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Vanishing women

Duke University Press

Chapter One

When Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria vanished from public view. And although Victoria was in mourning for Albert, a certain stubbornness marks her refusal to appear. The nation resented her temporary disappearance to such an extent that a growing republican movement threatened to make her, and the monarchy in general, disappear for good. Politicians and newspapers pleaded with the queen to show herself, but a court memo published in the Times on April 6, 1864, illustrates the extent to which Victoria, well aware of the nation's dissatisfaction with her disappearance, resolutely refused to reemerge.

An erroneous idea seems generally to prevail, and has lately found expression in the newspapers, that the Queen is about to resume the place in society which she occupied before her great affliction; that is, that she is about again to hold levees and drawing rooms in person, and to appear as before at Court balls, concerts, etc. This idea cannot be too explicitly contradicted.

The Queen heartily appreciates the desire of her subjects to see her, and whatever she can do to gratify them in this loyal and affectionate wish she will do.

But there are other and higher duties thanthose of mere representation which are now thrown upon the Queen, alone and unassisted-duties which she cannot neglect without injury to the public service.... More the Queen cannot do; and more the kindness and good feeling of her people will surely not exact from her.

This memo reveals Victoria's determined refutation of the world of "mere representation," in spite of the increasingly obvious threat that her disappearance poses to the institution of the monarchy. She will not appear. She will not be seen. Gladstone states quite simply in an 1870 letter to Granville, "The Queen is invisible." Even those who were permitted an audience with her had to contend with her visual instability. When Prime Minister Disraeli meets with Victoria in 1863, she appears then disappears in distinctly magical terms: "In less than five minutes from my entry, an opposite door opened and the Queen appeared. She was still in widow's mourning and seemed stouter than when I last saw her but this was perhaps only from her dress.... At last she asked after my wife, hoped she was well, and then with a graceful bow, vanished." Here Disraeli constructs an elaborate scene of startling entrances and exits that he implicitly links to the queen's stoutness, and in the course of this chapter we will see that vanishing repeatedly occurs in response to various types of corporeal excess. As Adrienne Munich points out, British republicanism developed not in response to the Queen's absence alone but to the combination of this absence with both her excessive consumption and her excesses of mourning: "Above and well beyond her age's elaborate mourning customs, she engaged in rituals and trappings of loss, expanding upon them to the point where she exhausted her subjects' capacity to enjoy or sympathize with her performance. Histories and biographies stress the increasingly republican sentiments of her subjects, who resented their enormous financial investment in a monarch who barely showed her face." The queen's withdrawal from public life has a private and personal explanation, but we can also read this withdrawal in the context of mid- to late Victorian Britain's fascination with the vanishing body and the vanishing female body in particular. Like the vanishing Victoria, the vanishing women of Britain can be read in various and even contradictory ways. Disappearance, masquerading as a certain kind of magical vanishing, can threaten to erase completely those bodies deemed superfluous or redundant. But it simultaneously offers a strategy of defiant resistance to the problematic paradigms of female visibility, a model of being that does not involve spectacular visibility. Although disappearance and vanishing may seem to signify the same thing, I want here to distinguish between these two words on the important grounds that while disappearance suggests a completed action vanishing is always in process. This inherent incompleteness becomes strategically useful at times when either an individual subject or the state itself tries to collapse magical vanishing into violent eradication, using the former as a screen for the latter. Because the action of vanishing offers terms of resistance from within itself, being never fully absent or fully present, it resists eradication even as it seems to support or mask it, and this ambivalent quality gives the term its political utility.

I begin this inquiry into the Victorian fascination with disappearing female bodies in 1851 because in this year the national census made the British public aware of a burgeoning female population, that left men in the minority. Extensive and elaborate debates about the "surplus woman problem" ensued, and these debates have received much critical attention within the field of Victorian studies. In this chapter, however, I want to suggest that a number of factors prevented the public discussions of the surplus woman from openly addressing the problem in its full dimensions. In order to access some of the material that is repressed from the public debate around this issue, but nevertheless is crucial to it, we need to turn to the spaces where collective fantasies make themselves visible. The British discussions of the surplus woman coincide with the world of stage magic's obsessive attempts to make women vanish. And only by reading the discourses of magical entertainment and population alongside each other can we render visible some of the repressed fantasies and fears that we need to understand in order to gain a fuller picture of what was actually at stake in these discussions of female surplus. This chapter aims to trace the metamorphoses of vanishing from 1851 through the end of the century, focusing in particular on the way a politicized discourse of human surplus and disappearance intersects with a specific moment in theater history. In 1886, magician Charles Bertram performed "The Vanishing Lady" for the first time on the British stage. The trick, which I suggest was from its inception highly politicized, captivated the imagination of the British public, appearing on the front page of the Times for an entire month. I will argue that this spectacle of vanishing both reflects and refutes Victorian anxieties about female surplus, offering us important insights about Britain's relationship not only with the early feminist movement but with the domestic political issues of unemployment and the care of the poor.

The questions of class and gender that emerge in the discourse of superfluous and vanishing women cannot be considered outside of Britain's relationship with its colonies. When Punch declares in 1850 that "the daughters of England are too numerous ... and if the mother cannot otherwise get them off her hands, she must send them abroad into the world," it conflates the image of a daughter leaving home to make a living and become independent of her parents with enforced female emigration. This proximity of working women at home to the exportation of surplus women also points clearly to the relationship between domestic concerns about female emancipation and Britain's expansion beyond the boundary of its own island. Although Victorian Britain's surplus woman problem emerged explicitly as a question of gender, producing numerous debates and texts that form the foundation of British feminism, the surplus woman also needs to be considered within the history of imperialism. Population always emerges as a spatial issue, and we must consider it in relation to Britain's own geographical imagination. The rhetoric of surplus bodies reflects, among other things, a sense of spatial inadequacy and a subsequent desire for increased lebensraum. As we will see, many nineteenth-century narratives of female surplus fantasize the colonies, especially the "white colonies" of Australia, New Zealand, and the formerly British parts of the United States, as empty spaces into which unwanted British women might simply disappear.

As Britain tried, and failed, to rid itself of its unwanted bodies-foreign and female-images of magical disappearance flooded the world of popular entertainment in striking and spectacular ways. Although the discourse of vanishing may seem to be confined to the realm of entertainment, these magical spectacles reveal something about the texture of the surplus woman problem that we would miss if we focused solely on the texts that deal explicitly with that issue. Having established a relationship between the surplus bodies of women and "natives" in the Victorian imagination, however, I want to make clear that I do not think the surplus woman question is in fact a purely, or even primarily, colonial issue, just as it would obviously not be useful to read Britain's relationship with India, for example, through the lens of gender or class alone. Rather, I want to argue that in the nineteenth century the discourses of gender and imperialism become increasingly intertwined with each other around the idea of vanishing in important and interesting ways. Here I want to align myself with the careful critical position articulated by Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather: "I write, then, in the conviction that history is not shaped around a single privileged social category. Race and class difference cannot, I believe, be understood as sequentially derivative of sexual difference, or vice versa. Rather, the formative categories of imperial modernity are articulated categories in the sense that they come into being in historical relation to each other and emerge only in dynamic, shifting and intimate interdependence.... I do not see race, class, gender and sexuality as structurally equivalent of each other.... Rather, these categories converge, merge and overdetermine each other in intricate and often contradictory ways." Rather than leveling the discourse about surplus women and colonial subjects, I will try to think about how the spaces between these two categories of marked bodies work to complicate and refine our understanding of Victorian vanishings.

Only in magic do the hidden connections between surplus women, imperial expansion, and the fantasy of disappearance become clear. One might argue that popular culture works to stage things as harmless and, perhaps because of this assurance of harmlessness, that the interconnections between these spheres can become visible. But before we examine how the vanishing lady comes to embody the hopes and fears of a nation we first need to look more closely at nineteenth-century population discussions in order to establish how English women came to be confused with Indian men and how both ended up in the role of magician's assistant.

The Lottery of Life

Overpopulation dominated the thoughts of nineteenth-century Britons. As birth rates grew and people moved en masse from the country to the city, agricultural production fell, creating a panic about how the nation would sustain itself. At the end of the eighteenth century, an anonymous pamphlet declared that population growth would always outstrip available food resources, a simple fact of nature that would constantly threaten human happiness. The pamphlet, entitled An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, reappeared in 1803 in extended form as Robert Malthus's Essay on Population. Malthus, as though possessed by the problem of excess and redundancy, continued to revise and reprint four further editions of the same work over the next twenty-three years. In the face of what he deemed to be misguided benevolence, he argued that the nation should leave those incapable of providing for themselves to die. Public debate raged, and Malthus's essay solicited impassioned responses from prominent writers such as William Hazlitt (1807) and William Godwin (1820), whose work on human happiness had inspired Malthus's original pamphlet in 1798.

"It has appeared that, from the inevitable laws of human nature, some human beings will be exposed to want," reasoned Malthus. "These are the unhappy persons who in the great lottery of life have drawn a blank." Even if more people were to practice celibacy, he argued, a surplus would always exist. Like the human body, the social body seemed bound to produce waste, waste that Mother Nature would simply carry away in her natural sewage system: "The diminution in the number of marriages, however, was not sufficient to make up for the great decrease of mortality from the extinction of the plague, and the striking reduction of the deaths in the dysentery. While these and some other disorders became almost evanescent, consumption, palsy, apoplexy, gout, lunacy, and the smallpox, became more mortal. The widening of these drains was necessary to carry off the population which still remain redundant" (239-40). For Malthus, human redundancy had less to do with any specific number of people and more to do with a particular section of society that he called the "abject poor," those who could do nothing for themselves, those whom the social body casts away, abjects. The abject poor were simply the feces of the social body, Malthus implied. And what could be more natural than that? In Malthus's contemplation of human waste, the process of social expulsion (the death of the abject poor) only served to confirm the health of the living social body and those who constituted it, just as the individual subject might assert itself in life through a contemplation of its own waste. As Julia Kristeva writes in her contemporary theorization of abjection, "These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricated itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live." In Malthus's formulation of identity, where the social body emerges only through the contemplation of its own waste, the nation or subject requires the visibility of the body's excess to mark the boundary between the "I" and the "not-I." Binding itself paradoxically to an unending visual fascination with the very thing it tries to eradicate, the subject or nation founds its sense of self on the spectacle of that self's surplus. Identity simultaneously yearns for and withstands the disappearance of its own excess. This paradoxical double bind provokes a crisis in mid-Victorian Britain, out of which emerges the idea of vanishing as spectacle.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Vanishing women by Karen Redrobe Beckman Excerpted by permission.
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