Desiring Women

Session Organizer : Barbara Baumgartner
Washington University
bbaumgar@artsci.wustl.edu

Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse

Barbara Baumgartner
Washington University in St. Louis
bbaumgar@artsci.wustl.edu

The Language of Saints: Resistance in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

“For what I felt there was no help, and how could I help feeling?” (Brontë 1853, 537).

Expressed in chiasmus, Lucy Snowe’s cry of frustration suggests syntactically the effect of double binds operating at the center of the Victorian sex-gender system Charlotte Brontë coruscates in Villette. In this, her last attempt to address one of her era’s most demanding rhetorical situations, Brontë claims Victorian sexual politics confined, defined, and de-sexed women in the service of controlling their power. Remonstrating against the intensification and elaboration of the sexual double standard in Victorian middle class culture, Villette investigates the destructiveness of a discourse that elaborates an aggressive and recreational male sexuality, while shrinking female eroticism to reproductory functions. In the Victorian era, medical, conduct, evolutionary, and religious literature combined synergistically to create a new discourse of sexology that Brontë identifies as eroding women’s erotic possibilities. This paper uses a psychoanalytic framework to illuminate the resemblances between the pathology Brontë represents as resulting from this misogynistic discourse and those later theorists diagnosed as melancholia, dereliction, hysteria, and borderline syndrome. Although scholarship has explored how Victorian ideology linked masculinity with active desire and femininity with ahedonia, it has yet to render adequately how Victorian women resisted their erotic diminishment. Understanding how resistance is a component of feminist consciousness is critical to women seeking to integrate their psyches in patriarchal cultures still today. In this paper, I will focus on Brontë’s deployment of a language of saints (Stiritz 2001) to achieve the goals of resistance.

The language of saints was part of a Victorian revival of hagiography, which functioned to interpellate women into self-sacrificing domestic roles (Stiritz 2001). Women appropriated and used it, however, in ways similar to the ways they employed the Victorian language of flowers---as a code with which to communicate desires deemed improper to discuss openly. In Villette, images of saintly figures from the three Western religious traditions flow through Lucy’s narrative, much as “the Catholic fete-days brought [to her pensionnat] a succession of holidays all the year round” (Brontë 92). The fervency associated with the lives of saints allows Brontë to signify the sexual desire she wishes to discuss while purportedly being concerned with religious matters. By the end of Villette, Lucy Snowe has become a Victorian version of the virgin Saint Lucy Jacobus de Voragine describes in his thirteenth-century Catholic classic, The Golden Legend. Lucy’s last words in Villette repeat the final ones Bunyan gives Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress. Finally, Lucy’s fate is that of Moses, who, Brontë reminds us, was permitted only to view, not to set foot in the Promised Land. In shaping her protagonist as an odd fusion of Catholic, Protestant and Hebrew religious icons, Brontë effectively symbolizes the difficulty women encounter trying to weave psychosexual coherence out of pieces of patriarchal fabric. Furthermore, by creating Villette out of hagiographic bricolage, Brontë suggests breaking and transforming the systems that regulate sexual desire.

In describing the sexual component of her era’s Woman Question, Brontë delimits the benefits of misogyny, details its personal and social costs, and declares pyrrhic the Victorian project of containing the female erotic. While the Papist fraternity in Villette succeeds in robbing Lucy of her husband and her chance for sexual fulfillment, the perpetrators lose more than they gain. In her ironic treatment, saintly suffrage becomes the vehicle in a metaphor Brontë uses to bring into view female experiences and perspectives, which the male symbolic of her day failed to represent. By using hagiographic images associated with her era’s normative gender prescriptions to affirm rather than undermine the survival of female sexual power, Brontë turns them upside-down. She thus transforms terms of oppression and contributes to a discourse of resistance.

Susan Stiritz
Washington University, St. Louis

Managing Female Desire "Behind the Scenes": Elizabeth Keckley’s "Secret History of Mrs. Lincoln’s Wardrobe in New York"

In Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), Elizabeth Keckley recounts her extraordinary experience as a slave who used her skills as dressmaker, businesswoman, and confidante to gain her freedom in St. Louis during the 1850s, then went on to become modiste for the elite of Washington, including Mary Todd Lincoln. Included in the autobiography is Keckley’s account of Lincoln’s attempts to pay her prodigious debts by selling some of the costly clothing she acquired during her years as First Lady. Analysis of this account reveals that Keckley negotiated her authority as author in relation to widespread fears that the excessive consumerist desires of white, middle-class women were undermining US national stability during the volatile post-Civil War period. Written in the context of a growing rift between African Americans and white women seeking to expand voting rights, Keckley’s narrative subverts dominant racial discourses to represent African Americans as models of respectability and national duty. The book’s theatrical metaphors, however, may well have undermined Keckley’s credibility at a time when women’s performances in the public sphere—as activists, as entrepreneurs, as actresses, as theatre managers, and as consumers—carried a taint of immorality.

Beth Fisher
Washington University in St. Louis
bfisher@wustl.edu