Gentleman Jack: Revisiting Anne Lister

Lately, there’s been a lot of fanfare around Gentleman Jack, the HBO production that brings to life part of Anne Lister’s copious nineteenth-century diaries. I’m a little behind on the episodes, but I’ve seen the first two, and am looking forward to the rest. The show is smart, funny, with high production quality, and a certain tongue-in-cheek quality that gives it a fun campiness that is perfectly appropriate to the life story of one of British history’s queerest ladies.

Suranne Jones as Anne Lister (left) and Sophie Rundle as Ann Walker

              

  Yes, Anne Lister was a lesbian. And she wore an outfit that was rather masculine for the time period—though she did often wear skirts as well, in keeping with the time period and her class status. And I write about cross-dressing women in literature of the eighteenth century. So, needless to say, people keep telling me about Anne Lister and Gentleman Jack—and as I mentioned on Twitter: I am aware.

                I know that sounds snarky to say, but part of me bristles a bit at the idea that people who know my work would think that I had never heard of Lister. On the other hand, I understand that people who know my work are excited to finally have access to a pop culture artifact that relates to my research and, in general, their enthusiasm is awesome.

                Because the story of Anne Lister really is amazing and intriguing—and it changed much of the thinking about the history of sexuality. Sexuality has a history, and there are hundreds of scholars from many different disciplines, geographical areas, and time periods who are studying what sex meant in the past. My work on lesbian desire and female cross-dressing fits squarely into this area of study, as I’m interested in how women who dressed as men became an object of fascination for the reading public of the eighteenth century and, moreover, how such “butch” women appealed to “femme”/“straight” women in the past. Some women who wore men’s clothing did indeed actually live as men, and in studying them, we also trace the history of trans people; indeed, Lister’s gender nonconformity is an important aspect of who she (or he?) was.

                But going back to Anne Lister…Lister is an important figure because she changed the discussion around sexuality. Cultural historian Michel Foucault theorized that sexual orientation became a category of identification only with the rise of Sigmund Freud’s theories of sexuality and gender roles, as well as the writings of eminent sexologists of the late nineteenth century. Prior to the late nineteenth century (so the thinking goes), people did not think of themselves as straight, gay, bisexual, etc. Those terms did not exist or were not used in the same way as today, and, as such, many scholars in the past (and today) believe that those terms cannot be used effectively or accurately to discuss people in the past.

                The decoding of Lister’s secret diaries in the 1980s by Helena Whitbread changed all that. The juiciest, gossipy-est, and sexiest parts of Lister’s diary were written in a code invented by herself, and she details all her sexual exploits therein. Lister writes in her diary about being only attracted to women. Literary scholar Terry Castle discusses these segments of the diary as an important instance of a woman showing a sexual orientation that is self-aware and same-sex oriented. Castle’s arguments, along with those many others, challenged the Foucauldian ideas about when people began to have sexual identities in the modern sense. While my current research project on cross-dressing women doesn’t analyze Lister’s diaries, the scholarship that reacted to those diaries has informed my own scholarship in crucial ways.

                Lister’s story is definitely a complex one, and I’m not going to get into it here. Now that there is a splashy show about her, the articles about Lister have proliferated. Everyone from Marie Claire to The Atlantic wants to tell you about Lister, how the show portrays her, and in what ways the show is awesome and ground-breaking or how it“misses the mark” etc. From being a figure relegated to the shadows of history, a footnote, a topic of scholarly discussion, Lister is out in the open now (pun intended), and everyone has an opinion about her. Some discussions opening up are important—such as whether to Lister was, in fact, a lesbian, or whether she was a trans (straight) man. There is ample evidence in the diaries that Lister did not enjoy anything having to do with being feminine or womanly, she was a tomboy growing up, and as an adult she preferred men’s clothing. The line between butch lesbian and trans man is and probably shall remain blurred since we obviously can’t go back in time and ask Lister herself, but these discussions are important ones that should serve as reminders that LGBTQ identities have always existed—and will always exist. Other discussions about the show and its depiction are perhaps less interesting (The Atlantic wants to know why Lister is presented in such a positive light, for example, as if we need more sad queers on TV).

                In any case, if you do watch the show and enjoy it, I recommend you read a little more about Lister. Maybe check out Helena Whitbread’s amazing blog about decoding the diaries; or Jeanette Wintersen’s discussion of Lister; or buy the book for an amazing beach read this summer. Don’t let the show be your only source about this fascinating person. (Also: this isn’t the first time Lister’s story has been dramatized, though the Maxine Peak film is about a sadder time in Lister’s life--which I discuss in a previous blog post.)

                And, of course, if you want to know about the longer history of women who dressed in men’s clothing in Britain and British literature, make sure to keep an eye out for my book, Sapphic Crossings, when it comes out at the University of Virginia Press in the near-ish future.

Cross-Dressing Ladies: Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter

DARING: Give me thy hand, Widow, I am thine--and so entirely, I will never--be drunk out of thy company--Dunce is in my tent--prithee let's in and bind the bargain.
RANTER: Nay, faith, let's see the wars at an end first.
DARING: Nay, prithee, take me in the humour, while thy breeches are on--for I never liked thee half so well in petticoats.
RANTER: Lead on, General, you give me good encouragement to wear them.
--Act IV, Scene iii, Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter; or, the History of Bacon in Virginia

Behn’s tragicomedy The Widow Ranter was her last play, and it was produced posthumously, in 1689. At the time, it was not a success on the stage. The dedicatory letter with which it was published in 1690 complains that “the Play had not that Success which it deserv’d, and was expected by her Friends; The main fault ought to lye on those who had the management of it. Had our Authour been alive she would have Committed it to the Flames rather than have suffer’d it to have been Acted with such Omissions as was made."
   Recent scholarship has suggested that the mis-production of the play, or even the fact that it hit the stage at the time of Williamite-Jacobite War in Ireland, does not completely account for its lack of success. Adam Beach suggests instead that it is Behn’s overly positive portrayal of the New World and the colonies, rather than the standard negative view of them at the time, that doomed the play. We might attribute, however, still other reasons for the play’s failure in the theater: its confusing plot, its romanticization of monarchical authority, its mis-representation of the real history of Nathaniel Bacon in Virginia, or even its somewhat misleading title, as the Widow Ranter gets very little stage time. This last fact is quite a shame, actually, as the Widow is a fascinating character: a smoker and heavy drinker who curses, fights and, as the quote above indicates, cross-dresses during the course of the play.
    Female cross-dressing was par for the course on the Restoration stage--and throughout the eighteenth century in England. The change in laws in the 1650s that allowed for women to take the stage altered the dynamics of performance. The idea of putting female characters into men's clothes was nothing new; after all, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night or The Merchant of Venice are only two or many examples of Early Modern plays that relied on this premise. The change in the Restoration, however, of having actual women play these parts meant that the female body could now be displayed in the scanty dress of tight breeches and waistcoat rather than covered up with bulky petticoats and dresses. Thus, the breeches part became an important component of the stage culture in the long eighteenth century. Aphra Behn's play exploits this trend--and complicates it.

Ann Bracegirdle as Semernia.

   For, in addition to the Widow's cross-dressing, which, in many ways, is quite conventional (she cross-dresses as a soldier in order to go searching for the man she loves, Lieutenant-General Daring, during the dangerous, final battle of the play), the play also contain the cross-dressing of another woman--the New World Indian Queen, Semernia (a fictionalized version of a real-life Indian queen who lived in Virginia at the time of the rebellion). Semernia cross-dresses as an Indian warrior (though how she achieves this is left to modern-day reader's and dramatists' imaginations) during the latter half of the play as a disguise so that she and her followers can elude the English. She, like Ranter, is initially so well-disguised that no one, not even her lover, can recognize her, and when Bacon and his men come upon her, (spoiler--sorry!) Bacon wounds her mortally. 
   Behn sets up these two women as foils for one another. Ranter, though low-born and coarse, finds money and love in the colonies. Her cross-dressing serves the purpose of literalizing her manly ambitions and mannerisms, while also, as we might surmise by Daring's desire to wed her while she is still in breeches, showing off the actress's body to advantage on stage. The figure of Semernia, by contrast, suffers through her contact with the English and her ultimate fate stands in for the fate of most of the New World Indians in the 17th and 18th centuries. Cross-dressing becomes not only the way to make these women mirrors of each other, but also to question issues of gender normativity, race, class, and imperialism. 
    Thus, while many Restoration and eighteenth-century plays put actresses in breeches either in breeches roles or in travesty parts (where an actress would play a male role), Behn's is one of very few (perhaps the only?) to portray a woman of color cross-dressing. One of the play's central themes is that of identity, and while cross-dressing proves one avenue for changing or asserting one's identity, the conclusion seems to suggest that the clothes one wears can never truly change one's essence.

Ladies in Breeches: Hannah Snell

My primary research interest in the eighteenth century right now is the representation of cross-dressed women in the literature . One of my favorite characters is that of Hannah Snell, a real life female cross-dresser, whose story was written and published under the title, The Female Soldier, in 1747 in England.

One of the most popular images of Snell.

Hannah sailed the seas with the British marines, disguised as a man, and, according to her story (she was illiterate, so her story is told by a, seemingly male, narrator), her female sex was never discovered. Initially, she joins the army in order to find her husband, who abandoned her when she was pregnant. After she gives birth and her child dies, she decides to find him. She hears of his being pressed into service (this was common in the 18^th century as Britain waged many wars and conquests without the resource of a standing army; more about that when I discuss Peg Woffington and her turn as “The Female Volunteer” next week!) and decides to join up herself in search of him.

While on her travels, she sees the world, and eventually she fights at the Battle of Pondicherry, India, where she is wounded with a groin wound. She manages to escape being “discovered” by convincing a local woman (referred to in the text as a “Black,” though this designation applies to the Indians of India in the eighteenth-century) to give her some ointment for her wound.

As with many of the “passing women” of the eighteenth century, Hannah must prove herself with feats of strength—and flirtations with other women. She defends the honor of several women in port who may have otherwise fallen in with some of her fellow crewmen with evil intentions, and these women apparently find her version of masculinity quite appealing. 

A rather different image of Snell.

 

Upon her return, Hannah goes with her ship’s mates to the marine offices to prove that she indeed served aboard ship and to collect her pay—which she does, successfully. Afterwards, she appears in her uniform on stage at Sadler’s Wells, performing her military exercises for money.

While the text ends on a happy note, historians have found evidence that Snell eventually re-married (rather unhappily) and died alone and in poverty (not unusual for an interesting, independent woman of this period, unfortunately; the writer Aphra Behn also died in pain and in poverty despite penning many fantastic works of fiction, poetry and plays).

What I find fascinating about the actual text of Snell’s tale are the narrative contortions necessary to make Snell a virtuous woman but also a strong and valiant character. She’s good at disguising herself (lying to others), but it’s ok, because she’s doing it for a noble end. She’s deathly afraid of getting raped aboard ship, but she’s also one of the toughest and strongest crew members. Most interestingly for my research is the narrator’s insistence that we understand exactly how she passed despite being female-bodied. We never learn how she relieved herself aboard ship in front of fellow crew-members, or how she hid her monthly menses, but we get a blow by blow of how she dug out the bullet from her own groin at Pondicherry to avoid dealing with a surgeon. 

 

A less masculine version of Snell.

Similarly, when Snell is to be whipped shirtless in front of the company for disobeying orders, the narrator goes into detail about how she had small breasts, and how she wore a bandanna, and how she stood with her arms held up and facing the wall, so no one could tell she had breasts. Snell’s female-bodied-ness is central to the story, as it establishes the need to stay hidden, it illustrates how much she wishes to preserve her virtue, and it creates the central tension of the text. On the other hand, this need to keep her true sex hidden leads her to flirt with other women, women who, according to the text, seem to really, really like her. As a man. Or something. The ambiguity, the possibility of reading women like Snell from many different angles, is part of what makes the study of 18th-century female cross-dressers so fascinating.