THE UNIVERSITY of HULL (Neo-)Victorian

THE UNIVERSITY of HULL (Neo-)Victorian

THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL (Neo-)Victorian Impersonations: 19th Century Transvestism in Contemporary Literature and Culture being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of PhD in the University of Hull by Allison Jayne Neal, BA (Hons), MA September 2012 Contents Contents 1 Acknowledgements 3 List of Illustrations 4 List of Abbreviations 6 Introduction 7 Transvestites in History 19th-21st Century Sexological/Gender Theory Judith Butler, Performativity, and Drag Neo-Victorian Impersonations Thesis Structure Chapter 1: James Barry in Biography and Biofiction 52 ‘I shall have to invent a love affair’: Olga Racster and Jessica Grove’s Dr. James Barry: Her Secret Life ‘Betwixt and Between’: Rachel Holmes’s Scanty Particulars: The Life of Dr James Barry ‘Swaying in the limbo between the safe worlds of either sweet ribbons or breeches’: Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry Conclusion: Biohazards Chapter 2: Class and Race Acts: Dichotomies and Complexities 112 ‘Massa’ and the ‘Drudge’: Hannah Cullwick’s Acts of Class Venus in the Afterlife: Sara Baartman’s Acts of Race Conclusion: (Re)Commodified Similarities Chapter 3: Performing the Performance of Gender 176 ‘Let’s perambulate upon the stage’: Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem ‘All performers dress to suit their stages’: Tipping the Velvet ‘It’s only human nature after all’: Tipping the Velvet and Adaptation 1 Conclusion: ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’ Chapter 4: Cross-Dressing and the Crisis of Sexuality 239 ‘Your costume does not lend itself to verbal declarations’: Mademoiselle de Maupin and the Confusion of Sexuality ‘My first beau and my first belle’: Misfortune and the Transvestite Option of Bisexuality ‘He exists, my friend, and he is not even a hermaphrodite: Monsieur Venus and the Model Male Conclusion: Perverting the Course of Gender Conclusion: ‘when we first met I wanted to know what you were, because I couldn’t be certain’ 304 Paratextuality: It is All About Appearances Intertextuality: Incestuous Influences Relationships: ‘a rather curious mixture of types’ Bibliography 318 2 List of Illustrations Figure 1, Image of James Barry available at www.speakequal.com [Accessed 3 June 2010]. Figure 2, Book cover image of Scanty Particulars available at www.amazon.co.uk [Accessed 1 May 2012]. Figure 3, Book cover image of James Miranda Barry available at www.amazon.co.uk [Accessed 1 May 2012]. Figure 4, Image of Hannah Cullwick as a ‘lady’ (no date) available at http://victoriancontexts.pbworks.com/w/page/12407401/Hannah [Accessed 20 June 2012]. Figure 5, Image of Sara Baartman as the ‘Hottentot Venus’ (1811) available at www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0609web/images/p49.jpg [Accessed 20 June 2012]. Figure 6, Picture of Hannah Cullwick as a chimneysweep (1862) available at www.tate.org.uk [Accessed 18 June 2011]. Figure 7, Book cover images of The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Watching Hannah and Love and Dirt, all images available at www.amazon.co.uk [Accessed 1/6/2012]. Figure 8, Advertising poster ‘Sartjee, The Hottentot Venus. Now Exhibiting in London. Drawn from Life’ (1822), available at www.spelman.edu/English/image004.jpg [Accessed 22 June 2011]. Figure 9, Cover image of Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus: A Novel, available at http://ecimages.kokobooks.com [Accessed 3 December 2011]. Figure 10, Gustave Doré’s picture of the music hall (1872) from the Victorian Web (available at www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/dore/17.jpg [Accessed 31 March 2011]). 4 Figure 11, Image of Boulton and Park from Bow Street Station to the police van, 10 April 1870, available at http://zagria.blogspot.com/2008/07/ernest-boulton- 1849-and-frederick.html [Accessed 18 March 2011]. Figure 12, Postcard of Vesta Tilley in masculine costume, from author’s private collection. Figure 13, Vesta Tilley in off-stage feminine clothing, available at http://scaa.usask.ca/gallery/genderimpersonators/vesta_tilley/images/vesta_tilley _wom006.jpg [Accessed 20/3/2011]. Figure 14, Keeley Hawes as Kitty (left) and Rachael Stirling as Nan (right) in a gallery still from Tipping The Velvet (BBC DVD, adapted by Andrew Davies, directed Geoffrey Sax, a Sally Head Production, 2002). Figure 15, Aubrey Beardsley, ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin’ (1898) available at http://quotationsbook.com/Beardsley_Maupin.jpg [Accessed 24 July 2012]. Figure 16, Book cover image of Misfortune available at www.barnesandnoble.com/WeasleyStace/Misfortune [Accessed 12 November 2011]. Figure 17, Image of Freddy Mercury from a music video still of ‘I Want to Break Free’ by Queen. Available at www.virginmedia.com/image/i-want-to-break-free.html [Accessed 12 November 2011]. Figure 18, Book cover image of Monsieur Venus available at http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0873529308.01.jpg [Accessed 23 December 2011]. Figure 19, Cover image of Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, available from www.amazon.com [accessed 1 July 2012]. Figure 20, Cover image of Mademoiselle de Maupin, available from http://covers.booktopia.com.au/big/9780140448139/mademoiselle-de- maupin.jpg [accessed 1 July 2012]. 5 List of Abbreviations DL Ackroyd, Peter (1994) Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, London: Sinclair-Stevenson. DJB Racster, Olga and Grove, Jessica (1932) Dr James Barry: Her Secret Story, London: Gerald Howe Ltd. DHC Stanley, Liz (1984) The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick: Victorian Maidservant, London: Virago. HV Holmes, Rachel (2007) 2008 The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman, London: Bloomsbury. HVN Chase-Riboud, Barbara (2003) 2004 Hottentot Venus: A Novel, New York: Anchor Books. JMB Duncker, Patricia (1999) 2000 James Miranda Barry, London: Picador. LD Atkinson, Diane (2003) Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick, Basingstoke: Macmillan. M Stace, Wesley (2005) 2006 Misfortune, London: Vintage. MdeM Gautier, Théophile (1835) 2005 Mademoiselle de Maupin, London: Penguin. MV Rachilde (1888) 2004 Monsieur Venus: A Materialist Novel, New York: Modern Language Association of America. SP Holmes, Rachel (2002) Scanty Particulars: The Life of Dr James Barry, London: Viking. TTVB Waters, Sarah (1998) Tipping the Velvet, London: Virago. TTVF Sax, Geoffrey (dir.) and Davies, Andrew (screenwriter) (2002) Tipping the Velvet BBC DVD, Sally Head Production. 6 Introduction Although this psychic peculiarity [of transvestism] is so difficult both to name and to define, it is, strange as that may seem, the commonest of all sexual anomalies to attain prominence in the public newspapers. There are several reasons why that should be. There is not only the real frequency of the condition, but the fact that it is so striking and so intriguing a violation of our most conventional rules and regulations of social life. (Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 1928)1 The Victorians, we might say, have attracted as much as they have repulsed those that have come afterwards, and each attempt at drawing a definitive line in the sand has subsequently been shown to disguise a more telling continuity. (Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror, 2007)2 As the opening quotation from Havelock Ellis implies, the interest in transvestism has the ability to transcend time due to its continued transgression of the social and cultural mores of normative gender expression: while cross-dressing is both the most common and frequent of ‘sexual anomalies,’ it is also ‘striking’ and ‘intriguing’. One of the reasons why this thesis concentrates on the act of gender masquerade and cross-dressing is because these acts remain, in the twenty-first century, prolific cultural phenomena that are still transgressive. The thesis will focus specifically on examinations and analyses of transvestism in neo-Victorian literature and culture, which involves drawing on, where appropriate, historical evidence of nineteenth-century cross-dressing along with contemporary gender and queer theory. Neo-Victorian literature and the neo- Victorian project as a whole are usually seen as contemporary (‘neo’=‘new’) historical fiction and culture that are set in or, at the very least, influenced by the Victorian era. Marie-Luise Kohlke points out that the term ‘neo-Victorian’ has been used to define the 1 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume VII (1928), in Heike Bauer (ed.), Women and Cross-Dressing 1800-1939, 3 volumes (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), I, p.182. 2 Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), p.3. 7 project itself, yet also refers to neo-Victorian as a ‘genre, as [a] “new” discipline, as cultural happening, as socio-political critique, as reinvigorated historical consciousness, as memory work, [and] as critical interface between the present and past’.3 In this project it is important to refer to Simon Joyce’s notion of the ‘continuity’ between the twenty-first century and the Victorian era, as referenced in the second epigraph. Since the end of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1901, society has desired to either create a distance from, or alternatively, draw closer to an understanding of the nineteenth century, and the Victorian era in particular, and its ideological implications. To that end, it is essential to consider neo-Victorian fiction and its postmodern approach with an awareness of how influential the ‘Victorians’ remain in today’s (post)modern society. According to Linda Hutcheon, ‘the contradictory nature of postmodernism involves its offering of multiple, provisional alternatives to traditional, fixed unitary concepts in full knowledge of (and even exploiting) the continuing appeal of those very concepts’.4 In its attempt to explore the nineteenth century neo-Victorian fiction has a tendency to over-emphasise or distort what is meant by ‘Victorian’, to alter how nineteenth-century history is viewed, to undermine the ideological implications of the period, and occasionally offer a narrative technique that is distinctly postmodern in its endeavour. Christian Gutleben contends that ‘at the same time as it pays homage to its Victorian model, the contemporary novel challenges, warps and undermines it.

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