Freaks of femininity: Webster's gallery of female grotesques in Portraits.
Luu, Helen
A murderous mother who kills her own sons, a sensual sorceress who transforms men into beasts, a child-woman billed as "The Happiest Girl in the World," a high-class prostitute "that feed[s] men's lusts and prey[s] on them," and an old maid "faded" into a "lifeless husk": this opening sequence of speakers in Augusta Webster's second volume of dramatic poetry, titled Portraits (1870, with "Faded" added in 1893), might call to mind the sensationalized and hyperbolic rhetoric of nineteenth-century freak exhibitions. (1) Like the Victorian freak show, these first five portraits in Webster's gallery, "Medea in Athens," "Circe," "The Happiest Girl in the World," "A Castaway," and "Faded," all exhibit human oddities--specifically female oddities and, even more specifically, female grotesques. Defined by Mary Russo as women who make a spectacle of themselves by transgressing the social norms of femininity, the female grotesque is characterized by a specifically feminine excess: female bodies that display their sexuality or simply fail to hide it; bodies that bear the mark of their female sex. As Russo writes, "the possessors of large, aging, and dimpled thighs displayed at the public beach, of overly rouged cheeks, of a voice shrill in laughter, or of a sliding bra strap--a loose dingy bra strap, ... too young or too old, too early or too late, ... anyone, any woman, could make a spectacle out of herself if she was not careful." (2)
In the same way, Medea, Circe, and Eulalie (the prostitute-speaker of "A Castaway") all clearly embody versions of the female grotesque in their display of sexual desire and their transgression of maternal, marital, and sexual norms. But so too does the speaker of "Faded," whose aging and unmarried body violates the same gender norms. Rather than transgressing these norms through excess, however, she does so through lack: by failing to fulfill "woman's destiny and sole hope," the roles of wife and mother (l. 102). Even the so-called Happiest Girl in the World, who seems the very embodiment of the feminine ideal as a young and beautiful bride-to-be, is no less grotesque. Through the poem's very title, Webster "enfreaks" this speaker, placing her among other human oddities common to the Victorian freak show. Like "The Tallest Man in the World," "The Ugliest Woman in the World," or the largest, skinniest, fattest, hairiest, and so on, "The Happiest Girl in the World" promises to present an extraordinary human exhibit, a superlative specimen, for the audience's view.
If, as Robert Bogdan argues, the term "freak" should refer not to "people who have certain physical conditions" but to "a frame of mind, a set of practices, a way of thinking about and presenting people," this essay will examine the different ways that Webster "enfreaks" her female subjects in Portraits, presenting them not only as female grotesques but also as female freaks: subjects set apart as objects on display, to be viewed and examined. (3) The difference between the two, the grotesque and the freak, Russo argues, is precisely in their differing relationships to spectacle, between spectator and performer, audience and spectacle. In contrast to Bakhtinian carnival, where audience and performers were equal participants in the spectacle and the grotesque body "was not distanced or objectified in relation to an audience," the nineteenth-century freak was "doubly marked as object and other within the world of spectacle"; unlike the grotesque body, freaks were, "by definition," beings set apart as "beings to be viewed" (Russo, pp. 78, 80, 79). Thus, while the very title of Portraits frames all its speakers, male and female, as subjects on display, it is significantly only Webster's female speakers that she "enfreaks," marking them doubly as object and other by displaying their bodies, exhibiting their deformities, and foregrounding their specularity.
This essay draws on the discourse of contemporary freak studies not only because Webster's strategies remarkably resemble those of Victorian freak exhibitions, as I will show, but also, and as a result, because freak studies provides the only critical language for explaining these representational strategies and the critical lens for seeing them in the first place. Thus, while other critics have focused on the ways that Webster minimizes her speakers' monstrosity and marginality by giving them voice, subjectivity, and agency, I focus on the ways that these same strategies foreground the speakers' specularity and grotesquerie, making them part and parcel of Webster's enfreakment strategies. It is through these strategies, I argue, that Webster reveals the true face of her female speakers' freakery: not their transgression of Victorian norms of femininity but their embodiment of the Victorian feminine ideal.
From Subjectivity to Spectacle
Acknowledging the monstrosity that figures like Medea, Circe, and Eulalie presented to the Victorian imagination, critics have focused on Webster's strategies for recuperating these figures of transgressive female sexuality. Preeminent among these strategies is Webster's use of the first-person point of view, which directly combats masculinist representations of these women by transforming them from desired objects to speaking subjects, replete with "narrative authority, psychological complexity," and the power of "self-assessment and self-representation." (4) Critics have argued that by adopting the speaker's point of view for the entirety of each poem, Webster humanizes these monstrous figures, both by envoicing their subjectivities and by deobjectifying or despecularizing their bodies. Rather than the passive sexual objects which Medea and Circe had embodied in nineteenth-century painting, these mythically transgressive figures embody in Webster's poems active and desiring female subjects, "each with a distinctive and forceful female voice." (5) Similarly, by adopting the first-person dramatic-I in "A Castaway," Webster rewrites the dominant cultural representation of Victorian prostitutes through "subversive identification" with a prostitute's persona and voice (Brown, p. 90). In this way, critics have argued, Webster's use of the dramatic-I reduces the specularity of her speakers by granting to each not only a voice but, through that voice, subjectivity and agency.
Furthering this argument for Webster's despecularization of her speakers is her exclusion of external auditors from her poems. This absence is particularly notable when we consider the fact that the implied auditor was by this time an established convention of Browning's "psychological school of poetry," to which Webster's poetry was frequently compared. (6) While adopting the dramatic--I removes the gaze of the audience outside the poem (i.e., by removing the body of the speaker from the gaze of the reader), absenting the auditor removes the gaze of the audience internal to the poem. In fact, in "Medea in Athens" and "Faded," Webster makes the speakers' retreat from the public gaze the very dramatic occasion of the poems. At the opening of "Medea in Athens," Medea turns to the private realm precisely to retreat from the "idiots' prying eyes" (l. 14) of the public domain. Under the shelter of night, in contrast, she can remove the "mummer's mask," seek her "secret" and "forgotten" self, and learn her true feelings about the news of Jason's death (ll. 18, 21, 19). In "Faded," the speaker similarly emphasizes her retreat at "dim eve" to study her photograph "alone" and "in quiet," where "there's none at hand to note" her "envious tears" shining through her "duller eyes" (ll. 11, 9, 10, 14, 13). In the other poems, Webster underscores each of her speakers' seclusion in other ways. While the Happiest Girl expresses cautious relief ("I am almost glad") to find herself free of her fiance for a "little while" in order to reflect on her engagement (ll. 7, 8), Circe bemoans her fate as one who "[d]well[s] like a lonely god in a charmed isle / Where I am first and only" (ll. 58-61). And in "A Castaway," Eulalie laments five times that she is "alone," which Webster makes the final word of the poem.
Taken together, these strategies of adopting the first-person perspective and secluding the speaker in an act of private self-communing might seem to fully secure Webster's speakers from the specularizing gaze. I suggest, rather, that each strategy is but another way that Webster "enfreaks" her female speakers, foregrounding and compounding their specularity. By placing them in the private realm, Webster literally, physically, sets each speaker apart, holding out--in the very absence of the auditor--the promise of a private display. In fact, this turn to the private realm parallels a specifically British strategy of marketing Victorian "freaks." To allay midcentury moral anxieties about the respectability of the spectacle trade, "Victorian showmen put new emphasis on the humanity of freaks" by publicizing customarily private details of their lives. As Heather McHold explains, Personal histories that emphasized such things as marital status, dedication to work, and access to material comforts appeared increasingly alongside the old advertising themes.... Since the domestic world was considered sacrosanct and a protective haven from the public sphere where, on the other hand, competition and free trade wearied and corrupted men, there was an implicit understanding that information about the private lives of freaks was somehow more authentic than regular advertising material. (7)
Consequently, Victorian freaks were often photographed with domestic props and in domestic poses (e.g., "seated on a fringed Victorian chair" or "standing on a plush ottoman in a well-appointed parlour") and even exhibited in their own homes (McHold, p. 28). (8)
In a similar way, Webster's private display of her female speakers might be viewed as a way of not only humanizing her "monstrous" figures such as Medea and Circe but also emphasizing the specularity of each figure on display. Just as freak performers were as much on display in the private drawing room as they were in the public exhibition halls, so too is each of Webster's speakers equally on display in the interior monologue: spoken in the first person, in the absence of any auditor, each poem proffers the spectacle of the speaker's secret self, unmasked for the reader on a private stage, in the intimacy of the private realm. Indeed, for Patricia Rigg, it is this element of display, in spite of the interiority of the monologues, that makes these poems not dramatic monologues but monodramas, the "framed living pictures" implied by the volume's title. (9)
Significantly, what Webster displays on the private stage is not simply the speaker's secret subjectivity but, more importantly, the speaker's body. Perhaps the most striking thing about Webster's female portraits in Portraits is that in all five poems, in spite of--or, indeed, by means of--the first-person dramatic-I, Webster returns the speaker's body to view by having each speaker gaze on an image of herself--whether in a pool ("Circe"), mirror ("A Castaway"), or picture ("Faded") or through the imagined gaze of another ("Medea"; "Happiest Girl"). In contrast, in Webster's earlier collection of dramatic poetry, Dramatic Studies (1866), only one of the three female speakers gazes on herself ("By the Looking-Glass"), while none of Webster's male speakers do so in either volume.
Thus, though Webster frames all her speakers of Portraits, male and female, as subjects on display through the volume's title, she presents only (and all) her female speakers as objects on display by having each speaker gaze on an image of herself. Indeed, by adopting the voice of the dramatic-I in each poem, Webster doubles her speakers' specularity by multiplying the gaze. Because the first-person perspective forces the reader to see through the speaker's eyes, the speaker becomes not only the object of her own gaze as she looks at herself but also the object of the reader's as the reader looks at the speaker looking at herself. And in the poems in which the speaker looks at herself through someone else's eyes, the speaker's specularity is tripled: she is the object of the viewer's gaze, her own, and the reader's as the reader looks at the speaker looking at herself through the eyes of another person looking at her.
Rather than minimizing female spectacle in the poems by merging the reader's and the speaker's gazes, as others have argued, Webster thus multiplies the spectacle, I argue, by multiplying the gaze. And by forcing the reader to see through the speaker's eyes, Webster forces us to see not only what the speakers see, including themselves, but also their act of seeing themselves; in other words, she forces us to see not only the image on display but also the act of displaying the image, the image of or as display. In short, she forces us to see her strategies of enfreakment. This shifts our gaze from the speakers as subjects to the speakers as objects--not solely how they appear to themselves reflected in the mirror of Victorian ideology, as others have argued, but how they appear within the context of Webster's larger portraits and her larger gallery. (10)
From Subject to Object
Focusing on the speakers as subjects of the gaze, critics have focused on the ways that these acts of self-gazing enable the speakers to reclaim their agency, power, voice, and self. In "Medea in Athens," for instance, Medea gazes on a vision of Jason in the final moments before his death, and in that vision, she sees him gazing on a vision of her: ["]She tossed her head back, while her brown hair streamed Gold in the wind and sun, and her face glowed With daring beauty; 'What of woes,' she cried, 'If only they leave time for love enough?' But oh the fire and flush! It took one's breath!" And then he lay half musing half adoze; Shadows of me went misty through his sight. And by and by he roused and cried "Oh dolt! Glauce was never half so beautiful." (ll. 64-72)
As Sutphin argues, Medea asserts in (and through) this scene complete narrative control and power: "As scriptwriter, director, stage manager, and actor of her own play, ... [s]he controls not only our vision of him but his vision of her" ("Representation," p. 386). Likewise, for Melissa Valiska Gregory, by "picturing Jason picturing her," Medea "substitutes her own beautiful self-portrait for Jason's image" and "overwrites his voice," "inserting her own words where his real ones might have gone." (11) For both critics, Medea thus transforms herself from pictured object to speaking subject in this scene, even though she remains the object of her own gaze, as well as Jason's and the reader's.
Similarly, when Circe gazes on and glories in her reflection in a pool, critics have read this act of self-objectification as a celebration of desire, assertion of agency, and affirmation of superiority. For example, when Circe anatomizes and eroticizes her image at length, exulting in her "sunlike glory of pale glittering hairs," "deep eyes, / Darker and softer than the bluest dusk" (ll. 114, 116-117), and continues, Oh, sad sweet longing smile--Oh, lips that tempt My very self to kisses--oh, round cheeks Tenderly radiant with the even flush Of pale smoothed coral--perfect lovely face Answering my gaze from out this fleckless pool-- Wonder of glossy shoulders, chiselled limbs--(ll. 120-125),
Rigg reads this as an act of self-aestheticization that "replac[es] love with self-love" and "effectively removes her desire from patriarchal control" (Julia Amgusta Webster, p. 129). And even though Circe asserts unequivocally that she loves herself "for him till he comes" (l. 129), critics have read this statement as another act of self-assertion. For instance, Sutphin argues that "Circe is her own lover because no one else has proved worthy" ("Heterosexual Desire," p. 381). So too in "A Castaway," critics have read Eulalie's act of self-objectification as an act of agency, her act of self-mirroring as a way of rewriting herself from a "fiend" and "slimy thing out of the pools" to "a woman sure" (ll. 28, 27): (12) A woman with a ripe and smiling lip That has no venom in its touch I think, With a white brow on which there is no brand; A woman none dare call not beautiful, Not womanly in every woman's grace. (ll. 29-32)
And yet, when we shift our gaze from the speakers as subjects to the speakers as objects of their own gaze, I suggest that another image of the speaker swims into view: not simply the active subject who contests the dominant discourses through acts of self-gazing and self-appreciation but also an object who embodies the ideal of femininity produced by those same discourses. In all five poems, Webster not only repeats the act of self-mirroring and self-objectification but, more crucially, reproduces the image of the speaker that is mirrored in each poem. In all five poems, each speaker embodies the ideal of feminine beauty: a "perfect lovely face," in Circe's words (l. 123); in Eulalie's, a face that "painters dream of' (ll. 35-36); in Medea's, a face that "glow[s] / With daring beauty" and takes "one's breath" (ll. 65-66, 68). The same face appears in "Faded" and "The Happiest Girl in the World": in "Faded," the picture of the "fair, happy morning face" (l. 7) of the speaker's younger self is also a perfect, lovely face, replete with "round curves" for cheeks, "gloss of almond-bloom in the March sun," "satiny brow, / Like smooth magnolia petals warmly white," and the "quivering woof of sunshine" through her hair (ll. 24-29). Similarly, in "The Happiest Girl in the World," the speaker paints the same picture of herself--twice--with sunlight playing over her "yellow hair," "flitting across" her, and touching her "hair and cheek" (ll. 60, 61, 73): once, as seen through her fiance's eyes and once again through the speaker's memory of being watched by him and knowing well that he watched (ll. 68-74).
Viewed side by side like this, these pictures of each speaker within each larger portrait might well call to mind the opening lines of Christina Rossetti's "In an Artist's Studio" (composed 1856): One face looks out from all his canvasses, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans; We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer greens, A saint, an angel;--every canvas means The same one meaning, neither more nor less. (ll. 1-8) (13)
What that "same one meaning" is for Webster's speakers is certainly not less than what Angela Leighton suggests: that the speakers have all internalized the dominant discourses of femininity, seeing themselves solely through "the flat mirror of social ideology" and through "men's eyes" (pp. 193, 192). Shifting our gaze, however, from the subjectivities of the speakers to the objects of their gaze, I suggest, in addition, one meaning more: that each speaker has not only internalized but also externally embodies the feminine ideal. In contrast to the "plain," "ungainly," "ugly," and "dull" face of the speaker of "By the Looking-Glass" (ll.17, 26, 63, 211)--the one poem in Dramatic Studies that also features a female speaker who gazes on her mirror image and also through the eyes of Victorian gender ideology--each of the female speakers of Portraits presents a picture of perfect feminine beauty, outwardly embodying the internalized ideal, whether in the past or in the present. Thus, though critics have often treated "By the Looking-Glass" and "Faded" as companion pieces, Webster's exclusion of the former poem from her expanded edition of Portraits in 1893, when she added "Faded" and various poems from Dramatic Studies, suggests that this singular difference between the two speakers was significant to her grouping of female portraits and to her gender critique. (14)
On the one hand, that all five speakers of Portraits embody the feminine ideal might be read as Webster's way of humanizing and normalizing her more monstrous speakers such as Medea, Circe, and Eulalie, and precisely by likening them to the "normal" speakers of "Faded" and "The Happiest Girl in the World." And yet, on the other hand, Webster does not let us forget the monstrosity of all her speakers, including her most "normal" ones. Unlike the canvasses in Rossetti's poem, Webster's portraits are emphatically not of saints or angels but of female monsters and female grotesques, including, I will argue, the one "nameless girl in freshest summer greens," the Happiest Girl in the World. In stark contrast to the picture of the breathtaking beauty that Medea fixes her (and Jason's and our) eyes on in "Medea in Athens," the larger portrait of Medea that Webster paints reminds us in detail of each of Medea's monstrous acts, from the murders of King Creon and Glauce (ll. 186, 187) to the butchering of her brother (l. 212), the slaying of King Pelias by his own daughters' hands (ll. 214-215), and the murder of her sons by her own (l. 230). In "Circe," just before Circe fills our eyes with her "perfect lovely face" and "chiselled limbs" (ll. 123, 125), she reminds us of her power not only to attract but to kill: those same deep "eyes," she asserts, contain a "stronger power / Than basilisks, whose gaze can only kill, / To draw men's souls to me to live or die / As I would have them" (ll. 102-105). Coupled with her "cruel and vengeful" scorn "for the lesser men" whom she transforms into beasts--or, as Circe would have it, from whom she removes their human disguises (l. 189)--Circe's perfect beauty becomes the grotesque face of her monstrous acts. Similarly, in "A Castaway," Eulalie inscribes directly onto her mirror image the grotesque double of the painter's dream: she forces us to see the "fiend" and "slimy thing out of the pools" with "venom" in her "ripe and smiling lip" that she denies, through her very act of denial (ll. 28, 30, 29). And as others have noted, Eulalie cannibalistically "feeds" on her own beauty (l. 34), but so too does she feed on men--and they on her--in an even more overtly grotesque image that blurs the boundaries between human and animal: she is, she declares, "the thing / Of shame and rottenness, the animal / That feed men's lusts and prey on them" (ll. 393-395). (15)
Even in "The Happiest Girl in the World" and "Faded," which feature the most "ordinary" of speakers, a young bride-to-be and an "old maid," Webster doubles the idealized object of each speaker's gaze with a picture of disfigurement, deformity, and decay. Like the common tactic of nineteenth-century freak shows of exhibiting performers with opposite attributes (e.g., giants with dwarfs or fat men with human skeletons) to "intensify by contrast their bodily differences" (Garland-Thomson, p. 10), in "Faded," Webster not only contrasts but conjoins the two faces of the speaker, young and old, "[e]lder and girl, the blossoming and the sere" (l. 18). In a single passage, we are presented with this double-headed vision as the speaker addresses a picture of her "young," "fair, happy, morning, face" (ll. 1, 7) and "blend[s]" their two faces into "one" (ll. 19, 17): Fie, cruel face! Too comely, thou. Thy round curves shame my cheeks; Thy gloss of almond-bloom in the March sun Affronts my hardened reds; thy satiny brow, Like smooth magnolia petals warmly white, Enforces all my tale of fretted lines; The quivering woof of sunshine through thy hairs Shows mine's spent russets deader. (ll. 23-30)
Even more overtly, Webster enfreaks her "faded" speaker by depicting her (and other aging, unmarried women like her) as "[s]ong-birds left voiceless, diswinged flies of the air" (l. 41), and by comparing them to "ghosts" and "lifeless husks, / Spent memories that slink through the world and breathe, / As if they lived, and yet they know they are dead" (ll. 77-79). She compares them further to a "numb void body, in its winding-sheet," a "shadow and an echo" (ll. 81, 138). Blending the human and nonhuman, life and death, natural and occult, gothic and grotesque, these images of deformity, disfigurement, and uncanny embodiments enfreak not only the elder speaker but also the girl; as Webster makes clear through the speaker, "at the end / Age and decay for thee too": "Both shall have had our fate ... decay, neglect / Loneliness, and then die" (ll. 159-160, 163-164).
In the same way, Webster enfreaks the very embodiment of the Victorian ideal of femininity, the Happiest Girl in the World, through an unexpected image of deformity. Contrasting the passion that she expects to feel for her newfound love and future husband--"That subtle pain of exquisite excess, / That momentary infinite sharp joy, / I know by books but cannot teach my heart" (ll. 145-147)--with the "cold" and "calm" (ll. 130, 122) that she actually feels, the speaker asks herself, "is mine but a child's heart, / And not a woman's fit for such a man?" (ll. 130-131). This grotesque image of deformity or disproportion, a child's heart in a woman's body, not only enfreaks the speaker but also enfreaks the conventions of romantic love that she desires but does not feel. Though the speaker feels herself out of proportion for her calm coldness toward her betrothed, Webster suggests that it is her desire for the conventions of desire, for "the fires and fevers and the pangs," the "anguish of too much delight," "the delirious madness at a kiss, / The flushing and the paling at a look, / And passionate ecstasy of meeting hands" (l. 114-118)--in short, her desire for "exquisite excess" with exquisite excess--that renders her grotesque. It makes her "yearn for pain" (l. 111), anguish, madness and excess, stretching the portrait of this epitome of Victorian femininity into a picture of the female grotesque.
From Normal Monsters to Monstrous Norms
Viewed together, then, these portraits of both ordinary and extraordinary speakers reveal a strategy that goes beyond simply humanizing the monstrous or sympathizing with the marginal. Particularly in "The Happiest Girl in the World," we can see a different kind of reversal at play. Rather than humanizing the monstrous, the poem exposes the monstrous within the feminine ideal, the monstrosity of the ideal itself. As freak studies has demonstrated, this reversal is central to strategies of enfreakment. The display of "human oddities" for amusement and profit not only confronts the so-called normal viewer with the spectacle of atypical or anomalous bodies but also calls into question the norms that have produced those bodies as atypical and anomalous in the first place. As Marlene Tromp and Karyn Valerius observe, while freak shows did help to materialize the politically invested distinction between the normal and the pathological, the relationship between the terms was not always simple and was always heavily inflected by social engagement. Freaks provoked both identification and disavowal. The ambiguity, rhetorical excess, and ambivalence mobilized by the freak could work to oppose the standard for normalcy--to destabilize its naturalized status--as well as to produce and confirm it. (16)
That all five poems portray a speaker who embodies both the grotesque and the feminine ideal suggests that the same strategy is at work in each poem. More than simply intensifying by contrast the speakers' bodily differences, this grotesque doubling, like the exhibition of conjoined twins, invites us to wonder at the relation between each speaker's two bodies, the ideal and the grotesque. The answer to this question, I suggest, lies in Webster's very strategy of enfreakment, of conjoining rather than simply contrasting these two versions of the speaker's self. The answer: that the feminine ideal and the female grotesque are not opposites, as is generally assumed, but conjoined or even parasitic twins, with one embedded in the other; moreover, the female grotesque is produced not out of the speaker's transgression of feminine norms or ideals but through her very embodiment of the norm or ideal.
As the clearest embodiment of the Victorian ideal of femininity, the Happiest Girl offers the best example. What renders the speaker grotesque or reveals her grotesquerie embedded within is not only her desire to embody the conventions of desire but, more significantly, her desire to embody the wifely ideal. For it is this ideal that requires the speaker to deform her thoughts to conform to its conventions--not simply the fires and fevers that she expects of romantic love but also the complete subordination that is expected of her. As Isobel Armstrong notes, the speaker "schools herself to passivity and submission" through the monologue, and the entire poem is an exercise in this lesson. (17) The speaker makes this lesson clear from the start: what little time she has away from her husband-to-be, "this little while," is a time, she says, to "think of him and tell myself / What to be his means, now that I am his, / ... And make myself believe it all is true" (ll. 8,9-12). And it is this wifely ideal--to be simultaneously "the friend whom he will trust," "the child whom he will teach," "the servant he will praise," "the mistress he will love," and "his wife" (ll. 197-201)--that produces the female grotesque: a child's heart in a woman's body, a child-woman, a child-mistress, a child-wife, and by logical extension, a child-mother. It is this final freak form of femininity that the speaker recoils at: "I cannot wish," she insists twice, "[t]o press a baby creature to my breast" (ll. 235, 238, 240), enfreaking the baby as an inhuman "creature" in the process. To defend against any anticipated charges of unmaternal monstrosity, the speaker justifies her maternal aversion as a form of marital devotion: "I would be all for him, / Not even children coming 'twixt us two / To call me from his service, to serve them" (ll. 241-243). Through this logic, however, Webster reveals the monstrosity of the ideal itself: it not only produces freak forms of femininity but also enfreaks the one form of femininity deemed to be the most natural for women. The demand of absolute submission of wife to husband makes unnatural the maternal ideal, "women's dearest wish ... / To press a baby creature to [her] breast" (ll. 238-240).
Placed at the center of Webster's gallery of female grotesques, "The Happiest Girl in the World" reveals the target of Webster's strategies of enfreakment: the ideal of femininity that the Happiest Girl embodies and, in particular, the Victorian ideal of marriage at its grotesque heart. Placed at the center, the Happiest Girl looks both backward and forward to all the female portraits before and after to reveal the same face of monstrosity reflected back. Thus, in "Medea in Athens," Medea is, like the Happiest Girl, "a grave and simple girl in a still home" (l. 191) before the arrival of Jason. But then he "cam'st," as critics have noted, and awakened her desire "with kisses hot and strange": (18) Thou cam'st, and from the day thou, meeting me In Hecate's dim grove culling my herbs, Didst burn my cheek with kisses hot and strange, The curse of thee compelled me. (ll. 203-206)
Yet Medea's account of her "fall" goes beyond the "curse" of desire to indict more specifically the "dreadful marriage oath." Medea continues, Lo, I am The wretch thou say'st; but wherefore? By whose work? Who, binding me with dreadful marriage oaths In the midnight temple, led my treacherous flight From home and father? Whose voice when I turned, Desperate to save thee, on my own young brother, My so loved brother, whose voice as I smote Nerved me, cried "Brave Medea"? For whose ends Did I decoy the credulous girls, poor fools, To slay their father? When have I been base, When cruel, save for thee[?] (ll. 206-216)
Highlighting her monstrosity here by enumerating her monstrous crimes, Medea tracks her "treacherous flight" back to a single point, the "[d]readful marriage oaths / In the midnight temple" that led her from home and father, turned her on her young brother, her "so loved brother," and transformed her into the "base," "cruel" "wretch" she concedes she now is. Webster thus traces the source of Medea's monstrosity not solely to her transgressive sexual desire--to Jason's "kisses hot and strange"--but, more specifically, to the "dreadful marriage oaths" that "bound" her to him.
Though the two points of sexual desire and marriage are certainly entwined here, they are not identical or even necessarily related in either the classical or Victorian imagination. As so many classical myths demonstrate, sexual desire and sexual fulfillment need not entail the bonds of marriage, even for women (e.g., Circe). Conversely, for Victorians, as Webster's own poems and essays highlight, marriage did not necessarily entail sexual desire--or love or even interest--especially for women, who did not have the freedom to choose their suitors (e.g., the Happiest Girl). As Webster writes in the essay "Husband-Hunting and Match-Making," women's "choice of whom to love is among those who have chosen them or who they fancy have chosen them, and it may be that a girl finds no one present himself whom she can regard with the highest affection, or even it may be that no one presents himself at all." (19) Thus, by making the "dreadful marriage oaths" a central motive for Medea's crimes, Webster singles out this very Victorian ideal as a central source of Medea's monstrosity. It is the reason that she betrays her father, butchers her brother, and exiles herself in a foreign land. It is also the reason that Medea murders her sons. In Euripides's play Medea, which Webster had translated in 1868 (two years before Portraits), Medea repeatedly cites Jason's breaking of the marriage oath as the reason for her vengeance, which Webster alludes to in the poem when Jason complains of Medea, "she breaks oaths more than I broke, / Even so much as she seemed to love most" (ll. 112-113). In this way, Webster makes Medea's monstrosity the result not of her transgression of feminine norms but of her pursuit--and protection--of its highest ideal: the bond of marriage that binds her.
Similarly, in "Circe," we can see this same grotesque heart beating beneath Circe's desire. Though Circe asserts at the outset of the poem an "active female desire" often noted by critics (Leighton, p. 194), she repeats throughout the rest of the poem her desire to be turned into a passive object--not just an object of male desire but also an object of male violence. In contrast to the poem's oft-quoted opening passage, in which Circe identifies with the agency and power of a female Darkness, who draws the sun down "[b]efore the time, not waiting as of wont / Till he has come to her behind the sea" (ll. 3-4), Circe identifies in the second verse paragraph with the objects of the storm that she calls down to her island: Oh welcome, welcome, though it rend my bowers, Scattering my blossomed roses like the dust, Splitting the shrieking branches, tossing down My riotous vines with their young half-tinged grapes Like small round amethysts or beryls strung Tumultuously in clusters; though it sate Its ravenous spite among my goodliest pines Though it will hurl high on my flowery shores The hostile wave that rives at the poor sward And drags it down the slants (ll. 11-17, 23-25)
Circe thus makes clear that she desires more than just "change" to break the "sickly sweet monotony" of a distinctly Victorian domesticity (ll. 31-32). (20) Rather, she desires violent change and to be the object of that violence: to be "rent," "scattered," "split," "tossed down," "hurled high," and "dragged down," just as she later "longs to be broken" (l. 106), "master[ed]" (l. 111), "bow[ed]" (l. 113), and "abash[ed]" (l. 193) by "the one true right man" (l. 190) "whom fate will send / One day to be [her] master utterly" (ll. 110-111).
Wrestling with this tension between, on the one hand, Webster's portrait of Circe as both feminine and feminist ideal--"a perfect lovely face" matched with both a "marvelous mind" and a look that can kill (ll. 123, 99, 103)--and, on the other, Circe's self-debasing self-portrait, critics have strained to recuperate Circe's agency and power out of her unequivocal desire to be "broken" and "beaten" (ll. 53, 54). Thus, Circe's desire for passivity and submission has been variously read as a fantasy of authority and power (Fiske), a defiance of conventional love (Rigg), an affirmation of her superiority (Sutphin), and a desire for radical transmutation (Pearsall). (21) I suggest, rather, that it is precisely in Circe's desire for complete subordination and subjugation as subordination and subjugation that Webster's most trenchant critique lies. For through this desire, Webster reveals the true face of Circe's monstrosity and its true cause: not her transgression of feminine norms but her embodiment of them; not simply her pursuit of heterosexual love and fulfillment but, more specifically, her pursuit of the social system of marriage. It is this that brings Circe to transform men into beasts (or remove their disguises as men) in search of the "one true right man of them" (ll. 189, 190). It is also what brings her to transform herself from the one true right woman--"[t]he one unknown rare woman" (l. 76) and "desire of all" (l. 112)--into the epitome of feminine submission and abjection, an object of violence and violation, a female grotesque.
More than a critique of the ideals of romantic love or heterosexual desire, this picture of complete subordination and subjugation captures precisely the social and legal position of women in a Victorian marriage, as the Happiest Girl happily--and Webster repeatedly--reminds us. In "The Happiest Girl in the World," the speaker's engagement transforms her from a "feathery wind-wafted seed / That flickered idly half a merry morn" (ll. 170-171) into a "prisoned seed that never more shall float," "[t]he prisoned seed that prisoned finds its life" (ll. 175-176, 178). Indeed, as "Circe" suggests, the ideal of marriage places women in a state of complete subordination and subjugation whether or not the "one true right man"--or any man--ever arrives. While Circe's act of self-admiring self-gazing seems to affirm and celebrate her status as active, desiring subject, Webster does not let us forget that Circe loves herself only "for him till he comes" (l. 129) and that the sole reason for her existence until he comes, whether or not he ever comes, is "for the sake of him" (l. 110). To her question, "Why am I who I am?" (l. 109), Circe answers, "But for the sake of him whom fate will send / One day to be my master utterly, / That he should take me, the desire of all, / Whom only he in the world could bow to him" (ll. 110-113). However, by ending the poem before the arrival of the ship that Circe espies at the end, Webster keeps Circe--and the reader--suspended in the state of frustration and longing that pulses throughout the poem. As Circe asks throughout, "Where is my love? Does someone cry for me / Not knowing whom he calls?" (ll. 72-73). And again: Oh love, oh love, oh love, art not yet come Out of the waiting shadows into life? Art not yet come after so many years That I have longed for thee? Come! I am here. (ll. 85-88)
And again: "Oh, ye gods, / Will he not seek me? Is it all a dream?" (ll. 91-92). Though the reader knows from legend that Odysseus will eventually come, we do not know how long Webster's Circe will have to wait for him before he comes. Thus, by ending the poem before the ship's arrival, Webster keeps both Circe and the reader in permanent suspense, watching and waiting for the arrival of the one true right man. (22)
Significantly, "The Happiest Girl in the World" also ends with a vision of an approaching storm and in the moment before the arrival of her expected lover. Though other critics have noticed this point of similarity between the two poems, they have viewed it as Webster's way of contrasting the two speakers--for example, "Circe's assertive ecstasy of anticipation" and the Happiest Girl's expression of a desire "hedged about with 'Victorian' conventions" (Sutphin, "Heterosexual Desire," p. 388). Yet their similarities go far beyond the final scene, revealing them to be doubles of each other: both find the calm of domesticity oppressive; both desire the fevers and the fires to break the calm; neither knows love, and both pine for it; and the love that they both imagine is grotesque. Thus, Circe is "too weary of this long bright calm" of her island (l. 33), just as the Happiest Girl is frustrated with her own "calm" and "cold" (l. 122, 130). The Happiest Girl desires to break that calm with "infinite sharp joy" (l. 146) and "the anguish of too much delight" (l. 115), just as Circe longs for "subtle joy / Of anguish and of hopes, of change and growth" (ll. 56-57). And like the Happiest Girl, Circe has "not loved" (l. 71) and yearns for it: while Circe cries, "Oh love, oh love, oh love, art not yet come / Out of the waiting shadows into life?" (ll. 85-86), the Happiest Girl echoes, "My love, my love, my love!" (l. 195). She then declares, "I shall be / So much to him, so almost everything" (ll. 195-196), which in turn echoes Circe's earlier claim that once her love has found her, "[t]here will be no more seeking anything" (l. 84). And just as Circe imagines her soul growing "beside" her lover's and "in it" (ll. 73-74), the Happiest Girl imagines a similar dissolution of boundaries when she declares of her future husband, "I near you shall grow at last like you" (l. 228). By thus mirroring these two speakers, the monstrous and the mundane, Webster reveals the normalcy of Circe's excesses of waiting and watching, anticipation and frustration, for the Victorian woman and the grotesquerie of this norm. In both, we see that desiring the monstrous state of marriage makes one monstrous; further, that this monstrous state of desiring the monstrous is in fact the ordinary state for Victorian women--a monstrous norm.
Indeed, as Webster's gallery of female grotesques attests, this monstrous state is not only the ordinary but the only state for women. Whereas the one "rule" that all women must learn, as Eulalie states in "A Castaway," is "that a woman's life, / Her natural life, her good life, her one life, / Is in her husband" (ll. 377, 388-390), the ideal of marriage makes monsters of all women: those who pursue it (Medea and Circe), those who achieve it (the Happiest Girl), and those who miss it (Eulalie and the speaker of "Faded"). In "Medea in Athens," it is what turns sister against brother, daughter against father, mother against son; in "Circe," it is what turns ordinary men into beasts and extraordinary women into willing objects of physical, social, and legal domination, even violence; in "The Happiest Girl in the World," it is what turns an ordinary woman and the epitome of femininity into a female freak. At the same time, those who miss this "destiny and sole hope" ("Faded," l. 102) for women do not escape its freak effects but are transformed by this "rule" into not-women or "other women things": like Eulalie, a "fiend" or "animal" ("A Castaway," ll. 615, 28, 394) or, like the "faded" speaker, "a ghost" or "lifeless husk," a "shadow and an echo" (ll. 77, 138). (23) By placing on display this ultimate freak form of femininity, Webster shifts our gaze from the normal monsters of a male mythology to its most monstrous norms: the ideal of femininity and the ideal of marriage at its grotesque heart.
Notes
(1) Augusta Webster, "A Castaway," l. 395; Webster, "Faded," l. 77. All references to Webster's poetry are drawn from Augusta Webster: Portraits and Other Poems, ed. Christine Sutphin (Toronto: Broadview, 2000).
(2) Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 53.
(3) Robert Bogdan, "The Social Construction of Freaks," in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1996), p. 35. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes, David Hevey coined the term "enfreakment" to refer to strategies of mediation used to frame the freak as spectacle on the cultural premise of irreducible corporeal difference. Garland-Thomson, "Introduction: From Wonder to Error--A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity," in Freakery, p. 10.
(4) Christine Sutphin, "Human Tigresses, Fractious Angels, and Nursery Saints: Augusta Webster's A Castaway' and Victorian Discourses on Prostitution and Women's Sexuality," VP 38, no. 4 (2000): 514; Susan Brown, "Economical Representations: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 'Jenny,' Augusta Webster's A Castaway,' and the Campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts," Victorian Review 17, no. 1 (1991): 92.
(5) Christine Sutphin, "The Representation of Women's Heterosexual Desire in Augusta Webster's 'Circe' and 'Medea in Athens,"' Women's Writing 5, no. 3 (1998): 380.
(6) In a review of W. W. Story's Graffiti d'Italia (1868) for the Fortnightly Review in 1869, H. Buxton Forman outlined what he called "Browning's method" and "the psychological school of poetry." For Forman, "the person addressed" in such monologues is assumed to be present and capable of responding, not merely an idealized self or fantasized other, since "we learn that the person addressed has said or done something" either "by detail on the speaker's part, or by some such artifice as a sudden shift in the tone." Forman, "Graffiti d'Italia by W. W. Story," Fortnightly Review, January 1869, pp. 117-118.
(7) Heather McHold, "Even as You and I: Freak Shows and Lay Discourse on Spectacular Deformity," in Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, ed. Marlene Tramp (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2008), p. 31.
(8) See also Joyce L. Huff, "Freaklore: The Dissemination, Fragmentation, and Reinvention of the Legend of Daniel Lambert, King of Fat Men," in Victorian Freaks, pp. 37-59.
(9) Patricia Rigg, "Augusta Webster: The Social Politics of Monodrama," Victorian Review 26, no. 2 (2000): 82.
(10) For discussions of the mirror motif in these poems, see Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 178-200; Patricia Rigg, Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 130-133; E. Warwick Slinn, Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique: The Politics of Performative Language (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 164-165; Glennis Byron, Dramatic Monologue (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 63-64.
(11) Melissa V. Gregory, "Augusta Webster Writing Motherhood in the Dramatic Monologue and the Sonnet Sequence," VP 49, no. 1 (2011): 30.
(12) See Dorothy Mermin, Godiva's Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830-1880 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993), p. 80; and Slinn, Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique, pp. 164-165.
(13) Christina Rossetti, "In an Artist's Studio," in The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. R. W. Crump (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979), p. 264.
(14) For discussions of "By the Looking-Glass" and "Faded" as companion pieces, see Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, p. 187 and Rigg, Julia Augusta Webster, p. 135.
(15) See Sutphin, "Human Tigresses," p. 523. Patricia Rigg analyzes this metaphor of feeding more generally as "the greedy, all-consuming, and self-serving nature of society" (Julia Augusta Webster, p. 134).
(16) Marlene Tramp, with Karyn Valerius, "Introduction: Toward Situating the Victorian Freak," in Victorian Freaks, p. 9.
(17) Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 365 (accessed via Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005).
(18) For an important reading that emphasizes Medea's pursuit of sexual fulfillment, see Sutphin, "Heterosexual Desire."
(19) Augusta Webster, "Husband-Hunting and Match-Making," in A Housewife's Opinions (London: Macmillan, 1879), p. 237. For similar critiques, see also "Yoke-Fellows" (pp. 198-202) and "Matrimony as a Means of Livelihood" (pp. 228-234) in the same collection.
(20) For discussions of Circe as a Victorian woman, see Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, p. 195; Sutphin, "Heterosexual Desire," p. 380; Rigg, Julia Augusta Webster, pp. 127-129.
(21) Shanyn Fiske, "Augusta Webster and the Social History of Myth," Women's Studies 49, no. 4 (2011): 487; Rigg, Julia Augusta Webster, p. 129; Sutphin, "Heterosexual Desire," p. 382; Cornelia Pearsall, "The Dramatic Monologue," in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 67-88.
(22) For alternative and more affirmative readings of the poem's ending prior to Odysseus's arrival, see Sutphin, "Heterosexual Desire," p. 384; Rigg, Julia Augusta Webster, p. 129; and Pearsall, "Dramatic Monologue," p. 81.
(23) Cf. Augusta Webster's essay "Matrimony as a Means of Livelihood," in which she writes, addressing all women, "here, ladies, is your lawful and only career.... Only marriageable and married are you recognizably women. She who being no longer a girl is not a wife has lost her place in creation" (Housewife's Opinions, p. 229).