MIAMI UNIVERSITY the Graduate School Certificate for Approving The

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MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

Erin Douglas

Candidate for the Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

______Director Dr. Madelyn M. Detloff

______Reader Dr. Kathleen N. Johnson

______Reader Dr. Stefanie Kyle Dunning

______Graduate School Representative Dr. Ronald Paul Becker

ABSTRACT

QUEER MAKINGS OF FEMININITIES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

by Erin Douglas

My dissertation explores the intersections of femininities and sexualities and how these intersections are made to appear natural and normal. My historical charting of queering femininities begins with different key historical and discursive moments in twentieth- century British Culture that shape how we now think about femininity. Femininity becomes a key area of contestation in early twentieth-century Britain, as Britain attempts to redefine femininity with the emergence of categories of lesbian sexuality. Because of this cultural shift in how femininity and sexuality are conceptualized, I analyze how different modernists and contemporary British literatures represent a historical trajectory of femme femininities and how this literature offers us a space to queer femininity. My dissertation project theorizes the resistant and transformative possibilities of the pleasures of femme femininities. My goals for this project are to question damaging and destructive assumptions about femininity, and then to show pleasurable resistant possibilities of queer makings of femininities to force people to confront, question, be aware, and change their preconceptions.

As my dissertation traces the intersections of femininity, lesbian sexuality, and heteronormativity, it also reclaims femininities as queer, positive, optimistic, and resistant. To reclaim femininity, I show how various queer narratives challenge dominant definitions of femininity by offering us scripts and performances of pleasurable, critical, and political femme femininities. In other words, not only do I explore what femininity might do for the individual who reclaims it, but I also explore how this reclamation can enhance all of our lives. I also reassert femmes as agents of pleasure, political, and princesses who rescue themselves. Femmes’ performances show how dangerous and damaging a dominant understanding of femininity can be; and at the same time, they show us that we are not stuck with such scripts. Stories can be rewritten offering us new queer scripts that signify femininities and femmes as intelligent, resistant, self-sufficient, strong, powerful, and assertive. It is necessary to reclaim femininities if we hope to change how gender is perceived, performed, and lived to imagine the pleasurable possibilities of femininities.

QUEER MAKINGS OF FEMININITIES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

Erin Douglas

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2010

Director: Dr. Madelyn M. Detloff

Erin Douglas

2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures iv-v

Dedication vi

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction “Queering Femininities” 1

Chapter One “The Making of Lesbian Definitions in Twentieth Century Britain: 33 Mobilizing Desires and Pleasures of Femininity”

Chapter Two “Fairytale Femme Femininities: Queering Femininity, Queering Pleasure 68 in Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando”

Chapter Three “Feminine Spectacles of Genders, Races, Sexualities, and Imperialism 91 in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus”

Chapter Four “Femininity at War in Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch and Virginia Woolf’s 117 Between the Acts”

Chapter Five “Resisting the Surveillance of Feminine Pleasure in Caryl Churchill’s 142 Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine”

Works Cited and Consulted 182

iii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Del LeGrace Volcano’s Kath Moonan, London 2006. Femmes of Power: 20 Exploding Queer Femininities. Eds. Dahl, Ulrika, and Del LaGrace Volcano. Serpent’s Tail, 2009: page 69.

Figure 2: Del LeGrace Volcano’s Itziar Ziaga, Barcelona 2007. Femmes of Power: 23 Exploding Queer Femininities. Eds. Dahl, Ulrika, and Del LaGrace Volcano. Serpent’s Tail, 2009: pages 22, 75.

Figure 3: Del LeGrace Volcano’s Itziar Ziaga, Barcelona 2007 in Femmes of Power: 24 Exploding Queer Femininities. Eds. Dahl, Ulrika, and Del LaGrace Volcano. Serpent’s Tail, 2009: pages 22, 75.

Figure 4: Del LeGrace Volcano’s Shawna Virago @ The Lexington, San Francisco 2006. 25 Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities. Eds. Dahl, Ulrika, and Del LaGrace Volcano. Serpent’s Tail, 2009: page 166.

Figure 5: Del LeGrace Volcano’s The 3 faces of Morgana Maye, San Francisco 2006. 27 Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities. Eds. Dahl, Ulrika, and Del LaGrace Volcano. Serpent’s Tail, 2009: pages 18-19.

Figure 6: Del LeGrace Volcano’s Marla Stewart, Atlanta 2007. Femmes of Power: 29 Exploding Queer Femininities. Eds. Dahl, Ulrika, and Del LaGrace Volcano. Serpent’s Tail, 2009: page 102.

Figure 7: Del LeGrace Volcano’s Jun Wizelius, Malmö, Sweeden 2007. Femmes of Power: 68 Exploding Queer Femininities. Eds. Dahl, Ulrika, and Del LaGrace Volcano. Serpent’s Tail, 2009: page 78.

Figure 8: “Botany Lanolin,” Harper’s Bazaar 1943 75

Figure 9: “Display Ad 62.” Chicago Tribune 12 Apr. 1965 76

Figure 10: “Display Ad 41.” New York Times (1923); Mar 15, 1964 (42). 78

Figure 11: Display Ad 37.” Chicago Tribune (1963); Mar 30, 1964 (B8). 79

Figure 12: Del LaGrace’s Volcano’s Valerie Mason-John, London 2007. Femmes of Power: 91 Exploding Queer Femininities. Eds. Dahl, Ulrika, and Del LaGrace Volcano. Serpent’s Tail, 2009: page 34.

Figure 13: “Keep Your Beauty on Duty!” advertisement for Ivory Soap from 122 Procter & Gamble Co. in Woman’s Home Companion (1942).

Figure 14: “Keep Your Best Face Forward” advertisement for Bond Street Beauty 123 Preparations from Yardley of London, Inc., in McCall’s (1942)

Figure 15: “Keep Your Best Face Forward” advertisement for Bond Street Beauty 124 Preparations from Yardley of London, Inc., in New Yorker (1942)

Figure 16: “Simple Secret” advertisement for Bond Street Perfume and Beauty 125 Preparations from Yardley of London, Inc. in Mademoiselle (1942)

Figure 17: “Military Objective” advertisement for Evening in Paris Cosmetics 125 from Bourjois in Ladies Home Journal (1943)

Figure 18: “it’s new…it’s trim…it’s essential” advertisement for Permanent hair 127 wave from Elizabeth Arden in New York Sun (1942)

Figure 19: “Frankly, hew was Fascinated…” advertisement for Burnt Sugar Lipstick 129 from Elizabeth Arden in Vogue (1942)

Dedication:

To those who have the courage to perform and revel in their femininity even when at times it might be difficult to do so and to those who love, admire, and find pleasure in varieties of femme femininities for their strength, intelligence, and assurance. Particularly my dissertation is dedicated to Jenise Bauman who continually reminds and encourages me to find strength and pleasure in my femme femininity forcing the world to imagine femininity anew.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to begin by thanking Miami University’s Department of English and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program for not only their financial support, which made my graduate work and dissertation possible, but also for their intellectual support and encouragement helping me to thrive as a scholar, teacher, and person. A special thank you to the Department of English for awarding me the Academic Challenge Dissertation Fellowship, 2008-2009 supporting my dissertation endeavors. Much thanks to the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Program for fostering my intellectual growth, funding my participation in the Duke Feminist Theory Workshop, and for giving me the chance to teach WMS 201, all of which have forever changed the direction of my teaching and scholarship. To Debbie Morner, Loretta Elm, and Cathie Isaacs your support has been instrumental to my success and made my life much easier! Thank you to my dissertation committee Dr. Madelyn Detloff, Dr. Stefanie Dunning, Dr. Katie Johnson, and Dr. Ron Becker whose wonderful comments encouraged me to transform my dissertation anew. Jamie Calhoun and Susan Pelle, our dynamic trio made graduate school one of the best experiences of my life in terms of friendship, professional support, and intellectual conversations. Lynn Hall, your friendship and kindness touch my life, and your comments on my dissertation were invaluable. To Lisa Weems who pushed me through the last leg of revisions and whose intelligence, conversations, generosity, support, and queer femininity continually inspire me. Thank you to Madelyn Detloff and Susan Pelle whose conversations over the years have influenced and shaped not only my scholarship and teaching but also my life. Mad your encouragement, guidance, support, and mentorship touch my life and move me as a scholar, teacher, activist, and person. To my family, specially my parents Janet and Bob Douglas who have shown me so much love, encouragement, and support throughout my life that none of this would be possible without both of you. Finally, thank you to Jenise Bauman who makes wherever we are home. Your love, support, strength, and kindness foster me as a person as well as my scholarship. Jenise you have changed and inspired my life showing me just how precious, wonderful, happy, and beautiful everyday can be and for that I will never be able to thank you enough.

vii

Introduction:

Queer Makings of Femininities in the Twentieth Century

I. Queering Femininities

My dissertation project queers femininity. I utilize the term queer as a practice, not as an identity or to name queer femmes as such. My project does not attempt to create or essentialize a lesbian femme representation as good and conventionally feminine women as bad; instead, I analyze discursive productions of femininities paying particular attention to the historical specificity of the changing definitions of femininity in the twentieth century with the emergence of lesbianism as a category of sexuality. Much important work theorizes female masculinity in connection with late nineteenth century and early twentieth century discourses of lesbianism and visible lesbian bodies (Judith Halberstam, Esther Newton, and Laura Doan to name a few). In a similar vein, I begin my dissertation situating my project historically, exploring emerging definitions of lesbianism and lesbians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to see how femininity is thus made discursively into something different. I explore how femininity changes (more than merely meaning “not lesbian”) with budding classifications of lesbian sexuality; I challenge such assumptions, analyzing how this particular historical and discursive moment makes performativity1 and identifications of femininities anew. Chapter One of my dissertation begins investigating simultaneous discursive productions of femininities and lesbian sexuality within Britain’s legal system, sexology, and

1 Butler theorizes performativity as: “If gender is performative, then it follows that reality of gender is itself produced as an effect of the performance. Although there are norms that govern what will and will not be real, and what will and will not be intelligible, they are called into question and reiterated at the moment in which performativity begins its citational practice. One surely cites norms that already exist, but these norms can be significantly deterritorialized through the citation. They can also be exposed as nonnatural and nonnecessary when they take place in a context and through a form of embodying that defies normative expectation. What this means is that through the practice of gender performativity, we not only see how the norms that govern reality are cited but grasp one of the mechanisms by which reality is reproduced and altered in the course of that reproduction. The point about drag is not simply to produce a pleasurable and subversive spectacle but to allegorize the spectacular and consequential ways in which reality is both reproduced and contested” (Undoing Gender 218).

Freudian theories to contextualize the historical moment that the twentieth-century British literature that I analyze draws upon. In the twentieth century, a shift occurs; femininity is rewarded and valued in culture, but only in particular ways. Tensions emerge about defining and performing “correct” and “normal” femininity. I move to a study of twentieth-century British literature that textually represents queerings of definitions, performativity, and identifications of femininities. I do not attempt to identify or classify certain characters as lesbian femmes; rather, my dissertation analyzes how different characters queer femininity. My dissertation project is not so much concerned with creating or displaying queer identities as such but rather analyzing and drawing attention to queer processes of identification and performativity of femininities. In late 1920s England, visual analytics of gender take on new meanings. Sexuality becomes quantifiable and classifiable via visual codes of gender that are taken to diagnose desire. Desire is problematic, complicated, pleasurable, painful, hurtful, happy, traumatic, changing, and stagnant all tangled together. Circuits of desire continually change people, relationships, relations, people’s places in and perception of the world, life, everything. As different methods of classification emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the supposed goal is to separate, categorize, explain, pattern, and know. Yet, even these methods of classification themselves demonstrate mixture: the watcher experiencing pleasure in the desire to know, create knowledge, and otherwise; the watched experiencing pleasure, pain, indifference; and even the reversal, mingling, changing of the watcher and watched. My project reclaims femininity, signifying it anew in terms of positivity, optimism, and resistance. I want to reclaim femininity from a past and present that plague femininity with negativity. When I say a “past,” I don’t mean one group of people nor do I mean a static meaning of the “past” or history, but rather relations among past texts, memories, and our presents. I explore how twentieth-century discourses have and continue to define femininity and feminine people as bad, unintelligent, unprofessional, incompetent, lazy, entitled, passive, manipulative, pretty with no substance, apolitical, selfish, sexy, excessive, superficial, weak and in need of rescue, receptacles/vessels for

men and family lines, spendthrifts, sex objects, innocent, virginal, whore, etc. For my particular theoretical interjection, I read and show how specific narratives (fictional, visual, historical, cultural, scientific, and legal) challenge normative discourses of femininity offering scripts, citations, and performances of pleasurable, critical, and political femininities. I reclaim femininity as intelligence, resistance, self-sufficiency, strength, assertiveness. I also reassert femmes as pleasurable subjects and agents of pleasure; political agents; princesses who rescue themselves; challenging; and desiring. It is necessary to reclaim femininity from pasts and presents that suggest feminine people cannot do certain things because of their genders, which reifies ideas of natural and inherent genders, abilities, bodies, personhood, and subjectivity. Queer desire marks the femmes and femininity in the twentieth-century. A plethora of discourses about femininity and pleasure abound in the twentieth century. My dissertation focuses on the pleasures of femininity and femmes as a call, in certain ways, to “say yes to pleasure” taking Michel Foucault’s theories of bodies and pleasures into a new direction. Foucault suggests at the end of The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 that “bodies and pleasures” is not merely a saying “yes to sex” because: We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim— through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for this counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures. (157) I suggest that experiencing, advocating, narrativizing, and even discursively producing narratives of feminine pleasure become necessary to battle the negative associations and significations of femininity with pleasure. When I call for the need to say “yes to pleasure,” it is not a call for a certain kind of pleasure or sex. As Foucault suggests, the desire for sex and a particular type of sex act is part of normative definitions,

deployments, and enforcements of sexuality (The History of Sexuality 156). In fact, we actually don’t know all the ways femmes experience and live pleasure or how queer makings of feminine pleasure can change and challenge how we think about pleasure. Pleasure comes out of discourses of femininity and queer makings of femininities re-inscribe and foreground pleasure without men. Much of the time genders and sexualities are figured and theorized about in terms of discrimination and surveillance, instead I study genders and sexualities as pleasurable. Madelyn Detloff asks us to consider a theoretical framework that “imagines,” “….a future for non-normative masculinities that are more filled with gender pleasing than gender policing” (“Gender Please” 101). Detloff theorizes gender in terms of “pleasing” and not “policing” to investigate the pleasures of genders and sexualities similar to Robyn Wiegman’s theorization of our “desire for gender” and how our erotic desires for and pleasure in other people’s genders “continue to make [our] own” (Wiegman, “The Desire” 225). I find wonderful possibilities in conceptualizing gender and how gender works in terms of desires, pleasures, and how they can “make” each other. Genders, desires, sexualities, and pleasures are mobile. Similar to Detloff and Wiegman, I reclaim femininity as something positive with wonderful and pleasurable opportunities for re-signification. I purposely theorize femininity in terms of positivity to reclaim femininity from a past that attempted to classify it as negative and always already about someone else’s pleasure. As we shift the focus to gender pleasure, the ways that conceptualize gender, sexuality, and their relations beside each other changes. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick theorizes that, “Beside is an interesting preposition also because there’s nothing very dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them. . . . Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations” (Sedgwick, Touching 8). Sedgwick’s breaks binary modes of thinking with her term beside because beside does not indicate any predetermined relation or relationship. For example, gender and sexuality can exist beside each other, which in no way means that they determine each

other. Beside offers the freedom of theorizing the relations among different genders and sexualities in terms of pleasure, pain, power, attraction, and shame. My dissertation explores femme femininity and female masculinity beside each other not only because they are invented together historically, theoretically, and in twentieth-century British literature, but also this erotic coupling represents the pleasurable play of genders and sexualities. Further, the pleasure created between queer femininity and female masculinity work to resist heteronormative definitions of sexuality, gender, and their interactions. 2 Similarly to Sedgwick, Judith Butler “complicate[s]” the “relation[s]” “between gender and sexuality” disrupting how we conceptualize desire relations by going beyond the idea that, “gender is merely instrumental to sexuality” (Undoing Gender 143-144). Genders and sexualities connect, overlap, and inform each other. Butler wants to break apart the idea that, “where gender crossing constitutes, in part, the condition of eroticism itself” (Undoing Gender 142). Here Butler critiques the idea that performing an alternative gender translates into one’s sexuality. This project engages with Butler’s articulations to investigate the possibilities of visually embodied performances of femininity that queer recognition and desire relations. For femininity, “gender crossing” might not be “the condition for eroticism;” instead, femmes can enact other resistant forms of queer performativity and identifications.

2 Livingston proposes that: “Femme is femininity taken back from being the object of the masculine gaze. I refuse to be confined, defined by masculinity. I am more than masculinity’s opposite, more than traditional femininity’s complement. Femme is subject: me writing about femininity, about femme, as the expert on my gender identity. In this way, femme transgresses expectations of women, but also expectations of femininity. We speak. We are both noun and verb” (Livingston 25).

II. Historicizing Femme Resistance: Despite knowing Una, Natalie Barney, and others like them, Hall was unable to publically articulate—perhaps to believe in—the persona of a real lesbian who did not feel somehow male. If sexual desire is masculine, and if the feminine woman wants to attract only men, then the womanly lesbian cannot logically exist. Mary’s real story has yet to be told (Newton 188).

The femme voice is underrepresented in historical records, though markings of her presence abound….Yet to others, the femme woman has been the most ambiguous figure in lesbian history; she is often described as the nonlesbian lesbian, the duped wife of the passing woman, the lesbian who marries….If the butch deconstructs gender, the femme constructs gender. She puts together her own special ingredients for what it is to be a ‘woman,’ and identity with which she can live and love (Nestle, “Flamboyance and Fortitude” 15-16).

Radclyffe Hall published her famous novel The Well of Loneliness (The Well) in 1928, which quickly became canonized as one of the first lesbian novels in Britain. Hall became an iconic lesbian with her indecency trial that shortly follows the publication of her novel. The Well tells the story of Stephen as s/he struggles with hir masculinity and desire for women. The relationship between Stephen and hir partner Mary becomes an iconic representation of a lesbian relationship, with Stephen as the masculine partner and Mary the feminine partner. Mary’s comes to represent an image/icon of the femme lesbian and her plights, as Joan Nestle suggests “she is often described as the nonlesbian lesbian, the duped wife of the passing woman, the lesbian who marries” (Nestle’s emphasis, “Flamboyance and Fortitude” 15-16). Mary is the iconic femme lesbian in Radclyffe Hall’s canonical novel The Well of Loneliness (Hall), the novel and trial, which made Hall the face of lesbianism (1928). 3 Nestle notes how even though there have not been thorough investigations of femmes in history, that “markings of her presence abound” (“Flamboyance and Fortitude” 15-16). I begin with Esther Newton’s comment that femme “stor[ies have] yet to be told” because it works as a call to action

3 Nestle argues that: “Why Radclyffe Hall with this steadfast femme woman by her side could not portray the same type of woman in her lesbian novel is a topic that needs further exploration. Troubridge’s cry, ‘I am sick of ambiguities,’ could become a femme’s motto” (Nestle, “The Femme Question” 144).

for femme stories and theorizations (188). My hope is to tell Mary’s, along with other femmes’, stories differently. Stephen ends her and Mary’s relationship and forces Mary to leave, hoping she will opt into heteronormativity and an ‘easier’ life with Martin. Stephen’s decision has nothing to do with desires that Mary herself articulates; instead, Stephen’s decision relies on her assumptions that Mary would face far less discrimination living as a heterosexual woman with a husband than she would as a lesbian. Mary has this option of heterosexuality according to Stephen, because she is visually coded as feminine. Here Stephen idealizes heteronormativity assuming heterosexuality would provide an easier life for feminine women than lesbianism. This assumption disregards the discrimination that heterosexual women must constantly endure within heteronormativity and ignores femmes’ desires, sexual and otherwise. As Stephen narrates hir story, s/he represents Mary’s femininity in terms of Christain idealizations and iconizations of femininity. Beryl Schlossman notes that Modernism historically situates feminine icons as, “two types of feminine objects, virginal and womanly (sensual, loving, and maternal)” and she goes onto theorize that “Mary the Virgin mother is a uniquely idealized feminine object of Christendom and the highest lady addressed by the poetic discourses of courtly love and fin’amor….Her role is passive, maternal, and ancillary; her femininity is defined by Christian doctrine in precisely these terms” (22, 188).4 In certain ways, Stephen turns Mary into this “idealized feminine object” as she makes certain life choices for Mary as if Mary is not a subject in her own right. Instead, Mary becomes a “feminine object” to be exchanged between Stephen and Martin. Stephen looks at Mary as “passive,” dependent, and in need of protecting precisely because of her femininity. The last image in The Well is of Stephen as a supposed martyr giving up her love, desire, passion, and partner so that Mary can enter into the blissful, happily ever after, Christian, and normative heterosexual

4 According to Schlossman, different male modernists (for example, Yeats and Joyce) as well as psychoanalysis (i.e. Freud) define femininity as either “virginal,” “womanly,” or both simultaneously (22, 188).

couple. In this final scene, Stephen watches from her window above as Mary leaves and Martin approaches to meet and console Mary (a meeting that Stephen herself has set up). But what does Mary desire? Does Mary’s femininity allow her to opt into heterosexuality? What does this assumption that femmes can and should be coerced into heteronormativity because of their femininity suggest about how we think about lesbian sexuality, heterosexuality, heteronormativity, femininity, and their intersections? My goals in this dissertation are to: (1) investigate how femininity and definitions of lesbian sexuality intersect, (2) explore how femininity actually becomes iconic (both ideas of “normal” and “abnormal” femininity) in the twentieth century (3) question how analytics of vision and visibility inform how we think about and look at femininity, and (4) challenge the normative perceptions and connections of femininity and pleasure. What if we look for feminine pleasure in early twentieth-century discourses of sexuality? What would we find and what do these representations do culturally? How is femininity disidentificatory, resistant, and political performative? The fairytale image of feminine women obtaining their “happily ever after” within heteronormativity is just that – a fairytale, a myth. I’m not suggesting that some feminine heterosexual women don’t have happy lives – some undoubtedly do. I am, however, suggesting that the idea that feminine women automatically obtain safety, security, happiness, and a life free of discrimination within heterosexual relationships, marriages, and heteronormativity is a fairytale and something that feminism and feminist writers have argued for centuries. How would Virginia Woolf would respond to Stephen’s portrayal of Mary and femininity considering that Woolf’s novel Orlando (published the same year as The Well) complicates and challenges normative ideas of femininity as Orlando demonstrates the plights and struggles women face directly as a result of normative discourses of femininity? Also, Woolf critiques norms of femininity that encourage and perpetuate heteronormativity (Woolf, AROO; Woolf, TG). Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit directly responds to The Well and Stephen’s assumptions when heteronormativity is violently enforced upon the main character, Jeanette. Further, Winterson addresses the fairytale of heteronormative

femininity when the Prince, in her subplot, has the ‘perfect’ woman’s head cut off because she won’t marry him (she refuses the Princess fairytale script of femininity and thus dies and in a very Salomé-like fashion). I begin contextualizing a timeline of queering femininity with Hall’s The Well because the novel and Hall work as icons of gender, sexuality, and their connections in the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, definitions of femininity intertwine with definitions of sexuality (erotic relationships, romantic relationships, and even the relationship between femininity and the British Nation/Empire). In much of the contemporary British literature that I focus on Modernism becomes a cited icon of sorts. Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters, Angela Carter, and Caryl Churchill resist ideas that feminine women can only experience pleasure in one “correct” way, signify beauty and unintelligence, merely exist as an object in heteronormative desire relations, and must be victims in need of rescue. Angela Carter in Nights at the Circus turns her main character Fevvers into an icon, citing W.B. Yeats “Leda and the Swan” while questioning, “Is she fiction or fact?” (Carter, Nights 127). Orlando in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando becomes an icon within the text and then within Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook. The icon of the Princess is interrogated in Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Winterson’s The PowerBook and Sexing the Cherry. Also, Sarah Waters cites Radclyffe Hall’s iconic text The Well and uses iconic materials of femininity (makeup, mirrors). Brenda Silver’s book Virginia Woolf Icon theorizes how the icon of Woolf works: Occurring across the cultural terrain, whether in academic discourses, the intellectual media, or mass/popular culture, the proliferation of Virginia Woolfs has transformed the writer into a powerful and powerfully contested cultural icon, whose name, face, and authority are persistently claimed or disclaimed in debates about art, politics, sexuality, gender, class, the ‘canon,’ fashion, feminism, race, and anger. The debates themselves have varied, and they have generated often radically conflicting versions of ‘Virginia Woolf,’ who must be understood in this

context as an image or representation, under erasure, between quotation marks. (Silver 3) Silver analyzes how Woolf ceases to be a person or writer as she actually becomes an icon, a representation, an idea, feelings, and even a marketable commodity. Similarly to Woolf, the icon of Hall and of The Well come to represent a key historical moment that signifies the emergence of lesbian sexuality as a visibly classifiable object for analysis. The idea that femmes would have it easier if they were with men persisted in the 1950s- 1990s as we can investigate reminants of such assumptions and anxieties in Joan Nestle’s The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader. Nestle’s anthology charts the 1950s femme-butch scene, femme-butch responses to 1970s lesbian feminism, and asserts the erotic power and politics of femmes. The Persistent Desire contextualizes key historical moments a thriving 1950s butch/femme lesbian scene which queers femininities emphasizing the power, erotics, and strength of femininities both in terms of femmes and drag queens. Also, Persistent Desire directly responds to 1970s lesbian feminism that attempted to frame femmes as apolitical, heteronormative, and not good lesbians. Included within The Persistent Desire is one of Pat Califia’s earlier poems “Diagnostic tests,” Califia writes: And you can tell she’s a femme Because she makes you cry When you can’t give her everything, You imagine she wants That a man could give her. (484) Califia poem situates and describes the problematic feelings associated with the fear that in the 1950s butches could not give femmes the same type of security as men could precisely because of homophobia and heterosexual privilege. The title of the poem “Diagnostic tests” suggests that markers of femme-ness and butch-ness work as a “diagnostic test.” Even though this section of Califia’s poem starts with “And you can tell she’s a femme,” Califia then switches to how butches “imagine” they “can’t give” femmes what “a man could give her.” More than “diagnosing” femmes or even butches,

this stanza references the cultural idea that a man could “give” a femme more than a butch, or more than she could give herself. Such “imaginings” of femmes and what “men could give” them motions to a historical moment that re-inscribes heteronormativity and femininity’s placement within it. These cultural assumptions that femmes could decide to be heterosexual, that they would want to, and that they would be offered more by “men,” reinforce traditional gender ideologies that suggest that gender, sex, desire, and sexuality determine each other. Much important work has been done on femme representation in lesbian and queer history and theory. In terms of 1970s lesbian-feminism alone, there is a forty-year history discussing femme performativity. If Freudian theories of “normal femininity,” sexology’s theories of female inversion, some early twentieth-century British literature, and 1920s court trials are part of such investigations of femme history, we have over a hundred years of discourses of queerings of femininities to explore. To a large extent, scholars of queer femininity blame 1970s lesbian feminism for devaluing femininity and feminine accessories. However, lesbian feminism is not only to blame; instead, there is a larger devaluing of femininity that happens culturally and discursively in the twentieth century. We often want to point fingers at those easiest and closest to us (for example 1970s lesbian feminists) rather than at a larger discursive problem that seems impossible to battle and change. So, sometimes we want to believe we can pinpoint the “source” of the devaluing of femininity. I show that there isn’t “one” source of femme and feminine oppression and discrimination; that instead, it surrounds us. We can critique 1970s lesbian feminism for how they constructed femmes and femininity, but we must keep in mind that the lesbian feminism of the 1970s was part of larger cultural discourses that situated femininity in similar ways and grew out of discourses that had already been produced. Of course we can critique lesbian feminism for suggesting that femmes were apolitical and for making femmes and butches feel like they couldn't be part of the lesbian feminist movement, but we should also attempt to understand their goals and

accomplishments historically, politically, and culturally.5 Particularly, 1970s lesbian- feminism insisted that femmes were not really lesbians or feminists because of their femininity. For example, lesbian feminists suggested that wearing makeup negated feminist performance and politics (particularly lipstick with the idea that “lipstick lesbians” were apolitical). This lesbian-feminist logic suggested femmes exhibited “false consciousness” and were wearing and buying the tools of the oppressors.6 Joan Nestle suggests that femmes were the “lavender lace menace” of 1970s lesbian feminism, similar to how lesbians were the “lavender menace” of second wave feminism (“Flamboyance and Fortitude” 18). 7 Largely, 1970s situates femme femininity as “assimilation,” “style over substance,” and being apolitical. For example Arlene Stein writes in The Persistent Desire, “What does it mean that often the most visible players in our communities today are lipstick lesbians, given that lesbian communities are more fragmented, that it’s harder to scrounge for a living, and that – for many women – political involvements fail to provide the sort of personal sustenance they once did? The rise of femme and the new ambiguity of lesbian style could be interpreted as a sign of retrenchment. It could be a argued that lifestyle lesbianism promotes assimilation over separation, and style over substance, and is a sign of our growing conservatism” (436). Stein’s comments demonstrate how femininity is made into something that is not taken seriously and instead is signified as stylish, frivolousness, and apolitical (ignoring the fact of how

5 Also, some of lesbian feminism’s projects are similar to the goals of queer femininity studies. For example, both projects deconstruct the necessary connection between “women” and “femininity” and illustrate how within some discourses these two terms become interchangeable (femininity as enforced on women). 6 In response to lesbian-feminist ideas that “….that high heels bound women’s feet. Lipstick was a sign that women did not consider themselves beautiful and must change themselves, and it simultaneously bound women to the market as excessive capitalist consumers. Skirts and tight clothing not only made women sex objects for men, but also were a source of sexual vulnerability to men,” Scholars such as Melanie Maltry and Kristin Tucker show us how, “. . . the femme was stripped not only of her identity, but of any understanding of her identity as subversive” (93-94). 7 Nestle suggests that, “Femmes are the Lavender Lace Menace within our community. For my femme sisters – the queerest of the queer, as one contributor says – this book is only the beginning” (“Flamboyance and Fortitude” 18).

fashion and style have been and are very political). Not surprisingly Nestle disputes this lesbian feminist logic: If we dress to please ourselves and the other women to whom we want to announce our desire, we are called traitors by many of our own community, because we seem to be wearing the clothes of the enemy. Makeup, high heels, skirts, revealing clothes, even certain ways of holding the body are read as capitulation to patriarchal control of women’s bodies. An accurate critique, if a woman feels uncomfortable or is forced to present herself this way, but this is not what I am doing when I feel sexually powerful and want to share it with other women. Femmes are women who have made choices, but we need to be able to read between the cultural lines to appreciate their strength. Lesbians should be mistresses of discrepancies, knowing that resistance lies in the change of context. (Nestle, “The Femme Question” 141) Nestle points out that cultural signs of femininity are not always means of “patriarchal control” over “women’s bodies;” instead, when not forced upon women, “makeup, high heels, skirts, revealing clothes, even certain ways of holding the body” can be very “sexually powerful” and very queer. Femininity becomes something to “share” rather than something to be enforced. Nestle goes onto demonstrate that femmes performing excessive femininity made it impossible for butch femme couples to pass: “In fact, the more extremely femme she was, the more obvious was their lesbianism and the more street danger they faced” (Nestle, “The Femme Question” 142). Here femme performance actually visually marks a femme-butch couple as lesbian within Nestle’s articulations. The more excessive the performance of femme femininity, the more visible the femme-butch couple was and “danger they faced.” Altering the logic that the butch marks the femme as lesbian; instead, Nestle emphasizes how the more feminine the femme, the more “danger they faced” as anyone who has ever read Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues can attest to (Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues).

For femmes, makeup does not play a part in or signify heteronormativity; rather, it works as pleasure and allows one to “arm” oneself against the world. Feminine accessories can be utilized to access queer performances and pleasures. Davis argues that femmes are “the queerest of the queer” in The Persistent Desire: Women who look and act like girls and who desire girls. We’re just the queerest of the queers. It makes me laugh, but it also makes me feel so different. For butches, their masculinity makes them seem more ‘normal.’ We’re kind of like those women in the ‘lesbian’ porn movies – long hair, lipstick – except we’re real. We desire everything about our butches – even their womanness. I think that’s pretty queer. (“Epilogue, nine years later” 270) As Davis advocates the queerness of femmes, she employs the rhetoric that traditionally situates femmes as “un-real” lesbians suggesting that there is something very queer about feminine women who desire other women and I would add other queer masculinities. Davis argues against those who suggest femmes are apolitical and not really lesbians because of their “lipstick” and femininity. The debate that Davis enters into says that femmes are heteronormative because they perform femininity (and within this debate femininity means conventional, traditional, oppressed, false consciousness). Davis says that femmes who desire butches desire both their masculinity and their “womanness.” Thus what makes femmes queer works twofold for Davis: (1) feminine women desiring other women (this defies the logic that female inverts are male souls trapped in female bodies and therefore desire feminine women and so the story goes symbolical heteronormativity) and (2) how her femme’s desire actually plays out. Part of Davis’ reasoning relies on how femmes break binary ideas of sex via desire because femmes are attracted to masculinity, not attached to a bio-male8 body and in fact are rather indifferent

8 I use the term “bio-male” to reference biologically born male body to point out how femmes erotic desire for trans men, butches, and/or other femmes queers femininity and the heteronormativity of how desire relations are thought about.

to men and heterosexual desire.9 As Nestle points out, dialoguing with Madeline Davis in Persistent Desire, “Thus femmes became the victims of a double dismissal: in the past they did not appear culturally different enough from heterosexual women to be seen as breaking gender taboos, and today they do not appear feminist enough, even in their historical context, to merit attention or respect for being ground-breaking women” (Nestle, “The Femme Question” 140). Here, Nestle asserts that lesbian-feminists thought that femmes were not different enough from heterosexual women because both performed femininity.10 In the 1990s, identity politics was a necessary form of resistance allowing femmes and butches to claim and see themselves in lesbian definitions, history, and as “authentic” lesbians as a way to challenge 1970s lesbian feminism.11 Nestle’s The Persistant Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (1992) and Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Kennedy’s Boots of Leather Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (1993) along with many other texts were published to show the importance of femme-butch couples, desires, peoples, and genders to emerging lesbian communities, cultures, and politics in the 1950s. Later, conversations emerge about butch/femme visibility such as Femme/Butch: New Considerations of the Way We Want to Go edited by Michelle Gibson and Deborah Meem (2002), Brazen Femmes: Queering Femininity (2003) edited by Cholë Brushwood Rose and Anna Camilleri, Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender edited by Sally R. Munt & Cherry Smyth (1999), and Femme: Feminists, Lesbians and Bad Girls edited by Laura

9 Maltry and Tucker argue: “The femme, though sometimes appearing as a heterosexual woman, is really no ‘woman’ at all. She is, instead, a body signifying queer acts from a queer space” (Maltry and Tucker 95). 10 Bolen says, “In the past, I felt invisible as a lesbian because I didn’t ‘look’ like one. I fell victim, as have countless others, to the ridiculous notion that cultural signifiers of femininity represent heterosexuality and therefore do not and could not translate as lesbian. According to this ‘logic,’ variations of masculinity and/or androgyny equaled lesbian; variations of femininity, particularly of the flagrant variety, were considered suspect, oppressive, and definitely not queer. Reactions to my femininity have often been negative; in lesbian bars, clubs, and some circles, my femininity has caused me to be questioned, snubbed, and sometimes harassed. As I’ve gone around the queer block, however, I’ve learned that this reaction is not universal but contingent, at least in part, on the racial and class makeup of the community” (Bolen 58). 11 See my previous work on femme invisibility Femme Fem(me)ininities: A Performative Queering.

Harris and Elizabeth Crocker (1997). Contemporary theorists discussing femme visibility also began to re-signify femme femininity. To build off of these previous conversations, I explore the discourses of femme femininity and how they work.12 This antagonism toward femmes was about their performance of femme femininity and their queer desire for masculinity. In other words, this antagonism was about femme-butch forms of erotic desires. Just as femmes were critiqued for supposedly being too like heterosexual women, butches were criticized for wanting to be like men. 13 Both historically and contemporarily, femmes are angered by lesbian-feminism because of lesbian feminism’s dismissal of femmes. Lyndall MacCowan discusses her anger even though at the same time she acknowledges how lesbian feminism impacted and made positive changes within feminism and women’s lives: Indeed, I’m not sure I’ve the right to be angry, though I am anyway. And what I’m angry at is feminism, specifically lesbian-feminism, despite its being a movement whose benefits I can name and touch, and whose philosophy has shaped my entire adult life and the history of my generation. I am angry because its message has been plain these past two decades: as a lesbian who is femme, I’m not considered worthy of liberation. (302) Lesbian feminism may have offered women the opportunity not to wear high heels and lipstick and voiced how sometimes femininity can be enforced oppressively upon

12 Sally Munt describes the conversation of visibility/invisibility politics, “Many of our contributors are centrally concerned with the visibility issue, historically because of the conjunctions between butchness as the visual sign of lesbianism, or contrarily, femmeness as erased through being read as an invisible secret. Visibility and non-visibility are linked to issues of pride and shame, and to the ambivalence with which our desires inhabit the symbolic realm of representation” (Munt and Smyth 10). 13 “You were banished too, to another land, with your own gender, and yet forced apart from the women you loved as much as you tried to love yourself. For more than twenty years I have lived on this lonely shore, wondering what became of you. Did you wash off your Saturday-night makeup in shame? Did you burn in anger when women said, ‘If I wanted a man, I’d be with a real one’?....Are you in a lesbian bar looking out of the corner of your eye for the butchest woman in the room?” (Feinberg, “Letter” 107). “When did we get separated in life, sweet warrior woman?” (Feinberg, “Letter to a fifties femme from a stone butch”).

women, but the political movement did not then allow for the possibility that high heels and lipstick can be both oppressive and very pleasurable. As many femmes and heterosexual women experience discrimination based on their femininity, they are painfully aware that feminine people, whether queer or not, do not occupy a position of privilege. As Brook Bolen points out in her contemporary autobiographical account of her own femininity in Visible: A Femmethology: Similarly, my comely mother’s intellect and competent demeanor were often questioned; the fact that she was neither stupid nor a shrinking violet meant the outside world frequently did not quite know how to deal with her. I saw her navigate many interactions by downplaying her intelligence; doing so made her appear more deferential and less threatening. My mother’s beauty and brains were ostensibly incongruous. The same was true of my femininity and powerlifting. False dichotomies meant neither of us were able to present our whole selves openly. (57)14 Bolen discusses how her mother’s femininity, beauty, and intelligence were seen as incongruous, just as Bolen’s “femininity and powerlifting.” Bolen’s mother’s participation within the heterosexual couple, the iconic Southern Belle representation of femininity and heteronormativity, does not grant her an easier life with less discrimination. Within conventional ideas of femininity, feminine people cannot be simultaneously pretty, intelligent, and strong. Thus, within this traditional gendered framework, femininity means stupidity, naivety, and physical weakness.15 Although

14 Stelly theorizes femme as, “I used to define femme as ‘intentional, performative femininity,’ and although I still recognize this definition as true, I am also aware that not everything about me is intentional or performative. Yes, I am aware of the ways in which I intentionally ‘do’ femininity, but why do I do femininity in the first place? Not every femme mannerism of mine is intentional or conscious. I don’t fight ‘em, but I didn’t necessarily choose them either. Sometimes, I have to admit that it’s not always about deconstructing or reconstructing or subverting the dominant paradigm: I just really like the way skirts feel swishing around my legs or the feeling of my eyelashes heavy with mascara. I’m a girly girl, plain and simple. Oh, but it was always so delightfully queer to be such a girly girl…” (Stelly 22). 15 Livingston discusses normative constructions of femininity: “If gender is constructed, why do we still associate feelings with femininity and femininity with weakness? From this angle, this picture is more complicated than either society or biology, gender as both constructed and

Bolen undoubtedly faces homophobic and sexist discrimination as a femme, she finds pleasure within her “creation” of queer femininity: Perhaps principally, I feel empowered because of the pleasure I derive from its creation. When I am getting dressed up for a date or doing my makeup and nails, I am saturating myself with simple feminine joys. I enjoy these activities not only for the indulgent delight I feel from them, but from the connection I feel to countless femmes before me, including my mother, who utilized the powerfully transformative powers of makeup, perfume, and clothing. (61) Femininity here is not about reinforcing heteronormativity; rather, Bolen “saturat[es] myself with feminine joys.” “Getting dressed up” and “putting on makeup,” instead, offer Bolen pleasure, delight, and connections with past femmes. Bolen describes her femininity as citation with a difference critiquing gender as biologically determined or essential. Thus within Bolen’s articulations, femininity is not a conduit for heterosexual male desire nor does Bolen suggest that her femininity would allow her to opt into heterosexuality or that she even desire to. Rather, Bolen’s femininity and queer desire are interwoven. Bolen can “indulge in” “feminine” “pleasures” and “joy” precisely because of her queering of femininity. My dissertation challenges how femininity has been historically and scientifically classified by its lack of desire. Sometimes people mistakenly assume that butch means traditionally masculine and femme traditionally feminine, but butch/femme interactions are shaped by gender play/desire. As Nestle says, “[i]n the past, the butch has been labeled too simplistically the masculine partner and the femme her feminine counterpart. This labeling forgets two women who have developed their styles for specific erotic, emotional, and social reasons” (“The Femme Question” 138). Wrongly and unjustly, people chastise others based on ideas of “correct” pleasures, gender performances, and sex acts. Specifically, I focus on heterosexual men criticizing women for how they embodied….I hear my mother’s voice on why I can’t possibly be queer, ‘But you wore dresses! You played Barbie until you were twelve,’ as if gender and sexuality are synonymous, as if sex and gender are dichotomies, manageable, finite options, enough” (Livingston 24).

experience pleasure, women criticizing other women, and even lesbians criticizing other lesbians. To people who don’t desire and/or perform a queer femininity, it signals vanity, frivolousness, normativity, wanting to pass, unintelligence, being non-critical, being apolitical, false consciousness, hedonist, diva, sexually selfish and non-reciprocal (a bad sexual partner i.e. un-pleasure), not really being a lesbian, etc. Some of these ideas often contradict each other. On the one hand, femmes signal un-pleasure (the viewer assumes that the femme won’t have sex with her in the way that she wants to have sex); on the other hand, the femme comes to represent sex and violence with her seductive clothing and the idea of her having passionate and at times rough sex with her butch partner (her blood red lipstick and nail polish begs certain inquiries, visions/images of desires, fantasies). This cultural logic suggests that there is a correct way to “be a lesbian” and even to have lesbian sex.16 I would then add to Nestle’s assertion that “resistance lies in the change of context” (Nestle, “The Femme Question” 141).17 This move suggests that femmes take accessories of femininity that have traditionally been scripted with shame, surveillance, and oppression and make them into something their own. This fem(me)inine remaking offers us scripts and performances that visually point out discrimination and find pleasure in high heels, lipstick, purses, mirrors, and so on (Nestle, “The Femme Question” 141). High heels become more than an accessory to Jennifer Clare Kofi-Bruce in Visible: A Femmethology when she describes how: “These high heels are my running shoes, and I

16 Austin reminds us: “My femme-ininity does not make me victimized. I have a choice in what I look like and who fucks me” (Austin 364). Nestle focuses on how femmes create spaces: “Joan: ‘I am trying to say that as femmes we found a way to create a sexual space for ourselves that made us different from the traditional woman and yet let us honor our women selves. We exiled ourselves from one land but created another’” (Davis, Madeline, Nestle, and Hollibaugh 267). 17 This is in reference to the previous blocked quotation from Nestle a few pages earlier that: “If we dress to please ourselves and the other women to whom we want to announce our desire, we are called traitors by many of our own community, because we seem to be wearing the clothes of the enemy. Makeup, high heels, skirts, revealing clothes, even certain ways of holding the body are read as capitulation to patriarchal control of women’s bodies. An accurate critique, if a woman feels uncomfortable or is forced to present herself this way, but this is not what I am doing when I feel sexually powerful and want to share it with other women. Femmes are women who have made choices, but we need to be able to read between the cultural lines to appreciate their strength. Lesbians should be mistresses of discrepancies, knowing that resistance lies in the change of context” (Nestle, “The Femme Question” 141).

can use them to walk all over anyone making assumptions about me” (Kofi-Bruce 56). The spectators viewing Kofi-Bruce’s femme performance probably have Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots are Made From Walking” playing in their heads as they watch her walk all over heteronormative assumptions about femininity and politics (Sinatra “These Boots”).18 III. Visualzing Femme Queerings

Figure 2: Kath Moonan, London 2006, Del LeGrace Volcano (Dahl and Volcano 69)

18 Istar reminds us that femme femininity: “It is not, however, a lack of strength, this femmeness, as any butch can tell you. A friend of mine who truly loves femmes describes femmes as soft, pretty women who will break a bottle over your head if you cross them” (Istar 383). Gomez describes femme femininity as very political: “The tension of where the unexpected comes together is what makes being a lesbian, and being femme, interesting. It is also what makes being lesbian a political act. That spilling over into categories women were not meant to occupy is the transgressive behaviour that can break down the barriers to personal and political liberation” (Gomez 106).

Del LeGrace Volcano’s photograph, Kath Moonan, London 2006, fabulously situates the femme within a multitude of volumes of queer and lesbian theories, studies, and histories. Kath Moonan rests her arms on copies of Joan Nestle’s The Persistent Desire and A Restricted Country, Pat Califia’s Sex Changes and Public Sex, Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity, Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter, Teresa De Lauretius’ The Practice of Love, Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body, Leslie Feinberg’s Transliberation and Stone Butch Blues, Sally Munt’s butch/femme: inside lesbian gender, etc. Moonan rests her arms on these books upon books and places herself in front of the stacks of books. Moonan creates a place for herself within the pile of books and a past that has not recognized femmes as inhabiting lesbian history. This photographic performance is very reminiscent of Angela Carter’s novel Nights at the Circus, which depicts the turn of the twentieth century with Fevvers, Nights’ main character, who is half-bird and half-woman. Fevvers says that, “‘You mustn’t believe what you read in the papers!’ Fevvers rewrites and performs the history and narrative of the “New Woman” for the “New Century,” (the twentieth-century), as does Moonan with her positioning in front of the books upon books (Carter, Nights 294). Referring to herself as a “bird” rather than “femme,” Kath Moonan recuperates and queers the British term “bird” and as “homage” to Fevvers: I am a bird! I don’t identify as a femme primarily because it is so tied to butch and the couple hegemony. Bird is more ambivalent and perhaps can break down this binary? And why do we need American terms when we have our own?....We are incubated in beauty salons and hatched in hairdressers! It’s also a homage to one of my heroines, Angela Carter and to Fevvers in Nights at the Circus. ‘Is she a woman or is she a monster?’ ‘Is she fact or is she fiction?’….I like using a non-human term, inspired by Donna Haraway, it’s about affinities between feathered and non-feathered birds and creating loose alliances between those who wear lipstick and feathers and those who don’t. (Dahl and Volcano 68, 70)

Moonan’s use of “bird” resists the Americanization of lesbian identity and attempts to challenge the couple form of butch/femme. “Couple hegemony” re-inscribes the heteronormative idea that everyone must be or should aspire to coupled monogamy. Opting for a non-human term such as “bird” illustrates that femininity has become something other than human in twentieth-century culture. In Carter’s Nights, other characters and discourses continually question Fevvers’ human status “Is she fact or is she fiction?” (Carter, Nights 147). Carter’s question is raised by femmes uniting Moonan’s use of the term “bird” with “femme.” Femme becomes a discursive product and icon rather than a feminine person per se – femme becomes Moonan’s performance and the books/scripts she inserts herself into. When I use the term femme, I mean feminine people who perform, enact, script queer femininity. At times I refer to femme lesbians, but I am in no way limiting my use of the term to femme lesbians. Femmes can be queer feminine lesbians, MTFs, drag queens, bisexual women, gay men, straight women who queer up their performances and critiques of conventional femininity.19 Femme becomes something other than human. Femme becomes a discursive, performed, and visual production.

19 In “Not so Much ‘MTF’ as ‘SPTBMTQFF’: The Identification of a Trans Femme-inist,” Josephine Wilson discusses the intersections of femme and trans: “I had the knowledge that there were others like me. Sure, most of the femmes whom I read about didn’t start off as trans. But I loved their power and their determination to be themselves despite conflict with their own community. I felt such affinity not only because I felt like I was in fact femme, but also because being femme and being trans were so closely related for me….The notion of femme and trans became looser for me too, as they started to flow into one another. The lines became blurred for me between the two identities ‘trans’ and ‘femme’ and among other group identities for which I have felt an affinity…. ” (Wilson 28-29).

Figure 2: Itziar Ziaga, Barcelona 2007, Del LeGrace Volcano (Dahl and Volcano 22, 75)

Volcano’s photography foregrounds the importance of how femmes take up and create spaces. Volcano’s photographs of Itziar Ziaga are interesting because of how she takes up space. In the first photograph, Ziaga is behind a rope fence, hanging onto it, with her eyes directly confronting the camera and the spectators. Ziaga wears a corset and a collar with a lock around her neck. Ziaga’s eye shadow matches the blue of the ropes, her corset and nail polish match the maroon on the brick buildings behind her, the black of her spiked collar matches the black of the cast iron bars, and the green of her gold fish ear rings picks up the neon green accent painting on the buildings. This purposeful “matching” situates Ziaga as part of her location.

Figure 3: Itziar Ziaga, Barcelona 2007, Del LeGrace Volcano (Dahl and Volcano 22, 75)

Then, in the second photograph, Ziaga poses differently looking to the side. The colors of Ziaga’s dress match that of the building behind her making the building/setting her accessories. Ziaga commands space. The focus of Volcano’s photograph is Ziaga as a subject, and the space around her seems to exist for her, for the performance she has created. As Ziaga enacts her photographic performance, we as audience members/spectators see the importance of performance to femme-ness.

Figure 4: Shawna Virago @ The Lexington, San Francisco 2006, Del LeGrace Volcano (Dahl and Volcano 166).

Volcano’s photograph of Shawna Virago, we see her legs framing the “Theatre of Magic” arcade game, emphasizing the performance of femme femininity. Femme becomes a theatre of sorts as Davis references, “There’s something kind of theatrical about being femme. It is not at all phony, but it seems like we learn to heighten our differences and create settings” (Davis, Nestle, and Hollibaugh 265). 20 Virago’s whole

20 Davis suggests that femmes are Amazon warriors: “Whatever it is, we are the root of something beautiful and powerful. I have such hope for us – to be able to allay the fears of the women we have loved and continue to love and desire so incredibly; to find our own special femme strength that is surely not ‘playing,’ but, as for our butches, is truly who we are; to know somehow inside that we, too, are Amazon warriors fighting ancient battles – even the battle to

embodied performance tell us that femme is theatre, femme is visual – with her baby blue lace corset with a strap suggestively falling onto her shoulder, her thigh high fishnets with her garters visibly showing, and her brightly colored lipstick that makes the color of her eyes even more dramatic. More than Virago’s clothes, the posture of her body situates her performance indicating that her femme-ness performs as well as what is between her legs. Virago beckons the viewer to pleasure her similar to how Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh suggest: “Fem(me) is the performativity, the insincerity, the mockery, the derision of foreplay – the bet, the dare, the bringing to attention of the suitor, the one would provide (her) pleasure. The performer who demands performance in return, the player who brings pleasure into play” (Duggan and McHugh 165). Just as Duggan and McHugh theorize that the femme is a “performer who demands performance in return,” Virago’s performance demands something from the viewer of the photograph. Virago’s photographic performance challenges and dares her spectators to pleasure her and to think about femininity differently. How femmes make their performance relates directly to spectator interaction. All of Volcano’s photographs are well aware of the spectator, as are the femmes pictured. Interestingly, a number of Volcano’s photographs contain femmes playing with mirrors and how they use mirrors to create their femme femininity.

love our flirtatious, seductive, calculating, knowing, innate femme power” (Davis, Madeline, “Roles? I don’t Know Anyone Who’s ‘Playing’” 268-269).

Figure 5: The 3 faces of Morgana Maye, San Francisco 2006, Del LeGrace Volcano (Dahl and Volcano 18-19).

The 3 faces of Morgana Maye demonstrates how looking relations differ between conventional femininity and queer femininity. Here, the spectator watches Maye viewing herself in her handheld vanity mirror in front of another mirror. Each image of Maye’s face differs, reflecting multiple images of her. First, the spectator views Maye’s side image and sees the parodic performance of Maye clenching her pearls, with her white gloves, fur collar, silk dress and surrounded by pink walls and her makeup table. Then, the spectators observe Maye’s hand where she holds her handheld vanity mirror with the image of part of Maye’s face highlighting her eyes and lips looking at herself seductively. Spectators can see that Maye’s performance of femininity actually gives her pleasure. The spectators glimpse into the mirror in front of Maye and for the first time we view her head on and the mirror actually makes Maye into a picture. The mirror frames her, creating a picture we could seemingly find as we flip through a 1950s issue of Ladies Home Journal. As spectators then focus on the entirety of the

photograph, they see multiple images and different angles of Maye. The 3 faces of Morgana Maye, demonstrates how looking relations differ between conventional femininity and queer femininity. Here the spectator watches Maye viewing herself in front of a vanity mirror. All Maye’s three faces differ reflecting back a different image to us. Purposefully (or so it seems), Maye does not confront the camera or the spectator’s except possibly through her reflection in her handheld mirror. The 3 faces of Morgana Maye suggests that Maye performs her femme femininity for herself, not those watching. Volcano’s photograph, depict the “outrageous” performance of femininity that Carolin and Bewley discuss: “In our minds, therefore, the concept of femme is deeply connected to the experience of struggle, as well as the power and pleasure we derive from our performance of outrageous femininity” (Carolin and Bewley 116). This “outrageous femininity” gives femmes pleasure and power. Although Maye may not confront the spectator, the excessive exaggeration of an iconic 1950s femininity points out the parody of her performance and how her femme femininity is citational and performative. As Maye’s photographic performance shows, femininity is “recycled” and remade into new scripts of gender (Muñoz 31). Informed by José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification, my study utilizes normative discourses to resist and change them and in turn create new scripts of genders and sexualities.21 Muñoz’s theorizes disidentification as: ….about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for

21 Look to my previous work on femme disidentification, “Pink Heels, Dildos, and Erotic Play: (Re)making Fem(me)ininity in The L Word.”

representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by dominant culture. (31) One aspect of Muñoz’s theory of disidentification relies on an excessive performance of fashion to make the spectators question their normative ideas about the minority identity in question. For disidentification, heteronormativity does not work as some static entity that we can “wipe out” so to speak, rather it is a continually changing ever-present thing. Disidentification then acknowledges this ever present heteronormativity and the need to “recycle” and remake such scripts. Maye’s performance is disidentificatory; Maye disidentifies with iconic 1950’s femininity with her pearls, mirrors, and vanity. Even the focus of the image evokes lesbian pulp fiction.

Figure 6: Marla Stewart, Atlanta 2007, Del LeGrace Volcano (Dahl & Volcano 102).

Notably in The 3 faces of Morgana Maye, none of Maye’s faces confront the camera like for example Marla Stewart’s does. Marla, looks directly at the camera, and

her mirrored reflection that confronts the camera, seems delightfully combative and resistant. Also, Stewart disrupts the normative connections of femininity with whiteness and heterosexuality.22 Stewart embodies Rose and Camilleri’s theories of brazen femininity: Femme’s combative ‘nature’ emerges, but this does not define her essence or her essential irony. What cannot be seen, what cannot be held or pinned down, is where femme is – she cannot be domesticated. Her wilderness is mercurial, encompassing the earthly and metaphysical. . . . Femme is the blade – fatally sharp; a mirror reflecting back fatal illusions. (Rose and Camilleri 11-12) The comment that femmes are a “mirror reflecting back fatal illusions,” demonstrates how femme femininity critiques traditional femininity and shows it its flaws. The femme fatale also “reflect[s] back fatal illusions” by her exaggerated performance of femininity indicating that femininity is that, a performance. Femmes are not confined by femininity: “We are troubled and troubling. Here, we blow the whistle on the confines of femininity. Here, we indelibly mark ourselves femme” (Rose and Camilleri 12). The representation of femme is “troubling” to some viewers because it disrupts their perception of femininity as powerlessness. IV. Chapter Summaries My dissertation begins with, “The Making of Lesbian Definitions in Twentieth Century Britain: Mobilizing Desires and Pleasures of Femininity” charting different emerging discourses of lesbian sexuality and how they conceptualize femininity. The first part of this chapter discusses the role of history in my project and how I analyze at the past in conjunction with the present particularly with the debate over passing an amendment to make indecency between women illegal, which eventually fails to maintain ideas of feminine innocence to sex and sexual pleasure between women. Then, I move to Maud

22 Look to Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense.

Allan’s famous trial and how femininity also attaches to emerging ideas of lesbian sexuality in the early twentieth century. I end this chapter with a discussion about Freudian theories of femininity and sexology’s attempt to define feminine pleasure and normative femininity. Chapter Two, “Fairytale Femme Femininities: Queering Femininity, Queering Pleasure in Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando” queers scripts of princesses and femininity in fairytales. In the first part of my chapter, I investigate how Woolf and Winterson challenge connections of flowers and conventional scripts of femininity and then secondly I explore how the tulip queers narratives of femininity with pleasure. I explore at Woolf’s Orlando in conjunction with Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook because Winterson utilizes Woolf’s tulip and even re-writes Orlando’s character with her character Ali whom is even named Orlando in part of Winterson’s novel (280). Bodily boundaries are defined as natural (i.e., binaries of people having to be either male or female) are thus made via “processes of materialization,” they do not naturally exist. Both Woolf’s Orlando and Winterson’s The PowerBook use a flower to challenge natural boundaries and the supposed fixity of gendered bodies and how those bodies then experience and produce pleasures. Chapter Three of my dissertation, “Feminine Spectacles of Genders, Races, Sexualities, and Imperialism in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus” explores resistant performances of femininity and how they challenge heteronormativity that defines “correct” or “incorrect” genders. In this chapter, I discuss how key normative discourses of femininity propose that “normal” femininity always already implies heterosexuality while Carter resists such scripts with feminine spectacle. The fictionalization of femininity (classic narratives/scripts of femininity) can create icons that normalize the damaging and sometimes violent effects of heteronormativity (for example, rape in W.B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” which builds upon an entire tradition of mythical Leda and the Swan representations in literature and art history). At the same time, Fevvers’ character, literary performances of femininity can challenge damaging icons. Fevvers uses the narrative of “Leda and the Swan” to make a different script of femininity,

turning the traumatic and victimized narrative of Leda’s rape into a story of the resistance, strength, and pleasure of femininity and feminine people. These performances of resistance offer us scripts of pleasure and femininity showing that pleasure is a necessary part of life for feminine people. Chapter Four, “Femininity at War in Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts” investigates how makeup, femininity, and war intertwine during World War I and up through World War II, producing and perpetuating new discourses of femininity. During the inter-war period in Britain, femininity becomes a weapon of war utilized to encourage ideal notions of war. For example, makeup and a performance of flawless femininity similar to the makeup advertisements that I explore in this chapter encourage and perpetuate the desire for male heroism and a dramatic heterosexual romance paralleling romantic war movies, and similarly to the goal of romantic narratives of war masking the realities of war. In Waters’ The Night Watch, femmes face a similar responsibility of heroic masculinity wanting femininity to create a picture that when viewed will displace audiences from war and offer them glamour. I investigate how makeup takes on new significance during wartime as normative discourses of nationality propose that beauty and the makeup-enabled flawless perfection of femininity are women’s duties for war efforts. Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and Sarah Waters The Night Watch, both show how of makeup, war, and femininity can encourage and perpetuate war, but simultaneously how they can be utilized to challenge normative ideas of nationality that want to idealize war and heteronormativity. Lastly, in Chapter Five of my dissertation, “Resisting the Surveillance of Feminine Pleasure in Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine,” I explore how Churchill’s Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine interweave showing that the surveillance of women, norms of femininity, British nationalism, and sexuality intersect and work similarly throughout different historical periods and our presents. For example, women must perform their duties as wives and mothers to serve the British Empire enforcing both normative femininity and heterosexuality. The only way to resist heteronormative the surveillance of femininity and queer sexualities is via pleasure.

Chapter One

The Making of Lesbian Definitions in Twentieth Century Britain: Mobilizing Desires and Pleasures of Femininity

Perhaps this is how it is—life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide…. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. Time, which returns everything, changes everything. (286) – Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook

I am often asked what femme means in my life. I have never given a concise or straightforward answer. Often I say I do femme as opposed to saying I am femme. The difference between those two verbs indicates ambivalence about my gender journey throughout my life. Gender appears to me as a figure seen under water with rippling edges and indefinite borders – Jennifer Clare Burke, “Introduction” Femmethology (11)

I. Historical Looking Feelings, memories, thoughts, ideas, and connections flow like water that Jeanette Winterson and Virginia Woolf reference as a way to demonstrate their theories of time. This notion of time-as-tide metaphorically shows the flowing mobility of the past, present, and future continually into and out of each other. At some moments the tide calmly hits the shore, but at others the waves violently pound into one another causing destruction. As suggested in Winterson’s The PowerBook and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, time doesn’t always flow nicely and smoothly.23 Winterson’s citation of Woolf demonstrates the pleasures, imaginings, innovations of time, yet time can violently

23 Winterson draws upon Woolf, “Thought—to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?....But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and it darted and sank and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was possible to sit still” (AROO 5-6).

collide like in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine. Figuring time as a tide actually helps us to envision time differently. Time not only connects past and present, but also interweaves literal and fictional places as tides hit multiple shores and deconstruct boundaries. Even Carter’s and Churchill’s rather traumatic citations of the past end with waves of resistant laughter and/or orgasmic pleasure. Both Winterson and Woolf deconstruct boundaries of fictional lands, which intersect with their similar deconstructions of boundaries of bodies. Winterson queers the bodies’ of her narrators and Woolf creates Orlando whose body changes/transforms. As Jennifer Clare Burke theorizes, “Gender appears to me as a figure seen under water with rippling edges and indefinite borders” (11). This image of water rippling over bodies makes their borders appear more fluid, mobile, and blurred. Bodies appear static, unchangeable, and to have “borders” because they’ve been discursively produced to appear in such a way. How we conceptualize and investigate how bodies change historically and relationally with present. I pay close attention to the historical identities and politics of the various time periods both within their historical specificity and comparatively with contemporary American and British politics and literature. Valerie Traub puts forward that queer theorists and historians should: not only contribute to the existence of historically specific figures and typologies, but also ensure correspondences across time….to comparative analysis across the boundaries of race, religion, language, and geography, it may, over time, be possible to fashion a broadly synoptic account of historical regimes of eroticism—without losing sight of each regime’s specificity, complexity, relative coherence, and instability. (Traub 126)24

24 Traub suggests that, “….they allow us to appreciate the extent to which their powers of definition extend across discrete historical moments, and thus, beyond the subjects that define them. They are substantive and constitutive: organizing the self-perceptions and contributing to the intelligablity of same-sex desire (as both representation and lived experience) for people in the past, while also providing the terms by which we have identified those subjects and made the past intelligible to ourselves” (Traub 135).

Traub questions how “eroticism” works “over time,” crossing different historical time periods while remembering historical specificity. We must think about how we conceptualize and examine the past particularly when theorizing about queer histories. I connect time with vision because how we look at the past effects what we see. How people see/look/watch takes on new directions in the twentieth century with the prominence of photography, film, new scientific methods of classification, court trials, etc. Traub discusses the importance of vision to how we investigate queer histories: This process of piecing together would encourage us to scrutinize multiple points of intersection, both temporal and spatial, forged from a variety of angles, among different erotic regimes, while also requiring analysis of the ways these linkages are disrupted or cross-cut by other angles of vision. Viewed from a wide angle but with all the rough edges showing, this genealogy of fragments would necessitate a method of historiography that is literally dialogical; it would be motivated in both form and content, by the question: how might we stage a dialogue between one queer past and another? (138) We view the past by literal fragments: novels, pictures, newspaper articles, scientific texts, fashions, etc., and then attempt to understand these fragments by making a unified story or theory about our initial question. Historiography works “dialogically” meaning that how we do history speaks from/to/with to the present moment and even with ideas and theories for the future within queer studies. We often place a great deal of significance on the future, but we need to re-think the past and how we explore the past. The relationship between the past and present informs memories, how remembering works, and even our ideas of the future. Looking at the past, present, and future “dialogically” helps us to find “new questions and, perhaps, new ways of answering them” (Traub 138).25

25 Traub theorizes historiography as a “kaleidoscopic vision” and “utopian dream”: “This collaboration, born of a common purpose, would not erase friction, but embrace and use it. I imagine such voices and the histories they articulate coming together and falling apart, like the fractured images of a rotating kaleidoscope: mimetic and repetitive, but undergoing

For my project, the citation of modernist literature and ideas makes modernism into icons in contemporary British fiction. Theories of modernism help me to evaluate its iconization in the contemporary moment. My notion of time in the twentieth century dialogues with the scholarship of Traub and her theorization of lesbian history and Madelyn Detloff’s and Gabrielle McIntire’s conceptualizations of modernisms. Instead of memory being an unchangeable object, McIntire suggests that: “memory stands as a replete ground of citation to which one is recalled to work through material from the past as a kind of palpable putty that is often sufficiently under the control of the conscious mind to be pleasurable” (McIntire 2).26 We can shape and mold memory like “putty.” In this way, changeability and manipulability come to define memory and its interworkings, not a digging for “truth” (interaction between historical texts/moments and audiences actually transforms and makes memory). In McIntire’s scholarship, the past marks: “….the past always leaves its mark and it is up to the operations of chance and desire to determine which fragments will re-emerge as memory” (McIntire 2). The past comes to visibly mark the body. And in literature, which rewrites a past literary/historical/cultural moment, the past and present continually interweave and mark the body in different ways. I explore this idea in chapter five of my dissertation with the way makeup is used to mark feminine bodies at war in Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch and Woolf’s Between the Acts. Studies of modernisms as well as much of modernist literature discuss and theorize how to put together the fragments of histories specifically with the destruction of war. Detloff uses the metaphor of the “patch” to show the connections of past and present: “Rather, the past, like the ‘patch,’ becomes part of the continuously emerging present” (Detloff 14). The “patch,” similar to a computer patch or virus, can change the

transformation as each aspect reverberates off others. Such a kaleidoscopic vision of historiography is, no doubt, a utopian dream. But like all dreams, it gestures toward a horizon of possibility, provocatively tilting our angle of vision and providing us with new questions and, perhaps, new ways of answering them” (Traub 138). It is necessary to examine, “our angle of vision,” in relation to our present moment and even as we think about the future. 26 McIntire theorizes “….memory is always already invested and intertwined with writing sexuality, the body, and desire” (McIntire 2).

entirety of a computer program, or even the computer, network space, online world which then seeps into everyday living. “Patches” interconnect desire, sexuality, gender, race, nations, and politics in interesting ways. The importance of using pleasure as an imaginative, creative, fictional, and theoretical tool to imagine sexuality and gender differently is necessary as we examine theories of sexology. Theories of sexology play a prominent role in queer archival work, which is why it is necessary to explore how sexology does not only create a visible “deviant” body, but also says something about pleasure and a need for pleasure. Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place and Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings are two recent queer texts that theorize the importance of queer archive. As Halberstam puts it, “In order for the archive to function it requires users, interpreters, and cultural historians to wade through the material and piece together the jigsaw puzzle of queer history in the making” (Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place 170). Regardless of sexology’s positive or negative impact on queer sexualities, sexology is a significant part of the queer archive of the early twentieth century. For me, looking for pleasure is part of this transformative queer archival project of “queer history in the making.” According to Halberstam: “I want to claim for the images that I examine here an aesthetic of turbulence that inscribes abrupt shifts in time and space directly onto the gender ambiguous body, and then offers that body to the gaze as a site of critical reinvention. Within this turbulence we can locate a transgender look, a mode of seeing and being seen that is not simply at odds with binary gender but that is part of a reorientation of the body in space and time” (Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place 107). In queer archival work, we must also implement the act of queer looking as queer archivalists/interpreters as “a site of critical reinvention.” I look for and show pleasure where it is assumed that there is none, i.e., sexology. II. Gender-izing Sexualities Between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality are invented as discursive categories to define identities and people simultaneously. This new system of sexual classifications

(including the diagnosis of “homosexuality,”) categorizes bodies, surveills/censors people and pleasures, and makes visible pleasures both normative and “perverse” (Foucault, History of Sexuality). Importantly, definitions of sexualities connect to gender performativity, gendering and analyzing bodies via discourses of sexualities. As Foucault discusses in The History of Sexuality, the intersections of genders and sexualities visibly mark pleasures on the body. Thus, the end of the nineteenth century “the homosexual was now a species” (Foucault, History of Sexuality 43). For Foucault, the homosexual becomes an identity and species whereas previously homosexuality was defined by sexual acts. We can investigate this change in how discourses of genders and sexualities are conceptualized intersectionally in two representative novels in 1928, Woolf’s Orlando and Hall’s The Well (Woolf, O; Hall). Both Orlando and The Well have been cited as iconic lesbian novels giving us glimpses into emerging cultural and discursive definitions and representations of lesbian sexuality. Critics have argued that both novels discuss and conceptualize lesbian sexuality (Doan; Doan and Prosser; Newton), theories of sexual inversion (Halberstam, Female Masculinity; Terry and Urla; Bland and Doan), and trans existence (Prosser). Hall’s novel received much attention because of her “obscenity” trial, which lead to the censorship of The Well under the British Obscenity Law (Marshik).27 Hall’s novel, sexology’s invention of sexual inversion (Havelock Ellis wrote the preface to The Well, also brought up during her trial), and Hall’s own embodied performance of masculinity merge in this famous “indecency” trial (Halberstam, Female Masculinity; Doan; Newton). Interestingly, Britain did not outlaw sex between women in 1885 as it did sodomy between men (Jennings 110). In 1921, Parliament considered adding an amendment to outlaw “indecency” between women. Parliament rejected the amendment in fear that creating legal language about sex between women, even to prohibit it, would give women “ideas” that they were innocent of prior to the intended law. Doan points out that “the clause would eventually fail on the grounds that it would be unenforceable, would render women vulnerable to blackmail,

27 See Marshik, Celia. British Modernism and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

and would only serve to increase lesbianism by advertising it” (Doan 38). Parliament feared that this amendment might actually influence, corrupt, encourage, and incite women to do such acts (Jennings 109-113).28 Without an actual amendment in place, Hall’s trial focused on the “indecency” of her novel while the everyday public discussed Hall’s lesbianism and photographically linked her female masculinity with lesbian performativity. In her book, Fashioning Sapphism, Doan details how masculine fashion was in style for women in the early twentieth century. In fact, masculinity fashions the image of “The New Woman” until Hall’s trial visually links female masculinity to lesbianism and theories of sexual inversion (Doan). After the rejection of the amendment in 1921, Hall was merely a conduit to censor: representations of sexuality in literature as well as alternative gender performances; “The New Woman” and her relationship with feminism, women’s right to vote (1918/1928), and new occupations that opened up to women because of the World Wars. As a number of scholars have noted, female masculinity visibly marks lesbian sexuality and the idea of a “lesbian body” during and after Hall’s obscenity trial. What happens to femininity within the invention of lesbian sexuality and “the lesbian body” in the twentieth century? Sexology, Psychoanalysis, the Law, Religion, Science, Medicine, and even traditional narrative constructions of genres and icons attempted to define

28 In 1921, the British Parliament attempted to amend the “Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885,” which prohibited sex between men, to include “indecency between” women. Rebecca Jennings describes discussions about the possible 1921 amendment: “….was the fear that legislation would only draw attention to the offence. This concern was based on an assumption that lesbianism only existed in a very few pathological cases and that the vast majority of the female population were unaware of the possibilities of lesbian sexual expression…In August 1921, three MPs attempted to introduce a clause which would have made sexual acts between women criminal in the same way as similar acts between men had been since 1885. The clause proposed that: ‘Any act of gross indecency between female persons shall be a misdemeanor and punishable in the same manner as any such act committed by male persons under section eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885” (Jennings 113, 127). The clause did not pass out of fear over what naming such an “offence,” even if to prohibit it, would do. Homophobia seeped through the rejection of the clause because the Parliament saw lesbianism as “pathology.” The Parliament did not want to put lesbianism, sex between women, and “indecency” in the minds of “normal” women since women would never think of sexual acts or sexual pleasures between women without the suggestion of the law.

“normal” and “abnormal” femininity and how these methods of classification worked. Lesbian and heterosexual women held a common bond; enforcing a “normal femininity” was damaging to both groups of women. In normative inventions of sexuality, sexology, and psychoanalysis, passively not wanting pleasure defined femininity, whereas actively pursuing pleasure signified masculinity. Thus, femininity and/or the pursuit of it historically and culturally became about other people’s pleasures (even viewing pleasures), but femininity supposedly did not desire or experience pleasure. In fact, “normal” women should have no knowledge about sex and pleasure, particularly their own. Conventional scripts and norms of femininity dictate innocence, purity, lack of sexual knowledge, and virginal innocence until baby making time (Schlossman).29 Some sexologists suggested that the feminine women in sexual relationships with female inverts were “cold,” un-desiring, and pursued and corrupted by the female inverts’ sexual desires (Ellis 264). Sexology, for the most part, defined female inversion as repulsed by femininity, but the case histories by these very same sexologists stated how the female inverts desired femininity and found pleasure in it with their feminine partners. The female inverts’ case histories show the discriminatory cultural enforcement of all women having to perform femininity thereby disciplining and regulating of female inverts’ masculinity. These case histories do not suggest the female inverts were repulsed by all femininity; in fact, they were very erotically, sensually, and admiringly attracted to other women’s femme femininity. Within the early twentieth century, definitions of female homosexuality, lesbian, and female inversion intersect. For as Halberstam30 suggests, 31

29 See: Schlossman, Beryl. Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of Modernism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. 30 Barbara Smith postulates that, “Further, work on the wives might have the most direct relationship to that of scholars like Halberstam who have opened up such important conversations about the relationship (or lack thereof) between sex and gender. Here, attending to the wives as well as to the husbands would enable us to broaden our understandings beyond an image of the female husbands as acting alone as they construct and experience their oppositional subjectivities, and instead allow a reading of the wives and their husbands as collaborators in their projects of challenging heteronormativity” (107). 31 Halberstam notes that, “The trials of Hall’s The Well of Loneliness are to lesbian definition what the trials of Oscar Wilde [for a Picture of Dorian Gray] were to gay male definition in the early part of the twentieth century” (Female 98).

“….Ellis counts on the narratives of masculine identification or of the failures of femininity to mark the invert” as well as “…the desire for more feminine women….” (Halberstam, Female 79, 89).32 Masculinity and desire for more feminine women mark the female invert. Ellis too points out desiring “more feminine women” as a characteristic of female inversion: “The inverted woman is an enthusiastic admirer of feminine beauty, especially of the statuesque beauty of the body, unlike, in this, the normal woman, whose sexual emotion is but faintly tinged by esthetic feeling” (Ellis 309). Thus, the desire for feminine women and for the “beauty of the body” partly characterize female sexual inversion for Ellis.33 Sexology’s theories of the “feminine invert” show the re-signification of femininity in conjunction with emerging definitions of “female homosexuality” and heterosexuality. Pre-1928 femininity fluctuates between signifying queerness and heteronormativity as represented in Maud Allan’s court trial. Then, after Hall’s obscenity trial, female masculinity attaches to an emerging discourse of lesbian sexuality in interesting ways even while Una Toubridge, Hall’s feminine partner, remains in the spotlight (during both of Hall’s court trials various newspapers publish both photographs of her and of her and Una Toubridge together). Hall and Toubridge work as an iconic lesbian couple in the early twentieth century. In certain ways, Hall visually represents lesbianism, but the publicized photographs of Toubridge and Hall in conjunction with the publication of The Well make Hall a threatening and iconic lesbian. This relationship challenges heterosexual marriage because: (1) Toubridge and her husband divorced and (2) Toubridge takes herself and her femininity out of heteronormative desire and, in turn, the marriage market. Unbeknownst to many, Hall’s 1928 obscenity trial was her second court trial. The emphasis of Hall’s first trial was not Hall’s masculinity, but rather her

32 Halbertam’s comment about desiring of “more feminine women” is directed towards John/Radclyffe Hall: “It was both masculinity and the desire for more feminine women that defined inversion for John” (Halberstam, Female 89). 33 Ellis writes that, “When a man is attacked by general paralysis he usually displays an extravagant degree of egoism and self-reliance; when a woman is the victim of the same disease it is not self-reliant egoism but extreme vanity which she displays. The disease liberates the tendencies that are latent in each – the man’s to independence, the woman’s to dependence….” (Ellis 22).

breaking apart of Toubridge’s heterosexual marriage (Medd). 34 The visual display of Hall and Toubridge’s relationship, desire, and their play on masculinity and femininity took center stage in the courtroom and in the media. Public debates on femininity and masculinity during this time not only indicate ambivalence towards discourses on gender and sexuality, but also imply a desire to publically entertain conversations about gender performativity and sex.35 Specifically, the many trials between1914-1920s regarding censorship, sexual inversion, obscenity, and “vice” between women might suggest that people received pleasure from viewing these displays of homophobic and sexist discrimination. A visible category of lesbianism policed and worked as identificatory and counter-identificatory mechanisms to say “that’s not me” and to define and discipline lesbians and women in general. Further, the emergence of a lesbian category gave people the language to talk about women’s sexual experiences and pleasures. With the creation of a visible “lesbian body,” female

34 As Medd notes the “emphasis on Hall’s responsibility for ruining Admiral Toubridge’s marriage was particularly highlighted by the press and resonated with the postwar national epidemic of failed marriages” (Medd 211). Also, see Doan and Garrity’s introduction to Sapphic Modernities for more information on the connection of the notion of the threat of sapphism to heterosexual marriage: Laura Doan and Jane Garrity: “….we do lavish particular attention on what we see as the formative moment of lesbian visibility in early twentieth-century national formations—most extensively in Britain, but also ranging further afield to France (the Paris salons of 1910-1940) and Australia (the Melbourne of the 1920s)—to determine what range of ‘sapphisms’ were circulating between the wars. Yet, while lesbianism was regarded by some as a menace to the nation (it was often conflated, in Britain, for instance, with the problem of ‘surplus’ single women), it nonetheless functioned, we contend, as a kind of cultural stimulus that reinvigorated many domains of national life” (Doan and Garrity 7-8). According to Medd, Hall’s well known obscenity trial in 1928 actually was not her first trial. Hall in 1920, shortly after Maud Allan’s trial, “when Hall charged St. George Lane Fox-Pitt, a member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), with slandering her as a ‘grossly immoral woman” (Medd 201). In Hall’s first trial, she sues St. George Lane Fox-Pitt for libel because he published her supposed involvement in the SPR and label her as lesbian detailing Hall’s, Toubridge’s, and Batten’s lesbian love triangle. After numerous psychical communications with Batten, Batten tells Toubridge to devote herself to taking care of Hall. St. George Lane Fox-Pitt attacks Hall for her lesbian love triangle, her work with SPR (because he doesn’t want her to get elected to SPR’s council), and for ruining Admiral Toubridge’s marriage one of the key anxieties about lesbians during World War I and thereafter. Hall retaliates with a libel suit for defamation of character and “a baffled jury was set the task of determining where lesbian meaning resides” (Medd 207). Surprisingly, unlike Maud Allan who lost her libel trial, Radclyffe Hall wins and “the jury….award[s] her 500 pounds for damages” (Medd 210). 35 Thanks to Lisa Weems for helping to crystallize this point.

masculinity comes to signify women’s pleasure – the fact that women have, experience, encourage, and invent sexual pleasure with each other and by themselves. A historical shift occurred in the twentieth century in Britain firstly defining lesbianism as an excessive female sexuality (i.e. Maud Allan) and then to make lesbianism a police-able visibly marked category (i.e. Radcylffe Hall). These two methods of lesbian classification and identification worked similarly – both blame lesbianism for the destruction of heterosexual marriage after World War I, possess pleasure and surveillance of watching, connect lesbianism to war, and ground lesbian accusations in terms of knowledge about women’s pleasures. This historical move created lesbianism as a visible category to classify, categorize, and discipline women as “indecent” at a time when women gained suffrage in Britain. III. Staging the Anxieties of Lesbianism in the British Courtroom during the World Wars Much of the time people think definitions of femininity, unlike other genders, have remained relatively constant and unchanging. As definitions of lesbian sexuality and heterosexuality surface within early twentieth-century British culture and literature, different heteronormative institutions anxiously and obsessively postulate how definitions of sexualities conceptualize femininity and femininity’s pleasures. The court trials create and publically display lesbianism as: connected with war (spies and the destruction of heterosexual marriage36), about women’s pleasures (clitoral), female masculinity as exemplified by Hall’s famous trial, and excessive feminine sexuality within Allan’s trial. The legal system in Britain in the early twentieth century, contradictorily wanted to “protect” women from thoughts of lesbianism while simultaneously using lesbianism as an acceptable form of legalized sexism and homophobia during the height of women’s

36 Oram suggests that the high divorce rate fuels the “threat” of lesbianism since “The same-sex seducers of the 1921 Parliamentary debate and related stories of broken marriages were dangerous precisely because they were not distinguishable from normal women, according to most commentators, though their assertive sexuality and power to lure wives away may be read as masculine” (Oram 174). Before 1928 when female masculinity begins to embody lesbianism, the assertive sexuality of feminine women “who were not distinguishable from normal women” discursively defined the “threat of lesbianism.” Women like Maud Allan, whose performance in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, makes her a prime target for lesbian accusations.

suffrage in Britain. Further, many of the court cases use literature to censor sexuality – Allan’s performance in Wilde’s Salomé37 and Hall as the author of The Well, for example. On the stage of the courtroom, lesbianism and its prosecution are linked with war, literature, and sexology. Women obtained the right to vote in 1928 in Britain,38 but then women faced legal prosecution for gender non-conformity, lesbianism, and for the higher divorce rate during and after World War I. Hall’s obscenity trial, 39 months after the Parliament approved women’s right to vote, demonstrated the legalized punishment of women for challenging traditional norms of genders and sexualities. 40 Hall’s, Allan’s, and the

37 For a detailed reading of Salomé and Maud Allan look to Elise Swinford’s chapter titled “Subversion, Sapphism, and Sedition: The Cult of the Clitoris and Oscar Wilde’s Salome.” 38 Women gained the right to vote in 1928 in Britain from the “Representation of the People Equal Franchise Bill”: “In the spring of 1928, when the Representation of the People Equal Franchise Bill (allowing women to vote on the same basis as men) received parliamentary approval” (Doan, Fashioning 4). 39Interestingly, later that year Radclyffe Hall was prosecuted for her novel The Well of Loneliness “under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857” (Doan, Fashioning 195). Footnote three in Laura Doan’s introduction reads: “The prosecution of The Well of Loneliness (published in July 1928) for obscene libel took place in November 1928 at Bow Street Police Court, London: ‘The Director of Public Prosecutions applied for an Order under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857….[which] gave magistrates throughout the country statutory powers to order the destruction of ‘any obscene publication held for sale or distribution on information laid before a court summary jurisdiction’” (Doan, Fashioning 195). Marshik notes that, “Under the 1857 Obscene Publications (Campbell) Act, publishers and printers were liable for financial penalties and losses should a work be convicted of obscene libel” (Marshik 92). 40 With heightened anxiety about women’s suffrage and anti-discrimination against women, combining gender discrimination and homophobia was the only way that the majority of people would find it culturally acceptable to discriminate on the basis of gender. As Doan suggests, “[t]his early attempt to criminalize lesbianism may have become in effect a weapon, enabling those who create and enforce the law to render some women—whether lesbian or not— vulnerable to intimidation, social humiliation, blackmail, and even imprisonment. Underlying the high moral tone of parliamentary circumspection of female homosexuality and the law may have been a more urgent and expedient agenda: to expunge female homosexuals from the law” (Doan, Fashioning 45). “Expunging female homosexuals from the law” works twofold (1) as a means of homophobia and (2) as a way to write “homosexual” women out of the law. Within the law, sexology, medicine, psychoanalysis, and even ideas of nationhood inextricably link women’s genders and sexualities. In this vein, the rejection of the obscenity clause for women suggested that women and lesbians were not thought of as human thus not written into the law in terms of protection or prohibition.

policewomen’s trials41 enforced a particular type of women’s gender and sexuality via their public display. Visually and publically, Allan’s trial demonstrates “lesbianism” displayed in the courtroom. Allan sued Pemberton-Billing42 for libel because Captain Harold Spencer published a newspaper article titled “The Cult of the Clitoris,” where he included Allan in his list of women in the “cult of the clitoris” accusing them of lesbianism and espionage: “‘In lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of the state were betrayed’” (quoted in Jennings 94). As Bland notes, Spencer wrote that Allan was the leader of the “Sapphists” and a lesbian spy helping Germany by sleeping with British men’s (influential politicians’ and soldiers’) wives thus “linking of [Maud Allan’s] name with the heading of ‘Cult of the Clitoris’” (Bland 184). What else could explain Britain’s heightened divorce rate after World War I? Although Allan sues Pembertoon-Billing for libel, the focus of the trial quickly changes to Allan’s “obscenity” because of: her performance in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, her supposed lesbianism and sadism, her associations with famous lesbians on the opera circuit, and her relation with Germany. Thus, the threat of “obscenity” accusations enforced normative ideas of gender, sexuality, and British citizenship. To those wanting to accuse Allan of sapphism, her performance as Salomé in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé proves her guilt of “obscenity” and lesbianism because of her association with Wilde, his literature, and his obscenity trial. The Morning Post illustrates such connections, “the play has its place in the minor literature of disease; but […] these perversions of sexual passion have no home in the healthy mind of England’” (quoted in Bland 189). These articles made the literate public of The Morning Post and other newspapers during 1919 very aware of the analogy between of homosexuality and “disease” and the fear that “homosexuality” would contaminate “the healthy….England.” The rhetoric of disease and citizenship intersect, informing definitions of “homosexuality” and suggesting that it would infect, hurt, and destroy the English

41 For more information about the policewomen’s trials in Britain look to Doan’s Fashioning Sapphism. 42 Bland notes that, “The following year [1915] [Noel Pemberton-Billing] had formed the Vigilante Society to promote ‘purity in public life’” (Bland 185).

Empire and England’s war efforts. Medical, legal, and nationalistic discourses contribute to definitions of homosexuality, lesbianism, “indecency,” and citizenship. According to such discourses, women were only “correctly” feminine if they were: British born, heterosexual, married, mothers, working within the home (or in a traditionally feminine occupation), and presumably white. Such discourses haunted homosexuality and lesbianism in literature and within British Culture. The threat of lesbianism to heteronormativity seeps through nationalist war and imperialist rhetoric. “The Cult of the Clitoris” suggests that lesbianism and lesbians threaten national security exchanging war secrets with “the most sacred secrets of the state were betrayed” “in lesbian ecstasy” (Captain Harold Spencer quoted in Jennings 94).43 Bland concludes from Allan’s trial that lesbianism was “branded” “worse” “than being” “a traitor to your country”: Travers Humphreys, one of the counsel representing Allan, explained the prosecution’s case:‘I find words which I must read, although I see there are ladies in the court […] The cult of the clitoris […] the words themselves are the filthiest words it would be possible to to imagine. (Indeed, none of the newspapers would print the heading, save the Vigilante.) ‘The cult of the clitoris can only mean one thing, and that is that the lady whose name is coupled with it […] approves of that which is sometimes described in […] less gross language as lesbianism, and more horrible libel to publish on any woman […] it is impossible to find.’ Later, in his summing up, Ellis Hume-Williams, Allan’s other counsel, suggested that to be branded a lesbian was worse than being deemed a traitor to your country. (Bland 186)

43 As cited previously, Captain Harold Spencer published the idea of “The Cult of the Clitoris” and that within this group “‘In lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of the state were betrayed’” (quoted in Jennings 94). “This had suggested that a ‘Black Book’ was held by the Germans naming 47,000 English men and women who were open to German blackmail because of their ‘sexual perversions’” (Bland 184).

Discourses of the clitoris coupled with lesbianism and espionage.44 At the height of women’s suffrage in Britain the idea of “The Cult of the Clitoris” and fear of lesbians infiltrating Britain and breaking up heterosexual marriages enforced discrimination and the surveillance of women. According to twentieth century nationalist rhetoric, national security and nation building was achieved through heterosexuality and the family; therefore, women must perform their heteronormative femininity as wives and mothers in order to support the British troops and the British Empire. Makeup advertisements targeted women suggesting that women could do their patriotic duty by buying cosmetics to make themselves up for the soldiers and to reflect an image to both the nation and the rest of the world that British women were not affected by war. Susan Keller analyzes the resistance of public powdering in the American women’s suffrage movement and in American modernism, pointing out that makeup challenges heteronormativity and surveillance bringing something defined as private (women powdering themselves in their bedrooms) into the public streets: One of the quintessential images of urban modernity in the early twentieth century was also highly scandalous: the figure of a woman applying powder or lipstick in public, transforming the city into her boudoir, the shop window into her mirror, and carrying her compact wherever she went. To a culture accustomed to protecting (and immobilizing) its ladies by containing them in the realms of the private, the domestic, and the natural, seeing a woman in public wearing makeup, much less applying it, was shocking and unthinkable. (“Compact Resistance” 1) 45 Keller examines the resistance and transformative potential of applying makeup in public. For Keller, it is both the putting on of make up in the streets and the compact itself that offer women mobility at the turn of the twentieth century. Women can use their compacts to apply makeup and to look behind them to see who might be watching and to

44As Jennings suggests, “[w]hile many of these debates centered on anxieties about female sexual encounters with men, female same-sex desire was also a source of concern during the First World War, often viewed as a threat to the nation and the war effort” (Jennings 94). 45 See Keller, forthcoming article: Keller, Susan. “Compact Resistance: Public Powdering and Flânerie in the Modern City.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

protect themselves. I draw upon Keller’s study to explore how makeup can queer femininity and pleasure with femmes using lipstick to reclaim the power, eroticism, and politics of femininity. Thus, this idealized heteronormative femininity became a reflection of a romanticized image of war. Women’s responsibilities to Britain and the war efforts were to hide the realities of war and imperialism. The emphasis of a “correct femininity” takes on even more significance during war when men are off fighting and women are left to their own devices. Britain’s entire image of the “perfect” British family (that they advertised to set them apart from their war enemies and that they used to justify colonial expansion similar to George W. Bush’s “Marriage Protection Act” and rhetoric during the Iraq war) was threatened particularly during and after World War I when new jobs opened up to women and women obtained suffrage. The divorce rate heightened and normative nationalistic discourses could not blame the war for this increase or that would destroy the romanticized vision of war; therefore, the category of “lesbian” was made to discipline, persecute, and surveil women. Similar to Churchill’s creation of Vinegar Tom, a play about witches without any witches in it, the discursive searching out of lesbians was not so much to “find lesbians” but rather to surveil and discipline women enforcing a “correct” and obedient femininity that would produce a picture perfect, heteronormative, romantic image of Britain to the British people and their colonies and war enemies. If Britain could not keep their women in line, disciplined, and under control, how could they maintain the British Empire that was falling apart? Maud Allan’s performance in Salomé, her training in Berlin, and her friendships with known lesbians, made her a target of lesbian accusations in 1918. She therefore represents the embodiment of the feminine temptress who works as a spy for Germany during World War I. Maud Allan performs a number of Britain’s contemporary fears in the early twentieth century: she displays excessive feminine sexuality and dances the erotic “dance of the seven veils” for an exclusively female audience. 46 Sharon Marcus studies Allan’s erotic dance as a means of resistance and how Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt

46 Oram suggests that, “idea of active female sexuality, combined with the name Oscar Wilde, also begins to signal desire between women in some contexts” (Oram 170).

work as celbirity (“Salomé and the Drama of Celebrity”). As Bland notes, “‘A Maud Allan dinner dance’ was held for society ladies who were asked to appear in Salomé costume; the evening was to be ‘undesecrated by any man’, a command no doubt disturbing to the women’s husbands” (Bland 185).47 Allan becomes a prime target for the anxieties that lesbians steal men’s wives while they fight for England and English “values.” Allan’s trial shows how British culture feared that lesbians make women leave their husbands because lesbians have knowledge of the clitoris and the inciting of its pleasures. Thus, this ideology suggests that clitoral pleasure contributes to the heightened divorce rate in Britain. According to this logic, Germany attempted to ruin the British nation by employing Allan to destroy heteronormativity, through seducing women out of their marriages and into her bed. British nationalism feared that if women participated in Allan’s infamous women-only parities, a lesbian orgy would ensue; and therefore, women would prefer lesbian sex, clitoral pleasure, and the company of other women, leading to an even higher divorce rate. Lesbianism threatened heteronormativity, marriage, and the production of children—particularly sons to fight as British soldiers in war. Allan’s knowledge and understanding of the clitoris contributed to Pemberton- Billing’s not guilty verdict for Allan’s libel suit.48 Instead, Allan was publically disgraced as Jennings notes: However, a central aspect of the defense case revolved around the word ‘clitoris’ and Maud Allan’s knowledge of its meaning. Captain Spencer

47 Allan’s “excessive female sexuality” in her dance performance of Salomé’s dance of the seven veils since as Oram notes, “Maud Allan’s stage persona drew upon long-established conventions of seductive femininity as well as on modern dance styles” (Oram 174). 48 In a legal system that wants to enforce feminine innocence, Allan’s dance in front of women confirms her own guilt. Maud Allan’s costume, in her famous Salomé performance, emphasizes excessive femininity with pearls covering the top half of her body, which moved as she danced. This costume design accented the sensuality of Salomé’s dance, with the skirt made of see- through material that accentuated the bareness of her legs. In Pall Mall Gazette, a review of Maud Allan’s performance of her “Vision of Salomé” suggested that, “‘[t]he pink pearls slip amorously about the throat of and bosom as she moves […] The desire flames from her eyes and bursts in hot gusts from her scarlet mouth infects the act with the madness of passion’” (quoted in Bland 185).

claimed that the word was a specialist medical term, which he had obtained by telephoning a doctor, and that it was intended to be intelligible only to medical or legal professionals. In admitting to being familiar with the term, Maud Allan demonstrated a detailed knowledge of sexual matters which exposed her to accusations of sexual immorality. The court cleared Pemberton-Billing of libel to scenes of loud cheering and pandemonium, and Maud Allan was publicly disgraced. (Jennings 96) The trial did not focus on Captain Harold Spencer’s attempt to ruin Allan’s career but attempts to publically display and shame the ‘Cult of the Clitoris.’ Allan’s excessive femininity and sensuality did not protect her from lesbian accusations; instead, her trial brought up sexology as a field to suggest that no one besides sexologists, medical doctors, or psychologists would have knowledge of the clitoris, its pleasures, or its function.49 This trial visually displayed the societal acceptance of homophobia and sexism against women who had knowledge of their own bodies and the different ways their bodies could experience pleasure (from other women, men, or themselves). In fact, the actual transcript of this court scene links the clitoris to lesbianism, according to Bland: Pemberton-Billing asked her if she was acquainted with the term ‘clitoris’. She answered: ‘Yes, but not particularly….a village doctor…was given the term ‘clitoris’ and told that it ‘was a superficial organ that, when unduly excited or overdeveloped, possessed the most dreadful influence on any woman, that she would do the most extraordinary things’….Dr

49 Oram suggests that, in a similar fashion to Allan, “[t]he femme fatale of fin-de-siècle decadence, the sexually powerful, often predatory woman, is a figure that also begins to represent same-sex desire. She embodies a feminine parallel to male homosexuality, a modern form of gender equality in an era of anxiety about women’s greater sexual and social freedom….The particular traditions of British press and its notional adherence to respectability led to diffuse images of same-sex desire, and the masculine lesbian only begins to appear in the 1930s” (Oram 169) and “Reflecting fears about female sexual subjectivity, the decadent woman figure was invested with considerable power to disrupt society, especially as a femme fatale, a predatory woman seducing men and, now, women. As a lesbian she had a strong presence in anxious British middlebrow writing on sexuality between the wars” (Oram 170-171).

Cooke, ‘it is a medical term […] nobody but a medical man or people interested in that kind of thing, would understand the term.’….[Dr. J.H. Clarke] replied: ‘I cannot think of another […] except […] ‘lesbianism’ and that word would be equally well known to the initiated and equally unintelligible to the uninitiated.’” (quoted in Bland 188) These doctors classify the clitoris as “superficial” and “dreadful,” because it allows women to experience sexual pleasure outside heterosexual reproduction. The clitoris can give women pleasure not connected with any particular sexuality – lesbians can do it, heterosexual couples can do it, and women can do it by themselves. Interestingly, the clitoris comes to stand in for lesbianism – (1) within sexology’s measuring of clitorises to signal female sexual inversion and the women’s ability to penetrate other women with their enlarged clitorises and (2) with Freud’s theories that clitoral pleasure gives itself over to vaginal (reproductive) pleasure in the development of “normal femininity.”50 The courtroom, medical field, and Freudian Psychoanalysis link knowledge of the clitoris and clitoral pleasure to lesbianism.51 I move from the courtroom’s classifications of the clitoris, lesbianism, and femininity to sexology to analyze the queering and emphasis of feminine pleasure. Some of sexology attempts to paint the feminine “female homosexual” as “not pleasure” while emphasizing quite the opposite through the female inverts’ case histories. Some of sexology and Sigmund Freud’s essay “Femininity” depict and articulate different ideas of normal/heterosexual femininity, abnormal/lesbian femininity, and how pleasure classifies femininity in general discursively. Female masculinity, not giving up clitoral pleasure, and aggressively pursuing one’s sexual desires, then, come to signify lesbianism in the twentieth century.

50 According to Lucy Bland, “it was the first British trial in which the defendant drew on sexology” (183). 51 Later in chapter one, I discuss Psychoanalysis’s role in such connections with Freud’s theories of clitoral pleasure and the development of femininity (Bland 189; Waters).

IV. ‘Scientific’ Conceptions of Feminine Pleasure Woman is the material on which man acts….Woman’s sexual part depends on contact; it is absorbing and not the liberating impulse….Woman is nothing but man’s expression and projection of his own sexuality (Weininger 28).52

Similar to the threatening image of Hall and Toubridge, Hall’s novel The Well demonstrates femininity actively desiring female masculinity--again challenging femininity’s place within a heterosexual paradigm of desire (Doan and Prosser). 53 In The Well, Stephen comes to understand her gender and sexuality through Ellis’s and Carpenter’s theories of sexual inversion.54 Before Hall’s trial, only select people had access to sexology texts (Doan, Fashioning 131-144). Hall’s representation of ‘indecent’ acts between women and sexual inversion as well as her trial made ‘the lesbian body,’ lesbianism, and gender inversion part of everyday public discourse through newspaper articles, photographs, and so on.55 (Doan, Fashioning 131-144) The everyday public

52 Weininger suggests that, “The passage of a woman from virginity is the great dividing point of her life, whilst the corresponding event in the case of a male has very little relation to the course of his life. [ ... ]. …The highest form of eroticism, as much as the lowest form of sexuality, uses the woman not for herself but as means to an end - to preserve the individuality of the artist. The artist has used the woman merely as the screen on which to project his own idea.” (Weininger 25) 53 Felski writes that, “As lesbianism had never been declared in England, there was no legal advantage for women in the new stress on congenital abnormality. Female sexual pathology, moreover, was almost invariably linked to gender pathology” (Felski 5). According to Doan, “women who refused to be constructed as culturally feminine or as heterosexual would be henceforth exceptionally vulnerable to the full force of political control by any institution of the state” (49). 54 I use the pronoun her only because that is the pronoun used in the novel itself. The Well of Loneliness has been argued to be the first lesbian novel by some critics and the first trans novel by others (Jay Prosser). 55Doan shows us how, “Critics invoke the ‘poison’ extract to invite readers to ponder what sort of culture would find in prussic acid an appealing metaphorical alternative to the literary representation of same-sex desire with synonyms of disease (‘contamination,’ ‘degeneracy,’ ‘pestilence,’ ‘plague,’ ‘contagion,’ ‘putrification,’ ‘leprosy,’), is cited again and again to illustrate not how a single newspaper spearheaded a tendentious campaign against one particular novel but rather how English society in the decade after the First World War had come to regard the female ‘sexual invert’ as heinously unnatural, sinful, and disgusting. Whether critical discussion focuses on the novel, the trial, the intricacies of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act under which the novel was prosecuted, or even Hall herself, just as Douglas believed it was ‘the duty of the critic’ to alert the British public to the potential ‘contamination and corruption of English fiction,’….” (Doan 2-3). Doan labeled as “obscene” as well as Hall’s use of it in her novel. Hall’s trail created

reading newspapers and watching the court trial then came to read Hall and The Well as lesbian icons.56 57 Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch attempts to revise Stephen’s and Mary’s characters in The Well with her characters Kay and Helen, which I discuss in chapter five, demonstrating the iconic status of Hall’s text. Feminine pleasure actually becomes a key-defining characteristic to early definitions of lesbianism and female inversion. Sexology gains discursive relevance in the late nineteenth century and persists throughout mid-twentieth century as a method of classifying bodies, genders, races, sexualities, imperialism, disability, and their intersections. In the twentieth century, science, medicine, and psychoanalysis purport to “know” gender and sexuality; and can thus, define, quantify, classify, and even treat genders and sexualities. Only medical professionals, scientists, sexologists themselves, psychoanalysts, and some of the literary elite had access to sexology texts and/or prior to the publicized court trials of Allan and Hall (Doan, Fashioning 131-144). Legal trials, sexology, psychoanalysis, medicine, and literature were key discourses that discuss and define lesbianism and gender in relation to lesbianism in the early twentieth century. The law, medicine, science, and psychoanalysis critique sexology as a field of knowledge of sexuality. The law at times looks at sexology as “obscene” as we see with Hall’s trial. Also, Freud continually discredits sexologists in his work. Some sexologists such as Weininger enforce

a visual “embodiment” of “lesbian”: “Consequently, the reading public would gradually come to regard Hall’s look as the embodiment of one formulation of ‘lesbian.’ Just as the prosecution of Wilde marked the arrival in public culture of the male homosexual, the controversy over Hall’s novel signaled the female homosexual’s transition from the shadows to public visibility….” (Doan. Fashioning 27). 56 Laura Doan, in her book Fashioning Sapphism, discusses how the modern woman of the early twentieth century was actually a masculine woman as World War I opens up new occupations for women rather than masculinity in women being a “marker” of one’s sexuality (Doan 63). Doan suggests that masculinity only signifies lesbianism after the publication and trial of Hall and The Well of Loneliness and also brought that sexology into the everyday public (Doan 37). 57 For example, Prosser argues that, “If sexual inversion is key to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexology, the dominant and most enduring category of this extensive field, then the dynamic of transgender, of gender identifications that cross (‘trans’) at angles to bodily sex, is arguably sexology’s main subject” (Prosser 116) and “My contention is that sexual inversion was transgender, and while homosexuals certainly numbered among inverts, the category described a much larger gender-inverted condition of which homosexuality was only one aspect” (Prosser 117).

normative views of gender and sexuality and classify female homosexuality as pathology similar to some of Freudian theory (Krafft-Ebing58 among others). Many sexologists Carpenter, Ellis, Browne, and others, however, don’t view female homosexuality or female sexual inversion as something that can, should, or needs to be changed or normalized. For example, Carpenter urges that: little discussed in this country, partly owing to a certain amount of doubt and distrust which has, not unnaturally perhaps, surrounded it….it would not be fair on that account to ignore them,…it becomes a duty for society not only to understand them but to help them to understand themselves….suffer a great deal from their own temperament--and yet, after all, it is possible that they may have an important part to play in the evolution of the race. (Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex lines 143-149) Carpenter argued that people with the “Uranian” temperament deserved equality and help from “society” urging people that it was their “duty” as citizens of the “country” to help all people “understand themselves.” According to Carpenter, the Uranians had “important parts” to “play” in the future of humankind (Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex

58 Krafft-Ebing categorizes sexual inversion in the following ways: “The causes of apparent infrequency in woman may be found in the following facts: (1) It is more difficult to gain the confidence of the sexually perverse woman; (2) this anomaly, in so far as it leads to sexual intercourse, among women, does not fall (in Germany at any rate) under the criminal code, and therefore remains hidden from public knowledge; (3) sexual inversion does not affect woman in the same manner as it does man, for it does not render woman impotent; (4) because woman (whether sexually inverted or not) is by nature not as sensual and certainly not as aggressive in the pursuit of sexual needs as a man, for which reason the inverted sexual intercourse among women is less noticeable, and by outsiders is considered friendship” (Krafft-Ebing 45), and he goes onto connect sexual inversion with homosexuality, “Mutatis mutandis [with due alteration of details], the situation is the same as with the man-loving man. These creatures seek, find, recognize, love one another, often live together as 'father' and 'mother' in pseudo marriage. Suspicion may always be turned towards homosexuality when reads in the advertisement columns of the daily papers: 'Wanted, by a lady friend and companion.' [...]”(Krafft-Ebing 45). Additionally, Krafft-Ebing classifies intersexuality within his four “facts”: “The intersexual gratification among these women seems to be reduced to kissing and embraces, which seems to satisfy those of weak sexual instinct, but produces in sexually neurasthenic females ejaculation. Automasturbation, for want of something better, seems to occur in all of the anomaly the same as in men. Strongly sensual individuals may resort to cunnilingus or mutual masturbation. In grades 3 and 4 the desire to adopt the active role towards the beloved person of the same sex seems to invite the use of the priapus” (Krafft-Ebing 45).

line 54). Carpenter used Uranian, “homosexual,” “sex intermediate,” and “homosexuality” interchangeably signifying the similarities of their definitions in his theories. Browne similarly theorizes urging that homosexuality and sexual inversion “….[have] fully equal right[s] to existence and expression, no worse, no lower; but no better” and she goes onto suggest that sexual and emotional repression causes “dislocation of mental values” (Browne 65).59 Carpenter’s and Browne’s theories of sexual inversion and female homosexuality show us how not all sexology classified female homosexuality and inversion as mental disorders or aliments; in fact, Carpenter and Browne suggest that for Britain to advance as a country they must encourage all of their citizens to live full sexual, emotional, and productive lives. Freudian theories and sexology struggle with ideas and intersections of citizenship, sexuality, and gender particularly as they attempt to define and encourage certain genders and sexualities. Sexology and psychoanalysis both inform how sexuality and pleasure define femininity in the twentieth century.60 According to Weininger: The condition of sexual excitement is the supreme moment of a woman’s life. The woman is devoted wholly to sexual matters, that is to say, to the

59 Browne suggests that, “I think it is perhaps not wholly uncalled-for, to underline very strongly my opinion that the homo-sexual impulse is not in any way superior to the normal; it has fully equal right to existence and expression, it is no worse, no lower; but no better. By all means let the invert – let all of us – have as many and varied ‘channels of sublimation’ as possible; and far more than are at present available” she goes onto suggest “The tragedy of the repressed invert is apt to be not only one of emotional frustration, but complete dislocation of mental values” (Browne 65). 60 I explore the interesting ways that gender, sexuality, and their intersections change as the discourses of sexology emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My study looks to how trauma and pleasure inform discourses of sexology. Cultural and literary studies largely discuss sexology’s influences in: culture, literature, defining gender identities, and articulating connections between sexuality and identity. Particularly, lesbian, queer, and transgender studies heavily engage with sexology. For example, Laura Doan argues that sexology and early twentieth-century lesbian writing intersect and that sexology works “….as a theoretical starting point for the lesbian literary imagination” (Fashioning 146). My project expands on Doan’s work and suggests that rather than sexology’s significance in twentieth- century British literature centering on a select group of lesbian writers, it instead works as a way to understand and complicate intersections of gender and sexuality within a strand of literature that persists throughout the entirety of twentieth century. I converse with the theories of sexual inversion put forth by Judith Halberstam, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Laura Doan, Siobhan Somerville, Jay Prosser, Esther Newton, and Ann Cvetkovich.

spheres of begetting and of reproduction. Her relations to her husband and children complete her life, whereas the male is something more than sexual….It is important to distinguish between the intensity with which sexual matters are pursued and the proportion of the total activities of life that are devoted to them and to their accessory cares. (Weininger 25) “Sexual excitement” here doesn’t mean orgasm but rather “the begetting and of reproduction” of children. The desire for children drives women to have sex not pleasure. Weininger theorizes that men “pursue” “sexual matters” and women are “devoted to them.” Sex becomes the “foundational” moment in women’s lives only out of “devotion” to their roles as wives and mothers. One must question – why such instance on no pleasure here? Sex for women becomes more about “devotion” and “care” rather than about pleasure. Freud and Weininger both make such connections, showing the proliferation of scientific discourses attempting define what “normal femininity” was and how it worked. Such discourses utilize “female homosexuality” and “abnormal femininity” to threaten, discipline, and surveil women into performing and living “normal femininity.” Sigmund Freud wrote a series of essays titled “Femininity” composed from Group Psychology (1921), “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes” (1925), “Female Sexuality” (1931), and “Chapter VII of the posthumous Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938]” (Freud 139). Freud writes “Femininity” at the time of the famous noted trials of Allan, Mary Allen, and Hall. In fact, Freud begins his theories of femininity in 1921, only a few years after Maud Allan’s publicized trial and the entrance of “The Cult of the Clitoris” into public discourses. Freud then uses these ideas of the clitoris, female sexuality, and femininity circulating in the 1920s-1940s to theorize femininity, the clitoris, and development of “normal femininity” into heterosexuality and heteronormativity. Freud theorizes that the path to to normal femininity” is women’s sexual development into heterosexuality and to at least

the symbolic desire to have a “baby” (Freud 156, 159).61 For Freud, women develop into “normal femininity” when they replace their desire to have a phallus with wanting a baby at least symbolically (i.e. they want the male husband, baby, fairytale, heterosexual romantic narrative, heterosexual reproduction) (159). Women can only achieve “normal femininty” via a desire for symbolic heteronormativity (Freud 159). Significantly for Freud, women can only “come into being” through femininity: “And now you are already prepared to hear that psychology too is unable to solve the riddle of femininity….In conformity with its peculiar nature, psycho-analysis does not try to describe what a woman is—that would be a task it could scarcely perform—but sets about enquiring how she comes into being” (144). At times Freud uses the terms women and femininity interchangeably and predicatively; therefore, according to Freud, a girl only becomes a ‘normal’ woman by developing into “normal femininity.” The idea of “normal femininity” relies on desiring certain heterosexual sex acts and producing children. Even how women should experience sexual pleasure was conceptualized in terms of sexual reproduction;‘correct’ femininity referred to women who only ‘received’ sexual pleasure from sensitivity in their vaginal canals and not their clitorises or any other body part. Similar to many normative discourses of femininity, psychoanalysis connects femininity with passivity while simultaneously suggesting it doesn’t. Freud warns us that, “[e]ven in the sphere of human sexual life you soon see how inadequate it is to make masculine behaviour coincide with activity and feminine with passivity” (Freud 143). However, Freud does the very same thing that he warns us against, connecting “feminine with passivity” as he conceptualizes how femininity should experience pleasure: “[w]e are entitled to keep to our view that in the phallic phase of girls the clitoris is the leading erotogenic zone. But it is not, of course, going to remain so. With the change to femininity the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity, and at the same time its importance, to the vagina” (147). For the development into “normal femininity,” women must move their multiple erogenous zones into their vaginal canals. Thus,

61 Freud writes that, “The feminine situation is only established, however, if the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby, if, that is, a baby takes the place of a penis in accordance with an ancient symbolic equivalence” (Freud 159).

pleasure and the movement of pleasure from the clitoris to the vagina for reproduction defined femininity; therefore, vaginal orgasms come to define femininity. Freud and sexology fear that the clitoris can work like a little penis and thus threatens heteronormative sex, gender, and sexuality. The clitoris threatens heteronormativity because it can penetrate if enlarged enough and can be a key site of pleasure for women outside of heterosexual reproduction and intercourse. If women actively want to have sex, penetrative or otherwise, it troubles the object/subject binary that Freud, Weininger, and others setup. Thus, the clitoris represents women’s self pleasure, pleasure without the fear of pregnancy, and sexual relations between women.62 This creation of a “normal femininity” directly responds to “threats” of lesbianism and a fear that the “lesbian contagion” will spread and lesbians will take over England, making women indifferent to men and their reproductive “duties.” Freudian theory suggests that women who fail to develop into “normal femininity” are “female homosexuals” because they do not do some or all of the following: give all of their clitoral pleasure over to their vaginas; actively want to pleasure their clitorises; want to give pleasure to other women’s clitorises and vaginas; want to receive pleasure from other women via their clitorises and/or vaginas; want to penetrate women with their enlarged clitorises; and/or find pleasure in other parts of their bodies. Freud terms these women who “cling to” “activity” and “avoid” “passivity”63 as: “defiantly rebellious, even exaggerates her previous masculinity, clings to her clitoral activity….the wave of passivity is avoided which opens the way to the turn towards femininity. The extreme

62 See Susan Pelle’s work on performative vaginas: Pelle, Susan. (Dis)articulating Bodies and Genders: Pussy Politics and Performing Vaginas. Diss. Miami University, 2008. (Pelle) 63 Much of the time we think about Freudian psychoanalysis as constructing feminininity as passive in sexual relations, but so to did certain sexologists. For example Weininger states that: “The relation of man to woman is simply that of subject to object. Woman seeks her consummation as the object. She is the plaything of husband or child, and, however we may try to hide it, she is anxious to be nothing but such a chattel….Woman does not wish to be treated as an active agent; she wants to remain always and throughout - this is just her womanhood – purely passive, to feel herself under another's will. She demands only to be desired physically, to be taken possession of, like a new property” (Weininger 27). Weininger suggests that women want to be “purely passive” “to be taken possession of, like a new property.” According to Weininger’s theories of sexology women “seek” becoming the “object” in the act of “consummation”, consummating the marriage.

achievement of such a masculinity complex would appear to be the influencing of the choice of an object in the sense of manifest homosexuality” (161). Thus for Freud, heterosexuality and heteronormativity define “normal femininity” and masculinity, clitoral pleasures, a “masculinity complex,” and activity signify “female homosexuality.” Here Freud does not use female masculinity and female homosexuality mutually exclusively; in fact, Freud thinks of homosexuality in women as a developmental stage and not a female body visibility marked by masculinity as many sexologists did. “The masculinity complex” is defined by sexual “activity,” enjoying clitoral stimulation, and not fully replacing the desire for clitoral pleasure with the desire for heterosexual intercourse. For Freud, “avoiding” “the wave of passivity” defines female masculinity, “abnormal femininity,” and “female homosexuality.” Importantly for Freudian theories, “achievement of a masculinity complex” defines “female homosexuality”; therefore, female homosexuality is not marked on the body rather is a failure in sexual development. All women are suspect (not just visibly marked female inverts). Freudian theories and certain strands of sexology combine to make lesbianism both visible and invisible, enforcing multiple forms of discipline – everyone was suspect simultaneously watching and being watched. The enforcement of “normal femininity” proscribes “correct” pleasures and passivity. The women who didn’t “develop” or choose “normal femininity” but instead “abnormal femininity” or “female masculinity” faced accusations of “female homosexuality” and in turn sexism and homophobia. Even if a woman “comes into being” via “normal femininity,” she still is not necessarily defined as human. Freud indicates that women are not automatically granted human definition or status: “But do not forget that I have only been describing women in so far as their nature is determined by their sexual function. It is true that influence extends very far; but we do not overlook the fact that an individual woman may be a human being in other respects as well” (my emphasis 167). At the end of Freud’s essay, he concludes that: 1. femininity is “nature” and “sexual function” and 2. that women “may be” “human beings.” Even normativity does not ensure that women have “human” status or definition. According to Butler’s theories of cultural intelligibility, people who

are culturally intelligible and defined as human embody norms have easier access to a “livable life.”64 Butler theorizes that, “We think of norms of recognition perhaps as residing already in a cultural world into which we are born, but these norms change, and with the changes in these norms come changes in what does and does not count as recognizably human” (Butler, Undoing Gender 17, 31). With the example of femininity, embodying or performing norms even as they shift and change does not necessarily grant one human definition. The status of human itself shifts/takes on different meanings for varying groups of people depending on gender, racial, sexuality, class, able-bodied privilege(s).65 For this reason and others my dissertation theorizes how femme pleasure can challenge human definitions and who has access to them. V. Theories of Feminine Inversion The female invert created through sexology becomes an iconic figure of gender and sexuality that modernist and contemporary British literature continually cites.66 For example, Woolf’s Orlando, Waters’ The Night Watch and Tipping the Velvet, and Winterson’s The PowerBook challenge sexology’s theories of sexual inversion that suggest the body inhibits sexual desire (i.e. that female inverts felt trapped within female

64 Butler asserts that, “What makes for a livable world is no idle question. It is not merely a question for philosophers. It is posed in various idioms all the time by people in various walks of life. If that makes them all philosophers, then that is a conclusion I am happy to embrace. It becomes a question for ethics, I think, not only when we ask the personal question, what makes my own life bearable, but when we ask from a position of power, and from the point of view of distributing justice, what makes, or ought to make, the lives of others bearable? Somewhere in the answer we find ourselves not only committed to a certain view of what life is, and what it should be, but also of what constitutes the human, the distinctively human life, and what does not. There is always a risk of anthropocentrism here if one assumes that the distinctively human life is valuable—or most valuable—or is the only way to think the problem of value. But perhaps to counter that tendency it is necessary to ask both the question of life and the question of human, and not let them fully collapse into one another” (Butler, Undoing Gender 17). 65 Butler suggests that legitimation and personhood are connected: “To be legitimated by the state is to enter into the terms of legitimation offered there, and to find that one’s public and recognizable sense of personhood is fundamentally dependent on the lexicon of that legitimation” (Butler, Undoing 105). But what happens when even the norm or the ‘legitimate’ are not necessarily defined as human or human status is always relative? 66 For example: D.H. Lawrence’s The Fox; Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, and Between the Acts; Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch and Tipping the Velvet; Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and The PowerBook; Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus; Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, etc.

bodies not allowing them to experience sexual pleasure). These novels also challenge sexology’s idea that female inverts corrupted feminine women into relationships with them. The coercion of feminine women into relationships with female inverts implies that feminine women could either desire heterosexuality (and male masculinity) or not experience desire at all (i.e., they were “cold” and “prudish”) (Ellis 264). This heteronormative cultural logic would have us believe that queer sex has nothing to do with the feminine women’s desires, drives, and/or pleasures because feminine women only desire heterosexual reproduction and aggressive male masculinity.67 As these discourses attempt to force femininity (particularly feminine women) into a heteronormative desire they attempt to reify the assumption that queer relationships have nothing to do with feminine desires or pleasures. In sexologists’ case histories, a select few sexologists’ theories, and certain literary representations, relationships between women refigured feminine desire and constraints of normative romantic narratives. Many times, feminine women are the sexual aggressors (i.e. Mary in The Well).68 Femininity becomes not quite “homosexual” but not heterosexual either within Ellis’s theories of sexual inversion. Ellis tries to extrapolate from his patients’ case histories that “womanly women,” and even women in general, lack desire for sexual pleasure. However, within the case histories themselves, femininity and female masculinity incite pleasure and possess sexual desire. It is important to note that within discourses of sexology the inherent connection between femininity and heterosexuality is

67 One possible reason for the relation between sexology and twentieth-century British literature is that some sexologists seemed to sympathize with the discrimination of the legal system based on a variation of gender and sexuality. For example, Ellis says, “At the same time I realize in England, more than in any other country, the law and public opinion combine to place a heavy penal burden, and a severe social stigma on the manifestations of an instinct which to those persons who possess it frequently appears natural and normal. It was clear, therefore, that the matter was in special need of elucidation and discussion” (preface 1 Ellis). 68 Twentieth-century British literature both early and contemporary possesses a compulsive need to comment on, support, and/or resist discourses of sexual inversion. Significantly, Havelock Ellis conducts 60 out of 80 of his sexual inversion case studies within Britain thus a possible reason for the strong British engagement of British Literature with sexology’s theories (Ellis 315). And then, the British legal system attempted to censor sexology in tandem with literature in Radclyffe Hall’s obscenity trial.

in question.69 Sexologists repeatedly suggest that female inverts desire and have relationships with “voluptuous” feminine women who supposedly do not sexually desire because their sexual desire would disrupt heteronormative conceptions of femininity that defined femininity as passively being pursued by masculinity. In one of Ellis’ most cited passages, he characterizes these feminine women in a class all of their own: A class in which homosexuality, while fairly distinct, is only slightly marked, is formed by the women to whom the actively inverted woman is most attracted….Their faces may be plain or ill-made, but not seldom they possess good figures: a point which is apt to carry more weight with inverted woman than beauty of face. Their sexual impulses are seldom well marked, but they are of strong affectionate nature….they are always womanly….So far as they may be said to constitute a class, they seem to possess a genuine, though not precisely sexual, preference for women over men, and it is this coldness, rather than lack of charm which often renders men rather indifferent to them. (Ellis 264) Ellis notes that the feminine invert “is only slightly marked” by “homosexuality.” Feminine inverts create a marked threat to heteronormativity because of their “coldness” and impartiality towards men and male masculinity, which takes on particular importance during times of war when female femininity is supposed to encourage, romanticize, and compliment male masculinity. Not masculine, these feminine women do not fit neatly into sexologists’ classifications of female inversion. Also, they show that femininity can actively desire queer masculinity and not normative male masculinity. Ellis emphasizes these “womanly women’s” coldness towards men and suggests that they experience genuine feelings for the female invert but “not precisely sexual.” The over emphasis of coldness and “not precisely sexual” illustrates a resistance in analyzing a queering of feminine pleasure when clearly these women experience extreme amounts of sexual

69 “The feminine invert was a social, rather than a sexual, deviant who had been rejected by men and pushed therefore into the arms of the masculine invert. They were the ‘odd women,’ or as he puts it, ‘they are the pick of the women whom the average man would pass by.’ The masculine invert was the congential invert who was born to an essential female masculinity” (Halberstam, Female Masculinity 76).

desire and pleasure described in Ellis’s own case histories of female inversion. For example, in a case history the feminine partner “groped” for sex (262). “Sexual impulses” and pleasures define feminine homosexuality for Ellis. Ellis defines this class of homosexuality with a feminine “body with beautiful curves,” “good figures,” and “plan or ill-made faces” (269). The “feminine invert” is marked by her voluptuous body and “ill-made” face. The case studies of female inverts tell a story about masculinity, femininity, desire, and pleasure. In much of the case studies, the female inverts themselves talk about pleasure – how they receive pleasure and how the women with whom they have sex desire and receive pleasure. In Ellis’s cases histories, sexual desire abounds. For example: It would have been intolerable to me to live with her without being able to touch her. We did not discuss it, but it was evident that the desire was even stronger in her than me….One night, however, when she had had a cruelly trying day and I wanted to find all ways of comforting her, I bared my breast for her to lie on. Afterward it was clear that neither of us could be satisfied without this. She groped for it like a child, and it excited me much more to feel that than to uncover my breast and arms altogether at once. (262) Within this case history, there is no description of a visibly gendered “female homosexual body.” Pleasure and desire mark the feminine partner since it was “intolerable” for her to live “without being able to touch” her partner. The masculine lover suggests that her feminine partner’s sexual desire, “was even stronger in her than me” and her lust “could [not] be satisfied” without sexual play, and her “grop[ing] for it,” indicating how the feminine partner encouraged the sexual scene. Some sexologists attempt to define lesbianism based on lack of sexual desire, but both women experience desire and pleasure with “touch[ing]” and “kiss[ing]” with “equal ardor” (Ellis 267). Within this case history, it is not gender that marks lesbianism rather both women’s pleasures and desires. History XXXVI. :

On leaving school at the age of 19 she met a girl of about the same age as herself, very womanly, but not much attracted to men. This girl became very much attracted to her, and sought to gain her love. After some time Miss H. was attracted by this love, partly from the sense of power it gave her, and an intimate relation grew up. This relation became vaguely physical, Miss H taking the initiative, but her friend desiring such relations and taking extreme pleasure in them; they used to touch and kiss each other tenderly (especially on the mons veneris), with equal ardor. (Ellis 267) Queer feminine women, seem to be classified more so by whom they are and are not attracted “very womanly, but not much attracted to men. This girl became very much attracted to her, and sought to gain her love.” They seem to be defined by – who they are not “attracted” to, men, and who they are attracted to, female masculine inverts. In this case history, the feminine invert “sought to gain [Miss H’s] love.” Sexually cold? I think not. Here femininity challenges normative male masculinity because these women do not desire men but profusely desire sexual pleasure with masculine women. Sexological theory reinforced heteronormative ideas that a need or desire for pleasure did not drive femininity but nonetheless these case histories tell a very different story of non-normative women’s sexualities that focused on pleasure. During the beginning of the twentieth century, there is a discursive break in how femininity is defined and lived out. Femininity becomes not quite homosexual but not heterosexual either within Ellis’s theories of sexual inversion. For as Judith Halberstam suggests, “…Ellis counts on the narratives of masculine identification or of the failures of femininity to mark the invert” as well as “…the desire for more feminine women….” (Halberstam, Female 79, 89). Halbertam’s comment about desiring of “more feminine women” is directed towards John/Radclyffe Hall, “It was both masculinity and the desire for more feminine women that defined inversion for John” (Halberstam, Female 89). It is both masculinity and desire for more feminine women that mark the female invert. Ellis too points out desiring “more feminine women” as a characteristic of female inversion: “The inverted woman is

an enthusiastic admirer of feminine beauty, especially of the statuesque beauty of the body, unlike, in this, the normal woman, whose sexual emotion is but faintly tinged by esthetic feeling” (Ellis 309). Here, the female invert is not only marked by her desire for feminine women, but also for having a strong sexual desire and desire for the “beauty of the body.” These “voluptuous” feminine women desire and perform new sexualities, genders, and couples that resist and challenge heteronormativity suggesting that femininity in women does not signify or visibly code as “not lesbian.” The inventions of lesbianism, female homosexuality, and female inversion turn femininity into something mobile, visible, and very pleasurable. Allan’s court trial represents the “Cult of the Clitoris” as very fem(me)inine. To the British legal system, Allan was someone who needed to be contained and reprimanded precisely because of her performance of pleasure (her “dance of the seven veils” in a theatre production of Wilde’s Salomé for an all woman audience). The performance of Allan’s trial turns her into the iconic Salomé character because she challenges normative conceptions of pleasure and then is publically shamed and punished. Similar to Salomé, a play about watching, the courtroom and those reading and viewing news stories about Allan, watched her just as sexologists and Freud watched femininity not only to categorize it, but also to find pleasure in it. In Wilde’s play, Salomé’s excessive and sexualized femininity has a violent edge as she demands the head of John the Baptist in exchange for her erotic “dance of the seven veils” (line Wilde, Salomé 350). Salomé uses her step-father’s sexual desire against him as he promises to give her whatever she wants if she dances for him. Salomé only succumbs to Herod’s request after he makes this promise, and waits to demand her request until after her dance. The only character who does not lust after or watch Salomé is John the Baptist and his refusal encourages her desire. As exchange for her dance, Salomé demands John the Baptist’s head on a platter so that she can kiss his lips. Interestingly, Salomé insists that the head be brought out on a metal charger and thus she could see her own reflection kissing John the Baptist. Throughout Salomé numerous characters warn against watching Salomé because of the dangers of watching:

THE PAGE OF HERODIAS ‘You are always looking at her. You look at her too much. It is dangerous to look at people in such fashion. Something terrible may happen’….. HERODIAS ‘You must not look at her! You are always looking at her!’…. HERODIAS ‘There are others who look too much at her’…. HERODIAS ‘She does right. Why are you always gazing at her?’ (Wilde, Salomé lines 16-17, 171, 190-191 201-202) Men constantly watch Salomé, even Herod. Salomé then uses their gazes, desires, and lusts to obtain her desires. She flirtatiously makes the guards and soldiers bring John the Baptist to her when Herod permits no one to see him. And then Herod relentlessly asks his stepdaughter to dance for him even offering Salomé her mother’s thrown. Salomé dances for Herod because she wants John the Baptist’s head for insulting her and for not succumbing to her desires and pleasures. When Herod pleads with Salomé to ask for something else, she says, ‘It is not my mother's voice that I heed. It is for mine own pleasure that I ask the head of Iokanaan in a silver charger. You have sworn an oath, Herod. Forget not that you have sworn an oath’” (Wilde, Salomé lines 359-361). Salomé wants “the head of Iokanaan” for her “own pleasure,” which seems odd to Herod because of the violence of her request as well as the utterance and acknowledgement of her own pleasure. After Salomé receives Iokanaan’s head, she kisses him, but then Herod has her killed to which the soldiers eagerly oblige. Importantly, Salomé stopped men from watching her and discourses from watching and disciplining her. Salomé’s and Maud Allan’s performances make men, in 1910-1919, anxiously upset because women’s erotic dances have nothing to do with pleasing them. In fact, Salomé’s dance has nothing to do with men at all—she doesn’t dance for John the Baptist’s pleasure but for her own. Salomé uses her sensual dance to obtain what she wants even if that means her own death.70 Allan then makes up her own

70 Alison Oram also notes that “and Maud Allan was not the first performer in the title role [in Salomé] to be associated with lesbianism” (170).

Salomé performance where she dances in front of an exclusively women audience. In Wilde’s version of Salomé, Salomé rebels against male control and male desire whereas Allan seems rather indifferent to her male audience. The figure of Salome is very similar to the feminine inverts in much of the case histories in Sexology. What are we left with as viewers and historiographers exploring Allan’s trial, Salomé, sexology, and Freud’s theories of femininity? Although norms of femininity have continually been used to discipline female bodies, women resisted surveillance and enforcement of gender normativity. Looking back at this history teaches us something new, that femininity does not signify gender normativity. Salomé takes John the Baptist’s head even if it means her own death, or does she accept the way masculinity attempts to define her as the “passive object” like Freud, Weininger, and others try to suggest about the “nature” of femininity. Instead, in a very “active” way Salomé reverses the men’s stares and watching as her dance reflects in conjunction with her demanding of John the Baptist’s head. Salomé confronts numerous audiences’ perceptions and viewings of her: those watching her within the play, reading the audience of Salomé, those watching the theatre production of Salomé, the women watching Allan’s re- enactment of the “dance of the seven veils” only for them, and those watching Allan’s trial. Allan’s re-invention of the dance that women’s pleasure is not always already about men or heterosexuality. In fact, this indifference to men resists discourses that suggest women’s desires rely on men. While heteronormative structures of desire are evident in sexological discourse (e.g., defining feminine inverts as “obscene” or “cold”); female inverts detail how their feminine lovers’ physically, visibly, and verbally talk about and show their pleasures.

Chapter Two

Fairytale Femme Femininities: Queering Femininity, Queering Pleasure in Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

I. Introduction Doing femininity is important – how we do it, for what purpose, what the performance actually does performatively, and for whom. Within this contemporary moment, we see less of a focus on femme visibility politics (or a desire of an ‘authentic’ femme lesbian representation); instead, the camera angle shifts to investigations of political strategies disidentification, intersectionality, and human definitions.

Figure 7: Jun Wizelius, Malmö, Sweeden 2007, Del LeGrace Volcano (Dahl and Volcano 78).

For example in Volcano’s photograph Jun Wizelius, Malmö, Sweeden 2007, spectators see Jun Wizelius’s “Malmö Miss Juniversum empire of ‘kitsch and bad taste’, or in Sossity’s traveling box of remade diesel femme wear for big girls” where this store works like a femme’s “….closet, a fairy tale place filled with stories of extraordinary experiences nestled softly within the folds of outfits worn to events, performances, and meetings” (Dahl and Volcano 78, 81). Jun attires herself with a pink feather boa, a pink

plastic tiara, a short black skirt, black nylons, a gold tank-top, magenta eye shadow, fake eyelashes, and matching lipstick creating an “extraordinary” campy femme performance. Even Jun’s positioning of her body is important as she leans open palmed onto the glass. In the photograph, the display glass reflects back the outside world merged with Jun. Jun becomes part of the display surrounded by plastic mirrors, plastic flamingos, fuchsia flowers, and glossy neon purses as she simultaneously commands this space – beckoning femmes to come shop and create your own campy fairy tale of excessiveness. 71 Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook foreground costumes demonstrating the transformative potential of accessories reimagining genders similarly to Wizelius’s photograph. Both novels begin with tales where characters change genders offering opportunities for pleasures to be transformed and intensified. Orlando and The PowerBook contain tales of costumes that change bodies, pleasures given and received by those bodies, and language used to describe bodies and the world. In these novels, costumes are more than just the clothing that people wear; instead, costumes allow people to become someone else and to shuffle among different subject positions and performances. The PowerBook begins with a section titled “language costumier” (Winterson 1), a costume shop, the narrator, a computer, and a request “Freedom for a night, you say. Just for one night the freedom to be somebody else…” (Winterson 3). Language costumes bodies and, therefore, can change them. The stories, scripts, classifications, and narratives used to describe life can change and transform with characters, people, events, performance, politics, desires, and pleasures. The request – to become someone else “just for one night” is – “hooked” (Winterson, The PowerBook

71 Yu says, “I am a mediocre cook who would rather eat take-out; I hate doing laundry and often pay to have it done; and I am not a mother. My apartment is not full of the sounds of dogs barking, children playing, me hollering at the butch to take out the trash while I am at the stove stirring pots simmering with hearty stews made from root vegetables, and a pile of button-down shirts from my butch partner in the corner waiting to be ironed….I have always had an uneasy relationship with the domestic. Maybe this is because I grew up watching my mother perform domesticity as part of an enforced femininity. Ultimately she found ways to enjoy domestic tasks and not just endure them. Still, I knew she never made a conscious choice around domesticity, but did the ironing, the cooking, and other tasks because it was expected” (Yu 31).

286) from another narrative, Woolf’s Orlando, where the narrator crafts language and narratives to change bodies. The PowerBook’s narrator crafts stories via the internet: This is where the story starts. Here, in these long lines of laptop DNA. Here we take your chromosomes, twenty-three pairs, and alter your height, eyes, teeth, sex. This is an invented world. You can be free for one night.

Undress. Take off your clothes. Take off your body. Hang them up behind the door. Tonight we can go deeper than disguise.

It’s only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it—creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I change the story. I am the story. Begin. (Winterson, The PowerBook 4-5) Stories of DNA are just that – stories. We tell ourselves stories about genders and sexualities that they are derived from DNA and thus are natural, biological, and factual. Scientific knowledge is crafted demonstrated by the continual changing of scientific stories, questions, and hypotheses. Science, similar to literature, is dynamic and ever changing as is the narrator’s DNA in The PowerBook’s virtual world. They can shift and change with the different narratives we tell. Conventional narratives of sexed bodies intersect with stories of fairy tales. The narrator details multiple stories/discourses that define genders and sexualities: religion, science, romantic narratives/literature, “crime,” and relationships. One of the main disguises in Winterson’s The PowerBook is a tulip. Flowers continually bloom in Woolf’s and Winterson’s novels, so I find myself pondering the

resistant potential of flowers. A number of scholars discuss the tulip as a flower with new imaginative possibilities – for example, Susan Pelle theorizes “the tulip as a ‘queer’ little flower” (Pelle 91), Anna Pavord discusses how “….the tulips were plotting new feats, re-inventing themselves in ways that we could never dream” (21),72 and Michael Pollan details the tulip’s “orgasmic history.”73 Woolf situates Orlando’s famous “sex change,” to use her phrase, in Constantinople, where tulips changed the way nations viewed the floricultural industry in Turkey. Both Woolf and Winterson utilize flowers as ways to transform normative ideas of bodies, genders, and sexualities, particularly critiquing the ways sexology categorizes bodies with Orlando’s and Ali’s fantastic and continual gender transformations. In the first part of this chapter, I investigate how Woolf and Winterson challenge connections of flowers and conventional scripts of femininity and then secondly I explore how the tulip queers narratives of femininity with pleasure.74 I look at Woolf’s Orlando in conjunction with Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook because Winterson utilizes Woolf’s tulip and even re-writes Orlando’s character with her character Ali whom is even named Orlando in part of Winterson’s novel (The PowerBook 280). Normative discourses signify bodies as naturally stable, similar to how Butler theorizes that, “….the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary,

72 Pavord writes that, “Even now, in their dark underground grottoes beneath the rocks, the tulips were plotting new feats, re-inventing themselves in ways that we could never dream” – Anna Pavord’s The Tulip: The Story of the Flower that has Made Men Mad (21), 73 Pelle shows how The PowerBook shatters the connection of the vagina with flowers and offers a “queer space” where “‘queer’ little flower[s]” imagine sexed, raced, and national bodies, and in turn sexuality, differently (113). 74 Esther Sánchez-Pardo González references the parodying of gender in Orlando in her article “‘What Phantasmagoria the Mind Is’: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Parody of Gender,” which focuses on androgyny in Orlando but still grapples with the complexities of femininity in the narrative. González describes Woolf’s use of femininity as: “Orlando begins displaying signs of the masquerade that according to Joan Riviere functions in the production of femininity. . . Orlando’s white and ‘respectable’ femininity is indeed a behavioral mask that covers her masculine ego and bisexuality, which in turn are displaced onto others” (79). I agree that at times Orlando’s use of femininity is like a masquerade, but I hope to show how a reading of femininity in Orlando is more complicated than femininity merely existing as a “mask” one can take on and off. Instead, Woolf constructs femininity with social histories and discourses that are very complex in their gendering.

fixity, and surface we call matter” (Bodies 9). Bodily boundaries are defined as natural (i.e., binaries of people having to be either male or female) are thus made via “processes of materialization.” They do not naturally exist. Both Woolf’s Orlando and Winterson’s The PowerBook use a flower to challenge natural boundaries and the supposed fixity of gendered bodies and how those bodies then experience and produce pleasures. Transgender theory helps to shed light on Woolf’s and Winterson’s configurations of bodies. Judith Halberstam explains both the subversive potential of the “shape-shifting and – identity morphing body” (In a Queer 6-77). Significantly, Winterson continually links her character/narrator Ali with Orlando. Not only does Winterson connect Ali/the narrator with Orlando via the bodily transformation and the tulip/flower, but also by Ali saying, “I said my name again and again—‘ORLANDO! ORLANDO! I hoped my name would contain me, but the sound itself seemed to run off my tongue, and drop, letter by letter, into a pool by my feet” (Winterson, The PowerBook 280). Winterson remakes Woolf’s Orlando with her narrator, saying that Orlando is his/her name. Unlike the focus of sexology on naming and classifying, Winterson’s narrator suggests that a fixed name is not possible with the falling of the letters of Orlando’s name. Winterson criticizes naming and instead focuses on the transformation and changeability of bodies, desires, and pleasures, which she draws from Woolf’s Orlando. Not only does my chapter utilize the “shape shifting” possibilities of flowers, but I also employ the queer fantastic to inform what happens to ideas of bodies and sexualities when changing bodies challenge notions of gender fixity. Robyn Wiegman theorizes that fantasies, our desire for gender, and politics collide: Rather, our object relations are enmeshed in the symbolic work and wildness of desire, which means at the very least that objects of study enmesh us in a living relation to our fantasy. That such a fantasy is often quite explicitly political does not make our object relations less fantastical, but it does indicate something about how profoundly tied to the intimacies of desire is our pursuit of the politics of knowledge from the outset. (“Desire” 231)

Wiegman suggests that the fantastical can mesh together desires and politics and even that our desires and intimacies inform our politics and objects of study. Fantasy in Woolf’s Orlando and Winterson’s The PowerBook gives us access to multiple desires and pleasures that constantly move and change. Within Orlando and The PowerBook, tulips intersect critiques of botany’s and sexology’s attempts to classify, categorize, and quantify nature. Theorizing that Winterson offers us a new type of queer future, Madelyn Detloff explores how: Scientia sexualis is thus obsessed with the seemingly mysterious past of the subject, whose pleasures are symptoms of what came before, rather than something potentially new and uncategorizable. As someone who resists the necrophilic lure of scientia sexualis, Winterson is an unprudish, unapologetic writer who imagines new constellations of bodies and pleasures that have yet to emerge because they are not located in the past, but rather in the uncharted future. (Detloff, “Energetic” 152) Detloff shows how Scientia sexualis attempts to look back at the past of the subject through a case history to categorize symptoms and bodies rather than Winterson’s focus on the uncategorizable. This space of the uncategorizable provides Winterson the space to create bodies and pleasures that have yet to be imagined. Through the bodily transformations of Orlando and Ali, via flowers, we are made even more aware that nature defies categorization; instead, discourses and the ways in which different fields of knowledge evaluate things (flowers and bodies within my project) impose categorizations and classifications. Woolf notably uses representations of flowers to refigure bodies; as Jane Goldman suggests, “The flowers are like mouths with tongues of colour, which become reference points for snatches of conversations flitting around them” (113). For Woolf, flowers transform and, in “Kew Gardens” they become body parts that communicate to the world. At times flowers are culturally associated with conventional scripts of femininity and, problematically, this association links femininity with nature as opposed to masculinity with the social world. However, Woolf and Winterson use the tulip to queer femininity and traditionally heteronormative romantic narratives (for

example, fairytales and pirate stories) to show that how we conceptualize the natural is very social, cultural, ideological, and discursive. Similar to Woolf’s comment in her diary that: “I’m neither one thing nor the other[,]” I assert that that body is not “one thing nor the other” questioning the desire for an ideal heteronormative body (DIII 128).75 Woolf and Winterson use a flower to transform the body to desire something different than masculine male bodies or feminine female bodies. These bodies become something all together different and their changeability suggests that these bodies can continually transform. II. Made-up Flowers, Made-up Femininity Part of the power, influence, eroticism, and citationality of icons is both what they are and how they are made. The making of feminine icons relies, not surprisingly, on feminine accessories and excessiveness: makeup, jewelry, high heels, purses, clothing, perfume, etc. Within the early twentieth century, makeup becomes not only a business but an icon in itself and makeup actually iconizes the leading ladies (Helen Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden76) of makeup. Makeup contributes to “the construction of fashionable femininity” according to Marie Clifford, “An exaggerated, almost hyperbolic, emphasis on decorative vocabularies coded as ‘feminine’ creates a scene that hovers between lush fairyland and Technicolor movie set…. In other words, the space actively participates in the construction of fashionable femininity” (Clifford 83). Makeup advertisements actually turn makeup into an icon – instead of just being tube of lipstick or even pigment, lipstick becomes beauty, perfection, accentuation, femininity in itself. Keller asserts the transformative potential of make up in changing social structures: As makeup became more widespread in the 1930s, its resemblance to art became more apparent. Not simply a sign of all that was modern and fashionable, makeup involved the play of line and color and promised a transformative process by which every woman could endlessly reinvent herself. Yet, while fine art painting was usually thought of as permanent and

75 This entry was written on February 12th, 1927 at the time Woolf begins conceptualizing Orlando. 76 Elizabeth Arden was connected with “Oscar Wilde” and “Bessie Marbury” (Woodhead 181)

timeless, an unchanging artifact in a gallery, makeup brought art out into the street and everyday life. As an ephemeral creation, with its constant need to be recreated anew, makeup seemed to offer the potential for reimagining surrounding social structures as well. A public, visible sign of social position, makeup’s intimate relation to the female body rendered it erotic, a catalyst for dreams and desires. (Keller, “Rubinstein Fantasies” 1) Makeup held the “potential for re-imagining social structures” and making the female body and makeup itself an “erotic” “catalyst for dreams and desires.” Also, through makeup advertisements we can see iconic discourses of femininity in action framed in visual relations.77

Figure 8: “Botany Lanolin,” Harper’s Bazaar 1943

Botany as a field of knowledge is about the classification, study, and questioning of plants, flowers, trees, fungi, etc. The above advertisement of the “Botany Lanolin”

77 Keller notes: “Advertisers, on the other hand, recognized that harnessing the fantasies catalyzed by makeup would help sell additional products; they had an investment in ensuring that when people dreamed, it was only of consumer fantasies and not of transforming the fundamental structure of society” (Keller, “Rubinstein Fantasies” 1).

line (1943) shows how makeup in certain ways becomes “the study and classification of” femininity (“Botany Lanolin”). Femininity is inspected, and in order to pass such scrutiny, women must be washed, lotioned, scented, powdered, nail polished, and lipsticked. The leading ladies of makeup had very interesting relationships with flowers and tulips in particular. Flowers and makeup are at times linked with conventional femininity, but can be very resistant depending on their use and context. For example, Helen Rubenstein’s tulip line of cosmetics, “The Tulips of Fashion,” was advertised in numerous newspapers in the 1960s78 and pictured a seductive woman biting a tulip with the title “Six fresh Tulip lipstick colors…and every Tulip has a silver lining” (“Display Ad 62” B11):

Figure 9: Chicago Tribune 12 Apr. 1965 (“Display Ad 62”)

78 This line of cosmetics appears in: the April 4, 1965 issue of the (as well as many other newspapers including the Reading Eagle 1965 newspaper (“Helena Rubinstein Picks: THE TULIPS OF FASHION”), Milwaukee Journal 1965 (“Helena Rubinstein picks: The Tulips of Fashion”), and The Herald Tribune 1966 Fashion Flips Over Tulips “Fashion Flips Over Tulips” 9) to name a few).

Then, below the picture of the woman nibbling on the tulip, the advertisement for “Display Ad 62” states: Helena Rubinstein picks The Tulips of Fashion: Six fresh Tulip lipstick colors…and every Tulip has a silver lining. Tempting new shades…each with a delicate underglow that puts delicious shimmer where your lips are! Your two lips (and tulips!) have never been this fascinating in their lives. Even the cases are meant to be looked-at and loved. Pick the long stemmed Tulip Fashion Stick (the lipstick and lip liner in one) or the Tulip Wedding Ring Lipstick. And for double the delight there is a matching Silk Fashion make-up compact! Wear Tulips and more Tulips this spring. (And it won’t really matter what else you have on!) (“Display Ad 62”) Makeup combines with another icon of femininity – flowers. First, the advertisement cites the fairytale-like silver lining and then goes onto sexualize the two lips and tulips. Sexual imagery in this advertisement relies on visual and textual images – the beautiful woman nibbling on her tulip, the makeup, the descriptions and pleasures of the makeup. Orgasmic and sexual words describes the wearing of the tulip lipstick with the glow of the skin, long, short, double the delight as well as what might happen after you wear the lipstick with the sexual suggestion of it not “matter[ing] what else you have on!” The tulip lipstick containers seem a lot like the tulip dildos similar in Winterson’s The PowerBook, urging those buying the lipstick – to pick different sizes of flowers for your delight might be. In this advertisement, flowers and makeup accessorize and accent femininity, and the ellipses leave the spectator questioning what happens within them.79 Desire within the ellipses guides our imaginations. Tulips and makeup become fashion and sexually enticing all at the same time. Tulips even accessorize the accessory (decorating makeup cases). The message is seemingly simple; buy and wear Rubinstein’s tulip makeup and perfume and you can access your own fairytale. Wearing the “wedding ring lipstick” will help those buying them receive a bouquet of tulips. A

79 See: Jane Marcus’s “Liberty, Soroity, Misogyny” in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy for her study of Woolf’s use of ellipses in A Room of One’s Own.

wedding ring will soon follow. Later in this chapter I detail how Ali uses a tulip as a transformable disguise to create new forms of sexual pleasure for both the Princess and Ali. The tulip in The PowerBook draws upon the delight and pleasure of Rubinstein’s tulip makeup. Ali utilizes the tulip to change genders and give the Princess sexual pleasure in a similar way that makeup works in Rubinstein’s makeup advertisements. Pick a flower. Pick a pleasure.

Figure 10: New York Times (1923); Mar 15, 1964 (“Display Ad 41” 42)

Some of the advertisements for Rubenstein’s tulip line focus on vision and how one will inevitably look wearing the makeup. “Display Ad 41” from a 1964 issue of the New York Times shows how the tulips from Rubenstein’s makeup line work as mirrors. Glimpsing into the mirrors within these advertisements, allows viewers to imagine their own beauty transformed. The mirrors also remind the spectators that they are constantly being watched and their beauty checked. This advertisement (Figure 10) in comparison to the previous (Figure 9) notes a particular connection to classed femininity. Figure 10 emphasizes an elegant femininity almost like a painting, which references Lord & Taylor the very expensive store. Figure 9 focuses on picking a lipstick and picking a pleasure

where as figure 10 seems to suggest a contained pleasure, the pleasure is contained by and represented within the frame of the mirror and the frame of the advertisement.

Figure 11: Chicago Tribune (1963); Mar 30, 1964 (“Display Ad 37” B8).

In this advertisement from the Chicago Tribune (1964), the tulip frames the model, turning her into a tulip. The model looks seductively at the camera as she puts on her shiny lipstick. Also, a bouquet of tulips decorates the frame. A tube of lipstick sits in front of the picture of the model giving us the notion that the wearer of this tulip makeup will be as pretty and perfect as a photograph and the advertisement. All of these makeup advertisements suggest that women should have their face ready because they can never know who’s watching. Problematically, normative discourses define an ideal femininity as a flawless perfection, which Winterson notes in her critique of the Prince who says, “ ‘I want a woman, without blemish inside or out, flawless in every respect. I want a woman who is perfect” (Oranges 61). Discursively, femininity is thus constructed as perfect and flawless, a reason why Rubenstein utilizes narratives of fairytales and perfection in her advertisements for her makeup line “Tulips of Fashion.” Winterson critiques the idea of

the perfection of femininity showing the impossibility of perfection particularly within Oranges are Not the Only Fruit when the Prince has the woman’s head cut off whom he thinks is perfect. When this woman defies her conventional place in the fairytale, she does not want to marry the Prince and become a Princess, the Prince has her murdered (Oranges 61-67). Then in The PowerBook, Winterson crafts a different script of fairytale femininities not about perfection or marrying a prince but rather about pleasure and “be[ing] your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way” (PowerBook 183). Both Winterson’s and, as I explore in my next chapter, Carter’s, femme princesses show princesses rescuing themselves and others – as strong, queer, powerfully feminine, and heroic. III. Not a Conventional Flower The tulip shows us how nature and bodies are continually transforming, changing, and queering. Significantly, Woolf and Winterson deconstruct boundaries of bodies with flowers. Winterson queers the bodies’ of her narrators by not giving them gender. This lack of gendered bodies again emphasizes the textual, as some of Winterson’s readers then read for gender clues to “figure out” her narrators. As some readers search through Winterson’s pages noting all the gendered references, we become aware of the way cultural discourses encourage us to find, analyze, and categorize gender with a similar symptomatic logic of sexologists. Significantly, Winterson continually links her character Ali with Woolf’s Orlando. The PowerBook connects Ali with Orlando via gender transformations since the tulip “graphs” a remade strap-on of sorts facilitating Ali’s bodily transformation. While Winterson’s character Ali – her Orlando – lives in Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, she picks a tulip to change into a boy. The narrator in Orlando says, “To his imagination it seemed as if even the bodies of those instinct with such divine thoughts must be transfigured. They must have aureoles for hair, incense for breath, and roses must grow between their lips--which was certainly not true either of himself or Mr Dupper” (Woolf, O 82-83). Here Orlando imagines that bodies “must be transfigured” – even bodies read as divine. It is not only discourses of science, but also those of religion that attempt to define bodies as unchangeable. For example, the Judeo-

Christian myth of Joan of Arc canonizes her as a Saint but does not remember one of the reasons Joan of Arc for her execution was because she dressed as a man and lead an army. Instead of making the slippage of Joan of Arc’s body and gender iconic, the myth remembers her as a woman, innocent, youthful, and connected with a ‘natural’ world.80 Orlando wants to imagine a world where all bodies are transfigured or at least are allowed such possibility, remembering Joan of Arc not just on her horse, in a dress, with a hallo around her head, but also offering the image and story of Joan of Arc in men’s clothing leading an army (not valorizing war but rather noting different gendered possibilities and how the divinity of Joan of Arc is not about a static body but a transfigured one). Ending this passage, Orlando imagines how roses incite bodily changes between lips they beckon desires. The tulip that transforms Ali directly connects to Orlando’s sexual transformation in Constantinople in Woolf’s novel. Soon after Orlando’s gender transformation and her stay with the gypsies, she describes a tale of tulips and pirates connecting the two: “….and lain with loose women among treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships on summer nights when the tulips were abloom and the bees buzzing…” (Woolf, O 162).81 The narrator describes sexual encounters with “lain with lose women” and “tulips were abloom” very suggestively. Interestingly in The PowerBook, Ali’s picks hirself a flower to change into a boy because the family cannot afford another child particularly a daughter, so Ali’s mother encourages hir to work on ship. With the tulip grafted penis, Ali works on a ship that is taken over by pirates. Ali becomes a “treasure sack” because the pirates sell Ali into slavery. Sold to a Turkish Princess, Ali is then told to teach the Princess the about sex before her wedding night (22). After Ali and the Princess meet, they experience mutual and

80 See: Caryl Churchill’s re-representation of Joan of Arc in Top Girls. 81 Ellis comments on fairytales, “Dreaming was forced upon me. I dreamed fairy-tales by night and social dreams by day. In the nightdreams, sometimes in the day-dreams, I was always the prince or the pirate, rescuing beauty in distress, or killing the unworthy. I had one dream which I dreamed over and over again and enjoyed and still sometimes dream. In this I was always hunting and fighting, often in the dark; there was usually a woman or a princess, whom I admired, somewhere in the background, but I have never really seen her. Sometimes I was a stowaway on board ship or an Indian hunter or a backwoodsman making a log-cabin for my wife or rather some companion” (Ellis 285-286).

multiple orgasmic pleasures, causing Ali’s tulip to transform yet again. The tulip “bridges” their bodies and the two proceed to have sex all night. Both Woolf’s and Winterson’s tulips link with pirates and tales of princesses. Woolf critiques fairytale scripts of femininity that suggest marriage is women’s ‘happily ever after,’ when, after Orlando has become a woman she feels: culpable; dishonoured; unchaste, which, for one who had never given the matter a thought, was strange.….and she felt that however much landing there meant comfort, meant opulence, meant consequence and state (for she would doubtless pick up some noble Prince and reign, his consort, over half Yorkshire), still, if it meant conventionality, meant slavery, meant deceit, meant denying her love, fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and restraining her tongue, then she would turn about with the ship and set sail once more for the gypsies…. (Woolf, O 162-163) While a man, Orlando’s thoughts about sex were that women must be “plucked . . . before nightfall” (27). Thus, for traditional notions of male masculinity, men can have as much sex as they want – actually the more sex the better within normative discourses that suggest sexually pursuing numerous women makes one a “real” man. Orlando describes the constraints of femininity and is plagued by scripts of conventional femininity that define the necessity of women as “chaste,” “denying,” not speaking their minds, and “slavery” in marriage. Of course, Orlando later challenges these traditional scripts of femininity pursuing sexual pleasure as often she wants and with whomever she desires. In Woolf’s diary, instead of the flower representing “blooming” heterosexual femininity ripe for the picking, she connects a flower with Sapphism and Orlando’s changeable genders: “I toyed vaguely with some thoughts of a flower whose petals fall; of all time telescoped into one lucid channel through wh. my heroine was to pass at will. The petals falling….(for this is all fantasy) …. Sapphism is to be suggested….The Ladies are to have Constantinople in view….” (DIII 131).82 Time becomes a lucid channel that

82 Goldman notes a different moment in Woolf’s diary where she talks about the transitory potential of flowers: “ ‘….future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident – say the fall of the flower – might contain it’” (quoted in Goldman 187).

Orlando can “pass at will.” As the petals fall, the flower opens and transforms into something new. Notably, the tulip is a flower whose “petals [physically] fall” unlike many flowers whose petals instead shrivel up. The falling of the tulip’s petals exposes the flower’s stamens and pistil. Orlando’s floral gendered transformation is continual, as Woolf notes that her heroine can “pass at will.” Orlando offers different figurations and scripts of bodies to challenge discourses that attempt to confine and discipline hir – for example, science, religion, and laws of inheritance. Before Orlando’s sex change, he narrates a similar passage: the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall . . . . As for using the artifices of the greenhouse or conservatory to prolong or preserve these fresh pinks and roses, that was not their way. The withered intricacies and ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age were unknown to them. Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded….Girls were roses, and their seasons were short as the flowers'. Plucked they must be before nightfall; (Woolf, O 27) Orlando mentions that greenhouses and conservatories do not use anything unnatural to “prolong or preserve” flowers in a similar way that girls/roses cannot extend their seasons again making connections between flowers and bodies. Importantly, the narrator references the intricacies and ambiguities of both flowers and genders foreshadowing Orlando’s gender transformation to come. Unlike the girls who must be plucked, Orlando continues to bloom after hir gender change. While as the “Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople,” Orlando thinks that he “should feel a passion of affection for the bright, unseasonable flowers” (Woolf, O 121).83 Orlando’s sex change occurs during the seventeenth century section of Orlando historically situated within Constantinople’s Tulip Era (Woolf, O 118).84 In

83 According to A.D. Hall, “The recognition of the tulip came curiously late in botanical history. The first European reference is contained in a letter written by A.G. Busbequius in 1554 when he was traveling to Constantinople as Ambassador of the Emperor Ferdinand I to the Sultan” (5). 84 Famously, the tulip pleasure gardens “flourished” in Constantinople, and according to Anna Pavord, “In the relatively settled period of Constantinople, tulips flourished in the gardens laid out by Sultan Mehmed II (1451-1481)…. He built himself a palace…and laid out pleasure

Constantinople, Orlando’s fantastic sex change occurs and Orlando awakens and glances into the “looking-glass” to find that she is now a woman (Woolf, O 138). The narrator says, “Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since” (Woolf, O 139). Orlando’s fantastic sex change defies biological determinism, psychology, medicine, and classification. Instead of sexology’s attempts to measure female inverts’ bodies to classify natural/normal and unnatural/abnormal female bodies, Woolf’s and Winterson’s intersecting of nature, flowers, genders, and bodies create worlds where genders, pleasures, desires, and bodies can change, transform, and move. IV. Pleasurable Femininities Heteronormative conceptions of femininity define femininity as about other people’s pleasures – for example heterosexual men’s or the female invert’s pleasures – within early twentieth century discourses of sexology and psychology, attempting to conceptualize femininity as a lack of sexual desire heterosexual or otherwise. As this traditional story goes, masculinity “actively” sexually pursues “passive” femininity. Ellis published Study of the Psychology of Sex, Sexual Inversion in 1927, one year prior to Orlando. Although Ellis attempted to create a theory about female inverts coercing feminine women into their beds, Ellis’s own case histories of female inverts describe mutual and multiple pleasures. Ellis attempts to suggest that in relationships between female inverts and their feminine partners, the feminine partners had objections and doubts: The ‘flame’ proceeds exactly like a love-relationship; it often happens that one of the girls shows man-like characteristics….Then the one who is first struck begins a regular courtship: frequent walks in the garden when the other is likely to be at the window of her class-room, pauses on the stairs to see her pass; in short, a mute adoration made up of glances and sighs. gardens inside the city’s courtyards” (30). Orlando has wealth and privilege in excess as the Ambassador to Constantinople; living in his palace-like house he experiences numerous pleasures in his pleasure gardens: sex, food, drink, luxury, and then the changing of sexes.

Later come presents of beautiful flowers….Finally, if the ‘flame’ shows signs of appreciating all these proofs of affection, comes the letter of declaration. Letters of declaration are long and ardent, to such a degree that they equal or surpass real love-declarations. The courted one nearly always accepts, sometimes with enthusiasm, oftenest with many objections and doubts as to the affection declared. It is only after many entreaties that she yields and the relationship begins. (420-421) Within Ellis’ theory of sexual inversion, the female invert is the “one first struck” and who begins the courtship while the feminine partner is said to have objections and doubts but finally yields to the female invert’s courtship.85 Despite Ellis’s theory that paints femininity as not sexually desiring with the feminine partner needing persuading, his reference to how the feminine woman “pauses on the stairs to see [the female invert] pass; in short, a mute adoration made up of glances and sighs” expresses feminine desire (421). The feminine woman glances and sighs as she watches the female invert stroll in the garden and seems very willing to accept the beautiful flowers. Woolf and Winterson, then, critique and change Ellis’ narrative. The PowerBook transforms fairytale scripts to stories not of romance and a Prince rescuing a Princess and living happily ever after; but rather, the fairytale turns into a story about how a tulip transforms a body to give the Princess sexual pleasures that she encourages and incites. Thus, fairytale scripts of femininity are made into tales of Princesses and their pleasures. In much the same way, the narrator of Orlando describes: She had, it seems, no difficulty in sustaining the different parts, for her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped a twofold harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased and its experiences multiplied. From the probity of breeches she turned to the

85 Carpenter links people of the intermediate sex with flowers: “some perhaps exhibiting through their double temperament a rare and beautiful flower of humanity, others a perverse and tangled ruin” (Carpenter lines 35-36).

seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally. (220) Orlando’s gender changeability causes Orlando’s pleasures to be “increased and its experiences multiplied.” Woolf’s narrative of pleasure actually challenges definitions of sexuality that define correct or singular types of pleasure.86 Metaphorically, Orlando is “a flower whose petals fall,” a transformation symbolized by Ali’s own floral bodily transformation in Istanbul (DIII 131). A tulip remakes Ali’s body: I found myself a well-formed fat stem supporting a good-sized red head with rounded tips….There are many legends of men being turned into beasts and women into trees, but none I think, till now, of a woman who becomes a man by means of a little horticultural grafting. (Winterson, The PowerBook 12) The PowerBook utilizes horticultural grafting to transfigure Ali’s body and gender with a tulip. It is significant to note the botanical characteristics of tulips to expand upon the importance of tulips and Constantinople in Orlando and The PowerBook. According to Michael Pollan, tulips are, “great changelings, freely hybridizing….but also subject to mutations that produced spontaneous and wondrous changes in form and color. The tulip’s mutability was taken as a sign that nature cherished this flower above all others” (80). The tulip’s mutability and “changes in form” give it transformative possibilities in

86 On the other hand, Karyn Sproles suggests that, “[t]here is no explicit evidence that Orlando is hetero- or bisexual. Orlando may receive the love of both sexes – and enjoy it – but her own sexual desires seem to remain consistent: she is physically attracted to women, whereas her relationships with men are purely ceremonial” (80). Sproles’s important and informative project explores Sapphic desire in Orlando. I agree with Sproles that Orlando experiences lesbian desire and attraction, but I diverge, arguing that Woolf’s project in Orlando situates pleasure as more significant than defining sexuality per se (lesbian, bisexuality, heterosexuality, or otherwise) Although at times Sproles suggests that “The climax of their partnership, Orlando is an explicit call for recognition of the instability of sexuality and subjectivity” (17), much of her attention focuses on painting Orlando’s Sapphic desire “even after he changes sex, desire remains unchanged” (65).

Winterson’s text. Within The PowerBook, the tulip simultaneously mutates itself as well as the idea of a gendered body. Ali’s tulip is not purely phallic. As Judith Roof suggests about Woolf’s crocus in Mrs. Dalloway: “A crocus is finally not a phallus—its petals peel back to reveal something other, a flame rather than a stick, radiance rather than solid unity, a transformation which renders the phallus itself invisible as either presence or absence” (109). Even when Ali uses the tulip to penetrate the Princess, the tulip does not signify a penis or a traditionally defined phallus. The tulip pleasures both the Princess and Ali. Remembering that the narrator grafts the story of Ali, the Princess, and the tulip, the narrator designs this fairytale to encourage Tulip’s (the alias of the narrator’s love interest) desire. The narrator wants to turn Tulip on constructing the strap-on tulip as textually erotic and about multiple forms of pleasures and desires. Ali’s names hir tulip bulbs “ ‘Key of Pleasure, and….Lover’s Dream’” (The PowerBook 25). Sexual pleasure takes on multiple meanings in The PowerBook. The narrator crafts sexual pleasure for Ali and the Princess, Tulip, hireslf, and as a key to queering this fairytale. The “Key” to both The PowerBook and Orlando is “Pleasure” (Winterson 25). As The PowerBook continues, Ali anxiously wonders how s/he will “fuck” the Princess with her/his tulip (Winterson 26). Taking the lead, the Princess says: ‘Take off your trousers and let me see you.’….‘I have never seen a man before.’ (You’re not seeing one now.) ‘The stories I have heard…the fleshiness, the swelling…but you are like a flower.’ (This was true.) She touched my bulbs. ‘They are like chestnuts.’ (Tulips, my darling, tulips.). (The PowerBook 24-25) The pretty flower enthralls the Princess because it is not the “fleshiness, the swelling” that she expects. The Princess’s femininity, Ali’s masculinity, and their bodies access pleasure in new ways not contained by heteronormative ideas of sexuality, pleasure, sexed bodies, and genders. Ali does not expect her/his own pleasure and feels astonishment when the Princess:

kissed and petted my tulip, my own sensations grew exquisite….as I felt my disguise come to life. The tulip began to stand up…. There it was, making a bridge from my body to hers…. Very gently the Princess lowered herself across my knees and I felt the firm red head and pale shaft plant itself in her body. (The PowerBook 25-26) Queer masculine and feminine pleasures mingle as Ali feels eagerness and pleasure, therefore making the stem of the tulip bridge Ali’s body to the Princess’s body (The PowerBook 25-26). Ali’s body transforms again as the tulip actually comes alive to give and receive pleasure. Taking off of Woolf’s use of a flower as the channel for Orlando’s sexual transformation, pleasure in Orlando, and the location of Constantinople of Orlando’s sex change prior to its own transition to Istanbul, Winterson re-imagines Woolf’s ideas of pleasure and flowers transforming bodies and definitions of sexuality, performing her notion that “Time, which returns everything, changes everything” (286). This sex scene demonstrates Wiegman’s desire for gender when she says, “While I learned early that a masculine object was necessary to my sexual subjectivity, it took longer to know that this object could never be legibly bio-male – and longer still to understand what that object’s gender made (and continues to make) of my own” (“Desire” 225). Ali’s queer masculine and the Princess’s queer feminine pleasure continually remake their desires, genders, and heteronormative scripts of genders, sexualities, and pleasures. Not rescued on a white horse by her prince, the Princess must “learn something of the arts of love” from Ali before her wedding night so that she can sexually please the Prince. On the other hand, with Ali the Princess’s pleasures and desires are encouraged, given, and urged, demonstrating the different discursive narratives about the Princess and her pleasures (The PowerBook 22). The Princess and Ali are “connected by rivets of pleasure” (The PowerBook 24). The tulip both re- imagines pleasure as well as bodies. New bodies and pleasures are “grafted” (The PowerBook 12).

V. Conclusion The narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook sits in her costume shop surrounded by costumes and disguises that s/he rents and fictionally crafts. The novel chronicles the narrator creating cyber-stories that work as disguises, offering Tulip, her Internet love interest, “freedom for just one night” (3). The narrator then creates herself/himself as the character Ali as s/he writes the story “Open Hard Drive” to Tulip referencing how the hard drive manipulated to change the story (The PowerBook 7, 29). After reading the story, Tulip messages the narrator, “That was a terrible thing to do to a flower,” and the two proceed to internet chat: “ ‘When you came on-line you said you wanted to be transformed.’ ‘Into a flower-fucking Princess?’ ‘Well, your alias is Tulip’” (The PowerBook 29). Ali straps-on the tulip, but the Princess encourages the sexual encounters and “fucks” the “flower” (The PowerBook 25). The narrator turns her/him-self into Ali, but then what about Tulip? Is she “a flower-fucking Princess,” a Princess, and/or the tulip itself? The blurring of the “flower-fucking,” the tulip, and the Princess, queers and resists heteronormative ideas of sex – someone does the “fucking” and someone is “fucked.” Winterson and Woolf offer us a space where sex and bodies become something else: not so determined and finite, rather dynamic and transient. Bodies, the act of sex, and pleasure intermingle. Expanding upon the disguises Orlando uses in her pleasurable pursuits (for example, when she dresses up as a “Noble Lord” to seduce women) (Woolf, O 215-217), the disguises in The PowerBook collide offering “freedom for one night” that defy biological determinism (3). Also, when Tulip says, “‘That wasn’t my idea of romance.’ [to which the narrator responds] ‘Was it romance you wanted?’” illustrating how the narrator, and in turn The PowerBook, challenge traditional heteronormative scripts of supposed fairytales of romance and instead transform them with pleasure scripts (29). The traditional fairytale scripts of romance focus on and end with marriage as a ‘happily ever after.’ What does Woolf’s and Winterson’s re-figuring of the tulip with bodies, desires, pleasures, and genders offer us? Gender as a narrative that we can craft and change in terms of the scripts themselves and the ways we read, perform, and live them. The tulip actually performs – what The

PowerBook sets out to do – it challenges and changes how heteronormativity couples sexuality and gender through scripts of romance-like fairytales and instead offers versions of genders, bodies, and sexualities that signify the continual making of pleasure. What a fabulous thing to do with a flower.

Chapter Three

Feminine Spectacles of Genders, Races, Sexualities, and Imperialism in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus87

Figure 12: Del LaGrace’s Volcano’s Valerie Mason- John, London 2007 (Volcano and Dahl 34).

I. Introduction: Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (Nights), set in 1899 and transitioning to the turn of the twentieth century, narrates the different spectacular performances of Fevvers, the novel’s main character, who is half woman and half bird. Fevvers desires to tell a different story that resists how normative discourses of gender, sexuality, and imperialism attempt to define her. I begin this chapter with Del LeGrace Volcano’s

87 (Carter’s emphasis, Nights 182).

photograph, Valerie Mason, London 2007, because Mason’s performance reminds me of Fevvers’s spectacle of femininity. Mason’s performance of black femininity challenges how femininity has, at times, been utilized to inscribe a white domesticity particularly within imperialism (McClintock 6-7). Similarly to Fevvers, Mason creates herself as a spectacle for spectators, seemingly begging audiences to think about and desire femininity while simultaneously representing a danger that almost beckons the viewer to challenge her. In the photograph, Mason’s resistant stance and direct confrontation to the camera lens and the spectator asserts that she can take care of herself and will fight back if challenged. Also, Mason utilizes feminine accessories to accent her performance and performativity: her red lipstick highlights the seductiveness of her lips; her black lacy bra pushes up her breasts making her cleavage one focal point of the photograph; and her jewelry which seems to reference Britain’s imperial past as Mason wears a collar-like necklace with bolts visible, rings and bracelets of gold, and earrings that appear to be made out of ivory. Later in this chapter, I discuss how Fevvers utilizes jewelry to critique British Imperialism’s definition of her as inhuman, as an object to be gazed upon and made into whatever the British Empire desires. As Nights and Mason’s photograph show, resistant performances of femininity challenge heteronormativity that defines “correct” or “incorrect” genders. In this chapter, I discuss how key normative discourses of femininity propose that “normal” femininity always already implies heterosexuality while Carter resists such scripts with feminine spectacle. The fictionalization of femininity (classic narratives/scripts of femininity) can create icons that normalize the damaging and sometimes violent effects of heteronormativity (for example, rape in W.B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” which builds upon an entire tradition of mythical Leda and the Swan representations in literature and art history). At the same time, an analysis of Fevvers character demonstrates how Fevvers displays challenge damaging icons of femininity. Fevvers uses the narrative of “Leda and the Swan” to make a different script of femininity, turning the traumatic and victimized narrative of Leda’s rape into a story of the resistance, strength, and pleasure of femininity and feminine people. These performances of resistance offer us scripts of

pleasure and femininity showing that pleasure is a necessary part of life for feminine people. Nights highlights challenging, traumatic scripts of femininity with pleasure in order to claim subjectivity and human status. Femininity provides an interesting analytical space because even when normative and culturally intelligible (for example the “ideal” feminine heterosexual women), such a performance and inclusion in heteronormativity does not guarantee human status. Similar to Ann Cvetkovich’s theories of S/M as one of “the creative responses” (3) to trauma, Fevvers character shows how pleasure and pain intertwine as she creates a fiction out of narrative trauma. In this way, femininity offers us a critical opportunity in both heterosexual and queer sexualities to question who has access to pleasure and human definition and thus demand justice. Thus, Fevvers utilizes sexist and traumatic scripts of femininity to remake them and offer audiences new narratives of femininity that foreground pleasure, the pleasure that can come out of pain, and stories of resistance. Not insignificantly, the phrase “Is she fiction or fact?” is scattered throughout the novel (Carter, Nights 147). Using the fiction that defines femininity as passive and thus susceptible to rape in W.B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” Fevvers creates another narrative of femininity out of Leda’s traumatic story.88 Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” is intriguing, as Helen Sword argues, “Even more than Yeats, then, who describes Leda’s rape as one in a series of annunciatory events shaping human history,” (311). Fevvers wants to then take Yeats’s narrative of Leda’s fictionalization of human history, and narrate human history differently with a focus on resistance. Fevvers narrates herself to Walser as a fiction that challenges heteronormative discourses of femininity with her resistant feminine spectacle, which

88 Helen Sword theorizes that rape on one hand is a very real thing and it is metaphoric in terms of traumatic narrative obsession male writers have to keep recreating narratives that suggest rape is something evitable: “For women, of course, rape is not merely an abstract concept; even if no woman actually fears being violated by a swan (or, one would hope, by Zeus in any form), tales like the Leda myth, in which human contact with the divine is couched in the vocabulary of sexual conquest, can serve as telling metaphors both for female poets' real-life experiences of male dom-ination and for their anxieties of male literary influence” (Sword 306).

even calls into question normative subject-object relations that supposedly structure gender, sexuality, race, and imperialism. Interestingly, these normative discourses open up spaces to challenge and create new performances of femininity. In his book, Disidentifications, Muñoz states: “disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology…this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance” (11-12). In this chapter, I show how femininity can break the binary of pleasure/constraint, showing that pleasure sometimes can be made out of constraint as a strategy of disidentification. Nights takes the constraints not just of “Leda and the Swan,” but also normative discourses of imperialism, gender, sexuality, race, and disability to make resistant scripts of femininity to offer a new narrative. Race, imperialism, and disability connect throughout Nights via performances and displays of femininity. Fevvers, the Princess, and Mignon all perform in The Imperial Tour, a circus that seems a lot like the exhibition of the “freak show” at some carnivals. Rosemarie Garland Thomson details the history of the “freak show” as a mode of imperialism, racism, and sexism where “[b]odies whose forms appeared to transgress rigid social categories such as race, gender, and personhood were particularly good grist for the freak mill” (12). Nights queers the history of the freak show because the performers, in the Imperial Tour, exhibit themselves for spectators to see while challenging normative notions of sexuality, race, and disability. The spectacle of the exhibition foregrounds questions about the resistant possibilities of visibility, insightfully, Wiegman describes how much of visibility politics relies on making invisible or unmarked identities seen (American 6).89 Utilizing Wiegman’s theories of “Western

89 Robyn Wiegman comments on such debates as she writes, “That this system itself is contingent on certain visual relations, where only those particularities associated with the Other are, quite literally, seen, demonstrates the political importance of unveiling, in a variety of registers, Western economies of visibilities….the critical gaze has also been increasingly attentive to the unmarked and invisible, but no less specific, corporeality that hides beneath the abstraction of universality” (Wiegman, American 6).

economies of visibilities,” I show how we can study these “Western economies of visibility” displayed on representational female bodies, as well as how these bodies are defined. Like Wiegman, I question, “What does it mean, for instance, that the visual apparatuses of photography, film, television, and video (as well as many offshoots of computer technologies) serve as our primary public domain, our main shared context for the contestations of contemporary cultural politics? And perhaps more important, what does it mean that within these technologies, the body is figured as the primary locus of representation, mediation, and/or interpretation?” (Wiegman, American 3). Within Carter’s the Imperial Tour, variations of the female body demonstrate how femininity, race, disability, and imperialism can signify inhuman in certain cultural and historical contexts. These characters reclaim their freak status teaching audiences something about normative sexuality, gender, racial, and able-bodied narratives that define who is and who is not human (Butler Undoing). To contest normative ideas of gender and nationality, Fevvers narrates her performances along with the Princess’s and Mignon’s to Walser, a newspaper journalist and her soon to be husband, for him to write a history of “The New Woman for the New Century” to create a history, literature, and “pages” that define them and their femininity as human. Since Walser’s is a journalists who first meets Fevvers because he wants to write a story about her as a half-bird, half- woman extraordinary creation, Nights draws attention to and implicates the media in creating and perpetuating normative discourses. Carter represents both the “New Woman” and the New Britain hatching from imperialism. Fevvers says that she will “hatch” Walser, the man whom she loves, so that she can make him the “New Man” to match her as the “New Woman” and he can write women’s history from Fevvers’s narration: “I’ll make him into the New Man, in fact, fitting mate for the New Woman, and onward we’ll march hand in hand into the New Century” (Carter, Nights 281). Fevvers intertwines the “New Woman,” New Century, and New Imperialism with a new fictionalized spectacle for consumption offering resistant narratives and new fictional scripts. For example, Fevvers is half woman and half bird and the Princess and Mignon are considered disabled within heteronormative able-bodied narratives. Also, with their

performances in The Imperial Circus, these characters question which bodies have claims to nationality and citizenship and which do not. As performers in this circus, they become imperial bodies/commodities without nationality and interchangeable parts from numerous British colonies. Carter critiques normative and disciplining discourses of psychoanalysis, gaze theory, the legal system, imperialism, government, religion, etc., in order to illustrate that their fictions of femininity can be made into something else. All these seemingly different discourses situate femininity similarly. As Schlossman suggests about the early twentieth century, “[m]odernism oscillates between two types of feminine objects, virginal and womanly (sensual, loving, and maternal)” (22). According to Schlossman, different male modernists (i.e. Yeats and Joyce) as well as psychoanalysts (i.e. Freud) define femininity as either “virginal,” “womanly,” or both. Schlossman asserts, “Mary the Virgin mother is a uniquely idealized feminine object of Christendom and the highest lady addressed by the poetic discourses of courtly love and fin’amor….Her role is passive, maternal, and ancillary; her femininity is defined by Christian doctrine in precisely these terms” (188).90 Femininity historically has been defined by its relationship to other discourses – with relationships with the maternal and Christianity. In the twentieth century, normative definitions of femininity intertwine with definitions of sexuality (erotic relationships, romantic relationships, and even the relationship between femininity and the British Nation/Empire). Femininity then comes to signify beauty and unintelligence, object, victimization, and a perceived inherent need to be rescued. Carter resists ideas that femininity (and, in turn, women because most of these discourses make women and femininity mutually exclusive) can only experience pleasure in one “correct” way. Fevvers creates herself as a visual spectacle and fiction of pleasure; a resistant pleasure that is not defined by others but by herself. Fevvers’s utilization of pleasure transforms normative fictions of femininity, instead suggesting that

90 “Western culture is mediated by a discourse of feminine desire, transgression, and original sin” (Schlossman 187).

femininity and feminine people are intelligent, not in need of rescue, and powerful and they contribute to the making of history, gender, and sexuality. Interestingly, Carter uses W.B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” in both The Magic Toyshop and Nights. Both Yeats and Carter write about Irish resistance to British rule, but Carter intertwines femininity and Irish nationality. Carter takes Yeats’s critiques of nationality, that “[n]ationality was like religion, few could be saved, and meditation had but one theme—the perfect nation and its perfect service” (Yeats, Autobiographies Vol. III 272), and expands upon it. This idea of the perfect nation and perfect citizens demonstrates a problematic aspect of discourses of nationality, that it is defined by exclusion. Yeats links nationality with religion, drawing on a history and political present for Yeats where people were killed in masses because of religious and/or national persecution. Carter critiques nationality similarly to Yeats, but Nights does challenge Yeats’s gendered narratives and politics. For example, Yeats writes: Women, because the main event of their lives has been giving birth, give all to an opinion as if it were some terrible stone doll….[Men] see the world, if we are of strong mind and body, with considerate eyes, but to women opinions become as their children or sweethearts, and the greater their emotional capacity the more do they forget all other things….At last the opinion is so much identified with their nature that it seems a part of their flesh becomes stone….Women should have their play with dolls finished in childish happiness, for if they play with them again it is amid hatred and malice….Women should find in the mask enough joy to forget the doll without regret. There is always a living face behind the mask. (Autobiographies Vol. III 372-373) Here Yeats says that women’s opinions become their children. Women seem to become (or at least have the possibility to become) stone dolls filled with hatred and malice, which is why Yeats warns against women playing with dolls or making their children into dolls. Yeats suggests that the mask of femininity is positive; in fact, he argues that

women should find joy in playing with the mask.91 Yeats’s assertion that, “There is always a living face behind the mask” reminds readers of the humanity of women and of femininity. In “Leda and the Swan,” the narrator asks “Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” (Poems 14-15). As a mode of resistance, Leda takes on power and knowledge while the poem simultaneously emphasizes she takes on his power. This heavily debated line in Yeats’s poem is ambiguous, causing wonder about its resistance, re-inscription of normative ideas of women, femininity, and intelligence or both (Sword 305). As Sword describes, Yeats’s sonnet: focuses less on Zeus’s erotic or political motivations for the attack than on Leda's capacity to translate such divine immanence into human understanding: ‘Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?’ (Poems 212). Although the poem, which thematizes divine revelation, presumably was not born of it-in fact, the early drafts demonstrate that ‘painstaking effort rather than a single flash of inspiration’ (Ellmann 176), a tentative hovering rather than a ‘sudden blow,’ characterized the poem's genesis—Yeats himself describes its origins as largely visionary….If, in contrast to Leda, who remains silent throughout the poem, Yeats himself succeeded in channeling pos-session into self-possession, inspiration into articulation, and spiritual annunciation into poetic enunciation, his visionary conception of the poem nonetheless implies a certain identification with Leda’s receptivity. (305)

91 Mary Anne Doane theorizes femininity as a masquerade: “The entire elaboration of femininity as a closeness, a nearness, as present-to-itself is not the definition of an essence but the delineation of a place culturally assigned to woman. . . . The effectivity of masquerade lies precisely in its potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image is manipuable, producible, and readable by the woman” (433). The masquerade of femininity is demonstrated as being different from traditional femininity because of the “distance from the image” – “the image” is the representation of traditional femininity. The performance of the masquerade of femininity must be “readable” as an alternative performance of femininity.

Utilizing Sword’s observation of the “identification” of “Leda’s receptivity” in Yeats’s version of “Leda and the Swan,” an analysis of Nights demonstrates how Fevvers’s transformative spectacles subvert the representation of Leda as receptive to her attacker. Fevvers is reproductively conceived from a picture of “Leda and the Swan” (Carter, Nights 28). Fevvers, “through a glass,” sees her own reflection merged and mirrored with “Leda and the Swan” and her “conception” (Carter, Nights 28). Half-woman and half- bird, Fevvers repeatedly recreates Yeats’s vision of “Leda and the Swan” much differently and defiantly. Fevvers uses her alternative femininity as a fiction to question and then (re)imagine gender, nationality, and looking relations. Nights revolves around a brothel, a museum of women monsters, an Imperial Circus, and a women’s prison. Feevers’s imperial metropolis, her “Beloved London”, “degenerately” racializes her as “Cockney bred and born” (Carter, Nights 87, 118). Further, I explore Fevvers because her “Cockney bred and born” status would make her not quite English in early twentieth century discourses of nation: “Like Fevvers, he was Cockney bred and born; his real name was George Buffins, but he had long ago forgotten it, although he was a great patriot, British to the bone, even if as widely traveled as the British Empire in the service of fun” (Carter, Nights 118). Unlike George Buffins who attempts to erase his “Cockney bred and born” becoming a “great patriot” and understanding his service to the British Empire as fun, in the Imperial Tour, Fevvers performs being “Cockney bred and born” to critique the British Empire and challenge spectators to do the same. In Fevvers’s first public display as the “Winged Victory,” she is whitened with powder and clown’s “wet white.” “Winged Victory” Illustrates that for those viewing Fevvers’ spectacle, as England’s Winged Victory, she is not quite “white” enough and thus must be made white (Carter, Nights 37). Audiences pay money to see this not quite white, not quite woman, not quite British citizen, not quite human, and not quite bird painted white and exhibited on her platform. The necessity of Fevvers being whitened also references normative constructions of femininity and imperialism that enforced an image of femininity as British white women imposing British ideas of domesticity both in England and its colonies. Fevers performs these intertwined discourses for audiences to

view as she constructs her display in the circus: “She twisted round, and, with her free hand, waved, or, as they say at the circus, ‘styled’ at the Imperial Box in an ironic gesture” (Carter, Nights 159). Fevvers attempts to resist normative spectatorship with her styled and ironic wave – creating an image of a parody of the Queens of England displaying their royal waves as gestures of their supposed dignity and grace. Thus, this imitation of Queen Elizabeth, points out the hypocrisy of the idea of her white virtuous femininity that was actually cloaked in imperialism. Importantly, heteronormativity also enforces gender, race, sexuality, and imperial relations on female bodies that then come to define femininity. Critics argue that Fevvers constructs her own pleasurable performance and thus resists Mulvey’s theories of the male gaze92 while other critics show that even through this resistance Fevvers reinforces objectification (Michael, Cella, O’Brien, Britzolakis, and Kohlke). For example, Michael suggests that “Fevvers exhibits herself as object, object of the audience’s gaze; yet, as the author herself as object, she is also a subject and thus has control over how much she will allow herself to be consumed by her viewers”, which indicates that Fevvers “authors” herself (500). Cella argues that, “Fevvers constructs herself as an object to be admired, but her posture and attitude reinforce the notion that she is the mistress of her own image, aware of herself as spectacle and

92 Laura Mulvey, an early theorist of the gaze suggests that: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be- looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin- ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire” (Mulvey’s emphasis 39-40). One must wonder if what Mulvey refers to is that femininity is defined as “passive,” rather than the “female” per se. The “role” that women are said to play in Mulvey’s theory is connected to their gender performance and as Butler says bodies are gendered as well. Femininity is passive because of the “to-be-looked-at-ness” – to be the one doing the looking is “active” and to be looked at is “passive” according to Mulvey. Mulvey’s “to-be-looked-at-ness” says that women are always looked at whereas men do the looking; therefore, women are powerless and men have the power. According to Mulvey, men have the power to structure the gaze – what is looked at, who is looked at, and how subjects are looked at. Fevvers resignifies this “to-be-looked-at-ness” as “active” and disrupt the active/passive binary.

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controlling the way this image is understood and publicized” Fevvers “controls” her “image” as spectacle and advertisement (Cella 56). O’Brien in particular theorizes the reception of Fevvers’s queer performativity: “Dislocating the conventional connection between the masculinist gaze and objectification or possession, Fevvers subverts notions of female object passivity by demanding to be looked at. For Fevvers, the audience perception and reaction to her appearance are necessary to maintain the performance of her identity as winged aerialiste” (O’Brien’s emphasis par 5). Britzolakis proposes that Fevvers does not resist objectification: “But the celebration of femininity remains, in both cases, linked to what Lizzie in Nights at the Circus calls ‘the discipline of the narrative’ (p 280). It seems to me far from clear whether these characters, in exploiting the creative possibilities of illusion, do indeed escape objectification or whether they end up colluding in their own objectification” (Britzolakis 461). Kohlke represents Fevvers as “pursu[ing] careers objectifying [her] femininity as fetishized spectacle for visual consumption” (Kohlke 161). Fevvers, the main character in the novel, is half woman and half bird, and she makes her living constructing herself as spectacle: as the Winged Victory in the brothel where she grows up to be looked at but not touched (Carter, Nights 15), in the museum of women monsters, and in the Imperial Circus. Much has been written about the novel and the gendered gaze, and the novel reads much like a response to Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” as Fevvers states that, “I served my apprenticeship in being looked at – at being the object of the eye of the beholder” (Carter’s emphasis, Nights 23). Fevvers continually emphasizes that she creates her own display and her “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey’s emphasis 39-40). Fevvers may create her “to-be-looked-at-ness,” yet she still experiences dangers of being the object of the gaze as Christain Rosencreutz attempts to sacrifice her and the Grand Duke wants to imprison her in his collection of rare objects indicating that neither see her as human at all. Although Fevvers may cite Mulvey, Carter uses this citation to move beyond Mulvey showing there is more to the subject/object relations of the gaze than Mulvey describes. Thus, much of the literary criticism focuses on femininity and how Carter’s representation of Fevvers, in Nights, disrupts the idea that how others view her constructs

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her and femininity simultaneously asserts the, as Wendy O’Brien suggests, “regulatory powers of the gaze” (O’Brien par 16). Wendy O’Brien performs an interesting analysis of femininity suggesting that “Fevvers frustrates more than conventional binaries of masculine/feminine as her metaphorical presence challenges the discretion of the corporeal form as human” and “Fevvers’s continual frustration of attempts to constrain her identity in terms of the mythologies of femininity, celestial beings or birds is counterpointed by the suffering of the other female characters at the hands of similar historical and discursive traditions” (O’Brien par. 7, 8). O’Brien’s insightful theories concentrate on the regulation of spectatorship and what that can do to different female characters in the novel. I add to O’Brien’s theories the importance of exploring femininity as it connects with imperialism and how Fevvers and other female characters actually challenge discriminatory discourses of gender and imperialism with their narratives and feminine performances of pleasured resistance. The Foucauldian commentary on “regulatory power” suggests that Fevvers cannot step outside power relations; rather, she weaves within them resisting them as she goes. Feminism informs much of the critical conversations about Nights, but not intersectional feminism as Magali Cornier Michael suggests: “This liberating power carries with it possibilities for change in the realms of subjecthood and the relations between the sexes and also anticipates potential new forms of feminist fiction” (Michael 495). I argue that we must study how gender intersects with race and imperialism. Fevvers represents the “lumbar room of femininity” and I would add “the lumbar room of [imperialism]” simultaneously (Carter, Nights 69). This “lumbar room” illustrates that femininity and nationality are made, can be unmade, and thus remade. Further, the very same spectatorship that objectifies femininity also objectifies colonized people under British rule. Nights shows that it isn’t just gender relations that structure looking relations rather as Ann Kaplan aptly notes, “Like everything in culture, looking relations are determined by history, tradition, power hierarchies, politics, economics. Mythic or imaginary ideas about nation, national identity and race all structure how one

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looks,….The possibilities for looking are carefully controlled….Looking is power, as Michel Foucault has amply shown” (Kaplan 4). Yes, “looking is power” but within Foucauldian theory, everyone has the ability to wield power although people’s access to power is disproportionate. Interestingly, Carter at times employs filmic looking relations. Film’s structure helps us, as Kaplan suggests, “….to examine how looking is conceived, what looking is possible and what boundaries there are to looking relations” (Kaplan 6). But unlike Kaplan, Carter shows “what looking is possible” merely to disrupt the “boundaries” of “looking relations.” Discourses of British nationality in the nineteenth century define nations, not exclusively by geographically bounded areas, but rather, as an Empire that circles different points of the globe. As Britain turns to the twentieth century, concepts of nation and nationality shift again with the influx of immigration. McClintock describes how these discourses historically work intersectionally: By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the analogy between race and gender degeneration came to serve a specifically modern form of social domination, as intricate dialectic emerged – between the domestication of the colonies and the racializing of the metropolis. In the metropolis, the idea of racial deviance was evoked to police the ‘degenerate’ classes—the militant working-class, the Irish, the Jews, feminists, gays and lesbians, prostitutes, criminals, alcoholics and the insane—who were collectively figured as racial deviants, atavistic throwbacks to a primitive moment in human prehistory, surviving ominously in the heart of the modern, imperial metropolis. (43) Nights illustrates McClintock’s theories about gender, race, imperialism, class, and sexuality. Within the imperial cities, normative discourses search out differences and define them as deviant and, in turn, people visibly marked as non-white, non-British, class privileged men, as deviant people. In addition to Fevvers’ character in Nights, the novel shows these connections as political when Fevvers says about Lizzie: “[a]nd it was, of course, never religion that made her such an inconvenient harlot, but her habit of

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lecturing the clients on the white slave trade, the rights and wrongs of women, universal suffrage, as well as the Irish question, the Indian question, republicanism, anti-clericism, syndicalism and the abolition of the House of Lords” (Carter, Nights 292). Lizzie, the “inconvenient harlot” and Fevvers’s foster mother, verbalizes connections of gender, imperialism, and heteronormativity with the call for universal suffrage for all people. Further, Lizzie challenges how people and discourses conventionally think about prostitutes because she discusses the politics and injustices of sexism and imperialism. Instead of having sexual encounters with her clients and leaving, she forces them to discuss issues of social justice with her. Lizzie demonstrates the connection of physical pleasures, bodies, politics, and intelligence. Importantly, heteronormativity also enforces gender, race, sexuality, and imperial relations on female bodies that then come to define femininity, which is why Lizzie warns Fevvers against marriage. II. Is Femininity Human?: Fevvers’s Performance of “Is she fiction or fact?” (147) Significantly set in 1899 at the turn of the century when critiques of the discrimination of imperialism, gender, and sexuality gain cultural prominence in Britain, Nights displays and exhibits a tableau vivant of the intersectionality of these discriminations (and the narratives/discourses that inform them) for audiences to see and critically engage with (Carter, Nights 23). Imperialism changes into cultural imperialism and globalization at the turn of the twentieth century – with the emphasis on global commodities and trade: “those last bewildering days before history, that is, history as we know it, that is, white history, that is, European history, that is, Yanqui history – in that final little breathing space before history as such extended its tentacles to grasp the entire globe, the tribespeople were already addicted to tea and handy imported firearms and axes which they could not make themselves” (Carter, Nights 265). This cultural imperialism spreads commodities around the world – not just tea but people as well with Fevvers’ performance within the Imperial Circus. The Imperial Tour visibly emphasizes the physical trade of people within imperialism and the visual exhibition of colonized people as spectacles for the colonizers to view. With World War I quickly approaching, the need for war necessitates imported firearms. Firearms, one of the most important

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global commodities during the World Wars, contribute to the writing of “white [global] history.” Framed by white European progress narratives of the necessity of violence and technology, this “white history” furthers imperial violence and dehumanization. These “tentacles” tangle themselves into the globe making the “tribes people” reliant on commodities from the very people who dehumanize them. Fevvers lives her life as a spectacle and performance, demonstrating to spectators the tangling tentacles of imperialism, racism, and heteronormativity. At the brothel where Fevvers grows up, she performs the Winged Victory for others to look at but not touch.93 The brothel closes and then Fevvers displays herself in the Museum of Women Monsters where she experiences the dangers and violence that can accompany her spectacle status. Fevvers and the other women in the museum of women monsters are “prisoners” and “slaves” to Madame Schreck (Carter, Nights 63). Fevvers discovers one of the dangers of living her life as someone else’s spectacle since Madame Schreck sells her to Mr. Rosencreutz – a direct connection to the slave trade, misogyny, and racism within the Christian religion and other discourses, which perpetuate ideas of humanity being defined by purity. Rosencreutz wants to sacrifice Fevvers because he sees her as the angel of death and as an in-between: “ ‘Beautiful lady who is neither one thing nor the other, nor flesh nor fowl, though fair is fowl and fowl is fair – tee hee! tee hee hee!....By pure thoughts,’…. ‘Queen of ambiguities, goddess of in-between, being on the borderline of species, manifestation of Arioriph, Venus, Achamatoth, Sophia’” (Carter, Nights 76, 81). Incorrectly, Rosencreutz assumes that Fevvers’ status as an in-between makes her inhuman and acceptable to sacrifice. Rosencreutz juxtaposes Fevvers’ in- betweeness with “impurity” suggesting that within normative religious discourse anyone with in-between status defies purity and thus is not human. However, as Carter points out with her continued connection with “Leda and the Swan,” even purity does not save women. This mythic construction of purity perpetuates culturally accepted violence and

93 Carter writes, “‘How was I costumed for my part [Winged Victory]? My hair was powdered white with chalk and tied up with a ribbon and my wings were powdered white, too, so I let out a puff if touched. My face and the top half of my body was spread with the wet white that clowns use in the circus and I had white drapes from my navel to my knee but my shins and feet were dipped in wet white, too’” (Carter’s emphasis, Nights 37).

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even condones it in order to eradicate impurity. Purity merely exists as a narrative that nations tell themselves in order to create nationality, which defines citizenship through exclusion. Purity protects no one, excluding the white European male privilege that it creates. Leda’s purity does not protect her from rape. But Fevvers’s impure body (according to normativity), half-woman half-bird, saves her and allows her to fly out of this violent scene. Rosencreutz connects imperialism and gender not only in his discussion of in- betweens but also as Fevvers comments that: I saw in the paper yesterday how he gives the most impressive speech in the House on the subject of Votes for Women. Which he is against. On account of how women are of a different soul-substance from men, cut from a different bolt of spirit cloth, and altogether too pure and rarefied to be bothering their pretty heads with things of this world, such as the Irish question and the Boer War. (Carter, Nights 78-79) Here, we can analyze the connections of gender and imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Politicians try to legislate that women should not have the right to vote because women would then have to worry their “pretty [little] heads” about imperialism. This legal discourse of femininity suggests that women exist as pretty creatures, not humans, because they lack intelligence – and the wherewithal to understand questions of nation, war, and imperialism – required for enfranchisement. The legal system’s attempt to separate discourses of women and imperialism shows how these discourses always already exist as connected defining neither as human. Further, Fevvers learns that Rosencreutz reads her as inhuman and expendable when she realizes he intends to rape and murder her with his blade. At this moment in the text, Fevvers makes connections between rape and England when she fears her own death and rape: Wondering, I stretch out face down on the coffee table. He approaches with a purposeful stride. I’d have clenched my teeth and thought of England had I not glimpsed, peering over my shoulder, a shining

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something laying along his hairy old, gnarled old thigh as his robe swung loose. This something was a sight more aggressive than his other weapon, poor thing, that bobbed about uncharged, unprimed, unsharpened…in the cold, grey light of May morning, I saw this something was – a blade. (Carter’s emphasis, Nights 83) England and masculinity connect in this scene as Fevvers fears rape.94 Rosencretz wants to rape and kill Fevvers with a blade, not his penis. His flaccid penis lacks phallic power, “uncharged,” “unprimed,” and “unsharpened.” Rosencretz’s blade works similarly to the beak in Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” As soon as Fevvers sees Rosencretz’s blade, she is reminded of her own blade and uses it to escapes through a window to fly to freedom (Carter, Nights 83). Up to this point in Nights, Fevvers cannot use her wings to fly. Then, out of necessity, Fevvers learns to fly. Yeats writes Leda as “So mastered by the brute blood of the air,” whereas Fevvers uses the air to avoid blood and to find freedom (Yeats, Poems 13). Yeats’s poem lyrically constructs this iconic version of victimization and femininity (or raped femininity), while Fevvers re-writes her place in this emblematic narrative “fiction” of femininity where femininity exists as “How those terrified vague fingers push/The feathered glory from her loosening thighs” (Yeats, Poems 5-6). Sword highlights how previous versions of the Leda myth and Yeats’s iconic femininity are in question and dialogue in the “Leda and the Swan,” “….Yeats’s poem focuses on Leda’s role as a visionary victim” (309). Fevvers challenges this victim narrative as she becomes the narrator herself and creates a new fiction of resistance and strength out of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” When faced with impending rape and death, Fevvers resists Rosencretz’s attempt to colonize her and escapes with the blade Lizzie gave her and her wings that people view as making her a freak and not quite human. If Fevvers is conceived from Leda’s rape scene, she then uses Zeus’s disguise (the swan) to change the script and escape her biological/fictional mother’s story of rape and death. Fevvers’s escape resistants and changes the iconic script of sexual trauma and violence against

94 At times, Fevvers describes England as idealic, “ ‘and now my own. Beloved London’” (Carter, Nights 87).

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femininity and feminine people, offering a new narrative. Walser’s writing of Fevvers’s stories changes previous narratives offering the “New Woman for the New Century” new resistant fictions of femininity (Carter, Nights 281). “Is she fact or is she fiction?” – she is both (Carter, Nights 147). Before Fevvers’s escape from Rosencretz, she fears that she will have to clench her teeth and think of England while he rapes her (Carter, Nights 83). In this scene, imperialist discourses of gender, race, and sexuality suggest that rape is something women must endure for England. Then, Nights’ critique of England’s imperialism and exhibition of people continues with “Captain Kearney’s Grand Imperial Tour,” which shifts names between Imperial Tour and Imperial Circus, making connections between the two as exhibitionist spaces (Carter, Nights 90). The Colonel advertises Fevvers as literally made out of imperialism: That morning, the newspaper carry an anonymous letter which claims Fevvers is not a woman at all but cunningly constructed automaton made up of walebone, India-rubber and springs. The Colonel beams with pleasure at the consternation this ploy will provoke, at the way the box- office tills will clang in the delicious rising tide of rumour: ‘Is she fiction or fact. (Carter, Nights 147) The Grand Imperial Circus composes Fevvers out of imperial products and suggests she “is not a woman at all” rather an automaton literally made out of imperialism to imitate a human with an inhuman spectacle exhibited to make money for the Imperial Tour (i.e. Britain). The very same discourses that attempt to change her from human into a colonized, inhuman automaton profits from the fiction imperialism creates of her. The Imperial Tour wants to use Fevvers and the other performers to advertise imperialism, proposing that what England has found in the colonies are objects and “freaks” to look upon with wonder and exoticism. As Thomson suggests about the freak show: “The exaggerated, sensationalized discourse that is the freak show’s essence ranged over the seemingly singular bodies that we would now call either “physically disabled or “exotic ethnics,” framing them and heightening their differences from viewers, who were

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rendered comfortably common and safely standard by the exchange” (5). The Imperial Tour thus: (1) justifies imperialism, suggesting colonized people are really automatons and not humans at all, and (2) perpetuates the necessity of future imperialism to obtain new automaton spectacles for the entertainment of the Imperial World. This advertisement and the Imperial Circus display imperialism for their audiences to visually consume. Scattered throughout the novel the phrase “Is she fiction or fact?” references how this very question repeatedly occurs in debates about imperialism, sexism, racism, etc. in the twentieth century. Are gender, race, and imperialism fictions or facts? Then, Fevvers perpetuates imperialism herself when she wants to wear and consume imperial products, “She wanted to eat diamonds” (Carter’s emphasis, Nights 182). Rather than jewels displayed on fashionable women, in Nights, the jewels themselves function as icons to display femininity, imperialism, race, and nation. Within twentieth-century British culture according to Enda Duffy and Maurizia Boscagli, “jewels and their enforced absence are used to resist normative discourses of imperialism and gender” (Duffy and Boscagli 190). Rather than the absence of jewels, Nights uses the presence of jewels to challenge normative discourses of gender, sexuality, and imperialism. Significantly, Fevvers herself continually connects women’s liberation with Irish liberation. Rather than coming to represent Ireland, Fevvers embodies India by demonstrating how, within an imperialistic logic, colonies are interchangeable just as women can be exchanged within heteronormativity (i.e. marriage). Diamonds represent heteronormative engagements to visually show that a woman is off the market so to speak, again connecting imperialism with heteronormativity and femininity.95 The woman receives a diamond ring and then becomes Mrs. [….] with her “Yes, I will marry you.” Diamonds on women’s left ring fingers visually perform heteronormativity. Within Nights, diamonds come to signify the constraints and dangers of femininity, heteronormativity, and imperialism. The Grand Duke gives Fevvers diamonds to “woe” her. Of course, Fevvers participating and wearing imperialism cannot end well for her, and the Grand Duke wants to collect her: “ ‘You must know I am a great collector of all

95 See: Gayle Rubin’s “Traffic in Women: Notes on ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.”

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kinds of objects d’art and marvels. Of all things, I love best toys – marvelous and unnatural artifacts” indicating heteronormativity does not define her as human rather as an “unnatural artifact” from the colonies (Carter, Nights 187).96 The Grand Duke references discourses of the natural to suggest that Fevvers is not natural thus not human and can be collected in his “objects d’art.” Fevvers risks becoming one of the Grand Duke’s pretty and expensive things because of her desire for jewels to beautifully adorn herself. As Fevvers walks through the Grand Duke’s display of “marvelous and unnatural artifacts,” she sees herself as one of his toys: “It was white gold and topped with a lovely little swan, a tribute, perhaps, too her putative paternity. And, as she suspected, it contained a cage made out of gold wires with, inside, a little perch of rubies and of sapphires and of diamonds, the good old red, white and blue. The cage was empty. No bird stood on the perch yet” (Carter, Nights 192).97 Gold wires are still wires, and Fevvers realizes that she does not want to live within this “golden” “gilded cage” for diamonds, gold, rubies, and sapphires (Carter, Nights 190). The cage and perch connect to England since the perch, made out of “red, white and blue,” pictorially represents the colors of the British national flag. Imperialism constructs the Britain of the twentieth century with the display of jewels obtained from Britain’s colonies. Upper-class women, queens, and kings wear these imperial commodities and display the connections of and encourage discourses of England, gender, class, sexuality, and imperialism sometimes unknowingly and others purposefully but both implicated. The Grand Duke wants to

96 Britzolakis suggests that, “It enables us to argue that Carter deploys masquerade-like tactics in order to expose the fictional and inessential character of femininity. But it also enables us to argue that she is at least equally engaged by the male scenario of fetishism which lies behind, and is required by, the female scenario of the masquerade” (470). 97 This is not the first time we’ve seen a preoccupation with diamonds as Madame Schreck seems to orientalize and worship her gold and jewels: “Aladdin’s cave, inside! the contents shone with their own light pile upon pile of golden sovereigns, a queen’s ransom of diamond necklaces and pearls and rubies and emeralds piled huggermugger among bankers’ draughts, bills of exchange, foreclosed mortgages etc. etc. etc. With a display of the greatest reluctance, [Madame Schreck] selects five soveirgns counts ‘em out again and, with as much painful hesitation as if they were drops of her dear heart’s blood, she hands ‘em over” (Carter, Nights 59).

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display Fevvers, who is rumored to be made out of Indian rubber; therefore, Fevvers represents India the jewel of the British Empire, on a British flag made out of imperial jewels. Significantly, Fevvers mentions, “with a lovely little swan, a tribute, perhaps, too her putative paternity” again harking back to Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” (Carter, Nights 192). Carter re-writes Yeats’s poem as she does numerous times throughout Nights, each time with a difference. Fevvers escapes the Grand Duke’s grasp as he masturbates and then ejaculates. He is so caught up in his own pleasure that it offers Fevvers the perfect moment to flee and rip off her diamonds, the shackles that almost bound her to life as the Grand Duke’s feminine and imperial toy. Fevvers challenge twentieth-century constructions of femininity beautifully attired in jewels, gold, and imperialism. Normative discourses of femininity entail a particular type of woman – so what happens when the woman is half bird, not clearly raced, sexualized, and colonized to begin with? Others attempt to “whiten” Fevvers’s “dark” feathers, thus she can never quite fit into normative discourses of femininity that “hatch” out of imperialism, racism, and heteronormativity (Carter, Nights 200, 281). Never defined as a ‘real’ woman, British citizen, or human, Fevvers exists as a fiction that lays claim to humanity. Race, nationality, and gender nuance femininity, its looking relations, its claim to human definitions, and its resistant pleasures within Fevvers’s performance. Fevvers’s performance challenges the supposed “great ones,” historically inscribed as English, white, and royal, because after all, “ ‘Don’t the great ones themselves weave the giant web of injustice that circumscribes the globe?’” (232). III. Pleasurable Intersections: Spectacles of Queerness and Disability “The culture asking such questions assumes in advance that we all agree: able-bodied identities, able-bodied perspectives are preferable and what we all, collectively, are aiming for. A system of compulsory able-bodiedness repeatedly demands that people with disabilities embody for others an affirmative answer to the unspoken question, ‘Yes, but in the end, wouldn’t you rather be more like me?’” (McRuer 9) – Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory

Mignon and the Princess’s spectacles represent pleasure, transformation, and happiness with their queer desires, disabilities, femininities, and relationship. Within

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norms and discourses of ability, the Princess’s scars and Mignon’s bruises become disabilities that they must overcome and make them ‘unfit’ in some way. Both the Princess and Mignon are considered disabled and “unfit” within able-bodied and heteronormative narratives. Their queer relationship and desires offer them the opportunity to challenge heteronormativity and imperialism. The Princess’ and Mignon’s queerness and disability become pleasurable abilities in Nights. Fevvers, the Princess, and Mignon perform their resistant femininities to question heteronormativity and damaging icons of femininity (Yeats and fairytales). Heterosexuality and able- bodiedness align to visually mark disability on the “homosexual body” to classify both as “unfit” according to McRuer (2).98 Interestingly, Carter queers this relation showing the pleasure that lesbianism and disability bring to Mignon and the Princess. The novel sets up Mignon and the Princess’s spectacle for other characters in the novel to watch. Mignon and the Princess’s spectacles offer viewers something different to imagine than the fairytale like heteronormative able-bodied romantic narrative. Mignon’s and the Princess’s disabilities are visibly written on their bodies via their skin.99 In fact, Mignon and the Princess transform spectacles of desire in both heterosexual and lesbian relations as well as in looking relations. When Fevvers and Walser rescue Mignon, her “skin was mauvish, greenish, yellowish from beatings” from

98 The female body becomes a key site of analysis in the twentieth century because of sexology’s measuring women’s breasts, vulvas, clitorises, and vaginal openings98 (Terry 138) and psychoanalysis detailing how women should and should not experience pleasure via sexual development of “normal femininity” (Freud). Part of this obsession with classifying the female body attempts to visually mark heterosexuality and homosexuality. Further, much of sexology, psychoanalysis, and medical discourses link the visibility of homosexuality with disability. Robert McRuer notes the connection of queerness and disability: “I also locate both, along with disability and homosexuality, in a contemporary history and political economy of visibility. Visibility and invisibility are not, after all, fixed attributes that somehow permanently attach to any identity, and it is one of the central contentions of this book that, because of changing economic, political, and cultural conditions at the turn of the millennium, the relations of visibility in circulation around heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, homosexuality, and disability have shifted significantly” (McRuer 2). 99 McRuer suggests, “….that critical queerness and severe disability are about collectively transforming (in ways that cannot necessarily be predicted in advance)—about cripping—the substantive, material uses to which queer/disabled existence has been put by a system of compulsory able-bodiedness, about insisting that such a system is never as good as it gets, and about imagining bodies and desires otherwise” (McRuer 32).

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her husband, showing how heteronormativity can violently visibly mark bodies (129). The Princess has scars covering her body from the tigers she tames: “On rare, random occasions when she took some other human back to her bed in the straw beside the sleeping tigers, she always made love in the dark because her body was, every inch, scarred with clawmarks, as if tattooed. That was the price they made her pay for taming them” (Carter, Nights 149). Both the bruises and claw-marks connect to sex as Walser and Fevvers look at Mignon’s bruised, naked body, and then Fevvers comments on the Princess’s entire body “tattooed with clawmarks” and the fact that she must make love in the dark so that no one can see her – she does not want her marked skin visible. No longer having to make love in the dark, from the first moment the Princess and Mignon meet erotic sparks fly giving both the opportunity to enact queer desire and, to use Cvetkovich’s term, “creative responses” to trauma (Cvetkovich 3). The Princess and Mignon live amongst the Princess’s tigers in her cage. Pleasure and pain mingle as the Princess’s and Mignon’s desires transform their caged performances within imperialism, able-bodied narratives, and heteronormativity. The cage and the Princess’s claw-marked skin visibly show the connections of pleasure and pain. The Princess’s scars become like electric circuits of desire, pleasure, and pain yearning to be touched by Mignon. A kiss signifies Mignon’s and the Princess’s queer desire: “….but Mignon she kissed on the mouth and the two girls clung together for a little longer, only a moment longer, than propriety allowed although, such was the vigour and ovation, nobody noticed except those to whom it came as no surprise. Then the Princess snapped shut the piano lid, took up her rifle and gestured imperiously with it” (Carter, Nights 165). The audience watching the Imperial Circus is not necessarily aware of the queer relationship except for the audience members to “….whom it came as no surprise” (Carter, Nights 165). Spectators view a performance of queer femininities as the women “kissed on the mouth” and the Princess gestures the end of their performance with her rifle. The Princess takes the rifle – a Prince does not have the rifle to rescue her nor do colonizers of British Imperialism – the rifle is her’s as is her queer desire.

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The other performers in the Imperial Circus daily view the Princess’s and Mignon’s newfound happiness, and pleasure in a world that attempted to tame them. Fevvers must question her own heterosexual assumptions: ….they smiled at one and another and one white hand and one brown one reached out and clasped together…. ‘Leave the love-birds together.’ Love-birds, was it? Of course it was! Hand in hand, the girls now went back into the cage,….So she would not sign in the ring; well and good. So much the better, in fact! They would cherish in loving privacy the music that was their language, in which they’d found the way to one and another. (Carter, Nights 168) The queer interracial relationship between the Princess and Mignon is the only extended display of pleasure and happiness in the novel. Other characters and relationships experience only momentary pleasures and traumas. Pleasure, pain, and happiness make the dark a subversive space that Mignon and the Princess create. Privately they experience – the language between their bodies mixing pleasure and pain transforming normative discourses of heteronormativity, gender, sexuality, race, imperialism, and disability. IV. Conclusion Nights queers Mignon’s and the Princess’s names, challenging how scripts of gender and sexuality define femininity. Mignon always remains “delicate, pretty, and small” but she looses her “puppet” like life when she comes to live and perform within the Imperial Circus and has a relationship with the Princess. Mignon sings while the Princess plays the piano and the tigers dance around them – a caged performance of pleasure and danger. The Princess in Carter’s tale queers notions of princesses since she tames tigers, carries a rifle, and is “love-birds” with Mignon (Carter, Nights 168). The use of “the Princess” calls onto a genre of fairytales and femininity. Carter’s Princess challenges the idea of fairytale femininity with her body “covered by scars” from taming tigers, the act of taming, and the rifle she carries. The Princess’s scars demonstrate how discourses of fairytale femininity actually attempt to tame women into submission at

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times visibly marking the body. Yet, no one “tames” Carter’s Princess; in fact, she tames. In Nights, The Princess rescues Mignon: “….carried the rifle with which she had shot the tigress, a peerless bullet straight between the eyes, the moment after, just one moment after the jealous tigress, deprived of her escort, could bear the sight of Mignon dancing with her mate no longer” (Carter, Nights 179). The Princess must shoot the tiger when she attacks Mignon. Always carrying a riffle, even in her “white” “good girl’s” dress, she performs an alternative femininity (Carter, Nights 148).100 Depicted as a strong and violent woman and never the traditional delicate and soft princess icon, Fevvers thinks about the Princess, “As she watched them, the Princess’s dark face was that of Kali and the perfume round her dense enough, rank and pervasive enough, to act as an invisible barrier between herself and all those who were not furred” (Carter, Nights 153). “Dense, rank, pervasive, and tough” this version of Princess femininity challenges traditional narratives of princesses in a similar way that Fevvers does with Leda. The Princess resists notions of fairytale-d virtuous, heteronormative, and white femininity. These new “mignon” and “princess” versions of femininities “enchant” others with their pleasurable, queer, and strong gender performances (Carter, Nights 165). Fevvers, Mignon, and the Princess critique heteronormative discourses of femininity and offer queer performativity and scripts. At the end of Nights, Fevvers’s spectacle shifts to the importance of her sexual pleasure: Fevvers, only one question…why did you go to such lengths, once upon a time, to convince me you were the ‘only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world?’ She began to laugh. ‘I fooled you, then!’ she said. ‘Gawd, I fooled you!’….‘You mustn’t believe what you read in the papers!’….The spiraling tornado of Fevvers’s laughter began to twist and

100 “So much for her history, which was only mysterious in that she told it to nobody because she never spoke. In the ring, she looked like a member of the graduating class at a provincial conservatories, in a white frock with starched flounces, white cotton stockings, flat, strapped shoes of the kind called Mary Janes, and a butterfly bow of white satin in the crisp hair that stuck out half way down her back. In this garb, she played the piano and the tigers danced….She came after, in her good girl’s dress, and sat down at the Bechstein grand” (Carter, Nights 148).

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shudder across the entire globe, as if a spontaneous response to the giant comedy that endlessly unfolded beneath it, until everything that lived and breathed, everywhere, was laughing…. (Carter, Nights 294-295) By this point in the novel, Fevvers and Walser are married. Walser assumes that Fevvers vigorously protected her chastity. Fevvers has narrated her life to Walser, but only specific parts. Walser has seen when Fevvers resists rape, but not when she experiences sexual pleasure. Her laughter itself moves forth as waves of pleasure that spreads around the globe as it “twists” and “shudders.” Walser attempts to put Fevvers in an innocent “once upon a time” feminine romantic fairytale narrative to which Fevvers responds, “‘You mustn’t believe what you read in the papers!’”( Carter, Nights 294). The papers are not just the newspaper articles that Walser writes about Fevvers, but also papers upon papers that attempt to write, fictionalize, historicize, legalize, medicalize, classify, psychoanalyze, and even corporeally create femininity as innocent, needing rescued, unintelligent, victimized, and not desiring or experiencing pleasure. Fevvers creates a spectacle of feminine laughter that displays and spreads pleasure in fooling Walser and such damaging normative discourses of femininity. Fevvers, the Princess, and Mignon offer resistant and queer femininities that challenge conceptions of desire, gender, sexuality, imperialism, disability, and human definitions. Desire, pleasure, femininity, and performance twist and shudder shattering illusions of binary conceptions of gender and sexuality. These resistant femininities question who has access to pleasure and human definitions and demand them.

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Chapter Four

Femininity at War in Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts

I. Introduction Makeup, femininity, and war intertwine during World War I and up through World War II, producing and perpetuating new discourses of femininity. I investigate how makeup takes on new significance during wartime as normative discourses of nationality propose that beauty and the makeup-enabled flawless perfection of femininity are women’s duties for war efforts. Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, both show how of makeup, war, and femininity can encourage and perpetuate war, but simultaneously how they can be utilized resistantly to challenge normative ideas of nationality that idealize war and heteronormativity. I explore the connections of makeup and watching because normative discourses of warred femininity in the twentieth century want femininity to act as an escape from war – spectators will watch the flawless performance of femininity and forget that they are at war. Also, this normative conception of watching femininity as a way for spectators to displace themselves from war encourages audiences to sit down, view, and forget where they, are at least momentarily. Lindy Woodhead, in her book War Paint, studies intersections of makeup and war drawing attention to the fact that “lipstick in a push-up metal container, [was] developed from cartridge shell cases after the First World War” (5). Makeup is literally made out of the remnants of war – gun cartridges. Thus, makeup is essential to the makings of femininity during wartime. Woolf suggests that femininity is marked by war: “We can see shop windows blazing; and women gazing; painted women; dressed-up women; women with crimson lips and crimson fingernails” (DM 210). These “painted women” “are slaves who are trying to enslave” (DM 210). Here, makeup is “crimson,” the color of blood. Woolf’s commentary works similarly to her criticism that women participate in war by encouraging men’s masculinity, heroism, etc. According to Woolf, women use their adoration of war to enslave men, enticing them with their weapons of

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vicious crimson painted femininity (Woolf, TG). Drawing on Keller’s methodology, I detail how lipstick and powder work to simultaneously mark and unmark femininity’s participation in war and the sadness associated with such a performance. Then, I move to investigate how, as a way to resist this conventional attempt to unmark femininity, Helen in The Night Watch utilizes S/M to mark pleasure on her body.101 Waters’ The Night Watch both ends and begins with watching, being watched. The Night Watch emphasizes how queer gendered desires work in and among the idea of “night watch.” As Emily Jeremiah notes, “the narrative moves backwards in time, in what could also be read as a queer gesture” with the backwards time span of 1947, 1944, to 1941 set in London ([Jeremiah's emphasis] 133). Waters shows how the concept of watching connects to scientia sexualis’s surveillance and categorization of gender and sexuality.102 Much of the criticism on Waters’ work explores her remaking a lesbian history and past. For example Paulina Palmer notes that Waters’ novels possess “….a

101 Cvetkovich theorizes that in the performance of femme femininity, “[f]emmes also provide a range of ways of being open without being passive or stigmatized, rewriting the meanings of vulnerability and receptivity” (81). Cvetkovich complicates the active/passive binary: “receptive” is a way to queer fem(me)inine sexual performance and the act of penetration. Being penetrated is a “vulnerable” act; yet femmes “rewrite” this sexual act so that their sexual performance is not linked with “vulnerability.” Not only is doing the “fucking,” active, but also being “fucked,” is active and “receptive.” As a result, both performances disrupt binary constructions of sexual relations. As Cvetkovich notes, “[t]he discourse of femmes undoes assumptions about any simple relation or analogy between binarisms such as ‘butch/femme,’ ‘top/bottom,’ ‘fucking/being fucked,’ and ‘penetrating/being penetrated,’ and makes it difficult to reduce them to any single master binarism, such as ‘masculine/feminine’ or ‘active/passive’” (59- 60). 102 Much of the criticism on Waters’ work explores her remaking a lesbian history and past. For example Paulina Palmer notes that Waters’ novels possess “….a metafictional slant, create a tissue of trans-historical and interdisciplinary references that contribute to the intellectual and textual vitality of her writing and serve effectively to illuminate the lesbian Past” (Palmer 83-84). Much of the literary conversations about Sarah Waters’ novels focus on her re-telling of the past, her implementation of a new type of storytelling, or the merging of both as Emily Jeremiah notes: “a queer historicity implies merging stories/selves” (Jeremiah 140). Within The Night Watch, Waters’ focus shifts to not just a lesbian project but a larger queer project. Waters looks to what happens to queer sexualities in war, and I would argue how we can remember the intersections of gender and sexuality differently. The Night Watch with its very interesting queering of time differs from the traditional narratives of sexual inversion in sexology and literature that posit the invert as a tragic character.

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metafictional slant, create a tissue of trans-historical and interdisciplinary references that contribute to the intellectual and textual vitality of her writing and serve effectively to illuminate the lesbian Past” (Palmer 83-84). Much of the literary conversations about Sarah Waters’ novels focus on her re-telling of the past, her implementation of a new type of storytelling, or the merging of both as Emily Jeremiah notes: “a queer historicity implies merging stories/selves” (Jeremiah 140). Within The Night Watch, Waters’ focus shifts to not just a lesbian project but a larger queer project. Waters looks to what happens to queer sexualities in war, and I would argue how we can remember the intersections of gender and sexuality differently. The Night Watch with its very interesting queering of time differs from the traditional narratives of sexual inversion in sexology and literature that posit the invert as a tragic character. The title, The Night Watch, situates the significance of surveillance in the dark. As Palmer suggests, “Here it is the binary opposites of invisibility/visibility, central to discussions of the socio-political position of the lesbian in hetero-patriarchal culture, that she investigates” (80). Not only does The Night Watch situate itself in discussions of the invisibility/visibility of lesbians in the 1940s, it also complicates what invisibility and visibility actually mean for queer people in times of war. Within the novel, most of the bombings in World War II occur at night and people continually watch for bombs and avoid the streets at night as a way to hide from the enemy watching them and protect themselves from bombings. Normative discourses of nationality in wartime enforce surveillance and attempt to justify this surveillance by making people think that the nation can protect them from violence if they only do what is asked. War creates a different type of watching, which Waters connects to the watching of scientia sexualis. In times of war, the human body can take on even greater significance because of the increased possibility of death and dissemblage. Erin Carlston notes that particularly within “Europe” that certain discourses are: “….rooted in and enabled by some of the overarching ideological discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: definitions of national boundaries, the significations of the human body, and the relation of the Other(ed) body – Jewish, homosexual, female, proletarian, exiled – to the nation”

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(Carlston 20, 41). In The Night Watch, Julia, a lesbian character, writes a novel titled The Bright Eyes of Danger. Her book is then reviewed in an article titled “Dangerous Glances” (The Night 20, 29).103 It is not surprising that Julia writes a book about the danger of eyes or watching as she seduces Helen from Kay: Julia watches Helen, Julia and Helen watch each other, Julia and Helen purposely avoid each other’s glances, and Kay does not watch to see what happens between Helen and Julia. All of the characters  Julia, Helen, and Kay  watch the night sky for air raids. Kay watches to save lives and recue people on her ambulance runs. Julia and Helen avoid night watching, wandering instead through the shadows as they attempt not to be caught by heteronormative glances on the street or a bomber overhead. Helen and Julia hide in the shadows between buildings, passionately consummating their affair. After wartime, Helen fears a similar type of homophobic watching and is frightened that lesbianism visibly marks their bodies and thus people might read that she and Julia are lesbians if they examine closely enough. No matter how closely people surveil each other during times of war, it cannot stop the destruction of war and how war disrupts heteronormativity. “Fairy tales,” homes, and heteronormativity are violently torn apart showing their un-solidity: “Every time Kay put down her feet, things cracked beneath them, or wrapped themselves around her ankles: broken window-glass mixed up with broken mirrors....in the days before the war she's imagined that houses were made more or less solidly, of stone—like the last Little Pig’s, in the fairy tale” (The Night 172). War changes everything – not only what we look at, broken fragments on the ground of what once appeared whole, but also how we look. War makes looking forward towards a future impossible. People must look amongst the fragmented things and bodies: backwards; forewords, sideways, diagonally, all ways, and even not-yet-known ways. At times, the war even breaks apart Kay’s sexual desires since she loves looking upon women’s “bare back[s]” in glamorous outfits but then in the

103 Helen, “….glanced at Julia’s smooth, handsome, upper-class face and thought of jewels, of pearls. Wasn’t hardness a condition of glamour, after all?” (201). Julia is “as a cool dark gem” (The Night 232).

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destruction of war, “The woman’s coat and hat had gone, and her hair was loose about her face; the evening-gloves were smooth and unmarked, still, on her dangling arms. Her silk dress, slivered by the moonlight, was pooled about her on the pavement as though she were curtseying; but the flesh of her bare back bulged where the iron pressed at it from within” (The Night 391). Kay initially desires women’s backs for their “unmarked- ness,” but here war literally marks the body. The garment's eyelets hook the dress together supposedly keeping eyes off the naked flesh, but the war breaks through the dress and the flesh itself.104

104 The scene that this war image is contrasted with is: “[Kay’d] always liked the sight and feel of a woman’s back. She liked, for example, the look of an evening dress on naked shoulders--the tautness of it--the way, when the shoulder-blades were drawn together, it gaped, giving you a glimpse of the underclothes or the pink, pressed flesh behind....When Kay had closed the final hook and eye she bent her head and kissed it” (Waters, The Night 280).

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II. Makeup in Times of War

Figure 13: “Keep Your Beauty on Duty!” advertisement for Ivory Soap from Procter & Gamble Co. in Woman’s Home Companion (1942)

Advertisements for beauty products during the World Wars and interwar period travel between Britain and the United States just as the makeup commodities themselves do. Many of the makeup advertisements during this historical period focus on women’s beauty as their service for war efforts. In our contemporary remembering of war, there is often a cultural idea that war happens outside of the domestic space and thus women do

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not feel the effects of war. This purposeful remembering of war reinforces normative scripts of femininity that want to suggest that war does not touch women. If we visit archives of beauty products advertised during World War II, we find a plethora of images that show how normative discourses in times of war enforce ideas that women’s duty to the war is to be pretty  actually linking women’s beauty to participating in war efforts. For example, this first Ivory Soap advertisement, “Keep Your BEAUTY on Duty” pictures a woman in uniform, with blushing cheeks and perfectly curled hair, showing soldiers standing behind her, two men with guns and a woman carrying war post (“Keep your Beauty on duty!”). This advertisement suggests that the realities of war are displaced for the woman on the phone through the distance of the telephone line. Even though she lives in a time of war and presumably works in a military office, she still maintains a perfect image and emblem of femininity. If someone looks at her, war becomes more of a fashion displacing the realities of war. Even the instructions for how women should wash their faces, in this advertisement, utilize war language with “Defensive care for dry skin!” and “Oily skin? Take the Offensive!” signifying women’s faces are at war, so they must remain both on the offensive and on the defensive to keep their beauty intact (“Keep your Beauty on duty!”).

Figure 14: “Keep Your Best Face Forward” advertisement for Bond Street Beauty Preparations from Yardley of London, Inc., in McCall’s (1942)

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Figure 15: “Keep Your Best Face Forward” advertisement for Bond Street Beauty Preparations from Yardley of London, Inc., in New Yorker (1942)

Both advertisements of Yardley’s “Keep your best face forward” use a variation on duty to one’s country suggesting that “Duty need not interfere with beauty…” (“Keep your best face forward” Figure 15) and “Your victory-vital duties needn’t interfere with beauty-as-usual…so long as” (“Keep your best face forward!” Figure 16) women wear Bond Street Beauty Preparations. The name of Yardley’s powder is “English Complexion” underscoring the connection between discourses of femininity, makeup, and nationality. The soft focuses in these advertisements, along with the framing of the women’s faces, reinforces the responsibility of femininity as an escapist picture during wartime. Both women are perfectly made-up, proposing that war does not affect their beauty. Even if women do work in the armed forces, according to such advertisements, they should keep up their beauty regardless of their “victory-vital duties” (“Keep your best face forward!” Figure 16).

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Figure 16: “Simple Secret” Figure 17: “Military Objective” advertisement for Evening in advertisement for Bond Street Perfume and Beauty Paris Cosmetics from Bourjois in Preparations from Yardley of Ladies Home Journal (1943) London, Inc. in Mademoiselle (1942) Also in Yardley’s “Best face forward” marketing line is their “Simple Secret” advertisement, which focuses on the woman’s powder and complexion. Both Woolf’s Between the Acts and Waters’ The Night Watch, focus on the connections of powder, makeup, femininity, and war. Powder makes the skin appear unmarked – not marked by

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war, fatigue, hunger, sickness, etc. The woman in the advertisement has on her uniform (hat, tie, suit jacket), her hair perfectly pinned back, and the focus is on her smooth and flawless complexion as the light in the advertisement highlights her complexion, even making the powdered effect appear to glow. Spectators can guess that the “Simple Secret” is that the powder makes skin look naturally flawless and unmarked. “Simple Secret” proposes that makeup will remain unseen, making flawless skin seem like it naturally glows. Susan Keller describes the possibilities of “compact resistance” as she discusses how makeup mirrors and the performance of public powdering also emphasize what is not seen and therefore not controlled: “[t]he fleeting gesture of fixing one’s makeup haunts those in power with the possibility of many more gestures and activities not seen, not caught, not under control, exposing the limits of a system which prides itself on being all-powerful and all-encompassing” (Keller, "Compact Resitance" 9). “Simple Secrets” shows makeup as both resistant and reinforcing normative scripts of femininity. On one hand, makeup works to challenge normative discourses of femininity that want us to believe that femininity is natural. On the other hand, such makeup advertisements like “Simple Secret” use the unseen – powder that appears natural – in essence stabilizing connections of femininity and natural beauty. "Military Objective" (Figure 17) shows conventional ideas that powder should be utilized as a tool for women to keep their men during war time. The powder and puff lie in front of the photograph of a solider sitting on a vanity where femininity is literally made with the lipstick, powder, and perfume. In this advertisement, femininity is described as a "fair target" and "delightful devastation," demonstrating how femininity actually becomes a weapon of war to discursively keep war going ("Military Objective"). The powder and lipstick work as weapons to encourage war through romantic, heteronormative narratives and therefore, perpetuate the idea that if men go off to war, their prize will be a beautiful woman waiting for them at home. Women's "Military Objective" is to keep idealized scripts of heteronormative romance and desire intact so men will want to be war heroes for their pretty women at home.

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Figure 18: “it’s new…it’s trim…it’s essential” advertisement for Permanent hair wave from Elizabeth Arden in New York Sun (1942)

Elizabeth Arden was one of the leading ladies of makeup and even gave makeup gift bags to some government officials’ wives and women in the military to avoid having her products rationed (Woodhead 264), particularly because according to Woodhead: In Great Britain, the government immediately placed a restriction on production, covering all goods it deemed ‘non-essentials’. Cosmetics

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companies were allocated production quantities, ranging from a quarter to two-thirds of their 1938 production, depending on the status and definition of goods of the company in question....[and thus]....Arden’s advertising quickly took up the patriotic theme. (259, 261). In figure five, Arden’s patriotic advertisement “it’s new…it’s trim…it’s essential” points out that the normative cultural idea of beautifully attired femininity is still essential for women, even in wartime. The advertisement goes so far as to state that the soft curls of the perm will look even prettier and more flattering because of the juxtaposition with the “harshest regulation” in war (Figure 18). Thus, Arden wants her spectators to believe that her products are even more essential now because of war. These makeup advertisements suggest that women must maintain the same beauty they had before war, and that is their duty to the country and for war efforts. Normative discourses enforce the idea that when spectators view women’s beautifully made-up performances, they will momentarily forget that the world is at war. Audiences are supposed to view femininity and feminine women’s flawless complexions and reddened lips like actresses in films, displacing their audiences from war into a movie theatre. Therefore women’s responsibility in war efforts is to hide the realities of war.

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Figure 19: “Frankly, hew was Fascinated…” advertisement for Burnt Sugar Lipstick from Elizabeth Arden in Vogue (1942)

The advertisement “Frankly, he was Fascinated” shows Arden’s red lipstick and nail polish line designed specifically out of war emphasizing that the red “costume colors” are “most effective with khaki…many of her friends compliment their uniforms of blue with the youthful vigor of Redwood” (“Frankly, he was Fascinated...”). Particular emphasis is placed on “costume colors” attempting to turn makeup into theatre. Also,

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these advertisements design makeup to accent women’s war uniforms, attempting to squelch normative fears of women becoming too masculine in wartime. Arden not only produces a number of advertisements targeted at patriotism, but also creates a “Montezuma Red” collection specifically designed for women fighting in war: ….Elizabeth was invited to produce a make-up kit for the American Marine Corps Women's Reserve. She called the lipstick, rouge and nail- polish set, which exactly matched the chevrons on the women’s uniform, Montezuma Red,….[Arden says about her visit to Camp Washington quoted in Woodhead] ‘I stood up and looked at the lovely, expectant faces of the girl Marines….The most thrilling moment of the day was the drill - arranged especially for me. Until you have seen such a thing you can never reali[z]e the overwhelming thrill of a lifetime to see three thousand young women marching by, in perfect order, all moving as one. It was such a lesson in discipline, symbolizing what seemed to be classic beauty and order, that I will never forget it.’ (Woodhead 287) The marching of the women marines with their red lipstick and nail polish symbolize “classic beauty and order,” which define some normative discourses about what femininity should be during wartime. Red, the color of blood, dominates feminine fashion – painting women’s lips and nails with what appears to be blood. Even after the wars, “Rivers of blood-coloured lipstick and nail polish flowed between Arden, Rubinstein and Revlon in the first half of the 1950s” (Woodhead 335). III. Femininity as a Weapon of War in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts The perfectly powdered face, reddened lips, and eye shadow paint a portrait of a unified and flawless femininity. For Woolf, makeup and vanity mirrors become weapons of war that are utilized by women to support and encourage war. The first mirrored scene in Between the Acts is Isa looking into her mirror. The narrator references Isa’s “three- fold mirror” that pictorially allows her to “see three separate versions of” herself (BA 13). One version of Isa’s self is being a wife and mother represented by, “on the washstand, on the dressing-table, among the silver boxes and tooth-brushes, was the other love; love

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for her husband, the stockbroker— ‘The father of my children,’ she added” (BA 14, 15). This version of Isa’s femininity is “slipping into the cliché conveniently provided fiction” of marriage and children (BA 14). Isa’s seemingly normative femininity becomes unstable because Isa does not have just one feminine self. Another version of Isa’s self is her desire for the “romantic gentleman farmer” that she sees while looking into the mirror (BA 14). The phrasing of “the romantic gentleman farmer” is specific because Isa attempts to utilize the romantic fiction of love to describe her desire. Isa’s desire cannot be contained by romantic discourses; instead, Isa reads her sexual desire through war terminology. Isa’s feminine performance intermingles with this warred sexual desire, as she looks at herself in the mirror making-up her femininity. The “tingling, tangling, vibrating” desire is described as an “areoplane propeller” that “attach[es]….to a certain spot in her” going “Faster, faster, faster, it whizzed, whirred, buzzed” with the orgasm that takes Isa “away and away” (BA 14, 15). In a way, this scene of desire disrupts the heteronormativity of war because it challenges the desire Isa feels for her husband. This scene of Isa's warred desire simultaneously solidifies connections of femininity encouraging war with women’s sexual desire actually energizing war. The third version of Isa’s self attaches her “conventional” femininity with her warred desire. Again, this version of Isa’s self is described through war terminology as: “‘Abortive,’ was the word that expressed her. She never came out of the shop, for example, with the clothes she admired….Thick waist, large of limb, and save for her hair, fashionable in the tight modern way” (BA 15-16). Interestingly, Isa is only happy with her hair, which relates back to “the heavily embossed silver brush that had been a wedding present” that she uses to fix her hair to make up her femininity (BA 14-15). Possibly, norms of marriage and motherhood are what Isa cannot fully “abort.” Isa’s mirrored reflections become fragmented pictures that the audience must read, teaching spectators that there are multiple ways to read femininity. Unlike Isa who fears that she is unfashionable, Mrs. Manresa flawlessly makes-up her feminine performance and unashamedly: “All evaded or shaded themselves—save Mrs. Manresa who, facing herself in the mirror; powdered her nose; and moved up one

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curl, disturbed by the breeze, to its place. ‘Magnificent!’ cried old Batholomew. Alone she preserved unashamed her identity, and faced without blinking herself. Calmly she reddened her lips” (BA 186). Mrs. Manresa does not turn away from her mirror; she uses it to touch up her feminine performance – “powdering” it into flawless perfection. Alas, this flawless perfection cannot last as the megaphone connects makeup and war: Consider the gun slayers, bomb droppers here or there. They do openly what we do slyly….Or Mrs. E’s lipstick and blood red nails….Then there’s the amiable condescension of the lady of the manor—the upper class manner. And buying shares in the market to sell’em….Look at ourselves, ladies and gentlemen!....which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization, to be built by. (BA 187-188) Mrs. Manresa displays how she is implicated with makeup made of blood demonstrating how femininity participates, encourages, and supports war. Although World War II has yet to start during Between the Acts’ setting, it is quickly approaching with the devistation of World War I in people’s remembrances. Rather than allowing such performances of femininity “to protect us,” we must analyze how war and imperialism inform normative definitions of femininity. The “blood red nails” link femininity to killing in war, and very dangerously because this performance of femininity does slyly what soldiers do openly  suggesting that femininity works like an undercover agent of war. In other words, when “lipstick and blood red nails” are refracted through the experience of war, feminine accessories and performances turn into weapons. In Between the Acts, femininity and makeup do not always reify heteronormativity and encourage war. After Mrs. Manresa hears the megaphone, she is one of the few characters who actually responds to its critical messages because her “[eyes] were wet; for an instant tears ravaged her powder)” (BA 189). Mrs. Manresa’s tears mingle with her powder and ruin the flawless perfection of made-up femininity.105

105 The portraits in Between the Acts are represented as “ancestresses,” and they are framed as a both a new telling of history and the portraits teach audiences how to read both history and femininity differently. Maggie Humm theorizes that: “The photographic memories are a performative process in which aspects of patriarchal culture and subject formation can be

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Now instead of concealing imperfections and war, the powder performs the sorrow and loss of war as well as the participation of femininity. When tears run down a powdered face, the tears themselves make pathways of bare skin surrounded by and highlighted with caked makeup emphasizing how tears have actually transformed the makeup. Mrs. Manresa feels regret and shame, which her makeup pictorially represents – the megaphone’s message changes her. The megaphone's critiquing of femininity’s encouraging of and participating in war as cruel and blood hungry makes Mrs. Manresa cry. The tears “ravage” the concealment of femininity, bringing war to the surface and marking the skin as well as femininity. Mrs. Manresa’s tears lead the audience members’ eyes down her face changing her feminine performance, how it is viewed, how it is read, and what it does. Mrs. Manresa’s performance is queerly “Magnificent!” (BA 186). Framed in the shard of mirror, the focus of Mrs. Manresa’s picture blurs her made-up feminine performance and seemingly cohesive picture of English femininity.106 Here, the powder does not work as the “blood red nails” do to hold up war; instead, the makeup itself changes as it merges with tears. Femininity cannot cover up the realities of war or of heteronormativity for that matter. Femininity is burdened with having to pretend that war does not exist. In this way, femininity is supposed to work similar to a glamorous picture/cinema that provides a momentary escape from reality. Similar to Woolf’s idea that femininity can support war, Waters shows how makeup can mark femininity with war-paint. In The Night Watch, “war-paint” describes screened, refocused, and subverted. It is the photographic memories, not the published photographs, that mark each privileged moment in the narrator’s disengagement with dominant culture” (652). Similar to Humm’s comments about Three Guineas, the portraits in Between the Acts are performative. The portraits destabilize the focus of the portrait, turning it into fragments that audiences must read. Woolf, herself, describes how viewer interactions with photographs are not static but changing: “It suggests that we cannot dissociate ourselves from that figure but are ourselves that figure. It suggests that we are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience but by our thoughts and actions can ourselves change that figure” (TG 168). Thus, how photographs are read changes. Photographs, portraits, and pictures are not ‘facts’ nor do they represent a cohesive ‘history’; instead the dialogue between the pictures and audiences “changes the figure.” 106 Look to: Peter Nichols’s book Modernisms for a study of how Modernist painting and literature are connected both shifting the idea of there being a central focal point. See: to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s book Touching Feeling for her theories about shame and how it works.

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makeup: “[Viv] got out her powder and lipstick and moved to the mirror. ‘Better freshen up the old war-paint, I suppose’” (The Night 18). Although powder attempts to cover up the flaws/imperfections of the skin and un-mark femininity, powder also works as a remnant of war: “….white powder—exactly the powder of broken glass at a bomb-site” (The Night 283). Powder masks imperfections and makes femininity appear glamorous, but the powder of bombsites are made out of shards of glass, which slashes skin. The emphasis on the making of powder as pieces of war suggests that the powder used to cover-up imperfections is actually made out of war. In fact, Woohead describes such connections with makeup powder and gunpowder when she mentions how Charles Revson, “….a Government Procurement Officer who asked him if he knew anything about powder. Charles replied, ‘I know everything about powder’ and before he knew it, he had a contract to make hand-grenades for the army. It didn’t occur to the government official to explain he had meant gun-powder or to Charles Revson to admit he meant face-powder” (259). Makeup history illustrates the connections between face-powder and gun-powder in times of war. IV. Marked/Unmarked Femininity Book 3 of The Night Watch captures the first meeting between Kay and Helen, the butch/femme couple. This scene is highly romanticized, picturing Kay rescuing Helen from the wreckage of a bombsite. Scared, Helen asks Kay if she can hold her hand to which Kay responds, “‘I would have offered it at the start; only, you know, I didn't want to seem forward’” (The Night 442). This scene seems rather to place this lesbian couple in a replication of an American picture about a romance during wartime. The romance between women queers this classic romantic narrative within war. The novel ends with Kay and Helen noting their importance to the novel as a whole, concluding with: She fished out her handkerchief, and wet it; and began, very gently, to wipe the dust from Helen’s face. She started at her brow, and worked downwards. ‘Just close your eyes,’ she murmured. She brushed at Helen’s lashes, and then at the little dints at the side of her nose, the groove above her lip, the corners of her mouth, her cheeks and chin....The

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dust fell away. The skin beneath was pink, plump, astonishingly smooth. Kay brushed a little longer, then moved her hand to the curve of Helen's jaw and cupped it with her palm--not wanting to leave her, after all; gazing at her in a sort of wonder; unable to believe that something so fresh and so unmarked could have emerged from so much chaos. (The Night 445-446) After Kay wipes the dust from Helen’s face, she thinks that Helen actually emerges unmarked from the chaos of war. Problematically, Kay only thinks about marking as something that physically marks the skin and not emotional marking. This scene emphasizes how Kay wants and desires femininity to remain unmarked even as Helen is physically trapped under the wreckage of war. Kay attempts to enforce a normative femininity on Helen whereas Helen desires something else. Kay continually stresses how she wants Helen not to be marked by war. Kay buys Helen’s birthday gifts on the black market because of rationing and justifies it saying: I wanted to get her--I don't know, something handsome. A bit of glamour. This filthy war's knocked all the glamour out of life for women like her. It's all right for us, we can just kick about in the muck and pretty well like it--….Well, I'm sick of gazing into Helen's face and seeing it look more and more tired and worn. If I were her husband I'd be off fighting; there wouldn't be a thing I could do about it. But the fact is, I'm here— (The Night 225) Glamourless, tired, and worn war mark Helen with war, and Kay wants to give Helen her glamour back in effect unmarking her. War opens up a space for Kay and Helen’s butch/femme relationship and romanticizes it, “ ‘when Kay met you. I wasn’t surprised at the way she met you, I mean. It was like something from a picture in itself, wasn’t it?’” (Waters’ emphasis, The Night 327). The emphasis on way indicates the importance how Helen and Kay meet, like a picture or romantic film. Even the war works as a prop for their picture as bombs appear to turn into cameras with their “spectacular flashes in the sky” (The Night 444). At this moment, war becomes something else, something queer with this lesbian relationship starting within in its midst. Situated during the war,

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Book 2 of The Night Watch follows Kay and Helen’s romantic relationship as Kay attempts to make their life “like….an American picture” with the glamorous silk pajamas: It looks like the kind of thing--doesn't it--that a fellow in an American picture would be carrying under his arm, when he calls on a chorus-girl, backstage.’ She set the box flat upon her lap--paused a moment, for effect--then carefully lifted the lid. Inside were layers of silver paper. She put them back, and revealed a satin pajama-suit, the colour of pears. (The Night 226) War makes this gift even more glamorous because the “satin pajama-suit” was bought on the black-market, which makes luxury items much harder to buy and enormously more expensive. In Kay’s picture, she is the gentleman calling on her “chorus-girl” Helen, and motions to this romanticized narrative she’s created as “she paused a moment, for effect.” Kay wants to create an effect as she shows her friends the pajamas so that they can view the picture of her relationship that she invents.107 Although Kay must clean up the mess of war and sees how war marks and changes everything, she desires the unmarked for her viewing pleasure on this screen that she creates for her American picture and queer fairytale. Kay continually says that she loves Helen because she is unmarked always referring to Helen as either “unmarked” or emphasizing Helen's “whiteness”:“[Helen’s] smooth, blemishless skin” (The Night 285), so fair and unmarked (The Night 277), Kay notices Helen’s “powdery arm” (The Night 438), and she wipes the dust of war from Helen’s “plaster-white cheeks—” so that she “look[s] her best” (The Night 445). “Plaster white” describes Helen – plaster is a material used to make things and most prominently to make/cover walls in houses/buildings. Bombs destroy the plaster walls that were designed to give the false illusion of protection against the outside world (and even protection against the bombing happening outside). Kay’s attempt at inventing a queer fairytale for herself and Helen doesn’t quite

107 Here Waters draws on sexology because, as Ellis quotes from a friend’s letter, “Lesbos, are extremely common in theatres, both among actresses, and even more, among chorus-and ballet- girls” (qtd. in Ellis 257).

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work: Helen “felt....sometimes, guilty, felt: that Kay’s constant fussing, which had been once so appealing, so exciting, could also be rather like a burden; that Kay made an absurd kind of heroine of you; that Kay’s passion was so great there was something unreal about it, it could never be matched...” (The Night 243). The picture that Kay attempts to make her and Helen’s relationship into, isn’t merely exciting and romantic. The normative romantic script burdens – burdens since people and life can’t always reflect cinema and the supposed ideal that such pictures reflect.108 Waters continues this idea that it is impossible for femininity to work as an escape from war as Helen purposely walks off Kay’s set into a world that physically marks her (sexually and otherwise). Helen possesses a visceral need to be physically marked, and moves away from her relationship with Kay and Kay’s desire to keep her unmarked to an affair with Julia, which literally leaves marks on her skin. Helen pleads to Julia, “ ‘Put your fingers inside me!’ whispered Helen. Push inside me, Julia!’ Julia pushed. Helen lifted her hips, to meet the movement with movement of her own. Her breath caught. ‘Do you feel me now?’ ‘Yes, now I feel you,’ said Julia. ‘I can feel you gripping me. It’s amazing— ’” (The Night 373). This sex act shows how Helen asserts herself as she “grips” Julia, demonstrating Ann Cvetkovich’s theory that, “[f]emmes reframe a conception of the violation of bodily boundaries as traumatic by suggesting that opening the body and, by extension, the self to the experience of being vulnerable is both welcome and difficult, and hence profoundly transformative” (66). Julia, it seems, hasn’t experienced sex quite like this before since she finds the act of “feeling” Helen and Helen “gripping” her amazing. Helen’s gripping of Julia as Julia penetrates her shows how Helen transforms the idea of heteronormative penetration (that women are passive and men active during penetration). Then, the two violently bite each other in their sexual scene to the extent that Helen, “….moved into the firelight and saw that her thighs and breasts were marked, as if with rashes, from the rubbing of Julia’s clothes” (The Night 374). This queer sex scene marks Helen. Helen suggests that, the marks on her body left behind from her and

108 The invention of Kay and Helen’s relationship like a picture makes it seem “unreal” although nothing seems quite “real” during war.

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Julia’s violent/passionate sex acts “now the marks upset her” (The Night 374). The marks remind Helen not only of her adulterous affair, but also her desire for S/M  to both be violently taken but at the same time “grip” her partner with her own body and power. Helen finds herself queer as she looks at her own reflection, “But [Julia] had one of those faces, so regular and even, it was exactly the same in the reflection as it was in life. Helen’s face, by contrast, looked rather queer and lopsided when studied in a mirror” (The Night 45).109 Unlike Ellis’s view that the “class of feminine homosexuality” isn’t “marked” by sexual desire, Helen’s queer sexual desires literally leave marks upon her body. V. Conclusion: Queer Girls Imagining Femininity Differently Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, also depicts a male prison with representations of male sexual inversion and male homosexuality. Male inverts are represented in the prison as marked by their femininity: the “queer Stella” and “queers” want to “make themselves like girls” (The Night 382). These queer girls show the makings of unconventional makeup: [Auntie Vi’s] hair was blonded at the front with a bit of peroxide, and beautifully waved--for she slept every night with strings around her head, to put the kinks in. Her cheeks were rouged, and her lips as red as a girl’s: you couldn’t pick up a scarlet-bound book in the library without finding pale little patches on it, where men like her had sucked at the boards for lipstick. (The Night 204) These queer girls imagine themselves and their femininity anew by using tools that they have access to – red books, strings, and peroxide – to literally make themselves up. They actually create their own makeup out of “scarlet book covers” connecting sexual

109 And the queer imagery seen in mirrors continues as Helen sees how she has marked herself through jealousy and anger: “She went to the mirror. It was unnerving, gazing at your face in a mirror in a darkened room; there was a little light from a street-lamp, however, and she could see by this that her cheek and bare arm were marked red and white” (The Night 135). Her reflection is “unnerving” and makes her feel unsettled as she sees herself in the dark “marked red and white.” In fact, all that seems to stand out in her reflection are her marks not an image of her in her entirety.

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inversion with books. This vampiric sucking on the books works metaphorically since these queer girls suck the red paint and the information that lies within these bounded books to rework theories of male inversion. Auntie Vi says that their dinner doesn’t “have the imagination to dress itself as lamb” (The Night 204). On the other hand, these queer girls enact their imaginations with their self-made femininity with their inventive makeup and hair dye as well as the way that they go “mincing down the hall” (The Night 212).110 They want to be watched. These queer girls make themselves the focus of people’s sight and conversations. People can’t help but watch their excessive performances of femininity with their self-made makeup, blatantly dyed hair, catty banter, and walk that even makes people take pause and look as they “mince down the hall.” “Imaginings” in Ellis’s case history allow for a place to experience sexual “feeling” (106-107). In this imagining, he can become a “girl” and “feel” how she would during sex. Such imaginings cause a physical transformation – for the queer girls in Waters’ novel they make themselves up as girls and in Ellis’s case histories through sexual feeling this male invert becomes a “girl.” But these texts construct their imaginings very differently, Ellis’s case histories represent imagination more in terms of a sexual imagination whereas Waters’ re-visioning of male inversion excludes sexual desire. Waters’ queer girls’ imagination instead comes from them performing their invented genders. Further, the focus of the queer girls is how they makeup their gendered performances, which is not like Ellis’s case histories on male inversion, which more so read as confessions of desire. Even in Ellis’s case history, History II, describes the importance of imagination to his inversion: “It is not that I, as a man, wish to act improperly with a boy, but I feel I would like to be in the girl’s place, and the strange thing is that in all these dreams and imaginings I can always apparently enter into the feelings of the woman better than into those of the man” (106-107). In another one of

110 The queer girls says, “Their words interrupted by a cry: ‘Yoo hoo! Miss Tragedy! Yoo hoo!’ It was Auntie Vi, and a couple of her friends--two boys a few years older than Duncan, called Monica and Stella. They were mincing down the hall between the tables, smoking, and waving their hands. They must have noticed Duncan getting to his feet. Now they called again: ‘Yoo hoo! What's the matter, Miss Tragedy? Don't you like us?’” (The Night 212-213).

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Ellis’s case studies, History V, the use of “imagination” is similar:”….I had a burning desire to have carnal intercourse with a male, and had the capacity for falling in love, as it is called, to the utmost extent. In imagination, I possessed the female organ, and felt toward man exactly as an amorous female would” (111). The Night Watch imagines makeup and makeup’s intersections with war in different ways – at times as an attempt to cover up war and at others as queer girls making their own makeup. A study of makeup within the novel depicts how makeup connects to watching. Kay wants Helen to wear makeup so that Kay can forget about the bombs falling around them and the dissembled bodies she must clean up. Helen feels burdened with the responsibility Kay places on her femininity and at times does not want Kay to watch her. On the other hand, the queer girls in the prison construct their own makeup sucking red coloring off of books and want to be watched; in fact, they encourage people to watch them as they mince down the halls. In the twentieth century, makeup was everywhere particularly in wartime as we see with the queer girls inventing their own makeup, the makeup advertisements, Helen’s character and the desire Kay feels for her to remain unmarked, and Mrs. Manresa.111 Audiences are supposed to be able to look at femininity and forget about war and instead be reminded of glamour and perfection. Just as the powder does not draw attention to itself (powder supposedly makes skin look naturally flawless as demonstrated within the makeup advertisements), femininity becomes the powder to cover up the cruelties and realities of war. The shards of glass that turn into powder in The Night Watch connect to Woolf’s shards of mirrors in Between the Acts. A concealed weapon, femininity’s participation within war attempts to remain hidden underneath the flawless projection. The phrase makeup as war-paint puts forward that the notion that femininity accessorizes war. As Woolf describes, femininity holds up war as a gallant occupation for men (women want/desire their husbands to show

111 Woodhead cites a poll in the New York Times magazine about women and their makeup wearing habits: “In 1946, the year that Florence Nightingale Graham, aka Miss Elizabeth Arden, appeared on the cover of Time magazine, the New York Times reported that out of a survey of 1000 women, 99% of them used lipstick, 95% nail polish, 94% face powder, 80% a tinted foundation base, 73% perfume and 71 % cleansing cream” (319). This poll was only targeted at women, so just imagine if men and other types of queer girls were included.

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their bravery by fighting for their country). Femininity as a weapon can assault heteronormativity, challenging heteronormativity as represented with the queer girls, Mrs. Manresa, and Helen’s S/M sex act that literally marks her skin. Heteronormativity can lose its constraints on femininity and the ability to use war to promote marriages, heterosexuality, and femininity’s performance in such paradigms if we invent femininity queerly.

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Chapter Five

Resisting the Surveillance of Feminine Pleasure in Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine

I. Introduction Throughout my dissertation I theorize how different discourses historically and currently discipline femininity, particularly non-normative and queer femininities. Chapters two through four of my dissertation focus on contemporary texts and how they cite key modernist works as icons showing the interconnectedness of twentieth-century British literature and culture as a whole. Exploring this citational practice of contemporary British Literature and how femininity is represented, in both early and late twentieth-century culture, demonstrates how femininity becomes a different type of gender and sexual analytic. This concluding chapter diverges slightly to explore Caryl Churchill’s, a contemporary British playwright’s, two key historical plays –Vinegar Tom (1976) and Cloud Nine (1978). Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine do not cite previous modernist texts, but rather key iconic moments in British history. Vinegar Tom is set during the witch trials in seventeenth-century Europe and uses songs and contemporary dress and style to show how difference is constructed as a visible category that must be hunted out of culture with witch-hunting and persists into contemporary British culture. Act I of Cloud Nine takes place in nineteenth century British colonial Africa and demonstrates discourses of British Imperialism and how the very same discourses that inform gender, race, nationality, and sexuality operate in contemporary British culture. These two theatre productions illustrate connections among past and present gender, racial, nationality, and sexuality politics and modes of surveillance, and discipline. Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine both reference British archives and help audiences think about connections of nationality, gender, race, and sexuality differently. David Román suggests that, “[o]fficial archives are understood as the repositories of a national culture. It is here, presumably, that the documents central to the formation and promotion of the nation are housed” (37). Archival live performance gives playwrights, performers, and

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spectators opportunities to look back at archives and the past differently, transforming meanings, the past, our presents, and our understandings of them. These plays enact Román’s theory that, “[p]erformance constitutes a means by which past performances are not just remembered but revived” (152).112 Thus, live performance offers the opportunity of reviving the past and reliving it differently. Román’s theorizations of live performance’s archival work and Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Vinegar Tom respond to Judith Halberstam call for “other modes of being and becoming that scramble our understandings of place, time, development, action, and transformation” (In a Queer 187).113 Halberstam uses the archive to queer time and space similar to how Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine scramble time, space, and even how we conceptualize bodies and how they are read and defined. Within this final dissertation chapter, I explore how the theatrical productions and interweavings of Cloud Nine and Vinegar Tom help spectators to see not just intersectional politics differently, but also interrogate how we look at the past in relation to the present. These theatrical productions show spectators that certain modes of discrimination and disciplining exist discursively throughout time, although the disguises may change. As the time periods continually shift, so too does the location of the plays – Cloud Nine shifts from colonial Africa to contemporary London and Vinegar Tom moves from a seventeenth century to a contemporary Britain. Julia Klein, in her review of Cloud Nine, insightfully suggests, “[b]ut their history isn’t just close; it literally invades the present” (Julia Klein Par. 10). History actually “invades the present” in both plays making them ideal for an exploration of social justice that connects our pasts to our presents. Rita Felski, suggests that time works as “cross-linkages, connections, [and] patterns” that “persist over years, decades, or even centuries” (Doing Time 26). Felski’s notion of

112 According to Román: “live performance remembers not only performances from an earlier historical moment but also the prior archives of those past performances” suggesting part of the potential of live performance is not that it performs a version of an “historical moment” but rather that live performance also cites the archive of “those past performances” (Román 151). 113 Also, look to: Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures for a queering of both the archive, how archives work, and how we theorize archives and our positions, politics, and sexual experiences in relation to them.

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“doing time” demonstrates that time and history always exist in process rather than progressing linearly. There is no one way that time is done, history remembered, or progress made. Informed by Felski’s and Churchill’s imaginings of time, I investigate in my final dissertation chapter, how similar structures of surveillance and policing trans- historically enforce women’s genders, sexualities, pleasures, lives, and even their human status. Churchill says about Vinegar Tom, “I wanted to write a play about witches with no witches in it; a play not about evil, hysteria and possession by the devil but about poverty, humiliation and prejudice, and how the women accused of witchcraft saw themselves” (Churchill 130). Vinegar Tom shows what different discourses inform witch-hunting and how they work not just in the seventeenth century but contemporarily. For Churchill, witches are not evil magical people but rather victims of mass witch panic that wants to blame people, particularly women marked by some type of difference from heteronormativity, for poverty, illness, disease, and the unknown. Importantly, Churchill’s Vinegar Tom comments on and critiques how discursive searching surveils and disciplines women in very real, horrific, and traumatic ways. According to Marc Carlson’s archival research of witch trials, “70,000 [people were] [p]urportedly killed after 1573” (Carlson “Historical Witches and Witchtrials”). Within seventeenth-century England, Ireland, and Scotland, it is estimated that between 574-4574 people were killed as a result of witch trials (Carlson). The large discrepancy of witch-related murders was because according to Carlson between “1649-1658….3-4000 [people were] [p]urportedly killed during Cromwell's tenure” (Carlson). With “70,000+” people brutally murdered after 1573 as a direct result of witch accusations, we can see how witch finding and witch-hunting discourses are enforced by literal and feared violence, murder, and humiliation. Added to the number of people executed or killed because of witch trials, many more people were accused and brought on trial, but not executed. The public performance of the witch trials worked to humiliate women since most of those accused and executed were women, and to discipline women – those actually on trial and those watching the witch trials. Churchill writes about her focus on the humiliation that

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women underwent during the witch trials in Vinegar Tom, “[t]he pricking scene is one of humiliation rather than torture and Packer is an efficient professional, not a sadistic maniac” (Churchill 134). Interestingly, Churchill casts the same actor to play both Packer and the Doctor representing the connections between witch finding and medicine in Vinegar Tom. Both Cloud Nine and Vinegar Tom illustrate how discourses of witchcraft, imperialism, medicine, homosexuality, and British citizenship define, discipline and surveil non-normative as well as normative people. Cloud Nine resists these normative scripts that discipline feminine people, with performances and calls for experiencing pleasure in one’s queer femininity. In Cloud Nine, Betty and Edward offer us different scripts and performances of pleasurable femininities while simultaneously showing how femininity is policed and hunted. In Act I, Edward, Betty’s and Clive’s son, enjoys playing with dolls during his childhood and lusts after Harry an older gay man. Importantly, Edward’s character in Act I is played by a woman thus sex, arguably sexual abuse, between a male child and older man is not performed on stage. Instead, spectators see a woman performing the part of a child who pursues an older gay man. Act II represents Edward’s character as a gay man loving his femininity and critiquing anyone who chides him for the pleasure he derives from his own femininity. Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine link gender and sexuality politics specifically with the doubling of the characters of Betty and Ellen, gender switching, and character doubling. Representationally, Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine interweave gender and sexuality with the characters Betty and Ellen being key characters in each play. Betty and Ellen enact their characters in Vinegar Tom and then are transported through time and space to Churchill’s Cloud Nine showing that the surveillance of women and norms of femininity work similarly throughout different historical periods and our presents. Betty must agree to marriage in Vinegar Tom out of fear of witch accusations and spectators then see how marriage plays out for her in Cloud Nine. Cloud Nine begins set in Colonial Africa with Betty married to a British imperialist, Clive. In Act I of Cloud Nine, Betty must take on normative conventions of femininity. Betty sees the consequences of not becoming what men and culture want in Vinegar Tom thus she

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literally reflects her husband’s desires in Cloud Nine. Then, in Act II of Cloud Nine, Betty finally gets what she continually asks for in Vinegar Tom: “to be left alone” (169). Betty moves to England without her husband (we assume her husband is dead), and she shuts out all of the voices and ghosts of her husband, Ellen (her potential lesbian lover), her children – everyone. Cloud Nine ends with Betty masturbating and coming in to herself as Betty from Act I of Cloud Nine walks on to the scene and embraces Betty from Act II. Betty can only resist cultural and discursive disciplining with her own self- pleasure and self-invention. The embrace of the Betty(s) visibly represents the joining of gender and sexuality politics. The staged production of Cloud Nine contains very important and specific character switching. For example, the same actor who performs Betty in Act I (Betty’s character is played by a man in Act I) then performs Edward’s character in Act II. Similarly, the actress who performs Edward’s character in Act I (Edward is played by a woman in Act I) then performs Betty in Act II. Betty and Edward thus at times mirror each other and literally and metaphorically embrace at the end of Cloud Nine. Churchill mentions “enjoy[ing] the Edward-Betty connections” indicating how through their character switching they actually make connections (Churchill, Churchill 247). Elin Diamond in her analysis about Churchill’s Cloud Nine says that the character switching shows audiences that: “[w]hat we see is what, given sexual and racial politics, cannot be seen” (194). Diamond suggests Cloud Nine’s specific casting of a male actor performing Betty’s character in Act I, a female actress playing Edward’s character in Act I, and a white actor enacting Joshua’s, an African slave, character make visible different racial, gender, and sexuality politics that attempt to operate invisibly in both nineteenth-century and contemporary discourses. The racial and gender switching visibly marks bodies similarly to nineteenth-century through twentieth-century discourses that attempt to conceptualize race, gender, and sexuality as biological and how differences manifest visibly on the body. Ideologically, these conceptualizations of bodies and identities work because of their invisible enforcement (Following Foucault’s ideas of panopticism and surveillance, people can be made to watch themselves and others, even if they don’t

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know who or what is watching them). The visible marking of such gender, sexuality, and racial switching in Cloud Nine and Vinegar Tom forces spectators to see these discourses, how they work, and how they operate historically and presently. Churchill’s representations of gender, race, and sexuality demonstrate Anne McClintock’s point that, “the story is not simply about relations between black and white people, men and women, but about how the categories of whiteness and blackness, masculinity and femininity, labor and class came historically into being in the first place” (16). Race, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc. “come…into being” they are not naturally or biologically determined. The visible enacting of such discriminations demonstrates how not all people have social justice. Both Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine work as calls for justice and can be informed by Judith Butler’s theorizations that: Justice is not only or exclusively a matter of how persons are treated or how societies are constituted. It also concerns consequential decisions about what a person is, and what social norms must be honored and expressed for ‘personhood’ to become allocated, how we do or do not recognize animate others as persons depending on whether or not we recognize a certain norm manifested in and by the body of that other. (Undoing 58) Thus, justice is both how people are treated and how others read their bodies. Ideas of bodies and justice collide in Churchill’s theatrical productions of Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine as both plays foreground theories of embodiment, representation, and surveillance via visibility. Visibility actually becomes a mode of resistance – making discrimination and surveillance that purposefully operates invisibly within normative discourses and ideologies visible. Wiegman expands upon this concept of how invisibility works when she suggests that: The epistemology of the visual that enables natural history is thus displaced (though not abandoned) by an emphasis on the organic nature of the body, on its invisibly organized and seemingly definitive biological

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functioning. It is this emphasis on race as a constituted ‘fact’ of the body – as a truth that not only can but must be pursued beyond the realm of visible similarities and differences – that characterizes methodological proclivities of the modern episteme, and it is under its disciplinary gaze an elaborate discourse purporting the African’s inherent inhumanity is most productively, though not originally, waged. (American 23) Wiegman details how the body changes meanings with the emphasis on the visual, and how, according to normativity, the body becomes a visible object of truth. Normative discourses emphasize that if the body undergoes close enough examination, that the observer can find the truth of that body. However, as Wiegman suggests, the visible and invisible are intertwined because discourses of visibility actually work invisibly. The “disciplinary gaze” works invisibly in attempt to surveil all people. Churchill confronts audiences with visibility of discrimination and bodily trauma and humiliation to show audiences the necessity of justice for all and making invisibly operating discipline and surveillance a visible performance for spectators to view and process. According to Foucault, seventeenth-century British discourses of religion, medicine, science, law enforcement, and the law utilize categorization and classification to access and conceptualize different fields of knowledge. For example, scientia sexualis suggests that sexual inversion and homosexuality are marked on the body.114 People, life, illnesses, diseases, bodies, plants, etc., are classified and categorized to attempt to contain, control, and discipline. This new focus on categorization causes visibility and bodies to take on new meanings as Foucault suggests, “the illness is articulated exactly on the body” and “the classificatory rule dominates medical theory and practice” (The

114 Siobhan Somerville details the intersectionality of discourses of race and sexuality particularly within Sexology and other fields, which quantify bodies based on visible markers: “Methodologies and iconographies of comparative anatomy attempted to locate discrete physiological markers of difference by which to classify and separate races. Sexologists drew on these techniques to try to position the ‘homosexual’ body as anatomically distinguishable from the ‘normal’ body. Likewise, medical discourses on sexuality appear to have been steeped in pervasive cultural anxieties about ‘mixed’ bodies, particularly the mulatto, whose symbolic position as a mixture of black and white bodies was literalized in scientific accounts” (Queering 37).

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Birth 4). In a similar vein, this chapter explores the intersections of definitions of gender and sexuality within discourses of Science Sexualis, psychology, and the legal system. Witch hunts work with this conglomerate of fields that attempt to define “dysfunctions” and “perversions” of sexualities and genders as marked differences upon bodies because as Foucault suggests, normative discourses define, “variations, tiny anomalies, always receptive to the deviant” (The Birth 89). Also, during witch trials, witch hunters examine women’s bodies to find the mark of the witch to pronounce her guilt. These supposed marks are invented as a way to create witches as a classifiable and blamable category of difference. Thus, in the seventeenth century, normative discourses attempt to create a visible “deviant” body marked by difference(s). In collusion with other discourses and institutional mechanisms of power, medical hunts dismember and reorganize women’s bodies to create a controlled and classified “normal” femininity and female body. The police and medical fields work in conjunction to surveil and discipline people scrutinizing bodies for visible differences (The Birth 25).115 Also, this conceptualization of medicine suggests that physical and mental illnesses and diseases manifest themselves on the body making the invisible visible to classify, find pleasure in, and contain. Methods of watching and classification remain hidden and invisible; therefore, encouraging people to discipline and police each other. Foucault shows how medicine conceptualizes itself as field of knowledge: The clinic was probably the first attempt to order a science on the exercise and decisions of the gaze. From the second half of the seventeenth century, natural history has set out to analyze and classify natural beings according to their visible characters….At this level there was no distinction to be made between theory and experience, methods and results; one had to read the deep structures of visibility in which field and gaze are bound together by codes of knowledge. (The Birth 89, 90) With this emphasis on visibility, it is assumed that if doctors examine bodies close enough, that they will find the disease or illness manifested on or in the body. According

115 As Foucault suggests, “A medicine of epidemics could exist only if supplemented by a police” (The Birth 25)

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to this logic, bodies are objects to examine, dissect, classify, and categorize in the pursuit of knowledge. Medicine becomes one of the discourses by which normative identities were made visible and policed. In Churchill’s Vinegar Tom, the inquisition of women accused of witchcraft is compared to Betty’s trip to the doctor’s office where she is bled and undergoes a traumatic and humiliating medical examination. Vinegar Tom critiques the gender violence and discipline of the medical field with Betty’s character linking her resistance to marriage to the enforced doctors’ examinations that she must constantly undergo. In The Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer and Sprenger connect witchcraft and medicine, “[a]nd if it is asked how it is possible to distinguish whether an illness is caused by witchcraft or by some natural physical defect, we answer that there are various methods. And the first is by means of the judgment of doctors” (Summers 87). The doctors and witch hunters mirror each other in Churchill’s remaking of the seventeenth- century English witch trials. II. Trials of Gender and Sexuality in Vinegar Tom “Alice: ‘I’m not a witch. But I wish I was. If I could live I’d be a witch now after what they’ve done. I’d make wax men and melt them on a slow fire. I’d kill their animals and blast their crops and make such storms, I’d wreck their ships all over the world. I shouldn’t have been frightened of Ellen, I should have learnt. Oh if I could meet with the devil now, I’d give him anything if he’d give me power. There’s no way for us except by the devil. If I only did have magic, I’d make them feel it’” (175) – Caryl Churchill Vinegar Tom

In sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century Europe, witch accusations could target any woman and then she must undergo torturous investigations where doctors of witchcraft or inquisitors of witches bleed, humiliate, and sexually violate them in search of devil’s marks. Even if the witch finders cannot find the make-believe “devil’s marks” on the women’s bodies, this does not guarantee an innocent verdict and some women were executed without the witch finders proving to the town that any type of evidence bodily or otherwise exists. One might assume that these witch-hunts would proscribe some type of normativity or normal woman’s body and femininity, but in actuality no “normal” exists in witch accusations – all women are at risk. Witch-hunts create a visible

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body to discipline that then through invisible methods of surveillance, these discourses attempt to censor. Further, this use of witch-hunts connects to persecutions that search out gay men and lesbians (i.e. the female sexual inversion trials of the 1920s worked like witch hunts). Similar to the sexual indecency trials of the 1920s, the goal of the witch trials did not focus on defining witchcraft but rather legalized the policing of, discipline of, and discrimination against women. In the 1948 introduction to Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger’s The Malleus Maleficrum, Montague Summers shows the intersectionality of hunting witches and witch trials: “Certain it is true that The Malleus Maleficarum is the most solid, the most important work in the whole vast library of witchcraft. One turns to it again and again with edification and interest: From the point of psychology, from the point of jurisprudence, from the point of history, it is supreme” (ix). People look back at The Malleus Maleficarum to see how discursively witch-hunts connect medicine, psychology, history, class, property rights, and the law. Churchill’s Vinegar Tom cites The Malleus Maleficarum, the iconic text of how to hunt witches, to force spectators to see the injustice of the witch hunts themselves and the discourses enforcing them. Accusations of witchcraft and sexual indecency enforced discrimination of women’s genders, sexualities, bodies, and disabilities. Much of Vinegar Tom focuses on the township accusing women who do not perform normative sexuality – women who have sex outside of marriage, reject marriage, and/or say no when they do not want to have sex – of witchcraft. As the play continues, witchcraft accusations spread making all women suspect of being witches. Within Vinegar Tom, the five women’s witch trials result in the following verdicts: Joan and Ellen are hung;116 Alice and Susan tortured and found guilty of witchcraft; and Betty117 escapes witch accusations by agreeing to marriage. Much of the witch trials punish those women not married or not performing their “correct” wifely role. Also, the fear of a

116 “JOAN and ELLEN are hanged while MARGERY prays” (Churchill, Vinegar 174). 117 “Bless Miss Betty’s marriage and let her live happy” (Churchill, Vinegar 174).

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guilty witch verdict forces some women into marriage. Religion,118 medicine, and witch trials collide as ways to watch women, make them conform, and punish them. One of the ways Vinegar Tom shows the disciplining and surveillance of women in everyday life is how medicine disciplines women. Betty’s character shows the connection between witch trials and medicine as audiences watch her doctor’s examination. Before Betty agrees to marriage, she confesses to Margery: ‘They lock me up. I said I won’t marry him so they lock me up. Don’t you know that?’” (Churchill 140). Betty must visit the doctor because she will not agree to marriage. This scene depicts medical torture and the connection between medicine and marriage: BETTY tied to a chair. THE DOCTOR is about to bleed her arm. Betty: Why am I tied? Tied to be bled. Why am I bled? Because I was screaming. Why was I screaming? Because I’m bad. Why was I bad? Because I was happy. Why was I happy? Because I ran out by myself and got away from them and – Why was I screaming? Because I’m bad. Why am I bad? Because I’m tied. Why am I tied? Because I was happy. Why was I happy? Because I was screaming. Doctor: Hysteria is a woman’s weakness….After bleeding you must be purged. Tonight you shall be blistered. You will soon be well enough to be married. (Churchill, Vinegar 149) In this scene, the doctor physically, emotionally, and mentally tortures Betty and does so under the guise of helping and healing her. For women in Vinegar Tom, the herbal healer Ellen heals and helps women, not the Doctor. The Doctor merely inflicts pain and surveillance, thus, disciplining her. Betty’s character works as a representation of how heteronormativity is forced upon women in very real ways. Betty must go to the Doctor even though she is not sick; she has no physical or mental aliment that bothers her. The Doctor bleeds and blisters Betty to attempt to make her agree to marriage as he states at

118 Susan references that religion colludes with medicine ensuring that women don’t have abortions since, “So if we try to get round the pain, we’re going against God” (Churchill, Vinegar 146).

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the end of the passage that, she “will be well enough to be married” (Churchill, Vinegar 149) suggesting that women can only be coerced into marriage with physical torture. Thus, within enforced discourses of heteronormativity, marriage is not Betty’s choice. Marriage is not about romance and desire in Vinegar Tom but instead shows the discipline, surveillance, and torturous examinations of women who do not want to be married. Vinegar Tom contains songs in which the cast performs in contemporary dress specifically linking past and present. Churchill makes the distinction that the actors in Vinegar Tom “are not in character when they sing the songs”; they should appear in “modern dress” marking the time period distinctions (133). This juxtaposition of the songs with the play itself is very Brechtian in nature and specifically emphasizes the social aspect of theatre as Brecht says, “….once illusion is sacrificed to free discussion, and once the spectator, instead of being enabled to have an experience, is forced as it were to cast his vote; then a change has been launched which goes far beyond formal matters and begins for the first time to affect the theatre’s social function” (39). Brecht theorizes that theatre can force spectators not just to be idle viewers but rather to comment upon that performance (making spectators react in some way) demonstrates the “social function” of theatre. The songs in Vinegar Tom mark a disjunction in the play and directly address the spectators forcing them (1) not to be passive implementing Brecht’s use of song and (2) to respond, react, and/or reflect building upon Brecht’s distancing effect. One such song “Oh Doctor” follows Betty’s doctor’s visit and details what can happen to women and their bodies on examining tables. The “Oh Doctor” song takes Betty’s medical torture scene and extends it to how the medical profession can treat women in the past and present. “Oh Doctor” connects violence against women, watching women, and medicine: ….Stop looking up me with your metal eye. Stop cutting me apart before I die. Stop, put me back….. Put back my body….

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….Tell me what you whisper to nurse, Whatever I’ve got, you’re making it worse. I’m wide awake, but I still can’t shout….

….What’s wrong with me the way I am?....

I want to see myself. I want to see inside myself…. ….Give me back my body. I can see myself. (Churchill, Vinegar 150-151) Doctors watch patients with their “metal eye[s]” that work like metal scalpels used to cut and bleed women. This torture scene is mirrored later in Vinegar Tom when women accused of witchcraft are pricked and bled to attempt to diagnosis them as witches. The “disease” of witchcraft could not be cured. Thus, it could only be eradicated with the executions of any supposedly proven witches. In Vinegar Tom, the doctor watches the patient until she cannot see herself. The woman continuously repeats that she can’t see herself, her body, or the procedures done to her. Importantly, the doctor becomes the only source of vision within this scene. The doctor’s metal eye cuts into the woman’s flesh, and the woman’s body then becomes an object of spectacle for the knives and simultaneously the eyes watching. Thus the woman’s body works like a cadaver to be carved upon, and she is disciplined within the picture frame and examining table. Anatomy theatre focuses on medicine’s taking apart of women’s bodies as an act of live theatre with the examining table being the stage. Amy Holzapfel theorizes how the body works in anatomy theatre where the focus of the body is “in pieces.” Holzapfel suggests that there is “porous boundary between science and art” (3) and that this connection “defines the human itself as a form of visual representation” (15). Thus, the body is then devoid of human status blurring the boundary between humane and inhumane treatment. Here the body becomes a prop for the doctors to utilize and

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discourses to act upon. The song “Oh Doctor” forces audiences to think about the social and inhumane repercussions and implications of such conceptualizations of bodies, genders, and personhood. Anatomy theatre shows how the medical table is the stage, the doctors are actors and actresses, and medical students are the spectators, watching the body under observation and examination. A body now devoid of human status turns into theatre: “It serves as a liminal space, a flat stone or wooden surface, the very rectangular horizontality of which frames the body that lies upon it almost as a pictorial representation. In other words, it’s as if the body itself, carved into and cut upon by the surgeon, becomes the central object of figural composition within a kind of live painting” (Holzapfel 4). This visual setup of the body demonstrates the body as an object for medicine (medical treatment, observation, and experimentation). Holzapfel suggests that “medical experimentation is rapidly shifting what it means to be human,” and I would add that medicine also defines who is not seen as human (Holzapfel 14). With women’s medicine, the doctor and attendants watch the woman in stirrups and examine inside of her (similar to Sexology’s measuring of clitorises and vaginal openings as noted in my previous chapters). Churchill’s “Why are you putting my brain in my cunt?” critiques ideas that women’s brains and vaginas are hysterical thus medical doctors and psychologists have to examine, prick, and treat them (Vinegar 150). Importantly the doctor’s examining room or operating table is setup as such that patients cannot see what happens to themselves, which “Oh Doctor” represents with the woman upset thinking, “Why can’t I see what you’re taking out?” (Churchill, Vinegar 150). As Butler suggests about human definition, “It is crucial to recognize that the notion of the human will only be built over time in and by the process of cultural translation, where it is not a translation between two languages that stay enclosed, distinct, unified” (Butler, Undoing 38). In Vinegar Tom, women are not considered humans and in Cloud Nine, women, African people, children, and homosexual people (to use the nineteenth-century terminology) are not considered or recognized as humans under British Imperialism. Churchill’s “Oh Doctor” song illustrates Foucault’s theory that, “[w]hat has changed is the silent configuration in which language finds support: the relation of

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situation and attitude to what is speaking and what is spoken about” (The Birth xi). Ideas of medical knowledge shift in the seventeenth century and thereafter so that silence reinforces medical language and power. Silence operates as medical discipline and reinforces the differential power dynamic between patient and doctor that we see present in the inaudible whispering that the woman on the examining table cannot make out in “Oh Doctor.” Vinegar Tom adds to Foucault’s theory suggesting that medicine operates similarly to witch hunts, trials, and persecutions of women.119 Further, Betty must agree to marry to escape the physical torture from the Doctor and the witch hunters. Earlier in Vinegar Tom, Betty would rather spend her time with Ellen than with a husband. Betty asks Ellen, “Betty: Can I come again sometimes just to be here? I like it here” (Churchill, Vinegar 156). At first Ellen says yes and that Betty can come as often as she likes. Betty enjoys the atmosphere that Ellen’s home provides and possibly Ellen. After the witch trials begin, Ellen tells Betty that she must get married: Ellen: You get married, Betty, that’s the safest. Betty: But I want to be left alone. You know I do. Ellen: Left alone for what? To be like me? There’s no doctor going to save me from being called a witch. Your best chance of being left alone is marry a rich man, because it’s part of his honour to have a wife who does nothing. He has a big house and rose garden and a trout stream, he just needs a fine lady to make it complete and you can be that….Or go on as you’re going, go on strange? That’s not safe. Plenty of girls feel like you’ve been feeling, just for a bit. But you’re not one to go on with it. (Churchill, Vinegar 169) Betty just wants “to be left alone,” and Ellen’s responds that people think women being alone visibly marks them as being “strange,” which can have dangerous consequences. This passage suggests that Betty and Ellen desire something other than heterosexuality

119 See: Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World for theorizations of how pain works culturally.

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and heteronormativity with the “go on strange.” In this scene with the suggestion of lesbianism, lesbianism and witch-hunts connect. Thus, accusations of witchcraft enforce heteronormativity, scaring women to think if they resist they might end up like Ellen, hung. Also, Ellen describes how doctors are the only ones who can save women from witch accusations again connecting witch trials with medicine and even strengthening medical discourses’ influence because doctors can override the witch finder’s accusations. Margery is the person who starts witch accusations in the town when her cows die, her butter won’t churn, and she and Jack face poverty. Witch accusations begin in Vinegar Tom because Margery thinks someone has bewitched her sick cows because they stopped producing milk, which contributed to the butter not churning. At first Margery’s husband Jack blames himself thinking that God punishment him for all of his sins. But then Margery suggests that maybe someone has bewitched the cows to which Jack responds: “Jack: ‘Then it’s not my sins. Good folk get bewitched’….Jack: ‘It’s good people the witches want to hurt.’ Margery: ‘The devil can’t bear to see us so good’” (Churchill, Vinegar 153). Interestingly, Margery as a way of detecting witches performs rituals culturally associated with witchcraft (i.e. she sacrifices live animals saying that the “stink” will bring a witch) (Churchill, Vinegar 153). Margery wants someone to blame for her misfortunes and poverty; particularly something that is easy to fix so that animals will stop dying and their farm is financially stable again. Churchill juxtaposes Margery and Jack’s witch accusations with the song “Something to Burn.” The song suggests that people accuse women of witchcraft to find someone to blame for unexplainable problems,120 tragedies, and aliments or as a scapegoat for their own guilt:

120 Witchcraft works as a method of surveillance, identification, and persecution so that the townspeople can explain, blame, and fix the unexplainable. Mary Kilbourne Matossian’s references how a bad fungus “Claviceps purpurea” attached to rye and caused many of the symptoms people blamed on witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (8). Matossian’s research concludes, “Witch trials were also more common in wet areas” and in places dependent on rye as a main source of food. The effects of ingesting “Claviceps purpurea”: “‘Outbreaks’ of witch craft were often accompanied by outbreaks of central nervous system symptoms: tremors,

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What can we do, there’s nothing to do, about sickness and hunger and dying. What can we do, there’s nothing to do, Nothing but cursing and crying. Find something to burn. Let it go up in smoke. Burn your troubles away.

Sometimes it’s witches, or what will you choose?.... It’s blacks and it’s women and often it’s Jews. We’d all be quite happy if they’d go away. (Churchill, Vinegar 154) A transition occurs from the bad thing that happens – in this example the death and sickness of the cows in Vinegar Tom – to finding someone visibly marked as deviant to blame. Finding “Something to Burn” links existent discriminations, with those that persecute “witches”: women, black people, Jewish people, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities. Discourses of discrimination intersect with the idea that differences manifest themselves on bodies and must be eradicated. This particular song, “Something to Burn,” addresses the spectators representing how differences are persecuted breaking Brecht’s fourth wall, “It is of course necessary to drop the assumption that there is a forth wall cutting the audience off from the stage and the consequent illusion that the stage action is taking place in reality without an audience. That being so, it is possible for the actor in

anesthesias, paresthesias (sensations of pricking, biting, ants crawling on the skin), distortions of the face and eyes gone awry, paralysis, spasms, convulsive seizures, permanent contraction of muscle, hallucinations, manias, panics, depressions. There were also a significant number of gangrene cases and complaints of reproductive dysfunction, especially agalactia (inability of a nursing mother to produce enough milk). Animals behaved wildly and made strange noises; cows to had agalactia” (9). Matossian’s hypothesis suggests that people and animals would eat the fungus infected rye, and then an outbreak of these symptoms occurred. Obviously, at the times of the witch trials no one knew about this fungus or its effects. The easy and most time efficient way to diagnose and supposedly fix the problem was to persecute ‘witches.’ Witchcraft, then, explains the unexplainable. Of course the problems still persisted because witches did not cause the fungus to grow. Matossian points out that even with the fabrication of witchcraft: “These symptoms were real” (Matossian 9).

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principle to address the audience direct” (Brecht 136). The audience is directly addressed in “Something to Burn,” with the song critiquing cultures where it is acceptable and even encouraged to burn, murder, torture, persecute people in some way for their differences. This performance makes people think about – what are the implications of normative discourses wanting to exterminate differences? With the reference to “Jews,” the song directly connects this desire to wipe out differences to eugenics and genocide, forcing audiences to question how many people have been killed because of their differences, both constructed and imagined. At first Margery accuses Joan of witchcraft (the old, drunk, woman without a husband who comes to Margery and Jack’s house to borrow yeast to make beer and other things). Then, witch panic spreads throughout the town and soon four women are on trial. For example, Jack accuses Alice of “bewitching” his “organ” because she refuses to have sex with him (Churchill, Vinegar 165). Even Susan who is called to testify against Alice accidently puts suspicion onto herself as well when she mentions that Alice forced her to go and see Ellen and encouraged her to take herbs to abort her pregnancy. Susan is then convicted of witchcraft too since she has given herself an abortion and defied Christian and national discourses that suggest it is her duty to serve her husband and have babies (Churchill, Vinegar 174-175). Thus, Churchill critiques how witch-hunting proscribed, disciplined, and surveiled norms by which women had to conform to or else they could face humiliation, torture, and death. Even how characters prove someone is a witch says more about the person/people making such accusations than about the women under examination. In Vinegar Tom, Margery and Jack visit Ellen at her herbal remedies shop to find out if she has a way to test for witches. Ellen responds, “‘I’ve a glass here, a cloudy glass. Look in the glass, so, and see if any face comes into it. [She gives them a mirror.]” (Churchill, Vinegar 157). This mirror that Margery and Jack see as a magic ball to see witches literally shows that they are really witches themselves as it reflects back their own images. Since the spectators can see that Ellen has handed Margery and Jack a mirror, they can see both their reflection in the mirror and their performance pretending that they see Joan and

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Alice. The mirror used to detect witches illustrates the importance of seeing in witch- hunts. Ellen and Margery continue their discussion: Margery: Proves she’s a witch then? Ellen: Not for me to say one’s a witch or not a witch. I give you the glass and you see in it what you see in it. (Churchill, Vinegar 158) Ellen’s “you see in it what you see in it,” suggests that no truth exists within witch accusations, you see what you want to see and that is all. Even though Margery and Jack specifically come to Ellen for a magic ball later in Vinegar Tom, Ellen is the one accused of witchcraft because of her non-traditional methods of healing. Vinegar Tom ends with witch trials, torture, and humiliation in “Oh Doctor” and “Something to Burn,” reinforcing how religion, medicine, the idea of a healthy nation, and witch trials collide. The staged performance visibly and verbally illustrates how women experience all of these persecutions intersectionally. Importantly, the actual witch trials do not take place until Packer and Goody come to town. Packer and Goody are representations of Kramer and Sprenger, the authors of Malleus Maleficarum, the famous witch finders who travel around England spreading mass panic of witchcraft, causing citizens to surveil themselves and their neighbors, and torturing and killing women to set examples for others to obey. Significantly, a woman plays Goody’s character and the same actor who performs the Doctor’s character also enacts Packer’s character. The same actresses who perform Joan’s and Ellen’s characters play Kramer’s and Sprenger’s characters because Joan and Ellen are hung before Kramer and Sprenger enter the final scene in Vinegar Tom. This is meant to signify how the ones guilty of witchcraft or, rather, how witchcraft is discursively defined as evil and destroying civilization, are actually Kramer and Sprenger themselves. The casting choice of having actresses play Kramer’s, Sprenger’s, and Goody’s characters draws attention to gender relations in witch trials. Spectators take pause as they see women witch finders forcing the audience to think about how gender persecutions work in witch trials and hunts. Kramer and Sprenger show the intersections of witch accusations with medicine, citizenship, and religion since they utilized the same medical rhetoric and were hired by

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the church. Kramer and Sprenger even collected money for their services. Not surprisingly, the witch trials happen in the public square in order to perform the examination and persecution as a warning for all to see. Historically, the church elects Kramer and Sprenger to travel England conducting witch trails and persecutions to collect monetary fees for their services thus the church monetarily profits from the witch trials (Churchill 164).121 Within Vinegar Tom, Kramer and Sprenger enter the final scene after the witch trials take place to address the audience with a speech about why more women are witches than men and to literally make the connections for the audiences of discourses of witch hunts and what they do. Sprenger and Kramer force the spectators to think about witch trials and how the discipline women with their direct address. This performative act cites the discourses that attempt to remain invisible to make them visible. Goody and Packer are the witch finders in Vinegar Tom who lead the witch trials and suggest the verdict and punishment by attempting to diagnose witches with examinations of women’s bodies. Goody and Packer discursively connect methods of witch finding, medicine, and nationality as Packer proposes that witchcraft is a disease that will spread throughout England, “ ‘….The infection will spread through the whole country if we don’t stop it’” (Churchill, Vinegar 167). According to Packer and this discourse of witch-hunting, the only way to save England is by stopping and curing the “infection” of witchcraft. Packer utilizes the fear of disease in the seventeenth century to cause and encourage cultural witchcraft panic. This use of panic is quite similar to the moral panic that the Conservative Right creates culturally out of fears the American public had about HIV and AIDS in the 1980s when little was known about the virus. Sedgwick theorizes how homosexual panic works when she asserts, “Thus, a lot of popularity of the ‘homosexual panic’ defense seems to come simply from its ability to permit and ‘place,’ by pathologizing, the enactment of a socially sanctioned prejudice against one stigmatized minority, a particularly demeaned one among many”

121 See: Kramer, Heinrich and James Sprenger. The Malleus Maleficarum. New York: Dover, 1971.

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(Epistemology 20).122 Sedgwick contextualizes how the AIDS virus is used to encourage and make societally acceptable homosexual panic. Later in this chapter, I explore how, in a similar way, homosexuality is represented as an illness that will destroy the British Empire in the nineteenth century section of Cloud Nine. Even as Goody, Packer’s assistant, describes his and Packer’s services and fees, his rhetoric connects surveillance, discipline, and exterminating witches with nationality and illness: Goody: He can tell by their look,….He says the reason there’s so much witchcraft in England is England is too soft on witches, for in Europe and Scotland they are hanged and burned and if they are not penitent they are always burnt alive, but in England they are only hanged….He’s well worth the twenty shillings a time, and I get the same….besides knowing you’re free of the threat of illness and death….I keep healthy keeping the country healthy. (Vinegar 168) Packer and Goody suggest that witches bodies are visibly marked; therefore, Packer can “tell” a witch by “their look.” Packer “watches” the women waiting for a sign of witchcraft (Churchill, Vinegar 172).123 The focus on the look of and looking for witches heightens surveillance – everyone is watching each other. Then, Goody suggests that England appears to be a weak nation to all of Europe for only hanging their witches instead of burning them. According to Goody, the ones who inflict the most torture, cures England of the illness of witchcraft, supposedly making a safer and stronger nation. This discursive logic suggests that the worse the torture (i.e. burning, quartering, etc.) the more that the punishment would dissuade women from misbehaving. Thus, according to this normative discursive construction, the strength of the country is determined by the severity of torture inflicted on their unruly citizens. The Malleus Maleficarum has a number of different introductions to the text because of its iconic status as one of the

122 For theorizations of AIDS and homosexual panic look to: Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Epistemology of the Closet, and Between Men. 123 Packer “ ‘….I’ve watched plenty of witches and hanged them all’” (Churchill,Vinegar 172).

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most important guides to witch-hunting. The 1928 introduction proposes that, “[t]here can be no doubt—and this is a fact of which is so often not recognized (or it may be forgotten) that one cannot emphasize it too frequently—that witchcraft in its myriad aspects and myriad ramifications is a huge conspiracy against civilization” (Summers xxiv). Twentieth-century discourses perpetuate ideas that witchcraft is a “conspiracy against civilization” rather than the torturing and killing of people accused of witchcraft. Thus, civilization here is not about how citizens are treated or treat each other in terms of humanity, but rather civilization becomes a means by which people are made to conform and are tortured when they do not obey – similar to how imperialism and nationality are enforced and disciplined in Cloud Nine. Goody and Packer travel around England killing women and collecting money from towns devastated by illness and poverty. Goody and Packer utilize the language of medicine and nationality to encourage the witch trials and make themselves doctors to heal towns and eradicate witches. Doctors specializing in witchcraft, Goody and Packer, want to torturously brand witchcraft onto the body. Poverty and illness make people more susceptible to witch panic. More witches means more money for Packer, Goody, and the church; therefore, more poverty within the towns causing even greater panic and leaving people more vulnerable to follow normative discourses and not resist. In addition to monetary gain, the church and medicine gain more influence defining knowledge and surveilling people. This branding helps detect witchcraft and marks difference so that people will constantly look for witches similar to how characters look for homosexuality in Cloud Nine. Churchill cites from Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum drawing attention to the societal acceptance and encouragement of the torture inflicted upon women. Churchill notes that Sprenger and Kramer “appear in top hat[s] and tails as performers in a music hall” (Churchill 132). This specific costume choice for Kramer and Sprenger calls attention to the fact that they are performs putting on an act for the public to participate in and watch. Within Vinegar Tom, Churchill quotes from Kramer and Sprenger’s discussion of why women are witches: Sprenger: we must fill those moral cavities

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Kramer: so we’ve written a book Sprenger: Malleus Maleficarum Kramer: The Hammer of Witches Sprenger: It works like a charm Kramer: to discover witches Sprenger: and torture with no hitches. Kramer: Why is a greater number of witches found in the fragile feminine sex than in men?.... Kramer/ Sprenger: she is more carnal than a man…. Sprenger: A defect of intelligence. Kramer: A defect of inordinate passions.…. Sprenger: Follow their own impulses…. Sprenger: vain…. Sprenger: contaminating to the touch Kramer: their carnal desires…. Kramer: All witchcraft Sprenger: comes from carnal lust. (Churchill, Vinegar176-178) Many of the reasons Kramer and Sprenger give for why women are more susceptible to witchcraft are the very same things used to discriminatorily define femininity: vanity, lack of intelligence, carnal lusts and inordinate passions. These witch accusations establish a correct femininity based on piety, virginity, innocence, virtue, being plain, modesty, self-denying, and patient (all of the things that a good Christian woman should be according to normative scripts of gender and sexuality).124 Within Malleus Maleficarum, Sprenger and Kramer detail why they think that witchcraft mainly afflicts women (the feminine sex according to them): “What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair

124 A good example of this type of femininity would be how Mr. Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre, wants the girls to be brought up (See: chapter VII of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre).

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colors!” (Summers 43) The words Kramer and Sprenger use are very sexual – “desirable,….natural temptation, ….delectable” – suggesting that those hunting witches find pleasure in the watching and punishment of witches. Danger and evil signify femininity and domesticity for Sprenger and Kramer, showing how normative discourses fear what will happen if gender relations change and property rights are transferred to women and if women start making decisions about how many babies they want to have, if they want to get married or not, and what types of relationships they want to have. Also, the “painted with fair colors!” references how makeup marks witches and how witch-y women are only acting fair and are trying to disguise themselves with makeup so that people won’t be able to look at them and see that they are witches. These damaging ideas of femininity, witches, and women propose that surveillance needs to be taken further with constant watching and examinations. The “domestic danger” seems rather similar to Clive’s comments to Betty in Cloud Nine: Women can be treacherous and evil. They are darker and more dangerous than men…If I shot you every British man would applaud me. But no. It was a moment of passion such as women are too weak to resist. But you must resist it, Betty, or it will destroy us. We must fight against it. We must resist this dark female lust, Betty, or it will swallow us up. (Churchill 277) Even when Betty’s married, she is described with similar language as that of witches. Within Clive’s performance spectators observe the connections among discourses imperialism, gender, and sexuality. Clive suggests that he and Betty “must fight against” “dark female lust” because it could “swallow [them] up” similarly to how imperialist discourses suggest that Africa is a dark hole that can swallow up explorers and colonists if they lose control. According to this logic, women’s feminine touch contaminates, which again connects witchcraft and medicine. Discourses surveilling witchcraft such as religion, the nation, and medicine affords a place for pleasure in defining women as contaminated by sanctioning various authorities to torture women in the name of healing. Vinegar Tom

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and Cloud Nine critique and resist such ideas even forcing spectators to think about these connections. Just as Betty’s bled at the doctor’s office, Kramer and Sprenger bleed and torture women to cleanse them and make them sanitary. Packer and Goody torture women, so too Betty must endure torture from the doctor. Packer details how he tests for witches: “ ‘[f]or God in his mercy has called me and shown me a wonderful way of finding out witches, which is finding the place on the body of the witch made insensitive to pain by the devil. So that if you prick that place with a pin no blood comes out and the witch feels nothing’” (Churchill, Vinegar 165). According to Packer, torturing and humiliating women is a calling from God.125 Packer pricks women causing them to bleed just as he did as the Doctor (since the same actor performs as both characters). Goody even says that Joan lies and that his inflicted torture doesn’t hurt: Goody: How she cries the old liar, pretending it hurts. Packer: There’s one for hanging, stand aside there. We’ve others to attend to. Next please, Goody. (Churchill, Vinegar 166) Goody and Packer search and prick women’s “secret parts” as a means to tame and examine women in rather violating ways (Churchill, Vinegar 172).126 Particular emphasis is placed on women’s sexualized body parts during the witch trials in Vinegar Tom: [GOODY takes ALICE. PACKER helps, and her skirts are thrown over her head while he pricks her. She tries not to cry out.] Goody: Why so much blood? Packer: The devil’s cunning here. Goody: She’s not crying much, she can’t feel it. Packer: ‘Have I the spot though? Which is the spot? There. There.

125 Kramer and Sprenger are actually chosen by the church for this ‘duty.’ 126 Susan’s “privates” are inspected: “Goody: ‘No need to shave the other for she has three bigs in her privates almost an inch long like great teats where the devil sucks her and a bloody place on her side where she can’t deny she cut a lump off herself so I wouldn’t find it’” (Churchill, Vinegar 173).

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There. No, I haven’t the spot. Oh, it’s tiring work. Set this one aside. Maybe there’s others who will speak against her and let us know more clearly what she is. (Churchill, Vinegar 166) Packer and Goody inflict torture and pain demonstrated by how much they make Alice bleed. Since Packer’s test fails – he cannot find a spot that won’t bleed – he calls for a verbal indictment of Alice showing how examinations of bodies connect with the court trial structure itself.127 Vinegar Tom ends in the Public Square with, “JOAN and ELLEN….hanged while MARGERY prays” (Churchill, Vinegar 174). One of the things Margery prays for is for God to “[b]less Miss Betty’s marriage and let her live a happy life” (174). Since the hanging, prayer, and marriage citations occur in the Public Square, all intermingle in these public performances. While Margery prays for Betty’s marriage, Ellen is hanged. Betty’s marriage is not publicly performed in either Vinegar Tom or Cloud Nine. Instead, Vinegar Tom ends displacing Betty’s marriage in the future and Cloud Nine begins after Betty and Clive are already married and have two children, Victoria and Edward. After the Doctor tortures Betty and she watches Ellen hanged by the “hammers of witches,” it is not surprising that Betty agrees to marriage (Churchill, Vinegar 176). Margery’s prayer for Betty’s happy marriage depicts the religious and romantic discourses that attempt to situate marriage as a blessed union of happiness. But in reality for all of the women in Vinegar Tom, marriage is actually the unhappily ever after and a mode of surveillance and discipline. As spectators watch this prayer, the public performance points to the hypocrisy of witch trials, religion, and marriage. Betty will not receive her happily ever after from marriage instead she must “‘….invent one’” for herself, which she does at the end of Cloud Nine (Churchill, Cloud Nine 319).

127 “Packer: ‘Though a mark is a sure sign of a witch’s guilt having no mark is no sign of innocence for the devil can take marks off’” (Churchill, Vinegar 173).

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III. Cloud Nine and Self-Pleasure as Resistance “If Everybody Worked as Hard as Me” “ ‘….Yes you can. Yes you can. Oh the country’s what it is because the family’s what it is because the wife is what she is to her man’” (Churchill 161). - Caryl Churchill Vinegar Tom128

Vinegar Tom ends with the song “If Everybody Worked as Hard as Me,” which is performed by the actors and actresses in Vinegar Tom out of character in contemporary dress. The song satirically puts forward that the “country is what it is” because “the family is what it is” because “the wife is what she is to her man” (161). Similarly, Cloud Nine begins as Vinegar Tom’s ends—with a song that situates the importance of gender normativity to the family and the necessity of the heteronormative family to the British Empire. Importantly, Act I of Cloud Nine is set in nineteenth-century colonial Africa and Act II moves to contemporary London (although the characters only supposed to age twenty-five years. Act I focuses on how discourses of British nationalism create themselves through gender, sexuality, and racial relations in British Colonial Africa. And Act II focuses on sexuality politics and how discourses of sexuality and gender intersect in the lives of the characters in Cloud Nine. After Betty undergoes the trauma of the Doctor’s exam and the inquisition of the witch finders in Vinegar Tom, she becomes what Clive, her husband, wants her to be in Cloud Nine: Clive: This is my family. Though far from home We serve the Queen wherever we may roam. I am father to the natives here, And father to my family so dear. [He presents BETTY. She is played by man] My wife is all I dreamt a wife should be,/ And everything she is she owes to me

128 Sung by the cast of Vinegar Tom in contemporary dress.

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Betty: I live for Clive. The whole aim of my life Is to be what he looks for in a wife. I am man’s creation as you see, And what men want is what I want to be. (Churchill, Cloud 251)129 A man performs Betty’s character because she exists as a reflection and creation of what men want wives to be according to nineteenth century discourses of heteronormative femininity. Just as a white actor plays Joshua, Clive’s African slave, reflecting what the British Empire wants to turn the people of Africa into – obedient, approval seeking, and white servants for the British Empire. According to Clive’s speech, he sees himself as the father to both his family and the “native” people of colonial Africa suggesting that he must raise both groups of people correctly and similarly. With Clive’s speech beginning Cloud Nine, spectators know from the outset that the play challenges discourses of imperialism, racism, and gender normativity. One of Joshua’s jobs is to watch Betty and report back to Clive showing how Betty is under constant surveillance – someone is always watching her. Joshua attempts to both surveil and enforce gender norms as he uses sexist insults against Betty and homophobic slurs to chastise Edward for being too feminine. Thus, Joshua reflects what British imperialist discourses want him to be – a mode of discipline and surveillance of normativity. In terms of British colonial discourses, women and slaves are supposed to be a reflection of whatever the white, British, imperialist, patriarch wants to see. Edward, Betty and Clive’s son, is played by a woman because, according to nineteenth century discourses of gender and sexuality, homosexual130 boys or men were really women trapped in men’s bodies. Significantly, Edward is not what Clive or normative gender and sexuality discourses want sons to be; instead, Edward is a reflection of definitions of homosexuality as something visibly marked on the body.

129 Clive: ‘That’s a brave girl. So today has been all right? No fainting? No hysteria?’” (Churchill, Cloud 254). 130 I use the terminology of homosexual and homosexuality precisely to draw attention to the nineteenth-century constructions of sexuality.

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Similar to Vinegar Tom, the unexpected gender and racial switching among characters forces audiences to reflect on their own assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality and how they are defined as marked on bodies rather than as changing discursive categories. Diamond explains, “[t]he male playing Betty [and], the female playing her son Edward, foreground the ways in which culture, through its custodians in the family, discipline the body, force it to ‘emit signs’ of clear masculinity and femininity” (Diamond 196). Thus, the switching of the genders here works to visibly mark masculinity and femininity on bodies. Edward plays with dolls and therefore must “emit signs” of femininity, which translates into a female body to normative discourses that Cloud Nine challenges. According to Churchill, Cloud Nine developed from a “workshop….about sexual politics” (Churchill 245). Gender and sexuality politics intersect in Cloud Nine, which is represented by the actor and actress switching between Betty and Edward (the actor who plays Betty in Act I plays Edward in Act II and the actresses who performs Edward’s character in Act I enacts Betty’s character in Act II). Femininity for Betty has always been something that she must perform out of duty and to protect herself. Unlike Betty, Edward desires to perform femininity. For example in Act II of Cloud Nine, Edward criticizes his soon-to-be ex-partner, for suggesting that he should not perform femininity: “….Everyone’s always tried to stop me being feminine and now you are too….I like doing the cooking. I like being fucked. You do like me like this really” (306). Edward emphasizes his pleasure in his own making of femininity. Edward does not merely cite normative scripts of femininity, he actually makes femininity his own. Here the performativity of queer femininity and sex intersect with Edward’s “I like being fucked.” Gerry, Edward’s partner, criticizes Edward for his femininity and suggests that femininity is heteronormative with Gerry’s declaration that he does not want a wife. Edward then shows audiences that femininity does not mean wife nor does it mean woman. Cloud Nine demonstrates how definitions of femininity connect to nationalism and imperialism with the characters of Betty and Ellen. Betty’s “service” to England is to be Clive’s wife in colonial Africa as she tells Clive: “[i]t’s just that I miss you when

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you’re away. We’re not in this country to enjoy ourselves. If I lack society that is my form of service’” (Churchill, Cloud 254). As duty and service to the empire, Betty must be Clive’s wife and have babies, and she plays a role in empire making. McClintock discusses how femininity and domesticity contribute to and encourage imperialism: As such, white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting….imperialism cannot be fully understood without a theory of gender power. Gender power was not the superficial patina of empire, an ephemeral gloss over the more decisive mechanics of class and race. Rather, gender dynamics were, from the outset, fundamental to the securing and maintenance of the imperial enterprise. (6-7) White women also perpetuated imperialism in the colonies and within England.131 Gender, race, and imperial relations interweave as audiences watch the racial and gender switching Cloud Nine. Cloud Nine’s racial and gender switching emphasizes how gender and race have been defined as something on and in the body in the nineteenth century – gender, race, and sexuality become biological. This re-signification of gender, race, and sexuality as biological emphasizes how gender, sexuality, and race are made. Betty’s, Edward’s, and Joshua’s Heteronormativity is “service” to the empire.132 We can read Betty’s and Ellen’s characters carrying over from Vinegar Tom to Cloud Nine and as a representative connection between the plays intersecting similar struggles, politics, and discursive surveillance. Although Churchill does not directly comment that she intended to have Betty and Ellen as the same characters in Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine, the two characters do perform similar struggles in both. In Vinegar

131 McClintock theorizes how Victorian domescity shows the significance of ordering to nineteenth-century British culture,“The clock presided magisterially over the life of the household, perfectly encapsulating the Victorian fetish for measurement, order and boundary. In short, the cult of domesticity became a crucial arena for rationalizing emergent middle-class identity and its presiding values” (McClintock 169). 132 Churchill writes, “Betty: ‘I always seem to be waiting for the men’” (Cloud 258).

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Tom, other characters hint that Betty, a fourteen-year-old girl, might be “strange” because she doesn’t want to marry. Then, in the nineteenth-century section of Cloud Nine, Betty enacts and lives out her wifely and motherly performances for England, making herself into what Clive “looks for in a wife.” Ellen and Betty are together again in Cloud Nine, but now Ellen is the children’s governess and Betty’s confident. Ellen, the insinuated lesbian, in Vinegar Tom, represents female homosexuality in the nineteenth-century section of Cloud Nine. Rather than Betty relying on Ellen as she did in Vinegar Tom, Ellen in Cloud Nine Ellen lives with Betty’s family thus relies on them for financial and living support. At the end of Act I, Ellen must marry for the empire – possibly a fate worse than death. The connecting of the two plays further joins time periods showing how strands of gender, sexuality, and empire weave throughout the seventeenth through twentieth centuries in very important ways. The relationship between Betty and Ellen in Vinegar Tom persists in Cloud Nine only Betty has taken Ellen’s advice from Vinegar Tom and has married a rich man and has become the heterosexual woman, wife, and mother, that England wants her to be. Instead of Betty following Ellen around dotting on her, Ellen hopelessly loves Betty and Betty lusts after Harry, a man who prefers eroticism between men. The first erotic scene between Betty and Ellen happens after Betty kisses Harry and the two re-enact the scene: Betty: He held my hand like this. Oh I want him to do it again. I want him to stroke my hair. Ellen: Your lovely hair. Like this, Betty? Betty: I want him to put his arm around my waist. Ellen: Like this, Betty? Betty: Yes, oh I want him to kiss me again. Ellen: Like this Betty? [Ellen kisses Betty.] Betty: Ellen, whatever are you doing? It’s not a joke. (Cloud 271) Prior to this point, Ellen is enamored with Betty. The two intimately hold hands (very similar to the classic romantic friendship narrative of the nineteenth century). Then in

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this scene, Ellen caresses Betty’s hair, puts her arms around her waist, and kisses her. The eventual kissing should not surprise Betty since Ellen continues to do everything that Betty says that she wants Harry to do. Betty’s statement “it’s not a joke,” emphasizes the enactment of queer desire and ironically references a tradition that represents women kissing each other as practicing for heterosexual relationships. In Act I of Cloud Nine, a male actor plays Betty’s character, so spectators see a man dressed as a woman kissing a woman. Thus, spectators observe desire queered on multiple levels – Ellen and Betty act out the kissing scene between Betty and Harry (casting creates this kissing scene with two male actors), Ellen desiring a man in woman’s clothing, and Betty and Ellen desiring one another. Because of the performativity of the gender switching, here specifically knowing how Churchill questions gender as something marked on bodies, this sexual scene makes us question how we as spectators define gender. If spectators just assume that Betty is a man because of a male-bodied actor playing her character, they then define gender in terms of bodily markers as Cloud Nine argues against. Therefore with Cloud Nine’s questioning of conceptions of gender, the play similarly critiques definitions and assumptions about sexuality. This desire between Ellen and Betty is not equated to heterosexual desire – it is something very queer. Later in Act I, Betty says that she loves Ellen, but that Ellen must marry and have children as her duty to the empire: Ellen: I don’t want another place, Betty. I want to stay with you forever. Betty: If you go back to England you might get married, Ellen. You’re quite pretty, you shouldn’t despair of getting a husband. Ellen: I don’t want a husband. I want you. Betty: Children of your own, Ellen, think. Ellen: I don’t want children, I don’t like children. I just want to be alone with you, Betty, and sing for you and kiss you because I love you, Betty. Betty: I love you too, Ellen. But women have their duty as soldiers have. You must be a mother if you can. (Churchill, Cloud 281)

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Ellen’s declaration to Betty of “I just want to be alone with you” is similar to Betty’s comment to Ellen in Vinegar Tom, when she states that she just wants to be left alone. The main difference between the two statements is that Ellen directs her desire to an addressee – Betty whom Ellen wants to be alone with. Ellen’s articulations name couplings that exist other than marriage with children. Similarly, Betty’s desire to be alone rather than married illustrates that there are other modes of living besides heteronormativity or coupling. In Vinegar Tom, Ellen advises Betty to marry to save herself from witch accusations. Comparably in Cloud Nine, Betty advises Ellen to marry, to save Ellen from an English Empire that diagnosis homosexuality as an illness similar to witchcraft. If Ellen doesn’t marry and confesses her female homosexuality, normative nineteenth-century discourses of sexuality and gender will attempt to classify, categorize, and treat Ellen’s “illness.” National, medical, legal, psychoanalytical, and scientific discourses enforce women’s heteronormativity as their duty to the nation. The British Empire in the nineteenth-century section of Cloud Nine depicts heteronormative, homophobic, and nationalistic discourses particularly with Clive’s character verbalizing that homosexuality is a “disease” that will ruin the empire. Both Betty and Clive tell Ellen and Harry that marriage will cure their homosexuality and that getting married and having a family are their duties to the empire. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, when definitions of homosexuality come about, homosexuality is defined – by and through scientia sexualis – as an illness that needs to be cured or an identity that needs to be disciplined. According to such normative discourses, people could sometimes be treated and cured them their illness. Significantly, Ellen marries Harry, the gay man whom Betty also finds attractive, creating Harry as an erotic conduit for Ellen’s and Betty’s desires for each other. Harry only enters into a heterosexual romance since Clive tells him marriage will help him overcome his “disease” of homosexuality. Harry and Ellen, must marry each other in order for Harry to get over his homosexual “disease” and to perform their duties for the British Empire. Clive acts

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“disgusted” when Harry tries to embrace him thinking that Clive feels the same love and attraction “between men”:133 Clive: My God. Harry, how disgusting. Harry: You will not betray my confidence. Clive: I feel contaminated. Harry: I struggle against it. You cannot imagine the shame. I have tried everything to save myself. Clive: The most revolting perversion. Rome fell, Harry, and this sin can destroy an empire. Harry: It is not a sin, it is a disease. Clive: A disease is more dangerous than diphtheria. Effeminacy is contagious. How I have been deceived. Your face does not look degenerate, Oh Harry, how did you sink to this? Harry: Clive, help me, what am I to do? Clive: You have been away from England too long.…. Harry: Clive, I am like a man born crippled. Please help me.…. Clive: I cannot keep a secret like this. Rivers will be named after you, it’s unthinkable. You must save yourself from depravity. You must get married. You are not unattractive to women.….Think of England. (Churchill, Cloud 282-283) Harry uses language of disease, shame, and disability to discuss his homosexual desire. Echoing the inquisitors in Vinegar Tom, Clive says that homosexuality is a contagion that can destroy the English empire. Particularly because Harry will go down in history books and his name will live on as national landmarks of empire, Harry must be cured. Harry must get married to perform a correct and healthy English citizenship and be cured from the disease of homosexuality. According to Clive, Harry must make this sacrifice

133 See: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theories of triangulated homosocial desire in her book Between Men.

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for England.134 Cloud Nine points out that even when normative discourses attempt to encourage heterosexuality as something natural, these discourses contradict themselves as Clive emphasizes that the important relationships and real intimacy are between men and that as citizens they must make sacrifices. One such sacrifice is heterosexuality. Thus, even discourses that attempt to define homosexuality as an illness as opposed to healthy heterosexuality, simultaneously suggest that heterosexuality is not natural but a sacrifice people must make for the nation. Within this scene, Clive says “your face does not look degenerate” referencing discourses of scientia sexualis, which suggest homosexuality is visibly marked on the body and that sexual inversion and homosexuality come from the colonies not England.135 In Act I of Cloud Nine, the wedding scene (or at least the wedding reception) is acted out unlike in Vinegar Tom where Betty’s impending marriage is implied for the future. Although male homosexuality is described as an illness to discourses of normativity, desire between women is rather unthinkable to Clive. As mentioned in chapter one of my dissertation, in nineteenth-century England, legal discourses prohibited sodomy but not lesbian sex acts. Cloud Nine challenges the ideas in twentieth-century England that conceptualize homosexuality as a “disease” and lesbianism as absurd and unthinkable but also resistant. Joshua tries to accuse Betty of kissing Ellen when he tells Clive: Joshua: The governess and your wife, sir. Clive: What’s that, Joshua? Joshua: She talks of love to your wife, sir. I have seen them. Bad women. Clive: Joshua, you go too far. Get out of my sight. (Churchill 285)

134 Clive then initiates Harry proposing first to Mrs. Saunders who is a widow and will have nothing to do with marriage again, and then to Ellen: “Harry: ‘Ellen. I don’t suppose you would marry me?’/ Ellen: ‘What if I said yes?’/ Clive: ‘Run along now, you two want to be alone’” (Churchill, Cloud 285). Clive overly exaggeratedly suggests that the lovebirds need to run off alone together to take a romantic stroll motioning to conventional narratives of romance in nineteenth-century British Literature (such as a Jane Austen romantic narrative). 135 For example, see: Iwan Bloch’s “The Sexual Life of Our Time” (1907) and C.G. Seligmann’s “Sexual Inversion Among Primitive Races” (1902).

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Clive up to this point believes everything that Joshua says about Betty. In fact, Joshua watches Betty, as part of his job, and reports back to Clive. Similar to Parliament’s decision to not legislate acts of obscenity between women, Clive thinks that the idea of female/female desire is absurd, unbelievable, and unthinkable. Nonetheless, there is a possibility of reading lesbian desire as resistant in Cloud Nine. IV. Conclusion In Cloud Nine, sexual enjoyment for women also exists outside the couple form with Betty quite literally coming to selfhood because of her sexual enjoyment in Act II of Cloud Nine. Betty, the scared girl forced into marriage in Vinegar Tom, takes ownership of her pleasure and imagines it anew. During Act II of Cloud Nine, Betty adjusts to living her life as a single woman – she has left Clive. In one of the final scenes in the play, Betty’s masturbation scene juxtaposes her own self-realization with sexual pleasure. Significantly, right before Betty masturbates Ellen appears (whom we have not seen in Act II thus far): Ellen: Betty, what happens with a man?136 Betty: You just keep still. Ellen: And is it enjoyable? Don’t forget me Betty. (Cloud 316) This scene references the previous kissing scene when Betty and Ellen act out what supposedly happens between men and women. Just as Ellen kisses Betty and puts her arm around Betty to enact what Harry did, spectators can imagine Betty showing Ellen “what happens with a man.” Betty obviously does not forget Ellen as she appears right before Betty gives herself an orgasm. Betty’s self and orgasmic pleasure invents her anew – her sexuality, individuality, and subjectivity. The placement of Ellen right before Betty’s masturbation scene works as a type of metaphoric pleasure between the two women. Heterosexual sex never invents a new world for Betty. Rather, giving herself pleasure does, as audiences observe in this long quote:

136 Act II is not the first time Ellen asks, “Ellen: ‘Betty, what happens with a man? I don’t know what to do.’ Betty: ‘You just keep still’” (Churchill, Cloud 286).

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Betty: I used to think Clive was the one who liked sex. But then I found I missed it. I used to touch myself when I was very little, I thought I’d invented something wonderful. I used to do it to go to sleep with or to cheer myself up, and one day it was raining and I was under the kitchen table, and my mother caught me with my hand under my dress rubbing away, and she dragged me out so quickly I hit my head and it bled and I was sick, and nothing was said, and I never did it again till this year. I thought if Clive wasn’t looking at me there wasn’t a person there. And one night in bed in my flat I was so frightened I started touching myself. I thought my hand might go through space. I touched my face, it was there, my arm, my breast, and my hand went down where I thought it shouldn’t, and I thought well there is somebody there. It felt very sweet, it was a feeling from very long ago, it was very soft, just barely touching, and I felt myself gathering together more and more and I felt angry with Clive and angry with my mother and I went on and on defying them, and there was this vast feeling growing in me and all round me and they couldn’t stop me and no one could stop me and I was there and coming and coming. Afterwards I thought I’d betrayed Clive. My mother would kill me. But I felt triumphant because I was a separate person from them. (Churchill, Cloud 316) Self-pleasure makes Betty realize that she is a separate person. In this orgasmic action, Betty defies Clive, her mother, heteronormative scripts that women don’t like sex or have sexual pleasure, and the empire. Betty comes back to something “quite wonderful” that she invented as a child – having fun with her own pleasure. In this scene, the shame of Betty’s mother’s disapproval turns into something else.137 From the girl Betty who just wants left alone but can’t in Vinegar Tom to the woman Betty finding her personhood,

137 For the queer theories of shame look to: Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

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self-reliance, and pleasure in the pleasure she invents alone with herself thus we see how sex is performative. Butler theorizes how touch can undo people: Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something…It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must) we mean something complicated by it. (Butler, Undoing 19) Pleasure and sex – with someone else or by oneself – have the ability to unmake gender and sexuality and remake them anew. Thus, scripts and citations shift and change as too do our ideas about gender and sexuality. Betty’s scene of pleasure as reinventing herself shows us how normative gender and sexuality can be resisted through performative sex and pleasures. Cloud Nine ends with: “[Clive goes. Betty from Act One comes. Betty and Betty embrace.]” (Churchill, Cloud 320). As the Betty(s) embrace, so do the Edward(s), and the Betty(s) embrace the Edward(s) showing the intertwining of Betty’s and Edward’s politics and representations. This embracing of the Betty(s) symbolically connects the Betty(s) of Cloud Nine and Vinegar Tom offering Betty not a new ending from Vinegar Tom but rather a new beginning. Even possibly more important than Betty and Ellen becoming romantically involved at the end of Cloud Nine, Betty acquires what she most wants in both plays – being left alone and her own identity, subjectivity, sexuality, and pleasure. Cloud Nine underwent numerous edition revisions some very minor between British editions, but others rather significant particularly with the American edition that rearranges particular characters speeches and thus largely impacts the sexuality politics of the play. Dimple Godiwala notes the American revision of Cloud Nine differs with: “The other significant alteration came with the 1981 New York production where Betty’s monologue of sexual self-discovery is moved from the middle of the last scene (II, iv) to the very end of the scene, producing an emotional climax to the play as well as a different

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focus on the character of Betty. The dislocation of the monologue from the middle of the last scene, and its subsequent relocation to the end of the play, shift the structural weight of the play, forcing an emotional climax originally unintended by the dramatist” (Godiwala, “Scripts” 165). Godiwala suggests that the movement of Betty’s speech changes the sexual politics of the play as it then “make[s] for a climax of sorts” to the play as a whole (Godiwala, “Scripts” 168). In a way, this change makes Betty’s sexual awakening the climax of the play rather than all of the characters sexual explorations. Churchill situates Betty as a very important character in Cloud Nine with the placement of this speech as well as the Betty from Act I coming in and hugging the Betty from Act II in the final scene of the play. Also, in the American version Joshua reappears in the final scene of Cloud Nine repeating his phrase, “ ‘Madam hear me wrong? I said you’ve got legs under that skirt, and more than legs” from Act I (Samuel French edition 96). This addition seems uncomfortably problematic in its possible reification in its re- utterance of sexist slurs. Betty does reject Joshua’s slurs and instead embraces Betty from Act I disregarding Joshua and the discourses he perpetuates. Betty links her sexual pleasure with “imagination,” she will not allow Joshua to ruin her self-made, newfound pleasure. Betty interconnects representations of women and women’s struggles in Cloud Nine and Vinegar Tom. Thus, Betty’s representation of sexual pleasure demonstrates the necessity of scripts that give women access to their own sexual pleasure not dependent on heteronormativity, any person, or relationship. At the end of Cloud Nine Betty says, “….But if there isn’t a right way to do things you have to invent one” (Churchill 319). Churchill’s Vinegar Tom and Cloud Nine show that there is not a right way to do gender, sexuality, or empire. Betty finds pleasure and self-realization outside the romantic couple. In this way, Betty significantly shows pleasure not defined via a couple as definitions of both gender and sexuality in the twentieth century would have us believe. Instead, self-individuation and self-realization define femininity and sexual pleasure for Betty. Very importantly, Betty attempts to re- enforce femininity within heteronormativity perpetuating normative scripts of gender, sexuality, desire, and nation throughout the play (for example, when Betty tells Ellen she

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must marry in Act I and then in Act II Betty criticizes her, Victoria, daughter for not focusing on being a wife and mother). This marked change in Betty’s character makes her challenging of such scripts immensely influential possibly helping normative audience members see the need for change. Betty’s character demonstrates that scripts that define femininity in terms of a couple must be changed and resisted allowing everyone to experience pleasure and subjectivity. And one cannot obtain subjectivity through a relationship with a partner, husband, or even institution; instead, feminine subjectivity invents itself through the ownership of pleasure and self-individuation.

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