The Victorians
Page 40
That is why, when the feminists turned to the only woman in England practising as a doctor, Elizabeth Garrett (1836–1917), and asked her to attack the Contagious Diseases Acts, she refused. ‘Degradation cannot be taken by storm and the animal side of nature will outlive crusades,’ she believed. Some members of the women’s movement never forgave her support for the CD Acts. She saw them as ‘very limited in scope’ and an ‘attempt to diminish the injury to public health which arises from prostitution’. As an experienced hospital doctor, Elizabeth Garrett saw it largely as a class matter – ‘Every member of the medical profession knows only too well how terrible are the sufferings of this class, and how difficult it is for them to get out of their life of vice, or even to discontinue in it for a time when in a state of urgent bodily suffering … Hospitals do not as a rule admit them, dispensaries cannot cure them; even soup kitchens for the sick will not help to feed them.’9 Garrett saw no alternative for these women than that they be compelled to undergo treatment in accordance with the Acts.
Incidentally, all modern research confirms Garrett’s contention that this was a problem overwhelmingly affecting the lives of the poor. Analysis of court and poor law records, hospital and penitentiary reports following the CD Acts in York shows that 73 per cent of men associating with prostitutes were working class.10 In many working-class districts women were prepared to take the risk of catching venereal diseases since, unlike their ‘respectable’ sisters, they were able to afford rooms of their own, new clothes, heat, cooked food, and above all alcohol; unlike the dressmakers and laundresses working fourteen hours a day, the prostitutes tended to avoid consumption.11 The very concept of prostitution was a vague one in such classes. When one Harriet Hicks was on trial for soliciting in 1870 the magistrate asked if she was still a prostitute. ‘No, only to one man’ was the reply. ‘You mean that you are not a prostitute, other than as living with one man without marriage?’ Hicks: ‘Yes, that’s what I mean.’ In the poorer parts of Plymouth and Southampton where the sailors poured off the ships looking for women, the notion of middle-class respectability did not exist. A female parish visitor at St Peter’s, Plymouth, found one woman with three children; they had three different fathers. She was now living with a sailor and passed for a married woman. ‘She says she is not ashamed of her baby – she never professed to be a Christian, and is not so bad as many.’ Another was ‘married at the register office to a man whose wife is living and argues that it is all right as the first wife is remarried, and wrote a letter to give him leave to follow her example’.
One should remember these women if one tries to form too neat a picture of middle-class men corrupting or seducing working-class women. When we read of Elizabeth Garrett, pioneer medic and keen supporter of women’s suffrage, it is almost as if there are two issues at stake in the 1860s – the Subjection of Women and the Improvement of the Working Classes. It is clear from her support of the CD Acts that she did not wish them muddled.
In her introduction to the Virago paperback edition of Harriet Taylor Mill’s essay on the Enfranchisement of Women and her husband John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women Kate Soper wrote in 1983:
What is likely to jar most on today’s readers, however, is the central argument of the essays, that sees the issue of female rights primarily in terms of the opportunity equality will allow for individually talented women to emerge to prominence and realize fulfilment. This is a theme in conflict with that strand of the contemporary women’s movement, which stresses not the individual’s right to compete, but the iniquity of the competition itself, and which appeals to a collective identity for women in their common struggle against patriarchy.12
In this context it is perhaps worth noting how our perceptions of gender politics, as with our notions of race and class, are still in a state of flux. A feminist of 2003 might write differently from Soper in 1983 about the women of the 1860s, and perhaps be less sceptical about the value of individual talent. In the case of Garrett’s career as a doctor what one sees is not so much ‘competition’ as a struggle of titanic heroism against seemingly insuperable odds. (You could as well describe a lone round-the-world yachtswoman as ‘competing’ with the sea.)
The resistance put up to a woman studying medicine by the entirely male medical establishment was huge. The Lancet, champion of liberty for the poor, for the teaching hospitals, for scientific research against obscurantists and for the independence of coroners’ courts against whitewashing politicians, had a disgraceful record in opposing Elizabeth Garrett’s very presence at lectures and demonstrations. Its objections were based on the supposed ‘refinement’ of women which we began by noting, or quoting. There are few clearer examples of how the idea of female delicacy was invented as a way of keeping women down. The Lancet dismissed Elizabeth Garrett, the sensible daughter of a merchant from Aldeburgh, as an hysteric. It congratulated the students of the Middlesex Hospital for trying to get rid of her. The editorial marvelled ‘that this lady is able calmly to go through the manipulations of sounding for stone in the male bladder … insensible to the unpleasant feelings which her presence must arouse’.13 The article omitted to mention that the male bladder in question belonged to a child about two years old.14 Against all the odds, and with the help of Elizabeth Blackwell, who obtained an MD in the United States and was then admitted to the British Medical Register, Elizabeth Garrett became a doctor. (She studied in London but only got a degree in Paris, partly through the support of the British ambassador, Lord Lyons, partly through that of Napoleon III himself.) Thereafter came the foundation of the London School of Medicine for Women by Dr Sophia Jex-Blake (in 1874), and though for many years Dr Garrett Anderson (she married George Skelton Anderson in 1871) was the only female member of the BMA, the barricades had been broken.
In some inevitable senses, though, Kate Soper was right. The nineteenth-century women’s movement was largely, if not essentially, a bourgeois movement. It certainly grew out of the prosperity of the early capitalist decades. The women who changed the lives of their sisters and daughters by campaigning for equal educational rights, equal, or at any rate just, parental rights, or for political suffrage were overwhelmingly either from the rich merchant class like Dr Garrett Anderson or daughters of the parsonage, the rentier class or the minor aristocracy. Dr Garrett’s friend Emily Davies was typical in being the daughter of a clergyman. Bessie Parkes was the daughter of a rich Birmingham businessman. Barbara Leigh-Smith – in marriage Mme Bodichon – was a cousin of Florence Nightingale, the daughter of the Radical MP for Norwich. Mme Bodichon helped Emily Davies found Girton College, Cambridge, in 1873, though it was not until after the Second World War that that university permitted women to take degrees.
Just as the Broad Church appeared to demolish Christianity but actually helped it to survive;fn3 just as the Reform Bill appeared to undermine aristocracy but actually enabled it to remain politically powerful; so the incipient women’s movement grew out of rentier and bourgeois money, seemed at odds with (some) new bourgeois values, but actually preserved and underpinned the strength of the class system. These women were all asking for preferments – professional qualifications and university degrees – which were denied to all but a handful of the male populace. Except for the heady days of Chartism, and for certain unusual moments since – in the days of Lloyd George, for instance, or during the election immediately following the Second World War – the English working classes have not been politically engaged, any more than they aspired to be barristers or surgeons. The Women’s Suffrage Movement could be seen as the final confirmation of the triumph of the haute bourgeoisie, not the first blast on the trumpet of revolution.
The Kensington Ladies Discussion Society met four times a year; under the chairmanship of Dr Garrett it rounded up the usual suspects – Mme Bodichon, Miss Beale, Miss Buss and Miss Helen Taylor, stepdaughter of the newly elected MP for Westminster, John Stuart Mill. In 1866 they presented to him a petition signed by 1,498 women asking for – d
emanding – women’s suffrage. Mill believed that bringing about the first parliamentary debate on the subject was ‘by far the most important public service’ which he was able to perform in the Commons.15 When one considers the size of the opposition both in Parliament and in the country at large, it is remarkable that eighty MPs voted with Mill. It was a battle which took half a century to win, but Mill’s rallying-cry is still impressive:
I know there is an obscure feeling, a feeling which is ashamed to express itself openly – as if women had no right to care about anything, except how they may be the most useful servants of some men … This claim to confiscate the whole existence of one half of the species for the supposed convenience of the other appears to me, independently of its injustice, particularly silly.16
He ended on a dark note:
I should like to have a return laid before this House of the number of women who are actually beaten to death, kicked to death, or trampled to death by their male protectors; and in an opposite column, the amount of the sentences passed, in those cases where the dastardly criminals did not get off altogether.
As the Norton case had made clear thirty years earlier, these cases were not limited to the poorer classes.
The Position of Women question, then, would have been much in the mind of the editor of Macmillan’s Magazine when he asked Caroline Norton to review together Patmore’s The Angel in the House and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market.
Coventry Patmore (1823–96) immortalized the joys of life’s ordinariness in a manner which must have inspired both Hardy and Betjeman:
I, while the shop-girl fitted on
The sand-shoes, look’d where, down the bay
The sea glow’d with a shrouded sun.
‘I’m ready Felix; will you pay?’
That was my first expense for this
Sweet stranger whom I called my wife.
Not long after the poem was published, with all its warm evocations of life and love in a cathedral town, Patmore was widowed. He became Roman Catholic, which so often marginalizes and narrows an English imagination, and the immense popularity of The Angel in the House was not enjoyed by the in many ways much finer Odes and the erotic/mystic work The Unknown Eros. Poets, and critics of perception, have seen him as something like a great poet, though his impossible character lost him friends in life, and in death he was satirized by Joseph Conrad in Chance. The ‘incandescent austerity’17 of his later verse will only ever appeal to cognoscenti. It was not only the cosy Anglicanism of Angel which appealed to his contemporary readers – it was what a hostile friend found repellent: ‘the mingling of piety and concupiscence’. Yet no modern woman could identify with the young wife in Patmore’s poem. Whether they could identify with either of the sisters in Goblin Market, it has been part of feminist criticism’s task to determine. Since Goblin Market was published at the beginning of a time of stupendous change in the lives of women in Britain, it is not surprising that modern literary criticism should have tried to tease out gender-politics and references to overt sexuality in the poem which its author insisted was ‘just a fairy story’ but others perceive as ‘a Victorian nursery classic, like many works, somehow considered appropriate for children … actually full of sinister, subterranean echoes fortunately too sophisticated for their understanding’.18 Many critics in the late 1960–2000 period went further than this and imagined that this poem, one of the undoubted masterpieces of the mid-nineteenth century, was too sophisticated for its author to understand either.
Having refused various marriage proposals, Christina Rossetti lived much under the shadow of a pious mother and of Maria, her elder sister who was a member of the Anglican sisterhood of All Saints. Much has been made of the harsh pieties of the Anglo-Catholics of the period and of Christina’s morbid feelings of guilt and depression which this religion supposedly fed. To discourage her from moping, Christina worked in the Highgate penitentiary, a House of Mercy for ‘fallen women’. The volunteers – Christina was known as Sister Christina in the House – undertook the work of reclaiming the fallen. They would ‘by sympathy, by cautious discipline, by affectionate watchfulness … teach them to hate what has been pleasant to them, and to love what they have despised, that so after a while they may go forth again into the world and be able to serve amid the ordinary temptations of life, the merciful Saviour whom they have learnt to serve and love in retirement’.19
Christina conceived Goblin Market as a moral tale to be read aloud in the penitentiary.20 Just as Milton’s Masque at Ludlow Castle (i.e. Comus) was first performed for a noble family rocked by the grossest sexual scandal – an audience which would have responded with particular eagerness to the moral: ‘Love Virtue, she alone is free’ – so the girls and young women in the Highgate penitentiary had probably learnt early that excess could bring wretchedness as well as ecstasy. This is the simple theme of Goblin Market, a theme as old as the story of the Garden of Eden.
The poem tells of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who are tempted by the tiny goblin merchants who haunt the woods and glens offering ripe fruit for a penny. Laura succumbs, and when she has run out of money, like a true addict she pays with anything to hand – in her case a lock of her golden hair. Then she really lets rip – ‘She sucked and sucked and sucked the more/Fruits which that unknown orchard bore./She sucked until her lips were sore.’ Lizzie goes to the wood to obtain an antidote for her sister’s sickness. The goblins try to force her to eat their fruit but she ‘laughed in heart to feel the drip/of juice that syrupped all her face’. She remains virginal, runs back to her sister, knowing she has it in her power to save – ‘Did you miss me?/Come and kiss me./ Never mind my bruises,/Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices/Squeezed from goblin fruits for you.’
One does not need to bring a blush to the reader’s cheek by spelling out some of the ‘explanations’ which critics have brought to these vivid lines. They are faced with a ludicrous dilemma. Either they have to imagine that Christina was so emotionally stupid that she did not know what she was writing. Or they have to suppose that the nun-like Christina was a pornographer. Neither is true. Christina’s relationship with her nun sister Maria is reflected in this poem – as, no doubt, is her observation of the excesses which led her brother Dante Gabriel into alcoholism, and the ‘fallen women’ with whom she worked in Highgate into ruin. The poem is about the dangers of excess – of an unbridled appetite. To say it is ‘really’ about rape, incest, lesbianism is to miss the point. It is about the human tendency, which could no doubt be shown by incestuous lesbians but is actually more general, to self-destruction by means of self-indulgence. A child who had been sick after eating too much chocolate would understand Goblin Market better than many of the academic commentators.
The inability of some modern critics to grasp the surface meaning of Goblin Market, their insistence that its author could not have known the kind of things going on beneath that surface, is suggestive of the gulf between the women of the twentieth and of the nineteenth century respectively. (The greater proportion of the critics are women.) Christina Rossetti’s most sensitive late twentieth-century biographer, Jan Marsh, wrote earlier studies of ‘the Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood’ and on ‘the Legend of Elizabeth Siddal’, which cunningly showed how much an interpretation of these Victorian women, of their lives and deaths, reveals about the historians and biographers who have tried to present them to contemporary readers.
Elizabeth and Gabriel Rossetti’s marriage, never perhaps very happy, entered a dark phase with the birth of a stillborn child on 2 May 1861. When Ned and Georgie Burne-Jones called on them they found Lizzie, dosed to the eyeballs with laudanum, rocking an empty cradle.21 From now on, other visitors noticed Gabriel wincing and shrinking when his wife spoke sharply to him. Her behaviour has been described as disruptive, ill-tempered, jealous.22 ‘She was almost certainly suffering from post-natal depression.’ Some visitors, she enjoyed – Swinburne, for example, who came and read to her from Jacobean plays – Fletcher’s The S
panish Curate was a favourite. But it was the friendship with Swinburne which precipitated the crisis. The poet met the Rossettis at the Sablonniere restaurant in Leicester Square for dinner: Lizzie was tired and Gabriel took her home at about eight, himself setting out, once she was in bed, for an evening, first at the Working Men’s College where he taught – in Great Ormond Street – then for some hours unaccounted for. When he came home Rossetti found that his wife had taken a huge overdose of laudanum: she died at 7.20 in the morning on Thursday 11 February 1862. Impulsively he buried with her, in the family plot in Highgate Cemetery, the manuscript of his poems which, as the years of his widowhood passed, he came to miss.
From 1864 to 1870 Rossetti was at work on his masterpiece, one of the great morbid statements of all nineteenth-century art, the Beata Beatrix in which he depicted Elizabeth as the Beatrice of Dante’s Vita Nuova. Though he began painting it in her lifetime it seems unmistakably the face of a dead woman who has outsoared the shadows of earthly existence – a quite sublime combination of the spiritual and the merely morbid. We sense in it both the sickbed smell of an unhappy woman who died of an overdose, and the ultimate hope that we are more than flesh and blood. Growing out of a deep domestic pathos, and a sordid failure to make emotional connections and sympathies, and created in the first decade when Doubt had become not merely a coterie-secret but the norm for millions of people, it gently speaks both of religion’s glory and its tragic impossibility. It is in a way the ultimate icon of what was going on inside men and women during the 1860s.