[A version of this essay appeared in Gasbag, Issues 233 (Summer 2006) and 234 (Autumn 2006). Thanks are due to Dan Florip for permission to post this here.]
Let’s start with some quotations.
A.H. Godwin (1926): “Speaking generally, Gilbert drew his women-folk from two models only, and in real life their types are almost forgotten. You cannot escape from his simpering innocents or from his man-trapping spinsters…. Why is it that Gilbert, with his inventive fund of humour, so often makes a mock of those pitiable creatures [the “man-trapping spinsters”] who are, and sometimes plainly announce that they are, on the bargain-counters of marriage?… Lady Jane and Katisha are the best or the worst of those sorry examples. Lady Jane’s chase after Bunthorne is not edifying comedy, and the words put into her mouth are a trifle cheap….”[1]
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1929): “What disgusts one in Gilbert, from the beginning to the end, is his insistence on the physical odiousness of any woman growing old. As though, great Heaven! themselves did not find it tragic enough—the very and necessary tragedy of their lives! Gilbert shouts it, mocks it, apes with it, spits upon it.”[2]
Audrey Williamson (1982): “… Gilbert again cannot resist his gibes at the plain and ageing woman making a last bid for a husband (it seems unlikely that the fact that women sometimes remain unmarried by choice, rather than take ‘second best’, ever occurred to this strangely twisted mind….)”[3]
The issue of the way Gilbert portrayed middle-aged women in the operas has always been a vexed one: even Sullivan objected to it. It is one of the few things that “everyone knows” about Gilbert and Sullivan, and for many people it stands in the way of a proper enjoyment of the operas. The journalist Susannah Herbert wrote in the year 2000 about her attitude to the operas: “Women who love a good hum as well as the next man are presented with a dilemma…. Gilbert makes it so hard for us. We aren’t blushing damsels and we aren’t man-eating battleaxes. We aren’t particularly politically correct. We’re just wondering where we fit in—and how.”[4]
In the face of such a barrage, the easiest solution seems to be to concede the point and attempt to ignore it. But this is obviously an inadequate response: a problem ignored is not a problem solved. I intend, in this essay, to take a deep breath and look long and hard at the fundamental issues that surround Gilbert’s portrayal of Katisha and her sisters. And it all starts—as such essays often do—with a sketching-in of the cultural background.
A Brief History of Misogyny[5]
Misogyny is a major presence in English literature. This is unpalatable, but true. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, literature was an overwhelmingly male preserve. Until the appearance on the scene of such indisputably major writers as Jane Austen, the Brontës, and “George Eliot”, and of the many lesser women writers of the Victorian era, the lady novelist had indeed been a “singular anomaly”. In fact, the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic note that the woman writer was “anomalous, indefinable, alienated, a freakish outsider” in the context of “overwhelmingly and essentially male literary history.”[6]
For a woman to write was in itself an act of courage, dissuaded as she was on every side by patriarchal culture. The eighteenth-century poet Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, whose poems are full of fire and life, found herself cruelly satirised as “Phoebe Clinket” in Three Hours After Marriage by Alexander Pope and John Gay, simply for having dared to write.[7] In the 1830s Charlotte Brontë wrote to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey for his opinion of her poems, and he replied kindly, but with this stern warning: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.”[8] Literature was regarded until surprisingly recently as a naturally “male” thing.
We can hardly be surprised that in these circumstances the body of literature created by men took a male attitude to life, placing men at the centre of the picture and viewing women from outside, through the male distorting lenses which remake women as either angels or monsters. Women as portrayed in literature were either idealised or demonised creatures, because they were not beings in themselves but symbols devised in the brains of men.
The female ideal, built up over centuries, enjoined women to be passive, submissive to men, one might say a blank or a cipher.[9] Any woman who violated this ideal with assertive characteristics or implied that she was the equal of man was viewed as an unnatural monster.[10] And why? Because, as Virginia Woolf noted in A Room of One’s Own, “when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price.”[11] Man’s sense of superiority is defined by his relations with the “inferior” opposite sex, so that if she is no longer inferior, he is no longer superior, and he is humiliated. Thus the submissive “angel” is good because she protects the man’s self-belief, and the assertive “monster” is bad because she threatens it.
Katharine M. Rogers has argued that “Misogyny… is more apt than not to appear in disguised form” because it has largely been considered an unacceptable mode of thought: “Sometimes the hostility is displaced, so that the hostile feelings for wife and mother, about which a man usually feels guilty, are transferred to the whore, who should be vilified.”[12] This is an important concept to bear in mind. An attack on a vulnerable section of womankind—shrew, prostitute, old maid—represents an attack on the whole; and it is usually easy to tell, from the tone of the writing, when this displacement is taking place.
And so, to return to our point of departure, we find a strong strain of misogyny running through man-written English literature. A few prominent examples will demonstrate the case.
Let us start at the top. Shakespeare’s sonnets undoubtedly contain a misogynistic element, as when the male subject of Sonnet 20 is described as having “A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted/With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion”; but the work of his which leaps out and shouts its misogyny to the world is, of course, The Taming of the Shrew.
Katherina, elder daughter of Baptista Minola, whom no one will marry because of her fiery and petulant temper, is bargained for and won by the chancer Petruchio, who marries her and sets about “taming” her by thwarting her, contradicting her sense of reality (calling the sun the moon, for instance), depriving her of food and sleep, humiliating her, grinding her down. At last she is tamed into submission, and in the longest speech of the play she answers Petruchio’s command to “tell these headstrong women/What duty they do owe their lords and husbands” (V, ii, 131-132):
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign….
And when [a woman] is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to [her husband’s] honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel,
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?
I am asham’d that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,
Where they are bound to serve, love, and obey….
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband’s foot. (V, ii, 147-180)
Stevie Davies, in her critical study on The Taming of the Shrew, notes that Shakespearean commentators have often tended to plead excuses for this play rather than look at it squarely and face up to what they see: there has been a pressing “desire to prove that Shakespeare cannot have meant what he seems to be saying; and that therefore he cannot really be saying it.”[13] Despite attempts to prove the play to be an ironically-expressed attack on Petruchio’s values, or a romantic comedy of quarrelling lovers in the mould of Beatrice and Benedict, it remains in production a persistent problem because its thesis is, and can only be, that a wife’s true role is to be the vassal of her lord, her hands below his foot, and that if a wife is foolish enough not to know her place she must be taught it, by whatever means necessary.
Brian Morris has drawn attention to the origins in the New Testament of Katherina’s speech of obedience: “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.” (Ephesians, Ch.5 V.22-23 [14]). This may in turn remind us that misogynist literature has a very long pedigree indeed, extending at least as far back as St. Paul. It is indeed one of the roots of Western civilisation; we should not fool ourselves that it has been killed yet.
A list of names and titles could be compiled, almost ad infinitum, of writers, performers and works with a strong misogynistic seam: Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Larkin, Dickens, Thackeray, John Osborne, Joe Orton, Cosi fan Tutte, La Traviata, Manon Lescaut, Noel Coward (“Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs”), Howard Jacobson, Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, Little Britain, Charles Bukowski, Basic Instinct, John Milton, John Donne (“Hope not for mind in women”), Samuel Butler, Strindberg, Nietzsche…. Once sought, this little knot of attitudes may be found everywhere and anywhere. We should not be surprised to find it also in Gilbert.
“CORINNA, Pride of Drury-Lane,/For whom no Shepherd sighs in vain…/Returning at the Midnight Hour;/Four Stories climbing to her Bow’r;/Then, seated on a three-legg’d Chair,/Takes off her artificial Hair:/Now, picking out a Crystal Eye,/She wipes it clean, and lays it by./Her Eye-Brows from a Mouse’s Hyde…/Pulls off with Care…./Now dextrously her Plumpers draws,/That serve to fill her hollow Jaws./Untwists a Wire; and from her Gums/A Set of Teeth completely comes./Pulls out the Rags contriv’d to prop/Her flabby Dugs and down they drop…./The Nymph, tho’ in this mangled Plight,/Must ev’ry Morn her Limbs unite./But how shall I describe the Arts/To recollect her scatter’d Parts?/Or shew the Anguish, Toil, and Pain,/Of gath’ring up herself again?”[16]
Figure 1: Illustration for “The Coming By-And-By” in The Bab Ballads, with which are Included Songs of a Savoyard (1898)
The parallel with Gilbert’s notorious lyric “Silvered is the Raven Hair” is clear, a parallel emphasised by the song’s grotesque illustration reproduced above.
Sad is that woman’s lot who, year by year,
Sees, one by one, her beauties disappear…
Compelled, at last, in life’s uncertain gloamings,
To wreathe her wrinkled brow with well-saved “combings,”
Reduced, with rouge, lip-salve, and pearly grey,
To “make up” for lost time as best she may!…
Silvered is the raven hair,
Spreading is the parting straight,
Mottled the complexion fair,
Halting is the youthful gait,
Hollow is the laughter free,
Spectacled the limpid eye—
Little will be left of me
In the coming by and by![17]
Gilbert’s lyric is vastly more decorous than Swift’s poem and even seems, in comparison, almost tasteful, but the meaning of each work is similar. While it is true that the ostensible targets of the satire in each poem—a raddled prostitute and an ageing spinster—seem very different, there is an emphasis on female decay which binds the two together. Katharine M. Rogers has drawn attention to the long tradition of misogyny in Christian literature, which appears to have sprung up as a way of reconciling holy men to their celibate state. Thus, from the medieval era through to the eighteenth century at least, the celibate Christian man was encouraged to view women as corrupt in both mind and body, slime and dung being popular metaphors in this respect. Swift, in particular, seems to have been deeply affected by this tradition.
Human decay is seen in each work as specifically female. Why? Because from a male point of view youth and beauty are among a woman’s most important obligations: “Keep young and beautiful,/It’s your duty to be beautiful;/Keep young and beautiful,/If you want to be loved”, as the 1933 song by Warren and Dubin told us with breathtaking frankness.
Winifred Holtby noted in 1935: “… if there is today a universal emotion, it would seem to be a terror of female middle age. The press suggests it; magazine stories suggest it; advertisements suggest it…. Advertisers of face creams, corsets, patent medicines, and slimming systems unite in eulogizing secrets of keeping middle age at bay. W.S. Gilbert’s Katisha in The Mikado was only one in a long line of repulsive middle-aged and desperate stage spinsters.”[18] Thus she confirms that the creation of Katisha is merely the other side of the “Keep young and beautiful” ethos which was so current at the time. The belief which led Gilbert to think of creating Katisha in 1885 was still going strong fifty years afterwards, in 1935—and is with us today. We are more cautious in laughing at Katishas these days, but have no qualm in considering female youth and beauty to be virtues in themselves, to be achieved at any cost including mutilation of the body.
And yet it would be grotesque—and wrong—to suggest that the major writers in the canon of literature were overwhelmingly misogynistic all the time. For instance, not all of Shakespeare is as unreconstructed as The Taming of the Shrew: Virginia Woolf praised the “androgyny” of his writing and the strength of his female characterisation. Misogyny is a passing mood rather than a fixed belief, and it is masked or negated in a thousand deeper and more considered attitudes expressed throughout our literature.
To summarise, then: Misogyny—the fear or hatred of women—is expressed throughout Western culture, most obviously in the portrayal of monstrous violations of the passive ideal of womankind, though also in many other ways. This misogyny extends back to Shakespeare and beyond, and lives on in our culture today. To this extent, therefore, the games that Gilbert plays with his female characters in the operas can be seen as simply one more item in a very long-standing tradition.
A Tale of Two Sisters
Gilbert’s early works—his Bab Ballads, stories, burlesques, and other plays—contain many examples of older women (spinsters, wives, widows) and of women whose main described characteristic is a lack of attractiveness.
The Bab Ballads have no time for subtle characterisation, so we should not be surprised to find in them some of the clearest, not to say crudest, examples of Gilbert’s mockery of ageing women. However, the mockery is almost always oblique (“Her beauty is beneath her skin,/And lies in layers on her bones”)[19] and it is only in the illustrations that the full sense of grotesquerie becomes obvious. Examples could be taken from many of the Ballads—“Lorenzo de Lardy”, “The Cunning Woman”, “The Bumboat Woman’s Story”, “First Love”, etc.—though it may be mentioned in passing that Bab sometimes proved himself capable of drawing elderly women in a much more good-natured way, and that he even occasionally made fun of old men in pursuit of young women, as in “Old Paul and Old Tim”. Let us focus on just one ballad, “Sir Barnaby Bampton Boo”, which Gilbert liked well enough to retell, with slight variations, in his cartoon story “Emily and Augusta”.
“Sir Barnaby Bampton Boo” (Fun, 29 August 1868) relates how Sir Barnaby came to the village of Tuptonvee in search of a bride, and showed an interest in the daughters of Mr and Mrs de Plow—Amelia (Milly) and Ellen (“Carrotty Nell”). Milly is “passable, only, in face… but worthy”, while Nell is “prettier… But oh! she’s a wayward chit”[20]. Which does Sir Barnaby choose? Why, pretty Nell, of course! They run off together; the poet commenting piously: “For years they’ve got on very well, as I hear,/But soon he will rue it, no doubt.” But we are given no reason to think he does rue it.
Figure 2: Amelia and Ellen in “Sir Barnaby Bampton Boo” (1868)
Bab’s original drawing of the two sisters is reproduced above. He redrew them in more decorous style for the 1898 edition of the Ballads, but the first, grotesque version tells us much more about Gilbert’s original attitude. Milly the Plain is given the face of an ugly man (though perhaps a good-natured one). She is, one would guess from the drawing, a good number of years older than her sister. Carrotty Nell, on the other hand, is drawn as a gross parody of “sexiness”: Gilbert is making fun of both sisters, not just of Milly.
The stated moral of the Ballad lies in those words: “soon he will rue it, no doubt.” But of course, as in so many of Gilbert’s comic stories and Ballads, the tone of dry irony makes us doubt this interpretation, and makes us think that Sir Barnaby Bampton Boo will in fact be very happy with his frivolous, coquettish Carrotty Nell. So can we say that Gilbert’s true intended “moral” is that a man with a pretty wife is always happy? It certainly seems so.
Figure 3: Augusta and Emily in “Emily and Augusta” (1869)
“Emily and Augusta”, contributed to Tom Hood’s Comic Annual for 1870, is subtitled: “The story of the young lady who was very pretty, but very wicked; and the young lady who was very ugly, but very good.” The pretty Emily flirts and courts in the approved manner, causing dozens of smitten suitors to shoot each other on Wimbledon Common, and finally she marries the Duke of Topknot. The plain Augusta, meanwhile, goes in for pious righteousness, and pursues the Reverend Mimble, until he throws himself off a bridge in order to escape from her. The caption-writer concludes: “No doubt next year Augusta will have married an Archbishop, and Emily will be dead, for (Moral) Vice never prospers.”[21]
The illustration gives Augusta a different face from Amelia, but she has similar ringlets, topknot, and flouncing at the hem of her dress. Her mouth is harder and more repressively “pious”, to suit her lifestyle of “anecdotic teas” (accompanied by a picture of her seated at table with two malicious old gossips) and holier-than-thou sisterly lectures. The “very wicked” Emily, who does indeed provoke the deaths of almost all her male acquaintances (like Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson), is treated with much more indulgence and affection, despite the cruel tilt to her mouth in Gilbert’s drawing.
It seems obvious, at first glance, that in each of these two stories we find the usual contrasting pair of women: the “angel” set alongside the “monster”. And yet when we look more closely it becomes clear that something strange has happened: the “good” sister, pious and conventional, has become the “monstrous” one, while the “bad”, sexually dangerous sister is portrayed (especially in “Emily and Augusta”) in—well, not quite in an “angelic” light but certainly in a much kinder way. Perhaps Gilbert is deliberately playing with the conventional categories and assumptions: it would not be the first or last time he did such a thing.
However, Gilbert is not really being as unconventional as I may be implying: he is still showing us the archetypal “angel” and “monster” women—only with some of the stereotypical attributes moved around. And if, as seems likely, Gilbert is simply saying that it is better for a woman to be a pretty flirt than an ugly saint, then perhaps the kindest thing to say is that this is a recognisable male attitude.
A Monstrous Regiment?
Gilbert’s plays and short stories contain, as we might expect, a good spread of relevant examples. What might be less expected is the range of Gilbert’s characterisation—which includes ageing grotesques, to be sure, but also sympathetically portrayed strong women.
The Marchioness of Birkenfelt in La Vivandière (1867) is not exactly the most promising example of the type, but she is the earliest I can find, so let us start with her. She is described in the stage direction in these terms: “she has all the appearance of a faded Coquette, and her manner is characterized by an affectation of extreme juvenility”[22], and her brief scene consists of her being the butt of jokes about her age and appearance: “You stain your tresses yellow? you’d have died first”[23]. She seems to be a cousin to Nicolette in Eyes and No Eyes (1875), who is described in the Dramatis Personæ as “An old Coquette”[24] and is portrayed in the play itself with an unnerving zest as a combination of extreme vanity and grotesquerie.
Mrs Pennythorne in No Cards (1869) is more interesting. The Dramatis Personæ describes her as “A lady of considerable matrimonial experiences, with strong opinions and convictions on ‘Woman’s Rights’ ”[25]. She had been deserted by her husband twenty years before the action of the play, but this has not soured her and she is a benign, though forceful, influence throughout the play—indeed, she brings about the resolution.
Still more interesting is Dolly Fortescue in “The Finger of Fate”. This short story, first published in Hood’s Comic Annual, 1872,[26] is narrated by “a middle-aged bachelor, of staid and careful habits”[27], who one day encounters an eccentric middle-aged woman while travelling by train; she so overpowers him with her personality and her persistence that he finally gives in to “the finger of fate” and marries her, even though he detests her. Dolly is described in these terms:
“She was a stout plain middle-aged woman—five-and-forty, I should say. She was extravagantly dressed in showy colours. Her complexion was very dark—she was, in fact, a Mulatto—and she wore a respectable moustache.”[28]
She is actually portrayed in the story as being rather good fun, though the rather stuffy Narrator is irritated by her. (If the Narrator is a Gilbert self-portrait, he’s making fun of himself.) Here is one of her speeches:
“Where you going, old passenger? You not tell? Secret, eh? Ah, sly old dog! You old cashier perhaps, bolting with bank moneys, eh? Confidential clerk with employer’s cash-box in portmanteau, eh? Old boy going up north to marry old girl on the sly, eh? Bagman and ashamed of it, perhaps, eh, you old passenger? Bah! Bagman good as anybody else! Never be ashamed—look at me! Me not blush at myself. What you say I am?—eh? You not guess. Duchess? No! Countess? No! Lady of large property—wife of Liverpool merchant? Devil a bit! Missionary woman? No! Tight-rope dancer? No! Stewardess on West Indiaman spending pay? Yes—Hullo! What’s that?”[29]
The story encourages us to respond in different ways to the character of Dolly Fortescue. She is amusing, she is persistent, she is irritating, and she is, of course, middle-aged, plain, and moustachioed. She is completely unashamed of herself. She is full of what would be called, thirty years later, the Shavian “Life Force”. She does not seem to fit in at all with what we usually think of as the Gilbertian scheme of things. Looking again at Audrey Williamson’s statement that “it seems unlikely that the fact that women sometimes remain unmarried by choice… ever occurred to [Gilbert]”, we may note that Dolly Fortescue’s unmarried state never seems to worry her in the slightest. The final proposal for the Narrator to marry her comes from the Narrator himself, as a response to the necessity of circumstances; and, indeed, she runs away from him as soon as she can.
Miss Spinn in Randall’s Thumb (1871) appears, at first sight, like a more familiar “Gilbertian” type: a middle-aged woman in full pursuit of her prey (Joe Bangles)—attaching herself to him and interpreting his every word and gesture as flirtation, even though he is frankly terrified of her and does his best to evade her. It seems, in short, like a prototype of the Dame Carruthers/Sergeant Meryll relationship in Yeomen. According to Bangles, “in her time [she] has been a governess, a lady’s companion, a Crimean nurse, a columbine, a missionary, a vivandière, a stewardess, and a Bloomer”[30]—which rather reminds one of the formidable Dolly Fortescue. She entraps Bangles into an engagement—but, right at the end, the whole situation is reversed when she helps resolve the plot of the play and in response he exclaims: “Adelaide Spinn, you’re a trump after all! and, if you’ll allow me, I’ll—hang it!—I’ll kiss you!”[31]—and it seems he is at last reconciled to a happy and adventurous marriage. The comic man-trapping spinster is finally reinterpreted as something much more benign.
Mrs Fitzosborne in On Guard (1872) seems to have been formed from the same mould as Mrs Pennythorne in No Cards. She is a quick-witted widow who delights in repartee, and particularly in being cleverer than the men around her. She is formidable and self-sufficient, and men seem rather afraid of her, though the dim-witted aristocrat Baby Boodle is in love with her. She particularly enjoys her bouts of verbal sparring with Kavanagh, a disreputable con-man, because he is clever but not quite as clever as she is; this leads her to encourage the young woman she is chaperoning to invite him to join them among a yachting party, and this in turn leads to the rather slight complications of the plot. It seems over-harsh on the witty lady that she is made to break down in the final scene and confess: “I’ve been the cause of all this—and I advised Jessie to act as she did—and I deserve to be humiliated”[32]. This whole scene rather uncomfortably shows the strong-minded woman being forced into a tearful “feminine” role, with the implication that she is being restored to her “natural” position.
Mrs Van Brugh is described in the cast list of Charity (1874) as “a widow, aged 35”[33]. She is the central, dynamic figure of the play, a rich and charitable woman who runs local almshouses and lets anyone in who needs it—even Jews, Catholics and Dissenters, much to local dismay[34]. She has a Secret, however—she was never formally married to the late Mr Van Brugh—and this provides the mainspring of the play. Throughout she is portrayed sympathetically and it is her accusers and critics who are demonised.
Sweethearts (1874) is a play in two short acts. Act One takes place in the year 1844, when Jenny Northcott is aged 18, and the action of the act concerns her flirtatious and “heartless” behaviour towards young Harry Spreadbrow, who is about to leave for India. He leaves her, heartbroken, while she remains cheerful; however, when he is out of sight she bursts into tears. In Act Two, thirty years have passed and Jenny Northcott is 48 years old. Harry Spreadbrow returns to find Jenny still unmarried. He has forgotten all about her, but she has not forgotten him. Now it is his behaviour which seems heartless. Perhaps because the play takes the time to allow us to understand her background, we sympathise completely with this particular example of the Gilbertian middle-aged spinster; we understand what she is going through when Harry returns, bluff and insensitive, to the haunts of his youth without realising she is still in love with him.
One final example. In the short story “Wide Awake” (1878), the Narrator is engaged to Georgina Sparrow, who is described as “bony, angular, acid, and forty”[35]. The Narrator detests her and tries to get out of the deal by various methods which take up the body of the story. However, the interesting thing here is that the Narrator is in love with another woman—and not a young and pretty “Yum-Yum” type but “a very plump and rosy widow lady of small independent property”[36] by the name of Bridget Comfit. We may imagine Mrs Comfit as being about the same age as the hated Georgina; she is “plump and rosy” like Little Buttercup. The difference between the two women really does appear to lie not in age or even, to some extent, appearance, but in personality: Georgina is “acid”, and plump Mrs Comfit is not. It is also relevant to note that Georgina is a spinster and presumably a maid, while Mrs Comfit is a widow, and, we may assume, a woman of experience.
It is obvious, even from this very incomplete survey, that A.H. Godwin’s assertion that “Speaking generally, Gilbert drew his women-folk from two models only… simpering innocents [and] man-trapping spinsters” is factually incorrect. The examples of Mrs Van Brugh and Dolly Fortescue are enough to prove the point. And yet there is something in some of these characters which suggests that Gilbert felt needled and provoked in the process of writing about them. Something puts venom in his pen when he is drawing plain-but-good Augusta for us, something tells him to humiliate Mrs Fitzosborne at the end of On Guard, and that same something is present, in more controlled form, even in “The Finger of Fate”.
It seems reasonable to assume that, when Gilbert was called upon to create an older woman character, he often felt as if he were being touched on a raw spot—not always, but often. Such is the very clear impression given in his writings. When he collaborated on comic operas with Sullivan, he was called upon, again and again, to create contralto roles in plots which (naturally) centred round romantic intrigues; and so—not always, but often—that raw spot was touched, with results which will be discussed in the next section. But for the moment I want to insist on the fact that he did not always create gross caricatures in these circumstances, but was quite capable of also creating real and likeable middle-aged women.
A good writer must be true to his/her personal vision of life—and this includes the flaws as well as the virtues that come with being personal. We accept Dickens as one of the greats of English Literature, despite the huge flaws in his style, such as his weakness for shameless melodrama and sentimentality, and the inadequacy of much of the characterisation of his women. We accept the flaws for the sake of the virtues. I would suggest a similar attitude should also be taken towards Gilbert.
Gilbert and the “Improper Feminine”
Conventional mid-Victorian thought suggested that women fitted into two categories—or rather, one category and one system of exceptions about which the respectable Victorian did not want to think too deeply. Lyn Pykett labels these categories the “proper” and “improper” feminine. We have already met these types in The Madwoman in the Attic: they are the angel and the monster dressed in new phrases. Pykett lists concepts associated with the “proper feminine”—passionlessness, innocence, commitment to duty, dependence, and so on—and suggests other adjectives and nouns associated with the “improper feminine”: self-assertive, knowing, independent, subversive threat, demon, wild animal, predator[37]. In literature, the “proper feminine” shows herself only as a nullity existing to serve others; it is the “improper feminine” who displays life and character. In The Taming of the Shrew, we remember Katherina rather than Bianca; in Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp rather than Amelia Sedley; in The Mikado, Katisha rather than Yum-Yum. The “improper feminine” characters of literature may seem to be hampered by the aggressively negative attitudes which the author brings to them, but actually these attitudes force the characters into fierce life.
How does this apply to the Gilbert and Sullivan operas? The first thing to insist is that not every middle-aged woman in the operas is made the subject of ridicule. Little Buttercup is liked and admired by everyone, while the Fairy Queen is dignified and tender-hearted, the few references to her supposed size being made amiably and without cruelty. Lady Blanche in Princess Ida is “formidable”, to use a slightly loaded word, but Gilbert mocks her for her hyper-dignity rather than for her age, and it is important to notice that she is certainly not a “man-trapping spinster”: she is obsessed with power and position, but shows no interest at all in men.
In the other contralto roles of this type we find, to a lesser or greater extent, the demon awakened: from Dame Hannah in Ruddigore at the lower end of the scale (the scene in which she protects her virtue against Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd has an undertone of something not quite explicable), through the middle level of Lady Sangazure’s man-chasing scene in The Sorcerer, to the final extremity shown in the creation, in equal parts magnificent and appalling, of the bloodthirsty tigress Katisha in The Mikado. I shall concentrate here on Katisha and on Lady Jane in Patience, because although they might seem at first sight the starkest examples of Gilbertian misogyny, on closer inspection their case proves to be rather more complex and interesting.
As we have seen, Lady Jane’s song “Silvered is the Raven Hair” derives closely from a tradition of misogynistic literature. Commentators, from the nineteenth century to the twentiy-first, have found it an uncomfortable song to listen to (as indeed do I). Percy Fitzgerald noted in 1897 that in this song Lady Jane “was made to dwell rather too persistently on her physical gifts. Such topics do not appeal to the humorous sense, and are something of a humiliation for the performer.”[38] In 2001 Gayden Wren wrote that the song “expresses a fear of aging and loss of beauty that still resonates for women everywhere, and audiences don’t like seeing it made fun of.”[39] It is noticeable that neither (male) writer has any quarrel with the truth of the lyric—merely with its tastefulness. In this, they are at one with Quiller-Couch, who, as we have seen, was disgusted at Gilbert’s “insistence on the physical odiousness of any woman growing old”—not because it was false, but because it was too true.
Jane W. Stedman’s superb essay “From Dame to Woman: W.S. Gilbert and Theatrical Transvestism” (1970) takes these attitudes and turns them on their head: “The effect of [“Silvered is the Raven Hair”] is both wistful and funny; it suggests self-knowledge and wry self-acceptance, and it is in effect totally unlike the traditional abuse of the dame.”[40] Stedman’s thesis is that Gilbert was writing against the background of a tradition of “theatrical transvestism”, in which the burlesque “dame” (a man dressed as a middle-aged woman) was subjected to the abuse of the other characters. Gilbert transformed this by giving the “dame” role to a woman rather than a man and by making sure the most barbed comments on her appearance were spoken by the character herself. This results in a character like Lady Jane becoming more like a recognisable human being, and seeming to be gifted with the virtue of self-knowledge.
Stedman mentions a key exchange which occurs in Act 2 of Patience:
BUN. … The damozels used to follow me wherever I went; now they all follow him!
JANE. Not all! I am still faithful to you.
BUN. Yes, and a pretty damozel you are!
JANE. No, not pretty. Massive. Cheer up! I will never leave you, I swear it!
BUN. Oh, thank you![41]
This shows not only the real, though spiky, relationship between Bunthorne and Lady Jane, but also Bunthorne’s highly male attitude to women (obsessed with pretty damozels) as contrasted with Lady Jane’s much more realistic appraisal of herself. When she responds to Bunthorne’s sarcastic “a pretty damozel you are!” with “No, not pretty. Massive”— she “realizes the nature of her own appearance and even asserts it”, to quote Stedman.[42] It is as if Lady Jane were deliberately saying to Bunthorne: “I’m not a pretty damozel. So what?”
The more one looks at the character of Lady Jane, as she appears in the script and without the burden of performance tradition, the more admirable and likeable she seems—except, perhaps, in the last moments of the opera when she improbably deserts Bunthorne for the Duke. She is honest, straightforward, and shrewd, and she is capable of deep and fierce emotion. Why does Bunthorne dislike her? Simply because she does not fit the drooping stereotype of the pretty damozel that is his very Victorian ideal of womanhood.
Katisha, like Lady Jane, is undeluded about her appearance, and also like her predecessor in Patience she contrasts herself with conventional “prettiness”, but this time with a much more aggressively derisive attitude to the conventions of beauty. “She revels in her ugliness and makes a distinction of it”, as Stedman notes[43] before quoting Katisha’s line: “I am an acquired taste—only the educated palate can appreciate me.”[44] Her taunting of Yum-Yum turns the phrases “Pink cheek, bright eye, rose lip, smooth tongue” into the bitterest insults, suggesting Yum-Yum’s appearance to be a mask that “foolest/Heroic nerves”[45]—in fact, suggesting that it is Yum-Yum who is truly the “improper feminine”, the subversive demon, while Katisha, who wears no pretty mask and says exactly what she thinks, has a much greater claim to respect. She is indeed honest, and is more comfortable with serious emotions than any other character in the opera; but we must not forget that she is also gifted with a deep and abiding cruelty, a bloodthirsty streak that she herself cheerfully admits, and that within the scheme of the opera she is certainly a villain, being a major blocking force between Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum. Is even honesty enough to counterbalance her eagerness to see the opera’s main characters boiled in oil?
That concept of the “improper feminine” has two edges. It describes the pre-modern dismissal of any version of female behaviour which does not fit in to accepted standards, and as such it may be seen as a term of abuse; but it also may be adopted by the woman herself as a badge of pride simply because she refuses to conform. The image of the rebel, the outsider, the iconoclast who refuses to conform to accepted standards, has long had paradoxically positive connotations. To be “improper” is, on the face of it, a bad thing; but the refusal to be “proper” is also a worthy badge of defiance. It is probably safe to assume that Gilbert intended his “improper feminine” characters to deserve the term in its derogatory sense; but at his best Gilbert was too good a writer to deprive his characters of their right to personal justification, and they often threaten to turn the thing for which Gilbert was mocking them into a blazing virtue.
Lady Jane is no “pretty damozel”: she is massive and proud of it. Katisha takes the reversal of the “proper feminine” to its extreme: denouncing “pink cheek, bright eye” as masks of deceit and setting herself up as superior because she is an “acquired taste”; finding beauty even in bloodthirstiness. She makes no concessions: she shows the world exactly who she is and will not capitulate. She is the “improper feminine” with a vengeance; she is the villain of the opera in which she appears, but this sometimes seems irrelevant in the face of the fact that she exists at a level which her supposedly superior rival Yum-Yum completely fails to achieve.
Conclusion?
Over the years, from Gilbert’s time to ours, there has been a general consensus of disapproval against the portrayal of “elderly, ugly” women in the Savoy operas—with the honourable, and very nearly convincing, exception of Stedman’s brilliant essay “From Dame to Woman: W.S. Gilbert and Theatrical Transvestism”. The reasons for disapproval have changed with the times, from the Victorian and Edwardian sense that Gilbert was offending against good taste and gallantry, to the modern realisation that his offence is one of sexism and misogyny. I have tried, in this essay, to place these well-known grotesques in a larger context, and also to suggest that there is enough that is interesting and even admirable in these characters to make them more than simply aberrations of which we, who love the G&S operas, should be ashamed.
I have drawn attention to the strain of misogyny which runs through so much of Western literature, from St. Paul through Shakespeare and Swift to the present day. The exact terms in which a male distrust, fear or hatred of women is expressed may vary, but the underlying impulse is broadly the same. It is also noticeable how often there is a sense that the (male) writer must have been touched on a particularly sore spot in order to respond with such a bitter attack. When the writer is in the mood for lashing out, women become in his eyes deceitful, false, monstrous, devilish, ugly, corrupt… and so on. This is the reverse side of the male gallantry which worships female purity and innocence and which depends on women being a perpetually blank slate. The lashing-out occurs when the woman becomes an active personality in her own right, and therefore a challenge to the man’s sense of power over her.
All this is familiar from feminist discourse, and perhaps over-familiar; but since it is scarcely thought worth a mention in most G&S discussion it might be useful to emphasise it here. The inference is clear: not that Gilbert is exonerated of anything, but simply that his misogyny should be set alongside the misogyny of many of the writers in the great canon of Western literature. Stedman has pointed out that “critics untroubled by Congreve’s Lady Wishfort [in The Way of the World] accepted as an article of faith Gilbert’s ‘loathing’ of Katisha”[46]—but that is no reason for us to operate by the same double standard.
It would be difficult to deny that a particular kind of “improper feminine” character had a very strong hold on Gilbert’s imagination. In some of the Bab illustrations of the 1860s something is being expressed which seems beyond his control: the mockery of Augusta in “Emily and Augusta” tips over into something like personal loathing and is more repellent than entertaining. But later, in the plays and stories of the early 1870s, the portrayals become more ambiguous or likeable: Miss Spinn who turns out to be a trump after all; wild Dolly Fortescue; witty but humiliated Mrs Fitzosborne. In Charity’s Mrs Van Brugh the type is turned upside down: an unmistakeable “improper feminine”, an unmarried mother who is no passive cipher but a witty and charitable woman, is shown to us as a heroine and an example of conduct. And opposing attitudes seem to be locked against each other in characters like Lady Jane and Katisha, who are at once grotesques made for the audience to laugh at, and also truth-tellers of a curious personal integrity.
So what can we conclude from all this? That Gilbert was to some extent a misogynist? Of course—just as Shakespeare, Swift, Milton, and innumerable other canonic writers were also to some extent misogynists. But I would suggest that, as with these other writers, Gilbert became much more than any mere –ist when writing at the height of his power. The intention behind the creation of such figures as Lady Jane and Katisha may have been misogynistic, but he was too great an artist not to be imaginatively true to what he was creating, and he gave these characters energy and life and, what is more, a real and distinct view of things.
It is not given to any one writer to be able to express more than one small part of the truth of life. The best writers find ways of setting down the little they know with clarity and art so that we can all share their little truth and so broaden our own understanding of the life we live. And there is surely something true in Katisha and the others, because they stick in our minds and will not leave. Perhaps Gilbert, misogynist and cynic though he may have been, was also a little too honest in his perceptions, and perhaps that is why a lyric like “Silvered is the Raven Hair” still makes us uncomfortable today.
The issues addressed in this essay are still live issues, and it is probably impossible to discuss them with an “objective” eye. Certainly I find this to be true personally. I am a Gilbert enthusiast, but I have tried not to over-defend Gilbert. I have probably failed in this aim. But I do hope that this essay has pointed out a few relevant facts, about, for instance, the sheer variety to be found within Gilbert’s supposedly interchangeable crowd of middle-aged “improper feminines”. I have given my “Conclusion” a question mark simply because I have no firm conclusion, only one or two suggestions. Even these should be viewed by the reader with some scepticism. If the man-written canon of Western literature is steeped in misogyny, what conclusions can be drawn from an essay on this subject which is, itself, written by a man?
NOTES.
[1] A.H. Godwin, Gilbert and Sullivan: A Critical Appreciation of the Savoy Operas (London & Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1926), pp123-4.
[2] Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, “W.S. Gilbert” (1929), reprinted in John Bush Jones (ed.), W.S. Gilbert: A Century of Scholarship and Commentary (New York: New York University Press, 1970), p17.
[3] Audrey Williamson, Gilbert and Sullivan Opera: an Assessment, 2nd ed. (London: Marion Boyars, 1982), p162.
[4] Susannah Herbert, “Gilbert’s Sour Notes Spoil the Hum Factor”, The Daily Telegraph (London), February 28 2000.
[5] Much of this section takes its information and interpretation from that classic of feminist literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1979). I am deeply indebted to Lisa Berglund of Buffalo State College for drawing my attention to The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature by Katharine M. Rogers (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1966), which I have found extremely useful.
[6] Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p48.
[7] The identification of Phoebe Clinket with the Countess of Winchilsea has sometimes been disputed.
[8] Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Penguin, 1975), p173.
[9] Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pp20-27.
[10] ibid., p28.
[11] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p44.
[12] Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate, p xii.
[13] Stevie Davies, The Taming of the Shrew (London: Penguin, 1995), p43.
[14] Brian Morris (ed. and intro.) The Taming of the Shrew, (London: Methuen, 1981), p146.
[15] Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p31.
[16] Jonathan Swift, Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp517-519.
[17] W.S. Gilbert, The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan, ed. Ian Bradley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p319.
[18] Winifred Holtby, “The Best of Life” in Good Housekeeping (May 1935), reprinted in Paul Berry and Alan Bishop (ed. and intro.), Testament of a Generation: The Journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (London: Virago Press Limited, 1985), p87.
[19] W.S. Gilbert, The Bab Ballads, ed. James Ellis (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1970), p107.
[20] ibid., p186.
[21] Tom Hood’s Comic Annual for 1870 (London: The Fun Office, [1869]), p97.
[22] W.S. Gilbert, New and Original Extravaganzas, ed. Isaac Goldberg (Boston: John W. Luce & Co, 1931), p54.
[23] ibid, p55.
[24] W.S. Gilbert, Gilbert Before Sullivan: Six Comic Plays, ed. Jane W. Stedman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p200.
[25] ibid., p56.
[26] Peter Haining is wrong to date it to 1890 in his The Lost Stories of W.S. Gilbert.
[27] W.S. Gilbert, Foggerty’s Fairy and Other Tales (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1892), p297.
[28] ibid., p298.
[29] ibid., pp300-1.
[30] W.S. Gilbert, Original Plays: Fourth Series (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922) p334.
[31] ibid, p382.
[32] W.S. Gilbert, On Guard (London: Samuel French, n.d.), p45.
[33] W.S. Gilbert, Original Plays: First Series (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925), p88.
[34] ibid., p93.
[35] Gilbert, Foggerty’s Fairy and Other Tales, p245.
[36] ibid., p246.
[37] Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), p16.
[38] Percy Fitzgerald, The Savoy Opera and the Savoyards (London: Chatto & Windus, 1894), p94.
[39] Gayden Wren, A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p113.
[40] Jane W. Stedman, “From Dame to Woman: W.S. Gilbert and Theatrical Transvestism”, in Victorian Studies (September 1970), p39.
[41] Gilbert, Complete Annotated G&S, p331.
[42] Stedman “From Dame to Woman”, p39.
[43] ibid., p40.
[44] Gilbert, Complete Annotated G&S, p641.
[45] ibid., p599.
[46] Stedman, “From Dame to Woman”, p43.
