Slumming
Page 31
The novel’s emotional climax and the resolution of the adventure element of the narrative occurs in a prison cell at the Old Bailey, where Martha awaits execution for murdering the one sexually aggressive male in the novel, Lucy’s wayward husband, Michael Lee. Joan knows intuitively and rightly that Martha could not have committed such a violent and immoral act and, like a latter-day Elizabeth Fry, visits her in prison to say farewell. The description of the scene, told from Joan’s perspective, bursts the conventions of controlled passionate longing of previous encounters.125 It is frankly erotic. In contrast to Lee’s overheated rhetoric about immoral longings in Miss Brown, the narrator offers no apologies and betrays no anxieties. As soon as Joan enters, Martha takes Joan’s hands, and
bending down began to kiss them. I put my arms round her neck, however, and then she kissed my lips again and again, as if she were starving, and I had given her a full and satisfying meal. The door was locked behind us; the female warder in attendance withdrew to the most distant part of the cell, where she sat with her back to us, stooping over some needlework. (295/6).
This kiss bears no resemblance to the many other kisses of friendship women exchange with one another in the novel. Working-class Martha initiates their lovemaking, but Joan has “given her a full and satisfying meal.” The freest expression of their spiritual and physical love is enacted deep within a prison cell in the institution that signified the policing and disciplinary authority of London, the Old Bailey. While the female warder discretely turns her back to do womanly work, Meade’s readers are given an unobstructed view of Martha and Joan and their words and actions. The imperative to use cross-class sisterhood as a means of purifying society leads Joan and Martha into physical intimacies that surpass the boundaries of romantic friendship. Had the homosexual socialist Edward Carpenter read Princess, he would have had no difficulty explaining Joan’s relationship with Martha. Carpenter insisted that many of the world’s “philanthropists of the best kind” (male and female) as well as the leaders of the movement for the emancipation of women were inspired by same-sex love, what he called the “uranian temperament” or the “homogenic passion among the female sex.” “It is hardly needful in these days when social questions loom so large upon us,” Carpenter explained, “to emphasise the importance of a bond which by the most passionate and lasting compulsion may draw members of the different classes together, and (as it often seems to do) none the less strongly because they are members of different classes.”126 As Carpenter developed a language by which to explain same-sex love from the 1880s onwards, he believed he had found one group of exemplary “urnings” (homosexuals) in the cohort of educated women committed to serving the poor and emancipating their sex.127
Princess offered its readers a deceptively radical ending. Absolved of guilt for a crime she did not commit, Martha is released from prison and free to assist in Joan’s philanthropic enterprises. At the conclusion of the novel, Joan is happily ensconced in a small community of loving women she has constructed for herself: her faithful housekeeper, Mrs. Keys; her artistic and bohemian cousin Anne, who flees the demands of bourgeois femininity in the West End to join Joan; and of course, the various “rough gels,” including Martha, who come to Joan’s clubs, parties, and teas. Men and marriage have no part to play in Meade’s unambiguously happy ending. In contrast to E. M. Forster’s involuntary deferral of his fantasy of loving cross-race friendship between men in A Passage to India—“not now, not yet”—Meade imagines an all-female arcadia in the slums of London. She, unlike Forster in Maurice, felt no need to postpone publication of her novel and exile her main characters to a distant greenwood. They lay claim to the very heart of the empire. Unlike New Women novels about slumming, such as Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Marcella, Meade’s heroine is not punished for violating gendered norms. In part, Joan has no price to pay for her unconventional life choices because Meade works so effectively to make the outcomes of the intertwined plots of romance and benevolence seem natural and inevitable. By so doing, she minimized the likelihood that her readers would scrutinize the implications of her novel’s ending.
Meade was able to exploit the privileges that came with her socially central position as wife, mother, and author of “wholesome” girl novels in producing a text unashamed of its own explicitly homoerotic and subversive content. The unmarried, woman-loving Vernon Lee, by contrast, keenly felt the need to censure her own homoerotic impulses. She unreasonably expected her readers to wade into the morass of ambiguities depicted by her novel and emerge with a heightened commitment to traditional morality. Her ending, Anne and Walter’s marriage, is all the more disturbing precisely because it is so bizarrely—or perhaps more aptly, “queerly”—conventional. On the other hand, for all of Miss Brown’s artistic and intellectual limitations, Lee at least tried to grapple with the dilemmas of self-aware (albeit crippling) adult female same-sex desire. These incompletely realized attempts make Lee’s work more provocative and weighty than Meade’s more open but less ambitious depiction of sisterly romance in and with the slums. Meade explored same-sex female love within the parameters of a well-established genre of schoolgirl fiction whose model of cross-age female friendships depended upon the willful ignorance of the very sexual desires the novel conjures. We are meant to know just enough about what is going on in the novel not to ask any uncomfortable questions.128
How did Meade’s contemporaries respond to Princess? Did they condemn Meade for writing a “nasty book” masquerading as a morality tale? Far from it. One reviewer called it a “refined and fascinating tale of London” life; another, less enthusiastically, described it as “a novel with a purpose, … to show what good can be done in the East End of London if you devote your time, energy, and fortune to the task of elevating the masses” but confessed that “we cannot say we found the record of her [Joan’s] doings very interesting reading.”129 What accounts for reviewers’ failure to notice the homoerotics of dirtiness, which, I have argued, informed Meade’s depiction of women’s slum benevolence? First, Meade herself would have strenuously objected to my interpretation of her text—not simply because I have taken so seriously a popular novel written in haste, but because “nastiness” had no place in her vision of her writings. Sally Mitchell, writing about Meade’s treatment of gender (not sexuality) argues that “it may indeed by Meade’s very failure to pursue the implications of her plots and to look head-on at what she writes that allow her to introduce daring material.”130 Second, in the years following the publication of Miss Brown, the public had grown accustomed to ever more sensational and sexually charged writing, fiction and nonfiction. Princess makes pale reading compared to W. T. Stead’s “Maiden Tribute” series. While all of Britain was intensely preoccupied with the dangers of male same-sex desires and friendships in the aftermath of the Wilde trial in 1895, lesbianism remained mostly hidden from public view by the beliefs in female moral superiority and “passionlessness” that buttressed domesticity. Finally, readers often find in books what they expect and want. As a reviewer for the Saturday Review commented, Meade was renowned for her attractive images of “healthy and innocent girlhood.”131 Readers’ assumptions about Mrs. Meade’s novels may well have precluded their noticing anything queer about her story. I feel certain that the anonymous “Momma,” who on Valentine’s Day, 1898, gave her daughter Mattie McMorris the copy I now own of Princess, had no intention of encouraging her daughter to “hunt up evil”—Miss Brown’s pernicious effect on some of its readers a decade before.
Meade and Lee were both self-conscious about their relationships to the novel as a literary form. Recall that Meade blasted social-realist and sensational novels as “microbes of disease,” sources of contagion and pollution. Her stance on developments within the recent history of novels written by women was decidedly reactionary. She disassociated herself from such women writers and put herself forward as a wholesome and purifying alternative. Lee’s standing in the world of letters was altogether different from Meade’s. H
er novel Miss Brown and her many essays on aesthetics contributed importantly to the emergence of literary decadence. In her 1884 diary entry, she attributed attacks on Miss Brown to the limits imposed on the novel as a form of literary expression. She alluded to this theme in a brief note she affixed to the diary manuscript in 1920. “What a pity,” she scribbled, “I didn’t put off writing Miss Brown thirty years!” In the aftermath of the much more frankly erotic and homoerotic literature produced in interwar Britain, we can understand Lee’s lament.132 But it also powerfully serves as a reminder that novels such as Miss Brown and Princess not only interpreted late Victorian perceptions of slum benevolence but also anticipated later sexual and social facts and fictions and thereby helped to make them possible as well. It should come as no surprise that Virginia Woolf paid fleeting homage to Vernon Lee and her contributions to aesthetics in A Room of One’s Own.133
CONCLUSION: “WHITE GLOVES” AND “DIRTY HOXTON PENNIES”
What was the something the matter with the ladies who went slumming? This question needs to be put somewhat differently. There was no one thing “the matter,” but rather a variety of “disorders” that elite women, despite their own best efforts, could not succeed in purging from how they thought about themselves and how contemporaries chose to represent them. The novels I have discussed suggest that elite women’s desires for same-sex intimacy with one another and with their poor sisters were “pure” but “dirty” at the same time. Same-sex love, fueled by but seemingly incompatible with a Christian sense of mission, was an important though elusive dimension of their gospel of social housekeeping in late Victorian London. Novels offered readers an encoded (and hence in some ways still private) way to talk about managing society’s dirt. With their public probing of private feelings and longings, they also offered women a safe space in which to examine the motivations of fictional—not real-life—characters. One of the problems that bedeviled Lee was the fact that too many of her friends and acquaintances believed that they saw themselves portrayed in Miss Brown. Lee’s penchant for incorporating her friends into her stories collapsed the protective distance between life and fiction and ultimately alienated even people like Henry James, who genuinely admired her intellectual prowess. The late Victorian world tolerated a great deal of “sisterly” affection; but only in a novel like Princess could women passionately and hungrily kiss one another on the lips without compromising their status as sexless and pure workers on behalf of the poor.
Female social workers, charity organizers, and settlement house residents along with journalists, writers, and novelists, like Lee and Meade, powerfully reshaped gender relations, sexual subjectivities, and social welfare in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Not all of them chose to don the mantle of “feminism” when it emerged as an organized political and social movement at the turn of the century; even fewer identified themselves as lesbians, although sexologists increasingly popularized and attempted to stabilize what that term meant in the 1890s. But their self-fashioning of a wide range of subversive femininities—from Lee’s mannish but “prudish” bohemianism to Meade’s respectable New Womanliness—was closely bound up with their passionate attachments to other women and to their various projects to cleanse not just the streets but the private interior spaces of the London slums.
Dirt, sex, cross-class sisterhood, and female emancipation were all too clearly—and lamentably—joined together according to Roy Devereux the pen name of Mrs. Roy Pember-Devereux. In her 1896 study, The Ascent of Woman, she offered a sweeping assessment of the history of women and their long “ascent” toward greater self-expression. Published as part of a series called Eve’s Library, The Ascent of Woman adopted an idiosyncratic though “modern” stance on social and sexual issues. Devereux called for easier divorce, not because she thought marriage was inherently unfair for women, but to preserve it from fanatics like Mona Caird who sought its total abolition. Whereas bonds of true fellowship had long joined man to man, history had shown that women more often than not stood divided against one another. But the present age, Devereux claimed in a chapter entitled “The Sisterhood of Woman,” marked a distinctly new phase in women’s relations with one another. In words that uncannily echo Vernon Lee’s tortured diary entries of 1883–84, Devereux asked whether woman’s interest in members of her own sex “is due to an impulse of morbid curiosity or to a genuine human sympathy.” “Genuine human sympathy” would presumably uplift the fallen whereas “morbid curiosity” sullies what once had been clean.134
It is certain that an increasing number of women who are morally stainless give evidence of an extraordinary absorption in the character and condition of those whose lives are notoriously and avowedly vicious. Formerly, the barrier which separated the virtuous among women from the fallen was absolutely definite and impassable. On the principle that to touch pitch is to be inevitably defiled, those within the fold held no communication with the outcast, whose very existence they were expected to ignore. Of late, however, the pharisaical passing-by on the other side has been replaced by an abnormal attraction towards the gutter. (58)
In this remarkable passage, boundaries seem to exist only to be violated. Moral opposites of the same sex (the virtuous and the fallen) promiscuously embrace, each literally blackened by contact with the other.
Devereux was quite sure that these “abnormal” attractions were symptoms of a deep and widespread social pathology among the present generation of women. She rejected outright those who saw in the mania for cross-class sisterhood in the slums “the germ of a brave humanitarianism, the inauguration of a new and fervent charity that presages an era of feminine fellowship and amity.” Against such roseate views, she offered her own cynically perceptive assessment of the modern woman, many of whom were spinster-do-gooders: “To my mind it has no such [humanitarian] significance, but is simply a form of hysteria based upon a morbid appetite for coquetting with sin, so characteristic of the modern woman…. Her inveterate habit of throwing dust in her eyes no doubt obscures the underlying motive of her devotion to what is called ‘rescue work.’” (59)
Devereux’s psychosexual vocabulary intimates that the “modern woman’s” illness is rooted in her deviant sexuality, whose source in turn she traced to the effects of “modern art and literature.” Women, Devereux contended, had “caught the taint of … devotion to sordid actuality” through their contact with the “sham realism” everywhere prevailing in artistic and literary circles. “It is not too much to say that all the most repulsive characteristics of the emancipated woman have sprung from the cult of the gutter with which she has saturated her spirit.” (64) Literary representations of the slums—“nasty books” like Lee’s Miss Brown and Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter—produce, rather than merely reflect, the “cult of the gutter,” whose high priestesses are none other than flesh and blood “glorified spinsters,” “new women,” and other varieties of independent women social reformers in the slums. In Devereux’s reactionary analysis of fin-de-siècle social and sexual politics, the gutter is both an obsessive subject of literary and artistic representation and a site of politicization for women demanding new rights for themselves.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, suffrage took center stage as the single most important issue around which activist women mobilized. The growing influence of Edwardian feminists depended at least in part on their ability to distance themselves from the sorts of psychosexual pathology upon which Devereux drew. With considerable success, suffrage campaigners represented themselves as healthy, “womanly women,” the physical and moral antithesis of the hysterical, mannish spinster beloved of Punch and anti-suffragists.135
Women social reformers romances with dirt had several significant consequences for the history of social welfare in the twentieth century. Women across the political spectrum forged a distinctly urban vision of the fledgling profession of social work that joined theoretical with practical knowledge of poverty.136 The Training Course for Women Workers, the p
recursor of the School of Sociology (the first in Britain) at the London School of Economics, was at the outset jointly sponsored by the Women’s University Settlement and the Charity Organization Society in 1896. Course readings and lectures emphasized the wide range of structural forces producing dirt and disorder in working-class households through academic study of political economy and government blue books about housing and poor relief. The course included academic training in case management, domestic economy, and social and personal hygiene for their elite female students, who were expected to confront and correct the improvident behaviors of laboring women.137 Anna Martin lampooned the clumsy interventions of middle-class women schooled in such programs. “A whole college of domestic-economy lecturers” knew less about how to run a working-class household, she insisted, than her untutored south London friend, Mrs. T.138
By the first decade of the twentieth century, two hierarchies were becoming rapidly entrenched. Men came to control sociology as an academic discipline while women dominated the supposedly more practical fields of social work and home economics. In other words, women were expected to do the dirty work of entering into the homes of the poor as social workers while men enjoyed the prestige and pristineness of practicing sociology as abstract brain work.139 At the same time, female social workers asserted their expertise and authority on behalf of, but also over, working-class families. The emergence of social work as a heavily feminized profession was built on the assumption that working-class women and their families were clients to be investigated and instructed. Such unequal relationships between women pained the pioneering suffragist and feminist, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy. In 1898, she ruminated upon the irony that “women’s position of slavery” led so many to seek “rather power to coerce others than to free themselves.”140