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Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
Searching for their own reflection:
Women and The Yellow Book
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor Paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Vergelijkende Moderne Letterkunde” by Goedele Gouwy
2014 – 2015 Gouwy 2
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to thank my promotor, prof. dr. Marysa Demoor, for having given me the ideas and inspiration for this topic, and helping me along on my path.
Secondly I would like to thank Ben van Eck for spending many hours on reading my draft version, and every one of my other friends who supported me along the way.
Finally I would also like to give thanks to all the people who were there for me along my Master and the process of working on this thesis: my parents, but also the brothers and sisters of ‘Moeder van Vrede’ in the abbey of my hometown, and most of all, François Eliat, who was always there when I needed help.
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Table of Contents
Introduction ...... 4
1. Women as object in The Yellow Book ...... 7
Intro : The Yellow Book ...... 7
1.1 Women as 'angels in the house' – muteness and bourgeoisie ...... 9
1. 2 Women as aesthetic and erotic objects ...... 16
1. 3 Fear of women and misogyny: women as femmes fatales ...... 19
2. Women as subject (in The Yellow Book and outside it) ...... 28
2.1 Women who wrote for The Yellow Book...... 30
2.2 Reasons for writing ...... 31
2.3 Problems facing female aesthetes...... 32
2.4 Discourses and Techniques ...... 34
2.4.1. Contesting the 'angel in the house' ...... 34
2.4.2 Contesting the idea of women as aesthetic and erotic objects ...... 45
2.4.3 Contesting the vampiric 'femme fatale' ...... 50
2.4.4 Caught between masculinity and femininity: problem of self-exposure vs. Victorianism ... 55
2.4.4.1 Problem of masculinisation in aestheticism and The Yellow Book ...... 56
2.4.4.2 Possible solution: celebrating (Victorian) femininity ...... 61
2.4.4.3 Solution: female aestheticism ...... 65
Conclusion ...... 75
Works cited ...... 79
Attachments ...... 84
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Introduction
Being issued between 1894 and 1897, The Yellow Book was a (new) sensation of its time. It promised to be both 'conservative' and progressive, representing both “high
Art and Literature” and “the present cultures of the 'new'” (Lyon Mix 1960: 72-79;
Ledger 2007: 9). It featured art work from both the Royal Academy, and from the
“New English Art Club”. It contained works of artists as Henry James but also works by Max Beerbohm and the infamous Aubrey Beardsley, who is still known for his eccentric decadent images (Lyon Mix 1960: 69,73,78). Publisher John Lane had his reasons for this mix: he wanted a public as broad as possible. The fin-de-siècle was the age of, as Ledger put it, “conflicting cultural trends”, a conflict between characteristics of Victorian and avant-garde art during the end of the century (Ledger
2007: 9). This struggle was also visible genderwise: it was a time of more and more participation by women in the public world as well as a time in which 'femininity' had become fashionable, among male artists as well. Yet, both new tendencies also evoked a reactionary masculine tradition.
When John Lane started his magazine, he sensed this growing female readership, and because of his policy to reach a large readers' public, he decided to include female authors as well and to present his magazine according to the new trend of 'femininity', as well as to give them in accordance with his ideas for his magazine, a daring image as the New Woman. An example of this is the drawing by
Beardsley for the Prospectus, which shows an independent woman browsing for a magazine alone at night (Ledger 2007: 12; see image in appendix). A lot of female aesthetes and women writers reacted eagerly and started sending in their work. Gouwy 5
Yet, despite this trend and eager cooperation, the editorial crew of The Yellow Book was still all-male (apart from unofficial co-editing by Ella D'Arcy (Lyon Mix 1960:
190)), and even though Lane wanted to attract female readers as well, it is very clear that the male voice, especially in the first volumes, dominates the magazine, consisting overall still of more than half the participation. After all, even though female authors started to become more and more proficient, they were still a novelty and the overall 'high culture' of the age was still mainly masculine and did the same to women as it had done: looking at women and objectifying them, or condemning their
'attempts' towards publicity (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 11-92).
Different critics have already pointed out the misogynous or objectifying entries by male authors in the magazine1. This objectification had happened in Great Britain throughout the nineteenth century in different ways, according to the evolution of society and culture, as Kathy Psomiades has pointed out in Beauty's Body (1997). I would like to examine how this objectification happened in the magazine and in
British society, how women were portrayed and what effects it had on the female writers towards identity and self-portrayal. I will use gender theories to analyse this and more specifically the problemacy of the place of women in art and literature, as the passive objects of study versus creative beings. One very important work on this is The Madwoman in the Attic by Gilbert and Gubar (1984), but there are many other works in that field that will be used and addressed in this dissertation.
Next to that, there is also another concern of gender theories quite essential, an important issue of feminists that Culler touches in his On Deconstruction (1982): choosing between denying the opposition between men and women, or accepting it
1 To name a few: Linda Hughes, Sally Ledger, Katherine Lyon Mix, Laurel Brake Gouwy 6
and celebrating 'femininity' (Culler 1982: 172). This was also a very important and problematic issue for female writers at the end of the nineteenth century, as will be clear in the progress of this thesis.
I will begin with a short overview of how women were objectified throughout the nineteenth century in Britain and how that is also the case in The Yellow Book.
The biggest part of this work, though, will be concerned with women as subjects in
The Yellow Book: who decided to write for it and why, what they wrote and how they positioned themselves in this male-dominated sector, and also, who did not participate in the cult of the magazine and why, taking an excursion outside The
Yellow Book.
Linda Hughes states in “Women Poets and contested Spaces in The Yellow
Book” (2004) that The Yellow Book consisted of “[f]our stages of publication: ‘initial male-dominated’, ‘etanglement with decadence and the trial’, ‘eclectic phase characterised by gender equity’, ‘resumption of male domination in terms of numbers, yet accompanied by integration of New Woman poetics’” (Hughes 2004: 850). It is true that the first three volumes definitely were dominated by male authors. Yet, I believe that the more or less misogynous or prejudiced content by men is quite constantly present and that the dialogue and discussion between male and female voices is audible throughout the whole magazine, although mainly from the fourth volume on. In order to justify such a claim, I would like to provide proof from different volumes over the whole series, though it will mainly consist of 'masculine' examples from the first three volumes, and 'feminine' examples from the fourth volume on.
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1. Women as object in The Yellow Book
Intro : The Yellow Book
As a magazine from the 1890s, The Yellow Book is a perfect example of the clash of the many discourses of the moment, both the older and more conservative ones, and the new movement of aestheticism and decadence, which consisted of a lot of different genres, such as symbolism, naturalism, impressionism and dandyism (Brake
1995: 48). Lane wanted established writers and writers from the Royal Academy, to counterbalance the new writers and members from the New English Art Club (Lyon
Mix 1960: 73). When the announcement for the new magazine was issued, it said:
“And while The Yellow Book will seek always to preserve a delicate, decorous, and reticent mien and conduct, it will at the same time have the courage of its modernness […] It will be charming, it will be daring, it will be distinguished”
(Prospection qtd. In Lyon Mix 1960: 78-79). The promised mixture of “delicate”,
“reticent”, “distinguished” and “daring” “modernness” was kept. As Sally Ledger puts in her article on “Wilde Women and The Yellow Book”, “The Yellow Book was […] a site for the most significant cultural dialogues and conflicts of the fin de siècle (Ledger
2007: 9). The reason for including all these different discourses was, as has been mentioned already, part of Lane's and Henry Harland's marketing strategy to attract a public as broad as possible and to incite “frissons or scandals that sold well”
(Hughes 2004: 849-850, 855).
Part of this strategy was to attract female readers and authors, as this was a group that had become quite substantial over the years. Thus, Lane asked female artists as well as male ones to publish in his magazine, and women gladly accepted as it was a great chance to be involved in a prestigious magazine. Yet, as Hughes Gouwy 8
pointed out, “the journal's debut [was] a textual reproduction, as it were, of the all- male Rhymers' Club” (own italics; Hughes 2004: 852), and the publisher and editors, being John Lane, Henry Harland and Beardsley, were all male as well (although Ella
D'Arcy did have an unoffical co-editing role). Although a lot of women did publish in the magazine over the years, the majority of the magazine was male, as was still the world of the masculine 'high Art' aestheticism. As Brake puts it: “The Yellow Book […] is so suffused with male discourses of gender, in works by women and men, that these male discourses characterise the journal as much as its 'aestheticism'” (Brake
1995: 39). As a consequence, a lot of prejudice existing in the male world from all over the nineteenth century was still present in The Yellow Book, in the general world of art and literature and in the minds of a lot of male authors. As Gilbert and Gubar argue, they had been shaping and still shaped the image of women and of women writers (Gilbert and Gubar 1984:15-17). These forms of prejudice in the nineteenth century will be categorised further, together with the instances of it in The Yellow
Book and the period of the 1890s.
About this prejudice, Ann Ardis, writing an article about Netta Syrett for Women and British Aestheticism, refers back to the term ““dominant 'masculine' aestheticism”” (Ardis 1999: 235), which has been used by Linda Hughes as well
(Hughes 1996: 128) and which refers to the polarisation between the 'active masculine' versus 'passive feminine' that happens in gender ideology (Psomiades
1992: 34-39). Ann Ardis explains it as “the aesthetic ideology most often associated with Wilde and Huysmans” (Ardis 1999: 244), comprising three aspects: “self- differentiation from bourgeois culture”, meaning that male aesthetes liked to consider their work 'highbrow' and 'high culture', as opposed to bourgeois culture, which is represented by women; “appropriation of femininity and feminine artifice as symbols Gouwy 9
for art's autonomy from nature”, i.e. femininity standing for artificiality, just like art, as opposed to nature, and lastly “association of the material (female) body with corruption, decay, and degeneration” (Ardis 1999: 235).
For my categorisation, I would like to use this concept and its subdivision(s) and combine it with a (very) broadly chronological conception, based on Psomiades' theory on the evolution of the image of women in the nineteenth century in Beauty's
Body (1997). She states that in the greatest part of that century, women are represented as “private and domestic, spiritual yet sexualised, the irresistible object[s] of desire and a certain kind of especially contemplative subject[s]”: in other words, the old ideal of the 'angel in the house', as Coventry Patmore described in his poem. Yet, near the end of the century, as women had become much more part of public life, more visible and started speaking up for themselves, they were represented more and more as “the wom[e]n who [court] public display – the actress, the dancer, the woman on a stage” (Psomiades 1997: 4-5). Moreover, through the emergence of certain more or less misogynous genres as reaction against these
'rising women', the image of women as dangerous, sexualised, vampiric creatures had been generated and become more and more popular in the 1890s (Psomiades
1997: 5-6).
1.1 Women as 'angels in the house' – muteness and bourgeoisie
Women as exemplary house angels is the oldest nineteenth-century idea about women, which connects them with domestic duties and bourgeoisie, and the 'ideal' of women as quiet, passive sufferers. This idealisation is, according to Gilbert and
Gubar as old as at least the middle ages, and is taken from the Biblical figure of the
Virgin Mary. This image has stayed alive throughout the next centuries. During the Gouwy 10
Renaissance, important writers, such as Dante, started using the image of the angelic woman, for example in the form of Beatrice. Throughout the later centuries, this image has been re-used by writers such as Goethe (Faust), and also, Coventry
Patmore, with his Angel in the House, and eventually developed into the image of the nineteenth-century Victorian woman. The question is what this angel-woman characterises. Gilbert and Gubar sum up the most important aspects when they mention the importance of eighteenth-century “conduct books for ladies”: they speak of the “”eternal feminine” virtues of modesty, gracefulness, purity, delicacy, civility, compliancy, reticence, chastity, affability, politeness” (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 23, 20-
23).
The question is, then, why so much goodness was expected of women. A few years ago I wrote an essay about the 15th century Dutch version of these women as depicted in works of male poets, which was pretty much the same. The reason why men clung to the importance of the existence of these angel-women, and seemed to panic when they felt they were resisting this role, is largely because of the socio- economic pattern in which men went out to work and women sat at home. Because men came across a lot of external problems and influences from the outside,
'dangerous' world, they needed the positive influence of their wives and the reassurance of being able to come home into safety and moral goodness. In The
Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar also assert this: “a Victorian angel-woman should become her husband's holy refuge from the blood and sweat that inevitably accompanies a “life of significant action,” as well as, in her “contemplative purity”, a living memento of the otherness of the divine” (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 24). Gouwy 11
As literature was monopolised by men up until a certain point somewhere halfway the nineteenth century, they were also able to control the images of women.
This had great consequences for women: men were able to keep them in their power, as because of this, women were always represented as the 'others'. They were turned into passive mutes, objects of creation, which could be made into exactly what men liked. As previously mentioned, they liked to turn them into angels, idealising them. With the famous words of the writer Honoré de Balzac: “woman's virtue is man's greatest invention” (Otis Skinner 1952 qtd. In Gilbert and Gubar 1984:
13). Yet, in real life this idealisation often proved unrealistic; in real life, women seemed to have a tendency to slip away from their appointed roles, or to show a tendency for the earthly or for jobs belonging to men. If they did this and/or put themselves before their duties, they failed to fulfil their angelic duties and suddenly seemed to have the features of a witch, a monster or a 'fallen angel'. This way, women were always prisoner of their images created by the pen of men. Because if they were not saints, if they were not like Mary, they had to be inspired by the snake, just like Eve, who caused the downfall of mankind. I will return to that later (see 1.3).
Another thing that was out of the question for women to do, was to write, because they simply did not have the time or strength or capacities to do so. If some of them did write, it was seen as a sign that they were mad or unwomanly. As it is put in The Madwomen in the Attic: “women who did not apologize for their literary efforts were defined as mad and monstrous: freakish because “unsexed” or freakish because sexually “fallen”” (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 63). In other words, women were victims of the ideas men created of them and it took a lot to break through the vicious circle as they were not allowed to make their own literary defences. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf still wrote that “'[b]efore we women can write, Gouwy 12
we must “kill” the “angel in the house”” (Woolf 1942: 236-8 Qtd. In Gilbert and Gubar
1984: 17).
Regardless, in the nineteenth century, women started to write more and more and it partly became more accepted, although it was still partly biased; some general prejudice was still quite common among their male colleagues. There was still a trace left of the patriarchal conception of the woman as less naturally a good writer. As
Schaffer argues in The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000), female authors were criticised much more severely, and by double standards. They were often seen as amateurs, writing from their kitchen table and about their personal life and experiences, as an extension to their diaries. But when they actually were full-time professional writers, they were accused of writing for money, without any idea of “the high calling of true art” (Schaffer 2000: 8, 70).
The idea of women as amateurs was closely connected with their overall image of being closer to the bourgeois world instead of the world of high art. This is also the first of Ardis' characteristics of “”dominant 'masculine' aestheticism”” (Ardis
1999: 235), which condemned 'female writing' to lowness. According to Psomiades, this connection of the female with low, commodity culture, is part of a larger movement of that period, in which there was, for the first time, a separation between
'high' and 'popular' culture, and in which aestheticism desperately wanted to project itself as the opposite of bourgeois. As there was also still a great division between male and female writing and female writing had only just started to arise, male writers shoved all responsibility for the commoditisation and massification of art and literature in the shoes of their female colleagues and of the female world. After all, Gouwy 13
over the centuries they had been more connected with the home and knew less about 'the real world' (Psomiades 1997: 1-17).
This idea that men had about women and the professional world was not just confined to the world of literature. In The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, one chapter is devoted to the realm of typical 'female art' such as home decoration and fashion, and how men took these arts on, with the idea that it needed to be professionalised.
Before, when being a niche exclusive for women, it was something considered unimportant and banal, connected with the bourgeois world. Yet, when men started to bother about it and 'professionalise' it with superior artistic taste, these new items became so popular that they became entirely commodified, unlike the 'amateuristic' decorations by women, which were handcrafted and had not become popular or commodified (Schaffer 2000: 73-86).
The Yellow Book
In The Yellow Book, the patriarchal voice was very present as well. It was clearly homosocial and still contained quite some patriarchal ideas about gender roles: men as the active, potent persons, often had to come to the rescue of a weak, passive, suffering woman. There are stories about frail or ill women, who die or are about to die, or women who are destitute and in urgent need of being saved by a masculine hero, spread across the different volumes. Also characteristic of homosocial content is the praise and idealisation of uniquely male friends or fellow writers. In volume one, the patriarchal voice of Edmund Gosse rings clear in his “Alere Flammam”, a poem dedicated to a male poet, singing praise of the masculine poetic tradition, which is compared to a sacred flame, started by Virgil and Homer (Hughes 2004: Gouwy 14
852-853). A bit further, Richard Garnett issued an essay in which he praises the work of another male Italian poet who wrote sonnets.
A good example of a mixture of these two characteristics of homosocial content can be found in volume three: the short story “When I am King” by Henry
Harland (Harland 1894: 73-75). In this story, the love of a man for a friend of his is central: he is described as a hero, whereas the girl he saves is the typical image of a victim. She is a classic sufferer, passive, who has to be rescued: she is frail and “half fainting” when she is rescued from her violent husband (Harland 1894: 75). There is also an extensive description of her lack of many 'accomplishments'. Luckily, his friend was able to teach her a little and she is a good housewife.
Another clear example in this volume of the patriarchal voice is “Women –
Wives or mothers? By a Woman”, which afterwards turned out to be written not by a woman but by Frederick Greenwood (Lyon Mix 1960: 114,115), in which we are informed that women are divided in either wife- or mother-types. The writer claims to be sympathetic with women, because he says that men are apt to expect too much from women on all levels, which is not fair, because “woman […] is […] a predestined wife or mother” (‘a Woman’ 1894: 12).
In volume five of The Yellow Book, an even stronger masculine vigour is present, mainly due to the controversy surrounding Oscar Wilde being put on trial, and The Yellow Book trying as best as possible not to be associated with this (they were though, due to an unhappy circumstance in which Wilde carried a book with a yellow cover to his trial). B. Paul Neuman contributed to this with his poem “Pro
Patria”, which starts like this: Gouwy 15
Land of the white cliff and the circling ocean,
Land of the strong, the valiant and the free,
Well may thy proud sons with their hearts' devotion
Seek to repay the debt they owe to thee.
(Neuman 1895: 226)
England, now representing “the strong, the valiant and the free”, and the
“proud sons”(..), clearly is brought back to the old values where the dominant, white, heterosexual man represents the norm and has all the power. Everything and everyone who deviates from this, is seen as marginal.
About volume six, then, Hughes says: “the first and last poems contributed by men to volume 6 emphasize piety and the angelic woman”. She gives some examples: “in "Earth's Complines" by Charles G. D. Roberts, the speaker sees “The image of God's face" in the mingled souls of man and nature, while Theodore Watts pays tribute to the angelic qualities of Le Gallienne's late wife in "Two Letters to a
Friend."” (Hughes 2004: 860)
To conclude, Hughes mentions in a note to her essay “Women Poets and
Contested Spaces in The Yellow Book” that “In all, ten of the thirteen volumes of The
Yellow Book included poems celebrating literary tradition as a homosocial male club”
(Hughes 2004: 869). She also points to the many titles that are drawn from the classical languages, and which are automatically linked with masculine poetic tradition as it was mainly them who received education in Latin and Greek. Some examples are “Sat Est Scripsisse” by Austin Dobson in the second volume or “Hor.
Car. I. 5” by Charles Newton-Robinson in the fourth volume (Hughes 2004: 869), the second example being a reference to a poem by the Roman poet Horace. Gouwy 16
1. 2 Women as aesthetic and erotic objects
In the previous part, it was clear how women's images were created by men as they had monopolised literature and art. The logical next step is that women's beauty was used throughout art and literature to men's content. This has been so ever since art and literature arose into existence, but this stress on female beauty has become especially applicable to the school of aestheticism and The Yellow Book. The reduction of women to artistic and artificial objects through 'the male gaze' was immensely popular. It already started with Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his 'fleshly school' and paintings of eroticised women with long red hair and full lips – although Psomiades even mentions Tennyson's Lady of Shalott as already part of this tendency (Psomiades 1997: 23).
Following this model in the second half of the nineteenth century, aestheticism, being predominantly masculine, had been using 'the feminine' as a model for art, a passive object of beauty, “the mute object of masculine desire” (Schaffer 2000: 102-
103). Gilbert and Gubar argued on this that women were 'killed' into art by becoming fixed on paper or in any other material (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 14).
Consequently, the ideals of beauty for this genre were determined and defined by the masculine ideals about female youth (Ardis 1999: 235-244). Yet, next to youth, another ideal for feminine beauty was fragility. Thus, women were not only 'killed' into art by being fixed in the art object, but also by means of having to become artistic objects themselves in the form of models. They had to risk their health in order to attain the ideal of a fragile beauty, because of, in the words of Gilbert and Gubar, “the aesthetic cult of ladylike fragility and delicate beauty”. They had to become “slim, Gouwy 17
pale, passive beings whose “charms” eerily recalled the snowy, porcelain immobility of the dead” (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 25).
Psomiades also has a theory on aestheticism's beauty ideal and its links with the commodity culture. She says: “Aestheticism is the marketing of beauty”
(Psomiades 1997: 12). As 'beauty' is linked with the young female body, this means that during aestheticism, with the rise of commodity culture, the female body started being used as an object used for marketing strategies. I already mentioned John
Lane's focus on marketing strategies, and his use of the new popularity of female literature by and for women for his own profit. But, as The Yellow Book is mainly also a product of the late nineteenth century and aestheticism, I would like to argue that he also used images of women to attract male readers. These images of women often showed them as erotic objects, to be stared at lustfully by the male gaze.
The Yellow Book
The biggest examples of erotically rendered images of women are of course the actual images. I would like to start with some examples from the artist Beardsley, who was, for the first four volumes, the main illustrator of the magazine, designing the front covers using images of women and adding a lot of pictures to the volumes, also almost all consisting of women (Lyon Mix 1960: 43-55;139). As Ledger said: “Twenty- seven out of Beardsley's thirty-one illustrations for The Yellow Book are of women”
(Ledger 2007: 10). On top of that, these images often contained erotic undertones.
Lyon Mix described “[t]he Beardsley girl” as a girl with “narrow eyes, ambiguous curves, and thick full lips” (Lyon Mix 1960: 52). In the first volume, there is a good example of this, in “Night Piece”, where a woman with a very exposed bosom is walking in the night air (Beardsley 1894: 127). There were also a lot of illustrations by Gouwy 18
other male artists which did the same as Beardsley's pictures, though: the magazine was full of artistic images of women, sometimes erotic, sometimes more demure.
But naturally my focus lies on the literary part of the magazine. There are many literary examples of objectified women as well. In the second volume of the magazine, there is a poem called “Dreams” by Ronald Campbell Macfie. This poem is a classic example of aesthethic poetry à la Gabriel Rossetti: praising the woman he dreams of, and in praising the woman's aesthethic beauty, adding in some erotic details: “In dreams I lie and listen/ Thy bosom beat,/ Hiving hot lips among thy temple-hair,/ O lady fair!” (Campbell Macfie 1894: 196).
Immediately following this is a story by Dauphin Meunier, “Madame Réjane”.
This short story starts promptly with the extensive description of a woman, “Woman at Paris”, “the Parisienne” or as she is called, “Madame Réjane”. Madame Réjane is the archetype of 'the Parsienne': and in her being Parisian, she reflects the ideal woman for aesthetes: “What has she read? Where was she educated? Who cares?
Her book of life is Paris” (Meunier 1894: 198). As I said, the first paragraphs of the story consist of a very detailed description of this ideal woman. This is the very start of the story:
Fabulous being, in an everyday human form; a face, not beautiful, scarcely
even pretty, which looks upon the world with an air at once ironical and
sympathetic; a brow that grows broader or narrower according to the
capricious invasions of her aureole of hair; an odd little nose, perked
heavenward; two roguish eyes, now blue, now black; the rude accents of a
streetgirl, suddenly changing to the well-bred murmuring of a great lady;
abrupt, abundant gestures, eloquently finishing half-spoken sentences; a Gouwy 19
supple neck -a slender, opulent figure- a dainty foot, that scarcely touches the
earth and yet can fly amazingly near the ceiling; lips, nervous, sensuous,
trembling, curling […] grace, wit, sweetness, tartness; frivolity and
earnestness, tenderness and indifference; beauty without beauty, immorality
without evil: a nothing capable of everything (Meunier 1894: 197).
It seems clear that this ideal is quite unrealistic; the Parisian woman is often even ascribed characteristics that contradict each other: she has to be frivol yet earnest, tender and indifferent at the same time, have traits of a street girl and also a great lady. She should be immoral but is still not allowed to be evil. Even further, her characteristics are even more elaborated upon. The woman is praised for her
“animation, her mobility, her elusive charm” (Meunier 1894: 198). Yet the talents she should have are linked with what we have discussed in the previous part: the typically female pastimes. She arranges flowers, decorates, dresses herself, etc. Above all, however, she is the inspiration for the male artist, the artistic object to be studied:
“She crowns the poet, sits to the painter, inspires the sculptor, lends her voice to the musician” (Meunier 1894: 198). Thus, in this short story, she is objectified twice: she is described, and thus objectified, as being objectifiable.
1. 3 Fear of women and misogyny: women as femmes fatales
As the end of the century drew nearer, 'decadence' arose as a new topic in which the degeneracy of the world was stressed, and women were strongly associated with this decaying material, vulgar, fleshly world which threatened to drag along the male artist into destruction. Women were portrayed more and more as dangerous 'femmes fatales': materialistic, sensualised monsters who try to lure men into their worldliness and base behaviour and detain them from their own noble intellectual, artistic course; Gouwy 20
after all, “Beauty was the striving male's supreme temptation” (Dijkstra 1986: 235,
210-234).
As I have mentioned before, Psomiades says that “[a]estheticism [was] the marketing of beauty”. The male artist began to notice that the visions of beauty started to get too aligned with consumerism and mass culture. The more this was growing, the more the artists felt repulsed by it and the more it was considered as tainting and threatening. Because of this, a new need arose to separate art from bourgeois culture. Psomiades argues, then, that to make a separation between these two, the already existing separation between men and women was used, whereby women got to be the guilty ones as they only just started to be part of public and artistic life. Therefore, their representation by this new group of decadents changed from images of quiet, innocent contemplation into “the public, tawdry woman who signifies the vulgarity of mass-cultural and commodity experience” (Psomiades 1997:
4-14).
The alignment of women with consumerism and vulgarity had deeper cultural roots than this, though. It was a much larger evolution, in which men stood looking anxiously at the emancipation of women, which was to them (one of) the reason(s) of the degeneration of the 'century of progress'. According to Dijkstra, the biggest reason for this great overall fear of that rather small percentage of 'New Women', was competition in the workplace. As women were becoming more present in public life and the term 'New Woman' was growing in meaning, men felt anxious about their economic and politic stability (Dijkstra 1986: 210-215). This was no different in the world of literature. Talia Schaffer speaks about decadence as a “brief defensive reaction of embattled elite male writers who perceived themselves to be losing status Gouwy 21
to popular women writers and consequently fetishized their own decay” . She also adds “In an era of journalistic writing and crass best-sellers, decadence commemorated a dying literary culture held by privileged men […] Decadents often contrasted themselves with women whom they viewed as crude, unthinking beings”
(Schaffer 2000: 6). Writers like Max Beerbohm and Edmund Gosse felt positively threatened by female competition. As Hughes put it: “when no clear heirs to Matthew
Arnold, Robert Browning, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson had established themselves, the emergence of numerous women poets who demanded consideration as poets rather than as poetesses, mere spontaneous singers, was sometimes perceived by male writers as a threat” (Hughes 2004: 851).
Thus, female authorship was not only done away with patronisingly as not artistic and qualitative enough, but they were sneered away much more because they were regarded as dangerous competition. Gilbert and Gubar extensively explore this
“male dread of women and, specifically, male scorn of female creativity” (Gilbert and
Gubar 1984: 29) in The Madwoman in the Attic, which, according to them, already started at the very beginning of women's attempts to write, in the eighteenth century.
This dread caused certain writers to satirise women or female writers, showing, as
Gilbert and Gubar put it, that “language itself was almost literally alien to the female tongue. In the mouths of women, vocabulary loses its meaning, sentences dissolve, literary messages are distorted or destroyed” (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 31). An example given by Gilbert and Gubar was that of Jonathan Swift's satirical verses about women who use all their 'arts' to 'restore' their own ugliness and rottenness, which is clearly a hopeless case: “Because she is inexorably rotting away [...] eventually all forms will fail, for “Art no longer can prevayl/When the Materialls all are gone.” (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 32). The same way were women's attempts at Gouwy 22
writing satirised and done away with. These attacks show the dread and prejudice men had at that time: they aligned women with failure of culture and literature, just like the fin-de-siecle artists did, as Psiomades has shown and I have mentioned above.
In the first part about the objectification of women, I pointed out that it was expected of women to be angelic, because if not, they were 'fallen' and monstrous, as they had the task of 'small morality' in the house. If they were not Mary, then they were her counterpart, Eve, who caused the downfall of man (Dijkstra 1986: 334;
Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 27-30). So when women started to take on jobs and pastimes that previously were solely men's domain, they had lost their status of mute angels, and become the dangerous counterpart: seductive monsters, letting their dark powers free, exposing themselves in front of public and destroying society by means of their dangerous sensualism (Dijkstra 1986: 210-212). As August Forel wrote in The Sexual Question: “The modern tendency of women to become pleasure- seekers, and to take a dislike to maternity, leads to degeneration of society. This is a grave social evil, which rapidly changes the qualities and power of expansion of a race, and which must be cured in time or the race affected by it will be supplanted by others” (Forel 1906:137 Qtd. In Dijkstra 1986: 216)
These misogynous ideas about 'evil women' arose at the same time as the ideas about their counterpart, the angel-women arose: thus, ideas about monstrous women were already present in, for instance, Spencer's The Faerie Queene in the character of Errour. According to Gilbert and Gubar, these ideas about women grew more popular as women slowly started publishing work, in the eighteenth century
(Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 27-64). Gouwy 23
It seems only logic then, that at the turn of the nineteenth century, when there was again a breakthrough by women into the public world, anxious and misogynous feelings arose again among the male artists, resulting in an abundance of masculine fantasies about sexualised and dangerous women in the last decade of the nineteenth century, such as the sphinx, the siren, etc. (Dijkstra 1986). One clear, more extreme but very popular example is the vampiric woman. An example of this is
La Gioconda by Walter Pater , but also certain French works by Baudelaire and
Gaultier, which had a great influence on English literature during the fin-de-siècle
(Hughes 1999: 123). Even Stoker's Dracula, Dijkstra argues, is a story about the world of Eve even though the predator is male, as Dracula has been summoned by
Lucy's wanton desire for three different men. She gets attacked first and gets a blood transport by her three suitors, after which she turns into a vicious, cruel vampire, killing new-born children. Lucy stands for the New Woman, who refuses the role of mute and demure wife and mother and becomes an unnatural, wanton beast, until she is killed by male force and turned into “that ideal creature of feminine virtue of the mid-nineteenth century: the dead woman” (Dijkstra 1986: 346).
The Yellow Book
In The Yellow Book, the fear of certain writers about the success of female writers is quite obvious. Critics writing about The Yellow Book such as Laurel Brake and Sally
Ledger have mentioned the “reactionary species of misogyny” of Henry James's short story “The Death of the Lion” in the first volume, in which the complaining sentence is uttered “in the age we live in one gets lost among the genders” (James
1894: 44), and the danger of the growing group of female writers at end of the century is lamented (Ledger 2007: 9-10). In this story male authors have to use Gouwy 24
female pseudonyms to still be able to sell their work. Another piece of complaint about female authors in the first volume can be found in “Reticence in Literature” by
Arthur Waugh. He complains that the female story “plays with the subtler emotions of sensual pleasure, [and] it has developed into that class of fiction which for want of a better word I must call chirurgical … [and] … it infects its heroines with acquired diseases of names unmentionable” (Waugh 1894: 218-219 qtd. In Ledger 2007: 10).
The threat of women in the workplace is also expressed in Kenneth
Grahame's short story “The Headswoman” in the third volume of The Yellow Book.
This story relates of a girl, Jeanne, who applied for and got the job of an executioner or 'headsman'. The narrator relates ironically of the eases and uneases of a woman doing a quite unusual job, and how since she started doing the job, as she is a very pretty girl, the condemned are no longer lamenting, but are merrily making jokes for
“we all know a maiden loves a merry jest when she's certain of having the last word!”
(Grahame 1894: 35). Now then, when a certain mistake happens and an execution has to be stopped, Jeanne is so keen on doing the right job, that she does not want to stop. Yet, in the end she is stopped and the man who was unjustly brought to the scaffold, the lord of a castle, explains why he did not protest:
”And when I got here, Thibault, old fellow, and saw that divine creature – nay,
a goddess, dea certe – so graceful, so modest, so anxious to acquit herself
with credit – Well, you know my weakness; I never could bear to disappoint a
woman. She had evidently set her heart on taking my head; and as she had
my heart already - ” […] Jeanne, as was natural, had the last word.
“Understand me, Mr. Mayor, “said she, “these proceedings are entirely Gouwy 25
irregular. I decline to recognise them, and when the quarter expires I shall
claim the usual bonus!” (Grahame 1894: 44).
Clearly, the point that is being made, is that a woman doing a man's job is a dangerous thing, as she has a certain power over men and will be bound to start making demands that are unreasonable. As the mayor says: ““You women are so precise. You never will make any allowance for the necessary margin of error in things.”” (42) Towards the end of the story, then, the mayor is turned into an anxious, whimpering man, completely run over by Jeanne, who, being an “unforgiving young person” (45), reprimands him by telling him:
“You are so hopelessly wanting in system and method. Really, under the
present happy-go-lucky police arrangements […] Of course, if it's anything in
the rack line of business, I shall have to superintend the arrangements, and
then you can feel sure you're in capable hands. But probably they'll only fine
you pretty smartly, give you a month or two in the dungeons, and dismiss you
from your post” (45).
Together with this fear expressed by the older generation, the arrival of decadence and its misogynous image of the vampiric, dangerous woman was also present in
The Yellow Book, as well as milder, but still somewhat offensive images of women associated with public life, the theatre, etc. (see above). The clearest and most
'famous' example is Arthur Symons' poem in the first volume, “Stella Maris”, which is about an encounter with a prostitute. This poem has been discussed and criticised a lot from the very beginning. Nobody could deny its rather shocking, sensational Gouwy 26
nature. Sally Ledger calls this poem “A more “yellow” species of misogyny”, as
“Sexually available and thoroughly sexualised, Symons's “Juliet of a night”, his irreverent “Stella Maris,” whose lips attach themselves vampire-like to his neck, is thoroughly characteristic of male Decadent formulations of femininity in the 1890s”
(Ledger 2007: 10).
Other instances of vampiric female character can be found in the fourth volume of the magazine, in a poem by Charles Newton-Robinson: “Hor. Car. I. 5: A
Modern Paraphrase”. This poem is, as it says, a paraphrase of a particular poem by
Horace in his Carmina, except that the writer has exaggerated the woman's wantonness and witch-like character: “Yes, like a witch in her cave, you sit/ In the gilded midnight, rosy-lit;/ While snares for souls of men you knit” (Newton-Robinson
1895: 202). The woman, Pyrrha, is depicted as a dangerous witch, seducing every boy she can get her hands on, leaving the narrator broken-hearted and angry.
This “exoticised, vampire-like sexuality” is, according to Ledger, also closely linked and associated with “Beardsleyesque femininity” (Ledger 2007: 7). As I have already pointed out in the previous part about women as aesthetic objects, most of
Beardsley's and other's illustrations in the magazine were portraits of women. Yet, a lot of these images are connected with decadence . The example I already gave,
“Night Piece”, which is actually a visual representation of “Stella Maris”, and also “The
Wagnerites” in volume three (Beardsley 1894: 50), are images by Bearsley of actresses and prostitutes, “often display[ing] women and their bodies as objects of the gaze of the (implied) male spectator […] or as objects of leering male (and sometimes female) creatures” (Brake 1995: 53). Thus, women are actually more than Gouwy 27
just aesthetic objects; they have become the object of perverse fantasies and eroticism.
There is also a rich representation of women as public figures in the magazine, both in pictures and stories. There are the pictures by Walter Sickert in volume two and three, 'The Old Bedford Music Hall' and 'Collins's Music Hall, Islington' (Sickert
1894: 220; 1894: 136) , both depicting female dancers on stage. In the short story
“Madame Réjane” by Dauphin Meunier which I mentioned before as an example of women as aesthetic objects, the Parisian woman is also an actress: “an actress, she is the daughter of an actor, and the niece of Madame Apcal-Arnault, sometime pensionnaire of the Comédie-Française. […] Her very name is suggestive; it seems to share in the odd turn of her wit, the sauciness of her face, the tang of her voice; for
Réjane's real name is Réju. Doesn't it sound like a nick-name, especially invented for this child of the greenroom?”(Meunier 1894:199). The very gracious, angelic, mute inspiration for men named Réjane is suddenly transfigured into a saucy public girl called Réju. Yet, the author still wants to retain some of her grace by in the end retaining her other name, Réjane: “”Réjane” calls up to us the fanciful actress – fanciful, but studious, conscientious, impassioned for her art; “Madame Réjane has rather a grand air” (199).
In the poem “To Salomé at St. James's” in the third volume, Theodore
Wratislaw addresses another ballet dancer. He calls her “Flower of the ballet's nightly mirthy/ Pleased with a trinket or a gown,/” as well as “my plaything”; a “princess less in birth than power/[...]/ With scarlet lips and naked arms/ And such rich jewels as beseem/ The painted damzel's charms,” (Wratislaw 1894: 110-111). The girl is again an aesthethic object, yet not to be taken as seriously, as she is a frivolous “plaything”, Gouwy 28
made up to entertain men “in our banal age” (111).
These portraits of women as public figures can also occur in the background of a story: In “When I am King” by Henry Harland, the story starts with the (male) main character entering a “brasserie-à-femmes”, described as follows: “you were waited upon by ladies, lavishly rouged and in regardless toilets, who would sit with you and chat, and partake of refreshments at your expense […] All this in an atmosphere hot as a furnace-blast, and poisonous with the fumes of gas, the smells of bad tobacco, of musk, alcohol, and humanity” (Harland 1894: 72). A bit later the woman who came to sit by him is mentioned en passant as “the painted female sipping eau-de-vie at my elbow” (79).
Again these public women are seen as non-important, non-serious 'playthings' for men, and like this we are very far from women as subjects with their own minds and feelings. Yet, these women were by the end of the century really more and more prominent in the literary world. I would like to move on now to how women writers reacted to these images made of them.
2. Women as subject (in The Yellow Book and outside it)
At the end of the nineteenth century, it had already become relatively 'easy' for women to write and publish. Yet, the biggest question for women writers of the end of the nineteenth century, was how they should position and portray themselves as female writers and what the concept 'woman' and 'female writer' should mean, considering the many ways they had already been rendered by men and masculine traditions. According to Gilbert and Gubar, this was a big question for every woman Gouwy 29
who started writing from the eighteenth and nineteenth century on. Women, previously being framed and judged as either the angel or the monster, now needed to frame themselves (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 35,36).
Next to that, according to Jonathan Culler, it was also still a vital question for feminists in the twentieth century, how the opposition between men and women should be treated. It could either be denied or minimised, or it could be accepted, and
'the feminine' could be celebrated for its distinctive characteristics. Women writers of the end of the nineteenth century faced exactly the same problematic choice: they could either choose to identify themselves with male writers and the masculine tradition, asserting and portraying themselves as 'New Women', or they could try to embrace the 'feminine' inside and make their own successes (Culler 1982: 172).
The women who chose to write for The Yellow Book mainly followed the first option. Being part of the aesthetic magazine comprised that they largely agreed with the main image of them as New Women, part of a daring, new project, which was dominated by masculine ideas of 'high' art. For a woman to choose such path, meant to project herself, almost expose herself, like the woman in Beardsley's picture, who is watched by a Pierrot-like figure while she goes to “visit Lane's avant-garde publishing house alone at night” (Ledger 2007: 12). As Showalter puts it, the world of aestheticism was in the general mind often associated with New Women, as “”twin monsters of a degenerate age, sexual anarchists who blurred the boundaries of gender”” in which “New Women's writing was unwomanly and perverse” (Showalter
1993 qtd. In Schaffer 2000:18).
Gouwy 30
2.1 Women who wrote for The Yellow Book
As I mentioned above, when women and women poets started becoming more and more prominent in the magazine, they often had a similar profile to that of the New
Woman, although they were not particularly feminists or even interested in political affairs (concerning gender). According to Hughes they “pursued full-time careers, ignored bourgeois prohibitions on female sexuality, and became vocal members of the Literary Ladies, an association formed in 1889 to promote women writers”
(Hughes 2004: 850). This corresponds with the image Lane wanted for his magazine and for his female participants, as I have stated above, as this suited his agenda of having a 'daring, progressive, factor'.
Yet, the image of women in general in the magazine cannot be pinned down to the New Woman or any other term or definition. As I stated in the previous part on objectification of women, there were a lot of different ways women were portrayed by men, which were a lot more prejudiced and less friendly. But at the same time, female writers also reacted in many different ways to those images (see later).
Although Lane's strategy was to have as many readers as possible and therefore used female authors as well (see above), the female portion only got substantial in the fourth volume of The Yellow Book, especially in its poetry section.
According to Hughes, in the first volume there is not one poem by a female writer; only two short stories, one by habituée Ella D'Arcy and one by George Egerton, and a part of a play produced by the female writer John Oliver Hobbes and George
Moore, who collaborated on it (Lyon Mix 1960: 127; Hughes 2004: 855).
The most important names of the circle were Ella D'Arcy, who actually was unofficial co-editor as well, Graham R. Tomson or, as she was named after the first Gouwy 31
volume, Rosamund Mariott Watson, Netta Syrett, Olive Custance, Evelyn Sharp, and other recurring names such as Dollie Radford, Nora Hopper and Leila Macdonald.
Some singular contributions were made by already important names such as John
Oliver Hobbes, Vernon Lee, George Egerton and E. Nesbit.
2.2 Reasons for writing
Women being portrayed as they were in the magazine, though, one might wonder why exactly they wanted to write for it. There are several well-grounded reasons, given by Schaffer in The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000). Firstly, she says, “To be published by John Lane was to achieve full aesthetic recognition, for it meant not only to be published by the same house that produced male aesthetes' work […] but also to be published on handmade paper, with an exquisite woodcut for a frontispiece, a stamped gilt design on the cover, special type, in a limited edition, and perhaps with a Beardsley drawing on the cover. Lane's emphasis on well-crafted books ensured that the text looked artistic, valuable, and antique, and those who published with him were writers who prized those aesthetic associations” (Schaffer
2000:49).
There were also some particular advantages for women to write in the aesthetic tradition on the whole, which were connected with the characteristics of the tradition itself. It allowed them, as Schaffer puts it, to “let them attain the high status of cultured writers yet also satisfied the reviewers' requirement that women produce pretty, descriptive literature” (Schaffer 2000: 50). In other words, they could combine literature genres that were expected of either men or women. It was actually the one genre that let women write without being limited to her status as 'female writer', as it opened up a lot of stylistic and topical possibilities. They were no longer confined to Gouwy 32
their 'traditional/ expected subjects' like political accounts in case they were New
Women or personal accounts as was typical for the traditional Victorian housewife; they could explore new kinds of subjects and even touch on things that previously were taboo or risky (Schaffer 2000: 70-71). In The Yellow Book as well, female writers were finally capable of putting themselves on the same level as their male colleagues, both in terms of genre and of themes. They were able to reassert themselves, create a new image of themselves as 'writers' and 'artists'.
Yet there is a catch to these things above. It is in the words ““to achieve full aesthetic recognition, for it meant […] to be published by the same house that produced male aesthetes' work” (own italics) and in “satisfied the reviewers' requirement that women produce pretty, descriptive literature”. This means that it was still the male writers who were the examples, and women, if they wanted to be considered real artists who deliver work of quality, had to 'measure up' to 'masculine standards'. They were still 'allowed' to use their 'own discourse' of “pretty, descriptive literature”, but only because that was what the reviewers, who were predominantly a masculine breed, wanted. To sum up, the world of 'high' aesthetic literature was still mainly a man's world, and women, if they wanted to fit in, had to adapt themselves to their rules. And that was what a lot of women did, for the reasons given above.
2.3 Problems facing female aesthetes
Again the big question for women who decided to contribute to the 'masculine' world of The Yellow Book, was how exactly to project themselves, after having been portrayed in the same magazine and projected into roles for over centuries by the patriarchal world. This was perhaps the biggest difficulty for a woman writer: to put herself beyond the images that had already been created of her and find her true Gouwy 33
reflection in the mirror. After all, in between the image of silent angel that some still promoted, the image of aesthetic object or of dangerous vampire, the woman writer had to position herself. More even, as we have seen above, this New Woman, fighting for her own independent and free life and trying to compose her own identity, still lived in a world that was predominantly masculine and that, as we have seen, still created images of women according to its own perceptions and fantasies. As a consequence, female writers for The Yellow Book were also still, for the greatest part, dependent on a male editor and publisher to be admitted.
Subsequently, wanting to participate in a masculine world and still being a woman and being perceived as a woman, moreover having to measure up to masculine standards, a lot of female aesthetes of the 1890s were divided between different gender expectations and roles: as Schaffer puts it, “being female yet being aesthetic; living like New Women while admiring Pre-Raphaelite maidens; trying to be mondaines (Ouida's term for cosmopolitan female dandies) but also emulating
Angels in the House” (Schaffer 2000: 4-5). This gave them their characteristic ambivalent appearance. They often used lots of special, experimental literary techniques in their quest for their identity and their possibilities for expressing things that they had been keeping for themselves in silence for centuries (Schaffer and
Psomiades 1999: 16; Schaffer 2000: 4-5). Yet, being aesthetes, they were still mainly concerned with the preoccupations and ideals of (masculine) aestheticism. As Linda
Hughes beautifully puts it:
The term "female aesthete," however, is riddled with tensions and
contradictions given middle-class ideologies of gender. If "aesthete" implies a
commitment to the unity of the arts, cultural authority (in the form of taste), Gouwy 34
and, as with Wilde, "advanced" political and artistic views superior to those of
the bourgeois herd, "female" invokes domestic duties and cultural marginality,
as well as the internal contradictions that constituted Victorian feminine
subjectivity (Hughes 1996: 173).
Trying to find their own voice and still trying to satisfy male demands, female aesthetes found themselves, in Hughes' terms, “bound at times to be a kind of voice in the wilderness, neither one thing nor the other. Elaine Showalter argues that
“women's writing... always embodies the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant” (own italics; Showalter 31 Qtd. In Hughes 1996:184). In the next part I will examine, then, how women dealt with this in The Yellow Book.
2.4 Discourses and Techniques
As Gilbert and Gubar argued, and as I have mentioned before, due to previously created images, women constantly found themselves in a position in which they had to shape their own identity and frame themselves. To construct their own (public) identity, the female aesthetes could choose either to identify themselves with the images already created of them, or they could try to put themselves beyond it, by contesting these images. No matter which discourse they followed, they often had particular reasons for it. I will examine their different motives and the techniques they used, and illustrate these with examples from female contributions in The Yellow
Book.
2.4.1. Contesting the 'angel in the house'
The first and oldest image of women, as stated in the first part of this dissertation, is that of the 'angel', sitting at home, silently and passively. She is also often linked with bourgeoisie and 'low' art. This numbing prejudice was already contested by women Gouwy 35
starting to write and publish literature. The act, then, of certain female artists contributing to The Yellow Book was also proof that they were nothing like these images. Another way women protested more and more against their previous roles was by their further conduct and choices in life, in which they opted both against muteness and their prescribed roles at home. I already mentioned how most female aesthetes participating in the magazine also in many ways were New Women: they made a living of their own, lived independently, divorced and remarried as they pleased, etc. They started speaking up for themselves, changing from silent muses living a private, discrete life into public figures, raising their voices and claiming their freedom. They expressed their anger, sexual desires and need for intellectual growth and they brought certain tensions to light, such as problems with marriage, etc. They did this using different techniques, that divert the reader's attention from the controversial content. Some of the most important and most apt techniques for this are the use of fanciful or unreliable characters or narrators, “phantasmatic diction”
(Schaffer 2000: 51), epigrammatic dialogue or psychological case studies (5-6).
I want to have a closer look at the first and second technique, which are very closely linked. In both, the fantastic or strange is used to convey certain feelings or behaviour that might have seemed shocking or strange for a woman in that age. By displacing these feelings or behaviours into a setting that has nothing or very little in common with the real, present world, or by displacing it into a strange or unreliable character, it certainly loses its shocking quality.
The term “phantasmatic diction” is further defined by Schaffer as “precious, archaic diction”, often “describing the beauty of material objects” because it “permitted new sorts of gender politics” (Schaffer 2000: 50-51): Gouwy 36
Writers situated a woman's desires in the unreal space of “dream” or “fantasy”,
thereby preventing the reader from criticizing the character according to
everyday nineteenth-century sexual norms […] By placing characters outside
realism, authors found themselves free to depict a wide range of behaviors.
Readers would hardly accept the idea that a good woman could want to
seduce a room full of amorous men. But this idea became palatable when it
was carefully separated from “real life” (Schaffer 2000: 51).
So again this technique is used to be freer in expressing certain things that were often still considered taboo, especially among the male and/or more conservative readers. Another function of this was also to contest the prejudice about female authors that they wrote from their own life experience, also called the
“autobiographical fallacy” (Schaffer 2000: 14).
Here I want to focus on the first function, though, expressing things that were taboo. A specific example of this sort, is the displacement of women's need for freedom: this can either be expressed in the motif of being imprisoned or even dead, being put in a grave, or of a fanciful character being free and independent. In The
Madwoman in the Attic, I mentioned before how the need among female writers to frame themselves was expressed. This framing was symbolised by means of several images such as mirrors, paintings or frames. Women could never be free from these frames, these costumes and masks that were put over them and which they could not shed off. That is why Gilbert and Gubar elaborate on these concepts which they call “Dramatizations of imprisonment and escape”, being a “uniquely female tradition” in the nineteenth century (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 85). The images of imprisonment, according to Gilbert and Gubar, are very broad: Gouwy 37
Ladylike veils and costumes, mirrors, paintings, statues, locked cabinets,
drawers, trunks, strong- boxes, and other domestic furnishing appear and
reappear in female novels and poems throughout the nineteenth century and
on into the twentieth to signify the woman writer's sense that, as Emily
Dickinson put it, her “life” has been “shaven and fitted into a frame”” (Gilbert
and Gubar 1984: 85).
This idea of being “fitted into a frame”, being objectified into a work of art, is something typical for the aesthetic movement as we have seen before and will return to (see above, also below).
Consequently, female writers react against these forms of confinement by
“explosive violence of […] “moments of escape””(Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 85). These moments bring about the “phenomenon of the mad double […] For it is, after all, through the violence of the double that the female author enacts all her own raging desire to escape male houses and male texts” (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 85).
Examples of female poets thematising the feeling of imprisonment can be found in volume six of The Yellow Book. In “The Golden Touch”, Rosamund Marriott
Watson tells how “the limits of [her] narrow room” and “the prisoning bars” are temporarily disappearing in a dream, hinting that they had always been there, as a self-evidence. The poetical voice compares her situation to a caged bird:
“Somewhere a neighbouring cage-bird sings,/ Sings of the Spring in this grey street
[…] Clothed with the sun he breaks to song - / In vague remembrance, deep delight -
/ Of dim green worlds, forsaken long” (Watson 1895: 77). In “A Song” by Dollie
Radford in the same volume, the prison is a garden wall consisting of rose hedges, Gouwy 38
again an image often used by female aesthetes. It is a man again, her lover, who comes from outside this wall and makes her able to break away (Radford 1895).
Female personae who are silenced or alienated from the world, their love or happiness by death or being (put) in their grave is also a trope that appears very frequently in literature throughout the nineteenth century. It was very consciously used by female writers, as it was the reflection of their own position in life and society
(Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 85-87). While men were free agents, it was believed that women were not capable of living their own life and were destined to be dependent, passive and weak, bound to the house. The more women started realising this, the more this kind of life pressed on them and was felt as suffocating and deadening.
Whereas their husbands were free to do as they pleased in the world, they felt already partly confined to the world of the dead. In volume ten of The Yellow Book,
Rosamund Marriott Watson issued her poem “D'Outre Tombe”, about a woman speaking from her grave to her beloved who is in the world of the living. Twice the juxtapostion is made between “I, in my grave, and you, above” and “I with the dead, and you among the living”. This is presented as the ultimate division between them that is irrevocable: “In Death's disseverance, wider than December/ Disparts from
May […] In separate camps we sojourn, unallied; / Life is unkind and Death is unforgiving,/ And both divide.” (Watson 1896: 54). Another poem by the same poet,
“Requiescat” in volume five once again deals with this division. The poetic voice says that in case she dies, “Bury me deep […]/ […] Lest my poor dust should feel the spring […] And you […]/ […] pass never there,/ Lest my poor dust should dream of you” (Watson 1895: 71). Gouwy 39
Examples of the second mode of expressing women's need for freedom, the displacement of freedom in fanciful characters, can be found in volume nine. The opposite of the passive, quiet housewife is the active adventurer or the wanderer.
The first character embodying this alternative is the wild “Wolf-Edith”, in the (same- called) poem by Nora Hopper (Hopper 1896: 57). She is a not clearly identified girl, and she is entirely unbound and free: “Wolf-Edith dwells on the wild grey down/ […]
She goes as light as a withered leaf,/ She has not tasted joy or grief.”. She is almost like a siren, as “Her lips know songs that will lure away/ A dull-eared clown from his buxom may”. She is certainly as alien, but she is entirely by herself and independent:
“never a man the bents above/ Might call Wolf-Edith his mate and love” (Hopper
1896: 57). Yet, Wolf-Edith does find herself a man, but he is no ordinary man. He is a ghost of a Saxon soldier, come from the grave. In fact, this love story is exactly the reverse of what we have just examined: now, it is the woman who is active, free and alive, and the man haunts her from the world of the dead.
Another example of a female free agent can be found in the narrative poem “A
Ballad of Victory” by Dollie Radford in the same volume (Radford 1896: 229). The poem is about a female “traveller from many lands” (229). She is again a free agent, arriving “[w]ith quiet step and gentle face,/ With tattered cloak, and empty hands” in a little village, where “[a]round her all the people came,/ Drawn by the magic of her speech,/ To learn the music of her name” (229-230). The girl is immediately loved, by men “for her beauty”, by women “for her tender healing ways” and by children,
“put[ting] their hands about her face” (230). Yet she set out on a journey with a particular goal, and being a free agent, “ere the shadows longer grew/ Or up the sky the evening stole”, she “took the lonely way she knew” (230). The people from the village see her wounds and scars and wonder who she is, where she is from and Gouwy 40
where she has wandered. It is first a woman, and then a “youth […] With clearer eyes and wiser heart” (232) who can answer these questions. The young man concludes:
But stronger than the years that roll,
Than travail past, or yet to be,
She presses to her hidden goal,
A crownless, unknown Victory.
(Radford 1896: 232)
The girl, even though wounded by the journey she had to make and the suffering she had to bear, is on her way to her victory. Women, finally struggling free, have been obliged to fight very hard and suffer a lot of blows in their fight for freedom, but they are marching towards their victory.
Yet, in both poems, the women are also alienated, uncanny beings, because fighting for freedom also isolates them from patriarchal society. The concept of uncanniness, moreover, can also be related to women's repressed anger, which is brooding in the unconscious and tends to erupt in extreme ways. Gilbert and Gubar refer to this tendency as the “mad double” (see above; Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 85).
This “mad double” of female writers leads us into the realm of the monster, another example of the strategy of displacement in a fanciful character, this time used to express anger and power.
Graham R. Tomson, aka Rosamund Marriott Watson wrote three poems in this tradition, in which she used the image of a monster, using violence on its previous oppressors. In “A Ballad of the Were-Wolf”, a quiet house woman can change into her alter ego of werewolf, slaughtering countless men. Still, these images of women as monsters, created by themselves, are not the same kind of images made of Gouwy 41
women by men as seen in the previous part (see 1.3). Hughes very beautifully describes the difference: “Tomson's crucial strategy: a careful segregation of the erotic and the aggressive. None of Tomson's monsters is beautiful; none tries – or wants – to seduce a male gazer […] They are worlds away from the dreamy, languorous nudes of Decadence” (Hughes 1995: 113). These examples have not been issued in The Yellow Book though – who knows, maybe because its male publishing house sensed its dangerous violence directed to themselves. Indeed, as
Hughes put it: “The excess of anger that accompanies the displacement of the beautiful by the beastly female body also suggests female rage, especially rage at norms and restrictions on the female body aestheticized in public discourse” (Hughes
1995: 114). This also refers to women's contest against the second kind of masculine prejudice, which we will discuss in the next part.
Another typical example of the technique of “phantasmatic diction” is the expression of sexual feelings or extramarital involvements through symbols. In “Red
Rose” by Leila Macdonald in volume four of The Yellow Book, love and sexual feelings are carefully embedded in the metaphor of a red rose being addressed:
Why do your leaves uncurl invisibly?
Is it mere pride?
When I behold your petals,
They lie immovably against your breast;
Or opened wide,
your shield thrown wide.
But none may watch the unveiling of your pride.
(Macdonald 1895: 143) Gouwy 42
A little more daring is “A Madrigal” by Olive Custance in the sixth volume, as it very openly refers to a love relationship with a woman. The metaphors and poetic diction are used here only as embellishment, not to hide or mask anything: in every stanza except the last, a particular part of the face is praised, and the last stanza then concludes with straightforward worship:
I see thee, and my soul is swung
In golden trances of delight;
I hear thee, and my tremulous tongue
Hurls forth a flight
Of bird-like songs, saluting thee.
Oh, come and dwell and dream with me
(Custance 1895: 216)
Also in the fourth volume, “Day and Night”, a poem by Edith Nesbit, expresses extramarital love in the disguise of a triangular relation between the earth, the sun and the moon:
All day the glorious Sun caressed
Wide meadows and white winding way,
And on the Earth's soft heaving breast
Heart-warm his royal kisses lay.
She looked up in his face and smiled,
With mists of love her face seemed dim;
The golden Emperor was beguiled,
To dream she would be true to him. Gouwy 43
Yet was there, 'neath his golden shower,
No end of love for him astir;
She waited, dreaming, for the hour
When Night, her love, should come to her;
When 'neath Night's mantle she should creep
And feel his arms about her cling,
When the soft tears true lovers weep
Should make amends for everything
(Nesbit 1895: 234)
The sun is the classical symbol for the patriarch and positive masculine strength, with his “golden shower” and “royal kisses”. “This golden Emperor” is “beguiled”, because he does not understand the real thoughts and inner depths of the earth. The earth, despite being 'untrue' to her 'official' lover, to whom she would probably be bound by marriage, is represented as the victim, because she does not love the 'sun'; she loves someone else, her true love, who comes to her at night, and “When the soft tears true lovers weep/ Should make amends for everything”
This same idea about unhappy marriages often returns in more prosaic, realistic renderings as well. In Netta Syrett's short story “Thy Heart's Desire” in the second volume, a very lonely wife who does not love her husband meets a friend of her husband and they fall in love. Here again, the woman is presented as the victim and her wrong deeds are excusable because of the horribly lonely situation, the alienating setting and a rather slow, clumsy, stupid husband, as is extensively described, by means of an almost ironical subversion of the aesthetic tradition: Gouwy 44
Awkwardness, perhaps, best describes the whole man. He was badly put
together, loose-jointed, ungainly […] his long pale face was made paler by a
shock of coarse, tow-coloured hair; his eyes even looked colourless […] He
had a way of slouching when he moved that singularly intensified the general
uncouthness of his appearance (Syrett 1894: 230).
When he speaks, he seems to be “drawling out the words with an exasperating air of delivering a final verdict, after deep reflection on the subject” (own italics; Syrett
1894: 230-231). After the man's return home, the girl is described as “lingering a moment after he had entered the tent, as though unwilling to leave the outer air; and before she turned to follow him she drew a deep breath, and her hand went for one swift second to her throat as though she felt stifled” (231). Clearly living with the man and seeing no one else could be enough reason to go slightly crazy.
In the story “A Vigil” by Mrs. Murray Hickson in the fifth volume (Hickson “Two studies” 1895: 104), another kind of unhappy marriage is shown. Again the woman is the victim, but this time because her husband does not love her and abandons and betrays her. He stays away a whole night and day without giving notice. He gives an excuse, but she knows he is lying and the story ends with their uncomfortable silence. This story is again a protest against the position of women as the ones who stay home and suffer silently.
Strongly linked with the concept of the angelic and mute woman then, is the
'bourgeois woman'. Here again, participating in The Yellow Book or the aesthetic discourse was already a form of contest, as this automatically put the female artist into the intellectual world of high art and literature, in which the concept of 'art for art's sake' was central. As I already mentioned, a lot of female contributors to The Yellow Gouwy 45
Book were 'New Women' in their choices in life. The 'New Woman' was as much against the concept of the 'angel', as against the idea of the 'bourgeois woman'. In the short story by Victoria Cross, “Theodora: A Fragment”, this new concept of women is expressed on paper as well. As Ledger puts it in “Wilde women and The
Yellow Book”, this story is about “a sexually ambiguous erotic encounter between a
New Womanish figure and a male aesthete. Both of the two main protagonists challenge dominant gender codes of the period” . Theodora is “intellectual and independent, her private sitting room with its piled up books and papers suggesting to the narrator that hers is “an intellectual but careless and independent spirit”; much like the New Woman, Theodora addresses Ray with a frank directness, calmly taking charge of social situations” (Ledger 2007: 22).
2.4.2 Contesting the idea of women as aesthetic and erotic objects
The second image created of women was typical of the aesthetic movement and therefore very apt for The Yellow Book: the conception of women as quiet and passive objects of art, whose beauties were 'made' or only recognised by the appreciation and rendering of the male artists and therefore could not stand by themselves. I would like to link this with the second element of “dominant 'masculine' aestheticism” (Ardis 1999: 235; see 1.Intro): women as linked with art and artificiality instead of reality or nature.
For female aesthetes, being part of the aesthetic movement, it was not evident to assert themselves as the active creative artist. Yet, again, simply the act of writing partly does that job. Naturally, though, there were certain techniques that female writers used to show themselves no longer as the quiet passive ones whose beauties could only be 'got' by male artists. This was either done by the female artist's Gouwy 46
assertion of her role as artist and active connoisseur instead of artistic object, or by the indication of the impossibility of male aesthetes to understand women and own their beauty.
The first technique is represented by some poems, which were also mentioned by Linda Hughes in her article on Women Poets and Contested Spaces in The Yellow
Book and which are each 'studies' or contemplations on a work of art: in “In a Gallery” by Katharine de Mattos in the second volume of The Yellow Book, a portrait of a woman is commented on. Yet, it is not just her beauty that is being praised as would be the case in classic male aestheticist work. The stress lies on the interplay between different on-lookers: “Veiled eyes, yet quick o meet one glance/ Not his, not yours, but mine” (de Mattos 1894: 177). Here the second technique is also partly used, because the fact is stressed that the painted woman could and cannot be understood by the male artist or gazer. Only the poetic voice seems to have understood her, and shares the secret with the other woman in the portrait:
Am I the first of those who gaze,
Who may their meaning guess,
Yet dare not whisper lest the words
Pale even painted cheeks?
(de Mattos 1984:178)
The poet, here, makes herself a gazer instead of the gazed-upon. Still, she does not turn the woman in the painting entirely into an aesthetic object either, as she lets us know there is much more to her than most other (male) gazers would notice. As
Hughes puts it, the poem of de Mattos (just like Nesbit's poem “Day and Night” (see above)) is “suggesting the pairing of female agency and female secrecy in contrast to Gouwy 47
the female mystery and instrumental sexual availability often found in male decadent verse” (Hughes 2004: 856).
A second poem in this genre can be found in volume seven: “To the Bust of the Pompeian Coelia” by Leila Macdonald. As the title suggests, it is a bust that is being commented on this time. Again, in asserting herself as the connoisseur, there is some participation in the masculine tradition of objectification, perhaps even more than in the last poem. But again, there is more to it. Again, the poetic voice investigates the inner life of the woman who stood for the artistic object, and again the stress is laid on her role of erotic agent instead of sufferer; “her beauty, never conquered yet, / Disdains the tears of men's regret” (Macdonald 1895: 117) and “'Mid scent, and song, and whirling dance,/ You bought men's worship with a glance” (118).
The second technique in which the male aesthete and his 'knowing gaze' is criticised, is very clearly rendered in the short story “The Pleasure Pilgrim” by Ella
D'Arcy in volume five (D’Arcy 1895: 34). The story consists of two men and two women who meet while they are travelling, the men being two 'kinds' of male aesthetes, Campbell and Mayne, and the women being a young, attractive girl, Lulie, with her 'nanny', who is not attractive but who is, as Ledger put it, “the archetype of the intelligent but sexually indeterminate New Woman” (Ledger 2007: 19). Both men are intrigued by Lulie and try to define her; for my arguments, I would like to focus on how Campbell approaches her, for he is the perfect example of a male artist who thinks that “he was the discoverer of her possibilities. He did not doubt that the rest of the world called her plain, or at least odd-looking. […] Her charm was something subtle, out-of-the-common, in defiance of all known rules of beauty. Campbell saw superiority in himself for recognising it, for formulating it” (D’Arcy 1895: 40). But his Gouwy 48
friend Mayne quickly takes him out of his illusion: “”Why, lieber Gott im Himmel, where are your eyes? Pretty! The girl is beautiful, gorgeously beautiful; every trait, every tint, is in complete, in absolute harmony with the whole” (41). And a bit further even: “Why, she's the most egregious flirt I've ever met […] I can see she means to add you to her ninety-and-nine other spoils” (42). To which Campbell, shocked, exclaims “”Miss Thayer is refined and charming””, as he “had a high ideal of Woman”
(42). When Mayne further lets him know that she goes cycling and shooting and dancing instead of the “singing lesson”, Campbell wonders “why on earth she should wish to do such things” (43). When furthermore Lulie's numerous earlier men- conquests become known to Campbell, he is “partly angry, partly incredulous, and inclined to believe that Mayne was chaffing him” (44). Campbell simply can not deal with the idea of a woman who lives an independent and active life, being her own erotic and aesthetic agent, so when they travel further, Campbell is more and more repelled and irritated by her. Still, he cannot help himself but believe in his way of shaping and aestheticising her:
and yet he was conscious how pleasant it would be to believe in her
innocence, in her candour. For she was so adorably pretty: her flower-like
beauty grew upon him; her head, drooping a little on one side when she
looked up, was so like a flower bent by its own weight. The texture of her
cheeks, her lips, were delicious as the petals of a flower. He found he could
recall with perfect accuracy every detail of her appearance: the manner in
which the red hair grew round her temples; how it was loosely and gracefully
fastened up behind with just a single tortoise-shell pin. He recalled the
suspicion of a dimple which shadowed itself in her cheek when she spoke, and
deepened into a delicious reality every time she smiled. He remembered her Gouwy 49
throat; her hands, of a beautiful whiteness, with pink palms and pointed
fingers” (Ella D’Arcy 1895: 49-50).
D'Arcy also mocks the tradition of male aestheticising, by making the first part of his praise for her beauty into a quite trite and clumsy comparison, repeating himself by using the term 'flower' thrice. In the next part of his revelry on her beauty, even more clichés of aesheticism and the aesthete's beauty ideal are used: red loose hair,
“gracefully fastened up”, furthermore with a “tortoise-shell pin”, being very fashionable in that age and calling up the exotic – tortoise-shell was one of the goods imported into Britain from their colonies in and around Central America (Helms 1969:
81) – also the stress on the throat and the whiteness of her skin was typical for the aesthetes.
In both the poems and short story, then, it is clear that the strongest argument of women against their objectification into an aesthetic work, was their own (erotic) agency and the fact that men were not capable of understanding what went on in their mind; all female writers clearly stressed the fact that a woman's beauty could not be objectified or mastered, even though the male aesthete seemed to think he could or did. These kind of stories then, as Hughes puts it, were an “outlet by which women writers could challenge social convention or misogynist contributions by men”
(Hughes 2004: 863).
This same technique was also used by Graham R. Tomson (Rosamund
Marriott Watson), who also regularly contributed to The Yellow Book. Hughes (beauty and The beast, about gra) also argued that while using the dominant “norms of feminine beauty”, she revised them “by asserting that a beautiful model for a painting Gouwy 50
can herself exert creative force to become the center of energy in the artwork”
(Hughes 1995: 103). She further says about it:
“Beauty," then, appears to have functioned for Graham Tomson not merely as
an enslaving ideology that objectified and reified women, but also as a force
that women could reflect, express, and modulate as women artists. This
woman's poetry likewise conforms to fin-de-siecle aestheticism yet also
subverts patriarchal configurations of the female body, though rarely in the
same poem (Hughes 1995: 103-104).
2.4.3 Contesting the vampiric 'femme fatale'
In “Wilde Women and The Yellow Book”, Sally Ledger says: “[a] number of the female contributors to The Yellow Book entered into a dialogue with its male
Decadent and aesthetic accounts of femininity” (Ledger 2007: 16). These accounts, of the lush, greedy serpent or monster, the opposites the image of the virtuous lady, were mainly contested by means of one particular technique. As this image of women was connected with decadence and the 1890s, and aestheticism and The Yellow
Book connected with this hype of decadence, female writers also tended to use this genre to be part of the masculine literary tradition. Yet, they often used this device to make their own point, or changed the role of women. Different instances can be found in The Yellow Book in which decadent images of women are used, but revised: they are monsters in outlook, but in fact they are innocent and often they are the victims of evasion, prejudice or even hatred.
In volume four of The Yellow Book, a very good example of this can be found in “Vespertilia”, by Rosamund Marriott Watson, according to Linda Hughes a poem on the 'female vampire'. Indeed, Vespertilia is described in words that are aligned Gouwy 51
with decay and the uncanny: the moment she appears is always at “the evening hour”, when “the red moon rose up behind the sheaves” (Watson 1895: 49). There is a long description of how she looks:
Her fair face glimmering like a white wood-flower
That gleams through withered leaves:
Her mouth was redder than the pimpernel,
Her eyes seemed darker than the purple air
'Neath brows half hidden – I remember well -
'Mid mists of cloudy hair.
(Watson 1895: 49)
Again, as in the aestheticist tradition, an eroticised description of a woman is used, though this time it has been taken a step further and turned into almost perverse eroticism, linked with death. Even though the hype of Twilight or True Blood did not exist yet, the idea of a white glimmering face, set in contrast with dark eyes and lips and a lot of hair, was then already a clear indication of a dead person; in this case, a living dead, which automatically brings us into the sphere of vampire-like creatures.
Not only her face, but also her whole attire is described:
And all about her breast, around her head,
Was wound a wide veil shadowing cheek and chin,
Woven like the ancient grave-gear of the dead:
A twisted clasp and pin
Confined her long blue mantle's heavy fold
Of splendid tissue dropping to decay,
Faded like some rich raiment worn of old, Gouwy 52
With rents and tatters gaping to the day.
Her sandals, wrought about with threads of gold,
Scarce held together still, so worn were they,
Yet sewn with winking gems of green and blue,
Where pale as pearls her naked feet shone through.
(Watson 1895: 49-50)
Here, the link with death and decay is even more explicit: her “wide veil” was “woven like the ancient grave-gear of the dead” and her mantle “of splendid tissue dropping to decay”.
Yet, as Hughes stresses, despite the fact that she 'haunts' the poetic voice, she is “also represented as an innocent victim, a marked departure from decadent convention” (Hughes 1999:129). The veil also stands for something that has been mentioned before: the images of imprisonment used by female writers (see 2.1.3.1).
It is clear that the vampire-girl in this poem is not of the dangerous, fatal, blood- sucking kind. She simply wants to be loved: “”Now I remember! … Now I know!” said she,/ “Love will be life … ah, Love is Life!” she cried,/ “And thou – thou lovest me?””
(50)
But as the man can not give this love to her, she has to abandon him and be left dead and lonely, lamented even by nature: “”Poor Vespertilia,” sing the grasses sere,/ “Poor Vespertilia,” moans the surf-beat shore” (52). As Hughes puts it,
“Graham R. Tomson's revenant poem "Vespertilia," […] engages in decadence only to refashion it in feminine terms as a representation of male erotic failure” (Hughes
2004: 855). Gouwy 53
A second example of this kind can be found in volume ten of the magazine, in the short story “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady” by Vernon Lee. This story is literally about a woman-snake; she was turned into a snake as punishment for a sinful life. She has been trying to lure men into a relationship with her for centuries, trying to become a beautiful woman again. Yet, this is presented as a legend that the protagonist, an innocent young man, hears about, goes through himself and thus shows to be problematic, because through his eyes we see the woman-snake's actual nature, which is innocent, loving, a victim: she took care of him, loved him and at the end she is killed brutally.
Next to these kind of stories, there is also critique of the masculine decadent and his ideas of women, such as in “The Pleasure Pilgrim” (D’Arcy 1895: 34): we have previously seen the one male aesthete, Campbell, who liked to elevate women to an artistic ideal, but the second aesthete, Mayne, can be seen as a parody of the male decadent. He does not elevate Lulie, but sees her as she 'is', an “egregious flirt”
(42) and a dangerous woman: “She's an adventuress, yes, an adventuress, but an end-of-the-century one” (43). In the end he concludes that she must be “simply the newest development of the New Woman”: ““Yes, I believe she's the American edition, and so new that she hasn't found her way into fiction. She's the pioneer of the army coming out of the West, that's going to destroy the existing scheme of things and rebuild it neare to the heart's desire”” (46). This masculine dread is also connected with women's literacy, as is clear from the following description:
And she's clever; she's read a good deal; she knows how to apply her reading
to practical life. Thus, she's learned from Herrick not to be coy; and from
Shakespeare that sweet-and-twenty is the time for kissing and being kissed. Gouwy 54
She honours her masters in the observance. She was not in the least abashed
when, one day, I suddenly came upon her teaching that damned idiot, young
Anson, two new ways of kissing (D'Arcy 1995: 43-44).
The fact that the girl learned everything from books and that she has a lot of knowledge, makes her ever so much more dangerous because it shows even more that she is elevating herself above men, that she is powerful, not only through her feminine abilities to seduce men, but also through masculine abilities to read, to have knowledge. The sentence “She honours her masters in the observance” also shows that she has qualities that were previously ascribed to men: she is not the woman who can be observed by the masculine aesthete, but she is his competitor, an aesthete, an active artist herself, observing instead of being observed. This fragment parodies the ideas men have about women who are able to attain knowledge and take up active roles: that this will immediately make them oversexualised, and dangerous devourers of the masculine realm.
Another kind of criticism can be found in Charlotte Mew's short story “Passed”
(1894: 121): the story relates of a woman who comes across a desperate girl in
London whose sister just died and who was entirely alone. The woman was so frightened of the girl's desperate clinging that she left her alone and ran away.
Months later, she saw the girl once again, this time in “a notorious thoroughfare in the western part of this glorious and guilty city” (139), i.e. the prostitutes' district, with a man by her side. The woman feels terribly guilty for having left the girl in her misery.
By means of this story, the terrible fate of women being forced into prostitution is related and lamented, and with this, the masculine decadent renderings of female eroticism. As Ledger puts it, “Mew's story presents a socialised and moralised Gouwy 55
encounter with a prostitute, an encounter that implicitly challenges Symons's connoisseur-like delectation of the prostitute's sensuous body in "Stella Maris" in volume one.” (Ledger 2007: 16). The occupation is rendered very negatively as the narrator wonders about these women:
What fair messengers, with streaming eyes and impotently craving arms, did
they send afar off ere they thus “increased their perfumes and debased
themselves even unto hell”? This was my question. I asked not who forsook
them, speaking in farewell the “hideous English of their fate.” […] It was
Virtue's splendid Dance of Death. A sickening confusion of odours assailed my
senses; each essence a vile enticement, outraging Nature by a perversion of
her own pure spell (Mew 1894: 139-140).
Yet, she clearly shows the side of women as victims; as she sees the girl again, among those women, she thinks back of “that silent witness, the poor little violet's prayer” (140), whereas the man by her side is portrayed as the 'victor': “[t]he man beside her was decorated with a bunch of sister flowers to those which had taken part against him, months ago, in vain. He could have borne no better badge of victory” (140).
2.4.4 Caught between masculinity and femininity: problem of self-exposure vs.
Victorianism
As I have pointed out previously, female writers were often caught between several possible gender roles, especially during the fin-de-siecle, at the moment of aestheticism. These questions about gender, about what was typically masculine and what typically feminine, and how, as a female writer, one ought to react to previously determined ideas about it, were very complex. Some liked to take on the masculine Gouwy 56
style and prove they could be very good at it, others liked to emphasize their
'femininity' and show it could be a worthy alternative.
Yet, in both directions, it could also become problematic. I would like to focus first on how this applied to the female contributors of The Yellow Book, and on possible alternatives.
2.4.4.1 Problem of masculinisation in aestheticism and The Yellow Book
Throughout the development of the arguments on female aesthetes contesting the classic, masculine-rendered images of women – being bourgeois, artistic objects or monsters - it has become clear that often these masculine images were used to subvert them. We just saw how women in the end-of-the-century magazine were able to criticise male artists, often by taking on the masculine stance and ridiculing it or looking at it from a different perspective. Yet, in doing this, taking on the masculine gaze or using the classic masculine-rendered ideas about women was not always part of a conscious choice in which the female writer was successfully able to parody and criticise it. Often, alas, these tendencies were due to an unconscious process in which women writers took on male stances on women or even themselves.
Many female writers, happy to be part of the elite world of aestheticism or all too eager to contradict the prejudice about female writers, or simply trying to fit into the predominantly masculine literary circle(s), had a tendency of losing themselves in the masculine-rendered ideas of beauty and women. Because through asserting herself as a New Woman, positioning herself as the equal of men, capable of sexual feelings, etc., the female writer on the one hand confirmed men's decadent anxieties about women becoming too 'public' and sexualised, and on the other hand forgot that they were female and had their own female qualities; indeed, by 'masculinising' Gouwy 57
themselves, taking on the 'male gaze', they exposed themselves more than ever, drawing in the gazes as they behaved like no other woman previously dared to behave.
A next step was that, while women wanted to object to the classic masculine ideas about bourgeois women and wanted to show that they were not 'that kind of woman', they tried so hard not being like that, that they took on the male stance entirely. Consequently, instead of contesting the images created of them by men, they started using them themselves. This kind of female writer is referred to by
Hughes as the 'male-identified poet' (Hughes 1995: 95).
Gilbert and Gubar address this problem as well in The Madwoman in the Attic:
“as Virginia Woolf observed, the woman writer seemed locked into a disconcerting double bind: she had to choose between admitting she was “only a woman” or protesting that she was “as good as a man”. Consequentially, “the continual use of male models inevitably involves the female artist in a dangerous form of psychological self-denial” (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 64, 69).
Hughes quotes a review that has been written about a female end-of-the- century poet: “’The Greeks once figured the Muses as women; [...] Certain it seems that Poetry in petticoats is only poetry on sufferance; only woman essaying to do the man's part"” (own italics; Hughes 2004: 851- 852). This idea was shared by many male and, unconsciously, even female artists.
This male identification was even visible in certain daily aspects, such as the many male pseudonyms women writers gave themselves, or their change of dress, especially among the 'New Women' of that time. They were often, according to
Schaffer, “accused of excessive unwomanliness”: “Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) wore a Gouwy 58
masculine bob […] New Women pulled on men's trousers” (Schaffer 2000: 18).
Although not all female aesthetes were entirely New Women, certainly not in dress as the aesthetic fashion for women consisted of long, shapeless robes and loose, long hair, it nicely proves my point: women in this age, in trying to assert themselves, often had the tendency to start identifying with men and becoming the “male-identified poet[s]”, as Hughes put it.
A very good example of this was what I mentioned previously: the chapter
Schaffer writes about home decoration. Because men had taken over this niche and professionalised it, women artists who wanted to look professional, now had to sympathise with their male colleagues on how amateuristic female decoration was.
This genuinely happened, for example, in columns for the prestigious male magazine
Pall Mall Gazette. When Rosamund Marriott Watson was asked to write for it, she distanced herself entirely from female decoration, worse even, she laughed at it
:“Nothing is sacred to the amateur decorator, especially if she be a woman […]
Perhaps most true women are vandals at heart” (Watson 1897: 150 qtd. In Schaffer
2000: 88-89). She even took as far as to start using the masculine prejudice about women we discussed as metaphors for how they destroyed the aesthetic, as described by Schaffer:
Women become carriers of plague, which “rages with fury” through those very
homes they were supposed to protect and transfigure […] Both woman as
demon and woman as prostitute segue into the description of woman as
criminal […] summing up the movement of the passage from biblical to sexual
to criminal to military codes, all of which women violate in turn (Schaffer 2000:
88-89). Gouwy 59
Another concrete example of the female aesthete taking on the male stance entirely can be found in volume 5 of The Yellow Book, in which the female poet Leila
Macdonald wrote “Refrains”, a poem completely written from the perspective of a male character: “Perchance a girl may weep to see them lead me out to die,/ May cross herself, and whisper, “God, he is as young as I.”” (own italics; Macdonald 1895:
131). Again this is a symptom of a female writer identifying herself with the masculine writers' world to such lengths that she forgets her own (female) identity.
Connected with this is another aspect of the 'male-identified poet', the female artist who identifies herself with masculine ideas on female beauty as the object of art and eroticism. Considering this was a central notion of aestheticism, this actually is not so very odd. In an article by Psomiades, a cartoon by Beerbohm of Christina
Rossetti is described. Psomiades says that this cartoon “observes the continuities between the work of men and women” in that “both poets create aestheticism's feminine images, both have an investment in those images as the location of their art and artistry, both operate in the aestheticist tradition”. Therefore, we need a “double vision [...] for thinking about the work of women who produced aestheticism”(Psomiades 1999: 102-103).
In “Women Poets and Contested Spaces in The Yellow Book”, Hughes says about a poem in The Yellow Book, “A Song” by Dollie Radford, one of the first poems by female writers in the magazine, that it “did little to challenge women's identification with sexualized objects in "Stella Maris" and other poems from volume l” (such as the short story by Mew in the same volume actually did (see above)): “Though woman is here a desiring subject, she is a passive one” (Hughes 2004: 853). So this poem by Gouwy 60
Radford was still a modest rendering of female sexuality, according to the masculine views.
In “Beauty and the Beast”, Hughes talks about Graham R. Tomson's view on aestheticism and beauty: she joined masculine aestheticism in her ideals of beauty, in that she joined in with the “aestheticizing of the female body” and was “complicit with the patriarchal project of aestheticizing young, beautiful women's bodies”
(Hughes 1995: 101-102). Thus, Tomson was also part of the strategy I already discussed, in which women artists portrayed other women, and also objectified them
(see 2.4.2). Yet, I used these examples to make my point that it was stressed that these women who were 'objectified' were still subjects and/or even made sure to show that women never truly were objects before, but that they actually were the agents of beauty. So in fact, once again this is an example of consciously mixed gender roles.
Still, despite this, there was too often danger of masculinisation: women denying their female identity, as they tended to take over a masculine view that often clashed with what their own views would be. I would like to show that choosing this first option, of trying to fit into, or use masculine traditions, was also not as evident, and that there also were women writers who very consciously chose against the risk of identification with masculine traditions. I will prove this by making an excursion outside The Yellow Book, to have a look at women writers who consciously chose not to write for this magazine, in order to take a look at their reasons for this.
Gouwy 61
2.4.4.2 Possible solution: celebrating (Victorian) femininity
There was a second option for female writers of the end of the 1800s, instead of trying to beat men at their own genres and proving their abilities by 'going public': staying discreet and in the background as they always had been. This was actually quite symptomatic for female aesthetes, according to Schaffer: she speaks of the
“characteristic self-effacement of so much female aesthetic writing”. These women presented themselves as “unimportant little writers”, partly to defend themselves against negative criticism (Schaffer 2000: 64).
These kind of women writers, then, who chose not to live in the spotlights during their careers, were also the women writers who decided not to write for The
Yellow Book. The question that arises, then, is what their true motives were: if it was their own way to contest or stand stronger against masculine prejudice, by doing it stealthily instead of rubbing it in their faces and confirming or stimulating certain decadent ideas, or if it was just another strategy to construct identity. Also, if this strategy was fully conscious or of it was unconsciously influenced by the ideals of angel-women in the house. I would like to examine some female aesthetes who did not contribute to The Yellow Book to find the answer: Alice Meynell and John Oliver
Hobbes.
In A Study in Yellow (1960), Lyon Mix speaks about how certain “of London's leading littérateurs” developed true “hostility” towards The Yellow Book, and how
“much of the opposition stemmed from the Catholic household of Alice and Wilfrid
Meynell” (Lyon Mix 1960: 136-137). Alice Meynell was at the same time an aesthetic poet and a wife and mother, living both the life of an aesthete and a Victorian housewife. Gouwy 62
According to Schaffer, Meynell's way to assert feminism was not to join in the masculine tradition and try to object to masculine prejudice by using and refuting it; she wanted an entirely new canon, as was clear in her feminist historiographic work.
She realised that the whole canon was based on gender bias and that it needed to be revised entirely. Moreover, she did not just look at contemporary male authors for inspiration, but at her female predecessors (Schaffer 2000: 185-186). Meynell was a feminist critic, expressing “unfeminine emotions such as rage and resentment” (162) and contributing to political activities for women's rights (165).
She was also an aesthete, though, using the specific techniques of female aesthetes to divert the reader's attention from the content towards the form, so that she would be able to write about 'daring topics' such as nudity (see later), using
“avant-garde sophistication” and “'art for art's sake” (Schaffer 2000: 161, 172,170).
She was friends with Beardsley, Wilde, Yeats, Le Gallienne, John Lane, Edmund
Gosse and influenced by Walter Pater and John Rusking, who were all important aesthetes and she also used purely aesthetic topics to evade personal discourse
(171, 174).
If Meynell also wrote about 'daring topics' and was to such an extent part of the aesthetic circle, the question arises how she was different from the women writing for The Yellow Book. Meynell did not like to be associated with the “controversial elements of aestheticism”, such as the trial of Oscar Wilde or The Yellow Book
(Schaffer 2000: 172). She liked to maintain a certain image of herself and was very much afraid of self-exposure. When Schaffer analyses Meynell's essay “The Colour of Life”, she argues how “[t]he beginning and end of the essay express a terror of a violent world ready to break open and publish the inmost modesties of women” (179). Gouwy 63
The 'nudity', then, that Meynell wrote about is not the usual feminine nudity. In fact, this particular instance of nudity that Schaffer refers to, was actually the instance where Meynell clearly showed her fear of self-exposure. It is in her essay “The
Colour of Life”, in which Meynell “celebrates “the London boy” who strips to bathe in the Serpentine, sloughing off his dusty, sooty garments” (Schaffer 2000: 177). It is this boy that is crowned, that is praised as usually a woman would have been. In doing this, Meynell herself has entirely disappeared. Schaffer says about this: “[i]n a startling reversal of all literary tradition, Meynell hymns the street boy's sturdy, dirty, despised body and neglects her own delicate, pale, much-adored woman's body, the usual object of desire.” (178). But Schaffer takes her analysis of the essay further: she shows how near the end there is a sudden outburst of anger, towards the
“murdering” of “women's blushes”(178-179). Schaffer states that this essay is mainly about “the problematic public/private status of Alice Meynell”: “[h]er feelings about her public exposure get negotiated through the metaphor of the body that is alternately violated, empowered, transfigured, and destroyed” (179).
The Yellow Book, then, is filled with images of women and women exposing themselves by identification with the avant-garde image of the magazine and the more or less masculine tradition of aestheticism and decadence. This, as has been mentioned before, is for instance clear in the image that had been put in the
Prospectus with the announcement of the magazine (see above, Introduction).
According to Hughes' article “Women Poets and Contested Spaces in The Yellow
Book”, women writers writing for The Yellow Book mainly represented decadence, the marginal and anti-bourgeois (Hughes 2004: 859). They were associated with
Wilde after his trial more than the masculine writers, as women who wrote were already marginal by themselves; but those writing for The Yellow Book often had a Gouwy 64
stronger tendency towards controversial content because they felt that this new aestheticist genre allowed them to address issues that used to be taboo, especially for a woman.
Meynell clearly did not want to be exposed like these women writers or the images of New Women in The Yellow Book. Instead, she chose to portray herself as a woman of earlier, Victorian times: silent and modest, entirely according to the masculine construction of femininity. Schaffer argues that Meynell had formed a complete construction of an impeccable public persona as a Victorian Angel, behind which she could safely hide (Schaffer 2000: 173).
Meynell, thus, lived entirely behind a mask of self-idealisation as an Angel, a coy Victorian woman, living for her husband and children. This mask overlapped to a certain extent with reality of course, but a lot of it was strongly exaggerated. Schaffer calls this “what may have been Meynell's most successful act of literary creation: her own angelic reputation” (Schaffer 2000: 162). According to Schaffer, Meynell had the image of the perfect housewife, whereas in real life she hardly knew how to cook or clean her house. This image of angel in the house, then, was for a great part due to her frailty, her catholic piety and the spiritual, mysterious aura she created around herself by not giving away much about herself or her feelings; it was due to “her carefully presented absence, her loneliness, bodilessness, and silence”, her
“semidivine status as the “muse” to her poet admirers, her apparent dissociation from mundane concerns, and her role as the presiding genius of the home” (158-160,
163).
The second female aesthete, John Oliver Hobbes, did publish in The Yellow
Book once, in the first volume: a play, written in collaboration with George Moore. Yet, Gouwy 65
after that first cooperation, and getting to know the magazine a little better, she quickly turned against it. According to Lyon Mix, she wrote to George Moore: “'He
[Harland] wants me to write a poem, a story, an article, anything, for the next number.
I fear I cannot oblige him. The Speaker on The Yellow Book is only too just. I have never seen such a vulgar production.' She added virtuously, 'Reserve is a great gift: I have always prayed for it.'” (Richards 1911: 86 qtd. In Lyon Mix 1960: 95).
Again, then, it seems that Hobbes did not want to contribute any longer because of the magazine's “vulgar” and scandalous reputation, and because she preferred “[r]eserve”, in other words, she, just like Meynell, preferred to stay away from the spotlights, afraid to display herself, feeling she might ruin her spotless angelic feminine reputation. We might conclude then, that the main reasons for some women not to write for The Yellow Book was because they did not want to become part of this male-dominated aesthetic artistic world in which women, once again, were apt to play a part according to the masculine preferences, and in which they were exposing themselves as 'attention whores' or 'male-identified writers'.
Yet, choosing this angelic role to keep away from any controversial initiatives was, of course, not ideal either; it was no better than the women who tended to take on a male identity, as here, again, they created an identity out of fear for the masculine prejudice; they were still influenced by the masculine ideals of women, the angels in the house as opposed to the witches.
2.4.4.3 Solution: female aestheticism
It is clear by now that female aesthetic writers were always caught in between two worlds. There was a way to find a new path, though, a new direction as solution: female aestheticism. It was already literally mentioned in the part about Alice Meynell, Gouwy 66
but also in certain examples on how certain masculine techniques were bent to give them new meanings; a new, 'feminine touch' is given to the masculine traditions and they are bent to feminine use, to serve their own purposes instead of those of the masculine artistic realm.
Both aestheticism's tendency to have certain beauty ideals, as well as its tendency to shock, or to use art for art's sake, is often used, together with the prejudiced ideas about women, only to give it a new interpretation. On the trope of
“forbidden sexuality” for example, Schaffer clearly states that female writers' use of this is to be seen in a very different light:
it is important to remember that female aestheticism does not necessarily
revolve around the “forbidden sexuality” we have come to expect from
focusing on their male counterparts. While female aesthetic texts often amass
a surface wealth of detail to conceal an anxiety-provoking sexual subtext, often
that forbidden content is not homosexuality but violence: rape or marital
abuse. Far from wishing for free expression of covert desires, the female
aesthetes often fantasize about a virginal realm far from any traumatic sexual
demands, fears, or feelings (Schaffer 2000: 31).
In The Yellow Book , as we have seen, there is a certain tendency towards this as well. To give one extra example, in the third volume we find a short story by Ella
D'Arcy, “White Magic”. On pages 60 to 61, a man is very negative and prejudiced about women poets, saying that “there is no more unpoetic creature under the sun”
(D’Arcy 1894: 60-61) and the female protagonist even agrees with him. On top of that, girls are made ridiculous as they are connected with superstition and silliness - the old idea of Erasmus who connected women with folly and nonsensicality. Yet, by Gouwy 67
the end of the story, D'Arcy shows that the man clearly is not able to see things in perspective; she lets him exaggerate his misogynous speech and then hints that it is due to his own experiences in the past: “[h]e fell silent, thinking of his past, which to me, who knew it, seemed almost an excuse for his cynicism” (67).
Yet, this kind of criticism is clearly very mild, and the idea of women being the most “unpoetic creature under the sun” was genuinely agreed with by the female protagonist. It is clear that female writers writing for The Yellow Book still had a much bigger tendency to follow men's ideas and make sure not to write anything too much against their views. I have already mentioned Tomson's use of the disposition of rage in monstrous creatures, such as the were-wolf (see 2.1.3.1). Yet, she did not publish any of these poems in The Yellow Book; the poems she did publish in there were all a lot more according to masculine aesthetic traditions, without any clear ambiguous twists.
I will give three other main cases, then, of actual female aestheticism to show the difference. The first case will be more about Graham R. Tomson, the second a journal that was also issued by her, and the third the novel of another female writer,
Anne Page, by Netta Syrett. Both of these female writers actually also contributed in
The Yellow Book (Graham R. Tomson especially, although after her first contribution
“Vespertilia” under a new name, Rosamund Marriott Watson) – a lot of which I have discussed in the previous chapters – but, as I said, these works in the magazine were never as 'feminine' as the examples I will give which are not from the magazine.
I have already mentioned in the previous part how Graham R. Tomson used the norms of feminine beauty, but at the same time empowered women (see 2.1.3.2): Gouwy 68
Hughes states that “[w]hen she is remembered”, “it is usually as an object of male desire” (Hughes 1995: 96). “However”, she continues:
her published work suggests that she took control of her beauty as part of her
literary career rather than passively suffering admiring gazes. She is complicit
with the patriarchal project of aestheticizing young, beautiful women's bodies.
Yet she consistently rewrites aesthetic doctrine because, , she so frequently
appropriates power to herself and to other beautiful women (Hughes 1995:
102-103).
This is quite close to what we have previously touched upon: the subverting of masculine-rendered ideals, but Tomson takes it a step further, to do something entirely new. She did this in an essay that was published in Woman's World, the journal issued by Wilde, by means of exploring beauty throughout history, and showing that this is a relative concept.
She touches on Egyptian, as well as European models, and closes the essay
affirming the beauty of Jewish and gypsy women. Tomson accepts
unquestioningly the importance of beauty to women: "personal appearance,
fair or otherwise, of most women is considered as being of the utmost
importance by them." But she objects to representations of women that imply
intellectual vacuity (p. 541) or that fragment the female body into a collection
of material parts (Hughes 1995: 103).
Now, this kind of strong, almost anti-aesthetic (or at least not up to masculine norms) arguments were something that would not have fitted in a magazine that is as male- dominated and as mainstream aesthetic as The Yellow Book. In Wilde's magazine, this was possible, because Wilde truly focused his magazine on women artists. But in Gouwy 69
The Yellow Book, where the masculine aesthetic still dominated, women writers would probably not have considered writing anything like this. Thus, for The Yellow
Book, Tomson (Rosamund Marriott Watson) only contributed aesthetic poems, often, as we have seen, framing her own death or imprisonment, while in Wilde's magazine,
She critiques Renaissance poets because "as a rule, the poet draws his
inspiration not from the actual features of his mistress, but from her wardrobe
and her jewel-casket. Her lips are rubies and her teeth are pearls . . . and so
on" (p. 539). She privileges instead, among contemporary representations of
women, that "most healthy and glorious type, to wit, the 'Athletic British
Matron,' with the head of Mrs. Langtry upon the superb shoulders of the Venus
de Milo; and she is no inane Waxen ideal, but a magnificent reality" (p. 541)
(Hughes 1995:103).
All in all, Tomson, in writing this essay, seems to “merge patriarchal, aesthetic, and feminist impulses, colluding in the aetheticizing of the female body but identifying this process with female agency and intellect” (Hughes 1995: 106). On top of that, next to giving 'beauty' a new meaning, empowering instead of paralysing women, she also
“reminds readers of the countless women whose stories have been lost and, in the last stanza's anxious glance, perhaps, toward her own reputation and transgressions of fame never justly awarded” (106). In asking attention for female writers of previous ages, she was very early. It was only in the beginning of the twentieth century, that another female writer, Virginia Woolf, was able to do this successfully.
Next to that, Graham R. Tomson herself was also the perfect combination of the two extremes shown above in which a woman artist could find herself: to write in the masculine tradition, or to celebrate her 'femininity. Tomson stood for a mixture of Gouwy 70
'high art' and bourgeoisie, being “a female invested in home and the importance of appearance as well as an "advanced" aesthete” , as is clear from another article by
Hughes (1996: 182):
She represented herself as a wide reader and gallery habitue and in doing so
also asserted the aesthete's conviction of a continuity of art forms among
painting, literature, fashion, and interiors. [...]Yet she was also a woman
delighting in thoughts of pretty new gowns ("Another Japanese design, . . .
white discs flushed with salmon, on an exquisite moonlight blue ground, is
perfect; it costs 2s. a yard, and is as beautiful as a real Japanese robe. For
tea-gowns it would be delicious" [March 1893, 175]). Or she acted as
domestic advisor, helping women find the best housewares for the cheapest
price (Hughes 1996: 182).
Even Tomson's name was a sign of her being mixed up between the two worlds: she switched between a male name and “Mrs. Tomson”; the different parts of her name were, according to Hughes, drawn from “her husband's name (Arthur Graham
Tomson), her son's name (Graham Tomson), her married name (Mrs. Arthur Graham
Tomson), and her personal name (Rosamund Tomson) but coincided with none of them” (Hughes 1996: 185). In other words, Tomson liked to be part of “both sides of the gender divide that structured so much of Victorian literary production”. She would
“announce multiple modes of being for women and implicitly suggest that attempts to fix roles oppress and distort” (185).
In this second article, Hughes also talks about how Graham R. Tomson started her own magazine, Sylvia's Journal, which is the perfect example of mixing both
'high' literature and bourgeoisie, and in doing so, becoming female aestheticism. As Gouwy 71
Hughes puts it: “Her positioning between aestheticist appreciations and women's domestic duties revised dominant "masculine"aestheticism, since her aestheticism did not suppress prosaic details of daily bourgeois life or aestheticism's connection to capitalism” (Hughes 1996: 182). The magazine sometimes “veered toward a 'New woman's' magazine” and “at other times in the direction of conventional domesticity”
(182):
Hence feminist stories and essays lay alongside fashion pages and domestic
advice. Tomson's writings within Sylvia's Journal, like the periodical as a whole
during her editorship, were characterized by a dialectic of cultural authority
and domesticity, the aesthete and female sometimes conjoined and
sometimes in tension with each other. (Hughes 1996: 182)
Interwoven with the idea of 'high art' versus bourgeoisie, is the idea of public discourse versus private writing, according to Hughes. In Sylvia's Journal, then, a perfect balance between the two has been created: “because women's letters of advice, editorial columns, and causeries are situated between "private" women's writing, the genres of the personal letter and diary, and public discourse in the form of opinion, reportage, or literary art” (own italics; Hughes 1996:184). Tomson even questions this division between the two: “Tomson's editorial letters and "bureaux," in company with other women's similar contributions to periodicals, constitute a genre that establishes permeable boundaries between private and public life and exposes ideological boundaries between the two realms as fictive” (own italics; Hughes 1996:
184). This fictionalising of the borders between the private and the public, hence between female and male creativity, is the ultimate denial of masculine ideas which established this division in the first place, by marginalising women's writing and Gouwy 72
consequently certain genres. We may conclude about this, then, that Graham R.
Tomson achieved a perfect balance between these two options, by combining both or even denying their opposition.
The last example of female aestheticism is the main character of a novel by female aesthete Netta Syrett: Anne Page. Ann Ardis discusses this novel in her article in
Women and British Aesthethicism (1999). This is, once again, a perfect example of a mixture of 'high' and 'low' literature. The heroine Anne Page is, according to Ardis,
“the antithesis of woman as figured by British and French aesthetes” (Ardis 1999:
235):
She is not an androgynous ingenue onto whom a male aesthete can project all
of his idealizing, and often homoerotic, fantasies of Beauty and Truth. Nor is
she a femme fatale, one of those “conoisseurs of bestiality and serpentine
delights” who will initiate him into the worldly pleasures of the flesh. She is not
a New Woman, compromising her femininity and her capacity to symbolize
woman through her struggles for economic and emotional independence. Nor
is she a figure of the anti-Platonic, anti-Hellenistic degeneracy of the modern
world” (Ardis 1999: 235-236).
Ardis argues that Syrett, throughout her novel, refutes the “oppositional sexual politics” (Ardis 1999: 240) that are so typical of that age. She denies the usual tendency, according to Felski, that “women have a characteristic double figuration in masculine aestheticism” (Felski 2009 qtd. In Ardis 1999: 243), by turning “this standard pattern of associations” around. Instead of functioning as “symbols of art's autonomy from nature” or of the “degeneracy of the modern world and the impermanence of the flesh” (Ardis 1999: 243), and we might add to that, women as Gouwy 73
sole representations of a bourgeois world, she proves that as a female aesthete it is possible to create her own patterns, her own rules (Ardis 1999: 243). Instead of representing art as something separate from nature, instead of having to be either the woman who associates herself with the artistic world or who stays in her home and garden and lives a bourgeois life, she combines art with nature in her life:
“Anne's art is her garden, her house, and her elegantly aging self. And she cherishes the vulgar reality of actual, prosaic facts of life in Dymfield every bit as much as she cherishes the fine paintings and furniture she has collected and her memories of other places and another life”, because before having settled in Dymfield, Anne has lived in Paris, been a mistress of a French artist and travelled through Europe (Ardis
1999: 243; 240-242). And instead of representing the “impermanence of the flesh”,
Anne Page, being by now “[a] woman in her late fifties”, is the perfect contest of the typical ideal of the young feminine beauty among aesthetes as she represents the aestheticised older woman: “Anne ages not simply “gracefully” but beautifully, appearing more and more radiantly self-possessed to her old friend Fontenelle each time he visits her” (Ardis 1999: 244).
This novel, then, is again a great example of how female aesthetes chose to position themselves or their characters in between bourgeois and high art and showed that the boundaries in between were superficial; they were revising
“”dominant 'masculine' aestheticism”” (Ardis 1999: 235).
Yet, Ardis also noted how “[i]n Anne Page and Strange Marriage scandal is avoided – not because Syrett's female aesthetes do not behave scandalously but because they do so without calling attention to their defiance of bourgeois social and sexual norms” (Ardis 1999: 245). She adds to that: “the homosocial subculture of The Gouwy 74
Yellow Book set remains merely a backdrop in her novels and her female characters choose not to identify themselves as New Women rebelling openly against Victorian social norms” (245).
In other words, Syrett chose for her novels to be entirely separate from The
Yellow Book; instead of the male-identified course of the magazine, she clearly opted for female aestheticism in her novel; inverting the rules of masculine aestheticism, but at the same time doing it covertly, staying away from scandal and self-exposure.
Just like the examples above, she carefully managed to position herself in between the “oppositional sexual politics” (Ardis 1999: 240), resting somewhere, as Hughes also said about Tomson, on the “borderland between “absolute impersonality and tactless self-exposure”” (Hughes 1995: 98). She was even in some way able to merge those two separate poles into a new kind of genre, a new kind of identity, that is free from prejudice or generalisation.
Of course, considering both female writers also wrote for The Yellow Book, one might argue that these writers nevertheless also 'projected' and 'exposed' themselves, as certain other contemporary (female) artists would have said. In any case, it was a continual search for women writers how to present themselves, how to work and find their own place in the literary place.
Gouwy 75
Conclusion
We can conclude by saying that it was not easy for women writers at the end of the nineteenth century to position themselves in the context of a masculine tradition, which had created images of women. These images were influenced by evolving
(social) conditions and consequential prejudice during the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, at the time of aestheticism, there were three existing kinds of prejudice about women. Women could either be angels in the house, connected with bourgeois world, or they could be artistic objects, connected with art's autonomy from nature, or they could be downright evil witches: femmes fatales, vampires, linked with the disintegration of the flesh, the century and the male artist, and connected to the commodification of culture.
Yet, by the end of the century, women writers were making their way into public culture more and more, partly having become an important part of the literary world, and partly still being looked down upon by the 'older', more conservative generation or their male colleagues. The Yellow Book, a magazine of the 1890s, was a perfect example of this mixture of women writers in a masculine world, in which they still had to take a stand against a lot of prejudice. These female writers had two main options: they could choose either to oppose the images made of them, or take them on for themselves. The problem was that it was very difficult for them to oppose these images that were still part of mainstream culture and were all around them, and had condemned and determined them for so many years, even unconsciously so.
This prejudice was a problem for all women writers, but especially for women writing in the microcosm of The Yellow Book. As this dissertation progressed, it became clear that certain problems arose around the women trying to oppose their Gouwy 76
images in the magazine. This was also the main reason why other women writers did not want to cooperate; after all, for women to cooperate with a magazine that projects itself as avant-garde and controversial as The Yellow Book, being issued by an entirely male crew was not something entirely self-evident. There was a danger of denying the self to be able to fit into a masculine tradition. Culler discussed that women writers had two other main options: they could either try to become part of the masculine tradition and excel at this, in other words, try to minimize the difference between men and women, or they could celebrate their femininity and 'feminine' literature. They could choose to project themselves as New Women, being independent, doing all sorts of things that previously only men could do, or keep to the things that were 'typically female'. We have seen that the women who chose to write for The Yellow Book mainly opted for the first and wanted to be part of the masculine-dominated artistic world. They were not afraid of 'exposing' themselves; the problem was that this sometimes resulted in complete identification with the masculine, in which they tended to forget or even deny their own female background.
There was also another group of women writers, though, who disliked the idea of writing for the homosocial and controversial The Yellow Book, and preferred to celebrate 'feminine' literature and stay modest and discreet, as their Victorian predecessors had always done. Yet again, this could be problematic, as their ideas about what 'typically feminine' was, was already predetermined by masculine tradition's images of women. These images had influenced everything, every person's ideas about gender in the western world, and women's ideas about themselves, about what was typically feminine. So 'embracing the feminine self' was actually not really the feminine self, or the self of female individuals, as it was an identity created by the masculine world (Gilbert and Gubar 1984) . In other words, Gouwy 77
choosing to write in the Victorian tradition was actually just as influenced by masculine ideas as the way women tried to 'measure up' to masculine standards in wanting to be part of the 'masculine world' of the magazine, and as we have seen in case of Alice Meynell, they sometimes even used these images created of them to create their own identity, an identity that would be popular among (male) audiences, which is again simply part of a marketing strategy, a way to sell oneself. We have to admit though, that through either way, women writers still searched for ways to oppose this masculine aestheticism and find their own genre. This resulted in 'female aestheticism': an entirely new, feminised 'genre' of aestheticism. This was among others practised by Graham R. Tomson, and later by Rosamund Marriott Watson.
It would of course be very interesting if this could be studied even further, for instance by examining the writing style of female writers in different kinds of magazines, from very ‘feminine’ ones, discussing fashion, household matters or the family, to very ‘(masculine) high art’: how certain combinations arose, and how female writers wrote when they wrote for a 'male-dominated' magazine such as the
Pall Mall Gazette, which I mentioned very briefly (see 2.4.4.1). I already noted in that example I gave, and in other examples in The Yellow Book, that women often tended to write in a different style or about different subjects, depending on whether they wrote for a masculine-dominated public or just for themselves.
For now though, I can conclude that female writers of the fin-de-siecle had already quite a bit of options as to the discourse they preferred, and aesthethicism seemed to open up new doors, but overall they were still very determined by the masculine culture and their predetermined images. It was a constant fight for women writers to find a way past the gender boundaries, and at that time female Gouwy 78
aestheticism was a solution, but there were still quite some more years to come before female writing became more and more accepted and recognised.
Gouwy 79
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