"The cult of the clitoris": Anatomy of a national scandal

Modernism - Modernity

Volumn 9, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 21-49

  Medd, Jodie ^a  

^a CARLETON UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149428663     PISSN: 10716068     EISSN: 10806601     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2002.0015     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994), 451
2. "The Old Bailey Shocker," New Statesman, 8 June 1918, 183
3. On the composition, banned production, illustration, and publication of Salomé, see Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Middlesex: Penguin, 1989), 350-5
4. Felix Cherniavsky, The Salome Dancer (Toronto: McClellend & Steward, 1991), 176; hereafter abbreviated SD
5. The Vigilante, 16 February 1918, reprinted in Noel Pemberton Billing, ed. Verbatim Report of the Trial of Noel Pemberton Billing, M. P. On a charge of Criminal Libel Before Mr. Justice Darling at the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey. With report of the preliminary proceedings at Bow Street Police Court, an Appendix of Documents referred to in the Case, Reference index, &c. (London: Vigilante Office, 1918), 455; hereafter abbreviated VR
6. Billing did not actually write the paragraph; however, he did take responsibility for it. The novelist Marie Corelli had sent the Times advertisement of the play to the Vigilante office, with the suggestion that one might find in attendance the members of the 47,000. Captain Harold Spencer, working for Billing at the time, read Corelli's letter and devised the short paragraph just before the newspaper went to press. See Michael Kettle, Salome's Last Veil: The Libel Case of the Century (London: Granada Publishing, 1977), 17-8; hereafter abbreviated SLV. Throughout my paper, I will refer to Billing as the author of the libel, as he took full responsibility for it, and had already planted the plot of the 47,000
7. Wilde's trials actually followed several well publicized trials and scandals regarding male homosexuality that occurred in late-nineteenth-century Britain. See Jeffery Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977), 13-21
8. Weeks mentions the trial in Coming Out, 105-6, and H. Montgomery Hyde narrates the trial in The Other Love: An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain (London: Heinemann, 1970), 171-6. More recently, Jennifer Travis, Lucy Bland, and Laura Doan have published work on the trial with a specific interest in the legal construction of lesbianism
9. Hoare's reference to the social representation of the war as an imagined "disinfectant" that would clean up the decline of morals associated with social and artistic decadence reproduces Samuel Hynes's argument that "What the war did was to make the condition of England a social disease for which war was the cure." Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 13
10. Lord Darling, the judge in the criminal case, directly requested that the press refrain from reporting the "disagreeable details" of the case and emphatically warned that "there is no protection for the publication of indecent matter in any newspaper.... [I]f it is indecent there is no protection simply by reason of the fact that it is a report of what is going on in the Court of law" (VR, 57-8). The Manchester Guardian even printed this warning from the judge, foregrounding, like many other newspapers, the unnamable obscenity of the case. See "Mr Pemberton Billing and Miss Maud Allan," Manchester Guardian, 30 May 1918. On the operations of the "open secret," see D. A. Miller's "Secret Subjects, Open Secrets," in The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)
11. Eve Sedgwick's "Epistemology of the Closet," in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)
12. and Michel Foucault's "The Repressive Hypothesis," in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978)
13. See Jennifer Travis, "Clits in Court: Salomé, Sodomy, and the Lesbian 'Sadist,'" in Lesbian Erotics, ed. Karla Jay (New York: New York University Press, 1995)
14. and Lucy Bland, "Trial by Sexology?: Maud Allan, Salome, and the 'Cult of the Clitoris' Case" in Sexology in Culture, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
15. In Fashioning Sapphism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), Laura Doan also refers to the trial to frame her discussion of "the visibility of lesbianism in English legal discourse and in the public arena" (32). Notably, none of these analyses use the original trial documents. Their reliance upon Kettle's selective reproductions of passages from the case limits their readings and leads to inaccurate claims about the trial proceedings
16. See both Samuel Hynes's A War Imagined and Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975)
17. on how the war impacted on the modern imagination. See also Jay Winter's Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) for a nuanced argument that dissents from the notion of the war as a "radical break" and insists on the continuities of tradition in the representation and memorializing of the war. Notably, even though Winter strongly protests the yoking of "modernism" (revolutionary aesthetic practices) and World War I, he calls upon a relatively caricatured notion of modernism as a radical break with the past that wholly disregards traditional forms of representation. My argument attempts to strike a dialogue between the war's simultaneous reliance and innovation upon established historical forms
18. Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, introduction to Women's Fiction and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1
19. Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 109
20. Knightley points out that censorship of the press was imposed at the outbreak of war, and when war correspondents were allowed at the front, they were strictly regulated so their reports would corroborate the propaganda effort. Appropriately, perhaps, Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the Times and the Daily Mail, was also the director of propaganda in enemy countries (Knightley, 82). On the deliberate invention and circulation of lies, false war stories, rumors, and the concealment of actual events, see also Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928). See also Trudi Tate's "Propaganda Lies," in Modernism, History, and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)
21. Jacqueline Rose, Why War? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 21
22. On suffrage, the ideologies of the separate spheres, and the "public woman," see Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 200
23. William Cohen argues that male homosexuality, the "unspeakable" crime and most covert of sexual practices during the late Victorian period, is the appropriate locus for an analysis of scandal, while female homosexuality is simply beyond imagination: "While the willful effort to deny female sexuality resulted in celebrated adultery, divorce, and illegitimacy cases, ironically it largely precluded lesbian scandals, which were less unspeakable than unthinkable." William Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 6
24. Indeed, most major critical engagements with Salomé in the last twenty years have been concerned with her sexual queerness. The most emphatic proponents of reading Salomé as a (gay) man trapped under transvestic veils are: Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and the European Theater at the Turn of the Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989)
25. Richard Dellamora, "Traversing the Feminine in Oscar Wilde's Salomé," in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, ed. Thais Morgan (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1990)
26. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991)
27. and Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anarchy (New York: Routledge, 1992)
28. Charles Chadwick, Symbolism (London: Methuen, 1971), 1
29. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899), 146
30. Notably, although Salomé clearly pays homage to symbolist drama, the play also self-consciously ironizes the symbolist compulsion in the very moment of enacting it. Thus, Herodias staunchly, even comically, refuses to play the symbolist game of lunar similes with the rebuff, "The moon is like the moon. That is all." Herod likewise ultimately realizes that "It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors." Salomé, in The Portable Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Aldington and Stanley Wientraub (New York: Penguin, 1981), 407, 419. In this sense, as much as the drama exploits the symbolist compulsion, it also foregrounds its maddening potential and keeps an ironic distance from the very paranoid associative chains of meaning that Billing forges in 1918
31. Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 42
32. For analyses of Wilde's trial, see Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993)
33. Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986)
34. and Michael Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviancy, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997)
35. In the spring of 1913 Douglas charged Ransome with libel for his literary biography of Wilde, which referred to the expurgated sections of De Profundis and largely blamed Douglas, without naming him, for Wilde's suffering. See Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913). Douglas lost the case when the jury decided that the words complained of did constitute a libel, but were true. Notably, Justice Darling was the judge presiding over the case, the same judge who presided over Billing's case
36. In fact, "The Cult of the Clitoris" not only gestures to the "cult" of Wilde (and the Dandy as the "cult of the self"), but also to the cult of Sappho practiced by the all-women salons of Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien or represented in Pierre Louÿs's Songs of Bilitis. The phrase suggestively overlaps the decadent Sappho-revival of Baudelaire, Louÿs, Vivien, Barney, and Swinburne with the political reaction to the successes of the feminist movement. On the sapphic revival in Paris, see Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986)
37. and Catherine Van Casselaer, Lot's Wife: Lesbian Paris, 1890-1914 (Liverpool: Janus Press, 1986)
38. While the journal Academy published an enthusiastic review of her debut in March 1908, less than two months later it published another review that questioned Allan's legitimacy and dismissed her fame as the effect of crass self-promotion. J. C. F., "Miss Maud Allan's Salome Dance," Academy, 21 March 1908, 598-9
39. Christopher St. John, "All We Like Sheep," Academy, 2 May 1908, 736
40. "The New Dancer," Times Literary Supplement, 26 March 1908, 102. By 1918 German composers had been wiped off of British concert programs, and the war against Strauss was particularly violent
41. See Hynes, A War Imagined, 75
42. Mata Hari fabricated an identity as a Javanese dancer, claiming to give authentic expression to Javanese and Indian sacred dances, which she performed in little or no clothes. Capitalizing on the same Salomania as Allan, Mata Hari performed her own "Dance of the Seven Veils," was constantly compared to Salome, and urged her agent to ask Strauss to produce a Salomé performance for her. Julie Wheelwright, The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage (London: Collins and Brown, 1992), 17
43. Mata Hari was immediately mythologized and her story exploited by war propagandists. An example of this is Henry de Halsalle's, The Life Story of Madame Zelle, The World's Most Beautiful Spy (London: Skeffington and Sons, 1917), a sensational, fictionalized account of Mata Hari's life as a German agent
44. The First Sea Lord, Prince Louis Battenberg, whose father had been a German prince; Lord Haldane, whose German education and diplomatic ties made him a target of public hostility; and the vice-consul in Rotterdam, A. G. Holzapfel, who was British-born with an unfortunate appellation, were all forced to resign because of popular anti-alien sentiment. See John Terraine, The Impacts of War 1914 and 1918 (London: Hutchinson, 1970)
45. See also David French, "Spy Fever in Britain, 1900-1915," The Historical Journal 21.2 (1978): 355-70, for a discussion of the prewar and wartime history of popular sentiment and official legislation regarding "aliens" and spies
46. Trevor Wilson speculates that the public, unable to dispense with its political and military leaders at this time, displaced its anxiety onto a renewed campaign against enemy aliens in Britain. Terraine concurs, diagnosing a vehement hatred and righteous indignation against the Germans as a desperate civilian attempt to combat the "flagging of the spirit as the war dragged on," and which found its most explosive expression in anti-alien activity. Terraine, Impacts of War, 177
47. Qtd. in SLV, 15. The purse refers to money raised in support of Robert Ross while he was undergoing his legal battles with Douglas
48. Qtd. in Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century (New York: Arcarde, 1998), 22. Douglas's representation of homosexuality as national sedition resonates with Allied anti-German propaganda that connected homosexuality and German moral degeneracy. Propagandist works published during the war such as Henry de Halsalle's Degenerate Germany (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1917) and de Halsalle and C. Sheridan Jones's The German Woman and Her Master (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1916) expressly aligned sexual perversity in Germany with the country's moral degeneracy, citing in particular "the unspeakable Eulenburg affair," in which a group of "advisers and confidants of the Emperor" were exposed as indulging in le vice allemand (155-6)
49. Allan's position as an actress actually feeds into the lesbian suggestion. Havelock Ellis includes the theatre along with girls' schools, prisons, and "lunatic asylums" as the breeding ground for female homosexuality. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1897; New Hampshire: Ayer Company, 1994), 83-4
50. Here we encounter what Stuart Hall et al would characterize as a signification spiral; that is: a way of signifying events which also intrinsically escalates their threat.... The signification spiral is a self-amplifying sequence within the area of signification: the activity or event with which the signification deals is escalated - made to seem more threatening - within the course of the signification itself. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: MacMillan Press, 1978), 223
51. Here is the full passage of Williams's instructive interpretation: [Y]ou cannot appreciate the gravity of the charge against this lady unless you appreciate what the real meaning is of this horrible phrase.... [T]he fact is that this particular part of the female organization is open to treatment, let us say, other than by normal means which nature intended. And, hence, there has come into this wicked world undoubtedly a practice.... - recognised as a vice which is supposed to have originated in the Island of Lesbos where there were women and no men - a vice by which the clitoris can be excited (six words omitted) and ways other than those which nature intended. And there do exist in the world vicious practices where men are able to gratify their passions with men, and women with women - degrading, repulsive, contrary to nature, and consequently destructive of health - practices which, indulged in to any extent, sap and undermine the sanity and probity and self-respect ... of those who indulge in them. [VR, 58] The notion of the clitoris as extraneous will not only be elaborated by Freud, but has a history stretching back to the middle ages. On the discursive history of the clitoris, see Valerie Traub, "The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris," Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 2 (1995): 81-113
52. and Thomas W. Laqueur, "Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur" in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Three, ed. Romona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), 90-131
53. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 34
54. Tate, Modernism, History, 97-9, 117-8
55. Letter to Cecil Sprigge; qtd. in Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand, 137
56. Cooke's exchange with Billing regarding sex perverts who "describe as beautiful and glorious all their perversions," particularly when in a courtroom, seems to be referencing Wilde's elegant account of "The Love that dare not speak its name" in his own criminal proceedings. For Wilde's speech, see H. Montgomery Hyde's The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York: Dover Publications, 1962), 256
57. "The Billing Trial," Daily Mail, 5 June 1918, 3
58. "A Scandalous Trial," Times, 5 June 1918, 7
59. "Study in War Psychology," Manchester Guardian, 5 June 1918, 4
60. untitled editorial, New Age 23.7 (13 June 1918): 99
61. J. H. Thomas, "Common Sense and the Billing Trial: To the Editor of the Times," Times, 5 June 1918, 7