Cherry Ripe : "Cult of the Little Girl"
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CHERRY RIPE: “CULT OF THE LITTLE GIRL” NARRATIVES IN LATE-VICTORIAN BRITAIN By CHRISTINE ANN ROTH A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2001 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have been First and foremost I must thank Chris Snodgrass for his unflagging support. fortunate to have not only a brilliant and challenging dissertation director, but a true in and mentor as well. His guidance and friendship have made me a stronger person both in out of the classroom. He represents, from my perspective, what is good and enduring whose the pursuit of knowledge. I wish also to thank Pamela Gilbert and Sheryl Kroen questions insightful readings of the dissertation, various “coffee talks,” and provocative complexities of the led me over and over to contemplate the theoretical and historical solid and clear, and I study. I appreciate Alistair Duckworth’s help in keeping my writing thank Elizabeth Langland of the University of California, Davis, for serving on my committee despite her leaving the University of Florida. The Department of English and thanks for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida are due graduate the grants for travel and the overall assistance that they provided. My fellow turns students in the University of Florida Victorian Studies Forum also provided me by with encouragement, inspiration, and a ready willingness to rip to shreds any foolish Greico, Barbara ideas that I dared issue. I would like to thank Jennifer Gentry, Jodilynn support Tilley, and Laurence Vagassky. These women unstintingly provided personal alongside a willingness to debate all manner of arcane issues related to my dissertation and research. Charles Sikora ensured that an encouraging word and fresh perspective were only a phone call away, and I thank him for his patience and his faith in me when I helping to doubted myself the most. I am ever grateful to my brother, Steven, for me maintain a healthy sense of humor, a fair mind, and a kind heart throughout the process. love and Finally, I could not have written this dissertation without the unwavering cannot express the support that I received every day from my beloved parents. Words depth of my gratitude and affection. 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT v CHAPTERS 1 ANGELS AND/AS PARAMOURS: THE CULT OF THE LITTLE GIRL IN LATE-VICTORIAN ENGLAND I Notes 35 2 “MY OWN CHIEF PET”: JOHN RUSKIN’S PURSUIT OF SAINTS AND LILIES 38 Notes 75 3 “DREAMING AS THE SUMMERS DIE”: LEWIS CARROLL’S FADING GIRL 78 Notes 1 12 4 VISUALIZING PARADOX: DODGSON, CAMERON, AND THE CULTURE OF GIRL-PHOTOGRAPHY 114 Notes 162 5 “HER DOUBLE PERVERSITY”: ERNEST DOWSON AND THE DUALITY OF LATE-VICTORIAN GIRLHOOD 165 Notes 194 6 BABES IN BOYLAND: J.M. BARRIE AND THE EDWARDIAN GIRL 196 Notes 218 REFERENCES 220 iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 226 IV Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy CHERRY RIPE: “CULT OF THE LITTLE GIRL” NARRATIVES IN LATE-VICTORIAN BRITAIN By Christine Ann Roth May 2001 Chair: Chris Snodgrass Major Department: English This dissertation is the first substantial study of the literary, artistic, and cultural phenomenon of the Cult of the Little Girl. It focuses on the ways in which English female children were constructed and obsessively worshipped as amie-enfants between hall, through the 1860 and 191 1, a period of time spanning from the heyday of music cultish interest in girls at Oxford in thel860s, to the publication of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Whether inspiring Oxford undergraduates to place little girl “mascots” on the sidelines at sporting matches or fueling John Ruskin’s maddening pursuit of his “own St. Ursula” among Winnington school girls, the startling intensity of the Cult of the Little Girl is most evident in its cultural manifestations. Yet, its literary, historical, and theoretical implications are best measured in texts that reveal paradoxical constructions of the nineteenth-century girl as chaste/irmocent in some cases and sexual/worldly in others, based largely on markers of class. For artists and writers like Jolin Everett Millais, John Ruskin, Charles Dodgson, Julia Margaret Cameron, O.G. Rejlander, Ernest V Dowson, and J.M. Barrie, this ambiguity supported a titillating paradoxical construction of little girls as simultaneously erotic and innocent, worldly and ethereal, scandalous and blessed. Their texts rely on a tension created by the irreconcilable schism between the ideal and the mundane—a schism created and sustained by girls who exist within a space that constantly negotiates two equally important ends of a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, the girl figures as a corruptible (and corrupting) agent of transgression and sexual vice. At the other, she possesses an invulnerable chastity that aligns her with domesticity and a sense of moral duty. In short, the ideal girl for these writers and artists embodies some fundamental duality (innocent/corrupt, virginal/carnal, sacred/profane) and is able to keep that duality in tension, so that the “dainty eyes” and the “bought red mouth” become contending sides of the same girl figure. Neither side can complete the formula without the other, because if they are isolated, the ideal girl becomes distant and cold, and the “real” girl becomes fallen, aesthetically flawed, and utterly forgettable. VI CHAPTER 1 ANGELS AND/AS PARAMOURS: THE CULT OF THE LITTLE GIRL IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND How is the indescribable beauty of that most lovely face to be described—the dark soft curls parting back from the pure white transparent brow, the exquisite mouth and pearly white teeth, the pure straight delicate features, the long dark fringes and white eyelids that droop over and curtain her eyes. .Oh, child, child, if you did but know your own power. Oh, Gipsy, if you only grow up as good as you are fair. Oh, that you might grow up good. Francis Kilvert, Kilvert’s Diary, 4 July 1870 As she stood and lifted those blue eyes, those soft dark loving eyes shyly to mine, it seemed to me as if the doors and windows of heaven were suddenly opened. It was one of the supreme moments of life. As I stood by the roadside holding her hand, lost to all else and conscious only of her presence, I was in heaven already, or if still on earth in the body, the flights of golden stairs sloped to my feet and one of the angels had come down to me. Florence, Florence Hill, my darling, my darling. It was well nigh all I could say in my emotion. Francis Kilvert, Kilvert’s Diary, 24 March 1874 Like many middle-class men of the nineteenth century, the Reverend Francis Kilvert filled his diaries with praise and longing for little girls, anecdotes about them, and detailed, rapturous narratives of his encounters with them.' Many writers and artists of the last few decades of the century spent innumerable pages trying to describe “indescribable beauty.” It was a beauty that was, in most cases, profoundly paradoxical. On the one hand, it reflected the ineffable effect of “dark soft curls” and “pure white transparent brow,” of “soft dark loving” eyes that suggest “windows of 1 9 heaven”; and yet, on the other hand, it also captured “curtained” eyes that suggest the more earthly pleasures of a Gipsy with a questionable future. The ambiguous sexuality of little girls suggested to Victorian observers like Kilvert both virtuous, dutiful affections and depraved, corrupted desires. The girls’ duality made them the subject of feverish interest in a culture that both sentimentalized and eroticized them. In May of 1876, Reverend Francis Kilvert (1840-1879) spent a week in Oxford, visiting the university where he was ordained, attending church services and reveling in the company of local little girls. According to his diary, he spent his final evening gushing over the daughters of his host and hostess. He was particularly affected when he was led to the nursery, where the youngest child slept: “So we went in and found her pretty and rosy with tumbled curly hair lying in her little soft white nest contentedly sucking chocolates” (Kilvert 256). Throughout his diaries. Reverend Francis Kilvert savors descriptions of parish girls and their features that threw him into rapturous adoration and an “ecstasy of happiness” (191). Yet, in his account of the nursery visit, as in his other diary entries, Kilvert does not simply recognize a girl child’s ethereal qualities. Rather, he balances quasi-religious adoration for her angelic intangibility with lust for her physical body. The reverend does not praise her spiritual qualities over her physical ones; he praises them alongside each other. The girl as emblem of spiritual and physical sanctity and the girl as object of physical desire and corruption are celebrated equally. Individually, each side of the equation is one-dimensional, but together they create a titillating paradox. Kilvert writes, “I sat down upon her bed and the rest gathered and so Queen Janet held her court as pleased as possible. But she was not satisfied to remain in bed and soon had her round plump limbs out from under the sheets with the innocent simplicity of childhood and her pretty little white feet in my lap, as she sat bolstered up by the pillows smiling, rosy and curly” (256). He couches a rapturous celebration of “round plump limbs” in “the innocent simplicity of childhood,” and he characterizes the girl as desirous and amorous by noting that she came out of the sheets because she “was not satisfied” to remain under them.