly developed itself and expanded fatally to the Christian Theocracy. (347)

80  Michael Shaw For Mivart, Christian theocracy could stand in opposition to the emergence of national forms of religion as it was often expansionist and only superficially rooted in locality. He states Christianity did try to establish national theocracies but these were simply “naked self-assertion” (360). Mivart’s sweeping statements need to be taken lightly but there is evidence to prove that, throughout Europe, nations – such as Lithuania – were turning to preChristian customs and myths to provide bases for new (or reviving) forms of collective identity (Davies 115). By returning to the spirit and even customs of pre-Christian societies, several neo-Pagans helped develop the ethnosymbolisms of many nations in fin-de-siècle Europe. In Ireland this was certainly the case. Several Irish cultural and political nationalists used neo-Paganism not simply as a means to return to an originary idea but also, at times, to build up a particularly gendered conception of the nation. Several examples of neo-Paganism in Ireland involved developing a cult of manhood, which countered the idea the Celt was fey and passive. It is most clearly evident in the pageants performed at Patrick Pearse’s St Enda’s School for boys between 1908 and 1915, principally The Boy Deeds of Cúchulainn (1909). The Celtic hero Cúchulainn was chosen as a role model to ignite a nationalist drive in the children who performed. Pearse stated, “the noble personality of a Cúchulainn forms a true type of Gaelic nationality, full as it is of a youthful life and vigour and hope” (cited in Sisson 79). Consequently, the school was “anxious to send [its] boys home with the knightly image of Cúchulainn in their hearts and his knightly words ringing in their ears” (Trotter 152). Pearse was trying to cultivate a “nationalist masculinity” in the boys (Sisson 113). This reached its peak in the school’s 1911 Passion Play at the Abbey Theatre that was, as Trotter notes, “a violent metaphor: a call for the Irish nationalist to accept his/ her own cross and be prepared to die for Ireland” (138). Much can be said of Yeats’s use of gender, but one aspect was his desire to dissociate himself from the “femininity” of Celticism (cited in Howe 72). In Cathleen ni Houlihan, men are needed to protect the mythical female symbol of the nation (the poor old woman). Thus clear gendered roles are ascribed based on a family dynamic in which the idealized feminine nation must be protected by a masculine nationality. This cult of masculinity often resulted in a homosocial culture. As George Mosse has argued, male friendship and homoeroticism were “close to the surface of nationalism” (Nationalism 67) in many European nations. This led to some accusations of homosexual activity among Irish nationalists, accusations designed to denigrate the movement and its advocates, notably Sir Roger Casement and Pearse. In turn, between 1882 and 1883, the Irish nationalist William O’Brien had “discovered allegations of sodomy against important British officials,” which gave the nationalist movement a new focus and political armor (Cocks 129). This practice of building militant national identity by styling it in opposition to the homosexuality of others continued into the twentieth century, most notably with the English MP

William Sharp’s Neo-Paganism  81 Noel Pemberton-Billing who “claimed that before the [First World War] Germany had devised a plot to infiltrate the British government and armed services with lesbians and homosexuals and in wartime used spies to blackmail civilians to debilitate troops” (Gagnier, Idylls 201). Neo-Paganism was often closely related to same-sex experience at the fin-de-siècle and, politically, such association with sexual deviancy could be damaging to the cause of Home Rule. Part of Home Rule cultural politics in Ireland involved using neo-Paganism to develop a cult of masculinity but simultaneously deflected any suggestion of transgressive homosexuality or effeminacy associated with it. Thus gender roles, in certain Irish nationalist circles, were very strict. There may have been a pan-Celtic movement in the 1890s but the revivals in Ireland and Scotland often had different hues and these reflected their political conditions. Scottish cultural nationalists were similarly engaged in performing a willed return to the past, not entirely dissimilar from the “return to an originary, pre-Colonial Irishness” (Howe 52). There were also attempts to build the “common symbolism” Yeats was pursuing with his Celtic Mysteries in Ireland (Howe 70). These features are clearly evident in the Ramsay Lodge murals Geddes and the artist John Duncan designed, adjacent to Edinburgh Castle, which depict Celtic Pagan figures, from Cuchullin (the Anglicized spelling) to Fionn, alongside other Scottish heroes. However, these designs do not take on the militarist features that could be associated with Irish neo-Paganism; for instance, in “The Awakening of Cuchullin” mural, the hero is only just awakening from sleep and thus appears more passive than active. Furthermore, Unionism is still celebrated in the Ramsay Lodge project, as is evidenced in the wall decorations that include the heraldry of the four nations that comprise the United Kingdom. Collectively, the designs are statements of a more muted Scottish nationalism, seeking to defend and underline Scotland’s civic autonomy within the UK, and dissociating itself from a stadialism that, many felt, was dividing Scottish nationality, but not to the extent that it would compromise Scotland’s role in the British Empire. While neo-Paganism could support the militarism of Irish nationalism, it could also support a more tentative Scottish cultural nationalism. Queer Identity and the Family in Neo-Pagan Scotland The rebuilding of a Scottish national family supported by neo-Paganism led to the development of particular representations of gendered and familial identities. It also resulted in what might be called queer neo-Paganism. While movements toward becoming a nation-state tended to involve a strongly masculine encoding of nationality that reversed the terms of established or projected gendered paradigms, the desire to be an autonomous but stateless nation relied on a particular form of gender discourse that was at once virile

82  Michael Shaw and passive, masculine and feminine,6 which complicated established categories and hierarchies. The discourses of cultural nationalist movements as well as gender and sexuality equality movements can be closely aligned, as they each attempt to destabilize the “paternalistic nature of cultural marginalization” (Reizbaum 168). This section will therefore examine how Scottish cultural nationalists attempted to reclaim their identity through a particularly queer neo-Paganism, using Pagan myths to form a national cultural identity that was encoded as neither purely male nor female and disrupted inter-national hierarchies. It will also explore how they drew strength from the reclamation of other marginal identities. To understand the “gentler” nature of Scottish cultural nationalism in the period, we need only look to William Sharp, who embodies it and its complications. Sharp occupies a contested position in understandings of fin-de-siècle Scottish cultural nationalism. All critical accounts of Sharp should begin by acknowledging that Sharp was a deeply conflicted man whose writings were often contradictory (although not always unintentionally).7 Critics tend to focus only on parts of Sharp’s oeuvre without acknowledging the diversity of his writing. Flavia Alaya has described Sharp as having “an instinctive anti-nationalism” (15), while Steve Blamires believes Sharp’s nationalism was “non-existent” (Little Book, 36). There is certainly evidence to support both of these positions. Sharp (under his most famous pseudonym Fiona Macleod) claimed “a country lives truly only when it realizes that its sole aim is not to live” (cited in Alaya 170). He also stated (as Macleod), “there is, for us all, only one English literature. All else is provincial or dialectic” (Winged Destiny 195–96). This attitude is reflected in the unpublished poem “West Britain: An Appeal” (Manuscripts of Poems), a scathing attack on Irish nationalists that condemns their attempts to “degrade the might of England”: Shall this foul shame be yours, shall this foul wrong Be done by you, West Britons, kith and kin? Shall the red flames of civil war wave long Athwart your isle? Think well ere ye begin! For yours shall be the bitter anguish strong, Even as yours the irrevocable sin! (23–28) The poem never acknowledges the “West Britons” as Irish; it is an assimilationist representation. The English nationality is encoded as noble, strong, and masculine (defending female England), while the Irish are violent pillagers who would “seize [England’s] greatness with rebellious rape” (8). The poem effectively reverses the colonial paradigm; it is ­Ireland that subordinates England and the narrative voice is firmly on the side of England: “Not in vain/Shall we be played with, like slaves bought and sold!” (21–22). This quotation subverts a much-quoted line from Robert Burns’s poem “Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation” (1792),

William Sharp’s Neo-Paganism  83 which claims the Scots were “bought and sold for English gold” (23). In such a way, Sharp works to reverse the terms of the nationalist debate. Indeed, the poem co-opts Scottish nationalistic complaints to undermine both Irish and Scottish nationalistic rhetoric. However, to represent Sharp solely through this lens is inaccurate. On the very evening that Prime Minister William Gladstone met Parnell to discuss the second Irish Home Rule Bill (18 December 1889), Sharp wrote an unpublished poem, “Gladstone” (Manuscripts of Poems), which describes the proHome Rule Leader of the Opposition as the “Prince of those who lead” (2) and states, “Thy triumph too is sure, for thou art girt/With weapons forged by the eternal powers,/Truth, Freedom, Right” (9–11). Whether this triumph refers to Irish Home Rule goes unstated, but Sharp’s willingness to give such praise to Gladstone when he was engaged in Home Rule discussions demonstrates he was not so vehemently opposed to Home Rule as the poem “West Britons” suggests. Furthermore, throughout his career Sharp voiced support for Scottish and Irish cultural nationalism. He believed in the “persistent preservation of the national spirit, of the national idiosyncrasy, the national ideals” and went as far as declaring, “I would not have reconciliation at any price, and would rather we should dwell isolate and hostile than purchase peace at the cost of relinquishment of certain things more precious than all prosperities and triumphs” (Winged Destiny 177). Here we see the extent of Sharp’s nationalism; he would rather pursue a form of political independence than have Scotland’s cultural autonomy compromised. Moreover, in his introduction to Lyra Celtica, he highlighted the “superb efflorescence” (l) of national idiosyncrasies at the fin-de-siècle and argued, in “A Note on the Belgian Renascence,” Scotland and Ireland should follow Belgium’s lead in developing cultural nationalist movements. Although he was not connected to the Scottish Home Rule Association, Sharp was often keen to ensure the voice of Scotland, usually Celtic Scotland, had strength. While this chapter focuses on Sharp’s cultural nationalist writings, it is important not to dissociate them from his anti-nationalist words, as both can inform each other. Like other cultural nationalists such as Geddes, Sharp’s cultural nationalism attempted to disrupt stadialist notions of progress that imagined “civilized” peoples as superior to “barbarous” ones. In his writings, he frequently reclaimed “barbarous” cultures or complicated attempts to easily divide the two, and his neo-Paganism often supported this. In The Washer of the Ford (1895), written under the Fiona Macleod pseudonym, he utters his desire to reclaim the “pagan sentiment,” “the old barbaric emotion” (4): “I long to express anew something of that wonderful historic romance in which we of our race and country are so rich” (5). Sharp was keen to interrogate the practices of those who would label peoples “barbarous” in order to marginalize them. He criticized the so-called “civilizing factor” (Winged Destiny 288) that destroyed and depopulated Highland communities, exposing the power relations that underpin “civilization” discourse. Such a desire to subvert the notion of, and the power dynamic associated with, “­civilization”

84  Michael Shaw by reclaiming barbarity manifests in his magazine The Pagan Review. In a footnote for “The Oread,” Sharp reveals (under his pseudonym Charles ­Verlayne) he is planning a series of “Barbaric Studies” (41). Elsewhere in The Pagan Review, Sharp also turns the civilization-barbarity binary on its head by stating he finds attempts to civilize through literature, by providing a moral “barbaric” (55), just as Wilde and Baudelaire did. Accordingly, The Pagan Review, and Sharp’s neo-Paganism more widely, represents a vehicle to interrogate stadialism and recover so-called barbarous and marginalized peoples. This project had important implications for gender discourse and conceptions of the family. In his Foreword to The Pagan Review, Sharp reflects on a power relationship that needs to be addressed: the male-female power dynamic. The “new paganism,” he tells us, is “a potent leaven in the yeast of the ‘younger generation,”‘ which holds that “The religion of our forefathers has not only ceased for us personally, but is no longer in any vital and general sense a sovereign power in the realm” (2). Sharp uses neo-Paganism to celebrate youth and challenge conservatism. He outlines this new ideology: A new epoch is about to be inaugurated … a new epoch in civil law, in international comity, in what, vast and complex though the issues be, may be called Human Economy. The long half-acknowledged, halfdenied duel between Man and Woman is to cease, neither through the victory of hereditary overlordship nor the triumph of the far more deft and subtle if less potent weapons of the weaker, but through a frank recognition of copartnery. This new comradeship will be not less romantic, less inspiring, less worthy of the chivalrous extremes of life and death, than the old system of overlord and bondager. … Far from wishing to disintegrate, degrade, abolish marriage, the “new paganism” would fain see that sexual union become the flower of human life. But, first, the rubbish must be cleared away; the anomalies must be replaced by just inter-relations; the sacredness of the individual must be recognised; and women, no longer have to look upon men as usurpers, men no longer to regard women as spiritual foreigners. (2) Sharp provides a focused summary of common facets of the neo-Pagan movement: celebrating youth, “the sexual emotion” (3) and reimagining human inter-relations, rejecting traditions and questioning Christianity.8 His words come very close to those of Edward Carpenter who, like Sharp, critiques the notion of civilization. Carpenter argues, in his 1889 essay “Civilization: Its Cause and Cure,” we need to return to “the naive insouciance of the pagan and primitive world” (3) and reject notions of “civilization” that espouse “forms of dominance” that turn “the woman into the property of the man” (5). Significantly, Sharp’s discussions on reviving the status of women often invoke the language of inter-nationality. He believes women are “usurped” and men and women are “foreign” to each other. Gender

William Sharp’s Neo-Paganism  85 and family relations in many senses reflect inter-nationality discourse; superiority and “overlordship” can be common. Sharp desires to subvert the inequality of paternalistic marriage by resisting the civilized-savage hierarchy (which, in terms of nations and races, can justify occupation and possession) and replace it with a “copartnery,” thus revolutionizing human inter-relations. There will be synthesis and mutual dependence; women will no longer be in bondage. Meanwhile, he hopes for “international comity” to replace international hierarchy. Sharp’s concerns are evident throughout The Pagan Review, as in such contributions as “The Pagans” in which the narrator, Wilfrid Traquair, a Scotsman, speaks of the “deep comradeship” (24) with his French lover Claire. Against the wishes of Claire’s brother Victor, who rejects her pairing with a “beggarly” (28) and “offensive” (26) Scot, these two “outcast pagans” “go forth into the green world” (28). Victor’s name represents his belief in hierarchy and his desire to marginalize the Scot reflects this; he signifies the “overlord” Sharp discusses in the Foreword. However, it is noted by Wilfrid that Victor and Claire have Scottish ancestry. By articulating this, Sharp complicates attempts to dissociate and degrade others and instead reveals connection. Like the sexes, which are styled as allies, not foes, against the “maze of life” (24), hostility is rejected on a national level too. As will be discussed below, the “green world” the pagan lovers enter also embodies Sharp’s interest in overcoming hierarchy. Sharp’s career was largely dedicated to this subversion of the power dynamic that marginalized peoples. He wanted to empower the female identity as well as those who were considered backward. At times, the writings of his most sustained pseudonym, Fiona Macleod, embodied these aspects of Sharp’s life. Macleod was essentially an expression of Sharp’s female self. Through Macleod he was able to engage in what could be called a transvestism of the authorial subject. Sharp was well aware of just how much power his feminine side exerted. Indeed, he acknowledged “in some things I am more a woman than a man” (cited in Crichton-Miller 39). In one of Sharp’s revealing unpublished poems, “Moi-même” (Manuscripts of Poems), the poetic subject performs a self-examination and reveals an internal gender conflict: I know not if a man thou art or a woman, Or what strange soul hath its abode in thee; I think thou art half demon and half human And yet sometimes a God I seem to see. … Thou hast the fiery flame of man’s desire, The hunger and the madness of the sense – Thou also hast the woman’s clear pure fire Of perfect love, her glory and defence. (1–12) Here Sharp interestingly associates masculinity with the language of aggression and femininity with defence, which reflects his Celtic Revivalism that

86  Michael Shaw was neither wholly aggressive nor defensive. Sharp also appears to prefigure Maud Gonne’s notion that “male and female consciousness working in ­concert” (Halloran 178–79) can more strongly experience the supernatural; only through this dual-sexed identity can the poetic subject “seem to see” a God. There is a striking parallel between “Myself” and Sharp’s own experience. This may explain why he used the French title to distance the poem from his own identity. The fact the poem borders on being a confession may also explain why it was never published. That being said, Sharp published several writings that attempted to inhabit the most intimate and harrowing female experiences, including maternal death during childbirth in the poem “The Rune of the Sorrow of Women” (1896). Sharp is also believed to have dressed up as a woman to write the Macleod texts (Fletcher 163). It is little wonder his secretary Lilian Rea said, “in him seemed to live again the child of Hermes and Aphrodite” (cited in Alaya 112), implying Hermaphroditus. He even related a dream to Yeats’s friends in which he was a woman and made love to a male version of Fiona (Yeats 129).9 The Fiona pseudonym was not simply a commercial interest for Sharp; through it, he could express the intense, even inextricable bond between men and women. In many ways, the Fiona identity embodied the “copartnery” heralded in The Pagan Review and the acknowledgement men and women were not so ­different, creating a queer dynamic that complicated Victorian paternalism. He would even write as a fusion of the two authors under the hybrid name Wilfion. Other factors certainly influenced the emergence of the Fiona identity, notably his intense love affair with Edith Rinder who functioned as his muse and allowed him to “lose himself in her consciousness” (Halloran 160), as well as his interest in supernaturalism. However, we should not reduce our explanations of the Fiona identity to simply the Edith affair or Sharp’s dabbling in the occult. Her existence was a product of Sharp’s time and place. What is striking is that Sharp used this female identity to write the vast majority of his Celtic Revival writings. In part, this replayed the feminine encoding of Celtic identity in the nineteenth century that was advanced by Matthew Arnold. This encoding subtly suggested the Celt was subservient – passive, emotional, and imaginative – and needed to be possessed by the rational Saxon.10 However, Sharp’s gender manipulation, through the Fiona identity but also through the Fiona writings, could also be employed as a tool to reclaim Celtic and Pagan cultures. This is suggested in Fiona’s name alone, a name Sharp popularized following its initial appearance in the Scottish poet James Macpherson’s Ossian. The name is a feminine form of Fionn, the Celtic god who became a key symbol for several Irish nationalists, most obviously Fenianism, the name of which derives from the Fianna, who were led by Fionn. In light of this, the Fiona name is typical of Scottish cultural nationalism in many ways. It uses a nationalist vocabulary but its potential for virile militancy is tempered by its recasting as feminine. Beyond the name of Fiona, the Macleod writings themselves rupture essentialist ideas of male and female identity as well as recovering other marginalized peoples. This is

William Sharp’s Neo-Paganism  87 best illustrated by Macleod’s short story collections, principally The Washer of the Ford in which the politics of neo-Paganism, cultural nationalism, and gender discourse operate in significant ways. Sharp’s building of the national family was founded on a queer neo-Paganism. The Washer of the Ford, published in 1895 by Patrick Geddes and ­Colleagues as part of their Celtic Library, principally includes tales from the period when Saint Columba (or Colum) brought Christianity to the Western Isles of Scotland from Ireland in the sixth century. The collection is an attempt to create a tailored Celtic mythology for Scotland to bind the national family, seeking to reclaim supposedly barbarous Celtic peoples and to muddle the borders between Christianity and Paganism. At the end of the nineteenth century, archaeological discoveries had demonstrated the close ties between Christian and Pagan customs and it was argued Christianity had fused itself with Paganism after failing to fully displace it. Many of these discoveries were made in Scotland where it was believed the most authentically Pagan societies remained intact. A great number of studies and articles were published on Scotland’s existing Paganism, with titles including “Survivals of Paganism in Foula,” “Still Pagan Scotland,” “A Remnant of Pagan Scotland,” and “Some Survivals of Paganism in Scotland.” These articles suggested “Christianity is but a thin veneer upon the solid timber of Paganism” (Sands 8) and portray Scottish Paganism as a counterweight to Enlightenment. Scottish Paganism had a “wondrous power” that “the moral forces of the culture and enlightenment of centuries were not able completely to overcome” (Munro 335). Sharp, being keen to reclaim the “pagan sentiment,” “the old barbaric emotion,” as he states in the introduction, uses Washer to expose the Paganism that underpins Christianity by providing a mythical retelling of the beginnings of Christianity on the west coast of Scotland. In such a way he authenticates the image of Scotland as a distinctively Pagan nation. According to Sharp, nothing less than “a strange complexity of paganism and Christianity” (Washer 6) characterized the Celtic mind. Besides this validation of Scotland’s difference from the Imperial core, what these stories also demonstrate is the queer nature of Scottish nation-building in this period. This is particularly evident in three stories included in The Washer of the Ford – “The Three Marvels of Hy,” “Ula and Urla,” and “The Annir Choille” – where Sharp recovers both the distinctive Paganism of Scotland while complicating gender binaries. Thus a national family that develops a strong masculinity through neo-Paganism is not pursued. Frequently in the text, the Christian figures represented learn from the Pagans and are themselves represented as more barbaric, turning the terms of stadialist discourse on their heads. This is evident in two conjoined stories, “The Dark Nameless One” and “The Three Marvels of Hy.” In the first story, Ivor McLean relates Colum’s encounter with Angus MacOdrum to the female narrator, presumably Fiona. Angus MacOdrum, or Black Angus, is “one of the race of Odrum the Pagan” (Washer 139), a reference to the North Uist legend of Clan MacCodrum of the Seals, “held to be the children

88  Michael Shaw of a Scandinavian king under spells” (Henderson 261). Henderson has noted Pagan festivals relating to this legend were once held in North Uist (262). Colum talks to the Seal who he believes is “no friend of Christ” and is instead “of the evil pagan faith” (Washer 138). It is locally understood Angus took a servant of Christ, Kirsteen McVurich, out to sea and there she became the sea witch of Earraid, the small island near Iona that David Balfour gets marooned on in Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886). Consequently, Colum is told the soul of Angus “is Judas” (142), confirming Paganism’s antithesis to Christianity and leading him to crucify Angus. However, in “The Three Marvels of Hy,” Colum is informed by Angus’s daughter, the Moon-Child, that Angus was “a man under spells” (167). Colum regrets his action, realizing he has left the child alone in the world, and then asks this Moon-Child of the Pagan race, “Teach me the way to God, O little child” (171). The Pagan becomes the leader of the Christian and the supposed moral superiority of the Christian is exposed. Significantly, the Moon-Child then transforms gender and becomes Christ: “there were no seaweeds in her hair and no shell in the little wee hands of her. For now, it was a male Child that was there, shining with a light from within: and in his fair sunny hair was a shadowy crown of thorns, and in his hand was a pearl of great price” (171). Sharp subtly transforms the Pagan sea imagery into Christian images: the seaweeds become a crown of thorns and the shell becomes the pearl of great price. The way to Christianity is through Paganism, not against it. The stories disrupt any form of hierarchy. Christian and Pagan are levelled, male and female become interchangeable, and his focus on the West of Scotland revives the Celtic voice over Anglo-centrism. Sharp hoped “the little northern isle [Iona] will be as it were the tongue in the mouth of the South” (cited in Sharp, William Sharp 317); he uses his writing to vocalize the fringe. Characteristic of fin-de-siècle neo-Paganism, Sharp disrupts the Christian/Pagan binary paradigm but he also brings gender and national discourses to bear. Collectively, these groups – females, Celts, and Pagans – can absorb each other’s energy and form a counter-hegemony that undercuts established hierarchies. Instead of division and authority, Sharp pursues a force that binds. He finds this force in the images of the newborn child, the natural world, and the Pagan god Pan. These concepts reflect the particular form of national family encoded in fin-de-siècle Scotland where images of binding and equal partnership were largely desired. The first is evoked in “Ula and Urla,” also in Washer. This tale, which continues the story “Silk o’ the Kine” from another of Macleod’s collections, The Sin Eater (1895), concerns two lovers, Ula and Urla, who also go by the names of Isla and Eilidh respectively. The king has sworn to give Eilidh/Urla to the best man in battle (Osra mac Osra) but she is already wife to Isla/Ula, a poet and a warrior, which the king is not privy to. They escape but Isla is later seized and killed with a spear. In the story, Urla speaks of her unborn child after the father, Ula, has been slain: “now he shall live again, and he and I shall be in one body, in

William Sharp’s Neo-Paganism  89 him that I carry now” (313). The child also appears to have the ability to see the heterogeneity of the human self. The child looks into the “sleeping soul” of Ula and finds it is “not Isla [Ula] nor yet Eilidh [Urla], but that it was like unto himself, who was made of Eilidh and Isla” (315). It is not simply the child that contains both sexes and yokes their two identities; they themselves are a mixed identity that is neither male nor female. Sharp creates a distinct representation of family relations here, one in which the crystallized self is dissolved into a wider web, challenging many of the core ideas that underpinned representations of the family in the late Victorian period. To emphasize this, Sharp frequently uses similar names for individuals with different genders and therefore creates semantic fluidity. Naming the male character Ula/Isla also contributes to this as Isla is typically a female name, which again suggests the mutability of genders in Sharp’s neo-Pagan myths. Indeed, Sharp prophesied Christ would come again on Iona but he would come as a woman (Blamires, Chronicles 180). In Sharp’s hands, Celtic Scotland is closely associated with fluctuating genders. Furthermore, the simple merits of militant masculinity are rejected by Eilidh. She loves Isla who is both warrior and poet, a key personification of Sharp’s gentler nationalism. The story, like the image of the child, is concerned more with bonding than the battlefield. The child in “Ula and Urla” is also associated with Pagan notions of nature as the words of Maol the Druid are recalled upon its birth. Maol speaks of Orchil who is “the dim goddess who is under the brown earth, in a vast cavern, where she weaves at two looms. With one hand she weaves life upward through the grass; with the other she weaves death downward through the mould; and the sound of the weaving is Eternity, and the name of it in the green world is Time” (317). Here Sharp imagines a Celtic underworld inhabited by a weaver. Orchil appears in various Sharp writings around this period, including in Green Fire (1896) where she even more clearly embodies synthesis: “It is only when we come to this vision of her whom we call Isis or Hera or Orchil, or one of a hundred other names, our unknown Earth-Mother, that men and women will know each other aright, and go hand in hand along the road of Life without striving to crush, to subdue, to usurp, to retaliate, to separate” (280). Orchil is not only a figure who unifies through her weaving but, in doing so, she binds the sexes together into “copartnery,” which overcomes hierarchy. In Green Fire, the narrator also speaks of genders as “the dual Spirit within us – the mystery of the Two in One” (279). Orchil is a figure that clearly demonstrates the interest in Scottish neo-Paganism of rejecting gendered binary paradigms and creating unity. It is this figure of Orchil, of synthetic identity through the processes of nature, which closes The Washer of the Ford. Sharp highlights the fact that her “loom” permeates everything; the image repeats itself throughout the collection in the numerous references to “loom” and “weave.” The image is thereby verbally stitched into the text to remind us of the materiality and processes of nature. As the Prologue

90  Michael Shaw informs, “we are woven in one loom” (14): the synthetic green life. This is not a neo-Paganism built on aggression, militancy, distinct gender roles, and hierarchies, but is one that prizes ­synthesis into a larger family through the land, reflecting the desire to weave unity and create partnership in Scottish cultural nationalism. Perhaps the most striking image of this synthetic consciousness that extends beyond the individual and traditional conceptions of the family is evident in “The Annir Choille.” Here the protagonist, Cathal, renounces Paganism and women. However, when he encounters the female Ardanna, he rejects Christianity. Following this, he gives up his Christian name, GilleMhoire – servant of Mary – and returns to being Cathal mac Art “of the race of Alpein” (183), a name that alludes to the man who is often considered the first king of Scots, Kenneth MacAlpin, and thus Cathal’s Pagan affirmation is tied to rediscovering his Scottish identity. This is substantiated by the fact that, when Cathal is caught, he is left in the hollow of an oak tree. This is significant as Charles II hid in an oak tree to evade the Roundheads after the Battle of Worcester, which led to the oak tree becoming a key Jacobite symbol. The name Cathal can also be anglicized as Charles, supporting the Jacobite symbolism. By the late nineteenth century, Jacobitism was closely associated with Scotland – the neo-Jacobite movement was largely focused there – and many cultural nationalists, including Geddes, felt nostalgia for the Jacobite past. Furthermore, when Cathal looks out from the oak tree, he can see in the stars the sword of Fionn and the harp of Brigidh, significant figures in Sharp’s Scottish neo-Paganism. In rediscovering his Paganism, Cathal rediscovers Scotland and, in turn, discovers synthesis. Through the oak tree, Cathal experiences the Green Life in which spirits can live in, and pass through and between, trees: “everywhere he saw tall, fair pale-green lives moving to and fro: some passing out of trees, swift and silent as rain out of a cloud; some passing into trees, silent and swift as shadows” (211). These spirits all draw energy from one another: “they are as I am” (212), says Deòin, the “Druid of the trees” (213). This “green life” was even practiced by Sharp himself. Lady Gregory, for one, related a time when Sharp embraced a tree and felt his soul flowing through the sap (­Halloran 185). Nature, for Sharp and in his literature, was a means of creating a larger national family that was built on synergy over hierarchy and was rooted in Paganism.11 National synthesis is also inferred in “The Annir Choille” when Deòin tells Cathal that Keithoir is their god. Sharp mentions Keithoir in the dedication of Pharais (1894) to Edith Wingate Rinder: “In the mythology of the Gael are three forgotten deities, children of the Delbaith-Dana. These are Seithoir, Teithoir and Keithoir […] Keithoir is the god of the earth; dark-eyed, shadowy brother of Pan; and his fane is among the lonely glens and mountains and lonelier isles of ‘Alba cona lingantaibh.’ It is because you and I are of the children of Keithoir that I wished to grace my book with your name” (viii). Sharp is building a specific Scottish mythology here that draws from both Celtic and Hellenic Paganism, which he found complementary: “To the

William Sharp’s Neo-Paganism  91 Gaelic mind, remembering what it had dreamed in the Vale of Tempe […] the myths of Persephone and Eurydice might well be identified […] in the gloomy underworld” (Manuscripts and Typescripts of Dramas). For Sharp, Keithoir is Scotland’s distinct version of Pan, who fuses man with nature. Pan becomes a key image for the synthetic form of cultural nationalism that was being pursued in Scotland in the 1890s. He played an important role in the Ramsay Lodge decoration scheme, featuring in two murals. Geddes not only associated Pan with Scotland in the mural designs but also in his claim that Pan’s spirit had been best “preserved here in the north” (Dramatisations 52). Pan for Geddes embodied the “unified whole” (Interpretation 15), which would have appealed to his commitment to synergism. In Pan’s Pipes (1878), Robert Louis Stevenson acknowledged Pan provided an alternative to stadialist progress, symbolizing “common” nature (8) and impulses. For Stevenson, “Pan [was] not dead” (5) but was essential to counter the stadialism he was so keen to question throughout his novels, particularly in Kidnapped. These few examples of Pan’s various appearances in Scottish culture in the period are revealing. They show Pan was a symbol that could counter the divisiveness felt in Scotland. If Pan represented virility in certain contexts,12 in Scotland he was almost exclusively representative of synthesis. The symbol of Pan not only rejected stadialism but signified commonality that was rooted in the land. It is unsurprising that Pan, and his “shadowy brother” Keithoir, became an important part of fin-de-siècle Scotland’s ethnosymbolism. The national and pan-national ­family, queer in many forms, is embraced, often at the expense of the nuclear, ­hierarchical family. What Sharp was doing is representative of what many cultural nationalists were doing in fin-de-siècle Scotland, although in a less frequent and obvious manner: rejecting forms of nation-building that relied on images of an uncomplicated masculinity. Scottish cultural nationalists drew on feminine and androgynous images to further their ends. Interestingly, there is evidence to suggest Scotland was a particularly stimulating ground for feminism at the fin-de-siècle and the Scottish legal authorities even appear to have been less resistant to homosexuality than their counterparts in England. Although it has been argued Geddes believed in “differential nature” based on “female passivity and male energy” (McCulloch 81), such generalizations do him an injustice. Geddes was in fact a solid defender of the female “depressed labourer” and heralded women’s “business capacity.” He also celebrated the importance of their role “in inspiring and in conducting that renewal of cities and city life which is at length happily incipient” (Sex 238). Notably he believed Scotland and other nations on “the maritime fringes” played important roles in the women’s movement, attributing this to the “strengthened individuality and self-reliance in those parts of the world” (68). Scotland also appears to have been less strict in punishing homosexual activity. Brian Dempsey has demonstrated that not only were no individuals executed for sodomy in nineteenth-century Scotland but no same-sex activity cases went to the High Court in the 1890s besides those related to

92  Michael Shaw pedophilia. There is also evidence to suggest some of those who appeared at the sheriff-court level were less harshly punished than in England. One sheriff, in Aberdeen in 1888, did not implement the two-year imprisonment sentence for gross indecency as outlined in the Criminal Law Amendments Act (1885),13 finding it too “severe” (“Indecencies in Victoria Park” 2). A further sheriff in Edinburgh appears to have been exasperated by the Scottish Crown authorities for being so “lenient” on the matter in “sending the case to be tried summarily,” but he himself only imposed a thirty-day sentence with hard labor (“General News” 3). Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that many homosexuals and individuals who engaged in same-sex activity, including Marc-André Raffalovich, John Gray, and Aleister Crowley, settled in Scotland in this period. It is also known that convicted homosexuals fled to Scotland after breaking bail in England, such as Percy Jocelyn in 1822. Nevertheless, it is important not to speculate too much on the Scottish response to the Labouchere Amendment or the enforcement of its laws on same-sex activity; more research still needs to be conducted on these issues. We need to be careful with our conclusions on Sharp, neo-Paganism, and the form of the national family. As this chapter has demonstrated, Sharp’s interest in cultural nationalism was conflicted and many other factors influenced the development of the Fiona identity and her writings than simply the Celtic Revival. We cannot reduce her emergence purely to cultural nationalism. Furthermore, what was happening in Scotland was not entirely dissimilar to what was occurring in Ireland. The two movements did share many similar aims and used common symbols and myths to bind their respective national families. But with these qualifications in mind, it is clear the Fiona identity was a product of Sharp’s time and place. Sharp clearly had an interest in nation-building, he was not simply elegizing the passing of the Celt, and the Fiona identity and her writings reflect not only Sharp’s ideas but a wider Scottish cultural nationalism. The “gentler” masculinity, and indeed the unraveling of gender binary paradigms in fin-de-siècle Scottish cultural nationalism, was a product of a context, a national culture that did not pursue a political movement that relied on building an image of a countermasculinity. In Scottish cultural nationalism – the (re)formation of Scottish national family – neo-Paganism and the destabilization of gender roles helped to support the position the nation largely desired in the late nineteenth century. As a group who sought to unify the nation and reclaim its autonomy, while never seeking to undermine its role in the British Empire, Scottish cultural nationalists developed a form of queer neo-Paganism, one that drew from both genders and interrogated inherited vocabularies. They developed a particular language for the formation of the national family, one of synthesis and “copartnery.” These individuals sought to reclaim the margins but never to fully divorce themselves from the center. Their synthetic neo-Paganism reflects and underscores this stance. Dennis Denisoff has written “the queer is far from against nature” (445) and, in the neo-Pagan context, it is clear queer identity could be a means

William Sharp’s Neo-Paganism  93 of synthesizing and strengthening communities through nature, ­embodying the type of gendered relations the national movement in Scotland needed to achieve unity within itself and with others, in “international comity.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, opponents of the Scottish cultural nationalist movement, such as the poet John Davidson, also held antagonism toward ­neo-Paganism. Cultural nationalism and neo-paganism were closely intertwined. In order to understand queer neo-Paganism in Scotland, it must be considered in light of the national question, for which Ireland at times provides a telling masculinist comparison. The recent movement to bring Scottish and Irish S­ tudies together is helping to develop and nuance our understandings of these nations’ cultures and histories. Their stories, like all nations’ stories, are of relationships. Notes  1. Often these pre-Christian images were fused with early Christian images, as Anthony Smith discusses in relation to Ireland (Myths 137).   2. The Celtic Library was published by Patrick Geddes & Colleagues (c.1895–96) and included works by Sharp, Rhys, Macpherson, and Rinder.   3. For a useful analysis of the inhibition of Scottish nationalism in the nineteenth century, see Kidd.  4. The Liberal Party and The Crofters’ Party (representing the Highland Land League) were the two main parties behind the Scottish Home Rule Association, formed in 1886, which argued for a Scottish Parliament.   5. On the relationship between nations and states in the nineteenth century, see Hobsbawm 22–23.   6. Christopher Whyte has argued political assimilation is often “envisioned in gender terms as an emasculation” (xii).  7. Sharp was heavily influenced by the Ossian writings, which he edited and penned an introduction to in 1896.  8. In his later writing, Sharp tends to integrate neo-Paganism with Christianity rather than singularly rejecting Christianity.   9. For an extended analysis of this dream, see Madden 106. 10. On Arnold’s gendering of the Celt, see Pittock 64–66. 11. Sharp’s writings have close connections with the German youth movement that formed “a pantheism that integrated man, nature and the nation, directing attention away from the physical and toward national mythology” (Mosse, “Nationalism and Sexuality” 83). 12. The figure of Pan is often associated with virility; for instance, in Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” (1913), the speaker who identifies with Pan states, “I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend” (cited in Urban 166) and in Machen’s The Great God Pan (1890), where Pan rapes Helen’s mother Mary. 13. The Labouchere Amendment, Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), was tabled by Henry Labouchere and designed to prosecute males who engaged in acts of “gross indecency” with other males when sodomy could not be proven. They were sentenced for up to two years, with or without hard labor.

94  Michael Shaw Works Cited Alaya, Flavia. William Sharp – “Fiona Macleod.” Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1970. Blamires, Steve. The Chronicles of the Sidhe. Cheltenham: Skylight Press, 2012. ———. The Little Book of the Great Enchantment. Arcata: R J Stewart Books, 2008. Burns, Robert. The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. Eds. Andrew Hogg and Patrick Scott Hogg. Edinburgh: Canongate Books Limited, 2003. Carpenter, Edward. Civilization: Its Cause and Cure and Other Essays. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1891. Cocks, H. G. “Secrets, Crimes and Diseases, 1800–1914.” A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages. Ed. Matt Cook. Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007. 107–44. Crichton-Miller, H. “William Sharp and The Immortal Hour.” British Journal of Medical Psychology 5.1 (1925): 35–44. Davies, Owen. Paganism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Dempsey, Brian, “‘By the law of this and every other well governed realm’: Investigating Accusations of Sodomy in Nineteenth-Century Scotland.” The Juridical Review 2 (2006): 103–30. Denisoff, Dennis. “Dissipating Nature of Decadent Paganism from Pater to Yeats.” Modernism/Modernity 15 (2008): 431–46. Fletcher, Ian. W. B. Yeats and his Contemporaries. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1987. Fuss, Diana. “Inside/Out.” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Gagnier, Regenia. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. Geddes, Patrick. Letter to R. E. Muirhead. 23 November 1928. MS. GB 237 Coll–1159. Centre for Research Collections, Edinburgh University Library. ———. “The Scots Renascence.” The Evergreen. 1 (1895): 131–39. Geddes, Patrick and J. Arthur Thomson. Sex. London: Williams and Norgate, 1914. “General News.” Aberdeen Weekly Journal 3 April 1886: 3. Halloran, William F. “W. B. Yeats, William Sharp, Fiona Macleod: A Celtic Drama: 1897.” Yeats Annual 14 (2001): 159–208. Henderson, George. The Norse Influence on Celtic Scotland. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1912. Hobsbawm, E. J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. 1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Howe, Marjory. Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. “Indecencies in Victoria Park.” Aberdeen Weekly Journal 3 July (1888): 2. “Inquiry – Into the Distress in the Highlands and Islands.” The Scotsman 3 February 1847: 3. Kidd, Colin. “Teutonist Ethnology and the Scottish Nationalist Inhibition, 1780– 1880.” The Scottish Historical Review 74 (1995): 45–68. Madden, Ed. Tiresian Poetics: Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888–2001. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2008.

William Sharp’s Neo-Paganism  95 McCulloch, Margery Palmer. Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959: ­Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange. Edinburgh: Edinburgh ­University Press, 2009. Meyers, Terry L. The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp: A Study of the Birth of Fiona Macleod, Incorporating Two Lost Works. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Mivart, St George Jackson. “Contemporary Evolution: Part II.” Contemporary Review 23 (1873): 346–62. Mosse, George L. “Nationalism and Sexuality in Nineteenth Century Europe.” Culture and Society 76 (1983): 75–84. ———. Nationalism and Sexuality. New York: Howard Fertig Inc., 1985. Munro, Robert. “Some Survivals of Paganism in Scotland.” Good Words 30 (1889): 333–37. Pittock, Murray. Celtic Identity and British Image. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Reizbaum, Marilyn. “Canonical Double Cross: Scottish and Irish Women’s Writing.” Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century “British” Literary Canons. Ed. Karen R. Lawrence. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. 165–90. Sands, L. “Survivals of Paganism in Foula.” Glasgow Herald 17 November 1884: 8. Sharp, Elizabeth A. William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir. London: William Heinemann, 1910. Sharp, William. Green Fire: A Romance. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1986. ———. Manuscripts of Poems. MS. NLS MS 8775. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. ———. Manuscripts and Typescripts of Dramas. MS. NLS MS. 8776. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. ———. The Pagan Review 1 (1892). ———. Pharais: A Romance of the Isles. New York: Duffield & Company, 1907. ———. The Washer of the Ford: And other Legendary Moralities. Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes & Colleagues, 1896. ———. The Winged Destiny: Studies in the Spiritual History of the Gael. London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1904. Sisson, Elaine. Pearse’s Patriots: St Enda’s and the Cult of Boyhood. Cork: Cork University Press, 2004. Smith, Anthony D. Myths and Memories of the Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1998. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Pan’s Pipes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910. Trotter, Mary. Ireland’s National Theatre: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Urban, Hugh B. Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Whyte, Christopher. “Introduction.” Gendering the Nation: Studies in Modern Scottish Literature. Ed. Christopher Whyte. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. ix–xx. Yeats, W. B. Memoirs. Ed. Denis Donoghue. London: Macmillan, 1972.

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Part II

Queer Actually

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5 A “Strange Family Story”1 Count Fosco, His Animal Children, and the “Safe” Patriarch in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White Monica Flegel Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) presents us with one of the more memorable father figures of Victorian fiction: the villainous Count Fosco. Possessing “a cockatoo, two canary-birds, and a whole family of white mice” (235), Count Fosco might more properly be termed a collector, and his relations to his pets certainly verge on the curatorial. Nevertheless, the Count refers to his mice as his “small family” (247) and his “little cherished children” (289), with himself as their “good Papa” (289). In doing so, Fosco relies on the Victorian linkage of children and animal “pets” within the domestic space as creatures that are defined by a common affective value and a shared dependent status.2 In the case of Fosco and his wife, however, the presence of animal pets as children speaks to their family’s incompleteness, as they are forced to approximate, through animal surrogates, the “natural family” (Thiel 8) of husband, wife, and progeny. While many Victorian literary representations of animal/human domesticity are meant to mock or critique failed gender and domestic relations,3 I argue Collins’s text provides a substantially more complicated and perverse version of pets as children, one that challenges heteronormativity far more than it supports it. Reading Fosco as an essentially queer figure, I assert his particular version of pet-centered paternity directly parodies English masculinity and the English family. Fosco’s use of animal progeny as a means of subterfuge by which he passes as a kindly paternalistic figure reveals family life is itself an alibi, one that sometimes – or, as is the case in sensation fiction, often – obscures ugly and violent relations within the domestic space. Furthermore, Fosco also challenges domesticity through a decidedly “queer” relation with his animal children, one in which he rejects physical boundaries by rendering his own body as his “children’s” playground. This “creeping” of the animal other upon the Count’s body disrupts the paternalism the Count so spectacularly performs for his audience, revealing a physical intimacy that subverts the ordered, sentimental, and hierarchical relations of family life he parodies. Count Fosco’s reliance upon the unquestionable respectability of domestic masculinity, combined with the boundary-crossing relationship he has with his pets, cannot easily be subsumed within a relationship of domesticity, dominion, and paternal care, and thus challenges the narrative of the animal-loving family man and all that figure is meant to uphold in Victorian England.4

100  Monica Flegel Pets and the Victorian Family The Victorian period saw the emergence of the “natural family” (Thiel 8) – one composed of a “husband, wife, and children” (Behlmer, cited in Thiel 8) – as the ideal, despite the variety of family formations that existed in the Victorian period. As Elizabeth Thiel observes, “The inclusive, supportive family had been in existence for centuries, but it was the Victorians who sought to elevate its status to that of an icon and, in so doing, to create a sense of permanence and stability to a country beset by anxieties” (2). While not included in strict definitions of the natural family, pets were nevertheless very much seen as an essential part of Victorian family life, as “what has been called the Victorian cult of the pet was firmly established” (Ritvo 86) by the middle of the nineteenth century. Pets could be encompassed within the nuclear family, in part because they were not necessarily seen as part of the animal kingdom but instead as emblematic of humanity’s separation and isolation from it and even from each other. For example, the pet dog, according to Kathleen Kete, served a specific function in the bourgeois imagination in nineteenth-century Paris, acting as a “defense against the onslaughts of modern life” (46). Signifying an enduring fidelity that belied the perceived harshness of modernity, the dog in the home operated as a sign of the family’s escape from the wider world. Furthermore, the dog actively worked to preserve private life, standing guard against strangers as “an interface between the home and the outside world” (48). The pet within the home, then, could be subsumed within the family as almost human, almost immediate kin. Davidoff and Hall note that even when the family was understood as more capacious than the nuclear unit, “Specific categories of age, gender, and function were seen as necessary to staff a family. If these were not filled biologically, surrogates were found” (322). Though Davidoff and Hall do not refer specifically to animals, pets could fill in for “missing” members of a nuclear family and assure its “completeness” as a self-contained unit; as Kathleen Kete observes, “dogs may have functioned as ersatz humans for many individuals in the nineteenth century” (37–38). Furthermore, through treasuring animals that often had little economic value and did not contribute to labor, middle-class pet owners “demonstrated that the home was functioning as it ought to” (Mason 13); “Their inclusion of the dog within their literal circle of affection testifies to their commitment to the affective priorities of home life rather than the economic principles of the market” (14). And teaching children to care for pets, while meant to inculcate children into the idea of duty to a larger world, also served to support the separateness of the middle-class home through mimicking the relations between parents and children: “By teaching children that relations with animals were governed by the same rules as those with humans, middleclass parents naturalized an idealized version of family life and prepared their children to assume their future roles as tenderhearted, self-disciplined mothers and fathers” (Pearson 33–34). Nurtured and nurturing, pets continually reflected back to their owners the principles of the domestic space as a refuge

A “Strange Family Story”  101 from the outside world, an affective space ruled by family hierarchy and the ordered relations of its members. But what of those families in which pets took the place of human progeny? Are such families incomplete or does the pet somehow replace the child, thus supporting the framework of the natural family by suggesting surrogates must be found, outside the species if necessary? In order to answer such questions, we need to examine that which arguably defines the natural family, namely, the couple at the head of the home and the role of progeny within the home. Children were both a sign of their parents’ proper, religiously and nationally sanctioned sexual relations and the symbol of the stability and futurity of middle-class endeavors, insofar as success is measured in progeny who carry on the patriarchal line and name, maintain the family’s assets, and ensure the continuation of its position within the class system. However, pets as children and children as pets illuminate the troubled relationship between the home as the site of proper reproductivity and the center of domestic affections by demonstrating, specifically, the second is not necessarily dependent on the first. Susan Pearson notes “both domestic pets and children were positioned as family-constituting beings that attracted emotional investment and care and provided a channel for the performance of the middle-class family’s purported raison d’être: nurturance” (37). In fact, as Kathleen Kete reminds us, the domestic dog in particular was in many ways the child par excellence, at least in terms of providing that affective center to the home: “Dogs were eternal children, captive outside of narrative, without a past, a future, or a culture. Dogs were uniquely malleable and controllable, nineteenth-century authors insisted, ‘they live an eternal childhood, a minority without end’” (82). Continually confirming the purpose of the middle-class home, the domestic pet could prove to be more than a child surrogate, being instead a continually replaceable, and therefore seemingly permanent, child who never grows up, one who never leaves its place absent and thus continually confirms the apparent completeness of the family home. But if both child and pet serve the affective economy of the home, they cannot play an equal role in the sexual economy of the home, in which the reproductive goals of the parents serve the larger productive needs of the nation and the reproduction of the class/gender status quo. Pets as children can in fact expose the failed sexuality of the pet “parents,” operating as a sign of the spinster’s, the bachelor’s, and even the couple’s inability to successfully achieve full adulthood marked by marriage and reproduction. Furthermore, pets as children can be read as an indication of a queer sensibility in the parent figures, a desire to take pleasure in border-crossing relations that exclude reproduction in favor of non-productive intimacy. A central concern of my analysis of Count Fosco is what Lee Edelman has identified as “reproductive futurism” and the role it plays in setting limits around ­animal/human domestic relations in the Victorian period. According to Edelman, “reproductive futurism” is a key feature of domesticity, ­representing

102  Monica Flegel the unquestioning logic that we must all be on the side of “the Child” who stands in for futurity, a futurity always predicated upon heteronormativity through “rendering unthinkable, [and] by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations” (2). As I will discuss, proper marital sex and its offspring, while safely enclosed within the “private” space of the home, serve to publicly display the right kind of sex has taken place. Those who remain single or childless, by contrast, are open to question, their sexuality and their choice of intimate/physical relations subject to scrutiny, particularly when a pet vividly attests to the non-reproductive capacity of the home. Representations of single people or queer people and their pets, therefore, must be understood within a social construction of sexuality that is always tied to reproduction, one that inevitably perceives families composed of a single human or a non-reproductive couple and their pets as a sign of social failure and deviant sexuality. Count Fosco and Pet Fatherhood Wilkie Collins’s representation of pet-centered paternity in The Woman in White on its surface seems to participate in the critique of familial outsiders, linking, as it does, the Count’s pet-centered patriarchy to his villainous assault on domestic peace and harmony. Though married, the Count is essentially a queer figure, far more homosocial than he is domesticated, with his close relationship with the odious Sir Percival Glyde providing the impetus for many of his criminal actions, and his past allegiance to a fraternal organization called the Brotherhood both informing his villainy and enforcing his secretive nature. Though Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests the Count’s homosociality is characterized by the extent to which his “allegedly vicious or dissolute drive seems more visibly to be directed at a man in his close proximity” (175), I argue his queerness is also evident in his relationships with women. His relationship with his wife, for example, though ostentatiously performed in a highly chivalrous, devoted manner, is one more closely resembling master and servant or high priest and acolyte than man and wife. A former espouser of women’s rights, Madame Fosco has been transformed by Count Fosco’s magnetic personality into his willing accomplice, supporting him in his nefarious actions and at all times engaging in the ritual of making his cigarettes. His performance of conjugal bliss, a deliberate act that helps to hide his actual role as a spy and an exiled member of the Brotherhood, suggests Fosco is arguably a “closeted” man, one who utilizes the appearance of heteronormativity in order to obscure a more scandalous reality. Furthermore, Fosco also defies gender and sex boundaries in his combination of masculine and feminine qualities and in his attraction to the equally boundary-crossing Marian Halcombe. He is described by her as a

A “Strange Family Story”  103 man of great power: “He looks like a man who could tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress,” she says (233). As a man who “tames” women he clearly establishes himself as a hunter within what Derrida has called the ­“carno-phallogocentric order,” one that links women and children with animals as subjects of male dominance and victims of male aggression. As Maggie Berg notes, Derrida “argues that a society’s eagerness to use animals for food is the foundation of a social hierarchy maintained by violence” (“Let me have its bowels then” 22). Fosco certainly participates in this violence, yet he also betrays a womanly sensibility. Marian observes, “He is as noiseless in a room as any of us women; and, more than that, with all his look of unmistakable firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive as the weakest of us. … He winced and shuddered yesterday, when Sir Percival beat one of the spaniels, so that I felt ashamed by my own want of tenderness and sensibility, by comparison with the Count” (Collins 235). Such characteristics are in keeping with Sedgwick’s identification of Fosco as an “aristocratic homosexual ‘type,’” one marked by “feckless, ‘effeminate’ behaviour” (175). Dennis Denisoff similarly argues Fosco is “portrayed as effeminately vain through his theatrical actions, facial expression, and extreme attention to sartorial detail” (47).5 Fosco’s “childish triviality of his ordinary tastes and pursuits” (Collins 238), as seen in his love of desserts, further links him to queer sensibilities because the construction of the homosexual man as trapped in an essential childhood, thus failing to move from the sexual inversion of youth to the “maturity” of heterosexual love, is a common homophobic trope.6 Finally, even Fosco’s erotic passion for Marian Halcombe underlines the Count’s status as a queer figure, for as Lisa Surridge points out, “Famously, her body is feminine and her face is masculine, with a ‘large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw,’ ‘resolute eyes,’ and ‘almost a moustache’ on her lip. … She shakes hands like a man, says she thinks little of her own sex, and even before Laura’s marriage fills the masculine role of guardian that the effeminate Mr. Fairlie fulfils so badly” (Bleak Houses 159). Fosco’s queer enactment of masculinity is significant because it plays into his particular version of pet-centered paternity, one that directly parodies English masculinity and the English family. Linking the Count’s love of pets to a taste for the exotic, as captured in his construction of a pagoda for his mice, the novel opposes his taste in domestic animals to a proper, English animal-human relation. Marian Halcombe writes in her narrative: If it be possible to suppose an Englishman with any taste for such childish interests and amusements as these, that Englishman would certainly feel rather ashamed of them, and would be anxious to apologize for them, in the company of grown-up people. But the Count, apparently, sees nothing ridiculous in the amazing contrast between his colossal self and his frail little pets. He would blandly kiss his white mice, and twitter to his canary-birds amid an assembly of English

104  Monica Flegel f­ ox-hunters, and would only pity them as barbarians when they were all laughing their loudest at him. (236) Marian’s observations of the Count’s pet relations certainly suggest, on their surface, that his own particular style of masculinity is inferior to English manhood, constructed as it is as “childish” and as something of which an Englishman would be “ashamed” and “anxious” and for which he must “apologize.” However, Marian’s comparison of Count Fosco to English men actually reveals the deficits in the English manly character or, at the very least, reveals the performativity of English masculinity. Though she questions whether it is even “possible to suppose” an Englishman might share the Count’s taste in pets, thus asserting such tastes would be unnatural to English character, her acknowledgement that if an Englishman had such tastes, he would have to hide them reveals an awareness of masculinity as a performance, one founded on shame and secrecy and bolstered by violence and a communal mockery of difference. By contrast, to Marian’s mind at least, the Count’s manliness consists of an ability to take ownership for his tastes and pleasures without the sanctioning support of normative masculine homosocial frameworks. Instead, the Count revels in his closeness to small creatures, captured both in his close relation to his “frail little pets” and in his desire to associate himself with women: “‘A taste for sweets,’ he said in his softest tone and his tenderest manner, ‘is the innocent taste of women and children. I love to share it with them – it is another bond, dear ladies, between you and me’” (314). While being connected with “frail little pets” (236) and “innocent … women and children” (314) could serve to undermine the Count’s masculinity, this does not occur. This is illustrated by Marian’s belief the Count would label Englishmen as “barbarians” and is supported by the Count’s later confrontation with a dog, that quintessential representative of English manhood: “‘You big dogs are all cowards,’ he said, addressing the animal contemptuously, with his face and the dog’s within an inch of each other. ‘You would kill a poor cat, you infernal coward. … You could throttle me at this moment, you mean, miserable bully; and you daren’t so much as look me in the face, because I’m not afraid of you’” (237). Like the hunters, who use dogs and horses to hound to death the small fox, this “big dog” is seen by the Count as an “infernal coward” whose strength is called into question, rather than supported by its dominance of weaker, frailer things. Rather than linking himself homosocially with the dog, the Count instead founds his manliness on his opposition to the “stronger” species – by implication the “stronger” sex – and by his ability to look them in the face and call them cowards and barbarians. What complicates Fosco’s masculinity as seemingly kind and gentle is, of course, the fact he utterly dominates both women and pets, all in the service of patriarchy. His own power, as captured in Marian’s observation that he could tame a tigress (233), is one he only masks behind a performance of

A “Strange Family Story”  105 childishness, domesticity, and sensibility. As the novel makes evident, his control of his pet menagerie, the denizens of which he plies with treats in order to teach them to perform tricks at his command, simply reinforces his theories on how to control inferiors in general: He philosophizes with Percival, pointing out that there are only “two ways to manage a woman”: by beating her, which he marks as the province of the working classes alone, and by “never accept[ing] provocation at a woman’s hands. It holds with animals, it holds with children, and its holds with women, who are nothing but children grown up. Quiet resolution is the one quality the animals, the children, and the women all fail in” [352]. Women, then, must be trained that their desires, wishes, and concerns have no impact on their lives or the lives of the men around them. Fosco requires only the quiet resolution of a glacier and the constant threat of private violence to tame his pets and Madame Fosco. (Tromp 85) As much as he defines himself in opposition to barbarous English men who use overt violence to assert their masculine power, Fosco’s own foundation for manliness differs only in respect to the tools he uses to support his authority. And while he frames his actions as suggestive of greater manliness – he does not, after all, have to resort to violence since the force of his personality alone is sufficient to impose his will on others – yet his own form of domination is every bit as performative as that of the Englishman. Fosco relies on “private violence” to reinforce his seemingly non-violent power and he does so primarily because the performance of civility renders him free from legal and social reprisal.7 Through Fosco and his pet relations, Collins reveals the ugly side of domesticity in ways the more obvious treatment of Sir Percival’s brutal relationship with Laura cannot quite encompass. Sir Percival’s and Laura’s marriage falls more easily within the sensationalist discourse surrounding aristocratic marriages, a discourse that upheld the superiority of the middle-class companionate marriage as opposed to the model based on financial and family interests, which was supposedly reserved for the upper classes. Fosco’s more sentimental relations with his animal “children,” though undoubtedly perverse and un-English, nevertheless still reference a version of family based on love, protection, pride, and affection, and thus share closer proximity to the middle-class narrative of family life. In his rendering of Fosco’s gentle paternalism, one that masks a hidden violence and a manipulation of family members’ love for the purpose of serving the patriarch’s own self interests, Collins reveals the ugly side of the sentimental construction of family, one in which love relations are not so easily separated from power and dominance. As Yi Fu-Tuan asserts in Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets, “Affection is not the opposite of dominance; rather it is dominance’s

106  Monica Flegel anodyne – it is dominance with a human face. Dominance may be cruel and exploitative, with no hint of affection in it. What it produces is the victim. On the other hand, dominance may be combined with affection, and what it produces is the pet” (1–2). It would be easy enough to dismiss Fosco’s “family” as a perversion of the proper English family, a failed copy produced by a foreigner unable to truly grasp English nature and customs, in much the same way Professor Pesca, at the beginning of the novel, betrays his alien origins through his “shrill foreign parody on an English cheer” (Collins 1). Nevertheless, what supports Count Fosco’s family as something other than a “foreign parody” of an English home is Fosco’s own defence for his wife’s part in his machinations: I remember that I was married in England – and I ask if a woman’s marriage obligations, in this country, provide for her private opinion of her husband’s principles? No! They charge her unreservedly to love, honour, and obey him. … I stand, here, on a supreme moral elevation; and I loftily assert her accurate performance of her conjugal duties. Silence, Calumny! Your sympathy, Wives of England, for Madame Fosco! (307–08) Fosco’s assertion that, regardless of his ethnicity, his marriage was founded in England and therefore shaped by and lived according to the customs of that country is a powerful reminder this marriage cannot easily be dismissed as indicative of “foreign” barbarity. With his pet mice and pet birds as progeny, Fosco does indeed make a parody of English “natural family” life, but he does so in ways that reveal the centrality of dominance to the patriarchal home. Fosco uses domesticity to pass, and in so doing subtly reveals all the ways in which domesticity normatively operates as a means of obscuring that which is hidden within the home and family from the outside world. In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud famously links the concept of unheimlich (strange, “unhomely”) to heimlich (“homely”). Some of the many shades of meaning attached to the word heimlich include “belonging to the house” and “intimate,” but also “concealed, kept from sight” (826–27). Reading Fosco’s “family” as a dark parody of English domesticity, a performance put on by a foreigner for the express purpose of concealing himself, reveals the extent to which the heteronormative family is always already constructed for the purpose of passing. For Fosco, his animal children are a crucial aspect of his disarming persona. As Marian describes early in her acquaintance with him: The gentleman, dressed, as usual, in his blouse and straw hat, carried the gay little pagoda-cage, with his darling white mice in it, and smiled on them, and on us, with a bland amiability which it was impossible to resist.

A “Strange Family Story”  107 “With your kind permission,” said the Count, “I will take my small family, here – my poor-little-harmless-pretty-Mouseys, out for an airing along with us. There are dogs about the house, and shall I leave my forlorn white children at the ‘mercies of the dogs? Ah, never!” He chirruped paternally at his small white children through the bars of the pagoda; and we all left the house for the lake. (Collins 247) The Count is “impossible to resist” in this moment because he falls very much within a performance of proper masculinity, one that is, of course, eccentric but also engagingly familiar in that he so clearly occupies the role of family man in this moment, with his “amiability” and the “darling” nature of his “small family.” The Count assiduously links himself to his pets, using his “poor-little-harmless-pretty-Mouseys” to underline his own performance as a harmless, childlike eccentric. Nevertheless, he also appeals to fatherhood to further win over his audience, with his “paternal” engagement with his children and with his role as protector of their helplessness, signaling to the women in his orbit he is a safe and kindly model of manhood. This persona is useful to the Count in his machinations, as seen in numerous instances in the novel when Fosco employs his intimacy with his animal “children” as a direct means of participating in domestic spying and plotting. On one occasion in which she overhears Count Fosco speaking with his birds, Marian assumes “The Count is safe in the breakfast room” (289) and sneaks away to send a letter. On another occasion, Marian again assumes the Count is occupied, based on his interaction with his pets: “The singing of the canaries in the library, and the smell of tobacco-smoke that came through the door, which was not closed, told me at once where the Count was. I looked over my shoulder, as I passed the doorway; and saw, to my surprise, that he was exhibiting the docility of the birds, in his most engagingly polite manner, to the housekeeper” (335). In both cases, Marian is proven wrong; the Count clearly is aware of her desire to evade him and uses his pets as a means of appearing “safe.” Upon encountering Fosco after believing him occupied, Marian questions his performance with his birds, saying, “I thought, Count, I heard you with your birds in the breakfast-room,” I answered, as quietly and firmly as I could. “Surely. But my little feathered children, my dear lady, are only too like other children. They have their days of perversity; and this morning was one of them. My wife came in, as I was putting them back in their cage, and said she had left you going out alone for a walk.” (293) The Count’s performance with his birds serves a complicated function here in terms of the domestic spying and intrigue taking place. By saying the “Count is safe” when he is occupied with his birds, Marian means, of course, she is “safe” from him, she is able to count on his being occupied by what she overhears

108  Monica Flegel in the breakfast room. But the double meaning of this is the Count wishes to appear “safe,” certainly in terms of making Marian think he is occupied but also in the larger scheme of things. His childlike play with his pets allows him to wear the persona of sentimental animal lover and family man, an eminently “safe” figure of domesticity. By questioning the Count “quietly and firmly” on his performance with his birds, Marian subtly challenges that persona, making him aware that she sees his domestic play for what it is: domestic intrigue. But this subtle accusation is countered by Fosco with another performance of domesticity. His play was interrupted by his children’s misbehavior because the birds “are only too like other children” and “have their days of perversity.” In arguing from the position of a father figure, one who must properly discipline his children, Fosco inhabits an unassailable position. To question him is to question his love for and management of his children. Fosco’s use of his animal children as a shield, as a means of subterfuge by which he passes as a kindly paternalistic figure, and as an alibi for his more underhanded actions gets at the heart of familial life as itself subterfuge and alibi. So long as one has attained the role of father and husband, one is, to a certain extent, shielded from inquiry. One’s sexual tastes and proclivities, even one’s morality and ethics, are to a certain extent judged to be normal or, at the very least, treated with a respectful reticence. For bachelors, by contrast, the “secret” of singleness is always a source of public questioning, of an attempt to discover what went wrong, what mysterious incidents within the past can explain or justify a man’s decision to remain unmarried, what “nature” the man has that prevents him from taking his proper place in society. But once married, a man enjoys the protection of marriage and family, with both operating as visible signs of his attainment of proper masculinity. Fosco’s willful manipulation of the paternal and the domestic therefore throws into high relief the performativity of the family itself, exposing the extent to which the possession of a family hides a multitude of sins behind the closed doors of intimate, domestic life. But these are, of course, animal children, and while Fosco’s relationship with them mimics and parodies the “natural” family in ways that reveal its uglier side, his inter-species family also allows for an exploration of intimacy and companionship that subtly challenges and undermines domesticity. If Fosco uses and manipulates his animals to his own end, he also appears to truly love them, engaging in play with them that is not solely reducible to domination but instead speaks of the shared pleasure of domination, submission, and intimacy. Accordingly, Marian’s description of the Count’s relations with his pet animals suggests that while his designation of them as “children” enables him to represent himself as an irreproachable paternal figure, it does not begin to encompass the sensual, tactile, and even erotic relationship he actually has with them: He attends to all the necessities of these strange favourites himself, and he has taught the creatures to be surprisingly fond of him, and familiar

A “Strange Family Story”  109 with him. The cockatoo, a most vicious and treacherous bird towards every one else, absolutely seems to love him. When he lets it out of its cage, it hops on to his knee, and claws its way up his great big body, and rubs its top-knot against his sallow double chin in the most caressing manner imaginable. He had only to set the doors of the canaries’ cages open, and to call them; and the pretty little cleverly trained creatures perch fearlessly on his hand, mount his fat outstretched fingers one by one, when he tells them to “go up-stairs,” and sing together as if they would burst their throats with delight, when they get to the top finger. His white mice live in a little pagoda of gaily-painted wirework, designed and made by himself. They are almost as tame as the canaries, and they are perpetually let out, like the canaries. They crawl all over him, popping in and out of his waistcoat, and sitting in couples, white as snow, on his capacious shoulders. He seems to be even fonder of his mice than of his other pets, smiles at them, and kisses them, and calls them by all sorts of endearing names. (236) The Count might boast of his resolute and masterful (352) pet-handling skills but Marian’s description instead highlights his failure to establish any boundaries with them. The Count has certainly “taught” and “cleverly trained” his animals to respond to him but he has also, in the process, transformed his body into their playground, surrendering his bodily integrity to their desires as they “mount his fat outstretched fingers” and “crawl all over him” (236). Their freedom serves to underscore his power as a man who does not have to employ force to impose his will; nevertheless, this freedom also speaks to his own pleasure in surrender, for counter to his own depiction of himself as a man always in control, Fosco’s consent to his animals’ free occupation of his person betrays a submission to their pleasure, one that signals a far more complicated play of wills than that encapsulated within his philosophy of dominance. This relation instead revels in the bodily surrender to pleasures that conflate domination and submission and challenge the borders between animal and human. Importantly, while Marian finds Fosco’s depiction of his animals as children to be both charming and disarming, her response to his more intimate relations with his pets is quite the opposite: “They are pretty, innocent-looking little ­creatures; but the sight of them creeping about a man’s body is, for some reason, not pleasant to me. It excites a strange, responsive creeping in my own nerves; and suggests hideous ideas of men dying in prison, with the crawling creatures of the dungeon preying on them undisturbed” (248). Marian’s “strange, responsive creeping” speaks to an important moment Alice Kuzniar identifies in ­animal/human relations: “It is when such b ­ orders … threaten to dissolve that one encounters the abject, defined as that from which one wants to distance oneself because it conjure[s] up an uneasy or repulsive association and thus threatens firm ego boundaries” (6). As the “true” companionspecies relationship that is obscured beneath the Count’s performance of

110  Monica Flegel animal/human domesticity, this “creeping” of the animal other upon his person works to ­disrupt the Count’s paternalism through a performance of polymorphous perversity, a physical intimacy with animal companions that falls closer to bestiality than it does to sentimentality, if we understand bestiality to refer to the whole “spectrum of affective relationships” between “human and nonhuman animals” (Boggs 31). The Count’s playful physicality with his mice bears more resemblance to what Erin Runions calls “raw sex” than it does to the ordered relations of familial life, and it is this complicated sexual/affective relationship that repels and disturbs Marian. Runions explains, “Raw sex is sexual expression understood simply through the desire and physicality of the moment, rather than through some future goal, whether relating to the solidification of a monogamous relationship, or the construction of a family. It is the opposite of heteronormative sex and of normative apocalyptically-oriented desire” (97). That “normative end” of desire Runions identifies is reproductive futurism, what “Calvin Thomas calls ‘justifiable,’ ‘teleologically narrativized sex: sex with a goal, a purpose, and a product [children]’” (97). So long as the Count’s relationship to his pets is paternalistic, a relation that falls within acceptable notions of domination and affection, it is an eccentric but tolerable relation. But in flagrantly allowing his pets free reign over his body, in submitting to their pleasures in ways that cannot easily be subsumed within the rubric of domesticity, dominion, and paternal care, the Count crosses a line, evoking instead disgust and horror. Linking him with death, predation, and criminality, Marian constructs this particular animal/ human relation as antithetical to domesticity, a queer subversion of proper hierarchical and affective companionship, insofar as queer can be used “to signify the continual unhinging of certainties and the systematic disturbing of the familiar” (Giffney and Hird 4). In the end, Fosco’s relations with his animal children defy easy categorization, with his final scenes both continuing his parody of normative familial relations while also indicating again Fosco’s affections for (at least some) of his children run deep. The scene in which Fosco must part with his pets plays upon the teleological narrative underpinning the family, in which the reproduction of the family unit is linked to the reproduction of social power through the act of willing one’s wealth to the next generation. For Fosco, however, it is his children who must be willed away, for in his flight from the consequences of his crimes, he finds his pets are an encumbrance to him: “My innocent pets! my little cherished children! what am I to do with them? For the present, we are settled nowhere; for the present, we travel incessantly – the less baggage we carry, the better for ourselves. My cockatoo, my canaries, and my little mice – who will cherish them, when their good Papa is gone?” (Collins 289). Simultaneously “baggage” and “cherished children,” Fosco’s pets are at once family members who will be a “last laceration” of his heart to part with and objects that weigh him down, of which he must divest himself in order to travel lightly.

A “Strange Family Story”  111 Constructing his pets as “baggage” certainly seems to suggest, in the last instance, Fosco determines his pet progeny to be closer to objects than to cherished family members; what they resemble most in this moment are beloved objets, works of art the Count has collected with care and for which he holds a curatorial passion. Indeed, he portrays his pets as products of his making in which he finds a means of leaving his mark upon society: “An idea!” he exclaimed. “I will offer my canaries and my cockatoo to this vast Metropolis – my agent shall present them, in my name, to the Zoological Gardens of London. The Document that describes them shall be drawn out on the spot. Number One. Cockatoo of transcendent plumage: attraction, of himself, to all visitors of taste. Number Two. Canaries of unrivalled vivacity and intelligence: worthy of the garden of Eden, worthy also of the garden in the Regent’s Park. Homage to British Zoology. Offered by Fosco.” (289) In offering up his pets for public consumption, marked by his name as the donor, Fosco seemingly abandons the “pet as child” narrative in favor of a collector/connoisseur relation. Nevertheless, Fosco’s curatorial relationship with his pets still mimics the workings of the family. Fosco shows all the hallmarks of a proud parent, with his animal “children” leaving the nest to attain high status in English society – or at least as high a status as a pet can achieve – and thus operating as the means by which their “Good Papa” establishes his name. His progeny are his works of art, his bequests, and in so being, they remind us of the extent to which human progeny are also expected to represent their parents as living examples of their family’s status. If, in parting with his birds, Fosco parodically reveals the parallels between progeny and possessions, his inability to part with his mice shows the limits of this correspondence: “‘All human resolution, Eleanor,’ he said, solemnly, ‘has its limits. MY limits are inscribed on that Document. I cannot part with my white mice. Bear with me, my angel, and remove them to their travellingcage, up-stairs’” (289). The Count’s choice of the word “limits” to describe the boundaries of his own “resolution” in this matter plays in a number of ways. On the one hand, it speaks to the Count’s continual performance of sentimentality. While he is expected to be hard-headed and rational in this moment of divesting himself of his encumbrances, he again dramatically performs his role as a caring, loving man, one who cannot part with his children despite the impracticality of keeping them. On the other hand, his focus upon “limits” reminds us of the Count’s perversions; his “limits” differ from those of law-abiding society. The Count does not respect the law, nor human life, and his absolute treasuring of what others might find worthless – mice – speaks to his defiance of normative values, captured in Cartwright’s observation the Count “had not been at all troubled about

112  Monica Flegel writing his confession, but he was visibly perplexed and distressed about the far more important question of the disposal of his pet” (289). The Count’s valuing of his animal companions, when placed in contrast to his lack of respect for human laws, demonstrates his white mice occupy a position in his heart that defies limits, one which might be described as “immoderate.” Laura Brown links the idea of “immoderate love” to the “lady and the lapdog” trope present in English literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (65–89). While “in the romantic period, dogs come to be seen as companions to solitary male figures” and “relationships between men and dogs explore notions of canine loyalty and devotion” (77), women and lapdogs, by comparison, were sometimes represented as enjoying an “inter-species intimacy” that represented a “perversion of kinship connections” (79) and acted as a “challenge to relations of hierarchy” (79). The Count’s refusal to give up his white mice and, in so doing, his assertion of their importance as beings of consequence speaks to this perversion, as he treasures animals above and beyond his “kinship” with his own species. Strangely enough, however, in this moment Fosco is also most like the ideal parent, in that he puts his children’s care before his own well-being. His relationship with his white mice both parodies and embraces the conflicting ideologies of fatherhood and parenthood, in which the father provides for and cares for his children but also expects dividends from his investment in them. In portraying a companion-species relationship shot through with domination and yet still affectionate and caring, Wilkie Collins holds a mirror up to normative paternalism, revealing it in all its strange, complex, and contradictory aspects.

Notes   1. This quotation is from Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (3).  2. Susan Pearson notes “both domestic pets and children were positioned as family-constituting beings … provid[ing] a channel for the performance of the middle-class family’s purported raison d’être: nurturance” (37). See also Flegel’s “Bend or Break.”  3. See for example Bartle Massey in George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), whose misogyny leaves him with only his dog Vixen and her pups for his “family”; Dora in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), whose overinvestment in her dog Jip bespeaks her childish inability to assume motherly and wifely responsibilities; the bachelors and spinsters of Dickens’s novels – such as Miss Flite and her birds and Mr Krook and Lady Jane in Bleak House (1853) – whose affiliation with pets represents, at least in part, their social isolation; and the spinster aunt and her cat in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Vixen (1859), who stands as a warning to the titular character that marriage, however difficult, is always preferable to a life of unproductive solitude.   4. By the nineteenth century, “More than other beasts, pets displayed ‘a generosity, gratitude, fidelity, and affection worthy of imitation.’ The pet encapsulated

A “Strange Family Story”  113 the virtues of the heart, unsullied by sceptical calculating intellect” (Turner 76). Just as the pet reflected proper middle-class values, so, too, as Susan Pearson points out, did emotional attachment to these pets demonstrate proper familial relations, as “adult families [were] both completed and formed through emotional investment in the pet-child” (38). Men had a particular role to play in this relationship, as “dog, cats, and birds became confused with the ideal of the ‘family’ on a par with women and children” (Danahay 98). The presence of pets within the home fully supported the conception of the paterfamilias as the individual representative of male power writ large. Animals within the family meant the ruler of the home embodied masculine authority and care over both lesser humans and beasts, thus mirroring patriarchal dominion beyond the home. In Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847), for example, Mr Weston demonstrates the compassion that proves him well suited for his future role as protector and guardian of a household. While the hateful M. Hatfield demonstrates his vanity and mean-spiritedness by “with his cane, administer[ing] a resounding thwack upon [Snap’s] skull” (179) and by knocking a poor lady’s cat off his lap (148), Mr Weston saves both the cat and the dog, thus cementing his character as a man of sentiment, kindness, and proper paternal feeling: “Weston’s superiority to all other male characters in the novel is signified by the fact that neither governesses nor cats are beneath his notice” (Berg, “Hapless Dependents” 189). Distinguished from the higher class, more refined “gentlemen” in the novel, Weston represents instead the model of the mid-Victorian family man, one characterized by firmness, kindness, and sincerity.   5. Denisoff places Count Fosco within a “spectrum” of masculinity in The Woman in White, one in which “Collins establishes the aristocratic and wealthy man’s degeneracy through sexuality and gender ambiguity.” He right observes other aristocratic male characters share similar traits with Fosco: “Glyde is marked by delicate features explicitly defined as womanly … [while] Mr. Fairlie … is described as having ‘a frail, languidly-fretful, over-refined look – something singularly and unpleasantly delicate in its association with a man, and, at the same time, something which could by no possibility have looked natural and appropriate if it had been transferred to the personal appearance of a woman’” (40) (Denisoff 47).   6. Victorian Romantic friendships, often formed in childhood, were usually homosocial, with the expectation being such homoerotic attachments would be left behind once one grew into adulthood and proper heterosexual attachments (Oulton). As Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley point out, such constructions of queerness are related to Victorian narratives of childhood: “Childhood itself is afforded a modicum of queerness when the people worry more about how the child turns out than about how the child exists as child. Alice, for instance, can be as queer as she likes in her dreams and in her childhood sorrows and joys, as long as she can be imagined telling her stories to other children around her when she is an adult” (xiv). Given contemporary childhood is based on Victorian models, it is not surprising Victorian exemplars of childhood remain important in current constructions of normative sexuality. Kenneth B. Kidd, in his critiques of the masculinity movements of the 1990s, notes the extent to which Peter Pan is used as a model in texts such as Dan Kiley’s The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up, which “valorizes heterosexuality as adult, predictably depicting the modern ‘man-child’ Peter Pan as determined to avoid

114  Monica Flegel women and responsibility. Peter, in Kiley’s account, is a potential homosexual, a ‘soft, ­effeminate boy,’ a narcissist, ‘a very sad young man whose life is filled with ­contradictions, conflicts and confusions’” (172).   7. Marlene Tromp points out, “A man whose violence remains concealed behind two linguistic structures – middle- and upper-class men are not physically violent with women, and physical violence has observable public results – remains free from discipline” (86).

Works Cited Berg, Maggie. “‘Hapless Dependents’: Women and Animals in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey.” Studies in the Novel 34.2 (2002): 177–97. ———. “‘Let me have its bowels then’: Violence, Sacrificial Structure, and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory. 21:1 (2010): 20–40. Boggs, Colleen Glenney. Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Bruhm, Steven and Natasha Hurley. “Introduction.” Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Eds. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ix–xxxviii. Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz, 1860. Danahay, Martin A. “Nature Red in Hoof and Paw: Domestic Violence and Animals in Victorian Art.” Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Eds. Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. 97–119. Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Denisoff, Dennis. “Framed and Hung: Collins and the Economic Beauty of the Manly Artist.” Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2003. 34–58. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Flegel, Monica. “‘Bend or Break’: Unravelling the Construction of Children and Animals as Competitors in Nineteenth-Century English Anti-Cruelty Movements.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 7.1 (2009): 53–73. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 824–41. Giffney, Noreen and Myra J. Hird. “Introduction: Queering the Non/Human.” Queering the Non/Human. Eds. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. 1–16. Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Kidd, Kenneth B. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Kuzniar, Alice A. Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

A “Strange Family Story”  115 Mason, Jennifer. Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850-1900. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Oulton, Carolyn W. De La L., Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Pearson, Susan J. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Runions, Erin. “Queering the Beast: The Antichrists’ Gay Wedding.” Queering the Non/Human. Eds. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. 79-110. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Surridge, Lisa. Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005. Thiel, Elizabeth. The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Tromp, Marlene. The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven: Yale ­University Press, 1984. Turner, James. Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

6 “The right and natural law of things” Disability and the Form of the Family in the Fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge Clare Walker Gore He lifted his eyes upwards; there was in them a new look, sweet and solemn, a look which expressed the satisfied content of a life now rounded and completed by that which it had received into and united with its own – making a full and perfect whole, which, however kindly and fondly it may look on friends and kindred outside, has no absolute need of any, but is complete in and sufficient to itself, as true marriage should be. A look unconsciously fulfilling the law – God’s own law – that a man shall leave father and mother, brethren and companions, and shall cleave unto his wife, and “they two shall become one flesh.” And although I rejoiced in his joy, still I felt half sadly for a moment the vague, fine line of division which was thus for evermore drawn between him and me of no fault on either side, and of which he himself was unaware. It was but the right and natural law of things, the difference between the married and the unmarried, which only the latter feel. — Dinah Mulock Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman1

In this passage from Dinah Mulock Craik’s 1856 novel John Halifax, Gentleman, the disabled narrator, Phineas Fletcher, observes the change brought about by the marriage of his beloved friend, John Halifax. Accepting his exclusion from John’s relationship with his wife as “right and natural,” Phineas can only observe John’s happiness, mourning what he has lost whilst accepting the necessity of that loss. There is never any question in the novel that Phineas himself will marry. Having been from birth “puny and diseased” (34), he accepts his “character was too feeble and womanish to win any woman’s reverence or love,” adding, “one sickly as I was, stricken with hereditary disease, ought never to seek to perpetuate it by marriage” (53). This image of the physically disabled bystander, for whom romantic love or sexual desire can only ever be frustrated, is likely to be familiar to any reader of nineteenth-century fiction. George Eliot’s Philip Wakem is the personification of such thwarted desire, his love for the beautiful heroine in The Mill on The Floss (1860) as impossible as it is pathetic, his isolation at her graveside symptomatic of his wider isolation from the social community (522). It would be tempting to read Phineas Fletcher’s lonely observation of John’s marital bliss in this tradition, as capturing the disabled character’s relation to the marriage plot and consequent exclusion from the family that

“The right and natural law of things”  117 such a plotline generates. Yet John Halifax, Gentleman is the perfect novel to complicate such a reading or, in fact, to queer it. Disability and gender are inextricably intertwined in the novel, for Phineas’s disability queers his gender identity, rendering him less than fully male in his own eyes and in those of other characters. Yet while Phineas’s queered gender identity excludes him from heterosexual masculinity, it does not shut him out of the family formed over the course of the novel, and his fear of exclusion proves unfounded. John’s marriage to Ursula is represented as a resounding success and is complemented rather than threatened by the inclusion of Phineas into their household. Far from warping either character’s spiritual or material progress, John’s and Phineas’s relationship leads to greater self-acceptance for Phineas and enhances rather than threatens John’s acquisition of social and marital status. This relationship is facilitated rather than thwarted by Phineas’s disability, which enables him to enjoy a same-sex relationship with John that the novel celebrates as neither tragic nor antithetical to the marriage plot. If we look to the margins of the nineteenth-century canon, to the work of such popular women writers as Charlotte M. Yonge and Dinah Mulock Craik, such accommodation of the “queer” is typical rather than ­exceptional. While disabled characters are generally excluded from the marriage plot because of the authors’ unwillingness to write disability into reproductive heterosexual unions, they are not necessarily excluded from the families that are formed in these novels.2 Such families are queer in that they displace reproductive heterosexual union from the center of family life, whether through their focus on same-sex desire, platonic heterosexual relationships, sibling love, or visions of marriage that welcome both celibacy and samesex love into the marital home. These novels thereby offer an alternative view of the family that is irresistibly queer in its instability and variety and in its challenge to the universalizing and ahistorical impulse to read the “­traditional” family as a heteronormative touchstone.3 This argument is inspired by the recent turn in queer studies, captured by Holly Furneaux’s compelling reading of Dickens as an “eminent Victorian [who] can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and forms of family founded on neither marriage nor blood” (3).4 Such studies recognize not only the suppression of queer experience in Victorian culture and literature but also its accommodation.5 Simultaneously, in the field of disability studies there has been increasing recognition of the analogues and continuities of queer and disabled experience as interconnected cultural constructions of deviance.6 While these are recent critical preoccupations, they turn out to have been vital subjects for mid-nineteenth-century domestic novelists, who were concerned with the proper form of the family and with possible alternatives to socially dominant (and male-dominated) definitions of ­fitness and success. In such work, disabled characters’ exclusion from the marriage plot did not necessitate their exclusion from the family but rather

118  Clare Walker Gore enabled the articulation of alternative forms of desire and the formation of alternative families. In the novels of Charlotte Yonge, disability is represented as a spiritually salutary experience and one that counters the impulse toward heterosexual romantic love, frequently depicted as destructive of familial bonds. In The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), the worth of romantic relationships is determined by their ability to accommodate disabled family members, and even the most idealized marriage plot is ultimately sidelined in favor of the preservation of the natal family unit. In the family chronicles The Daisy Chain (1856) and The Pillars of the House (1873), the celibacy of cherished disabled characters enables the voluntary celibacy of their able-bodied siblings, as the marriage plot is further displaced as the bedrock of the family in favor of sibling and avuncular attachments. It would be fair to say Dinah Mulock Craik is more inclined to idealize the heterosexual bond and the married state, but in focusing both John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) and A Noble Life (1866) on disabled characters who form families despite their inability to marry, she denaturalizes the links between marriage, biological connection, and family. In their place, she depicts affective bonds as the basis of family life and disability as conducive to the fostering of such bonds. John Halifax, Gentleman begins with the moment when Phineas meets John, as if to establish the absolute primacy of this relationship to both men’s lives. Phineas is immediately impressed by John’s embodiment of ideal masculinity, “even to his crisp curls of bright, thick hair” (10), but it is when John carries him up the steps into the house and “the tremble in his voice was as tender as any woman’s – tenderer than any woman’s I ever was used to hear,” that Phineas falls in love: “My heart cried after him with an irrepressible cry. What I said I do not remember, but it caused him to return” (15). After this moment, the two boys are bound together in a relationship defined by mutual assistance, with John supplying Phineas with physical aid and emotional care and Phineas introducing the penniless John to his wealthy father, who gives John the start in the tanning industry that begins his inexorable rise to bourgeois prosperity. Their mutual dependence appears to be threatened when John falls in love with Ursula March. When he hears the news, Phineas’s “irrepressible cry” gives way to irrepressible crying (152). Yet Phineas’s fears prove to be exaggerated, as John is at pains to reassure him Ursula will not come between them: “you must not think,” he insists, “I could ever think less, or feel less, about my brother” (153). Although it is a hard struggle for Phineas to accept he will no longer have John for his “very own” (120), a compromise is quickly reached. The exclusivity of John’s marriage to Ursula does not persist long, for Phineas soon takes up permanent residence with them once his concerns about “break[ing] the sacred duality – no, let me say the unity of their home” are overridden by John’s and Ursula’s “demand” he become a part of their family group (221). Indeed, reflecting upon the moment when he wept at the thought of losing John, Phineas goes so far as to assert, “it was good for him to feel that

“The right and natural law of things”  119 the one crowning cup of life is not inevitably life’s sole sustenance; that it was something to have a friend and brother who loved him with a love – like Jonathan’s – ‘passing the love of women’” (152). Constructing himself as “a poorer and more helpless Jonathan,” rejoicing he has “found [his] David” (16), Phineas is able to cast the bond between himself and John as being biblically ordained and thereby complementing, rather than threatening, “God’s own law” of marriage (204). Ursula and Phineas are shown to maintain co-existing and uncompetitive relationships with John to the very last, as the final, finely balanced negotiation between John’s obligations to his wife and his “brother” shows. Although the novel closes with the image of Ursula and John resting beside each other in bed, it is Phineas beside whom John actually dies. Ursula’s claim, “We only need one another” (440), is balanced by the acknowledgement John offers Phineas as he breaks the news of his illness: “we have known one another these forty years. Is our love, our faith, so small, that either of us, for himself or his brother, need be afraid of death?” (436). It is true this accommodation of queer desire within the family unit rests upon Phineas’s acceptance of the heterosexual union at its center, lending support to Melissa Free’s argument that while difference in Victorian fiction might be shown to be “procreative … it was quite specifically not self generative: it produced heteronormativity” (276). Phineas mediates between John and Ursula during John’s illness and, in speaking on John’s behalf and bringing the lovers together, he might be said to act as what Martha Stoddard-Holmes has called “a queer sort of marital aid” (“Queering” 239). However, the marriage Phineas helps bring into being forms the basis of a family in which he, too, has a place, and his relationship with John is not primarily productive of selfrenunciation but of self-acceptance. While his role in the narrative becomes increasingly passive as the novel progresses, this is accompanied by a steady diminution in the anxiety and self-hatred of his narrative commentary. When Phineas first sees John, he regards the difference between them as shameful to himself: “I, poor puny wretch! so reverenced physical strength. Everything in him seemed to indicate that which I had not” (9–10). It is John’s acceptance of Phineas’s disability, and his resultant feminized identity, which eases this discomfort.7 From their very first meeting, when John is so “tender” (15) in carrying Phineas up the stairs, the physical assistance Phineas has feared would shame him becomes instead an opportunity for shared intimacy, even eroticism. The pattern for their relationship is established when John turns to go and Phineas utters the “irrepressible cry” (15), which immediately brings him back. Phineas’s dependence and desire always elicit concern and care. Unquestionably, the dynamic of their relationship is unequal, but this is coded in chivalric terms, with Phineas’s adoring admiration of John meeting with “the natural deference … of the strong to the weak” (33). Such inequality is constitutive of romantic relationships within the novel. Phineas explicitly claims, “If I had been a woman, and the woman that he loved, he could not have been more tender over my weakness” (65), and

120  Clare Walker Gore John does indeed go on to patronize Ursula in a similar fashion. Phineas “remember[s] the time when John Halifax bowed to the stately and dignified young gentlewoman,” and marvels he should now call her “little one!” (205). Clearly, to be the love object of the hero is to take up a dependent position, and John’s readiness to accept Phineas in this capacity eases the selfloathing he feels at the beginning of the novel. John responds to Phineas’s disability “only with compassion,” “however humiliating to myself, and doubtless contemptible in most men’s eyes” (65), and Phineas’s unhappy references to his impairments recede over the course of the novel until they cease to be mentioned at all. The tender relationship between the two men, which, as Holly Furneaux puts it, generates the novel’s “queer creativity” (“Negotiating” 117), also generates a greater acceptance of disability, both in Phineas himself and in his wider community. Interestingly, the disabled protagonist’s love for an able-bodied friend proves more difficult for Craik to negotiate in A Noble Life, her next novel featuring a prominent disabled character. In one sense, the Earl of Cairnforth’s disability is dealt with far more directly than that of Phineas. There are visceral narrative descriptions of his unusual embodiment and a much franker acknowledgement of his impairments. In contrast to Phineas’s nonspecific, generalized weakness and reliance on crutches, the Earl is represented as “a poor deformed figure, with every limb shrunken and useless, and every joint distorted” (1.4). Whereas Phineas, as observing narrator, stands on one side of the plot of John Halifax, Gentleman, Craik opens A Noble Life with the claim it is “like a biography” of the Earl of Cairnforth (1.4). Yet this seemingly direct engagement with her subject is countered by the distance maintained from the Earl, both by the narrator and the other characters, specifically the Earl’s beloved, Helen Cardross. The moment when John first hands Phineas his crutches is one characterized by shared laughter, as John diminishes Phineas’s embarrassment with humor, causing Phineas to “burst out laughing, which maybe was what he wanted,” and to allow himself to be carried around the garden until they are “both very merry” (20). This is in distinct contrast to Helen’s first encounter with the Earl, which is marked by an effortful suppression of discomfort. Having put out her hand, “she instinctively drew it back again; for, oh! what poor, helpless, unnatural-looking fingers were feebly advanced an inch or two to meet hers! They … gave her a sick sense of physical repulsion; but she conquered it” (1.88–89). The triumph of her “warm, loving heart” over this “repulsion” is sealed by the kiss she gives the Earl, and this gesture of acceptance initiates the close relationship they share for the rest of the book. Yet whereas the Earl’s feelings for Helen are straightforward and unchanging, Helen’s feelings continue to fall into this pattern of alternating acceptance and rejection. The relationship they share during the Earl’s childhood is characterized by mutual regard and appreciation, with Helen coming to feel “towards the Earl of Cairnforth a deep tenderness … not pity – something far deeper”

“The right and natural law of things”  121 (1.96). However, it is complicated in his adulthood. The Earl indirectly acknowledges he will never marry, “as if merely stating a fact beyond which there is no appeal” (1.238), and after he has given up hope of any improvement in his physical condition, voices the sense he is less than fully male: “I am a man now, or ought to be” (1.183). For Helen to desire such a person would not only be to accept that his disability does not render him fundamentally sexless but also to admit the possibility of sexual desire between two people who are not equally and oppositely gendered. This queer possibility is never resolved in the text, although it is repeatedly raised. The idea the Earl might marry Helen is never voiced, and yet when Helen takes advantage of his temporary absence in Edinburgh to make a hasty and unsuitable marriage to his wayward cousin, Captain Bruce, the narrative is imbued with a sense of loss. The narrator insists the Earl’s feelings for Helen cannot be named, claiming “it would be almost sacrilegious to intrude upon them, or to venture on any idle speculation concerning them,” but nonetheless allows “one thing was clear; in losing Helen, the light of his eyes … was gone” (2.28). While the Earl names himself only as Helen’s “special friend,” leaving the degree of exclusivity in their relationship ambiguous, Helen’s tear-stained parting letter is imbued with guilt, captured in her seemingly desperate claim “nobody I love will lose me at all, nor shall I forget them: I should hate myself if it were possible” (2.52). Helen’s father tells the Earl it was the Captain’s “gratitude towards you … admiration of you … which won Helen’s heart” (2.36), and she did not agree to the marriage until the Captain had told that he had gone to Edinburgh to obtain the Earl’s blessing. (This visit, of course, turns out to have been a fabrication.) Helen’s desertion of the Earl, which causes both parties such severe pain that the narrator suggests “the good angels … might have looked with pity upon both” (2.52), is made harder still to understand by the description of the Captain as a man with “an exceedingly worn and sickly appearance,” an expression of “weakness and indecision,” “uncandid,” and “rather sinister” (2.265). Even before the revelation that he is a dishonest adventurer, the strongest term of approbation the narrator can muster for the captain is that he is “interesting” (2.265). However, this description is immediately followed by the suggestion Helen regards him “with no small curiosity” because she “saw so few strangers, and of men, and young men, almost none, from year’s end to year’s end” (266). The unavoidable implication is that the Captain’s gender is his sole, and sufficient, recommendation in Helen’s eyes. The Captain’s total inadequacy as a romantic figure and later as a husband underscores this point. Despite the Earl’s obvious superiority to the C ­ aptain in every respect, the impossibility of his fulfilling the masculine role required for a heterosexual relationship leads Helen to desert him for the first able-bodied man she meets. The queer, celibate relationship they enjoy is apparently no match for the prospect of even the most ­unsatisfactory heterosexual union.

122  Clare Walker Gore The impossibility of marriage between the Earl and Helen, I would s­ uggest, rests on the Earl’s unstable gender identity. Like Phineas, he is of the male sex, but his disability debars him from being (at least fully) a gendered male, and whereas Phineas’s same-sex desire for John could therefore fall into a conventionally gendered pattern, the Earl’s relationship with Helen cannot. At the same time, where Phineas’s desire for John was removed from the possibility of marriage, and thus posed no direct threat to the marriage plot, the Earl’s relationship with Helen, because it is heterosexual, inescapably raises the question of whether such a marriage might be possible. The narrative shuts down this apparently disturbing possibility by having Helen contract an uncharacteristically hasty off-stage marriage, only to raise it once again in the equally hastened end of the marriage through the Captain’s untimely death. This uncomfortable dance with queer desire continues, as Craik ­represents the Earl attempting to take up an explicitly masculine gendered identity when the possibilities of a romantic relationship with Helen are once again opened up by her husband’s death. He responds to Helen’s summons “as if an almost miraculous amount of endurance and energy had been given to that frail body for this hour of need … the strong, manly soul, counteracting all physical infirmities, [rising up to protect] the one creature in all the world who to him had been most dear” (2.100–01). While no mention is made of any proposal of marriage, the Earl tells Helen on their journey back to Cairnforth that he intends to make her his heir and to adopt her son, inviting them both to live with him in his castle. His suggestions are not entirely accepted, but neither are they wholly rejected. For the next twenty years, Helen and the Earl both do and do not live as a married couple, and they manage to negotiate a relationship that is sufficiently complex and ambiguous to justify the adjective “queer.” Helen will not accept the Earl’s invitation to reside at the Castle and “as nothing else but the minister’s daughter would she, for the present, be recognised at Cairnforth” (2.142). Yet the narrator’s claim the two have been “brought back into their old brother-sister relation” (2.123) is irresistibly complicated by the image of the “very large” diamond ring Helen “wore as a sort of guard” to her wedding ring, a gift from the Earl that, we are told, Helen initially refused, until, “seeing how deeply she had wounded him, had accepted the ring as a pledge of amity, and had worn it ever since – by his earnest request – until it had become as familiar to her finger as the one beside it” (2.215–16). The wearing of a diamond ring on her ring finger clearly suggests either the prospect or the existence of a marital relationship, an implication Helen seems to have resisted and then accepted. Similarly, she both fosters and thwarts his parental relationship with her son, Boy. When Boy is a child she brings him to the Earl whenever “she could not manage him herself, which not infrequently happened” (2.167), and later acknowledges the Earl’s “right” to determine how his (temporary) profligacy in youth is to be managed (2.225). At such moments

“The right and natural law of things”  123 she seems to consider Boy their child. Nonetheless, when given the choice between ­giving him her own and the Earl’s name, “Alexander Cardross ­Montgomerie,” or preserving that of his biological father, “she said at last, almost with a gasp – ‘I wish my son to be Bruce-Montgomerie’” (2.235-36). The Earl responds to this rejection with silence. What might lie behind it is bleakly indicated by the narrator’s remark that, when Helen thanks him for leaving her to be with Boy in St. Andrews, she “knew not half of what she thanked him for” (2.255). Silence, misunderstanding, and pain continue to characterize their relationship, and the discomfort of the compromise they reach is in contrast to the ease with which Phineas is integrated into the Halifax household. It is as though Phineas’s queer desire for John, in its implicit acceptance of the social reinscription of his gender identity as a result of his disability, is less transgressive, and gives rise to less discomfort, than the Earl’s desire to take on the male role in a heterosexual union. Where Phineas’s feelings for John are freely owned and quite openly analyzed, the Earl’s feelings for Helen are declared unspeakable by a narrator who hesitates to name their relationship. It would, however, be misleading to suggest there is no warmth or comfort in the queer family they form, for despite the narrator’s suggestion their relationship is a substitute for the heteronormative, reproductive union of a conventional marriage, it is a substitute that is shown to be far preferable to the dysfunctional relationship Helen had with her husband. Moreover, it does not compete with any representation of happy marriages within the text, and while the Earl may be only conditionally and partially accepted by Helen as a husband figure, he is fully accepted by her son. Boy does not perceive the Earl’s difference as disability – “he could not comprehend it as an affliction at all” (2.148) – and in his adulthood he offers the Earl a devotion that sees him assume a feminine role: “he would leave everything, or give up everything – both his studies and his pleasures – to sit, patient as a girl, beside the Earl’s chair, or to follow it … never heeding who looked at him, or what comments were made” (2.261–62). If the Earl’s uncertain gender identity queers his relationship with Helen, then Boy is happy to queer his own gender identity through a devotion to the Earl that renders him “patient as a girl,” thereby allowing the Earl to take up the masculine subject position he has so desired. Moreover, their relationship is read by others as reciprocal and mutually beneficial: “People said sometimes, What a lucky fellow was Mr. Bruce-Montgomerie. But they also said – as no one could help saying and seeing – that very few fathers were blessed with a son half so attentive and devoted as this young man was to the Earl of Cairnforth” (2.263). Here we are offered a glimpse of a relationship in which the disabled Earl is not a figure of pity but of admiration, and in which dependence and affection are truly reciprocal. Boy not only fulfils the Earl’s desire he “be all that I ought to have been” (2.134) but also accepts the Earl unconditionally, not as he ought to have been but as he is. Craik may struggle to name

124  Clare Walker Gore the relationships within a family that has a disabled man at its center, but I would argue this descriptive deficit does not prevent her from demonstrating its viability. The complicating factor here would seem to be the ultimate desirability of the marriage relationship for Craik. This is clearly captured by Phineas’s description of marriage in the passage with which this chapter opens: marriage “round[s] and complete[s]” a person’s life, “making a full and perfect whole”; the fundamental difference between the married state and every other is seen as “right and natural” (204). The terms in which Phineas celebrates marriage are explicitly and uncompromisingly gendered, which is why he accepts that, as a “womanish” man, he will never marry, perhaps recalling Craik’s reference in A Woman’s Thoughts About Women to “the wonderful law of sex” (138). Craik finds it possible to depict a queered relationship co-existing with such a marriage, but cannot envisage a disabled man as capable of actually marrying, nor of a woman rejecting even the remotest possibility of marital bliss for an alternative kind of relationship. This is consistent with Craik’s broader treatment of same-sex attachments in A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, in which love between women is seen as acceptable when it is a “wise substitute” for marriage and a “making the best of fate” (135), but is sinister if it interferes with the marriage relation (Putzell-Korab 182–83). In this context, Helen’s abandonment of her relationship with the Earl in favor of the first offer of marriage she receives seems consistent with her “wholesome nature” (148). Such an attitude toward conventional marriage – perhaps indicative of Craik’s sympathies with Muscular Christianity8 – is far from being ubiquitous in fiction of this period, and is notably absent from the writing of Charlotte M. Yonge. Here, disabled characters are positioned at the heart of families that appear to be threatened, rather than completed, by marriage plots. In her family chronicles, Yonge celebrates the natal family at the expense of the conjugal. Disabled characters’ exclusion from marriage frequently enables them to form alternative family units with siblings whose inability or unwillingness to perform conventional gender roles diverts them from marriage as a goal. When Yonge does center a novel on a marriage plot, she redefines marriage as familial, condemns relationships that are seen as exclusionary, and uses the integration and inclusion of disabled (and thus celibate) characters as an indication of worth. Critics have long argued about Yonge’s excessive punishment of Laura’s and Philip’s secret romance in The Heir of Redclyffe. It has been seen variously as an instance of Yonge’s hysterical rejection of any form of rebellion against parental authority (Battiscombe 75; Brownell 172), of her lack of sympathy with female characters’ independently asserted desires (Thompson 103), and, more recently, of her distrust of the coercive nature of rationalist, masculine imperatives exerted unscrupulously over the feminine mind (Budge 178). I would suggest all these readings underplay Yonge’s central objection to Laura’s and Philip’s secret engagement, which is essentially the

“The right and natural law of things”  125 distance it places between Laura and her natal family. Laura’s romantic idea that it is natural to keep secret the “sensation of her innermost heart” is immediately accompanied by the narrator’s suggestion that, in fact, such exclusive affection is a dereliction of the duty of affection she owes to her family: “she was sometimes startled by perceiving that tenderly as she loved her own family, all were subordinate to him” (Heir, 134–35). Yonge clearly shows Philip has stolen her away from her family by selfishly claiming a sole – rather than a conditional and compromised – right to her affections. At Amy’s wedding, Laura’s whole heart cannot be with her sister: “All the time, Laura was … feeling as if she was acting a play, sustaining the character of Miss. Edmonstone, the bridesmaid at her sister’s happy wedding; while the true Laura, Philip’s Laura, was lonely, dejected, wretched” (301). When their engagement is finally revealed, her brother Charles says Laura might as well marry at once, since “She has been as good as married to him these four years, for any use she has been to us” (348). Far from celebrating the exclusive, dyadic nature of the marriage relationship, as Craik does in the passage with which I opened this chapter, Yonge suggests here that such splendid isolation is to be regretted. Amy and Guy’s relationship, in contrast, is not merely predicated on the approval and assent of Amy’s family but upon their active involvement. The role Amy’s disabled brother Charles is enabled to play in this relationship is in sharp contrast to his wholly sidelined role in Laura’s emotional life. He is the confidante of both Amy and Guy, the stalwart promoter of their attachment while Guy is in disgrace, and their first concern when they are reunited. His place in their relationship is captured by the image of the wedding guests’ first sight of the happy couple the day before their wedding: “The first sight that met the eyes of Aunt Charlotte and Lady Eveleen as they entered, was … Guy’s light agile figure, assisting Charles up the step … Amy, her deep blushes and downcast eyes almost hidden by her glossy curls, stood just behind, carrying her brother’s crutch” (292–93). Charles’s own relationship with Guy is so close that Karen Bourrier can speak of the “eroticism and tenderness” of their bond (Bourrier 122). Yet even this accommodation appears to be unsatisfactory to Yonge, who vividly depicts not only Charles’s sense of loss, in the sense that Amy “could never again be to him what she had been,” but also Amy’s own “silent crying fits” (291). Despite the supposed joy of the occasion, her sister Charlotte’s declaration on Amy’s wedding day that she “never mean[s] to marry, it is so disagreeable” (299) seems well founded. In fact, Yonge soon returns Amy to the bosom of her family, and specifically to Charles’s companionship, by having Guy succumb to fever just three months after their marriage. Speaking from his death bed, Guy himself appears to accept this is the silver lining of Amy’s widowhood: “‘And Charlie – I shall not rob him any longer. I only borrowed you for a little while,’ he added, smiling” (363). Our last view of Amy is beside Charles in a carriage on Laura’s wedding day, happily planning her permanent

126  Clare Walker Gore residence in her natal family home. Her contented life as a widow is held up in clear contrast to Laura’s “harassed, anxious life” with Philip (463). While Amy’s relationship with the saintly Guy is utterly idealized, it seems it is at its very best after his death, when her devotion to his memory can co-exist with her family ties and particularly with her relationship with Charles. The ideal pattern for family life offered here is distinctly queer in its almost total displacement of the marriage plot, and Charles’s role in this is crucial. The part played by disabled siblings, both in setting an example of celibacy and providing an excuse for the celibacy of others, only grows more prominent over the course of Yonge’s fiction. The Heir of Redclyffe is relatively unusual in being centered on a marriage plot (even one that speedily restores the heroine to the family home she has left). Family chronicles such as The Daisy Chain and The Pillars of the House sideline the marriage plot completely, focusing instead on large families that are disrupted and threatened by marriage, rather than completed. This strongly affects the reader’s reaction to a character’s inability or unwillingness to marry. In a novel that depicts marriage as the ultimate happiness and the ideal object of every character’s ambition, celibacy appears tragic, but in these novels it seems to be a blessing, and the reader’s perception of what it means for a character to be deemed disabled is affected accordingly. In The Daisy Chain, the reader’s attitude to the celibacy of the disabled eldest sister Margaret May is subtly adjusted over the course of the novel. Initially, Margaret’s celibacy appears merely an unfortunate consequence of her disability. She becomes engaged to her beloved Alan Ernescliffe at an early stage in the novel, soon after the carriage accident in which she injures her spine, when she is still hoping to recover her ability to walk. It is a matter of almost universal agreement that she cannot marry unless she does so. This impediment to marriage is never removed, for Margaret’s health deteriorates rather than improves over the course of the novel, until she sinks into a terminal decline after learning Alan has died at sea. Yet as her brother Richard notes with “surprise,” Alan’s death “[does] not seem like an affliction to her” (503), an attitude consistent with the novel’s wider construction of marriage as at best, representing a painful separation from home and at worst, a spiritual snare. Disabled characters are shown to be particularly alive to this reality, perhaps through their heightened religious capacities. When the disabled school teacher Cherry Elwood tells Margaret of her own abandonment by her fiancé after her accident, she reassures her, “I do see how some, as are married, seem to get to think more of this world; and now and then I fancy I can see how it is best for me as it is” (311). Margaret’s experience follows a similar pattern. Because they cannot marry, she and Alan achieve a truly religious sublimation of romantic desire, symbolized by Alan’s posthumous endowment of the new church at Cocksmoor and Margaret’s wish her engagement ring be set in the stem

“The right and natural law of things”  127 of the chalice. I would suggest this vision of ideal romantic love should be understood as queer, even when it is heterosexual, because it is antithetical to reproductive heterosexuality and moreover, it actually thrives off disability. Such a depiction of romantic love leads to a version of family life that is queer in its aversion to reproductive marriage. Margaret and Alan’s sublimation of sexual desire into a romantic but unconsummated relationship not only reaps spiritual rewards but also averts the need for a parting from Margaret’s natal family. In the case of her married siblings, severance from the natal family is consistently represented as the downside of matrimony. When her sister Flora marries, for example, the wedding day becomes a tearful occasion; the narrator gloomily suggests Flora has belatedly come to the realization that she has failed to appreciate “the father … whom she had held so cheaply” (407). While Flora’s marriage may seem an extreme example, entered into for worldly motives, even Norman’s far more satisfactory marriage to Meta Rivers only occurs after, and perhaps even as a result of, his crisis of faith and constitutes “a trial” for his most beloved sister Ethel (651). As the novel’s heroine, Ethel herself resolves to remain celibate, in terms that make it clear this act of devotion to her father is to be celebrated rather than regretted as a resolution consistent with both her steadfastness of character and her religious piety: Meanwhile, Ethel stood unnoticed and silent, making no outward protestation, but with lips compressed, as in her heart of hearts, she passed the resolution – that her father should never feel this pain on her account. Leave him who might, she would never forsake him; nothing but the will of Heaven should part them. It might be hasty and venturesome. She knew not what it might cost her; but, where Ethel had treasured her resolve to work for [the church at] Cocksmoor, there she also laid up her secret vow – that no earthly object should be placed between her and her father. (393) She is unshaken in this resolve when confronted with the prospect of an eligible and attractive marriage, choosing to leave her prospective suitor before “harm” can be done (433). Margaret’s declining health enables Ethel to step into her role as their father’s “comfort and companion” (411), and Margaret’s death leaves the field entirely open for Ethel to assume her place as the “angel in the house.” The death of the disabled sister in nineteenth-century fiction is frequently connected to her inability to play a role in the marriage plot, envisaged as the only possible future for an adult woman.9 However, in Margaret’s case, it appears to be the result of having served as an example of sexual abstinence to her younger sister, and her demise allows the novel’s heroine to take up her central place in the family. Mia Chen has pointed out Margaret plays a “socially reproductive” role in providing “a model of feminine discipline for her younger sisters” (4), and stresses Margaret’s part in bringing together

128  Clare Walker Gore Norman and Meta. By contrast, I would highlight the role she plays both in modeling the alternative to heteronormativity, through her own chastity, and, perhaps even more importantly, in serving as an added inducement and excuse for Ethel’s own determination not to marry. Imagining Margaret “ill and pining” (433) strengthens Ethel’s resolution at the moment when she is tempted by the prospect of marriage, which enables her to stay true to the familial bonds that, in the economy of the novel, are strengthened rather than threatened by the refusal of matrimony. The possibility that disability might enable resistance to marriage, rather than disable a desired marriage plot, is taken much further in The Pillars of the House, in which Geraldine’s decision not to marry is greeted with open relief by her adoring brother Felix. When asked for Geraldine’s hand in marriage by her eminently acceptable suitor, the wealthy and kindly sculptor, Mr Grinstead, Felix mentions her disability in order “to have something to say that was not all consent,” and is far from relieved when Grinstead reacts “as if longing to be taking care of her” (2.129). Here disability is not represented as an insuperable barrier to matrimony, as it is in The Daisy Chain, but rather as an impediment that can be cited when the real reasons for refusal are difficult to express. Geraldine cites her disability as an additional reason to refuse Mr Grinstead’s offer, but her explanation to Felix soon reveals this is an excuse for her refusal rather than its true motivation. Having had her claim “he only could have done it because he saw a poor little lame thing and wanted to take care of her” refuted by Felix’s insistence Mr Grinstead is in love with her, she declares this “very disagreeable” (2.132). In the end, the matter is clinched by her admission that what she most wants is to retain her independence (through her artistic production) and to stay with Felix, her true love: If I had not learnt to work, and had not a work to do, I might try to think of freeing you from a burthen; but now that I have, why should I upset it all, and wrench myself away from you? When I lean against you, I have got my home, and my rest, and all I want here. I never go away from you but I feel that I do want you so; and when one feels that, what’s the use of looking out for somebody else? (2.133) Felix’s relief that Geraldine will remain with him at home, the “most cherished spark” at his hearth (2.130), is palpable. Yet after Felix’s death, Geraldine does not revert to the possibility of matrimony; instead, she sets up house with her brother Clement and their orphaned nephew Gerald.10 I would suggest this family, based on sibling and avuncular rather than conjugal or parental relationships, poses a definite challenge to the heteronormative definition of the family that is structured upon the marriage plot, for the marriage that produces Gerald takes place firmly offstage and is represented as a sad dereliction of familial and religious duty. Whilst there are marriages that are far more warmly represented, such as Wilmet’s,

“The right and natural law of things”  129 matrimony is in no way depicted as superior to the bond Clement and Geraldine share, and the novel ends on a note of affirmation: “No one could be more tenderly cherished and watched over than Geraldine. Clement’s devotion was more genuine and less dutiful, more loving and less compassionate than Robina had expected, for it had that essential though involuntary quality of dependence” (2.517). The queer family Geraldine and Clement form is capable of accommodating not merely disability but also gender instability. If Geraldine’s disability has made her appear to Felix “set apart from marriage” (2.130), there is also a strong suggestion Clement’s effeminacy points to an analogous exclusion from matrimony. Nicknamed “Clementina” as a child, Clement is said to be “pretty rather than handsome” (1.147), and while he is teased at home by his more boisterous brothers, he thrives in the all-male community of his cathedral school. Where the figure of the celibate, and potentially effeminate, clergyman was treated with suspicion or even hostility by Anglican writers associated with Muscular Christianity (Hilliard 187–88), the Tractarian Yonge is sympathetic to the clergyman-brothers whom she depicts in close relationships with their sisters rather than wives.11 June Sturrock argues, “Yonge’s Christian heroes share the domestic values of the women of her novels and are judged by their share of qualities normally connected with the feminine” (100). This assertion is borne out by the sympathetic portrayal not only of Clement Underwood but also of Richard May in The Daisy Chain. Though Richard is a disappointment to his father because of his lack of prowess in the masculine field of academia, he nonetheless proves to be an ideal brother in surprisingly feminine ways. He is gifted with a maternal ability to soothe his younger siblings (37), is able to teach the tomboy Ethel to tie a bow and pin up her petticoats (57), and is fitted by his patience and sympathy to be Margaret’s chief confidant and advisor. In both these novels, disability and gender ambiguity facilitate the sibling relationships that are shown to be central to family life. The perfect brother turns out to be the one least associated with conventional masculinity while the perfect sister is disabled. Valerie Sanders is right to point out, however, that although passionate attachments between siblings are depicted by Yonge as wholly natural and desirable, “she nevertheless ensures that most of her sibling pairs are split up, usually by death or marriage” (99). The perpetuation of the families of Yonge’s chronicles ultimately depends upon procreation, which only marriage (in this context) can enable. While the procreative couples who stand behind the large families of the chronicles tend to be removed from the scene – Mrs May, for example, dies at the very beginning of The Daisy Chain, while both parents are killed off in quick succession in The Pillars of the House – the pressure to reproduce cannot be evaded indefinitely or definitively. However, the representation of marriage as a necessary evil – in Sanders’s phrase, something “inferior to sibling love” (99) – enables disabled characters to stand in a very different relation to the marriage plot than is possible

130  Clare Walker Gore in novels in which marriage appears to offer the ultimate form of emotional fulfillment. Moreover, the capaciousness of Yonge’s novels and the large size of her families provide greater scope for the co-existence of marriageable and unmarriageable siblings, and indeed of marital and non-marital bonds, than Craik’s more compact novels and families can offer. Since there are thirteen Underwoods and eleven Mays, disabled characters have a large pool of siblings from whom to choose potential partners or carers, while siblings who choose to remain celibate can hardly be said to threaten the future of the family, which is assured by their more matrimonially inclined brothers and sisters. It is easy for alternative plotlines to proliferate in novels that are so lengthy and loosely structured (The Pillars of the House runs to well over nine hundred pages in the two-volume Macmillan edition), giving Yonge more scope to construct alternatives to the marriage plot without displacing or rejecting it outright. Although neither Craik nor Yonge is able to stage the integration of disabled characters into their fictional families without tension, loss, frustration, and grief, this does not overshadow the affirmative aspects of their integration. I do not mean to discount Phineas’s tears at John’s marriage, the Earl’s silence in the face of Helen’s rejection, Charles’s pang at Amy’s departure, Margaret’s thwarted desire to become Alan Ernescliffe’s wife, and Geraldine’s bereavement at Felix’s death. But these images are offset by others: that of Phineas cradled tenderly in the arms of his beloved John; the Earl of Cairnforth admired in the street as he is pushed along by his adoring adopted son; Charles riding out of the novel in a carriage with Amy once more by his side; Margaret’s couch in its central place in the May family drawing room; and Geraldine setting forth to make a new life in London with her nephew and brother. An affective space is accordingly opened up for disabled characters to inhabit, a space that allows not only these novels but our wider conception of the Victorian family to be queered by disability.

Notes   1. Craik (204–05).  2. Craik’s 1850 novel Olive is an important exception to this rule, as its disabled protagonist is married at the end of the novel. However, I think it is significant that Olive is depicted as a stepmother; the need for her to bear children of her own is thereby circumvented through surrogate motherhood. The anxiety Martha Stoddard-Holmes (Fictions 7) detects in Victorian novels regarding disabled characters bearing children of their own, which is so well captured in Phineas’s explicit ­statement about heredity (Halifax 53), would seem to be ubiquitous in Craik’s work.   3. I am indebted to Annamarie Jagose’s helpful definitions of queer theory in Queer Theory: An Introduction and to Donald E. Hall's wonderfully suggestive Queer Theories.   4. Such an approach contrasts with the definition of the queer as inherently antifamilial and anti-domestic, for example as it is developed in Lee Edelman’s study of queer negativity, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.

“The right and natural law of things”  131   5. Sharon Marcus’s ground-breaking Between Women provides an excellent starting point for such work, demonstrating that far from being seen as necessarily disruptive, affective bonds between women played a crucial part in the marriage plots of nineteenth-century novels.   6. See, for instance, Robert McRuer’s exploration of the intersection between disability and the queer in Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and ­Disability.   7. The possibility that Phineas’s disability destabilises his gender identity and opens up the possibility for a queer relationship was voiced as early as 1858, when R.H. Hutton complained in his review essay, “it is difficult to suppress a fear that Phineas Fletcher will fall hopelessly in love with John Halifax, so hard is it to remember that Phineas is of the male sex” (475).  8. The ecumenical tendencies Craik displays in her novels, aside from an overt mistrust of Roman Catholicism, point to broad church sympathies that might have allied her with writers such as Kingsley on questions of gender and marriage. Kingsley, as Laura Fasick argues, had a sacramentalized and strongly gendered view of marriage, while his most idealized heroines show “a willingness to admire and wish for a strong man as a husband” (Fasick 93, 98).   9. For example, in John Halifax, Gentleman, John’s blind daughter Little Muriel dies when she is a child. Mary Klages has suggested “female social roles in sentimental fiction are focused almost exclusively around questions of wife-andmotherhood,” and in combination with the “requirement that disabled bodies remain asexual,” this generates a “contradiction that prevents Craik from attempting to portray Muriel as anything other than a dependent child” (71). Tellingly, Phineas says, “none of us ever seemed to think of Muriel as a woman” (265) and John regards the idea she might some day marry as “a profanity” (293). Conveniently, her early death leaves the field free for her sighted sister to marry Lord Ravenel, who had at one time looked at Muriel “as the woman whom afterwards he would learn to adore” (293). Margaret’s death, on the other hand, leaves Ethel free, not to marry but to take up her place as their father’s chief confidant and the mainstay of the family at home. 10. In the much later sequel to the novel, The Long Vacation (1895), Yonge depicts Geraldine as having subsequently married Mr Grinstead. This conclusion is neither represented as inevitable nor even desirable in The Pillars of the House, however, I do not think this should affect our sense of how Yonge represents Geraldine’s decision not to marry in the earlier novel. 11. It is important not to caricature Craik’s own attitude. In A Woman’s Thoughts About Women (1858), she asks, “do we not continually find womanish men and masculine women? and some of the finest types of character we have known among both sexes, are they not often those who combine the qualities of both?” (73). Such a view seems to inform her most idealized characterizations. John Halifax, for example, combines strength with tenderness, a characterization of ideal masculinity repeated in A Noble Life, in which Boy is shown to combine feats of masculine heroism, as “the best golfer, the most dashing rider, the boldest swimmer” (261), with a nurturing capacity for tending his adoptive father as “patient[ly] as a girl” (262). The Earl’s inability to perform masculinity convincingly may thwart a fully heterosexual relationship with Helen, but their affective connection is repeatedly underscored and he is shown to be an ideal landlord, father, and Christian.

132  Clare Walker Gore Works Cited Battiscombe, Georgina. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life. London: Constable, 1943. Bourrier, Karen. “‘The Spirit of a Man and the Limbs of a Cripple’: Sentimentality, Disability, and Masculinity in Charlotte Yonge’s ‘The Heir of Redclyffe.’” Victorian Review 35.2 (2009):117–31. Brownell, David. “The two worlds of Charlotte Yonge.” The Worlds of Victorian Fiction. Ed. Jerome H. Buckley. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. 165–78. Budge, Gavin. Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. Chen, Mia. “‘And There Was No Helping It’: Disability and Social Reproduction in Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4.2 (2008). Web. 8 January 2014. Craik, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik. A Noble Life. 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1866. ———. A Woman’s Thoughts About Women. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1858. ———. John Halifax, Gentleman. Stroud: Nonsuch, 2005. ———. Olive. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1850. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fasick, Laura. “Charles Kingsley’s scientific treatment of gender,” Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Ed. Donald E. Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 91–113. Free, Melissa. “Freaks that Matter: The Doll’s Dressmaker, the Doctor’s Assistant, and the Limits of Difference.” Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain. Ed. Marlene Tromp. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 259–82. Furneaux, Holly. “Negotiating the Gentle-Man: Male Nursing and Class Conflict in the ‘High’ Victorian Period.” Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Ed. Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 109–25. ———. Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hall, Donald E. Queer Theories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Hilliard, David. “Unenglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality.” Victorian Studies 25.2 (1982): 181–210. Hutton, Richard Holt. ‘Novels by the Authoress of “John Halifax, Gentleman”.’ North British Review 29.58 (1858): 466–48. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1996. James, Henry. “A Noble Life, By the Author of John Halifax, Gentleman.” Nation (1 March 1866). Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 845–48. Klages, Mary. Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

“The right and natural law of things”  133 Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Putzell-Korab, Sara. “Passion Between Women in the Victorian Novel.” Sexuality and Victorian Literature. Ed. Don Richard Cox. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984. 180–95. Sanders, Valerie. The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: From Austen to Woolf. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Schaffer, Talia. “Maiden Pairs: The Sororal Romance in The Clever Woman of the Family.” Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Ed. Tamara Wagner. Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2009. 98–115. Stoddard Holmes, Martha. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. ———.“Queering the Marriage Plot: Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady.” Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain. Ed. Marlene Tromp. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 237–58. Sturrock, June. “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women. Victoria, B.C., Canada: University of Victoria, 1995. Thompson, Nicola Diane. Reviewing Sex: Gender and the Reception of Victorian Novels. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Yonge, Charlotte M. The Daisy Chain: Or, Aspirations: A Family Chronicle. ­London: Macmillan and Co., 1873. ———. The Heir of Redclyffe. London: Macmillan and Co., 1888. ———. The Pillars of the House. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co., 1889.

7 Two Girls in Love Romantic Friendship and the Queer ­Family in Elizabeth Anna Hart’s The ­Runaway Ellen Brinks In a charged scene in Elizabeth Anna Hart’s 1872 novel for girls, The ­Runaway, Olga protests against the “inhuman changes” she fears lie in her future and that of her passionately adored friend Clarice: becoming each other’s bridesmaids and assuming their social roles as wives and mothers (187).1 It is part of the fantasy sustained by this now scarcely known but well-loved and popular text of the last three decades of the Victorian era that these “inhuman changes” do not come to pass. The Runaway prioritizes the kind of magical thinking capable of overriding “real world” sex-gender demands. These girls do not grow up. The exuberant story of a romantic girl friendship, The Runaway’s imaginative world is one in which multiple forms of queerness – of gender expression, of erotic desires, and of family units – are sustained and seem to coexist quite naturally. I use queer here to designate dislocations from normative, seemingly secure, or naturalized representations of gender, sexuality, and the nuclear family in favor of something aslant, more open and varied; these dislocations call forth the “strange temporalities,” “imaginative life schedules,” and “alternative methods of alliance” associated with queerness (Halberstam 1). As an unusual example of girls’ literature, The Runaway refuses any re-naturalizing turn toward proper femininity or heterosexuality. Instead of same-sex-attracted girls maturing into heteronormative family roles, the family itself becomes queer. As such, The Runaway challenges current generic classifications of Victorian girls’ fiction and forces readers to rethink what kinds of gender roles or eroticized experiences within the family home were considered permissible for female characters in literature meant for girls. The novel’s representational complexity queers, that is to say it disturbs, easy lines of conceptual demarcation and presumed value systems we have often imposed upon the period. It stands to provide partial answers to many important questions: How did the Victorians present sexuality in works for girls? What reception did such works receive? What modes of cultural repression and cultural acceptance for same-sex-attracted girls and queer families are visible in the literature of the period? A close reading of this novel and its reviews suggests Victorians possessed far more playful and inclusive attitudes toward representations of girls’ gender and sexual queerness than we have allowed ourselves to ­imagine. Instead of negative reactions to non-reproductive families and

Two Girls in Love  135 same-sex erotics, in The Runaway we find an example of Victorian girls’ literature that is able to accommodate same-sex-oriented girls within a ­ domestic space that is ultimately depicted as both supportive and enjoyable. The Runaway’s plot can be quickly summarized. Clarice, an English girl of fifteen whose mother has died and who is being raised by her businessman father and an elderly governess, laments the boredom of her circumscribed life at home and longs for opportunities for heroism and adventure. Change immediately comes in the form of Olga, a thirteen-year-old runaway from a boarding school where she has been sent by her parents, who are living in India. Olga pleads with Clarice to hide her, and Clarice, enchanted with Olga’s high spirits and the novel situation she affords, agrees to hide her in her bedroom closet. The narrative follows Olga’s frequent escapes from confinement and her high jinks in the house and the neighborhood, precipitating near discovery again and again. A newspaper account warning readers of a runaway girl wanted for theft raises suspicions about Olga’s identity, and drama ensues as some locals, glimpsing the mysterious girl, seek reward money. Clarice feels morally conflicted about her concealment of Olga, but the growing intensity of their attachment leads the older girl to commit herself selflessly to the (possibly criminal) runaway, heroically risking threatened imprisonment as the representatives of the clergy, the law, and the police close in on them. The novel ends with Olga’s innocence affirmed, Clarice’s loyalty applauded, and the two girls enjoying each other’s extended company at Olga’s family estate in the Scottish highlands. Making one of her main female protagonists a runaway was an unusual choice on Hart’s part. While readers’ interest in runaways is evident in children’s and youth periodicals in the same decade The Runaway was published, these narratives almost always feature either boys, male slaves, convicts, or stallions as their gendered referent and/or protagonist. Some examples include: “The Runaway: A Story for Boys” and “A Sailor He Would Be” (in Our Young Folks); “The Runaway Slaves” and “Icebound; Or Little Hans the Runaway” (in Little Folks); “Hazel Cottage; Or, The Runaway” (in The Young Folks’ Weekly Budget); “Tales Out of School. The Runaway” (in Kind Words); and “The Three Runaways; of the Adventures of Tom, Dick, and Bob” (in Boys of England). Not only are stories of female runaways rare during this same decade, but when they do occur, their ideological differences to Hart’s embrace of Olga’s athleticism and escape from school’s confining environment are striking. In Jenny Joy’s poem “Our Runaway,” for example, the child elf Maggie strays from her witch-mother’s side, running away to play in a moored boat by the river. Predictably, the boat comes loose and Maggie takes a frightening ride down the river before her mother saves her. At the story’s end, Maggie finds herself safely “sheltered in [mother’s] arms so tight – /Sweet Maggie, the runaway,” ensuring the desire or opportunity to seek new adventures will be significantly curtailed (117). “The Runaway’s Return to the Girl’s Home,” written by H. Nairne Dowson, features an orphaned girl’s return to the charitable home from which she

136  Ellen Brinks has run away. Begging for re-entry, the runaway is welcomed and forgiven by the “mothers” with open arms, saving her from a shameful future life on the streets (238). Julia C. R. Dorr’s “The Little Runaway” is a three-year-old who toddles off to church, where she presents an image of natural piety to the adults who find her. In contrast to stories of boys and men, where running away is a prelude to heroic adventure, these stories of girl runaways either warn of the life-threatening dangers of running away or, in the case of the last example, convert the act of running away into an exemplary, idealized form of Christian devotion and submission. Charlotte Yonge’s novel Countess Kate (1862) offers another useful comparative text to Hart’s The Runaway, enabling the reader to better measure the originality and difference of Hart’s queer response to gender ideology. Kate, Yonge’s eponymous protagonist, becomes a wild, willful girl runaway. Unhappy at being raised by her staid, severe maiden aunts, Kate runs away from London to the rural parish home of her previous guardian, the clergyman Mr Wardour or “Papa Wardour,” as Kate calls him. The condemnation she receives upon arrival from the men in the family indicates the severity of her transgression. “Run away! You don’t mean it!,” her older “brother” Armyn cries out, “standing still and aghast … shocked” (208). Her “father,” on the other hand, uses the occasion to shame and instruct her, as the abbreviated excerpt below shows: You have done a thing that nothing can justify, and that may do you much future harm; and I cannot receive you as if you had come properly. … Did you think what an outrageous act it was? There is something particularly grievous in a little girl, or a woman of any age, casting off restraint, and setting out in the world unprotected and contrary to authority. … It frightened me so much that till I saw more of you I did not like you to be left alone with Sylvia [her friend]. … you ought to know that it is both very wrong in itself, and will be regarded by other people as … terrible. So, if you do find yourself distrusted and in disgrace, you must not think it unjust and cruel, but try to submit patiently and learn not to be reckless and imprudent. (215, 231) Kate’s confusion and embarrassment during Mr Wardour’s lesson – “the deep red colour [flushing] all over [her] face and neck” (231) – signal her internalization of appropriate feminine behavior; “running away” compromises her sexual purity and puts her social standing at risk, even in her intimate, familial relationships. Deviating in significant ways from these narratives, Hart’s novel links running away to gender protest and the creation of a new queer family comprised of two girls. Olga is the title’s obvious runaway, an escapee from social institutions that confine girls to boarding schools or to domestic roles of a predictable kind. Hart’s interrogation of gender expectations, however, is also evident in her portrayal of Clarice, who is similarly attempting to exit

Two Girls in Love  137 from the confines of her own home life in its current form. When Clarice, at the novel’s beginning, strolls out of the neat shrubberies of the garden into a teeming sensuous thicket where “hazel, laurels, ferns, fox-gloves and furze, all grew together in a mass,” she ardently wishes twice “if any thing would happen – if only any thing would happen!” (4). Magically, Olga appears to dispel her boredom. Clarice, who had already begun imaginatively to escape her father’s shrubbery-lined world, continues her metaphorical running away as friend and accomplice to Olga, finding herself in the thickets of romance where her dream self and dream life begin to emerge. “Few girls are like you …; they are kept safe in quiet homes, and have not a chance of running away,” she muses wistfully (12). With Olga’s arrival, Clarice seizes her chance of escape. Her passionate friendship with Olga makes her a runaway from conformity; she resists restraining her own desires, a key component of middle-class girls’ education and training for their future family roles as wives and mothers. In contemporary advice manuals from physicians to mothers, for example, “roving behaviors” are particularly singled out as “unwholesome” at best and the sign of a diseased domestic femininity at worst: “A well-adapted young Angel in the House would not be ‘listless,’ nor would she be ‘irritable,’ nor would she desire to ‘escape from home,’ nor, above all would she be unchaste or sensual” (Gorham, Victorian Girl 90). In The Runaway, the reader catches a glimpse of all these maladaptive behaviors in Clarice and Olga’s actions and desires. However, in Hart’s novel they are viewed with sympathy. Olga’s wandering ways mirror the emerging tomboys of US juvenile fiction, of which a few titles were well known in Great Britain by the 1870s: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Gypsy Breynton (1866), Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did (1872), and perhaps most notably, E. D. E. N. Southworth’s unrepentant, bold, and cross-dressing protagonist Capitola (“Cap”) in the novel The Hidden Hand (1859).2 The characterization of Olga and Clarice points to the rise of a more athletic, irreverent generation of girls whose educational and professional possibilities would far exceed those of their mothers (Abate 28). The insufficiency of women’s domestic existence, scorned by “Cap” who, in The Hidden Hand, finds herself “decomposing above ground for want of having my blood stirred” (173), is echoed in Clarice’s similar lament: “Oh that I had been born a knight and a hero … when heroic deeds were the daily food of happy men and women” (2). Clarice equates female fulfilment with the chivalric masculinity of a bygone era.3 Olga, by comparison, is more rooted in the present and fantasizes about running off to sea to become a “real sailor boy” (36). In appearance, she combines the looks of a “young and handsome boy” with a “fair face too entirely feminine” (4-5). Her robust and impulsive physicality is introduced by the “push … scramble … jump, and almost a fall” (5) that propels her out of the bushes where she has been hiding. This athleticism inspires Clarice’s admiration and love, whether Olga is climbing down the vines on the side of the house “with an agility that

138  Ellen Brinks took away [Clarice’s] breath” (49) or recounting how she could “ride faster, walk farther, dance longer, and catch more fish than any other girl” (38) in her native Scotland. This recitation of accomplishments immediately leads to the wish on both girls’ parts for an exchange of kissing and caresses. But most of all, Olga, unlike Clarice, cannot be contained within typical houses or domestic spaces; her professed love of “gypsying” is coupled with a penchant for scampering on roofs or up in trees.4 Her rejection of conventional femininity is rooted in her conviction that “boys are so much better than girls, and boys do become their own masters,” while girls “are kept under and kept down” (63). Her conclusion is “there’s nothing left for girls but to run away” (63), an action of physical and psychological self-assertiveness the novel’s title commemorates and links to highly unconventional performances of gender. The development of Olga’s and Clarice’s passionate friendship is enabled by Clarice’s already atypical or queer family. She has a widower father who doesn’t supply the kind of parental presence or oversight a mother typically would. Clarice’s father conforms to what various historians of the Victorian era have identified as the “absent” father because his primary role as family provider takes him away from home to the shop, office, or factory (Tosh 93–95; Broughton and Rogers 6–7). Though still possessing families, Olga and Clarice are both de facto orphans, a perfect state in which to discover and act on deep desires. Here Hart follows a formula of romance – the liberation for young women that orphanhood confers – first remarked upon by Florence Nightingale in her unpublished essay from 1853, Cassandra: “the secret charm of every romance that ever was written … is that the heroine has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence” (cited in Reynolds, Victorian Heroines 26). Olga’s parents are in India, and she is sent to boarding school once she is thirteen. Clarice’s father, a wealthy merchant, travels each morning from their home in the suburbs to his work in London; he returns later in the day, leaving Clarice in the care of her elderly, sensible governess Miss Simmonds (who for most of the novel is confined to bed with a head cold). “Assiduously [carrying] on his lucrative business” (3), her father squarely fits the pattern in much fiction of the period in which fathers’ roles were not carefully delineated beyond their function as family breadwinner (Nelson, Family Ties 46). Further, as a staid businessman, he utterly lacks the heroic qualities that inspire Clarice and make her feel alive: “if Papa was like Sir Henry Lee [the master of the armory and champion of Queen Elizabeth I], how I would love him! I would not a bit mind his going into passions then, if they were Sir Henry Lee sort of passions – not just crossnesses and strictnesses, like modern gentlemen” (2; emphasis original), she bemoans. Unlike Olga’s romantic father Colonel Leslie, a career soldier in India whose dress stylishly alternates between uniforms and dress kilts, Clarice is tied to an unadventurous father who has no desire to be a soldier or to wear anything dashing, “as if a man could be … heroic in a chimneypot

Two Girls in Love  139 hat” (2; emphasis original). His practicality, common sense, and literalism in conversation are qualities that contrast strikingly with Olga’s impulsiveness and verbal play. In attaching herself to Olga and the Leslies, Clarice finds the improbable, queer family to which she temperamentally belongs, instead of her boring biological one. Colonel Leslie is a military man by profession, the kind of man who “besiege[s] forts” and leads “a forlorn hope,” a man of “immense resolution” (11, 12), and he is Clarice’s ego ideal. For the majority of the novel, however, both girls are functionally without parents. Since mothers were expected to socialize their daughters and check any tension toward their future gender roles, the absence of ­mothers in The Runaway tellingly enables the expression of their frustrations with domestic femininity, wayward desires, and the intensity of their bond.5 Their orphaned condition is liberating for them, as they find their actions, thoughts, and emotions freed from parental scrutiny. Clarice feels “the excitement and the vivid interest which the adventure [with Olga] lent to her daily life made up for all the rest” (50), referring to the moral dilemmas she faces as a consequence. Kimberley Reynolds has identified the socially unconventional discourses of gender that emerged in children’s literature featuring girl orphans. In the mid-nineteenth century the orphan was established as … capable of providing alternative behavior and roles to the domestic ideal without directly threatening the structure of the family. The orphan thus provided an emblem on which could be built a symbolic structure capable at once of articulating and containing the tensions and contradictions circulating around the changing image of women. (Victorian Heroines 31; emphasis original) In keeping with these discourses, The Runaway frees Clarice and Olga from parental scrutiny. Yet unlike them, being orphaned enables them to redefine what family means: first, as an elective, non-biologically based family of two and then expanding their queer family later to include their fathers, as we will see. The novel affirms girls’ desires for alternative sex-gender roles and it does so precisely by restructuring the heterosexual, nuclear family structure. The Runaway thus features a configuration particularly unusual for its time. It combines the tomboy tale’s celebration of women’s athleticism, a genre that would explode about a decade later in Great Britain, with a story that unapologetically foregrounds adolescent same-sex passionate friendship.6 Michelle Abate’s work on tomboys suggests it is not until the very end of the nineteenth century that tomboys and lesbianism become associated (xxi). By yoking gender inversion with same-sex desire, The Runaway looks both startlingly ahead of its time and queer to readers today. In its playful disruption of prescriptive gender systems, The Runaway ties tomboyism and running away to the unexpected discovery of romantic same-sex desire and

140  Ellen Brinks the creation of a new, intimate family based on affective rather than blood ties. Olga exclaims, “I couldn’t imagine I should find you. Why, I might have gone on all my life … without ever finding you, or knowing even that you were anywhere that could be found, if I hadn’t run away” (183). While there is no way Clarice’s closet could ever conceal the hyperactive Olga, Clarice’s bedroom mostly does. The physical intimacy they share – Clarice undressing Olga; the conversations at night in Clarice’s bed; Olga dancing with Clarice; the obsessive thoughts; the kisses demanded and returned; the “delicious” days that “took Clarice’s heart by storm” (66) – pushes on the acceptable limits for Victorian female friendships that already legitimized sentiment, as well as a certain degree of physical affection and attraction (Marcus 28). That Olga’s and Clarice’s kisses and caresses could signify (or be read to signify) a sexual relationship beyond friendship, especially in a work addressed to young adult readers, might seem an over-determined reading. Indeed, critics such as Gorham have asserted the impossibility of any erotic encoding in juvenile fiction meant for public consumption, since Victorian attitudes constructed middle-class girls as ignorant and innocent of sexuality or sensuality (Victorian Girl 54). Yet it is equally problematic to assume the boundaries between friendship and romance, or the overlapping words to describe them, could be strictly maintained or controlled. Though critics such as Sally Mitchell and Leslie Williams contend middle- and upper-class girls were “unsexed,” others have asserted the evidence of the sexualization of children in photography and advertising, while not uncontestable, is compelling (Mitchell, Girl’s Culture 244–45; Williams 128; Mavor; Richards). At the very least, Hart’s novel reveals how much overlap could exist between the bonds of female friends and those of female lovers and the words used to describe them. Further, Olga’s and Clarice’s mutual caressing – away from adult supervision and never checked or critiqued – constitutes some of The Runaway’s most potent queerness, its embrace of intensely physical alliances between girls. Even more significantly, perhaps, Hart’s novel also offers clues about how this overlap between female friendships and lovers could begin to yield some distinctions. Sharon Marcus’s Between Women has stressed the importance of not conflating female friends and female lovers, noting that in the nineteenth century, they were different social bonds, despite a shared, often overlapping expressive vocabulary to describe them both. Discourses of mutual affection, shared confidences, and idealization were common in descriptions of female friends and female lovers. Marcus’s work, in its attempt to identify where and how Victorians distinguished lovers from friends so as to avoid erasing same-sex desire – certainly always an ambiguous and blurry line – identifies a number of features that sever same-sex passion from social marginalization and yoke it instead to notions of family and marriage: Female friends and female lovers alike expressed affection, shared confidences, and idealized one another’s physical and spiritual qualities. But

Two Girls in Love  141 friends differed significantly from female lovers who threw ­themselves into obsessive passions or lived together, functioned socially as a couple, merged finances, and bequeathed property to one another. (29) She goes on to assert these relationships of lovers, as explored in the life writing of the period, need to be distinguished from friendship. They are characterized either through a vocabulary of “unrequited passion and obsessive infatuation” or of “life partnerships, which some Victorians described as marriages between women” (44). Two of these features – obsessive (not unrequited) passion and the desire to live together as a married couple would – are exhibited in The Runaway (others, such as pooling financial resources and bequeathing property are clearly impossible due to the protagonists’ young ages). Thus Clarice fears that with Olga’s discovery, “she [would be] deprived … of the principal object of [her] life” (51) and “she could not cast Olga off if she tried, and must suffer for and with her” (191). When Olga disappears and Clarice assumes she has left, “a feeling of profound depression came over her, and her heart within her felt as if it was made of lead” (91). Mutually obsessed with each other, Clarice can “think of nothing but Olga” (65) and the “delicious” days they spend together (66), and Olga asserts that if the adults force her to return to school, she will run away again to Clarice (183). Further, they both house their mutual, passionate feelings by direct allusion to the cottage of the Ladies of Llangollen. Inspired by the new family she has found in Clarice, Olga exclaims they must “always live together, like those two old creatures in North Wales. We must have an ornamented cottage, and lots of carved wood and scarlet geraniums, and wear men’s hats” (63). By the mid-nineteenth century, the Ladies of Llangollen, Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, with their rurally situated ornamented cottage, were famous for their “anomalous … sexual arrangements” (Reynolds, “Cottage Industry” 217). Their story too begins with running away; disguised as men, they fled home and parents, albeit unsuccessfully. Their fidelity to one another and stalwart resistance to parental disapproval enabled them finally to establish a retreat in Wales that became culturally synonymous with living “happily ever after”: “theirs was a triumphal plot.  … Single women revered a romanticized version of the Ladies. … Long after their deaths, the Ladies remained a byword for simple conjugal happiness” (Vicinus 6, 14). For some, these women were friends; for others, they were spouses. The erotic nature of their relationship was simultaneously seen and not seen, depending on the viewer. Similarly, Olga’s and Clarice’s kisses and caresses might and might not be the sign of an eroticized relationship that goes beyond friendship. However, the intensity of their language of feeling, the hyper-physicality of the language of attraction they use, provides its own kind of evidence, one that suggests the presence of a queer eroticized desire that is difficult to refute, one that gestures beyond sentimental friendship. When Clarice in

142  Ellen Brinks the garden “doubt[s] whether she would gather anything but roses … the splendid creatures” and “buries her face in their fresh fragrance with a sensation of delight” (190), it is hard to forget that “roses” have frequently and exclusively been used to describe Olga.7 The girls’ bodies and the imagery Hart uses to link them to nature thus play a crucial role in naturalizing or literalizing the kind of desire a reader might come to understand these characters feel for one another. In this narrative replete with Clarice’s misleading statements to adults concerning the unusual happenings and her active concealment of Olga, their bodies never lie about or hide their own responses. Somatic authority goes unquestioned in The Runaway, and it endorses same-sex desire, gender inversion, and the girls’ future family life together. This raises a number of questions: Was there a greater tolerance for representations of gender-inverted or eroticized girl friendships than we have imagined? Is this text an anomaly? Or did the protagonists’ ages, their “innocence,” defuse any potential threat to the heterosexual status quo? Clarice and Olga are in the stage of “youth which had scarcely ceased to be childhood” (81), according to the novel, situated liminally between childhood and adulthood; each “had only lately ceased to be a child” (178). The illustration from the first edition, entitled “Olga threw herself in Clarice’s arms and kissed her warmly,” is instructive, as it (and the volume’s other illustrations) defuse the eroticism by making them appear much younger than adolescent girls of thirteen and fifteen years (Figure 1).8 In its suppression of passionate female friendship and erotic energies, Yonge’s Countess Kate again offers an instructive contrast to The Runaway. Yonge’s novel features Kate’s ardent and physically affectionate friendship with Sylvia: “Sylvia was one of those very caressing children who can never be happy without clinging to their friends, kissing them constantly, and always calling them dear, love, and darling” (165). Sylvia’s mother chastises her and forbids all physical touching in public, save a meeting and greeting kiss. This maternal discomfort about female touching and close physical interaction contrasts starkly with the naturalization and celebration of Olga’s and Clarice’s caresses; indeed, there is an absence of concern in The Runaway about setting limits to the girls’ intimacy. While Victorian depictions of female friendship often included expressions of physical affection, this does not mean there was a lack of cultural anxiety regarding them, as Yonge’s Countess Kate demonstrates. Sylvia chooses to appear quiet and submissive in front of others while secretly continuing her romance with Kate: “instead of training herself in a little self-control and obedience, [Sylvia] thought it ‘cross’; and Mamma was no sooner out of sight than her arm was around Kate’s waist” (166). Although she is uncomfortable with deceit, Kate does not protest Sylvia’s calling her “darling, duck, and love,” or her “soft warm arm” as it squeezes her, or Sylvia’s “tongue approaching” her lips because “it was so sweet to be loved; and she told Sylvia she was a star in the dark night” (166). Yonge’s narrator, however, condemns Sylvia’s dishonesty and disobedience and its damaging effect upon Kate. Sylvia’s

Two Girls in Love  143

Figure 1 “Olga threw herself in Clarice’s arms and kissed her warmly,” from the first edition of Elizabeth Anna Hart’s The Runaway (1872).

aunt “Lady Barbara … freely let the girls be constantly together. The aunt little knew that this meek well-behaved maiden [Sylvia] was giving the first warp to that upright truth that had been the one sterling point of Kate’s character!” (167).

144  Ellen Brinks Countess Kate’s overt moralizing about the dangers of dishonesty, ­running away, and inordinate female affection offers a clear contrast to The Runaway’s freedom from moral censure. The Runaway not only ­tolerates the girls’ unconventional desires and expressions of tomboyism, it shies away from disciplining Olga and Clarice into conformity with a heterosexual family ideal. There is no exploitation of female romantic friendship as “a rehearsal for marriage and fragile in its transience,” as Carolyn Oulton characterizes Sarah Stickney Ellis’s views and those of other popular writers (81). Clarice, in fact, categorically refuses m ­ arriage and then asserts the only man she would consider marrying is the ­Italian freedom fighter Garibaldi (28), thus finding a new way to trope h ­ eterosexuality – not same-sex desire – as the impossible. Advice manuals, like Yonge’s Countess Kate, warned against “sudden and violent liking” between girls, as friendship was intended to foster a gradually ­developing heterosexual femininity (Gorham, Victorian Girl 113, 115). Dinah Craik’s novel Olive (1850), albeit written for adults, may be ­relevant here. ­Sympathetic to the eroticized desires binding young women to one another during girlhood, it nonetheless projects a normative ­heterosexual family future for them. Indeed, the text remains u ­ nconcerned about these girls’ desires, since girls will “naturally” grow up: There is a deep beauty … in this impassioned first friendship, most resembling first [heterosexual] love, the fore-shadowing of which it truly is. … Many a mother, with her children at her knee, may … call to mind some old playmate, for whom when they were girls together, she felt such an intense love … the delicious meetings – sad partings, also quite lover-like in the multiplicity of tears and embraces – embraces sweeter than those of all the world beside. … (cited in Bilston 37–38) Olive’s graduation from romantic friendship into marriage and motherhood is precisely what Olga and Clarice manage to avoid, despite a network of parents, schoolteachers, clergymen, the press, magistrates, and police concertedly making efforts to disrupt their adventure and return Olga to strict oversight. The policing of children (and their sexuality), described by historians such as Michel Foucault, insinuates itself here comically (38, 41–42). In a book devoted to the pleasures of girlhood, there is a remarkable deficit in the smooth functioning of these surveillance systems: the governess is ill; the servants are easily duped; the father is absent and absent-minded; and the local informants leap to faulty conclusions that the police adopt, to their later embarrassment. Instead of wayward girls being redomesticated into heterosexual femininity, the concluding tableau of Olga and Clarice stomping about the Scottish Highlands affords them a wider, more inclusive family than their unit of two, one that seamlessly incorporates their queerness. But not before they have escaped one last danger. The conventional destiny of

Two Girls in Love  145 passionate female friends is to become each other’s bridesmaids, as Olga knowingly recites the script: “we shall always be friends, and you’ll come and see me at Glenkeen, and I shall pay you visits here, and we’ll be each other’s ­bridesmaids – that’s what the girls at school always promised each other” (186). The way out of this fate, or what Olga will call “those inhuman changes,” is to ensure “that whatever is happening [now] must go on, and that we can’t go on, out of it” (187). The magical thinking that enabled Clarice to conjure Olga up out of the thicket in order to fulfill her desires enables them to escape the enemy, temporality. This time they follow Olga’s intense wishing “I would always keep a boy; I’d never come home and be a girl again. … Just think, what a world it would be if boys and girls never grew up!” (36–37). As adults close round them and exposure looms large, Olga enjoins Clarice to desire her desire in order to avert the predictable future: “Then you come round to my plan of having only children in the world; for then you would not have grown up [and lost me], and we should not have any of those inhuman changes” (187). Here, through Olga’s voice, the text mirrors the kind of sensibility critic Susan Zieger has noted in some of Dickens’s representations of “queer” boys, namely, the rejection of paternal authority; the celebration of “children’s affective relations among each other – relations that do not reflect parents’ originating affection”; and “a potentially queer social reorganization” (150, 154). The ending ­testifies to the success of Olga’s and Clarice’s magical thinking as they find a way to ward off the heterosexual family ending by remaining “children in the world.” With its unqualified affirmation of an intense female romantic friendship, The Runaway stands in stark contrast to the contemporary literature for girls, which was overwhelmingly comprised of “tedious, tame tales of domestic life” or “domestic adventures” that instructed the girl readers “in acceptable social and moral behavior” (Reynolds, Girls Only? 93–94). Deborah Gorham echoes this characterization of girls’ literature, denominating the period between 1850–1880 as literature for the “daughter at home” (“Ideology” 41), whose femininity was defined by qualities such as “innocence,” “purity,” “gentleness,” and extreme “self-sacrifice” (43), with Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856) standing as a representative example of the genre. Examining works by best-selling authors Annie Keary, Elizabeth Sewell, Juliana Ewing, Charlotte Yonge, and Mary Molesworth, Gillian Avery names the period of girls’ literature written between 1830 to 1880 “The Happy Family” (122). While pointing out the gender and sexual orthodoxy of most girls’ reading, scholars have also identified exceptions. Kimberley Reynolds and Michelle Abate identify the important, if occasional, presence of rebellious, willful girl protagonists and tomboy figures (Reynolds, Victorian Heroines 33 and Girls Only? 98). To these tomboys, we can add the curious, candid, extroverted Alice in Lewis Carroll’s works; both stand as precursors to the unconventional, adventure-seeking heroines of the 1890s in the stories and

146  Ellen Brinks novels of L.T. Meade and Bessie Marchant. Developments within children’s literature over the course of the nineteenth century were creating more rounded, “realistic” girl characters and affirming the importance of childhood play and adventure for girls as well as boys.9 Both Reynolds and Abate note, however, that even these alternative narratives ultimately reinstall conventional gender-sex arrangements, recentering their protagonists in normative domestic life either through discursive “monoglossia” (Reynolds, Girls Only? 108–09) or through “tomboy taming” in which errant girls are cured of their wildness and made to repent the error of their ways through a variety of means: illness or injury, the return to a strict boarding school or relatives’ home, marriage, or motherhood (Abate xix). Even narratives for adult readers that featured passionate female friendships “resolved” them in marriage (Oulton 74). At the end of Yonge’s Countess Kate, with her new parents (a returned aunt and uncle), the formerly unruly Kate is “earnest in the struggle” to conquer any naughtiness (281), her heart is “in a strange peaceful rest” (269), and she begins “to feel that she might hope to be always good with her uncle and aunt” (270). Thus, as many other authors of girls’ fiction did, Yonge links orthodox femininity to traditional family virtues such as patience, generosity, and selflessness. In contrast, The Runaway eschews an ending that redeems its wayward girls for gender or domestic normativity. Olga’s tomboyism is celebrated and never relinquished. Over most of the narrative, creative deception is what keeps this family of two together since Olga does not have a sanctioned place in Clarice’s English world, hemmed in by the law, the police, the clergy, the servants, the gardener, and Clarice’s father and governess, all of whom would never allow her to stay. Instead, the reader sees Olga hiding in closets and cupboards or under the covers of Clarice’s bed, clattering up and down trellised walls, using ladders and trapdoors as she enters and exits like a thief, and scrambling through the bushes as Clarice undertakes her own “military manoeuvre” (12) to get Olga into the house. In The Runaway, queering the bourgeois home and family takes nothing less than a siege. We could say that what Olga represents is an unacknowledged and improbable difference within the respectable English middle-class family home. Clarice’s father calls the very idea of Olga “impossible”: “there never was anything so foolish as searching a man’s house, in which it is impossible anybody should be concealed. … the idea is preposterous – a moderate-sized house like this, full of people, and in a thickly populated country” (169). In The Runaway, however, what is impossible becomes reality, even if the reality of a visibly queer home in south England, with Olga as future family member, is not sustainable. Instead, like so many other queer diasporas in the Victorian era, Hart’s novel sends such “unsanctioned female sexuality” and gender play – the novel’s foreign elements (Olga with her “un-English ways” [66] and the India-returned Leslies) – back where they came from, to Scotland (Furneaux 142,151). Yet Clarice and her father follow them. His presence signals he too has “run away” from his commercial life and been remade. Instead of

Two Girls in Love  147 being the conventional daughter “passing from the authority of [the father] to that of [the husband],” Clarice authorizes her father’s escape (Nelson, Family Ties 81). Unlike the representations of queers traveling abroad in much nineteenth-century literature, in which abroad signified unbound forms of eroticism that were asocial precisely because they were untied from the values of family and home, The Runaway’s ending harmonizes the girls’ roving spirits with fantasies of a domestic future partnership together. The text’s magical thinking incorporates queer desires into a new familial space. Olga and Clarice and their fathers find “romantic” and “ardent” delight in and with each other in the Scottish Highlands (209). Adolescence wasn’t fully developed as a category until the early twentieth century (Bilston 1–4; Vallone and Nelson, “Introduction” 3; Dyhouse 115). The term “girl” could be used to refer to young women from anywhere from twelve to twenty-seven years of age, though it generally applied to ages thirteen to nineteen. It was a phase of life that attracted heightened cultural interest, evident in novels for adults and in the rise of a literature directly targeting a girl readership (Bilston; Bratton; Moruzi). The fantastic nature of the narrative may have made a lot of The Runaway’s non-­normative behavior acceptable. Reviews uniformly praised the text’s spirit of fun, reading it as a departure from realism in favor of playful fantasy. Only one review, in The Graphic, fretted over the possibility young female readers might attempt to imitate Olga’s and Clarice’s actions and suffer real-life consequences. It cautioned parents to advise their children of the dangers of running away: “it would be well, before placing it in the hands of enterprising young people, to warn them that the termination of such a proceeding in real life would scarcely be so satisfactory as in fiction” (n.p.). Reviews in the Athenaeum and The Illustrated Review did not seem to be troubled by the novel’s decidedly un-moralized content. However shallow the novel’s lesson may be, its ending undoes any ambivalent tensions between normative morality and same-sex desires, and it does so without jettisoning the girls’ passion. Upon discovery, the girls confess their complicity and are censured. Significantly, however, the chastisement is quick, gentle, and perfunctory. Newly back from India, Colonel Leslie attempts to scold Olga and Clarice, but Olga’s charm and Clarice’s honesty get the better of him; he ends up praising Clarice for her “kindness” and “heroism.” He also defends her behavior to her father (208). Clarice’s father’s displeasure is greater, yet Clarice’s genuine remorse obviates the need for lengthy moralizing or further punishment. Olga falls ill from the stress of her escapades but fully recovers, a situation the narrative conveys in a single sentence. On the face of things, a conventionally moralized conclusion is provided. A number of considerations, however, work to undermine this view. First, the reprimand is wrapped up within the space of a paragraph. Second, the reader is not provided with a speech that might expand upon the nature of the girls’ disgrace (as was the case in Yonge’s Countess Kate). Further, this kind of sermonizing is, in fact, unnecessary, because Clarice

148  Ellen Brinks has been struggling with her moral choices all along. Finally, Clarice is rendered as a true heroine for her selfless actions, the personal risk she has taken on Olga’s behalf, and her willingness to bear the consequences of her decisions. The “punishment” at the narrative’s denouement is accordingly an obligatory, brief rhetorical gesture before the novel transports the two protagonists to a fairy-tale ratification of their bond with the full approval of their fathers. The strength of the girls’ passion for one another and desire to create a future home together, first established through an independence from adult oversight, have vanquished the combined power of various social institutions. Secured for them is a seemingly enduring girlhood in a remote corner of Britain, where networks of institutional power are nonexistent. The Runaway creates a present space and imagines a future family for queer girls; it never rationalizes same-sex desire as mistaken or misplaced. Deferment of adulthood proves to be the measure of these girls’ success. In anticipation of features of the New Girl fiction of the early twentieth century, The Runaway’s seeming evasion of reality may be the best avenue, to use Sally Mitchell’s words, for a “serious critique of adult beliefs” (The New Girl 4). What we have is a story about girls, innocent but not entirely sexually so, given Clarice’s and Olga’s erotically charged feelings that are bound up with childhood play and joy. This is enhanced in various ways through Olga’s otherness: her name, her Danish and Scottish ancestry, her time in India, differences compounded by her tomboy antics, her love of pranks and mischief, and most importantly by her unorthodox use of language. This runs the gamut from inversions of regular usage that up-end the status quo (the police are imposters and thieves; adults are liars), a preference for subjunctive and counterfactual statements (modes of the possible, the “what if”), an embrace of storytelling and bizarre analogies, and a preference for the aesthetic values of language that, to name one example, leads to Olga’s disdain for the telegram because, in her words, “all the little words [are] left out, and I like the little words best” (152). It’s tempting to equate Olga’s linguistic experimentation with the narrative’s affirmation of queerness. It’s also appealing to link her desire to preserve “the little words” to the narrative’s commitment to the validity of children’s experiences, what Adam Phillips has called “children’s astonishing capacity for pleasure … an unwilled relish for sensuous experience” (18). The novel’s “escapism” – its linkage of subjectivity with “running away” from gender/sex and family norms in order to establish new forms of queer kinship; its ultimate relocation of Olga and Clarice to the Highlands; their moral victory over adult and patriarchal forms of knowledge and control; the sense of a timeless childhood idyll extended indefinitely – arguably depends upon a central operative analogy: the difference of childhood from adulthood is somehow like the difference of same-sex desire from ­heterosexuality. The likeness is intensified by the mutual dependence of the terms – childhood and same-sex desire – within the novel; Olga and Clarice are girls, not adults, and they are same-sex attracted. If this conceptual analogy is a structuring

Two Girls in Love  149 trope, what are the grounds for the resemblance? The first lies in a similar language of temporality assigned to them within culture (Bruhm xviii). Childhood is like same-sex desire because of the culturally imposed limits to their duration. As Steven Bruhm says, “The story of the child shifts almost imperceptibly to the story of the adult at a key moment: the ending” (xiii), an ending that makes a queer childhood only compatible with the past, not with a future (xviii), unless, as in The Runaway, that ending can be deferred. Secondly, childhood is like same-sex desire because both easily become the desired object of adult surveillance. Finally, same-sex desire can be like childhood because both can feel intensely physical, emotionally uncompromising yet secretive, and under threat. In The Runaway, a new brand of female heroism is cultivated to defend Olga’s and Clarice’s attraction, and a new queer family is found to accommodate it. At the novel’s end, with Olga’s mother mysteriously sidelined, Clarice’s father has “taken a great fancy to Colonel Leslie,” Olga’s father, and to Olga.10 Suggestively, on the first of what are projected to be many extended visits to the Highlands, the “two papas … go out shooting together, with dogs and guns” (209) and Colonel Leslie’s handsome legs below his kilt become the object of admiration. Instead of an escape from same-sex eroticism, we have its duplication in the older generation. With a final image or tableau of a family of two passionate girls and two fathers who fancy one another, the novel ideologically contains any impulse to run away from its avowed pleasures. The difference of same-sex desire, preserved in fantasy through its troping as the atemporal difference of childhood, here seamlessly embraces temporality by its slide over to a homoeroticized adult bond. Could this be a projection of Olga’s and Clarice’s possible queer future? In what amounts to a recentering of domestic authority in children and the gratification of their needs, these girls create a home for themselves and their formerly absent fathers. The Runaway’s ending revises what constitutes family for Olga and Clarice, from their initial intimate unit of two to one with male parents who mirror their same-sex oriented desires. Beyond the typical romantic female friendship plots of Victorian girls’ literature, Hart has queered her text not simply by intensifying the erotic exchanges between Clarice and Olga but by refusing to subject adolescence to temporal, disciplinary imperatives. The Runaway’s queer energy arises from its disruption of this trajectory, creating “strange temporalities” indeed (Halberstam 1). Instead of giving way to the demands of the “real,” adult world, i.e. marriage and the heteronormative family, the novel’s romantic friendship is not condemned as childish. Being sympathetically portrayed, Clarice’s and Olga’s girlhood suggests the contours of a personal history whose childhood beginning defines an identity in preparation for adulthood (the child/girl is father to the [wo]man). Olga’s and Clarice’s passion for one another and the intensity of their caresses will not be a disavowed prelude to a traditional domestic womanhood but an affirmation of the emergent energies and identities of their girlhood, projected indefinitely

150  Ellen Brinks forward. The novel gives a new validity to same-sex adolescent desire as something that is not merely one moment or a phase, to be cast off in a developmental narrative of “growth” toward adulthood. Instead of channeling girl love into a nuclear, patriarchal, heterosexual family, Hart imagines a queer girl family of two in which it can grow and flourish and then posits a queer girl/queer father familial paradigm to authorize its difference. Far from caving to the demands of “the real,” The Runaway celebrates the magical thinking characteristic of childhood, showing how an inverted politics of childhood/adulthood can be used as a queering strategy that fashions adolescence as a queer family space.

Notes  1. A decade and a half after its first appearance, Charlotte Yonge, the influential writer of juvenile fiction, recommended The Runaway in her list What Books to Lend and What to Give. The novel went through multiple editions up to 1953. Then, after five decades out of print, in 2002 the work was reissued by Persephone Books. I use the Persephone edition, which lists the author as Elizabeth Anna Hart, as do numerous entries in the catalogue of the British Library. There is some confusion over authorship of this text, as some libraries and web editions list the author as Fanny Wheeler Hart, another Victorian author of the same period who wrote books for children. It is not clear when or how the confusion regarding attribution occurred. I follow the lead of Anne Harvey, who wrote the afterward to The Runaway for Persephone Books, in identifying the author as Elizabeth Anna Hart.   2. I could not ascertain the publishing history of The Hidden Hand in Great Britain but there were three stage versions produced before The Runaway appeared (Abate viii, 2).  3. There will be other parallels to The Hidden Hand in The Runaway, namely Olga’s use of slang, her gender inversion, and the insignificance the text affords marriage, motherhood, and femininity.   4. For the (late) Victorian connection of gypsies to sexual non-conformity, see Blair.   5. Sally Mitchell has noted that in the motherless, mobile girls of sensation fiction of the 1860s, female dreams and fantasies are indulged and often validated. According to her, these novels provided an imaginative space for emotions and needs that otherwise were culturally repressed (“Sentiment and Suffering”). Does the romance mode of The Runaway represent the afterlife of sensation fiction’s improbable stories, directed now at an audience of girl readers?   6. Precursors of this trend are the stories in a periodical called Girl of the Period Miscellany (1869). According to Kristine Moruzi, it promoted strenuous physical play for girls; its protagonists cycled, climbed mountains, used slang, and conquered difficulties. They did this without compromising their femininity, so the feminine ideal was preserved (79, 64, 81).   7. The text’s three previous references to roses all refer to Olga’s face: “her rosy cheek” (6), her “rosy lips slightly parted” (30), and “Olga’s cheeks … as pink as the roses that peeped in at the window” (151).

Two Girls in Love  151   8. To a twenty-first-century audience, this picture is particularly queer because one never sees two girls kissing passionately. That such a picture was ­published in the 1870s indicates just how much was acceptable in terms of physical ­intimacy between children. Reviews alternated between stressing Olga and Clarice are children, while others called them “girls.” In one review, they are seen as girls of an age to be interested in boys, yet the writer de-eroticizes their romance by then infantilizing them as “little maidens” whose passion for each other is just “affection”: “the talk of the little maidens together in the secure harbor of the bedroom is excessively amusing. Clarice declares she does not like modern boys. … The warm affection that grows up between the two girls … is very prettily described” (The Pall Mall Gazette).   9. See Claudia Nelson’s “Children’s Fiction” (156, 168). 10. Olga’s mother is mentioned once in the sentence that describes Olga’s illness but then she disappears. The implication in the novel is that the only good mother is an absent mother.

Works Cited Abate, Michelle. Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. Avery, Gillian. Childhood’s Pattern: A Study of the Heroes and Heroines of Children’s Fiction, 1770–1950. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975. Bilston, Sarah. The Awkward Age in Women’s Popular Fiction, 1850–1900: Girls and the Transition to Womanhood. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Blair, Kristie. “Gypsies and Lesbian Desire: Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf.” Twentieth-Century Literature 50.2 (2004): 141– 66. Boufis, Christina. “‘Of Home Birth and Breeding’: Eliza Lynn Linton and the Girl of the Period.” The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915. Ed. Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994. 98–123. Bratton, J.S. The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction. London: Croon Helm, 1981. Broughton, Trev Lynn and Helen Rogers. Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Bruhm, Steven. “Introduction.” Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. Minneapolis: University of of Minnesota Press, 2004. ix–xxxviii. “Christmas Books.” Review of The Runaway. The Graphic 28 December 1872: n.p. Dorr, Julia C. R. “The Little Runaway.” St. Nicholas 1 (1879): n.p. Dowson, H. Nairne. “The Runaway’s Return to the Girl’s Home.” The Children’s Treasury and Advocate of the Homeless and Destitute 72 (1876): 238. Driscoll, Catherine. Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Dyhouse, Carol. Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1978.

152  Ellen Brinks Furneaux, Holly. Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Gorham, Deborah. “The Ideology of Femininity and Reading for Girls, 1850–1914. Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women, 1850–1950. Ed. Felicity Hunt. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. 39–59. ———. The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Hart, Elizabeth Anna. The Runaway. London: Persephone Books, 2009. Joy, Jenny. “Our Runaway.” Our Folks Weekly Budget of Tales, News, Sketches, Fun, Puzzles, Riddles &c. 165 (1874): 117. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Mavor, Carol. “Dream Rushes: Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of the Little Girl.” The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915. Ed. Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994. 159–93. Mitchell, Sally. “Girls’ Culture: At Work.” The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915. Ed. Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone. ­Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994. 243–58. ———. The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. ———. “Sentiment and Suffering: Women’s Recreational Reading in the 1860s.” Victorian Studies 21.1 (Autumn 1977): 29–45. Moruzi, Kristine. Constructing Girlhood Through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. Nelson, Claudia. “Children’s Fiction.” The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820–1880. Ed. John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 154–68. ———. Family Ties in Victorian England. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007. Oulton, Carolyn. Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Phillips, Adam. The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998. Review of The Runaway. Athenaeum 28 December 1872: n.p. Review of The Runaway. The Illustrated Review: A Fortnightly Journal of Literature, Science, and Art 5.55 (January 1873): 45–46. Reynolds, Kimberley. Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880–1910. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Reynolds, Kimberley and Nicola Humble. Victorian Heroines: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art. New York: New York ­University Press, 1993. Reynolds, Nicole. “Cottage Industry: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Symbolic Capital of the Cottage Ornée.” The Eighteenth Century 51.1 (2010): 211–27. Southworth, E. D. E. N. The Hidden Hand, or, Capitola the Madcap. Ed. Joanne ­Dobson. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Two Girls in Love  153 Vallone, Lynne. Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Vallone, Lynne and Claudia Nelson. “Introduction.” The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915. Ed. Claudia Nelson and ­ Lynne Vallone. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994. 1–10. Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. ­Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Williams, Leslie. “The Look of Little Girls: John Everett Millais and the Victorian Art Market.” The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915. Ed. Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994. 124–55. Yonge, Charlotte. Countess Kate. New York: Random House, 1960. ———. What Books to Lend and What to Give. London: National Society’s ­Depository (1886): 36. Zieger, Susan. “Dickens’s Queer Children.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 20.1–2 (2009): 141–57.

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Part III

Queer Connections

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8 Reading on the Contrary Cousin Marriage, Mansfield Park, and Wuthering Heights Talia Schaffer

In 1860, when Florence Nightingale was lamenting men’s and women’s ­difficulties getting to know each other, she remarked, “in novels, it is generally cousins who marry; and now it seems the only natural thing – the only possible way of making an intimacy” (47). In a volume on queer families, it may seem odd to begin with an assertion that cousin marriage seems “the only natural thing,” rather than casting it as an incestuous taboo. Yet cousin marriage pervades nineteenth-century fiction and can be found in novels by almost every major writer: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, ­Margaret Oliphant, and Thomas Hardy. As Adam Kuper has shown, this preference for cousin marriage extended into real practice throughout the century. Among middle-class families, more than one in ten marriages involved cousins (Kuper 18), and the resulting extended family clans dominated Victorian religious, financial, and intellectual life. Critics like Kuper and Mary Jean Corbett have explained the economic benefits of cousin marriages, which kept property within the family and reinforced consanguinal loyalties with conjugal ties. However, what may be less obvious to modern readers is that cousin marriage also carried strong emotional values. We should not read it as a perverse redirection of erotic desire into the family, nor as a failure of desire itself. Rather, we need to read its pleasures in a different way, not in terms of desire but in terms of a radically different and older understanding of marriage. In this chapter I sketch the history of marriage, noting that marrying for romantic fulfillment was a new, disruptive, and controversial notion in the early nineteenth century, and I demonstrate how two major novels set in the first half of the century grapple with this new idea, ultimately preferring an older marital ideal instead. Through readings of Mansfield Park (1814) and Wuthering Heights (1847), I trace the uses of cousin marriage to perpetuate an older idea of marriage, itself importing and reinforcing a notion of subjectivity that differs from the modern liberal subject’s. Indeed, I argue it is the tradition of the marriage plot itself that formulates this idea of selfhood, an idea that would be contested by anthropology but an idea we would do well to recover because it undergirds so many of the plots we read.

158  Talia Schaffer As Ian Watt, Lawrence Stone, and Nancy Armstrong have argued, the marriage plot is the way the modern subject forms. In a romantic marriage, a person seeks a unique individual, reading subtle signs that indicate the potential mate’s suitability. Armstrong explains, “authors began to represent an individual’s value in terms of his, but more often in terms of her, essential qualities of mind.” This, in turn, introduced “a whole new vocabulary for social relations, terms that attached precise moral value to certain qualities of mind” (4; emphasis original). The new vocabulary for writing characters gave people the tools to imagine the modern self. Further, the rise of the novel, as Watt has famously surmised, is connected with women’s choice in marriage (138). Yet this idea of the marriage plot assumes two important factors to be true: first, the suitor is an independent agent seeking to maximize his or her own happiness, and second, marriage is contracted for personal pleasure. What happens if one sees oneself as part of a larger collective, whose marital alliances must be determined by (and serve) the larger needs of the group? What might the marriage plot mean in terms of a relational idea of the self, an idea that, I argue, continued to thrive and to compete with the modern notion of the individual? The liberal model of individualism requires “rationally competent adults who, as Locke says, are, in the state of nature, ‘free, equal, and independent’” (cited in Nussbaum 104). It is thus implicitly set against the non-modern subject, someone defined by emotion instead of rationality, by subservience instead of equivalence, by affiliation instead of independence, and by a private rather than a public sphere. In other words, when the monistic agent emerges, a man in a marketplace, so does its implicit opposite, a woman in a family. “The family and state arose in conjunction with each other and … their very structures are interdependent,” writes Linda J. Nicholson (114). Nicholson explains, “as liberalism has been credited with constituting the individual, in all the senses in which we understand that term, so too must it be credited with constituting the family in the most fundamental sense in which we understand that term, specifically as a separate and distinct unit related to a more inclusive governing body” (135). To reinvent the family meant to reinvent the state and vice versa. To imagine someone as a subject of one realm meant to imagine someone else as the subject of the other, the atomized subject of modernity versus the relational subject of history. We can trace the opposition of these two fundamental ideas through three important discourses: the history of marriage, the story told by the marriage plot in fiction, and the notion of “primitive marriage” in Victorian anthropology. While space obviously forbids anything like a thorough account of these genres in this chapter, I will take a few representative samples of each mode of thought, first giving a brief synopsis of the crisis in marital ideology in the nineteenth century, then showing how one emblematic type of pre-modern marriage, the endogamous union, develops in marriage plots and in Victorian anthropology. By reading Mansfield Park and Wuthering

Reading on the Contrary  159 Heights against Victorian anthropological thought, we can see the notion of marrying a family member encodes older ideals Victorians were not ready to surrender, particularly since those older ideals often offered enhanced capacities for female activity. Anthropologists like John McLennan understood the modern subject as an aggressive, self-interested male whose relations with others consist of sex, violence, and (occasionally) trade. Cousin marriages in Austen and Brontë, however, posit a very different subject of endogamous unions, a female who exercises concern for familial harmony and social affections. This model is rooted in pre-romantic, pre-nineteenthcentury marital ideologies. Inventing Romantic Marriage Although there had always been records of lovers getting married, the late eighteenth century marked the first time love was widely accepted as a legitimate reason in itself to marry. Marriage historian Stephanie Coontz explains: By the end of the 1700s personal choice of partners had replaced arranged marriage as a social ideal, and individuals were encouraged to marry for love. For the first time in five thousand years, marriage came to be seen as a private relationship between two individuals rather than one link in a larger system of political and economic alliances. (145–46) Previously, love had been seen as a kind of madness one needed to overcome in order to contract a decently prudent union; to let a wild wish determine a lifelong arrangement was clearly foolish. “Evidence of hostility to sexual desire as a basis for choice of a marriage partner can be found in every commentator of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” Lawrence Stone asserts (281).1 In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, parents generally arranged the marriage, but children usually had veto power. As one woman summed it up, “[I] receiv’d the Addresses of my Lord — through the Recommendation of my Parents, and marry’d him with their Consents and my own Inclination” (Green 50). During this period, people begain seeking something that would come to be called “companionate marriage.” Companionate marriage means the partners specifically seek amity: “personal affection, companionship and friendship, a well-balanced and calculated assessment of the chances of long-term compatibility, based on the fullest possible knowledge of the moral, intellectual and psychological qualities of the prospective spouse, tested by a lengthy period of courtship” (Stone 271). Such a union served the interests of the extended clan. Partners fully expected to be involved in their family’s interests after marriage, and that family was

160  Talia Schaffer a wide and flexible one, sometimes including distant connections, friends, relations of friends, neighbors, lodgers, apprentices, servants, and foster children (Tadmor). This form of marriage aimed for an affectionate, trusting partnership. One married in order to benefit one’s larger network and one expected to remain in that social network after marriage as well. It is true companionate married couples were supposed to feel love, but Ralph Houlbrooke explains, “the word love had a number of meanings, ranging from friendship to passionate mutual absorption. Furthermore, it was widely believed, especially among the upper classes, that mutual affection could easily develop within marriage between well-matched partners. In this view a strong prior attraction between prospective spouses was inessential” (74). Thus it made sense to marry based on a well-tested knowledge of and respect for one’s partner. It was shockingly risky for a woman to pin her political, legal, and economic future on someone who might be a dangerous stranger simply because she was attracted to him. The traditional way of choosing a consensual spouse, someone known for years and vetted by one’s parents, might be less exciting but was probably more secure. On the other hand, companionate unions risked forcing participants to form unions with people they disliked for their families’ material benefit. Certainly it felt more attractive for a woman to find a desirable partner and imagine lifelong bliss with him. One might even say the modern novel tradition begins with this agonizing choice, as Clarissa has to face the worst sort of companionate prospect only to flee to what turns out to be the most dangerous type of romantic suitor. Advice manuals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century evinced great anxiety about this new trend. The Lady’s Monthly Magazine asked in 1799 whether the individual was truly marrying “from the tenderest, from the most exalted principles of esteem and affection?” After all, one might “mistake the transient glow of passion, or the fond delirium of the imagination, for the fervours of a rational attachment, and rush presumptuously into the marriage state without reflection” (cited in Green 141). Similarly, Sir Thomas Bertram is appalled that Fanny “can and will decide for yourself, without any consideration or deference for those who have surely some right to guide you,” since “the advantage or disadvantage of your family, of your parents, your brothers and sisters, never seems to have had a moment’s share in your thoughts on this occasion. How they might be benefited, how they must rejoice in such an establishment for you, is nothing to you. You think only of yourself” (249; emphasis original). It is crucial to marry for the benefit of the larger kin network; to pursue one’s personal happiness is sheer, unforgivable selfishness. The new kind of marriage ushered in a new understanding of family. Elizabeth Gruner writes: “Definitions of the family underwent a shift from a fluid network of family relations in the early part of the nineteenth century to an increasingly naturalized nuclear unit by about the middle of the century. The negotiation between seeing the family as an affiliative

Reading on the Contrary  161 network of friends, neighbors, servants and distant kin and seeing it as a privatized domestic unit was neither easy nor complete by mid-century” (428). For most of the nineteenth century, elements of the earlier ideal of family coexisted with the newer one. Both Mansfield Park and Wuthering Heights thematize this division by locating each type of family in a rival building. The Prices and the Earnshaws have open, permeable homes. Fanny notes the Portsmouth home’s openness to dirt and noise, its status as a thoroughfare for the unrestricted passage of children and servants, with their return or departure (even for years) being given no special attention. Similarly, the Earnshaw home includes foster children, servants, and returning adult children; their house has no private space (when Isabella requests a private room, Joseph cannot comprehend what she means). The Bertram and Linton families, however, are self-contained nuclear families, living in houses divided into private zones, closed to outsiders, thus prefiguring the modern privatized family. The permeable space suits a companionate marriage in which one weds in order to improve relations with a wider group, so friends, allies, and extended family are expected to circulate or cohabit after marriage as well as before. But the private, closed familial space suits two people who have chosen one another and formed a dyad, later perhaps to expand to a nuclear family. In the regime of romantic marriage, each couple forms an isolated pod, independent from others. Ruth Perry has argued this severance from the natal family was quite traumatic for women: Romantic love-in-marriage as an ideal developed in English culture as women were increasingly isolated from their consanguineal kin and the communities of their youth. In the fiction of the day characters wailed their dismay at their vulnerability to the absolute authority of the men they married. … The newly privatized marriage – privatized in the sense of private ownership as well as seclusion in domestic space – detached a woman from her family of origin and from her pre-existing friendships and concerns in order to put her at the service of being a companion to her new husband. (196–97) In focusing on the blissful immersion in a romantic dyad, we can overlook the pain of being ripped away from one’s family and social circle, particularly if the romantic dyad turns out not to be so romantic. Isabella wails to Nelly, “four miles distant lay my delightful home, containing the only people I loved on earth: and there might as well be the Atlantic to part us, instead of those four miles, I could not overpass them!” (138–39). By contrast, the older marital model rejoices in the reinforcement of shared values and looks forward to a marriage in which the couple will continue to share the rich social world in which they are already living. Cousin marriage perpetuates older notions about marriage: alliance with a clan, reinforcement of kin claims, companionate trust rather than romantic passion. It allows

162  Talia Schaffer the woman to retain multiple identities as sister, daughter, friend, instead of becoming solely a wife in the kind of radical redefinition about which Perry writes so eloquently. Cousin marriages generally occur in Victorian fiction when a first generation wrecks the family dynamics, with siblings attacking one another, and the second generation repairs the damage by making the representatives of each branch unite in wedlock. This marital relationship depends upon the readers seeing the cousins as familial emissaries. Mansfield Park, for instance, opens with the sisters’ mutual alienation and ends with the Price and Bertram branches reunited through their respective children’s marriage. Wuthering Heights fits into such a pattern; its reparative structure is a way of reading kinship networks through two generations that was both recognizable and meaningful to a Victorian readership. Family Love in Mansfield Park Mansfield Park constructs marriage as something that ought to be founded on family feeling. Glenda Hudson explains, “in [Austen’s] novels, the infamily marriages between the cousins and in-laws are successful because they do not grow out of sexual longing but are rooted in a deeper, more abiding domestic love which merges spiritual, intellectual, and physical affinities. Moreover, such unions form a new chapter in the fictional depiction of male/female relationships in that the participants are temperamentally equal. …” (25). Fanny and Edmund do not marry in spite of being cousins, they marry because they are cousins. In the narrator’s famous description, “An advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means in their power, which no subsequent connection can supply, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived” (211–12). A relation that modern readers tend to find incestuous, worrisomely queer, is in fact Austen’s model of normative relations within this novel. Mansfield Park starts with only one viable relationship, the sibling affection between Fanny and William, and the other family members must learn to remodel their relations according to that basis. As George Haggerty comments, in Mansfield Park “only the cozily familiar love of quasi-siblings can be depended on as sustaining and meaningful” (186). This healthy sororal love offers an alternative to the cold, formal, and embittered family relations amongst the three original sisters and the four siblings in the Bertram clan. It is notable the novel begins, almost uniquely in Austen’s oeuvre, with the previous generation.2 When Maria and Frances Ward marry, the result is “an absolute breach between the sisters,” while Mrs Norris has “no real affection for her sister” (2, 6). After mutually accusatory letters, they cease contact for eleven years. Thus the inception of this novel is a tale of

Reading on the Contrary  163 sisterliness gone awry. Estranged siblinghood is clearly the crisis that the novel must resolve. In the next generation, all three families, the Bertrams, Crawfords, and Prices, have siblings at war with one another. The Bertrams’ fraternal feeling is mainly characterized by animosity. Maria and Julia enact a toxic rivalry over Henry Crawford, and Tom and Edward, although remaining courteous, are structurally situated as rivals for the same diminishing estate.3 The Bertram household is one of insufficient resources and greedy children; the sisters fight over the one romantic prospect, the brothers fight over the one inheritance. Their sibships are competitive rather than cooperative. The Crawfords’ model derives from a different world of emotional interactions, which favors the immediate satisfaction of desire, followed by the polite release of the once-beloved. The siblings may temporarily collude for a shared goal and come together only for their mutual interest. Mary’s halfjocular complaint about Henry’s correspondence (“done in the fewest possible words” [53]) reveals the essential emptiness of their relation, especially when compared to William and Fanny’s long letters. Meanwhile, the Price children quarrel continually over parental attention: clothing that is not prepared, meals that are not managed, souvenirs that are not protected from depredations. Both family organizations are faulty, but the answer is not to leave the family in order to grow into a fully fledged individual. Marilyn Butler writes, “in Jane Austen it is the villain who has always in some form or other embodied self-sufficiency, a whole intellectual system of individualism or self-interest that the more social and outward-turning ethic of the novel was designed to counter” (280–81). If Watt and Armstrong assume the development of individualism is crucial to the marriage plot and the novel, Austen herself sees liberal individualism as a real threat, endorsing an alternative in the person of Fanny Price. Fanny’s alternative system is based in pre-modern sociality instead of ­individual self-interest, and it essentially converts these warring families. Both Henry Crawford and Edmund Bertram realize Fanny’s love of her brother William provides an enviable alternative ideal. Edmund’s first conversation with Fanny begins when he offers, “let us walk out in the park, and you shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters” (12). His kindness enlivens Fanny; her “countenance and a few artless words fully conveyed all their gratitude and delight, and her cousin began to find her an interesting object” (13–14). Sibling love animates her face, makes her visible in a new way to Edmund. Some years later, Henry will have the same reaction when he sees Fanny with her brother: “Fanny’s attractions increased – increased two-fold – for the sensibility which beautified her complexion and illumined her countenance, was an attraction in itself. He was no longer in doubt of the capabilities of her heart. She had feeling, genuine feeling. It would be something to be loved by such a girl …” (212). It would be easy to say both Edmund and Henry are aroused by Fanny’s love for William but it is not

164  Talia Schaffer exactly arousal; it would be more precise to say they are stirred to e­ mulation. They desire not so much Fanny herself but Fanny’s feeling. What Henry wants to do is to provoke an equivalent of sibling love for himself. In this new sight, familial affection, the tired roué finds a better alternative than the stories of seduction, flirtation, and escape that had previously occupied him. Yet the stranger can never be like a brother. Henry is an example of the untrustworthy, plausible romantic suitor whom young women were being urged to mistrust. As a good girl, Fanny ought to prefer a suitor whom she thoroughly knows and trusts, a union that will repair the damaged family. Hudson sums up, “Even more important for Austen is the idea that conjugal love should be patterned after fraternal love, that the perfect marriage should be like the ideal sibling relationship with its shared trust and understanding, love and esteem, high regard and loyalty, and that the partners should come not only from the same social circle but also, if possible, from the same family. … Fraternal rather than sexual love preponderates in Austen’s fiction, and, in many regards, the romantic scenes are domestic scenes” (7–8). Austen rejects both modern liberal individualism and modern romantic marriage. One might note there are virtually no happily married exogamous couples in this novel. When we consider the Bertrams, the Grants, the Prices, the Rushworths, Admiral and Mrs Crawford, and even the Norrises, marriage in the first generation (plus Maria and Rushworth) is characterized by the partners’ indifference, irritation, violence, fear, or dislike.4 Nor do passionate romantic couples have a future: Maria’s and Henry Crawford’s pairing fails. Only siblinghood teaches how to love. The second generation can, at last, achieve harmonious cousinly marriage. No wonder the end of the novel is a festival of sibling harmony. “Indeed, the breach between sisters created by the unequal alliances described at the opening of Mansfield Park is repaired in one branch of the next generation,” explains Corbett, “as the felt need for proxy daughters ultimately enables two of the Price sisters to renew their attachment” (47). Mrs Price and Lady Bertram repair their bond; Susan and Fanny live together; and the younger set of sisters serves the elder. The real resolution of Mansfield Park is not the marriage between Fanny and Edmund but the restoration of appropriate family feeling based on the model of good sibling affection. The famously suspiciously hasty tone of Austen’s description of Fanny’s and Edmund’s marriage is often read as revealing Austen’s own skepticism about cousin marriage, but what I would argue it really shows is Austen’s haste to get the marriage out of the way in order to get back to the family relations. Here is the real happy ending: “In her [Susan’s] usefulness, in Fanny’s excellence, in William’s continued good conduct, and rising fame, and in the general well-doing and success of the other members of the family, all assisting to advance each other,” Mansfield Park has finally become not an estate but a family (431; emphasis original).

Reading on the Contrary  165 Yet this harmonious convergence of familial alliances would soon meet its match in a very different kind of narrative. If Austen participates in a tradition of imagining reparative endogamous unions, Victorian anthropology would reimagine those unions as primitive remnants and construct marriage itself as a violent and divisive act. How might one write cousin marriage in the era of anthropology? How, in other words, might an author like Emily Brontë use the literary tradition instantiated by Austen, the sense of marriage as a safe harbor, when Victorian anthropologists were developing a history of marriage that centered on violence? Primitive Marriage In the 1860s, Victorian anthropologists developed a theory of “primitive marriage,” and it is this paradigm in which Wuthering Heights’s depiction of erotic obsession plays a formative role. Published two decades before John McLennan’s Primitive Marriage (1865), Wuthering Heights nonetheless offers a vivid projection of the concerns that would shape Victorian theories of “savage” love. Wuthering Heights offers a sense of the discourse of primitivism out of which McLennan’s work would arise, showing how the key ideas of primitive-marriage anthropology developed in those formative years, and how and why mid-Victorians began to imagine a violent, sexualized form of marriage. We can see early stirrings of anthropological thinking in Britain in the 1840s, some of which Emily Brontë would have encountered through her practice of reading the political articles in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine aloud to her father (Gerin 145). Blackwood’s published “On Population” in 1840, a review that discussed savage man and pronounced “the passions of our nature are universal and inherent; the controlling principles partial and acquired; the former act most powerfully where the latter are unknown,” an assertion of the elemental power of desire that may well remind us of Heathcliff’s drives (818). Three years later Auguste Comte’s theories of primitive theology received extensive treatment in Blackwood’s. The last two pages of this review focus on Comte’s ideas of fetishism and primitive religion, giving a sense of a savage perspective in which nature itself is animated, a notion that may have contributed to Brontë’s conception of Heathcliff’s non-Christian world view. These interests in savage religious and sexual behaviors developed into the full-blown theory of primitive marriage expounded by John McLennan in 1865, along with Henry Sumner Maine (Ancient Law [1861]) and Sir John Lubbock (On the Origin of Civilisation [1870]). This theory began with the notion of primitive promiscuity, the idea the primal horde was a disorganized mass of undifferentiated sexual partners, and it traced the progress of society from this barbaric state up toward civilized monogamous marriage. One step in this ascent occurred when primitive man developed marriage by

166  Talia Schaffer capture. In Primitive Marriage McLennan claimed exogamous tribes murdered their own girl children in an effort to preserve scarce resources, then kidnapped and raped their neighbors’ women. Marriage was based on the original abduction of women, and social relations began with the interactions generated by the attempt to get a bride from another tribe.5 This violence marked the beginning of international relations, and eventually, when marriage by purchase emerged as an alternative to capture, it marked the origins of private property (Coward 66). In McLennan’s version, male heterosexual desire is the engine of history, propelling societies out of primitive promiscuity and toward civilization.6 In this story, as Gail Rubin has famously pointed out, it is the men who are active, propelled by powerful heterosexual desire to initiate the crucially formative mercantile and military relations with outsiders. For not until men leave the stagnant safety of their endogamous backwaters can they generate social interaction. This idea has two important consequences for the society that supposedly springs from primitive marriage. First, its vision of social interaction is inherently a hostile one in which men’s relation to other men can initially only be enacted through an antagonistic economic or military engagement, although subsequently tribes may form alliances due to their shared bonds through women. Second, only men partake of social interaction. The woman posited by the Victorian primitive marriage story is merely an object to be circulated, by trade or violence. McLennan’s follower, Sir John Lubbock, surmised women wanted to be captured, but even such minimal speculation on women’s agency is absent from Primitive Marriage (Eller 79–83). According to Elizabeth Fee, “In McLennan’s theoretical system, women seem completely passive social units of property who may be either individually or collectively owned by men, but who initiate no action of their own” (30). It is particularly interesting that primitive marriage theory emerged in the 1860s. Kathy A. Psomiades cannily points out these were the years of the great ferment over women’s agency, legal status, and property ownership in marriage, between the first Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) and the Married Women’s Property Act (1870) (“Heterosexual” 93–94). I would extend Psomiades’s point to add this was also a period in which exceptionally active female characters populated fiction. In 1865, the year McLennan’s book appeared, recent novels included Aurora Floyd, Wives and Daughters, and Our Mutual Friend, hardly featuring passive female victims at the mercy of marauding male raiders, and readers enjoyed sensation fiction plots of strong women exulting in bigamy and often murder. It is perhaps precisely because Victorian authors and activists were reconfiguring marriage as a space of female self-assertion and exploring ways to dissolve marriage that Victorian anthropologists reacted by insisting permanent monogamy was a hallmark of civilization and marital exchange was really the foundation of the modern marketplace. “Female ‘inferiority’ could therefore be explained by marriage – an institution designed by men to bring women

Reading on the Contrary  167 7

into subjection,” writes Coward (66). In posthumously published notes, McLennan remarked marriage was, quite simply, “the union of one man and woman in a consortship for the whole of life – an ‘inseparable consuetude’ of life between husband and spouse, with interests the same in all things civil and religious. That idea, despite all woman’s rights movements to the contrary, is that destined to prevail in the world” (“Studies” 45). The anthropologists argued that, from an original condition of lawless promiscuity, humans moved toward civilization. To threaten existing Victorian patriarchal marriage arrangements was to revert to barbarism. The theorist who picked up the Victorian anthropological legacy in the twentieth century was Claude Lévi-Strauss, who dedicated his Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) to Lewis Henry Morgan and who brought back a theory Edward Burnet Tylor had advanced in 1889 (Wolfram 166; Michie 12). Lévi-Strauss imagines marriage as a system of sexually bonded, exclusively monogamous couples. “As soon as I am forbidden a woman, she thereby becomes available to another man,” he explains, “and somewhere else a man renounces a woman who thereby becomes available to me” (51). In other words, the woman cannot be “available” to more than one person, she is “available” only to a male, and her availability must be specifically sexual, since one presumes familial or friendship affection could be widely shared. Availability, for Lévi-Strauss, is faithfully and exclusively monogamously heterosexual and, indeed, sexual, with men as sexual agents and women as sexual objects. Lévi-Strauss’s assumption that women solely offer sexual services for men offers a particularly clear example of the gender ideas in the anthropological tradition to which he affiliates himself. Yet if we turn to the history of the novel, many women were “­available” to other people in multiple ways. Fanny, for instance, is “available” to Mrs Norris as a quasi-servant, to Edmund as a vulnerable relation, to Lady Bertram as a helper, to Sir Thomas as a surprisingly marketable niece, to Susan as a mentor, to William as a beloved and encouraging sister, to Maria and Julia as a rival, and to Mary as a useful friend. As an unmarried young woman, Fanny lives with the Prices, the Bertrams, and at one point even contemplates living with Mrs Norris, and in each of these non-sexual cohabiting relations she performs crucial emotional and economic services. Jane Austen imagines a more complex social scene than Lévi-Strauss. Whereas Lévi-Strauss reduces a woman to one man’s exclusive sexual property, Austen writes her as an agent with multifarious affective relationships in fluid family configurations over decades. The primitive-marriage story does not work with the marriage plot that descends from Austen and privileges a companionate rationale for marriage. Cousin marriage’s advantage did not stem from sex but rather from familiarity, trust, and companionability, emotions that may not be as primal but were perhaps equally appealing to Victorian readers. Cousin marriage is orthagonal to desire. It is, rather, about social and familial repair.8 Thus while the primitive-marriage story casts women as mute prizes stolen for

168  Talia Schaffer sexual use, the Victorian marriage plot centers on women as psychologically deep navigators of complex relationships while embedded in varied social scenes. The assumption that marriage is driven by (male) desire that undergirds Victorian anthropological discourse contrasts markedly with the tradition of multiple relations we see in the novel. Nowhere is the stark contrast between those two visions clearer than in Wuthering Heights, which pulls on both discourses to make sense of its two generations’ marriages. Reading Wuthering Heights Wuthering Heights may seem an odd choice for this chapter, since it most famously depicts violently erotic possessive desire, the opposite of the feelings behind cousin marriage. Indeed it was the Brontë sisters who helped popularize romantic passion in the first place. “Their fiction produced – and continues with each act of interpretation to produce – figures of modern desire,” writes Nancy Armstrong, who accuses the Brontës of turning every cultural, phenomenological, or biological element into the sign of a universal, primal, crucial desire (191, 198). It is true Wuthering Heights does generate a version of desire as primal, timeless, and universal but that is only in the first generation, and it is no happy situation. It generates cruelty and it ends in death. It is also ambiguous in terms of endogamy, since Heathcliff both is and is not within Catherine’s family. The culminating vision of Wuthering Heights is the opposite: a specific product of the turn to the nineteenth century, a union that succeeds in kindliness, humor, affection, and mutual support, offering a promising future. We remember the narrative of erotic violence but it is the narrative of consanguinal harmony that triumphs. Wuthering Heights was written during the first stirrings of this interest in primitive marriage and it can be read as an anthropological document, a contact zone where the ethnographer Lockwood discovers a tribe and finds a native interpreter, Nelly, to explain its ways.9 If the novel is a kind of ethnological report, what it records is its main male character’s unmistakably savage state. Terry Eagleton writes, “Heathcliff the adult is ‘natural’ man in a Hobbesian sense: an appetitive exploiter to whom no tie or tradition is sacred, a callous predator violently sundering the bonds of custom and piety” (110). Indeed Wuthering Heights records an anthropological primitive marriage in which members of the Heights tribe and the Grange tribe swoop down to capture each other’s women. “The two families exchange their daughters/sisters,” notes Drew Lamonica, although neither Catherine nor Isabella (nor, in the next generation, the younger Cathy) necessarily want to be exchanged (109).10 Catherine’s and Isabella’s husbands separate them from all previous ties, a grievous state of isolation from everyone they had loved, a situation that kills Catherine and nearly destroys Isabella before she can escape.

Reading on the Contrary  169 Yet it is also possible to read Wuthering Heights another way. ­Catherine, Isabella, and the younger Cathy may seem like victims of male sexual exchange but, like Fanny, each views herself as a person in a social context. Each wants to maintain relations with multiple people: parents, cousins, friends, servants. And, as we shall see, it is this wider vision that ultimately triumphs, as the younger Cathy manages, at last, a kind of marriage that differs from the violent warfare that killed her mother. For if Wuthering Heights depicts the anthropological state of savagery, it also enshrines anthropology’s antithesis: the idea of female character made possible in the novel. The men may see the elder Catherine as a pawn in a male sexual exchange but she views herself as a person in a social context they are inexplicably violating. Patsy Stoneman explains, “only if we regard Catherine as Edgar’s ‘possession’ is there any logic in Heathcliff’s equalizing the situation by stealing his other ‘possession’ – that is, Isabella.” Rather, Catherine wants inclusivity, access to both men (xxix). She believes she could be “available” (to use Lévi-Strauss’s term) to more than one person. She believes she could have social relations with more than one person, a goal modern readers might well regard as poignantly modest. As the carvings show in her bedchamber, she imagines she can simultaneously be Catherine Linton and Catherine Heathcliff without, moreover, losing Catherine Earnshaw. These selves coexist; “the air swarmed with Catherines” (Brontë 20). Lamonica says, “Catherine’s decision to ‘choose both’ (and, thereby, to ‘be both’) is ultimately an attempt to dodge the operations of marital exchange” (106). But I would say Catherine is not trying to “dodge the operations of marital exchange,” as if marital exchange were an immutable fact, but rather to stand for an alternative form of human relations that has warrant in another kind of text. She stands for the personhood the history of the marriage plot has constructed. “Marital exchange” is an anthropological construct, but sociality is a novelistic tradition. Stoneman has identified Catherine’s wish to have both Heathcliff and Edgar as a literary artifact in itself, a free-love imperative deriving from Emily Brontë’s reading of Shelley’s “Epipsychidion.” Yet the text gives us no reason for assuming Catherine intends her relation to both men to be sexual, except for our own tendency to see erotic desire as the motivator for relationships. What she wants is not so much free love as what we might see, pitiably, as free society: the company of more than one person. Catherine wants different, and not necessarily sexual, forms of companionship from each man. She wants a familiar, mutually respectful marriage with Edgar and a romantic, passionate marriage with Heathcliff; or perhaps a friendly companionship with Edgar and an intense cohabitation with Heathcliff; or perhaps a marriage with Edgar and a close friendship with Heathcliff. The possibilities are numerous, simultaneous, and unsettled, capable of altering over time and taking in the possibility of changing future alliances like the one Catherine improbably foresees between Edgar and Heathcliff. These

170  Talia Schaffer individuals are not sorted into exclusive permanent dyads or stable small units or isolated nuclear-family cells. One reason Heathcliff cannot comprehend Catherine’s wishes is he has lived a life devoid of books. Heathcliff has had no experience of tracing others’ feelings. In youth, Heathcliff gives up language, his hard work extinguishing “any love for books” while he enters what Nelly tartly calls “an almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness” (68). Exiled from reading, Heathcliff will gain his adult knowledge instead from legal and economic structures of power. He will be unable to comprehend Catherine’s embrace of multiple relationships. Under his adult rule, Wuthering Heights is a place where it is almost impossible, as Isabella finds, “to preserve the common sympathies of human nature” (136). He has the greatest contempt for anyone “picturing in me a hero of romance,” interestingly foreclosing the way many readers have responded to him (149). Yet the fact he is in a novel, and the fact Wuthering Heights is a realist novel as well as a Gothic thriller, guarantee characters will develop in ways Heathcliff lacks the capacity to predict (Pykett, RenaDozier). Hareton proves educable; Linton and the younger Cathy show qualities their elders do not expect. Heathcliff cannot understand his own fiction. Edgar, too, who can see Heathcliff only as a runaway servant cannot possibly offer the kind of complex reading Catherine requires (96). For this novel enacts a much more Victorian idea of psychological depth than anything Heathcliff or Edgar can comprehend. Perhaps this is because its narrator, Nelly, points out, “I have read more than you would fancy, Mr. Lockwood. You could not open a book in this library that I have not looked into, and got something out of also” (63). Women who tell the story, steeped in books, ultimately demonstrate a different kind of narrative than the men with their narrow views of female exchange. Whether the self-taught Nelly, the Romantic literature reader Isabella, or the writer Catherine, the women inhabit a textual tradition neither Edgar nor Heathcliff share. Significantly, the only male who wants to read is Hareton. Kate Flint remarks, “it is Cathy who teaches Hareton to read, thus giving him the key to unlock literature, the very thing which, the novel demonstrates by its own existence, has the potential to unsettle, to pose questions rather than provide answers” (177). Hareton, not Heathcliff, is thus fit to understand his own novel. For we track Hareton’s tentative shame about his illiteracy, his painstaking efforts at self-education, his eagerness to offer books to Cathy, and his yearning to have Cathy read to him. Learning to read, Hareton comes to understand character in every sense; he intuits Cathy’s underlying kindness in spite of the cruelty of her behavior. Cathy and Hareton share fidelity to a world of rich imagination Heathcliff never knows, a world in which one can have a finer sense of character and an expanded understanding of relations amongst characters than Heathcliff ever realizes. Through Heathcliff and Edgar, Wuthering Heights rehearses the fatal limits of the anthropological understanding of marriage, demonstrating

Reading on the Contrary  171 the need for creative, loving, literate alternatives. Although ruthless sexual exchange kills Catherine, the next version of Cathy will finally be able to achieve the friendly goal of companionate marriage. In her agony Catherine cries, “I’ll try to break their hearts by breaking my own” (116). But a generation later, her daughter vows, “Hareton – you are my cousin, and you shall own me,” and in the reworking of that word “own,” from possessive ownership to verbal acknowledgement, from violence to recognition, we have the whole work the marriage in Wuthering Heights is trying to do (278). Edgar and Heathcliff wanted to “own” the elder Catherine in a legal and sexual sense, and all Catherine can do in response is to insist she “own[s]” her own heart. Stuck in the language of possessiveness, forced to match violence with other violence, there is no way out. But Hareton must be coaxed to “own” the younger Cathy, to enter into relationship with her. We see this idea succeeding in the scene where Cathy teaches Hareton to read the word “contrary.” Its staging of opposition harmoniously surmounted offers us a scene of an alternative understanding of cousin marriage. What Cathy teaches Hareton, specifically, is to turn the word “contrary” into a harmony. “‘Con-trary!’ said a voice, as sweet as a silver bell – ‘That for the third time, you dunce! I’m not going to tell you again – Recollect, or I pull your hair!’ ‘Contrary, then,’ answered another, in deep, but softened tones. ‘And now, kiss me, for minding so well’” (307). They enact the emotional ambiguity of love in Wuthering Heights in this scene: kisses and hair-pulling, sweetness and insults at once. They make the scene of reading into a social interaction, not a solitary communion with a book in a private, silent space. “Contrary,” in fact, is in dialogue with itself, its two pronunciations coexisting in one historical moment. For according to the OED, the accepted pronunciation of the word in the eighteenth century is indeed the one Hareton offers. The entry cites an eighteenth-century source saying the first syllable should be stressed but adds this preference has now been reversed.11 Hareton’s ambiguous pronunciation places him in the transitional era from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, and in a transitional class as well. His first-syllable stress marks the fact his linguistic training from gentry speakers occurred decades ago, and he has had no subsequent contact with more modern interlocutors. But the scene is also a microcosm of the novel as a whole. It references the “contrary” families of the Lintons and the Earnshaws learning to harmonize in their descendants, turning their violence into affectionate play. This cousin marriage is an alternative to the sterile world of sexual violence that destroyed the older generation. It is also, of course, the story of Hareton and Cathy’s courtship, their opposition dissolving into affection. When Hareton mispronounces the word, stressing the first syllable, he emphasizes “con,” which means “with” but also “against.” By “con[ning]” his lesson, he learns opposites can chime in together. Emily Brontë’s novel describes the way the modern family becomes instituted. How do you invent a family that is a domestic haven? You work

172  Talia Schaffer through and kill off its unruly members – its racially and classed others, its rebellious women – and you marry the remaining cousins to one another to reinforce the newly purified version. It happens in Mansfield Park and it happens in Wuthering Heights. In other words, the goal is to fix family relations, which has little to do with desire. That is why desire is not very relevant in cousin marriages. Characters may or may not feel an erotic pull to each other, but it is subsidiary to the more central motivations for marriage. In Hareton and Cathy’s cousin marriage, we see their shared care for their family estate – the repaired gate, the flowers – before we see them kiss. But as we all know, there is an unresolved residue. The ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff still walk. The new life of endogamous harmony is haunted by the old, fierce violence, a violence that will help inform the mainstream story of marriage, just as Catherine and Heathcliff have become the dominant characters in readers’ experience of the novel (and in virtually all film versions). Catherine and Heathcliff fit what we regard as the truth of romantic union, with their fierce, exclusive erotic passion; Cathy and Hareton seem disappointingly quaint, conventional, old-fashioned types. But what I have been arguing in this essay is that the system they embody had value, too, and it is a value we ought to recognize. What cousin marriage does is to join in holy matrimony those who had previously been opposed to one another and to overwrite the violent, monogamous, anthropological narrative with social harmony. Instead of female abduction, we get the cousin marriage plot; the sound of a voice like a “silver bell,” a wedding bell, gets the last note in the story. From Mansfield Park through Wuthering Heights, cousin marriage represents an older regime of marriage that stresses multiple social relations that value women’s multiple capacities, instead of seeing marriage as an individual, privatized, sexual choice. Modern readers see love for a stranger as normative and love for a relation as perverse. But in the nineteenth-century marriage plot, these relations are quite frequently reversed. In the period in which Wuthering Heights and Mansfield Park are set, it is horrifyingly selfish to marry for desire and admirable to contract a marriage that consolidates and extends existing social relations under the aegis of trusting, companionable affection. If endogamous marriages seem queer today, we must remember that two hundred years ago, they seemed “the only natural thing” (Nightingale 47). What makes family queer is historically variable. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, desire for a stranger was the queerest thing of all.

Notes   1. I use Stone because he articulates this argument most vividly without endorsing The Family, Sex, and Marriage’s problematically selective evidence or excessive claims for the emotional superiority of the modern family.

Reading on the Contrary  173  2. Sense and Sensibility is the only other Austen novel that begins a generation or two before its primary characters.   3. Edmund’s future living gets sold to pay off Tom’s debts. As Sir Thomas says, “I trust I may pity your feelings as a brother on the occasion. You have robbed Edmund for ten, twenty, thirty years, perhaps for life, of more than half the income which ought to be his” (Austen 20).   4. Even the relatively harmonious Grant marriage is characterized by Mrs Grant’s anxieties about Mr Grant’s fussiness.   5. George Stocking points out that although Victorian anthropologists differed from McLennan in specific points, they all generally accepted his view of the development of human marriage. “They all tended to view marriage in terms of the control of human sexuality” and accepted the idea of primitive ­promiscuity (204).  6. Other anthropologists offered variations on McLennan’s story, with Maine featuring voluntary contract rather than force and Lubbock imagining what he called a “communal marriage” rather than an individual abduction. These thinkers (including Darwin and J. J. Atkinson), moreover, agreed men probably practiced polygamy but disagreed whether it was likely women ever practiced polyandry. In spite of these differences, however, what the anthropologists shared was an assumption that marriage was progressing toward civilization and the history of marriage featured sexually aggressive males and sexually recalcitrant females.   7. George Stocking has noted “that these years were also very nearly the exact period of the anthropological debate over the evolutionary priority of ‘matriarchal’ marriage seems scarcely a historical coincidence” (201). “Matriarchal marriage” refers to the discovery that some people organized descent, kinship, and inheritance through the maternal line rather than the paternal one, a prospect Victorian ethnographers found profoundly disturbing. Matriarchy is another version of anthropology’s anxiety about female dominance in the 1860s.   8. Of course, the primitive-marriage story may work with some Victorian novels. Dracula, for instance, can be read as men fighting over the sexual ownership of women who are abducted from one group by a dangerous stranger (Stevenson, “Vampire”). Certainly anthropological work informs those later nineteenthcentury narratives that are interested in savagery, male sexual aggression, and female sexual passivity.   9. Goetz sees Wuthering Heights as a perfect example of a Lévi-Straussian tribal society. 10. John Allen Stevenson points out the Grange and the Heights are set up for a perfectly symmetrical Lévi-Straussian exchange. Each family has one daughter and one son needing a wife, but Heathcliff’s advent disrupts this exchange ­(“Heathcliff” 77). 11. A writer in 1791 remarked, “the accent is invariably placed on the first syllable by all correct speakers, and as constantly removed to the second by the illiterate and vulgar” but the OED editors remark that in present-day usage, “the words ‘placed on’ and ‘removed to’ should change places.” It is unclear whether “the present-day usage” refers to the original 1893 edition or the revised 1933 ­edition but either way, it means the accent shifted during the nineteenth century.

174  Talia Schaffer Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Atkinson, James Jasper and Andrew Lang. Social Origins: Primal Law. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1903. Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Penguin Classics, 1995. Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. “Comte.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 53:329 (March 1843), 397–414. “Contrary.” Oxford English Dictionary. 1933. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Penguin, 2006. Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Coward, Rosalind. Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. London: ­Macmillan Press, 1975. Eller, Cynthia. Gentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Elizabeth Fee. “The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology,” Feminist Studies 1 (1973): 23–39. Gerin, Winifred. Emily Brontë. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Goetz, William R. “Genealogy and Incest in Wuthering Heights.” Studies in the Novel 14:4 (1982): 359–76. Green, Katherine Sobba. The Courtship Novel 1740-1820: A Feminized Genre. ­Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991. Gruner, Elizabeth Rose. “Born and Made: Sisters, Brothers, and the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill.” Signs 24:2 (1999): 423–47. Haggerty, George. “Fanny Price: Is she solemn? – Is she queer? – Is she prudish?” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 53:2 (2012): 175–88. Houlbrooke, Ralph A. The English Family 1450-1700. London: Longman, 1984. Hudson, Glenda A. Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992. Kuper, Adam. Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England. ­Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Lamonica, Drew. “We Are Three Sisters”: Self and Family in the Writing of the Brontës. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer. Ed. Rodney Needham. Oston: Beacon Press, 1969. Maine, Henry Sumner. Ancient Law: Its Connection With the Early History of ­Society, and its Relation to Modern Ideas. New York: Charles Scribner, 1864. McLennan, John. Primitive Marriage: An Inquiry Into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1865. ———. Studies in Ancient History, Second Series. London: Macmillan, 1896. Morgan, Lewis Henry. Ancient Society. Ed. Eleanor Burke Leacock. Gloucester: P. Smith, 1977.

Reading on the Contrary  175 Nicholson, Linda J. Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Nightingale, Florence. “Cassandra.” Florence Nightingale’s Cassandra. New York: Feminist Press, 1979. “On Population.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 48 (December 1840): 808–24. Perry, Ruth. Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Psomiades, Kathy A. “He Knew He Was Right: the Sensational Tyranny of the Sexual Contract and the Problem of Liberal Politics.” The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels. Eds. H. M. Marwick, Deborah Morse and Regenia Gagnier. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009, 31–44. ———. “Heterosexual Exchange and Other Victorian Fictions: The Eustace Diamonds and Victorian Anthropology.” Novel 33.1 (1999): 93–118. ———. “The Marriage Plot in Theory,” Novel 43:1 (2010): 53–59. Pykett, Lyn. Emily Brontë. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1989. Rena-Dozier, Emily. “Gothic Criticisms: Wuthering Heights and Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism.” ELH 77:3 (2010): 757–75. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Feminist Anthropology: A Reader. Ed. Ellen Lewin. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2006, 87–106. Stevenson, John Allen. “‘Heathcliff is Me!’: Wuthering Heights and the Question of Likeness.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 43:1 (1988): 60–81. ———. “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula.” PMLA 103:2 (1988): 139–49. Stocking, George. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1987. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Stoneman, Patsy. “Introduction.” Wuthering Heights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. “Catherine Earnshaw’s Journey to Her Home Among the Dead: Fresh Thoughts on Wuthering Heights and ‘Epipsychidion.’” The Review of English Studies 47:188 (1996): 52–33. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. ­Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Wolfram, Sybil. In-Laws and Out-Laws: Kinship and Marriage in England. London: Croom Helm, 1987.

9 The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville Alec Magnet

Sometime in the summer of 1850, while Herman Melville was working on Moby-Dick, he famously borrowed Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus from his friend Evert Duyckinck, one of the unofficial leaders of New York’s literary scene. Though scholars have deciphered and published marginalia from many of the books Melville owned himself, no such material has appeared from this volume. Perhaps he was too polite a borrower for that. Still, much has been made of this fateful loan, with scholarship linking the two texts regularly since the beginnings of modern academic interest in Melville in the 1920s (cf. Barbour and Howard 214). At close to the same time, however, Melville borrowed another book from Duyckinck, Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., which had been published earlier that year. Though not much time could have elapsed between the two loans, according to the catalogue at Melville’s Marginalia Online, connections between Tennyson and Melville have received very little scholarly attention.1 Their contemporary critics, however, were readier to link the two, both to compliment and to denigrate them. G. W. Peck, for example, described them as the two unmanly avatars of all that was wrong with modern literature in 1847: “The manliness of our light literature is curdling into licentiousness on the one hand and imbecility on the other; witness such books as Omoo, and the namby-pamby Tennysonian poetry we have of late had so much of” (cited in Higgins and Parker 138). On the other hand, an 1856 review of Melville’s The Piazza Tales, attributed to Thomas Powell, praises the two writers’ ­lyricism and lushness of affect: In fact, if we may use such a comparison and be understood, Mr. Melville’s prose, particularly in his magnificent descriptions of scenery, sea and cloudland, resembles the Tennysonian verse. It possesses all the glowing richness, exquisite coloring and rapid, unexpected turn of phrase that distinguishes the Poet Laureate of our day – Marianna of the Piazza, ‘the lonely girl, sewing at a lonely window; the pale-cheeked girl and fly-specked window, with wasps about the mended upper panes’ – has a distinct and yet not traceable relationship to ‘Marianna in the Moated Grange’. The very cadence of thought – the same heart melody – fills both. (Cited in Higgins and Parker 471)

The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville  177 Different as their assessments may be, these two reviews lay out exactly the terms by which I want to connect Tennyson and Melville. First, I wish to draw attention to their queerness, the complicated question of how their writing’s homoeroticism and androgyny exceeded or deviated from what prominent elements of their culture strove to enforce as properly “manly.” Secondly, I wish to highlight the ineffability of their kinship, its “distinct and yet not traceable” quality. The connections one might draw between Tennyson and Melville are not so obvious as a straightforward influence narrative. Instead, they are evinced by psychic idiom and reverberation – “heart melody” and “cadence of thought” – and by the similar emotional and physical responses their texts invite, for example, through the evocative lushness of their descriptions. It is not just the unexpectedness of the comparison, then, that provokes Powell’s hesitant preface but also the indirect and indefinite quality of its evidence that makes itself manifest at the level of reader response. Nevertheless, for those of us who feel ourselves vibrate to that same heart melody when we read these writers, the feeling stands in and of itself as a powerful demonstration of the reality and significance of their kinship. It is this sympathetic resonance between the two writers and among their readers I seek to understand and explain under the rubric of queer kinship. In common usage, kinship can refer both to familial relations and to resemblance, as in the adjective “akin.” Susan Manning elaborates an argument across a series of recent texts for the scholarly merit of this latter sort of connection based on “confluence rather than influence” in transatlantic literary studies (Fragments 5). Seeking to supplement rather than oppose the “cultural history” model of much recent transatlantic criticism, which privileges linear narrative, emphatic contextualizing, and ideological exposure (“Grounds” 26), Manning’s approach “establish[es] networks of relationships and analogies” through close textual attention to style and rhetoric as a means of exploring “how written words engage the emotional responses of readers” (Poetics 6). One analogy that unites Tennyson and Melville is their shared fascination with alternative forms of relatedness: with recognition, identification, and incorporation, with same-sex attachment and erotics, and with literary echo and inheritance. Both, moreover, employ similar metaphors of familial relation to describe these forms of kinship – friendship as marriage, for example, or as twinship or a parent-child bond. They thus present the literary as a performative space in which to discover and create such relatedness, a space open to the potential desire of a queer reader – in this case, my own actual desire – to acknowledge and participate in the textual kinship these two writers’ enabling relationality invites. In order to help theorize this relational use of the literary, I turn first to the related concepts of “statistical kinship” and “archival reproduction” that Wai Chee Dimock develops in Through Other Continents, and secondly to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s explorations of queer reading as an affective and relational experience.

178  Alec Magnet Dimock’s concept of statistical kinship derives from another nineteenthcentury source fascinated with alternative, literary forms of kinship: ­Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). For Dimock, the emblematic instance occurs in that book’s brief comment about Madame de Staël:2 De Stael’s name was not so clear of offence; she could not forget the Woman in the thought; while she was instructing you as a mind, she wished to be admired as Woman; sentimental tears often dimmed the eagle glance. Her intellect, too, with all its splendor, trained in a drawing room, fed on flattery, was tainted and flawed; yet its beams make the obscurest school-house in New England warmer and lighter to the rugged little girls who are gathered together on its wooden bench. They may never through life hear her name, but she is not the less their benefactress. (Fuller 55–56) Dimock connects this passage to the nineteenth-century interest in mass population and its statistical measurement. She reads Fuller’s image of de Staël’s intellect beams as an example of how “a large-scale paradigm makes for a different kind of kinship. Given enough space and time, given a big enough population, there will be other human beings similar to De Staël. These human beings are not her biological offspring; they are her statistical offspring. Their kinship with her is a populational effect” (57; emphasis original). Dimock’s different kind of kinship thus encompasses both influence and confluence. On the one hand, between de Staël and the schoolgirls “[s]omething has been passed on,” Dimock writes. “How that passing on takes place – and what it does to the benefactress as well as to the beneficiaries – is the central argument of Woman in the Nineteenth Century” (52). On the other hand, their kinship is also a product of chance likeness. The relationship it refers to is not necessarily a genealogical connection, but, just as often … a convergence of attributes, issuing from environments roughly similar but widely dispersed. … Born of the local circumstances that shape them and echoing other forms shaped by circumstances more or less alike, [these convergences] make up a decentralized web, something like what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘rhizome.’ (74) Though not genealogical, this sort of kinship may still function, according to Dimock, as a form of reproduction – a “reproduction through archives” (58) – though it complicates reproduction’s usual temporal direction. Thoreau, for example, by engaging in a vivid and personally significant debate with an ancient text from another continent becomes for Dimock “a ‘reproductive’ reader: reproductive in the sense of rewriting the text, updating

The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville  179 it, giving it a new context of action” (16). This understanding of kinship has specifically feminist consequences, moreover, inasmuch as it proposes a vision of femininity that evades the demand to bear and raise biological offspring, as well as a vision of reproduction open to either gender’s participation in multiple ways. It therefore might also fruitfully be described as queer, especially inasmuch as it emphasizes and cultivates what Sedgwick refers to as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Tendencies 8). In fact, Dimock’s concepts of statistical kinship and reproductive reading overlap with Sedgwick’s discussions of queer reading and writing in multiple, striking ways. In Epistemology of the Closet, for example, Sedgwick recommends what she calls “camp-recognition” as an approach toward texts that might otherwise be dismissed as sentimental kitsch and that hint at the possibility of covert queer meanings. Such an approach consists in imagining the possibility of kinship, in asking: What if the right audience for this were exactly me? What if, for instance, the resistant, oblique, tangential investments of attention and attraction that I am able to bring to this spectacle are actually uncannily responsive to the resistant, oblique, tangential investments of the person, or of some of the people, who created it? And what if, furthermore, others whom I don’t know or recognize can see it from the same ‘perverse’ angle? (156)3 In Tendencies, she writes of her “ability to attach intently” to such texts as a child as “a prime resource for survival.” Her need was almost boundless to discover in them “sustaining news of the world, ideas, myself, and (in various senses) my kind” (3). Alluding to John Bowlby and psychological attachment theory, Sedgwick implicitly associates the reading relations she describes with the innate need to form intimate emotional bonds – paradigmatically between infant and caregiver(s) – that help to keep us alive. She thereby intimates the intense love and need a reader can feel for a text in which she recognizes herself (and hence in turn may feel recognized or even perhaps even loved by it).4 At the same time, the stakes of such relationships are high. Tendencies begins with the stark reminder of the frequency of queer teen suicide, a problem that has not improved since that book’s publication and for which Sedgwick blames a society that seemingly “wants its queer children to conform or (and this is not a figure of speech) die” (2). Death is a persistent reference and motivator for both Sedgwick’s and Dimock’s writing, often in ethically and politically freighted ways. S­ edgwick first published what has become her most influential formulation of objecthungry queer reception, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in 1997, the same year AIDS-related deaths in the US decreased for the

180  Alec Magnet first time and the year after Sedgwick’s own diagnosis of incurable cancer. In it, she writes, “The desire of a reparative impulse … is additive and ­accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self” (­Touching Feeling 149). Especially for those living outside the prefabricated ­meaningfulness of the procreative, heterosexual family, there is thus a desperate exigency to the essay’s project of learning “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (150–51). Similarly, mortality is central to Dimock’s discussions of both Fuller and Thoreau. She first defines reproductive reading by comparing it to Thoreau’s responses to death. After his brother John died suddenly of lockjaw, Thoreau developed psychosomatic symptoms of the same disease that lasted on and off for months. And after the antislavery insurrectionist John Brown’s execution, Thoreau, a vocal supporter, wrote that Brown “is more alive than ever he was,” his death having inspired so much conversation, attention, and commitment to carry on his work (Essays 224). Both responses, according to Dimock, “feed [death] into the fabric of life itself, giving it license to spill over into a reproductive cycle” (16). She suggests a close analogy between the memorial preservation of the dead through the psychosomatic identification and the creative, enlivening relationship with texts she describes as reproductive reading, itself a response or a resistance to the absoluteness of death. Likewise, the archival kinship she describes in her chapter on Fuller leads directly, for Dimock, to a particular ethical relationship to the dead: “Always on the verge of oblivion, they cry out to be revived and, in that cry, make of us obligated hearers. We are … capable of hearing the dead; that auditory range makes us relational beyond the limits of biology” (69).5 This obligation is especially pressing as each of us will one day be in their position. The literary, in particular, is where we may hear and respond to that cry, and thus the literary kinship relations she describes have the further function of carrying what she calls “the burden of a cry for repair, for mending” (66). The relevance to Tennyson’s In Memoriam is unmistakable, inasmuch as that poem seeks not just to mourn and memorialize the poet’s dearest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly at the age of twenty-two, but also to preserve and carry forward their friendship through performative metaphors of incorporation, spiritual contact, and familial relationship. Melville’s Moby-Dick does not grieve a particular death, but it responds to a more generalized mournfulness and morbidity with a similarly reparative proliferation of queer, literary kinship relations. Both works, moreover, through modeling these emotional and relational practices implicitly invite their readers to imitate and participate in similar reading relations. Whether or not a direct line of influence can be drawn between Tennyson and Melville, they are certainly related through what Dimock calls

The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville  181 “contextually induced parallels,” personal as well as cultural-historical (74). Tennyson was ten years older than Melville almost to the day and died almost exactly a year after he did. They were both raised in families in reduced circumstances, whose financial anxieties stood out more starkly in contrast to prosperous relations. Each had at least one emotionally difficult parent and grew up to be melancholic, suffering periods of bleak depression and insecurity throughout his life. Both desired a secure Christian faith but were plagued by doubt. Both cultivated incorporative writing styles – Tennyson’s early poems “recapitulate the entire history of English poetry,” according to Dwight Culler (9), while Moby-Dick, in Leo Bersani’s graphic depiction, “opens its jaws to devour all other representations” from “a vast field of cultural reference” (139). Finally, both expressed deep, eroticized, same-sex attachments and desires in their published writing.6 Over the past half century, Melville scholars have assiduously documented his reading and reproduced his marginalia, which, I argue, richly evinces his own cultivation of archival kinship relations of both influence and confluence. Rereading Edmund Spenser in the mid-1850s, for example, he bracketed some lines that encourage the suicidally depressed to go to sea, wryly commenting in the margin, “Absolute coincidence here between Spenser’s conceit and another person’s, in connection with a very singular thought” (Cowen 2: 594). The singular thought is Ishmael’s who, in his famous self-introduction in Moby Dick, describes going to sea as his “substitute for pistol and ball” (3). Biographer Hershel Parker points out Melville uses almost the same language – “singular coincidence” – in a marginal note marking a discovered affinity with Milton (2: 405; cf. Grey 122). “Always alert to literary echoes,” as Parker writes, he recorded similar connections among the authors he loved, not to expose unoriginality but instead to draw what he imagined to be pleasurable lines of affinity and descent. Underscoring Spenser’s line, “Now in the valleys wandring at their wills,” for example, he wrote at the bottom of the page, “‘The river wanders at its own secret will’/Wordsworth,” adding, “How W. W. must have delighted in this stanza” (cited in Parker 2: 406). Melville’s note captures a balance between inheritance and coincidence important to his own, and Tennyson’s, experiences of literary kinship. Wordsworth, he implies, adapted Spenser’s line for his own poetry but only because Wordsworth was already the sort of person whom that line would delight. As Melville renders it, Wordsworth’s line encapsulates the reciprocal enlivening that Dimock’s “reproductive reading” entails by transforming the agent of this “wandering at will” from a flock of living sheep to an inanimate river. By specifying that will as “secret,” Wordsworth emphasizes the intimacy and inwardness of such textual relations even after they are published. All this may, however, be Melville’s own projection, as Wordsworth’s actual line reads, “The river glideth at his own sweet will” (“Westminster Bridge” 11; emphasis added). This misremembering touchingly reveals the desire for such affinitive connections behind Melville’s attention to literary echoes.

182  Alec Magnet The intensity of this desire can be seen in Melville’s attempts to forge such connections with living writers, as well as to discover them in the texts of dead ones. In 1850, for example, he wrote a letter to Richard Henry Dana expressing his delight that Dana might have felt the same “strange, congenial feelings” reading Melville’s novels that he felt reading Dana’s, feelings of being, “as it were, tied & welded to you by a sort of Siamese link of affectionate sympathy” (Correspondence 160). If finding such links was one of the pleasures of reading for Melville, it was perhaps the main purpose for writing. As he tells Dana, if he didn’t have to support himself, he would almost prefer to print just one copy of each subsequent sea novel for only Dana to read (160). Dana’s response unfortunately does not survive, but the two writers’ relationship does not seem to have developed much further than this exchange. Melville may have been auditioning Dana for a role that was open more generally, however. The same concatenation of likeness, familial relationship, and physical merger implied in his metaphor of “Siamese” or conjoined twinship also appear in his letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne from later in 1850 and 1851, and they pervade his depiction of the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg – also described as “Siamese” (320) – in Moby-Dick, which he wrote during those same years. Both Moby-Dick and Melville’s writings to and about Hawthorne, moreover, persistently eroticize these metaphors, creating a vocabulary of same-sex intimacy that blends erotic, familial, emotional, and literary affinity in a way strikingly similar to the relational idiom of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. His belated review of Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), for example, written soon after his first excursion with Hawthorne and attributed to a fictional “Virginian spending July in Vermont,” imagines reading Hawthorne as a prolonged textual rendezvous that will nourish, transform, and inseminate its author: To what infinite height of loving wonder and admiration I may yet be borne, when by repeatedly banquetting on these Mosses, I shall have thoroughly incorporated their whole stuff into my being, – that, I can not tell. But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germanous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul. (250) This passage alludes to what has been known since 1871 as Plato’s Symposium, but which Melville knew by its earlier nineteenth-century title The Banquet. According to Beverly R. Voloshin, Melville echoes The Banquet’s portrait of art as “brought into being through the desire to ‘beget’ … furthered by the erotic connection between two exceptional men” (23). If “Hawthorne and His Mosses” marked the start of that friendship’s sixteen-month heyday, Melville’s letter in response to Hawthorne’s praise of Moby-Dick marked just about the end. In it, he extends and Christianizes what Voloshin describes as his Platonic “reference to banqueting as communion, taking in

The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville  183 and incorporating the sacred body of the beloved” (23), writing: “Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips – lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling” (Correspondence 212). Tennyson similarly alludes to Plato in the idyllic descriptions of his intellectually fecund relationship with Hallam. He describes summer days interspersed “With banquet in the distant woods;/Whereat we glanced from theme to theme/ … Or threaded some Socratic dream” (89.32–36). He also compares Hallam’s brow to that of Michelangelo (87.40), who, like Plato, was a Victorian icon of homoeroticism, inasmuch as they both shared a “broad bar of frontal bone over the eyes” (cited in Gray 63n.5). In Moby-Dick, Ishmael identifies the sperm whale as “a Platonian” in part because of his broad brow; Plato’s name derives from the Greek for “broad,” probably referring to his brow or shoulders (Crain, “Melville’s Secrets” 13; Sealts 391 n.41). Indeed, just as Moby-Dick reflects the desire for and influence of Hawthorne’s friendship – Melville dedicated the novel to Hawthorne “In token of my admiration for his genius” (vii) – so too does In Memoriam register the profound impact of its author’s brief but transformative friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam. Like Melville, Tennyson compares this friendship in his writing to an astonishing range of familial and romantic relationships, often simultaneously and often in ways that collapse or exceed the relational types to which they refer. At the same time, both emphasize how fundamentally mediated by text their experience of these friendships must be. As poet-speaker of In Memoriam, Tennyson, in his grief for Hallam, compares himself to a widower, a wife, the husband of Grief, a man who has lost his female lover, a woman who has lost her fiancé, parents whose daughter has moved away, and, indirectly, an infant crying for any rescue from solitude. As Eric Gray points out, “Hallam is, within the space of five lines, a friend, a bother, a spouse, a mother, a more-than-brother” (xx). Tennyson even dreams he and Hallam might produce offspring, as Mary Jean Corbett points out, through figuring as a sort of co-fatherhood the homosocial bond that would have been generated had Hallam lived to marry his sister Emily (305–08). Tennyson describes his relationship with the dead Hallam in not just familial or erotic terms but also of desired fantasies of spiritual interpenetration. One of Tennyson’s most famous manuscript revisions contrasts these two descriptive vocabularies. The wish he expresses just before what many consider the emotional climax of the poem that Hallam’s soul would, from beyond the grave, “Descend, and touch, and enter; hear/The wish too strong for words to name” (93.13–14), begins in the 1842 Lincoln manuscript “Stoop soul and touch me, wed me” (Poems 405). To modern ears, the revised version sounds even less discreet, with the inevitable sexual connotations of “enter” replacing the more decorous marital connotations of “wed.” In both versions, though, the touch leads to a reparative interfusion with Hallam, either through the metaphor of marriage as becoming one

184  Alec Magnet flesh or through the fantasy of Hallam’s spirit entering and permeating the speaker’s body. At a climactic moment, the poem in fact fulfils this desire for interpenetrative contact in a mystical experience of visitation by Hallam’s soul (one importantly provoked by reading): A hunger seized my heart; I read Of that glad year which once had been, In those fall’n leaves which kept their green, The noble letters of the dead: .............................. So word by word, and line by line, The dead man touch’d me from the past, And all at once it seem’d at last His living soul was flash’d on mine, And mine in his was wound. (95.21–24, 33–36) More than two decades after In Memoriam’s first publication, Tennyson attempted to tone down these last two lines, revising them for the 1872 edition to read “The living soul” and “mine in this was wound” because, he later explained, “my conscience was troubled by ‘his’” (cited in Rosenberg 306, emphasis mine). The problem may not have been just with the pronoun’s homoeroticism but also with its overtones of idolatry. The less specific determiners “this” and “the” suggest an intertwining with the divine in everything, whereas “his” intimates a potentially inappropriate valuation of one individual soul. The revision stands in tension with Tennyson’s earlier rejection of the belief “That each, who seems a separate whole,/ … should fall/Remerging in the general Soul” as a “faith as vague as all unsweet” inasmuch as it contradicts the hope “I shall know him when we meet” (47.1–8). Tennyson requires the survival of individual identities for the interpenetration of soul with soul – Hallam’s entering his and his winding itself in Hallam’s – to remain meaningful. Melville’s letters to Hawthorne and Dana reveal his hunger for fellow writers to acknowledge and reflect back to him the sense of kinship and affinity he felt with them. In Moby-Dick, Melville elaborates similar fantasies, particularly, though not exclusively, through Ishmael’s queer marriage to Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooneer who, like Hallam in In Memoriam, takes the roles of friend, twin, mother, and spouse for Ishmael. In the chapter called the “Monkey Rope,” for example, Ishmael describes the “cheerful duty” of being tied waist-to-waist to Queequeg as the latter tries not to fall off the back of a whale carcass: So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; … an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother. … So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed

The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville  185 distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two. (320) This is a “humorously perilous business” for both of them. Queequeg might easily fall and drag Ishmael with him, conjoined as they are by a rope figured as both a shared umbilical cord and the marriage tie (320). His descriptions of Queequeg slipping and sliding on the whale have a slapstick quality, as well as a winking suggestion of scopic enjoyment: “On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the Highland costume – a skirt and socks – in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage” (319). Indeed, “in his rolling and swaying,” Parker and Harrison Hayford explain, “Queequeg shows off more than his legs to the appreciative Ishmael” (255n.2). Their marriage, however, is no idle metaphor. After Queequeg declares they are married, they combine their finances, perform a ceremony of Queequeg’s religion that Ishmael decides he must join, and then lie in bed together like “[m]an and wife,” whispering secrets “in our hearts’ honeymoon … a cozy, loving pair” (52). Moreover, by repeating the metaphor of Siamese twinship from his letter to Dana, Melville recalls another moment from Plato’s Banquet, Aristophanes’s myth of the origin of love in each person’s search for the lost other half of their original, two-person body. The conjugal family Ishmael and Queequeg form together thus incorporates fantasies not only of merging, but also, as in Melville’s reading practices or Fuller’s as Dimock describes them, of discovering preexisting affinities and kinships and resemblances. The activities of whaling provide a number of similar opportunities for eroticized merger with other men. The most notorious example is Ishmael’s extended mutual-masturbation fantasy in the chapter “A Squeeze of the Hand.” Describing the task of squeezing congealed clumps of “sperm” – the liquid oil in a sperm whale’s head, so named for its resemblance to the bodily fluid – back into liquid, Ishmael writes: Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, … Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. (416) Christopher Craft quotes from “A Squeeze of the Hand” at length in perhaps the only previous scholarly comparison of In Memoriam and Moby-Dick, which appears in an extended end note to his foundational queer reading

186  Alec Magnet of Tennyson’s poem in Another Kind of Love. This scene and certain of the “Calamus” poems from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, according to Craft, “offer comic and comically displaced versions of Tennyson’s fellowship of the hand” (201n.28). Throughout In Memoriam, hands “touch,” “clasp,” “embrace,” “reach out,” and are shaken. Craft describes this pattern of images as an eroticized, “almost obsessive … concern for the human hand and … desire for a restored male touch” and connects it to what he calls “the extended trope by which Christ’s hand comes to substitute for Hallam’s own” (55). Manual touch in In Memoriam is thus something queerer than the “manly,” respectable, “and sexually innocent gestures of Victorian male homosociality” (55–56), and something more specifically erotic and involved than Tennyson’s fantasy of supernatural interpenetration and merger. Just as Ishmael’s frothy hand-squeeze fantasy ends up in heaven – “In the thoughts and visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti” (Moby-Dick 416) – so too, Craft writes, does In Memoriam identify “the ‘conclusive bliss’ of its Christological closure … as the site of a deferred but certain erotic restoration … [and] dissolving incorporation” (54, citing Tennyson 85.91). According to Craft, “pivotal differences in tact” distinguish Tennyson from Melville and Whitman, though these differences merely “serve to texturize the therefore palpable sameness that otherwise we would not be able to feel” (205n.28). Craft is most interested in the erotic implications of manual touch in Moby-Dick and In Memoriam. A wider concern with queer kinship-­ formation, however, suggests even deeper and richer parallels. Each text describes the touch of a ghostly hand not only to intimate the romantic or erotic aspects of its central queer relationship but also to explore the convolution of overlapping desires, feelings, and needs implied in accretion to each relationship of different, sometimes mutually exclusive, types of familial bonds, both real and metaphorical. Ishmael, for example, waking up from their first night in bed together and finding “Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner” (25), compares this touch to an uncanny experience, maybe real and maybe a hallucination, recalled from his childhood. His stepmother, whom he remembers often whipping him or depriving him of food, had sent him to bed at two in the afternoon on the longest day of the year, a sort of living death to the child Ishmael, who lies there “dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I could hope for a resurrection.” At some point, he feels a “supernatural hand seemed placed in mine” and, frozen in terror for longer than he could tell, he imagines the “nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom” it might belong to. Unable, back in the present time of the story, to wake Queequeg and escape his “bridegroom clasp,” the adult Ishmael feels similarly trapped. The two situations seem alike to him in their “strangeness,” but crucially, the current one lacks “the awful fear” remembered from childhood. In fact, far from entombed, this time he feels “alive to the comical predicament” and the experience ends up endearing

The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville  187 Queequeg to him further (26). Somehow, Queequeg has managed to restage this traumatic scene for Ishmael in a way that preserves its uncanniness and power but transforms its dread into humor. Part of his ability to do so derives from the fact that Ishmael has already seen him behave in a maternal or parental fashion (or perhaps has projected that role onto him), at least in relation to inanimate objects. Having already been fascinated the night before to watch Queequeg prepare a sacrifice of toasted biscuit for his little wooden idol Yojo (which looks, according to Ishmael, like a “three days’ old Congo baby” [22]), he describes Queequeg’s tomahawk pipe in the morning, “sleeping by the savage’s side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby” (27). The uncanny repetition of Ishmael’s childhood haunting is thus transformed into a sort of reparenting that begins an emotional repair of the uptight, stir-crazy, potentially suicidal Ishmael we first meet: “No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it” (51). Appropriately, the chapter after this first reparative touch is called “Breakfast,” with its apt connotations of shared awakening and nourishment (29). In Memoriam describes similar maternal and matrimonial fantasies of Hallam. Bookended, more or less, by an embrace and a handshake, S­ ection 40, for example, imagines him as a woman – still a daughter, newly a wife and mother – knitting together the generations of her family through storytelling, child-rearing, and education and the fostering of affectional bonds. The tone of loss this section expresses, however, makes it very nearly the emotional converse of the scene from Moby-Dick discussed above. It envisions Hallam in the afterlife as generative and maternal, but also as unbridgeably separate and alien from Tennyson’s speaker: And, doubtless, unto thee is given A life that bears immortal fruit In those great offices that suit The full-grown energies of heaven. ............................ But thou and I have shaken hands, Till growing winters lay me low; My paths are in the fields I know. And thine in undiscover’d lands. (40.17–32) Nevertheless, as we have seen, In Memoriam concatenates and collapses any number of different types of familial relationship together. Thus when later in the poem, for example, “from the grave/Reach out dead hands to comfort me” (80.15–16), the androgynous image of Hallam as a maternal, fruitful spirit and a bride of heaven necessarily informs the fantasy of reunion. As counterpoint to In Memoriam’s and Moby-Dick’s fantasies of reparative queer kinship, both texts employ much darker familial metaphors to express the sense they share that their cultures, and even the universe itself,

188  Alec Magnet may be unnourishing and hostile to their needs and survival. Closing with the words “another orphan,” Moby-Dick is emphatic about the literal and spiritual orphanage of its characters. Ishmael, raised by his contentious stepmother, tells us to call him by the name of the Bible’s archetypical rejected child (3). Queequeg, fearing “Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him” for the throne he was to inherit, feels exiled from home until somehow purified; meanwhile, his father has almost certainly died (56). Ahab, whose “crazy, widowed mother” died in his first year (79), slowly reveals the filial anger and desire behind his obsession with hunting Moby Dick. Late in the novel, he takes an appearance of St. Elmo’s fire to be a visit from his supernatural father with whom he can interact only through violent, destructive competition. Itself a “foundling,” the paternal fire spirit seems also Ahab’s twin and he “would fain be welded with” it. However, he accuses it of being “but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her?” (508). In this context, his explanation for the hunt itself – that killing the White Whale would be tantamount to striking through the “pasteboard mask” of visible reality and discovering the “unknown but still reasoning thing” behind – begins to sound like a particularly rage-filled family romance. The worst part for Ahab is this thing behind the mask is unknown, “inscrutable,” and thus cannot be proven to exist (164). In this last doubt, Ahab resembles Ishmael, for whom the true terror of the whiteness of the whale is that it threatens to reveal the entire universe as meaningless or even already dead and decaying (195). Similarly, Tennyson’s famous image of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (56.15) embodies In Memoriam’s condensation of personal bereavement, scientific disenchantment, and agnostic dread in the personification of an abandoning, persecuting mother. As James Eli Adams argues, the power of this image derives from the fact that it “confounds the traditional figure of Mother Nature … [which] rests in turn on an identification of woman with maternal care that is particularly insistent in Victorian discourse” (15). Her declaration “I care for nothing” (56.4), according to Adams, is “the defiant cry of a female Nature renouncing her traditional maternal function,” as one of the things to care for means “is to take care of, to nurture, particularly as one would care for a child” (15). Hence this personification of Nature not only refuses to comfort the poet-speaker as “An infant crying in the night” (54.18) but also allows or commits such violence toward life that she undermines the religious faith on which his hope of posthumous reunion with Hallam depends: “Nature, red in tooth and claw/With ravine, shriek’d against his creed” (65.15–16). Given the seemingly transgressive homoeroticism and gender slippage I have described in Tennyson’s and Melville’s writing so far, it is reasonable to ask how their depictions of eroticized queer kinship did not raise more eyebrows. Despite the homophobic criticisms of Tennyson documented by Craft (47–48) and Jeff Nunokawa (427, 432), In Memoriam became one of the central, establishment texts of Victorian culture, beloved of Queen Victoria herself. Moby-Dick was something of a flop but most reviewers had bigger

The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville  189 problems with its literary indecorum and religious impiety than with its sexual or gender dissidence, certainly more than a twentieth- or twenty-firstcentury reader would expect (Higgins and Parker xvii–xix). Two important recent articles on In Memoriam, inspired by Sharon Marcus’s revisionist reading of sexuality and gender in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, Between Women, reach different positions on this question. Marcus argues that, far from hostile or opposed to conventional domesticity, women’s same-sex and even homoerotic bonds were not only “acknowledged by” but in fact “at the heart of normative institutions and discourses” in Victorian Britain (13). Hypothesizing a similar condition for men’s same-sex bonds, Sarah Rose Cole reads In Memoriam as a development narrative in which the proliferation of familial metaphors increasingly subordinates marriage to homosocial male friendships. These friendships are not in any way transgressive but instead serve to establish and defend the poet-speaker’s ruling-class, masculine privilege. Mary Jean Corbett similarly criticizes In Memoriam’s occlusion and moralistic scolding of Emily Tennyson. But her main interest, likewise extending Marcus’s observations to include men, is in “the ways normative forms of Victorian familialism and conjugality enabled the expression and experience of homoerotic love by making a sibling’s spouse one’s own sibling” (301) and even, as I have cited above, by imagining “men may father one another’s children because they have become brothers (-inlaw) through the homosocial bonds of heterosexual marriage” (308). Rather than assimilating In Memoriam’s homoeroticism entirely into patriarchal and classist normativity, Corbett explores how the poem also makes room for a wider, more capacious variety of relationships. My perspective in this chapter is largely congruent with Corbett’s, but I depart from her and from Cole on two important points. First, for all its significant merits, I think there is a danger of overstating the revisionist force of Marcus’s arguments. In any given time and place, understandings of gender and sexuality tend to be, as Sedgwick writes, “unexpectedly plural, varied, [and] contradictory” (Epistemology 48). Indeed, they are often contentious, and depictions of same-sex love in Tennyson’s and Melville’s writings did stir up controversy. However, even to the degree these texts did not offend conventional tastes, both Moby-Dick and In Memoriam include important moments of distancing themselves from those standards. E. Anthony Rotundo has described how young men’s romantic friendships in mid-nineteenth-century America might include both physical affection and comparisons to marriage (3–6). Ishmael’s and Queequeg’s relationship, however, exceeds even the more capacious boundaries of permissible same-sex intimacy. For one thing, Queequeg is, as Ishmael so frequently and casually describes him, a “savage,” a “cannibal,” and a “heathen.” On the streets of New Bedford, their interracial affection draws the stares and jeers of “boobies and bumpkins … who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a white-washed negro” (60). For another, whereas the romantic friendships

190  Alec Magnet Rotundo describes were expected to fade as young men grew up and married women, Ishmael explicitly rejects this teleology of maturation into manhood. He explains, “by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart … the fire-side ….” He would prefer to remain in the erotically charged, homosocial world of the whaling ship instead, with its opportunities for alternative family structures and experiments in sustained intimacy between men (416). Tennyson also suggests alternatives to the developmental teleology from youthful same-sex friendship to grown-up heterosexual marriage, as in his Marlovian proposal, “O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me/No casual mistress, but a wife,/My bosom-friend and half of life” (59.1–3). Earlier he seems to endorse the telos of heterosexual marriage, but his endorsement in fact conveys, as much as anything, his ambivalence and smoldering anger about the whole institution. The section begins with the poet-speaker’s internal debate over whether to publically acknowledge the truth that “many a father …,/ A sober man, among his boys,/ … Who wears his manhood hale and green” has grown up to be a successfully conventional patriarch only because he sowed his “wild oat” during a “foolish … youth” and thereby fertilized the soil from which all his subsequent relationships then grew (53.1–8). Though he never explicitly defines this “wild oat” as a same-sex relationship, in the context of both the immediately preceding sections and the poem as a whole so far, it is difficult not to make the connection. Nunowaka, in fact, uses these two passages in particular as evidence for his claim that “In Memoriam proposes a developmental model of male sexuality which establishes the homoerotic as an early phase that enables and defines the heterosexual” (428). Moreover, the previous two sections express his fear that Hallam, returning from the afterlife, will see through not only his inadequacy (52.1–4) but also “some hidden shame” or “inner vileness” (51.7, 4). The voice of Hallam reassures him, as, presumably, does his perception of how harmless youthful folly often turns out to be. Here, however, is where the hopeful tone of these sections breaks. Surprisingly, Tennyson’s answer is no, this truth should not be publically acknowledged, “For fear divine Philosophy/Should push beyond her mark, and be/Procuress to the Lords of Hell” (14–16). The danger of sexual transgression is too great to sustain the hopeful narrative of masculine development and the generous acceptance of youthful excess it implies. The next few sections universalize this denial of hope, introducing “Nature, red in tooth and claw” as another example of how foolish it is to “trust that somehow good/Will be the final goal of ill” as a general principle (54.1-2). In this context, it is tempting to read the figure of Nature – a “Fury,” in James Eli Adams’s word (15) – as in part an embodiment of Tennyson’s own rage at the prohibition he feels against acknowledging the value of youthful oat-sowing. In Memoriam thus would seem to resist the leveling out of its queer ambivalence toward mainstream sexual values, though more elliptically than Moby-Dick.

The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville  191 Secondly, however, my argument is simply less historicist than Corbett’s or Cole’s. That is not to say my goal is to discover in these texts some inherent, trans-historical queerness, especially not of the sort that often boils down to a reflection of current queer political interest in subversion, transgression, and resistance. Instead, my concern in this chapter has been to demonstrate how these two texts, though seldom considered together, enact forms of textual, often homoerotic kinship that are expressed through comparisons with – but are still substantially different from – conventional, procreative, patriarchal family structures. They thereby demonstrate their affinity, their queer, archival, literary kinship, with each other while at the same time making themselves available to generations of queer readers who may identify not only with the homoeroticism central to both texts but especially with the reading relations they offer as models for alternative forms of nourishing, reparative, queer kinship.

Notes   1. Only one article or chapter exclusively devoted to the relationship between Tennyson and Melville has appeared so far: “Tennyson’s Maritime Influence on Melville’s John Marr” by Karen Lentz Madison. Other criticism linking the two, though not as the central focus, includes Dryden, Ford, Garner, Hutchinson, Spengemann, and Zlatic. All of these, like Madison, are relatively recent and all limit themselves to Melville’s poetry or to Billy Budd. Maxwell, on the other hand, names Moby-Dick as one of the “most suggestive links” to “The Kraken” (15), while Parker’s Biography and Melville: The Making of the Poet describe Melville’s engagement with Tennyson’s poetry beginning as early as 1838. This list is not exhaustive; it leaves out, for example, sources that compare the two only cursorily or discuss them in parallel without suggesting or t­heorizing ­connections.   2. Confusingly, Dimock and Fuller both transcribe de Staël’s name idiosyncratically. Fuller writes it “de Stael,” Dimock, “De Staël.” Nevertheless, I have replicated each writer’s spelling faithfully in quotations.   3. James Creech employs the concept of “camp recognition” to argue for the recognizable gayness of Melville’s Pierre (1852) and of Melville himself.   4. Sedgwick and Adam Frank write in their introduction to the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, “As people who fall in love with someone wish at the same time to exhibit themselves to others as being loved, we’ve also longed … to show how perfectly Tomkins understands us” (Touching Feeling 117, emphasis original).  5. There is another rich vein of overlap between Dimock and Sedgwick to be explored on the subjects of temporality, error, and hope that unfortunately falls outside the scope of my chapter. For Dimock, this relation to the dead is predicated on the inevitable incompletion and failure of individual lives, a universal condition that implies “an ethics in which error is both an obligation and a form of clemency. Obligation: because as the living members of the species we must pick up where the dead leave off, though we are bound to fall short. And clemency: because falling short is no more than what we would expect, a predictable

192  Alec Magnet outcome, forgivable for that reason, and in turn compelling future humans to act on our behalf” (66). For Sedgwick, a crucial part of reparative practices is an acceptance and even appreciation of mistakes and failure, an ability to make them, as she quotes from a personal communication from Joseph Litvak, “sexy, creative, even cognitively powerful” (Touching Feeling 147). This acceptance implies an attitude toward contingency that makes room for hope, despite the fact that hope can be “a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience” (146). The temporality in both cases is unpredictable, not necessarily linear, and at once open to and influenced by relationality, broadly conceived – with others, with texts, with the dead.  6. Significant queer readings of In Memoriam I do not cite elsewhere include Dellamora and Sinfield. Rosenberg represents an insightful counterpoint to ­ these ­readings, while Joseph provides a sensitive early reading of the poem’s homoerotics and a crucial source for Craft. Corresponding readings of Melville and Moby-Dick include Fiedler, Martin, Milder, and Crain’s “Lovers of Human Flesh.”

Works Cited Adams, James Eli. “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine in Tennyson and Darwin.” Victorian Studies 33.1 (1989): 7–27. Bersani, Leo. The Culture of Redemption. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Cole, Sarah Rose. “The Recovery of Friendship: Male Love and Developmental Narrative in Tennyson’s In Memoriam.” Victorian Poetry 50.1 (2012): 43–66. Corbett, Mary Jean. “No Second Friend?: Perpetual Maidenhood and Second Marriage in In Memoriam and ‘The Conjugal Angel.’” ELH 81.1 (2014): 299–323. Cowen, Walker. Melville’s Marginalia. 1965. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1987. Craft, Christopher. Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English ­Discourse, 1850-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Crain, Caleb. “Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville’s Novels.” American Literature 66.1 (1994): 25–53. ———. “Melville’s Secrets.” Leviathan 14.3 (2012): 6–24. Creech, James. Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Doyle, Jennifer. Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Dryden, Edgar A. Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. Rev. ed. New York: Delta-Dell, 1966. Ford, Sean. “Authors, Speakers, Readers in a Trio of Sea-Pieces in Herman Melville’s John Marr and Other Sailors.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 67.2 (2012): 234–58.

The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville  193 Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Larry J. Reynolds. New York: Norton, 1998. Garner, Stanton. The Civil War World of Herman Melville. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993. Gray, Eric. Introduction. In Memoriam. By Alfred Lord Tennyson. New York: Norton, 2004. Grey, Robin, ed. Melville and Milton: An Edition and Analysis of Melville’s Annotations on Milton. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004. Higgins, Brian and Hershel Parker, eds. Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Hutchinson, George B. “The Conflict of Patriarchy and Balanced Sexual Principles in Billy Budd.” Studies in the Novel 13.4 (1981):  388–97. Joseph, Gerhard. Tennysonian Love. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. Madison, Karen Lentz. “Tennyson’s Maritime Influence on Melville’s John Marr: An Idyll Speculation.” This Watery World: Humans and the Sea. Ed. Vartan P. Messier and Nandita Batra. Rev. ed. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 93–107. Manning, Susan. Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing. New York: Palgrave, 2002. ———. “‘Grounds for Comparison’: The Place of Style in Transatlantic Romanticism.” Wordsworth in American Literary Culture. Ed. Joel Pace and Matthew Scott. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. ———. Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters 1700-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Martin, Robert K.  Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Forms in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Maxwell, Richard. “Unnumbered Polypi.” Victorian Poetry 47.1 (2009): 7–23. Melville, Herman. Correspondence. Ed. Lynn Horth. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and Newberry, 1993. ———. “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839–1860. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and Newberry, 1987. 239–53. ———. Moby-Dick or The Whale. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and Newberry, 1986. Milder, Robert. Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine. Cary: Oxford University Press, 2006. Nunokawa, Jeff. “In Memoriam and the Extinction of the Homosexual.” ELH 58.2 (1991): 427–38. “Online Catalog of Books and Documents Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by Herman Melville.” Melville’s Marginalia Online. Ed. Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon. Ormond, Leonée. Alfred Tennyson: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1993. Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996–2002. ———. Melville: The Making of the Poet. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008.

194  Alec Magnet Parker, Hershel and Harrison Hayford, eds. Moby-Dick. By Herman Melville. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2002. Plato. The Banquet. The Works of Plato: A New and Literal Version. Trans. George Burges. Vol. 3. London: Bohn, 1850. 473–576. Rotundo, E. Anthony. “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900.” Journal of Social History 23.1 (1989): 1–25. Sealts, Merton M., Jr. Pursuing Melville 1940-1980: Chapters and Essays. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. ———. Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. ———. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Sinfield, Alan. Alfred Tennyson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Spengemann, William C. “Melville the Poet.” American Literary History 11.4 (1999): 569–609. Tennyson, Alfred. The Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Christopher Ricks. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Voloshin, Beverly R. “Parables of Creation: Hawthorne, Melville, and Plato’s Banquet.” Leviathan 13.3 (2011): 18–29. Wordsworth, William. “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802.” The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 285. Zlatic, Thomas D. “‘Horned Perplexities’: Melville’s ‘Donelson’ and Media Environments. Leviathan 13.2 (2011): 38–53.

10 The Victorian Family in Queer Time Secrets, Sisters, and Lovers in The Woman in White and Fingersmith Lauren N. Hoffer and Sarah E. Kersh

There she lay, unconscious that I was looking at her. … I waited a moment, looking at her from behind her pillow, as she lay beneath me, with one arm and hand resting on the white coverlid, so still, so quietly breathing, that the frill of her night-dress never moved – I waited, looking at her, as I have seen her thousands of times, as I shall never see her again – and then stole back to my room. My own love! Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White1 She said she could not sleep. She said she was cold. She said she would like to keep me close to her again, in case she woke up ­frightened. She said the same the next night, and the night after that. … It was ordinary at first, with Maud and me. Her dreams never ­bothered her. We slept, quite like sisters. Quite like sisters, indeed. I always wanted a sister. Sarah Waters, Fingersmith2

Each of the passages presented as epigraphs, one from Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and the other from Sarah Waters’s ­Fingersmith (2002), conceptualizes sisterhood as a dynamic that can encompass much more than the attachments and tensions conventionally associated with the sororal bond. In the first, Marian Halcombe gazes upon her half-­sister as Laura Fairlie rests on the eve of her wedding to Sir Percival Glyde. This scene, expedient evidence for the several scholars who have read the ­relationship as one infused with homoeroticism, also serves as one of many instances in which the novel seeks to establish sisterhood as a safe, ­innocent, blissful haven. Although Laura is vulnerable in this moment, “unconscious,” “beneath,” “still,” and quiet under Marian’s powerful gaze, we know she is secure and undisturbed in Marian’s love. It is Marian who is distressed in this scene, aware she “shall never see her again” in this way, for soon Laura will be someone (Lady Glyde) and something else (initiated into a h ­ eterosexual economy), a fact Marian bemoans more explicitly in another scene when she laments, “she will be his Laura instead of mine! His Laura!”(185; emphasis original). In The Woman in White, sisters are beset by the deviant behavior of men, and male characters are portrayed as ­disrupting ­important female bonds. The second of the epigraphs seems an echo of the first, but Waters’s novel – in this instance and more broadly – fleshes out the centrality of sisterly

196  Lauren N. Hoffer and Sarah E. Kersh bonds in Collins’s text. Sisterhood is a starting point, even a ­metaphor, for Maud Lilly and Sue Trinder; as Sue states, “It was o ­ rdinary at first. … Quite like sisters.” In bed with Sue, Maud’s nightmares cease, just as Laura rests comfortably with Marian nearby. However, Maud’s and Sue’s sisterhood is, even “at first,” much more physical, and desire is made explicit: “I always wanted a sister.” Sue’s concomitant lack and desire are initially cast in this more socially acceptable, familial form but it is a form that will quickly be shed. Individually, and especially when taken together, these novels challenge both nineteenth- and twenty-first century conceptions of the Victorian ­family in their representations of sisterhood as an alternative to a ­traditional, ­heteronormative nuclear family unit. The Woman in White achieves this covertly through its treatment of actual and potential sexual transgressions that result in illegitimate births and secret sisterhoods. In the familial unit at the center of Collins’s novel, half-sisters Marian, Laura, and Anne ­Catherick become the foci of a narratively complex tale insistent on doubling, fluid gender categories, illegitimate family ties, and eroticism. On the one hand, Laura’s and Anne’s sisterhood must remain a secret due to its roots in sexual misconduct; on the other, Laura’s and Marian’s sisterhood suggests ­alternative models of female intimacy. Fingersmith reappropriates the transgressive ­sister bonds embedded in Collins’s text. Because Sue and Maud are switched at birth, their familial lines are crossed and intertwined; while Waters plays on the sororal bonds in The Woman in White, she also reimagines the secret at the center of that novel. In Fingersmith, same-sex desire is made manifest. Instead of a secret, illegitimate sisterhood, the illegitimate secret is the erotic relationship between the two female protagonists. If the sisterly bonds in these novels open up possibilities for queer f­ amilial arrangements, these families are further sustained by the narrative s­ tructures of the novels themselves. Famously told from the perspective of multiple narrators over three epochs, The Woman in White disrupts a linear t­elling of the story, creating an unreliable flow of information and ­disorientation for the characters as well as for the reader. Similarly, Waters’s story is told in three distinct narrative sections by two different narrators who are ­unreliably located in time. Ultimately, same-sex desire is foregrounded at the close of Fingersmith through the reunion of its two protagonists in a scene of writing that acts not as an ending but as another narrative beginning in which Maud produces a new, queer tale about a different kind of family. Read together, The Woman in White and Fingersmith represent queer temporality wherein there is a distinct link between narrative brokenness, unreliable narrative time, and queer possibility. Maria K. Bachman writes, “Generally regarded as the first and most ­influential sensation novel, The Woman in White is, at its very center, in its margins, between the lines, and beyond its pages, obsessed with secrecy” (75). From the beginning of Collins’s novel, the curious affinity between Laura Fairlie and the titular woman in white is cause for concern and

The Victorian Family in Queer Time  197 defined as knowledge that must be concealed. Walter Hartright, Laura’s eventual ­husband and the hero of the story, responsible for uncovering most of the novel’s secrets, is the first to encounter the woman in white whom he later identifies as Anne Catherick. He is also the first to note the resemblance between Anne and Laura. In a dramatic moment of epiphany in which doubt “flashed into conviction in an instant,” Walter recognizes the “ominous ­likeness” between the two and is so alarmed he resorts to ­praying, “Let me lose the impression again, as soon as possible.” To this, Marian responds, “Let this discovery of the likeness be kept a secret between you and me” (Collins 62–63). Collins never makes explicit, here or at any point in the novel, why this fact is so chilling. The uncanny nature of the ­doubling itself and of Walter’s first encounter with Anne on the road at night, c­ oupled with the awareness Anne has escaped from an asylum, go a long way toward explaining why Walter is so disturbed, but are these sufficient explanations for his reactions? And what of Marian’s immediate impulse to keep this ­discovery private? Perhaps Walter and Marian begin to suspect on some level, even in these first moments, the reason for such a striking r­ esemblance; perhaps their horror is due to the implication of sexual indiscretion ­suggested by such a likeness. To read the scene in this way gives new meaning to Walter’s comment that the newfound association between Laura and Anne “seems like casting a shadow” on Laura’s future. Anne’s very existence now implies familial betrayal, shame, and disgrace. For this reason, then, the resemblance and the possibility of a latent ­sisterhood must be kept a secret and the sin of Laura’s and Anne’s father must remain hidden. The same physical manifestations that lead to Walter’s and Marian’s ­discovery also make keeping the secret of Laura’s and Anne’s blood relation impossible. The link between Anne and Laura is registered on their ­bodies. Their striking physical resemblance, described by Laura’s own mother as “the living likeness in her hair, her complexion, the colour of her eyes, and the shape of her face,” inspires Count Fosco’s plan to switch one for the other (62). The girls share affective traits as well, such as an identical sickly look when they have been through “sorrow and suffering,” “a nervous uncertainty about the lips” (97), and the anxious tick of playing with their fingers when they are distressed (142). Anne is viewed as simple-minded and Laura is repeatedly referred to as simple in terms of her girlish innocence and naiveté. Their remarkable similarity ensures the blood bond between them cannot go undiscovered. Effectively, their bodies operate as the writing on the wall. The kinship between Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick is one of The Woman in White’s central secrets, and it is colored by several shades of irony in terms of its connection to the novel’s other mysteries. Anne is the product of Mrs Catherick’s illicit affair with Sir Philip Fairlie before he weds Marian Halcombe’s mother, a marriage that results in Laura Fairlie’s birth. While Anne’s parentage ties her to Laura, the illegitimacy of her birth aligns her with Laura’s husband Sir Percival Glyde, who uses the resemblance

198  Lauren N. Hoffer and Sarah E. Kersh that marks this hidden sisterhood as part of a larger ploy to hide his own ­illegitimacy. It is Sir Percival’s manipulation of this likeness, however, that precipitates the revelation of several related secrets we may imagine would otherwise have remained undisclosed: the sisters’ true r­ elation to one another, his own s­candalous birth, and usurpation of the family fortune, and even Fosco’s and Pesca’s membership in the Italian secret society. It is the secret, ­illegitimate sisterhood at the core of The Woman in White that drives the plot and unravels its enigmas. Thus the novel suggests ­unsanctioned ­sexuality, as exemplified by the extramarital affairs of Anne’s and Sir ­Percival’s parents, respectively, is the secret that above all others must, and yet never can, be concealed. Anne struggles to reveal a secret she does not actually know, the sexual misconduct of Sir Percival’s parents, as she simultaneously embodies another, the sexual indiscretions of her own parents. Anne, in fact, is the secret. Sir Percival spends the novel trying to hide his family’s sexual shame and his own subsequent crimes only to reveal them as a direct result of these machinations. In The Woman in White, the truth will out and this exposure of illicit sexuality leaves destruction in its wake. In contrast, the bond between the legitimate half-sisters Laura and ­Marian is defined not in terms of likeness but difference. Marian and Laura could not look less related, nor could their circumstances be more dissimilar. As Marian tells Walter: Except that we are both orphans, we are in every respect as unlike each other as possible. My father was a poor man, and Miss Fairlie’s father was a rich man. I have got nothing, and she has a fortune. I am dark and ugly, and she is fair and pretty. Everybody thinks me crabbed and odd (with perfect justice); and everybody thinks her sweet-tempered and charming (with more justice still). (37) Whereas Laura’s kinship with Anne is inevitably apparent in their physique and mannerisms, her relation to Marian is belied by these same external details. Even in those circumstances under their control, such as dress, the two are diametrically at odds. While Marian dresses richly despite her ­relative poverty, Laura insists upon a “plain white muslin” in deference to her less fortunate companions (56). Nevertheless, these sisters are more or less inextricably linked. No sooner does Marian introduce herself to ­Walter than she explains her relationship with Laura to him: “My mother was twice married: the first time to Mr. Halcombe, my father; the second time to Mr. Fairlie, my half-sister’s father. … I won’t live without her, and she can’t live without me” (37). While Marian represents herself as the more ­independent of the two – she “won’t live without” Laura whereas Laura “can’t live without” Marian – Collins suggests their bond is so intense that an introduction of one must be accompanied by the introduction of the other. Marian further reinforces this idea when she warns, “You must please both of us, Mr. Hartright, or please neither of us” (37). These sisters are not of one appearance but of one mind or heart.3

The Victorian Family in Queer Time  199 If the illegitimate sisterhood is made inescapably manifest by c­ orporeal, empirical evidence, while the legitimate one is obscured by the same ­criteria, it is in the space between that Collins is able to hint at another kind of ­sisterly bond. By obfuscating Laura’s and Marian’s blood relation, the novel allows room for a slightly different understanding of the women’s ­feelings for one another. The eroticism seemingly beneath the surface of the ­sisters’ relationship has been well excavated by scholars.4 The ­potential for this ­element of Laura’s and Marian’s relationship can be seen as located in the particular episodes in which the sisters are accused of keeping secrets between themselves. Each of these passages notably involves Laura and Marian in confidence with one another to the explicit exclusion of the male characters around them, suggesting there is something about their bond that denies access to men. In the first epoch, for example, the lawyer Mr ­Gilmore suspects “Miss Halcombe and Miss Fairlie had a secret between them which they were keeping from Sir Percival and keeping from me. I thought this hard on both of us – especially on Sir Percival” (140). Later, Sir Percival himself threatens, “I’ll have your secret out of you; and I’ll have it out of that sister of yours, as well. There shall be no more plotting and whispering between you” (299–300). Both of these quotations represent the intimacy between the sisters as threatening to a male figure who in turn threatens to interpose himself between them. On some level, both Gilmore and Sir ­Percival ­perceive the secret kept by Laura and Marian interferes with ­Laura’s relationship with her husband. In the most significant of these instances, Marian writes of Laura’s impending sexual initiation in marriage in terms of the secrets they share: I was obliged to tell her that no man tolerates a rival – not even a woman rival – in his wife’s affections. … I was obliged to warn her, that my chance of living with her permanently under her own roof, depended entirely on not arousing Sir Percival’s jealousy and distrust by standing between them at the beginning of their marriage, in the position of the chosen depository of his wife’s closest secrets. Drop by drop, I poured the profaning bitterness of this world’s wisdom into that pure heart and that innocent mind, while every higher and better feeling within me recoiled from my miserable task. It is over now. She has learnt her hard, her inevitable lesson. The simple illusions of her girlhood are gone; and my hand has stripped them off. Better mine than his – that is all my consolation – better mine than his. (185–86) Here, Marian characterizes herself as Sir Percival’s rival because she is the “chosen depository” of Laura’s “closest secrets.” It is this fact she states ­situates her “between” husband and wife, breeding “jealousy and distrust.” Thus the intimacy between the women not only harbors secrets, it is a “secret” in its absolute inaccessibility to the men in the novel. They can neither experience nor breach it. Therefore, the women’s bond interrupts heterosexual relations in the text. The harsh reality, with all its “profaning

200  Lauren N. Hoffer and Sarah E. Kersh bitterness” into which Marian initiates Laura, is one in which an i­ntimacy such as theirs is impossible to reconcile with the social imperatives of heterosexual ­ ­ marriage. According to “this world’s wisdom,” this is the “inevitable lesson” that must be learned. The Woman in White is a novel replete with secrets. With the e­ xception of Count Fosco’s and Pesca’s membership in the Italian secret s­ociety, all these secrets pertain in one way or another to desire and to sex: ­Walter’s and ­ Laura’s secret feelings for one another, the secret, i­llegitimate birth of Sir  ­Percival Glyde, and the secret affair between Mr Fairlie and Mrs  ­ Catherick. These are secrets that are revealed explicitly over the course of the novel. The one secret that is not divulged, but is everywhere ­apparent in Collins’s text, is the ­presence of a homoerotic dimension to Marian’s and Laura’s ­relationship. While the two sisters go so far as to attempt to have their relationship made legally binding,5 the potential for a ­fulfilling life spent in exclusive p ­ artnership with one another does not appear ­possible within the world they inhabit; nor is it even necessarily preferable due to both w ­ omen’s ­investments in ­Walter. Each of the sisters verbalizes an ­anxiety about ­marriage interfering with their bond. Laura, in reference to her impending marriage to Glyde, reminds Marian “All your love and ­courage and ­devotion will not alter what must happen, sooner or later,” and ­Marian, in the same ­conversation, exclaims, “Men! They are the enemies of our ­innocence and our peace – they drag us away from our parents’ love and our sisters’ ­friendship!” (181). At this point in the novel, neither sister can i­magine a future in which they are free to maintain their desired level of i­ntimacy. Marriage must i­nterrupt it. H ­ owever, by the end of the novel, it is clear Walter, as opposed to Sir ­Percival, offers a version of ­ heteronormativity that accommodates the s­isters’ bond. Successfully ­navigating Marian’s imperative in their initial meeting that he “must please both of us … or please neither of us,” Walter accepts Laura’s attachment to Marian as ­central to her identity and annexes that ­relationship onto his marriage with Laura.6 The marriage between Walter and Laura depends on maintaining the ­relationship between the sisters, and thus Collins’s text ­suggests there are possible alternatives to those men who “drag” women away from one another. The Woman in White concludes not with the ­normative ­heterosexual marriage of Laura and Walter but with a vision of the family that equally values the relationships between Laura, Walter, and Marian but still allows for the heterosexual reproduction of the family line. Waters’s Fingersmith, on the other hand, dismantles the ­heteroreproductive plot, opening up a space for something beyond it. While much has been made of Fingersmith as a revision of Oliver Twist, Waters herself has cited the sensation novels of the mid-nineteenth century as inspiration for the narratively sly tale.7 As she says in a 2002 interview with The Guardian, “Fingersmith is a pastiche of the whole sensation genre, a gothic melodrama like Wilkie Collins [there are clear parallels with The Woman in White] and Mary Elizabeth Braddon – fantastic novels that

The Victorian Family in Queer Time  201 spiral out of control and are often quite transgressive, if only in the way they destabilise the reader” (Moss). The novel draws on The Woman in White’s storyline of locking up a young woman in an asylum in order to steal her fortune. In Fingersmith, Sue Trinder, a young girl raised by the baby-farming Mrs Sucksby, agrees to take part in a scam with the villain Richard Rivers. Sue is to become the maid of Maud Lilly, a young woman of great fortune who is isolated from the world by her uncle, and through this position will work to convince Maud to marry Richard. At the close of Part One, it is Sue whom Maud and Richard dupe. The two lock her up in an asylum under Maud’s name/identity so they may draw Maud’s ­fortune and escape the grasp of her pornography-peddling uncle. Both Collins’s and Waters’s pecuniary plots require a “double” for the heiress, and both appear under the guise of a heterosexual marriage to an unscrupulous ­gentleman. While Fingersmith draws on The Woman in White, it also reimagines the plot and characters in multiple ways. Waters conflates, for example, aspects of ­Collins’s ­Walter Hartright, Count Fosco, and Sir Percival Glyde into the ­singular male ­villain Richard Rivers.8 Fingersmith also revises and ­re-genders Collins’s ­plotline of questionable fathers and extramarital affairs in favor of ­problematic ­mothers and infants swapped at birth. More ­significantly, notions of k ­ inship in The Woman in White are redrawn in Fingersmith as a family of ­half-sisters is replaced by a family of thieves, and the novel ­ultimately opts for the e­ xclusive same-sex union of two women rather than the heterosexual reconciliation of Laura, Walter, and Marian. As in Collins’s text, the relationship between the two female ­protagonists is associated with secrets. Sue and Maud’s first sexual encounter, narrated in Part One by Sue, hinges on an unspoken secret between the two. Maud begins to make a request and pauses; Sue, delighted at the prospect of revealing the “truth” about her plan to swindle Maud, is disappointed by the actual secret Maud wishes to learn: ‘Sue,’ she said, ‘I wish you would tell me –’ Tell me the truth, I thought she was about to say; and my own heart beat like hers, I began to sweat. I thought, ‘She knows. She has guessed!’ – I almost thought, Thank God! But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all. (146; emphasis original) Sue’s feelings for Maud have become complicated, and in this moment she hopes Maud has figured out Richard’s plan to swindle her. However, we soon learn Maud is referring to the secret of what “it is a wife must do, on her wedding night” (146). The sexual “education” in which Maud and Sue engage following this conversation forms a striking parallel to the scene cited earlier from The Woman in White in which Marian schools Laura on the realities of marriage. While Marian deflowers Laura’s “pure heart and ­innocent mind” by inculcating the “inevitable lesson” that their own ­intimacy must be compromised to make

202  Lauren N. Hoffer and Sarah E. Kersh way for Laura’s marital relationship, Waters’s revision makes this moment overtly sexual by representing it in terms of a climactic union for her heroines. The suggestive language in C ­ ollins’s text when Marian states, “my hand has stripped” Laura of the “simple illusions of her girlhood” is echoed and then transformed in Sue’s description of her bringing Maud to orgasm: “It was like I was calling the heat and shape of her out of the darkness – as if the darkness was turning solid and growing quick, under my hand” (Waters 150). Whereas Sir Percival haunts the scene of education in The Woman in White as Marian repeats “better mine than his,” Sue is able to abandon (at least temporarily) any thought of Maud’s intended husband in Fingersmith: “I thought I must show her how to do it, or her fear would spoil our plot. So, I kissed her again. Then I touched her. … I forgot to think of [Richard], after that. I thought only of her” (Collins 186; Waters 150). In the retelling of the same sex scene in Part Two of Fingersmith, this time from Maud’s point of view, the secret of desire and the secret of the con are overlaid. Maud knows Sue is out to swindle her but Sue does not know Maud knows. Moreover, Maud knows what a “wife must do” because of her work on her uncle’s collection of pornography, but nonetheless plays the innocent in order to seduce Sue. In the first part of the novel, Waters coyly suggests lesbian desire can be rationalized, at least by Sue, through a ­heteroreproductive narrative in which one woman educates another about heterosexuality. Lesbian desire is displaced by the necessity of learning “what a wife must do.” When the scene is replayed with Maud as the n ­ arrator, it becomes clear Maud needs no education, and the relationship between the two heroines is conveyed in a more autonomous way with almost no ­reference to the heterosexual swindle plot. It is precisely this narrative structure, which revisits the same scene through two distinct points of view, which allows Waters to play with and ultimately dismantle the heteroreproductive marriage plot of The Woman in White. This formal construction, in which the plot does not move ­teleologically, is borrowed from Collins and was part of his novelistic experiment. In the Preface to the 1860 edition, Collins addresses the form of his novel: An experiment is attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction. … If the execution of this idea had led to nothing more than the ­attainment of mere novelty of form, I should not have claimed a moment’s ­attention for it in this place. But the substance of the book, as well as the form, has profited by it. It has forced me to keep the story constantly moving forward; and it has afforded my characters a new opportunity of expressing themselves, through the medium of the written contributions which they are supposed to make to the progress of the narrative. (3) Collins emphasizes his usual narrative is not merely for “novelty of form” but that these individual narratives “keep the story constantly moving forward.”

The Victorian Family in Queer Time  203 His choice of “forward,” however, is problematic, for the n ­ arratives are ­anything but linear in their progression. As we move from story to story within the epochs, we move backward and forward in time, sometimes ­revisiting the same period of time from several distinct points of view, thereby gathering separate, simultaneous experiences of events. Through his “experiment,” Collins’s form opens up a space for q ­ uestioning and ­disrupting readers’ preconceived ideas about novelistic form, particularly in terms of “the progress of [a] narrative.” Fingersmith takes up this ­narrative experiment, revisiting the same scene of sexual education to underscore that what, on first reading, seems to be in the service of heteroreproductive ­plotlines is emphatically not. By refusing to unfold in a linear progression, The Woman in White’s innovative form engages queer time. Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer ­ Time and Place locates courtship and marriage narratives at the center of ­normative temporality. A normative telos is charted by marriage and ­reproduction while non-normative temporality – what Halberstam calls “queer time”– disrupts this progression: ‘queer’ refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of ­community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time. ‘Queer time’ is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of ­bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and ­inheritance. (6) Queerness disrupts a normative notion of time that is constructed or marked out by a series of heteronormative events, specifically marriage. Hence queer time has the potential to “produce alternative temporalities” because the future “can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those ­paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (2). Halberstam suggests the “imagined” is a ­ ­possible site of intervention through aesthetic means, and those ­imaginations are by their own terms political; they resist and reframe normative social standards and understandings of kinship/family, community, and legacy. Within The Woman in White, there is a great deal of anxiety r­ egarding time and how it functions. Both the plot to switch Laura’s and Anne’s ­identities as well the endeavor of returning Laura to her rightful social ­position depend upon dates. Characters within the story strive to make sense of events in terms of a traditional, linear understanding of time only to find this fails them. In the third epoch, for example, when Walter writes of Anne’s and Laura’s father, Mr Fairlie, and his affair with Anne’s mother, he states: ‘The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.’ But for the fatal resemblance between the two daughters of one father, the ­conspiracy of which Anne had been the innocent instrument and Laura the ­innocent victim, could never have been planned. With what unerring

204  Lauren N. Hoffer and Sarah E. Kersh and terrible directness the long chain of circumstances led down from the thoughtless wrong committed by the father to the heartless injury inflicted on the child! (554–55) That affair and the resulting child, he posits, is what brought doom to the Fairlie half-sisters with “unerring and terrible directness.” What ­ ­ Walter attempts to assert is the power of heteronormative time. His i­nterest in “the sins of the father” fall under what Elizabeth Freeman calls “­heteroreproductive lines”; past indiscretions must be read as predictive of future events in order to make sense of the property rights his son will, at the conclusion of the novel, inherit.9 However, Walter’s explanation of time is not representative of the novel’s; there is no “terrible directness” to be found in the narrative structure of The Woman in White. The sensation novel depends upon the suspense it creates through circuitous plotting, and the characters within it must conceive of another way to understand time as well.10 In other moments, Walter and other characters appear to sense the ­possibilities for alternative modes of temporality. In the first epoch, ­Walter notes,  “One farewell look; and the door had closed upon her – the great gulf of separation had opened between us – the image of Laura Fairlie was a memory of the past already” (126). Walter clearly writes from a ­retrospective standpoint in this scene, as indicated by his statement Laura “was a ­memory,” yet, he strives to re-embody, as it were, this lost present. In doing so, time folds in on itself as the past becomes the present only to become the past in an instant – she is a memory “already” before they have even parted and because, from the narratorial standpoint, they had parted. Although we know, by midway through the novel, they have also been reunited, we also understand it is a much different Laura who Walter marries. In this scene, it is to the “image” of Laura to which Walter refers, a Laura that is ideal, virginal. In her journal, Marian conveys a similar a­ wareness of time in terms of her relationship with Laura when she writes, “It is strange to look back at this last entry in my journal, and to find that I am writing of the marriage and parting with Laura, as people write of a settled thing. It seems so cold and so unfeeling to be looking to the future already in this cruelly composed way. But what other way is possible, now that the time is drawing so near?” (185). Marian engages with past, present, and future all at once, layering each upon the other. She must “look back” to reconsider a present in which the “future” seems “already” upon her and her sister, and all the while, “the time is drawing so near.” Each of these moments, p ­ ertaining as they do to the complex relationships within the novel, show the way the queer time of ­Collins’s novel allows for a logic that lies “outside” of the paradigmatic markers of the Victorian novel: family, marriage, money. The narrative structure of The Woman in White engages queer time in order to create a text in which secrets, especially the secrets held between ­Marian and Laura and Anne, can drive the plot.11 The novel’s non-normative ­structure replicates the non-normative sisterhoods at its center.

The Victorian Family in Queer Time  205 Just as Fingersmith revises much of Collins’s plot, it also draws heavily on aspects of its narrative structure. The Woman in White’s three epochs and short narratives by a number of characters are replicated in ­Fingersmith. Also divided into three parts, Waters’s novel likewise changes point of view with each break. The novel opens with Sue as our first-person narrator, moves to Maud in Part Two, and ends with Sue again. Parts One and Two depict the same set of events from these two radically different perspectives; however, both Sue and Maud’s narratives are composed, like Walter’s, at some later, unknown moment in time. Fingersmith offers alternative modes of temporality from the beginning, opening the novel with: “My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder. … I believe I am an orphan” (3). “Susan Trinder” and “those days” are suspect; as readers we do not know when those days ended and what became of Sue Trinder. Moreover, Sue’s syntax of “I believe I am an orphan” is set ambiguously in time, gesturing to the fact she is an unreliable narrator and underscoring that what she “believes” and what readers believe will soon change dramatically. Much like Walter and Marian in The Woman in White, Sue’s opening layers past, present, and future in its syntactical construction. In another, similar moment midway through Part One, Sue recalls, “We were thinking of secrets. Real secrets, and snide. Too many to count. When I try now to sort out who knew what and who knew nothing, who knew everything and who was a fraud, I have to stop and give up, it makes my head spin” (117). Again, the narrative is written in the voice of a future Sue looking back on the scene. She is retelling the story but from an unknown position within it so as not to give away any of its many secrets. Readers do not yet know the extent to which the layers of secrets overlap and how deeply the lies are intertwined. Waters’s syntax ­emphasizes the deeply ­complex layers of plot by refusing parallel structure. “Who knew what and who knew nothing, who knew everything and who was a fraud” suggests binaristic thought – fraudulent/innocent and everything/nothing – but it does not produce binaries on the sentence level. In Sue’s sentence there are no neat binaries and, as the story progresses, the reader finds the secrets do not fall within a simple who knows/who does not know p ­ aradigm. When the reader encounters Sue’s passage where she is “thinking of secrets … too many to count,” there are already at least three schemes in play: Sue and Richard’s plan to lock Maud up and take her money is in turn part of the cover story for Maud and Richard’s plan to lock Sue in the a­ sylum, thereby ensuring Maud’s freedom from her uncle. Both of these plots are, h ­ owever, only aspects of the even more elaborate scheme that began with Mrs Sucksby and the deceased Marianne Lilly almost eighteen years before the ­narrative begins. In that scheme, two mothers agreed to swap their babies – our ­protagonists – each hoping to save her daughter from the p ­ erils of p ­ overty (Maud) or an abusive uncle (Sue). Ultimately, however, the novel’s most significant secret is the one the narrator Sue knows but which the character Sue has not yet experienced and that none of the characters planned for: the lesbian relationship between Maud and Sue and the new family they create together.

206  Lauren N. Hoffer and Sarah E. Kersh Fingersmith’s ending, when examined alongside that of The Woman in White, is a particularly rich site for understanding the significance of secrets, family, and queerness in these novels. Concerned with family not just in the past and present but for the future as well, both texts culminate with the main characters rightfully inheriting estates that were almost lost to ­villainous swindlers. When Sue finally returns to Briar estate at the end of the novel as the heir of the late Mr Lilly, time has, in the form of the Briar clock, come to a halt: “The stable doors were open, the horses gone. The great white clock was there, but the hands – this shocked me, more than anything – the hands were stuck, the hour was wrong. The clock had not chimed, all the time I had walked: it was that, I think, that had made the silence so strange” (573). The “strangeness” of the scene and the “stuck” hands of the clock signal the queer time Sue and Maud have entered. No longer is the rule of Mr Lilly governing their interactions; they are in new ­territory.12 Maud has already returned to Briar and Sue finds her in the library, writing what she soon reveals is a story of lesbian desire. Referring to Mr Lilly’s ­collection of ­pornographic works in the library, Sue exclaims, “You are w ­ riting books like this!” (581). Maud asserts she is, she is good at it, and she can make money selling such stories. The novel concludes with Maud showing a receptive Sue her latest work, “the words she had written, one by one,” containing, Maud says, “all the words for how I want you” (582). While some critics have suggested Waters’s ending serves to ­reintegrate the two women into the heterosexual economy through the production of pornography for a mainly male audience, the scene looks remarkably different when juxtaposed with The Woman in White, which also ends with the inheritance of the family estate and a scene of writing.13 In the closing pages of Collins’s novel, we learn Walter and Laura have had a son and he is the heir to the Limmeridge estate previously ­occupied by Laura’s uncle Mr Fairlie. This final section is notably composed at ­Limmeridge as the new family – Walter, Laura, Marian, and little Walter – have returned as the property’s rightful owners. Walter closes the narrative stating, “In writing those last words, I have written all. The pen falters in my hand; the long, happy labour of many months is over! Marian was the good angel of our lives – let Marian end our story. THE END” (627). Walter and Marian resolutely conclude the narrative, offering the telos the novel had suggested in its opening pages of “the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve” (9). Simultaneously acknowledging her integral role in the family and in the creation of the narrative itself, Walter defers to Marian when his pen “falters” and so it is with her words in mind that the novel is completed. Throughout the text, it is Marian’s diary, kept as a record of her own experiences, to which Walter returns for the purposes of his own story and it is from her diary that a number of salient locations and identities are discovered. Because of this, we should hardly be surprised he gives Marian “the last word.” However, while Walter suggests Marian closes the tale, it is in actuality his voice and his pen

The Victorian Family in Queer Time  207 that compose the conclusion. Marian is not the author here, and the text is finalized in the repetition of “end”: “… end our story. The End.” Even while Marian’s presence at the end of The Woman in White suggests sisterhood has withstood the traditional, heteronormative nuclear family unit and she and Laura have achieved their desire to never be parted, the novel grants narrative control to Walter and – with the marriage of Laura and Walter, the production of a child, and the inheritance of the family estate – the novel decisively closes with a more-or-less conventional heteroreproductive resolution. Unlike The Woman in White, Fingersmith circumvents a traditional ­conclusion by refusing to end at all. In the trajectory of Waters’s novel, Sue narrates the first and last part, while Maud narrates the middle. In this way we can read Maud’s latest story as the beginning of a new section of the novel, the next one to be added from her point of view. Alternatively, because the narrators of Fingersmith are located unreliably in time, Maud’s new story may in fact be the beginning of the novel we have just read.14 The tale of two women out to swindle one another only to end up falling in love might be one of the new sensational pieces Maud is in the act of ­composing. As Cora Kaplan points out, the title Fingersmith “cleverly [condenses] a slang reference to Victorian thieves, to writing as labour, and theft, and to sex” (52). What is important is Maud as author does not end the novel as Walter does. Instead of a telos, we are offered a new narrative of female desire – “all the words for how I want you” – and the suggestion there are many more narratives to come. The secret sisterhoods and their revisions in both novels provide the ­central challenge to the heteronormative Victorian family. Queer ­families and queer time intersect at the ends of these novels. While Collins’s e­nding closes the story, the future of Marian, Laura, and Walter’s new f­ amily is secured through the son Laura and Walter produce. Maud and Sue also “­reproduce” at the end of Waters’s novel; however, they are located u ­ nreliably in time and their family lineage is not based on children but instead on more ­stories, more tales, more narratives of secrets and desire. Waters’s c­ ontemporary novel does not look to “out” same-sex desire within The Woman in White although, as we have seen, illicit desire is present ­throughout much of that earlier text. Instead, a useful way to read the ­relationship between ­Collins’s and Waters’s novels is in terms of Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of “­erotohistoriography.” Erotohistoriography establishes a genealogy of the past that “capture[s] the centrality of pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, in queer practices of encountering and documenting the past” (xxiii). As a part of Fingersmith’s erotohistoriography, The Woman in White links secrets, sororal bonds, and tales of sexual indiscretion with a narrative form that moves through time in a nonlinear fashion. Fingersmith’s final image of a reunited Sue and Maud engaged together in reading and ­writing ­highlights the “centrality … of ­sexual pleasure” and legitimizes desire. Waters’s neo-Victorian novel borrows Collins’s narrative form but shifts the secrets of his text to produce a revised, queer family.

208  Lauren N. Hoffer and Sarah E. Kersh Notes   1. Collins (194).   2. Waters (94-95).  3. Insightful work by Sarah Annes Brown and Michael Cohen on sororal ­relationships in The Woman in White, as well as their broader scholarship on nineteenth-century sisterhoods, provided important foundations for this argument. Additionally, Leila Silvana May’s claims regarding the “strange ­ ­family” in Collins’s novel were particularly useful.  4. Laurel Erikson argues it is “difficult for any reader to deny the homoerotic tension between Marian Halcombe and her half-sister, Laura” (103). She ­ ­suggests Marian is an “odd woman” whose “swarthy” face and moustache are a marker of her queerness; furthermore, “as an odd woman, Marian escapes the familiar role of the single-young-woman-trapped-in-the-body-of-a-marriage plot. She is allowed instead to circulate in a narrative space that has not already been defined for her” (98,100). Carolyn Dever likewise asserts, “The union of Laura and Marian is the novel’s most fully realised ‘marriage’, if we consider marriage a union based on emotional depth, mutual trust, and the presumption of permanence. … Walter and Laura enter a marriage anchored by its essential bisexuality. Providing a masculine companion for Walter and a feminine one for Laura, Marian is a full partner in this marriage of three” (114).  5. Ardel Haefele-Thomas suggests, “In asking Gilmore to write into law that ­Marian must live with [Laura] after her marriage to Percival, she is basically asking that she and Marian also have a legal and binding contract to be with one another – a contract not unlike marriage” (21).  6. In Between Women, Sharon Marcus argues for the existence of bonds between women even within a marriage plot. In other words, the existence of the ­marriage plot between Walter and Laura does not necessarily negate the r­elationship between Marian and Laura: “nineteenth-century authors openly represented relationships between women that involved friendship, desire, and marriage. … Critics intent on restoring lesbian desire to fiction have asserted that the m ­ arriage plot puts an end to all same-sex bonds – but Victorian marriage plots depend on maintaining bonds of friendship between women” (75).   7. Barbara Schaff writes, “Not only does the heroine Sue Trinder’s a­ utobiographical account begin with a visit to a stage version of Oliver Twist as her first ­memory, but the ensuing plot is grounded in a Dickensian social context of thieves, ­forgers, pickpockets and imposters” (66). See also Chialant (49–50).   8. As a drawing master, Richard Rivers recalls Collins’s Walter Hartright. He is also, however, masquerading under a false birthright and, at times, ­physically violent like Sir Perceival Glyde. Additionally, he is positioned in the first half of the novel as the criminal mastermind behind the events, which aligns him with Count Fosco. An argument could further be made linking Rivers’s ­suggested homosexuality with Count Fosco’s unusual appetites and Laura’s uncle, ­Frederick Fairlie’s, continually emphasized effeminacy.  9. Freeman explains it thus: “the past seems useless unless it predicts and becomes material for a future. These teleologies of living, in turn, structure the logic of a ‘people’s’ inheritance: rather than just the transfer of private property along ­heteroreproductive lines, inheritance becomes the familial and ­collective ­legacy from which a group will draw a properly political future – be it national, ethnic, or something else” (5; emphasis original).

The Victorian Family in Queer Time  209 10. Ardel Haefele-Thomas also reads The Woman in White using Halberstam as her critical interlocutor (13); however, Haefele-Thomas points to Marian’s journal as the “only factual [record] of exact time.” She locates the journal as central to the discussion of queer time saying, “through her [Marian’s] diary and through her control of time, Marian does not so much oppose these familial institutions as actually reconceptualize and reconstruct the definition of ‘family’ outside of rigid biological and matrimonial constructions of family” (14). 11. Richard Nemesvari’s reading of homosexuality and xenophobia in the novel is useful here. He suggests “The Woman in White, like most sensation fiction, is structured so as to create in the reader a frisson of shared dread through its plots and characters. It is perfectly positioned to generate anxieties that it can then alleviate by imposing resolutions that, at best, only partly disguise the ideological imperatives behind them.” These “containment strategies,” he says, ultimately fail because “finally, in [the novel’s] nervous acknowledgement of secrets that cannot fully be named, it reveals what it is trying to hide and foreshadows the collapse of the authority that it is struggling so hard to create” (107). 12. Hands, particularly the white-gloved hands of Maud, are a repeated trope in the novel and often a site of sensuality. The white hands of the clock, another nod to the gloved hands, no longer follow the same track, signaling a shift in the representation of desire in the novel. In the following scene, Sue finds Maud writing without her gloves and her hands stained with ink. 13. Helen Davies has suggested this moment’s “liberatory potential” is curtailed because “the critical reader who is familiar with the controversies surrounding women and the history of pornography will know that there is no record of women such as Maud.” Moreover, she suggests Waters “comes perilously close to being recited as an instrument of the very patriarchal script it attempts to rearticulate” (161, 162). 14. At the outset of the novel, Sue Trinder is illiterate, and her illiteracy becomes a central reason for her continued imprisonment in the asylum. Because the Sue of the narrative is illiterate but the tale is rendered in her voice as first-person narrator, we assume at some future point Maud has taught her to read and write. At the very least, Maud has transcribed Sue’s tale, making her complicit in the telling of new tales of desire between women.

Works Cited Bachman, Maria K. “Concealing Minds and the Case of The Woman in White.”  ­Victorian Secrecy: Economies of Knowledge and Concealment. Ed. Albert D. Pionke and Denise Tischler Millstein. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. 75–94. Brown, Sarah Annes. Devoted Sisters: Representations of The Sister Relationship In Nineteenth-Century British And American Literature. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.  Chialant, Maria Teresa. “Dickensian Resonances in the Contemporary English Novel.” Dickens Quarterly 28.1 (2011): 41–51. Cohen, Michael. Sisters: Relation and Rescue in Nineteenth-century British Novels and Paintings. Hackensack: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Davies, Helen. Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

210  Lauren N. Hoffer and Sarah E. Kersh Dever, Carolyn. “The Marriage Plot and Its Alternatives.” The Cambridge ­Companion to Wilkie Collins. Ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 112–24. Erickson, Laurel. “‘In Short, She Is An Angel; And I Am–’: Odd Women And ­Same-Sex Desire in Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White.” Foreign Woman in British Literature (1999): 95–116.  Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Haefele-Thomas, Ardel. Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing ­Monstrosity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Kaplan, Cora. “Fingersmith’s Coda: Feminism and Victorian Studies.” Journal of Victorian Culture 1 (2008): 42–55. May, Leila Silvana. Disorderly Sisters: Sibling Relations and Sororal Resistance in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Moss, Stephen. “Hot Waters: An Interview with Sarah Waters.” The Guardian. 25 September 2002. Web. Accessed 16 March 2014. Nemesvari, Richard. “The Mark of the Brotherhood: Homosexual Panic and the Foreign Other in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.” Straight Writ Queer: Non-Normative Expressions of Heterosexuality in Literature. Ed. Richard ­Fantina. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. 95–108. Schaff, Barbara. “On Not Being Mrs. Browning: The Revisionist Feminism of Sarah Waters’s Neo-Victorian Trilogy.” Anglistik 24.1 (2013): 63–75. Waters, Sarah. Fingersmith. New York: Riverhead Books, 2002.

Contributors

Ellen Brinks is a Professor of English at Colorado State University. Her research explores the cultural context of gender and sexuality and the tensions between individual and social expressions of identity. She is the author of Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920 (2013) and Gothic Masculinity: Effeminacy and the Supernatural in English and German Romanticism (2003). In addition, she has also published ­numerous essays, including articles on women and seventeenth-century cartography, the intersection of economics and sexuality in contemporary film, the presence of the aesthetic in Winnicottian object relations theory, and gothic representation and traumatic history. Duc Dau is an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellow in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. She is the author of Touching God: Hopkins and Love (2012), and has published in such journals as Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry, Religion and Literature, and Literature and Theology. She is currently writing a book on the influence of the Song of Songs in Victorian literature and culture. Monica Flegel is Associate Professor of English at Lakehead U ­ niversity. Her research focuses primarily on cultural studies in the Victorian period. She is the author of Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England (2009), and has published articles in Victorian ­Periodicals Review, Victorian Review, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, and Victorian ­Literature and Culture. Her forthcoming book, Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture (2015), was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and addresses the role of the domestic pet in supporting and challenging Victorian familial ideology. Lauren N. Hoffer is Assistant Professor of Victorian Literature at The University of South Carolina Beaufort. Her book manuscript, Sympathy for Sale: The Lady’s Companion and the Victorian Novel, explores the ambiguous power and affective dynamics between ladies’ companions and their mistresses in the Victorian novel to demonstrate ­writers’ ­anxieties ­regarding manipulative, parasitic forms of sympathy in the period. She has published articles on the companion in the work of Jane Austen,

212 Contributors Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. Her current research focuses on remarriage and stepfamilies in Victorian literature and culture. Sarah E. Kersh is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Dickinson College, C ­ arlisle, Pennsylvania. Her book project, Naked Novels: Victorian A ­ matory Sonnet Sequences and the Problem of Marriage, argues for the political worth of the amatory sonnet sequence as a resistance to the legal and social institution of Victorian marriage. In addition, she is exploring a second project centered on the construction of authorship and the role of social networks in the writings of fin-de-siècle author Michael Field. Alec Magnet is a doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York CUNY. His dissertation examines queer aesthetics and echoes of the Gothic in nineteenth-century British and American literature. An adjunct lecturer at The City College of New York, he has designed and taught classes on literature and queer history, as well as on gender and the family in nineteenth-century literature. Claudia Nelson is a Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her work focuses primarily on childhood and family studies in the nineteenth ­century. She has co-edited four collections of critical essays and is the author of five monographs, most recently Family Ties in Victorian ­England (2007) and Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian England (2012). Tracy Olverson is a Lecturer in Literary Studies in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney. Her primary area of research is on nineteenth-century women’s appropriation of classical literature and culture and the intersections between politics and culture. She has published on a variety of Victorian women writers, including Amy Levy, Michael Field, and Emily Pfeiffer, all of whom feature in her recent monograph Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism (2010). Shale Preston is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English at Macquarie University. She is the author of Dickens and the Despised Mother: A Critical Reading of Three Autobiographical Novels (2013) and has published a range of articles and book chapters on the representation of gender and sexuality in Dickens’s fiction and the relationship between Dickens’s oeuvre and contemporary philosophy. Talia Schaffer is a Professor of English at Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center CUNY. She is the author of Novel Craft: ­Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2011); The ­Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian ­England (2001); co-editor with Kathy A. Psomiades of Women and British Aestheticism (1999); editor of Lucas Malet’s 1901 novel The History of Sir Richard Calmady (2003); and editor of Literature and Culture at the

Contributors  213 Fin de Siècle (2006). She has published widely on non-canonical women writers, material culture, popular fiction, aestheticism, and late-Victorian texts. She is currently working on a book on “familiar marriage,” a rival to romantic unions in Victorian marriage plots. Michael Shaw is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow. His doctoral research explores fin-de-siècle culture in Scotland, examining the reactions to aestheticism and decadence in Scotland and how these discussions were influenced by the resurgence of nationalism, internationalism, and the resistance to Enlightenment stadialism in the period. He is currently compiling a bibliography of criticism on William Sharp, one of the most prolific Neo-Pagans in Scotland, to be published as part of the University of London’s The William Sharp/Fiona Macleod Archive, and has contributed to the British Library’s Catalogue of Photographically Illustrated Books, 1839–1914. Clare Walker Gore is a PhD student at Selwyn College, Cambridge. Her AHRC-funded PhD research is on representations of the disabled body in nineteenth-century fiction, with a particular focus on Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte M. Yonge, and Dinah Mulock Craik. She has published work in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and NineteenthCentury Contexts, and is currently working on a new edition of Dinah Mulock Craik’s A Noble Life. Laura White is the John E. Weaver Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of Romance, Language, and Education in Jane Austen’s Novels (1988) and Jane Austen’s Anglicanism (2011) as well as the editor of Critical Essays on Jane Austen (1998). She has published widely on Austen and on interdisciplinary approaches to Victorian literature. Her current book project on Lewis Carroll is titled Alice and the Victorian Culture Wars.

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Index

ABC Family 1–2 adolescence 147, 149–50, 151 Alice books 13, 19–35; Alice 9, 13, 19–32, 33, 34, 113, 145 animal “children” 99, 106–11; see also dogs; pets anthropology, Victorian 157, 158, 165, 169, 173; see also “primitive marriage”: theory of attraction: between girls 134, 148–49; language of 141; between prospective spouses 160 aunts 60, 63; maiden aunts 61, 136 Austen, Jane, 157, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167; see also Mansfield Park Bickle, Sharon 61, 67, 73 Blain, Virginia 60, 63, 73 Bleak House 36–56, 112; Barbary, Miss 43, 44–45, 53; Clare, Ada 37–42, 44–51, 52, 53; Jarndyce, John 36–51, 52, 53–54; Summerson, Esther 36–54; see also Blue Beard Blue Beard 38, 42, 44 Bradley, Katharine 57–66, 68, 72, 73, 74; see also home Brontë, Anne: Agnes Grey 113 Brontë, Charlotte 157 Brontë, Emily 157, 159, 165, 169; see also Wuthering Heights Butler, Josephine 2 Carroll, Lewis 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30–35; see also Alice books; Liddell, Alice; Liddell family Census 4–5, 6, 60 childhood 5, 101, 113, 120; and adulthood 142, 148–50; and the construction of the homosexual man 103; fantasies of 31; idylls of 148; and magical thinking 150; play in

146, 148; queer 149; and romantic friendship 113; and same-sex desire 148–49; and the uncanny 186–87 Collins, Wilkie: and cousin marriage 157; and gothic melodrama 200; see also The Woman in White Comte, Auguste 165 Contagious Diseases Act 2 Cooper, Edith 57–66, 68, 72, 73, 74; see also home Corbett, Mary Jean 1, 2, 6, 157, 164, 183, 189, 191 Countess Kate 136, 142, 144, 146, 147 cousin marriage 157, 159, 161–62, 164–65, 167–68, 171–72; see also endogamous unions Craik, Dinah Mulock 11–12, 116–31; see also John Halifax, Gentleman; A Noble Life; Olive; A Woman’s Thoughts About Women curious: use of in Victorian texts 13 curiosity: in Victorian texts 9, 26, 41–42, 121 Daisy Chain, The 118, 126–28, 129, 130, 131, 145 danger 12, 28, 62, 67, 68, 136, 144, 147, 160, 173, 190 David Copperfield 112 Davidoff, Leonore 2, 5, 14, 73, 100 Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act (1907) 63 desire 57, 69, 78, 80, 81, 83, 137, 138, 145, 163, 164, 165, 167, 172, 200, 202, 207, 208, 209; absence of 53; alternative forms of 119; for alternative sex-gender roles 139; animal 109; and border-crossing relations 101; for conquest 71; erotic 134, 157, 168, 169; and familial relations 63; female 105, 124, 207;

216 Index filial 188; for friendship 183; incestuous 65; male heterosexual 85, 123, 166–68; for masculine subject position 123; lesbian 54, 202, 206, 208; for male touch 186; modern 168; non-normative 67; normative 110; private 68, 70; queer 60, 65, 68, 70, 119, 122, 123, 141, 147; of a queer reader 177; for partnership in Scottish cultural nationalism 88, 90, 92; and “raw sex” 110; reciprocity of 52; of a reparative impulse 180; romantic 126; same-sex 53, 117, 122, 139, 140, 142, 144, 147, 148–50, 181, 196, 207, 209; sexual 72, 116, 121, 127, 159; and sisterhood 196; for spiritual interpenetration 183–84; subversive 69, 85; for textual connections 181–82; thwarted 130; universal 168; for victory 30 Dickens, Charles 117; and cousin marriage 157; and the representation of “queer” boys 145; see also Bleak House; David Copperfield; Oliver Twist; Our Mutual Friend disability 3, 4, 11–12, 116–30; 131 and gender 117; and the marriage plot 117–18, 122, 124, 126–30; studies 3, 117 divorce: validity of 59 Divorce Court 58–59, 73 dogs 107, 149; canine loyalty 112; companions to solitary male figures 112; function of 100; as eternal children 101; representative of English manhood 104; women and lapdogs 112 domestic spaces 19, 31, 99, 100, 135, 138, 161 domesticity 37, 51, 99, 101, 105, 106, 108, 110, 189 effeminacy 81, 103, 114, 129, 208 Eliot, George: Adam Bede 112; The Mill on the Floss 116 endogamous unions 12, 158–59, 165, 166, 172; see also cousin marriage eroticism 119, 125, 142, 147, 149, 196, 199; lesbian 53; see also homoeroticism estate 40, 42, 135, 163, 164, 172, 206, 207; authorial 37, 41, 51, 54;

family: definitions of 1–2, 4–6, 58, 73, 100, 128, 160, 209; familial treachery 65; middle-class ideal of 2; modern 171–72; nuclear 57, 58, 59, 91, 100, 134, 139, 150, 160, 161, 170, 196, 207; queer, Victorian literature 5–13; queering of the 1, 3, 4; revisionary scholarship on Victorian 5–6; see also estate femininity 85, 145, 150, 179; of Celticism 80; conventional 138; domestic 137, 139; heterosexual 144; ideals of 66; orthodox 146; proper 134; see also masculinity Fosters, The 1–2, 9 friendship, friendships: female 140, 142, 146, 149, 180, 183; male 80, 189; romantic 40, 113 134, 144, 145, 149, 189 Furneaux, Holly 3–5, 8–9, 54, 117, 120, 146 gender 59, 64, 67, 70, 72, 80–82, 84–86, 88–90, 92–93, 99, 100–02, 117, 121–22, 124, 131, 134–36, 138–39, 145–46, 148, 167, 179, 189, 196, 201; ambiguity 113, 129; discourse 11, 81, 84, 87; dissidence 189; hierarchies 78; instability 129; politics 66; slippage 188 gender bending 62 gender binaries 87, 89, 92 gender inversion 139, 142, 150 Halberstam, Judith 4, 203, 209 Hallam, Arthur Henry 180, 183–84, 186–90 Hardy, Thomas 157 Hart, Elizabeth Anna: authorship of The Runaway 150; see also The Runaway Hawthorne, Nathaniel: Melville’s writings to and about 182–83, 184 Heir of Redclyffe, The 118, 124–26, 126 heterosexuality 65, 113, 134, 144, 148, 202; reproductive 12, 127 home 2, 13, 31, 59, 77, 101–02, 106, 113, 117, 126, 134, 146–47; Bradley/Cooper “marital home” 64; Cooper family home 59–62; ideal of 5; open, permeable homes 161 homoeroticism 80, 117, 177, 183, 184, 188, 189, 191, 195

Index  217 homosexual phase 54 homosexuality 14, 80–81, 91–92, 208, 209; see also lesbianism homosocial exchange 10, 45, 53 homosociality 57, 73, 80, 102, 104, 113, 183, 186, 189, 190 identity: Celtic 79, 86; collective 80; crisis 78; dual-sexed 78, 86; English 78; female 85, 86; feminized 119; gender 65, 117, 122, 123, 131; gendered 78, 81, 122; familial 81; masculine 78; mixed 89; national 80, 82; political 79; pseudonymous 57; queer 60, 78, 92; Scottish 90; sexual 7, 65, 78, 203; synthetic 89; transvestite 70, 85 incest 11, 57–58, 62–63; and endogamous marriage 12, 162; incestuous 62, 65, 157, 162 inheritance 37, 41, 163, 173, 177, 181, 203, 206, 207, 208; see also estate intimacy 8, 157; between children 151; of textual relations 181; same-sex 9, 48, 53, 61, 119, 140, 142, 182, 189–90, 196, 199–201; with animal companions 99, 101, 107–08, 110, 112 Jagose, Annamarie 7, 130 John Halifax, Gentleman 116–17, 118–20, 122, 123, 124, 130, 131 Kete, Kathleen 100, 101 Kids Are All Right, The 1 kinship 177, 197–98, 201, 203; alternative forms in neo-Victorian literature 6; archival 180–81, 191; bonds of 77; customs 58; definition of 2; extended 77; heterogeneous 9; homoerotic 191; and matriarchy 173; networks 162; non-normative 4; perversion of 112; queer 148, 177, 186–88, 191; relations 3; statistical 12, 176–79; structures 2, 4, 58, 60, 167; textual 12, 177–81, 184–85, 191 lesbianism 54, 65, 139: latent 48; Dickens’s 53; Proust’s 53; sadistic 48; see also homosexuality Liddell, Alice 25, 26 Liddell family 20, 22, 23, 25, 28, 31 Living Apart Together 4

love 21, 28, 37, 38, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47–48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71–72, 85, 86, 89, 104, 105, 106, 108–09, 112, 121, 128, 131, 134, 137–38, 142, 160, 163, 168, 171, 191, 195, 200, 207; Aristophanes’s myth of the origin of 185; conjugal 164; domestic 162; familial 72, 125, 172, 179; filial 60; at first sight 54; fraternal 164; free- 59, 169; heterosexual 103, 144, 150; homoerotic 189; letter 37; marrying for 159; of pets 103; romantic 3, 9, 116, 118, 127, 161; same-sex 117, 119–20, 124, 189; “savage” 165; sexual 164; sibling 117, 129, 163–64; sororal 162; for a stranger 172 McLennan, John 159, 167, 173; Primitive Marriage 165, 166 Macleod, Fiona 78, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88; Fiona identity 86, 92; see also Sharp, William Mansfield Park 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163–64, 167, 169, 172; Price, Fanny 160, 161, 162, 163–64, 167, 169 Marcus, Sharon 9, 40, 64, 131, 140, 189, 208 marriage 1–3, 5–6, 9, 12–13, 27, 32, 37–40, 42, 45, 58–60, 64, 72–73, 84, 101, 103, 105–06, 108, 112, 116–19, 121–31, 140, 144, 146, 149–50, 158–62, 164–73, 177, 183, 189–90, 197, 199–204, 207–08; arranged 65, 159;and bisexuality 208; companionate 60, 105, 159–61, 167, 171; exogamous 12; female 3, 64, 161; and gender 131; history of 157–58, 165, 173; matriarchal 173; monogamous 165; paternalistic 85; queer 184–85; redefinition of 124; reproductive 127, 129, 202–03; romantic 158–59; 161, 164, 169; as violent 165, 169, 172; see also cousin marriage; Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act (1907); endogamous unions marriage plot 12, 116–18, 122, 124, 126–31, 157–58, 163, 167–68, 169, 172, 202; marriage proposals 44–45, 52, 122

218 Index masculinity 59, 66, 87, 118, 129, 131; chivalric 137; counter- 78, 92; cult of 80–81; domestic 99; English 99, 103–04; heterosexual 117; hyperaggressive 68, 72; and language of aggression 85; militant 89; movements 113; and nation building 91; nationalist 80; Count Fosco’s 103–04, 107–08, 113; see also femininity; effeminacy Melville, Herman 176, 181–85, 191; see also Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Moby-Dick “Michael Field” 11, 57–60, 61, 62, 64–70, 72–73; Roman dramas 57, 58, 72; see also Bradley, Katharine; Cooper, Edith; home Moby-Dick 176, 180–92; Ishmael 181, 182, 183, 184–87, 188, 189-90; Queequeg 182, 184–85, 186–87, 188, 189 Modern Family 1–2, 13 monogamy 110, 166–67, 172, and marriage 165

and the Victorian family 100–02; see also animal “children”; dogs Pillars of the House, The 118, 126, 128–29, 130, 131 plots: domestic 57; heteroreproductive 200, 202, 203; heterosexual swindle 202; marriage see marriage plot; pecuniary 201; romantic female friendship 149; sensation fiction 166; triumphal 141 “primitive marriage”: theory of 158, 165, 166–68, 173; see also marriage prostitution 2, 69

nationalism: and Celtic Revivalism 77–79, 81, 85; fin-de-siècle Scottish 11, 77–79, 81–82, 86, 90–93; and the lexis of the family 77; and masculinity/homosexuality 80–81; and Paganism 79; see also neo-Paganism Nelson, Claudia 5, 60, 73 neo-Paganism: and Irish nationalism 79–81; queer 78, 81–82, 87, 92–93; and same-sex experience 81; William Sharp’s 83–92, 93 Nightingale, Florence 138, 157 Noble Life, A 118, 120–24, 130, 131

scopophilia 53 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 9, 12, 45, 102–03, 177, 179–80, 189, 191–92 sentiment: anti-matrimonial 59; legitimized 140; pagan 83, 87; man of 113 sentimentality 110, 111 sexuality 2, 7, 53–54, 59, 63, 65, 68, 78, 82, 101, 102, 113, 134, 140, 144, 146, 173, 179, 189, 190, 198; definitions of 8; see also heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism Sharp, William 11, 77–93; see also Macleod, Fiona sibling relationships 12, 63, 65, 69, 71, 117–18, 124, 126–30, 162–64, 189; see also love sisterhood 13, 63, 195–99, 204, 207, 208 subjectivity 148; modern liberal subject 157–58

Oliphant, Margaret 157 Olive 130, 144 Oliver Twist 200, 208 One Million Moms 1–2, 14 Our Mutual Friend 166 Paganism65, 79, 87; see also nationalism passion 160; erotic 70, 103, 172; romantic 161, 168; same-sex 52, 140, 147, 148, 149, 151; unrequited 141 pets: Count Fosco and pet fatherhood 102–12; domestic 24; keeping of 11;

Queen Victoria 5, 188 queer, definition of 6–8 readings: queer 177, 179, 185, 192; reproductive 179, 180, 181 respectability 57, 58, 60, 64, 99, 146, 186 rivalries 28, 29, 37, 40, 65, 163 Runaway, The 134–51 Ruskin, John 5, 31, 33, 59

Tennyson, Alfred 181, 183, 184, 190; In Memoriam 176, 180, 182–90, 192 time: ahead of 73, 139; queer 13, 65, 203, 204, 206, 207, 209; heteronormative 4, 203–04; unreliable narrative 196, 207

Index  219 transgression, transgressions 61, 68, 123, 136, 188, 189, 201; sexual 190, 196 Trollope, Anthony 157 Vicinus, Martha 59–60, 141 violence 28, 29, 58, 71, 103, 104, 105, 114, 159, 164, 165, 166, 171, 172, 188; erotic/sexual 66, 69, 168, 171 Waters, Sarah: Fingersmith 195–96, 200–03, 205–10 What Books to Lend and What to Give 150 Woman in White, The 99–115, 195–209; Count Fosco 99, 101–12, 113, 197, 198, 200, 201, 208

Woman’s Thoughts About Women, A 124, 131 Wuthering Heights 157, 161, 162, 165, 168–72; Earnshaw, Catherine 168–71, 172; Earnshaw, Hareton 170–72; Heathcliff 165, 168, 169–72, 173; Linton, Cathy 168–69, 170–71, 172; Linton, Edgar 169–71; Linton, Isabella 161, 168–69, 170 Yonge, Charlotte M. 116–31, 145, 150, 157; see also Countess Kate; The Daisy Chain; The Heir of Redclyffe; The Pillars of the House; What Books to Lend and What to Give