The Figure of the Muscular Woman, Physical Culture, and Victorian Literature a Challenging Task, but Not a Futile One

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FORMS UNCONFINED: THE FIGURE OF THE MUSCULAR WOMAN,

PHYSICAL CULTURE, AND VICTORIAN LITERATURE

MARCUS B. MITCHELL

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

August, 2018

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of

Marcus B. Mitchell

candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Committee Chair

Athena Vrettos

Committee Member

Christopher Flint

Committee Member

Kurt Koenigsberger

Committee Member

Renee Sentilles

Date of Defense

May 2, 2018

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained

for any proprietary material contained within. TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures………………………………………………………...…………………..2

Preface……………………………………………………………………………………3

Acknowledgements……………………………………….……………….……………..6

Abstract…………………………………………….………………………….…….…...7

Introduction: Physical Culture and the Complications of Female Musculature….…6

Chapter One: The Cultural Contradictions of Female Musculature

in the Periodical Press………………………………………………………….35

Chapter Two: Visual Contrasts: Depictions of Female Musculature

in the Illustrated Press…………………………………………………………59

Chapter Three: Muscular Women and the Difficulties of Categorization

in Sensation Fiction…………………………………………………………….84

Chapter Four: Muscular Anxieties in New Woman Fiction……………………….114

Conclusion………………………………………………………………….………….143

Appendix………………………………………………………………………………152

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………..159

LIST OF FIGURES

1. “A Muscular Maiden” (The Girl of the Period Miscellany, 1869)

2. “Athletic Girls of the Period” (The Girl of the Period Miscellany, 1869)

3. “Hygienic Excess” (Punch, 1879)

4. “The Niobe of Nations” (Punch, 1870)

5. “The Modern Andromeda: Will She Be Released?” (Fun, 1870)

6. “Training Female Pugilists” (The Illustrated Police News, 1872)

7. “The Ascent of Leona Dare from a Baloon [sic] at the C. Palace” (The Illustrated

Police News, 1888)

8. “Exciting Scene at a Menagerie” (The Illustrated Police News, 1888)

9. “A Fair Maiden Soundly Thrashes a Man Who Has Made Himself Objectionable

to Her Father” (The Illustrated Police News, 1898)

PREFACE

This dissertation grew out of four scholarly interests I discovered during my studies at Case Western Reserve University. First, I am fascinated by the notion of the human body, as it is depicted in both Victorian fiction and non-fiction texts, as a repository of meaning—an index of the ideologies, values, and anxieties of a wider society. I am also intrigued by constructions of gender in nineteenth-century England and concerns about shifting definitions of both womanhood and manhood that emerged as the century progressed. Additionally, I have come to find the Victorian periodical press an invaluable resource for gauging cultural attitudes toward—and reactions to—domestic and international events, at-times quirky topics, and abstract ideas. Lastly, I am fascinated by the nineteenth century British national fervor for physical culture, a rather loose, broad umbrella term that captures how commentators from different professional backgrounds advanced various approaches to health, exercise, and sports. Not only is physical culture concerned with how the human body functions, but with what goes in an on the body as well. In my effort to conceptualize a dissertation that captured these interests, I consulted the historian E.M. Palmegiano’s Health and British Magazines in the Nineteenth Century

(1998), an annotated bibliography of articles covering topics such as nutrition, physical education, and hygiene. I was especially struck by the number of article titles listed that, in some way, gestured toward either girls’ or women’s physical training and muscular development. (Admittedly, I had just finished re-reading the author Menie Muriel

Dowie’s Gallia (1895)—which includes a bodybuilder as one of the major characters— so the significances of muscles and toned physiques were on my mind.) Using databases such as the British Newspaper Archive, The Curran Index, the HathiTrust Digital

Archive, and the University of Florida Digital Collections, I located many of these articles and found competing commentaries on female muscularity. From there, I felt that

I had the beginnings of a project.

Although I focused my dissertation on depictions of muscular women in nineteenth-century British fiction and non-fiction texts, I often found myself thinking about the conflicting reactions that current, mainstream female athletes with muscular physiques have garnered. Accomplished athletes such as mixed martial artist-turned professional wrestler Ronda Rousey and tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams have occupied the covers of various glamor magazines, but they have also been body-shamed, through verbal attacks, as too muscular and described as masculine in both print publications and social media. (In the case of the Williams sisters, such attacks have often had a racially-charged undercurrent.) These attacks—particularly those against the

Williams sisters—have generated commentaries about female athletes’ confrontations with what Guardian author Erika Nicole Kendall has called the “femininity police.”1

Throughout my study, I found it striking that the figure of the muscular, athletic woman in mid- and late-nineteenth century England was the subject of similar conversations about either perceived disconnections or links between muscularity and femininity.

Furthermore, in my early research for this project, I was struck by how earlier critical discussions of female musculature in Victorian England were often small portions of wider studies about freak shows, or perhaps one chapter in a sizable historical study of professional strength athletes. By examining debates about female musculature that took place across literary and non-literary genres, and by exploring the roles that that figure of

1 See Kendall, “Female athletes often face the femininity police – especially Serena Williams.”

4 the muscular woman played in the Victorian physical culture movement, my project seeks to show that this figure deserves sustained attention within her own space.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have received support and encouragement from many individuals throughout my composition of this dissertation. My advisor, Athena Vrettos, has been an incredible mentor. Her guidance has helped me think critically about the ideas I consider in this project, and her feedback on drafts has pushed me to sharpen my writing. From our conversations, I have learned much that I will carry onward. I am also grateful for the advice that the additional members of my dissertation committee—Christopher Flint,

Kurt Koenigsberger, and Renee Sentilles—have offered. My entire committee has made this journey a rewarding one. Additionally, I would like to thank Bob Nicholson, of

Edgehill University, for pointing me in the direction of several images I analyze in the second chapter of this project. His enthusiasm for my work has been a source of inspiration.

My support network throughout this process has extended to other faculty and staff members at Case Western Reserve University as well. Without pep talks and words of encouragement from Marilyn Mobley, Kimberly Emmons, Kristine Kelly, Judith

Olson-Hammer, and James Eller, I am not sure I would have reached this point. Finally, I would like to thank Molly Youngkin, of Loyola Marymount University, for her feedback on presentations I’ve given at annual meetings of the Research Society for Victorian

Periodicals. Her questions and words of encouragement were especially motivating as I navigated the first two chapters of this project.

Forms Unconfined: Muscular Women, Physical Culture, and Victorian Literature

Abstract

MARCUS B. MITCHELL

This dissertation examines contradictory representations of the figure of the muscular woman in Victorian fiction and the periodical press. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, writers debated whether the muscular female body should be celebrated as a fresh alternative to the wasp-waisted ideal of female beauty or condemned for its perceived destabilization of established social and aesthetic codes of feminine decorum. Within this debate, commentators advanced competing views about the efficacy of rigorous physical fitness regimens for women, the relationship between muscularity and women’s reproductive capacities, and the coherence of female musculature and traditional formulations of womanhood. These conflicting views illuminated wider cultural concerns about national fitness and changing configurations of gender. My project analyzes representations of muscular women in chapters that focus on women’s physical fitness commentaries, magazine illustrations, sensation narratives, and New

Woman novels in order to demonstrate how muscular women necessitated revisions to

Victorian cultural configurations of beauty, motherhood, femininity, and masculinity.

The dissertation also explores connections between the muscular woman’s unconventional embodiment of physical culture ideals and the “transgressive” forms of the literary genres in which she appeared. I argue that depictions of muscular women in

Victorian fiction and the periodical press reveal fissures and contradictions in the gender and sexual ideologies underpinning Victorian physical culture, thus illuminating the muscular woman’s versatility as both a fictional character and real-life social conundrum.

My project demonstrates how muscular women’s bodies could figure as both objects of social construction and agents of social change, as they called into question Victorian cultural understandings of gender, sexuality, and female physicality. The muscular woman’s challenge to the boundaries of aesthetic form became a model for new forms of literary experimentation. By considering the muscular woman’s embodiment both alongside and within new forms of Victorian fiction, this project uncovers how parallel transgressions of gender and genre exposed the tensions and contradictions of Victorian cultural and aesthetic ideals.

Introduction

Physical Culture and the Complications of Female Musculature

The teacher should be careful to MAKE A DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE EXERCISES GIVEN TO GIRLS OR BOYS. The weaker sex will naturally not require such difficult or hard work as boys; it should never be the object of a teacher to make the girls under him muscularly “strong women,” but rather sound and healthy women. – Ferdinand Graf, Hints to Gymnasts (1898, emphasis Graf’s)

Edited by Ferdinand Graf, an instructor at London’s Orion Gymnastics Club, the illustrated manual Hints to Gymnasts offers extensive advice for conducting successful gymnastics courses. A reference for aspiring gymnastics club leaders and physical education teachers who have not completed proper pedagogical training, the manual cites advancing a “more scientific knowledge of gymnastics” as its primary aim (Graf 3).

According to the manual, teachers of schoolchildren should select gender-appropriate exercises for their students—a directive that is notably emphasized by the appearance of capital letters and is thus indicative of the manual’s firmness regarding the practice (20).2

When working with girls, in particular, instructors are urged to avoid aiming for increased musculature and to instead encourage the achievement of physical soundness.

But in order to prevent the development of muscular women and preserve what Hints to

Gymnasts later describes as a female student’s “sense of womanly feeling,” instructors are advised to “confine” their programs to activities that are “pleasing and aesthetic,” including marching, stretching, and wand exercises (20). This suggestion illuminates two

2 These regimens are outlined in tables that appear later in Hints to Gymnasts (46-50). Many of the individual exercises are the same for both girls and boys, though activities on horizontal bars, slanted ladders, and pommel horses are not among the listed exercises for girls. Boys’ training regimens are noteworthy for their emphasis on extensive repetitions of many exercises.

9 types of confinement: whereas instructors are somewhat limited in the methods they might employ when training girls, their students are similarly restricted to exercises that are perceived as aesthetically appealing and unfavorable to muscular growth. These constraints reveal how athletic girls, along with those who assist in their training, must manage a tricky balance between physical fitness pursuits and aesthetic codes of femininity. That gymnastics instructors are advised never to mold their female students into muscular women suggests that both the muscular female body and the exercises that contribute to muscular growth in women’s physiques do not fit within these codes.

My intention in this dissertation is not to analyze late-nineteenth century gymnastics pedagogy, but to instead suggest that the opposition to female musculature that is apparent in Hints to Gymnasts brings a larger issue into relief: the capacity of the muscular female body to transgress social boundaries. It is only in relation to boys’ gymnastics courses that muscles are discussed in anything approaching a favorable light:

“In the boys’ classes everything should aim at the development of muscular power through precision of movement and hard, energetic work” (Graf 20-21). Thus, while the muscular female body fails to meet the aesthetic standards of girls’ gymnastics classes, it also unsettles the gender binary that underpins much of the advice Hints to Gymnasts offers. In The Circus and Victorian Society (2005), Brenda Assael notes that gymnastics training “mushroomed” in the late nineteenth century alongside the proliferation of publications such as Hints to Gymnasts, William Blaikie’s Sound Bodies for Boys and

Girls (1884), Gymnast (1890), and F.J. Harvey’s Physical Exercises for Girls (1896)

(Assael 125). This increased interest in exercise was attached to a wider national enthusiasm for physical culture, which Hillary Marland describes in Health and Girlhood

10 in Britain (2013) as “a label applied loosely and broadly, embracing a variety of approaches to health, exercise, and sport” (Marland 48). However, embedded within

Great Britain’s cultural fascination with physical fitness were concerns about its national image and racial longevity. As Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor explain in their survey of nineteenth-century British and Irish journalism, Gymnast was created in response to

“mass displays of foreign physical might” at gymnastics festivals across Europe, largely to ease concerns that Great Britain was being “left behind in the race” (Brake and

Demoor 264). In Managing the Body (2010), Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska links these concerns to growing anxieties about degeneration—anxieties that were exacerbated, to different extents, by increasing awareness of international economic competition and imperial rivalry (Zweiniger-Bargielowska 5). Medical professionals, health reformers, and educators responded to these concerns by intensifying their efforts to promote the benefits of physical fitness. However, as Kristine Moruzi observes in Constructing

Girlhood through the Periodical Press (2012), some commentators worried that excessive physical activity would “defeminize” women and, as a result, impair their fitness for both marriage and motherhood (Moruzi 84). By proposing limits on the extent to which women might engage in physical activity, these commentators sought to confine women’s bodies to specific forms that aligned with established feminine ideals of beauty and medical definitions of procreative fitness. But what became of muscular women— women whose physiques were incongruous with traditional cultural and aesthetic codes of womanhood? To what extent did these women challenge Victorian configurations of femininity and masculinity? These questions situate the unconventional figure of the

11 muscular woman within wider conversations about shifting constructions of gender and women’s social roles in the British national fitness imperative.

The first part of this dissertation’s title, Forms Unconfined, gestures toward the

British educator J. Hamilton Fletcher’s assertion, in her 1879 Good Words essay on the health benefits of physical education for young women, that the muscular female body should be admired for exuding a combination of strength and elegance; it is a “form unconfined” by the popular attitude toward female beauty that celebrates the thin, corset- constrained waist and limp arms (Fletcher 534).3 But I have also chosen this title in order to show that the figure of the muscular woman was not limited to brief, dismissive mentions in physical training manuals. She was discussed in competing written and visual commentaries in the periodical press, and she was deployed in genres of imaginative literature that were themselves noteworthy for their subversions of traditional, formalistic expectations of nineteenth-century fiction. As I demonstrate in the chapters that follow, the figure of the muscular woman was a subject of vigorous debates throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Writers from various professional backgrounds questioned whether the muscular female body should be celebrated as a fresh alternative to the wasp-waisted ideal of female beauty or condemned for its perceived destabilization of established social and aesthetic codes of feminine decorum.

Within this debate, commentators advanced competing perspectives on the efficacy of rigorous physical fitness regimens for women, the relationship between muscularity and women’s reproductive capacities, and the coherence of female musculature with traditional formulations of womanhood. These conflicting views, in turn, illuminated

3 See Fletcher, “Feminine Athletics.” I discuss this essay further in Chapter One.

12 wider cultural concerns about national fitness and changing configurations of gender. In this project, I analyze these contradictory and contested representations of muscular women in women’s physical fitness commentaries, magazine illustrations, sensation narratives, and New Woman fiction in order to demonstrate how the hybrid figure of the muscular woman necessitated revisions to Victorian cultural formulations of beauty, motherhood, femininity, and masculinity. I further explore how fiction writers deployed the muscular woman’s unconventional embodiment of physical culture ideals as an analog for the “transgressive” forms of the literary genres in which they were writing.

Depictions of muscular women in Victorian fiction and the periodical press uncover fissures and contradictions in both the gender and sexual ideologies underpinning

Victorian physical culture, and they reveal the muscular woman’s unstable position within Victorian society. While my analysis of these depictions reveals how Victorian fiction and non-fiction writers reacted to the figure of the muscular woman, it also shows that the instability of this figure simultaneously complicated debates about the capacities of women’s bodies and provided a unique perspective on the boundaries of aesthetic form that would become a model for new forms of literary experimentation.

Throughout this project, the phrase, “the figure of the muscular woman” carries multiple meanings, all of which are focused on the word, “figure.” First, I am referring to the notion of character. As I demonstrate in this project, muscular women functioned as both central and peripheral characters in literary texts, and they were also depicted in illustrations in competing, contradictory ways. Considering the muscular woman as a character invites contemplating the notion of performance, particularly in circus

13 exhibitions and music hall shows.4 Second, “the figure of the muscular woman” refers to the physical forms of the women I discuss and both the shared and divergent attitudes toward those forms that are revealed in women’s fitness commentaries, illustrations, and literary works. Third, I am interested in how the muscular woman’s unconventional body

“figures” uncomfortable conversations about changing configurations of gender, sexuality, and aesthetic form in Victorian culture. Considering these three valences of

“the figure of the muscular woman” allows for a more sustained engagement of the relationships between this figure, the physical culture movement, and Victorian literature.

Investigating the significance of the muscular female body in the Victorian literary and cultural imagination, my analysis is guided by a variety of questions that probe how both fiction and non-fiction writers engaged the topic of female musculature in their works. These questions illuminate not only the links between literary and non- literary genres, but also the wide variety of subjects that the muscular woman’s unconventional figure brought into relief. In what ways, for example, did Victorian writers register their anxieties about gender identity and changing feminine and masculine ideals through the figure of the muscular woman? How did concerns about racial progress intersect with gender in representations of female musculature? To what extent did authors of imaginative literature anticipate, confirm, or contradict the ideas about muscular women advanced in the periodical press? In which literary genres did the muscular female body appear, and to what purpose? How did fiction writers dramatize the connection or disconnection between the muscular woman’s body and her mind, and

4 I briefly female strength athletes’ participation in the physical culture movement later in this introduction.

14 to what extent did they use her transgressive embodiment to conceptualize their own fictional forms? These questions are crucial to understanding how Victorian authors critiqued the gender dynamics of physical culture through the figure of the muscular woman and deployed her in their fiction. By exploring these questions, my analysis offers new insights into the muscular woman’s versatility as both a fictional character and real- life social conundrum, as well as her potential for revising Victorian cultural understandings of female physicality.

The Perceived Capabilities and Limits of Women’s Bodies in Victorian Physical Culture

The emergence of the British physical culture movement in the second half of the nineteenth century came with increased public interest in subjects such as the scope of physical education curricula in schools, the most effective regimens for achieving optimal physical fitness, the value of participating in sports, and the adequacy of established hygienic precepts. Examining the history of this movement reveals that its popularity was fueled by several concurrent social developments. Among them, the late-1850s rise of the muscular Christianity movement—what the British physician Morell Mackenzie refers to, in his New Review article on exercise and physical training, as “that curious cult of the biceps”—was noteworthy for its promotion of an association between religious faith, physical strength, moral development, and masculinity (Mackenzie 373).5 As Donald

Hall explains, regular involvement in sports was linked to the acquisition of a “physical

5 In the introduction to his edited collection on this movement, Donald E. Hall notes that the muscular Christianity tag originated in the English barrister Thomas Sandars’s review of Charles Kingsley’s novel, Two Years Ago (1857), in the Saturday Review (Muscular 7). Hall adds that appraisals of Kingsley’s writings cemented him as a leading advocate of the movement. Many reviewers saw, in Kingsley’s work, portraits of ideal men who fear God and are athletically gifted (7).

15 armor-plating” that was deemed necessary for enduring any “potential threats to religious belief, bodily health, and social stability” (Muscular 7-8). It may seem odd to begin with the muscular Christianity movement, especially since muscular Christian writers focused on the physically-sound male body as “a metaphor for social, national, and religious bodies” (8). However, it is precisely this early association between masculinity, muscularity, religious faith, and national identity that conceptualized the exclusion of female musculature from both Christian and national ideals. As Kathleen E. McCrone asserts in her study of sports in late-Victorian girls’ schools, women were viewed as sports outsiders by many muscular Christians; their perceived role was to “watch and applaud” male competitors (McCrone 102). But as scholars including McCrone, Nancy

Fix Anderson, Jennifer A. Hargreaves, Richard Holt, and Cartriona M. Parratt have shown, the second half of the nineteenth century saw many women, particularly those of the middle class, turn to sports as a refuge from the sedentary, restrictive lifestyle of the domestic sphere.6 In The Sporting Life (2010), Anderson notes that while women began asserting their rights to exercise their bodies and play outdoors, they caused controversy in their demands to participate in sports competitions because these events were widely recognized as masculine domains; they were ways of both developing and displaying manliness (Anderson 114).7 This controversy was compounded by concerns that sporting women would become susceptible to a loss of femininity, and they would be major

6 See McCrone, “Play Up! Play Up! And Play the Game! Sport at the Late Victorian Girls’ Public Schools,” 100; Hargreaves, “Victorian Familism and the Formative Years of Female Sport,” 130; Holt, Sport and the British (1992), 117-118; Anderson, The Sporting Life (2010), 113; and Parratt, “Athletic ‘Womanhood’: Exploring Sources for Female Sport in Victorian and Edwardian England,” 142-143.

7 Hargreaves echoes this point in Sporting Females (1994), adding that in Great Britain, such competitions were closely associated with predominant, “specifically Victorian images of masculinity, embodying physical prowess, gentlemanly conduct, moral manliness, and physical training” (Hargreaves 43).

16 catalysts in the blurring of sex differences and the female encroachment of the male sphere (134). Despite the potential health benefits of a more active lifestyle, some observers viewed athletic women as disruptive figures for compromising the pronounced cultural reverence for cultivating masculinity (Parratt 143).

That there were anxieties about women’s athleticism, their growing interest in sports, and their potential breach of the line of demarcation separating them from men is not surprising given ideas about sex differences that were prevalent in the mid-nineteenth century. In Uneven Developments (1988), Mary Poovey observes that the “model of a binary opposition between the sexes, which was socially realized in separate but supposedly equal ‘spheres,’ underwrote an entire system of institutional practices and conventions at midcentury, ranging from a sexual division of labor to a sexual division of social and political rights” (Poovey 8-9). Poovey suggests that a rigid gender divide was entrenched within the social organization of midcentury England. Altering this model would have effectively impaired the function of English society as it was known. In “The

Social Construction of Victorian Femininity: Emancipation, Education and Exercise,”

J.A. Mangan adds that the inflexible separation of sex roles in the nineteenth century was

“the consequence of a male-controlled classification system” (Mangan 146). Drawing on the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s notion of “pollution” as a type of social disorder,

Mangan notes that male-controlled categorization was an effort to create stability. To challenge this system was to spark confusion and, ultimately, generate social tension

(146). These ideas about established gender roles and the potential for social unrest underpin the lack of agency that women with aspirations for improved fitness and enhanced musculature had in the early stages of the physical culture movement. In

Playing the Game (1988), Kathleen McCrone explains that women largely had no input in “determining what was acceptable, what was muscular and graceful, what was masculine and feminine, what was excessive and moderate” (McCrone 212). They were essentially outsiders looking inward to an established patriarchal system that dictated gender-appropriate approaches to health, exercise, and sport for women. Further complicating the extent of women’s participation in physical culture was that men were widely viewed as the focus of the movement, particularly as it pertains to the subjects of exercise and physique development. Michael S. Kimmel and Amy Aronson acknowledge, in Men and Masculinities (2004), that in its focus on creating physically sound and aesthetically pleasing bodies, the physical culture movement promoted exercise for both men and women (Kimmel and Aronson 608). However, the aim of exercise “has historically been the development of properly ‘masculine’ bodies and minds” as a way to combat the physical deterioration of men consumed by “cerebral occupations” and limited to inactive lifestyles (608). That women were not the first priority in the Victorian physical culture movement is clear. However, Kimmel and

Aronson’s observations raise the question of how women who were enthusiastic about exercise, athletics, and toned, muscular physiques “fit” into this movement, particularly if such women toed a strict boundary line separating the masculine and the feminine.

The national enthusiasm for physical culture was also fueled by the public’s increased interest in scientifically-grounded perspectives on human nature. Particularly, conversations about the physiological demands and associated social implications of procreation figured prominently in shaping beliefs about the purpose of women’s physical fitness pursuits and the extent of women’s involvement in the physical culture

18 movement. In Sporting Females (1994), Hargreaves observes that commentators capitalized on women’s natural abilities to menstruate, bear children, and nurse by suggesting that while women should enjoy physical activity, their participation should be limited, particularly during pregnancy and after childbirth (Hargreaves 43). This recommendation was grounded in the widely-recognized symbolic association of women with nature and “their reproductive roles and positions as wives and mothers in the home” (unlike men, who were often linked with their professional roles and additional activities outside the domestic sphere), as well as the idea that these duties require substantial energy and attention (43). Conversations about the science of human nature and reproduction were also invigorated by the publications of Charles Darwin’s The

Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871)—two texts that challenged long-held Victorian cultural perspectives on the origin of life, nature, human development, and national progress. Darwin’s meditations on natural selection and the reproductive necessity inherent in species survival provided a scientific basis for commentators’ assessments of the capabilities of women’s bodies as the second half of the nineteenth century progressed. Furthermore, as Hargreaves observes in Sporting

Females, Darwin’s contributions to evolutionary thought became employed as justification for the notion of motherhood as woman’s “highest function;” it was

“essential to the healthy progress of the nation” (44). As I discuss further in Chapter One, writers in the periodical press advanced competing perspectives on whether bearing and rearing healthy children was even plausible for muscular, athletic women. For some writers, pronounced musculature on the female body signaled an absence of the energy presumably required for healthy reproduction and successful child rearing.

In the physical culture movement, discussions of the ideal aesthetics, physical capabilities, and social significances of women’s bodies were often spurred by commentators’ negative appraisals of women’s collective wellbeing. Writing in The St.

James’s Magazine in 1861, Mary Philadelphia Merrifield, whose works primarily focused on the visual arts, asserts that what she perceives as the poor health of British women “has become almost proverbial. Each succeeding generation is found to be less strong—to use a mild form of expression—than the preceding” (Merrifield 91).

Attributing this apparent regression to women’s abandonment of their ancestors’ “active habits”—ancestors Merrifield describes as “more robust”—in favor of more sedentary pursuits, Merrifield urges women to be steadfast in restoring their own health for the good of managing a household effectively and raising healthy children (93, 96). In addition to adopting more active habits, women should “seek and obtain that knowledge of the laws of life and health” that would best enable them to perform their domestic duties (96). In a related 1864 commentary from the literary periodical Macmillan’s

Magazine, Scottish gymnast Archibald MacLaren argues that the notion that girls are naturally weak and therefore do not require strengthening has factored into so few girls maturing into healthy womanhood (MacLaren 413). To curtail this trend, MacLaren suggests swimming, gymnastics (provided a gymnasium is accessible), and “health- promoting games” such as badminton as among the activities that should begin in girlhood (414).8 For MacLaren, it is on exercise that “the extent and limitation of all other

8 In a gesture toward potential concerns about adverse outcomes of girls’ participation in games such as badminton and handball, MacLaren remarks that such activities would be best for a meadow, field, or park because in these settings, girls will be exposed to both fresh air and soft grass that will not harm their growing feet (414). He adds that these games may be successfully executed without fear of “freckle or tan” or other possible changes to girls’ “delicate complexion[s],” thus attempting to assure potentially skeptical readers that game play will not detract from girls’ feminine features (414).

20 agents of health depend,” thus emphasizing the value of physical activity for girls’—and ultimately women’s—overall wellbeing (415). Both commentaries serve as calls to action, urging a departure from the idea that a predominantly leisure-filled life is in women’s best interests. In Femininity, Crime, and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society (2012), Emelyne Godfrey explains that the mid nineteenth century saw a philosophical clash between commentators who perceived mild physical activity as beneficial to women and those who opposed women’s athleticism altogether in favor of

“bourgeois aspirations to gentility” (Godfrey 86). Godfrey adds that many mid-Victorian medical professionals and journalists were at the forefront of campaigns encouraging more vigorous physical fitness routines for women, citing the British physician Elizabeth

Blackwell’s praise of women’s bodies that “can move in dignity, in grace, in airy lightness, or conscious strength, bodies erect and firm, energetic and active—bodies that are truly sovereign in their presence, the expressions of a sovereign nature” (qtd. in

Godfrey 86). Such bodies—pictures of grace, strength, and vitality—exude a sense of power that is lacking in the female figures that both Merrifield and MacLaren criticize.

Conversations about women’s fitness continued into the late nineteenth century, with increasing attention devoted to the best practices for physical education in both public and private schools. As Sally Mitchell explains in Daily Life in Victorian England

(1996), different schools offered competing ideas about appropriate physical activities for female students. Whereas some late-nineteenth century reformed girls’ schools integrated sports into their curricula, some private schools continued to tout activities such as a

“decorous walk in the open air” as adequate daily exercise for their students (Mitchell

192). Thus, in the latter institutions, students had limited opportunities to realize the full

21 potential of their bodies. In The Eternally Wounded Woman (1990), Patricia Vertinsky explains that many female physicians, in their efforts to outline ideal physical education practices for girls, advocated regular and varied exercise as essential to the development of girls’ health and strength (135). Some medical experts, including Blackwell and

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, also tied their insistence on physical training to the idea that girls with well-cultivated bodies would become “ideal vessels for motherhood,” thereby aligning themselves with commentators such as Merrifield, MacLaren, and others outside the medical community (137). These physicians viewed appropriate physical education for girls as a critical facet of a wider social imperative to cultivate healthy, sound bodies that could manage maternal and domestic demands. Lydia Murdoch gestures toward this point in Daily Life of Victorian Women (2014), adding that physical education for young women had moral aims. According to Murdoch, conversations about women’s fitness were “intertwined with parallel understandings of moral vigor and the strength of the nation” (Murdoch 113). The interconnectedness of prevailing ideas about physical education, women’s fitness, morality, and national strength suggests that a woman’s body was not just her own, but was instead inextricably tied to the health of future generations and the national identity that Great Britain was attempting to cultivate.

The physical culture movement continued to grow in popularity by the end of the century, as demonstrated by the opening of more gymnasiums, an increase in high-profile bodybuilding competitions, and a rise in exercise equipment manufacturing, hygiene products, and physical culture-focused publications. In Managing the Body, Zweiniger-

Bargielowska adds that physicians and health reformers expanded public health services and initiated health campaigns that continued into the twentieth century (Zweiniger-

Bargielowska 1). Moreover, they aggressively promoted “body management,” a wide- ranging concept that encouraged both dietary and dress reform, good hygiene practices, regular exposure to the outdoors, and a combination of sports and exercise as vital to the cultivation of one’s wellbeing (1). Thus, not only was the physical culture movement concerned with how the human body moves and performs, but also with what goes in and on the body. To different extents, these initiatives also demonstrated a multi-pronged effort to enhance the fitness of the British race “as a precondition for defending and maintaining the British Empire,” thereby attending to concerns that Great Britain was in danger of losing its superior position on the global stage (6). But medical experts were not the only individuals to capitalize on the national fervor for physical culture. For example, the Prussian-born circus bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, who performed strength exhibitions throughout Europe and North America but settled in London in the late

1880s, achieved commercial success by opening a chain of private gymnasiums throughout London and publishing both the bodybuilding manual Strength and How to

Obtain It (1897) and the monthly magazine Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture

(1898) (Scott 79-80).9 In Strength and How to Obtain It, Sandow includes a one-page advertisement for training at his Piccadilly School of Physical Culture, the content of which is noteworthy for the differences in the predicted results for men and women.

While Sandow guarantees, after three months of training, a minimum muscle mass growth of between one and three inches (depending on the part of the body) for his male students who arrive in ordinary health, he explains that women have “no need to develop their muscles to this extent, but in their case I promise that three months’ training at my

9 Sandow’s magazine was originally named Physical Culture.

School will give them increased health and strength, the size of the waist also being reduced to its natural proportions” (qtd. in Scott 82). With this remark, Sandow does not rule out the possibility of some muscular development for women, but he indirectly dismisses the idea that his female students may want to equal or even surpass their male counterparts in increased muscle mass. Although his advertisement states that women can expect to have “natural” waists by the end of the third month, it also indicates that there is something decidedly unnatural about any physical changes in women’s bodies beyond increased strength and overall soundness.

By the late nineteenth century, circus arenas and music hall stages emerged as among the more welcoming venues for the muscular female physique, particularly that of the professional strongwoman. As Graeme Kent argues in The Strongest Men on Earth

(2012), both female and male strength athletes became popular entertainment figures at this time and well into the twentieth century, admired by a curious and enthusiastic public that was already fascinated by the subjects of health and physical fitness. In addition to a growing national interest in sports (both professional and amateur) and a greater accessibility to athletic clubs for members of the middle class, Kent identifies the continuing influence of muscular Christianity and a renewed cultural interest in the Greek physical ideal as major factors contributing to the popularity strength athletes achieved

(Kent).10 On the subject of strongwomen, critics including Kent and Rosemarie Garland-

Thomson have shown that popular figures such as Miss Darnett (also known as the

10 In “Physical Culture: The Male Nude and Sculpture in Late Victorian Britain,” Michael Hatt contends that sculptures modeled after figures in Greek and Roman mythology, as well as those depicting past and contemporary athletes, function as “the impetus for physical culture, its founding moment” (Hatt 245). According to Hatt, such sculptures inspired many viewers to shape their own muscular physiques (245- 246).

Singing Strong Lady), Vulcana (Kate Roberts), and Zazel: The Human Cannonball

(Rossa Richter) amassed large followings for their exhibitions that featured displays of strength, high-risk acrobatic stunts, and, in the case of Miss Darnett, musical selections.11

Even though these muscular, more robust, and multitalented women participated in a profession that, as Jan Todd describes in “A Legacy of Strength: The Cultural

Phenomenon of the Professional Strongwoman,” was “diametrically opposed to the prevailing Victorian notions of femininity,” they encountered enthusiastic audiences and found opportunities to shape their individual identities within the burgeoning physical culture movement (Todd 13). However, the fame that many professional strongwomen achieved had wide-ranging consequences. On the one hand, some strongwomen served as role models for other women. As Kent argues, the success of some strongwomen encouraged other women to be independent and to be diligent about shaping their own bodies (Kent). On the other hand, while audiences seemingly appreciated the physical capabilities strongwomen displayed, many were equally enthused by the near nudity they witnessed on the performance stage. Depictions of scantily-clad muscular, robust women in popular magazines such as The Illustrated Police News (and, in the United States, the

National Police Gazette)—what Kent calls a “promotion of female flesh”—transferred to the performances of professional strongwomen, some of whom wore revealing outfits during their exhibitions (Kent). Whereas professional strongwomen were perceived as inspirational figures by some, their muscular and unconventional bodies evoked sexual subtexts, thereby rendering these women as complex figures in the physical culture movement. Of course, not all muscular women sought entertainment careers in the circus

11 See Kent, “The Electric Girl and Other Ladies,” The Strongest Men on Earth; and Garland-Thomson, Freakery (1996), 357.

25 or music hall. As my study will show, the figure of the muscular woman was present in both the private, domestic sphere and in the public, challenging fiction and non-fiction writers to confront changing ideas about women’s physicality and feminine decorum.

Chapter Overview

Part One of this project examines contradictory attitudes toward gender identity and female musculature in the Victorian periodical press. I consider how written commentaries and illustrations in various genres of largely middle-class periodicals, including literary magazines, comic miscellanies, and sensationalist news magazines, contributed to vigorous debates about the muscular woman’s place in Victorian physical culture. In the introduction to their 1982 essay collection exploring critical approaches to the study of Victorian periodicals, Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff argue that the press became “the context within which people lived and worked and thought, and from which they derived their (in most cases quite new) sense of the outside world”

(Samplings xiv-xv). Shattock and Wolff assert that the press was an educational fixture in

Victorian culture because it exposed readers to ideas that were sometimes unfamiliar and provided a lens through which those readers interpreted the world around them. In

Gender and the Victorian Periodical (2003), Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith

Johnston speak to the influence of the periodical press when they argue that it was a

“fundamentally provocative and reactive medium, initiating dialogue on topics of the day and demanding a response” (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 1). In addition to characterizing the periodical press as versatile and unpredictable, Fraser, Green, and Johnston contend that it was “a major sphere for the working out of social attitudes toward women, a subject that received intense, even at times disproportionate attention by both supporters

26 and attackers of women’s rights” (169). By considering the contradictory perspectives on female musculature in the periodical press, this study shows how the muscular woman’s unconventional figure prompted many writers to clarify or reformulate their own understandings of womanhood and female physicality.

Chapter One, “The Cultural Contradictions of Female Musculature in the

Periodical Press,” investigates how commentaries on women’s physical fitness and muscular development in the late-Victorian periodical press created uncertainty as to how to interpret the aesthetics of the muscular female body. Writers such as novelist Charles

Kingsley and women’s suffrage advocate Laura Ormiston Chant praised the development of pronounced female musculature because they believed it ensured the optimal health of women and their potential offspring. By contrast, commentators including the British physicians Arabella Kenealy and Morell Mackenzie argued that the energy expended on muscular development could make women appear too masculine and hinder racial progress. By exploring these contradictions in periodicals such as The Nineteenth

Century, Good Words, and The New Review, I demonstrate how muscular women became polarizing figures in late-Victorian culture. I argue that the mixed reaction to the figure of the muscular woman positioned her within a liminal space. She did not fit neatly within late-Victorian society, but she was not completely excluded from it either. This liminality enabled writers to effectively use the muscular woman as needed to advance their own definitions of social, sexual, or national fitness, alternately presenting her body as a form to be admired or as a warning to women about the consequences of breached gender boundaries.

In Chapter Two, “Visual Contrasts: Depictions of Female Muscularity in the

Illustrated Press,” I examine how illustrations in the mid- and late-Victorian periodical press provided competing portraits of the muscular woman by critiquing the appropriateness of her physique, suggesting her role in erotic fantasies, and using her image to comment on domestic and international affairs. I explore these illustrations as forms of social critique because, as I show in Chapter One, the sight of the muscular female physique worried some commentators by challenging prevailing ideals of beauty and configurations of womanhood. With various advancements in pictorial reproduction technology throughout the nineteenth century, including the emergence of the steam- powered press and four-cylinder stereotype printing, readers found many opportunities to observe the figure of the muscular woman and formulate their own interpretations of her appearance. Images of muscular women in periodicals such as The Girl of the Period

Miscellany, Punch, or the London Charivari; Fun, and The Illustrated Police News both anticipated and reflected the contradictions of female musculature that were especially pronounced in the late-nineteenth century. I argue that these images—along with the extended essays, brief anecdotes, and poems they often accompanied—reveal how illustrations participated in a constant refashioning of the aesthetics of the muscular female body and its polarizing role in late-Victorian conceptions of gender and sexuality.

These combinations of illustration and text reinforced the muscular woman’s status as an enigmatic and contradictory figure in the illustrated press.

Part Two of this study focuses on the ways that fiction writers in the second half of the nineteenth century—specifically, authors of sensation fiction and New Woman narratives—both reacted to and deployed the figure of the muscular woman in their

28 works. I am interested in how these writers, through their imaginative extensions of the muscular female body, joined the commentators from the periodical press in debates about female musculature. My rationale for examining representations of muscular women in both sensation and New Woman fiction is twofold. First, by exploring sensation narratives, I demonstrate that authors had begun offering their own commentaries on female musculature long before debates became more vigorous in the late nineteenth century. But I also argue that the challenges of categorizing the figure of the muscular woman were exacerbated by the fact that she appeared in two genres that themselves subverted orthodoxy in terms of subject matter and form, thereby unsettling

Victorian literary and social conventions. In their resistance to being confined by one form or “voice,” sensation and New Woman novels provided authors the space to experiment with the boundless form of the muscular woman. I argue that the muscular woman’s emblematic role in sensation fiction anticipated and helped to shape subsequent debates about women’s roles in the physical culture movement, as well as new forms of gender identity in the hybrid genre of the New Woman novel.

In Chapter Three, “Muscular Women and the Difficulties of Categorization in

Sensation Fiction,” I discuss how contradictions in the appearances and dispositions of muscular, physically-imposing women in texts such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in

White (1860), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s

Aurora Floyd (1863), and Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863) become both reflections and expressions of these texts’ own generic hybridity. Sensation novels upset literary expectations by featuring complex plots that often combined a variety of transgressive acts, including bigamy, attempted murder, disguise, adultery, and false incarceration. As

Lyn Pykett explains in her 2001 essay “Sensation and the Fantastic in the Victorian

Novel,” sensation novelists employed these devices as provocative ways to confront cultural anxieties about marriage, family, and shifting gender and class relations

(“Sensation” 203). Moreover, these devices also evoked physical and psychological reactions from readers and exposed the “secrets of respectable society” (203). Sensation novels are also noteworthy for dangerous and sometimes deranged heroines they featured—women who were not exactly candidates for the title of “the angel in the house.” My interest in this literary genre lies in how the muscular women depicted within it challenged mid-Victorian ideas about womanhood, the aesthetics of the female body, and sexuality. This chapter thus links the difficulty of categorizing muscular women in these sensation novels to the challenge of categorizing the literary genre in which they appear. Analyzing the depictions of muscular women in these novels in conjunction with recent scholarship on the generic tensions of sensation fiction, I argue that the figure of the muscular woman challenged traditional formulations of womanhood in ways that parallel the sensation novel’s challenges to the aesthetic and formal conventions of

Victorian literature. In doing so, she prompted readers to confront an alternative formulation of gender that did not appear to fit within comfortable categories of Victorian understanding. By considering these depictions, I demonstrate how sensation fiction writers were early participants in conversations about female musculature and aesthetic ideals of the female body that would intensify as the nineteenth century progressed.

Chapter Four, “Muscular Anxieties in New Woman Fiction,” explores how representations of muscular, athletic women in New Woman novels dramatize competing late-nineteenth century understandings of the acceptable limits of female muscular

30 development and illuminate wider cultural anxieties about muscular female bodies as disruptions to traditional understandings of gender and physicality. While it analyzes how

New Woman writers challenged Victorian codes of feminine decorum through the unconventional figure of the muscular woman, it also examines how these writers transgressed conventional fictional forms by experimenting with new combinations of various narrative techniques. Critics have explored how authors of New Woman fiction either attempted to use available fictional modes in new ways or experimented with new ways of writing altogether to construct narratives that appropriately captured the spirit of redefining woman’s place in the world. In New Woman Strategies (2004), Ann Heilmann identifies “formal hybridity,” “textual instability,” and “gendered multivocality” as the generic parameters of this genre (Heilmann 3). These parameters capture the various stylistic innovations in many New Woman novels and show that the genre is defined by terms that are indicative of openness instead of limits. Additionally, in New Women, New

Novels (1990) Ann Ardis argues that many New Woman narratives are constructed on and through the bodies of their heroines, thus making the New Woman’s body an experimental subject (Ardis 85). As I go on to show, the muscular woman’s body became a conduit through which New Woman writers tested out new ideas about female sexuality, physicality, and social roles. This innovation in bodily form intersected with

New Woman writers’ explorations of unconventional narrative methods, drawing parallels between experimental bodies and experimental texts. I argue that the depictions of female musculature in novels such as Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) and

Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance (1901) advance new configurations of femininity and masculinity as analogs for new ways of configuring

31 fiction. These depictions illuminate links between the muscular woman’s resistance to conventional ideals of womanhood and the New Woman novel’s defiance of traditional, formal expectations of nineteenth-century fiction. Considering these fictional representations of muscular women allows us to see how New Woman writers contributed to debates about female musculature and physical culture that were also taking place in the periodical press.

By examining how mid- to late-nineteenth century fiction and non-fiction writers engaged the subject of female musculature in their works, this dissertation joins a variety of studies that, to different extents, explore representations of women’s bodies or specific body parts as repositories of meaning in Victorian literature and culture. Critics such as

Tracy J.R. Collins, Pamela K. Gilbert, Ludmilla Jordanova, Helena R. Michie, Anna

Krugovoy Silver, and Laurence Talairach-Vielmas have shown how depictions of women’s bodies in various literary works and visual media illuminate topics as diverse as women’s athletic pursuits in the late nineteenth century, consumerism, and the “logic of anorexia” (Silver 14).12 To different extents, each of these studies examine how various states of the female body both clarify and complicate cultural ideas about gender, sexuality, and physicality. While my study explores how the muscular female body complicates these ideas as well, it examines the implications of links between the muscular woman’s transgressive body and new fictional forms that were transgressive in their own right, and it probes how the muscular woman raises questions about the

12 I’m specifically referring to the following works: Collins, “Athletic Bodies Narrated: New Women in Fin- de-Siecle Fiction” (2012); Gilbert, Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (1997); Jordanova, Sexual Visions (1989); Michie, The Flesh Made Word (1987); Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (2002); and Talairach-Vielmas, Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novel (2007).

32 ideologies underpinning Victorian physical culture. This project also joins earlier, diverse studies of physical culture, including Michael Anton Budd’s 1997 investigation of the relationship between sculpture, consumerism and physical culture in nineteenth-century

Britain; Jan Todd’s 1998 analysis of purposive exercise in the lives of nineteenth-century

American women, and Jennifer Hargreaves’s and Patricia Vertinsky’s 2007 essay collection on topics as disparate as movement education in post-World War Two British primary schools and the relationship between athletic Muslim women’s bodies and

Islamic gender ideologies.13 My project, in its examination of imaginative and non-fiction writers’ meditations on female musculature, shows that Victorian writers grappled with their own curiosities and concerns about physical culture through the contradictory figure of the muscular woman.

Ultimately, I see this dissertation as probing conversations taking place across literary and non-literary genres about female musculature, offering a fresh look at the

Victorian physical culture movement and the roles muscular women played within it. As

I discuss in the chapters that follow, muscular women resisted established constructions of femininity, leaving them “unconfined” by the medical professionals, educators, social reformers, and other observers who attempted to define the ideal aesthetics of women’s bodies. While some observers viewed the figure of the muscular woman as a cultural outlier, others perceived them as vital to the success of British national progress. Through its analysis of how both imaginative literature and the periodical press created a nuanced

13 See Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful; Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire; and Hargreaves and Vertinsky, Physical Culture, Power, and the Body. I would also like to acknowledge David L. Chapman’s and Patricia Vertinsky’s Venus with Biceps (2010), which provides a pictorial history (with occasional anecdotes) of both famous and little known muscular women from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

33 portrait of the muscular woman, my project demonstrates how muscular women’s bodies could figure as both objects of social construction and agents of social change. It also examines how the muscular woman’s challenge to the boundaries of aesthetic form became a model for new forms of literary experimentation. By considering the muscular female body as a site of contestation for writers from various professional backgrounds, and by examining the muscular woman’s transgressive embodiment in new forms of

Victorian fiction, this project uncovers how parallel transgressions of gender and genre exposed the tensions and contradictions of Victorian cultural and aesthetic ideals.

Chapter One

The Cultural Contradictions of Female Musculature in the Periodical Press

In her highest development woman is subtle, elusive…something beyond formulation and fact; a moral and refining influence; as a sister, wife, or friend, an inspiration, a comrade and a comforter; as mother, a guardian and guide; as citizen or worker a smoother of life’s way, a humaniser, nurse, and teacher. But none of these her highest attributes are attributes of muscle! And human capability is limited. One cannot possess the delicately evolved qualities of woman together with the muscular and mental energies of man. – Arabella Kenealy, “Woman as an Athlete” (1899)

In her April 1899 essay in The Nineteenth Century, “Woman as an Athlete,” the

British physician Arabella Kenealy views women’s excessive participation in athletics and physically demanding pursuits as contrary to the defining characteristics of Victorian womanhood. Of the various changes in women’s physiques as a result of more vigorous physical activities, Kenealy finds marked increases in muscular development to be most troubling because of a lack of coherence between the visibility of muscles and what she identifies as women’s highest, less tangible attributes. The limits of human capability,

Kenealy argues, make it difficult for women to sustain both their distinctive characteristics and the “energies” associated with manhood. This difficulty is heightened by the notion that, in Kenealy’s conception of the evolutionary process, women are

“delicate.” Despite this perceived contradiction between muscularity and womanhood,

Kenealy acknowledges the importance of exercise in the development of healthy bodies.

She contends, however, that excessive exercise compromises a woman’s ability to maintain “the balance” of adequate attention to her physical, mental, and emotional needs

(Kenealy 638). In Kenealy’s view, sustaining equilibrium between the needs of both body and mind is crucial to women fulfilling the domestic duties that they are expected to

35 perform. Moreover, by using terms and phrases such as “subtle,” “elusive,” and “beyond formulation and fact” to describe women who have achieved their “highest development,” Kenealy reveals her central concern that pronounced muscle growth disrupts women’s natural resistance to definition. That is, muscles diminish what Kenealy describes as “that mysterious and nameless something” that women possess (639).14

Thus, Kenealy frames women’s muscular development, somewhat paradoxically, in terms of reduction: With the addition of pronounced muscles, women lose the subtleties that make them distinctive. Her assertions illuminate a wider cultural concern that women’s excessive musculature might necessitate revisions to traditional formulations of womanhood and women’s roles.

Kenealy’s commentary was one of many essays in the late-Victorian periodical press that examined the potential individual and social consequences of marked muscular growth in women’s physiques. As part of broader discussions about the appropriateness of various athletic activities and exercise regimens for women, writers debated the possibility that women who developed excessive musculature would no longer appear feminine. Furthermore, many commentators gestured toward a growing cultural unease about racial degeneration when they considered how increased muscularity might affect a woman’s reproductive capacities and, in turn, advance or stifle British national progress.

These concerns figured prominently in a contentious exchange between Kenealy and women’s suffrage advocate Laura Ormiston Chant in the April through June 1899 issues

14 Kenealy writes that “charm” is the most appropriate term that captures what she means by “something” (639). She offers another explanation through the use of an analogy, adding that the mysterious “something” is to woman “as atmosphere is to landscape” (639). Through the use of such language, Kenealy adds to her idealized portrait of the Victorian woman as one who maintains an enigmatic aura.

36 of The Nineteenth Century—a periodical that, as Laurel Brake explains in Subjugated

Knowledges (1994), often featured “philosophically and theologically divergent writing” within the same issue (Brake 51). In “Woman as an Athlete,” Kenealy asserts that women who are engrossed in their muscular development risk “debasing” their femininity, in that they may become deficient in their abilities to weave fabric, prepare meals, nurse healthy children, and care for those who are ill (Kenealy 645). In a later response to Kenealy,

Chant describes that Kenealy’s concerns as “provocative of mirth” because they are grounded in premature assumptions about the consequences of female muscular development—assumptions derived from subjective observations of “a mere handful of women” (Chant 746). Chant’s perspective on women’s musculature is decidedly more optimistic than Kenealy’s. For women, Chant writes, the combination of muscular vigor and moral qualities—as opposed to the absence of it—is a “valuable commodity,” particularly in calamitous circumstances (751). The debate between Kenealy and Chant captures conflicting ideas about women with muscular physiques that many writers raised in late-Victorian periodicals. As this chapter will show, commentaries on women’s physical fitness were often intertwined with discussions about the links between muscular physiques and the perceived capacity for motherhood, meditations on the extent to which female physical education programs clashed with prevailing ideals of beauty, and conversations about the muscular woman’s blurring of boundaries between femininity and masculinity. The lack of consensus on how to interpret the figure of the muscular woman was perhaps a byproduct of the inextricable ties between her unconventional physique and shifting feminine and masculine ideals.

By examining competing attitudes toward women with pronounced musculature through an analysis of essays on women’s physical fitness and muscular development in the late-Victorian periodical press, and by exploring how some writers embraced muscular women as alternatives to women with more fragile frames while others disparaged them as too masculine, this chapter demonstrates how muscular women became polarizing figures in late-Victorian culture. I argue that the mixed reaction to the figure of the muscular woman positions her within a liminal space. She neither fits neatly within late-Victorian society, nor is she completely excluded from it. The muscular woman’s liminality thus enabled late-Victorian writers to effectively use her as needed to advance their own definitions of social or sexual fitness, alternately presenting her body as a form to be admired or as a warning to women about the blurring of gender boundaries and the consequences of too much exercise. Although my analysis is focused primarily on competing responses to the figure of the muscular woman in commentaries published in late-Victorian periodicals, discussions of women’s physical development were not limited to the final years of the Victorian era. Earlier commentaries on exercise and women’s health lay important groundwork for later writers’ more comprehensive articulations of concerns about women’s musculature. These earlier discussions of women’s physical soundness set up some of the specific, provocative positions that later writers such as Kenealy and Chant advance, and they also prompt questions about competing cultural responses to muscular women. In what ways did columnists in the periodical press register their concerns about shifting feminine and masculine ideals through the figure of the muscular woman? How did that figure confirm or challenge writers’ ideas about the relationship between muscularity, motherhood, and British racial

38 longevity? What “meanings” or messages did writers glean from the muscular woman’s body? Considering these questions helps to reveal the pronounced discomfort that the muscular woman created among writers who contemplated her place in late-Victorian culture.

Scientists, medical professionals, and health reformers were among the observers who advanced and contested ideas about women’s fitness and muscularity in the late-

Victorian periodical press, thus demonstrating a widespread cultural investment in understanding the intricacies of women’s physical development. In Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society (1994), J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel describe nineteenth-century Britain as “uniquely the age of the periodical” because periodical literature documented the cultural shift from “earlier, less sophisticated, less urbanized times” to the “modern technological era” (Vann and VanArsdel 8).15 Hilary Fraser,

Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston add, in Gender and the Victorian Periodical

(2003), that the development of the periodical press throughout the nineteenth century was spurred by “unstable and transitional times” that were the byproducts of a departure from “old absolutist certainties” in favor of “a more relativist culture” that welcomed competing and sometimes provocative perspectives (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 3). A venue for the dissemination of ideas, the periodical press was an enduring presence in a

15 Vann and VanArsdel cite advances in printing processes, low printing costs (and thus low purchasing prices), ease of distribution, and improved literacy as among the factors that contributed to the prominence of periodical publications (7). Commenting on literacy rates in the nineteenth century, Melissa S. Van Vuuren writes that legislation such as the Elementary Education Act (1870), which standardized and enhanced education practices for members of the working class, improved literacy to the extent that periodicals saw marked increases in their readerships (Literary 154). As Catriona M. Paratt adds, women formed a significant contingent of the growth in periodicals readership. As a result, publishers introduced many journals geared toward women in the second half of the nineteenth century (“Female Sport” 143).

39 culture that experienced social, scientific, and spiritual change as the nineteenth century progressed. As this chapter will show, many writers who discussed women’s physical fitness toward the end of the century viewed the changes in women’s muscle tones as threats to established formulations of femininity and masculinity. According to Fraser,

Green, and Johnston, the periodical press attended to questions of gender identity to the extent that it became “the medium that most readily articulate[d] the unevennesses and reciprocities of evolving gender ideologies” (2). As I suggest in this analysis, the figure of the muscular woman served as a medium in her own right, as her unconventional form compelled observers in late-Victorian England to grapple with the mutability of both physical bodies and gender constructions.

Before the appearance of essays that offered divergent outlooks on the consequences of women’s increased musculature in late-Victorian periodicals, earlier and more generalized nineteenth-century commentaries on physical fitness stressed close attention to the maintenance of the body as essential to optimal human health. In the opening anecdote of his 1861 Cornhill Magazine essay, “Health,” the aural surgeon

James Hinton recalls an unidentified deaf man who, when prompted to define the term,

“health,” replied, “[i]t is pleasant life” (Hinton 332). Expanding upon this response,

Hinton argues that optimal health and the associated experience of pleasure require that man’s body be “in harmony with the ceaseless activities of nature […] his blood is warm with the soft kiss of air, his muscles vigorous with hearty toil, his brain fertile in wise and earnest thoughts, his heart glowing with generous purposes” (332). Hinton later adds that this harmony, in conjunction with the seamless regulation of chemical processes within the body, allows man to achieve “the perfection of his instrument” (335). The British

40 physiologist Michael Foster offers an alternative way of understanding the health and maintenance of the human body in the September 1, 1866 issue of The Fortnightly

Review. Analyzing the physiological processes involved in the development of muscular strength, Foster describes the human body as a “muscular machine ready for use” and emphasizes the importance of maintaining a diet rich in nitrogenous foods in order to cultivate the muscles and tissues for peak performance (“Elements” 194). That both an aural surgeon and physiologist explain their respective philosophies on the human body’s requirements for optimal functioning suggests that questions of exercise and health captured the interest of doctors from seemingly unrelated fields of specialization. By using the terms “instrument” and “machine,” Hinton and Foster describe the human body as a mechanism that requires regular sustained attention and fine-tuning. In doing so, not only do they offer insight into the human body’s capabilities, but they also gesture toward some of the potential consequences of a poorly-maintained body, including the absence of “pleasant life” and a lack of physical strength.16

In early physical fitness commentaries that focused exclusively on women’s health, writers often expressed concerns about a perceived lack of visual evidence of physical vigor in many of the female physiques they observed. The absence of any outward bodily indications of good health practices not only led some writers to question the aims of the parents of weak-framed girls, but to also evaluate the efficacy of physical fitness regimens that only allowed light, limited exercise. In the February 1860 Once a

Week essay, “The Young Lady in Town and Country—Her Health,” the social reformer

16 Whereas Hinton speaks of the maintenance of the human body using mostly non gender-specific terms, Foster mentions both men and women, though his mention of women is rather brief.

41 and novelist Harriet Martineau contends that the rarity with which she observes middle- class families that include healthy young women is indicative of parents not providing for their daughters’ health of both mind and body (Martineau 191, 195). For girls, Martineau adds, irregular or no exposure to vigorous health practices results in “the too common spectacle of sickly girlhood” (194). Martineau perceives an unfortunate trend in which sights of girls in poor physical condition seemingly outpace images of healthy, physically-sound girls. Perhaps even more unfortunate, however, is that another commentator could still offer similar observations about female bodies years after

Martineau’s essay appeared. Writing in the Christian beliefs-leaning magazine Good

Words in 1874, Charles Kingsley argues that the “hundreds” of malnourished, physically- underdeveloped women he sees in the streets of London are signs of a social need for

“large frames, which indicate usually a power of keeping strong and healthy not merely the muscles, but the brain itself” (“Nausicaa” 20). Larger and more robust frames,

Kingsley suggests, symbolize both physical and intellectual strength. For Kingsley, the ideal physical training regimen for women is that which the “drama of Nausicaa” demonstrates: training that is done to song and is viewed as both a duty and an amusement (19). Such training not only allows for the development of women’s muscular frames, but also cultivates elasticity and grace in women’s bodies. Near the conclusion of his reflection, Kingsley addresses the underdeveloped women he often observes in

London when he asks, “Where is your vitality?” In posing this question, Kingsley demonstrates his preference for seeing vigor in the flesh—a preference that bodies lacking musculature or robustness cannot accommodate (22). He articulates an aesthetic ideal of the female body as exhibiting both potency and strength.

Women’s physical fitness becomes a tricky subject when considered alongside the ideals of femininity that were prominent in Victorian Britain. In The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (1982), Deborah Gorham argues that many of the ideals of Victorian femininity manifested themselves in women’s roles as wives and mothers (Gorham 5).

Motherhood, in particular, was widely regarded as vital to British racial longevity.

Patricia Vertinsky gestures toward the connection between race and motherhood in The

Eternally Wounded Woman (1990) when she examines female physicians’ advocacy of regular and varied exercise as essential to the development of girls’ health and strength.

Some physicians, Vertinsky writes, tied their insistence on physical education programs to the idea that girls with well-cultivated bodies would be the most prepared to both bear and rear similarly healthy offspring (Vertinsky 137). However, many commentators were concerned that strenuous athletics and other forms of excessive physical activity would be detrimental to women’s bodies and thus harm the future of the British race. As Athena

Vrettos explains in Somatic Fictions (1995), many observers worried that female reproductive capacity—used as a factor in evaluating female health—would be overburdened by excessive physical activity and would subsequently compromise future generations (Vrettos 127, 131.) Female reproductive health, then, was a major variable in the health of the nation. But the lack of consensus in the late-Victorian periodical press about what might constitute the healthy female body illuminates a wrinkle in cultural discussions of women’s physical fitness. By viewing muscular physiques as, alternately, either harmful or beneficial to women’s maternal capacities, commentators fostered both confusion and anxiety among women who attempted to navigate their equal desires to enhance their musculature and become mothers. Furthermore, the ambiguous relationship

43 between female musculature and the perceived capacity for motherhood demonstrates how women’s physical fitness fascinated, perplexed, and worried observers who sought to make sense of how to “read” the muscular female physique as the nineteenth century progressed.

Feminine Ideals and the Aims of Women’s Physical Education

While cultural discussions of women’s physical fitness yielded competing viewpoints on the amount of physical activity the female body could safely endure without harming its reproductive capacities, they also generated attitudes of both optimism and anxiety about the outcomes of physical education for young women.

Writers who insisted that women should be physically active contended with the notion that women who developed muscular physiques would be viewed as masculine or unattractive. An advocate of physical training as a major component of women’s higher education, the British schoolteacher J. Hamilton Fletcher writes, in “Feminine Athletics”

(1879), that many observers find the sight of female musculature repulsive because it contrasts with the popular ideal of female beauty, which holds in high regard the

“creature with limp, powerless arms and a wasp-like waist” (Fletcher 534). Fletcher admonishes parents who do not attend to the “muscular education” of their daughters, and argues that muscular female bodies should not be viewed negatively, but should instead be celebrated as properly developed: “What we ought to admire is a form unconfined, well-knit, ‘supple as that form of a panther,’ with an arm rounded, white, and hard as marble, from the well-strung muscles under the polished skin” (534).17 For Fletcher, the

17 Other writers in the late-Victorian periodical press have also commented on the level of involvement or influence that parents should have in their girls’ physical development. In “The Old and New Ideas of Women’s Education” (1878), Millicent Garrett Fawcett writes that parents who are “too anxious or too

44 ideal female body exudes both strength and elegance. By describing the muscular female form as “unconfined,” Fletcher suggests that muscular women enjoy a feeling of freedom that is absent in women whose bodies are “confined” by prevailing ideals of female beauty.

Fletcher was one of many writers in the late-Victorian periodical press who analyzed the physical and intellectual benefits of physical education for young women.

Reflecting on the characters of the colleagues and pupils she encountered during her three-year tenure at an unnamed boarding school, Fletcher writes that girls’ mental capacities “depend so much on their physical capabilities” (533). Because of this perceived link between body and mind, Fletcher argues that women’s education programs that focus solely on intellectual development and ignore the “culture and training of the equally important bodily power” employ a flawed educational methodology (533). She further emphasizes the importance of physical training when she asserts, “[w]e shall never have great doings from women unless they have great souls, —we cannot well expect great souls in little cramped bodies” (536). According to Fletcher, diminutive, underdeveloped bodies cannot accommodate the intangible spiritual and intellectual characteristics that larger frames can hold. Perhaps more important, however, is that young women are essentially robbed of the chance to perform a “great doing” without the opportunity to develop more robust physiques. Physical training, Fletcher concludes, helps girls to become self-reliant, free of cowardice, and strengthened both physically and

ambitious” may put a “severe strain on the constitution” by insisting upon too much physical exertion (Fawcett 858). By contrast, in “The Training of Girls of the Middle Classes” (1901), Mrs. H.A. Johnson scolds parents who do not participate in the “training and equipment” of their daughters, insisting that parents have no right to neglect such a crucial responsibility (Johnson 335). Even though these essays focus on the physical development of young women, they serve as “training” texts for parents as well.

45 in “moral courage” (536). In an 1891 essay on exercise and training in The New Review, the physician Morell Mackenzie argues for the value of women’s exercise by comparing the “ruddy-cheeked, full-limbed” girl of the 1890s to her “wasp-waisted beringleted great-grandmother, with her languid elegance and her Draconian code of feminine decorum” (Mackenzie 373). While Mackenzie jabs at what he sees as an antiquated formulation of femininity, he also uses language similar to that in Fletcher’s essay in describing girls who exercise as healthy, more intelligent, self-reliant, and energetic

(373). Implicit in Mackenzie’s and Fletcher’s commentaries is the notion that the invisible consequences of physical training regimens for young women hold almost as much significance as those that are visible. That is, a physically-active woman might develop a muscular physique that draws criticism from observers who endorse the wasp- waisted feminine ideal, but that strengthened physique may not reveal the self-reliance the woman also gained. Mackenzie’s and Fletcher’s commentaries illuminate a relationship between inner and outer—seen and unseen—that operates within discussions of women’s physical fitness.

Although Mackenzie is supportive of girls and women who exercise, he suggests that his support is not an endorsement for women’s pronounced musculature, but instead his recognition of the crucial influence that physically-fit women hold over Britain’s long-term well-being. Mackenzie acknowledges a widely-held belief that there exists “a certain antagonism between brainpower and muscular development,” but argues that the race that values muscular strength will be “most powerful in brain,” thereby heightening the importance of muscular development (373, 374). Mackenzie’s ideas are informed by his desire to see that British racial longevity is advanced. For him, girls’ improved

46 physical education is vital to that desire coming to fruition: “in the ‘physical betterment’ which is so inconspicuous in the girls of the period lies the best hope for the future of our race” (372). While Mackenzie encourages regular exercise regimens for women, he suggests that enhanced musculature should not be women’s primary aim: “it is a mistake for women to aim directly at the development of muscle; the Venus of Milo, not the half- masculine Amazon, must always be the type of physical perfection for them. Their exercise should be chiefly hygienic rather than athletic” (457). Mackenzie suggests that women whose fitness routines focus on muscular development compromise both their own womanhood and the integrity of late-Victorian manhood by becoming “half- masculine.” That is, by becoming half-masculine, muscular women are not fully anything, but are instead a combination of physical characteristics that blur distinctions between masculine and feminine gender constructions and complicate efforts to situate muscular women within late-Victorian culture.

“Masculine Pursuits” and Unsettled Gender Constructions

As physically fit women became more involved in athletics and more vigorous physical activities, they raised concerns among late-Victorian commentators that they had begun to encroach upon masculine pastimes. In “Manly Women,” an essay from the June

22, 1889 issue of The Saturday Review, the unnamed author offers a stinging indictment of women who behave and dress as men (“Manly” 757). The author argues that women who choose to follow the “current rage” of imitating men are making a major mistake because “they are apt to lose the great charms that have always surrounded well-bred

Englishwomen, of gentleness and modesty” (757). In sporting events, in particular, the author has observed athletic women exerting themselves to the point of excess in order to

47 project a masculine appearance (757). The author suggests that these women pay both a physical and figurative toll in their attempts to imitate men, in that they expend inordinate amounts of energy and relinquish feminine characteristics. While the author’s commentary provides an unflattering portrait of physically-active women, it also reveals an underlying concern about the ease with which women are able to “intrude” upon masculine sports and mimic manly behaviors. Manly women expose the impermanency of the “manly” label that is attached to many pastimes and thus bring the permeability of constructions of manhood into relief toward the end of the nineteenth century.

The concerns raised in “Manly Women” are similar to those that appear in

“Modern Mannish Maidens,” an anonymous essay in the February 1890 Blackwood’s

Edinburgh Magazine. Here, the author expresses anxiety over women’s growing involvement in the public sphere upon perceiving that “on all sides women are trying to compete with men” (“Modern” 252). Drawing from the ideas advanced in a previously- read pamphlet titled, “Why women cannot be turned into men,” the author asserts that

“Dame Nature” had created “barriers in respect of mental texture, of physique, of functions, duties, pastimes, sympathies, and affinities” that women of the present day are beginning to breach (252, emphasis author’s). That “physique” is stressed indicates the author’s concern that the form and size of women’s bodies might bear similarities to those of men. In a reluctant acknowledgement of the increasing acceptance of the “newly claimed rights of the softer sex,” the author observes that times have changed such that more women are earning university degrees, appearing behind postal counters, and inscribing their names on brass plates outside doctors’ offices (252). However, the author’s recognition of the growing trend of women in the workplace is coupled with

48 disapproval of the extent to which some women have become consumed by a “modern craze for mannish sports and mannish ways” (253). Concerned that the behaviors and appearances of some female participants in sporting events are unbecoming of women, the author proposes that there should be limits imposed upon women’s involvement in selected pastimes. In doing so, the author not only demonstrates unease about women’s encroachments within “mannish” sports, but also reveals a related desire to prevent women from relinquishing what is later described as “the seemliness, the dignity, the attractiveness, the lustre” of womanhood (264).

Among the athletic activities the author identifies as appropriate for women are rowing and lawn tennis, as women can participate in them “without derogation from

[their] feminineness” (258). The author’s survey of various recreations is noteworthy for its gestures toward notions of symmetry, both in terms of the aesthetics of the human body and less tangible qualities of womanhood. Originally a “manly pastime,” rowing is a muscular exercise that has the potential to “be overdone by female arms,” but combines

“both healthfulness and grace” when done in moderation (255). Using an oar, the author adds, provides effective exercise but does not compromise a woman’s “symmetrical feminine figure” (255). That is, no muscles are hypertrophied to the extent that a woman’s figure appears misshapen or unconventional in any way. Lawn tennis, meanwhile, is another acceptable pastime for women because it “combine[s] play with moderate exertion” and allows women to keep up their feminine appearance (255, 256).18

18 The author is not as resolute in the assessment of tennis. Too much tennis, the author argues, can turn women into “tennis-y girls” who discuss the sport at every moment of the day (256, emphasis author’s). Furthermore, widely recognized events like the Wimbledon championships—which feature women competing in fierce tennis matches for prizes—might advance negative messages about the sport to women who are not professionals (256).

The author’s survey of popular pastimes reveals dual concerns regarding women’s participation in “mannish” sports: not only can women lose some of their feminine characteristics in the spirit of competition, but that loss can manifest itself in the form of an asymmetrical figure that is the result of an imbalance of physical exertion and grace.

Moreover, a woman’s loss of femininity can be a source of humiliation. Observing a comic illustration of two muscular women boxing under the supervision of a giant, amused man, the author suggests that the athletic, muscular woman may not be taken seriously, but may instead become a source of entertainment and derision (258-259). Yet, in late nineteenth-century Britain, the muscular woman was already taken seriously because of both the uncomfortable feeling of unfamiliarity she perpetuated and the critical attention she attracted.

Women who were physically active and involved in the public sphere were sometimes perceived as breaching natural barriers in order to engage in manly pursuits, but they were not always cast in a negative light. Writing in The Nineteenth Century in

January 1890, Lady M.E. Jersey acknowledges that in earlier generations of

Englishwomen, “bolder spirits” were steadfast in their efforts to try outdoor activities other than archery or riding and “encroach on what were commonly considered masculine pursuits” (Jersey 61). Jersey explains that modern women are finer, taller, possess greater health and vitality, and have more access to athletic activities than their foremothers (60). Thus, in contrast to one of the major assertions from the “Manly

Women” essay, Jersey argues that it is unfair to assume that women who try activities that are “more ordinarily done by men” seek to imitate or compete with men (57).

Instead, those women might wish to fulfill desires that are unrelated to questions of

50 gender. The conviction with which some observers assumed that women engaging in masculine activities were attempting to imitate men indicates a wider cultural anxiety about the figure of the physically-sound, athletic woman due to uncertainty regarding whether—or how—her next pursuit or feat might unsettle ideas about gender constructions that were previously assumed to remain stable. The unnamed authors considered in this analysis point out what women might lose as a result of their involvement in masculine activities. In doing so, and in identifying pursuits that are no longer solely masculine, the authors also suggest that manhood lost some of its distinctive characteristics as a result of the athletic woman’s encroachments.

Motherhood, Racial Progress, and the Muscular Female Physique

Of concern in some late-Victorian commentaries on the figure of the muscular woman was that the energy required in order to develop and maintain a muscular physique, as well as the energy necessary for participation in athletics and physically- demanding activities, was at the expense of a muscular woman’s maternal qualities.

Thus, the muscular woman generated spirited debates about the ways in which her unconventional physique was tied to the well-being of her offspring. Kenealy and Chant were among the writers who took up this subject at length in their 1899 debate on athletic women. In “Woman as an Athlete,” Kenealy introduces an athletic woman, Clara, who over a two-year period improved her physical fitness and developed a passion for cycling.

Reflecting on an unnamed friend’s observation that Clara’s enhanced stamina and toned physique allowed her to enjoy sustained physical activity without discomfort, Kenealy questions whether Clara’s muscular energy overrides some of her other qualities

(Kenealy 636). Whereas Clara’s complexion was once “sensitive and variable,” it is now

“possibly too strong in its contrasting tones” (639). Moreover, Clara’s sympathies, emotionalism, delicacy, and tact have likely “gone to feed her augmented sinews” (639).

Kenealy also identifies an absence of literal and figurative “softness” in Clara’s physical appearance and comportment:

In her evening gown she shows evidence of joints which had been adroitly hidden

beneath tissues of soft flesh, and already her modiste has been put to the necessity

of puffings and pleatings where Nature had planned the tenderest and most dainty

of devices. Her movements are muscular and less womanly. Where they had been

quiet and graceful, now they are abrupt and direct. (640)

Kenealy portrays Clara as a disruptive figure. While one perceived consequence of

Clara’s physique is that she will need to modify her style of dress in order to accommodate her new body, a more significant concern is that Clara has bypassed nature’s “plan” for her physical composition. In doing so, she has not only developed a physique that Kenealy views as unnatural, but has avoided socially-imposed limits on the extent to which women can shape their bodies before they exceed “womanly” boundaries.

The catalyst of the debate between Kenealy and Chant is Kenealy’s discussion of the supposed threat that Clara and other muscular women pose to the future of the British race. Kenealy argues that the future of the race lies in women giving birth to and nurturing healthy offspring (642). Women like Clara and her “sister athletes” put racial progress at risk by expending their energy on becoming “muscular systems” whose abilities to endure extended bicycle rides without fatigue overtake their abilities to attend to their children’s needs (643). Noteworthy about Kenealy’s assertion is that her word

52 choice suggests a lack of agency for female athletes. That they are described as muscular systems—and not as muscular women or as any other term that is indicative of personhood—indicates that the self becomes overshadowed by an almost mechanical muscularity. Furthermore, Kenealy argues that children suffer major consequences as a result of women’s excessive musculature, in that they fall victim to artifice. Children born to muscular women cannot feed properly because of their mothers’ “artificial puffings and pads,” and they suffer from “incompetent” stomachs that are incapable of processing milk (643). In the muscular woman, Kenealy thus observes a deceptive figure that compromises the wellbeing of her offspring by fashioning a physique that cannot sustain both the feminine, delicately evolved qualities needed for motherhood and muscular energy. As a result of her unusual physique, the muscular woman is unable to properly perform a critical evolutionary role. Kenealy depicts the muscular woman as an antagonist of sorts to the British race, in that she expends her energy in ways that are harmful, rather than beneficial, to racial progress.

Chant offers a more positive portrait of the muscular woman in her reply to

Kenealy, and in doing so she undermines Kenealy’s ideas about the muscular woman’s fitness for motherhood. In a subtle jab toward Kenealy’s intelligence, Chant argues that the notion that muscular women are threats to both their offspring and the race is based on flawed logic: “common experience, as well as reason, is on the side of the more assured safety of both mother and child when the mother is muscular and well-developed, as against that of the average puny and ill-developed one” (Chant 746). In contrast to

Kenealy’s view of pronounced musculature as a deterrent to maternal capacities, Chant suggests that women’s muscular physiques signify the health and potential well-being of

53 both mother and child. She also stresses the idea that muscles do not create “a radical change in character, and turn a conscientious unselfish girl into a cold and unfeeling lump of human clay” (748). That is, from Chant’s perspective, muscles do not overshadow or remove a woman’s sense of self or alter her womanhood. Throughout her response,

Chant repeatedly questions the integrity of Kenealy’s analysis, despite Kenealy’s position as a physician. She accuses Kenealy of “carelessly jumping at conclusions” about the cultural consequences of women’s muscular development, and she describes Kenealy’s commentary as filled with “dreary libel” (746, 752). Despite these accusations, Kenealy opts to ignore Chant’s “discourtesies” in her June 1899 rejoinder to Chant’s essay, though she does not hold her composure for long: she eventually labels Chant’s interpretation of her initial remarks “ridiculous” (“Rejoinder” 915, 923). Nonetheless, Kenealy remains firm in her contention that the children of muscular women are inferior to those of “the more womanly type” (925). While she concedes that not all children of muscular women are “knock-kneed and puny,” she moves past that acknowledgement by reasserting that they fall short of the mental and physical prowess of their counterparts born to women who are less muscular (925). Both Kenealy, and, to a lesser extent, Chant, situate the child as an important figure in their interpretations of muscular women, thus emphasizing how the muscular woman’s physique and the well-being of her offspring were inextricably tied. It is clear, based on the exchange between Kenealy and Chant, that competing understandings of women’s muscular physiques raised frustration over how to interpret the muscular woman’s body and its fitness for motherhood.

Discussions of the relationship between muscularity, womanhood, and motherhood continued into 1900 with the novelist Alice Lee Moque’s Westminster

Review essay, “An Educated Maternity.” Basing her analysis on the contention that it is

“absurd” to categorize pronounced musculature and bodily vigor as qualities that are exclusive to men, Moque argues that woman’s “inferior position” in late-Victorian culture is the result of her “inferior physical condition” (Moque 57). Until women become well-versed in all practices essential to maintaining optimal health, Moque adds, it is a futile endeavor to expect them give birth to “sound, perfect, well-born progeny”

(57). Moque suggests that for late-Victorian society, a logical path to racial progress and longevity involves the elimination of cultural assumptions that muscles and bodily vigor are masculine, as well as a greater investment in promoting women’s physical fitness that is free of stifling social restrictions. Supporters of traditional ideals of femininity, Moque contends, perpetuated harmful attitudes toward women’s physical fitness: “the old scarecrows […] once threatened all women with excommunication from their sex who dared to aspire to athletic sports or other ‘unwomanly’ exercises” (56). Moreover, Moque argues that men who continue to marry “physically imperfect women” do little to advance racial progress, as they willingly accept a “pretty face”—together with unstable nerves, undeveloped muscles, and physical ailments—as “feminine concomitants” (58).

In both cases, Moque reveals her concern that British racial progress will stall if harmful attitudes toward women’s physical fitness continue to influence ideas about womanhood and maternity. In her plea for women to pursue an educated maternity, Moque also calls for a larger social education initiative on the rich potential of women’s bodies that are uninhibited by rigid ideologies of femininity.

To different extents, Moque’s, Chant’s, and Kenealy’s meditations on women’s muscularity demonstrate what a contested category it had become and the challenges

55 involved in determining the muscular woman’s place in late-Victorian culture. Unwilling to accept any notions of separation between womanhood and muscularity, Moque urges women to seek a proper education that enhances both the body and the mind. Chant, meanwhile, contests Kenealy’s insights about children born to muscular women and finds that a major component of Darwinian evolutionary thought may confirm her argument:

“may not the process of natural selection be trusted to decide in favor of the muscular as against the unmuscular of the sex?” (Chant 746). Kenealy’s invocation of evolution, by contrast, suggests that the “unmuscular” would be favored. Thus, competing interpretations of how women have evolved and how they will continue to do so figure prominently within the debate about women’s musculature and racial progress.

Criticizing Clara’s “augmented thews and sinews,” Kenealy stresses the consequences of vigorous physical activity and muscular development for women (Kenealy 640).

Excessive muscular energy may lead to “incapacitation, prostration, and illness” (637);

“extreme muscle power” is evidence of an unspecified disease (641); and, as Kenealy asserts in her rejoinder, robust women are more susceptible to cancer (“Rejoinder” 926).

While Kenealy’s objections to excessive female musculature appear both dramatic and scientifically unsubstantiated, they are noteworthy for suggesting that women lose more than they gain by engaging in too many athletic pursuits and increasing their musculature accordingly. However, women are not the only individuals who find themselves on the losing end of this exchange:

Can it be shown that modern woman is lacking in those which were wont to be

considered womanly faculties? Can it be denied? And since the power of a

healthy adult can be increased only at the expense of some other power, and since

modern woman has inordinately added to her muscle power, and since muscle

power is the least of the human qualities, what is to be deduced but that human

capability has lost rather than gained in the exchange? (Kenealy 638)

The link Kenealy finds between women’s added muscle power and human capability suggests that the consequences of women’s increased physical activity and muscular development extend beyond women themselves. Kenealy’s understanding of human capability as a competition for limited energy informs her concern that muscular development is at the expense of qualities more central to motherhood, qualities that would affect humanity as a whole if lost. Moreover, in her view that muscle power is the

“least of the human qualities,” Kenealy implies that modern woman’s excessive addition of muscle does little by way of forwarding the social imperative for racial progress. As I have suggested, the figure of the muscular woman becomes, in competing formulations, either a benchmark for the evolutionary potential of women’s bodies or a cautionary tale about the consequences of too much exercise. That she has the potential to fill both roles complicates late-Victorian efforts to stabilize the meaning of the female body and to situate female musculature within one category.

The Challenges of Interpreting Female Musculature

The conversations about female musculature that took place across and within late-Victorian periodical publications reveal both apprehension and optimism toward muscular women. As this chapter has shown, these conflicting attitudes were the result of competing impressions that the figure of the muscular woman left on her observers.

Because of her pronounced musculature, she was viewed as either a safer candidate for motherhood than her weaker-framed counterpart or a threat to the well-being of her

57 offspring. She was either condemned as unsightly or praised as a healthy alternative to the wasp-wasted feminine ideal. These competing responses suggest how femininity had become an unstable category by the end of the century. That late-Victorian writers were unable to settle upon the meaning of the muscular woman reveals discomfort and indecisiveness within a culture that prided itself on the ability to categorize and make judgments. This uncertainty not only centered on the muscular woman’s “place” in

Victorian culture, but also involved questions of how to read her transgressive body.

Interpreting the muscular woman’s body became a significant undertaking in late-

Victorian culture because her unconventional form raised questions about physical education, gender formulations, maternity, and racial progress. Because muscular women resisted easy classification, they challenged observers to confront unstable constructions of femininity and masculinity, as well as ideas about women’s physical development and motherhood. Exploring the competing reactions to muscular women in the periodical press not only shows how commentators used the muscular female body to advance or contest ideas about sexuality and fitness, but also how they adjusted, clarified, or reformulated their methods for understanding the meanings of women’s bodies in order to determine what pronounced musculature adds to or detracts from their constructions of womanhood.

Chapter Two

Visual Contrasts: Depictions of Female Muscularity in the Illustrated Press

The May 1869 issue of the short-lived satirical periodical The Girl of the Period

Miscellany includes an illustration, “A Muscular Maiden,” that depicts an unidentified woman declining a man’s offer of assistance after apparently subduing two boys on her own (Fig. 1). Accompanied by the caption, “‘Thanks,’ she said, quietly; ‘I think I have arranged the matter,’” the illustration appears to serve as a visual representation of the woman’s independence and fortitude (“Muscular” 78). The woman does not look disheveled despite the disordered appearance of her surroundings; she commands the center of the image with her fists clenched. However, the illustration’s seemingly positive message is undermined by a letter to the fictional editor that appears on the following page. In the letter, Guy Santorini reveals that the illustration depicts his recent encounter with a woman he assumed was a governess. A self-professed “worshipper of muscle,”

Santorini recalls that upon first observing the woman on a quiet street, he perceived that her deltoid muscle “stood out in a peculiarly fascinating way beneath her jacket” (79). It was not until Santorini witnessed the woman successfully combat two mischievous boys, however, that he recognized the full extent of her physical capabilities. Santorini initially praises the “little Amazon[’s]” defensive tactics, but his reflection takes an unsettling turn when he meditates on the woman’s muscular definition and imagines a companion of his own with a similar physique: “But I want a muscular wife. I want to see her trapezius prettily developed, a beautiful biceps, and a delightful little deltoid. Then we can playfully practise [sic] pugilistic feats upon each other, and amicably settle all conjugal differences by putting on the gloves” (79). By revealing his fascination with the maiden’s

59 musculature and articulating his desire for a muscular wife, Santorini advances his view of the muscular female body as an object for both play and sexual fantasy. Thus, his reflection constructs a portrait of the muscular woman that differs from the celebration of agency and physical prowess depicted in “A Muscular Maiden.” Not only do these competing representations of the muscular maiden highlight complex connections between visual depictions of muscular women and individual attitudes toward female musculature, but they also suggest the layered interpretations and subtexts that the aesthetics of the muscular female body evoked.

“A Muscular Maiden” was among numerous illustrations that appeared throughout The Girl of the Period Miscellany, a monthly, six-penny periodical that was inspired by an unsigned March 1868 Saturday Review article, “The Girl of the Period.”

The anti-feminist journalist Eliza Lynn Linton, later identified as the author of the article, argues that the fair English girl of the past—the girl who was “a tender mother, an industrious housekeeper, and a judicious mistress”—has been replaced by a new type of young Englishwoman who indulges in various extravagances, lacks consideration for others, intimidates men, and appears unfit for motherhood (“Girl” 340, 341). Linton perceives this change as indicative of a “national madness” among many women that may subside over time (341). The Girl of the Period Miscellany explored the notion of changing constructions of womanhood through provocative, largely comical works of prose and verse. As Kristine Moruzi argues in Constructing Girlhood through the

Periodical Press (2012), these works collectively represented a tension-filled

“transitional moment” between two competing ideologies of femininity: the “traditional mid-Victorian feminine ideal of duty, charity, and domesticity;” and the “fin-de-siècle

60 model” that embraced women’s sexual freedom, educational aspirations, and independent pursuits of professional opportunities (Moruzi 53). The illustrations figured prominently in capturing this tension, as they depicted women competing in sports, working in public establishments such as pubs, flirting with men, and, in the case of “A Muscular Maiden,” resisting male aggressors. Like many of the illustrations that appeared throughout each issue, “A Muscular Maiden” consumed a full page, which suggests that readers had the opportunity to “take in” the image without distraction before continuing to the next section of text. That is, they were invited to view and interpret the visual depiction of the muscular maiden for themselves before proceeding to Santorini’s account. Assessing the significance of illustration in The Girl of the Period Miscellany, Moruzi contends that the girl of the period “becomes a visual figure who is no longer contained within the drawing room. Instead, she works and plays in public spaces, and she travels in the hands of the men (and perhaps some women) who purchase the periodical” (53).19 But while becoming a visual figure may liberate the girl of the period by providing her public exposure, it simultaneously reinforces her position as a subject of critique; she becomes susceptible to intensified scrutiny from observers whose beliefs about feminine ideals may not align with her comportment. For the girl of the period, then, becoming a visual figure through illustration attracts more “readings” of her appearance that may be contradictory. These additional readings are rendered more complex by combinations of illustrations and text that do not always cohere.

19 Although The Girl of the Period Miscellany primarily appealed to a male audience, many of its advertisements were targeted toward women (Moruzi 56). Moruzi argues that the juxtaposition of advertisements for bridal accessories, clothing for infants, and shampoo alongside advertisements for rifle manufacturers and insurance companies not only suggests that the Miscellany sought to increase its readership regardless of gender, but also indicates the likelihood that both men and women were captivated by responses to the controversy that Linton’s article sparked (56).

This chapter examines the muscular woman as a “visual figure” in the mid- and late-Victorian illustrated press. My interest lies in how illustrations that feature muscular women help to document divergent cultural attitudes toward female musculature. As I have argued in Chapter One, not only did the sight of the muscular woman’s unconventional physique spark debates in the late-Victorian press about the efficacy of strenuous exercise regimens for women, but it also served as a catalyst for conflicting feelings of anxiety and optimism about the muscular woman’s fitness for maternity, as well as her aptitude for completing domestic tasks. These competing perspectives, in turn, revealed wider cultural uncertainties about aesthetic ideals of womanhood and illuminated concerns about racial degeneration. However, it is important to note that while these commentaries demonstrate the topicality of female musculature and its links to questions of procreative fitness in the late nineteenth century, they do not represent of all of the ways in which muscular women were depicted in the periodical press.

Illustrations such as “A Muscular Maiden” offered alternative portraits of the muscular woman by critiquing the appropriateness of her physique, suggesting her role in erotic fantasies, or using her image to comment on domestic and international affairs. Because visual depictions of muscular women appeared across multiple genres of periodical publications, including special-interest journals, miscellanies, and satirical magazines, this chapter considers four “case study” periodicals whose illustrations collectively anticipated or reflected the contradictions of female musculature that were especially pronounced in the late-nineteenth century. Images of muscular women in The Girl of the

Period Miscellany, Punch, or the London Charivari (hereafter, Punch); Fun, and The

Illustrated Police News capture a wide spectrum of reactions to the figure of the muscular

62 woman, ranging from mockery to admiration. I argue that an analysis of these images— along with the extended essays, brief anecdotes, and poems they often accompanied— reveals how illustrations participated in a constant refashioning of the aesthetics of the muscular female body. These combinations of illustration and text perpetuated the muscular woman’s resistance to singular constructions and reinforced her status as an enigmatic and contradictory figure in the illustrated press.

“The Excitement of Looking”: Theories and Practices of Victorian Illustration

Historians of the Victorian illustrated press have noted early-nineteenth century advancements in printing technologies as major factors in the growth of British pictorial publishing and the popularity of illustrated periodicals. Patricia Anderson has identified the engraver Thomas Bewick’s late-eighteenth century revival of wood engraving as the

“origin of Victorian periodical illustration,” and she notes that mechanized paper-making

(1803), the steam-powered press (1814), and four-cylinder stereotype printing (1827) were among the innovative technologies that made image printing faster and more cost- efficient (“Illustration” 128).20 The emergence of four-cylinder stereotype printing, in particular, was noteworthy for enabling metal plate (stereotype) casting from original reliefs that were made of materials such as papier-mâché, clay, and plaster (128). As Kate

Flint suggests in The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000), the versatility afforded by the new printing technologies and reduced newsprint costs allowed for a more efficient dissemination of engraved and photographic images (Flint 3). Flint adds

20 Anderson explains that wood engraving was a favorable alternative to the woodcut because engraving allowed for clearer lines and finer details (“Illustration” 128). Punch was one of many illustrated periodicals between 1840 and 1880 that relied heavily on wood engraving as their primary illustration production mechanism (129).

63 that periodicals such as The Illustrated London News and its closest competitor, The

Graphic, relied just as much on images as on words for the content of almost every issue

(3). Thus, efficient and low-cost image printing technologies were essential to the livelihoods of both publications. Perhaps the most significant benefit of these technological advancements is that they helped publishers increase their respective readerships. According to Anderson, the new developments in the reproduction of illustrations as the nineteenth century progressed helped create a greater variance in both cheap and more expensive periodicals that appealed to readers from diverse social classes, including penny weeklies, monthly reviews, and literary magazines

(“Illustration” 130). These developments also enhanced the lucrative potential of illustrations. Commenting on the popularity of magazines within the middle-class market,

Barbara Onslow adds that illustrations became “a major selling-point” for magazines by the middle of the century (Women 157). Her observation suggests that with the support of improved technology and reduced costs, illustrations functioned as promotional materials for attracting and retaining readers.

While advancements in printing technologies are often credited with spurring the growth of British pictorial publishing, the mid- to late-nineteenth century emergence of illustrators with strong artistic backgrounds contributed to that development as well. In

Reading Victorian Illustration (2012), Paul Goldman and Simon Cooke contend that the period from the mid-1850s to the mid-1870s—often labeled by illustration historians as

“the Sixties”—was among the “most productive epochs in the history of British illustration” because it featured a major shift in the “aesthetics of the printed page”

(Goldman and Cooke 1). Goldman and Cooke write that illustrators from the 1830s and

1840s, including frequent Punch contributor Richard Doyle and Dickens illustrator

George Cruikshank, were mainly caricaturists who had limited formal training; their illustrations often exhibited “an interest in fey humor and the comic grotesque” (1). By contrast, the illustrators who rose to prominence in the Sixties, including engraver Myles

Birket Foster and cartoonist George du Maurier, advanced the aesthetic of “poetic naturalism,” which involved “representing deep feeling which was still rooted in the observation of the ‘real’ world” (1). Their work, Goldman and Cooke argue, was noteworthy for being “by turns lyrical and dramatic, journalistic and psychologically penetrating” (2). The authors suggest that most illustrations from this period balanced emotional appeal with careful depictions of real-life people and events. Furthermore, in his extended study of illustrated Sixties magazines, Cooke explains that illustrations

“played a central part in entertaining the eye and improving taste,” in that they provided attractive and at-times didactic visual supplements to serial fiction, verse, and discussion pieces (Illustrated 32). Cognizant of this idea, many publishers from this period carefully scrutinized the style of each image in order to maximize the desired aesthetic impact of their works (32). Thus, illustrations not only appealed to the audiences of Sixties magazines, but influenced content configuration decisions for magazine publishers.

Innovative illustration practices continued into the late-nineteenth century and increased the diversity of illustrations in Victorian periodicals. As Patricia Anderson writes in her historical account of British pictorial publishing, the 1880s and 1890s saw photographic illustration gain a larger presence in periodicals as a result of more sophisticated halftone printing techniques (“Illustration” 130). Anderson adds that in the

1890s, many magazines and reviews regularly featured both photographs and engravings,

65 including Review of Reviews, The Strand Magazine, and Pearson’s Magazine (130).

Furthermore, in Gender and the Victorian Periodical (2003), Hilary Fraser, Stephanie

Green, and Judith Johnston note that popular literary magazines such as The Yellow Book embraced modern and experimental visual art and often reproduced works from artists who employed unusual styles (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 188). Perhaps the most significant implication of these diverse visual techniques is that Victorian illustration cannot be limited to a neat, singular formulation. Julia Thomas gestures toward this idea in Pictorial Victorians (2004) when she asserts that Victorian illustration was “never the stable, unified practice that such a classification implies” (Thomas 4). Not only was this instability due to various illustrated publications having their preferred visual conventions and pictorial reproduction mechanisms, but it was also influenced by the unique skillsets of individual artists (4). Victorian illustration was perhaps most noteworthy for its lack of permanent “boundaries,” in that it evolved with technological advancements, the contributions of artists with diverse backgrounds, and the needs of specific readerships.

A major factor in the steady growth of Victorian pictorial publishing was a wider cultural fascination with the complexities of human vision. In Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (1995), Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan locate the source of this interest in a widely-held belief that the eye was the “preeminent organ of truth” (Christ and Jordan xx). Similarly, Kate Flint adds that this curiosity encompassed questions about both the physiological mechanisms and intellectual values of vision: “the

Victorians were fascinated with the act of seeing, with the question of the reliability—or otherwise—of the human eye, and with the problems of interpreting what they saw”

(Flint 1). Yet the desire to understand how vision “works” was also attached to both

66 concerns about behaviors that could harm visual acuity and curiosities about preventative measures for protecting eyesight. As Chris Otter writes in The Victorian Eye (2008), texts that addressed the treatment of eye disorders multiplied as the nineteenth century progressed (Otter 34). Moreover, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of new instruments and techniques for measuring eyesight, most notably the ophthalmoscope

(35).21 In addition to scientific advancements that provided new insights into the dynamics of vision, optical devices such as the magic lantern, kaleidoscope, and stereoscope perpetuated what Flint describes as “the excitement of looking;” these devices “challenge[d], at the level of popular perception, the quality of observations made by the unaided human eye” (Flint 5). A similar enthusiasm for looking drew readers to the wealth of images that illustrated periodicals provided. Flint writes that the growth of both the illustrated press and photography during the nineteenth century offered readers new avenues for learning about the nation, culture, and the unfamiliar (4). Moreover, illustrations that supplemented both fiction and non-fiction texts provided “an interpretive gloss on the written word” (4). Thus, there was an educational benefit to the images featured in illustrated periodicals, as they allowed readers to acquire knowledge that may have been inaccessible through alternative means.

The artists who depicted muscular women in the mid- and late-Victorian illustrated press faced the dual challenges of crafting eye-catching images that conveyed the arguments advanced in written commentaries while also rendering unconventional, muscular, female physiques within a landscape of shifting formulations of womanhood.

21 Invented in 1846 by William Cunning, the ophthalmoscope projected artificial light into the eye through the pupil, via a mirror (Otter 37). This light enabled observers to examine the “fundus,” or the “bottom of the eye” (37).

According to Fraser, Green, and Johnston, illustrators joined poets, fiction writers, and essayists in engaging a “consciousness of feminine identity” as a major theme that spanned the various genres of the periodical press (Gender 173). Speculating upon the reasons for this widespread interest in constructions of femininity, the authors contend that “[t]he feminine attracts attention and contradiction, often inviting its apparent boundaries to be challenged” (173). For some press contributors, however, attempts to understand “the feminine” paradoxically involved critiquing “the unfeminine,” a construct that became a subject of “constant lampooning” among periodicals illustrators and writers from the 1860s onward (173). Although muscular women were sometimes the targets of this ridicule, particularly in satirical magazines, they were not always depicted in an unfavorable light. As Patricia Marks observes in her study of the New

Woman in the popular press, representations of muscular, athletic women were sometimes used as “jabs [that] were directed against the delicate ‘old’ woman” who adhered to the wasp-waisted ideal of feminine beauty (Bicycles 179). It seems fitting, then, that illustrators were among the press contributors who took up the figure of the muscular woman in their works. The evolving and multiform nature of Victorian illustration allowed artists and observers room to grapple with the perceived unstable boundaries of femininity that were complicated by competing views of female muscularity. If the notion that the images included in illustrated periodicals aid in knowledge acquisition is right, then what, exactly, do these images help readers learn about muscular women? How do these illustrations, along with the texts they often accompany, represent competing cultural attitudes toward female musculature and aesthetic ideals of femininity? What might audiences understand about the nation through

68 images of the muscular woman? Considering these questions removes the muscular woman from the periphery of prevailing ideals of femininity and instead resituates her as a focal point.

Illustrating Female Muscularity

An unsigned essay and an accompanying pen-and-ink sketch in the August 1869 issue of The Girl of the Period Miscellany gesture toward cultural concerns about the feasibility of a balance between women’s active lifestyles and the maintenance of their distinctive feminine attributes. In the essay, “Athletic Girls of the Period,” the author describes the girl of the period as “excessively fortunate” because of both the abundance of opportunities she has to improve her mind and the perceived lengths to which individuals as wide-ranging as dressmakers, fiction writers, and concert organizers will go to appeal to her fancies (“Athletic” 204). What has been lacking in the girl’s life, however, is the “opportunity for physical culture” (204). In a claim that articulates one of the major arguments that some later commentators would advance in favor of women’s exercise, the author writes that physical education “cannot for one moment be underrated, and it is of the utmost moment that the future wives and mothers of British society should do their best towards keeping up the stamina of our race” (204). Thus, the author connects the physically-fit female body to the well-being of the larger British social body.

Prefacing the illustration that appears on the following page (Fig. 2), which depicts thirteen women stretching, performing strength exercises, and participating in sports, the author builds anticipation for readers by promising that “[a] more captivating sight than that of these young devotees of Hercules and Hygeia it were impossible to conceive”

(204). Particularly fascinating for the author is the juxtaposition of femininity and physicality in each woman’s respective athletic performance:

Arrayed in bright-hued tunics and knickerbockers, with flowing sashes and

infinitesimal boots, they acquire simultaneously health, strength, grace, and

appetite. Some skim like swallows through the air, as they launch themselves into

space from the bars of the trapeze; others displaying the instinctive feminine

fondness for rings (wedding or otherwise), seize upon twin iron circlets and go

through performances which are marvels of serpentine litheness. (204)

By conflating terms that, to varying degrees, are indicative of elegance with terms that suggest muscular power, the author stresses the notion that both physical fitness and femininity can be maintained simultaneously. The illustration captures this idea through the postures and facial features of the women who are depicted. The women whose faces are visible appear to be smiling (and, in some instances, posing), even as some of them are engaged in strenuous exercises. Moreover, women with more pronounced musculature share the same page with women whose physiques are not as toned. While the author’s mockery of women’s perceived “fondness for rings” plays on stereotypes of womanhood, it is important to note that the athletic women here are neither spoken of nor sketched in a condemnatory or objectifying manner. Instead, “Athletic Girls of the

Period” offers an optimistic visual and verbal perspective on the convergence of muscularity and femininity. In contrast to “A Muscular Maiden,” both the author’s commentary and the accompanying illustration in “Athletic Girls of the Period” work in tandem to portray the figure of the athletic, muscular woman in a favorable light.

The weekly three-penny magazine Punch, known for both its often stinging social commentaries and what the critic J. Don Vann has described as its “spirited high-jinks,” engaged the subject of athletic women’s physiques as well (Vann 282). In the October 18,

1879 issue, the half-page “Hygienic Excess” cartoon depicts four athletic women, identified as the “O’Farrell-Mackenzie Girls,” posing for pictures next to a tennis net while holding their rackets (Fig. 3). None of the women appears as though she has been adversely influenced by the physical demands of her play; each stands tall and appears self-assured. However, in the caption beneath the image, Mr. Punch appears to criticize the O’Farrell-Mackenzie Girls for what he perceives as their excessive involvement in athletics, and he also asserts that their bodies have become misshapen: “they have distorted their figures into the likeness of so many Greek statues, and have no more waist to speak of than that quite too horrid Venus at the Louvre; indeed they have given up stays altogether as a bad job” (“Hygienic” 174). Not only have the O’Farrell-Mackenzie

Girls distorted their bodies, but they have relinquished a garment that figured prominently in cultural discussions of the aesthetic ideals of feminine beauty. The caption to “Hygienic Excess” appears to form a sharp contrast to the non-judgmental tone of the cartoon. However, Mr. Punch’s sarcasm renders the relationship between the caption and cartoon more complex. At the conclusion of the caption, Mr. Punch claims that the wasp- like waist is “as essential to a lady as a—well, hump between the shoulders, a prominent nose and chin, and a protuberant abdomen are to a gentleman” (174). By highlighting unflattering physical characteristics of gentleman, Mr. Punch essentially pokes fun at conservative, unsupportive attitudes toward the muscular female body. Thus, while the caption to Hygienic excess initially appears to stress the O’Farrell-Mackenzie Girls’

71 improprieties, it ultimately supports the girls in a roundabout way. Mr. Punch’s sarcasm mocks the way some conservative viewers would interpret the athletic woman’s figure.

The relationship between the “Hygienic Excess” cartoon and its caption is rendered even more complex by Mr. Punch’s discussion of issues that are not visible in the illustration itself. In addition to suggesting the perceived physical tolls of the

O’Farrell-Mackenzie girls’ excessive involvement in sports, Mr. Punch casts a shadow over what appears to be a harmless photography session by arguing that each woman’s athleticism and muscular definition could bring about significant social consequences.

Because all four women are engaged to marry Dukes, their behavior is subject to heightened scrutiny due to concerns that they might “set the fashion” for future women

(174). That is, they might inspire other women to adopt an athletic regimen that challenges the supposed limits of female physiques and presumably puts their marriage prospects at risk. Mr. Punch’s sarcastic tone indicates that he does not actually have a problem with the “fashion” the O’Farrell-Mackenzie Girls may set, but he recognizes that observers who are unsupportive of the athletic female body would be uncomfortable. But by using his caption to describe a circumstance that is not visible in the cartoon, Mr.

Punch mimics what he perceives other commentators to be doing when they observe the

O’Farrell-Mackenzie Girls. He also challenges readers’ visual perspectives and heightens interpretive tensions by discussing a circumstance readers cannot see.

While some illustrations of muscular women in the periodical press offered competing perspectives on the aesthetics of the muscular, athletic, female physique, others deployed the figure of the muscular woman in commentaries on international affairs. The November 5, 1870 issue of Punch includes a twenty-stanza poem, “The

‘Niobe of Nations,’” which chronicles an unidentified traveler’s encounter with a stone monument of the Greek mythological figure Niobe in the Lydian hills. Inspired to reflect on Niobe’s story, the traveler recalls that Niobe incessantly boasted about her birthing of fourteen children to Latana, who had only given birth to two. As an act of revenge,

Latana directed her own children, Phoebus (Apollo) and Diana (Artemis), to murder each of Niobe’s offspring. Overcome with sorrow, Niobe wept until she was turned into stone.

The significance of the traveler’s recollection becomes clearer when considered alongside the full-page illustration that follows the poem’s thirteenth stanza (Fig. 4). In this illustration, a large, muscular woman with a flexed left bicep gazes at a flying figure who aims a bow and arrow at her face. Wearing a partially-hidden sash with “France” inscribed on it, the muscular woman is surrounded by smaller women—most of whom appear to be in distress—wearing sashes that bear the names of French cities. Given the publication date of this issue of Punch, it is safe to assume that the muscular woman not only represents Niobe, but embodies a once fertile country in ruins after a crippling defeat at the hands of German coalition forces in the Franco-Prussian War. The muscular woman dominates the illustration with her size, distinctive physique, and position as the central figure. However, her striking presence is somewhat mitigated by the fact that she is at the mercy of a much smaller man—likely a representation of Apollo—as a result of her transgressions. Furthermore, the woman’s muscular figure contrasts with the feminine, maternal softness that is exemplified in both her attempt to shield some of the smaller-framed women from harm and the pronounced look of grief in her face. “The

‘Niobe of Nations’” offers insight into the versatility of the figure of the muscular

73 woman. While she serves as a stand-in or substitute for a defeated France, she also shows that she is capable of exhibiting contradictory masculine and feminine characteristics.

Whereas the illustration and poem satirize France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian

War, the poem advances the idea that external appearances are unreliable indicators of one’s physical capabilities. In a tone that is both mocking and triumphant, the speaker notes specific unflattering attributes of the “Niobe of Nations” and gestures toward the idea that certain prior perceptions of her “disposition” were ultimately misguided:

Lo, who is the “Niobe of Nations” now!

She was thought so strong and was so proud,

Whose armed and sceptered hand and haughty brow

Once o’erawed Europe, at her footstool bowed. (“Niobe” 190)

The speaker admonishes the Niobe of Nations’ arrogance and mocks her for not being as powerful as she previously led “once o’erawed Europe” to believe. In the accompanying illustration, the muscular woman’s physique symbolizes a France that was once a strong, hegemonic presence in Europe, but has since been rendered helpless. The dark, billowing smoke behind her further symbolizes her ruin. Although the muscular woman looks physically imposing, her strength no longer appears to be effective. While the illustration emphasizes France’s grief, the poem explores the implications of France’s downfall. Both

“texts” work together to satirize France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War through the figure of the muscular woman, but they also accomplish slightly different tasks and thus demonstrate the value of each mode of representation.

The weekly, comic, penny magazine Fun, established in 1861 by the actor and dramatist H. J. Byron, used an image of a muscular woman to offer its own political commentary on the Franco-Prussian War. The October 29, 1870 issue includes a full- page illustration, “The Modern Andromeda: Will She Be Released?” (Fig. 5), which, like

Punch’s “The ‘Niobe of Nations,’” satirizes France’s ill-fated campaign. This image depicts a tall and muscular woman shackled by her arms and legs against a stone edifice.

The woman, wearing a cap with “Paris” inscribed on it, faces the open mouth of a cannon labeled “WAR.” Unlike the illustrations considered thus far, however, “The Modern

Andromeda” does not accompany an essay or poem, nor does it include a caption other than its subtitle, “Will She Be Released?” (“Modern” 171). Moreover, the illustration is preceded by humorous sketches about shaving and portrait drawing, and it is followed by a narrative poem on friendship. While its position in this issue of Fun is somewhat perplexing, “The Modern Andromeda” is most noteworthy for its inclusion of a group of male spectators who appear to be inspecting the shackled woman and deliberating about her release. At the top of the image, a bird carries a message that reads, “THE

JUDGMENT OF EUROPE,” which emphasizes the notion that Andromeda is not only physically confined by chains, but also trapped within the gaze of her observers (171).

Moreover, the illustration offers no indication that Andromeda will receive aid or sympathy, as she must contend with the scrutiny of all of Europe. Thus, there appear to be at least two levels of spectatorship at play in relationship to this image: not only is

Andromeda judged by the male representatives of European countries, but she is also observed by readers who encounter her unusual figure within the pages of the ironically- named Fun. As such, she is positioned as an unwanted subject of public display. In “The

Modern Adromeda” and Punch’s “The ‘Niobe of Nations,’” the figure of the muscular woman is depicted as subdued and defeated by grief or restricted by chains, all the while being monitored by men. There is a subtext of reassurance, in both images, that the male figures are still dominant despite their comparatively smaller sizes. In the same manner that France is put in her place in the Franco-Prussian War, masculine power triumphs over muscular femininity, and is capable of putting the figure of the muscular woman in her place.

In a brief historical overview of Victorian comic periodicals, J. Don Vann argues that it is challenging to develop a list of observations that apply to all comic publications because “the nature of comic periodicals is so diverse” (“Comic” 284).22 It is perhaps fitting that visual depictions of muscular women appear within multiple comic periodicals, as the illustrations collectively inhibit any attempts at making definitive judgments about the muscular female form. Yet, as a survey of images from the penny periodical The Illustrated Police News suggests, illustrations featuring the figure of the muscular woman also appeared outside of the comic genre. In Cruel Deeds and Dreadful

Calamities (2011), Linda Stratmann writes that The Illustrated Police News distinguished itself from other British periodicals by focusing exclusively on crime and “the sensational” (Stratmann 8). Founded in 1863, with the first issue appearing in February

1864, the Illustrated Police News was noteworthy for its distinctive front cover, which typically featured wood-engraved illustrations of gruesome murders, domestic disputes,

22 As Vann suggests earlier in his essay, a major reason that it is difficult to generalize comic periodicals is that the editorial statements of various magazines had contrasting aims. The British Lion, established in 1860, stated that its goal was “to be the ‘protector, patrol, and symbol’ of all British values” (Vann 280). In the first issue of Mr. Merryman (1864), the editorial statement suggests that the magazine is impartial in its hatred of “shams,” whether they emerge in “the rusty black of a begging-letter impostor, or under the coronet of a Whig or Tory nobleman” (qtd. in Vann 280).

76 violent altercations, and mysterious deaths—most of which were supplemented by prose articles of varying lengths on the pages that followed.23 These vivid illustrations and their associated articles were not without controversy. In an 1886 survey of readers from the

Pall Mall Gazette, The Illustrated Police News was voted the “worst newspaper in

England” for allegedly encouraging crime and demoralizing readers (qtd. in Stratmann

20, 21). This survey does not appear to have hurt sales, as the paper reached a weekly circulation of 300,000 by late 1889 (18). According to Stratmann, a defining characteristic of the Illustrated Police News is that women “often took center stage” in the illustrations and articles (83). Stratmann acknowledges that women were often the victims of crime, but adds that “they also committed murder, were cruel to children and servants, assaulted other women or their husbands, captured burglars, indulged in openly saucy behavior, drove cabs, and carried out plucky rescues” (83). The muscular women featured in The Illustrated Police News were sometimes depicted as being involved in one or more of the above activities, thus adding more variety to competing views about her figure and comportment.

In addition to articles about crime and death, The Illustrated Police News regularly included features on boxing (Stratmann 14). Along with visual depictions of two murders and a near-drowning on the River Thames, the cover of the April 13, 1872 issue includes an illustration, “Training Female Pugilists,” which depicts two muscular women lifting weights and sparring with a makeshift punching bag, respectively (Fig. 6).

23 Stratmann notes that the first issue of The Illustrated Police News does not list the names of the founders. However, an article in the November 23, 1886 edition of Pall Mall Gazette indicates that the founders were adventure magazine publisher Henry Lea and leather manufacturer Edwin Bulpin (8). Stratmann suggests that these conclusions are likely based upon the volume of advertisements devoted to Lea’s works and Bulpin’s shoe business (8).

The women are monitored by trainers and a fellow boxer. In the article associated with the image, the author praises “[o]ur American Cousins” for being “rather ingenious in inventing new sensations. The last novelty is a match made between two female competitors for fistic honours in the prize ring” (“Training” 2). Fascinated by the prospect of a women’s prize fight, the author recounts the contents of a letter from a writer at the Stark County Democrat that outlines the women’s strict training regimens.

The details of the daily routine indicate that the female pugilists, ages nineteen and twenty-two, have little autonomy; their bodies are essentially “policed” from sunrise to sunset, including structured rest breaks throughout the day, strict dietary requirements, and timed periods for boxing and cardiovascular exercise (2). The writer suggests that such a rigid training regimen has yielded satisfactory results, in that the pugilists are “in good trim” and are “powerfully put up” (2). The illustration aligns with the writer’s assessment, as the women it features display muscular, toned physiques. But whereas the illustration focuses on the pugilists’ physical development, the associated article divides its attention between the training and the “sensation” of the pending prize fight.

According to the letter writer, the fight has already generated thousands of dollars in bets, which is an indication of considerable interest from boxing enthusiasts and other interested observers. The writer also reveals that the pugilists will appear in special

“costumes” for their match, further heightening the spectacle of the upcoming encounter

(2). The women depicted in the “Training Female Pugilists” illustration are never named in the article. This lack of identification is perhaps an indication that the writer is more interested in the pugilists as revenue generators and “new sensations” than as individuals.

Other images throughout The Illustrated Police News depicted muscular women performing dangerous stunts. The June 16, 1888 issue features an illustration of the

American trapeze artist Leona Dare, known for her often death-defying acrobatic performances that captivated audiences in both North America and Europe. Writing about

Dare and other popular female aerialists in Circus Bodies (2005), Peta Tait notes that

Dare was particularly recognized for her balloon acts, which involved suspending herself by her teeth from a hot air balloon’s attached trapeze (Tait 45). The illustration, “The

Ascent of Leona Dare from a Baloon [sic] at the C. Palace” (Fig. 7), portrays one of

Dare’s many balloon performances at London’s Crystal Palace. Wearing an outfit that reveals her muscular figure and seemingly allows for a full range of movement, Dare exudes a blend of physicality and femininity that is reminiscent of the various women depicted in The Girl of the Period Miscellany’s “Athletic Girls of the Period.” Not only does Dare’s performance suggest the accuracy of her last name, but it also shows that she will test the limits her body at her discretion. While the brief article associated with the illustration begins by describing Dare’s performance as being of an “exceptional character,” it then recounts a conversation between Home Secretary Henry Matthews and

Parliament member S. Smith regarding both the safety of the performer and the legality of such an exhibition (“Woman” 2). Dare essentially disappears from the discussion while Secretary Matthews considers whether any existing laws could halt potentially life- threatening public performances. At the conclusion of the article, Secretary Matthews argues that any danger associated with Dare’s performance is “more imaginary than real,” and he gives his consent for future exhibitions (2). The visual depiction of Dare’s performance and the article it accompanies are noteworthy for demonstrating two types

79 of agency. The illustration appears to grant agency to Dare by positioning her at the center of the image—notably, above the impressive Crystal Palace—and capturing the physical strength required to suspend herself from the trapeze using only her teeth. In the article, however, government officials debate the future of Dare’s performances and temporarily call a major aspect of her livelihood into question. Although Dare appears to exercise great control over her body in order to complete her balloon act, she remains susceptible to being controlled by figures of authority.

An illustration and article from August 11, 1888 issue of The Illustrated Police

News provide a portrait of a female circus performer who exhibits many of the same characteristics as Leona Dare. The illustration, “Exciting Scene at a Menagerie” (Fig. 8), depicts a muscular woman who risks harm in order to entertain a group of spectators. In a mishap at a New Brighton menagerie, a snake charmer, Esmeralda, is wounded multiple times by snakes coiled around her body, much to the horror of the audience. In a brief, unsigned story recounting the event, the author describes the snake bites as so deep that

Esmeralda was “almost blinded with blood” (“Menagerie” 2). Despite the trauma she suffers, Esmeralda remarkably removes the snakes from her body, completes her performance as planned, and later returns for an evening show routine in a lion’s den—an act that earns her the descriptor, “daring female,” from the author (2). Unlike the written perspective on Dare’s balloon ascent, which removes Dare’s impressive accomplishment from much of the discussion, the article associated with the “Exciting Scene” illustration documents each moment of Esmeralda’s incident before saluting her resolve to honor her performance commitments. But whereas the article praises Esmeralda’s quick thinking and physical stamina, the illustration appears more intent upon capturing just the

80 sensationalism of the scene. The excitement does not lie in Esmeralda’s physique—and perhaps it would not, as audiences are likely accustomed to seeing unconventional figures in this setting—but in her confrontation with the snakes. Because the illustration appears on the front cover of the periodical, it allows readers to make their own interpretations of the scene and builds anticipation for the related article.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, The Illustrated Police News began to feature racier images and stories in which women figured prominently. According to

Linda Stratmann, the mid-1890s saw a rise in depictions of unfaithful wives, women frolicking in public while drunk, dancing girls, and women dressed in “frothy décolletage” (Cruel 83).24 These portraits joined the stories of female violence, traumatic incidents, and athletic feats that had been staples of the periodical (83). An illustration in the January 29, 1898 issue depicts an altercation between a muscular trapeze artist and a spectator at her performance (Fig. 9). In “A Fair Acrobat Soundly Thrashes a Man Who

Has Made Himself Objectionable to Her Father,” the father of an unnamed acrobat confronts a man who “interfered with the rope” during his daughter’s performance at the

Carnarvon Pavilion (“Fair” 2). After recognizing that her father is in trouble, the acrobat returns to the ground floor and “boxe[s] the man well about the head amidst the encouraging cries of a large section of the crowd” (2). Although the acrobat is not dressed in attire that appears conducive to combat, she lunges at the troublemaker and forces him to adopt a defensive posture that effectively contorts his body. Moreover, the acrobat

24 Stratmann attributes this rise to changes in both ownership and editorial philosophy in 1894 (83). (The new owners were not named, but instead identified themselves as “The Illustrated Publications Co. Ltd.”). The editor seemed equally fascinated by stories of women who would “attempt anything” and women who would “revert to type” and seek safety from men in difficult circumstances (83). The illustrator, Stratmann observes, seemed to enjoy depicting women in revealing attire, often assaulting men (83-84).

81 initiates a role reversal of sorts with the man who started the commotion. While the man is initially a threat to the acrobat’s safety and the father’s well-being, it is the acrobat who assumes a protective role over her father and becomes a threat to the man’s health and dignity. That is, she becomes the aggressor and demonstrates her ability to overpower men. While this illustration is celebrates the acrobat’s physical strength, it also honors her ability to quickly transition from the role of a performer to that of a protector in calamitous circumstances.

Refashioning Femininity through the Figure of the Muscular Woman

The visual depictions of muscular women considered in this chapter allowed readers of illustrated periodicals to connect specific images of female musculature to the contentious debates about the ideal aesthetics of the female physique and changing roles of women that figured prominently in the periodical press. While these images and their accompanying texts offered another method for readers to gauge competing cultural attitudes toward female musculature, they also gave readers the opportunity to formulate their own interpretations of this unconventional figure. In the illustrations discussed here, muscular women are depicted as active participants in physical training programs, subjects of erotic fantasies, embodiments of foreign countries and mythical figures, and accomplished performers. These diverse and contradictory depictions show that the figure of the muscular woman could be deployed across genres and contexts. But in addition to demonstrating the muscular woman’s versatility, these illustrations also perpetuate her resistance to singular constructions by adding nuances to her character.

Many of the illustrations I have considered also show that the figure of the muscular woman embodies a delicate juxtaposition of feminine and masculine features.

To borrow David Chapman’s terminology from the introduction to a photographic, historical study of muscular women co-authored with Patricia Vertinsky, the figure of the muscular woman is “a smorgasbord of mixed messages” (Venus 11). While some of the images of muscular women examined in this chapter depict female musculature in a negative light, others celebrate the muscular female physique as a new and welcome configuration of the female body. These competing responses confirm that images of muscular women collectively embody cultural uncertainties about changing feminine aesthetic ideals. In doing so, they advance the notion that constructions of femininity require constant reformulation.

Chapter Three

Muscular Women and the Difficulties of Categorization in Sensation Fiction

This slang term [sensation] is not quite accurate as applied to me. Without sensation there can be no interest: but my plan is to mix a little character and a little philosophy with the sensational element. — Charles Reade, 1868 Preface to Hard Cash

What distinguishes the true sensation genre, as it appeared in its prime during the 1860s, is the violent yoking of romance and realism, traditionally the two contradictory modes of literary perception. —Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar (1980)

Charles Reade explains his method for writing Hard Cash (1863) in his December

1868 Preface, noting that his extensive investigations of unethical practices in England’s mental institutions shaped his narrative of false imprisonment in a lunatic asylum. Reade adds that despite the legal documents, letters, and interviews that inspired what he identifies as a “matter-of-fact Romance—that is, a fiction built on truths,” he has faced skepticism about the accuracy of his “madhouse scenes” from biased administrators at private asylums (Reade). These scenes “have been met with bold denials of public facts, and with timid personalities, and a little easy cant about Sensation Novelists” (Reade).

Reade defends the madhouse passages in Hard Cash by asserting that he wrote them with the same meticulousness as other scenes in the narrative, including a lengthy sea voyage and courtroom proceedings. He agrees to share the evidence he has gathered with any detractor who “cares enough for truth and humanity” (Reade). In his response to what he perceives as condescension toward sensation novelists, Reade distances himself from the term, “sensation,” but also argues that the absence of sensation would be detrimental to the appeal of his narrative. By stating his aim of blending character and philosophy with

84 the “sensational element” in his work, and insisting that he is basing his fiction on “public facts” and carefully-researched societal “truths,” Reade shows his recognition of the efficacy of sensation in fictional narratives, and speaks to the hybridity of Hard Cash and, by extension, the sensation genre as a whole.

In her seminal study on sensation fiction, The Maniac in the Cellar (1980),

Winifred Hughes has identified Reade’s description of Hard Cash as a matter-of-fact

Romance as capturing the “essence” of the sensation novel (Hughes 16). Hughes observes an inherent paradox in the sensation novel’s engagement of both romance and realism, and her use of the term, “violent,” indicates the jarring, intense nature of this merging of literary styles. Furthermore, Hughes contends that these texts are “at once outrageous and carefully documented…extraordinary in intensity and yet confined to the experience of ordinary people and operating in familiar settings” (16). Her observations highlight the contradictory characteristics of sensation novels, and, indirectly, the versatility of sensation fiction writers. Serialized in popular periodicals and easily accessible via circulating libraries and railway bookstalls, sensation novels surged in popularity among Great Britain’s growing reading public in the mid-nineteenth century.

But with that popularity came competing reactions among early reviewers of this new genre. Writing in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in May 1862, the novelist and historian Margaret Oliphant cites Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White

(1860) as a promising indication of a potentially fruitful “new school in fiction” because of what she perceives as Collins’s ability to “thrill us into wonder, terror, and breathless interest” with scenes that are legitimate and plausible (“Sensation” 565). For Oliphant, there is a certain freshness about the sensation novel’s rendering of circumstances that are

85 both shocking and reasonable. Perhaps the harshest critique was an unsigned essay, later attributed to the Reverend Henry Mansel, which appeared in the April 1863 issue of The

Quarterly Review. In an unflattering comparison, Mansel likens the rise of sensation novels to the lives of evolving insects, in that they begin as piecemeal instalments in periodicals, transform into reprints within the circulating library, and finally become yellowbacks sold in bookstalls—yellowbacks with attractive exteriors but interior narratives that lack much substance (“Sensation Novels” 484). That is, the sensation novel has a surface, but no depth. Mansel also labels the sensation novel as “mere trash, or something worse” for what he perceives as a transgressive blurring of journalism and fiction and because, in his view, sensation novels cultivate poor writers and undiscerning readers (488). Thus, for Mansel, the growing popularity of sensation fiction is to the detriment of the mid-Victorian reading public. The contemporary responses to sensation narratives from Mansel and Oliphant, along with Hughes’s more recent study of the genre, capture the enigmatic nature of sensation fiction.

Along with discussions of form and subject matter, contemporary reviews of sensation narratives also examined issues of characterization. In her 1867 Blackwood’s review, Oliphant condemns what she perceives as an “unfortunate spectacle of femininity” in sensation novels—one that presents women as “passive or assertive, heroine or villainess, or sometimes a blurred distinction between the two” (“Novels”

259). By identifying these contradictory descriptors and asserting that they are sometimes merged, Oliphant suggests that sensation narratives hindered definitive constructions of womanhood. This notion of ambiguity in characterizations of female characters is embodied in two muscular women that Reade introduces in Hard Cash: Hannah Blake

86 and Mrs. Edith Archbold. Both characters hold positions as nurses at the asylum in which the protagonist, Alfred Hardie, is initially confined. As I will later discuss, Reade’s vivid portraits of Hannah and Mrs. Archbold reveal contradictions in both their appearances and dispositions—contradictions that not only perplex Alfred, but challenge mid-

Victorian constructions of ideal womanhood and also foreground the novel’s interest in hybrid forms. Hard Cash is not the only sensation novel that depicts women with commanding physical presences. Novels such as Collins’s The Woman in White, Charles

Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863), and Reade’s Griffith Gaunt (1866) include both central and peripheral female characters who are notable for their unusual appearances and pronounced physical vigor, among other characteristics.25 In The Victorian Freak Show (2009), Lillian Craton writes that novelists and readers were fascinated by the “strange forms of womanhood” represented in sensation fiction, in part because these forms served as points of contention in wider cultural debates about women’s rights and gender roles (Craton 128). Not only did these strange forms include women with unconventional body types such as muscular physiques, but also women who committed murder, bigamy, and other acts of social deviance (128). Yet, as writers and readers explored unusual constructions of womanhood in these works, they simultaneously wrestled with the unfamiliarity of a new and multidimensional literary genre. Sensation novels appeared to offer a space for the

25 I include Great Expectations in my analysis because the novel explores many of the transgressive subjects that figure prominently in other sensation novels, including physical violence, white-collar crime, and both women and men with dark, secret histories. Critics such as Deborah Wynne (The Sensational Novel and the Victorian Magazine, 87), Laurie Garrison (Science, Sexuality, and Sensation Novels, 123- 124), and Nicholas Rance (Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists, 100-101) have also included Dickens’s novel as part of the 1860s emergence of the sensation genre.

87 study of non-traditional femininity, but the specific characteristics of that space were undefined.

My interest in this chapter lies in the different ways that sensation novelists deployed the figure of the athletic, muscular woman in their works. Analyzing the conflicting depictions of this figure in sensation narratives illuminates a complex relationship between representations of the muscular female body and the form of the

Victorian sensation novel. That is, the unconventional, contradictory figure of the muscular woman becomes both a reflection and expression of the generic hybridity of the sensation novels in which she appears. Considering these representations also reveals how sensation fiction writers were early participants in conversations about female musculature and the aesthetic ideals of the female body that would intensify in both the periodical press and in New Woman fiction later in the nineteenth century. Although I examine representations of women with muscular, unconventional bodies in works by

Collins, Dickens, and Braddon, I consider Reade’s Hard Cash as the most sustained example of how the muscular woman could be deployed in sensation fiction as a commentary on—and analogue of—the genre’s own formal contradictions. This chapter thus links the difficulty in categorizing muscular women in Hard Cash and the other sensation novels from the 1860s to the challenge of categorizing the literary genre in which they appear. By analyzing the depictions of muscular women in these novels in conjunction with recent scholarship on the generic tensions of sensation fiction, I argue that the figure of the muscular woman challenged traditional formulations of womanhood in ways that parallel the sensation novel’s challenges to the aesthetic and formal conventions of Victorian literature.

The Victorian Sensation Novel: Definitions of a New Literary Genre

In attempting to define the specific characteristics of the Victorian sensation novel, critics have examined multiple delineations of the term, “sensation,” and its variants. These examinations often intersected with discussions about the physical and emotional consequences of reading sensation novels. In The Novel and the Police (1988),

D.A. Miller argues that the excitement that “seizes” readers of sensation fiction is “as direct as the ‘fight-or-flight’ physiology that renders our reading bodies, neither fighting nor fleeing, theaters of neurasthenia” (Miller 146). Elaborating on the physical experience of reading sensation fiction, Miller adds that the genre primarily engages “the sympathetic nervous system, where it grounds its characteristic adrenalin [sic] effects: accelerated heart rate and respiration, increased blood pressure, the pallor resulting from vasoconstriction, and so on” (146). Similarly, Lillian Craton writes that sensationalism is

“defined by the visceral response it seeks from its audience, one that depends on surprise, horror, titillation, and distaste” (Freak Show 123). Laurie Garrison observes alternative meanings of sensation in Science, Sexuality, and Sensation Novels (2011), noting that some early reviews of the genre associated sensation with characters’ deviant behaviors as well as “the status of many of these novels as runaway bestsellers” (Garrison 2). These reviews also explored the physical and emotional aspects of sensation. Garrison notes that sensation was understood as an “artificially produced” and “unwholesome” excitement, as well as an appeal to the nerves (3).26 It is Pamela K. Gilbert’s 1997 study

26 As Pamela K. Gilbert explains in Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (1997), the sensation novel was believed, by some critics, to “dangerously and inappropriately excite” its female readers, in particular, because it appealed to the “lower tastes” of the body that, for women in the upper and middle classes, should remain “closed and impermeable” (Disease 78).

89 on the connections between mid-Victorian women’s popular fiction and cultural anxieties about disease, though, which illuminates a particularly provocative delineation of the term: sensation served as a “thinly-veiled literary euphemism for the action of disease upon the body” because the qualities of sensation literature paralleled prevailing discourses of disease and contagion (Gilbert 80).27 The notions that sensation can seize readers’ nervous systems and essentially contaminate their bodies indicate that some critics linked sensation with a dangerously heightened suggestibility and dramatic loss of agency for readers.

Critics have also examined what they perceive to be the social aims of sensation novels. In her study of Braddon’s Aurora Floyd, Lillian Nayder argues that one of the central purposes of sensation novels is to “expose to the stranger’s gaze the illicit relationships and the dark domestic secrets of well-established English families” (Nayder

188). Nayder suggests that sensation novels probe a domestic space that, on its surface, at least, may not appear out of the ordinary, but that reveals underlying tensions and contradictions in both form and content. Speaking on some of the “work” that sensation novels perform in Victorian Sensation Fiction (2009), Andrew Radford adds that they confront prevailing cultural issues of the time, including “urban crime, alcoholism, class unrest, and fiery debates over women’s domestic fiction and responsibilities” (Radford

31). Lyn Pykett offers a similar argument in her historical account of sensation and the fantastic in Victorian literature, but she importantly explains how sensation novels

27 Gilbert notes that the spread of cholera was a major medical concern in the 1860s because of its repeated emergence in urban areas of England (Disease 71). Cholera outbreaks were often associated with immigrant workers since these individuals usually resided in the poorest and most afflicted areas. The disease was also viewed as “an alien enemy from colonial lands” (72). Gilbert observes that literary critics of the period equated sensation literature with the foreign and disease by speaking of sensationalism as “an epidemic which threatens to become endemic” (72).

90 explore social concerns: through the use plot devices such as murder, bigamy, and descents into madness (“Sensation” 203). Pykett argues that by employing these devices, sensation novels simultaneously evoke physical and psychological reactions from readers and expose the “secrets of respectable society” (203). Not only does the sensation novel address a wide-ranging series of social concerns and concurrently question the propriety of Victorian culture, but it also has a variety of methods at its disposal to do so. Nayder,

Radford, and Pykett suggest that the Victorian sensation novel is noteworthy for its versatility in challenging cultural assumptions and behavioral norms.

Of course, discussions of the form of the sensation novel have figured prominently in commentaries on definitions of the genre as well. Pykett explains that sensation novels are “generic hybrids,” noting that these novels combine “the journalistic and the fantastic, the domestic and the exotic, realism and melodrama” (“Sensation”

203). Radford echoes Pykett’s claim when he suggests that the sensation novel is notable for its “emotionally and socially provocative plots and plurality of generic affiliations”

(Radford 2). In The Maniac in the Cellar, Winifred Hughes observes a plurality of narrative techniques in many sensation novels, noting that these texts combine “a melodramatic tendency to abstraction with the precise detail of detective fiction, an unlimited use of suspense and coincidence with an almost scientific concern for accuracy and authenticity” (Hughes 16). But for early critics, the sensation novel’s combination of genres was both confusing and alarming. Radford notes that reviewers perceived the sensation novel as “at once readily identifiable and difficult to delineate with exactitude”

(2). That is, reviewers struggled to distinguish what exactly the sensation novel was and what it might be doing to readers. According to Radford, this struggle had wider

91 implications for a Victorian literary culture that thrived on “convenient classificatory concepts and…an array of strategies for drawing narrow distinctions” (2). Sensation fiction necessitated constant re-evaluations of the parameters of “social, textual, and even organic categories” (2). Thus, the emergence and subsequent popularity of sensation narratives frustrated many reviewers whose strategies for classification had been disrupted and rendered ineffective.

While critics have discussed the form of the sensation novel in terms of its combination of styles, they have also considered questions of form in relation to definitions of femininity. In The Improper Feminine (1992), Pykett’s survey of early sensation fiction commentaries illuminates a general disdain among some reviewers for the mass production and rapid distribution of sensation novels. Analyzing the concern, shared by many commentators, that the mass-market appeal of sensation novels and the concurrent rise of consumer culture had created a reading public that thrived on the

“passive, appetitive consumption” of sensational plots, Pykett argues that the sensation novel became “marked…as a feminine form, irrespective of the gender of the particular sensation author” (Improper 31). This marking was inspired by a critical discourse that associated male authors with “high” art and women authors with “inferior” artistic forms

(31).28 But while the sensation novel was defined as a feminine form, it was also paradoxically viewed by some commentators as anti-feminine for its inclusion of unrealistic portraits of women that transgressed established codes of femininity (33, 34).

28 Pykett elucidates this claim by invoking Henry Mansel’s 1863 comparison of sensation fiction to spasmodic poetry. According to Pykett, Mansel viewed sensation fiction as “inferior art” because it was “tainted” by a mass-market atmosphere that was suggestive of a factory or shop (31). Spasmodic poetry— typically associated with male writers—qualified as (high, serious) art because the poet presumably wrote it to “satisfy the unconquerable yearnings of his soul” (qtd. in Pykett, Improper, 31).

This paradox suggests that sensation novels came to represent anomalies of gender in both content and form, as well as across authors, characters, and readers. As Lillian

Craton has observed, the prevailing definition of sensation fiction as a feminine form that focused on female deviance spurred many reviewers to declare the popularity of the genre as “both sign and accelerant of social decay” (Craton 128). For these reviewers, sensation novels offered no substantive edification to complement the physical and emotional reactions the narratives evoked.

According to Pykett, vivid depictions of women’s bodies in sensation novels were major topics of concern in early critical discussions about the genre (Improper 99). Not only did some commentators view passages that focus on the female body as clear examples of indecency, but they also located the potential source of a sensation novel’s perceived transgression in the “intense physicality” of its heroine (99). By examining how reviewers attached meaning to the female body in sensation narratives, Pykett demonstrates their discomfort with portraits of femininity that diverged from established social and aesthetic ideals. The scrutiny that sensation novels faced for their subversions of cultural orthodoxies was further intensified by the fact that, as Craton points out, the centrality of female characters in many sensation novels brought changing ideas about women’s gender roles into relief (Craton 123). By defying prevailing formulations of ideal womanhood, the female characters in many sensation narratives heightened cultural anxieties about gender identity. The figure of the muscular, athletic woman contributed to these anxieties, as her unconventional form blurred boundaries between womanhood and manhood, as well as between working-class realities and middle-class ideals. In the same manner that sensation novels challenged readers to navigate a new and multiform literary

93 genre, the figure of the muscular woman prompted readers to confront an alternative gender construction that did not appear to fit within neat and comfortable categories of

Victorian understanding.

Unnatural Bodily and Generic Forms: The Woman in White

In his discussion of the 1860 “explosion on the scene” of Wilkie Collins’s The

Woman in White, Richard Nemesvari labels Collins’s narrative a “cultural phenomenon” due to both its commercial success and its role in a wider literary debate about the appropriate content for Victorian novelistic fiction (Nemesvari 16). The popularity of the novel was evident in the appearance of Woman in White-themed perfume, bonnets, dressing gowns, and other commemorative products (16). Nemesvari adds that The

Woman in White also helped spark a conflict between sensation fiction and the realist novel—a split between “popular” and “high” fiction—that compelled some commentators to meditate on “exactly what fiction was supposed to do, and how it was supposed to do it” (16). That The Woman in White figured into this debate is not surprising given its unusual, and explicitly hybrid, narrative structure as a series of documents and eyewitness testimonies that collectively relate an elaborate mystery of mistaken identity. Moreover, the novel employs a variety of intersecting and disparate plot devices, including the emergence of at least one character deemed mad, two false incarcerations, two revelations of illegitimacy, a mercenary arranged marriage, a stolen inheritance, various falsified identities, domestic abuse, kidnapping, forgery, arson, foreign spies, and secret societies. In addition to this eccentric mix of narratives, The

Woman in White features bizarre characters like Marian Halcombe, whose fragmented diary entries convey a large portion of the story and whose fragmented gender identity

94 and simultaneously masculine and feminine physical appearance become emblematic of the novel’s fascination with hybrid forms. When the hero, Walter Hartright, encounters

Marian for the first time at Limmeridge House, he is struck by the “rare beauty” of

Marian’s figure when viewed from behind (Collins 34). In what reads like an inventory of Marian’s physical features, Walter writes that she “was tall, but not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat…her waist, perfection in the eyes of man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays” (34). Walter admires Marian’s body because it is not artificially shaped by the traditional, yet harmful feminine practice of wearing corsets. By repeating the term,

“natural,” and appraising Marian’s waist as perfect, he presents himself as an authority on the aesthetics of the female form.

Walter’s initial assessment of Marian’s beauty requires revision when he gains a closer view of her body. From his new perspective, he recognizes that the attractiveness of Marian’s figure contrasts with the ugliness of her face:

Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly

contradicted—never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and

startlingly belied by the face that crowned it. The lady’s complexion was almost

swarthy, and the dark brown on her upper lip was almost a mustache. She had a

large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes;

and thick, coal-black hair growing unusually low down on her forehead. (35)

In Walter’s view, Marian’s body contradicts both a conventional saying and itself in its juxtaposition of unnaturally masculine facial features and a natural, feminine figure.

Although Marian’s figure is attractive and unrestricted by corsets, its beauty is

95 overshadowed by her mannish face. That Walter is startled by this contradiction demonstrates Marian’s embodiment of an unfamiliar formulation of womanhood—she is a disconcerting visual hybrid of both feminine and masculine attributes. But Marian’s masculinity is not limited to her appearance. When she reveals to Walter that her half- sister, Laura, is already engaged, she establishes a firm grip on Walter’s arm and urges him to “crush” his feelings for Laura “like a man” (73). Marian’s grip on Walter’s arm and her own emotions shows that she is knowledgeable of how to eliminate feelings in a

“manly” way. In The Novel and the Police, D.A. Miller characterizes Marian as “the conspicuous curious case of a woman’s body that gives all the signs of containing a man’s soul” (Miller 176). This combination of identities that shape the figure of Marian

Halcombe becomes emblematic of the strange combination of narratives, plot devices, and eccentric characters that form Collins’s novel and that will later come to define the entire sensation genre. Walter’s disorientation upon first viewing Marian’s body, as well as Marian’s own sense of gender dysphoria throughout the novel, anticipate the figure of the muscular woman that, as I will go on to argue, embodied the hybrid forms and transgressive subjects of sensation fiction.

Variations of Strength: Great Expectations and Aurora Floyd

In Great Expectations, a novel Margaret Oliphant discussed alongside The

Woman in White in her 1862 Blackwood’s review, Dickens’s portrayals of violent, muscular women provide additional case studies in physically-imposing female figures whose contradictory appearances and behaviors match the diverse formal conventions of

96 the sensation narrative in which they appear.29 Primarily a bildungsroman that documents

Pip’s social development from an orphaned child to adulthood, Great Expectations also engages a variety of plot devices, including cases of confused identity, dysfunctional family relationships, harrowing encounters in gothic settings, attempted murder, comic relief, entrapment, domestic violence, unrequited love, illegitimacy, dubious legal proceedings, and financial distress. Moreover, the narrative of Pip’s development is interwoven with the stories of characters as disparate as convicts and jilted lovers. It is through depictions of Pip’s interactions with these characters that the novel interrogates the boundaries of both class and gender. Among the figures Pip encounters, Mrs. Joe

Gargery (Pip’s sister) and Molly (a domestic servant) are noteworthy for their unusual physical strength, proclivities toward violent outbursts (Mrs. Joe), and dark, criminal pasts (Molly). The novel’s portrayals of these characters’ unique attributes show how both women are indirectly linked to ideals of middle-class domesticity and femininity that only exacerbate Pip’s own confusion about selfhood, expectations, and desire.

Upon her first appearance in Great Expectations, Mrs. Joe, a housewife, establishes herself as a dictatorial woman who obsessively controls the Gargery household through physical and verbal abuse. When Pip returns home after his initial encounter with the convict Abel Magwitch, he prefaces his expected, painful confrontation with Mrs. Joe by noting that she possesses “a hard and heavy hand” and is

“much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me” (Dickens 8). Thus,

29 Oliphant argues that Great Expectations qualifies as a sensation novel because it features incidents “all but impossible, and in themselves strange, dangerous, and exciting” (“Sensation” 575). However, she criticizes the narrative as “feeble, fatigued, and colourless” in relation to Dickens’s other works and argues that its sensation scenes are not rendered as skillfully as those in Collins’s The Woman in White (575, 576).

Mrs. Joe’s abuse extends to all members of the Gargery family. As the confrontation unfolds, Mrs. Joe demonstrates her physical strength by hurling Pip in Mr. Joe’s direction—an act that prompts Pip to recall that he has often been used as Mrs. Joe’s

“connubial missile” against Mr. Joe (9). Mrs. Joe contrasts her husband in both appearance and disposition. Whereas Mr. Joe is a “fair man” with flaxen hair and a

“smooth face” that appears to complement his good-natured personality, Mrs. Joe is an unattractive woman with a red tint to her skin that matches her fierce temper (8).

Ultimately, the contrast between Mrs. Joe’s masculine characteristics and Mr. Joe’s feminine traits indicate a gender subversion that appears to define their relationship.

Although Mrs. Joe manages the appearance of the house through her obsessive housekeeping, she also assumes the masculine role of managing Mr. Joe’s money. But

Mrs. Joe’s appearance reveals another dimension to her character. Pip observes that she

“almost always wore a coarse apron…having a square impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this apron so much” (8). By describing Mrs. Joe’s apron as coarse and impregnable, Pip uses terms that also capture the abrasive, unfeminine nature of Mrs. Joe’s character. For Mrs. Joe, however, the apron functions as a constant visual pronouncement of her desire to improve her position in the Victorian social class structure. This pronouncement is accompanied by verbal jabs toward Mr. Joe, such as Mrs. Joe’s assertion that she would be able to enjoy Christmas carols if she was not “a blacksmith’s wife, and (what’s the same thing) a slave with her apron never off”

(22). Furthermore, during public excursions, Mrs. Joe wears items such as a large bonnet and pattens—items that Pip perceives as being displayed as “articles of property—much

98 as Cleopatra or any other sovereign lady on the Rampage might exhibit her wealth in a pageant or procession” (99-100). One the one hand, Mrs. Joe’s accessories heighten her senses of power and self-importance throughout much of Great Expectations. On the other hand, they function as important additions to the novel’s portrait of an unconventional woman who embodies tensions between working-class physicality and middle-class pretensions.

Dickens explores issues of gender and class in alternative ways in his depiction of

Molly, Mr. Jaggers’s housekeeper. Molly’s reserved demeanor upon her introduction in the novel offers no hint of her dark past that is revealed later in the narrative: she was accused of committing murder and was later acquitted due to Mr. Jaggers’s careful legal maneuvering (392). Moreover, Molly is Estella’s estranged biological mother (394).

When Pip observes Molly for the first time during a dinner party at Mr. Jaggers’s house, he is struck by the “curious expression of suddenness and flutter” in her countenance, a look that reminds him of the faces from the witches’ cauldron in a recent theatrical production of Macbeth (212). But Pip’s attempt to decode Molly’s facial expressions and mannerisms is temporarily disrupted when he and the other gentlemen begin discussing their respective rowing feats. When Bentley Drummle is teased by the other guests for a recent lackluster performance, he becomes “wound up” to the extent that he engages everyone in displaying their muscles (213). According to Pip, Drummle “fell to baring and spanning his arm to show how muscular it was, and we all fell to baring and spanning our arms in a ridiculous manner” (213). Pip’s use of the term, “ridiculous,” highlights both Drummle’s sensitivity to lighthearted banter and the absurdity of an impromptu

99 display of physical prowess among supposed gentlemen.30 But it is this display of musculature that ultimately illuminates Molly’s unique physical features. The somewhat comic tone of this scene shifts when, without warning, Mr. Jaggers grabs Molly’s hand and commands her to show her bare wrist to the guests. Molly’s wrist, a scarred and disfigured marker of her violent past, becomes an object for display. That her wrist is subject to multiple male gazes adds an erotic undertone to the scene. When Mr. Jaggers assumes control of Molly’s hand, contorts it so that her scars are more visible to his guests, and then traces her sinews with his finger, he describes her wrist as a symbol of strength: “‘There's power here…[v]ery few men have the power of wrist that this woman has. It’s remarkable what mere force of grip there is in these hands. I have had occasion to notice many hands; but I never saw stronger in that respect, man’s or woman’s, than these’” (214). Not only is this brief episode noteworthy for revealing Mr. Jaggers’s odd fascination with hands, but also for presenting Molly’s wrist as the central component of a commentary on strength—strength that “very few men” seem to possess. Molly’s impressive power both mitigates the physical prowess that the gentlemen demonstrate earlier in the scene and contrasts with her submissive role as a domestic servant to Mr.

Jaggers. Ultimately, Molly is a pseudo “angel in the house;” although she yields to Mr.

Jaggers’s commands, her troubled past and pronounced strength situate her outside traditional mid-Victorian formulations of womanhood.

30 In his 2012 essay on Great Expectations, Nicholas Shrimpton labels Dickens’s narrative as a “muscular novel” because its profusion of violent altercations, displays of strength, and references to muscularity reveal ties to the muscular Christian novels of authors such as Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, as well as secular (yet muscular) works by G.A. Lawrence and George Whyte-Melville (Shrimpton 135). The scene at Mr. Jaggers’s dinner party, however, questions the necessity of muscular behaviors.

100

Dickens’s depiction of Molly’s unconventional, contradictory figure becomes even more complex when Molly’s relationship to Estella is revealed. During another dinner at Mr. Jaggers's house, Pip becomes convinced that Molly is Estella's mother when he realizes that Molly’s hands and facial features resemble Estella’s:

I looked at those hands, I looked at those eyes, I looked at that flowing hair, and I

compared them with other hands, other eyes, other hair, that I knew of…I thought

how one link of association had helped that identification in the theatre, and how

such a link, wanting before, had been riveting for me now, when I had passed a

chance swift from Estella’s name to the fingers with their knitting action, and the

attentive eyes. And I felt absolutely certain that this woman was Estella’s mother.

(390-391)

Pip’s perceived links between Molly’s and Estella’s physical characteristics demonstrate both his attention to detail and his analytical ability. His observations become more significant when both characters’ social class positions are taken into account. Although

Estella is the biological daughter of parents from working-class backgrounds (Molly and

Abel Magwitch), her adoption and rearing by the wealthy Miss Havisham allows her to be set up as a pinnacle of upper-middle class female beauty. Yet her attractiveness contrasts sharply with her cold, emotionally unavailable demeanor, likely a byproduct of

Miss Havisham’s own eccentricities and unfulfilled marital desires. Thus, Estella functions as a major variable in the novel’s investigations of the malleability of both class and the self. But the physical similarities between Estella and Molly suggest that Molly’s unconventional body is as the crux of these investigations. Molly is essentially a peripheral character in Great Expectations. However, her relationship with Estella and

101 her interactions with Mr. Jaggers and his guests position her as an important figure in probing mid-Victorian class and gender boundaries.

The athletic, eponymous heroine in Mary Braddon’s Aurora Floyd joins Marian

Halcombe, Mrs. Joe Gargery, and Molly in providing a study in contradictions of gender identity that are emblematic of the form of the sensation novel in which she appears. Like

Molly, Aurora has a secret past that comes to light as the novel progresses. This secret— her elopement with James Conyers, a horse trainer she meets after running away from a

French finishing school—underpins Aurora’s bigamous marriage to John Mellish, her subsequent involvement in acts of bribery and blackmail, and the mystery surrounding her character when Conyers is found murdered. But before the novel chronicles the particulars of Aurora’s tumultuous marriages, it offers details about Aurora’s beauty and mannerisms which indicate that Aurora does not embody mid-Victorian ideals of femininity. The narrator describes Aurora as attractive, but qualifies that description by adding that her beauty is marked by irregularities: Aurora’s striking eyes and perfect teeth, for example, do not match her “doubtful little nose,” unusually wide mouth, and forehead that is “too low for the common standard of beauty” (Braddon 20). Talbot

Bulstrode, one of Aurora’s suitors, initially describes Aurora as “a divinity” when he first encounters her at a ball, but he then likens her beauty to “a horrible spirit called bang, which made the men who drank it half mad…the beauty of this woman was like the strength of that alcoholic preparation; barbarous, intoxicating, dangerous, and maddening” (33, emphasis Braddon’s). Not only does Talbot identify contradictions in

Aurora’s appearance by associating her beauty with terms that are indicative of harm and exasperation, but he later describes Aurora’s athletic passions for the outdoors, her

102 massive pet mastiff, and horse racing as demonstrating her “unfeminine tastes” (48). As the narrative progresses, however, critiques of Aurora’s masculine tendencies—such as her preference for reading racing manuals over novels—are often countered with observations of her “girlish ignorance” (329). For many characters in the novel, Aurora embodies a disconcerting combination of feminine and masculine attributes that heighten the mysteriousness of her nature.

Concerns about Aurora’s unusual appearance and unfeminine tastes are linked to meditations about her place in mid-Victorian society. Aurora’s father, Mr. Archibald

Floyd, likens Aurora to a shrub that needs to be “trimmed and clipped and fastened primly to the stone wall of society with cruel nails and galling strips of cloth” (50). In his assessment of Aurora, Mr. Floyd uses terms that are indicative of confinement and, to a lesser extent, punishment. His observation portrays Aurora as a disruptive figure who should be forcefully reoriented to established social and aesthetic codes of feminine decorum. However, Mr. Floyd’s description of society as a stone wall that accommodates cruel nails paints an unflattering portrait of mid-Victorian culture as unyielding in its interpretation of ideal womanhood. Aurora paints a similar portrait of England in a later conversation with Talbot and her cousin, Lucy. While Aurora does not specifically speak of womanhood, she reveals that she hates England because she feels “chained to one set of ideas,” a claim that both draws “helpless amazement” from Lucy and sends Talbot into a “state of bewilderment” (52, 53). While Aurora’s sentiments and Mr. Floyd’s comparisons dramatize Aurora’s poor fit within mid-Victorian culture, they also suggest that any social “trimming” and “clipping” of Aurora’s unconventional interests and unique physical features would be to the detriment of her natural identity.

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Aurora’s unfeminine passions manifest themselves in a violent altercation with the “Softy,” an experienced horse stable worker who is distinguished by his repulsive appearance, slight derangement, and muscular hands. When Aurora discovers the Softy abusing her mastiff, she grasps him with hands “convulsed by passion”—a grasp that forces the Softy to crouch into a submissive position—and brutally whips him until John

Mellish intervenes (138). Aurora’s attack distances her even further from the stone wall of society by showing that she is prone to violence and capable of overpowering men who are themselves noteworthy for their musculature. Ironically, Aurora’s moment of physical supremacy is undercut by Mellish’s assertion that Aurora’s violent outburst will lead to a bout of hysteria “as all womanly fury must, sooner or later” (139). But given the passages in Aurora Floyd that focus on the Aurora’s physical strength and seemingly masculine capacity for violence, it is not surprising that Braddon drew heavy criticism for her depiction of her heroine. As Marlene Tromp writes in her analysis of Aurora Floyd, many reviews of Braddon’s work chastised Aurora as being unnatural, immoral, dangerous, and a harmful influence to younger readers (Tromp 94). Tromp adds that the sensation in Aurora Floyd “lies in the bodies of Aurora and those around her,” a fact that makes Braddon’s work resistant to “the dominant novelistic and social discourse of the mid-century that appeared to manage women’s identities in terms of the domestic ideal”

(95). Braddon’s depiction of Aurora’s unusual appearance, muscular strength, and unfeminine behaviors invites readers to confront an unfamiliar form of femininity and adjust their conceptions of how womanhood looks. But Aurora’s unconventionality is heightened by the hybrid nature of the novel itself. In an odd statement at the end of the novel, the narrator describes Aurora Floyd as a “simple drama of domestic life” (457).

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However, notions of simplicity do not cohere with a sensation novel that features plot devices and themes as disparate as extensive narrative intrusions, murder, alcoholism, tender romance, bigamy, extortion, adultery, and childbirth. Similarly, little is simple about Aurora; her unbounded and complex character “fits” the hybrid form of Braddon’s sensation novel.

Charles Reade and the “Fresh Complications” of Muscular Women

In his account of the events that influenced Charles Reade’s composition of Hard

Cash, Richard Fantina notes that Reade was heavily involved in the case of E.P. Fletcher, a man who had been falsely imprisoned in an insane asylum by relatives who sought to cheat him out of his inheritance (Sensational 64). According to Fantina, Reade worked tirelessly throughout 1858 to publicize Fletcher’s case and campaigned for a public trial through a series of open letters that he later titled “Our Dark Places” (64). As Winifred

Hughes writes in The Maniac in the Cellar, Reade also volunteered to keep Fletcher in seclusion after Fletcher escaped from his asylum (Hughes 87). These efforts, along with

Reade’s arrangement of mental examinations by reputable doctors, aided Fletcher in achieving his exoneration in July 1859 (Sensational 64). Reade’s dedication to Fletcher’s case is indicative of his desire to draw attention to his concerns about corrupt practices in

England’s private asylums. Analyzing representations of gender and transgression in

Reade’s fictional works, Fantina writes that Reade is best known in current literary circles for his commentaries on unfavorable conditions in both prisons and madhouses

(“Chafing” 135). These commentaries, however, tend to include explorations of “the dynamics of human sexuality, often as it intersects with emerging institutions of punishment and madness” (127). Fantina adds that Reade depicts “intensely sexual

105 characters” in many of his fictional works (127). Reade’s female characters, in particular, are often “adventurous, independent, and carnal” (132). Thus, even as Reade attempted to expose injustices in England’s prisons and asylums, he actually generated more controversy by testing the limits of mid-Victorian feminine decorum in his depictions of women who diverged from the ideal of the “angel in the house.”

While the prologue and opening chapters of Reade’s Hard Cash suggest that the narrative will chronicle the budding romance between Alfred Hardie and Julia Dodd, they also demonstrate Reade’s fascination with muscular physiques. Reade’s depiction of a men’s rowing competition at Exeter College—in which both Alfred and Julia’s brother,

Edward, are participants—is noteworthy for its vivid descriptions of the muscular definition on the competitors’ bodies. When Julia and her mother recognize Edward in one of the boats, they notice that Edward’s jersey “reveal[s] not only the working power of his arms…but also the play of the great muscles across his broad and deeply indented chest” (Hard Cash 12). Later in the race, the narrator observes how the physical demands of the competition are evident in the various contortions of the participants’ bodies: “their young eyes all glowing, their supple bodies swelling, the muscles writhing beneath their jerseys, and the sinews starting on each bare brown arm” (13). While the vivid description of the boat race illuminates the tolls associated with competitive rowing, it also celebrates the muscular male physique—a celebration that is captured in Julia’s praise of her brother’s beauty and strength (12).

Reade’s early depiction of the rowing competition brings the pronounced muscularity of female characters’ bodies into greater relief later in the narrative. When

Alfred begins to question his father about both missing money from his trust fund and the

106 whereabouts of Captain Dodd’s hard-earned fortune, he is committed to the Silverton

Grove asylum—the first of three madhouses in which Alfred finds himself unjustly confined—courtesy of a clever plot orchestrated by his father and Dr. Wycherley, a socially respected, but ethically-flawed physician. There, Alfred encounters Hannah

Blake and Mrs. Edith Archbold, two nurses who are noteworthy for their muscular physiques. Upon Hannah’s introduction, the narrator identifies incongruous aspects of her physique as central to her identity:

This Hannah was a young woman with a pretty and rather babyish face,

diversified by a thick biceps muscle in her arm that a blacksmith need not have

blushed for. And I suspect it was this masculine charm, and not her feminine

features, that had won her the confidence of Baker and Co., and the respect of his

female patients: big or little, excited or not excited, there was not one of them this

bicipital baby-face could not pin by the wrists, and twist her helpless into a

strong-room…and she did it, too, on slight provocation. (360)

Embedded within Hannah’s innocent, childlike prettiness is a “masculine charm” that effectively complicates attempts to define her character. Not only do her thick biceps provide a stark contrast to her “babyish” and aesthetically appealing face, but they also overshadow her feminine features and render her gender identity ambiguous. Her ability to subdue the female patients at Silverton Grove with little provocation attests to her physical prowess and the limits of her feminine patience. A chaotic incident in which

Hannah apprehends a female “erotic maniac” who sneaks into the men’s wing of the asylum is one of several instances in which Hannah is referred to by the narrator as

“Baby-face biceps” (371). In these moments, Hannah loses her name and any indication

107 of her professional credentials. Instead identified by a hyphenated synecdoche that stands in for the paradox of her unconventional body, Hannah becomes a commentary on both the objectification of humanity at Silverton Grove and the muscular woman as an object lesson in anomalous gender identity in Reade’s text.

The head nurse at Silverton Grove, Mrs. Archbold, is similarly notable for her imposing physique. The narrator offers little by way of a description of Mrs. Archbold’s figure when she first encounters Alfred, only noting that she is “a tall, well-formed woman of thirty” (339). However, the narrator provides further insight into Mrs.

Archbold’s form when describing her growing infatuation with Alfred: “The mind of

Edith Archbold corresponded with her powerful frame, and bushy eyebrows. Inside this woman all was vigour and strong passions, strong good sense to check or hide them; strong will to carry them out. And between these mental forces a powerful struggle was raging” (366). Although Mrs. Archbold contends with an inner conflict between her physical passions and her mental fortitude, she sequesters her struggle within a powerful body that matches her inner strength of character. Her passion for Alfred initially manifests itself through an assertion of her physical prowess. When she observes Alfred on the losing end of a brutal altercation with Cooper, a male attendant, she joins Hannah and an unnamed nurse in pinning Cooper “with a strength, sharpness, skill, and determination not to be found in women out of a madhouse” (368). However, Mrs.

Archbold’s feelings for Alfred later turn into sexual advances. In one incident at Silverton

Grove, she sneaks into Alfred’s room and takes “cowardly advantage” of him by kissing him as he is confined to his bed (374). At the Drayton House asylum, she intensifies her advances by volunteering to be Alfred’s love slave, but when she is refused, she vows to

108 enslave Alfred instead (459, 460). In her interactions with Alfred, Mrs. Archbold oscillates between submissive and aggressive sexual attitudes, and feminine and masculine gender roles, effectively contradicting the “sweetness and unobtrusive kindness” she seeks to display through her uncomfortable demonstrations of physical and sexual coercion (446).

During his tenure at the Silverton House, Alfred inadvertently becomes involved in a love triangle of sorts with Mrs. Archbold and Hannah, a situation that the narrator describes as a “fresh complication” in Alfred’s already challenging circumstances (373).

It is this complication, however, that further illuminates contradictions in Hannah’s and

Mrs. Archbold’s characters. The narrator explains that when Hannah discovered Mrs.

Archbold’s fancy for Alfred, her eyes “were sharpened by jealousy, for that muscular young virgin was beginning to sigh for him herself, with a gentle timidity that contrasted prettily with her biceps muscle and prowess against her own sex” (367). Thus, unlike the

“correspondence” between Mrs. Archbold’s muscular body and her passionate, aggressive inner self, Hannah’s disposition contrasts with her muscular frame. Similarly, as Hannah forcefully ushers the erotic maniac back to the women’s wing of the asylum, she simultaneously lays a “timid hand, gentle as falling down,” upon a discouraged

Alfred (371). Mrs. Archbold joins Hannah in oscillating between competing acts of physicality and gentleness, thus adding to confusion about her character. When Mrs.

Archbold observes Alfred kiss Hannah out of gratitude for her kindness, her jealously intensifies to the extent that she threatens to kill Hannah if Alfred kisses her again (373).

This threat, however, follows soon after Mrs. Archbold apologizes to Alfred for suggesting that he had tainted his relationship with Julia. Thus, Alfred’s difficult

109 confinement is exacerbated by the challenge of contending with the sexual obsessions, conflicting behaviors, and anomalous genderings of these two muscular women.31

In Medical Women and Victorian Fiction (2005), Kristine Swenson argues that sensation fiction “demonstrated the post-war sexualization and demonization of the nurse” (Swenson 6), citing the figure of the foreign nurse (and possibly spy), Mrs.

Rubelle, from The Woman in White, and the nurses from Hard Cash. Swenson adds that the “sensation nurses” in Hard Cash figure prominently in “a plot which is thinly-veiled pornography” (6). A defining feature of this plot, as Richard Fantina observes, is a sexual role reversal: Alfred “becomes the passive sexual object of two women, both with

‘masculine’ attributes and in positions of social power over him, in a reversal of contemporary views of sexual desire” (“Chafing” 133). While Swenson and Fantina have observed the sexualization of—and power reversals in—Reade’s nurses, they have framed these characterizations more as pornographic digressions than as representations of the sensation novel’s interest in experimenting with gender and sexual hybridity and linking that hybridity to the genre’s form. In his depiction of Alfred’s interactions with

Hannah and Mrs. Archbold, Reade makes the triangulated sexual subtext of The Woman in White more explicit, but not any less representative, of the sensation genre’s unconventional form. Although Alfred eventually secures his freedom and marries Julia, doing so comes at the expense of enduring an extended period of being feminized by his incarceration, coupled with physical distress. Thus, in Reade’s vivid depictions of asylums, the injustices committed by the staff are compounded by the fact that Hannah,

31 Later in the narrative, however, Hannah assists Alfred in obtaining his freedom by testifying to his sanity in court (574).

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Mrs. Archbold, and Alfred are either perpetrators or victims of a dramatic disruption of mid-Victorian gender demarcations and sexual codes.

In Hard Cash, Reade seems particularly interested in depicting muscular women who are “diversified” by conflicting attitudes, incongruous physical features, and, in the case of Mrs. Archbold, competing acts of benevolence and malice. That Hannah and Mrs.

Archbold are ambiguously gendered and capable of overpowering both men and women demonstrates Reade’s fascination with eliminating rigid gender categories. To a lesser extent than in Hard Cash, Reade explores similar interests in his 1866 sensation novel,

Griffith Gaunt—a narrative that Winifred Hughes describes as Reade’s “last readable novel” because of what she perceives as his final successful exploration of taboo topics

(Hughes 101). The heroine of Griffith Gaunt, Catherine Peyton, is notable for her athleticism, “imperial” beauty, and gaze that makes men feel “small; and bitter” (Griffith

1, 2). Catherine is passionate about horseback riding, and she is similarly enthusiastic about fox hunting. However, a description of one of Catherine’s hunts suggests a sexual undertone to her sporting interests: “It was a gallant chase, and our dreamy virgin’s blood got up. Erect, but lithe and vigorous, and one with her great white gelding, she came flying behind the foremost riders, and took leap for leap with them” (3). While this passage demonstrates Catherine’s competitiveness, it also employs terminology that suggests her sexual stimulation. Furthermore, that Catherine is “one” with her castrated horse invites confusion about her sexual and gender identity. These early passages, along with Catherine’s frequent discussions of her religious beliefs and her threat to harm her husband (the eponymous character) after learning that he has committed bigamy, show that Griffith Gaunt joins Hard Cash in challenging mid-Victorian gender roles and codes

111 of decorum, albeit in different ways. Richard Fantina notes that Reade gained many critics and enemies for his exposure of the poor conditions in England’s asylums and his

“frank portrayals of sexuality” in his works (“Chafing” 127). These issues, along with the seemingly impenetrable biases of reviewers who desired a “stable definition of literature” and blocked authors like Reade from the literary canon, led to a sharp decline in critical attention toward Reade’s fiction by the turn of the twentieth century (126, emphasis Fantina’s). As I have attempted to show, a close examination of Reade’s work reveals complex, confusing, and nuanced portraits of the figure of the muscular, athletic woman. It also illuminates the extent to which Reade, like so many other authors of sensation fiction, tested the limits of mid-Victorian social codes.

Sensationalizing the Figure of the Muscular Woman

Sensation novelists offered pervasive and varied portraits of the athletic, muscular woman, and were thus early contributors to the conversations about female musculature that would take place in the late-Victorian periodical press. That is, sensation writers began to explore contradictory attitudes toward muscular female physiques that, as I have shown in Chapters One and Two, catalyzed contentious debates about the aesthetics of ideal womanhood. An advantage, but also a challenge, of these different depictions is that they provide insight into the hybrid, multilayered identity of the figure of the muscular woman. As I have shown, this figure does not fit seamlessly within the boundaries of specific categories of gender or social class. But the difficulty of categorizing muscular women in sensation novels may also be viewed as an opportunity to explore new ways of thinking about gender, sexuality, and the aesthetics of the female body. Through their representations of muscular, athletic women, sensation writers compelled both critics and

112 casual readers to grapple with the notion that women were more dynamic and contradictory than the corseted, domestic angel. Offering “fresh complications” to the social and aesthetic ideals of femininity through the figure of the muscular woman was perhaps the first step to adjusting traditional configurations of womanhood in mid-

Victorian culture.

The sensation novel is one of the few places in which the figure of the muscular, athletic woman “fits” owing to combinations of themes and plot devices that match the contradictions of female musculature. A constant in both early and recent critical appraisals of sensation novels is that they present subject matter that Victorian audiences often perceived as shocking and immoral. Sensation novels provided readers the opportunity to be excited, scandalized, or discomfited by the masculine, muscular woman’s unconventional form, confident actions, and unusual mannerisms. Readers were confronted by the muscular woman’s ability to modify, manipulate, or completely reverse of gender identities and sexual roles. Thus, Charles Reade’s assertion that there can be no interest without sensation seems apt in relation to both the figure of the muscular woman and the form of sensation fiction. Both draw readers’ attention to uncomfortable questions about gender and genre that would only increase in the decades that followed.

The muscular woman’s emblematic role in sensation fiction thus anticipated and helped to shape subsequent debates about women’s roles in the physical culture movement, as well as the portrayal (and celebration) of new forms of gender identity in yet another hybrid genre: the New Woman novel.

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Chapter Four

Muscular Anxieties in New Woman Fiction

[Women] may exercise their brains and their muscles to their utmost tension; but let them not in those cases exercise the natural function of woman and bring children into the world. For nature, which never contemplated the production of a learned or muscular woman, will be revenged upon her offspring, and the New Woman, if a mother at all, will be the mother of a New Man, as different, indeed, from the present race as possible, but how different the clamorous females of today cannot suspect. – Charles G. Harper, Revolted Woman (1894)

The opening chapter of the British travel writer and illustrator Charles George

Harper’s markedly anti-feminist work, Revolted Woman, begins with Harper’s assertions that the emancipated, New Woman has assumed privileges that once belonged exclusively to men and plans to “leap the few remaining barriers of convention” as time progresses (Harper 1). Harper’s wide-ranging meditations on what he perceives to be the

New Woman’s faults—including vanity, mental inferiority, and increasing incursions into masculine spaces—culminate in his assertion that learned and muscular women should avoid giving birth. According to Harper, these women have acted against nature’s intentions in their pursuits of physical fitness and intellectual advancement. Therefore, they should forfeit their natural maternal capacities or risk bearing offspring that will be to the detriment of British racial longevity. Harper positions muscular and learned women as antagonists to the British Empire because, in his view, they have defied traditional formulations of ideal womanhood with their new physiques and enhanced intellectual vigor. Furthermore, his emphasis on the word, “how,” demonstrates his anxiety that these New Women are unaware of the extent to which their unconventional ideas and behaviors will harm future generations. The title of Harper’s book indirectly

114 captures these concerns; the muscular, New Woman is both in revolt of traditional constructions of ideal womanhood and revolting because of her perceived transgressions.

While Harper’s polemic serves as a warning to New Women, it also portrays them as catalysts for the dangerous undoing of Victorian cultural codes.

Harper’s reaction to the New Woman is not representative of all of the ways in which late-nineteenth century commentators responded. While the New Woman was portrayed as a threat to British society in Revolted Woman, she was alternatively depicted as a comic, bicycle-riding, ambiguously-gendered figure in Punch and similar satirical periodicals. New Woman fiction played a major role in making the figure of the New

Woman a fixture in late-Victorian culture by introducing increasingly complex ways of viewing her character. As Sally Ledger notes in her study of how the New Woman figures into theories of feminism, imperialism, socialism, and capitalism, lesbian identity, and the modern city, the early 1890s saw the publication of an “enormous number” of widely-read New Woman novels (Ledger 94). Ledger adds that this high publication rate was connected to both the rise of mass-market fiction and a renewed cultural interest in debating women’s social roles (94). New Woman novels engaged this debate by introducing heroines who assert their rights to social and economic parity with men. In A

New Woman Reader (2001), Carolyn Christensen Nelson adds that this fiction also featured content that often angered conservative readers, including provocative discussions of women’s sexuality and negative portrayals of marriage (Nelson xii). But as the author of a March 18, 1893 Athenaeum review of Sarah Grand’s novel The Heavenly

Twins (1893) demonstrates, late-nineteenth century critics were sometimes dissatisfied with the forms of New Woman narratives as well. The reviewer praises Grand for

115 crafting a compelling story, but also describes the structure of her novel as a “chaotic, haphazard arrangement” (“Review” 342). Furthermore, the reviewer suggests that some of the content of The Heavenly Twins might have been more effective had it been

“distributed” in a different way (342). In The “Improper” Feminine (1992), Lyn Pykett notes that New Woman writers either attempted to use available literary modes in innovative ways or experimented with new styles of writing altogether in order to construct narratives that appropriately captured the spirit of redefining woman’s place in the world (Improper 194, 195). Pykett adds that for some New Woman narratives, these experiments have been appraised as “aesthetically flawed” in both contemporary and recent assessments. For many authors, writing about the New Woman required foregoing conventional fictional forms in order to accurately depict an unconventional figure.

This chapter explores how New Woman novelists deployed the figure of the muscular, athletic woman in their works in order to comment on established aesthetic ideals of the female body and growing uncertainties about the rigidity of boundaries separating constructions of womanhood and manhood. Furthermore, it both analyzes how

New Woman writers challenged Victorian codes of feminine decorum through the figure of the muscular woman and examines how these writers transgressed traditional fictional forms by experimenting with new combinations of narrative techniques. Grand’s The

Heavenly Twins and Lucas Malet’s (Mary St. Ledger Kingsley Harrison’s) The History of

Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance (1901) are two New Woman novels that provide diverse commentaries on female musculature and its implications. Not only are the heroines in these novels noteworthy for their muscular physiques, but also for asserting their rights to educational and career opportunities and establishing the terms of either

116 their marriages or sexual relationships. I argue that the depictions of female musculature in both novels advance new configurations of femininity and masculinity as analogs for new ways of configuring fiction. Furthermore, these depictions illuminate links between the muscular woman’s resistance to conventional ideals of womanhood and the New

Woman novel’s defiance of traditional, formal expectations of nineteenth-century fiction.

Writing the New Woman

Critics of New Woman fiction have examined how New Woman writers experimented with various combinations of narrative methods in their works. These combinations illuminate the unusual configurations of many New Woman narratives and demonstrate the artistic versatility of their authors. In her study of women writers of the

1890s, Carolyn Nelson observes that novelists often “refused to conform to traditional expectations for realistic and formalistic fiction” (British 5). Citing Grand’s insertion of an interlude that functions as a short story in The Heavenly Twins, as well as Grand’s use of both third- and first-person narration in the same novel, Nelson argues that late-

Victorian women writers challenged traditional thought on the proper form of—and appropriate subject matter for—fiction (5).32 Furthermore, these writers’ experiments with different fictional modes enabled them to render women’s experiences with greater accuracy, as their unorthodox maneuvers were more indicative of “the inner life of women, their shifting emotions and consciousness” (5, 6). Nelson suggests that many writers found, in the multiform nature of New Woman narratives, ideal venues for both

32 The work of George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright) figures into Nelson’s analysis as well. Nelson identifies Egerton as a New Woman writer who departs from the “tightly plotted realistic novel” in favor of the short story form (5). In her works, Egerton often employs both the stream-of-consciousness technique and variations in verb tense in order to illuminate women’s “dreams and fantasies” (5).

117 stylistic innovations and formulations of womanhood that would not “fit” within literary genres with more rigid boundaries. In The “Improper” Feminine, Lyn Pykett observes that to varying extents, many New Woman novels are essentially “fragmented and episodic” versions of the more traditional “massive, multiplotted, panoramic, Eliotean novel” (Improper 194). This fragmentation, which is often accentuated by writers’ deployments of literary devices as disparate as allegory, melodrama, and satire, causes many New Woman novels to feel “more like collections of short stories than novels”

(194). While Pykett highlights additional fictional modes present in New Woman novels, she importantly questions how the presence of these modes affects the coherence of New

Woman narratives.

The various stylistic innovations in many New Woman novels have led critics to characterize the genre using terms that are indicative of openness instead of limits. In

New Woman Strategies (2004), Ann Heilmann identifies “formal hybridity,” “textual instability,” and “gendered multivocality” as the generic parameters of New Woman fiction (Heilmann 3). These terms capture both the aesthetic variability of New Woman writing and the presence of multiple voices within these narratives. Annette R. Federico examines similar parameters in her analysis of the complex relationship between the

British novelist Marie Corelli and the figure of the New Woman.33 Like many New

Woman novels, Federico argues, Corelli’s works—such as The Soul of Lilith (1892) and

The Sorrows of Satan (1895)—are dialogic or polyphonic, thus allowing Corelli

33 Federico describes Corelli as an enigmatic figure. Although Corelli spoke out against women’s suffrage and opposed the New Woman—in part because she identified with an audience who “felt alienated from the tenets of emerging feminists and practitioners of the New Fiction”—she “believed in the intellectual equality of women,” supported women’s right to economic independence, and “loudly opposed sexism within the male literary establishment” (241).

118 opportunities to engage various viewpoints (Federico 242). Moreover, Corelli’s novels

“maneuver conventions of form, perspective, realism, and gender” in unorthodox ways, and they explore the questions of gender and sexuality that figure prominently in New

Woman narratives (242). Perhaps one of the factors that hinder singular definitions of

New Woman fiction is that the authors’ aims are not always clear. As Angelique

Richardson and Chris Willis note in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact (2001), the works of many New Woman writers “reveal contradictions and complexities which resist reductive, monolithic readings” (Richardson and Willis 12). This lack of definition suggests that New Woman writers themselves were still making sense of how to construct narratives that conveyed their intended messages—exploring what new literary possibilities might emerge from their exercises in unconventional forms of thought. By depicting the New Woman in their works, these writers contributed to growing conversations about women’s changing social roles while grappling with new combinations of literary modes.

The identity of the New Woman was ultimately as unstable as the multiform nature of the New Woman novel. As Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham explain in

New Woman Hybridities (2004), the New Woman was an “ambiguous figure” who sparked competing feelings of intense anxiety and hope in contentious media debates about her perceived aims (Heilmann and Beetham 1). Lyn Pykett also speaks to the elusiveness and enigmatic nature of the New Woman when she describes her as “a mobile and contradictory figure” (“Foreword” xi). But as Sally Ledger points out in her

1997 study of both fictional and “real” New Women, the New Woman was an unstable category due to how she was portrayed within different discourses (Ledger 10). Whereas

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“medico-scientific discourses” emphasized the New Woman’s perceived objection to maternity, “antipathetic fictional discourses” focused on her “reputed sexual licence

[sic]” (10). This variance in characterizations eliminates any notions of one- dimensionality in the figure of the New Woman, but it also emphasizes the idea that the

New Woman was perceived as a disruptive figure from many vantage points. As Ledger argues, the New Woman’s elusiveness “marks her as a problem, as a challenge to the apparently homogeneous culture of Victorianism which could not find a consistent language by which she could be categorised [sic] and dealt with” (10). That is, the New

Woman exposed flaws in late-Victorian categorization practices and left commentators hesitant as to how to respond to her. These concerns joined other social problems the

New Woman was perceived to have caused or exacerbated. According to Ledger, the

New Woman compromised both women’s roles as the mothers of the Empire and the

“economic supremacy of bourgeois men” by opting to forego motherhood in favor of professional and educational pursuits (19). Similarly, Pykett—who describes the New

Woman as “a condensed symbol of disorder and rebellion”—argues that the New Woman threatened traditional gender boundaries by withdrawing from the restricted sphere of ideal womanhood, “aping masculinity,” and “becoming an intermediate sex” (Improper

137, 141). The late-Victorian cultural discomfort with the New Woman was at least partly due to the idea that she did not present only one threat, or one challenge, that commentators could evaluate and contain.

Competing fictional representations of the New Woman have, of course, played key roles in shaping many perceptions of her character. According to Sally Ledger, New

Woman writers advanced different interpretations of the New Woman by portraying her

120 in various ways, including as a proponent of free love, a “champion of sexual purity,” and an “attacker of motherhood” (Ledger 10). Moreover, in her analysis of the New Woman as a media construct, Talia Schaffer argues that by fictionalizing the New Woman, writers were able to use her as needed to fit the aims of their narratives (Schaffer 45).

Schaffer acknowledges the New Woman’s psychological impact on readers, noting that in imaginative works, she “evokes an extraordinary range of emotional associations, a flood of feelings which can powerfully support whatever goal the writer has channelled

[sic] it towards” (45). By using phrases such as “extraordinary range” and “flood of feelings,” Schaffer illuminates the fictionalized New Woman’s versatility and suggests the extent to which the New Woman may overwhelm her audience’s senses. Despite the various fictional representations of the New Woman, the ambiguities of her identity, and the uncertainties regarding her potential influence on late-Victorian culture, some perceptions of the New Woman were shared by many commentators. Angelique

Richardson and Chris Willis note that the New Woman was widely recognized for “her perceived newness, her autonomous self-definition and her determination to set her own agenda in developing an alternative vision for the future” (Richardson and Willis 12).

That is, the New Woman was noteworthy for her pronounced agency as demonstrated by her own identity construction and her advocacy for social change. But whereas the New

Woman was perceived to set her own agenda, fiction writers had their plans for her as well. In the New Woman, writers saw a malleable figure that could be deployed in multiple ways to unsettle restrictive Victorian cultural codes.

A major component of many New Woman fiction narratives is the centrality of the female body in challenging the boundaries of aesthetic form and exploring new

121 definitions of both femininity and masculinity. In New Women, New Novels (1990), Ann

L. Ardis observes that many New Woman writers “are producing or constructing sexuality” through their frank discussions of marriage and other forms of intimate relationships (85, emphasis Ardis’s). In these narratives, Ardis adds, the New Woman’s body “serves as a proving ground for new conceptualizations of ‘human nature’” (85).

Ardis argues that New Woman narratives are constructed on and through the bodies of these women. The New Woman’s body becomes an experimental subject; it functions as a conduit through which authors may test new ideas about female sexuality and women’s prescribed social roles. This experimentation joins New Woman writers’ explorations of unconventional narrative methods that allow for adequate fictional representations of an unfamiliar figure. Critics have explored diverse ways that the New Woman was depicted in both popular fiction and the late-Victorian periodical press. As Carolyn Nelson notes, the New Woman asserted her physical and social mobility by riding bicycles, smoked in public without inhibition, and advocated for Victorian dress reform (Reader ix). But what about the muscular women depicted in New Woman novels? In what ways did the muscular, athletic, female body serve as a “proving ground”—to borrow Ardis’s terminology—for new gender and sexuality configurations? How did New Woman writers interpret the muscular female body? What attitudes toward female musculature did these writers advance through their depictions of muscular women? Furthermore, to what extent did writers’ meditations on the formal contradictions of the muscular woman become an analog for the formal experimentations of the New Woman novel itself?

Exploring the ways female musculature was invoked in New Woman novels shows how

122 writers jointly advanced fresh formulations of gender and fiction while confronting late-

Victorian cultural anxieties about the changing image of womanhood.

Forms of “Freedom” and Entrapment: The Heavenly Twins

A best-selling New Woman novel in Great Britain and the United States, Sarah

Grand’s The Heavenly Twins documents the interweaving life experiences of three young women: Edith Beale, Evadne Frayling, and Angelica Hamilton-Wells. Using a mixture of narrative methods including fantasy, humor, horror, dream sequences, melodrama, verse, and both third- and first-person narration, Grand explores issues of gender identity, women’s physical development, marital relations, sexually transmitted disease, and women’s changing social roles through her portraits of her heroines.34 In the figure of

Angelica, in particular, Grand depicts a character who is noteworthy for her athletic physique, sharp wit, and regular involvement in mischievous childhood acts with her twin brother, Diavolo. Throughout the novel’s early scenes, passages focalized through both

Angelica and other characters show that Angelica views an active lifestyle as vital to her health and her ability to confront social and economic disadvantages associated with the female body. To the dismay of many family members and acquaintances, Angelica regularly fights Diavolo because, on the one hand, fighting is “good for the circulation of the blood…warms a body, you know” (Grand 28). But on the other hand, these altercations also allow Angelica to assert her right to the family estate, which will

34 In Married, Middlebrow, and Militant (1998), Teresa Mangum notes that early manuscripts of The Heavenly Twins were rejected by many London publishers for reasons ranging from Grand’s perceived inability to tell a compelling story to concerns that the content of her novel was too provocative to appeal to a wider “culture of readers” (Mangum 85, 86). Grand sought feedback on revised portions of her novel from members of the predominantly female Pioneer Club and soon after put forth her own money to publish her novel in printed sheets (86-88). Grand’s actions demonstrate her unyielding resolve to publish her work, as well as her investment in the new ideas about womanhood that her novel advanced.

123 presumably be awarded to Diavolo because he is a male. By demonstrating her physical prowess over Diavolo, Angelica shows that biological sex is an insufficient determinant of one’s suitability for social and financial advancement. In a later reflection on

Angelica’s unfeminine mannerisms, a family friend, Lord Dawne, recalls that Angelica has developed a two-pronged strategy for overcoming the “disabilities” that being a girl imposes upon her: “she means to get over them all by hook, which she explains as being the proper development of her muscles and physique generally, and by crook, which she defines as circumventing the slave drivers of her sex, a task which she seems to think can easily be accomplished by finessing” (73). In addition to demonstrating Angelica’s perception of the physical fitness and delicate social maneuvering required to achieve her desired independence, this passage portrays Angelica’s muscular body as a disruption of the restrictive gender ideologies with which she must contend. By focusing on Angelica’s unconventional physicality in these early scenes, Grand exposes tensions between

Angelica’s desire to shape her own physique and the cultural codes of decorum that seek to dictate both her physical form and her social trajectory.

Grand’s depiction of Angelica’s physical development intersects with issues of identity that are seemingly the byproducts of Angelica’s divergence from traditional formulations of femininity. These issues manifest themselves in Angelica’s insistence upon experiencing the same educational opportunities that Diavolo enjoys—an attitude which defies “old-fashioned ideas” that advocate superior education for boys (123).

During a conversation with a tutor who is hired to provide more intellectually demanding lessons exclusively for Diavolo, Angelica argues that she deserves equal instructional rigor because she and Diavolo are the same person: “With us, you know, the fact of the

124 matter is that I am Diavolo and he is me” (124, emphasis Grand’s). Striking about

Angelica’s assertion is that the stressed pronouns, along with her claim, “he is me,” demonstrate a conflation of identities that effectively challenges predetermined characteristics associated with traditional Victorian configurations of gender. By applying the male pronoun he to herself, Angelica unsettles boundaries separating constructions of femininity and masculinity. She embodies these destabilized boundaries by fashioning an athletic physique that clashes with the traditional aesthetic ideal of a more delicate, corset-framed, female body and by frequently dressing in Diavolo’s clothing—actions that prove confusing and discomforting for other characters in the novel. These unconventional behaviors and the confusion they cause render Angelica’s identity resistant to a singular construction. Instead, they invite readers to reconsider definitions of femininity and masculinity, as well as how those definitions might converge.

Angelica’s disruption of feminine aesthetic and social codes parallels Grand’s defiance of nineteenth-century literary traditions in The Heavenly Twins. Grand’s heterogeneous narrative method commences with the novel’s Proem, which offers an extended meditation on the town of Morningquest, the setting for much of the novel.

Written in a style that is reminiscent of a fairy tale, the Proem combines traditional prose, lines of poetry, the repetition of a verse with corresponding sheet music from the pianist

Felix Mendelssohn’s “Elijah,” and direct discourse that is representative of the

Morningquest vernacular within a text that oscillates between the prosaic and the lyrical.

While Grand’s rendering of the novel’s primary setting through multiple narrative modes provides an early example of her artistic versatility, it also paints a nuanced portrait of

Morningquest. But throughout the novel, Grand’s use of various devices does more than

125 illuminate additional layers of the subjects under consideration. Book I, in particular, notably shifts from the Proem’s fairy tale-like depiction of Morningquest to a less fanciful study of the protagonists’ girlhoods, and it draws upon texts as disparate as the

Bible, the novelist Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), the American poet Henry

Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Six Sonnets on Dante’s Divine Comedy” (1864-1866), and issues of Punch magazine. In this book, Grand further experiments with narrative configurations by including lengthy correspondence that is indicative of an epistolary novel and by interspersing song lyrics within traditional prose. These combinations of narrative methods are sometimes as jarring as Angelica’s unconventional, unfeminine behaviors because they effectively disrupt the flow of the story. For example, the verse from Mendelssohn’s “Elijah,” which both precedes and follows Angelica’s proposed strategy for overcoming female limitations, temporarily discontinues the novel’s prose, a rhetorical maneuver that parallels the pause Angelica creates among other characters in the novel due to her muscular form and defiant attitude. Through this unique narrative style, Grand advances a new configuration of Victorian fiction as a patchwork of seemingly incongruous methods. However, this patchwork accommodates Angelica’s equally unconventional and disruptive figure.

Although Grand experiments with multiple narrative modes throughout the novel’s entirety, her sustained meditation on Angelica’s appearance and its social implications in Book IV further illuminates both the hybrid nature of Angelica’s character and the novel’s unique configuration. Written prior to the rest of the novel’s composition and later published as a separate story, Book IV chronicles the companionship between a tenor (also referred to as “Israfil”) and a boy who is ultimately

126 revealed to be Angelica disguised in Diavolo’s clothing (Senf xi). Angelica is married by this point in the narrative—a marriage of convenience instead of love, and one that

Angelica demands with a horse whip in-hand—and her resumption of her childhood proclivity toward crossdressing stems from her insistence upon doing as she pleases as a required condition of her matrimony. But the physical and psychological realities of

Angelica’s deceptive, cross-gender performance become pronounced as Angelica’s relationship with the tenor progresses. In one of several passages in Book IV with a homoerotic undertone, the tenor admires “the Boy’s” figure for both the way it is accentuated by specific fabrics and for its graceful movements. From the tenor’s perspective, the Boy’s body “showed to advantage in light flannels. They made him look broader and more manly while leaving room for the free play of limb and muscle” (Grand

436). Furthermore, in his appraisal of the Boy’s figure, the tenor observes that “every movement was natural and spontaneous, like the movements of a wild creature and as agile. He seemed to rejoice in his own strength and delight in his own suppleness” (436-

437). The tenor’s observations speak to the persuasiveness of Angelica’s disguise and masculine performance, in that her male persona appears natural despite its artificiality.

Moreover, the tenor’s uses of terms such as “free play” and “rejoice” are indicative of a celebration of the young, male body and its uninhibited physical capabilities. But Grand ultimately uses this positive appraisal in order to highlight the difficult processes

Angelica endures in configuring her alternative appearance. The celebration of

Angelica’s masculine figure is undercut by how Angelica alters her own body in order to achieve her desired image. In addition to concealing her natural hair with a more masculine wig, Angelica crumples her hands and hides them from view so as to mask her

127 fair skin (451-452). These actions demonstrate how Angelica’s performance exacts a toll on her own body—an athletic, muscular body that is already at odds with traditional aesthetic ideals of femininity. However, Angelica’s execution of these maneuvers and her deception of the tenor also suggest a new formulation of masculinity as either a dramatic modification or complete erasure of one’s feminine features.

Angelica’s cross-gender performance occurs within a section of The Heavenly

Twins that is itself a microcosm of the novel’s unconventional configuration. Subtitled

“An Interlude,” Book IV emphasizes its departure from the emotionally-charged marriage plots of the previous sections by beginning with a reflection on Morningquest’s spiritual climate. This reflection, which is rendered in the style of the Proem, joins recitations of verses from the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas

(1820), Latin mass chants, the repetition of the verse from Mendelssohn’s “Elijah,” lyrics from various choral arrangements, and a mixture of direct and free-indirect discourse in creating a multiform narrative that matches Angelica’s hybrid identity. The interlude is also focalized through various perspectives, including the omniscient narrator’s brief return to a birds-eye view of Morningquest, the tenor’s appraisal of Angelica’s disguised figure, and Angelica’s first-hand account of her experience assuming a male identity. But unlike the narrative latitude that is a hallmark of the novel, Angelica identifies a lack of individual liberty for girls as the catalyst for her performance: “I was a girl, and therefore

I was not supposed to have any bent. I found a bog groove ready waiting for me when I grew up, and in that I was expected to live whether it suited me or not. It did not suit me.

It was deep and narrow, and gave me no room to move” (450). Angelica’s explanation is noteworthy for the pronounced feelings of entrapment and suffocation it exudes because

128 it shows that Angelica feels confined by the narrow, socially-constructed “bog groove” of ideal femininity that awaits her as she approaches womanhood. Without latitude or bent,

Angelica has no room for adjustment. That is, she has no opportunity to shape her individuality to her liking because the socially-constructed groove does not provide her the space to do so. Angelica adds that in her quest for independence, she has encountered antagonists in the form of friends: “I wanted to do as well as to be…but when the time came for me to begin, my friends armed themselves with the whole social system as it obtains in our state of life, and came out to oppose me” (450, emphasis Grand’s).

Unsupportive of her intellectual and physical pursuits, Angelica’s friends have employed the “social system” of feminine domestic virtues as a weapon against her. Angelica’s reflection serves as an indictment of both her social circle and the harmful cultural ideologies of femininity that influence it.

In her depiction of Angelica’s relationship with the tenor, Grand raises a wider concern that in order to experience freedom, women must essentially abandon or modify identities that are already constrained by traditional codes feminine decorum. When

Angelica’s identity is discovered after a boating accident that exposes her contrasting feminine and masculine features, she reflects on the freedom she enjoyed by disguising herself: “I began to love it; it came naturally; and the freedom from restraint, I mean the restraint from tight uncomfortable clothing, was delicious. I tell you I was a genuine boy,

I felt like a boy; I was my own brother in very truth” (456). Grand represents Angelica’s cross-dressing as both a transgressive play upon gender roles and a sign of the cultural restrictions she faces as a woman. When dressed in Diavolo’s clothing, Angelica no longer feels restrained by her femininity, but she can only experience that feeling of

129 freedom by assuming Diavolo’s identity. Thus, she temporarily erases her own sense of

“self” and demonstrates the relative ease with which she can perform as a man. A different kind of erasure occurs when Angelica returns home to her husband in a move that effectively extinguishes the energy, steadfastness, and fierce independence she exhibits throughout much of the novel. That her most transgressive act of the narrative takes place in the interlude seems fitting, in that her cross-gender performance provides a temporary break from both her marriage and the feminine ideologies that do not work in her favor. But ironically, her final words in Book V suggest that she is no longer interested in the “room to move” that she coveted earlier in the novel: “Don’t let me go again, Daddy, keep me close. I am—I am grateful for the blessing of a good man’s love”

(551). By referring to her husband as “Daddy,” Angelica confirms her marriage as resembling a relationship between a father and child rather than the union of two loving partners. Her plea for a return to a restrictive, domestic lifestyle, along with her only temporarily successful crossdressing performance, demonstrates how even physically and socially unconventional women might remain ensnared by traditional feminine ideals.

Grand tests new configurations of both physical form and gender identity through her portrayal of Angelica’s muscular figure. On the one hand, Angelica embodies a more athletic and robust formulation of womanhood than the ideal advanced by established cultural and aesthetic codes. On the other hand, she demonstrates how the figure of the muscular woman might fashion a convincing masculine persona through her selection of appropriate clothing and her careful modifications to her feminine features. Ultimately,

Angelica’s appearance and behaviors challenge cultural proclivities toward categorization by bringing into focus the permeability of boundaries separating constructions of

130 femininity and masculinity. But because of Angelica’s submissive embrace of her husband at the end of Book V, the novel leaves open the question of the benefits of defying traditional codes of feminine decorum if that defiance yields only a temporary experience of autonomy. In the figure of Angelica, Grand depicts a muscular New

Woman who accepts the social risks associated with fashioning an unfamiliar identity that is a hybrid of feminine and masculine physical characteristics. Similarly, Grand takes risks of her own by constructing a novel that transgresses the formal expectations of nineteenth-century fiction through its unorthodox structure and combinations of narrative methods. By defying formal conventions, Grand advances a new configuration of the novel that is as flexible and multifarious as its muscular heroine.

Formal Composites: The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance

Similarly unorthodox in its configuration, Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir

Richard Calmady: A Romance explores new formulations of femininity and masculinity in its depiction of a muscular, athletic woman who straddles the boundaries between both gender constructions. This exploration occurs within a sprawling narrative that primarily chronicles the life of its eponymous character, an aristocrat born without lower legs and with feet growing from his knees due to an ancestral curse that victimizes the Calmady men. Malet renders her story through a variety of literary modes and narrative techniques, including melodrama, tragedy, realism, allegory, dream sequences, epistles, and shifting points of view. The diversity of these styles, along with the narrative’s taking up of wide- ranging topics such as social class tensions, spirituality, lesbianism, dysfunctional family relationships, adultery, physical disability, and prostitution, make Richard Calmady a

131 challenging text to classify in both fictional method and subject matter.35 Malet advances a similar resistance to simple interpretations of her muscular heroine, Honoria St.

Quentin. The virtuous cousin and eventual wife of Richard Calmady, Honoria advocates for women’s social autonomy and assumes leadership roles in community initiatives such as the construction of a rehabilitation facility for crippled industrial laborers. But in contrast to the clarity of her passions, much of Honoria’s identity is rendered ambiguous by contradictions in her appearance and comportment. Examining these contradictions reveals how Honoria jointly tests the aesthetic parameters of the female form and challenges definitions of women’s social roles. Ultimately, both Honoria and the narrative itself function as experimental subjects in unusual formal configurations and the interpretive possibilities they yield.

In Richard Calmady, Malet depicts Honoria as enigmatic in both her physical features and the conflicting feelings her appearance elicits. When Richard encounters

Honoria for the first time as an adult, he receives “an impression at once arresting and subtly disquieting” (Malet 195). This impression, which the narrator recounts before detailing Honoria’s features, indicates the immediate, simultaneous feelings of fascination and anxiety that Honoria causes. That is, the competing feelings evoked by

Honoria’s appearance have an almost disorienting impact on Richard’s senses. In addition to being unusually tall and exuding a “lazy, almost boyish indifference and grace in the pose of her supple figure and the gallant carriage of her small head,” Honoria

35 As Patricia Srebrnik shows in her analysis of Richard Calmady, Malet’s novel received an ambivalent response from contemporary reviewers. While some critics praised the novel as comparable in quality to George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872), others condemned it for its graphic treatments of sexuality and other taboo topics (Srebrnik 204). In Art and Womanhood in Fin-de-Siecle Writing (2011), Catherine Delyfer adds that the content of Malet’s work fueled already-widespread cultural anxieties about degeneracy at the turn of the century (Delyfer 83).

132 sports an “unconventional” style of dress that is a confusing combination of men’s and women’s clothing (195). In particular, she complements her long jacket and skirt— notably absent of trimming and the popular women’s fashion of crinoline—with a matador’s hat that includes three “audaciously” positioned pompoms (195). By stressing the oddities of Honoria’s appearance, the narrator emphasizes Honoria’s position as an outsider to traditional aesthetic codes of femininity. So unusual are both her figure and attire that Richard perceives in her “a baffling element, a something untamed and remote, a freedom of soul, that declared itself alike in the gallantries and in the severities of her dress, her attitude, and all the lines of her person” (196). That Honoria is baffling, untamed, and remote captures the difficulty Richard encounters in making sense of her image and suggests the inaccessibility of her character. In this depiction of Honoria,

Malet constructs a composite figure that embodies the challenges of interpreting women with unconventional appearances. By doing so, she dramatizes the discomfort and confusion that an unfamiliar, hybrid form of womanhood may create.

Malet’s portrayal of Honoria as a perplexing, unusual figure takes on different complexions in later passages that highlight Honoria’s muscular definition and physical strength. These passages are noteworthy for their juxtapositions of Honoria’s physical contrasts and various intangible attributes, thus illuminating the multiplicity of her character. After Richard agrees to join Honoria in reinvigorating a damaged tract of land to house poor families, he observes that Honoria’s “transparent sincerity, her superb chastity—he could call it by no other word—of manner or movement, even of outline— the slight angularity of strong muscle as opposed to soft roundness of cushioned flesh— these arrested and impressed him” (625). Reminiscent of his first meeting with Honoria,

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Richard is stifled by—and in awe of—both Honoria’s virtuous qualities and her distinctive, muscular physique. For Richard, Honoria’s physical characteristics complement her intangible traits, in that they jointly arrest and impress him. But by illuminating the contrast of Honoria’s strong muscles with her soft flesh, in particular,

Richard shows how Honoria’s physical form is a blend of subtlety and pronounced definition. It is simultaneously sturdy and delicate. This blend, along with Honoria’s intangible traits and her donning of both feminine and masculine clothing, is indicative of multidimensionality in both her form and her sense of self, even though some

“dimensions” are more defined than others. Yet, Honoria’s character becomes increasingly nuanced as the narrative progresses. That she is a hybrid, enigmatic woman is again apparent when she figures prominently in Richard’s meditation on adopting a young boy (Dick Ormiston), a move that would disrupt the ancestral curse that afflicts the

Calmady men:

And then suddenly the vision of Honoria St. Quentin, in that red and black-

braided gown, with that air of something ruffling and soldierly about it, whipping

the small Dick up in her strong arms, throwing him across her shoulder and

bearing him bodily, and of Honoria later, her sensitive face all alight, as she

discoursed of the purpose and ultimate aim of life and of living, came before him.

(627)

While Richard’s vision further establishes Honoria as a commanding physical presence, it also presents Honoria’s appearance as disturbing in multiple registers. That Honoria’s gown is “soldierly” and evokes a sense of perturbation gestures toward earlier accounts of her unconventional, ambiguously-gendered attire and the discomfort it causes.

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Furthermore, Honoria’s imagined interaction with Dick Ormiston—described in terms indicative of violence such as “whipping” and “throwing”—portrays her muscular body as a danger to others. But Richard’s vision concludes with another striking contrast, in that it juxtaposes Honoria’s disturbing physicality with her sensitive face and perceived capacity for philosophical inquiry. This contrast, which further demonstrates Honoria’s hybridity, compounds the challenge of deciphering the confusing portrait of Honoria that

Richard Calmady develops. In these body-intensive passages, Malet explores various

“images” of the muscular female figure, but she entangles them with competing portraits.

It is through this entanglement, however, that Malet advances a new configuration of femininity as one that is decidedly more robust, flexible, and complex than what is outlined by traditional, aesthetic codes of feminine decorum.

Malet mimics her configuration of Honoria in the “shape” of Richard Calmady itself, in that she renders her narrative through contrasting literary modes. Whereas some passages engage the gothic literary tradition in their portrayals of supernatural phenomena and vivid descriptions of remote settings, others invoke parables, offer realistic depictions of everyday life in the narrative’s primary setting of Brockhurst,

England; or adopt the style of an erotic adventure tale that alludes to the artist William

Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1734). Given that Malet labels Richard Calmady a romance, thus signaling an often episodic text that mixes fiction with fact and is typically fluid in its accommodation of other genre elements such as satire, it is perhaps no surprise that she draws upon these diverse literary modes. But what does she achieve in her narrative by doing so? In Books Four and Five, which primarily depict Richard’s failed attempt at a marriage, his subsequent sexual indiscretions in Italy, and Honoria’s intimate

135 relationship with Richard’s mother, Malet deploys parables, depicts a (derailed) marriage plot, alludes to mythological figures, describes a character’s descent into madness, and portrays a spirit manifestation. In addition, she briefly suspends the story’s omniscient narration in favor of correspondence, thus providing access to characters’ thoughts through the epistolary mode.36 Using this combination of methods, Malet advances a narrative plurality that is analogous to the complexities of Honoria’s figure and makes the diversity of the various intersecting storylines in Richard Calmady more pronounced.

That is, she crafts a “history” that is noteworthy for its formal heterogeneity. In this hybrid narrative—one that is sometimes mythical and other times mimetic—Malet’s use of contrasting literary modes allows her to capture the moods of the Brockhurst society and probe both the motivations and eccentricities of her central characters. But her textual experimentation also offers a fresh perspective on configuring an imaginative narrative by demonstrating a marked unboundedness by traditional, formal expectations of nineteenth century fiction.

In Richard Calmady, Honoria’s athletic body can be read as an experimental

“text” in its own right, as its muscular definition and contrasting features challenge established, aesthetic boundaries of the female form. Not only is Honoria’s figure unconventional, but her self-identification is as well, in that she frequently refers to herself as a man. But a major element of Malet’s experiment with Honoria—a component that helps shape Malet’s new formulations of femininity and masculinity through her

36 These contrasting styles mirror the hybrid nature of various settings throughout the narrative. Early in Richard Calmady, the narrator describes the Calmady estate as “gothic in its main lines, but with much of the Renaissance work in its details” (3). Similarly, the city of Naples, Italy—the site of Richard’s sexual deviance in Book Five—is described as “that bewildering union of modern commerce and classic association” (418). In the latter description, notably, Malet’s use of the term, “bewildering,” is reminiscent of the confusion Richard feels upon his first observance of Honoria’s appearance earlier in the narrative.

136 muscular heroine—is her frequent pairing of Honoria with Richard throughout the text.

Many of the narrative’s most sustained observations of Honoria’s figure and actions are effectively focalized through Richard. On the one hand, these observations highlight

Richard’s struggles to make sense of an unfamiliar, ambiguous figure. On the other hand, they demonstrate his desires for a type of physical and social existence to which he does not have access. Whereas Honoria is able-bodied, athletically-gifted, and involved in the masculine public sphere through her extensive civic engagement, Richard is primarily confined to the domestic sphere of his family estate, dependent upon a “wretched crutch” for limited mobility, and nursed by his mother and other female attendants (628). In the figure of Honoria, a commanding physical presence that provides a stark contrast to

Richard’s diminutive, deformed, and comparatively weak body, Richard observes an ambiguous embodiment of the masculine traits he lacks. Even though Honoria’s hybrid body is perplexing, it represents freedoms of expression and movement within the public sphere that Richard covets. Malet depicts Honoria’s figure as disruptive in multiple ways, but she also portrays it as an object of desire and thus adds to the complex list of attributes that shape Honoria’s character.

Honoria’s articulation of her own desires demonstrates how her prominent role in

Malet’s exploration of new gender configurations extends beyond her challenges to the boundaries of aesthetic form. In the last two books of the narrative, Malet depicts significant shifts in Honoria’s sexual interests and her attitude toward companionship.

While Honoria describes herself as both a passionate lover of Richard’s mother and “not what you call a marrying man” in Book Five, revealing a disconnect between her biological sex and gender identity, she adds even more confusion to her character in

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Book Six by declaring her love for Richard and asking for his hand in marriage (455,

460). Malet mimics Honoria’s shift in desires in the narrative itself by transitioning from the adventure tale-like style of Book Five to more of a naturalist study of Honoria’s and

Richard’s altruistic community efforts in Book Six. That is, the style and tone of Richard

Calmady changes in the final two books in the same manner that Honoria’s attitude shifts, offering another indication of Malet’s fascination with rendering her narrative through multiple, contrasting modes of representation. Even Honoria’s marriage proposal is noteworthy for its own shift in agency. Although she appears in control of the proceedings when she places her hand “on the peak of [Richard’s] saddle” during a sexually-suggestive horseback ride, literally holding him in place, she yields power to

Richard by declaring that she is “man enough” to accept rejection and adding, “don’t take me out of pity. I would never forgive you…I have never failed anyone yet. I will never fail you. I am yours body and soul. Marry me” (679). Honoria assumes a masculine role by initiating the marriage proposal and dictating how Richard should respond if he is uninterested in the commitment, but she softens her approach by relinquishing her body and soul to Richard’s discretion. Furthermore, her proposal indirectly demonstrates her desire to be needed and to prove her reliability as a companion. Although this scene is a departure from earlier passages that focus on Honoria’s hybrid form, it nevertheless adds to the narrative’s larger portrait of Honoria as a figure who crosses, reverses, blurs, and undoes categories of gender and sexuality. By exploring Honoria’s desires, Malet simultaneously humanizes her heroine and exposes the fluidity of both femininity and masculinity constructions.

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An experiment in unusual configurations of aesthetic form, Malet’s portrait of

Honoria resists singular interpretations of the figure of the muscular woman. In turn, it embraces both a physical and social plurality by emphasizing the contrast of subtlety and pronounced definition in Honoria’s body, highlighting the juxtaposition of her unconventional physical form and her virtues, and depicting her shift in sexual desires. It is through this portrait of a muscular, ambiguously-gendered figure that Malet contests definitions of both womanhood and manhood, expanding the ways in which gender might be embodied in the process. Furthermore, she questions whether particular mindsets or specific mannerisms fit neatly within rigid constructions of sexuality. But Malet raises the stakes of her depiction of Honoria’s unusual figure by rendering it analogous to the hybrid form of Richard Calmady itself, in that she makes Honoria’s muscular, composite body part of a wider experiment in unconventional formal configurations and their interpretive implications. The contrasting literary modes in Richard Calmady essentially work together to create nuanced portraits of the narrative’s characters and settings, thus advancing a new way of configuring fiction as a multifarious invention. Similarly,

Honoria’s contrasting features fashion a figure that is an intermediate, multifaceted form of feminine and masculine gender constructions. Malet’s fascination with the aesthetics of both fiction and the muscular female form becomes more significant when considered alongside appraisals of her own appearance. In her study of Malet’s literary career,

Patricia Lorimer Lundberg notes that Malet’s looks were subject to questions of gender ambiguity among contemporary critics (Lundberg 9). While Malet was often complimented for being “elegant in dress and demeanor,” she was also perceived as having a masculine appearance which resembled that of her father, Charles Kingsley—a

139 passionate advocate for muscular manhood that was grounded in Christian ideals (9).

Critics struggled to “figure out” Malet in the same manner that Richard finds Honoria’s appearance baffling. But Malet seems to welcome this difficulty in Richard Calmady because it places both the characters in the story and her readers in the uncomfortable position of confronting or adjusting their own understandings of gender, sexuality, the physically-sound body, and the female form. Moreover, such difficulty in deciphering

Honoria encourages a constant grappling with how muscular women fit in late-Victorian culture.

Configuring New Forms of Gender and Genre

The New Woman narratives I have discussed contribute to contentious late-

Victorian debates about the figure of the muscular woman by introducing athletic, muscular heroines who, to different extents, challenge sexual double standards and unsettle Victorian aesthetic ideologies of womanhood. In both The Heavenly Twins and

Richard Calmady, the muscular female body is a catalyst for various degrees of curiosity, captivation, and disorientation among observers because of its hybrid, ambiguous configuration. But it is also a canvas for authors’ wider investigations of the seemingly permeable, unstable distinctions between constructions of femininity and masculinity, as well as the adjustable boundaries of aesthetic form. Furthermore, in these works, the muscular female body provides a fitting encasement for attitudes and behaviors that are equally unconventional. That is, we might understand this unusual form—its “newness,” hybridity, and divergence from traditional aesthetic codes—as a visual representation of the diverse social, sexual, and economic freedoms that many late-Victorian New Women pursued. While Grand and Malet portray the sight of the muscular female body as

140 evocative of competing feelings that are at times challenging to define, they embrace these feelings as part of a wider celebration of unconventional forms of embodiment and new, unfamiliar configurations of gender identity.

In the New Woman narratives I have examined, there exists a complex relationship between authors’ depictions of female musculature and the texts in which those depictions appear—one that makes the multiform nature of the New Woman novel more pronounced. As I have argued, Grand’s and Malet’s portrayals of muscular women advance new gender formulations as analogues for new, unconventional ways of configuring fiction. Thus, the muscular female body, with its contrasting features and natural resistance to being deciphered fully and with certainty, functions as a model for a literary genre that is itself noteworthy for its aesthetic variability. Whereas readers of these texts are charged with the task of interpreting an unfamiliar figure in the muscular woman, the difficulty of that task is compounded by the challenge of navigating a hybrid literary genre that departs from traditional, formal expectations of nineteenth-century fiction. But by exploring textual forms and experimentations that effectively mimic those of the muscular female characters, the authors of these New Woman narratives demonstrate a strategy for examining new constructions of physical form, sexual desire, and gender identity that are insistently plural and flexible. As a result, depictions of female musculature in New Woman narratives become inextricably tied with the narratives themselves, in that both function as enigmatic texts to different extents. By deploying the figure of the muscular woman in their works, New Woman writers confront the inadequacy traditional Victorian gender constructions and while complicating established views of nineteenth-century fiction. However, it is through this

141 simultaneous “undoing” and reconfiguring that writers stress a spirit of revision that matches both the changing physical form and social status of women in late-Victorian culture.

142

CONCLUSION

Examining depictions of muscular women in both Victorian fiction and the periodical press, this dissertation has aimed to demonstrate, first, that the figure of the muscular woman presented an unconventional and transgressive embodiment of British physical culture ideals—an embodiment that spurred many commentators to (1) debate shifting formulations of gender, sexuality, motherhood, and beauty; (2) advance their own perspectives on the links between muscularity, women’s fitness, and national progress; and (3) use images of this figure for endeavors as divergent as suggesting her role in erotic fantasies and commenting on domestic and international affairs.

Additionally, it has been a major concern of this project to show how both sensation and

New Woman novelists engaged the enigmatic and hybrid figure of the muscular woman in their works by deploying her as an analog for the transgressive forms of the literary genres in which they were writing and by defying aesthetic and formal conventions of

Victorian fiction in the process. In the preceding chapters, my investigations of verbal commentaries on female musculature in the periodical press, visual representations of muscular women in illustrated magazines, and imaginative depictions of the muscular female body in both sensation and New Woman narratives show that the figure of the muscular woman elicited reactions ranging from anxiety to optimism. That she was also the subject of conversations that took place across literary and non-literary genres reflects her appeal to writers from various professional backgrounds. Among the byproducts of these investigations is the illumination of a link between the figure of the muscular woman and terms that are indicative of uncertainty and discomfort. Throughout my dissertation, the repetition of words such as competing, confusing, disorienting,

143 ambiguous, and contradictory confirms the muscular woman’s resistance to singular constructions and neat, seamless categorization. This resistance makes any effort to arrive at one definitive interpretation of the relationship between the figure of the muscular woman, physical culture, and Victorian literature a challenging task, but not a futile one.

Examining how writers reacted to the muscular woman in their works, and making the case that this figure simultaneously complicated debates about the capacities of women’s bodies, challenged the boundaries of aesthetic form, and became a model for new forms of literary experimentation has led me to formulate several conclusions about the muscular woman’s place in the Victorian literary and cultural imagination:

As I have suggested in the preceding chapters, it was the sight of the muscular female form that fascinated, vexed, or simply perplexed both commentators in the periodical press and characters in literary works. For some observers, the figure of the muscular woman became an object of sexual desire, as notably demonstrated in chapter two by Guy Santorini’s illustrated reflection, “A Muscular Maiden.” Alternatively, for the eponymous protagonist of Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance, the muscular female form becomes an object of desire in a different sense: Honoria St.

Quentin’s presence throughout the novel serves as a regular visual reminder of masculine characteristics to which Richard Calmady aspires but cannot achieve. But whereas commentators such as J. Hamilton Fletcher saw, in the figure of the muscular woman, a refreshing combination of elegance and strength, writers such as Arabella Kenealy viewed the muscular female body as a troubling sign of a woman’s abdication of both her femininity and capacity for healthy reproduction. In many of the texts I have considered—particularly those that discuss female musculature in conjunction with

144 meditations on beauty, racial progress, physical education, or perceived encroachments upon masculine spheres—there exists an implicit anxiety about the figure of the muscular woman’s potential impact on Great Britain’s national image. Writers grappled with the question of how the muscular female form fit within Great Britain’s “physique,” perhaps due to the muscular woman’s disruption of the popular idea that women are delicate. In a male-focused physical culture movement that was noteworthy for its rigid ideas about the functions and limits of women’s bodies, the sight of the muscular woman inspired writers to either defend or adjust their ideas about both prevailing aesthetic codes of womanhood and the image that Great Britain should project to the rest of the world.

Investigating the diverse ways Victorian writers and illustrators depicted the muscular woman reveals the versatility of her figure and uncovers a tension between cultural expectations or stereotypes of womanhood and the physical reality of female musculature. In the women’s physical fitness commentaries I discussed in chapter one, these dynamics are especially pronounced. Gesturing toward their competing views on prevailing aesthetic codes of feminine decorum, writers alternately presented the muscular female body as a form to be celebrated for its visible display of vigor or viewed as a warning to women about the consequences of excessive physical activity. In doing so, they also used the figure of the muscular woman to advance their own definitions of social or sexual fitness. Furthermore, illustrated commentaries such as The Girl of the

Period Miscellany’s “Athletic Girls of the Period” and Punch magazine’s “Hygienic

Excess” mocked stereotypes of womanhood and poked fun at conservative attitudes toward the muscular female body, respectively, while simultaneously supporting muscular women’s engagements in sports and strength exercises. In an alternative

145 commentary on the convergence of muscularity and femininity, Grand’s The Heavenly

Twins presents, in the figure of Angelica Hamilton-Wells, a defiant character that voices her displeasure at the lack of liberty women are to expect, assumes a convincing male identity in order to enjoy a sense of liberty and adventure she may not otherwise have, and molds a muscular physique to overcome the disadvantages associated girlhood. A muscular, masculine body is essentially her refuge from restrictive codes of femininity. In my examinations of these and other representations of female musculature, I was struck by how often the figure of the muscular woman was sexualized or prominently featured in sexually-suggestive scenes. From Santorini’s unsettling infatuation with the un-named maiden’s deltoid and trapezius muscles in “A Muscular Maiden” to Edith Archbold’s aggressive sexual advances toward Alfred Hardie in Hard Cash, there exists an erotic element to many of the depictions I have considered, suggesting a link between female musculature and sexual fantasy. But in addition to illuminating sexual subtexts in the figure of the muscular woman, this dissertation has also shown that her body was a mechanism for violence, a source of entertainment, a refreshing symbol of vigor, an ideal combination of strength, elasticity, and grace; either a suitable or unsuitable vessel for motherhood, depending upon who was asked; and a rebuke of established aesthetic ideals. These varied interpretations indicate that the figure of the muscular woman expanded Victorian cultural understandings of female physicality, ultimately compelling observers to revise their assumptions about the limits of women’s bodies.

The muscular woman served as an object lesson on how an unconventional, hybrid form can create confusion and raise uncomfortable questions about gender and identity. In the sensation and New Woman novels I have examined, authors used her

146 transgressive embodiment as a model for conceptualizing new and hybrid fictional forms.

However, in deploying the muscular woman in these unconventional narratives, they also widened the interpretive possibilities of her figure. As I have shown in chapter three, sensation novelists were early participants in conversations about female musculature because their conflicting depictions of muscular women—women whose unusual and contradictory physical forms reflected the generic hybridity of the sensation novel— anticipated later debates about both the significance of the muscular female body and women’s roles in the physical culture movement. In muscular women such as Reade’s

Hannah Blake, the incongruous conflation of her thick bicep and pretty, “babyish” face; along with the contrast between her powerful physique and inward timidity, is depicted within a novel that is itself a hybrid of different plot devices and narrative modes. By engaging the figure of the muscular woman in this way—highlighting both her physical contrasts and the relationship between her body and mind—Reade and the other sensation novelists I have considered attempt to demonstrate that much like the sensation novel’s formal contradictions, the muscular woman’s distinctive, imposing exterior may not always cohere with her disposition or secret desires. Her muscular physique may provide some insight into her character, but it does not offer the full picture. Furthermore, it is through the hybrid figure of the muscular woman that sensation writers explored the permeability of both gender and class boundaries. We can see such explorations in the various reversals of gender identities and sexual roles that occur in the novels I have examined, as well as in figures such as Mrs. Joe Gargery’s embodiment of tensions between working-class physicality and middle-class pretensions. These ideas seem especially important in a literary genre in which identity and its loss is a constant

147 concern. Although some of the muscular women in these novels are peripheral characters, they are at the center of sensation writers’ investigations into hybrid forms, and they bring the generic tensions of the sensation novel into relief through their unusual physical configurations.

Joining what had become a spirited conversation on female musculature in the periodical press by the end of the nineteenth century, New Woman novelists depicted hybrid, ambiguously-gendered, muscular women who jointly tested the aesthetic parameters of the female form and cultural understandings of women’s changing social roles. Their portrayals of these transgressive figures in novels that similarly violated formal conventions compounded the challenge of interpreting the muscular female body but also advanced a strategy for examining new and flexible configurations of physical form, gender identity, and sexuality. In experimenting with combinations of textual forms that effectively mimic the contradictory figures of Angelica Hamilton-Wells and Honoria

St. Quentin, Grand and Malet, respectively, enable readers to observe these characters’ behaviors, interactions, and attitudes through multiple modes of representation.

Furthermore, in both texts, there exists a link between the muscular body and notions of freedom that matches the New Woman novel’s unboundedness by traditional, formalistic expectations of nineteenth century fiction. Whereas Angelica’s athletic, muscular physique is tied to overcoming impediments associated with womanhood, Honoria’s physique is perceived as a symbol of autonomy for representing uninhibited expression and movement. Both characters operate outside the bounds of feminine decorum, defying restrictive cultural ideologies through muscular physiques that blend feminine and masculine features. New Woman writers assisted in this ideological challenge by

148 departing from aesthetic and formal conventions of Victorian literature and providing new configurations of gender and genre.

Reflecting on my investigation of contradictory, contested representations of muscular women in Victorian literary and non-literary texts has helped me formulate several ideas for future research. While I have explored, in the second chapter, how illustrations and their accompanying texts participated in a constant refashioning of the figure of the muscular woman, my sense is that performing rhetorical analyses of a more robust selection of images would illuminate additional nuances to this enigmatic figure.

These images might include, for example, advertisements and photographs of popular strongwomen who frequented circus arenas and music halls toward the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the illustrations of female bicyclists and other athletic women in Punch and similar publications. Furthermore, my focus on exploring how writers reacted to the figure of the muscular woman leaves open the questions of how muscular women themselves regarded their bodies, understood their identities, navigated socially-constructed ideas of how a woman should look and act, and viewed their places in Victorian culture. The strongwomen I mention in the introduction to this study immediately come to mind, in that their accounts of their attitudes toward their bodies and lifestyles, if available, would provide first-hand perspectives for critical studies of muscular women. Additionally, in my composition of part two of this project, I focused on analyzing how the figure of the muscular woman was depicted within literary genres that were themselves transgressive in their subversions of orthodoxy. But in doing so, I have not included muscular, athletic, and masculine characters such as Lizzie Hexam in

Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) and Candida St. John in George Paston’s

149

(Emily Morse Symonds’s) The Career of Candida (1897). Because Our Mutual Friend is not a sensation novel, and because The Career of Candida—while technically a New

Woman novel—does not exhibit the experimentation with combinations of narrative methods that is apparent in The Heavenly Twins and Richard Calmady, I felt that these texts and the aforementioned muscular women did not fit within the scope of this project.

However, it may be a productive endeavor to explore how representations of muscular women differ in texts that align more closely with formal expectations of nineteenth- century fiction. This project has also sparked my curiosity about how racialized discourses of embodiment might figure into discussions of female musculature. In The

Strongest Men on Earth, Graeme Kent notes that strongwomen of color were rare in

England throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Those who did appear on performance stages, such as the mixed-race Miss Lala (Olga Kaira), received hardly any press coverage

(Kent). A sustained investigation of figures such as Miss Lala could offer insight into how race affected mid- and late-Victorian observers’ attitudes toward muscular women.

Ultimately, in their fascination with the figure of the muscular woman, writers and illustrators situated her at the intersection of debates about physical form, gender identity, and sexuality in Victorian culture. She was viewed by some commentators as a disruptive and dangerous outlier because of her transgressive body and perceived by others as vital to British national progress, thus demonstrating both the interpretive complexities she raised, the discomfort and indecisiveness she caused within a culture that prided itself on being able to categorize and make judgments, and the extent to which the notion of womanhood had become destabilized. Furthermore, because of her unconventional configuration of contrasting feminine and masculine features, she

150 provided an ideal experimental “text” from which sensation and New Woman fiction writers modeled their own hybrid, transgressive narratives and investigated the boundaries of gender and class. It is through the figure of the muscular woman that we can see how parallel transgressions of gender and genre exposed the tensions and contradictions in the Victorian ideals that underpinned the physical culture movement.

However, considering the variance in reactions to her transgressive body reveals her potential for opening dialogues on the nature of physical difference and the possible revision of social codes—dialogues that are still relevant today.

151

Appendix

Figure 1: “A Muscular Maiden.” (The Girl of the Period Miscellany, 1869)

Figure 2: “Athletic Girls of the Period.” (The Girl of the Period Miscellany, 1869)

152

Figure 3: “Hygienic Excess.”(Punch, 1879)

Figure 4: “The ‘Niobe of Nations.’” (Punch, 1870)

153

Figure 5: “The Modern Andromeda: Will She Be Released?” (Fun, 1870)

Figure 6: “Training Female Pugilists.” (The Illustrated Police News, 1872)

154

Figure 7: “The Ascent of Leona Dare from a Baloon [sic] at the C. Palace” (The

Illustrated Police News, 1888)

Figure 8: “Exciting Scene at a Menagerie” (The Illustrated Police News, 1888)

155

Figure 9: “A Fair Maiden Soundly Thrashes a Man Who Has Made Himself

Objectionable to Her Father.” (The Illustrated Police News, 1898).

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