Copyright

by
Michelle Stoddard Lee
2009
 The Dissertation Committee for Michelle Stoddard Lee
certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Renovating the Closet: Nineteenth-Century Closet

Drama Written by Women as a Stage for Social
Critique

Committee:

Lisa Moore, Supervisor

Carol MacKay, Supervisor

Samuel Baker

Lynn Miller

Hannah Wojciehowski
Renovating the Closet: Nineteenth-Century Closet
Drama Written by Women as a Stage for Social
Critique

by

Michelle Stoddard Lee, B.A., M.A.

DISSERTATION
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

May 2009
I dedicate this work to my husband Charles, and to those women who need a
nudge to emerge from their own closets.
 Acknowledgments

This dissertation is more than words on pages, more than years of re-
search, more than a study of a certain genre or time period. This dissertation
is more than a career stepping stone, more than a potential book project. This
dissertation represents my personal transformation, my journey, my quest. It
was unexpected, this dissertation, bringing me new ways of thinking about
myself and about others those alive and those only alive in books. I need to
acknowledge the people who supported and advised, who listened and encour-
aged, who contributed to this wondrous project. Every one of you participated
in the enrichment of my self and my world. Unfortunately, I only have the
space to thank a handful.

I express my deepest appreciation to my advisors, Lisa Moore and

Carol MacKay. I am indebted to Lisa for her patience, her accessibility, her
guidance, her sense of community, and her belief that I indeed had academic
rigor, somewhere inside. I am also greatly indebted to Carol for her unwaver-
ing confidence in me, for her presence in the audience of the various theater
productions that grew from the Michael Field chapter of this dissertation, for
her grace, hospitality, and kindness. Both women showed me that successful
poet-playwright-scholars do exist. I also want to thank my committee mem-
bers, Samuel Baker, Hannah Dolora Wojciehowski, and Lynn Miller, for their

v
commitment to and support of this project. For you, Lynn, I have a special
debt of gratitude for your constant encouragement, incredible wisdom, creative
inspiration, and lasting friendship.

I extend my warmest praise to the members of my dissertation group,

led by Lisa Moore: Layne Craig, Amena Monfar, Caroline Wigginton, Cather-
ine Bacon, and Laura Smith. Thank you for reading half-baked drafts, slogging
through unknown texts, and leaving amazing commentary in the margins of
my chapters. You kept me on my toes, forced me to consider new perspectives,
and brought much-needed snacks to the table. I am honored that you took
the time away from your own projects to critique my work.

I was blessed to have a circle of friends who hugged me both in person

and in the blogosphere, friends who sent me positive thoughts in the form of
tofu recipes, advice about saving money, instructions on how to knit a hat,
holiday photos, and plain-old cheerleading. Thank you, Amena Monfar, Layne
Craig, Ingrid Devilliers, Crystal Kurzen, Olga Herrera, and Christy Attwood
for showing me that people can love and share, even at a distance. You all
are awesome women. I am proud to know you. For you, Amena merci for
all the rejuvenating phone calls and love. For you, Christy, an extra big hug
for all the croissants at La Madeleines, the long family stories, the years of
writing fiction, the reminder that life is joyful outside academia.

I found a kindred spirit in Elisabeth McKetta one day in a class on

Victorian novels. She became my friend from the first, and never have I met
such a lightning bug. I turned her into a witch, lured her into baring her soul on

vi
stage with Zelda Fitzgerald, and twisted her arm into reading my poetry. She
made grad school fun, creative, exciting, and everything seem possible. Thank
you, Elisabeth, for phone calls, walks at Zilker, strong coffee, the voice of Eve,
stumpy dog tails, Farfelu, red boots, black dresses, and little apartments that
I wont ever forget. You were my best friend when I was 12, in another life.

I credit my ability to stay trendy and well-fed during this ordeal to

Claire Canavan. She brings the world into every conversation, not to mention
ideas for delicious meals and decadent pastimes. Thank you, Claire, for always
knowing what and where to eat, what to watch on tv and in the theaters, and
how to have a real life, with class and style.

My inner child and my winged self-esteem must thank Lisa Leit for her
ever-present optimism and faith. She has a gift of making people rise to their
potential, of enabling them to clearly see their power and abilities. Thank
you, Lisa, for your soaring spirit.

Finally, I must thank my husband, Charles. He gave me his heart 19

years ago, and he has never stopped trying to give me the world. He was
the one who encouraged me to take the first step of this mad walkabout and
then, along the way, held my hand tight when I ranted, whined, complained,
screamed, pulled my hair out over theory, told dinner stories about a lesbian
aunt and niece, questioned my purpose, and lost my way. He is the one who
believes in every bit of me, believes I can write novels, rebuild old houses, act
in Shakespearean plays, and become a Doctor of Philosophy. He has walked
alongside me on beaches, around lakes, through cities, and under stars, and

vii
I cant wait to see where we walk next. Thank you for always being there
to take off my dusty boots, and for carrying me across one threshold after
another when I have faltered. I love you so much.

viii
 Preface

On an airplane from Daytona Beach, Florida to Austin, I came across

a poem written by blogger, essayist, and poet Rebecca Woolf in an advertise-
ment in the May 2009 issue of Oprah magazine.1 Though it is not the way I
originally intended to begin this dissertation, the poem seems a fitting way to
lead into my work on the figurative and literal closets that nineteenth-century
women were restricted by and fought to open, as reflected in three closet
dramas written by women of the period: The Spanish Gypsy by George Eliot,
Stephania by Michael Field, and A Woman Sold by Augusta Webster. Incred-
ibly, Woolfs twenty-first century poem illustrates the contemporary relevance
of the thematic messages I highlight in my study of these works.

Were a generation of List-makers & Jugglers,

women who wear many hats.
Perhaps, we should reserve on our
lists of things to do today, a bullet point for ourselves.
A place in our closets for a hat that says
not mother or wife or writer but
your name here.
Not to mention a fabulous
party to wear it to.

1
See Fig. 1 for a reproduction of the actual poem.

ix
I want to hone in on the phrase, a place in our closets. I imagine an over-
stuffed storage space with shoes and clothes and boxes and mementoes filling
every nook and cranny. The speaker suggests that women should shove these
things aside to find a place in their closets, make room for a hat. Could be
feathered, felt, or a fedora. It doesnt matter. What matters is the embroi-
dery. Not mother or wife or even writer. But your name here. The
speaker makes a contrast in these labels. Mother, wife, even writer are
terms others use to name a woman, while your name here implies that a
woman must name, embroider, herself. Your name here. It can be anything,
multiple things at once, whatever a woman wishes. It is a conscious act, this
self-naming, just like reserving a bullet point on a list of things to do is a
conscious act. The poem offers the idea that women should find a spatial and
metaphorical place in their lives for reclaiming and renaming their hats, or
their identities, and mark that place with an event a fabulous party
where they can celebrate this reclamation. Yet, if we look closely at Woolfs
poem, that reclaimed hat is not actively worn, but still remains in the closet.
The speakers message is perhaps, we should. A hesitance, a wondering, a
measuring. However, in the closet, there is potential for action.

Like George Eliot, Michael Field, and Augusta Webster, Rebecca Woolf
suggests that for a generation, the public casting of womens identities and
performances have influenced the private casting of womens identities and
performances. For Woolf, womens closets are filled with many hats embroi-
dered by others. For Woolf, a womans awareness of her given clutter and

x
her first step toward clearing it away both begin in the closet. With my work
on the nineteenth-century closet dramas The Spanish Gypsy, Stephania, and
A Woman Sold, I show that this theme runs deeper and longer than a sin-
gle generation of women. I show how Eliot, Field, and Webster, in revising
the epic, Roman history, and biblical mythology through the closet drama,
called attention to the spatial and metaphorical closets that limited social and
cultural possibilities for nineteenth century women and created female protag-
onists who confront patriarchal belief systems, institutions, and conventions
that define and restrict their gender roles, sexual identity, and social power.
Certainly, Fedalma in The Spanish Gypsy may not fully succeed in growing a
future for her gypsy nation, but she does take her place as their leader. Cer-
tainly, Stephania in Stephania may not lead Rome to glory, but she does oust
an Emperor from a position he stole by murdering her husband. Certainly,
Eleanor in A Woman Sold must spend years of her life unhappily married, but
through that experience realizes the wider meaning of love. All three charac-
ters take action, take steps to renaming themselves, and are made aware of the
sociocultural ideologies that underscore the names or roles they have chosen
for themselves. Potential for change.

Interestingly enough, this potential for change, the exciting possibility

of a new role, inspired me to act, to write my own closet dramas, all derived
from my extensive research on Michael Field and staged at intimate theatri-
cal spaces in Austin. In my first, A Question of Memory, self-performed
at the Cohen New Works Festival, I explored, in a fifteen-minute one-act, my

xi
auto/biographical connection to the archival and creative material of Katharine
Bradley and Edith Cooper, the two women who wrote dramas and poetry using
the name Michael Field. In my second, The Oneness of Two: Re-membering
Michael Field, embodied by actors of the Bare Bones New Works Festival
hosted at the Vortex Theater, I turned again to Bradleys and Coopers per-
sonal correspondence to imagine a dialogue between the two women and their
literary persona, Michael Field. For my third, however, The Angels of the
House, I wrote and produced a full-length play that leaned more toward
Michael Fields biography and enlisted the help of director Susan Todd and
an all-womens theater group, The Weird Sisters, to bring the story to life.2

Though all three plays thematically emphasized the fantastic waltz of

public and private that characterized Bradleys and Coopers creative and per-
sonal lives together, The Angels of the House dealt with the notion of the
closet on a number of levels. Spatially, the play was performed in an old, beau-
tiful classroom on the UT campus, with wood paneling and a tall, imposing
armoire tucked into the corner. We closed the heavy shutters during perfor-
mance, darkening the space and keeping the audience as shut away as those
characters on stage. Since we had limited room for exits and entrances, the
armoire became a space of waiting for the servants and other actors, a literal
closet from which they had to emerge when called upon to act. As the char-
acter of Michael Field longed to take his/her place in the public eye, he/she

2
See the Appendix to this dissertation for more on this play, as well as the performance
script.

xii
paced back and forth along the wide wooden windowsills high above the stage,
yet never was allowed to leave. Metaphorically, the play flirted with lesbian
themes and homosexually-oriented closets as Bradley and Cooper expressed
their desires for each other and as Cooper became emotionally involved with
one of the young female servants, Josephine. The closet, in its multiple man-
ifestations, was the birthplace of Bradley and Coopers identity as Michael
Field, of Michael Field him/herself, and of womens agency.

The narratives, characters, and themes of my original plays illustrate in

varying degrees and manners the definitions of the nineteenth-century closet
and closet drama that I offer in this dissertation. These works, along with
Rebecca Woolfs poem as part of a full-page advertisement in Oprah maga-
zine, also mark the fact that, even in the twenty-first-century, women are still
struggling to escape the same types of closets; that the themes of identity,
choice, action, and desire still resound deep within women; that women must
remember that they are not named, but must name themselves. Although
Bradley and Cooper had a penchant for gloriously decorated hats, their cre-
ative achievement grew from the unique hat they embroidered together and
wore proudly: Michael Field. With this note, I invite you to join my conversa-
tion about Renovating the Closet as portrayed in nineteenth-century closet
drama written by women.

xiii
Figure 1: Turning Leaf advertisement, Oprah Magazine, May 2009.

xiv
 Renovating the Closet: Nineteenth-Century Closet
Drama Written by Women as a Stage for Social
Critique

Publication No.

Michelle Stoddard Lee, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2009

Supervisors: Lisa Moore

Carol MacKay

My dissertation, Renovating the Closet: Nineteenth-Century Closet

Drama Written by Women as a Stage for Social Critique, contributes to a
new understanding about nineteenth-century closet drama through three dis-
tinct and innovative texts: George Eliots The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Michael
Fields Stephania (1892), and Augusta Websters A Woman Sold (1867). I
contend that these three women writers employed the closet drama, a genre
written in dramatic form but intended to be privately read or performed, to
critique the social, cultural, and ideological limitations placed upon women of
their time. In their symbolic use of the genre and innovative experiments with
form, Eliot, Field, and Webster created a new stage on which their female pro-
tagonists challenge belief systems, institutions, and conventions that confine
their gender roles, sexual identity, and social power.

xv
 My chapter, Angel of the Homeless Tribe: The Legacy of The Span-
ish Gypsy, shows how George Eliot melds the conventions of epic narrative
with those of Victorian closet drama and reveals a dynamic connection be-
tween the character development and genre. Eliots canonical novels are fa-
mous for their indictment of the limited roles Victorian culture offered to
women. Equally famous are the tragic destinies of her rebellious heroines:
they end up dead, unfulfilled, or virtually imprisoned. But scholars have
failed to notice that in her experiment with The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot cre-
ated a female epic: Fedalma, a woman of fifteenth-century Spain, becomes
the leader of her Gypsy nation, sung into the future by an admiring bard.
Eliots formal experiment makes The Spanish Gypsy an important text for
understanding how genre shaped gender representation in Eliots canon, and
in Victorian literature generally. My chapter, Something of His Manhood
Falls: Stephania as Critique of Victorian Male Aesthetics and Masculinity,
offers Stephania as Katharine Bradley and Edith Coopers commentary on
the predominantly-male Aesthetic and Decadent movements of the 1890s.
Through the pseudonym Michael Field, Bradley and Cooper wrote their way
into, and claimed their own space inside, a very exclusive males-only closet.
The chapter demonstrates how Stephania, set in Rome 1002 A.D., reclaims
agency for a Victorian artistic sisterhood adulterated and exiled by a broth-
erhood of male Decadents (who saw woman as a nemesis to social order, per-
sonal salvation, and creative production), both through its form, and its cast
of three: Stephania, Emperor Otho, and his old tutor Gerbert. Stephania, a

xvi
former Empress turned courtesan bent on revenge for her husbands murder,
challenges homosocial exclusivity and ultimately triumphs as a symbolic queen
and emperor. Successful in her plan to bring down Otho through her seduc-
tion and manipulation of both men, Stephania is redeemed and saved; she has
restored social order. In its resistance of the boundaries and expectations of
the closet drama genre, Stephania projects a new ideology for Victorian wom-
anhood and female authorship. My last chapter, I Could Be Tempted: The
Ev(e)olution of the Angel in the House in A Woman Sold, presents A Woman
Sold as an early example of Augusta Websters strategic social rhetoric, as her
use of the closet drama acts as a structural metaphor for the sociomythological
confinement of the nineteenth-century middle class woman. I investigate how
A Woman Sold exposes the notion that marriage for nineteenth-century mid-
dle class women symbolized a closet of social and cultural paralysis, as grown
from a history of socially and culturally institutionalized gender expectations.
At the same time, I demonstrate how Webster employs irony through a nexus
of genre, narrative, and form to support and advocate for opportunities outside
marriage that encourage female agency to develop.

Essentially, the fundamental argument in this dissertation hinges on

the ways in which Eliot, Field, and Webster revised the conventional closet
drama to renovate and, in turn, reveal the metaphorical and literal closets that
confined social and cultural possibilities for nineteenth-century women.

xvii
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments v

Preface ix

Abstract xv

List of Figures xix

Chapter 1. The Paradoxical Cultural Field

of Closet Drama: Introduction 1

Chapter 2. Angel of the Homeless Tribe:

The Legacy of The Spanish Gypsy 26

Chapter 3. Something of His Manhood Falls:

Michael Fields Stephania as Critique
of Victorian Male Aesthetics and Masculinity 76

Chapter 4. I Could Be Tempted:

The Ev(e)olution of the Angel in the House
in A Woman Sold 129

Chapter 5. Further Renovations of the Closet Drama:

Conclusion 181

Appendix 195

Works Cited 282

Vita 296

xviii
 List of Figures

1 Turning Leaf advertisement, Oprah Magazine, May 2009. . . . xiv

xix
 Chapter 1

The Paradoxical Cultural Field

of Closet Drama: Introduction

The spatial and metaphorical construction of private domestic space

is thus fundamentally paradoxical: the gestures of privacy (con-
cealment, withdrawal, control of access) only become meaningful
if they are discernable to others.
(Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Womens Closet Drama:
1550-1700 )

[T]he closet play as discursive formation and as material ob-

ject is situated in a cultural field in which private and public
are shifting rather than fixed points of reference.
(Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Womens Closet Drama:
1550-1700 )

Like any other institution, genres bring to light the constitutive

features of the society to which they belong.
(Tzvetan Todorov, The Origin of Genres)

This dissertation is about how three nineteenth-century British women

writers used the closet drama, a genre written in dramatic form but meant to

1
be privately read or performed, not only to call attention to the social, cul-
tural, and ideological limitations placed upon women of their time, but also
to portray women breaking through those limitations and moving toward the
possibility of personal development, action, and redemption. The female pro-
tagonists in George Eliots The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Michael Fields Stepha-
nia (1892), and Augusta Websters A Woman Sold (1867) each face a future
seemingly pre-determined by patriarchal, homosocial, and misogynist ideals,
but ultimately reclaim ownership of that future. In these three dramas, this
struggle of a woman taking hold of her own identity begins in the closet, de-
fined by Marta Straznicky in her study of early modern closet drama written
by women as representative of private domestic space in both a spatial and
metaphorical sense. The closet adopts various manifestations in the three
texts I have mentioned, from the figurative for example, the institution of
marriage and the idea of filial duty in The Spanish Gypsy and A Woman Sold
or the disguise of a courtesan in Stephania to the literal, such as the palaces
in The Spanish Gypsy and Stephania or the middle-class domestic space in A
Woman Sold.

In this dissertation, I use Straznickys definition of closet, as well as

the formal taxonomy of the word closet offered by the OED and the more
visionary epistemology of the closet conceptualized by Eve Sedgwick in her
work of the same name, to qualify the material and metaphorical characteris-
tics of the closet inhabited by the female protagonists of The Spanish Gypsy,
Stephania, and A Woman Sold, in addition to those of the closets inhabited by

2
the Victorian woman herself. The OEDs definition of the closet leans toward
the physical:

1. (a) A room for privacy or retirement; a private room; an inner chamber.

(b) Such a room as the place of private devotion.

(c) As the place of private study or secluded speculation; esp. in refer-

ence to mere theories as opposed to practical measures.

2. (a) The private apartment of a monarch or potentate; the private council-

chamber; a room in a palace used by the sovereign for private or
household devotions.

(b) A pew in the chapel of a castle occupied by the lord and his family,
or in a Chapel Royal by the Royal family.

3. (a) A private repository of valuables or (esp. in later use) curiosities; a

cabinet.

(b) A small side-room or recess for storing utensils, provisions, etc.; a

cupboard.

(c) A skeleton in the closet (or cupboard): a private or concealed trou-

ble in ones house or circumstances, ever present, and ever liable to
come into view.

(d) To come out of the closet: to admit (something) openly, to cease to

conceal, esp. ones homosexuality.

3
 4. With special reference to size: Any small room: especially one belonging
to or communicating with a larger.

5. The den or lair of a wild beast.

6. That which affords retirement like a private chamber, or which encloses

like a cabinet; a hidden or secret place, retreat, recess.

7. Short for Closet of ease, water-closet.

8. (a) In reference to the closet as a place of privacy, the word was formerly
almost adjectival = Private.

(b) Secret, covert, used esp. with reference to homosexuality; closet

queen, a secret male homosexual.1

The OED, for the most part, pinpoints the closet as a private, domestic space
for worship, thought, or storage, an image that I will repeatedly return to in
this dissertation. However, I must acknowledge and incorporate the notional
description of the closet provided in lines 3.c)A skeleton in the closet (or
cupboard): a private or concealed trouble in ones house or circumstances,
ever present, and ever liable to come into view.; 3.d) To come out of the
closet: to admit (something) openly, to cease to conceal, esp. ones homosex-
uality.; and 8.b) Secret, covert, used esp. with reference to homosexuality;
closet queen, a secret male homosexual. Of course, the idea of the closet as

1
I edited the OED definition here, removing the indicators of types or parts of speech,
places of origin, and other abbreviations to focus on the meaning of the word closet itself.

4
a site of concealment, withholding, and secrecy, especially in the context of
homosexuality, undoubtedly invites contextualization with Sedgwicks ground-
breaking Epistemology of the Closet (1990), in which she considers the closet
as a publicly intelligible signifier for gay-related epistemological issues (14),
particularly due to the sociocultural assignation of the term homosexual2
during the late nineteenth-century, which instigated a systemic trend of ho-
mophobia that continued into the twentieth century and inspired her pointed
line of antihomophobic inquiry (2). Certainly the dramatic conflicts at the
heart of The Spanish Gypsy, Stephania, and A Woman Sold reflect Sedgwicks
theory about the binarized institutional power structure erected from the late
nineteenth-century sociocultural designation of the term homosexual as clas-
sification of a behavior subordinate and in contrast to heterosexual (2). In-
deed, each of the dramas that comprise the focus of this dissertation mark
the site of an individuals struggle against governing systems (social, political,
cultural, religious, and so forth) in claiming and naming their own identity.

In this dissertation, however, I keep Sedgwicks theory just outside

my argument. I view the logical first step in this particular query of how
Victorian women writers used the closet drama genre to identify the closet
as reflective of a social, cultural, historical, and mythological performance
space for nineteenth-century women as the laying of groundwork: in imagin-
ing this field of study as a closet itself, dark and deep, I see my argument

2
The term homosexual was first mentioned officially in Krafft-Ebings Psychopathia
Sexualis(1892).

5
here as addressing and generating the necessary, even broad, questions about
what the closet drama genre provided nineteenth-century women writers that
other genres could not. I see these questions leading beyond this study toward
more complicated interrogations, ones which use Sedgwicks antihomophobic
inquiry of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts to further illu-
minate the open secret of desire and sexuality that anchors the narratives
and overall character development of The Spanish Gypsy, Stephania, and A
Woman Sold, as well as other nineteenth-century closet dramas written by
women. Though already intrigued by what the rich complexities of Sedgwicks
homosexually-oriented metaphor of the closet can offer, I deem it crucial to
start with a simpler grounding of the closet drama genre and of Eliots, Fields,
and Websters employ of that genre, as related to their textual interpretations
of the closet role given to, and played by, the nineteenth-century woman.

Although Marta Straznicky included the definitions that begin this

introduction in her study of early modern closet drama, her remarks best
describe the manner in which I define closet for the purposes of this dis-
sertation and speak to heart of my argument about Victorian closet drama.
She suggests that women between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies wrote closet plays, or what I will refer to as closet drama, because
the genre, meant to be read silently or aloud, internalized or performed, al-
lowed women authors to enter this shifting paradoxical cultural field,
this private domestic space where they could engage with mental and phys-
ical concepts on a number of levels, both privately and publicly. Straznicky

6
maintains the importance of recognizing those private and public boundaries,
no matter how permeable, as intrinsic to the identity of the closet drama and
as vital to rhetorical interpretation of the work itself (3). My study of the
nineteenth-century closet drama aligns with what Straznicky implies about
the early modern closet drama and focuses on two main points: 1) the notion
that gestures of the closet or private domestic space seem to only have
value in the eyes of others, or society at large, is one that still affects and
restricts womens lives centuries later; and 2) women writers of the nineteenth-
century, in the tradition of their female forebears, rhetorically used the closet
drama genre to reveal the closet or private domestic space as a public field
or stage on which women had to perform sociomythologically and culturally-
determined roles, namely the angel in the house, the femme fatale, the widow,
the wife, and the whore, among others. But while Straznickys investigation
focuses on the motivation and strategy of early modern women authors in
writing closet drama, in my study of The Spanish Gypsy, Stephania, and A
Woman Sold, I turn toward the theory of Tzvetan Todorov, which I also used
to open this introduction, and the way genres reveal the constitutive features
of the society to which they belong (200) in my examination of the closet
drama as a structural and thematic metaphor which signifies the central con-
flict in the lives of both the titular female protagonists at the core of each of
these texts and the nineteenth-century woman.

Though already a common concept in the early modern period, the

assignment of distinct roles for men and women became a popular theme in

7
the nineteenth-century, with men socially assigned to be the guardians of po-
litical and economic affairs and women designated as angels of the household.
As such, women became the site of cultivation for morality, virtue, and peace
befitting nationhood and empire representative of the desire for the greater
good; a communal, public desire. By experimenting with the form of the
traditional closet drama in their telling of women-centered narratives, Eliot,
Field, and Webster created room for their female protagonists to recognize
their personal, private desires in their pursuit of the greater good and to con-
sider unconventional options for their futures. In essence, this dissertation is
about how nineteenth-century women writers in their renovation of the closet
drama attempted to rhetorically reform the dogmatic construction of the Vic-
torian womans closet itself. In this introduction, I will build a foundation for
my argument by first, briefly reporting on the state of contemporary criticism
on closet drama; second, establishing the definition and historical context of
closet drama for the purposes of this dissertation; and third, providing an
overview of the core issue that will be examined in each chapter.

With this dissertation, I hope to enhance the arguments made over

the last several decades by scholars like Terry Otten, Alan Richardson, Shou-
Ren Wang, Marta Straznicky, Karen Raber, Catherine Burroughs, Katherine
Newey, and Susan Brown, who have been making great strides in illuminat-
ing the history, politics, dramaturgy, and metatheatrical aspects of the closet
drama genre. In the 1970s, Otten drew attention to the nineteenth-century
closet drama in his book about the Deserted Stage, in which he discusses the

8
way poets like Shelley, Tennyson, Byron, and Browning were innovators in the
genre, with a goal to embody subjective action in dramatic form (10) or to
move the dramatic focus toward character development. The 1980s included
scholarship by Richardson, who wanted to differentiate Romantic mental the-
ater from closet drama by marking mental theater as a tragedy of conscious-
ness as opposed to a what he saw as dramaturgically viable historical tragedy
(175). A decade later, Wang continued to discuss the Theatre of the Mind and
the work of Shelley, Browning, and Byron, among other male authors, and
made it a point to describe mental theater as unacted drama because of its
subjective content. Not until the twentieth century did work on women closet
dramatists emerge, with Burroughs study of Joanna Baillies dramaturgical
innovations on Closet Stages of the Romantic period, which cut a path to
twenty-first-century study by Straznicky, Raber, Newey, and Brown. These
critics of womens closet drama broadened a field of study formerly focused
on dramas written by, and about, men and began to explore how women in-
corporated the connections between the mind and the body into a genre that
previous scholars like Richardson and Wang were isolating in their mental
and unacted classification.

Despite the different critical approaches, this closet drama revision-

ism, as Burroughs considers the movement, examines the value in the tension
that inherently exists in the closet drama, a genre that has been critically and
historically wedged between, and bound by the characteristics of, drama and
literature (Burroughs 179). Because of its positioning on the cusp of, and its

9
equal potential for falling into, these two categories often seen by critics as op-
positional and exclusive, the closet drama has generated much debate about
not only where it belongs in terms of categorization, but also its value in terms
of both canonical study and performability.3 The closet dramas simultaneous
shouldering against and merging with drama and literature points to what
Straznicky marked as a shifting of public and private and generates a com-
plicated, slippery rhetoric that defies classification. This uncertainty about
whether to read, perform, and situate the closet drama publicly or privately
has resonated in the multitude of synonymous designations associated with
the genre, a list which includes mental theater, private theatricals, unacted
theater, verse drama, poetic drama, dramatic poetry, and lyric drama. The
inconsistent terminology arose based on how a critic viewed a works level of
peformability, its lyricism, and its subject matter, thus reflecting and con-
tributing to the resistance with which early critics engaged with the genre.4

3
The emphasis on a characters emotions as the source of plot created the division between
what were considered successful acting plays as opposed to unsuitable dramatic poems,
as so-called by an anonymous reviewer of Louisa Jane Halls Miriam (1837), who introduces
his/her critique by reaffirming and clarifying the differences between the two genres (North
American Review 314). The reviewer asserts that acting plays emphasize drama, whereas
dramatic poetry emphasizes language (North American Review 315). Dramatic poems,
the reviewer suggests, also allow for licenses in ornament, in description, in rhetoric, in
digression which would be inappropriate and untranslatable on the stage (North American
Review 315). In other words, audiences would lose interest as the drama digressed into
what they viewed as extraneous emoting versus actual plot. Contemporary critic Thomas
Crochinus in Dramatic Closet at the Present Time claims that the way critics and readers
received a writers plays was influenced by public discourse about that writers relationship
to both the stage and the closet (para. 2).
4
While the OED defines closet drama simply as a play intended to be read rather
than performed; such plays collectively, another source positions the genre as [a] literary
composition written in the form of a play (usually as a dramatic poem), but intended

10
Ultimately, all of these terms grew to include and deny each other, and this
lack of stability in classification led to a lack of understanding about the genre
which is only now, and in recent years, gaining interest for its instability.

While I see the value in a study of the nuances in the terminology that
maps the epistemology of the closet drama, particularly as it would fill in the
sketchy history of a multi-faceted genre long neglected, for my argument in
this dissertation, I turn to the basic definition Catherine Burroughs gives in
her study of Romantic closet drama:

[W] ritten to resemble a play script and therefore implying a poten-

tial theatrical performance, the closet play makes dramaturgically
explicit the bifurcated character of all dramatic literature, tensed
between script and live performance. (16)

This definition, like Straznickys, captures the general essence of the closet
drama in its inclusivity and exclusivity, its shifting of private and public: Bur-
roughs pointedly identifies the closet drama as a text written to resemble a

or suited only for reading in a closet (i.e., a private study) rather than for stage
performance (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms). Here, a play becomes a dramatic
poem, a valuation established with regard to dramatic and poetic qualities as the core of
the work is marked a poem and its type identified as dramatic. But dramatic poetry can
be defined as lyrics or short poems that imply a scene; plays that are valorized with
the adjective poetic ; and dramas whose dialogue is calculatingly rhymed in rhythms
that are often regularized into meters and that are usually presented as discreet lines on the
page, in addition to verse drama . . . conceived for performance (Brogan 57). At the same
time, some resources also claim that poetic drama is not identical with dramatic poetry,
which also includes verse compositions not suited for the stage, such as closet dramas
(Oxford Dictionary, emphasis mine). I cannot begin in this dissertation or this introduction
to untangle the different and circular arguments scholars have made about the closet drama,
but I do believe that the debate is a vital one to acknowledge in future study.

11
play script, yet acknowledges the stress and slippage between written script
and live performance. But in order to successfully analyze the particular
nineteenth-century works featured in this dissertation, it is important for me to
amend Burroughs definition by identifying several elements deemed common
to the closet drama written in the nineteenth-century, namely 1) its emphasis
on psychological exploration or personal philosophies of male protagonists or
its male author, 2) its tendency toward historical, mythical, or supernatural
subjects, 3) its large cast of characters, 4) its long speeches, and 5) its use of
blank verse rather than ordinary dialect.

To support and illustrate my criteria, I will provide a quick historical

identification and positioning of the closet drama in the nineteenth-century.
During that time, audiences demanded action on stage, and with the over-the-
top happenings of melodrama, the excitement of music halls, and plays that
addressed and grappled with social issues of popular concern, drama heavy
on character development seemed stagnant and consequently lost its appeal
(Otten 4). Romantic writers, frustrated creatively by what they viewed as de-
terioration in the quality of writing for the stage, began to experiment, moving
toward a deeper, more philosophical approach to action through an exploration
of the self or the a quest for lost morality, what Wang calls the ascendancy of
character (201).5 Robert Browning addressed this creative switch in direction
in the dedication to his first historical tragedy Strafford (1837), emphasizing
Action in character, not Character in Action and implying the action of

5
Also see Burroughs Closet Stages (9) and Ottens Deserted Stages (35).

12
the text erupts from internal rather than external conflict a struggle of the
self and the soul, rather than of the self against society. While Strafford and
plays with similar internal leanings such as Tennysons Maud (1855) eventu-
ally were staged, critics and audiences found the style appropriate for readers,
but too cerebral for audiences. Additionally, many of the dramas had a long
list of characters and rapid and elaborate scene changes, which made staging
difficult and expensive.6 Brownings Strafford fell into both categories. With
a cast of 17 major characters and a slew of minor ones, the drama was based
on events in the life of Thomas Wentworth (Earl of Strafford), a famous En-
glish statesman of the seventeenth century, but Brownings strategy was not to
conventionally dramatize the political exploits of Wentworths biography. In-
stead, the drama grew from Brownings characters and their personal feelings
about a situation.7 A look at Pym, a Parliamentary leader and Straffords po-
litical opponent, when he speaks to Strafford/Wentworth in the final act of the
drama about betraying their friendship for his own political gain, illustrates
Brownings emotional focus:

Have I done well? Speak England! Whose sole sake

I still have laboured for, with disregard

6
For a critical opinion about Strafford that seems to reflect the common opinion at the
turn of the century about this type of mental drama, see Stopford Augustus Brookes
The Poetry of Robert Browning (London, Bath, NY: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons Ltd., 1911)
219-228.
7
In an 1892 edition of Strafford, Samuel L. Gardiner states in the introduction that [t]he
interest of politics is mainly indirect (xiii). He also suggests that Browning abandoned
all attempt to be historically accurate and did so in order to achieve higher truth in
character (xiv).

13
 To my own heart, for whom my youth was made
Barren, my manhood waste, to offer up
Her sacrifice this friend, this Wentworth here
Who walked in youth with me, loved me, it may be[.]
[. . . ] And, saying this, I feel
No bitterer pang than first I felt, the hour
I swore Wentworth might leave us, but I
Would never leave him: I do leave him now.
[. . . ] for I am weak, a man:
Still, I have done my best, my human best,
Not faltering for a moment.
[. . . ] Ay, here I know I talk I dare and must,
Of England, and her great reward, as all
I look for there: but in my inmost heart,
Believe, I think of stealing quite away[.] (268296)

Though one speech among many in the play and obviously taken out of context,
this monologue punctuates a sudden confrontation between two former friends,
yet the focus is on internal action rather than external action. Although Pym
says that he has laboured for England in his political machinations with
disregard for [his] own heart, he goes on to reveal how his labor for England
has left his youth barren, [his] manhood waste, youth and manhood both
abstractions. He literally feel[s], as signposted by the seventh line (and
repeated in various conjugations), that he is weak and, in the end, sees in
his inmost heart his truest desire of stealing away and forgetting all. Pym

14
and Strafford/Wentworth continue an emotional exchange to the last lines of
the drama, clasping each other in the throes of forgiveness as Strafford goes
to his execution. Despite being derived from a history structured by political
maneuvers, the drama ends with a scene not about political triumph, but
about a friendship lost to political triumph an emotional loss.

Some writers had immediately realized that the psychological orienta-

tion of their work would not be not appreciated by theater-goers and decided
their work deserved a better venue than the sinking stage (Wang 6), as Byron
remarked in 1812 during a speech he gave on opening night of the new Drury
Lane theater. Dismissive of the stage and its audiences, Byron privileged what
he named mental theater (Wang 12), a work written to be appreciated by the
solitary reader (Wang xi). In Byrons Manfred (1816), protagonist Manfred is
in anguish over a possibly incestuous relationship with his sister Astarte, who
died as a result, and invokes spirits to help him forget. When they cannot
help him, he tries to stop his thoughts by attempting suicide, but fails when
Fate intervenes. Written in blank verse, the narrative of Manfred turns on
the overwhelming power of a mans psyche as its main conflict, as manifested
through the supernatural and mythical. Early lines of Act One establish the
premise:

My slumbers if I slumber are not sleep,

But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not: in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close

15
 To look within; and yet I live, and bear
The aspect and the form of breathing men. (I, 38)

Immediately, Byron introduces Manfreds conflict: his never-ending enduring

thought that keeps him mentally awake. Manfred continues for 41 more lines;
in [his] mind there is/A power (I, 15-16), and he calls to the Spirits of the
unbounded Universe (I, 29), compelling them to appear by [t]he thought
which is within [him] and around [him] (I, 48) and to help him forget his
angst. From the start, Manfred acts inside his mind, his ultimate goal to
make his internal conflict disappear.

Returning to the five-pronged amendment I made to the closet drama

definition offered by Burroughs, I am interested in the ways nineteenth-century
women writers adopted some of the traditional elements of Romantic mental
theater while adapting others. I begin with my first point: the male-centric
scope of the Romantics. Just as Browning, Tennyson, Byron, and others
depicted psychological drama as a personal, mental closet to thematically
explore and thus composed solipsistic drama classified by critics as best suited
to be read alone in a private domestic space, or physical closet, women writers
also used the genre to call attention to and explore the psyche and domestic
space. However, the private navel-gazing of their female protagonists did not
lead to the personal anguish found in the depths of the soul, but rather to the
personal freedom and social engagement found in the exposure and reforma-
tion of ideological, psychological, even physical, closets which restricted social
and cultural possibilities for their gender. I chose works by Eliot, Field, and

16
Webster as revisionary examples of how women saw the closet drama not as
a venue for inward-thinking but outward mobility, as their protagonists grow
toward moments of self-awareness and take risks for their future. In all three
texts, Eliots The Spanish Gypsy, Fields Stephania, and Websters A Woman
Sold, the emotional conflict of the female protagonist inspires her to act in
her society, rather than withdraw from it. Unlike Byrons Manfred, who longs
for self-oblivion (I, 145), all of the female protagonists of the closet dramas
discussed in this dissertation work through their psychological discord, an ac-
tion which makes them evaluate and challenge the restrictive choices regarding
their gender roles, sexual identity, and social power. These protagonists, by
facing and exploring their emotions, claim a physical connection to, and agency
in, the world around them and represent potential change for women on and
off the page. The closet drama allowed Eliot, Field, and Webster to create
opportunities, situations, and destinies for their female protagonists in ways
that other genres could not.

This idea draws me back to the rest of the points I included in my

amendment to Burroughs closet drama definition: though the three authors
took on different forms and themes and varied their prosody as well as the size
of their cast of characters, they all, like their male counterparts, abandoned in
varying degrees the popular style of realism, or a style that looked toward an
authentic and unidealized portrayal of life (OED). But these women writers
used history, mythology, and mysticism not to emphasize the genres mental
focus or their protagonists lack of real-world engagement, but instead to shed

17
light on prescriptives and issues which had the power to form and reform the
identity physical and figurative of women. Mary Eagleton, in Genre
and Gender, suggests that [n]on-realist forms [of writing] permit the woman
writer to express the contradictions, fantasies or desires that the demands of
realism silence (253). Though Eagleton refers to modernist or avant-garde
forms of writing and even lecriture feminine (253), I aim to illustrate in
this dissertation that the three works by Eliot, Field, and Webster indeed
express the contradictions, fantasies, or desires of their female protagonists,
particularly those that the demands of realism silence. In the reality of
the patriarchal, misogynist society of the nineteenth-century, the corporeal
existence of women was commonly recognized as either angel or whore, or, by
and large, women were not physically recognized, or heard, at all. While Eliot,
Field, and Webster acknowledged the growing trend of realism in other work,
they used the non-realism of the closet drama, ironically, to give their female
protagonists presence, power, and voice.

Each chapter of this dissertation highlights the distinct choices Eliot,

Field, and Webster made in reforming the closet drama genre. In On Form,
Angela Leighton describes form as the distribution of space caused by edging
one thing against another, so that each calls attention to the other (16).
She sees form as not a fixed shape to be seen, but the shape of a choice
to be made (16). In each chapter, I focus on the shape of those choices
made by each author, and how the spaces literal and metaphorical cal[l]
attention to, or contextualize, not only each other, but also the narrative, the

18
characters, and the genre as a whole. I also touch back on an idea Otten posed
in his study of what he saw as the innovative literary drama of the nineteenth-
century: how the primarily subjective or internal action in each play forced
its poet to experiment with new structural forms or drastically to modify
orthodox dramatic form (12). Like Ottens decades ago, my thesis deals
with how a protagonists internal action her spaces, her choices, her closets
demanded a new structural form, a new fixed shape, a new authorial
choice in modifying the closet drama. With that in mind, I evaluate the texts
in this dissertation not in chronological order, but rather in an order that
pulls attention to the way each dramas form signals the connection between
the authors formal use of nonrealism and their female protagonists level of
mobility. I am interested in discovering if the farther an author strays from
formal realism, the larger potential for public impact their female protagonists
choices have in their fictional worlds.

By the same token, I am also interested in discovering through the anal-

ysis of these closet dramas if the more impact the female protagonists actions
have in a world of nonrealism, the stronger an authors critique about the less
real potential the Victorian woman has to effect a significant public change
from a position of authority. In examining The Spanish Gypsy, Stephania, and
A Woman Sold in that order from the drama I see as constructed with
the fewest elements of formal realism to the drama possessing the most I
aim for a reading of these texts that identifies them as important portals to a
more expansive study of how the act of revising the closet drama for women

19
writers of the nineteenth-century seemed to serve as a conscious, formal way
to suggest that the only way a woman of the Victorian period could revise her
role in the closet into one of authority and power was to revise the history and
the belief systems that led her there.

The Spanish Gypsy : The Epic Closet

Although George Eliot drew success from the novel form, she made
a conscious decision to depart from that genre in constructing The Spanish
Gypsy, the tale of a fifteenth-century young woman who, though raised in a
Spanish palace, discovers she is a Gypsy princess and must choose between
her love for a Spanish knight and her allegiance to her father, who wants her
help in leading the Gypsy nation toward their future outside of Spain. The
unusual form of The Spanish Gypsy, a hybrid of prose, poetry, and drama,
has been critically mentioned, but as a focus of study has been strangely
ignored. In 2008, Antonie Gerard van den Broek edited the scholarly edition
of The Spanish Gypsy, including Eliots various drafts, but analysis was spare.
Critics like Deborah Nord, Michael Ragussis, Victor Neufeldt, and Brenda
McKay have looked at the The Spanish Gypsy through the lenses of race,
nationalism, memory, and identity, while others have evaluated The Spanish
Gypsy against Eliots novels, often treating the work as little more than a
testing ground for ideas, themes, characters, and plots for Eliots future texts
like Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda. While it is important to explore the
ways in which The Spanish Gypsy relates to and lends new understanding of
Eliots other texts, The Spanish Gypsy should not be regarded as a secondary

20
afterthought or an anomaly in comparison to those works.

In Middlemarch, the narrator says in the Prelude that no woman torn

between self-despair and the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self has
had an epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action;
perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur
ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which
found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion (3). As a closet drama
infused with elements of the epic, The Spanish Gypsy proposes that a womans
internal conflicts, conflicts that arise from her thinking about and challenging
the covenants of patriarchal society, can indeed set her on a heroic quest of
spiritual grandeur and can offer the chance for far-resonant action to be
remembered for all time. Eliot connects the narrator of The Spanish Gypsy to
the tradition of epic storytelling, and subsequently collective memory, and thus
mythologizes, memorializes, Fedalmas narrative, joining a womans private,
internal struggle with a public consciousness. Furthermore, the works title,
The Spanish Gypsy, makes it clear that this is not a story about an ordinary
place (like Middlemarch or The Mill on the Floss) or an ordinary person (like
Adam Bede or even Romola). The title of The Spanish Gypsy emphasizes
the protagonists singularity, her uniqueness; at the same time, she is not
specifically named and consequently becomes a symbol, an icon. Thus, Eliot,
in fact, becomes the sacred poet who keeps the Spanish Gypsy from sinking
unwept into oblivion.

Stephania: The Closet of the Empire and Art

21
 My second chapter offers a new perspective on the critical scholarship
of Michael Field (the aunt and niece pairing of Katharine Bradley and Edith
Cooper) by evaluating their little-known drama, Stephania. Although Fields
canon includes 25 dramas, scholars have focused on their lyric poetry, their
collaborative relationship as Michael Field, and the homoerotic/homosexual
nature of their relationship.8 On the whole, despite unsubstantial mentions in
critical articles, Fields dramatic opus has been unstudied, with the exception
of David Moriartys Michael Field and Male Critics, which focuses on how
men of letters received Fields dramatic work; Holly Lairds Michael Field
as the Author of Borgia, which discusses the post-Michael Field phase of
Bradley and Coopers authorial anonymity; and Vickie L. Tafts The Tragic
Mary: A Case Study in Michael Fields Understanding of Sexual Politics,
which looks at The Tragic Mary (1890) through a lens of same-sex desire. Both
contemporary scholars and turn-of-the-century critics alike have attributed
Fields marginal literary success to Bradleys and Coopers spinsterhood, their
gender, their collaboration, and the genres in which they wrote. But I want
to recognize Stephania as a signpost in a career that would be more and more
disregarded, particularly by their literary coterie at the fin de si`ecle, a coterie

8
I remark here about Yopie Prins showing how the homoerotic Sapphism of Michael
Field revises the singularity of authorship associated with the lyric (17); Virginia Blain
investigating the problematic cultural myth, or rather series of myths that have been con-
structed around the sign of Michael Field (243); Holly Laird, Bette London, and Lorraine
York exposing the complex, creative, feminist, and erotic space of Bradley and Coopers col-
laboration; Sharon Bickle recovering the lesbian textuality in the personal correspondence
archived at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and Marion Thain examining Fields poetry
with an eye to its role in the aesthetic movement.

22
made up primarily of men notably aligned with the Decadent movement. In
my study of Stephania, I want to show how Bradley and Cooper alienated
this group of Decadent male readers with the story about a former empress
in eleventh-century Rome who exacts revenge on the new ruler and his male
mentor for murdering her husband and usurping the Empire, an allegory that
identified the homosocial/homosexual desires of the male Decadent community
as the source of what Bradley and Cooper saw as a nineteenth-century empire
of Art in rapid decline.

A Woman Sold : The Closet of Eve and Angels

Much like Stephania, A Woman Sold has been overshadowed by the

study of Websters poetic canon, which includes lyrics, dramatic monologues,
and translations. In this chapter, I want to propose a reading of A Woman
Sold that not only reveals a new angle to Websters writing career, but also
predicts the rhetoric of irony that she will use in her future essays to champion
womens social and political causes. Webster unites the genre, form, and
narrative of A Woman Sold to project an ironic metanarrative that challenges
the literal message of the text: while at its core A Woman Sold appears to
center on a simple marriage plot about a young woman torn between marrying
the man she loves and the wealthy man her parents want her to marry, Webster
weaves a subtle allegory that depicts the institution of marriage as a confining
closet where her female protagonist is trapped inside the sociomythological
constructs of the biblical Eve and the nineteenth-century angel in the house
made popular by Coventry Patmore; specifically, marriage in this drama is

23
portrayed as a bound, restrictive space where the nineteenth-century middle
class woman must play the angelic, virtuous role to make amends for Eves
original sin or accept the consequences of causing societys downfall. With
her structural choices and allegorical reference, Webster implies that the idea
of womanhood in this drama is not new to the nineteenth-century, but began
with the birth of humanity itself, and thus proposes that the very nature of a
womans identity and existence has forever been sold on the sociomythology
born from patriarchal ideology. At the same time, Websters revision of the
closet drama points the way toward the possibility for female agency to grow
outside these ideologically constructed closets.

My purpose in this dissertation is to take a closer, more critical look at

The Spanish Gypsy, Stephania, and A Woman Sold, three works that have been
marginalized in their classification, as well as for their unusual forms, in order
to widen the scope in the existing analysis of how Victorian women authors
contributed to the closet drama genre. Ultimately, I want to offer a new
criteria, other than aesthetic, for determining their value and the value of other
closet dramas written by Victorian women, especially in viewing the works
varied forms as examples of an inherently inward-focused genre renovated to
open a personal, social, and cultural space of mobility for nineteenth-century
women. I see the study of these texts as important to furthering the movement
of closet drama revisionism and to (re)building the historicization of an oft-
ignored genre that bridges traditions of both literature and theater, in order to
reveal, through the metaphor of the closet, a critique of the nineteenth-century

24
womans designated place in the politics of gender and sexuality.

25
 Chapter 2

Angel of the Homeless Tribe:

The Legacy of The Spanish Gypsy

I want something different from the abstract treatment which be-

longs to grave history from a doctrinal point of view, and something
different from the schemed picturesqueness of ordinary historical
fiction.
(George Eliot, Leaves from a Notebook, 1884)

In his 1868 review of the The Spanish Gypsy, Henry James wrote that
until the publication of this particular work, many readers himself included
had hitherto only half known George Eliot and that by [a]dding this
dazzling new half to the old one, readers constructed for a moment a really
splendid literary figure (622). Though James went on to say that the dramas
virtues and failings (622) ultimately revealed the same old Eliot everyone
knew, Jamess initial insight provides an opening for a revised understanding
of Eliots art. Indeed, The Spanish Gypsy (1868) shows a dazzling new half
of Eliot, one that allows her to be associated with the word novel, not
simply referencing the literary genre but also meaning innovative, unique, even
atypical. In writing The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot exchanged her signature realism
to write something different from the schemed picturesqueness of ordinary

26
historical fiction, or a modified closet drama, an inventive work that shows
her challenging both literary and social conventions of the mid-nineteenth-
century.

Eliot, in the essay Leaves from a Notebook included within a collec-

tion published in 1884, asked, What is the best way of telling a story? Since
the standard must be the interest of the audience, there must be several or
many good ways rather than one best (qtd. in Pinney 444). Indeed, with The
Spanish Gypsy, Eliot combines several or many good storytelling techniques
to meet the interest of the audience. Although Eliot, in the Preface to The
Spanish Gypsy, notes that she mimicked the trochaic measure and assonance
of the Spanish Ballad, the work is structurally a hybrid of verse, drama, and
prose. In this chapter, I want to examine Eliots unique blend of verse and
drama in order to show how the closet dramas infusion of epic elements ex-
pands Eliots authorial identity from novelist to experimental poet/dramatist
and revisionary historian. It is no coincidence that The Spanish Gypsy ex-
emplifies the organic, variable philosophy reflected in Eliots Notes on Form
in Art, written the same year The Spanish Gypsy was published but printed
some time after; in her notes, Eliot discusses the metaphorical, moving bound-
aries, the constant interchange of effects, that develop and shape a poetic
form (qtd. in Pinney 435). Although the ideas in Eliots notes can certainly
be applied to a study of Eliots fiction as observed by Eliot scholars Freder-
ick Karl and Thomas Pinney, Eliot wrote her novels with an eye toward a
more realistic treatment as noted in a letter she wrote to her publisher John

27
Blackwood in 1861 after the release of the novel Silas Marner. Despite the
classification of Silas Marner as a legendary tale, one that focused heavily
on the psychology of Silas himself, Eliot did not think his story expansive
enough to warrant a poetic form (qtd. in Haight, Biography 341). Obviously,
for Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy required a form not bound by realism, a form
that could reveal the psychology of its main character and could also hold
the constant interchange of effects needed to tell a legendary tale a form
united by the genre characteristics of the closet drama and the epic.

Eliot incorporated elements of the outward-seeking epic into the intro-

spective closet drama in order to frame the narrative of Fedalma, the virginal
bride of the Spanish knight Don Silva. Believed to have been found as a child
by Silvas mother, Fedalma was raised to fulfill the role of the proper Duchess
she would some day become as Silvas wife. But when a Spanish captive, the
king of the Gypsies (or Zincali, both terms used by Eliot) tells Fedalma she is
his daughter and was long ago stolen from their camp, their nation, during a
raid, she struggles to determine where she belongs and where her loyalties lie.1
Fedalmas internal conflict her initial hesitation over her identity as Silvas
wife, her love for Silva, her duty to her father, and the uncertainty that arises
from her privately contemplating her complicated circumstances becomes
the impetus for her confrontation of the roles she has been socially and cul-

1
In this dissertation, when referencing textual details of The Spanish Gypsy, I use the
terms Eliot herself employs in order to be consistent with the work itself. However, I would
like to note that Romany or Romani is the name preferred for the group in contemporary
classification (Nord 18, Hancock xvii).

28
turally assigned. From options bound by patriarchal prescriptions grows her
fated personal quest, as underscored by the merging of the conventional closet
drama with qualities of the epic.

In bringing certain characteristics of the epic, a genre of valiant action

and adventure, to the closet drama, a genre predicated on private, personal
happenings, Eliot metaphorically reclaimed for her female protagonist (and
women of her time) the space to actively change her socio-cultural role and to
imagine, if only for a time, how that change might impact lives and destinies
of a nation. The conventional closet drama of the mid-nineteenth-century,
more fully defined in the Introduction of this dissertation, took the form of
a dramatic script written in verse for literary purposes or private production.
Closet drama narratives usually focused on action often emerging from inner
conflict or offered a story too large and complex to be portrayed on an actual
stage. Epic convention cast its protagonist as a heroic male figure whose
individual mission his destiny determines the future of others. His actions
decide their fate, which often involves the fate of a nation or race (Brogan 72).
Eliots innovation began when she referenced the male-centered epic in telling
the tale of a female protagonist psychologically struggling with her identity
and seeking a future where she can satisfy her desires along with everyone
elses.

In 1857, Elizabeth Barrett Browning achieved something similar with

Aurora Leigh by reconstituting the male-orientation of the epic in what crit-
ics considered a novel-poem. As the story of a woman writer trying to find

29
her identity both socially and professionally, Aurora Leigh was modern in set-
ting, relatively autobiographical, and was told using realism, rather than the
grand, elevated style of the traditional epic (Brogan 72). Barrett Browning,
distrust[ing] the poet who . . . trundles back his soul five hundred years (Au-
rora Leigh V, 191) for inspiration, decided to create a contemporary or living
epic (Friedman 211). Although Barrett Browning wanted to acknowledge an
epic woman in, and for, her time and chose to locate the plot of Aurora Leigh
within the scope of ordinary life, Aurora Leigh does resemble The Spanish
Gypsy in its idea of legacy. Both Aurora Leigh and The Spanish Gypsy show
a woman rising to meet her larger destiny as the leader of a marginalized,
even socially invisible, people women writers for Aurora Leigh, women and
Gypsies for Eliots female protagnist Fedalma. As the titular subjects of
tales which recall the collective memory of oral tradition, Aurora Leigh and
Fedalma symbolically unite and immortalize their respective nations by the
record of their very existence and experience (though fictional) and become
cultural figureheads and/or matriarchs. Yet at the end of her story, unlike
Aurora Leigh, Fedalma is not relegated to a future of marriage.2

In this chapter, I want to argue that Eliots formal revision of the closet
drama genre helps construct a female protagonist unlike any of her others, one
who has the opportunity to make a social, cultural, and historical impact
within her world, one who despite her social casting as both angel in the

2
See the chapter in this dissertation on Augusta Webster for a more detailed view of
nineteenth-century marriage.

30
house and exotic other presses against her domestic confines and moves
toward a sense of independence and agency. While Barrett Browning used
qualities of the novel, a female-coded genre, to revise the epic, Eliot turned
away from the medium in which she primarily worked. For The Spanish Gypsy,
she went outside the home epic (a term for her novels which she coined in
Middlemarch [1871]) to ultimately settle on the closet drama. At the time,
women writers like Augusta Webster were putting a twist on the closet drama
much in the way Barrett Browning did with the epic, using contemporary
settings and topics to show middle-class Victorian women as split subjects
(Brown 104) torn between their individual desires and social duty as a women.
While Eliot did choose a present-day setting and context for her closet drama
Armgart (1871), about a gender-bending stage actress who must deal with
losing her voice, Eliot turned to the historical resonance of the epic to adapt
the closet drama in writing The Spanish Gypsy.

To develop this argument, I will first discuss The Spanish Gypsy in the
context of Eliots career at the time. In doing so, I will reveal her awareness
of the rhetorical effects of different genres, as well as the ways in which the
collision of epic and closet drama conventions caused a problem for some lit-
erary critics, those who could not accept works that ignored or tampered with
prescriptive notions of genre. Then, I will demonstrate how characteristics of
the epic and closet drama work with certain elements of The Spanish Gypsy to
create a unique form that develops new possibilities for its female protagonist,
possibilities which can only come from, and exist in, this hybrid.

31
In the Most Irregular Fashion: The Epic Hybridization of the
Closet Drama

In December 1863, Eliot attended a play, Leah the Forsaken, with her
partner George Lewes (Haight, Biography 374). Lewes was inspired by the un-
requited love story between a young Jewish girl and a Christian farmer set in
seventeenth century Germany and felt compelled to write a similarly-themed
play for their actress-friend Helen Faucit (Haight, Biography 374). He outlines
the five-act plot, but urges Eliot to flesh out the drama itself (Haight, Biog-
raphy 374). Eliot agreed, but the project was eventually neglected; however,
the bare essence of the story and Eliots desire to write a drama remained
(Haight, Biography 375; Karl 379). Yet, Eliot felt compelled to change the
subject matter; she writes in her Notes on The Spanish Gypsy:

nothing would serve me except that moment in Spanish history

when the struggle with the Moors was attaining its climax, and
when there was the gypsy race present under such conditions as
would enable me to get my heroine and the hereditary claim on
her among the gypsies. (qtd. in Haight, Biography 376)

On September 6, 1864, Eliot notes in her journal that she has begun the
First Act of [her] drama (qtd. in Haight, Letters 165). By early November,
she is well into the second act, and by the new year, she has completed the
third (Haight, Letters 167). When she becomes ill in February 1865, on the
strong advice of Lewes Eliot sets aside the drama, now four acts, and does

32
not return to it until August 1866 (Haight, Letters 303). At this point, Eliot
still considers the work a drama, precisely because it was in that stage of
creation, or werden, in which the idea of the characters predominates over the
incarnation (qtd. in Haight, Letters 303; in Cross 332). But Eliot is dubious
about the dramatic form and writes that the whole requires recasting and
that she intends to give The Spanish Gypsy a new form (qtd. in Haight,
Letters 303; in Cross 333, 334). A year later, Eliot classifies the work as a poem
that began as a drama, yet the structural shadow of its original form remains
in palimpsest. However, in a letter to John Blackwood dated December 30,
1867, Eliot says that [Lewes] is especially pleased with the sense of variety
[The Spanish Gypsy] gives; and this testimony is worth the more, because he
urged me to put the poem by on the ground of monotony (qtd. in Haight,
Letters 412; in Cross 360).

This sense of variety describes the way The Spanish Gypsy is repre-
sented and categorized in years to come, situated in the variable gap between
poetry and drama by literary critics and scholars alike. For example, though
her article is included in an issue of Victorian Poetry, Susan Brown classifies
The Spanish Gypsy as a closet drama and defines closet drama as a perfor-
mance that will occur within a readers mind as he or she sits inside closets
or private rooms (Brown 89, 91), while Sylvia Kasey Marks describes The
Spanish Gypsy as a long dramatic poem (Marks 184). Despite this ob-
vious slippage in classifying the works genre and Eliots pointed essays on
form, scholars have focused their studies of The Spanish Gypsy on Fedalmas

33
characterization, the theme of social duty and personal desire, the connection
between the Gypsy people and English identity/nationalism, Eliots technique
of narrative sympathy, and the relationship between The Spanish Gypsy and
Eliots novels.3 None have fully examined the link between the works genre
blend, unusual form, and character development of its female protagonist.4

While scholars do find The Spanish Gypsy of interest with regard to

Eliot and her novelistic career, astonishingly many still consider the work aes-
thetically inferior to Eliots other books and tend to echo K.M. Newton, who

3
Ian Hancock in We are the Romani People, Lou Charnon-Deutsch in The Spanish Gypsy:
The History of a European Obsession, and Deborah Epstein Nord in Gypsies and the British
Imagination, 18071930 provide comprehensive discussions on the histories of the gypsy
race. Both Charnon-Deutsch and Nord cover the mystery of their origin (Nord 7) and
mark the commonly held belief that their race originated in Egypt, which notes the deriva-
tion of the name gypsy from Egyptian (Nord 7, Charnon-Deutsch 5). Romany, or
Romani is the name currently preferred in contemporary classification (Nord 18, Hancock
xvii).
4
The scholarship on The Spanish Gypsy includes: 1) Lou Charnon-Deutschs The Spanish
Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession, a study of the idealized and sometimes
demonized figure of the Spanish Gypsy over centuries, which contains a section on Eliots
The Spanish Gypsy (4); Charnon-Deutsch focuses on the way nineteenth-century social
scientists across Europe influenced public perception of the Spanish Gypsies and looks at
how the rhetoric of race plays out in the drama, discussing how it affects duty, freedom,
nationhood, and even science(114124); 2) Bernard Semmels George Eliot and the Politics
of National Inheritance, a study of Eliots drama as reflective of social conservatism and
positivism; 3) Michael Ragussiss Figures of Conversion: The Jewish Question and English
National Identity, a turn toward the Jewish perspective in the drama (per a minor character,
Sephardo), though he does consider The Spanish Gypsy a portrait of the heroism of the
female heart; the entire project of The Spanish Gypsy was framed from the beginning by
an attempt to understand in what ways the genre of tragedy could function as category of
the feminine that is, as a representation of a specifically female action (152); however,
he neglects to fully explore the ways and leans into a discussion on race; 4)Deborah Epstein
Nords focus on the gypsy as a symbol of unconventional [. . . ] femininity in Marks of
Race: Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in nineteenth-century Womens Writing;
and 5) James Krasners look at the tension between fame and artistry for Fedalma and
for Eliot herself in Where No Man Praised: The Retreat from Fame in George Eliots
The Spanish Gypsy.

34
makes the distinction that while The Spanish Gypsy reveals a side of Eliots
canon that opens up a new realm of Eliot study, no one would make great
claims for the poem as a work of art (390) or Deborah Epstein Nord, who
considers The Spanish Gypsy a rehearsal for the novel Daniel Deronda (Nord
100). However, The Spanish Gypsy, as a hybrid of the closet drama and the
epic, allowed Eliot to create a space where the fate of her female protagonist is
eternal, generative, and hopeful, even positively affected by the sorrows of per-
sonal sacrifice. Unlike Eliots other female protagonists, Fedalma is recognized,
even mythologized, for her self-sacrifice and is cast as a heroine, essentially a
Moses destined to deliver [her people] from bondage into freedom in a new
land (Nord 109). The Spanish Gypsy elevates Fedalmas quest for identity
and agency (an internal conflict) to the heroic, making her story worthy of
legend and legacy. In comparison, Eliots Armgart, while also focusing on a
womens struggle to define herself and her role in society, is not epic in scope.5
Armgart tells the contemporary story of an opera singer who loses her voice
to illness and worries about how that loss will affect her present and future,
lamenting that she has been cast to The Womans Lot: A Tale of Everyday
(Armgart V, 129). Katherine Newey argues that Armgart liberated Eliot as
a work in which the future of the female protagonist offers more than death
Armgart becomes a singing teacher while The Spanish Gypsy weigh[ed
Eliot] down in that regard (114115). Though many biographical details

5
Eliots The Legend of Jubal (1870), though possessing themes of minstrelsy, identity,
and community which reflect The Spanish Gypsy and epic in nature, is a long narrative
poem, not a drama.

35
about Eliot could support Neweys claim, I disagree; the form of The Spanish
Gypsy, just as the form of Armgart, plays an essential part in developing the
narrative and rhetoric it is trying to convey.6 A close examination of The
Spanish Gypsy shows that, while the epic and the closet drama lost Victorian
readership to the popularity of the novel, Eliots combination of these demode,
yet classic genres into one work makes a creative and social statement about
how the formal revision of genres extant and emerging in the mid-nineteenth-
century speaks to the revision of roles and prescriptions given to Victorian
women, in and out of literature.

Eliot displayed her enthusiasm for inventive approaches to writing in

Leaves from a Notebook. She wrote that an author had the responsibility to
bring a new perspective to old ideas and ordinary concepts and argues, Why
should a story not be told in the most irregular fashion that an authors id-
iosyncrasy may prompt, provided that he gives us what we can enjoy? . . . The
dear public would do well to reflect that they are often bored from the want of
flexibility in their own minds(qtd. in Pinney 446). In giving her readers The

6
Eliot experienced massive anxiety and depression while writing The Spanish Gypsy.
Frederick Karl in George Eliot: Voice of a Century, his biography of Eliot, claims that at
the time of her writing [h]er talk is all of malaise and feebleness clearly psychological and
emotional (384). Between 186365, she hit bottom, Karl writes, and after considerable
writhing, she reached more deeply into herself than ever before; from that, she could exorcise
the subjective parts of herself and let a more objective, broader element emerge (386). Karl
also says the drama evoked personal feelings for her about her father, whom Eliot idealized
as a young girl and on whom he solely depended later in life. As an old man, he was very
set in his ways and in his politics protected the past as something sacred, his role in it as
priestly (43). Additionally, her anxiety could have been related to financial strain this
period marked a dry spell in her writing and income or various ailments (419).

36
Spanish Gypsy, Eliot challenged the flexibility of her readership by telling
the story in an irregular fashion, perhaps in hopes that her idiosyncrasy
would inspire them to think about what the innovations signified or suggested
to the story. The year The Spanish Gypsy was published, Eliot also wrote in
another personal notebook that

it must be more fruitful to ask, what relations of things can be

properly included under the word Form as applied to artistic com-
position, than to decide without any such previous inquiry that a
particular work is wanting in form, or to take it for granted that
the works of any one period or people are the examples of all that
is admissible in artistic form. (qtd. in Pinney 432)

Eliot obviously saw, with regard to Form, the value in slipping outside the
admissible, in originality, in creativity, in relations of things. Yet after the
incredible success of the series Scenes of a Clerical Life (1858) and the novels
Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola
(1863), and Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Eliot was aware that her faithful
readership might not like a work wanting in form, or an idiosyncratic and
irregular poetic turn inward and toward the past.7 Eliot began to warn her

7
In writing Romola, a historical romance set in fifteenth-century Florence, Eliot was
worried about the publics reception. Eliot wrote in a letter to John Blackwood, You
know very well enough the received phrases with which a writer is greeted when he does
something else than what was expected of him (qtd. in Cross 208). But Romola, like her
other novels, did strive for realism unlike The Spanish Gypsy; in a letter to R.H. Hutton,
she suggests that the details of Florentine life and history hold the same weight as the
details of English village life(qtd. in Cross 276).

37
publisher, John Blackwood, long before the work was sent out into the world;
on a letter dated March 21, 1867, she writes, The work connected with Spain
is not a romance. It is prepare your fortitude it is a poem (qtd.
in Haight, Letters 354-355; in Cross 348). She goes on to say that she is
not hopeful about the new work, despite being quite sure the subject is
fine(qtd. in Haight, Letters 354-355; in Cross 348). In later correspondence,
Blackwood encourages Eliot about the work, but Eliot remains cautious. On
December 7, 1867, she replies, What you say about Fedalma is very cheering.
But I am chiefly anxious about the road still untravelled the road I have
still zur
uck zu legen [to cover](qtd. in Haight, Letters 404; in Cross 357).
After publication of The Spanish Gypsy, Eliots public continues to worry her,
as noted in May 1868, when she writes to her friend Caroline Bray,

I expect a good deal of disgust to be felt towards me in many

quarters for doing what was not looked for from me, and becom-
ing unreadable to many who have hitherto found me readable and
debateable. Religion and novels every ignorant person feels compe-
tent to give an opinion about, but en fait de poesie, a large number
of them only read Shakespeare.(qtd. in Haight, Letters 438; in
Cross 15)

Obviously, Eliot anticipated The Spanish Gypsy to be poorly received, as read-

ers who expected the readable style of novels would greet the drama with
a good deal of disgust.

38
 But despite her anxieties, Eliot was compelled to frame the story in
this unfashionable way, as she notes in a letter to Blackwood at the end of
March 1868 when she says The Spanish Gypsy is a little in the fashion of the
elder dramatists, with whom I have perhaps more cousinship than with recent
poets (qtd. in Haight, Letters 428; in Cross 4). As the fashion of those
elder dramatists, Eliot was inspired by history: a small Titian painting of
the Annunciation that she had spied on her second visit to the Scuola di San
Rocco in Venice inspired new ideas. As she scribbled in her notes on the work,
she wrote, It occurred to me that here was a great dramatic motive of the
same class as those used by the Greek dramatists, yet specifically differing
from them (qtd. in Haight, Biography 376; in Cross 9). In the painting, Eliot
sees the story of a young woman torn between marriage and a more profound
destiny one entailing a terribly different experience from that of ordinary
womanhood (qtd. in Haight, Biography 376; in Cross 9) as a universal
tragedy weighing individual desires against the actions which would support
the greater good, or community. However, she does not simply contain this
narrative in the classic tragedy, or even a novel, with a female protagonist
whose downfall leads to resignation of domestic duty or death, as exemplified
by Romola or The Mill on the Flosss Maggie Tulliver. Instead, Eliot turns
these tragic elements into a dramatic, epic conflict that does not doom her
female protagonist to a bleak, bound, definitive end.

At the time of The Spanish Gypsys initial inception, Eliot was not
new to the epic and, in a letter to M. DAlbert-Durade in 1860, considered

39
her novels to possess epic breadth and also an epic tediousness, a possible
reference to her wide scope of characterization, theme, and setting (qtd. in
Haight, Letters 361; in Cross 215). The epic, a long narrative poem with a
setting which unfolds on a grand and vivid scale, originated as an oral genre,
a tale told and shared by a community. By that year, Eliot had published two
novels, Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860), both of which fo-
cus on relationships in provincial English communities as well as on the theme
of individual desire versus a moral and social duty that seems preordained.
These home epics represent Eliots signature style, one which translates the
elevated settings, deeds, action, and consequence characteristic of the epic into
those relative to the domestic sphere and the ordinary person. Book One of
The Mill on the Floss begins with a narrator who dreams s/he is standing on a
bridge overlooking the idyllic river Floss, and as an epic poet might, expresses
his or her intention to tell the reader a tale about a day long gone by but
still resonant in the present, a tale that starts with an ordinary Mr. and Mrs.
Tulliver who sat by the bright fire in the left-hand parlour (13). In Adam
Bede, the narrator compares himself or herself to an Egyptian sorcerer who
uses a single drop of ink to reveal the far-reaching visions of the past and
takes the reader, not to an epic battle or conflict, but to the village workshop
of carpenter Jonathan Burge. In these two novels, and in the two to follow
before publication of The Spanish Gypsy Silas Marner (1861) and Felix
Holt (1866) Eliot establishes her narrator as a conduit of memory, a phys-
ical way to bring past into present, possibly to shape the future. As told by

40
the narrator, and by Eliot herself, these home epics were a record of localized,
domestic traditions, experiences, and history.

But with Romola, first published serialized in Cornhill Magazine be-

tween July 1862 and August 1863, Eliot veered from the recognizable settings,
characterizations, and conflicts to a novel influenced by both the epic and his-
torical romance. Set in the midst of fifteenth-century Florence when the Medici
were ousted by King Charles VIII of France and Dominican priest Girolamo
Savonarola swept through the city with his religious reforms, the novel gar-
nered mixed reactions. In 1863, Robert Browning couldnt immediately find
a copy of Romola because Eliots fans were so anxious to read the work they
snatched every copy they could (Sanders 7). But although sales of Romola
were high, Eliot drew disappointment from her readership in veering from
her conversational tone and contemporary setting, as she imagined she would.
Though many critics still regarded Eliot as a skillful and deft writer, they also
felt that [s]ometimes the antiquarian quite drowns the novelist (Saturday
Review 21) and that [t]he historical background . . . somewhat oppresses the
human interest of the tale, and in its ultimate impression affects us like a
mediaeval painted window, in which the action has to be disentangled from
the blaze of color and overwhelming accessories (Westminster Review 28).
Even for a historical novel with elements of romance and melodrama, readers
found the tone of Romola artificial and somewhat over self-conscious, even
pompous in its self-consciously epic assertiveness (Sanders 10, 16). Eliots
readers, though loyal in their purchase, missed the folksy novel world she

41
usually delivered.

However, the self-conscious qualities and assertive risks of Ro-

mola apparently made appropriate scaffolding for The Spanish Gypsy, whose
pompous larger-than-life themes, plot, and characters seemingly required a
true epic frame. Told by a narrator whose identity is not blatantly revealed,
The Spanish Gypsys narrative develops against the lush and detailed fifteenth
century backdrop of the Christian-Muslim battle over Spain and the eradica-
tion of both the Jews and the Gypsies and focuses on two protagonists, Duke
Silva, a goodly knight, [a] noble caballero (I, 20708), and Fedalma, a vir-
ginal orphan raised by Silvas mother after being stolen during a raid on a
Gypsy camp.8 Fedalma is believed by some characters (represented by the
Roman Catholic Prior) to be too far below Silvas station; nevertheless she
and Silva fall in love. As the drama progresses, Fedalma discovers she is ac-
tually the daughter of Zarca, king of a band of Gypsies captured by Silva,
and must ultimately choose between her desire for Silva and her duty to her
new-found heritage. Though both Silva and Fedalma are the protagonists of
the work, Fedalma ultimately becomes the heroic figure who will attempt to
lead an entire nation, and race, into the future. She is, after all, The Spanish

8
The drama also frames the nineteenth-century debate about Jewish conversion and its
relationship to English nationalism, The Jewish Question, but I will not explore that issue
here. In the fifteenth century, as expressed in the play, the Zincali, or Gypsies, were seen
by Western European culture as cunning and unworthy and only fit for imprisonment, after
which they could be forced into labor or war. During this period, this particular band of
Gypsies made their way into Spain, coming over the Pyrenees from Egypt. The Spaniards
viewed the Zincali as wild, unruly thieves. As Fedalma says, [A] race more outcast and
despised than Moor or Jew (288485).

42
Gypsy, while Silva, in the end, goes off to find personal redemption.

The Spanish Gypsy adheres to many epic conventions, from its myth-
worthy protagonist and long narrative to its rich descriptive setting. But
the work strays from epic formality in its overall composition. Regarding
the construction of the epic, Bakhtin sees the genre as having a past [that]
is distanced, finished, and closed like a circle (79). He suggests that only
low genres like the novel are flowing and transitory and represent a life
without beginning or end (80), while all high genres of the classical era . . . are
structured in the zone of the distanced image, a zone outside any possible
contact with the present in all its openendedness (79). Bakhtin views the
epic as a story whose time has come and gone, whose action is not alive (69
70), while the novel remains in process, a new world still in the making
(73). He also submits three distinguishing marks for a novel: a style which
reflects a world whose cultures and languages are merging and exchanging; an
inherent instability in its constant activity and development; and a collapse
of time, which causes past, present, and future to overlap and dissolve (76
80). Interestingly, I find Eliot accomplishing in her work the opposite of what
Bakhtin theorizes.

In her novels, Eliot employs a conclusion, epilogue, or finale to mark a

definite end to the story she wants to tell; in doing so, she takes the opportunity
to tidy up the characters various trials and tribulations, and while these final
sections frequently allude to the characters continuing to live their lives long
after the book is closed, the very fact that Eliot caps off her novels provides

43
closure to the story and implies a distinct end to the narrative. For example,
a Conclusion wraps up The Mill on the Floss, sending the reader five years
into the future after the tragic flood in which Maggie drowns. Nature, after
the destructive flood, has repair[ed] her ravages and restored life around
the river Floss, but assures the reader that scars have been left behind, most
notably on a tomb etched with the names of Tom and Maggie Tulliver and a
dedication: In their death, they were not divided (547). In contrast, Eliot
concludes The Spanish Gypsy with the everlasting image of Fedalma and Silva
standing apart, the waters widen[ing] slowly (V, 436) between them and a
blackness overhung by stars (V, 438). The story is left unfinished, implying
that its characters are still acting, living; their lives have no beginning or
end.

Eliot evokes this feeling of timelessness throughout The Spanish Gypsy.

As an epigraph to The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot remarked that she paid homage to
the Spanish ballad, a genre which is often classified as a descendant of the epic,
through her trochaic measure and assonance; however, Eliot also employed
another unique characteristic of the Spanish ballad: its unusual approach to
time.9 Time is transitory within The Spanish Gypsy as the verb form changes
from present to past tense (and vice versa). From one moment to the next, the
narrator exchanges present for past; one instance of this unexpected change in
grammar occurs in the scene just before Fedalmas dance in the Placa Santiago,

9
Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature. eds. Mary Ellen Brown and Bruce A. Rosen-
berg.

44
when Roldan the entertainer and his son Pablo are performing for a crowd,
Roldan with magic tricks and Pablo with his instrumental and vocal skills. The
narrator describes how Pablo pours [his] wondrous voice . . . /With wounding
rapture in it, like loves arrows (I, 1271, 1273) and how from him [f]all words
of sadness, simple, lyrical (I,1276). Pablo then pours out the lyrics of his song
in real time, present time, but when he takes a temporary breather and the
text returns to narrative, the narrator returns to the past:

When the voice paused and left the viols note

To plead forsaken, twas as when a cloud
Hiding the sun, makes all the leaves and flowers
Shiver. But when with measured change the strings
Had taught regret new longing, clear again,
Welcome as hope recovered, flowed the voice. (I, 12971302)

It could be that the narrator is indeed telling a story of a finished past here,
but after Pablo sings one more song, the narrator arrives back on the scene
with the following present tense narrative:

The long notes linger on the trembling air,

With subtle penetration enter all
The myriad corridors of the passionate soul,
Message-like spread, and answering action rouse
Not angular jigs that warm the chilly limbs
In hoary northern mists, but action curved
To soft andante strains pitched plaintively. (I, 13151321)

45
This song can with subtle penetration enter all/the myriad corridors of the
readers passionate soul. These long notes did not linger from some
time long past, but are lingering now, spread[ing] and rous[ing] the soul
to action. The story, in this way, becomes unfinished, boundless.

Eliots temporal revision of the epic, a genre of action, experience,

courage, and conquest, makes for an interesting rhetorical marriage to the
closet drama. In the mid-nineteenth-century, closet drama was revered only
as an exclusive literary genre. As discussed in the Introduction to this disserta-
tion, the closet drama, by this time heavy with Romantic contemplation and
philosophizing, could not be translated into theatrical production and sub-
sequently left the footlights; with the popularity of melodrama, music halls,
and plays about contemporary social issues, drama based on character devel-
opment alone went straight to the page as audiences wanted action (Otten
4). But though closet drama was still considered a high form of literature,
the genre did not have the plot or the realism audiences wanted. By the
1860s, the closet drama was essentially an unstaged monodrama, a space of
authorial contemplation where the reader became spectator to a characters
psychological conflict. As I mentioned in my introduction, Robert Browning
described the genre in the dedication to Stafford (1837) as Action in charac-
ter: the action of the text comes from internal rather than external con-
flict. Though its strong lines of internal exploration could classify The Spanish
Gypsy as what Byron considered mental theatre, or drama which fu[ses]
the objective portrayal of action with the subjective lyrical voice (Richard-

46
son 1), the composition of a traditional mid-nineteenth-century closet drama
typically does not include much narrative, if any, and alternates sections of
dialogue with a few stage directions. In comparison, the construction of The
Spanish Gypsy, an active blend of omniscient narrative, dialogue, song, and
epic themes, seems to promote movement, opening the doors of the closet
drama to explore more than just psychological conflict or an authors personal
philosophies. Unfortunately, its patchwork form did not appeal to critics who
appreciated the familiar realism usually found in Eliots work.

Surprisingly, The Spanish Gypsy was well-received by Eliots loyal read-

ership and went through several printings. But, because of Eliots successful
reputation as a novelist, most literary critics of the time immediately pit-
ted The Spanish Gypsy against her previous works, as the anonymous J.M.
admits in the 1868 May/October issue of Macmillans Magazine: We can-
not help measuring performance in the new medium by standards and ideas
moulded from the study of achievements in the old; and George Eliot has such
unrivalled mastery in prose that to equal herself she must be nothing short
of transcendent in verse (281). The critic goes on to say that it is some
disappointment at first to find that the new form has not quickened the beat,
nor much heightened the pitch, nor given anything new of sweep and fire and
intensity (281). Henry James, in his review mentioned at the start of this
chapter, also sets up the conflict between Eliot the verse dramatist and Eliot
the novelist by suggesting that her reputation was essentially prose-built, and
in the attempt to insert a figment of verse of the magnitude of The Spanish

47
Gypsy, it was quite possible that she might injure its fair proportions (621).
The reputation of Eliot, as a prose writer of recognized worth and distinc-
tion (Edinburgh Review 524), obviously played a major part in the lukewarm
response to, and perception of, The Spanish Gypsy.

Critics still applauded Eliots skill with detail, but they did not accept
her approach to the dramatic genre. James joins this school of thought when
he says:

Those who prize most her descriptive powers will see them won-
drously well embodied in these pages. As for those who have felt
compelled to declare that she possesses the Shakespearian touch,
they must consent, with what grace they may, to be disappointed.
. . . A real dramatist, I imagine, could never have reconciled him-
self to the odd mixture of the narrative and dramatic forms by
which the present work is distinguished; and that George Eliots
genius should have needed to work under these conditions seems
to me strong evidence of the partial and incomplete character of
her dramatic instincts. (624)

Both J.M. and James prize the descriptive powers and other skills that
forge Eliots talent as a novelist, but eschew as faulty and only partially dra-
matic the odd mixture of narrative and dramatic forms which make up The
Spanish Gypsy. James even discredits Eliots genius because of The Span-
ish Gypsys nonconformity, suggesting she is not a real dramatist. J.M.
also claims that The Spanish Gypsy will be appreciated not for its general

48
structure but on the strength of select passages (287) and notes that the in-
termixture of form displays an absolute insensibility to the elementary rights
of form and to all artistic fitness of things(281). An anonymous reviewer for
the Edinburgh Review from October 1868 also criticizes the peculiar form of
The Spanish Gypsy and considers it built by some arbitrary method arising
from some accident or convenience in the authors plan (524). This reviewer
goes on to censure Eliot for some injury to that sense of artistic completeness
which suspends critical judgment of the cultivated reader (Edinburgh Review
524). Perhaps this mode of thinking explains why The Spanish Gypsy was
so well-received upon publication, but has not been commonly studied as one
of Eliots major works; her name drew her fans, but the peculiar form left
her critics believing it might . . . have been told as well in prose (Edinburgh
Review 525).

The Spanish Gypsys Horizons of Expectation

Literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov argues in The Origins of Genres

that [i]t is because genres exist as an institution that they function as hori-
zons of expectation for readers and as models of writing for authors (qtd
in Duff 199). A genre then brings with it certain horizons of expectation,
associations, inferences, and/or allusions, and as such, affects the way a narra-
tive and its characters will be created and read. To illustrate the point using
one of Eliots more familiar works, The Mill on the Floss: if that novel were
revised into a dramatic monologue, the essence of Maggie Tullivers story, her
familial relationships, and her contented renunciation (Mill 390) might be

49
well captured, but the whole of Maggies identity, as fleshed out through its
development as a character inside a Victorian novel having the room for the
expansive details of realism, would certainly change.

The year The Mill on the Floss was published, an anonymous writer
in Macmillans Magazine defined the modern novel as one of the most
important moral agents of the community (442) and located fiction at the
core of all the truths of this world; specifically, a mid-nineteenth-century novel
had to observe and reason, and guide moral passions (Macmillans 446).10
In thinking about Todorovs horizons of expectations with regard to a mid-
nineteenth-century novel, the novels narrative was to be evaluated in terms of
its ability of observation and reason, while certain aspects of Maggies life
in particular her actions, inaction, thoughts, emotions, and above all her
moral passions were to be measured with a public yardstick. Located in
a Victorian novel, Maggies fictional life is positioned at the core of all the
truths, an example from which to learn. Maggie then becomes a symbol of
what a young middle-class woman should or should not do, should think or
not think.

In contrast, the Maggie Tulliver of a dramatic monologue, a genre in

which the speaker of the poem interacts with herself or a silent listener, would
be cast into a new role because the horizon of expectation, the rhetorical
intention, would change. Like Todorov, John Stuart Mill noted a difference

10
This article, To Novelists and a Novelist, addresses both the responsibilities and
influence of novelists at large, acknowledging George Eliot with praise.

50
in the rhetoric of different genres, namely poetry and fiction; in his essay
What is Poetry?(1833), he suggested that poetry was a representation of
feeling (qtd. in Collins 1213), and while [t]he truth of poetry [was] to paint
the human soul truly, the truth of fiction [was] to give a true picture of life
(qtd. in Collins 1214). In other words, Mill believed that a poem exposed
an individuals authentic being as captured in a given moment, while a novel
focused on an individuals engagement with, and influence on, the larger world
around him: life. If we take poetry to mean, then, as Mill suggested, feeling
confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude (qtd. in Collins 1214), the
dramatic monologue version of The Mill on the Floss could be pared down
to Maggies personal actions, reactions, and reflections (as told to an auditor
or an implied auditor), without the judgment or guidance of a narrators free
indirect speech, without the outside commentary on how Maggie (and the other
characters who inhabit her world) lives within, and affects, the community. Or,
the story could be told by someone else in the town of St. Oggs, someone
who could provide only sideline commentary, or no commentary at all, about
Maggies life. In either case, the work would become one-voiced and subjective,
the sense of community sidelined as well. As F. George Steiner asserts in a 1955
Preface to Middlemarch, a storyteller depends essentially on the nature of his
material and on the associations it will evoke in the readers imagination
(273). But the meaningful horizons of genre determine the nature of
a storytellers material and the associations it will evoke and, as such,
dictate the narrative in its approach, point of view, and theme, which is what

51
Eliot seemed to realize when she wrote in her journal that to fully embrace
the scope of Fedalmas tale, the genre and form, and in turn, the narrative,
the whole of The Spanish Gypsy requires recasting.

Obviously, Eliot suspected that using a unique form of the closet drama
to tell The Spanish Gypsy would be more rhetorically effective than that of
the novel. As Mathilde Blind writes in her biography of Eliot (1883), The
poetic mode of treatment corresponds to the exalted theme of the Spanish
Gypsy, a subject certainly more fitted for drama or romance rather than for
the novel (167). Indeed, in Leaves from a Notebook, Eliot writes,

How triumphant opinions originally spread how institutions

arose what were the conditions of great inventions, discoveries,
or theoretic conceptions what circumstances affecting individual
lots are attendant on the decay of long-established systems, all
these grand elements of history require the illumination of special
imaginative treatment. (qtd. in Pinney 446)

The conventional closet drama, its action based on introspection or a fleshing

out of personal philosophy, would not have quite possessed the sense of va-
riety or the special imaginative treatment that Eliot ultimately sought for
the grand elements of the historically-based The Spanish Gypsy. In addi-
tion, the conventional closet drama, with its lack of stage directions and its
long ruminations, would not have been able to mimic an epic tone or put The
Spanish Gypsy in the same active, storytelling context; in this epic-infused

52
fashion and form, Eliot takes mental performance and makes it a cultural
statement. To return to one of the quotations I used to open this chapter,
Eliot writes: I want something different from the abstract treatment which
belongs to grave history from a doctrinal point of view, and something differ-
ent from the schemed picturesqueness of ordinary historical fiction (qtd. in
Pinney 447). In wanting something different from the schemed picturesque-
ness, the realism, of the ordinary historical fiction that she had already
accomplished, Eliot decided the original nature of The Spanish Gypsy had
to be retooled, even perhaps distressed, to fully capture her rhetorical in-
tention. Susan Stewart defines a distressed genre as a contemporary version
of a once-oral tradition antiqued to appear as though it belongs to the past
(6) and includes the epic in her study. A distressed genre takes on an im-
mortal form (Stewart 12) in reclaiming history for the reader; time becomes
blurred as memory becomes the now, yet obviously has already occurred and
been recorded. In distressing the closet drama with epic qualities, Eliot au-
thor[ed] a context as well as an artifact (Stewart 6), or attached to the work
a certain set of associations particular to the epic. In this way, Eliot made
legendary the story of a young woman forced to choose between her desires
and her destiny and thus provided the story with enough credence to make it
an authenticating document (Stewart 12) of permanence and legacy.

But what makes the form of The Spanish Gypsy so complex derives from
the works narrator which, by its very identity, drives the storys theme,
shapes the storys direction, dissolves stylistic and social boundaries, estab-

53
lishes a context of mythos as well as of community, and challenges gender
roles and histories. Eliot does this by recalling the Romantic use of folklore
and oral traditions and returning to the culture of the minstrel, an entertainer
in the medieval period known for his heroic or lyric poetry (OED). Eliots
minstrel style hearkens back to the eighteenth-century style of Thomas Percy
and Sir Walter Scott, as the narrator of The Spanish Gypsy falls into the
category of what Andrew Taylor calls pseudo-minstrelsy (39); more than a
wandering musician, storyteller, or poet, the medieval minstrel was a respected
historian, the chief guardian of the chivalric ethos (Taylor 38), rather than
the street corner juggler or musician. Like those in Eliots novels, The Span-
ish Gypsys narrator is essentially an agent of nostalgia who takes the reader
back to another time and place, a keeper and conductor of memory. However,
unlike her the fictional narrators in her novels, the narrator of The Spanish
Gypsy is not merely a third-person omniscient device which oversees, and at
times shapes, interrupts, and comments on, the story from a distance. This
narrator is involved in the development of the story, both in telling the tale
and in existing on scene.

The narrators true identity is unknown as Eliot blurs the line between
three possible roles: omniscient storyteller, unnamed witness inside the tale
itself, and a specific participant in the tale, most likely Juan the minstrel.
In fact, the conflation of the narrators roles immediately generates questions
about identity, as well as about the construction and presentation of both his-
tory and memory, themes vital to establishing the cultural mythos of Fedalma.

54
First, the narrator could simply be the omniscient poet/storyteller/minstrel,
providing for the reader a personal interpretation of historical record or
passing along folklore. The narrator refers to one of the men, a tavern keeper,
as Mine Host (I, 235). This reference could signify two things. One, Mine
could merely be evidence of the narrators awareness of social propriety: the
narrator could be making a nod to polite custom and acknowledging the host
of the tavern as the guests would have. Or, two, the possessive pronoun
Mine could mean that the narrator is reporting an eye-witness account of
his own experience as an observer within the tale. In this situation, the narra-
tor has a choice of roles: in introducing the reader to five men grouped in a
white tavern (I, 222) to Mine Host, the narrator could either be part of the
group, or merely a guest at the same tavern where the men are congregating.
Simultaenously, the possessive pronoun Mine attached to the word Host
could also mean that the narrator represents one of the four men being hosted:
Blasco the silversmith, Juan the minstrel, Roldan the old jester, or Pablo, son
of Roldan.

Although the narrator, with this line of logic, could be any person
in this group, Juan, described as a crystal mirror to the life all around
(I, 329) and singing as a listener (I, 334), poses the most obvious choice,
since the narrator in telling the story can be described as possessing those
qualities himself. The narrator of this drama is, for the reader, a crystal
mirror to life all around this fifteenth-century Spanish setting and sing[s] as a
listener with the ability to hear and witness all. Stylistically, the narrator, like

55
Juan, hardly take[s] note/Of difference betwixt his own [voice] and others (I,
333) as he switches between his own narrative and the dramatic dialogue
between other characters. Enamored with Fedalma, his former student of
poetics, Juan believes Silvas knightly love (I, 744) for Fedalma is the stuff
of a poets strain (I, 754). As the spare man with the lute/who makes you
dizzy with his rapid tongue, (I, 28889), Juan is

a minstrel still, in times

When minstrelsy was held a thing outworn.
Spirits seemed buried and their epitaph
Is writ in Latin by severest pens,
Yet still they flit above the trodden grave
And find new bodies, animating them
In quaint and ghostly ways with antique souls. (I, 316322)

A new body animat[ed] by the antique souls, Juan bears the responsibil-
ity of recording and remitting the past. These same reasons could also apply
to the possible omniscient distant storyteller or the unnamed witness. Ei-
ther could be reciting Juans original story, tapping into the notion of social
continuity. Juan, during the time the narrator tells this story, may be the
minstrel buried, seeking a new bod[y] (the narrator) to animat[e] with
his antique sou[l]. By taking on the role of the narrator, Juan makes the
narrator a troubadour revived and continues the social cycle. The reference
to Mine Host, then, becomes a mark of collective memory, part of Juans

56
original story handed down through the years. The narrator, from this van-
tage point, hardly take[s] note/Of difference betwixt his voice and others
because he is one in a line of communal creation. The fluidity of the narra-
tors identity, time, and location, not to mention rhetorical intention, prevents
the story being told from adhering to one time, place, and genre expectation.
The narrators impermanence reflects the notion of myth and legend, stories
which stretch and simultaneously smudge prescribed boundaries.

Another important aspect of the narrators variable identity is gender;

though minstrels, on the whole, were male, some like Eleanor of Aquitaine,
influential duchess and queen consort in the twelfth-century, were known to be
women. The identity of The Spanish Gypsys narrator is ambiguous, and as
such, could be identified as female as easily as male. If we imagine the narrator
as a woman, the telling of The Spanish Gypsy resonates that much more: a
female minstrel, one of few, passing along an authenticating document or
artifact about a woman whose destiny is to become a national and cultural
leader gives new meaning to, in the patronizing tone of Romney Leigh to
his cousin and love interest Aurora, writ[ing] womans verses and dream[ing]
womans dreams (Aurora Leigh II, 831). For the narrator of The Spanish
Gypsy (as for Aurora Leigh), the womans verses become the makers and
keepers of a female-centered history and the womans dreams become the
potential for a cultural and matriarchal space. Granted, Fedalma predicts she
will not succeed in keeping the gypsies united and will instead foster a saint
tradition, flickering low/In dying memories (V, 109110), yet nevertheless

57
she is determined [t]o guard her people and to be the strength/Of some rock-
citadel (V, 128129).

Though Isobel Armstrong credits Eliot for penning the first humanist
epic by a woman (370), she also believes Fedalma fails as a prophet (371)
and is not allowed to be both woman and leader. I disagree to an extent.
A potentially female minstrel, if we imagine her in the mindset of the bardic
Aurora Leigh, would be fashioning a record of a woman who nobly strive[d]
(Aurora Leigh V, 81) to achieve a future for her people. Failure could be
merely recognized as the honorable battle scar of labor and productivity, an
attempt at aims sublime (Aurora Leigh V, 71), as noted in the drama itself.
Fedalma does ask Zarca:

Will the women in our tribe

Suffer as I do, in the years to come
When you have made them great in Africa
Redeemed from ignorant ills only to feel
A conscious woe? Then is it worth the pains? (I, 32993303)

But Zarca reassures her: even if they fail in their mission, they will [f]eed
the high tradition of the world,/And leave our spirit in our childrens breasts
(I, 331718). Their spiritual and cultural nourishment will be their legacy.
With a female narrator, The Spanish Gypsy becomes the text of two women
trying to achieve something larger than themselves, acknowledging and acting
despite the great possibility of failure.

58
All Gathering Influences Culminate: Genre and Characterization

As earlier noted, the nineteenth-century closet drama was a genre of

personal contemplation and intimate exchange, a drama to be played out on a
domestic stage, whether read individually or performed with a small group
of friends or often, as in the case of Eliot, with her partner George Lewes. This
genre is fitting for a character like Fedalma, who, at the start of The Spanish
Gypsy, worries over about her upcoming role as the future angel of Don Silvas
house.11 Though they are not yet married, Fedalma already anticipates how
her life will change as his wife, her desires converging on and confined to the
domestic stage. Seeking to experience a bit of the world before she becomes
wed to the responsibilities of a Duchess, Fedalma sneaks into town and dances
in the Placa Santiago, where the reader first encounters her. Coaxed and
impassioned by Juans lute playing, the singing of the boy Pablo, and the
ardour of the crowd (I,1451), she dances glorified (I,1360):

All gathering influences culminate

And urge Fedalma. Earth and heaven seem one,
Life a glad trembling on the outer edge of unknown rapture. (I,1456
59)

In this scene, Fedalma becomes the point where all gathering influences cul-
minate: physical, metaphysical, public, private. She leads the chorus of

11
The angel in the house is an archetype popularized in the mid-nineteenth-century by
Coventry Patmores long narrative poem The Angel in the House (18541862). The Angel
in the House provided a concrete image for middle-class domestic ideals: a virtuous, loving
wife at the heart and soul of a virtuous, loving marriage.

59
the peoples joy (I,1360) and is both possessed and inspired by the exultant
throng (I,1469). She simultaneously belongs and does not belong to them,
performs for and performs with them. She does not remain in one place, but
instead is pushed, hustled . . . and thrust(I, 1470) in and out of the crowd,
according to her desires and theirs. Individual and community blur, exchange
roles, and play multiple parts as Fedalmas private and public identities merge.
She loses [a]ll sense of separateness: Fedalma died/[a]s a star dies, and melts
into the light./[She] was not, but joy was, and love and triumph (I, 1983
1985). The closet drama genre becomes important to note here as Fedalma
embraces public performance; she cannot dance this way within the walls and
under the scrutiny of the Court. Eliots choice and revision of closet drama
works on many levels to bolster Fedalmas internal and external conflicts: as
a genre inherently geared toward a smaller public, where action happens
within the mind or, if physically performed, within a contained community,
the formal presence of the closet drama marks the contrast between what
Fedalma wants and what is expected of her. She wants her life, her actions,
to mean something in a larger space and community. As she explains to Silva
afterward: I longed to dance/Before the people be as mounting flame/to
all that burned within them (I, 197476). Fedalma wants to be a conduit
between the external and the internal, breaking down barriers and inspiring
her audience to be and feel in the moment.

Silva is upset about her public display, dancing alone, virtually unchap-
eroned:

60
 Silva: Dangerous rebel! If the world without
Were pure as that within . . . but tis a book
Wherein you only read the poesy
And miss all the wicked meanings. Hence the need
For trust obedience call it what you will
Towards him whose life will be your guard towards me
Who now am soon to be your husband.
Fedalma: Yes!
That very thing that when I am your wife
I shall be something different shall be
I know not what, a Duchess with new thoughts[.] (I, 1990. . . 1993
2000)

As Silvas wife, Fedalma shall be something different, certainly not the

nave dangerous rebel Silva currently chides. Not only will she have new
thoughts, trusting and obeying only him, her lifes guard, but more than
likely as a Duchess, she will live her life inside the Court. After all, a loving
womans world lies within the four walls of her home, as Eliot previously
defines it in Adam Bede (99). Because she loves Silva, Fedalma accepts this
future position, but goes on to tell him, That very thing has made me more
resolve/To have my will before I am your wife (I, 20042005). Inspired by this
will, she ventured into the village because she wanted one last opportunity
to see the streets, the shops, the men at work,/The women, little children
everything (I, 20182019). When Silva chastises her for daring modesty
(I, 2031) and accuses her of shrink[ing] no more/From gazing men than from

61
the gazing flowers (I, 20312032), Fedalma says she only wants the world to
look at [her]/With eyes of love that make a second day (I, 20342035). She
sees no lust in the eyes of those around her, only love divine enough to control
and create, or expand, time.

When their dialogue turns to their wedding, which Silva has arranged
for dawn the next day, Fedalma expresses her joy over her experience in the
village: Now I am glad I saw the town to-day/Before I am a Duchess
glad I gave/This poor Fedalma all her wish (I, 21272129). She laments that
she will mourn for her days as poor unwed Fedalma (I, 2136), as they
are sweet,/And none will come just like them (I, 21362137). Silva tries to
assuage her grief by reassuring her that their marriage will be the time of
promise, shadows, and dreams (I, 2152), then presents her with heirloom
jewels as a pledge of his love. Yet when Fedalma tries on the rubies, she
hears a noise which reminds her of the imprisoned gypsies she had seen in the
Placa. Sympathizing with their confinement, she confesses to her fiance that
she long[s] sometimes to fly and be at large (I, 2223) and feels imprisoned
by her luxury (I, 2224). She tells him of dreams in which she seem[s] to
spring from the walls,/And fly far, far away, until at last/[she] find[s] [her]self
alone among the rocks (I, 22852287). She admits that she is afraid of her
desire for freedom, and of how that desire might affect their love. She tries
to contain her thoughts, those like a torrent rushing through [her] soul (I,
2300), but cannot.

After Silva leaves the room, she continues to meditate on her irrecon-

62
cilable longings, projecting her anxieties onto the rubies:

These rubies greet me Duchess. How they glow!

Perchance they loved once, were ambitious, proud;
Or do they dream of wider life,
Ache from intenseness, yearn to burst the wall
Compact of crystal splendor, and to flood
Some wider space with glory? Poor, poor gems!
We must be patient in our prison-house,
And find space in our loving. (I, 23682376)

Fedalma dream[s] of wider life, ache[s] from intenseness, and yearn[s]

to burst the wall. Barricaded in the prison-house, she cannot flood some
wider space with her zest for life and must find a way to be content and
patient within the space she will be given. The development of this aspect
of Fedalmas internal conflict speaks directly to the dramas hybrid form; as
Fedalma is faced with becoming the angel imprisoned in Silvas house and longs
to burst the wall, the meeting of the closet drama, a genre based on private
meditation and thought, and the epic, a genre structured on action and deeds,
builds that emotional tension. Thus, when Fedalma discovers she is a Gypsy,
this thematic, formal connection, this junction of private and public genres,
becomes even more vital to the construction of story as Fedalma wonders
what path to choose. Fedalma is caught at a crossroads between her loves
prison-house and a wider life, just as her story becomes a crossroads of
genres.

63
 This conflict of desires is often expressed through the bird imagery,
which also speaks to the rhetorical intentions posed by the closet drama and
epic. When Fedalma reminds Silva about the time she uncaged the birds (I,
1931) against his wishes because something stronger/[f]orced [her] to let them
out (I, 193334), the birds not only represent her fear of confinement, but
also allude ironically to the psychological exploration of self which typically
forms the basis of the closet drama. In the genre, the focus is not on how
a characters thoughts lead him or her to act, but the thoughts themselves.
Although Fedalmas restless thoughts would provide a strong foundation for
a story grown from self-analysis and contextualized in a genre built on the
investigation of the restless psyche (a seemingly perfect fit), she is not freely
permitted to uncage her thoughts, just as she cannot freely uncage the birds.
In other words, Fedalma feels like she must explain herself, restrain herself.
The birds, in this case, symbolize the imprisonment of Fedalmas thoughts and
actions as a woman, and demonstrate how a woman had limitations set even
on her private intimations.

In contrast, when Zarca finally confronts Fedalma about her true iden-
tity as a Gypsy princess, he tosses a dead bird through her window with a note
attached written in blood: Dear child, Fedalma,/Be brave, give no alarm
your Father comes! (I, 279293). Zarca wants her to fly (I, 3109) with him
and the Gypsies, rather than stay with Silva in the palace where her spirit
will be grounded and will eventually die like the bird he tossed through her
window. With Silva, she will be a parrot, chained to a ring (I, 3187), an ex-

64
otic bird domesticated and made a pet, while with Zarca, she will either be an
eagle (I, 3186), a bird of freedom, strength, and independence, or a crane
with outspread wing (III, 652). Zarca wishes for his daughter to soar beyond
her miserable, petty, low-roofed life (III, 644), to take wing`ed pleasures,
wing`ed pains (III, 662). These are not the pleasures and pains of someone
destined to live the life of a home epic, but of someone born to reign (I,
3164) in a true epic.

Fedalmas conflict between remaining with Silva and flying with her
father also manifests itself in the cultural motif of the Gypsy, which, like the
bird imagery, provides another reason why the interplay between the epic and
closet drama can be discussed as more than some arbitrary method arising
from some accident or convenience in the authors plan, as suggested by a
reviewer at the Edinburgh Review (Edinburgh Review 524). In fact, as I men-
tioned earlier in this chapter, Eliot, in notes she made during her drafting
of The Spanish Gypsy, purposefully chose to focus her narrative on what she
termed the gypsy race, particularly as it was positioned at the height of
the Spanish conflict with the Moors and the Jews (Haight 376); historically
speaking, at the end of the fifteenth century when the drama takes place, the
Spaniards regarded Gypsies below Jews, who had enraged and alienated the
Spaniards with their religious beliefs, financial prosperity, strong sense of com-
munity, and, for some, their seemingly false conversion to Christianity.12 The

12
On March 31, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella announced an edict of expulsion,
marking their decision to banish all Jews of both sexes forever from the precincts of Our

65
Jews were expelled from Spain on order of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella,
and those who were found by the Inquisition to be pretending Christian faith
were burned alive. Eliot illustrates the treatment of the Gypsies and the Jews
in a comment Blasco, a silversmith, makes to the rest of his friends at the inn
after another man, Lopez, remarks that the Queen would have the Gypsies
banished with the Jews (I, 959):

Jews are not fit for heaven, but on earth

They are most useful. Tis the same with mules,
Horses, or oxen, or with any pig
Except Saint Anthonys.13 They are useful here
(The Jews, I mean) though they may go to hell.
And, look you, useful sins why Providence
Sends Jews to do em, saving Christian souls.
The very Gypsies, curbed and harnessed well,
Would make draught cattle, feed on vermin too,
Cost less than grazing brutes and turn bad food
To handsome carcasses; sweat at the forge
For little wages, and well drilled and flogged
Might work like slaves, some Spaniards looking on.(I, 970982)

Blasco argues that although Jews commit the useful sins so Christian souls

realm. The Jews were commanded on pain of death to leave within four months. They
could take personal belongings, but no gold, silver, coins or jewelry. See The Origins of the
Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain by Benzion Netanyahu (New York: Random House,
1995).
13
This pig, according to the fable, helped St. Anthony bring fire from Hell to people on
earth.

66
do not have to stoop to such work, Gypsies are valuable because they work
more than the grazing brutes, or Jews, cost less, are able to survive on
spoiled meat and vermin like vultures, and take orders and ample punish-
ment like slaves. Blasco goes on to say that God sent the Gypsies wander-
ing to Spain to do the most menial jobs for the Spaniards and turning them
away would be a sin. Eliot, in the early stages of plotting the drama, was
familiar with the historical events and sociocultural prejudices of the time as
interpreted by William Hickling Prescott in his historical narrative History of
the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, The Catholic of Spain (1861), since she
was reading his book while writing the first act of The Spanish Gypsy (Karl
383). In Eliots notes on The Spanish Gypsy, she remarks,

I could not use the Jews or Moors, because the facts of their history
were too conspicuously opposed to the working out of my catastro-
phe. Meanwhile the subject had become more and more pregnant
to me. I saw it might be taken as a symbol of the part which is
played in the general human lot by hereditary conditions in the
largest sense, and of the fact that what we call duty is entirely
made up of such conditions; for even in cases of just antagonism
to the narrow view of hereditary claims, the whole background of
the particular struggle is made up of our inherited nature. (qtd.
in Cross 10)

For Eliot, her subject, the Gypsies, symbolizes how hereditary conditions
in the largest sense physical characteristics, heritage, history decides

67
the way in which one is treated in society, determines ones future or ones
general human lot, and plants in one a certain sense of duty. All of this
measures how much of a particular struggle they will have to endure in
life. For Eliot, the hereditary conditions of the Jews and Moors were too
known, too conspicuously opposed to the conditions of a subject that, for
many early and mid-nineteenth-century writers like Sir Walter Scott with his
Gypsy character Meg Merrilies in the novel Guy Mannering(1815) and George
Borrow, whose first-hand experiences with the Gypsies as recorded in both
The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841) and Romany Rye
(1857), conjured images of boundlessness, freedom, and most importantly, the
unknown (Nord 25, 71).14

Lou Charnon-Deutsch in The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a Eu-

ropean Obsession states that the marginalization of the Roma/Romany as a
people began with their identification as Egyptians (5) because, as he sum-
marizes, myth claimed that the Egyptians

had denied succor to the Holy Family as it fled Egypt and so were
ousted to wander the world to atone for their refusal; they were the
Egyptians of the Old Testament, who, Ezekiel prophesized, would
be dispersed among the nations; they had denied their Christian
faith and were being punished by forced pilgrimage for five years,
or ten, or forever; they were a people forever cursed after they

14
For an overview on this topic, see Deborah Nords Gypsies and the British Imagination,
18071930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

68
 participated in the death of Christ by making the nails with which
he was crucified. (5)

Their hereditary condition, in Eliots context the history commonly believed

about the Gypsy heritage, had doomed the Gypsies to a rootless existence of
wander[ing] the world to atone for their sins against God, the Holy Family,
Christ. The Egyptians, or Gypsies as the name evolved, became people on
the periphery, as Deborah Epstein Nord suggests in Gypsies and the British
Imagination, 18071930 (4). Nord posits that their positioning as exiles or
outcasts within the bounds of mainstream society categorized the Gypsies as
stuck in representational limbo (122) and marked them as displaced and
disinherited. In literature of the nineteenth-century, the figure of the Gypsy
often symbolized a quest for roots and belonging, the search for identity with-
out having a distinctive history or geography to draw from (Nord 11, 122).
In the shadow of their mythology, the Gypsies had no allegiance, no faith,
no homeland to claim; as Zarca, the king of the Gypsies says himself in The
Spanish Gypsy, his people have no Whence or Whither in their souls,/No
dimmest lore of glorious ancestors (I, 28892890), no great memories (I,
2908). This lack of lore and memories marked a certain sense of cultural
vacancy and inspired the idea that because the Gypsies did not have much
to remember and/or contemplate, they hardly existed. This partial existence
translated to the Gypsies being compared in The Spanish Gypsy to draught
cattle (I, 978), further referencing the social shackles placed on their identity,
self-expression, and even on their thoughts themselves. In Eliots novels, the

69
Gypsy figure rarely has a voice and is hardly more than a thematic device, re-
flecting a rhetoric of primitive desires (Nord 3) on the part of writer, reader,
and character. For example, Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss sees an
epic freedom and independence in Gypsy life, but that vision soon becomes
an unrealistic dream that she is conditioned to resist and force herself not to
think about. The contradictions of the Gypsy lifestyle the freedom to
wander, the non-existent past, the roguish physicality were at once frighten-
ing and exotic to those of nineteenth-century mainstream society and signified
an Other space, a possible place where one could escape from propriety and
address ones darker side (Nord 6, 12, 24, 71).

Through the revising and joining of elements belonging to the epic

and the nineteenth-century closet drama, Eliot exposes the existence of this
representational limbo, this Other space. In this hybrid genre, a fifteenth-
century Gypsy a woman is trapped by nineteenth-century representations
of cultural and gender identity and is offered the opportunity to break free.
Eliots implementation of the epic into the closet drama makes Fedalmas
quest for representation seen, heard, acknowledged. As the epic allows the
Gypsy people in the drama to inherit a new lore through an authenticating
document, to again reference Susan Stewarts definition of the epic, not to
mention the telling (and retelling) of this tale, the closet drama gives a people
once deemed unworthy to speak or think a forum in which to contemplate both
a past and a future. It literally formalizes their quest for public recognition, to
be more than grazing brutes on the edge of humanity. In this work, Fedalma

70
becomes the starting point for the Gypsies history; she becomes the glorious
ancestor, the lore. At the same time, The Spanish Gypsy, as a work whose
title specifically locates place and culture, finally provided the Gypsies with a
Whence [and] Whither in their souls, making them no longer displaced or
disinherited.

To Wed a Crown: Revising a Womans Lot

Isobel Armstrong argues that [a]t the heart of [The Spanish Gypsy]
is a question about the extent to which women are capable of producing a
powerfully imaginative national myth about unity and cohesion, a matriar-
chal myth (370). While Armstrong does not believe Eliot succeeds, I offer
another opinion. Certainly, as I have noted in this chapter, the text indicates
that the Gypsy nation may not stay together when Fedalma becomes leader
after her fathers death; although the Zincali (as the speakers are identified
when they speak as a group) vow to obey [their] Queen (IV, 959) at Zarcas
final breath, Fedamla imagines the end of her people as a nation. She envi-
sions them turning away from her leadership to fashion their own service,
to come when it should suit them(V, 9798). Because of their desire for
independence, she sees them break[ing] into small and scattered bands that
would propogate forgetfulness (V, 103, 105) of their nation. She predicts
the death of hopes/Darkening long generations (V, 146147) and views her-
self as the funeral urn that bears/The ashes of a leader (V, 289290), even
forecasts [s]ome other hero with the will to save/The outcast Zincali (V,
279). But as I have suggested, the unconventional form of this work demands

71
a new perspective of Fedalma and her fate. Like Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea
Brooke, Fedalma bemoans forfeiting her love and anguishes over her duty to
the Gypsies; however, The Spanish Gypsy is not one of Eliots novels in which
the female protagonists deeds do not have consequences that go very far
beyond herself (Berman 555556), or in which the female protagonist herself
is permanently stuck in representational limbo, particularly as evidenced
by the comparison of an ordinary womans lot to an extraordinary, epic,
womans lot.

Zarca tells Fedalma that she belong[s] not to the petty round of cir-
cumstance/That makes a womans lot (I, 317071), using the term to refer-
ence what he sees as just an ordinary marriage to Silva. To him, the ordinary
womans dream or womans lot of love, romance, and desire equates to
enslavement and cannot compare to being the woman who would save her
tribe (I, 3011, 3033); this woman would have power beyond the domestic,
beyond the petty. In Zarcas mind, marriage to Silva, though founded on
love, would limit his daughters experiences and keep her in a role where social
and religious authorities would denigrate her, while as a Gypsy queen, she
would have authority over all. Fedalma ultimately sacrifices her love for Silva
for public service, rather than sacrifices who she is for love. In fact, the act
may even be more than duty or even hereditary condition on a subconscious
level, as Fedalma always longed for the personal freedom to fly far, far away
(I, 2286). Silva tells the Prior, I seek to justify my public acts/And not my
private joy (16691670), and Fedalma takes that vow equally. To the con-

72
trary, Victor Neufeldt believes Fedalma makes a useless sacrifice motivated
by others and describes her fate as the nothingness of a future based on a
denial of personal happiness (52), a statement which echoes a metaphor Eliot
uses in the short story, Janets Repentance, from Scenes from a Clerical
Life: the blank that lay for her outside the home (Scenes 335). In Janets
Repentance, Janet chooses to remain married to an abusive man rather than
venture on her own into the blank or unknown. Janet obviously worries
about the nothingess, choosing to stay instead with the familiar, despite
its dangers. In The Spanish Gypsy, Fedalma may forego her personal happi-
ness, but does so with courage and awareness; for her, the blank is frought
with visions of risk and tragedy. Experiencing the loss of a father, lover, and
a community can certainly be considered suffering, but not nothingness.

Instead the blank becomes the site for female potential beyond the
norm, particularly for some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen
(Aurora Leigh V, 196) whose historic tragedy the fictional Aurora Leigh (and
literary critics) dismisses as the type of story too far in the past to be relevant
to contemporary readers. But Fedalma is depicted as a self and nation
divided, one side of her representing the socially acceptable or conven-
tional personality, the other externalizing the free, uninhibited, often criminal
self, a common motif in nineteenth-century literature (Rosenfeld 328). Claire
Rosenfeld in The Shadow Within: The Conscious and Unconscious Use of
the Double states that the motif indicates [t]he dream of reconciliation be-
tween conflicting selves (328, 343), and The Spanish Gypsy entertains that

73
possibility for Fedalma. In her quest for identity, Fedalma chooses to be the
angel of the homeless tribe (I, 2971), a moniker which not only identifies
her with the Gypsy nation inside the text, but also connects her to a mid-
nineteenth-century readership, a nation of women who, like her, strive and fail
to fully become the angels of the house because of their own conflicting duties
and selves.

As the name angel of the homeless tribe illustrates, Fedalmas con-

flicting selves do not perfectly reconcile: Fedalma must adhere to certain pa-
triarchal ideals (since her choices are limited to duty to her father/patriarchal
nation or duty as a wife), while surrrendering a personal ideal (her love for
Silva). Additionally, although part of her meets the definition of Patmores
angel, because of her hereditary conditions she cannot fully become an
angel in the house: Fedalma is as pure as a rain-tear on a rose leaf (I,
894), and Juan tells his friends at the start of the drama, no highest born
Castilian dame,/Betrothed to the highest noble, should be held/More sacred
than Fedalma (I, 747749). But Fedalma is also crowned with glossy black-
ness (I, 884), her angelic halo taking on a darker hue and threatening the
submissive, innocent, and angelic notion of woman. She is not a bride of Pat-
mores poem, but a brid[e] of Satan in a robe of flames (I, 1748). Yet at
the same time, a space of reconciliation opens for Fedalma as her personal
dream, to be free (I, 2295), comes true, a space of reconciliation in which
Fedalma receives the chance to lead her own life and lead her people. Whether
or not she fails is somewhat irrelevant.

74
 Fedalma is not Maggie or Mary or Dorothea or even Romola; she is
resigned to her duty, but she will wed a crown (I, 3357), and in her fa-
thers eyes, they will make royal (I, 3358) their peoples lowly lot (I,
3358). Fedalmas royal crown could not be worn in the domestic reality of a
conventional nineteenth-century novel, but in the unstaged epic verse drama,
Fedalma finds a sacred poet (Middlemarch Prelude) to sing and record her
experience with the power of oral tradition, communal memory, even the idea
of a shared performance. She will not s[i]nk unwept into oblivion (Middle-
march Prelude). Yet there are those scholars who argue that because Fedalma
does not die mercifully in the end, nor experience a grand epiphany, nor feel
a great comfort, her life is bleak (Neufeldt 52). I have to question, bleak by
what and whose definition? Since we are not privy to the alternative future
of Fedalma, i.e. her future with Silva, can we call her actions a useless sac-
rifice, especially since we only know idealistically what she sacrificed? If she
had stayed with Silva, would her fate necessarily be less bleak? Or, is there
a possibility she might have a different sort of self-sacrificial fate similar to
Dorothea Brookes marriage to Will Ladislaw or a darker fate similar to the
drowning of Maggie Tulliver? The Spanish Gypsy not only gives us a new
Eliot heroine whose story warrants further debate and analysis, but allows us
to see Eliot as a writer taking risks outside her usual genre, acknowledging
and acting despite the great possibility of failure, much like Fedalma.

75
 Chapter 3

Something of His Manhood Falls:

Michael Fields Stephania as Critique
of Victorian Male Aesthetics and Masculinity

We are desperately alone in a world that shuns us. What can it

be! Stephania cannot be responsible for it all. We are boycotted
in the papers, by the men (Pater, Meredith, Hutton) to whom we
have sent our book & by even literary society. It is mysterious.
(Edith Cooper, from their journal, Works and Days, January 26,
1893)

[E]ach time I heave/My bosom something of his manhood falls.

(Stephania, II, 381-82)

Not long after the closet drama Stephania (1892) was published by
Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper under the pseudonym Michael
Field, Cooper recorded her bewilderment and anxiety over the public reaction
to the work in the personal journal she shared with Bradley called Works and
Days. This was not the first time Cooper worried about criticism regarding
their work. In the eight years since they had begun writing together as Michael
Field, Bradley and Cooper often expressed, in their collaborative journal as

76
well as in their personal correspondence to each other, anxiety over their pub-
lic reception and often discussed how contemporary audiences resisted their
archaic language and Shakespearean bent.1 In these instances, Bradley and
Cooper would cheer each other, encouraging the other woman to persevere in
her talent and ambition. In a letter to Cooper in 1885, early in their career as
Field, Bradley refers to a less-than-stellar review in the Pall Mall Gazette that
she had ripped into small fragments and advises her niece that their literary
struggles are common to all poets and that they should rejoice to share
their bitter herbs of adversity (Folio 117, MS. Eng. Lett.c.418). Bradley goes
on in the same letter to remind Cooper that as Michael Field, [W]e have
determined by Heavens grace to give the English people plays full of poetry
& religion, & humour, & thought. They will not like this. I believe, however,
that the unusually strong critical reaction to Stephania, labeled by Cooper
in the quotation that begins this chapter as a boycott and a shunning, indi-
cates something more than just the ordinary critical resistance from the press,
which contemporary scholars and turn-of-the-century critics usually attribute
to Bradley and Coopers spinsterhood, their gender, their collaboration, and
the genres in which they wrote.2

Stephania, set in the eleventh-century about a woman seeking revenge

1
They would write together for nearly 32 years (1881-1913), and would publish 25 dramas
and 11 books of poetry. Print runs remained small, for an elite audience.
2
Contemporary scholars of Michael Field include Marion Thain, Ana Vadillo, Jill Ehnenn,
Yopie Prins, and Holly Laird. In her unpublished biography of Michael Field written in the
mid-1970s, Ursula Bridge recounts the opinions of many of Bradley and Coopers peers on
this subject (See Ms.Eng.misc.d.983, Michael Field archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford).

77
against a man for murdering her husband, had struck a very particular chord
with a very specific readership, one that might not be as mysterious, as
Cooper indicated. Given that Stephania eschews Fields usual Elizabethan
form and foregrounds what they called their Eternal-No period in which
publishers hesitated to print their dramas (Donoghue 89), Coopers diary entry
at the start of this chapter suggests a possible new explanation. I want to
argue that Fields Stephania is an allegorical narrative that uses the female
invasion and conquest of an exclusive homosocial empire in eleventh-century
Rome to blame what they saw as the nineteenth-century decay of Art on the
homosexual desires of the male Decadent community.3

A few months before Cooper wrote about the boycott, she seemed to
have an inkling of things to come; in a journal entry from September 18,
1892, the day she and Bradley took the manuscript to their publisher, Elkin
Matthews, Cooper writes: The man seems in a panic; he says nothing about
the sale of the book, he never smiles again. Does he fear, does he sicken
over our morality? We make these sacrifices for art G.M. says women will not
make.4 Though Matthews, in a partnership with John Lane (a frequent editor

3
This type of allegorical narrative participates in the tradition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson, which J.A. Symonds references in a letter to Stevenson
himself: Viewed as an allegory, it touches upon one too closely (Showalter 115; March 3
1886 - Letters of J.A. Symonds, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters [Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1968] 120-121). Showalter says men may have read [Jekyll
and Hyde] as a signing to the male community (115). Additionally, throughout this chapter,
the term homosocial will reference Eve Sedgwicks definition within an orbit of desire (10),
on a continuum between homosocial and homosexual (1).
4
The drama was then named Otho. Also, George refers to good friend George Mered-
ith. The quotation comes from Add Mss 46780, Folio 16, Michael Field and Fin de Siecle

78
of Fields work), was an avid publisher of work by Aesthetes and Decadents,
including Arthur Symons, John Gray, and Oscar Wilde (Beckson xxxiv), he
obviously does not react positively, in Coopers eyes, to Fields drama; he
does not engage Bradley and Cooper in the usual fashion, does not smile or
speak about the work. Cooper undeniably has anxiety over whether Matthews
fear[s] for or sicken[s] over their collective moral state. In December 1891,
after Cooper and Bradley pitched Stephania to Matthews, Cooper does write
in their journal that he hesitates over Stephania because Michael Field has
waited so long after The Tragic Mary (1890) to produce another closet drama
and suggests they concentrate on publishing lyrics since their readership is
more receptive to that genre.5 Bradley and Cooper give Matthews a collection
of lyrics to be compiled in the poetic volume, Sight and Song (1892), but they
continue to advocate for Stephania. Matthews finally relents but, based on his
initial negative reaction to the receipt of the manuscript, is not enthusiastic
about promoting the work. Though Matthews response is open for interpre-
tation, I want to show that the reception of Stephania is directly connected
to the sacrifices for art Bradley and Cooper make which other women
will not. More specifically, I want to show how Bradley and Cooper, in trying
to thematically reclaim Art and agency for women artists through the
narrative and metanarrative of Stephania, offended their already small and

Culture and Society: The Journals, 1868-1914 and the Correspondence of Katharine Bradley
and Edith Cooper from the British Library London, hereafter referred to as Journals and
Correspondence.
5
Folio 140 - from a note written by Katharine Bradley, November 29, 1890, Journals and
Correspondence.

79
elite readership comprised mostly of male Decadents.

In the biography We Are Michael Field, Emma Donoghue claims Bradley

and Cooper were fully aware of the bold statement they were making about
the corruption of their time, particularly through the actions of their female
protagonist, a former Empress turned prostitute murderess (76). Donoghue
also notes that Cooper had acknowledged a connection between, in Coopers
words, the laxity wealthy degeneration, of Imperial Rome and the
fin de si`ecle (76). Although Donoghue goes on to claim that Stephania was
partly a fantasy of revenge against Bernhard Berenson, a man who emotion-
ally invaded Bradley and Coopers relationship, I want to shelve that particular
biographical reading in this chapter and align with Coopers analogy of Roman
and Victorian society to devise a more complex, palimpsest-like style analysis
of Stephania.6

The plot of the drama unfolds as follows: in 1002 A.D., former Empress
Stephania, bent on revenge for her husband Crescentiuss murder, plots to rid
Rome of the new Emperor. She invades the usurpers male-only inner sanctum
by assuming the guise of a courtesan and ultimately triumphs as a symbolic
queen and emperor. For Emperor Otho and Gerbert, Stephania represents a
sexual insurgence which has the power to destroy their physical and emotional

6
Apparently Cooper developed feelings for Berenson, and he was the only person who
came between Bradley and Cooper in a romantic sense. Donoghue remarks that Bradley ap-
preciated the intellect of this good-looking, Lithuanian-American art expert, but Cooper
developed a full-on crush (70). I agree that Stephania provides ample evidence for that
reading.

80
well-being, their relationship to each other and to God, and the spread of the
Roman Empire. For the Decadent male artists and critics who viewed woman
as a nemesis to creative production, social order, and personal salvation, the
figure of Stephania, as created by two female members of their literary co-
terie, not only represented a personal betrayal in a time when the Labouch`ere
Amendment to the Criminal Law of 1885 made illegal all male homosexual
acts, private or public, but also seemed to chime in with homophobic attacks
on fin de si`ecle homosexual decadence, attacks that blamed the end of the
British empire on the same depravity that, many believed, had brought down
the Roman Empire. For Bradley and Cooper, the figure of Stephania, as she
battled what they considered masculine perversity, reclaimed for the woman
artist a new authority based on an aesthetic vision of Beauty and Art that
they saw becoming tainted by the male Decadents focus on physical desires.
For those male Decadents, Stephania seems to have put Michael Field finally
and firmly on the wrong side of this artistic and political/sexual divide. While
Bradley and Cooper felt writing the drama was the Eve of their resurrection
as artists, as Cooper declared in a journal entry prior to the dramas publi-
cation, ironically, the dramas critique of the exclusion of women from power,
which Bradley and Cooper hoped would win them a place in the homosocial
world of the Decadents, instead ended up permanently exiling them from that
world.7

7
The journal entry is dated Easter Thursday, 1891; Folio 27, Journals and Correspon-
dence.

81
 Elizabeth Primamore, in echo of other Field scholars, suggests that
Bradley and Cooper used Michael Field as a means to dialogue with an
elite male homosexual world (Primamore 100). A drama about a woman
disguising herself to access male power, written by a pair of women claiming a
male identity also to access male power, blatantly displayed womens growing
social and literary cogency in the turn from the fin de si`ecle to Modernism
and challenged the authority and agency of the very people who made up
their primary and elite readership.

I want to specifically demonstrate here that, in writing Stephania,

Bradley and Cooper adapted the closet drama, traditionally a male-identified
genre with its narrative based on inward conflict rather than external con-
flict, in three important ways: 1) they used Stephania to repurpose the closet
drama genre and consequently the closet as a place of physical action
for women; 2) they present Stephania as a figure of strategy and agency by
revising literary portrayals of her and by appropriating the Decadent trope
of the courtesan; and 3) they reconfigured the power dynamic of the erotic
triangle to depict Stephanias ultimate dominion (rather than subordination
or death) by using a trialogue form to structure the drama. To make my argu-
ment in this chapter, I look back to a few key definitions of the closet offered
in my introduction: the spatial sense of the closet as a private room, an
inner chamber, or the private apartment of a monarch or potentate (OED)
representing the source of authoritative power, and the metaphorical sense of
the closet as a place either of private or concealed trouble in ones house or

82
circumstances or of the secret, covert, especially with reference to homo-
sexuality. I will also illustrate how the triangular relationship of Stephania,
Emperor Otho, and Gerbert adds a new dynamic to the theory of triangular
desire in Eve Sedgwicks Between Men.8

Before illustrating these points, I want to speak to the recent argu-

ment made by leading Field scholar Marion Thain. In Michael Field: Poetry,
Aestheticism, and the Fin de Si`ecle, Thain takes Bradley and Cooper from
the margins of mainstream Aestheticism and makes the women central to the
movement; she looks through a number of lenses, including the way in which
relationships with their male mentor figures reveal the pairs active involve-
ment with aesthetic principles and ideals (12). Like most Field scholars, Thain
focuses on Fields poetry, rather than their diaries and/or dramas, and marks
poetry as Michael Fields major legacy for todays critic (10). She credits
one reason for this classification as our lack of understanding of the closet
drama genre (10). Through my analysis of Stephania, I want to present
Bradley and Coopers revision of the closet drama as a direct commentary on
Aestheticisms wayward relative, Decadence, and, along the way, I hope to
improve our lack of understanding of the closet drama genre. Ultimately,

8
This chapter undoubtedly draws provocative connections among the relationship of
Bradley and Cooper, the closet drama genre, the closets of male and female homosexuality,
and the trends of Aestheticism and Decadence at the fin de si`ecle. But I see the primary
goal of my work here as offering the first critical inquiry of the intersection of genre and
womens agency as shown through Stephania and, consequently, hope to sow the seeds for
future field of investigation that focuses on what the closet drama genre reveals about the
performance of sexuality as depicted in Bradley and Coopers dramatic canon and evidenced
in their correspondence and journals.

83
because the dramas are still fairly neglected in Field scholarship, and Stepha-
nia itself has little to no study, I want to resurrect the closet drama as a major
part of Bradley and Coopers legacy.9

This chapter is divided into two main sections. In the first section, I will
provide a brief background of why Bradley and Cooper created Michael Field
and how that identity was positioned at the time of Stephanias printing. I will
also situate Stephania inside the closet of Decadence, by giving an overview
of that artistic movement and showing how Bradley and Cooper censured the
decay and demoralization of Decadence. In the second section, I will explain
how Stephania castigated the male participants of the Decadent movement
through its revision of closet drama convention. This will lead me to illustrate
how Bradley and Cooper, through Stephania, transformed the Decadent trope
of the courtesan into an authoritative performance for women. Finally, I will
demonstrate how the trialogue form of Stephania places power in the hands
of a woman, of women, upsetting the male, homosocial dominance of the
conventional erotic triangle.

Michael Field and Decadence

Like Stephania employing the guise of a courtesan to infiltrate Othos

palace, Bradley and Cooper invented the persona of Michael Field in 1884 to

9
Stephania has not been the subject of singular study, but has been mentioned in a
few texts, including Emma Donoghues biography We Are Michael Field and David Mo-
riartys article, Michael Field and Male Critics. Recently, in Michael Field and Their
World, edited by Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson, Joseph Bristow in his article,
Michael Fields Lyrical Aestheticism: Underneath the Bough, boiled Stephania down to
the description Fields exploration of a Roman womans sexual subjection (51).

84
enter the male palace of Art, cloaking both their gender and their collabora-
tion. They hoped the secret identity would give them an unbiased critique of
their literary endeavors a real criticism, such as man gives man (Sturge
Moore 6), as they told friend and mentor Robert Browning. In fact, Bradley
urged Browning to keep their secret, fearing the report of lady authorship
[would] dwarf and enfeeble [their] work at every turn (Sturge Moore 6). As
avid readers of Wordsworth, Bradley and Cooper were familiar with his def-
inition of a poet as a man speaking to men (Lyrical Ballads) and were
concerned that a woman poet would not be accepted, or heard, speaking the
language of men.10 But much of this anxiety about their place as women came
from much closer sources, like their admiration for, and eventual relationship
with, Walter Pater, an idol whom they grew to love and call Tottie (Donoghue
55). Bradley had a painful awareness of the following remarks in Paters essay,
Style (1889):

The literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he proposes

to do will have in mind, first of all, the scholar and the scholarly
conscience the male conscience in this matter, as we must think
it, under a system of education which still to so large an extent
limits real scholarship to men. (64)

Throughout their lives, Bradley and Cooper would seek out every educational

10
As exemplified in April 1890 journal entries (Journals and Correspondence), when Edith
mentions that they were reading constantly, particularly Wordsworths Odes on the Intima-
tions of Immortality. The quotation referencing a poet as a man speaking to men comes
from Wordsworths Lyrical Ballads (1802).

85
opportunity open to them11 ; however, Paters identification of the literary
artist as scholar and, in turn, the scholarly conscience as the male con-
science stuck with Bradley so much she once told Oscar Wilde how hurt she
was by that very comment (Sturge Moore 137, qtd. in Leighton 218). The
idea of the scholarly conscience and in conjunction, the identity of the
literary artist being male affected Cooper as well. During an encounter

11
Some background on Bradley and Coopers education and family life: Bradley and
Cooper recognized and envied the options available to men, particularly with regard to
their education and career path. In preparation for a socially prescribed future as a wife
and mother, Bradley as a child was tutored at home in the genteel pursuits of Romance
languages, Classics, music, and painting (Donoghue 14). Though she loved learning and was
fearless in libraries, she resisted the direction chosen for her and her older sister Lissie
(Coopers mother); marriage seemed a risk and a sacrifice, especially when it came to
childbirth and child-rearing (Donoghue 14-15). However, Lissie became perpetually feeble
after Coopers birth, and Bradley was left to care for both her sister and her niece, along
with her own mother, who was struck by cancer (Donoghue 15-17). Bradleys father had
died years earlier, and James Cooper, Bradleys brother-in-law, left the household duties
to the women so he could pursue his business, his worship, and his hobbies (Donoghue
15). Though Bradley loved her family and felt a connection to Cooper early on, she grew
frustrated with her assigned role as family caretaker and longed for time alone so she could
write (Donoghue 22). During this time, she lashed out in her diary: Wild gusts of passion
sweep over me, & leave me desolated in body & spirit. At such times, I feel evil as a strong
man within me (Donoghue 17). Bradley connects this surge of resentment, these wild
gusts of passion, to being evil as a strong man, and when these gusts blow through,
they leave her desolated inside and out. What remains is a woman unfulfilled in body &
spirit, depleted of passion. The strong man within her symbolizes a certain freedom of
emotion that she cannot show on a daily basis or even have, a yearning to be as uninhibited,
unencumbered, and powerful as only a man could be. Those feelings are evil, inappropriate
and wrong for the roles she must play. Donoghue quotes Bradley as saying she was made
for something nobler than to be an old spinster aunt (17). For Bradley, a nobler future
meant furthering her education, to the extent possible as a woman of the time. In the
years to come, after her mothers death, she traveled to France to attend classes at the
Coll`ege de France (which was free and open to everyone) and later took a summer course
offered at Newnham College, the newly created womens college of Cambridge (Donoghue
22). In between bouts of her studies away from home, Bradley tutored Cooper and her
younger sister Amy, and when Cooper was sixteen and the family Bradley, Cooper, Amy,
and Coopers parents moved to Stoke Bishop, a suburb of Bristol, Bradley and Cooper
attended daily lectures at University College Bristol (Donoghue 33).

86
with literary critic Lionel Johnson after a lecture, Cooper found herself prat-
tling, shaking, and nervous. In their diary, she chides what she sees as her
female behavior, suggesting that in her public anxiety she demonstrate[s] that
woman cannot have the scholarly conscience. I am an occasion for cynicism
a stumbling-block to youth, the sensibility of male youth: a dream turned
into a nightmare, perchance! (Sturge Moore 192, qtd. in Leighton 218). Only
a male youth could dream of having a scholarly conscience, while she,
a woman, could only turn [it] into a nightmare.

In their joint diary, Bradley often recorded her recognition and envy of
the expressive and creative options available to men, as in this brief rant:

What good times men have, what pipes, what deep communings!. . . yet
if women seek to learn their art from life, instead of what the angels
bring down to them in dishes, they simply get defamed. (Sturge
Moore 202, qtd. in Leighton 218)

Bradley and Cooper sought the good times of men, envied the brotherhood
that could sit around smoking and partaking indeep communings. Yet the
two women felt the good times of life were, for their gender, limited to
heavenly fare, and, if they expressed want for anything more, they would be
defamed. However, by taking on a male pseudonym, they could, as Bradley
wrote in a letter to Browning, sidestep drawing room conventionalities and
say things the world [would] not tolerate from a womans lips (Sturge Moore
6). In constructing Michael Field, Bradley and Cooper thought they could

87
not only access an exclusive realm of male privileges, but could grasp the
power that came with artistic manhood, the power to skip public and private
conventionalities, the power to say and write what they wished without
shocking or offending the world. With Michael Field, Bradley and Cooper
used the male-identified scholarly conscience to promote dramas that dealt
with brutal kings, women in positions of authority, Machiavellian politics,
sins of the father and son, tyrannical governments, and desire both male
and female, and combinations thereof all thinly veiled social and political
commentaries.12

Yet interestingly, at the time Stephania was published, the secret iden-
tity of Michael Field was out; most of Bradley and Coopers literary coterie
knew the two women were behind the pseudonym. In essence then, Stephania
was neither fully produced by nor fully filtered through the man who had
been guaranteed an audience because of his gender. By this time, Michael
Field had become a socially-recognized male performance publicly put on by
two women; Stephania, as published by the women acting as Michael Field,
was a work in which the conscience of the literary artist was doubly
female. In fact, after the publication of Stephania, Bradley announces in
a letter to a friend that [Stephania] is a womans book, & women must de-
fend it. Except for a few dusty old cousins, all my women friends rejoice
in Stephania. . . . Men of course dont like this (Donoghue 77). Bradley di-

12
Their poetry has been studied as social, cultural, and political commentary, especially
with regard to gender play and sexuality, but little has been written on the socio-political
commentary presented in their dramas.

88
rectly classifies Stephania as a womans book, yet at the time the novel, not
the closet drama, was traditionally the womans book, or the predominant
womans genre of the time. Even earlier, as Bradley and Cooper finished
writing Stephania (originally titled Otho), Bradley wrote: Otho exists as a
completed conception. To be altered yes but henceforth a work to be read
from cover to cover. I can walk about now with the certain step of men.13
Bradley sees herself as walking not as a man but with the certain step of
men and thus claims herself with or equal to a man. As mentioned in
my Introduction to this dissertation, the closet drama, especially one which
tended toward introspection or historical subjects, was a dying masculine breed
which, more than once, friends like George Moore advised Bradley and Cooper
to revise or stop writing.14

Although writing about events of centuries past allowed Bradley and

Cooper to address and challenge contemporary issues indirectly and from a
safe distance, Fields loyalty to a historical genre, in a world where realism
was a trend both on the page and on the stage, eventually grew too stale
and stodgy for the reading public. Bradley and Cooper, in entries of their
joint journal dated August 1890, recognized that they needed to curb their
haphazard development of plot to create a more firm, pliant structure.15
Over the next year, they would birth a firm, pliant structure in Stephania,

13
Friday, November 29, 1891; Journals and Correspondence.
14
August 18, 1890. Folio 98, MS. Eng.misc.b.47., from the archive at the Bodleian Library,
Oxford.
15
August 13, 1890. Folio 109, From Add Mss 46780; Folio 16 in Journals and Correspon-
dence.

89
a streamlined, simplified structure that would showcase the will of a woman
as sprung from two female heads, or rather from a literary artists doubly
female conscience.

This womans book, so proclaimed by a pair of ambitious spin-

sters, did not play well at a time when Victorian women as a whole were
asserting themselves more and more through societal and political activism,
with employment and education opportunities, and in the literary marketplace.
Stephania, with its cross-gender author(s) and its avenging female protagonist,
represented this social and cultural invasion of womanhood and began to at-
tack the Decadent dogma that had mutated and risen from Paters Aesthetic
philosophies born some years earlier.16

Paters Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) inspired Bradley

and Cooper, as well as an enthusiastic fellowship of other writers and artists
(which included Lionel Johnson, Alice Meynell, Oscar Wilde, and George
Moore), to uphold the motto art for arts sake and to use that motto to
develop a religion of art based on the idea of personal transcendence through
the creation of beauty.17 The basis for Paters aesthetic religion came from

16
Though other artists ran with lart pour lart and other principles that resonated with
Pater, Pater seems to have been the single most important influence on their writing
(Leighton 215). This verse from Fields closet drama Callirrhoe reflects his aesthetic ideas:
All art is ecstasy,/All literature expression of intense/Enthusiasm: be beside yourself./If a
god violate your shrinking soul/Suffer sublimely.
17
Theophile Gautier is credited with originating the phrase art for arts sake in France,
though Desire Nisard brought it to England in 1837 (Fletcher 1618). For information
on Paters aestheticism, see Chapter 4, Masculinity Transformed, in Herbert Sussmans
Victorian Masculinities.

90
a long-standing tradition of artistic manhood. For Pater, art was all about
reflecting the intense experience of the male psyche held still on the brink
of ecstasy, as shown in his critique, Poems by William Morris (1868): A
passion of which the outlets are sealed, begets a tension of nerve, in which
the sensible world comes to one with a reinforced brilliance and relief all
redness is turned into blood, all water into tears (Pater, Westminster Review
145, qtd. in Sussman 177). In Paters philosophy, when the male outlets are
sealed, the passion builds; the tension of nerve comes to a head, so to
speak, resulting in a rush of blood, making a mans perception of the world
and hence, his artistic output shine with reinforced brilliance. Pa-
ters metaphorical language in his essay on Morris undeniably brings to mind
the image of a sustained erection, as does his famous quotation: To burn al-
ways with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life
(Pater, Conclusion 148, qtd. in Sussman 197). Pater defined manhood and art
by what I call mental Viagra, a mans constant and unremitting personal
determination to keep desire burn[ing] always inside, rather than to permit
the chaotic release of seminal energy that could result if allowed (Sussman
197, 200). But if achieving artistic beauty grew from a man bolstering a hard
gem-like flame, then artistic beauty went flaccid, to borrow another word
from Pater, when a woman was involved. For this reason, Pater viewed artistic
endeavors as a male refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from certain vulgarity
in the actual world (Pater, Appr. 18). Pater, like Thomas Carlyle before
him, advocated the idea of an all male society of the cloister that would

91
devote itself to art through a monastic tenet of self-control (Sussman 3, 5).18
But unlike Carlyle who sought to repress sexuality in that sanctuary, Pater
believed artistic achievement arose from the tension that derived from a mans
unrealized desire for other men, as Herbert Sussman suggests in Victorian
Masculinities (189).

However, while Pater sought the epitome of spirituality and beauty

through monastic discipline, Greek ascesis, and male comradeship (Hanson
178), Oscar Wilde and his circle changed up the ideals a bit. In the words of
Richard Le Gallienne, Victorian poet, essayist, and critic, Wilde popularized,
and indeed somewhat vulgarized, as he perhaps to a degree misunderstood,
and certainly dangerously applied, the gospel of beauty and ecstasy which
Pater taught with hierarchical reserve (Seiler 157). Pater had been concerned
that some readers might misconstrue and misuse his words; in fact, he removed
The Conclusion from the second edition of The Renaissance (1877) in case his
tenet might beguile or delude his young male readers (Dowling 3). In The
Conclusion, Pater writes:

[W]e are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says . . . , [W]e have an

interval, and then our place knows us no more. [. . . ] [O]ur one
chance is expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations

18
A bit about Carlyle: Bradley and Cooper read Carlyles Past and Present, which com-
pared the lives of a medieval abbot and a nineteenth-century man and championed com-
munal values. Carlyle wrote about an all male community excluding females (Sussman 17);
wrote Phallus Worship (1848) in which he sees sexualized desire as danger to social order
(Sussman 36); and advocated chaste masculine bonding (Sussman 74).

92
 as possible into the given time. High passions give one this quick-
ened sense of life, ecstasy, and sorrow of love, political or religious
enthusiasm, or the enthusiasm of humanity. Only, be sure it is
passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied
consciousness. (Pater 41)

The Conclusion did, in fact, exact a virulent reaction from those who were
disgusted by what they viewed as a soulless hedonism (Dowling 111). Some
readers, shocked by the idea of filling life, or ones personal interval, with
as many pulsations or high passions as one can, viewed Paters following
as a cult of intense experiences (Dowling 180).19 Suddenly, followers of
Aestheticism seemed to strive to express the enthusiasm of humanity and
high passions over artistic technique.

The principles of Aestheticism began to grow Decadent as Paters cul-

tivation of the beautiful experience for its own sake was replaced as an artistic
credo by the cultivation of any experience for its own sake (Small xii, qtd. in
Primamore 51). Experiences considered perverse or unnatural were extremely

19
For instance, John Wordsworth, grand-nephew of William Wordsworth, former student
of Pater, and eventual colleague at Brasenose College in Oxford, wrote him about The
Conclusion not long after the books initial printing (Dellamora 158-159). Wordsworth, in
echo of many other men within the college and outside in the press, reprimanded Pater for
perpetuating the dangerous idea that no fixed principles either of religion or morality can
be regarded as certain, that the only thing worth living for is momentary enjoyment, as well
as for inspiring that idea in minds weaker than [Paters] own (Wordsworth letters, qtd.
in Dellamora 158-159). Pater, having already been passed over for a professorial promotion
at Oxford and wanting to prevent another professional snub, revised and reprinted The
Renaissance without its conclusion (Dellamora 158-159). But his words had already made
a great impression on many.

93
idealized, carefully designed to undermine traditional mores (Hanson 3). Talia
Schaffer calls the Decadent style a brief defensive reaction of embattled male
writers who perceived themselves to be losing status to popular women writers
and consequently fetishized their own decay (6). Ian Fletchers borrowed de-
scription of Decadence from Theophile Gautier characterizes this fetishization:

it is ingenious, learned, complicated, diseased, gamy, nuanced,

borrowing from all the technical vocabularies, expressing the vaguest
and most fleeting of contours, alert to the subtle confidences of the
neuropath, the avowals of ageing or depraved passion, and the sin-
gular hallucinations of the idee fixe. (Fletcher 10)

This Decadent revision of Paters art for arts sake ideal transformed his
religion of high passions into a religion of ageing or depraved passion
practiced, or hallucinate[d], by men truly condamnes in the eyes of society
(as well as in their own). With the enactment of the Labouch`ere Amendment
of 1885 in which any male homosexual act, whether public or private, was
deigned against the law, Decadent men moved their close male relationships
and their art, which often reflected their relationships deeper into both
literal and figurative closets.20

20
Certainly, one could debate that Oscar Wilde was not concealing much in the public
eye, but I would argue that his careful control of his public image, his persona, was in many
ways a closet. Support of this idea might be seen in the incident following the exposure
at his trial of his intimate letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, sent from Reading Gaol. In the
letter, Wilde recalls being humiliated at the train station when he waits to be taken away
to jail: he weeps at the loss of the personal walls he had meticulously constructed around
him, exposed to the elements as he stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a

94
 Richard Le Gallienne, though often categorized with the Decadents
because of his literary style, comments on what he sees as this downward spiral
from Aestheticism to Decadence in a prefatory poem titled and addressed To
the Reader in his volume of English Poems (1892):

Art was a palace once, things great and fair,

And strong and holy, found a temple there:
Now tis a lazar-house of leprous men.

For Le Gallienne, Paters great and fair, strong and holy, palace of Art has
been transformed into a house of diseased, leprous male bodies, a common
metaphor for male homosexuality as a pestilence, plague, or malady.21 Ellis
Hanson in Decadence and Catholicism suggests that male Decadents used the
highly wrought language of illness, perversity, and degeneracy to scandalize,
even shock conventional morality (3). The seedy contagiousness of Deca-
dence was infesting what was once an artistic temple. For Le Gallienne, for
Bradley and Cooper, it had to stop.

Bradley and Cooper were extremely critical of art, theirs and every-
one elses, and their devotion to Paters clean aestheticism (despite Pa-

jeering mob (De Profundis 491). For a more detailed portrayal of Wildes emotional state
in the letter, read Oliver Bucktons Desire Without Limits: Dissident Confession in Oscar
Wildes De Profundis in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999).
21
As suggested in Gregory Tomsos The Queer History of Leprosy and Same-Sex Love
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 747, 773. In Tomsos footnotes, he reveals that
in nineteenth-century medical discourse, leprosy and homosexuality were given the same
name, satyriasis.

95
ters gender bias) led them to denounce the more perverse forms of deca-
dence (Leighton 217). Though Bradley and Cooper themselves were consid-
ered Decadent in style by many, Stephania undoubtedly confronts the ways in
which Decadence was seen as corrupting Victorian masculinity, and as a result,
art itself.22 In Roba di Roma, printed in Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine
(December 1890), the anonymous author writes: There is no period in the
history of the popes more stained with crime than that of the three Othos
(771). Thus, to the reader of Stephania, Stephania, in identifying herself as
Rome well into decay under the imperial reign of Otho III, represents both
fin de si`ecle England and its palace (or empire) of art - as threatened by the
same condition. In addition, to many Victorians, this homosexual ignominy
spreading through Victorian society and illustrated through its Decadent art,
as Elaine Showalter in Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de
Si`ecle notes, resembled the same type of immorality that had led to the
downfall of the Greek and Roman Empires and predicted a similar fate for

22
From a letter from Theodore Maynard, who wrote an article on Bradley and Cooper
after their deaths to Thomas Sturge Moore, their literary executor who was a bit taken
aback by the label: I dont think it is critically unsound to say that your friends were
at one time decadent, tho some readers might misunderstand the expression. Of course
Michael Field was not decadent in the sense that Wilde was decadent, but he was nearer
the literary school (by a long way) than were the two poets you mention. Browning &
Meredith seem to me to be about unlike decadents as it is possible to be. Probably we
mean different things by the word. I understand it to describe a certain unnatural union of
paganism & mysticism which, when attempted, brings about the disease & then the decay of
both (Folio 19, MS.Eng.lett.c.433). Moores response, edited for clarity: . . . I appreciate
the kindness of your concession over the footnotes and only regret that I failed to persuade
you over the wholely unjustifiable use of the words, decadent of the decadents. [Y]ou
couldnt have used stronger of Wilde himself Rimbaud or Verlaine. [. . . ]I begin to doubt
whether you have ever read [a] major portion of the work of Michael Field, finding you so
ready to justify a perfectly preposterous phrase (Folio 20).

96
England (3). Showalter quotes from The Political Value of Social Purity,
an article printed in The Sentinel, September 1885: If England falls, one
clergyman warned, it will be this sin, and her unbelief in God, that will have
been her ruin (3-4). When Stephania recounts the experience of her rape,
which occurred before the drama opens, during her first official introduction
to Otho she eloquently describes her subsequent change in being and credits
her lush manner of speaking by admitting, In my womanhood/I was a poet
(I, 571-572). In reclaiming Othos moribund Roman empire, Stephania will
restore the power of her artistic womanhood and thusly will revive national
identity along with poet[ic] tradition.

In her essay, Tyranny of Women (1894), artist and journalist Ellen

Gosse satirically portrays women as the saviors of England against a weakening
male Roman Empire:

[S]ocial Boadiceas are sweeping everything before them with a

fierce volubility. Every year some fresh outpost goes down, and
the Roman boy, in the tender effeminacy of his politics . . . hears
the enemy ever louder at his gate. Bloodily, bloodily falls the bat-
tleaxe, and one by one the privileges of men are falling. (qtd. in
Showalter 24)

Though published two years after the publication of Fields Stephania, Gosses
metaphorical casting of Victorian women as Boadicea, a legendary queen who
led an uprising of ancient British tribes against the Romans in 60 AD, not to

97
mention the male Decadents as the Roman boy, in the tender effeminacyof
his politics anticipating the invasion at any minute by a female enemy,
aptly reflects the story of Stephania, an Empress wronged, who sweep[s]
into Emperor Othos fresh outpost, flings open the gate, and restores
order to a land Otho had poached by murdering her husband.23 To relate
this imagery back to Le Galliennes poetic observation, Stephania raids the
artistic empire of leprous men in order to reinstate something great and
fair, strong and holy. In the final verses of the drama, Stephania declares
that her love herded the wicked into hell (III, 821-822); she is rid of the
usurper (III, 827) and has cleansed herself (III, 821) and the palace. With
this in mind, the doors to what Gosse sees as a closet of tender effeminacy
and passivity are flung open. In Stephania, Rome, England, and the palace of
art are saved from Decadence. Bradley and Cooper have decided that women
will be the new rulers of country and art.

Stephania takes place in a lazar-house of sorts as the action of the

drama is confined to Othos palace and the pageantry great and fair of
Rome has disappeared under Othos leadership. Nineteenth-century histori-
ans viewed the real Otho as at once vehement and vacillating, melancholy
and excitable by turns the victim of violent fits of remorse and devotion,
during which he was guilty of gross cruelties and crimes (Edinburgh Maga-
zine 773). For Bradley and Cooper, who did a vast amount of research, Otho

23
In ancient Rome, Roman men could only claim masculinity if they had the insertive
role in penetrative acts (Williams 125). If not, they were considered effeminate. Effeminacy
was a Decadent trait.

98
and his Empire were the perfect choice to represent the heart of a Decadent
civilization.24

Otho is a young man of 21 when the drama opens three years after
he marched on Rome, hung the Consul Crescentius high on the battlements
of Castle St. Angelo, and set about restoring what he saw as the glory days
of the Roman Empire.25 Othos vision for a new Rome has not materialized;
the citizens are on the verge of revolt, the ancient pomp and spectacle he had
fought for nowhere to be found. He blames Gerbert, his right-hand man so
to speak, for leading him down this path of blind ambition. Gerbert, also
named Pope Sylvester II, symbolizes the Roman Empire, the power wielded
by the unification of political and religious institutions. Although Gerbert has
a mystical past in learning wizardry from the Moors in his younger days,

24
In More Roba Di Roma, a collection of essays about Italian culture and history by
William Wetmore Story included in the December 1870 issue of Blackwoods Edinburgh
Magazine, Otho is described with characteristics of a decadent: In character he was at
once vehement and vacillating, melancholy and excitable by turns the victim of violent
fits of remorse and devotion, during which he was guilty of gross cruelties and crimes, and
of equally violent fits of remorse and devotion, during which he strove to expiate his offenses
by long pilgrimages, penances, fasts, and superstitious rites[.] In Roba Di Roma, Story
juxtaposes the state of mid-nineteenth-century Rome against its rich history, compelling
nineteenth-century readers to see how both Romes reflect each other (New York: Leonard
Scott Publishing Co., 1870).
25
Fields interpretation of Othos story adheres closely to the reported history of the actual
Emperor Otto III: while Consul Crescentius ruled Rome in Othos stead under a peaceful
republic and subjected the papal authority to civil authority, Emperor Otto decided to take
his rightful place as leader of the empire. Otho and Crescentius did indeed battle. Otho
offered Crescentius a deal, which Crescentius accepted under false pretenses. Otho hung
Crescentius on the castle battlements. There are many versions of Othos final demise.
Bradley and Cooper began researching the history in 1890; they visited archives in the
British Museum, read Bryces Holy Roman Empire (1887) and went to Germany to visit
Othos tomb. See the 1890 entries from Journals and Correspondence and Donoghue, 61.

99
he has become a political player (I, 8-9) and wants to keep Othos attention
on battling to save Rome. However, Gerbert does not encourage this imperial
warfare simply to build a divine empire. Nor does he stay by Othos side
merely to strategize and conquer. In Victorian Masculinities, Sussman claims
that in circumstances of war close masculinities bonding into adult life [was]
permitted within a warrior model of masculinity (49). For Gerbert, war and
empire-building sanction intimacy with Otho.

For Bradley and Cooper, Gerberts love for Otho reflects the controlled,
yet erotic, passions advocated in Paters artistic cloister. Gerbert conveys his
mental and spiritual love for Otho through a language of eroticism and longing,
as evidenced by this image Gerbert uses to describe for Stephania his love for
Otho:

. . . It is unsupportable
To breathe beside him with the consciousness
That he is growing alien whom I love
With such constriction of the heart, my prayers
Grow ruddy as with life-blood at his name,
Who is my dream incarnate, half my God. (II, 126-131)

In the tradition of Pater, whose passion rises and all the sensible world comes
to one with a reinforced brilliance and relief all redness is turned into
blood, Gerberts prayers grow ruddy as with life-blood with the invocation
of Othos name. Otho is his dream incarnate, half [his] God, his path to

100
transcendence into beauty. The relationship between Otho and Gerbert began
in the institutional cloister (I, 413) when Otho was 15 and Gerberts pupil,
but to Gerberts disappointment, Otho pulled away from the tutelage and
went his own way, questioning Gerberts motives and teachings. Bradley and
Cooper treat Gerbert with compassion, almost as if he is Pater himself, yet
also portray the relationship as constricting, claustrophobic, and crumbling.26
Gerbert feels Otho growing alien because of his attraction to what Romuald,
the zealous hermit practicing his religion in far-off countryside caves, can of-
fer. Romuald, like Gerbert and Otho, is also based on a historical figure; in
contrast to Gerbert, he railed against the hierarchical and excessive behav-
ior of religious authority and sought to transform the world into a hermitage
where no privilege, rank, or institutional regimen existed (Damian). Follow-
ing historical record, the Otho in Stephania supports Romuald, to Gerberts
dismay, and longs to relinquish his duty to the Holy Roman Empire so he
can become devoted solely to the hermit. In the drama, Bradley and Cooper
play up Gerberts fears that Othos actions will be their joint fall into what
the drama projects as depravity, rather than their joint transcendence into
Beauty/Power.

The unbridled, spiritual relationship between Romuald (who never phys-

ically appears en sc`ene) and Otho represents what, to Bradley and Cooper,

26
Though Im not certain if Bradley and Cooper were aware, Pater, like Gerbert was
known to have had relationships with younger men; well-known was Paters relationship
with 19-year old William Money Hardinge that cost Pater a university proctorship (Hanson
17475). See Ellis Hansons chapter on Pater Dolorosa in Decadence and Catholicism.

101
was the messy turn from Paters disciplined, mental ecstasy of Aestheticism
to the debauched and uncontrolled physical desire of Decadence. Othos con-
flict is illustrated through his account to Gerbert, early in the drama, of his
confession at Romualds cavern in the hill (I, 249). His physical encounter
with Romuald is one of renitence and acquiescence. When Otho arrived at Ro-
mualds grot, he found repentance for Cresentius murder in [Romualds]
arms and lost himself in the hermits presence (I, 244-245, 255, 258). Later,
Otho lay down (I, 275) with Romuald and, in the morning, was awakened by
Romualds kiss: A touch/woke me at last between my eyes that opened/To
see the saints mouth clingingly withdrawn (I, 275, 278-280). But the lan-
guage blurs to depict the scene as more like a rape:

Beneath his passion

Almost I yielded but the breeze was strong,
In the cold brightness ere the sun was risen
I thought of how my army to the trumpet
Replied with life; an eagle on the sky
Went past; I snatched my toga from the floor,
And then there was no colour to be seen
Throughout the earthy dwelling-place. I broke
A crust, I tried to drink beneath those brows
Planted above me, till in fear I rose
As if to go: he asked me of my choice,
But in my face he found not what he sought.
I strove, I parried, I implored, I made
Wavering conditions[.] (I, 284-297)

102
Othos vacillation is evidenced by his fear and by his physical response to
Romualds advances: Otho finds himself aroused with life by the encounter,
but as an emperor who has only commanded other men to have sex (as seen
in his order of Stephanias rape which he does not join), and has not had sex
himself, he is confused by the enticing call of the trumpet, what could be read
as both a military call and as Romualds phallic trumpet, and tries to flee
the monks dark earthy dwelling place. This scene depicts Othos struggle
with both his identity and his desires. Shall he, as a soldier of Empire, resist
and control his passion, or shall he become a soldier of God and give in to his
physical nature like Romuald?

The night after his visit with Romuald, on the move with his army,
Otho weeps in private over this personal dilemma (I, 326328). He wonders
if he has sinned, and if he is worthy even manly enough to control
an empire. He went to Romuald for redemption, but found himself emotion-
ally and physically disturbed. Yet he is still attracted to the religious life
of solitude Romuald offers. Ultimately he considers himself, to recall Victor
Hugos condamne, damned in [his] very destiny (I, 693) and anguishes about
being caught between the lives of Gerbert and Romuald: I perish/Between
them, yearning for such unity/As they proclaim impossible (II, 391-392). The
drama presents both options as unnatural and unhealthy, on a personal level
and a national level. In Act One, Otho accuses Gerbert of making him sway
a vacant kingdom (I, 187); Otho, under Gerberts mentoring, remains a vir-
gin emperor; therefore, the kingdom remains vacant like an empty womb since

103
its leader is not populating the Empire. If he were to align himself with Ro-
muald, a zealot wanting to populate the Roman Empire with hermitages and
monasteries, Otho would also surrender his empire to infertility, as Romuald
seeks to create a world of men and solitude. Additionally, Otho would sacrifice
himself, in Gerberts words, to [a] creature skilled to blemish and deflower
(II, 7) and would be unmanned (II, 276).

In speaking with Gerbert and having her own brief encounter with
Romuald (off-page) when she was left to wander after her rape,27 Stephania
realizes that Othos connection to either man bodes badly for Romes future,
and on a metaphorical/thematic level, neither option bodes any better for Eng-
land. The stylistic and metaphorical treatment of the homosocial relationships
in Stephania suggest that any society or vocation limited to the male con-
science has inherent weakness and is certain to founder from its sterility. But
since Otho cannot quit the rule of men (II, 622), as he tells Stephania, the
fertility and survival of Rome hence, the fertility and the survival of Eng-
land, of Art depends on Stephania. At the start of the drama, she speaks
of poisonous spices wafting through the palace:

There are perfumes here

Full of spices that grow old in tombs,
Soft, penetrative scents that shaken out

27
After she was left to die in the camp, she wandered into the hills and found herself at
Romualds cave. She asked for his help and kissed his feet, at which point he became violent
and beastly, crying as he were bitten by a serpents fang and clawing at her (II, 75-84).

104
 Spread poison, but are fatal being breathed
By one without suspicion as in sleep. (I, 1014)

The poison could very well come from the censer Stephania clasps, as noted
in the stage directions, which might indicate that she has spread the fatal
poison which ultimately kills Otho. Yet at the same time, since historical
myths disagree about whether or not the real Stephania killed Emperor Otho
III by poison, this Stephania could be using the censer, or incense vessel, to
cleanse the palace of the poison that already seeps through the palace in
the form of Gerbert and Othos patriarchal, homosocial, and vacant Roman
Catholic Decadence. On the level of metanarrative, Stephania could represent
a censer itself, its rich imagery, as exemplified by this passage, a poison that
Bradley and Cooper created in the name of cleansing Beauty and Art. But
as Bradley and Cooper adopted the language of Decadence, infusing passion
with the metaphor of disease and death, to tell the story, the drama became
fatal being breathed by its Decadent readership.28

Shaping Forth My Eager Thoughts: Rehabilitating the Closet

Drama

Bradley and Coopers choice to employ and renovate the closet drama
genre with Stephania seems purposeful and innovative, especially when eval-
uated alongside the rest of Michael Fields vast closet drama canon. Michael

28
In fact, at the time of Stephanias publication, Nietzche frequently employed the French
word decadent to paint the Church as the epitome of all that [was] weak, archaic, and
irrational in modern civilization (Hanson 8).

105
Fields closet drama was usually characterized by genre convention: blank
verse form, large cast of characters (or Dramatis Personae), and historical,
mythical, or supernatural themes. Similar to others of the genre, many of
Fields dramas were deemed either too large or too interior to be portrayed
on the stage and thus remained in their literary form. The pace of dia-
logue was also noted as being too slow and speeches too long. For example,
The Tragic Mary (1890), the drama published just before Stephania, with its
cast of twenty-four-plus characters, follows a traditional five-act style made
popular by the Roman philosopher/dramatist Seneca and adopted by Eliza-
bethan dramatists, including Shakespeare, whom Bradley and Cooper greatly
revered. The dramas Elizabethan form seems appropriate to chronicle the
story of Mary, Queen of Scots, especially since it takes place during her cousin
Elizabeth Is reign as Queen of England. However, The Tragic Mary received
hit-and-miss reviews (Donoghue 56), and Bradley and Cooper, as noted earlier
in this chapter, felt pressure to change.

In analyzing the importance of Bradley and Coopers choice and re-

vision of the closet drama form, I want to look briefly at two other fictional
works of the nineteenth-century that dealt with the same Stephania history:
Felicia Hemans Widow of Crescentius (1812) and W.W. Storys Stephania:
A Tragedy in Five Acts with a Prologue (1875). In Hemans long narrative
poem Widow of Crescentius, after Stephanias husband Crescentius is killed,
she disguises herself not as a courtesan, but as a minstrel-boy named Guido
to entertain, endear herself to, and eventually poison Otho. This costuming

106
obviously generates bold questions about gender, sexuality, and pederasty, as
does the narrators erotic language, exemplified by the moment when Otho
bids [the boys] lay (II, 175) and another orgasmic moment when, as the boy
plays his harp, Othos lip is quivering, and his breast/Heaves with convulsive
pangs oppressd, his dim eye seems fixd and glazed;/And now to heaven in
anguish raised. (II, 241244). The double entendre and homoerotic allusion
in Hemans version is much like that in Fields Stephania, particularly in its
depiction of the relationships among Gerbert, Otho, and Romuald. However in
Widow, Stephanias agency only goes as far as her disguise; in telling Stepha-
nias story as a long poetic narrative in two parts, the narrator, who is never
identified, restricts the tale to a third-person omniscient and consequently fil-
ters Stephanias thoughts, emotions, and words, not to mention controls the
construction of her identity. Stephania is a heros bride (II, 275), as she
reveals (in dialogue) to Otho near the end of the poem, and live[s] for one
dread task alone (II, 286) Crescentius glory. But this mission seals her
fate: she emphatically bids Othos court to lead [her] to death (II, 305), and
at the end of the poem, the narrator assures the reader that indeed she will
find repose (II, 322). Death was a common and accepted end for a woman
in Victorian literature, the ultimate sacrifice of her being to the males she
had been born to serve (Dijkstra 29). Though Stephanias death could be,
at first, read as a noble sacrifice, in the final four lines of the poem, the nar-
rator announces that her deed, her actions, will be forgotten with her grave:
And oer thy dark and lowly bed/The sons of future days shall tread/The

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pangs, the conflicts of thy lot,/By them unknown, by thee forgot. It seems
that Stephania, as the Widow, begins and ends as the subject of another Ro-
mantic elegy, one that the narrator intends to bury with her, cross-dressing
minstrel-song lost.29

More in line in terms of genre with Fields approach, Storys Stephania

is a closet drama, yet has twenty characters and a five-act Senecan/Elizabethan
form. Both Hemans Stephania and Storys Stephania only have one purpose:
to avenge her husbands murder. But while Hemans Stephania, in executing
her plan, has sorrow in her face and occasionally a flash of troubled mystery
(II, 162), Storys Stephania is, right from the prologue, akin to Lady MacBeth
and the femme fatale. The closet drama genre, with its structure founded on
non-mediated dialogue, presents Stephania with the ability to speak her own
mind, and Story uses the opportunity to the fullest. When Crescentius tells
Stephania his plan to surrender to Otho, she balks at his decision:

[W]eak woman though I am

No strength but heart I would have fought it out
While one red drop of blood ran in these veins.
I would have courted death rushed to it glad
As to a bridegroom flung me in his arms.(I, 230235)

29
Hemans was known for her literary piousness, sweet language, and mothering voice
that bespoke true womanhood (Leighton 16). Yet Angela Leighton in Victorian Women
Poets: Writing Against the Heart does credit Hemans with liberat[ing] the idea of the
woman poet from the . . . denials of history (4041).

108
This Stephania expresses her mettle from the start, and at Crescentius sug-
gestion that she submit to Otho, she vehemently refuses. Not long after, when
Crescentius is led away by Othos men, Stephania vows: God shall avenge
him: if not God, then I (374).

Instead of playing the courtesan or the minstrel-boy, Storys Stephania,

living in a convent after her husbands murder, decides to go to an ailing Otho
as a veiled nun and healer. She reveals her identity at Othos insistence, and
for the remainder of the drama, tries to play Othos sympathies as a poor,
weak, broken woman (IV, 77). At first, Otho is charmed, but soon tires of
her when she rejects his sexual advances. When Stephania realizes his plan
to oust her from his domain, she poisons him. Similar to Fields Stephania,
Storys Stephania transforms herself to execute her revenge. The drama, like
Fields, even culminates with a question that seems open-ended: For me,
what now remains? (V, 91). However, Storys Stephania has only one goal
throughout the drama to honor her husband. She proclaims: What more
do I need/Than the one thought, Crescentius of thee/Dear noble heart (III,
132134). In the end, Stephanias purpose is complete, and she finds herself
lost. She does not win power for herself or for womanhood. She ends up
immobile, inactive, uncertain what to do.

Often a genre of personal immobility, the traditional closet drama was

frequently driven by psychological exploration, or inward conflict, rather than
character development through action, or external conflict. In this type of
closet drama, the drama unfolds in the closet of the mind as the male pro-

109
tagonist in these dramas tends to grow debilitated by his psyche and seeks
asylum from his overwhelming emotions. Both Storys version and Fields ver-
sion of Stephania design the closet as a site of physical action. But while
many of Storys twenty characters act throughout the drama and his Stephania
ends in emotional paralysis, Fields Stephania is the only one who acts to and
beyond the end of her story. Thus, by using a dramatic structure (rather than
a poetic narrative structure as did Hemans, for example), yet keeping the cast
to three, Bradley and Coopers emphasis on female autonomy, authority, and
agency is unmistakable. Three years after Stephania was published, Richard
Le Gallienne declared that man for the present seems to be at a standstill,
if not actually retrograde, and the onward movement of the world to be em-
bodied in woman (Westminster Review 143, qtd. in Schaffer 24). As a closet
drama named for a determined, ambitious woman who includes in her goals
glory to [her] womanhood (I, 87), Stephania rehabilitates a physically re-
pressed genre based on a males inward movement by showcasing a womans
onward movement.

The setting of Stephania provides the first clue. As touched on earlier

in this chapter, the three acts are confined to Othos palace. The palace
represents Othos inward focus; here, he re-evaluates his past, interrogates his
future purpose, questions his spirituality. He is anguished, confused: his army
has marked the growth of his empire across Italy, yet his victory tastes hollow.
Guilt over murdering Crescentius unsettles him, and he longs to repent for
his crimes. He wrangles with relinquishing his power and seeking sanctuary

110
with the hermit Romuald, who aspires to populate Italy with monasteries and
hermitages. Otho sees no meaning in the world he conquered and, though
only twenty-one, feels blind, damned, and close to death. He is paralyzed with
inaction.

While Othos growing insecurities eventually bloom into madness, Ste-

phanias inward exploration does not crush, torture, or paralyze her, but in-
stead inspires her agency. The narrative of Stephania pivots on the way in
which Stephania first calculates, then executes her subterfuge; this corporeal
manifestation of her thoughts changes a genre and a place traditionally
confined by philosophical rhetoric and self-exploration into a space of action
and change. The drama opens with Stephania alone in a hall of the palace
the closet reclaimed by Emperor Otho. Active verbs show her executing
her plan as she immediately slips into her role as the hostess to the foreign
guests who have come to socialize with the new Emperor (I, 2). She meditates
aloud about the role she must play as a courtesan: she will offer welcome,
diffuse strange grace, breed the smiles/Men love, provide/The strong in-
citements of the slave born free, and make vice sibylline (I, 2-7, emphasis
mine). Using her body, bright with exultation as a shield (I, 90) and her
vitality (I, 92), Stephania intends to seduce and murder Otho and seeks re-
venge against his advisor Gerbert as accomplice to the crime. But even before
the drama begins, Stephania has been drawing physical strength and power
from her psyche, as noted when she provides a flashback early in the first act.
Three years prior to the start of the drama, after her husband Crescentius

111
was overthrown, Stephania was taken to camp by Othos troops and, on his
orders, raped, borne away/To degradation (I, 62-63). At first, she surren-
dered to her attackers, but when the brutal assault ended, she wasted no time
in musing [her] revenge (I, 65). Weakened and in shock, she escaped the
city and headed into the distant hills, trying both to heal and to make sense
of the traumatic events. On the move, she realized that the assault did not
mutilate or destroy her spirit, and saw that power still remained in her beauty.
Through this self-awareness, this self-consciousness, she recognized her power-
ful need for justice and reward: she became determined to honor her husband
and, at the same time, bring glory to [her] womanhood (I, 87). The entire
drama is fueled by the physical manifestations of Stephanias will, the female
conscience.

Victor Barrucand, in a piece written for an 1895 issue of the avant-garde

journal La Revue blanche,30 captured the essence, wiles, and temptations of
the type of femme fatale role Stephania was trying to play:

[W]ith a simple undulation of her rump, she was able to trouble

mans brain; and with her slowly insinuating ability to fascinate,
she picked apart fortunes, the arts, creeds. Venus-Pandemos31 tri-

30
La Revue blanche was a journal first printed in Belgium in 1889, but moved to Paris
in 1891. The journal catered to a readership of intellectuals and was dedicated to the
support and development of art. See Venita Dattas Birth of a National Icon: The Literary
Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France (New York: SUNY Press, 1999)
3133.
31
Grecian surname of Venus Pandemos means common to all. Also a symbol of pros-
titution. A temple was built for her with money public girls had to pay. (The Popular

112
 umphed over idealistic aspirations; she ridiculed chastity, the fam-
ily, the fatherland, the future life, drama and the world of dreams.
It was the revenge of brute desire, breaking the lyres and the gui-
tars of an aged worlds orphic singers whom she had forced into
prostration before sex itself. (qtd. in Dijkstra 358, Barrucand 350)

Indeed, Stephania fits Barrucands vision of prostitute, as she fully intends

to trouble mans brain, to pic[k] apart fortunes, and to ridicul[e] the
fatherland in her revenge. She appears to possess the qualities of a brute
with animalistic desire. She undulate[s], insinuate[s], fascinate[s]. She is
a woman who cannot be contained in the tenets or closet of patriarchal
ideals.

This characterization of Stephania can be illuminated against the bib-

lical figure Salome, a popular femme fatale/seductress depicted throughout
Victorian literature and art. Bram Dijkstra in his comprehensive Idols of Per-
versity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Si`ecle Culture suggests that
Salome represented the inherent perversity of women: their eternal circu-
larity and their ability to destroy the males soul (384). During the fin de
si`ecle, Oscar Wilde made Salome a scandalous, self-aware femme fatale and
the symbol of Decadence in his play, Salome (1896).32 In Wildes version,
Salome aggressively pursues her own desires and becomes obsessed by John

Encyclopedia: Being a General Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, ed. Daniel Keyte Sanford,
Thomas Thomson, and Allan Cunningham [Oxford University: Blackie & Son, 1837] 404.)
32
Wilde wrote the play originally in French and used the French spelling of Salomes name.

113
the Baptist (Jokanaan), only to cause his execution after he refuses her affec-
tion. In the biblical myth, however, Herodias commands her daughter Salome
to seduce Herod, her new husband and Salomes stepfather, into ordering the
murder and the plated head of John the Baptist. No matter the take on
her gruesome mission, Salome was often presented as bestial virgin of deadly
desires (Dijkstra 386), and, in plotting Othos demise through the persona of a
courtesan, Stephania, like Salome, is classified by this bestial role of seduc-
tion. Yet Stephania is not motivated by brute desire, as Barrucand suggests
of Wildes Salome. Wildes Salome is driven by carnality or sensuality, even
a lack of reason, shown by Salomes repetition of imperatives as she tries to
physically possess Jokanaan:

Salom
e.
I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan. I will kiss thy mouth.
The Young Syrian.
[...] Princess, do not speak these things.
Salom
e.
I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan.
(Note: A few lines of dialogue follow here. The Young Syrian can-
not bear Salomes actions and kills himself, falling between Salome
and Jokanaan. The Page of Herodias expresses his guilt over the
action. A soldier announces the Syrians death.)
Salom
e.
Suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan.
Jokanaan.

114
 [...H]ath he not come, the angel of death?
Salom
e.
Suffer me to kiss thy mouth.

Salome has no perception of what is happening around her. She focuses solely
on kissing Jokanaans mouth, undeterred even when a man falls to his death
at her feet. She goes on to repeat the phrases I will kiss thy mouth and
Suffer me to kiss thy mouth a few more times, determined to get her way,
despite the fact that Jokanaan will suffer for it.

Bradley and Cooper, in contrast to Wilde, do not make Stephania a

femme fatale in her own right, but rather a woman who takes advantage of
the seductive, decadent appeal of the temptress ideal to lure and captivate.
She is an empress cloaked by a plan, yet with her slowly insinuating ability
to fascinate, she represents a growing temptation the two men in the drama
cannot turn away or ignore. But like the soldier in Wildes Salome who kills
himself because he cannot endure her charms, Otho finds himself losing control
in the presence of Stephania. About Stephania, Otho says,

This woman summoned up

Such fantasies, such horror, such detail,
Of deeds that I have never done, of thoughts
Strange to me, summoned them as memories,
That all I have to do is now reap
What I have never sown. (I, 684689)

115
In her purposeful seduction, Stephania stirs up heterosexual desires in Otho,
desires he has never felt or experienced. He loses control of his own body and
mind as she summon[s] fantasies to erupt from inside him. In a sense, this
image resembles a Paterian Aesthete gone beyond Wilde; for Otho, it is bad
enough that he cannot control his thoughts, but they are thoughts strange
heterosexual thoughts. For this reason, in the all-male artistic communities
portrayed by Carlyle and Pater, women were demonized, excluded, othered,
and objectified because men could not figure out any other way to control them
or their effect. Thus, men believed that if they could not control women or the
temptations they caused, their manhood and consequently their creative
and social production was soon to be lost.

Gerbert must weigh this consequence as he watches Otho sway toward

Romualds lifestyle. To keep Otho from the hermit, Gerbert finally decides
to employ rather than reject Stephanias feminine wiles and asks her to use
the famed powers of womanhood (II, 360361). But even before Gerbert
solicits her aid, Stephania chooses the role of courtesan, knowing full well how
the men would see her. In doing so, she regains ownership of womanhood for
womanhood by commandeering the power to transform and transcend gender
prescriptions. Stephania intentionally decides to become a courtesan after she
is raped and left for dead by Othos soldiers. In the aftermath of their sexual
violence, she is at first numbed by the experience, but gradually finds new
inspiration and awareness:

Then sacred grew my agony, my shame,

116
 Sacred my beauty, sacred the strange arts
I found myself endowed with, as the child
Of a great craftsman is endowed with skill
To handle unfamiliar instruments[.] (I, 74-78)

The agony and shame she feels because of the demoralizing physical as-
sault becomes sacred, worthy of religious veneration, holy; the agony and
shame become feelings to revere. Her beauty and sexuality turn sacred
as well, as she realizes the skill she possesses as a woman. In comparing
herself to a child/Of a great craftsman, she implies that prior to the attack,
she was nave in the craft of sexuality and likens her body to an unfamiliar
instrument. At the same time, she is endowed with [the] skill to use it. She
recognizes the power and honors it with gratitude and awe (I, 79); she is not
pick[ing] apart the arts as Barrucand wrote, but sees herself as craftsman.
While the men who raped her, as well as Otho, the man who ordered the rape,
subjected her to complete degradation (I, 63), Stephania does not remain
in that state. She chooses to honor her body by wielding it, by allowing it
to gr[o]w bright in exultation as a shield/ fresh-burnished (I, 8991). In a
sense, she is a crusader for her own body.

Furthermore, Stephania refers to herself as courtesan (I, 4), not pros-

titute or any other, lower, classification. This pointed label identifies her not
of the Roman citizenry or working class, but puts her on another, higher, level,
especially for the Victorian reader. Katie Hickman in Courtesans: Money, Sex,
and Fame in the nineteenth-century offers a new image of the late-nineteenth-

117
century courtesan as a powerful symbol of a womans potential for autonomy,
for sexual and emotional self-expression; and a sweet-throated counterblast to
the stultifying tyranny of female propriety (332). Hickman posits that those
qualities are exactly the reason why the courtesan is denied a voice (331),
excluded and othered as I stated earlier. Hickman writes, Shunned in their
own day for being moral degenerates, courtesans were, quite to the contrary,
some of the most quick-sighted and astute observers of the moral issues at
the heart of womens lot (334). Stephania demonstrates her quick-sighted
and astute observations of morality in her critique of the courtesan role. In
Act III, near the end of the drama, Stephania rues having to act the part:
O God, how tedious is the harlots part,/. . . To dress for him,/To garnish
infamy (III, 611, 615616). A few lines later, she continues her censure of the
part: I clad myself/Thus secretly in grave-clothes every time/That I put on
harlots ornaments (III, 625627). Stephania sees herself as a harlot, an
unchaste woman costumed in robes of death, grave-clothes that have obvi-
ously been worn for Otho, but prescribed by everyman; since she dresses for
him, she is not the moral degenerate he is. In recognizing that she does
not shroud herself in this fashion, Stephania not only recognizes Otho and
Gerbert as well as the men who raped her, and men as a whole as the
moral degenerates, but also recognizes her true self underneath. In the final
scene, Stephania declares that the courtesans hateful clothes/ Make havoc
of [her] beauty (III, 791792) and strips them off. This action, as tied to her
beauty, seems to connect back to Paterian aesthetics and marks the disposal

118
of a hateful trope in the Empire of Art. As Stephania endows the courtesan
with the autonomy and stature befitting an Empress and, for that matter,
a woman, the trope and power of the courtesan changes as Stephania
physically discards her place as object for subject and other for self.

And Thrice a Womans Voice: The Power of the Trialogue

The form of Stephania itself plays a vital role in creating some of

Stephanias intrinsic power. Certainly some of Michael Fields other dra-
matic works have a three-act structure similar to that of Stephania (mostly
those published afterward, including Attila, My Attila [1896] and The Race
of Leaves [1901]), but the fact that Bradley and Cooper classify Stephania
in its title as A Trialogue warrants special notice. The designation seems
intentional, reflecting not only its three acts, but also its three-day time span
and cast of three. This unification of form, time, and character in a leitmo-
tif of three becomes a knot woven from Symbolist tenets which, according
to Arthur Symons33 in his treatise on the French movement, crystallized
alongside Decadence at the fin de si`ecle and on into the early twentieth cen-
tury (Symons 7). Begun in France by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarme, the
literary movement created works that used symbols to suggest certain associ-
ations or connotations, instead of presenting an explicit meaning or message
(Bradshaw/Olds 155157). As the poetics of a text language, imagery, etc.
seeded symbolic value, the text itself grew into a symbol (Bradshaw/Olds

33
A friend of Bradley and Cooper, who supposedly developed romantic feelings toward
Cooper; various biographical sources disagree.

119
157). In this way, the trialogue form could very well symbolize a power strug-
gle between men and women as, historically, the triangle, a shape with three
sides and angles, is known to represent both sexes: pointing downward, uterus-
fashion, for women; pointing upward, phallic-style, for men. In Stephania the
trialogue, Stephania the woman emerges on top.

The repetition and symbolism of the three leitmotif is key to illu-

minating Stephanias success. In constructing the drama around three days,
Bradley and Cooper provided more weight and urgency to Stephanias char-
acter and actions. Richard Patterson explains the significance of the third
day in his study, Use of Three in the Bible, and given that Stephania is set
against the backdrop of the failing Holy Roman Empire, his biblical reading
seems apt and telling in this context. Throughout the Bible, the third
day, according to Patterson, worked in five suggestive ways: the third day was
frequently earmarked to perform a given activity or matter at hand for some
distinct purpose; to reveal new information that would inspire further
activity; and to serve as the culmination of a proper time of preparation.
The third day was also designated as a day of healing and spiritual activity
or a day of resurrection (Patterson). Bradley and Cooper specifically chose
to confine Stephanias mission to three days time, and for her, interestingly
enough, the third day represents exactly what Patterson suggests.

In the third act of the drama, which opens as the third day dawns,
Stephanias plan to bring down Otho, her distinct purpose, draws to its
culmination. She has spent three years before the drama, and three days

120
during, prepar[ing] for this moment when she would exact her revenge on
Otho. She has seduced him physically and has even convinced Gerbert that
the seduction was his idea. In this third act, on this third day, she reveals her
duplicity to Gerbert, and the new information comes as a surprise. She tells
him that he was complicit in her plot:

You give no signal of dissent, and therefore

I may affirm unquestioned narrative
Is easy where none dares to contradict.
You eagerly besought me by all arts
To disenchant the Emperor of the cowl[.] (III, 525529)

Realizing that he has participated in the impending death of his love, a de-
feated Gerbert exits the scene without saying anything further and does not
return to the drama. At this point, Otho grows more ill, either from the discov-
ery that his mentor betrayed him by collaborating with Stephania, his previous
sexual encounter with Stephania (which tore him away from his homosocial
path), or a literal, airborne poison made from herbs, which Stephania may or
may not have dispersed. Whatever the cause, the third day for Stephania was
Othos deadline, literally and figuratively.

For Stephania, this third day is also a day of healing and resur-
rection. As the stage directions mark, [s]he sweeps the coronation mantle
around her, symbolizing her resurrection as Empress. Yet not long after she
acknowledges that her actions have come to fruition, she looks at herself in

121
Othos shield and turns from her reflection with disgust (III, stage direc-
tions). Suddenly, she is drained physically and mentally by the role she had
to play: lethargy falls on [her] like a hell/Pressed inward, and she has need
of sleep (III, 619620), a time of renewal. Stephania removes the mantle,
her jewelry, and her dress, beneath which she wears a shroud (III, stage
directions). She regrets her brutal actions and feels as though she has lost
her virtue, [her] reality (III, 793). But as Otho lay dying, he forgives her,
making sure to leave no poor reproach upon [his] lips (III, 807). In the final
scene, as the sun sets on the third day, Stephania, in casting off her shroud,
sheds her courtesan identity, renews her vows to her dead husband, and re-
stores her chastity. Between its connotations of agency and revivification, the
three-day construction of Stephania makes this closet drama a symbol of a
womans definitive action, or onward movement, to once again reference Le
Gallienne.

David Moriarty identifies Stephania as one of the first examples of

a genuine symbolist drama produced in England (125). But Bradley and
Coopers main purpose of the drama, in his opinion, was to comment on
the symbolic role of the temptress and to portray the Decadent trope as
harmful to women (125). Stephania does symbolize the reworking of the
temptress/femme fatale/prostitute trope, but also offers this reworking as the
symbol for a shift in power dynamics. In other words, by Stephania performing
the symbolic role of the temptress as part of her plan to tidy up Rome, she
tilts the patriarchal/homosocial balance of power in the dramas structural,

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erotic triangle. She is not a mere trope created by men, but a woman of virtue
and honor who borrowed the role. At the end of the drama, she tells Otho,
I never spoke/The least untruth to you (III, 68889). She finally tears the
shroud from her breast and pulls down her hair from the flat folds of her hood,
as the stage directions indicate, baring herself as the symbol of a revived and
empowered Rome, a revived and empowered womanhood, and a revived and
empowered art.

Stephanias symbolic power shines even more brightly when explored

through Eve Sedgwicks theory of triangular desire.34 In Between Men: En-
glish Literature and Homosocial Desire, Sedgwick, in addressing theories by
Rene Girard, Levi-Strauss, Luce Irigary and others, posits that in a triangle of

34
I have thought about discussing the drama with regard to Shakespeares sonnets: Sedg-
wick shows the homosocial power dynamic of the erotic triangle through Shakespeares
sonnets to the Dark Lady and Fair Youth. Without a doubt, Stephania plays with the
triangular relationship evident in these sonnets and shows Stephania revising Sedgwicks
reading of that homosocial power dynamic. As Adrian Poole writes in Shakespeare and the
Victorians: The Victorians had Shakespeare in their bones and blood. . . . He was certainly
around them, on stage and on posters, in paintings and print and cartoons, in the air they
breathed, on the china they ate off. As we listen to them now, his words seem always on the
tips of their tongues (1). Shakespeare was certainly around Bradley and Cooper and,
in fact, permeated the very air they breathed, the china they ate off. Shakespeares
influence went deep for the two women; he represented the literary gold standard. But at
the time, even Shakespeare was becoming corrupted by Decadence as a potent strait of
deviance especially in his sonnets because of the adulterous and homosexual themes
(Williams 65). Although many Victorian authors clung to Shakespeare in order to revive a
sense of literary decorum and national identity, as Rhian E. Williams states in Michael
Fields Shakespearean Community, the sonnets were also being adopted by the homosexual
community as advocating same-sex desire (65). Though Bradley and Cooper had what some
deem a sexual and incestuous relationship, their pride in a literary decorum and national
identity leads me to theorize that in Stephania they were playing right into the strait of
deviance in order to comment on it. Much of Fields canon poetic and dramatic rings
with Shakespearean influence.

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two men who desire the same woman, the women is frequently positioned as
a locus of commutation, trade, barter, even honor between men.35 The desire
between the male rivals grows stronger than the desire either man has for the
woman, and through this desire, the men exchange power and confirm each
others value, leaving the pitiable and contemptible woman as a mere pawn
in, or even out of the equation (Between 160). In other words, the woman
acts only as a conduit for male-male desire, and this asymmetrical triangle
becomes a symbol of patriarchal, homosocial supremacy. This theory gains
new meaning in examining the triangular relationship formally constructed in
Stephania. Stephania, purposefully playing the role of the pitiable and con-
temptible woman, prevents Otho and Gerbert from exchang[ing] any sort
of power and from confirm[ing] each others value. Stephania is not simply
the mediator of male desire, even though Gerbert clearly loves Otho. She har-
nesses their illicit desires, uses them, and destroys them in favor of fulfilling her
own desires. When Gerbert admits to her that Otho is close to being sucked
up by the fiend Romuald (II, 198), Stephania decides to use his affection for
Otho to her advantage. At first, she kneels to Gerbert in deference:

Consent
To let me be your leech, and, while you mock
And disregard me, you will feel your powers
Press to expansion as the buds in spring. (II, 192195)

35
I have compressed ideas here that were sprinkled throughout Sedgwicks text.

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As the pitiable and contemptible woman, even leech, she tempts him
with the figurative and physical; certainly his powers to influence Otho will
press to expansion if Stephania were to draw Otho back to Gerberts side,
but the connotations of an erection and of mental Viagra as well are
unmistakable. Stephania offers a reinforced brilliance and relief for Gerbert,
to touch back on Pater, something the cloistered Gerbert cannot refuse. In
the end of Stephania, the desires of a harlot are revealed to be the desires
of a noble woman and a widow, and these desires, not the desires of Otho or
Gerbert, crown the triangular structure of empire, glory, and honor. Stephania
dominates the triangle and gets the final word.

A Monument to Desire Fulfilled: Conclusion

In Act One, Stephania asks Otho to remember that she is more than
his handmaid (I, 644); she is

no ghost, [but] a creature of warm blood,

Banished all lovely offices of life,
Having no tears to shed, with no regrets,
Remaining merely as a monument
Contending hosts have clashed against, that stands
Erect amid the carnage of the plains. (I, 650656)

In this verse, the monument shows Stephania as a human being denigrated like
an inanimate object, stripped of her life, left numb, made a symbol of war. She
is merely the monument to carnage and events past, a site of nothing-
ness or the gap left by the husband perhaps, as Dagni Ann Bredesen marks

125
the popular portrayal of Victorian widowhood(7). Bredesen, in her study
Categorical Exceptions: Widows, Sexuality, and Fictions of (Dis)Coverture in
Victorian Domestic and Imperial Narratives, poses an interesting question rel-
evant to the analysis and themes of Stephania discussed in this chapter: How
can a married woman virtually dead in the eyes of the law come back to
life, so to speak, on her husbands death? (65). Bradley and Cooper use the
closet drama genre not only to resurrect a widow who ceased to be/[her]self
after her rape (I, 56667), but also to show that empowerment as a challenge
to the male homosocial supremacy and desire. In the end, the story of Stepha-
nias triumph becomes a different sort of monument than the image offered at
the start of the drama.

Specifically, in the last verses of the drama, Stephania vows to have

herself and her husband Crescentius

sculptured on a monument
Together, side by side, and hand in hand,
As any mortal pair that had their part
Of joy and sorrow and then sank in death
The wife, the husband! (III, 829833)

The image of the monument, with its artistic and historic connotations, is
an important one on which to close Stephania. Though the monument offi-
cially and permanently memorializes the wife, the husband, that mortal
pair also sank in death. Stephania has cleansed (III, 821) her reputa-
tion as Crescentius wife, but in the final lines of the drama, she sits alone,

126
contemplating the great triumph [she has] won, first for Italy, then [her]
womanhood, and lastly, her husband. Crescentius, though celebrated on the
monument to come, is now the site of nothingness he has no actual tomb
(III, 833). In this way, the monument becomes a bold annunciation erected
by a woman and symbolizes a challenge to those doors and empires closed
by men and limited to male desires. Furthermore, Stephania, as a cleansed
woman with her love made so whole (III, 821) that she can turn the wicked
into hell/as unperturbed as God (III, 822823), a woman whose eradication
of those who trample[d] and pollute[d] (III, 818) the Roman Empire has
restored her purity, a wife who remains pure in her status as widow, is herself
a monument. She symbolizes womanhoods reclamation of the fallen, immoral
Roman empire, and in the same vein, womanhoods reclamation of the fallen,
immoral, decadent empire of Art. The battle for control over physical desires
is won.

With this lasting image, Bradley and Cooper, in their devotion to the
principles of Aestheticism and their struggle for equality as women writers, sent
a clear message to their readership about their personal covenant regarding
Art. Certainly, Bradley and Cooper did not set out to offend a coterie which
they admired, as shown by this quotation from Bradley to Robert Browning
early in their career as Field: It is not in our power or desire to treat irrev-
erently customs or beliefs that have been, or are, sacred to men (Works 8).
But in Bradley and Coopers rigid interpretation of the Paterian aesthetic
specifically, pleasure brought to the brink but deftly controlled, the physical

127
manifested through written expression or material decoration,36 earthly pas-
sions made divine through language and their dismissal of anything that
strayed from or, more importantly, tainted that philosophy, the two women un-
doubtedly saw corporeal desires (in effect, both homosexual and heterosexual)
as the cause of the decline in what they viewed as true Art. It appears that
they were not trying to offend men per se, just as they promised Browning,
but did so in their all-encompassing condemnation of uncontrollable physi-
cal passion. This point is ironic in light of what some scholars identify as a
physical relationship between Bradley and Cooper, as supported by explicitly
ardent entries in their correspondence and shared journals. In my opinion,
however, the language in those archival materials, as well as the rhetoric of
Stephania, only definitively indicates that Bradley and Cooper lived for, and
valued above all else, the written expression of ecstasy, and that pursuit led
to their professional demise.37 In a time when homosexual acts, private or
public, were illegal, Stephania, with its female protagonist using her feminine
wiles to destroy the relationship between two men, and its two female authors
condemning those who acted on physical desire, indeed made something of
manhood fall.

36
Bradley and Coopers dedication to Art could also be seen in their flamboyant manner
of dress and home decor. See Donoghue.
37
Throughout the correspondence between Bradley and Cooper, there are too many in-
stances to count of both women trying to control their wayward passions for each other, with
and without success. Most times, they express anguish, guilt, or regret for these feelings
and suggest this emotion is getting in the way of their creativity. I am intrigued by this
conclusion and am eager to further investigate archival materials.

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 Chapter 4

I Could Be Tempted:
The Ev(e)olution of the Angel in the House
in A Woman Sold

Eleanor.
Lionel, I know
I could be happier so with you I know,
Than in the tempting paradise Sir Joyce
Has won my parents with and almost me.
Ah! love, I have been weak. You were away.
And I was flattered. And I had gone far
Before I knew where I was being led.
(A Woman Sold, I, 310316)

As did many of the works in her cross-genre career, Augusta Websters

two-act closet drama, A Woman Sold (1867), thematically addressed the pop-
ular mid-nineteenth-century attitude of the English middle class regarding
what they viewed as the sinful implications of choosing a mercenary marriage
over a marriage born of love.1 In A Woman Sold, Webster situates female

1
By mercenary marriage here, I refer to a union initiated by the promise of a financially
stable future and by love, I refer to what Wendy S. Jones calls a virtuous passion as

129
protagonist Eleanor Vaughan at the crossroads of committing this marital sin.
Eleanor must choose between marrying the wealthy, older gentleman Sir Joyce
Boycott a match she is pressured by her friends and family into accepting
or her middle class suitor Lionel, a fledging lawyer. Throughout the entire
first act of the drama, Eleanor and Lionel argue over her decision to sacrifice
their love for a mercenary marriage. Lionel accuses Eleanor of allowing herself
to be sold by her parents for jewels, social status, and property and warns that
she will lose her piety, innocence, and virtue if she goes through with what
he considers an unholy business deal. In the second act of the drama, set six
years later, Eleanor now named Lady Boycott to indicate her new status
since she did indeed marry Sir Joyce off-page is mourning her husbands re-
cent death, grieving over her lost love for Lionel, and is devastated to discover
her best friend Mary is betrothed to Lionel and will live the life Eleanor once
desired.

For the mid-nineteenth-century reader, the message of the drama may

have seemed simple: a woman is tempted to turn her back on love by the
seductive promise of wealth and rank (I, 304) a temptation that also
seduces her family and surrendering to this temptation leads her into an
unhappy future filled with eternal regret, personal loss, and exile from domestic
paradise. The dramas language and imagery stray from realism by subtly
evoking the familiar allegorical metanarrative of Eves experience with the

opposed to an uncontrollable desire, as was popular in nineteenth-century thought (Jones

6).

130
serpent in the garden of Eden, as exemplified by the quotation that opens this
chapter, and thus lends moral weight to Eleanors choice: a spiritually weak
Eleanor (along with her parents) is led, lured, far away from love by the
material power promised in Sir Joyces tempting paradise.2 Though Eve is
seduced in Genesis by the idea of wisdom and Eleanor in A Woman Sold by
the idea of a secure upper class future, A Woman Sold conflates the choices of
the two women into a moral lesson about how disregarding the divine laws of
marriage and falling into temptation can lead to exile from certain contentment
in Paradise and to lifelong atonement for that sin. In this chapter, I want to
argue that Webster creates in her drama a synergy of narrative, genre, and
form to revise that lesson and to critique the institution of marriage itself.

Though A Woman Sold might, at first read, seem like a simple parable
instructing its readers about the importance of marrying for love, I want to
reveal how, upon close examination, the drama instead predicts the way in
which Webster will later lean on irony as a favorite rhetorical device to de-
liver sociopolitical commentary throughout what will be a prolific cross-genre
career. Twelve years after Webster wrote A Woman Sold, she published A
Housewifes Opinions (1879), a collection of previously printed essays that
range in subject from an analysis of Greek translation to the Protection for
the Working Woman, and challenged certain patriarchal and misogynist ideas

2
Regarding the story of Genesis, I refer to the King James version of the Holy Bible,
Oxford Text Archive, 1995, made available through the University of Virginia Library:
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=KjvGene.sgm&images=images
/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=teiHeader.

131
about womens roles and interests. Though written some time after A Woman
Sold, these unconventional housewifes opinions show her purposeful employ-
ment of rhetorical irony as the self-proclaimed mid-nineteenth-century house-
wife of the volumes title demonstrates her political and intellectual knowledge
and critiques social and cultural attitudes. The intentional construction of A
Housewifes Opinions presents Webster as a writer who knew the power of
rhetorical form and function, particularly in gathering essays published sep-
arately and anonymously in the Examiner and promoting them through the
voice of a middle class housewife; through this collection, Webster showed the
housewife as well-read, socially conscious, and politically savvy, and used form
and genre to show that the change legislated in large halls or even Parliament
could begin right with her. In this chapter, I want to show that the construc-
tion of A Woman Sold provides an early example of Websters attention to
formal rhetoric, as her use of the closet drama acts as a structural metaphor
for the sociomythological confinement of the nineteenth-century middle class
woman.

In detail, I want to explain how Webster uses irony in the narrative,

genre, and form of A Woman Sold to expose incongruity in the literal mes-
sage of the text: by layering a marriage plot with an allegorical metanarrative
that relates Eves original sin to the popular image of Coventry Patmores
angel in the house and choosing to frame the story inside the closet drama
genre, Webster identifies the institution of middle class marriage in the mid-
nineteenth-century not as the site of potential Paradise for women to dutifully

132
nurture and maintain behind an idyllic little rose-covered wall, an image of
home life that social critic John Ruskin presented in Sesames and Lilies, his
widely read treatise on the inherent responsibilities of men and women pub-
lished two years before A Woman Sold in 1865. Rather, Webster depicts the
institution of marriage as a bound, restrictive space where society dictates that
the identity, choices, and actions of the nineteenth-century middle class woman
must be projected in an angelic, virtuous form to make amends for Eves orig-
inal sin. Though Marilyn Yalom in A History of the Wife (2002) negates this
idea by claiming, No longer the daughters of Eve associated with mans un-
doing, Victorian wives and daughters were elevated to the position of spiritual
guides (182), I believe A Woman Sold suggests that Victorian women were in
fact elevated to the positions of spiritual guides because they were seen as
daughters of Eve, that these spiritual guides or angels in the house were
created to keep women from having to make choices which, as in the Genesis
story, could have an adverse effect on the future of mankind at large. In
its allegory, A Woman Sold illustrates how the social and cultural interpreta-
tion of Eves story transformed marriage in the mid-nineteenth-century into a
dead-end choice that would restrict womens personal and social growth, inde-
pendence, and knowledge. I want to illustrate, then, how the construction of
A Woman Sold presents the idea that marriage for nineteenth-century middle
class women was a closet of social and cultural paralysis, built on a history of
sociomythologically-limited gender expectations.

I will base my discussion of the term closet on the etymology of the

133
word as provided in my introduction. For my specific use in this chapter, I
have pared down the definitions for clarity, eliminating certain redundancy:

In later Fr. applied exclusively to a small enclosure in the open air.

A room for privacy or retirement; a private room; an inner chamber; the

place of private study or secluded speculation.

A private repository of valuables or (esp. in later use) curiosities; a

private or concealed trouble in ones house or circumstances, ever present,
and ever liable to come into view; to come out of the closet: to admit
(something) openly, to cease to conceal.

With this set of definitions in mind, I speak of the closet as a private space,
a private trouble, the word private reflective of the following explanations:
restricted to one person or a few persons as opposed to the wider community;
of a conversation, communication, etc.: intended for or confined to the person
or persons directly concerned; confidential; kept or removed from public view
of knowledge; secret; concealed (OED). I also invoke Sedgwicks theories from
Epistemology of the Closet to highlight these points; however, I use Sedgwick
here not in the context of homosexuality per se, but rather a more basic level
of mobility and agency in a particular space.3 Although the closet takes on

3
As I mentioned in my introduction, while I see ample possibilities for discussing A
Woman Sold and the other closet dramas in this dissertation through the complex dis-
course of homosexuality Sedgwick offers in Epistemology of the Closet, I consider the level
of argument in this chapter an essential step in preparing the groundwork for those future

134
many manifestations in A Woman Sold, from the metaphors suggested by the
dramas genre and subject matter to the physical location where Eleanor/Lady
Boycott dialogues with Lionel and Mary, each manifestation projects a similar
meaning of confinement and restriction, yet ironically blurs the lines between
private and public, or the wider community, as the issues discussed and
decisions made inside the closet represent individual as well as social anxieties.

At the same time, I also want to direct attention in this chapter to the
ways in which Websters ironic interplay of narrative, genre, and form points
the way toward female agency growing outside those closets represented in A
Woman Sold. In positioning Eleanors marital choice in the first act as the
only choice she has for her future, Webster cast her female protagonist as the
mid-nineteenth-century middle class daughter, inheritor, and redeemer of Eve,
faced with a decision that not only will determine her own moral worth and her
future, but will affect the moral worth and future of other women of her time.
But at the end of the drama, Websters tightly-knit unification of narrative,
genre, and form supports a reading in which her female protagonists sin of
choosing a mercenary marriage over love only leads to temporary exile, as Lady
Boycotts punitive sentence ends when her husband dies and she is left inde-
pendent and financially secure. As the second act comes to a close, Webster
shows Lady Boycott moving toward taking possession of her voice, her reason,
her virtue, and her identity in imagining her future involved with a triangular

queries. I do not, by any means, intend to de-homosexualize Sedgwicks theories, but

rather, in this limited space, hope to show their relevance and their requirement in future
study.

135
friendship with both her best friend Mary and her former suitor Lionel (now
Marys fiance), rather than entertaining the idea of another marriage, continu-
ing a life of widowed solitude, or even looking toward death, all popular finales
for nineteenth-century women in literature. I posit that Webster transforms
the closet, and the closet drama genre, from a male-defined space into a site
that invites for the mid-nineteenth-century middle class woman possibilities
beyond the patriarchal myths and prescriptions which bind her, especially to
the institution of marriage; Webster does this by choosing to write the story
of a womans impossible choice as a closet drama to recap, a genre tradi-
tionally written by men that tends to focus on the psychological exploration
of a male protagonist layering that story with an allegorical metanarrative
that critiques the sociomythologies of both Eve and the angel in the house,
and structuring the drama as two acts that signpost the female protagonists
life Before and After she chooses a husband.

My argument in this chapter contributes to the work on A Woman Sold

initiated by Susan Brown, one of the few scholars to study this drama. In her
article, Determined Heroines: George Eliot, Augusta Webster, and Closet
Drama by Victorian Women, Brown aims to draw attention to the way a
particular trend of Victorian closet drama by women (exemplified in Browns
article by Eliots Armgart and Websters A Woman Sold ) directly dialogues
with contemporary social issues and consequently diverges from traditional
closet drama topics. She focuses on the determined heroines of Eliots The
Spanish Gypsy and Armgart, specifically on how the closet drama form helps

136
to inscribe women as subjects and actors, and to demystify the historically
specific constraints to which they were subject (104). She suggests that these
closet dramas and others like them, in contrast to those characteristic of the
Romantic mental theater, show women recognizing, struggling against, and
acting on the various external forces that contributed to the construction of
their social identity (105). Brown posits that the women in these dramas
reflect the social complexity of their gender roles, at once heroically and
socially constrained (106). In terms of Websters A Woman Sold, Brown
discusses how the social institutions of marriage and family constrain Eleanors
desire, and only when she gets the opportunity to slip outside of them is she
rewarded with a fluidity of identity that can escape limiting and totalizing
social judgments (101).

I agree with Browns main arguments and support the idea that the
closet drama form of A Woman Sold (along with Eliots Armgart) allows for
an exploration of social questions and resists simplistic reduction (103).
But I believe Browns acknowledgement of the social engagement of A Woman
Sold, though important in the re-introduction and recovery of Websters work,
needs fleshing out to fully illustrate how A Woman Sold resists a simplistic
reduction. For example, while Brown declares that the status of the fallen
woman is also at issue in A Woman Sold and that the drama works to deny
the notion of female essence or of an opposition to pure and fallen natures
(97), she doesnt make any direct connection between the fallen woman/Eve
influence on Eleanor/Lady Boycott or the form of the drama. Brown does suc-

137
ceed in analyzing the language of the narrative but fails to fully explore what
she calls A Woman Sold s subjective, dialogized, dramatic form to support
her points (102). Thus I proceed further along Browns track by demonstrat-
ing how Webster, in tying a contemporary narrative to allegorical stakes and
containing it within a revised closet drama framework, allowed A Woman Sold
to critique the biblical mythology that created for the mid-nineteenth-century
woman a literal and figurative closet in which the institution of marriage, as
well as gender prescriptions, rendered her inert and voiceless.

Furthermore, I want to address the claim that Webster has a critical

and not a myth-making voice, an idea advanced by Angela Leighton in Vic-
torian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (173). Through my analysis
of A Woman Sold, I want to show that, by recasting the traditional gen-
der role-play of the Victorian woman, Websters revision of the closet drama
genre added to the conversation of nineteenth-century women writers who
were reimagining the mythology of Eve and introducing new interpretations
into social consciousness (Taylor/Weir 205). Many nineteenth-century women
writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Elizabeth Strutt could not
identify with, and thus amended, the biblical and Miltonic portrayals of Eve
that were widely accepted.4 As Marion Ann Taylor and Heather Weir write

4
Valerie Sanders in Eves Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists notes
that mid-nineteenth-century writer Elizabeth Strutt believed that the sexes were equal since
Adam and Eve came from the same place of origin, but still adhered to the idea that
men and women had inherent differences in their manners (164). In the early nineteenth-
century, author Hannah Mather Crocker also saw in the story of Genesis the equality between
men and women, yet promoted the idea that women became subordinate beings after the

138
in Let Her Speak for Herself: Nineteenth-century Women Writing on Women
in Genesis, nineteenth-century women writers perceived Eve in a multitude
of ways, from the crown of creation to Eve as the victim of power; from a
woman to be pitied to a woman to be praised (24). But Taylor and Weir posit
that most women writers of the period did not radically oppose the patriarchal
interpretation of the Bible, but instead offered their own retellings which gave
new depth to the character development of Eve. In the myth and character-
ization of Eve, as Taylor and Weir argue, nineteenth-century women writers
discovered self-understanding, self-knowledge, guidance, and direction (104)
and in their interpretation of the traditional mythology challenged conven-
tional readings, even when they did adhere to certain biblical and Miltonic

fall (Taylor, Weir 25). In Paradise Lost, Milton fleshes out the ribs of the original story
recorded in Genesis 2-3, which offers the account in a scant 49 lines or so, or two brief
chapters. Whereas the biblical telling eschews any form of character development, Milton
creates characters who cultivate certain gender roles and prescriptions for centuries to follow.
Miltons Eve is, at first, blissful in both her innocence and her ignorance and is happily
guided by Adams reason (Milton IV). The biblical description of Eve and her actions is
much more spare, leaving room for interpretation. Many nineteenth-century women writers,
as Gilbert and Gubar note, could not connect with either of these portrayals and offered
their commentary on, and adaptation of, the history through their own works. Gilbert and
Gubar mention some of these revisionary texts, including Charlotte Brontes Shirley and
Christina Rossettis Goblin Market, as well as Elizabeth Barrett Brownings closet drama, A
Drama of Exile (189). Like Webster, Barrett Browning set her drama, modeled after Greek
tragedy, following Adam and Eves exile from Paradise. The work focuses on Eve as she
deals with the guilt and consequences of her sinful deed; however, Barrett Browning uses the
drama to question the conventional gender roles and attitudes constructed by the patriarchal
myth.Ultimately, Eve comes to appreciate her mortality and the physical punishments she
received as a result of her fall. As Terence Allan Hoagwood suggests in Biblical Criticism
and Secular Sex: Elizabeth Barretts A Drama of Exile and Jean Ingelows A Story of
Doom, Eve relinquishes the abstract eternity of patristic exegesis to embrace a bodily
love of mother earth (167). She learns the love of motherhood and is honored by Adam as
Mother of the world (Exile 1824) and learns to [l]isten down the heart of things (Exile
2068) for answers, rather than to look up to Heaven for guidance (Hoagwood 167).

139
ideas.

Through the irony created by the textual construction of A Woman

Sold, Webster joins her peers in offering a mid-nineteenth-century Ev(e)olution:
a daughter of Eve commits, and pays for, the social sin of choosing mercenary
marriage over love, but is redeemed, not through her duty as angel in the house,
but by the personal awareness that comes with the death of her husband. In
this chapter, by exposing several strata of a complex drama that recognizes
and revises womens mythological history in order to imagine a new one, I
hope to truly keep A Woman Sold from simplistic reduction. In fact, I hope
a more thorough analysis of the sociomythological connections evoked by the
genre, form, and narrative of A Woman Sold will inspire a new examination of
how Webster works rhetorically with genre and form throughout her canon.5

My analysis in this chapter is separated into two main sections. In the

first section, I will position the rhetorical irony of A Woman Sold by framing
the drama as a critique of specific ideas in John Ruskins Sesames and Lilies
and Coventry Patmores The Angel in the House, works that popularized the
mid-nineteenth-century middle class ideology regarding gender roles and the
institution of marriage, especially with regard to their moral imperatives for
women. In the second section, I will show how Websters employment and

5
Scholarship has focused on Augusta Websters poetry and includes: an overview of
Websters poetic canon in Angela Leightons Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the
Heart; Christine Sutphins edited collection of Portraits and Other Poems and her article
The Representation of Womens Heterosexual Desire in Augusta Websters Circe and
Medea in Athens; and Marysa Demoors Power in Petticoats: Augusta Websters Poetry,
Political Pamphlets, and Poetry Reviews.

140
adaptation of the closet drama genre acknowledges and calls for a revision of
popular ideologies: essentially, the narrative, genre, and form of A Woman
Sold work together not only to recognize the institution of marriage as a figu-
rative closet that constrained the life possibilities of the unmarried Victorian
woman of the middle class, but also to remodel that closet into a space where
a woman could choose to reject the subordinate and submissive gender roles
assigned to her. With this chapter, I will conclude that A Woman Sold rad-
ically reveals the angel in the house as the angel in the closet, a direct
descendant of Eve in her closet Paradise, yet leaves the closet door open for
the reclamation of female agency and a new sort of female redemption.

Was not Eve Born a Bride: Critiquing the Nineteenth-Century

Institution of Marriage

At the time of A Woman Sold s publication in 1867, due to the tech-

nological advancements and employment opportunity resulting from the In-
dustrial Revolution which pitched across the end of the eighteenth century
and into the nineteenth, the English middle class was rising in status and
attempting to displace the aristocracy in their social and political control.6

6
For more in-depth study on the social and religious attitudes of the rising middle class:
Gerald Parsons et al, Religion in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1988); Claudia Nelson, Family Ties in Victorian England (Santa Barbara, CA: Green-
wood Publishing Group, 2007); Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-century
England (London: Routledge, 1989); Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home (New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004); Krishan Kumar, The Making of English Identity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Wendy Jones, Consensual Fictions:
Women, Liberalism, and the English Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
My discussion in this paragraph was synthesized from the information provided throughout
these texts.

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Even as it reached for material success and social power, the middle class as-
signed itself the protector of moral authority, denouncing what it considered
the self-indulgence and wasteful excess of the upper class by championing the
Protestant work ethic (pointedly, hard work and success equate to salvation)
as well as evangelical Christian doctrine. In a time when moral beliefs were
in danger of becoming deprioritized in the avid pursuit of capitalism and dis-
missed in the favor of scientific discovery, many in the middle class saw their
ethical fight as essential to the future of England. The institution of mar-
riage, and the home created by that marriage, became the site of repentance
not only for what the middle class saw as its growing social sins, but also for
the original sin committed in the first marriage between Adam and Eve,
which had resulted in Paradise lost. For the majority of the middle class,
upholding the sanctity of marriage a sacrament between two people and
the manifestation of Gods will was a crucial part of restoring Paradise on
Earth and, consequently, of supporting English nationalism; essentially, a soci-
ety built on the model of love and domestic duty portrayed in Genesis, a story
about mankinds creation and womankinds sin, was certain to fuel England
with Godly strength. Therefore, according to this middle class ideology, en-
tering into a marriage that equated to little more than a financial transaction,
rather than a moral, spiritual, and physical pledge, committed the ultimate
sin against both God and country.

As noted earlier in this chapter, John Ruskin in his bestseller Sesame

and Lilies, published in 1865 two years before A Woman Sold, discussed the

142
concept of marriage as a social and national covenant and described how hus-
band and wife played different roles in fulfilling their commitment to the mar-
riage and to England.7 The notion of separate spheres for men and women
based on their natural attributes was one that would identify the century, and
while a husband was responsible for defending home and country against the
vagabonds of violence and vice, his wife, according to Ruskins treatise, was
cast as the centre of order, the balm of distress, and the mirror of beauty,
both within her gates and without her gates (138). In other words, though
a husband defended the boundaries of home and nation, a wifes social re-
sponsibility was to nurture and maintain the edenic, peaceful world inside
the boundaries of home, as well as to use the skills inside the home to lessen
and heal the agony of men beyond what Ruskin called her as previ-
ously illustrated little rose-covered wall (143). Furthermore, a wife, in
Ruskins popular opinion, had to cultivate her domestic paradise by being
enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise wise, not for
self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself
above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side (122). Essen-
tially, a womans power came from her role as a mans moral guide and pious
helpmeet, privately and publicly. Therefore, since marriage was the mark of
eternal love, as Ruskin proclaimed, and a wife was expected to express that

7
Ruskins Sesame and Lilies is a transcript of lectures he delivered in 1864: Of Kings
Treasuries and Of Queens Gardens. The book, according to the 2002 reprint edited by
Deborah Epstein Nord, was a common gift for girls and a fixture in middle class homes
(Ruskin xiv).

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love through her virtuous caretaking, a woman who succumbed to a loveless
marriage for the sake of status or wealth demonstrated a divine disobedience
and a moral corruption that would lead to the downfall of home, society, and
nation (Ruskin 117, 120).8

Ruskins view of gender and marriage in Sesame and Lilies was greatly
influenced by another widely read work about gender and marriage, Coventry
Patmores The Angel in the House, a long narrative lyric comprised of four
different volumes serialized between 1854 and 1862. The poem celebrated
the institution of marriage and identified woman as a paragon of virtue with
the moral power to rise above Eves fall, prompting the term angel in the
house to become a moniker that would historically symbolize ideal Victorian
womanhood.9 As the speaker, a poet named Vaughan, extols the marvel that
is first his beloved, then his fiancee, and finally his wife, he offers her as a
representative of what Everywoman should be an angel, a queen. Patmores
theme caught on with the public and was the subject of critical and literary
writings. For example, a five-part series called The Daughters of Eve (1861),
published in Temple Bar, a London town and country magazine, chronicled
the lives of seven famous women whom the anonymous writer believed to

8
I am simplifying Ruskins argument about womens roles quite a bit here. See Victoria
and Ruskins Domestic Mythology by Sharon Aronofsky Williams in Remaking Queen
Victoria, ed. Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich, particularly the argument beginning
on page 105, for a more comprehensive reading of the connections Ruskin makes in Of
Queens Gardens between Queen Victoria and the Angel.
9
The Angel in the House includes a verse entitled The Daughter of Eve, in which the
speaker states that he accepts womans flaws, faults, and errors because underneath all
of those, she is a gentle woman.

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epitomize Eve as she was created. In part five, Louise Emilie Beauharnais,
Comtesse de Lavalette, the writers definition of a true daughter of Eve
resembles Patmores married angel in the house:

[I]t is clear that no woman can claim to be a true daughter of Eve

but on the condition that she has taken upon herself the solemn
joys and hallowed cares of wifedom; for was not Eve born a bride,
wreathed in the ineffable splendour of her beauty as the fountain
of all female loveliness to the end of this worlds time, veiled in the
mystic reserve of her native modesty and purity as the womanliest
of women[.] (417)

Like the speaker of Patmores The Angel in the House, the author of Louise
Emilie Beauharnais describes contemporary woman in the state of Eve before
the Fall, born a bride in her native modesty and purity, ready to experience
the solemn joys and hallowed cares of wifedom. This language echoes the
way Patmores angel in the house also seems to be made in Eves image, as
depicted in a section of the poem called The Rose of the World, which tells
the story of God who formd the woman (7) with a countenance angelical
(12), such power in her beauty to bring the faithless the hope of heaven, and
modesty, her chiefest grace (25).

Though some nineteenth-century critics did chafe against the portrayal

of women in Patmores poem, The Angel in the House would earn Patmore

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the long-standing title of consecrated laureate of wedded love.10 The poems
theme is summarized in Book One of The Angel in the House, in a verse called
Love Justified; Vaughan declares, This little germ of nuptial love,/Which
springs so simply from the sod,/The root is, as my Song shall prove,/Of all our
love to man and God (Patmore 4144). Through Patmore, the poets Song,
about nuptial love from which a root grows and is love to man and God,
became, as proclaimed by an anonymous essay in an issue of Macmillans that
appeared in the autumn of 1863, the song of songs, wherein is glorified the
the pure passion, which, if it is to be found anywhere in the world, is to
be found at our English firesides conjugal love (Macmillans 256). The
domestic image of marriage based on mutual love as an anthem to be sung at
English firesides, or hearths, assigned woman as the heavenly guardian of
the marriage flame that kept England strong, and subsequently faulted her for
dousing that flame by being tempted to marry for any reason but love, and
especially eschewing love for money. Patmore illustrates how marrying for
money negatively impacts an edenic domestic future in a section of The Angel
in the House called Aetna and the Moon when a woman on her sweet self
set her own price (58):

How has she cheapend paradise;

How given for nought her priceless gift,

10
Many of the ideas of those who criticized Patmores feminine ideal would grow into the
philosophy of the New Woman. In contrast, critic Edmund Gosse would give the name
consecrated laureate to Patmore in his 1905 biography.

146
 How spoild the bread and spilld the wine,
Which, spent with due, respective thrift,
Had made brutes men, and men divine. (6064)

By pricing herself as free goods, this woman cheapend paradise, wasting

physical and spiritual nourishment by spoil[ing] the bread and spill[ing]
the wine. Furthermore, her action turned men into brutes, beasts. This
verse implies that a woman who was instead thrift[y] with her self as gift,
had the power to turn beasts into men and make men divine, and was thus
granted the power to lead men unto salvation. The allusion to Eve is obvious,
as the woman cheapend paradise by freely giving away her priceless gift:
the innocence imbued in her by God. By giving away this gift, she made Adam
a brute by association and severed, sold, their divine connection.

As the mythology of The Angel in the House was socioculturally grafted

atop the mythology of Eve, Augusta Webster began her writing career under
the name of Cecil Home and like other writers seemed to be inspired by popu-
lar ideology and traditional poetic form. Several poems in her first collection,
Blanche Lisle and Other Poems (1860), address the personal misery that be-
falls those who do not embrace, secure, or, most importantly, marry for love.
In the ballad Edith, a young woman encourages her suitor to instead marry
a wealthy woman, even though the marriage would be loveless. Her suitor re-
luctantly agrees, and, in the end, on his wedding day, Edith hopes the marriage
bells will soon turn into a death-knell for her, emphasized by the phrases Edith
repeats throughout the poem, Oh! well that a maiden should be proud!/And

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my wedding robe will be a shroud. In another ballad, Cruel Agnes, a man
falls in love with a beautiful woman who declares that she could not be a poor
mans bride and demands he raise his fortunes to her height, but when he
succeeds in obtaining riches, she demands he achieve glory for his name on
the battlefield. He dies trying to gain her love, and she marries, sold, to be
a nobles wife,/To an old baron her young life. The woman goes on to live
a horrible life in woe and strife with an authoritarian husband and dies,
to her tyrant lord husbands satisfaction, regretting her lost chance at true
love. The common strains of love sacrificed and loveless marriages also reside
in the narrative poem Lilian Gray (1864) and Websters only novel Lesleys
Guardians (1864); throughout these works, the female protagonists find un-
happy ends as a result of either somehow turning their backs on love and the
marriage that could be born from that love or being forced into marriage out
of social expectation or familial necessity.

For the first collection of poetry published under her own name, Dra-
matic Studies (1866), Webster turned to the dramatic monologue and away
from the marriage theme in the poem By the Looking-Glass. Webster does,
however, critique the expectations of the angel in the house and presents the
speaker, a young woman, lamenting the fact that she does not fit the angel in
the house criteria in her words she is a common, clumsy creature never
given the angels wings and consequently has never experienced love or
marriage. The speaker of the poem declares that people do not know the poi-
sonful sting or the sense of shame she feels because she is not beautiful, nor

148
do they realize the way her plain appearance dictates her womans lot;
her successful future as a woman courtship, love, marriage, motherhood
depends on her looks.

The poetic form with which Webster framed the sociocommentary of

By the Looking-Glass hints at the choice of genre Webster would choose in
addressing the subject matter of A Woman Sold. By the Looking-Glass is
a monologue that can be considered both dramatic and interior: a dramatic
monologue marks engagement between a speaker and a silent listener who
may or may not be acknowledged through the speakers words while an interior
monologue marks thoughts heard only by the speaker. The speaker of By
the Looking Glass leaves a ball to sit alone in the sanctuary of her room; she
classifies herself and her worth in the pitiless mirror she faces nightly, the
mirror acting as a metaphor for the eyes of society that evaluate and judge her
outside her room. She is aware that society, not her self, creates her reflection
and inspires self-loathing, but she sees no means of escape.11 Thus, in a poem
that can at once be both dramatic (having a possible audience) and interior
(representing a moment of solitary rumination), Webster shows that the female
speaker longs for but does not have, in her womanhood, a private space to call
her own, even when she is contemplating her self alone in her room. At the
end of the poem, the speaker wants to sleep her wild thoughts away and sees
freedom only in the peace of night. The popular poetic metaphor of sleep

11
My reading coincides with Angela Leightons reading of the poem in Victorian Women
Poets: Writing Against the Heart 186187.

149
as death predicts the speakers bleak future, potentially her only option since
she cannot fulfill the role society has assigned.

At the time Dramatic Studies was published, Webster was helping to

generate opportunities for women that would allow them to grow beyond
their socially prescribed roles (Sutphin 11). With the support of her husband
Thomas who quit a law career and a lectureship so they could explore her in-
terests in London (Sutphin 11), Webster spoke out for womens causes, joining
the womens suffrage movement and being elected to the London School Board
where she advocated for more opportunities in womens education (Leighton
166). Webster believed if women had a solid education, they could support
themselves, thus eradicating the aimlessness and drifting and fussy futility12
of their prescribed angelic lives and giving their existence meaning (Leighton
170171). Although Webster did in fact revere married love, as evidenced in
her later essays, she touted education as a vital option particularly for those
women who could not marry for love: [T]he ability to earn her livelihood [...]
might save a girl from ruining her self-respect and her happiness by a merce-
nary marriage (Sutphin 392). Webster viewed education as a way for women
to get out from under the physical and financial control of men, a position
socially and politically configured by legislation written by men. Efforts of
Webster and the other women who championed equal educational opportuni-
ties for girls and young women led to The Education Act of 1870, which made
primary education mandatory for both sexes, as well as the creation of the

12
From Websters collection of essays, A Housewifes Opinions(1879), 96.

150
Girls Public Day School Trust in 1872, which allowed many girls to pursue
secondary education (Leighton 170). However, even with these legal improve-
ments, universities such as Oxford and Cambridge wouldnt give women de-
grees until the early twentieth century, an issue Webster lobbied for decades
by supporting womens right to vote (Leighton 170). In 1878, Webster wrote
a piece for The Examiner in which she demanded that all women should have
the right to vote, keeping in line with those husbandless or independent
women (widows, spinsters) who were considered heads of their households and
were already entitled to vote under the law (Sutphin 400401). This essay
argued for the right of married women to suffrage by highlighting the extant
right of unmarried women, a point which I will resurrect later in this chap-
ter. Change for all women, Webster believed, would come from the revision of
misogynist legislation enacted by men.

After Jacob Brights Suffrage Bill (1870, the first womens suffrage bill)
and others were soundly defeated, Webster honed in on the public anxiety
over what might happen if women thought for themselves and became too
independent:

There are fears that [women] will make matrimony illegal, suppress
cooking, and have the Prime Minister chosen for his good looks and
his skill at lawn-tennis. It is also apprehended that they will at
once throw off all their present customs, tastes, virtues, and attrac-
tions which, as is well known, are the compensations bestowed
on them by nature for the absence of a vote and will become

151
 coarse-featured un-mannerly hybrids, men-hating and hateful to
men. They will wear coats and trousers, they will refuse to sew on
shirt-buttons, they will leave off poudre de riz and auricomiferous
waters, they will be Bishops and Judges, and will break all the
commandments. (Leighton 169, HO 273).

Webster ironically predicts what the public thinks might happen if women
were to vote for issues that would allow them to step outside their angel in the
house role, which had been designed to atone for the choice made by their sinful
mother Eve. Women would do away with marriage altogether by deeming it
illegal, and in so doing, would stop cooking, hire the Prime Minister as
their boy-toy, and overall would cause utter chaos by dismissing any sort of
customs, conventions, or virtues. The angels in the house, those women
whose daily domestic virtue was supposed to nurture a social and national
paradise as atonement for Eves wrong choice, would become coarse-featured
un-mannerly hybrids who, in refus[ing] to sew on shirt buttons, wearing
coats and trousers, and claiming the roles of Bishops and Judges, would
no doubt destroy the patriarchal institutions of marriage, religion, and law
through their irrational vote. Webster implies through irony what she views
as the only role socially sanctioned for women: they must marry, have culinary
talents, stay out of political affairs, cultivate and maintain certain manners and
their physical appearance, and above all, obey the commandments put forth
by society and God.

At the same time as Websters remarks, novelist and journalist Eliza

152
Lynn Linton offered a more straight-forward opinion in The Modern Revolt,
published in Macmillans Magazine (1870), about the two popular schools of
thought regarding women:

one, the cynical school, making [women] the authors of all the
evil afloat, sly, intriguing, unreasonable, influenced only by self-
interest, governed only by fear, cruel, false, and worthless; while
another, more poetic and quite as untrue, paints them as seraphic
creatures gliding through a polluted world in a self-evolved atmo-
sphere of purity and holiness and ignorance of evil. . . . [N]o school
has yet upheld them as sober, rational, well-informed beings with
brains to regulate their impulses, yet with more love than calcu-
lation; . . . women who do not care to make a fools paradise of
Arcadian innocence for themselves[.] (142)

I introduce Lintons more direct commentary here to complement Websters

wry take and to position her argument within a Modern Revolt, as Linton
titles the article in which she advocates for women working outside the home,
voting, and obtaining property rights. Though Linton reinforces nineteenth-
century gender norms in the article by suggesting that women must take care
of their household duties first and foremost, she joins Webster in proclaiming
that a woman has the potential to do more with her life than make a fools
paradise of Arcadian [pastoral] innocence and that women are more complex
than the role of sly, unreasonable self-absorbed authors of all the evil
or pure seraphic creatures devoid of all evil knowledge allows them to be.

153
 But marriage, or rather becoming a professional good wife and mother,
was the highest ambition for any good girl of any social class, as Judith
Rowbotham states in Good Girls Make Good Wives: Guidance for Girls in Vic-
torian Fiction, since mid-nineteenth-century England did not offer much for
women in the way of guaranteeing a secure future (Rowbotham 12, 223). They
could seek respectable employment as a governess, seamstress, or housekeeper,
domestic vocations that still allowed them to wear the angel of the house
halo, albeit one belonging to a lesser angel (Rowbotham 223), yet marriage
was still the goal. As Webster wrote in Husband-hunting and Matchmaking
(1879): While young women know, and their parents know for them, that
marriage is not merely the happiest and fittest condition to which they can
look forward, but the only happy and fit condition the only escape from
dependence on charity or on their own incompetences, from loss of social po-
sition, and from all the hardships and hazards of an unskilled gentlewomans
precarious existence (qtd. in Sutphin 385). Despite Websters public advo-
cacy and writings on behalf of womens labor and education, she does not offer
any escape from dependence or outside employment to Eleanor/Lady Boy-
cott in A Woman Sold, published a year after Dramatic Studies and before
Websters career in journalistic social commentary picked up steam. In the
drama, Webster depicts marriage as the middle classs only possible option
the only happy and fit condition for her female protagonists future.

However, Webster puts Eleanor in a situation where she cannot achieve

happiness or maintain her virtue no matter the choice, where money in fact

154
becomes impossibly intertwined with love and duty. On the surface, Eleanors
choice appears simple: marry the young enterprising Lionel, whom she loves
and who attempts to protect her womanly honor, as opposed to the wealthy Sir
Joyce, who tempts her away. However, Webster makes things more complex
by showing that choosing either man either marriage leads Eleanor to a
sinful situation; no matter if Eleanor remains faithful to love or remains dutiful
to her family, her identity, virtue, independence, and future will be sold in
one way or another.

Although Lionel initially takes on the role of righteous fiance, Webster

complicates Eleanors relationship with Lionel by tainting his supposedly pure
love for Eleanor with materiality; near the end of the drama, after Lionel has
convinced Eleanor to renounce her parents wishes and marry him, his language
of love changes into a rhetoric of ownership and economics. When she embraces
him, he asks her, My Eleanor,/You are my own again, is it not so? (I, 271
272). His use of the word own twists the dynamic of their virtuous love into
one of possession. She becomes his property, reflecting the fact that in 1867,
when A Woman Sold was published, women were legally considered part of
the property or estate of a man once they married.13 Lionel promises Eleanor
a simple home where things are smoothed/By love more than by spending
(I, 290291), but goes on to say: Im prospering, love./I shall not win for long
what was to be/My goal for claiming you, the promised prize (I, 304306).

13
The Married Womens Property Act of 1870 legally made married women the rightful
owners of the money they earned and gave them the ability to inherit property. Women
were then no longer considered to be part of their husbands property.

155
The juxtaposition of the phrasing Im prospering against the word love
links the endearment a symbol for her to his prosperity, or monetary
success. Eleanor becomes an object that aspiring lawyer Lionel plans to soon
win; his goal is to make enough money to claim her, his promised prize.
He tells Eleanor he must go to work and will only return when he can say,
[T]here is room for you/In a fit home which I have earned (I, 309310). This
line casts her as an object with which to decorate his appropriate fit home,
and the phrasing, There is room, implies that she will be one object among
many, but he will make room for her. Eleanor begs him not to leave her
for work, but he dismisses her: Nay, dear, I must work./ Clients and causes
stand no truanting:/And I am greedy to heap up gains (I, 312314). Lionel
openly admits his greed, which points directly to his last line in the drama,
Sir Joyce can never buy my wife away (I, 320). Once Eleanor is [his] wife,
the middle class, upwardly mobile Lionel will have ownership and the power
over Sir Joyce, which indicates that Lionels good, righteous love for Eleanor
is no more virtuous than Sir Joyces mercenary proposition. Yet ultimately,
even though both possible marriages are mercenary at their core, Eleanor
still has no other choice but to accept one of the proposals.

In order to uphold her responsibility as a dutiful daughter, Eleanor

cannot value her love for Lionel over her allegiance to her family. As Judith
Rowbotham suggests, the Victorian family and its social and cultural power
was grounded in religion, particularly in the fifth commandment:honour thy
father and thy mother that thy days may be long (and thy status assured) in

156
the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee (54). Essentially, in order to
have a long comfortable life on Earth (and in Heaven), children, particularly
girls, had to obey their parents. Within the family unit, [g]ood girls always
had their Bible and prayer book close to hand, and a good girls behavior
derived from unselfish submission (Rowbotham 23, 54). In fact, young women
were constantly being reminded through didactic fiction, as well as guides and
manuals on practical domestic matters, that self-sacrifice and family loyalty in
the image of Christ were their responsibility (Rowbotham 56,59).14 Although
young ambitious Lionel, with the social, economic, and political privileges
doled out to him as a mid-nineteenth-century middle class man, would be
expected to receive Eleanors unselfish submission as her husband, Eleanor
is a single young woman living in her parents home under their care and
commandment (as decreed by God). So, as Rowbotham proclaims in the title
of her book, to be a good girl, Eleanor must make a good wi[fe], which
means, to her parents, marrying Sir Joyce. Thus, Webster argues that a
society based on religious ideology places some unmarried women of the mid-
nineteenth-century in an impossible situation: you must love and you must
listen to your parents.

In 1864, only three years before the publication of A Woman Sold, an

article in the high-church quarterly The Christian Remembrancer pronounced
that women were [p]rone to worship, prone to lean; in fact, a woman has

14
Though I wont discuss this here, I find it fascinating that Websters Household Opinions
rhetorically plays with the genre of domestic matters.

157
pleasure in submission, in bowing to authority, in the consciousness that her
trust outstrips her reason, in a double faith faith in her religion, and in him
that teaches it(Remembrancer 391). A womans pleasure, then, came from
bowing to authority, but Eleanor cannot bo[w] to both Lionel and her
family, and thus must disobey authority one way or another. As a result,
Eleanor can never be virtuous in the eyes of society no matter whom she mar-
ries. In presenting Eleanor with this choice that prevents her from attaining
moral, personal, or social worth, Webster illustrates the need for unmarried
women to have alternatives to marriage and speaks to a cause she will strongly
advocate in the future: the idea that if women were allowed a strong educa-
tion and professional opportunity, they could financially support themselves
and would not have to base their virtue or worth on marriage. They wouldnt
have to be responsible for creating and maintaining a, to reference Linton,
fools paradise. In building her theory about the metaphorical closet, Eve
Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet states that [i]gnorance and opacity
collude or compete with knowledge in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire,
goods, meanings, persons (4). Sedgwicks statement, though employed in her
own argument through a discourse of homosexuality, seems appropriate for how
Webster, in trapping Eleanor between two marriages and two authority figures
and not suggesting the merest hint of educational or employment opportunity
for Eleanor, reveals the ways in which sociomythology keeps Eleanor ignorant
and immobilizes her energies, desires, and meanin[g] as both goods and a

158
woman.15

Bearing Fruit: A Budding Mobility in the Closet/Drama

The closet drama, with its focus on the conflict of the psyche, seems an
appropriate medium in which to situate the narrative of a female protagonist
whose future, not to mention her conscience, identity, and worth, is bound by
ideologically constructed closets. Additionally, relative to the way the closet
drama genre was slipping further into the literary closet of the nineteenth-
century,16 A Woman Sold, as a closet drama, commented on the way women
were being pushed deeper into institutional and ideological closets where they
had no control of their lives or even their own thoughts. Webster could have
written Eleanor/Lady Boycotts story as a dramatic monologue similar to By
the Looking-Glass, especially since the basic narrative of A Woman Sold also
critiques the way in which the private, personal spaces of a nineteenth-century

15
Again, I see ample opportunity to reach into Sedgwicks theories, particularly with
regard to the way she suggests that sexuality has been made expressive of the essence of
both identity and knowledge [and] may represent the most intimate violence possible (26).
A Woman Sold pre-dates the texts that Sedgwick explores in her work, but it certainly
reflects many of her theories and deserves more space to do so.
16
Websters choice to write a closet drama for the telling of A Woman Sold gains further
meaning when regarded in the context of closet drama written during the Romantic period,
which officially ended with the ascension of Queen Victoria in 1837, but lingered in its
influence for some years after. As discussed in my Introduction to this dissertation and in
my chapter on George Eliots The Spanish Gypsy, Romantic writers, as a response to what
they saw as the decay in the quality of writing for the stage, revived and revised the closet
drama to foster a more meaningful theater of the mind. During the period, Charles Lamb
seemed to express the shared feeling of his fellow closet dramatists when he wrote: On the
stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while
we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, we are in his mind (Burroughs 9). The
stage had become a farce to serious writers like Lamb and Byron. By the 1860s, the
drama-written-to-be-read was becoming passe.

159
woman are invaded and impacted by the dictates of society. Instead, Webster
used a closet drama, a genre that resembles the dramatic monologue in its
blend of drama and interiority yet includes other characters and subsequently
incorporates other voices and perspectives, to recontextualize, dramatize, and
assert a similar, but more complex rhetorical message. In this section, I want
to show how Websters choice of genre for A Woman Sold works together
with narrative and form to expose the limited range of social motion allowed
her female protagonist, particularly in the context of marriage, and in fact,
implicates that institution as a closet, a private domestic space to which women
are exiled and emotionally paralyzed.

A Woman Sold certainly fits with the more conventional mental theater
of the Romantic period, but also nods to the idea of closet drama put forth
during that time by poet/dramatist Joanna Baillie.17 As Catherine Burroughs
noted in Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Ro-
mantic Writers, Baillie viewed the closet drama as a theatrical or public per-
formance of what Burroughs calls real-life closet dramas, personal events
or moments that often occurred in private spaces (89). According to Bur-
roughs, Baillie recognized the value in revealing the traditionally unseen and
unheard and believed theater audiences would get as much out of spying on

17
Baillie, who wrote dramas for both stage and page from 1790 to just before she died in
1851, purposefully imagined her dramas as if they would be performed, though some were
never acted in her lifetime. For more detailed information about Baillie and her view of
the closet drama, see Chapter 3, Joanna Baillies Theater of the Closet: Female Romantic
Playwrights and Preface Writing, in Catherine Burroughs Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie
and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Writers (1997), and The Collected Letters of
Joanna Baillie, ed. Judith Bailey Slagle (1999).

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mens actions, to quote Baillie in her Introductory Discourse from 1798, in
the closet as well as in the field (Burroughs 90). But while Baillie identified
the closets dramatic potential by publicly producing and staging drama
ordinarily enacted in the closet (91), Webster, in contrast, demonstrated the
closets dramatic potential at the site of its origin by illustrating, in each
act of A Woman Sold, her female protagonists inner conflict through a sin-
gular dialogue which she exchanges privately with one other character. Thus,
A Woman Sold acknowledges the performance of its protagonist on the stage
of her own real-life and shows, through two intimate conversations, that
the closet, here manifested as the domestic space of marriage, is actually a
public stage. Lionel and Mary in their performative language and purposeful
conveyance of middle class expectations regarding the institution of marriage
(and its relative, betrothal) and womens roles within that insitution, not only
direct Eleanor/Lady Boycott in her emotional and physical performance, but
also represent the sources of Eleanor/Lady Boycotts inner conflict, as well as
her conscience and her audience, marking the public role she must play, even
in private.

When A Woman Sold begins, Eleanor Vaughan must verbally defend

her decision to marry Sir Joyce, especially since Lionel regards her critically,
oddly, as illustrated when Eleanor remarks in the second and third lines of
the drama that he looks so strangely at her. She proceeds to justify her
potential marriage by explaining that she has [s]o many reasons to marry
Sir Joyce, including pressure from her mother and her friends, who will hear

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no Noes in protest. Lionel will not hear of the lie Eleanor is considering
to live by marrying Sir Joyce and charges ahead in a sixty-seven line speech in
which he lectures her, reminds her, about who she is as an unmarried woman:

. . . a young thing
In the bud of stainless girlhood, you the like
Of babies in your fond grave innocence,
You proud as maidens are who do not know
What sin and weariness is like in lives
Smirched by the pitch that seethes[.] (I, 1924)

Lionel sees Eleanor through a patriarchal, misogynist lens, positioning Eleanor

in the bud of stainless girlhood, where she knows only what others have told
her, where she is protected from the sin and weariness of lives/smirched
by the pitch that seethes. I want to point out here the obvious comparison
of Eleanor to Eve, as newly created as a babe in her fond grave innocence,
with no hope of development or knowledge. Furthermore, though bud can be
seen as an image of early growth and potential, I offer a different metaphorical
reading, one which looks to the contracted bud of a flowering plant as a close-
fitting container, a closet of sorts. As I have noted, the initial definition of the
word closet offered by the OED projects the image of a small enclosure in
the open air, and Lionels bud metaphor could be seen as such an enclosure
for Eleanor; she is a young thing, a baby, a maiden, trapped inside
closeted, if you will this closed, immature flower and is never allowed to
take full advantage of the open air. In a way, this image of a woman in arrested

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development could be seen as a possible outcome for what Eve might have been
like should she have stayed in Paradise and never sinned.

In Act Two, Webster employs Mary to contain and redirect Lady Boy-
cotts feelings and actions. As the widowed Lady Boycott waxes sardonic about
her loveless six-year marriage to Sir Joyce, Mary first advises her not to speak
of the matter aloud (I think you should not say it even now. II, 49), then
encourages her to [h]ush, oh! hush, since she disapproves of Lady Boycott in
her flouting moods (II, 76). Mary accuses Lady Boycott of bitter acting
(II, 80) and offers her emotional direction: You shall not scorn yourself so.
Weep, dear, weep./ If you are sad, and bid me comfort you,/ But let be with
that jarring heartlessness (II, 7779). Webster, in supplying Mary with the
commandment You shall not, along with the imperatives weep, bid, and
let, positions Mary as the director of Lady Boycotts performance. Mary
does not approve of Lady Boycott covering her grief with a show of laughter
and mirth (II, 81) and urges her friend to demonstrate a more suitable and
authentic exhibition, one that is not so heartless or cynical. Through this ex-
change, Webster indicates that even in a private conversation, Lady Boycott is
not allowed to indulge her desires; she must fulfill the desires of Mary, her au-
dience of one. Indeed, Lady Boycott adheres to Marys direction, even saying
to her friend, You were right to hush me (II, 82), but does ask Mary to allow
her [t]he ease of complaining, after which she goes on at length to explain
her marital remorse: she had numbed [her heart] to an unsinning deadness
(II, 152) in her relationship with Sir Joyce, though he was kind and generous

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to her. However, Mary still chides Lady Boycott for run[ning] too wild/In
[her] regrets (II, 159160); I stop you once again, (II, 159), she says, I
know you had no love (II, 160). She proceeds to tell Lady Boycott that she
has no need to feel guilty about her distant relationship with Sir Joyce. Here,
Mary justifies her directives and reasons away Lady Boycotts past:

But you had no fond passion quick in you

To make a fever in your heart. That pulsed
Too slow and chilly. You were faint because
You had foregone the love on which it lived,
And you knew that. (II, 168172)

Although Mary does not use imperatives or commandments here to demand

a present change of action or emotion from Lady Boycott, Mary projects her
own sanctioned interpretation of Lady Boycotts past. In this way, Mary
characterizes Lady Boycott according to her own assumptions and redeems
her as a woman who entered into a mercenary marriage and, as such, acted
properly. After all, Lady Boycott had foregone the love required for a socially
sanctioned marriage, and her heart, as a result, had pulsed too slow and
chilly, not to mention, Mary adds, that Lady Boycott tore the blossom
of [her hearts] hope with [her] own hand and now hunger[s] in a barren
day/Because it bears no fruit (II, 214216). Though Lady Boycott tries to
protest Marys influence and regain control of the conversation let me break
my heart (II, 224) Mary does not let her. Webster places Mary, through

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her language, as an agent of Lady Boycotts past, present, and future, confining
Lady Boycott to Marys directives and assertions, all of which attempt to guide
Lady Boycott back onto the path of love. Lady Boycott, in Marys eyes, must
realize she has eaten the forbidden fruit and accept the consequences.

In addition, while Lionel, as a member of the patriarchy, preaches to

Eleanor about what role he believes she must play, Mary preach[es] a little
hope/out of [her] simple life (II, 467468) as a role model. When Lady Boy-
cott tires of her own diatribe and bids Mary to [t]alk of something else/Of
anything but me (II, 465466), Mary decides to talk about herself, but her
description of her love life (her engagement to Lionel) serves not as a light-
hearted change of subject for her friend, but as an example for Lady Boycott
to emulate. Mary explains that she was once hurt by love when a former fiance
impregnated another woman. She told him to marry the other woman, which
he did. Heartbroken, she was heavy for the loss of love (II, 482) but found
hope and happiness in a new love. She tells Lady Boycott, And now/I am
happy, happy! Better too than that,/I make him happy though that means
the same (II, 495497). Making her new fiance Lionel happy means the
same for Mary as her own happiness. Their love [i]s part of daily life (II,
525), a bright monotony (II, 537). Lady Boycott protests Marys feelings
with her own string of assertions and commandments:

Mary, you do not love him. . . .

You do not love him. No,
Not with your heart, the very life in you ,

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 Less will not do. You must not; no, you must not.
You shall not marry so. (II, 516519)

But because Mary has already established that Lady Boycott is acting scorn-
ful and heartless, Lady Boycotts attempt to gain control, act on her own feel-
ings, and instruct Mary is futile. Mary tells Lady Boycott that she will change
her mind when she meets Marys fiance Lionel Ellerton and finally realizes
what love is: Youll know how far from possible it were/ For the woman who
loves Lionel Ellerton/To love a little. . . . Youll know what a rich thing my
sunshine is (II, 531533, 544). Under Marys direction, Lady Boycott will
know the truth of love, and Marys repetition of Youll performatively
commands the inevitable.

Webster also indicates Eleanor/Lady Boycotts limited options through

the two-act form of A Woman Sold, which splits Eleanor/Lady Boycotts life
into two parts, before and after her mercenary marriage to Sir Joyce. Webster
might have just as easily told the story in three or five acts, further explor-
ing, for example, the courtship of Lionel and Eleanor prior to the conversa-
tion that opens the play, Eleanors familial relationship, or even the marital
relationship that unfolds between Eleanor and Sir Joyce. Instead, Webster
structures the drama around two key turning points: the moment when the
unmarried Eleanor must choose between being tempted and virtuous and the
moment when the widowed Lady Boycott must choose between allowing others
to control her life or deciding to act for herself. Form and narrative thus unite
to reflect a leitmotif of duality commonly found across nineteenth-century

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texts and ultimately represent the binaries that cause Eleanor/Lady Boycotts
conflicts good/evil, love/money, sin/piety, temptation/resistance, redemp-
tion/ruin, man/woman, and self/other, as signified by the characters own
double moniker.18 Together, the two acts identify and unify the absolutes of
the sociomythologically constructed existence as the angel in the house/post-
fall Eve from which Eleanor/Lady Boycott eventually breaks free late in Act
Two, just before the drama ends.

Eleanor/Lady Boycotts identity as built on ideological binaries is im-

mediately established in the initial exchange between Lionel and Eleanor in
Act One:

Lionel.
Then it is true!
Eleanor.
Oh, Lionel, you look
So strangely at me.

The very first line of the drama, Lionels Then it is true!, signals only two
possibilities for his discovery (as-yet-undefined for the reader): to be true

18
As mentioned in my earlier chapter on The Spanish Gypsy, Claire Rosenfeld in The
Shadow Within: The Conscious and Unconscious Use of the Double talks about how
the Victorians saw two opposing selves and the two sides represented the socially ac-
ceptable or conventional personality while the other externaliz[ed] the free, uninhibited,
often criminal self (327328). Eve Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet also denotes
certain binaries or pairings as basic to modern cultural organization, for example, mas-
culine/feminine, majority/minority, natural/artificial, and so on. Sedgwick discusses these
binaries in the context of the binary homosocial/homosexual, which I will not bring into the
argument in this chapter (73).

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or false. This single, emphatic statement immediately forces Eleanors answer
into a track of confirmation or denial, true or untrue, and, coupled with
Lionels critical countenance as he look[s] so strangely at Eleanor, it also
implies her probable involvement in the activity that is or is not true. Con-
sequently, the first exchange of A Woman Sold wastes no time showing its
female protagonist having to answer to a man not only for something she may
or may not have done, but also for what he expected her to do or not do.

In the nine lines that continue their conversation, Eleanor proceeds to

defend and explain for the reader the truth of Lionels discovery, or her
recent betrothal to Sir Joyce:

Think I all alone,

So many reasons, all my friends so fain,
My mother pressing me, Sir Joyce so good,
So full of promises, he who could choose
No bride among the highest ladies round
But she would smile elate and all her kin
Bow low and thank him and go swelled with pride
You cannot wonder that my friends declare
Theyll hear no Noes, but force me to my good. (I, 311)

She pleads her case as an innocent woman suffering in a social pressure-cooker:

her mother is pressing (I, 4) her to marry the good (I, 4) Sir Joyce,
who could have his pick of the highest ladies (I, 6), but wants her instead.

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Eleanors friends are also encouraging the match and will not hear her objec-
tions, given the fact that any woman would [b]ow low and thank him and go
swelled with pride (I, 8) at his offer. Eleanor attempts to explain how com-
plicated the situation is, particularly since her mother and her friends believe
Sir Joyce to be so good. But her version of the truth makes her, in Lionels
eyes, untrue; Lionel is appalled by this lie of a life she is considering and
goes on to pronounce her actions as untrue to that pure self/Of [his] love
Eleanor (I, 1617), to that young thing/In the bud of stainless girlhood
(I, 1819). In other words, if Eleanor leaves him for Sir Joyce, she is staining
herself, corrupting her intrinsic purity, denying what Lionel and society believe
makes her true pure self.

In Act Two, Lady Boycott seems to have internalized this concept as she
recalls to Mary how for six years she boycotted all happiness as Sir Joyces
wife and kept her husband at a distance as self-induced punishment for being
untrue to love and surrendering her moral purity to material temptation. But
Lady Boycott regrets her behavior as Sir Joyces wife; Sir Joyce objectified her
but was generous and kind in his treatment of her, yet she still, as atonement
for her mercenary choice, refrained from showing him any affection:

Ah! he had
His rights upon me. He meant me well.
He was not often hard to me; he gave
With an unstinting hand for all my whims,
And tricked me with the costliest fineries

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 Almost beyond my wish; was proud of me
And liked to look at me, and vaunted me,
My beauty and my grace and stateliness,
My taste and fashion. (II, 112120)

Sir Joyces appreciation of his wife can be considered in a variety of ways,

all alluding to his physical/sexual relationship with her. The line He was
not often hard to me either can be read as evidence that he may not have
had a temper or, perhaps, indicates that he did not often force her cold
wifely duty (II, 277) of sexual intercourse. Read in context with the lines
he had/His rights upon me followed by He meant me well amplifies this
latter interpretation, as rights could equate to conjugal rights and well
could signify that he never intentionally wanted to harm her. In fact, going
one step farther, the fact that Sir Joyce gave/With an unstinting hand for
all [her] whims, could possibly allude to his contribution from time to time
to Lady Boycotts own sexual pleasure.

Furthermore, although in saying that Sir Joyce tricked her with the
costliest fineries, Lady Boycott suggests that he might have paid for her
physical attentions with material things in the fashion of a prostitute, in the
same breath she admits that the fineries and whims were almost, but
not quite, beyond her wish. In effect, then, Lady Boycott did wish for what
her husband could provide materially and physically; he was not one hundred
percent evil, with a dried up pithless soul (I, 48), as Lionel describes him
in Act One. Consequently, Lady Boycott in Act Two reconsiders not having

170
reciprocated his kindness, admitting to Mary that she could not even shar[e]
with him little daily thoughts or answe[r] when he talked (II, 133134). In
marrying Sir Joyce, Lady Boycott had numbed [her heart] to an unsinning
deadness (II, 152), forcing herself not to feel, in both the emotional and
physical sense in order to redeem her choice of marrying him. But after keeping
herself true to the middle class ideals of wives, love, and marriage, she comes
to realize that she might have punished both herself and Sir Joyce and, for six
years, refused any chance at creating a different sort of Paradise: a mercenary
marriage in which love blooms, a Paradise that would be socially unaccepted
since the love grew from a union created for economic reasons.

By choosing in Act Two to have the widowed Lady Boycott confess all
about her six-year marriage through backstory to Mary, rather than devote
an entire real time act and a third dialogue directly showing Lady Boycotts
relationship to Sir Joyce, Webster emphasizes Lady Boycotts self-inflicted
suffering through silence. In thinking about the way in which Eve Sedgwick in
Epistemology of the Closet identifies closetedness as performance initiated
. . . by the speech act of silence and the way in which Sedgwick also considers
speech acts, the explicit and the inexplicit, as peculiarly revealing (23),
the silence of the missing third act speaks loudly, even from deep within
a closet that cannot even be seen. The omission of this act seems to reveal
much in its spectre-like non-performance, particularly in lieu of the Married
Womens Property Act of 1870. The Married Womens Property Act of 1870
had not yet gone into effect at the time of the dramas publication, and married

171
women were considered part of their husbands property; as such, they revoked
all rights to property they had held previously in their own names to their
husband. Because the married Lady Boycott could not own anything in the
eyes of a patriarchal, androcentric law, the silent gap in the drama in which
six years supposedly pass marks Lady Boycotts legal identity as an invisible
mute. In Act Two, the widowed Lady Boycott tells Mary that she smiled/A
cheating silence for so many years (II, 5354) as the penance to be good/And
pretty mannered dull day by dull day (II, 5556). Legally, the married Lady
Boycott does not have the right to possess anything except pretty manner[s];
legally, reminiscent of Gods law forbidding Adam and Eve from taking for
themselves the fruit of knowledge, Gods property (a law that Eve ultimately
broke), the married Lady Boycott must remain a beautiful, stately, graceful,
ignorant help-meet/angel.

Sedgwick also suggests the fact that silence is rendered as pointed and
performative as speech, in relations around the closet, depends on and high-
lights more broadly the fact that ignorance is as potent and multiple a thing
as knowledge (4). This idea further enhances the meaning of Lady Boycotts
closeted, unwritten, unspoken marriage to Sir Joyce. Specifically, Sedgwick
notes the way, with credit to Foucault, that knowledge and sex became
conceptually inseparable after the eighteenth century, with knowledge com-
ing to mean sexual knowledge and ignorance, sexual ignorance (73). In
the first act, Eleanor does not yet know Lionel sexually; despite their chaste
kisses and embraces, she retains her purity. Even if she had married him, in

172
the spirit of Patmores angel (or, the redemptive Eve), she would have re-
mained sexually ignorant, her wifely duty a divine sacrifice made out of love.
However, in accepting a mercenary marriage to Sir Joyce, Lady Boycott has
been tempted into sexual knowledge with, in a middle class view, Satan, their
conjugal relations socially and culturally worthless/worth far less than true
love: the price [she] earned was only smiles/And too familiar fondlings (II,
111112). Yet as wife of either man, she must play the part with knowledge
and ignorance, either way a woman sold. As Lionels wife, she would have
been considered the fit angel of the fit house, haloed object symbolic of a pros-
pering middle class. As Sir Joyces, she is viewed as the whim and property
of the upper class, or Satan himself.

Yet by leaving a hole between two acts that signifies Lady Boycotts
marriage to Sir Joyce, Webster opens space for Lady Boycott to eventually
experience a new awareness, the ironic realization that marriage to Sir Joyce
was not the extreme unholy bargain or treachery that Lionel, and society,
deemed it (I, 209, 281). Going into the marriage, she had wanted to see the
bad harsh tyranny (II, 143) of Sir Joyce, and although he touched her with
a condescending husbandly caress (II, 145), she also had noted his kindness
and his smile (II, 144). The knowledge that she gained through her marriage
to Sir Joyce was related not only to sexuality, then, but also to love and,
consequently, morality. As Sir Joyce suffered through his final moments, Lady
Boycott seemed to love him (II, 375376), as she tells Mary in Act Two,
and suddenly realized how much she and her husband both suffered from her

173
complete renunciation of any sort of love between them, as well as from her
renunciation of him, as the man who supposedly represented social ruin for her
and for society at large. She had dreamed, not loving him, I loved/No other
then (II, 150151); in other words, in never allowing herself to truly care for
Sir Joyce, she had believed she could honor by forgetting what she saw
as her pure, socially acceptable love for Lionel. In this way, the void Webster
leaves to mark Lady Boycotts six-year relationship to Sir Joyce begins to fill
with the possible consequences of the two choices that exist on either side for
Eleanor/Lady Boycott, and the tension of remembering and reevaluating those
choices pushes toward a social and personal awakening for her in the end. The
void eventually fills and spills over into Act Two, representing a new source of
power for Lady Boycott: widowhood.

Lady Boycotts status as a widow directly connects to the variable,

off-page, fill-in-the-blank of her marriage to Sir Joyce. As Dagni Ann Bre-
desen notes in Categorical Exceptions: Widows, Sexuality, and Fictions of
(Dis)Coverture in Victorian Domestic and Imperial Narratives, the widow is
a marker of the gap left by the husband, an absence to be filled, while also a
figure of excess and overflow that needs to be contained (7). Lady Boycott
exemplifies this image in bemoaning both the loss of her husband as well as
the loss of any chance with her former lover. She is essentially questioning
who she should be, now that all the men in her life had left vast absence[s]
to be filled in her identity, yet concurrently, her long rambling monologues
(though interrupted by Mary) illustrate an overflow that needs to be con-

174
tained. In either case, Lady Boycott as nineteenth-century widow, a woman
whose identity is no longer subsumed by her husbands, was doomed to the
same filling, containing, and general controlling that she experienced as
an unmarried woman and a wife.

But Bredesen also defines widowhood as a site of category collapse,

where this lack and overflow swirl into each other to create a nexus of sexual,
legal, social, and economic identities for the widow (8). At once, widow is
maiden and wife, respectable and disrespected, poor and enterprising (79).
Here in this nexus, Lady Boycott burst[s]/[Her] serious due disguise of wid-
owhood (II, 9091), denying her role as the container or the contained. True,
she wishes she could recapture young girl follies (II, 72). True, she regrets
the way she treated her husband, still harbors feelings for the man she once
loved, and scoffs at the hope and her foolishness that remains. True, her
exile from domestic paradise has made her cynical with regard to love, and
her sour outlook could be viewed as a cautionary tale. But as Act Two winds
down and Mary exits the scene leaving Lady Boycott alone, Webster allows the
widow to finally take control through a monologue. In shifting to a monologue
from the give-and-take of a dialogue, Webster recognizes a new independence
and authority in Lady Boycott, and for the first time, the closet becomes a
place where Lady Boycott can think for herself, speak without interruption,
and and make a choice to follow her own desires.

This change occurs after Lady Boycott has finished telling Mary about
her marriage to Sir Joyce and has recapitulated feelings and events that have

175
developed over the last six years. After releasing her pent-up emotion, Lady
Boycott then discovers, a few moments before Marys fiance comes to the house
to pick her up, that Marys fiance is Lionel. Out of respect to her friend, Lady
Boycott does not reveal to Mary that Lionel is the man she still loves and
insists that Mary not betray to Lionel her secret feelings for Sir Joyce or the
unnamed man she let get away what Lady Boycott refers to as her [w]eak
baby trash. Mary then hears evidence of Lionels arrival in an exterior room
of the house and goes to fetch him, leaving Lady Boycott alone to figure out
what to do:

Her Lionel! Her husband! Oh my heart,

The pain in it! Her lover! If I wait
Shell say, Weve Lady Boycott here, and then
The quick surprise may make him tell her more
Than she should know. No, I must go to him
Welcome him briskly, wear the cheerful face of
Pleasant meeting: hes my friends betrothed,
And I must take him so. Twere easier
To ape indifference, dislike itself.
But I can play my part, and naturally,
And hell not tell her, hell be so at ease,
So careless of me.
For she must not know[.] (I, 601613)

Lady Boycott is hurt by the knowledge that Lionel will be Marys husband and
lover. She makes a quick decision: rather than wait for Mary to bring Lionel

176
into the room and risk Lionels stunned realization, Lady Boycott chooses to
be pro-active and go to him/Welcome him briskly, wear the cheerful face/Of
pleasant meeting, determined to play [her] part, and naturally, to put him
at ease and head off any potential awkwardness.

She continues her monologue the only moment in the drama when
she is alone on stage and further explores her feelings about the predica-
ment, about the role she must play, and about how she and Lionel will behave:

Oh my rare smiling part!

My pretty cordial acting! We shall be
A genial pair of friends. We both love her,
And theres our bond. Oh! to be day by day
Talking and talking, smiling and smiling! Well
It will not last forever. I have lied
In smiles and saying nothings prettily
To a worse purpose ere to-day. (II, 622626)

Rather than slowly draw away from her friendship with Mary or die some
contrived death as was the mid-nineteenth-century literary trend for female
characters who did not make the right social choices, Lady Boycott, even in
the knowledge of Marys love for Lionel, chooses to be Lionels friend, cordial
and gregarious in her demeanor. An obvious and easy reading of this verse
suggests Lady Boycott is reverting back to the ways of her married self or even
the unmarried Eleanor, biting her tongue and playing the part of the virtuous
woman who values others feelings above her own. She must feign happiness

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yet again in smiles, just as she did in her marriage to Sir Joyce. Her voice
will again be silenced beneath pretty nothings, though her silent suffering
for Mary will be far better than her silent marital suffering.

But I want to offer a different reading, one that shows Lady Boycotts
declaration in a less restricted light, one that offers a different possibility.
Just prior to the eight lines above, Lady Boycott pronounces her affection
for Mary, saying that she loves her for herself (II, 617). Therefore, Lady
Boycotts acting becomes more about supporting another womans desire
as well as her own and less about adhering to patriarchal standards, as
well as moral and gender expectations. She expresses the love of friendship,
something she seems to never have experienced as Eleanor, whose friends only
are only mentioned by Webster briefly in the context of forcing her to marry
Sir Joyce. Lady Boycott wants to genuinely support her friend in growing a
life and love with Lionel. Through her affection for Mary, Lady Boycott will
try to be genial friends with Lionel; granted, she believes the role will not
last forever, but I interpret this phrase to mean that even though the role
would continue until death do they part, she would endure. Because Lady
Boycott regrets her insincerity as Sir Joyces wife and despises herself for the
charade, she is ready or at least willing to embrace a new kind of love, beyond
the love associated with marriage. She seeks to create a stronger bond with
Lionel through their love for Mary, a bond that even suggests a more spiritual
connotation through the holy significance of the name Mary.

In fact, the last four lines of the drama could be read as a resurrection

178
of sorts for Lady Boycott as she proclaims:

Lionel, Im coming to you; I, not Eleanor:

Shes gone, shes dead. But, as for Lady Boycott,
Perhaps youll like her . . . she is Marys friend. (II, 635638)

Eleanor is gone, shes dead, but the widowed Lady Boycott has declared that
she will take her place. She identifies herself as Marys friend, empowering
herself with moral credibility, loyalty, and devotion. Webster closes the drama
on the image of a triangle of friendship that offers a potential for a love that
allows Lady Boycott to finally claim her existence and her desires.

A Dreamy Sort of Time: Conclusion

The combination of understated allegory and contemporary themes in

A Woman Sold draws Eleanors conflict into a space between time and place,
myth and realism, reflecting the phrase Lady Boycott uses in opening Act Two:
[a] dreamy sort of time (II, 4). Indeed, the issues in A Woman Sold reflect
those of concern to a mid-nineteenth-century audience, but the subtle allusion
to the myth that surrounds Eve, or the first woman, together with the
dramas lack of stage directions, evokes an ambulatory quality that suggests
the issues are not particular to just an individual woman, a specific year,
a distinctive experience, or a precise location. Thus, the dialogues between
Eleanor and Lionel and Lady Boycott and Mary become emblematic: through
them, Webster suggests that the conflict in this drama is not new, but rather
began with humanity itself, and consequently grew immalleable as history

179
unfolded. In this way, Webster argues that woman has forever been sold on
myth, ideologies, and gender prescriptions, and as a result of it all, the nature
of her very own identity.

But, as Eleanor becomes first the wife, then the widow, and, lastly,
woman in her own right, Webster offers the possibility of revising those man-
dates as well as moving beyond them. Lady Boycott, in looking to a friend-
ship with Mary and Lionel rather than matrimony as an option for her future,
trades patriarchal relationships to honor the desires of a female friend. She is
no longer invisible or mute. She is no longer bound by her family, her fiance,
her husband. Webster thus rethinks Eves future by showing a woman nearly
smothered by her closet Paradise who still manages to grow a new-found iden-
tity and personal awareness, and, ultimately, plants new boundaries in order
to survive her way.

A Woman Sold also predicts the irony Webster will use later in her
career. While the drama could appear like a cautionary tale for nineteenth-
century women about the pitfalls of choosing mercenary marriage over a mar-
riage based on love, the construction of the drama offers a reading which
implies that women need more than marriage to prevent them from having
to rely on their parents or men for their futures, to prevent them from selling
themselves literally and figuratively, to prevent them from basing their worth
and virtue on mythology that paralyzes their choices.

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 Chapter 5

Further Renovations of the Closet Drama:

Conclusion

In this concluding chapter, I want to round out my discussion of The

Spanish Gypsy, Stephania, and A Woman Sold by showing how my work might
lead to expansive fields of further analysis about closet drama and sociocultural
connections to genre and form. The fundamental argument in this dissertation
centers on the ways in which George Eliot, Michael Field, and Augusta Web-
ster used the closet drama a genre written in dramatic form, but intended
for private reading or performance rather than the commercial stage to
expose and, in turn, reform the figurative and literal closets that limited social
and cultural possibilities for nineteenth-century women. In their unification of
the genre, form, and narrative of these closet dramas, Eliot, Field, and Webster
established, to return to the definition offered by Straznicky that opened this
dissertation, their own cultural fields, spaces of private and public exchange
where their female protagonists could confront these limitations and acknowl-
edge both their individual desires and those desires representative of a larger
community. Rather than mire their female protagonists in the personal angst
of the soul, a characteristic of the solipsistic closet drama written by male
Romantics, Eliot, Field, and Webster showed contemplation and internal con-

181
flict as a catalyst for their female protagonists to discover possibilities brought
on by self-awareness and social engagement. Ultimately, this dissertation is
about how Eliot, Field, and Webster used the closet drama to critique the
patriarchal and misogynist ideologies that shaped nineteenth-century gender
roles for women, as well as the stages on which they had to perform those roles.
Within this cultural field of the closet drama, the farther away these three
authors moved from Victorian reality, the larger opportunity their fictional
protagonist was offered for mobility, action, and change. Yet, these authors
also seemed to suggest that the more epic the life of the female protagonist,
the less real potential a nineteenth-century woman had for that same sort of
grand destiny, unless she began to view her sociocultural mythology in a new
way. To return to Eliots quotation from Middlemarch, a Victorian woman
was somewhat doomed to be a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and
sank unwept into oblivion (3). These three dramas used nonrealism to sug-
gest nineteenth-century women needed a new past, new collective memories,
and new monuments to mark futures that would not be forgotten.

New Directions for Study: Eliot, Field, and Webster

Other closet dramas written by Eliot, Field, and Webster would provide
rich material in support of this investigational direction. Eliot only wrote one
other closet drama, Armgart(1870), about a successful opera singer who must
entertain new possibilities for the future when she loses her voice. The closet
drama, set in the nineteenth-century, deals with a womans artistic talent,
ambition, identity (as a woman and a woman artist), sexuality, fame, and

182
performance, which critics like Grace Kehler, Britta Zangen, Renata Kobetts
Miller, Louise Hudd, Susan Brown, and Rebecca A. Pope have addressed.
But the fact that Eliot told the story about a stage prima donna in a closet
drama rather than through a novel begs a thorough examination of how the
closet drama enhances meaning for this narrative about a woman who reveres
and loses the identity she had cultivated on the public stage, a stage where
her starring roles were male characters. Susan Brown begins this type of
investigation in Determined Heroines: George Eliot, Augusta Webster, and
Closet Drama by Victorian Women, but does not give the topic the space it
requires.

Fields vast dramatic canon is fertile ground for study, as many of their
closet dramas have been mentioned in emerging scholarship but have rarely
been studied in depth. Several of the works could be read in the context of
Shakespearean drama as was Bradley and Coopers intention for the reader, ev-
idenced by the womens shared journal and personal correspondence in which
they discussed channeling the genius whom they, in the trend of Victorian
writers, regarded as the premier dramatist. Shakespeare was a cultural icon
for nineteenth-century artists, and Fields dramas, which undeniably resonate
with his influence, demand analysis of the way Shakespearian convention, in
theme, characterization, and form, greatly affected nineteenth-century con-
structs of society, politics, and culture, gender and sexuality. Furthermore,
in the context of Bradley and Coopers collaboration and unique relation-
ship, all of Fields dramas support opportunity for critical dialogue about the

183
private/public intersection of art, identity, and performance, as manifested
through the Victorians cultural insitutionalization of Shakespearian tradition.

After A Woman Sold, Webster wrote three more closet dramas: The
Auspicious Day (1872), In a Day (1882), and The Sentence (1887). Though all
three dramas are set in different times and places an aristocratic court during
the days of witchcraft, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome, respectively they
are thematically connected to each other and to A Woman Sold. The Auspi-
cious Day uses the metatheatrical issues as an opportunity to comment on gen-
der roles and womens performance as the drama features a play-within-a-play,
a production reminiscent of the Romantic mental theater with an all-woman
cast playing abstract roles like Love, Constancy, and Fame. The manner in
which the men watching the play comment on how well the young women fit
their roles encourages a closer look at how Webster used this metatheatrical
device to critique issues of womens social performance, their confinement and
agency with regard to certain ideological constructs, and their roles in social
institutions like marriage issues common to all three of Websters plays. The
historical and temporal distance Webster employs in these dramas would make
for interesting and layered comparison to that of Websters poetic translations,
as well as of her politically charged essays, provoking new discussion about the
rhetorical result of genre, form, and content.

Other Women Closet Dramatists of the Nineteenth-Century

I hope the consideration of the rhetorical form and function in the closet
dramas by Eliot, Field, and Webster will turn a critical eye toward the work

184
of other female closet dramatists of the long nineteenth-century to illustrate
how the dramatic form not only contributed meaning to the story the authors
were trying to tell, but also allowed them to comment on the female agency
(or lack of agency), in public and private situations. Felicia Hemans Siege
of Valencia (1823), for example, shares common ground with The Spanish
Gypsy as a closet drama with female characters who take on epic roles. The
narrative of this drama, set in eleventh-century Spain during a Moor invasion,
offers strong female characters in Elmina, a mother who directly pleads to
the marauders for the safe return of her son who was captured, and Ximena,
a young woman who takes a leadership role in the cause when her city has
lost hope. Elizabeth Barrett Brownings A Drama of Exile (1845), a text
that remains understudied, yet ripe for criticism on many levels, responds to
Miltons Paradise Lost, and, stylistically modeled on Greek tragedy, follows
Adam and Eves exile from Paradise. The narrative focuses on Eve as she
deals with the guilt and consequences of her sinful deed; however, Barrett
Browning seems to use the drama to question nineteenth-century gender roles
and attitudes constructed by Miltons revision of the patriarchal myth. Like
A Drama of Exile, Vernon Lees Ariadne in Mantua: A Romance in Five
Acts (1903) is not often recognized in the context of Lees overall literary
accomplishments despite being well-received by critics, one of whom marked
the work as the most self-revealing of all Vernon Lees work (Gunn 179).
Ariadne in Mantua: A Romance in Five Acts also invites examination of
gender, sexuality, and identity issues through a historical lens. Set in Italy

185
during the Holy Wars, the story revolves around Ferdinand, a Dukes son
who returns home emotionally scarred after being held captive in a Moorish
prison. His uncle hires Diego, a Spanish singer of Moorish descent (line) to
lift Ferdinands spirits. In reality, Diego is Magdalen, a courtesan/slave with
whom Ferdinand fell in love while in captivity. The Cardinal, desperate for
Ferdinand to marry the Princess Hippolyta and produce an heir to secure the
family line, believes Magdalen can use the feminine charms hidden under her
male disguise to cure Ferdinands mood. But as Hippolyta and Ferdinand both
succumb to Diegos wit and manner, the play recalls Shakespeares Twelfth
Night and demands exploration from that angle, yet it also welcomes study
of how Lees construction of the closet drama shapes the rhetoric about the
performance of gender and sexuality in the nineteenth century.

Closet Drama by Nineteenth-Century Women and Sedgwicks

Theories of the Closet

My work in this chapter only peels away the first layer of what I see
as a larger, more densely-stratified investigation promoted by Eve Sedgwicks
Epistemology of the Closet and her earlier work, Between Men. In this dis-
sertation, I merely scratch the surface in analyzing the ways in which these
nineteenth-century dramas portray the Victorian closet as a literal and figu-
rative stage regulated by what Sedgwick considers the binarized sociocultural
ideologies that were institutionally made normative during the period, a
stage on which the characters of these dramas struggle to perform their desig-
nated roles but ultimately resist them, a stage representative of similar social

186
and cultural structures of performative confinement outside the text. In the
arc of the argument that stretches across Between Men and Epistemology of
the Closet, Sedgwick traces the effects of male homosocial desire on the soci-
etal construction of, and allowance of agency inside, the closet, primarily from
the late eighteenth-century to the twentieth. Using Sedgwicks theories more
actively to investigate The Spanish Gypsy, Stephania, and A Woman Sold
through the lens of the homosocial continuum, not to mention the comprehen-
sive system of sociocultural valuation created through the homo/heterosexual
binary emergent in the nineteenth-century a methodology not yet fully un-
dertaken by closet drama scholars confronts the Tzvetan Todorov quotation
with which I began this dissertation: Like any other institution, genres bring
to light the constitutive features of the society to which they belong. As ex-
amples of the closet drama genre revised by nineteenth-century women writers,
The Spanish Gypsy, Stephania, and A Woman Sold can be seen to bring to
light and to reform for women (both inside and outside the text) a traditional,
institutionalized power play involving identity, gender, and sexuality.

However, Sedgwicks interest in the oppressive effects on women and

men of a cultural system of male-male desire (Epistemology 15) would also
bring to light the structural power dynamic erected within and between
genders (and sexualities) that thematically moors these closet dramas both on
and off the page; in this line of study, the female protagonist and her author
would be viewed as more than victim and champion of her circumstance,
and instead as active contributor to and participant in a family of individuals

187
(male, female alike) affected by the same restrictive and dictative ideologi-
cal systems. As with Sedgwicks studies in Epistemology of the Closet and
Between Men, the analysis of these closet dramas could reach beyond a fem-
inist approach to a more inclusive conversation about the nineteenth-century
homophobic trend reflected in their portrayal of power and identity.

In fact, in reading The Spanish Gypsy, Stephania, and A Woman Sold,

for instance, I was struck by the realization that Don Silva, Otho, and Lionel
are as much products of patriarchal, homosocial, and misogynist ideologies as
Fedalma, Stephania, and Eleanor/Lady Boycott. I am driven to think about
the closets to which those male characters are also confined, a consideration
that challenges me to imagine what further analysis of these texts might reveal
in looking at them from that perspective.

When first introduced in The Spanish Gypsy, Silva is identified as be-

longing to a class of Castilian gentlemen who [c]hoose not their task, but
choose to do it well (I, 163); in other words, he is given a task, a duty, but
elects to successfully complete it. His internal conflict, like Fedalmas, derives
from his coming to terms with an identity split between dedication to self and
dedication to others, on one hand charged [b]y the dead gaze of all his
ancestors (I, 182, 180) to fight for chosen Spain (I, 179) as a caballero and
an epic hero, and on the other, to guard [Fedalma] from the world (I, 751)
as her fiance and lover. He is described by the narrator as lion and man (I,
1570), yet also a character who seek[s] to justify [his] public acts/And not
[his] private joy (I, 16691670). Thus, he, too, must ultimately struggle with

188
who he is and what is expected of him as a Spanish Catholic Duke devoted
to the duties commanded by his King and his religion, as well as the duties
to his true love, the Gypsy queen Fedalma. At the center of Silvas conflict,
Eliot positions the Prior, a religious zealot who tries to control Silvas physical
and emotional desires for Fedalma. An investigation of the Priors character
development would expose the heart of the ideological and institutional clos-
ets that strictly assign roles of gender, race, and class in this world and thus
determine the characters actions, reactions, choices, and futures.

Similar to Silva, Emperor Otho, in Stephania, wrestles with duty and

desire. In the face of what he sees as a dying Roman empire, he longs to
resign/War, empire, politics, the subtle arts/Of learning, and fall back on ig-
norance (I, 328330), but is reprimanded by his mentor Gerbert for this
forsaking of [his] higher self (I, 332). Otho considers himself [d]amned in
[his] very destiny (I, 93) as he longs to join the homosocial world of hermit
Romuald but is bound by heredity to rule Rome and to forsake his individ-
ual, physical desires. Although I did not pursue the angle in this dissertation,
evidence from Bradleys and Coopers personal archives and journals would
provide an interesting lens for Othos conflict, as the dynamics of their rela-
tionship often slipped into male homosocial role play. Examining Stephania
through the expression, and shifting, of these particular desires would reveal
another dimension to the way both manhood and womanhood are treated in
Othos closet.

Like Silva and Otho, Lionel in A Woman Sold is also a man shaped

189
by the duties socioculturally assigned to him. Lionel is a middle-class man
trapped by the nineteenth-century patriarchal idea of manhood. His speeches
to Eleanor resound with expectations of who she should be and consequently
reflect who he is expected to be; if Eleanor, as a young thing/In the bud of
stainless girlhood (I, 1920), does not fulfill her promise to marry him, he, as
an aspiring lawyer, will not fulfill his responsibilities as a man. Specifically, as
a middle-class man who has been ideologically cast to redeem Adams sin and
prevent temptation before it begins, therefore given another chance to hold
onto Paradise, Lionel relies on the love of a stainless woman like Eleanor to
make his life near divine. He set all his hopes on [her]/Because he had [her]
promise (I, 279280), and if Eleanor fails him, he will have failed to achieve
his fit home (I, 328), his Paradise. He will have failed nationhood, empire,
and, as inheritor of Adam, God. Additionally, although Sir Joyce is never
physically present during the drama, the homosocial connection between him
and Lionel draws the boundary of their social and sexual agency as Victorian
men: what one man possesses, the other man must buy, own, and mark to
increase his worth. This connection would not only further expose the nu-
ances of Eleanors/Lady Boycotts life in a patriarchal, homosocial culture as
transaction (a woman sold between men), but may also suggest that the men
in this play are sold on that very idea as well.

In this way, an investigation into how the closet dramas by Eliot, Field,
and Webster also structurally emphasize and critique the closet of manhood
seems an essential part in fully evaluating how the genre, form, and narrative

190
of the closet drama work together to make a statement about gender roles, sex-
uality, the institutions and dogma of religion and marriage, and various other
Victorian closets. Specifically, this type of inquiry would identify the closet
dramas showcased in this dissertation as exemplary of the way the nineteenth-
century closet drama genre could be viewed as a symbolic textual monument
for the sociocultural negotiation of gender and sexuality issues that historically
closeted the identity, agency, and performance of Victorian men and women
alike.

The Twenty-First-Century Resonance of the Closet Drama: The

Oprah Winfrey Show and the Soap Opera
Studying the thematic action of three female closet dramatists has also in-
spired me to think about the representations of womens literal and figurative
closets in the twenty-first-century and about what I would classify as closet
drama genre in our time. With this in mind, I see the innovative texts in
my dissertation as resonating beyond their nineteenth-century context to dia-
logue with contemporary conversations about womanhood, gender roles, and
identity.

My work has prompted me to think about the manifestation of drama

in private domestic space (both as physical location and metaphor), which sur-
prisingly has led me to begin examining The Oprah Winfrey Show, as well as a
nearly extinct genre, the daytime soap opera, as descendants of closet drama.
As one of the pioneer examples of television psychology, The Oprah Win-
frey Show has been, for over twenty-two seasons, marketed with the mission

191
of offering strategies for the self-improvement, empowerment, and education
of women. I would be interested in contributing to Corinne Squires work in
Empowering Women? The Oprah Winfrey Show (Feminism & Psychology,
4(1994): 63-79) by looking at the television talk show in terms of its closet-
edness: how can we see the show itself as a closet? Furthermore, how can we
see the show as exposing and opening the doors to certain closets for women?
What connections can we make between the fluidity of public and private
spaces (domestic and otherwise) in nineteenth-century closet drama and the
fluidity of public and private spaces illuminated by The Oprah Winfrey Show ?
How does the relationship between the psyche and action in nineteenth-century
closet drama speak to the relationship between the psyche and action touted by
Oprah herself? Where does the nonrealism of the nineteenth-century closet
dramas written by women intersect with the super-realism of The Oprah
Winfrey Show ?

Like The Oprah Winfrey Show, another television phenomenon, the

soap opera, has also catered to the shaping of womens identity and conflates
public space and private domestic space. Soap operas began in the 1930s as
domestic radio dramas aimed at an audience of housewives. While the opera
tag lent the new genre a certain cache, the word soap pinpointed rhetorical
purpose: soap operas were a medium for soap manufacturers to advertise their
latest and greatest cleaning wonder to middle-class women whose mission was
to keep the house spic-and-span. To ensure women would return to the ra-
dio and consequently the television set on a daily basis, broadcasters

192
and sponsors wrote serialized dramas that gave ordinary women a peek into
fictional lives frought with emotional and physical conflict. The goal of the
soap opera: to sell domestic products by drawing the simple housefrau into
this fictional, sudsy fantasy world. As the genre of the daytime soap opera
fights for survival in the twenty-first-century, I think about the unpopular-
ity of the closet drama in the late nineteenth-century and find myself faced
with questions that address the similarities between, and the fates of, the
two genres. What can we say about how the message of womens identity
and agency expressed by the nonrealism of nineteenth-century closet drama
written by women is reflected in the message of womens identity and agency
expressed by the nonrealism of the soap opera? How does the soap opera reveal
the socio-cultural ideologies, collective memories, and communal experiences
that shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century womanhood in the tradition
of nineteenth-century closet drama written by women? How does the soap
opera operate as a nexus of popular genres, much like the nineteenth-century
closet drama served as a nexus of popular genres? Do the narrative strategies
of the soap opera operate in the same fashion as the narrative strategies of the
nineteenth-century closet drama written by women? What conclusions can
we make about the genre stigma that plagued the nineteenth-century closet
drama and shadows the twenty-first-century soap opera? How does the fact
that many women in the twenty-first-century still hide their habit of watching
daytime soap operas speak to the public/private performance aspect of the
closet drama?

193
 My work on nineteenth-century closet drama has compelled me to write
three of my own closet dramas on Michael Field, to start on a quest for the
genres descendants, and to cast an eye backward toward the closet dramas
written by early-modern women writers like Margaret Cavendish, whose flam-
boyant, often outrageous costumes were a strategic public distraction from her
commentary on science and society. My work has compelled me to explore my
own closets, to figure out why I wear certain hats (to recall the poem in the
Preface to this dissertation), and why I have yet to cast aside others. Ulti-
mately, my work has compelled me to action, to see potential for change in
the darkest spaces and across generations. My work in this dissertation, then,
looks beyond the recovery of a literary and theater history for nineteenth-
century women writers toward a wider field of closet drama studies, in order
to find new strategies with which to discuss and define a variable tradition of
performance and social commentary.

194
Appendix

195
 The Angels of the House, a closet drama by
Michelle Lee.

This drama ran four nights in mid-April, 2006, staged in a classroom on the
University of Texas at Austin campus. Dr. Susan Todd directed the pro-
duction, leading a talented cast comprised of all women from the company
called The Weird Sisters Womens Theater Collective based in Austin, TX.
Much of the dialogue grew from material in the Michael Field archive in the
Bodleian Library in Oxford or from Michael Field texts themselves, including
the closet drama, Stephania, which I discuss in this dissertation. Several of
Michael Fields poems were set to music and choreographed. I took great lib-
erties with the relationship between Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, as
well as with the relationship they had with members of their literary coterie.
Although I definitely lean in the script toward imagining the two women hav-
ing a physical relationship, I have not yet arrived at a definitive idea about the
nature of their intimacy. This version is the final acting script, accounting
for the minor inconsistencies in some formatting.

The Angels of the House

This play takes place on the cusp between Victorian and Edwardian England.
Time is blurred; years have merged and, at the same time, have been forgotten.
The set is full of lace, heavy drapery, ivy, books, art, a large birdcage, and busts
of important men. There is tea, cream, and scones. There is silver and brass.

196
And there is paper: writing paper, newspaper and ink. This is a story
about two women who want to be seen and heard. This is a story about words
becoming flesh. This play remembers Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper,
two poet-dramatists who were neglected for nearly a century and who are only
now being re-membered in academia. This play speaks their words, and my
own.

CAST
KATHARINE BRADLEY
EDITH COOPER
MICHAEL FIELD
The Critics:
GEORGE
BERNARD
ANNA
GRAY
MARY
The Parlourmaids:
SALLY
LILLIAS
JOSEPHINE
Theater Folk and Supporters:
JT GREIN
ROBERT BROWNING

197
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON
BOY

Act 1
Scene 1. A sunroom in a brick
townhouse called Number One, The
Paragon, overlooking the Thames.
KATHARINE sits at a desk, making a
scrapbook with zeal. She is chopping
up newspapers and gluing/pounding the
ragged pieces in a hardbound book.
EDITH is arranging roses in a vase on
an end table with equal fury and atten-
tion.
BERNARD is somewhere offstage but
visible. He may be speaking to another
critic.
MICHAEL is on high, and still, like a
statue on a mantelpiece. He is dressed
like an archangel, in a breastplate and
wings. He carries a sword.

KATHARINE: One review of our play. One! And what do the critics of The
Academy have to say? That we make grotesque blunders in our history.
What do they know?

EDITH: They know nothing about tragedy.

KATHARINE: But more importantly, they write as women and are treated
as women.

198
BERNARD: Womens pictures, womens plays, womens books. What makes
them temporarily so successful and eternally so wanting? A.G. P. Sykes

KATHARINE: Poetesses, Female Pens, Lady Fictionists. They are set apart
to stand delicately on pedestals.

EDITH: Waiting for hysteria and passion to overtake them.

KATHARINE: And for their feminine nature to be exposed and ridiculed.

Talking wombs. Angel of the house.

EDITH (talking to herself, about herself): Trapped inside themselves. Long-

ing to be free.

KATHARINE stops her fury, inspira-

tion obviously dawning.

JOSEPHINE pours the tea with an eye-

ful of interest on the conversation.

KATHARINE: Do we not know the power of the gods? Have we not spent
hours at University studying Zeus, Dionysus, Apollo, and those who hold the
earth captive by their whims?

BERNARD: Tragedy requires testicles. Voltaire

KATHARINE: Perhaps we need to write from our codpieces.

199
 JOSEPHINE enters with tea on a tray.
She is startled by the animated conver-
sation but continues with her duties,
setting the tea out on a side table. She
listens intently, with a half-hearted at-
tempt at discretion.

EDITH: We could write a cookery book or a travelogue or a novel of manners

or domesticity. Perhaps then the public would hear what we have to say.

KATHARINE: I have a few things I would like to say to men.

KATHARINE picks up the scissors

with a gleam in her eye. She snips the
air before snatching the newspaper back
up.

BERNARD: Man is the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His
intellect is for speculation and invention, while a womans is for sweet order-
ing, arrangement, and domestic decision. John Ruskin.

KATHARINE: While I do not wish to displace man from his role, I am not
and will never be an angel of the house.

EDITH: We cannot give up. We must think of Christina Rossetti. Elizabeth

Barrett Browning

KATHARINE: I do admire their artistry, yet they do not write the things we
want to write. We want to return literature to Elizabethan valor and nobility.
To the unity of beauty and truth. To Art.

200
 KATHARINE forgets her scrapbooking
and stands, fired up and fuming.

KATHARINE: But more importantly, they write as women and are treated
as women.

BERNARD: Womens pictures, womens plays, womens books. What makes

them temporarily so successful and eternally so wanting? A.G. P. Sykes

KATHARINE: Poetesses, Female Pens, Lady Fictionists. They are set apart
to stand delicately on pedestals.

EDITH: Waiting for hysteria and passion to overtake them.

KATHARINE: And for their feminine nature to be exposed and ridiculed.

Talking wombs. Angel of the house.

EDITH (talking to herself, about herself): Trapped inside themselves. Long-

ing to be free.

KATHARINE stops her fury, inspira-

tion obviously dawning. JOSEPHINE
pours the tea with an eyeful of interest
on the conversation.

KATHARINE: Do we not know the power of the gods? Have we not spent
hours at University studying Zeus, Dionysus, Apollo, and those who hold the
earth captive by their whims?

EDITH: So?

201
KATHARINE: Dont you see? The deities would transform themselves, create
their own destiny. Take a form that served their purpose.

EDITH: They would be themselves, yet something else entirely.

KATHARINE: Precisely!

EDITH: But we already created nom de plumes for ourselves. Arran and Isla
Leigh. How would a new form change anything?

KATHARINE: We need to have one name, one voice.

EDITH: One name, one voice? Whose name and voice would we use? I suppose
Arran Leigh. After all, you did publish a book under that name before you
asked me to join you

KATHARINE: No, Puss, a new name. A new voice. A new someone, like, like
. . . our very own child.

EDITH: Or Frankensteins monster.

KATHARINE: No, no a god of art and a muse all in one. Think of it! The
merging of Apollo and Dionysus. The birth of a tragic poet. Why do you
frown so?

EDITH: How will this free us to write?

KATHARINE: Wordsworth says a poet is a man. Voltaire engenders tragedy

with a handful of . . . stones. So well oblige. No more Female Pens.

202
 JOSEPHINE has forgotten the tea. She
is fascinated.

EDITH: What would we call our self?

KATHARINE: Something bold and resolute. A champions name.

EDITH: Not George. There are far too many women and men with that
name.

KATHARINE: And too many Arthurs.

EDITH: And Williams and Johns.

KATHARINE: We need the name of someone who would wield a pen as a

sword.

EDITH: And who would fight with divine power.

KATHARINE: Michael.

EDITH: Michael.

JOSEPHINE mouths the name.

KATHARINE: And his last name

EDITH: Something of nature. Something spacious and teeming with light.

KATHARINE: When you were a child, we called you Field.

EDITH: Field. Yes, yes, perfect. Michael Field. No more Arran and Isla

203
Leigh. No more Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, aunt and niece. No
more standing on pedestals.

KATHARINE: We will finally be heard. Recognized at last. We must cele-

brate.

Their celebration could be conveyed sev-

eral different ways - they could dance,
attend MICHAEL with a flourish, or
announce him grandly. They have cre-
ated a god, an angel, an emissary.

KATHARINE: O Woman, all too long by thee

Loves praises have been heard;

EDITH: But thou to swell to minstrelsy

Hast brought no wealthning word.

KATHARINE: Thou who its sweetest sweet can tell

Heart-trained to the tongue,

EDITH: Hast listend to its music well

But never led the song!

EDITH: And in the beginning, the poet was without form. And so Two
Women made Him in their image and of their flesh.

MICHAEL bows to the women who

summoned him to life.

204
KATHARINE: He is Michael Field. Let no man try to put asunder what two
women have joined.

In her excitement, JOSEPHINE forgets

her place. She doesnt see MICHAEL
but she has witnessed a great spectacle.
She applauds.

JOSEPHINE: Michael Field.

She quickly recovers, embarrassed.

KATHARINE: Josephine, dont stand there gaping like a fish. Bring us some
champagne.

JOSEPHINE hurries away.

KATHARINE: We have so much to say and not a moment to lose. Grab a

pen and some paper. Michael Field needs to speak.

EDITH: All we must do now is revise that scene where Nephele confesses to
Callirrhoe her wild night in the forest with the Maenads and then our play
will be complete!

First Nephele speaks

Callirrhoe, oh! Hide me in thy gown;

205
It is so perilous a grief, a . . .

MICHAEL moves from his perch.

Throughout the scene, he interacts with
KATHARINE and EDITH, though he
never touches them.

MICHAEL: a shame

EDITH: A shame, so wild and strange that I must tell thee of;
I shudder
MICHAEL: tremble

EDITH: I tremble, to remember it, and more

To tell it open-faced.
KATHARINE:
To the red bower
Of oleander, by the forest-stream,
Where thou and I in girlish solitude
So oft have hidden for . . .
MICHAEL: sweet conference

KATHARINE:
sweet conference, I went
And looking up, saw not thy clear
Calm brows, Callirrhoe a face as bright
As burnished shield
EDITH:

206
With hair that looked alive,
And cloak of shining hide. I lay as still
KATHARINE:
As if a leopard crouched there, threw her spells on me,
EDITH:
And emptied my young heart as easily
As from a . . .
MICHAEL: pomegranate

EDITH:
And emptied my young heart as easily
As from a pomegranate one plucks the seeds.
KATHARINE:
And then she drew me, in caressing arms,
By secret pathways, to the temple-gates
Where stood Coresus.
EDITH: And then Callirrhoe says
The new Bacchic Priest?
My father likes him not, thinks that the gods,
KATHARINE:
In scorn of mortal insolence, connive
At this terrific
MICHAEL: No, chaotic

KATHARINE: Connive at this chaotic fury in mens wits.

207
EDITH: And then Nephele says:
Callirrhoe, had you been there I think
You would have saved me!
MICHAEL and KATHARINE: Perfect!

EDITH: Not since the ancient bards has anyone told the story of Callirrhoe.
She is reborn.

KATHARINE: As we are with Michael Field.

Scene 2. GEORGE, BERNARD,

GRAY, MARY, and ANNA nois-
ily, jovially enter KATHARINE and
EDITHs parlour from the dining
room. They have just experienced a
lively meal. They are joking, singing.
They toast.

CRITICS (singing): Its an Irish trick thats true

I can lick the mick who threw
The overalls in Mrs. Murphys chowder!

GEORGE: To the Sirloin of England!

GRAY: May we always have wine in our glasses and the Queen in our pocket!

Throughout the scene, SALLY,

JOSEPHINE, AND LILLIAS move
with practiced ease around the guests,
removing and replacing plates, refilling
wine glasses. They are gracefully
invisible, yet definitely aware of all.

208
BERNARD: When we are married, I must have two servants.

ANNA: Im sure you shall, darling. One coming and one going.

Groans, laughs, etc.

GRAY: Wait, wait, I have a story: Poor young Bridget left Ireland with an
excellent letter of recommendation from her last mistress, but on the way over,
the letter fell into the sea. Distraught, she asked a friend to write another:
Dear Madam, Bridget Flaherty had a good reputation when she left Ireland,
but lost it on the way over.

BERNARD: To Bridget!

ALL: To her reputation!

KATHARINE and EDITH join their

guests. MICHAEL is with them. He
is now dressed like a dandy, in a waist-
coat, pants, a hat. He still wears his
wings. He wanders about the group,
playing tricks, amusing himself, before
climbing atop a perch to oversee all.

MARY: And to our lovely hostesses!

GEORGE: I have discovered a new playwright. His name is Michael Field.

BERNARD: Exactly what we need in a city far too melodramatic as it is.

Seems theres a playwright scribbling out his drivel on every corner these days.

209
KATHARINE: Tell me, Bernard, do you critics even taste the words someone
wrote before carving them up and serving them al dente?

BERNARD: We know what isnt stale and overdone.

GEORGE: But Field isnt one of those He writes verse tragedies to be read,
closet drama, like Tennyson and Byron and Shelley.

GRAY: Arent those old chaps in a tomb somewhere?

MICHAEL: These gods are clever, arent they? They disguise themselves,
meet mortals unsuspecting in the market-place, and enjoy wholesome inter-
course.

KATHARINE: So what else about this Field fellow, George?

EDITH shoots KATHARINE a curi-

ous, even quelling, look. MICHAEL
leans in with interest.

GEORGE: Id say he shows an almost Shakespearean penetration.

GRAY: Thats got to hurt a man.

Laughter, drinking, merriment.

KATHARINE: What else do they say about him?

GEORGE: Hes a poet of notable endowments.

KATHARINE: Do tell.

210
MICHAEL: Yes, tell.

ANNA: This country needs someone to breathe new life into drama.

MARY: I like musicals. In fact, I saw Macbeth just last week at the Lyceum.

KATHARINE: That is appalling. Next theyll have Hamlet doing the can-can.
Now back to Field

GEORGE digs into his coat pocket, pro-

duces a book, and begins ripping out
the pages. KATHARINE looks pleased,
while EDITH looks appalled by the ac-
tion.

GEORGE: Here, see for yourself. The ring of a new voice among the English-
speaking people.

BERNARD: Is this Michael Field paying you to publicize?

KATHARINE (with amusement, looking pointedly at EDITH): Doesnt sound

as if he needs anyone to make him famous. What is his play about?

GEORGE: Glad you asked. Imagine it. Greece. A young girl named Callir-
rho (mispronounces the name).

KATHARINE: Callirrhoe!

GEORGE: Callirrhoe has captured the heart of Coresus, a priest of Diony-

sus. They speak of the god. Gestures toward GRAY.

GEORGE: Read.

211
 The servants react to the scene:
SALLY rolls her eyes as if this is a
regular occurrence; LILLIAS smothers
raucous laughter; and JOSEPHINE is
captivated.

GRAY (girly voice): Yet I hold it true . . .

KATHARINE: Not like that.

KATHARINE snatches the pages,

dashes over to MARY, pulls her from
her chair, and climbs upon it. A true
performer! The critics and EDITH
are astonished at KATHARINES
behavior.

KATHARINE: Yet I hold it true,

Divinity oft comes with a quiet foot.

GEORGE: To give a moments counsel or to guard

From instant peril. When a god forsakes
Olympus to infuse divinity
In mans mean soul, he must confound, incite,

KATHARINE and MICHAEL:

Oerwhelm, intoxicate, break up fresh paths
To unremembered sympathies. Nay, more,
Accompany me further in my thought
Callirrhoe, I tell you there are hours
When the hereafter comes and touches me

212
O the cheek.

GRAY (gaze sweeping the table): Well, that was a mouthful of ham. And for
dessert?

EDITH (annoyed): That is a wonderful idea. Josephine?

The servants cue to return to their

tasks. JOSEPHINE needs to be nudged
by SALLY.

KATHARINE and MICHAEL:

I tremble at your god, for terrible
In wrath I fear him; though you speak him fair.
I surely know
That he provokes men to unnatural deeds,
And once stirred frenzied mother as a fell
Tigress to murder her deluded son.

GRAY: Quite an image for the digestion, I must say.

MICHAEL (to GRAY): That he provokes men to unnatural deeds.

ANNA: You must admit the verse has a nice ring to it.

KATHARINE: It does, doesnt it?

MARY: Is there a song?

KATHARINE: Why yes, yes, there is. A quaint little rhyme.

GEORGE: As a matter of fact, a faun does sing How did you know?

213
EDITH: Shes always been good at predicting the turn of certain plots. Anyone
care for dessert?

BERNARD: I think the hour is getting rather late. Anyone care to share a
hack?

GRAY: I think we just did, didnt we?

MICHAEL (to KATHARINE): But I am not a hack, am I?

KATHARINE: Michael Field is not a hack. Come. Lets read a few pages
more. Its not too much past the hour.

MICHAEL: No, it is not too much past the hour.

EDITH: Im certain Michael Field would be grateful for your devotion to his
work. But if he is as good as you say, there will be another opportunity for
trembling, murder, and, yes (smiling at Mary) song.

MICHAEL: Yes, trembling, murder, and song.

KATHARINE: We must do this again soon.

The group leaves the table in a

flurry of conversation and farewell.
JOSEPHINE collects the torn pages
when no one, except LILLIAS, is look-
ing and puts them in her apron. She
exits.

214
 Scene 3. KATHARINE goes to the sofa
to unlace her boots, EDITH is untuck-
ing the silk scarf from her decolletage.
Her mood is stormy. MICHAEL ex-
plores things in the sunroom. He tries
on KATHARINE and EDITHs dis-
carded clothes. Or, he could remain on
his perch, just observing. A voyeur.

KATHARINE: Wasnt that exciting?

EDITH: You werent exactly discreet. I thought for sure someone would dis-
cover our ruse with all your preening.

KATHARINE: What are you talking about, Puss? (KATHARINE goes to

MICHAEL) Michael Field was the star.

EDITH: And you were standing on a chair, for heavens sake. What if we are
revealed? We will be patted on the head and our work will be placed back
into shackles again. We will lose everything.

MICHAEL: Guard from instant peril

KATHARINE: Its late and you tax yourself.

EDITH: You are too bold. And I wrote the fauns song. It isnt just a quaint
little rhyme.

MICHAEL: Give a moments counsel

KATHARINE: You love me for my boldness. Have, ever since you were born.

EDITH: Yes, I have. Though youve never given me any choice.

KATHARINE: What do you mean by that?

215
EDITH: Youve been everything to me. Aunt, mother, partner, lover. Now

MICHAEL: Accompany me further in my thought . . .

KATHARINE: Do you love me?

EDITH (to KATHARINE): I do.

KATHARINE: Stop being anxious. The public believes Michael Field is on

par with Shakespeare. Have you read our fan letters?

She goes to the desk where she picks up

an envelope from a pile and removes a
letter.

KATHARINE: Dear Sir, I am astounded at the abundance and richness of

beauty in Callirrhoe. You have such genuine virile power. I am much struck
by the force and freshness of dramatic impulse displayed in it

MICHAEL: You speak him fair!

EDITH: Do you ever imagine who they are writing to?

KATHARINE: Im sure no one suspects the name belongs to two old birds
like us.

EDITH: What does Michael Field look like, do you suppose, in their minds
eye?

All three preen in front of a mirror.

216
KATHARINE: Virile.

EDITH: Do you think so?

KATHARINE: Perhaps he has a moustache.

EDITH: A moustache? I dont see it.

KATHARINE: What do you see then?

EDITH (whispers): Me.

MICHAEL:
I tell you there are hours
When the hereafter comes and touches me
O the cheek.

KATHARINE: Michael Field is us, sweet Puss.

EDITH: Yes, us.

KATHARINE: And with a name like Michael ...

EDITH: He would be ready to take on Satan himself.

KATHARINE: Come, Puss, lets go to bed. It has been a long night. I want
to curl up next to you at last.

EDITH: Ill kiss the birds and be right up.

KATHARINE: I can wait.

EDITH: Go get the sheets warm.

217
 EDITH blows a kiss to KATHARINE.
KATHARINE exits. EDITH goes to
the window, opens it, leans into the
breeze. JOSEPHINE comes in with the
intention of tidying up. She pauses by
the door, not wanting to disturb, want-
ing just to look.

KATHARINE (offstage): Puss?

MICHAEL: She waits.

EDITH: I know.

KATHARINE (offstage): Are you coming, Puss?

MICHAEL: Shell come for you if you stay away too long.

EDITH: I know.

KATHARINE (offstage): Puss?

MICHAEL (to EDITH): In mans mean soul, he must confound, incite,

Oerwhelm, intoxicate, break up fresh paths
To unremembered sympathies.
Accompany me further.
When EDITH doesnt join him,
MICHAEL stalks off in the direction
of KATHARINE.

JOSEPHINE: Miss Cooper?

EDITH: You startled me.

JOSEPHINE: Im sorry, Miss Cooper. Sally told me to turn down the lamps.

218
EDITH: Oh, I do that before I go up to bed.

JOSEPHINE: They read Michael Fields play at dinner.

EDITH: They did.

SALLY: Josephine! You finished in there?

EDITH: Good night, Josephine.

Jo exits. EDITH falls asleep in the win-

dow near the birds.

Scene 4. The dining room.

JOSEPHINE, SALLY, and LILLIAS

are cleaning in some fashion after the
dinner party.

LILLIAS: Another evenin of pomp and poetry.

JOSEPHINE: Did you see Miss Bradley jump onto the chair?

SALLY: Yes, and those shoe prints are not going twash out of that silk. If
they think Im goin ta

LILLIAS: Those odd ol birds will just buy another one. They can afford it.
They can afford a lotta things. Like fine china and furs and summers abroad.
Guess every woman needs her father or brother to die for her ta live the good
life

219
SALLY: Shush now and keep workin. Besides, we got it good. The misses may
pinch each other now and again, but the only thing omine getting pinched in
this place is my feet.

JOSEPHINE: Do you think people know who they are?

LILLIAS: Who they are is women who can afford a place otheir own and a
job that doesnt make their hands cracked and red. Did I say job? The only
work they do is slap words ont paper.

JOSEPHINE: I meant do people know they are that poet Michael Field. I
think its grand that they write books under a fake name.

LILLIAS: And its so grand they have tbe a man for their own friends tread
them.

SALLY: Shush. You dont even know how tread.

JOSEPHINE: I think their books are beautiful. As beautiful as they are.

SALLY: Oh, you dont know how tread neither.

JOSEPHINE: As a matter of fact I do. Some.

LILLIAS: Well, la dee da. Queen Josephine knows her ABCs. Guess thats
why you stole these.
LILLIAS reaches into JOSEPHINEs
apron for the pages.

JOSEPHINE: Give them back.

220
LILLIAS: Think youll get smarter reading this? Better off buying a penny
romance. Youll learn something useful from that.

JOSEPHINE: I heard the Misses talking about how they learned everything
from all those books in their library and from their mother and some cousins
I think. Learned German and Latin and French and Italian and all about art

SALLY takes the pages.

SALLY: You shouldnt be listening in on the Misses. (to LILLIAS) And dont
get me started about puttin your ear to the door. Would ya like to end up a
scullery maid or a slavey for L5 a year?

LILLIAS: Sals right, we shouldnt listen in on the Misses, especially not at

night when the misses are in bed together. Theres something strange about
an auntie and her niece giggling under the covers

JOSEPHINE (defensive): I sleep with my auntie when I visit home. A time

or two shell tell a joke and well laugh

LILLIAS: Does your auntie tickle you beneath your nightie too? Call you her
sweet Puss? Something isnt quite right

JOSEPHINE: Miss Bradley loves Miss Cooper with all her heart. Worships
her.

LILLIAS: Oh, I seen em worship each other once or twice in the garden by
the fountain. They pretend theyre Romans or fairies or somethin, singin,

221
dancin and carryin on under the full moon. They put flower crowns on their
heads and run barefoot through the grass Anyway, youve only been here a
few months. Youll see.

JOSEPHINE (awed): In the garden?

SALLY: Enough athis wind-blowin, ya haybags. Take the plates and lets
bid gnight. Im sure therell be more pomp and poetry tomorrow.

LILLIAS: Keep dreamin, Queen Josephine. Dreams are all yer gonna have.

They leave: SALLY purposeful, LIL-

LIAS snickering. JOSEPHINE takes
out one page from her apron that SAL
or LILLIAS didnt find. She walks off,
revering, reading, smoothing the page.

Scene 5. A blue light glows on a large

bird cage. EDITH sits inside on the
perch. She is dressed in a white night-
gown, humming. This is Ediths dream.

GEORGE, GRAY, BERNARD,

ANNA, MICHAEL, and MARY enter
disguised in outlandish bird masks.
They flap, walk, skitter like birds. The
effect should be decidedly frightening.
KATHARINE will enter separately.

EDITH: O homely birds, whose cry is harbinger

Of nothing sad, who know not anything
Of sea-birds loneliness, rock round me when I die!
So sweet it were

222
To die by open doors, with you on wing
Humming the deep security of life.

GEORGE: Bravo, bravo.

ANNA: Is there more?

BERNARD: I think the play is done.

EDITH: Wait, I have things to say. I wrote a song. Michael, Michael, come
here. You know the words.

MARY: Oh, Id like to hear.

KATHARINE: Allow me. I love you with my life, tis so I love you.

EDITH: That is my song

JOSEPHINE enters with tea. She

slowly fixes the cups.

KATHARINE (joined by MICHAEL): I give you as a ring

The cycle of my days till death
I worship with the breath
That keeps me in the world with you and spring

EDITH: And God may dwell behind, but not above you.

MARY: Thats lovely.

KATHARINE: You dont really love me.

EDITH: I do.

223
MICHAEL, GEORGE, BERNARD, ANNA, GRAY, and MARY (hissing, whis-
pering): Do you? Does she?

KATHARINE: I took care of you when your mother died, when your father
died. I loved you more than I could ever love anyone. You were more than a
niece to me.

EDITH: I know.

KATHARINE: When you were a girl and we went to the sea, I saw the poetry
and passion in your eyes. We were kindred spirits.

EDITH: You understood me.

KATHARINE: Then why arent you happy, Puss? Why? I have taken care of
you. I have given you my soul.

EDITH: Its too much. No, no, Love, come back. Take me to bed. I dont
want to be alone.

MICHAEL, GEORGE, BERNARD, ANNA, GRAY, and MARY (hissing, whis-

pering): You dont? She doesnt?

JOSEPHINE: Shoo! Shoo! Shoo!

She chases the birds away from EDITH.

JOSEPHINE: Would you like some tea, Miss Cooper?

EDITH: Let me out. Please.

224
JOSEPHINE (key in hand): I dont have the keys, Miss Cooper.

EDITH: My name is Edith, Josephine. Take me to bed.

JOSEPHINE exits. MICHAEL joins

EDITH on her perch.

EDITH (singing): I give you as a ring

The cycle of my days till death
I worship with the breath
That keeps me in the world with you and spring
And God may dwell behind, but not above you.

Exeunt.

Scene 6. KATHARINE is break-

fasting in the sunroom. EDITHs
place is empty. There is a stack of
mail on the table beside the tea ser-
vice. JOSEPHINE is serving ner-
vously. The silence is thick as clotted
cream. KATHARINE simmers.

JOSEPHINE: Sugar?

KATHARINE: No, thank you.

JOSEPHINE: Cream?

KATHARINE: No, thank you.

225
JOSEPHINE: Scone?

KATHARINE: That will be all, Josephine.

JOSEPHINE: Where is Miss Cooper?

KATHARINE: Dont concern yourself, Josephine. Shes . . . probably turning

about the garden. You know how she loves to make things bloom.

JOSEPHINE: She hasnt been feeling ill, has she? I heard some awful creaking-
about on the floorboards the past few nights like someone was pacing back and
forth. When I cant sleep, I know I always

KATHARINE: Shes fine, Josephine.

JOSEPHINE: Are you fine, Miss Bradley? You look a mite piqued. I could

KATHARINE: Miss Cooper is fine, Josephine, and I am fine, and I dont need
any sugar or cream or scones.

JOSEPHINE moves to exit, obviously

wounded.

JOSEPHINE: Im sorry, Miss Bradley. Just let me know if you do need any-
thing.

KATHARINE: Josephine, I need you to go.

226
 JOSEPHINE leaves. KATHARINE
tries to breakfast as if everything didnt
just fall apart, but she is rattled. She
takes up a pen & paper and writes fu-
riously.

MICHAEL enters, sits at the table be-

side her. He is a reflection of her mood,
her gestures. MICHAEL might read
over her shoulder.

KATHARINE: I must speak

At every moment words of reprimand
That shake my courage; I must ever dread
Some new occasion for my wearied blame.
(to MICHAEL) I never say the right things. You must help me. You are part
of her.

MICHAEL: O Woman, all too long by thee

Loves praises have been heard
So listen to its music well
And ever lead the song!

KATHARINE: Yes, perhaps my Puss needs a tender word of wooing. I must

find her.

KATHARINE and MICHAEL leave,

hopeful - each for their own reasons.
EDITH enters, dressed as if she were
outside. JOSEPHINE enters with mail
on a tray.

227
JOSEPHINE: Oh, good morning, Miss Cooper. A letter came in this morning
for Michael Field, but it was addressed in care of you.

EDITH: Thank you, Josephine. Its from Robert Browning.

JOSEPHINE: By the look on your face, he is someone important.

EDITH tucks the letter in her dress

pocket to savor later.

EDITH: He is a veritable god, Josephine. Do you read?

JOSEPHINE: I know some, Miss Cooper.

EDITH: Call me Edith, please.

EDITH goes over to the bookshelf and

retrieves a volume. KATHARINE and
MICHAEL enter but arent seen.

EDITH: You must read his poems.

JOSEPHINE (looking at the book): Men and Women.

EDITH: My favorites are A Womans Last Word and Any Wife to Any
Husband. (reciting) And yet thou art the nobler of us two.
What dare I dream of, that thou canst not do,
Outstripping my ten small steps with one stride?
Ill say then, heres a trial and a task
Is it to bear? if easy, Ill not ask

228
Though love fail, I can trust on in thy pride.

JOSEPHINE: I couldnt take your book.

EDITH: Ive seen you flipping through one or two on occasion. Now you can
savor in private.

JOSEPHINE: Ive never had anything private.

EDITH: I suppose not, with you, Lillias, and Sally all tucked under the roof
at night.

JOSEPHINE: Oh, never mind about that, Miss . . . Edith, Im used to sharing
my things.

EDITH: Tell me.

JOSEPHINE: My parents died when I was ten and my aunt took me in, but she
only has two rooms and 6 children and someones always steppin on somebody
else or wearin someone elses clothes or spillin something No, I can breathe
here.

EDITH: Is that so? That must be nice.

JOSEPHINE: I was lucky to find a situation in a house like yours and Miss
Bradleys. I knew a girl whose employer visited day and night when no one
was lookin and shed constantly be having to take a good dose of salts and
senna to make sure nothing grew, but eventually

EDITH: Yes, you are lucky your cousin has demonstrated her competent char-
acter at Mrs. Havershams. Your recommendation came highly. (pause) Enjoy

229
the book, Josephine.

JOSEPHINE: I will. Do you need anything else?

KATHARINE decides to make herself

known. MICHAEL follows.

KATHARINE: There you are.

EDITH: Nothing more, Josephine.

JOSEPHINE exits. There is a moment

of tense silence.

MICHAEL: Speak your courage.

EDITH: You ate breakfast without me.

MICHAEL: At every moment, she dreads new occasion for her wearied blame.

KATHARINE: Were you out walking? Your cheeks are pink.

EDITH: Mmmm. How much have you written this morning?

KATHARINE: Just a few lines.

MICHAEL: Do not forsake her.

KATHARINE: Would you like to hear? I can read it

EDITH: I though we would finish the scene together.

230
KATHARINE: Im sorry. Its a lovely day. Would you like to work in the
garden with me? The roses are in need of pruning.

MICHAEL: She speaks you fair.

EDITH: I may stay in and write. Add to what you were working on.

KATHARINE: I could stay in with you.

MICHAEL: She trembles.

EDITH: Bring me some roses, love. Enjoy the fresh air.

KATHARINE: You will attend Mrs. Chandler-Moultons salon with me at the

end of the week? Im dying to hear what she has to say about Michael Field
and I dont want to go without you. You know what champagne does to me.

EDITH: Of course, I will attend.

MICHAEL: So sweet it were!

KATHARINE exits, happy.

MICHAEL hovers around EDITH, who
takes the letter from her pocket.

ROBERT B (on or offstage): Dear Miss Cooper, Your publisher instructed

me to write to Michael Field in your care. It is long since I have been so
thoroughly impressed by indubitable poetic genius.

EDITH and MICHAEL: Poetic genius.

EDITH: And he wrote to me.

231
EDITH and MICHAEL: Yet high in mastery, born perfect man.
Soon as I touched my harp, how the gods ran
Ravished to listen!

ROBERT B: I would be honored to know, Miss Cooper, which of you owns

particular pieces of this lovely verse, you or your aunt, whom I am told by
your publisher also writes Michael.

EDITH: Which of you? You or your aunt?

MICHAEL: Born perfect man. How the gods ran ravished to listen.

EDITH: Dear Mr. Browning . . . (rushing to find a pen and paper, writing)

MICHAEL: Yes, dear Mr. Browning . . .

Exeunt.

Scene 7. Louise Chandler Moultons

literary salon

The salon is a flurry of social activity

perhaps a poetry reading, perhaps a
song or two? The CRITICS gather in
small groups and LOUISE greets them
all with aplomb and charm.

KATHARINE and EDITH enter but

hold an intimate moment away from
the hubbub maybe KATHARINE
could even give EDITH a flower for her
hair a peace offering? A gesture?

232
 MICHAEL admires an exceedingly
large painting of the archangel Michael
expelling Satan, then joins the gather-
ing. He physically teases the CRITICS,
who feel him but dont see him.

KATHARINE: You look lovely tonight.

EDITH: Thank you.

KATHARINE: No man will be able to take his eyes from you.

EDITH: And what of woman?

KATHARINE: Must I climb atop a chair and express my feelings properly?

EDITH: No, no Come, sweet, lets join the fun.

GEORGE: Have either of you read the Bristol Times? Seems my praise of
Michael Field was quite accurate. They say Mr. Field has few, if any, living
rivals.

KATHARINE: I suppose the critics have finally acquired some taste.

GRAY: I read that Michael Field could be a woman. Or a man and a woman.
Possibly even two women.

KATHARINE: Why that is scandalous. Do you really think two women are
capable of imagining such bloody and violent tales?

GRAY: Have you met either my mistress or my wife?

EDITH: Do you truly think it matters who Michael Field might be if the work
is compelling? Elizabeth Barrett Browning once said, What is genius-but the

233
power of expressing a new individuality?

GEORGE: You know, Oscar Wilde told me that it is often genius that spoils
a work of art.

KATHARINE: Oscar spoke too much about too many things. He should have
been a bit more discreet about his opinions and his interests. Maybe then he
wouldnt have gone to trial.

GRAY: If ol Oscar were here, hed probably call Michael Field a poet that
dare not speak his name. Or her name. Their name? Of course, Oscar didnt
like naming names.

LOUISE notices KATHARINE and

EDITH.

LOUISE: Who have we here? Miss Bradley and Miss Cooper! Im delighted
you could come to my salon. I have heard so many wonderful things about
you.

KATHARINE: The delight is ours. It is you, Mrs. Chandler-Moulton, who

has the exquisite reputation. Your salons are the talk of the town.

LOUISE: I beg to differ. You are the talk of the town.

KATHARINE and EDITH exchange

curious looks.

234
KATHARINE and EDITH (different in tone and reaction): We are?

LOUISE: Well, soon will be at least. You dont know how much Ive looked
forward to your company this evening. I am a great admirer.

EDITH: Might we ask why?

LOUISE: We have a mutual friend, Robert Browning. I attended a recent

dinner where he hinted about the marvelous collaborative secret Miss Cooper
shared with him.

EDITH appears ruffled, KATHARINE

stunned and tense.

KATHARINE (to EDITH): You didnt tell me you spoke with him.

EDITH: I answered one of his letters. I might have said something to the
effect that

KATHARINE: After you became so angry with me for all my preening. We

will speak about this at home.

EDITH: He was so kind, I It was Robert Browning.

LOUISE (to the group): Do you all know who you have here in your midst?

MICHAEL: Yet high in mastery, born perfect man.

EDITH: Mrs. Chandler-Moulton

LOUISE: Call me Louise, please, dear Pen sisters

KATHARINE: Louise, this is not the time

235
LOUISE: Everyone, it is my greatest pleasure to present the poet Michael
Field.

Everyone reacts with appreciation and

surprise to LOUISEs unexpected rev-
elation. KATHARINE glares at
EDITH, who realizes the severity of the
situation.

EDITH: Mrs. Chandler-Moulton, everyone, please. We are not

MICHAEL turns from the painting,

ready to protect his creators, ready to
take his place as public poet.

MICHAEL: I am Michael Field. How the gods ran ravished to listen.

GRAY: So you two are the bloody geniuses? That explains some things.

EDITH: Well, yes, I suppose, but we

LOUISE: Your humility is charming, though Im not sure I understand the

reason.

MICHAEL: And God may dwell behind, but not above me.

KATHARINE: We have many things to say that the world will not tolerate
from a womans lips.

GRAY: Oh, God, that I were a man. I would eat his heart in the market-
place. Arent you making much ado about nothing?

LOUISE: Would you like something to eat or drink? You both look rather

236
flushed.

MICHAEL:
I must speak
At every moment

EDITH: No, thank you, Mrs. Chandler-Moulton. We should be going home.

LOUISE: Please stay. Im sure everyone would love to chat with you about
your work.

BERNARD: Yes. Which of you writes the males?

EDITH: Really, it was lovely seeing you all, but we really must be going

MICHAEL (to KATHARINE and EDITH): O homely birds, whose cry is

harbinger

LOUISE: I didnt mean to offend.

KATHARINE (to EDITH, more than LOUISE): You certainly didnt, Mrs.
Chandler-Moulton. You only repeated what Mr. Browning told you. You had
no idea it was meant to be a confidence. If you did, Im certain you would
have been more discreet. And as a matter of fact, I think I would like some
champagne.
KATHARINE and LOUISE go off arm
in arm toward a tray of champagne.
EDITH looks lost and decides to leave.
She asks a servant to bring her wrap
and hat.

237
 MICHAEL cant decide which woman
to follow. Ultimately, he stays right
where he is, with his public.

BERNARD: Women are so sensitive. There is no way they could continue

their insipid masquerade as a man.

MICHAEL: You provoke men to murder

BERNARD: Sooner or later, Michael Field will be seen for what they are.

MICHAEL: In terrible wrath, you should fear him

MARY (counting on her fingers): One woman plus one woman cant make one
man, can it?

MICHAEL: When you forsake Olympus

BERNARD: There is a saying, It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings

in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. Those two should
commit that to memory.

ANNA: Are you saying we women cant define our emotions? Strange, I seem
to know exactly what Im feeling at this moment, Bernard.

BERNARD: Anna

MICHAEL(to BERNARD): So sweet it were to die

238
 KATHARINE excuses herself with dig-
nity and grace, though is obviously
concerned about - and angry with -
EDITH. Louises servants should be
nearby, trying to be discreet, obviously
intrigued.

KATHARINE (to EDITH): Ill go home with you.

EDITH: I will hire a ride.

KATHARINE: Fine. Whatever you wish.

KATHARINE: What did you tell Mr. Browning?

EDITH: I told him who Michael Field was, but that the revelation would be
utter ruin to our career, that the report of lady authorship would dwarf and
enfeeble our work at every turn.

KATHARINE: He certainly didnt waste any time. Probably spilled our news
between the soup course and the roast.

EDITH: He does support us. He believes we have true talent.

MICHAEL: O homely birds, rock round me

KATHARINE: We support each other, Puss. Thats what makes Michael

Field. We need to remember that if we dont want to lose everything.

EDITH: But do you want to know what Mr. Browning asked in his letter?
Who writes which lines.

KATHARINE: I am not your adversary.

239
EDITH: Which one of us is Michael and which one of us is Field? Which one
of us can be the righteous warrior delivering our holy words? And which one
of us is earth, silent and underfoot?

KATHARINE: Is that what is bothering you? Both of us are Michael Field.

We created him.

MICHAEL:
Thou who its sweetest sweet can tell
Heart-trained to the tongue . . .

EDITH: Are you sure?

KATHARINE: Do you trust me?

They tentatively make peace as

MICHAEL brings them together.

EDITH: Im sorry. Its been a trying evening.

KATHARINE: Lets go home.

MICHAEL: I am Michael Field. Let no man try to put asunder what two
women have joined.

Act 2

Scene 1. LILLIAS and SALLY in the

dining room, back at The Paragon, pol-
ishing silver.

240
LILLIAS: Its been weeks and my friends are still talking about the salon over
at the Chandler-Moultons. Guess the days of those two ol downies playing
hide and seek behind a man are nearly over.

SALLY: You only wish you had the freedom to play as they do.

LILLIAS: I wouldnt play with my freedom. I wouldnt pretend to be some-

thing Im not. I know who I am.

SALLY: Everyone in London knows who you are. Now stop yer blowin and
keep polishin.

LILLIAS: You know full well they got masqueradin words for women like them
in certain uppity circles. Ladie Love. Sister. Wife. Husband. Mother. Aunt.
Tomboy. Female Rake. Horsewoman. And a new one, hot off the cobblestones
Lesbian.

SALLY: Are you kiddin? Most people probably dont even think anything
about the Misses, let alone give em names. In their world, theyre as invisible
as we are.

LILLIAS: Not what I hear. Frienda mine told me that at a party, she over-
heard someone say that if Miss Cooper and Miss Bradley play at being men,
its never in the uncouth unsexed manner which one is inclined to associate
with, for example, the Ladies of Llongollen or Christina of Sweden. I may not
know who those other ladies are, but I bet theyre up to no good.

SALLY: Just like you.

LILLIAS: Wheres Queen Josephine?

241
SALLY: Gettin clothes off the line.

On another part of the stage, in the gar-

den, JOSEPHINE is lying in the grass
reading her book, clothes flapping in the
breeze. Or she could be frolicking. She
could even have a ring of dandelions in
her hair. She could be mouthing words.

LILLIAS: Sure she is. Have ya seen her trying to read that book shes been
carryin around in her apron? Says Miss Cooper gave it to her.

JOSEPHINE:
I have but to be by thee, and thy hand
Would never let mine go, thy heart withstand
The beating of my heart to reach its place.

SALLY: Easy on the girl, Lillias. She wants more for herself.

LILLIAS: And I dont? Tell you one thing, if you caught me readin youd
whip me up one side and down the other.

SALLY: And damn if I wouldnt enjoy it.

LILLIAS: Why, Sal. I didnt think you were into that sort of thing. There is
hope for you yet.

JOSEPHINE:
When should I look for thee and feel thee gone?
When cry for the old comfort and find none?
Never, I know! Thy soul is in thy face.

242
SALLY: Easy, ya dollymop, dont get excited. Im too seasoned fer ya.

LILLIAS: Yer seasoned all right. A tough ol bird. Get Queen Jos nose out
of that book. Shes liable to forget who she is and what she should be doing.

Scene 2. The sunroom.

MICHAEL: You harness my soul to the impossible. I run

Wildly across a waste that has no goal,
Spurred on by your ambition. To excite
My love of fame you urged me to the quest
Of Charlemagnes tomb; and now you see me raised
Like him a Roman Emperor, but like him
I sway a vacant kingdom.

(to EDITH) You crossed this out!

EDITH: I do believe Walter Pater is right when he says all art constantly
aspires toward the condition of music.

KATHARINE: Music of the soul. Divine inspiration meeting human skill.

Unity.

MICHAEL: Is this the Empire you have called me to? What is this mood?

He rifles through the piles of news-

papers and their clippings. Obviously
KATHARINE and EDITH have read
them.

243
MICHAEL:
There are perfumes here
Full of the spices that grow old in tombs,
Soft penetrative scents that shaken out
Spread poison but are fatal being breathed

EDITH: It is beautiful to think that some of the life youve given me has gone
out into the world, giving joy to so many.

MICHAEL (to KATHARINE):

Call the men to battle, swords
Clash the response; bid them arouse themselves
from foolish habit, customary sloth,
In bestial ignorance of your intent,
They trample, tear you.
Think but of me, no veiled divinity!

KATHARINE: I will never forget the day you were born. I was walking be-
neath a full moon and burst into tears when my brother told me.

EDITH: You knew me from the start.

KATHARINE: I did. You were a precocious, demented, sweet little demon.

MICHAEL: O agony. It is supreme.

Although these bosom-friends
As a young married pair, make interchange

244
Of counsel and fondness, one of them
watches the other, both mute in their decay.
Can you exorcise
And rid me of my perilous distraction
If I attend you daily in your cell?

KATHARINE: Should I have let you go all those years past? Should I have
let you grow apart from me?

EDITH: I could never leave you.

KATHARINE: You had so many chances to marry. John Gray, Bernard Beren-
son. Arthur Symons. You enchanted all of them. You could have bore their
children

EDITH: And you were in love once, with Alfred Gerente. No, we are closer
married than any we know. And my art, our art, is my child.

MICHAEL: O sorry sight! Whose child am I?

He picks up newspapers and looks

through the holes (obviously reviews cut
out).

MICHAEL:
I was too weak at first to apprehend
The mysteries beyond the knowledge forced
Upon me!

245
 KATHARINE and EDITH approach
each other, uneasy.

KATHARINE: My sister used to say I kept you too close.

EDITH: My mother never understood the depths of our love, our devotion.
No one does. We are bound by words.

KATHARINE and EDITH stand in

apology. Slowly, they near each other
but dont touch.

MICHAEL:
O believe
the things that ye were born for from this hour
Shall find fulfillment. Embrace your past,
Breathe over it and pray.

EDITH: I think I may go walk about the garden.

Josephine looks like she needs help with

the linens.

MICHAEL: Do not go!

KATHARINE: Stay. Write with me.

EDITH: I wont be long.

KATHARINE: May I read what youve written?

246
EDITH: You dont need to ask, do you?

MICHAEL: Do not go!

EDITH kisses her before leaving, a light

peck. KATHARINE picks up EDITHs
writing and reads.

KATHARINE and MICHAEL:

A sense of ruin
Comes over me at the sight of such a sky,
So soon to close in darkness.
Search the stars,
Look deep into my destiny; so strange
A languor creeps upon me, I could say
Those powers that breed within a mans own breast
The very mood and temper of his fate
Move noiselessly within.

KATHARINE: What does she mean by this? A sense of ruin. Those powers
that breed within a mans own breast move noiselessly within. (to MICHAEL)
Its you. She wants you - alone.

MICHAEL: Embrace your past. Search the stars. Harness your soul to the
impossible.

KATHARINE: I thought you would make her happy. But you are too much.
I am too much.

247
MICHAEL: Peace, peace. Love is the frenzy that unfolds ourselves. Let go of
this.

KATHARINE: How can I? She is pulling away.

She sinks to the couch, crying.

MICHAEL sits with her, comforts.

MICHAEL: Peace, peace. She sleeps.

Scene 3. Lighting, perhaps blue as

in EDITHS dream, should signify the
fantasy of Katharines dream. A baby
cries. GEORGE and MARY bustle in
with a bundle. BERNARD, GRAY,
LOUISE and ANNA rush over. They
coo, fawn over the baby. KATHARINE
wakes at the noise. EDITH enters
through the window to sit with her
birds.

GEORGE: I have discovered a new playwright.

MICHAEL:
A face as bright
As burnished shield
With hair that looked alive,
And cloak of shining hide.

KATHARINE tries to take the child.

248
KATHARINE: Give her to me.

MARY: Will you sing to her?

BERNARD: No, shell smother her.

KATHARINE: I wont.

EDITH: Wont you?

MICHAEL: You will empty her young heart.

ANNA: She is but a child.

KATHARINE takes the child.

KATHARINE: I will watch over her and teach her and love her like no one
else. She will be my Muse and I will be hers.

MICHAEL:
They are bound by such close ties
None can tell of either breast
The native sigh
Who try
To learn with whom the Muse is guest.

249
 The CRITICS applaud.

BERNARD: Michael Field is a poet, if intensity of imagination and energy of

expression can make a poet.

ANNA: As a dramatist, however, he has not learned, or worse, has mislearned

the rudiments of his art.

BERNARD: In my opinion, The Fathers Tragedy was dismally, almost grue-

somely ultra-masculine, and the same must be said, we fear of Brutus Ultor.

ANNA: Dont forget Stephania. The plots of an indecency that only pure-
minded elderly Victorian virgins could have imagined.

KATHARINE: Michael Field is no hack. I am no hack.

LOUISE: Youre right, of course. You are divine.

KATHARINE drops the baby as she

bows.

GEORGE: She killed the playwright.

KATHARINE: I didnt!

JOSEPHINE (grabbing the baby from the floor): She let her fall!

JOSEPHINE holds the baby, but even-

tually will give it to EDITH.

250
GRAY (examining the baby): Her? I thought it was a him. A them?

EDITH: She drove her away. She drove everyone away. Her parents, my
parents. They all left her.

KATHARINE: But I was the one who took care of them when they got sick.
When they left you. I was the one who held our family together. I was the
one who loved them all

MARY: An aunt and a lover should not be the same.

ANNA: It is quite immoral.

GRAY: Can two women be immoral together?

BERNARD: Which of them writes the males?

KATHARINE: Tell them, Puss. Tell them how you love me. How you pepper
my brow with kisses every morning. How I am your wise old bird

EDITH: I cant.

KATHARINE: You can. Tell them.

BERNARD: Obviously poetry cannot be written successfully in collaboration.

A poet must sing in solitude to be heard.

KATHARINE: No, no, my Puss and I are one!

MICHAEL: I am Michael Field.

EDITH (pointing to KATH?): And you are Arran Leigh. And I . . . (forlorn?)

LOUISE: You are the talk of the town.

251
JOSEPHINE: You are a veritable god.

BERNARD: You are an angel of the house.

EDITH: And I cannot stay.

KATHARINE: Wait, Puss! Dont go! I need you. I will be the only one left.
You are my heart, my life, my voice. With you I am not afraid

MICHAEL:
Already to mine eyelids shore
the gathering waters swell,
For thinking of the grief in store,
When thou wilt say Farewell.

EDITH: Farewell.

CRITICS: Farewell.

JO and LOUISE: Farewell.

EDITH and the CRITICS, with

LOUISE, exit.

KATHARINE:
I dare not let thee leave me, sweet,
Lest it should be forever;
Tears dew my kisses ere we meet
Fore-boding we must sever.

252
 KATHARINE runs after them.

Scene 4. LILLIAS is cleaning the sun-

room. She is surreptitiously admiring
the paintings, the flowers, the books.
JO comes in, doesnt see her, picks up
a book.

LILLIAS: Which grim little fairytale is it this time?

JOSEPHINE is startled.

LILLIAS: Dont bother lookin guilty. Everyones seen you sneakin off to read
scraps of paper or that book Miss Cooper gave you. Writing things down too.
What do you have to say anyway? A parlourmaid.

JOSEPHINE: You seem to have plenty to say.

LILLIAS: Thats because Ive been around, Josephine. I know what lifes all
about.

JOSEPHINE: Dont you think there might be more?

LILLIAS: Thinking is a waste of time.

JOSEPHINE: Have you ever read one of their plays? Their characters are
larger than life.

LILLIAS: Of course Ive read one of their plays, Jo, between makin the beds
and cleanin the lamp chimneys and polishin all this brass and silver.

253
JOSEPHINE: Well, this one is about an empress who disguises herself as a
prostitute to seek revenge on the man who murdered her husband.

LILLIAS: Who do you think we are, Josephine? Were told how we should
dress - cotton print dress in the morning, black dress with white cap for af-
ternoon how we should talk never let your voice be heard above a whisper
around guests - how we should deliver the post - on a silver tray and how
we should stand - perfectly still when speaking to a lady. We must know our
place, Josephine, and we must stay there. We dont have a choice.

JOSEPHINE: Maybe not, but you know we have it better than most.

LILLIAS: Then we should count our blessings, shouldnt we?

LILLIAS softens slightly toward Jo.

LILLIAS: So that story of the Misses you were talking about . . . Is it finished?

JOSEPHINE: Not quite. Theyre still working on it. I could read a little.

LILLIAS seems to consider the ques-

tion for a brief moment.

LILLIAS: Can if you like. I cant shut my ears, now can I?

Exeunt.

254
 Scene 5. The sunroom.
KATHARINE and EDITH move into
the room arguing. EDITH snatches
sheets of paper from KATHARINEs
hands. Their appearances are slightly
wild, disheveled. EDITH might even
have feathers in her hair. The sun-
room appears lived-in, as if the women
havent left for awhile. MICHAELs
clothes look too big for him.

EDITH: The scene isnt finished yet.

KATHARINE: Youve been working for months. Read it.

EDITH: For Brutuss sake, let me be silent a little longer. You must not hear
a word until I have done the gods will with this great inspiration.

MICHAEL:
O doom, O endless years of fiery penalty!
I dare not think of what it were to live
Chained up from shaping forth my eager thoughts ldots
I sway a vacant kingdom.

EDITH: How are you coming on Canute?

KATHARINE: I am nearly done.

EDITH: Nearly? You are so easily distracted. I suppose youve begun some-
thing new?

KATHARINE: I, like you, am taking my time to work on perfection, sweet

Puss.

255
EDITH (crumpling up the papers and tossing them toward a wastepaper bin):
Perhaps I could help settle its fate.

KATHARINE (upset): And what of that modern thing you started? The new
Ibsen?
They continue to bicker and charge
through the room.
JOSEPHINE enters the sunroom to
give KATHARINE and EDITH the
mail: a few newspapers, letters. She
hesitates, knowing its bad news.

KATHARINE: More papers? What do the critics have left to say?

JOSEPHINE holds fast to the mail, but

KATHARINE eventually wrestles the
pile away and tosses them about the
room. JOSEPHINE immediately goes
to tidy up.

MICHAEL:
I swear no harm shall touch you
My wealth is your possession.

EDITH (fuming, pacing): We no longer have any friends that believe in our
work. We are boycotted in the papers by the men to whom we have sent our
books and by literary society. We do not walk with any of the great souls of
the past. We walk alone. We have lost our friends. We have lost everything.
I knew this would happen. She tears apart the room as if she is trying to find
what they lost.

256
MICHAEL: Ask yourselves have you not a deeper need than the stale rites
of customary gods can satisfy?

KATHARINE (to JOSEPHINE): Dont touch that. Just go arrange some-

thing else. Wash the linens! Order some sweets! Do what you are supposed
to do!

JOSEPHINE exits.

MICHAEL: Look not so wild!

EDITH: You didnt need to frighten her.

KATHARINE: You dont need to give her books.

EDITH: She is not our downfall. Look at this place. Our art doesnt live
outside of us. We do not live outside our art.

MICHAEL:
All art is ecstasy
All literature expression of intense
Enthusiasm.

EDITH goes to the birdcage.

EDITH: So much poetry, so many lives. Deirdre, Mary, Lucrezia, William

Rufus, Rosamund they do not leave us to go out into the world. We are

257
their birth place and their resting place. They have no other place to let their
spirits go. Neither do we.

She opens the cage door. The birds es-

cape.

KATHARINE: The birds!

As KATHARINE tries to catch the

birds and put them back in their cage,
JOSEPHINE hurries back in, breath-
less, excited.

KATHARINE: This is not a good time

JOSEPHINE: You may want to read this letter straight-away.

KATHARINE: Give it to her and help me.

JOSEPHINE gives EDITH the letter,

helps KATHARINE try to catch the
birds. As EDITH reads the letter, JT
talks from another part of the stage.
JOSEPHINE runs offstage after a bird.

JT GREIN: My dear Misses Bradley and Cooper, I, J.T. Grein, founder of

the Independent Theatre, am looking for a serious play to produce. A modern
play. A story taken from the papers. I heard you might just have something.

KATHARINE (leaving the bird crisis): Our play. A Question of Memory.

Performed on stage. Now at last we are to speak with the living races of men

258
- to give them ourselves.

EDITH: The curtain will rise. The public will embrace us. All will applaud
the voice of two hearts.

MICHAEL:
In you I see
Human emotion, action in the rough;
Through me, your agitated gestures shall become
Rhythmic in tidal refluence, your hoarse shrieks
Sonorous intonations.
Let me speak for you.

JT: It is your first foray into the modern.

MICHAEL: The past is blotted out.

JT: No Elizabethans touting blank verse. No Greeks spouting the divine.

MICHAEL: No blank verse?

Who dwell but themselves grow impotent;
They have no Past.

EDITH: We will be honored.

KATHARINE: We will be heard and seen.

MICHAEL: I have nothing of my own.

JT: As soon as you give me permission, we will begin auditions. I would love
for you to become a part of it.

259
 KATHARINE and EDITH embrace in
celebration.

KATHARINE: This is our moment. We must get ready. We are staying in

town.

KATHARINE and EDITH exit.

MICHAEL:
I find corruption in my very dreams,
They crumble at a touch. I have foregone
All honour and hope.

Scene 6. SALLY and LILLIAS are

cleaning glass, knickknacks, plates,
dust.

LILLIAS: Dont see why Queen Josephine gets to go to town and live in a flat
with the Lady Loves.

SALLY: Look, Cinderella, theyre probly afraid of how many balls youd be
attendin to after midnight.

LILLIAS: Its cuza the way she looks at them Horsies. All moon-eyed like
their goddesses or something. Shes no different than I am, except for the fact
she reads a little.

260
SALLY: You only wished someone would gape at you that way.

LILLIAS: And you dont?

SALLY: Never said I wouldnt mind being a goddess a time or two.

LILLIAS: You might pass in the right light. With the curtains drawn.

SALLY: Promises, promises, ya Judy. Now pay attention to what yer doing
or yer gonna break that.

LILLIAS: If those ladies are that queer here in the country, I wonder what
theyll be like near theatre folk. What do you really think about the Misses?

SALLY: What do I think? I think they are livin as it suits them. Im not a
god. I dont judge. I dont have that kinda power.

LILLIAS: And if you were a god?

SALLY: Wouldnt be here, thats for sure. Would you?

SALLY wanders off in her bluster, not

really paying attention. LILLIAS day-
dreams, admires the room, the books.

LILLIAS: If I were a god, maybe Id have time to run through the grass.
Maybe Id have time to roll around in pretty words . . .

SALLY: Whats all that whisperin ? You know we dont have time for this-n-
that.

LILLIAS: We never do.

261
 Exeunt.

Scene 7. The sunroom.

KATHARINE and EDITH are making
love - this could be shown through erotic
dance or something more graphic.
MICHAEL is in the shadows above
them.

KATHARINE: We have watched our characters come to life all these weeks.
We have watched them sigh and caress and tug on each other, love and disturb
each other. We have lived our work.

EDITH: I hear your words come from strange mouths. I see you as a man, as
a woman, as a soldier, as a child.

KATHARINE: As I see you.

MICHAEL: They do not see me.

KATHARINE: Are you happy? This is our moment.

EDITH: This is our moment.

MICHAEL: They do not see me.

KATHARINE: Tell me you are happy.

EDITH: This is our moment.

MICHAEL: See what I am - no ghost. A creature of warm blood.

262
 As they continue making love,
JOSEPHINE creeps into the room.
She is dressed for bed, perhaps even
has a quilt pulled tight over her head.
She is a voyeur.

MICHAEL:
Having no tears to shed, with no regrets
Remaining merely as a monument
Contending hosts have clashed against . . .

KATHARINE and EDITH:

From thee untwined
I shall but wander a disobedient sprite,
Until thou wake me
With thy kiss-warmd breath,
and take me
Where we are one.

JOSEPHINE gasps at the intimate mo-

ment. EDITH and KATHARINE look
up, amused by the intruder. Em-
barrassed, JOSEPHINE makes herself
small, and hopefully, invisible.

EDITH: Josephine?

KATHARINE and EDITH

exit,giggling. JOSEPHINE falls
asleep under her quilt.

263
 Scene 8. Lighting should indicate a
break in reality, much like the other
dreams. JOs dream should evoke a
garden of nymphs, of Muses, dressed all
in white. SALLY, LILLIAS, MARY,
and ANNA touch, coax, and dance
around JOSEPHINE.

SALLY and LILLIAS MARY and ANNA to join (singing):

Silver movements, silver voices
Women moving to & fro
Where the garden-spices blow
At the June days summer close
Daughter, mother,
Women gracious to each other

JOSEPHINE: Youre making too much noise. The misses will hear.

ALL except JO:

Now the plucking of a rose,
Now the dropping of a hand
Soft upon a flower-stand.

KATHARINE and EDITH enter.

JOSEPHINE: The misses will see.

LILLIAS: Isnt that what you want?

264
EDITH: Yes, isnt that what you want?

KATHARINE and EDITH (singing to JO, dressing her in flowers):

Now a goddess stooping low,
Now an angel glancing up;
Now the raising of a head
Lovely as the lifting-up
Of a flower from its cup.

KATHARINE: You are lovely, are lovely, but unknown. What is your name?

ANNA and MARY: Her name.

LILLIAS: Ladie Love.

ANNA: Lady Fictionist.

SALLY: Sister.

EDITH: Wife.

KATHARINE: Husband.

MARY: Mother.

EDITH: Aunt.

LILLIAS: Female Rake.

EDITH: Female Pen.

SALLY: Horsewoman.

JOSEPHINE: Parlourmaid.

265
SALLY: Do you want more, Josephine?

LILLIAS: You have a choice, Josephine.

EDITH: Be bold and resolute.

ANNA: Be seen.

MARY: Be heard.

KATHARINE: Create your own destiny.

ANNA: Create a new life.

JOSEPHINE: Can I?

EDITH: You can.

LILLIAS: You can.

JOSEPHINE: But you said

LILLIAS: You can.

JOSEPHINE dances with the women.

ALL:
Silver movements, silver voices
Women moving to & fro
Where the garden-spices blow
Where sweet women race together,

266
Softly moving, speaking low.

Exeunt.

Scene 9. The CRITICS enter the Inde-

pendent Theater; they settle into their
seats with grumbling and small talk.
JT enters with panache and speaks to
the audience. MICHAEL watches from
above.

JT: Welcome, welcome. It gives me great pleasure to see such an eager and
enthusiastic crowd tonight. As you are well aware, here at the Independent,
we pride ourselves on modern and avant garde theater. Tonight we have a
special treat, a new work by Miss Katharine Bradley and Miss Edith Cooper,
better known as Michael Field.

The CRITICS have a mixed reaction to

the announcement and curse GEORGE
for bringing them to a Field play. To
indicate the play occurring, a BOY will
flip and read placards.

BOY: JT Grein and the Independent Theater Present Michael Fields A Ques-
tion of Memory.

BERNARD: Not another Field play, George.

GEORGE: But this ones on stage.

GRAY: Even worse. Now we cant rip out pages.

267
BOY: Written by Miss Katharine Bradley and Miss Edith Cooper. And Fea-
turing Mr. Acton Bond as Ferencz and Mrs. Charles Creswick as Thekla.
(new card) Act One.

The CRITICS sigh as the act moves

along.

GEORGE: It wasnt bad.

GRAY: It wasnt good.

MARY: Maybe if there was a s-

BERNARD: No, Mary, a song wouldnt have saved them.

BOY: Act Two.

ANNA: Did someone forget their lines?

GRAY: It wouldve been worse if they hadnt.

BOY: Act Three.

The CRITICS are now snoring.

BOY: The End.

The CRITICS wake up, clap half-

heartedly.

268
JT: I hope you enjoyed tonights production of A Question of Memory. It
gives me great pleasure to introduce its authors, Miss Katharine Bradley and
Miss Edith Cooper, otherwise called Michael Field.

As KATHARINE and EDITH take

their bows, JT hastily leaves the
stage. The CRITICS begin to leave.
KATHARINE and EDITH look de-
jected.

GEORGE: What ingenious ladies!

BERNARD: And how earnest and quaint their play.

GRAY: Especially the bit about the executions. Women have such a senti-
mental flair with war.

JOSEPHINE comes with their furs

and opera cloaks. KATHARINE and
EDITH look at the audience, despon-
dent. They seem as if they dont know
what to do, where to go. MICHAEL is
all about I-told-you-so.

EDITH: It is worse than before.

GRAY: Maybe Mary was right. Audiences need a good song.

BERNARD: And maybe they should have kept their drama in the closet.

MICHAEL:
Do you see what you have done?
It would please me best

269
You declare allegiance to the god,
And make yourselves subservient to my worship.
It is not too late.

KATH & EDITH look lost. All the

CRITICS save MARY & GEORGE
leave the stage.

MICHAEL:
Tremble not
My office is to save and purify
To lift from degradation.

EDITH: I suppose were not meant for the stage.

GEORGE: You must remember that present literary tastes are feverish. Your
themes are drawn from history. Too remote for comfortable digestion.

JOSEPHINE: Hes right. You cant give up.

They all glare, gape at her.

GEORGE: Shes right. You cant surrender now. But maybe you should think
about a new style.

EDITH: But our play was modern. We gave up the Shakespeare, the Greek.

GEORGE: And came up with something Hungarian.

270
MARY: Not everyone enjoys goulash. Not everyone knows what goulash is.

KATHARINE: It was the Hungarian Rising of 1848. A mans family was killed
and he went mad.

GEORGE: Some people may not find that . . . appetizing.

KATHARINE: And I suppose women cant do revolutions, or risings, as well

as men.

MICHAEL:
Search the stars,
Look deep into my destiny

GEORGE: The English are wholly inartistic. They ruin all their poets, for
they only praise what they find easy to understand. Do not give up hope.

Silence, awkwardness.

EDITH: We found rats in the house yesterday.

MARY: Rats?

KATHARINE: Seems nothing of ours is sacred.

MARY: Perhaps its your name.

EDITH: What name?

MARY: Michael Field.

MICHAEL: I am Michael Field.

271
GEORGE: She may be right. I have seen it make grown men wince. Or, more
often and more importantly, do nothing at all.

KATHARINE: That is because Michael Field is now seen as two old spinsters
trying their fragile hands at writing.

MARY: More like dried up old-fashioned eccentrics.

KATHARINE: Right. Much more elegant.

MICHAEL:
Think of all that I inherit and combine
Think of the fiery heart in me

EDITH: Shakespeare did say, A rose by any other name

KATHARINE (slightly encouraged): is something else entirely.

MICHAEL:
I am a plan, a work of some strange passion
Life has conceived apart from Times harsh drill,
A thing it hides and cherishes to fashion
At odd bright moments to its secret will:

KATHARINE: We wrote under other names once.

EDITH: Arran and Isla Leigh.

MARY: Who?

272
 GEORGE and MARY leave hurriedly.

MICHAEL:
I have plunged deep in wars
Have summoned councils

KATHARINE: Perhaps names are detrimental to art.

MICHAEL: Oh unjust

EDITH: We must get rid of the rats in our house.

KATHARINE and EDITH leave.

JOSEPHINE looks around the theater
with awe.

MICHAEL: Am I now a rat? No, you make me feel like a strange creature,
rising to the seas surface, previously unseen by human eyes, barely grazing
the light of the sun before sinking once again to its cold dark depths. Or a
simple plan. A rose. A rose.

JOSEPHINE pretends she is an ac-

tress. She clears her throat, lifts her
chin, straightens her posture. She plays
to a house of admirers.

JOSEPHINE: My life will not be determined by the people who love me, but
by the people I love. When I love, I grow wonderful to myself. I am a woman
yet not a mere spectator.

273
 JOSEPHINE blows kisses and bows to
imaginary applause then runs to catch
up with her mistresses.

MICHAEL:
Yet not a mere spectator.
Passive from the first
I yielded to my ravishers, and when
They left me fell musing to my revenge.

Act 3
Scene 1. The sunroom.
The silence belongs to a couple deep in
thought and afraid to voice their worry.

KATHARINE: I hear it might rain tomorrow.

EDITH: It will be good for the roses.

KATHARINE: Yes, good for the roses. I guess we should go to bed.

EDITH: It has been a long day.

Silence. The anxiety, uncertainty

should be palpable. MICHAEL is in the
shadows, stealthy, waiting.

KATHARINE: Do you think we will be remembered in 50 years?

KATHARINE: Do you think he will be remembered?

KATHARINE: What do we do now? What do you want to do?

274
EDITH: The only thing I have ever wanted to do. Write.

KATHARINE: We can reinvent ourselves.

EDITH: Again? What is left for us?

KATHARINE: Michael Field was not as we imagined, was he?

MICHAEL approaches KATHARINE,

threatening, aggressive. A hiss.

MICHAEL: I am exactly how you imagined.

KATHARINE: No, you arent.

MICHAEL: You created me so everyone would see you. Hear you. You used
me to speak.

KATHARINE: You ruined everything.

MICHAEL: I was your child, your ideal. Your messenger. I am the angel you
couldnt be.

KATHARINE: Because of you, we were thrown from Paradise.

MICHAEL: I am damned, damned in my very destiny. You used me.

By this moment, MICHAEL should

have KATHARINE alone, maybe cor-
nered with his sword pointed at her
throat. EDITH moves to protect
KATHARINE.

EDITH: You exist because of us. We imagined you. We created you.

275
MICHAEL: I am more than what you could imagine. I am Gods emissary.

EDITH: You were our emissary.

MICHAEL:
I could say
The powers that breed within a mans own breast
The very mood and temper of his fate
Move noiselessly within.
I am your word made flesh.

EDITH: You were.

MICHAEL (to KATHARINE): Is this the end? I recoil. Who is it that put a
brand on me while I was absent? I came to you a moody dreaming child. You
gave me knowledge, played me about the past like summer lightning

KATHARINE: You must go.

MICHAEL: I am Michael Field. You twain are doomed. Your power shall
wane without me.

EDITH: You must go.

MICHAEL: I am the angel of the house.

EDITH: You are exactly who we didnt want to be.

EDITH tears his wings, wounding him,

hurting him.

276
MICHAEL:
Ah, me!
How brutal, coarse, and ignorant I stand
Beside this sweet stray in humanity. Call the men to battle.
(to EDITH) I can free you.

EDITH: I can free myself.

KATHARINE is still uncertain.

KATHARINE: It is a full moon. Like the night you were born. I was so afraid
Id drop you. Hurt you. I still am.

EDITH: You have always watched over me.

KATHARINE: Held you too tight.

EDITH: Maybe. I have allowed you to.

MICHAEL: I kneel down, swear to be your most faithful

EDITH: I could have flown at any moment. I chose to stay. I choose to stay.

MICHAEL: And if I attend you daily in your cell?

EDITH: We will write. We will create anew.

KATHARINE: Are you sure?

EDITH: Divinity oft comes with a quiet foot.

277
MICHAEL: Think but of me, no veiled divinity. I can be who you want me
to be.

EDITH (to KATHARINE): Do you not remember the power of the gods? The
deities would transform themselves, create their own destiny. Take a form that
served their purpose.

MICHAEL: I have no parentage - all that I am, I cease to be. I am the last of
a dying species.

He runs off, injured.

EDITH: We are finally free. He can finally be who we want him to be. A voice
for our words. A voice for us. Our souls will be the things seen and heard by
all, not our bodies, not our wombs. We will be formless, as deities are just
before they become thunder, stallions, swans. Like shadows around men, we
will seduce, charm, anger, and imagine. We will give and take as we wish.

KATHARINE: They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of
him as somewhat of a recluse.

EDITH: Yes, perhaps all gods need to be anonymous. Maybe that is where
their power lies.
Scene 2. A dinner party.
The Chorus of CRITICS gathers. In
the center of the table, a vase full
of huge white angel plumes instead of
flowers.

278
GEORGE: I have discovered a new playwright.

Groans, laughter.

BERNARD: Exactly what we need to go down with our sherry. Who is the
melodramatic sot this time?

GEORGE: He is a recluse. Was a recluse.

GRAY: Then how, pray tell, did you discover him? Reading between the lines?

GEORGE (pulling a book from his coat pocket and jumping to his feet as in
Act 1, scene 2): Reading this. Queen Mariamne.

MARY: Is there a song?

BERNARD: Shall I move dear Mary or will we not be performing on the chairs
this evening?

GEORGE (ignoring all): A hidden hoard of his manuscripts were found in

Rome, apparently after a long illness.

GRAY: Well, in the case of an ill manuscript, perhaps its better he was lost.

ANNA: Come to think of it, I heard the man was buried in an unmarked grave.

GRAY: Must be too dark to write in there.

ANNA: How do you know he wasnt a woman?

279
GRAY: Or two?

MARY: How could a dead man be a woman?

BERNARD: Impossible. What is this recluses name?

GEORGE: He is nameless.

Ooooos and ahs.

BERNARD: Everyone has a name.

GEORGE: Apparently he was the author of Borgia.

BERNARD: Oh yes, Borgia. No one put their name to that.

ANNA: Seems to me it got some fair reviews.

GRAY: I suppose we could do with a little humor this evening. Rip out the
pages, George.
GEORGE gives the pages to MARY.
Somewhere offstage but noticeable,
JOSEPHINE is also reading.

MARY (reading) and JOSEPHINE: In my womanhood, I was a poet I pos-

sessed the world.

Perhaps KATHARINE and EDITH

will be onstage dancing as nymphs
alone or at their desk, reading what
they have written.

280
KATHARINE and EDITH:
And beyond a king lies dead.
But that land is blest forever,
Safe & healed, & happy so
Where sweet women race together,
Softly moving, speaking low.

END.

281
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 Vita

Michelle Lee, nee Stoddard, grew up in a Maryland suburb, where she bor-
rowed stacks of books from the public library, played pretend in the woods
behind her house, devoured her mothers homemade cookies, and watched her
father paint. After receiving her B.A. in English and graduating summa cum
laude from the University of Maryland, Michelle worked in public relations
for education-oriented nonprofit organizations, then upon marrying an Air
Force officer and moving across the country pursued a career in freelance
writing. Several years, several projects, an agent, and an e-novel later, Michelle
took her husbands advice and went back to school, accepting a spot in the
M.A. in Creative Writing Program at UT. While studying the craft of fiction-
writing, Michelle decided to go further in her studies and applied to the Ph.D.
in Literature program at UT. During her Ph.D. career, Michelle published
across genres, including poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and wrote a handful of
plays about her beloved Michael Field.

Permanent address: 1010 N Swallowtail Dr Apt 1004

Port Orange, Florida 32129

This dissertation was typeset with LATEX by the author.

A
LT EX is a document preparation system developed by Leslie Lamport as a special
version of Donald Knuths TEX Program.

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