‘call me an “oddity” if you please’
What might it mean to try to think forward to Anne Lister, instead of looking backwards to find her foreshadowing the present future? For that purpose, this inquiry brackets freighted keywords like ‘identity’ and even ‘subjectivity’, lest they retroactively colour her writing too much with preoccupations of our moment. What frameworks does Lister call on to write her own way forward? The ubiquitous phrase dubbing her ‘the first modern lesbian’ has surprisingly much to recommend it, but its three descriptors raise as many historiographic questions as they resolve.2 Helena Whitbread precisely captures what does seem modern: Lister’s articulation of an ‘unswerving credo’, ‘I love & only love the fairer sex.’3 This chapter expands our picture of the non-modern idioms on which Lister drew as she forged an authority to live the remarkable way she did. In particular, her unwavering claim that ‘Nature’ authorised what she called her ‘oddity’ – itself so striking in the history of ideas – demands a closer account of its premises. If we read Lister predominantly within a metric of transgression or even nonconformity, we may miss the scope of her intellectual project (as well as some of the grounds for her storied confidence). For Lister stakes a claim to core cultural knowledge and textual traditions in order to make venerable ideas about Nature answer to her life. Embracing ‘oddity’ and composing a lifelong brief in its favour, Anne Lister articulates a theory.
Nature offers perhaps the most Protean concept in the history of ideas. Even so, Lister’s improvisation made it mean something daringly new. This excavation of her claim on Nature locates it within the tradition of natural history, a durable mode of thought that (from early modernity to Darwin and beyond) mingled classical science and the Christian creation story. Natural history assumed a creator and dwelt more in the details; its close cousin, natural theology, moved in the other direction, proposing to prove God’s existence retroactively from the order evident in those details. They share one archive.4 Since the Renaissance, as the mostly Christian cultures of Europe assimilated ancient material ranging from Pliny’s encyclopedic Historia Naturalis to Horace’s aphorisms into vernacular writing, the related concepts of God and Nature converged. The two terms almost interchangeably named an artist-creator of the world’s ‘creatures’, and classical and Christian origin stories alike emphasised earthly splendour as fit for direct moral contemplation.5 So configured, this tradition aims not just to explain the variety of lifeforms, but to tarry with it. In natural history’s embrace of original diversity, Lister found a mandate for her ‘oddity’. It was ‘regular’ because it followed natural rules of creation.
The opening chapters of Genesis loomed large in the natural-historical archive and not only as theology. Its creaturely procession establishes differentiation itself as natural. Divine fiat grounds a quasilegal existence for the distinct kinds being formed. All are legitimate, in the most technical and absolute sense; this God is not making any mistakes. By virtual decree, all forms of life are enrolled and enfranchised to thrive, each according to their kind – to go their own ways, to persist in being as they were made, and so to spread their metaphorical and literal wings across earth’s elemental spaces. The Genesis origin story, then, backs native diversity with the single, strongest warrant available to human thought: a godly mandate for all creatures great and small to continue ‘as-built’. In colloquial terms, they are supposed to be themselves.
Anne Lister fully grasped the extraordinary authority that natural-historical discourses and the providential logic of Genesis combined to make available, not simply to justify her ‘oddity’, but to see a divine hand in it. So much so we can call her theory creationist, keeping in mind this was no flat-earth vision and the evolutionary models modern creationism arose to deny had not yet arrived. By contrast to modern creationism, this non-modern, creatures-and-creator logic endowed every one of the world’s creatures with a native patent backed by divinity itself. In conjunction, natural-historical habits of mind favoured the ramifying enumeration of particulars over the clustered groupings of taxonomy.6 Character approaches the singularity of a fingerprint. We might now associate the capaciousness of natural history (as a habit of thought at the cosmic level) with a tendency to open-ended lists and even a spirit of inclusivity. As we will see, Lister conscripted these perfectly traditional habits of thought to authorise her own, queer form of life; we can call her method queerly traditional. Providence provides.
The term ‘queer’, of course, marks a swerve, a surprise, a puzzle or a break – being akimbo to expectation instead of following an assumed or common path. But we should not yet set ‘queer’ in opposition to ‘normal’, because that scientistic term barely appears in print before rising in usage after Lister’s death in 1840.7 The word ‘tradition’, by contrast, indexes something that abides. It suggests an oppressive weight when marking a constraining tyranny from the past, ‘handed down’ regardless of the specific person on whom its burden falls. But ‘tradition’ derives from Latin tradere (to hand over, deliver, surrender, transfer or give up some possessory interest), and this fuller resonance suggests a more interesting practical dynamic of authority for so-called traditional transfers. They might be linear, they might even be lineal, but the line need not run straight or in prescribed directions. How did Lister, born to provincial Yorkshire gentry in 1791, engage the textual bedrock of her cultural inheritance? Fostered by her unmarried aunt and uncle in the free and queer domesticity of Shibden Hall above Halifax, and enjoying broad social and intellectual scope in York and Paris, Anne Lister took tradition queerly in hand.
This chapter traces Lister’s bold theory that natural history and theology backed her ‘oddity’. We have a powerful and growing sense of the role of erotic/obscene Roman writers and Romantic models like Byron and Rousseau in Lister’s knowledge repertoire.8 Scholars have shown she read Roman poetry and its annotated commentaries both forensically and for pleasure; they have also analysed how she deployed literary references in social situations to gauge/engage friends and lovers.9 To extend our overall mapping of Lister’s thought and citational range, this chapter adds natural-historical and theological discourses to the other resources she so keenly mined for sexual and related forms of knowledge. That context, in turn, enables us to take ‘oddity’ more seriously as the word Lister chose for herself across her decades of writing.
Lister was an erudite, multilingual collector of the vocabularies of sexual knowledge, from ancient poetry to dictionaries to contemporary anatomical sciences.10 But whether recording exchanges with friends or musing, and across her crypt hand and plain hand alike, to gloss herself Lister chooses ‘oddity’. Occasionally she calls herself ‘an oddity’ (as in my epigram), but she embraces oddness mostly by the adjective ‘odd’, or as ‘my oddity’, denoting a property she possesses. Indeed, even in crypt hand she tends to avoid nominalisation. In a telling encounter with Frances Pickford (the most similar ‘oddity’ Lister ever met), however, Lister classifies ‘Pick’ in just that way, calling her ‘a regular oddity’.11 Two ‘regular oddities’ will never be ‘the same’, but Chris Roulston has demonstrated how this encounter challenges Lister’s justifying sense of singularity; Pickford’s similarity ‘threatens to obliterate Lister’s own sense of uniqueness’.12 Lister immediately differentiates herself, noting ‘she supposes me like herself how she is mistaken!’13 For Lister, ‘oddity’ encodes irreducible singularity; there is nothing justificatory or confirming in doubles or likeness, let alone in some larger grouping.
By this same logic, for herself, she seems not to have adopted the classifications she assiduously gathered from her wide reading, notably the agentive nouns tribade (Gr.) and fricatrice (L.), drawn from the verb ‘to rub’.14 If we read her disinclination to adopt such categorical nouns alongside her 1823 transcription of Rousseau on singularity (‘Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j’ai vus; j’ose croire n’être fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent’ / I am not made like any of those I’ve seen; I dare to believe not made like any of those who exist), we can see how Lister’s theory of being a singularly ‘made’ creature is not only non-identitarian, but anti-identitarian in effect.15 While she does not quote the entire passage, Rousseau’s paragraph immediately goes on to pose the question ‘whether Nature did well or ill when she threw away the mould that made me’, directly linking Romantic singularity to the older creationist discourse considered here.16 What affordances might we moderns have missed by mistaking Lister’s choice of ‘oddity’ for a quaint, vague, euphemistic or merely archaic usage?
As Susan Lanser has argued, ‘oddity’ along with terms like ‘singular’ and ‘unaccountable’ index lesbian/nonconforming behaviour; Caroline Gonda has further emphasised how such ‘allusive codes’ can expand ‘our sense of the patterns and possibilities of lesbian narrative and lesbian history’ in the period.17 In usage, the heyday for ‘oddity’ runs from 1750 to 1899, neatly bracketing Lister’s life.18 Despite the commonplace that our prolific diarist lacked words for her experience, for Anne Lister ‘oddity’ answered. Continuing her invitation to Sibbella Maclean to ‘call me an “oddity” if you please’, Lister underscores it: ‘I am odd, very very odd.’19 ‘Oddity’ connected Lister’s sense of social and sexual singularity with the providential force of a creation story, one that carried the imprimatur of godly backing. Conceptually, it derives from a natural-historical vision of creation that authorises variety and favours particulars; ‘oddity’ thus serves in a wider logic of ethical self-accounting and also navigates the apparent polarity (for us) between the queer and the traditional. Ultimately my inquiry aims to complicate notions of Lister’s ‘conservatism’ by suggesting the larger traction of her argument: that authorising one’s own life – necessarily, paradoxically – entails queer traditionality. Indeed, it seems impossible that the optimistic philosophical tradition compressed in Pope’s phrase, ‘Whatever IS, is RIGHT’, has EVER been put to queerer or more radical purpose.20
The Past, On Time
If history arcs, it also loops. The monumental testimony of Lister’s journals (from 1806 and continuously from 1817 to 1840) survived as a time-capsule literally immured at Shibden Hall. Their importance remained completely unknown until Helena Whitbread’s paradigm-breaking volumes brought them out of the archive and into the world in 1988 and 1992.21 In life, Lister traced thousands of peripatetic miles to and from Yorkshire, sojourning in European cities, scaling peaks from Ben Nevis and Mount Snowdon to the Pyrenees and the Alps, seeking world enough to match her investment in it. She died in distant reaches of the Russian empire, the farthest from Yorkshire she had ever been. Thanks to Sally Wainwright’s drama Gentleman Jack, her story has (re)taken this sweeping stage, as Lister comes home again in the twenty-first century.
Even so, the Gentleman Jack project had to be pitched some twenty years before its proper ‘time’ arrived. Wainwright’s ‘exquisitely scripted show’ and Suranne Jones’s ‘alchemical’ performance as a ‘force of nature’ have given Lister a soundtrack of her own; the Guardian’s five-star review called it a disruptive ‘masterpiece’ that arrived at just the ‘time’ it was needed and ‘one of the greatest British period dramas of our time’.22 At once timely ‘period drama’ and ‘of our time’, the series establishes, for all time, the exclamation mark of Anne’s all-black attire, her sustained romantic (but not sexual) disappointment, the tenacity of her hope, her cognitive firepower, her covert emotions of butch sentimentality, her polymorphous authority and her inexhaustible zeal. Suggesting the queer temporalities at stake in the show’s many disruptions, Wainwright and her team aimed to represent Lister ‘like she was from a different planet, almost’.23
In this time-twist between now and then, Lister’s long occluded writings and emergence as an LGBTQ+ icon inspire contemporary enthusiasts practising their own queer traditionality.24 New cultural practices have sprung up under Lister’s banner, as she vaulted from the small screen into fan art, fiction, swag, blogs, social media groups, GIFs, memes, street art and growing institutional adoption. Within months of the 2019 airing of the show’s first season, the West Yorkshire Archive Service launched a diary transcription project, recruiting 150+ international transcribers and earning a national award for volunteer engagement in 2020.25 In 2021, Wainwright and Jones unveiled a bronze sculpture at the heart of Lister’s home town and the University of York established Anne Lister College; town and gown moved beyond mere gestures of inclusion to incorporate LGBTQ+ history in permanent landmarks of our common culture.26 In 2022, hundreds descended on Halifax for Anne Lister Birthday Week, and the Anne Lister Society’s inaugural meeting showcased new research on the diarist.27 Across this range of registers, Lister has been ardently embraced as a sudden, dazzling ancestor, one her enthusiasts never knew we had lost.
If notions of ‘queer heritage’ or ‘queer tradition’ seem paradoxical, they reflect Lister’s own method: moving ahead partly by looking back. In Jones’s words, Lister has landed, ‘cutting through history to 2022’.28 The world had become ready for a ‘lesbian superhero’.29 But history cuts both ways, and part of the force of Wainwright’s writing springs from its care with the historical Lister’s signature habits of thought and phrasing, making Gentleman Jack singular in the repertoire of television drama: a diary curation of its own.30 The script incorporates Lister’s own words, often in verbatim soliloquy, and the speeches of others she transcribed. Historically accurate, large-format journals appear, like characters, in Wainwright’s indelible drama. What if the historical ‘oddity’ of Lister’s ‘proud spirit’, leaping out from her emerging text, is part of her present power?31 As bumper stickers proclaim – relaying a diary leitmotif in Lister’s own hand, abbreviated style and optimism – ‘ver. fine day’.
The material specifications of Lister’s journal are as singular as she was. In two partial volumes and then across twenty-four continuous volumes from a formal incipit (21 March 1817) until six weeks before her death in 1840, Lister inked an estimated five million words, roughly a sixth in unspaced, unpunctuated cipher. Pepys’s diary is the closest precedent. Traversing the 1660s, it likewise bridges historico-political, household and frankly sexual matters (also using code). It too speaks in the charismatic voice of a particular personality. But at 1.25 million words, Pepys’s diary is one-quarter the heft of Lister’s. Measuring in European novels, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu measures a tad longer than Pepys (1.26 million words); Richardson’s 1748 Clarissa is shorter, at just under a million. Lister’s journal chalks up to roughly five Clarissas.
These staggering statistics cannot overshadow the even more extraordinary content of a text whose time has come.32 UNESCO named the diaries a pivotal document in British history in 2011; for the history of sexuality, Emma Donoghue likened Whitbread’s publications – without hyperbole – to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.33 What this chapter proposes further is that we also understand Anne Lister’s ‘journal’ as an emerging masterpiece of English writing, a monumental text to reckon with in literary, ethical, and intellectual terms as well as documentary and historical ones.34 For Lister’s diaries join the pantheon of self-accountings from the Stoic philosophers to Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau and beyond. They command our attention as a highly engaged thinker’s sustained analysis of the challenges her ‘oddity’ posed, but also as a spirited showing of why Lister’s claim to proper cosmic membership is a rightful one. Choosing the path of greatest resilience – day upon day, year after year – Anne Lister’s journal models one way to take life very seriously.
Scholars approaching the journals from whatever discipline (and it will take all of them) must contend with the intellectual confidence Lister summoned where nothing predicts it. Of course, this poses a constitutional, even metabolic question. Lister’s anomalous situation, too, as the inheriting female member of a fading provincial line, was enviable. She well understood place has its privileges and eagerly expected her eventual inheritance to give her greater ‘éclat’ – indeed, ‘éclat enough to pass off my oddity’.35 But a journal like hers does not derive from any complacency about place. It stems from a non-modern and broadly theological imperative to grasp one’s place. With the mental dedication of an ultramarathoner, Anne Lister took the time to muster a principled authority to live her way. She sometimes passes as libertine or transgressive, industrialist or ‘entrepreneurial’, stylistically imitative, and sometimes ‘archly’ conservative in religion or politics. The balance of this chapter, instead, analyses the learned resources of the queerly traditional Anne Lister who exhorted herself to ‘never fear, learn to have nerve to protect myself & make the best of all things … & then face danger undaunted’; who affirmed simply, on the scrap of paper by which her code was cracked in the 1890s, ‘in God is my hope’.36 This Anne Lister gave new life to the storied Horatian line that still overlooks the housebody she renovated at Shibden Hall – justus propositi tenax (the just hold true to purpose) – as, of all things, a motto of queer confidence.
The Bias of Nature
To broaden our ethical and literary reckoning of the diaries and unfold Lister’s queer traditionality, some precedents from natural history will situate what it means to claim a God-given nature in the nineteenth century’s earliest decades. While Lister attended lectures with leading natural historians in late 1820s Paris, even befriending palaeontologist Georges Cuvier, these academic pursuits followed on intellectual ideas she had already framed from her own very wide reading at home in Yorkshire. The tradition of natural history approaches the world in a cornucopian spirit. Beginning with Aristotle, its open-ended encyclopedias collect lore about the world’s creatures. The key figure in the historical relay of classical ideas – Pliny the Elder – captures this open attitude, musing, ‘the more I observe nature, the less prone I am to consider any statement about her to be impossible’.37 Pliny’s sprawling, first-century classic, the Historia Naturalis, held a bursting treasury of not exclusively scientific details. From the sixteenth century, it served as a gateway text for Latin learning and continued to be cited, pro et contra, by scientific thinkers from Bacon to Linnaeus, Buffon, Cuvier, and Darwin. Lister was familiar enough with Pliny’s compendium to record an October day in 1822 spent ‘Till very nearly 4 looking over Pliny’s natural history … having first put my hair in curl’.38 That December, she mused about translating this mammoth text herself.39
The ramifying, inclusive style of Pliny’s classical natural history was absorbed into the enumerative aspects of the natural sciences by Lister’s time. But the supervening biblical account gave further legitimising force to a vision of creaturely life as a matter of distributed, even prodigally scattered endowments.40 As ancient natural history and Christian doctrine amalgamated during the Reformation and Anglican settlement, Genesis played a multivalent role, dressed in its new garb of vernacular translation; it signified as both natural history and scripture. The opening verses of Genesis enumerate a parade of creatures, rising in order of their creation. The emerging series of kinds (the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, the beasts of the earth) shows distinct domains made proper to each. Each creature rightfully holds a divine endowment and imprimatur.
With the expansion of Latin learning and the Englishing of liturgy and theology, new archives of vernacular writing disseminated what it could mean to think of having an ‘appointed’ or God-given nature. As a core example, one of the Sermons or Homilies to be Read in Churches (1547) expands Genesis, using a poetry of lists:
Almighty God hath created and appointed all things in heaven, earth, and waters … al birdes of the aire … earth, trees, seedes, plantes, herbes, corne, grasse, and all maner of beastes keepe them in their ordre … all kyndes of fishes in the sea, rivers and waters, … yea the seas themselfes, kepe their comely course …41
Here we see natural history’s enumerative style inflecting theology. This language instils each creature with an agency to continue, according to the arc of its own natural ways; the refrains stress how things have a delegated sovereignty to ‘keep themselves’ to their own ‘comely [fitting] courses’. Although the Homilies were no longer read systematically in churches in Lister’s time, they suffused English culture. Indeed, the catalogue for the posthumous sale of Lister’s library lists her copy of the Sermons or Homilies to be Read in Churches.42 Like her contemporaries, she routinely read sermons aloud at home when family were indisposed to attend church.
Meanwhile, another text from the Elizabethan vernacular mix of theology and naturalism remained a cornerstone of Anglicanism, with a major Oxford scholarly edition published in 1836. This treatise on church governance by Tudor theologian Richard Hooker found in these laws of Nature a via media between Puritanism and Catholicism. Hooker’s account of a God-given nature pertains here: ‘All things that are have some [natural] operation … for unto every end, every operation will not serve. That which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and the power, that which doth appoint the form and the measure, the same we term a law.’ These kinds trace a ‘course’ established by Nature, as ‘wonted motions’, ‘unwearied courses’ and customary ‘ways’.43 Hooker explicates a theology of Nature in which created beings possess a signature arc or way of acting.
A detailed account of intervening developments exceeds my brief, but Pope’s popular poem cited above, An Essay on Man (1734), faithfully rehearsed this older creationist vision in which everything across the natural world accrues sacred licence by its rightful share in divine intention. From our perspective, the poem’s notorious line, ‘Whatever IS, is RIGHT’, sounds mainly complicit in the controlling hierarchies of a status quo. But in Lister’s hands, this very logic shows itself ready to turn to queerer purposes. In scientific contexts, a theology of creation remained central during her life, and works like William Paley’s widely read Natural Theology (1802) continued to propose that whatever exists can only have been intended to be. In 1859, Darwin would challenge natural theology’s view of God as the direct author of each creature and its faith in the creaturely immutability that, as discussed below, anchored Lister’s self-accounting. In Lister’s lifetime, meanwhile, texts like the compendious Dictionary of the Natural History of the Bible; or, A Description of All the Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, and Insects, Trees, Plants, Flowers, Gums, and Precious Stones Mentioned in the Sacred Scriptures (published in Boston, London, Glasgow, and Dublin from 1793) worked to ‘open new beauties in the sacred volume’, even citing ‘the natural history of foreign countries’ as important for actual biblical understanding.44 Natures are God-given; thus they teach and speak.
To begin turning to Lister’s own textual improvisations on what it means to have a God-given nature, two Shakespearean pivots show how readily these traditional ideas could apply to human variety, particularly concerning gender and sexuality.45 This creation model – in which an endowed bent is conferred by divine art or Nature’s hand – shapes the two most intriguing close encounters between Nature and sex/gender in the canon. First, in the gender-bending Sonnet 20 (‘A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted’), the (male) poet imagines the process by which Nature creates his (male) beloved. Line ten proposes that ‘nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting’, randomly making the beloved male by a slip of her drifting hand. Nature’s creatures, including humans, are ‘wrought’, or made, and the process contains enough free scope for a ‘doting’ Nature to vary her plans. Shakespeare casts sexual difference as something almost accidental – because Nature, as an artist, has her queer freedoms and moods.
The second instance is a textual crux in Twelfth Night, the most queerly convoluted of Shakespeare’s comedies. When the cross-dressed boy actor playing Olivia, a female character who has fallen in love with another female character, Viola (who is also played by a boy, but spends most of the play disguised as a man), discovers these layered masks, another character (Viola’s twin) naturalises the attraction between two likes. ‘So comes it lady you have been mistook’, he says, but, he explains, ‘nature to her bias drew in that’.46 The idea of Nature drawing to (keeping to) her bias comes from the game of bowls, where an inbuilt weight (the bias) directs the natural course of the ball as a bent or turn. By these lights, natural movement (life, hope, desire – all the creaturely prerogatives) bends or curves; no ‘nature’ can be straightened or confined against its own grain. This conception of nature encompasses both the freedom of Nature as an originating artist and distributed sovereign nature(s), which all naturally desire the self-constancy of staying ‘true to purpose’. Every nature is endowed by a creator with a bias all its own.
It Was All Nature
Anne Lister does more than accept or explain that she is ‘odd, very very odd’; she justifies it with arguments resting squarely on natural history’s sense of this native, creaturely endowment. ‘Oddity’ bundles many things beyond sexuality, as Lanser and Gonda have shown, and Lister captures that range. Countless diary passages register other people’s notions of her singularity. Of a London dressmaker, Lister writes, ‘I think she understands me to be a character.’47 Flirting with Miss Browne, who asked about her youth, she explains in 1819, ‘I was a curious genius & had been so from my cradle’; to Maria Barlow, asking in 1824 what her servants made of her, she answers, ‘Oh, merely … that I have my own particular ways.’48 Setting off from Shibden in 1832, she likens it to ‘exile’, considering how her ‘own people … are accustomed to my oddities, are kind, & civilized to me’.49
Beyond these glancing instances, the diaries make clear her ‘oddity’ was a common topic of conversation; it is not too awkward to discuss and even supports flirtation. Indeed, Lister often notes that people like her that way. On 2 July 1821, for example, she describes being ‘led into talking about myself … my figure, manner of walking & my voice; their singularity etc’ by Emma Saltmarsh, naming all these ‘my own oddities’. But crucially she adds that Emma ‘does not appear to object[;] in fact she thinks me agreeable & likes me. So does her husband’.50 Another friend, Ellen Empson, ‘said I was odd but hoped I would not change’.51 When Lister argues that her ‘inquisitive, curious’ gaze is like other people’s, a new acquaintance in Paris counters, ‘No … it is only like yourself. But I don’t dislike it.’52 Though her beloved Aunt Anne wryly commented in 1832, ‘Well, you’re a queer one & I’ll ask no more,’ Lister is always answering for her ‘oddity’ – the thing is, with evident success.53 Singular, odd, curious, particular, queer: that she has something to answer for is unsurprising. The surprise is the apparently persuasive weight of the answer she reliably gives. Putting it plainly, she explains to Mrs Barlow as their Paris intimacy proceeds apace, ‘it was all nature’.54
Indeed, we might add, it was all ‘nature’s bias’ in the Shakespearean sense: Nature’s embedded weight or guide directing a God-given ‘inclination’ or ‘turn’. Across the years, Lister keenly prosecutes this natural and creationist theory of her native ‘oddity’, transcribing sustained dialogues with friends and lovers into her journal. Considering three of these by the lights of natural history shows both the erudition and the daring of Lister’s experiment in queer traditionality. In a deft editorial decision, Whitbread’s first volume opens with one such conversation, extending over two months in 1816. Tortured by the heterosexual marriage of her greatest love, Mariana Belcombe, Lister is brought into close quarters with Mariana’s sister, Nantz; a dalliance ensues. Edging into the topic, Lister tells her ‘I should never marry. Could not like men. Ought not to like women.’55 But she immediately undercuts the wrong implied in ‘ought not’ by accounting ‘for my inclination that way by diverse arguments’; Lister expounds on ‘my penchant for the ladies. Expatiated on the nature of my feelings.’ Working by diverse arguments, expatiating on nature as an inclination or penchant – and succeeding with Mariana’s sister – Lister then contends with Nantz’s fear their sexual engagement is wrong. Sticking to the language of scholarly debate, Lister confidently writes, ‘I dexterously parried all these points.’
Distinguishing male homosexual acts from female (with the latter ‘certainly not named’ in the Bible), Lister actually bends and expands scriptural logics in her favour. She transfers opprobrium from same-sex connections, per se, to the inconsistency of playing both sides instead. She calls it ‘infamous to be connected to both sexes’, but finds allowances for those who exclusively ‘kept to one side of the question’. Making her case to Nantz, Lister continues:
I urged in my own defence the strength of natural feeling & instinct, for so I might call it, as I had always had the same turn from infancy. That it had been known to me, as it were, by inclination. That I had never varied & no effort on my part had been able to counteract it. That the girls like me & had always liked me. That I had never been refused by anyone.
These lines reverberate with keywords from across the ‘nature’s bias’ tradition: instinct, a consistent ‘turn’ since birth, an unvarying ‘inclination’ so deeply planted it cannot be redirected. The ‘feeling’ is ‘natural’ – and defensible – because it is native. The absence of terms like ‘lesbian’ and related vocabularies aside, we are watching Lister forge a discourse of her own, seized from the heart of traditional texts, including the Bible.56 Using marked rhetorical phrases (‘for so I might call it’ and ‘as it were’), she musters older understandings of a bespoke endowment for every ‘made’ creature – and conscripts them queerly to make a peerless case for legitimacy. We may add, too, her ‘oddity’ having ‘always’ been liked and ‘never’ refused (essentially ratified by the world) chimes with Pope’s logic, ‘whatever IS, is RIGHT’.
A second episode extends the argument from Nature, as Lister takes Frances Pickford’s measure. In 1823, she expands her earlier points. ‘If it had been done from books & not from nature’, she reasons, ‘the thing would have been different. Or if there had been any inconsistency, first on one side of the question, or the other, but, as it was, nature was the guide.’57 Nature may wend, but it does not waver. Indeed, it is precisely this consistency principle that shapes the emphatic grammar built in to of one of the most singular declaratives in sexuality’s long history: Lister’s 1821 claim not just ‘to love the fairer sex’, but to ‘love & only love the fairer sex’.58 With Pickford, Lister distinguishes ‘the thing’ (nature-based sex between women) from the notorious counterexample of whatever we decide goes on in Juvenal’s racy Sixth Satire, which she knowingly critiques as both ‘artificial & inconsistent’.59 The sexuality she justifies is, in sharp contrast, both ‘the effect of nature’ and also ‘always consistent with itself’. Across these passages, nature rarely appears without its companion gloss, self-consistency. Natura propositi tenax.
A third conversation extends from Lister’s meeting Maria Barlow in Paris in 1824 to their becoming lovers, giving another sustained meditation on ‘the thing’. The same marks of argumentation and off-setting distinction recur. Lister takes up a ‘vindicating style of conversation respecting myself’. She explains: ‘Said how it was all nature. Had it not been genuine the thing would have been different.’ Lister amplifies the earlier distinction between her own, authorised natural ‘ways’ and artificial or bookish ones. Here we find her disclaimer of ‘Saffic regard’ or ‘Sapphic love’ (glossed as the use of sexual devices) on the grounds that ‘there was artifice in it. It was very different from mine.’60 By 1832, as Lister faced new challenges wooing Ann Walker, she writes of these naturalising arguments as long settled. Countering Walker’s fear that the legal jeopardy male lovers would face implied that their connection too was wrong, Lister ‘appealed to her reason & put my arguments on the basis of religion’. She records what is by now shorthand for earlier arguments: ‘I answered this in my usual way: it was my natural & undeviating feeling etc etc.’61
Appealed to her reason? On the basis of religion? Etc etc? Across these textual cruxes, Lister’s queer naturalisation of her ‘oddity’ draws on traditional intellectual resources to make a boldly original case for Nature’s backing. At the same time, she sets a rigorous, even unforgiving, standard for the natural ‘thing’. Both sexual artifice and inconsistency in sexual object choice stray from Nature into a zone she has no care to defend. Nature, as an inclination, a bent or a turn – instilled from birth and ‘not put on’ – is righteous, even ethical.62 The Listerian path is not straight, but it is still narrow because it unfolds, ultimately, as an ethical construction. To round out this account of the intellectual resources Lister taps to justify her ways, we must add one more thread: the ethical tradition of Stoicism.
Whether drawn from Zeno, Epictetus, Diogenes, Horace or Cicero, the Stoic ethos appears in aphoristic maxims strewn across print and manuscript culture – in Greek, Latin and English garb. As Nicholas White describes, ‘from the Renaissance until well into the nineteenth century, Stoic ethical thought was one of the most important ancient influences on European ethics’, especially due to ‘the effect it had had in antiquity, and continued to have into the nineteenth century, on Christian ethic[s]’.63 Stoic ideas infused discourses of consolation, its doctrines proposing that the ethical life and the happy one converge in a life lived ‘according to’ or ‘in agreement with nature’. Let nature take its course; keep to Nature as your guide. Equipoise reigns between release and restraint. Lister herself highlighted a major locus classicus for this principle, inscribing it on the flyleaf of one of her volumes. Quoting Horace’s aphorism (likely from memory, since it is good Latin but not exact), she writes: ‘naturam expellas furcâ, licet usque recurret’. In more fulsome English, it exclaims, ‘Go ahead! Drive nature out with a pitchfork if you want to try, it will always rush back in.’64 This nature is the same inextinguishable inclination, instinct, bent, genius, penchant, bias, or turn inscribed in bodies across the creationist traditions of natural history and theology.
In Shakespeare’s phrasing of the inscription process, ‘Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting’. Lister’s friend Eliza Priestley accounts for Anne’s ‘oddity’ in exactly this way. ‘Speaking of my oddity, Mrs Priestley said she always told people I was a natural, but she thought nature was in an odd freak when she made me.’65 In addition to taking ‘oddity’ as natural and making Nature its artist-creator, two further points stand out in both cases. First, Nature’s creatures are not the only place where ‘oddity’ unfurls its flag; that ‘odd’ old girl Nature herself possesses it, as one of her freedoms, moods, or powers. Queerness is no exclusively human prerogative. Nature was in ‘an odd freak’, but Lister is not a ‘freak of nature’. Second, questions were openly asked in Lister’s environment, but (more surprisingly) not only Anne Lister, but even Mrs Priestley has an answer. When she records the answer Mrs Priestley says she ‘always’ gives to others who ask, Lister recounts: ‘I looked significantly & replied the remark was fair & just & true.’ The extraordinary passage records what Anne Lister herself experienced as recognition, what she herself judges a ‘fair & just & true’ representation.
In the process of setting her creatures off with their odd scripts, where might we say Nature inscribes the ‘bias’? Lister ‘had thought much, studied anatomy, etc’, but she drew a confident conclusion: ‘No exterior formation accounted for it’; instead, ‘It was all the effect of the mind.’66 My penultimate example of Lister’s thought addresses the mind as the place where ‘oddity’ resides. In her journal’s priceless treasury of women’s engagements, Lister not only records live conversation, but often copies letters sent and received. In 1824, she transcribes a dialogue of letters with Sibbella Maclean, a much-understudied Scottish friend and lover whose poor health and Hebridean remoteness foreclosed one possible future for Lister.67
We find Maclean summoning the idea of Nature’s bias to comprehend Anne and sending it back to her. Anne’s ardent admiration had led Sibbella, who seems to have felt undeserving, to call Anne ‘romantic’, to which Anne objected. At a pivotal moment, Lister recounts ‘Finished reading my letter by this morning’s post from Miss Maclean … she is sorry she called me romantic.’ Lister transcribes Maclean’s apology:
I shall never do so again, & am sorry I did so – I am convinced what you write, and how you will ever act is from the natural bias of your mind – I can assure you I thought not of affectation, or applying to you romance in the common acceptation of the word – your mind is not formed in the ordinary mould.68
Maclean repudiates the charge of affectation Lister heard in ‘romantic’, disclaiming artifice by invoking the larger discourse of Nature under discussion here. Assessing Lister by the mind and echoing Rousseau’s idea of Nature throwing away ‘the mould that made me’, Maclean affirms that Lister writes and acts – and ‘will ever act’ – both with constancy and in accord with ‘the natural bias of [her] mind’. In this friendly terminological negotiation, we find (once again) Nature conjured as the authorising figure.
What are the consequences, then, of Anne Lister’s queerly traditional claims on Nature to justify her ‘oddity’? For one thing, she defies the grip of charges against ‘unnatural’ behaviour. The charge goes back to Romans 1:26, about women abandoning ‘the natural use for what is against nature’, a passage with which she was highly conversant.69 In later historical circumstances, fin-de-siècle and modern writers like Oscar Wilde and Vita Sackville-West would have their reasons to embrace this language, articulating homosexuality against nature. Lister instead outflanks the narrow biblical charge, reversing Pauline condemnation to insist on the wider theological perspective in which Nature is on her side. Rather than seeing herself turning from Nature or violating its laws, she claims exactly the opposite. She and her method too are ‘odd’, surely, and ‘queer’ in all the senses – but not ‘deviant’. She is supposed to be here – as such, and as-is; she is, in other words, ‘a regular oddity’.
‘When we leave nature, we leave our only steady guide, and from that moment become inconsistent with ourselves.’70 Wresting this impeccable maxim from the pedigreed resources of the past, Lister reads that tradition queerly – which ironically includes taking it literally. Nothing in that archive prepares us to think it includes ‘a capital grubbling’ or ‘right middle finger up queer’, as she writes with such indelible economy. But with this argument, she dares natural history, theology, and philosophy – on their own terms – to say otherwise. A second consequence of Lister’s end-run on her own time, then, is a revised sense of ours as somehow the crowning goal of some less perfect past. Walking alongside Anne Lister as she thinks her way up the mountain of a nineteenth-century life offers an ethical resource to us, as we clamber about in the twenty-first. Consider what she knew about surviving. Contemplating her bold experiment in queer traditionality, we moderns might hope to catch up with her fluency in the everyday work it takes to live ‘undaunted’. If Anne Lister posed ‘an enigma even to [her]self’, as she mused in a letter to Sibbella, we should also pause to note that she seems to have solved it.71
In October 1814, when she was twenty-two, Anne Lister wrote ‘clytoris’ on a scrap of paper.1 But she did not find the clitoris ‘distinctly for the first time’ until 1831, when she was forty.2 Why did it take so long? She had clearly been experiencing pleasure through the clitoris and giving pleasure to other women. She attended lectures in Paris on anatomy and read many medical texts. Yet until 1831, when she tried to find the clitoris on her own and her lovers’ bodies, she seems to have confused the cervix with the clitoris.
Where could she find information about the clitoris and how did she interpret it? Famously, anatomist Renaldo Columbus claimed to discover the clitoris in 1559, and declared it was the seat of women’s pleasure. Furthermore, popular anatomy books asserted that women could not conceive without an orgasm, so as the source of women’s pleasure, the clitoris was rather important. At the same time, popular anatomists traditionally regarded the vagina as analogous to the penis, which made things somewhat confusing. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, historian Thomas Laqueur argues, scientists began to understand that female orgasm was not necessary for conception; thus, the clitoris became less important, and some medical texts began to leave it out.3 Other historians have criticised this chronology as too simple. Recently, Alison M. Moore has argued that in fact nineteenth-century medical texts did include the clitoris.4 However, aside from Laqueur, these recent articles skip from the seventeenth and early eighteenth century to the 1840s, leaving out the early nineteenth century, Anne’s time. By looking at Anne’s reading about the clitoris, we can illuminate the debate about what nineteenth-century people could know about the clitoris and when they knew it.
Anne’s diaries reveal that it was not enough for a medical or popular book simply to mention the clitoris. Anatomy could be difficult to understand: even medical experts could find it hard to understand the anatomist Vesalius’s text and images.5 Studies focus on what medical experts wrote and thought, not how women themselves interpreted them. If such an erudite and sexually experienced woman had such difficulty accurately finding it on her own body, other women would face even greater confusion. Lister’s diaries provide a rare opportunity to examine a woman’s detailed exploration of her own body and of anatomy texts, therefore contributing to the historiography about how people understood their own bodies and interacted with popular and official medical knowledge.6 A few historians have shown that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century people read popular medical tracts and learned about folk medicine, and the literate middle class also had access to books about anatomy and even venereal disease in circulating libraries.7 With Anne’s diaries, we can trace how she understood anatomy in detail. Conveniently, Anne noted each book and article she read, so that we can track where she found certain words and concepts.8
Because these texts often buried the clitoris in confusing and abstruse detail, Anne practised ‘queer reading’ to interpret them. In other writings, I use this term to explain how she found obscure references to sex between women, researched them down the rabbit hole of commentaries and used them for her own ends.9 She also had to ignore negative depictions of women who had sex with each other. I have previously written about how she read deeply in Latin classical works that scornfully depicted women who had sex with each other as ‘tribades’. Similarly, she loved the Romantic poet Byron, famed as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’, and emulated his libertine persona to create a sense of self as a romantic hero, even though she denounced him as improper to her acquaintances.10 In this chapter, I will argue that she read anatomy books in a similarly queer way, disregarding condemnations and warnings to find sexual information fascinating and arousing.
For instance, Anne also ‘queerly’ read Onania, Samuel Tissot’s anti-masturbation tract.11 Lister had decried her own masturbatory practice (indicated as a cross in the margin of her diary) as ‘self-pollution’, as ‘shameful’ and a ‘vile habit’. Yet she never stopped masturbating, and after 1825, she no longer expressed guilt about it.12 Like many such tracts, Onania titillated in condemning by conveying information about sex, even sex between women. Although Anne only lists reading up to page 102 in Onania, further in the book the author reprints a letter supposedly from another woman who recounts how she learned pleasure with other girls in boarding schools. The book also mentions anatomist Regnier de Graaf’s theories that some women have enlarged clitorises that they use with other women.13
Two years later, Anne discussed the ‘sin of Onan’ with Mrs Barlow, her sexually experienced lover in Paris. Anne generally kept her queer reading interpretations very private: in conversations with others, she did not directly discuss sex; instead, she hinted obliquely until the other woman had implicated herself with her own knowledge. To get the sexually experienced widow Mrs Barlow to admit first to her own knowledge of female desire, Anne then ‘made her believe how innocent I was all things considered’, until Mrs Barlow implicated herself by saying she thought there was ‘little harm’ in such things. Mrs Barlow then showed Anne a French book, Voyage à Plombières, which contains a brief and oblique condemnation of lesbian eroticism. Then, she was able to discuss with Mrs Barlow that the sin of Onan – spilling his seed or semen on the ground to avoid conceiving a child with his brother’s widow – was how French husbands themselves avoided conceiving. Onania also mentioned the biblical condemnation in Romans 1:26–27 (KJV) that ‘even their women changed the natural use into that which is against nature’, implying this meant sex with each other. She and Mrs Barlow creatively decided that this meant women having sex with men contrary to nature (anal sex), and that the passage did not apply to women having sex with each other.14
Anne developed a secret language and code to record her sexual encounters both solitary and social. While she shared her code with a very few lovers, her sexual symbols seem to have been secret. Transcribers Steph Galloway and Livia Labate have also identified Anne’s sexual vocabulary and the symbols for her sexual practices she noted in the margins of her daily entries (which Anne sometimes defined in her journals).15 During her teenage relationship with Eliza Raine, Anne noted ‘felix’ (Latin for happy) in her diaries, apparently when they had sexual encounters – and also when she masturbated, for she noted ‘felix’ in her journal when Eliza was not there.16 In her diaries, she wrote when she gave or received a ‘kiss’, using the word in 1816 if not earlier.17 While she uses the word, as we would, simply to mean a kiss, it is very clear that this also meant a genital sexual encounter, perhaps deriving from the French baiser, which could mean kiss or sexual intercourse.18 But it might also mean an orgasm: for instance, in 1817 she wrote ‘[Mariana] had a very good kiss last night mine was not quite so good but I had a very nice one this morning’.19 Her lovers also gave her a kiss when they ‘got close’ or pressed together. She also used the more technical term vagina in the medical context.20
Anne seems to have worked on developing this sexual vocabulary even more intensively between 1818 and 1820, when she became embroiled with several lovers around the same time (sometimes on the same day). It is possible that some of these words were shared, and then these young women were aware amongst each other about the possibility of mutual sexual pleasure. For instance, Eliza Belcombe, Mariana Belcombe’s sister, claimed she saw Anne lick Mariana’s neck and that another girl grabbed her in bed at night, and alluded knowingly to ‘using the fingers’. But Anne disapproved of this open conversation.21 Instead, she seems to have preferred to invent or modify her own terms. She used ‘queer’ or ‘quere’ as her term for the female genitals, perhaps derived from ‘quim’, a slang term for them. She first used this term when she initiated sex with Miss Vallance in October 1818.22 In her diaries, she described how she ‘grubbled’ women, reaching up under their petticoats and stroking and penetrating them with her fingers (she specified which finger she used); to grubble is defined in Johnson’s dictionary as ‘to feel in the dark, as in Dryden’, and was used in Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s Art of Love, as ‘to grubble, or at least to kiss’. It also meant ‘grope’ in earlier times, and perhaps later in northern parts such as Scotland.23 Anne Lister first used this term on 19 October 1820, at a time when she was engaged in fervid sexual exploration with several women, and also when she had begun reading in the classics, such as Juvenal, to find obscure Latin references to sex between women.24
Anne’s particular spelling of ‘clytoris’ also provided a clue that she found anatomical information in Aristotle’s Masterpiece. This particular spelling of clitoris was found most often in some editions of the work, and in 1817, 1819, 1820 and 1821, her journal mentions reading it.25 Aristotle’s Masterpiece, a popular sex guide printed on cheap paper and sold by pedlars in several versions, was not an academic treatise but a compendium of many sources that often contradicted each other, as Mary Fissell has found.26 It is impossible to note exactly which edition of many it was that Anne read, but I have cited a 1717 version of Aristotle’s Masterpiece that contains this spelling of ‘clytoris’ and mentions other points cited by Anne. Like Onania and other popular medical and erotic literature, it intentionally had to be read against the grain: for instance, the introduction links ‘the mutual delight [men and women] take in the act of Copulation’ to the wonders of generation, and apologises that this information might ‘stir up their Bestial Appetites, yet such may know, this was never intended for them’, but only to help married couples procreate. Of course, not only married couples read it: Anne obtained her copy from her aunt, who had seized it from a maid.
Aristotle’s Masterpiece did not have illustrations depicting the location of the clitoris, and it described female anatomy in three rather confusing instances. First, just after a paragraph on the nymphaea, or labia, the ‘clytoris’ is described as the ‘seat of venereal pleasure’, and as ‘like a yard [in] Situation, Substance, Composition and Erection, growing sometimes out of the Body two Inches, but that never happens unless thro’ extream Lust, or extraordinary Accidents’. In another chapter, it compares the clitoris to the penis, claiming its ‘outer end’ is like the penis or glans in men. In the third instance, the work describes the ‘neck’ of the womb, and goes on to say, ‘near unto the Neck there is a prominent Pinnacle, which is called of Montanus, the Door of the Womb, because it preserveth the Matrix from Cold and Dust. Of the Grecians it is called Clytoris, of the Latins Proputium Muliebre [penis muliebre], because the Jewish Women did abuse this Part of their own mutual Lusts, as St Paul speaks Rom. 1:26.’ The Masterpiece also referred to the theory that women’s genitals were like men’s but turned inside out, so that by extension, the penis resembled the vagina. Of course, this is very confusing if the clitoris is also analogous to the penis, but this may explain why Anne thought that the clitoris was located in the vagina.27 Aristotle’s Masterpiece does not define the cervix, so it is possible that Anne thought that this fleshy knob in the vagina was the clitoris, or the door of the womb.
It may be that the overall frame of thinking about sex during her time, as well as in the Latin authors she read, was still so phallic and focused on penetration that it shaped her assumptions about sex. Anne came of age during the Regency period, when prudishness competed with public sexual jokes, and the upper-middle class and gentry people with whom she socialised often told erotic jokes. Anne herself often disapproved of such public ‘indecency’ of men and even the ‘gross language’ of female friends, but she also regaled female lovers with wild sexual tales. Although Mr Empson kept ‘indecent’ books in his drawer, his wife did not understand the joke Anne told her about the Wexford oyster as ‘rough without, moist within, and hard to enter’. This was a joke from Yorick’s Jests, a collection of mildly smutty and highly phallic bon mots.28
In her diaries, we can see how Anne did not clearly understand the location of the clitoris. In 1820, she mentions the clitoris – spelled ‘clytoris’ – to her lover Miss Vallance. Miss Vallance recounted that a doctor told her that ‘something came too low down and blocked the passage’, and she feared she should not marry as ‘she could not bear much and could never make anyone happy’. In response, Anne told her ‘the clytoris had slipped down too low from illness anxiety etc’.29 This resembles the discussion in Aristotle’s Masterpiece of the ‘dropping of the mother’, or when the cervix and uterus sag into the vagina, what is now called a prolapsed uterus.30 Anne seems to have been confusing the clitoris with the cervix. She also noted in her code that she was able to feel Miss Vallance’s ‘stones of ovaria’ with her fingers.31
Anne continued these explorations with Mrs Barlow in Paris. She penetrated Mrs Barlow and reported that this enabled her to feel ‘her clitoris all the way up just like an internal penis’. But Anne herself did not like anything ‘inside her’; although she tried to find her own internal clitoris, she said it hurt and did not give pleasure, and with other women, it made her feel too much like a woman.32 Instead, she decided to ‘incur’ a cross in her ‘old way by rubbing the top of the queer’ – no doubt the clitoris.33 In 1821, she tried penetrating herself with a finger after managing to use a uterine syringe, but mentioned, ‘anything of this sort would never give me pleasure or a kiss the latter is produced on the surface’.34
Aristotle’s Masterpiece and Anne’s studies in anatomy can also illuminate the wider debate about Anne’s masculinity and whether she should be seen as a potentially trans subject. As Laqueur writes, popular anatomy often depicted the vagina as like a penis turned inside out, by implication comparable in substance and function, and possibly able to turn outside in. While texts sometimes told stories of boys who turned into girls or vice versa, this does not mean that early modern people saw gender as easily fluid or reversible.35 For instance, Aristotle’s Masterpiece presented a debate between ancient Greek physicians about this. Galen is quoted as saying that a man
is different from a woman in nothing else, but having his genital members without his body, whereas å woman has them within. And this is certain, that if nature, having formed a male, should convert him into a female, she hath no other task to perform, but to turn his genital members inward, and so to turn a woman into a man by the contrary operation.36
The Masterpiece states, however, that Galen’s model refers to possible gender confusion in the womb, when an imbalance of humours might make a boy become effeminate and shrill, or a girl too strong and masculine, rather than to allow a total transformation. Yet the text quotes Severus Plineus as regarding men’s and women’s genitals as utterly different, and states that apparent transformations of girls into boys and vice versa were merely cases of mistaken identity, of boys with very small penises who were mistaken for females or females with ‘overfar extension of the Clytoris’.37
Unfazed, Anne took from Aristotle’s Masterpiece the possibility that the clitoris could grow larger. She discussed with Mrs Barlow whether her attraction to women was based on her own anatomy. She declared that this attraction was ‘all nature’: ‘I had thought much, studied anatomy, etc. Could not find it out. Could not understand myself. It was all the effect of the mind. No exterior formation accounted for it.’ Evoking Aristotle’s Masterpiece quoted above on women’s genitals as like men’s turned inside out, she ‘alluded to there being an internal correspondence or likeness of some of the male or female organs of generation’. Mrs Barlow even tried ‘To examine if I [Anne] was made quite like her but she merely observed that Anne had smaller breasts and narrow hips’. Anne also noted that rumours had spread that her physician thought there was a ‘small difference between my form and that of women in general’. She made a parallel between men with undescended testicles and the possibility that she had something internal, alluding ‘to the stones not slipping thro’ the ring till after birth, etc’.38 This most closely resembles the discussion of the development of the foetus in Blumenbach’s 1817 work on anatomy;39 Lister later visited him in Germany. But she may have also learned it from Guillaume Dupuytren, a famed French physician whom she visited for treatment for her presumed venereal disease, who explained to her that men with only one testicle had the other one undescended in the abdomen. She had been asking questions about Charles Lawton, husband of her lover Mariana.
Instead of becoming a man, Anne hoped that she could enlarge her clitoris and therefore ‘copulate with women’. In 1825 she mused to Mrs Barlow: ‘I felt as if something might come farther out and that perhaps if I had an operation performed I might have a little thing – half an inch would be convenient. It would enable me to have my drawers made differently – that is to make water more conveniently.’ She allowed Mrs Barlow to imagine that her doctor, Mr Simmons, had said this was possible.40 A few months later, she wrote in her diary that she ‘began putting up my left middle finger to bring down the clitoris, wishing it come so as to be able to copulate with women’.41 Around the same time, she worried that ‘I cannot do enough for Mrs B[arlow]. I cannot give her pleasure in any way but with my finger, and this does not suit. If I had a penis an inch or two long, or the clitoris down far enough I could manage.’ Mrs Barlow never expressed any discontent about this, and in fact said that she had more pleasure with Anne than with men.42
More reputable sources than Aristotle’s Masterpiece did not prevent Anne from confusing the cervix and the clitoris. In 1821 she read Cheselden’s Anatomy on the genital parts of men and women; it described the clitoris as the ‘chief seat of pleasure’ for women in coition, as the glans is in men. Anatomically, Cheselden described the clitoris as a ‘small spongy body, bearing some analogy to the penis in men’. But the description of its place is highly technical, stating ‘it begins with two crura from the ossa ischia’: although he does mention that this ‘proceeds to the upper part of the nymphaea’, this text did not help Anne understand the location of the clitoris.43
With both Mariana and Mrs Barlow, she tried to reach the ‘orifice of the womb’, but it is unclear whether she meant the hymen or cervix.44 She was intent on ‘devirginating’ Mariana, or breaking her hymen, in a way to triumph over Charles, her husband, who had not been able to accomplish the act. In 1825, she penetrated Mariana with her finger and was surprised to find no entrance into the womb; she did not understand, therefore, the nature of the tightly closed cervix. At other times, Mrs Barlow complained that Anne pressed so far against the ‘orifice of the womb’ that it was painful.45
The theory of male and female seed also fascinated Anne, who was very aware of female wetness during sex. To Mrs Barlow, she said, ‘in copulation I always used my finger to keep the parts open so that I could give them what came from me’.46 She and Mrs Barlow speculated what it would be like if Anne had a penis: ‘she said I must excuse her saying so but she thought if I had a little one meaning a penis what I emitted was not good enough to beget children it was too thin not glutinous enough to which I agreed’.47 One night in 1834, her partner, Ann Walker, complained, ‘I gave her no dinky dinky that is seminal flow.’48 This is interesting because it referred to debates about generation at the time. Earlier anatomy books, and especially popular works, debated whether the male or female fluids contained the seed that formed the embryo. By the 1820s new anatomical studies were proving the latter theory wrong; however, their work was still hotly contested.49
Anne also read widely to try to find more sophisticated and scientific understandings of anatomy than Aristotle’s Masterpiece. This was not just because she was searching for the clitoris: she was intensely interested in the body and in the medical treatment of her relatives, and followed the symptoms of her ailing aunt and uncle very closely. Although she never published anything, she was insatiably curious about science and pursued a systematic course of reading and lectures. As early as 1819 she wrote to the famed anatomist Cuvier and asked if she could study with him in Paris.50 By the 1820s, she was also very concerned that she had contracted venereal disease from her great love, Mariana, who in turn had contracted it from her husband, Charles Lawton. While this may have been simply thrush or another similar infection, Anne sought out experts, such as Guillaume Dupuytren, for treatment, including mercury.
In 1824 Anne asked local doctors in Yorkshire what she should read about, and they recommended Andrew Fyfe’s Anatomy and John Bostock’s Physiology.51 In contrast to the centuries-old Aristotle’s Masterpiece, and earlier more scientific anatomists, these newer books often ignored or slighted the clitoris. For earlier anatomists, the clitoris was interesting because its erectile tissue was similar to that of the penis. As Laqueur points out, the change in the understanding of fertilisation meant that the clitoris became less important, and also once the idea of female seed was discredited, then female sexual pleasure was also less significant.52 Fyfe’s Anatomy focused on the process of generation and buried the clitoris in a paragraph about the labia, noting that it produced the same sensation as the penis but without referring to pleasure. Unlike Aristotle’s Masterpiece, Fyfe began his description with the uterus, for he saw it as more important in the process of conception and birth. He also described the cervix in a way that might confuse it with the clitoris, which in other works was often compared to the penis. Fyfe claims ‘the under part of the Cervix projects into the Vagina, somewhat in form of the Glans Penis’.53 Similarly, while Alexander Monro, whom Anne read, mentions the clitoris in highly technical terms, he describes the womb and vagina first, and only mentions the function of the clitoris as ‘sensibility’.54 Bostock was up on the latest science. Trained in Edinburgh, he became fascinated by the chemical functions of the human body and trained in chemistry as well as medicine.55 Bostock was a physiologist, which meant that he was concerned with the mechanical, that is muscular or contractile, and nervous functions of the body, rather than simply describing anatomy. Although Bostock presented the debates about generation in detail, he was not concerned with sexual pleasure; he did not mention the clitoris.56
By 1828 Anne returned to Paris to attend lectures on anatomy, as well as botany, geology, zoology and mineralogy. In 1829–31 she wrote, ‘Surely my taste is decidedly for anatomy tho’ every part of science gives me so much pleasure I have always had difficulty in choosing that which seemed really to suit my natural inclination best.’57 Her studies also provided a welcome distraction from her romantic entanglements with three women, and she wrote, ‘What is there like gaining Knowledge? all else here below is indeed but vanity and vexation of spirit – I am happy among my books.’58
She purchased a skeleton for her rooms, and even dissected human body parts and foetuses, employing a medical student to teach her. Dissecting a human hand first made her feel ‘very queerish … somehow the cutting at a hand so like one’s own’.59 Studying anatomy was not something she could publicly discuss; she kept this information from Mariana, and when she told Vere Hobart, a prospective lover, Vere remarked ‘what pleasure you will have some time in dissecting me I merely said oh no even if I felt it a duty to have her opened I should not could not be there to see no one dissected those they had loved or had even much known’.60 In Britain dissections offended the devout, and only murderers could be legally anatomised. As a result, anatomists employed body-snatchers to find corpses to provide material for them,61 leading to several murders in Edinburgh, the infamous ‘burking’ of which Anne was well aware.62 In 1834, she noted that the people of Hull were ‘threatening to pull [the museum’s public dissecting rooms] down’.63 In contrast, since the Revolution, French doctors could dissect the bodies of diseased patients in charity hospitals.64 As Foucault points out, doctors thus exerted power over the bodies of the poor, who had to submit to become ‘spectacles’ in order to receive treatment.65
Anne enjoyed the intellectual and social ferment of early nineteenth-century Paris, where ladies attended scientific and medical lectures, in part to learn, and in part as a form of entertainment. She was omnivorously curious, attending lectures on botany, geology, chemistry, comparative animal anatomy and human anatomy. She was able to meet eminent lecturers such as Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier, and even socialised with Cuvier’s wife and daughter. As Outram writes, the household and the natural history museum had porous boundaries. These eminent men often disagreed with each other fundamentally on the way to approach the examination of human and animal bodies, whether to follow form or function, similarities or differences on the surface or deep in the body.66 Anne was interested in much more than her own body, but she certainly mentioned lectures that touched on ‘generation’ or reproduction, even among molluscs.67
Studying anatomy in Paris exposed Anne even more to new approaches to anatomy and physiology.68 The older anatomy was interested in surveying and categorising all the organs of the body in a taxonomy, but the Paris School of Medicine focused on the functions of the tissues of the body.69 Bichat, who pioneered this approach, identified the different types of tissues that could be found across the body in various organs, so he would look beyond the individual organ to see its components. He also focused on the function of these tissues in terms of ‘contractability and sensibility’ that tied together the functions of the system of the body; furthermore, he organised his anatomy in terms of a ‘hierarchy’ of these systems.70 Paris anatomists did mention the clitoris, but these new ways of thinking about the body meant they sometimes downplayed it. Bichat describes the clitoris and notes the similarity in the tissue between the clitoris and the penis, with its corpus caverneaux, but in this he is echoing longstanding anatomical tradition. He noted that unlike the male genitals, which could be analysed ‘according to the principal phenomena of the function which they exercise; those of the woman do not lend themselves to this distribution’.71 Although Anne took out Bichat’s book from the circulating library and returned it, she does not mention any findings from it.72 She did read the works of his associates Pierre-Hubert Nysten, Pierre Béclard, and the brothers Hippolyte and Jules Cloquet.73
Even when she read these advanced anatomists, the necessary information was hard to find and decipher: it took a year and a half. Today, we can just look in the index or Google search a term, as I have done in this research. But French books had their tables of contents at the back and did not index them. Anne tended to read through books systematically, noting which pages she read each day, so it took some time to get to the end of the book – and to find information about female sexual organs, which even then was not entirely clear.
First, Anne found Nysten’s dictionary of medicine to be useful – and stimulating. In February 1830 she wrote in code, ‘Reading anatomy from 12 to 1 50/60. Chiefly dictionary, clitoris, etc., & at last, in trying if I had much of one, incurred a cross on my chair.’74 Nysten described the clitoris as something which is often touched, ‘titiller’, at the ‘partie superiore de la vulve’, composed of erectile tissue and analogous to the penis. However, this meant the ‘top’ or upper part of the vulva, so that Anne might have confused it with the top of the vagina.75
She then read Béclard, who followed Bichat’s discipline in emphasising function; instead of presenting his book as a visual tour through anatomy, he organised it by tracing the function of bodily fluids: ‘The human body, like all organised bodies, is composed of solid parts and of fluids, which have a similar composition, and continually change into each other.’ Furthermore, he also delineated sensations such as irritability that produce motion. Generation was another function produced by irritability: ‘the sensations and voluntary motions which accompany it, the motions of irritation, the phenomena of the secretion of the spermatic fluid and the formation of the ovula, those of the nutrition and grow the fecundated egg, are all seen to be more or less directly subject to the nervous action’. Béclard mentioned the clitoris, but it is buried in the text of a chapter on ‘Erectile tissue’ and its function and sensation are not described.76
Anne finally made the discovery in reading the works of the Cloquet brothers, but it took from June 1829, when she bought Hippolyte Cloquet’s Traité d’anatomie, to February 1831.77 Hippolyte Cloquet’s book was all text, and to identify the organs Anne had to purchase or obtain the very expensive plates of his brother Jules’s anatomy books. First, she had to plough through Hippolyte Cloquet’s dry prose about the heart and the brain; on 6 March 1830 she read on the urinary tract, and on 13 March 1830, she started reading a bit on the organs of generation, but soon nodded off.78 Hippolyte Cloquet, as usual, described the clitoris as resembling the penis because they were both composed of erectile tissue; he also noted that, like the penis, the corpus cavernus behind the clitoris had ‘an extraordinary number of blood vessels and nerves’. But these lists of anatomical parts did not help Anne conceptualise the location of the clitoris. She did borrow and eventually buy Jules Cloquet’s expensive book of plates, but it put her to sleep when she started to read it on 8 May 1830.79
It took another year for Anne to make the final discovery. On 25 January and 1 February, the comparative anatomist Cuvier lectured on the process of reproduction, including ‘the hymen uterus menstrual discharge and penis’, and she noted that half a dozen ladies, plus Cuvier’s wife and daughter, attended, undeterred by the topic.80 In his later published lectures, Cuvier described the vagina as analogous to the penis only in that it was made to receive the liquor of ‘fecundation’. However, like the anatomists, he mentions the clitoris briefly and as an afterthought. He states that it has ‘erectile tissue’ somewhat analogous to the penis, and that it was exquisitely ‘sensible’, but this is not related directly to sexual pleasure, unlike earlier anatomical descriptions.81
Anne decided to buy Jules Cloquet’s book for herself on 27 January. At the same time, she bought Sarlandière’s anatomy book.82 Finally, on 17 February 1831, she wrote that she fell asleep reading Cloquet, and then incurred a cross, noting, ‘it was from studying the female [parts of] generation and finding out distinctly for the first time in my life the clitoris’. 83 Anne must have put together the description in Hippolyte Cloquet’s written text with the plates in Jules Cloquet’s Anatomy.84 To figure it out, she would have to look at each plate, and go back to the description of the plates to find out which organ each number corresponded to. Since the clitoris was so small, not all the plates made this very obvious. But one side view did make it quite clear; the clitoris appears as a little protrusion from the nymphae, but it is quite distinct. The same day, she also read more in Sarlandière, who described the clitoris and the external organs as ‘organe de l’appétit vénérien de la femme’, separately categorising the vagina and the uterus. A plate on the previous page clearly labelled them. The organs of digestion are on the same page.
Figure 3 Manuel d’anatomie descriptive du corps humain: représentée en planches lithographiées by Jules Cloquet.
In reading these texts, Anne also had to contend with the fact that Parisian sources tended to link the clitoris negatively with sex between women. Bichat began his discussion of the clitoris by disapprovingly mentioning the problem of women with enlarged clitorises who engage in ‘vicious’ practices and become too masculine and lascivious.85 In his dictionary, Nysten noted that a M. Fournier had invented the word ‘clitorisme’ to diagnose those women with enlarged clitorises who ‘abused’ other women with them.86 If Anne had investigated this definition further, she could have found an entry in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1813) that presented titillation of the clitoris in highly negative terms as leading to ‘bizarre tastes’ for relations between women, such as that indulged by Sappho, which would distract from the natural relations between women and lead to ‘bitter feelings’; it also led to excessive masturbation.87 Anne had to read such texts with all the tools of queer reading to take the information she needed without feeling as if she were tainted by such perversity.
Anne also read cultural and anthropological works that took a negative approach to women’s anatomy. For example, she read J.-J. Virey’s Histoire naturelle du genre humain and De la femme.88 Virey stressed that men and women were different in every way, and women were suited to the softer domestic world owing to their physiology. Anne did not take on Virey’s ideas about women’s soft and submissive nature; in fact, around the same time, she planned to write a book arguing that women of property deserved the vote. Virey mentioned the clitoris only in the context of puberty, and in more detail, in exotic and racialised tales of the so-called Hottentot Venus as well as oriental women with supposedly large clitorises.89 On 20 April, Anne read the very pages in which Virey mentioned the Hottentot Venus and the necessity in oriental countries of female circumcision for enlarged clitorises, and then spent half an hour in the closet touching her clitoris; the next day she tried to titillate it in order to enlarge it.90 Although Virey clearly meant accounts of enlarged clitorises to indicate racial difference and pathology, Anne found these accounts instead to be inspiring.
Virey probably learned of the Hottentot Venus from the pre-eminent anatomist Georges Cuvier. She was actually Sara Bartmann, a woman of KhoeKhoe heritage from South Africa, who had been taken first to London, then to Paris, to be exhibited on the stage as exotic. When she died, Cuvier obtained her body and dissected her, and then wrote a great deal about her supposedly elongated labia and clitoris, repeating these mentions in his book on anatomy that Anne read.91 He and other anatomists were pioneers of racist interpretations of human physiology.92 Anne also visited Johann Blumenbach in Germany, another scientist well-known for his racial theories.93 However, Anne seems to have simply ignored the racist implications of the anatomical works she was studying (although further transcriptions may reveal more of her opinions).94
What can Anne’s search for the clitoris tell us? This is a very unusual example of how a nineteenth-century person studied anatomy to understand her own body, and how it took so long for her, a well-educated and sexually experienced woman, to figure it out. On the one hand, she was so shaped by Aristotle’s Masterpiece and dominant phallic discourses that she was searching for the clitoris deep within her own and her lover’s vaginas. On the other hand, she used her tools of queer reading in searching for the clitoris, taking on negative depictions and turning them around – and getting turned on by them. At first, she thought she would find something about her own anatomy that was different, such as an enlarged clitoris, and that would explain why she was so attracted to women. But as she searched for the clitoris, she was also trying to find her lovers’ clitorises to give them pleasure, and to give herself pleasure; she saw herself as different from them, as masculine and usually not wanting to be touched, but also as similar, in sharing the same anatomy. For Anne, the search for the clitoris was part of her general tendency to study, document and control; she sought to explore her own body and those of her lovers in the same way as she mapped and controlled her land and her destiny, but the surrounding culture mapped sexual anatomy in a way that sometimes took her in a false direction.
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