City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London

Basic Themes

• Walkowitz: an historian using historical texts in same fashion as interpretable literary texts
• A new kind of London, 1880s “cultural dynamics and social struggles” wherein “the dynamics of metropolitan life as a series of multiple and simultaneous cultural contests and exchanges across a wide social spectrum,” a “shifting pattern” rather than a set, fixed opposition; public spectacles, new kinds of spaces (department stories), new sexual identities
  • Women walking the streets to shop, be entertained, or prostitute herself
  • New Woman movement
  • Spiritualism
  • Sensational journalism (Jack the Ripper)
    • Jack the Ripper’s story only “piecemeal” and “after the fact”
    • In the end, fabricated picture of privileged man (class and mobility), open sexuality, showing dangers of women walking the streets: stay out of public, women
    • Such journalism makes people take sides: makes clear-cut what is extremely complex; often leading to political changes (public policy)
  • Madame Tussaud’s
    • 1980s: Installation of Jack the Ripper is cold, slimy, haunted by the shadow only of Jack, with realistic looking slit-throat victim, surrounded by laughter and singing from nearby pub
    • But in 1890s, Tussaud’s refuses to put him there b/c he didn’t have a face, too elusive
• London
  • A divided city: overworld/underworld
  • A maze-like city: labyrinthine
  • Competing narratives do circulate: it’s not just about confining women
  • Possibilities for adventure
  • Possibilities for public speaking: women now ascend public stage to talk about sexuality, passion, and sexual danger
• Why Sexuality Now?
  • For the white middle class, sex not just about family procreation anymore, so unleashes anxiety about the free-floating sexuality everywhere and conservative reaction (sanitary and chastity movements, anti-vice campaigns)
  • Sex talked about in newspapers, courtrooms, drawing rooms, medical/scientific journals
  • Gives women a voice: female reformers use prostitution as arena to have a public voice
    • Sexual danger lets women enter public sphere: ironically, the figure of the problematically public woman purchases a new public woman role
    • Notes that these women are the ones responsible for the bulk of the representations of sexuality and sexual violence in London (even more than pornography)
    • Also notes that their new opportunities and policy-influence led to the control and repression of working-class women and their public sphere appearance (ie, on streets): working-class women purchase for middle-class women their rights
      • Think of middle class women protecting purity of sexual health of sons and husbands by forcing working class women to inspections, labelling, tagging
      • A class-based version of the Spivak argument about white feminism purchasing power at expense of non-white female population
• Method: poststructural
  • Takes cue from Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments
  • Attention to complex web of cultural production, the field of “power, agency, and experience” (Foucault: dispersed, decentralized power; no one “outside” of power)
    • Although she doesn’t ignore the real inequalities of power
    • Although she doesn’t believe that women could just make up whatever about their identities: had to negotiate within certain given horizon of possibility
    • And of course Foucault’s assertion that Victorians were always talking about sex, not repressing it
  • Refusal to obey oppositions (elite/popular art; production/consumption, reality/representation) (Derrida)
  • Says these things were already happening in feminist studies before Foucualt: cf Linda Gordon, Nancy Cott, Kathy Peiss, Christina Simmons (b/c of destabilized gender identity)
  • The Subject: not autonomous, but does have certain amount of power (follows Marx and Engel’s insight that people can change history but within a given historical framework)

Topics

• Initially, urban male spectatorship of London
  • Landscape of London: “imaginary” landscape that will promote your (ie, middle class or upper class white man) adventures and identity-creation
  • Boundaries: not fixed, but transgressed, crossed
  • One example: Henry James, who saw London as an “ogress who devours human flesh” yet learns to love it as he can “take long walks in the rain.” “I took possession of London,” he enthuses and can imaginatively participate in the “whole” of London by getting to know a corner of it.
• Then becomes Contested terrain
  • Not just for white middle class men anymore!
  • Working-class demonstrations, for example
  • “Far less polarized and far more interactive than those imagined by the great literary chroniclers of the metropolis” (11)
    • But then why did those chroniclers create that kind of London instead of the “correct” one?
• Newspapers
  • W. T. Stead’s child prostitution expose series, the “Maiden Tribute” begins the pattern of women getting to speak out
    • Talked about everywhere: courts, lower-class neighborhoods, socialist circles, feminist circles: mass culture and elite culture, part of a common discourse but one that’s interpreted variosuly
  • Creation of “new typology of sexual crime” (12) in popular newspapers
• Positivism
  • “an epistemology and as an authoritative discourse on gender, but one that did not lead to a stabilized account of sexual difference” (12)
  • Law, religion, and melodrama are competing modes of knowing (most used by women)
• The Men and Women’s Club
  • Where they debated sexuality
  • Karl Pearson (eugenicist, socialist) organized and ran it
• Mrs. Georgina Weldon, spiritualist and singer, a “success story” about the opportunities opening up for women
  • Her husband tried to get her put in asylum, but she successfully resisted and began to tell her story publicly
  • Fought against the lunacy doctors who are “traders in lunacy”
  • Women like her used the narrative of sexual danger to gain access to spheres of power (like journalism) and to combat men and their power over women (child prostitution, prostitution, epitomized by Ripper)
  • Women were actors on this scene, not passive victims
• The Men versus Market Culture
  • Men: “it’s sordid and feminized” (13)
• Jack the Ripper
  • Brings it all together: pathology discourse, melodrama, the legal cases, the newspaper exposes
  • Everyone makes their own story about it: touchstone?

Upshot

• Earlier forms of urban male spectatorship are fractured, disseminated
• New people on streets: female white-collar workers, evangelists, intellectuals, reformers; not only flaneurs and male reformers
  • Only the narratives about this change represent women as the victims: the reality was that they were a part of Foucauldian power fields
  • The stories were really sexual fantasies on the part of the reporters, assuming male aggressiveness and female vulnerability, quite contrary to the reality of heterogeneous actors on the Victorian stage
    • For example, Josephine Butler showing powerful female figures with strong, effectual maternal powers within melodramatic discourse (so she’s unfortunately paternalist by working w/in nuclear family rhetoric; plus W. T. Stead also “contests” in certain ways the male power narrative: so everyone is on multiple sides of the story, no easy “polarization,” says Amanda Anderson)
• Walkowitz shows discursive field that is always open, never definite or closed

Cf

• Susan Buck-Morss in New German Critique one Flaneur, Sandwichman, and Whore (the flaneur can make interesting juxtapositions) (why do I care? it sounds like Marxist method)