Sex and the Victorian City
Session Organizer: Erin V. Obermueller
Saint Louis University
obermuev@yahoo.com
Session Moderator: Caroline Reitz
Saint Louis University
reitzc@slu.edu

"The real or fancied wrongs of their lot": Sex and Social Reform in Victorian Writing about Urban Working Women

Sandra Hill
Eastern Kentucky Univ.

Female Flaneur or Female Emigrant?: Urban Wanderers in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lizzie Leigh

Elizabeth Gaskell’s short story Lizzie Leigh appeared in the first three installments of Household Words (March 1851) at the invitation of the editor, Charles Dickens. Gaskell’s story ran alongside articles entitled “A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters,” “An Australian Ploughman’s Story,” and “Shortcuts Across the Globe.” Reading Gaskell’s text within its original format emphasizes its theme of emigration, both international and domestic. Gaskell’s sketch of urban experience casts female figures as flaneurs within the city of Manchester, wandering day and night. These women—Mrs. Leigh, Lizzie, and Susan—come to embody a kind of restlessness with their prescribed lives, and experience the way a city welcomes their mobility as well as expels them for it. Lizzie Leigh is a tale of a kind of localized emigration for fallen women, ideologically akin to the shipments of women of disrepute to Australia and the colonies.

The city has been a topic of much critical scholarship in recent years, and London in particular has come to represent, in Anne Humphreys’s terms, “the heterogeneity of modernism” (602). Gaskell presents the mid-Victorian city of Manchester as the embodiment of such heterogeneity in terms of the circulating and mobile female presence. The city engulfs and hides while also exposing and publicly displaying its inhabitants. Her text demonstrates the city from what Michel de Certeau describes as the “street-level view,” detailing the fragments of urban experience without a coherent view from above. My argument is that Gaskell develops a kind of female emigrant experience, akin to the female flaneur, through the urban center. Drawing from letters between Dickens and Gaskell of the time, and reading around Gaskell’s text in Household Words, we realize that emigration and the emigrant experience not only informs these writers’ concerns, but also offers a way to understand female life in the city. As urban wanders, Gaskell’s women see the city at street-level and roam with the freedom of flaneurs, but also feel its tendency to expel and exclude the fallen woman.

Erin V. Obermueller
Saint Louis University
obermuev@yahoo.com

“Criminal Intimacies”: Rough Trade and Queer Space in Sins of the Cities of the Plain

John Saul’s Sins of the Cities of the Plain; or, the Recollections of a Mary-Ann, with Short Essays on Sodomy and Tribadism was privately published in 1881. The publication of Saul’s memoir was sandwiched between two well-publicized scandals that shaped Victorian notions and discourses about same sex desire and practice. It was printed eleven years after the cross-dressing scandal of Boulton and Park and eight years before the Cleveland Street Scandal in which Saul named the names of aristocratic patrons of erstwhile male prostitutes. At the request of a well-to-do john, Saul penned his personal history for a sum of ₤20.

Although this autobiography, as many have pointed out, is not strictly Saul’s, it does establish a liminal subjectivity that exists in the erotic play of the streets. It is this liminality that seems to characterize Saul’s texts and the spaces he describes. Sins of the Cities… emerges as a sort of strategic ‘confession’ that is pleasurable despite its haphazard compilation. But Saul’s confession functions very differently in that it establishes queer subjectivity as it delineates queer spaces that it neither respect nor seek to replicate the spaces colonized by normative sexual practices. Indeed, Saul’s topoi and topographies seem to skirt definition altogether. In this paper, I will discuss how Saul’s narrative continually resists the natural order of singular or binary sexual identities. I also plan to show how Saul’s narrative flouts the sexual and textual authenticity that is so necessary to the establishment of what Foucault calls scientia sexualis.

L. Anne Delgado
Indiana University
lpdelgad@indiana.edu