Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  On 2 November, payment seems at last agreed and a Treasury civil servant notes: This is a satisfactory resolution of this long vexed question.’ Yet the amount owed to Broadmoor from Christiana’s arrival there in July 1872 until November 1875 is still outstanding. Orange writes to A. J. O. Liddell, the new Secretary of State at the Home Office, emphatically stating that Broadmoor is owed £121.10. Solicitors to the Treasury give advice to the Home Office, pointing out that they have already advised on Christiana Edmunds and the matter of ‘Criminal Pauper Lunatics’ of which she is one: there is a loophole in the law here that needs to be tightened. In 1878 the whole question of arrears of maintenance goes to the Lords, and an amendment to the Criminal Lunatics Act to make recovery possible is urged. On 1 May that year the Treasury finally sanctions the Broadmoor authorities to abandon the claim against both the Lewes and Canterbury authorities.

  Dr William Orange had been medical superintendent of Broadmoor for less than two years when Christiana arrived. The asylum now had its full complement of blocks, two for women, six for men; the men usually outnumbered the women four to one, with the more violent inhabitants being kept in a block furthest from the grounds and playing fields. A significant proportion of the ‘criminally insane’ women confined at any one time had committed infanticide, then the main form of female murder: this accounted for what, from time to time, was the higher percentage of female to male murderers. The class breakdown amongst the women was balanced even more than amongst the men towards a working and ‘underclass’.

  Treatment consisted largely of the discipline of asylum life. The total environment that was the asylum provided work, order and recreation. The hope was that this methodical discipline would ‘cure’ or at least regularize the lives of the inhabitants. Work could take place on the asylum farm and grounds, or indoors in the general running and maintaining of the facilities, or in sewing, etching or even painting, as the outstanding example of Richard Dadd shows. The more orderly inmates could go for walks, play team sports or attend the occasional musical evening or ball. For a long time there were only two medical doctors and a complement of about a hundred warders to look after some five hundred inmates. Many patients had their own rooms and visitors could be seen. Inhabitants might stay the length of their sentence or in some cases be moved into an ordinary prison. Under Orange’s reforming and humanitarian aegis, some of those confined may have lived better lives at Broadmoor than in the terrible circumstances they had experienced before.

  A series of brief hospital notes (mostly of the formulaic kind submitted in annual reports to the Lunacy Commissioners as demanded by the Criminal Lunatics Act 1884) and one letter make up the rest of Christiana Edmunds’s documented life. The examination letter from Sir William Gull and Dr Orange, together with a report from Surgeon Richard Turner of Sussex County Prison, are lodged on her arrival at Broadmoor. Turner states: ‘After 10 months daily Supervision, I fail to satisfy myself that Christiana Edmunds is insane, or irresponsible for her actions. She is of delicate constitution & disposed to be hysterical and is much weakened by her long detention in prison.’ Responding to the query ‘Whether Suicidal or Dangerous to others’, Turner writes: ‘She has never shown any symptoms of being suicidal or dangerous to others.’ Under ‘Chief Delusions or indication of insanity’ he writes: ‘Has manifested no delusion in my presence.’ Nor had she had, or was she subject to, any fits. Removed from Dr Beard and, it would by now seem, from the hope of ever seeing him again – and perhaps, too, faced with the attention of other doctors – Christiana’s monomania, or erotic obsession, seems to have dissolved.

  The Broadmoor staff, particularly the matron in charge of her, however, find her decidedly peculiar, not to say irritating. Christiana manifestly lacks that ordinary human remorse, that sense of responsibility for her crimes, or indeed that fellow-feeling that signals ‘normality’. She is just not a good girl: she has none of that quota of submissive goodness that the matron expects of sane women.

  Referring back to William Gull’s letter in a note made soon after Christiana’s arrival, Dr Orange writes that the opinions expressed in the letter are confirmed by Christiana’s ‘conduct and conversation’ since admission. At the news of her brother William’s death on Robben Island she ‘appears quite unable to experience any feeling of sorrow although she tried to look grieved’. Christiana, it seems, can only enact emotion for her family, not experience it. In the same note, Orange points out – as if the lack of feeling were somehow a consequence of her vanity – that when she was admitted Christiana was ‘wearing a large amount of false hair and her cheeks were painted. She also has false teeth & she is very vain.’

  Christiana’s vanity is the subject of many subsequent notes. Her desire to have her own clothes or send them out for mending, her penchant for false hair and make-up, are never interpreted as a proud attempt to keep up appearances (and indeed status) in a distressing environment and not to succumb to its lack of aesthetic resources. It is seen as a mark of moral madness. It’s clear that, like some unprincipled Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, Christiana is both rebellious and driven by a need to behave seductively in male company. She seems to continue to believe, even with the passing years, that her ability to charm is intact. It is the only means open to her to be a woman.

  When on 21 August 1873 her mother comes to visit – perhaps worrying that the doctors may release Christiana once more into the proximity of the hangman – she tells Dr Orange that her son William ‘gave evidence of mental illness before his death’. She also tells him that Christiana never once expressed any sorrow for the trouble she caused her family. She would regard her want of feeling as shocking if she were not insane, Mrs Edmunds says, adding that Christiana was not truthful as a child.

  As if given a key to the daughter by the mother’s words, Christiana’s hospital notes are now full of ‘her desire to deceive’ (2 November). Asylum discipline is not what Christiana does best. A letter she sends to her sister Mary, the record states, ‘ingeniously contains a single scrap of paper covered with very small writing’. Christiana’s writing is evidently fated to doom her. This time her letter asks her sister to bring her ‘some articles of wearing apparel clandestinely at her next visit and also half a crown which was to be given to one of the attendants’. Found out, Christiana exhibits neither surprise nor shame and simply carries on in the same way. One begins to wonder whether this behaviour has been long in the making and learned at home. Another letter to her sister repeats a desire for ‘articles of dress different from other patients’ and also reflects on ‘modes of applying paint to the face’. Her sister, the matron thinks, colludes. She is irate. A letter needs to be sent stipulating that ‘the patient is at all times well provided with comfortable and suitable clothing to her present position’.

  Some kind of cushion or ‘leather toy or loaf’ arrives for Christiana and is found to contain false hair! Dr Orange is rounded up to write to Mary Foreman to tell her that not only has this stuffed cushion been confiscated, but that this kind of secret gift is in no one’s interest. She says she will comply. The matron, Mrs Jackson, is asked to return the gift (which she can’t because it has fallen apart) and to write saying that if Mary ‘really wishes to assist in promoting her sister’s happiness, she ought to try gently in all her letters to her to make her as contented as possible with her surroundings feeling assured that everyone has every wish to be kind to her’.

  In July 1874, the Broadmoor authorities learn that Christiana has been ‘endeavouring to set on foot a clandestine correspondence with the chaplain of Sussex County Prison’. Her sister has been asked to post the letters for her, but when a reply from him comes through ordinary channels the matter is found out. Christiana, it seems, is again playing with secrets and revelation. She is resistant to the controlling asylum authorities. ‘There would have been no objection to her writing to the chaplain of the prison from which she came,’ the notes primly state, ‘had she asked to be allowed to do so, but it is in c
onformity with her state of mind to prefer mystery & concealment.’ But then, if Christiana is still subject to an undercurrent of inexpressible sexuality, she can hardly cease her rebellion and tell the authorities what she’s up to, since she doesn’t altogether know herself.

  Almost a year later, in April 1875, when she moves from her present room to another and the first is searched, numerous hidden articles are found and yet another letter – this time addressed to an attendant. ‘Her love of deception is quite a mania,’ her record states. On 30 July even more secreted articles are found. Her hospital notes state that ‘her mind becomes more impaired and she is more irrational in her conduct. She deceives for the pure love of deception and with no sufficient motive.’ We have no way of knowing, but perhaps Christiana is caught up in the torrid world of her obsessions once more, bringing into being an attendant-lover whom only she knows about. Certainly this masquerade of femininity, with its accoutrements of hair and clothes, shows a continuing anxiety about fitting into the delimitations of being mid-nineteenth-century woman.

  Christiana uses all the ladylike wiles she can muster in her impoverished surroundings – except when her mother comes to visit, when, according to the record, she looks as pitiful as possible. Matron, it is clear, doesn’t approve. ‘When visited by her mother she omits the colour on her cheeks, sheds tears, and complains of the injustice and cruelty with which she is treated, and of the searching of her room. At the same time, the faculty of secretiveness is so strong that she is probably quite unable to resist the desire to conceal, even when there is no occasion for it.’ Like one of Freud’s patients, Christiana is excited by secrecy, a stand-in for sexual excitement, when not its accompaniment.

  By the time of this update, 8 July 1876, Christiana has been moved into Ward 2, close to the Broadmoor gardens where ‘she has been tolerably tranquil and orderly in her behaviour’. While she was in Ward 3, her ‘delight and amusement seemed to be in practising the art of ingeniously tormenting several of the more irritable patients, so that she could always complain of their language to her whilst it was difficult to bring any overt act home to herself’. This may in part have been why she was moved, and in her new ward Christiana doesn’t indulge in baiting other patients and then grumbling about them. Perhaps she doesn’t feel the need in this better accommodation to set up her superiority, or at least her difference, a constant theme in her character armoury. From now on, she seems to be more or less resigned to her place in institutional life.

  Somewhat ‘more uniform & settled’, state the hospital notes in January 1877, even though the regime hasn’t managed to cure her of her superficial character faults. She is still Very vain & affects a youthful appearance’. In September 1877, she ‘continues to paint & “get herself up” – as far as she can’, but ‘she does not interfere so much with the other patients as formerly’. Nothing has changed on the seductive front, however: ‘Bent of her mind, as evidenced by the tendency of her conversation & by her manner & expression, evidently lies towards sexual and amatory ideas.’

  And so it continues over the next years. Christiana remains ‘tractable and amenable to the ordinary rules of the place’, ‘quiet and orderly in her behaviour’; painting, etching, doing bits of embroidery. There is ‘no prominent indication of insanity’; she is ‘free from actively insane indications’. Yet immediately, as if this moral fault were a signal of insanity, comes the sting in the tale the hospital notes tell: she is still ‘vain and frivolous’ in her appearance and ‘in the general tone of her conversation and behaviour’. Christiana can only repeat her parody of everyday Victorian girlishness: it is her only remaining act. But once inside the walls of the largely working-class asylum, these characteristics of femininity garner disapproval. She is also too old for such vanities. She is meant to be penitent.

  Yet with the passing of her obsession with Dr Charles Beard, can Christiana still be considered insane?

  On 30 October 1880, she writes a letter to the Home Office in a neat and regular script. It is the only piece of her handwriting that remains. The letter itself is a cogent and moving memento to a troubled woman who has left no other personal trace.

  Sir,

  I venture to petition for my release from the Broadmoor Asylum. I have been eight years in confinement and am very anxious to regain my liberty. I earnestly trust that my conduct has been such as to gain for me the favourable regard of the Superintendent and those over me. I shall feel very grateful if you will kindly consider my petition and grant my release.

  I remain Sir

  Your humble Petitioner

  Christiana Edmunds

  The accompanying letter from Broadmoor notes that she ‘is at present tranquil and orderly in her conduct, but her mind is unsound’. On 4 November, there is a note from the Secretary of State saying that he ‘cannot comply with her appeal’. Christiana never appeals again, and as the years go by, her asylum notes grow briefer and briefer, testifying to her good health and ‘the same vain indifferent irresponsible manner’. An entry of 1886 finds her ‘quiet and well behaved, cheerful and pleasant in conversation, but [she] is very vain, courts and desires attention and notoriety, pushes herself forward on all occasions, paints and tricks herself up for inspection and in almost her every act shows how little she appreciates the gravity of her crime or the position in which it has placed her’. Vanity – in Christiana’s circumstances – has become a mark of insanity.

  The hospital records do not reveal whether she responded in any way to her mother’s death in 1893. She is ‘cheerful and contented’ that year, and in the following year ‘employs herself in painting and sketching’. Nor is there any note to mark a response to her sister Mary’s death in 1898. Perhaps, in the way of things, they had long ceased to visit her. No change is noted in Christiana’s condition until 1901, when signs of physical deterioration set in. Her sight is failing and there are backaches and various pains. In 1902 her symptoms improve as the annual ball approaches. After that, comes physical decline. Perhaps fittingly for a woman so concerned with appearances, time is kind to her: increasingly impaired sight accompanies the passage of the years. In one of those little ironies of history, the Brighton house in which Christiana spent her most passionate years as the Borgia of Brighton, became a site of spectacle; a cinema.

  On 22 November 1906, when she is scarcely able to walk without assistance and has spent over a week in the infirmary, a note records a conversation that could provide a fitting epitaph for Christiana Edmunds, a woman whom the delusions of passion led into criminality and an unintended murder. She is overheard talking to a patient who has ‘been in the habit of rendering her various little services’:

  E[dmunds] – How am I looking?

  A[friend] – Fairly well.

  E – I think I am improving. I hope I shall be better in a fortnight, if so, I shall astonish them; I shall get up and dance – I was a Venus before and I shall be a Venus again!

  We don’t know whether Christiana rose from her sickbed to be the Venus she at least wished she had once been. In the way of those who today might be considered to suffer from a psychotic mental structure, wishes and fears for Christiana seemed to have acted as facts might for others. The Venus of Broadmoor gradually grew weaker and died at half-past five on the morning of 19 September 1907 at the age of seventy-eight. Charles Beard, who had left Brighton with his family soon after the trial and moved to Southport in Lancashire, outlived her by nine years, to die at the age of eighty-nine in London. His will shows him leaving £1889 18s. 2d., not a vast sum compared to Sir William Gull’s £344,022 19s. 7d.

  It is unlikely that Charles Beard knew of or marked the passing of the woman who had nurtured a morbid passion for him, one he had somehow provoked into murderous rage.

  Perhaps Christiana Edmunds would have thrived a little better if she had been born at a slightly later date and in belle époque France. Propriety may have reigned here as well, but the public discussion about the passions had a far greater openn
ess to it, even in the courts, where the required ‘confession’, adapted from the Catholic inquisitorial system, could incorporate sexuality. Mind doctors, writers and that floating demi-monde – which might find itself part of the beau monde, the moneyed and respectable classes – even lawyers, all had a say about how love can drive you mad. Then, too, the earliest French alienists – who also had the excesses of the French Revolution in mind – had incorporated passion into the language of lunacy: there it would stay, through the course of subsequent upheavals, both social and individual.

  PART TWO: FRANCE

  VIRTUE ON TRIAL

  ‘If you asked eighty years ago if feminine virtue was part of universal humanism, everyone would have answered yes.’

  Michel Foucault

  II

  A Hysteria of the Heart: The Case of Marie Bière

  During the cold winter days and nights of the last month of 1879, thirty-one-year-old concert singer Marie Bière, partly disguised by a wide-brimmed hat and a lorgnon, stalked her lover through the streets of Paris. A revolver to hand, she followed him to dance halls and theatres. She hired a carriage and for hours staked out his apartment at 17 Rue Auber, a few steps from the newly completed Palais Gamier, home of the Paris Opera where Marie had once aspired to sing. Her despair was total. She could only wait, wait and watch. She was waiting for an opportunity to shoot.