Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity

QUEER OTHERS IN VICTORIAN GOTHIC

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholastic developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Glamorgan

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

Queer Others in Victorian Gothic

Transgressing Monstrosity

Ardel Haefele-Thomas

© Ardel Haefele-Thomas, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

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ISBN978-0-7083-2464-6 (hardback)

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti, cover illustration for Christina Rossetti’s poetry collection Goblin Market (1862); © Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy.

for Lisa and Jalen

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1Introduction

2The Spinster and the Hijra: How Queers Save Heterosexual Marriage in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and The Moonstone

3Escaping Heteronormativity: Queer Family Structures in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch and ‘The Grey Woman’

4Disintegrating Binaries, Disintegrating Bodies: Queer Imperial Transmogrifications in H. Rider Haggard’s She

5‘One does things abroad that one would not dream of doing in England’: Miscegenation and Queer Female Vampirism in J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire

6In Defence of Her Queer Community: Vernon Lee’s Coded Decadent Gothic

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is not an exaggeration to say that I have been thinking about the intersections of sexuality, gender, race and empire in Victorian Gothic for the past two decades, and I am grateful for all of the support I have had along the way. In the earliest stages of this project, which was part of my doctoral thesis at Stanford University, I would like to thank Lisa Cody, Barbara Gelpi, Peter Stansky and Regenia Gagnier. Without their integrity, kindness and guidance, I would not have been able to ask some of the early, more difficult questions surrounding the histories of diverse and marginalized people.

I would like to thank everyone at the International Gothic Association; they have created such a fantastic venue for creative, stimulating and intellectual discussions. Since 1995, I have had this wonderful and quirky conference to look forward to on all of the ‘odd’ numbered years. Some of my most fulfilling academic relationships have been formed through the IGA. More specifically, I would like to thank William Hughes and Andrew Smith, whose energetic support of my work has been unflagging throughout the years; they have both so enthusiastically and generously created space for my work on Queer Gothic. I would also like to thank Paulina Palmer for our discussions about Lesbian Gothic as well as Agnes Andeweg and Sue Zlosnik for our discussions about Elizabeth Gaskell’s short gothic fiction.

I want to thank everyone at the University of Wales Press for giving me this opportunity to work with them. Sarah Lewis and Gabi Maas have been incredibly helpful at various stages in the writing process. Siân Chapman ensured the smooth production of the book. And a very special thank you to Dafydd Jones who has maintained a fabulous sense of humour throughout all of my queries about citation and style; he has made this project fun.

I am very blessed to live near two outstanding research institutions – UC Berkeley and Stanford University. There are countless people at both libraries who were able to help me in my research. In particular, I want to thank Stanford Special Collections for their amazing holdings. It was there that I was able to actually hold one of the original copies of The Yellow Book and read Vernon Lee’s ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ within the context of the book as a whole. I was also able to slowly work my way through gorgeous bound copies of James Forbes’s gigantic collected writing and illustrations from his travels in India. For me, it really did make a difference to be able to touch these controversial and beautiful old books as I conducted my historic research. The most unusual research help, however, did not come from an academic institution or library, but rather from Gay’s The Word bookshop in London. I want to say a special ‘thank you’ and ‘cheers’ to Jim MacSweeney and Uli Lenart for helping me to find historic books about underground queer culture in London in the 1800s. Beyond book help, however, they were also able to answer my numerous e-mail questions about homosexual male cruising areas – and with a great sense of humour they addressed my query regarding Hampstead Heath in the nineteenth century. After all, I was curious about Walter Hartright (and of course Anne Catherick) wandering around Hampstead Heath at one in the morning; in the twentieth century, Walter would most assuredly been looking to ‘hook up’ with another man.

I spent one year (2004–5) in Lexington, Kentucky teaching at Lexington Community College, where I met Dr Eileen Abel, an avid swimmer and, perhaps more importantly, another Victorianist. The focus of Eileen’s doctoral thesis was Elizabeth Gaskell, and it was through conversations with her that I first discovered Gaskell’s gothic short fiction. I remember the moment when Eileen looked at me with a glint in her eye and said, ‘so you want something queer? Have you read ‘The Grey Woman’? I cannot thank Eileen enough for her generosity and for our continued discussions about the deeply radical and subversive ‘Mrs Gaskell’. I would like to dedicate my chapter on Elizabeth Gaskell’s queer family structures to Eileen.

Leslie Minot has been a friend and colleague from the moment we met at the Soko Joshi Judo Club in San Francisco in 1992. Leslie and I worked our way through graduate school in the same time frame; she was a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. When she was not literally throwing my body around on the mat at the dojo, Leslie found ways to send my brain sailing (I say this with affection). Throughout my doctoral thesis, our collaboration on ‘Queer Sexuality and Empire’ written for The Reader’s Guide to Gay and Lesbian Studies as well as countless discussions leading up to this current book, Leslie has never ‘pulled the punches’ on her questions. I am grateful to her for this because her keen insight always prodded me to dig deeper into my own stereotypes and notions about the Victorian era. Leslie has read this book in its entirety, but I would like to dedicate the H. Rider Haggard chapter to her in particular.

None of this would have been possible without my best friend, the love of my life and my wife, Louisa (Lisa) Gardner Haefele-Thomas. Her one ‘shortcoming’ is that she is a Modernist, so the Victorian novel is a bit like a torture device. What that means, though, is that she must love me very much for wading through numerous Victorian novels as well as all of the drafts of all of the chapters to this book. I could not have done this without her kindness and integrity. She has kept me honest throughout this project.

Finally, I would like to thank Kelly Hurley at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In January of 1990, when I was not yet even a fully matriculated graduate student, I walked into Kelly’s Victorian Literature and Culture course and my life changed from that moment on. For me, Kelly brought all of the complexity and ‘mess’ of nineteenth century Britain to life. How could I not be indebted to the person who introduced me to Carmilla? Beyond her being a terrific teacher and mentor, though, I want to take this opportunity to thank Kelly for supporting me as a queer scholar – especially in the early 1990s when Queer Theory and Queer Studies was seen as a fad and was often not taken seriously. I can safely say that my work and my path in academia would not have been the same without her support.

1

Introduction

The intersections of queer, postcolonial and Gothic theories

A missing Indian diamond. A scaffold in New England. A map of the African interior written on a potsherd. A Jamaican vampire bat. A portrait of an Italian castrato. These are some of the props I have chosen to analyse in Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity. The props themselves are only pieces of a larger tropology where queer sexuality, transgender bodies, racial otherness and Gothic horror intersect. Each item signifies a site of crisis as well as a site of transgression in Victorian culture. The Western authorities who search for the unusual Indian diamond cannot find it; rather, it is the biracial, genderqueer ‘anti-authority’ figure who solves the mystery of the stolen yellow jewel. The New England scaffold becomes a murder site where an American Indian woman and an English woman, clinging to one another as they are conducted out of their dank prison cell, are hung as witches by the power hungry Puritan authorities. The map on the potsherd sends three Britons to the heart of Africa where they discover a ‘savage’ monarch who appears hauntingly similar to Queen Victoria. The vampire bat represents a conflation of racist and imperialist stereotypes about the Jamaican spiritual practice of obeah, fin-de-siècle worries about hereditary taint and the possibility of queer contagion. And the portrait of the genderqueer, beautiful and ‘wicked’ Italian castrato seduces and then haunts men and women until they wither and die for want of hearing his decadent voice sing yet another song. In some cases, these props signal the author’s use of Gothic to interrogate and subvert Victorian hegemonic ideals regarding sexuality, gender identity, race, empire and nation. In some other instances, the props signify the author’s deep ambivalence about how to read the multiple and changing faces of the monstrous ‘Other’ in the nineteenth century.

This project aims to explore the intersections of Gothic, cultural, gender, queer, socio-economic and postcolonial theories in nineteenth-century British representations of sexuality, gender, class and race. Broadly, Michel Foucault’s writings about the violence of the ‘Victorian regime’ – one that forced anyone who was not bourgeois, white and heterosexual into closeted silence – help set up the framework for understanding the ways that the ‘other Victorians’ were portrayed.¹ These ‘other Victorians’ included working-class people, imperial subjects, prostitutes, homosexuals and anyone else who did not fall into the prudish and rigidly structured identity deemed appropriate in the Victorian age. At the same time, this project looks to interrogate some of our current assumptions in Victorian studies, especially the idea that Victorian culture was monolithic in its disdain for those who were ‘other’. Throughout the course of this project, I have found that some authors employed Gothic frameworks to defend queer and other marginalized characters in ways that were quite subversive. For other authors, Gothic as a genre allows them to express their ambivalence regarding ‘others’ in society; this exemplifies their willingness to approach these subjects in a complex way.

What is queer about Gothic? And what is Gothic about queer?

In the introduction to their anthology, Queering the Gothic, William Hughes and Andrew Smith explain that ‘Gothic has, in a sense, always been queer. The genre . . . has been characteristically perceived in criticism as being poised astride the uneasy cultural boundary that separates the acceptable and familiar from the troubling and different.’² ‘Gothic’ and‘queer’ are aligned in that they both transgress boundaries and occupy liminal spaces, and in so doing, they each consistently interrogate ideas of what is ‘respectable’ and what is ‘normal’. As Hughes and Smith argue, ‘to be queer is to be different, yet it is also to be unavoidably associated with the non-queer, the normative . . . The two states exist in reciprocal tension.’³ ‘The queer’ is bound to function within heteronormative culture while at the same time this figure calls the idea of ‘the norm’ into question. Gothic is also ‘different’ because it, like ‘the queer’, straddles the boundary between ‘acceptable’ and ‘troubling’. As a genre, Gothic often gets defined against other more ‘normative’ types of fiction; it is often not taken as seriously as, say, Realism. George Haggerty points out that ‘the cult of Gothic fiction reached its apex at the very moment when gender and sexuality were beginning to be codified for modern culture . . . Gothic fiction offered a testing ground for many unauthorized genders and sexualities.’⁴ While Gothic became a place to explore the terrain of taboo sexual desires and gender identities, I would also argue that it became a safe location in which to explore ideas about race, interracial desire, cross-class relations, ethnicity, empire, nation and ‘foreignness’ during the nineteenth century. Gothic writers would often simultaneously explore many if not all of these issues within one story or one novel. The strength of Gothic rests upon its being a liminal genre; it allowed many nineteenth-century authors to look at social and cultural worries consistently haunting Victorian Britain even as the official discourse worked tirelessly to silence those concerns.

Through a queer, postcolonial and historical lens, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity explores the ways that various Victorian Gothic authors give voice to complex issues concerning queer sexuality, gender identity, racial and ethnic subjectivity, national affiliation and socio-economic status. In most of the works examined, the authors explore anxieties about ‘foreigners’, racial miscegenation and/or empire alongside anxieties about gender ambiguity and ‘perverse’ sexuality. I utilize the term ‘queer’ on numerous levels: in its nineteenth-century historical context to point to the generally weird, odd or ill, as well as in the early twentieth-century evolution of the term as it was applied (quite negatively) to homosexuality. In my theoretical framework, I also employ the term ‘queer’ in the complex, politically charged late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century reclamation of the term. Unlike the gender specificity found in gay and lesbian theories and historiographies, queer theory – especially given the historical definitions of ‘queer’ – supplies room for multiple, potentially polyvalent positions, conveying gender, sexuality, race, class and familial structures beyond heteronormative (and often bourgeois) social constructs. I read gender ambiguity as transgender or genderqueer when it challenges the gender binary.⁵ In many cases, looking beyond the gender binary produces a sort of ‘transness’ that actually gets mapped back onto the ‘foreign’ or the colonial situation. This crossing of boundaries can offer new ways of looking at the liminality of the figure of the ‘go-between’, a person who often challenges racial or national paradigms, much like the gender-queer who challenges the gender binary as well as the gender specificity of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ narratives. In Queer Gothic, then, we encounter all manner of ‘different’ and ‘transgressive’ characters.

When I originally began this project, I had intended to look at the ways in which various authors wrote their Gothic monsters as queer and quite often as racially miscegenated. Certainly, Gothic theorists like Judith Halberstam and Kelly Hurley (who focus on issues of gender and the body) as well as Patrick Brantlinger and H. L. Malchow (who explore race and empire) have all argued insightfully that – for a fin-de-siècle British audience struggling to uphold a unified British identity against the changing force of rapid imperial expansions and the constant influx of foreigners into London – many of the Gothic monsters cause fear and panic because of their uncanny ability simultaneously to embody multiple subject positions.⁶ As the project progressed, however, I was haunted by the ways that many Victorian authors, including solidly mid-century writers like Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell, approached subjectivities deemed ‘degenerate’, ‘perverse’ and/or racially ‘other’ sympathetically through the complex mechanism of Gothic and their radical reconfigurations of monstrosity.

In some cases, the precise characters who ‘should’ be monstrous within typical Victorian Gothic frameworks are given great sympathy as well as crucial roles within the narrative. For other authors, there is a palpable ambivalence in their approach to Gothic as they struggle with ‘normative’ ideas about sexuality, gender identity, race, class and nation. The Gothic genre seems to have enabled them to explore the complex issues of the day more honestly and thoroughly. Now, in the twenty-first century, their Gothic narratives can help us call into question monolithic ideas we might have about Victorian culture and Victorian attitudes. Taken together, these texts transgress monstrosity in the sense that they help interrogate the very idea of what is monstrous, opening up spaces where we can read sympathy for others who are queer, who are multiracial, who live outside of the heteronormative economy, or who choose their own family constructs that offer alternatives to the heteronormative paradigm. These queers and others exist outside (and in their existence challenge) a hegemonic Victorian construction of the patriarchal British family as upholder of gender, sexual, national and racial purity.

Chapters 1 and 2 of this book examine two popular mid-century authors – Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell – who were both publishing with Charles Dickens in All The Year Round. Through a Gothic framework, Wilkie Collins explores a crisis in the heterosexual marriage plot in his two most famous novels, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). In both cases, the solution to the crisis does not rest with the usual socially acceptable authorities – the solicitor, the detective or the doctor – but rather with the ingenuity of a queer character. Both Marian Halcombe and Ezra Jennings exhibit genderqueer possibilities, swarthy complexions and homoerotic tendencies. A Victorian audience would have read these signs and been prepared to recognize Halcombe and Jennings as queer monstrosities. Collins, however, does not deliver what we might expect from such characterizations. Through their marginalized positions, these two queer characters are given special insight into the facades of ‘normal’ and ‘reality’, and through their abilities, Halcombe and Jennings, interestingly, come to facilitate the ritual of heterosexual marriage and the resolution of the marriage plot. It is not a leap to claim that without these queer characters, there would be no marriage to resolve the crisis and to conclude these two Gothic novels. By giving Marian Halcombe and Ezra Jennings such important roles, Collins calls into question the ‘acceptable’ notion that queer people and in the case of Jennings in particular, queer, multiracial people are unimportant to culture and society.

While Elizabeth Gaskell is still best known for her industrial novels (Mary Barton and North and South) and her depiction of village life in Cranford, this chapter explores her Gothic tales in which gender, race, class and subversions of ‘normative’ heterosexual family structures can function together to create transgressive critiques and narratives. Within her intricate and menacing landscapes found in Lois the Witch (1859) and ‘The Grey Woman’ (1861), Gaskell employs the Gothic to create a space for her radical family restructurings.

Gaskell’s Lois the Witch is a cautionary tale about Puritan fanaticism and the tragedy of what happens when an entire society decides to eliminate all of the people it deems to be ‘different’. Although it is Gothic fiction, it is a story deeply rooted in historical fact: the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. While Gaskell experiments with the elision of the real and the Gothic in her subject matter, she also finds a means to critique the ways in which women are often forced into the heteronormative economy and, subsequently, what happens when a woman rebels. While the novella focuses on seventeenth-century New England and the ways that American Indians were treated there, Lois the Witch also covertly questions nationalist sentiment in the aftermath of the 1857 Indian uprising.

In an even more daring story, ‘The Grey Woman’, Gaskell revisits the ideas of constructing a ‘chosen’ family. Set in Germany and France, the tale involves a young lady, Anna, who has to be saved from an abusive, murderous husband by her servant, Amante, who cross-dresses as her husband.