Slumming by Koven Seth

Author:Koven, Seth
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION: “WHITE GLOVES” AND “DIRTY HOXTON PENNIES”

What was the something the matter with the ladies who went slumming? This question needs to be put somewhat differently. There was no one thing “the matter,” but rather a variety of “disorders” that elite women, despite their own best efforts, could not succeed in purging from how they thought about themselves and how contemporaries chose to represent them. The novels I have discussed suggest that elite women’s desires for same-sex intimacy with one another and with their poor sisters were “pure” but “dirty” at the same time. Same-sex love, fueled by but seemingly incompatible with a Christian sense of mission, was an important though elusive dimension of their gospel of social housekeeping in late Victorian London. Novels offered readers an encoded (and hence in some ways still private) way to talk about managing society’s dirt. With their public probing of private feelings and longings, they also offered women a safe space in which to examine the motivations of fictional—not real-life—characters. One of the problems that bedeviled Lee was the fact that too many of her friends and acquaintances believed that they saw themselves portrayed in Miss Brown. Lee’s penchant for incorporating her friends into her stories collapsed the protective distance between life and fiction and ultimately alienated even people like Henry James, who genuinely admired her intellectual prowess. The late Victorian world tolerated a great deal of “sisterly” affection; but only in a novel like Princess could women passionately and hungrily kiss one another on the lips without compromising their status as sexless and pure workers on behalf of the poor.

Female social workers, charity organizers, and settlement house residents along with journalists, writers, and novelists, like Lee and Meade, powerfully reshaped gender relations, sexual subjectivities, and social welfare in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Not all of them chose to don the mantle of “feminism” when it emerged as an organized political and social movement at the turn of the century; even fewer identified themselves as lesbians, although sexologists increasingly popularized and attempted to stabilize what that term meant in the 1890s. But their self-fashioning of a wide range of subversive femininities—from Lee’s mannish but “prudish” bohemianism to Meade’s respectable New Womanliness—was closely bound up with their passionate attachments to other women and to their various projects to cleanse not just the streets but the private interior spaces of the London slums.

Dirt, sex, cross-class sisterhood, and female emancipation were all too clearly—and lamentably—joined together according to Roy Devereux the pen name of Mrs. Roy Pember-Devereux. In her 1896 study, The Ascent of Woman, she offered a sweeping assessment of the history of women and their long “ascent” toward greater self-expression. Published as part of a series called Eve’s Library, The Ascent of Woman adopted an idiosyncratic though “modern” stance on social and sexual issues. Devereux called for easier divorce, not because she thought marriage was inherently unfair for women, but to preserve it from fanatics like Mona Caird who sought its total abolition.

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