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School for Scandal: Sexuality, Race, and National Vice and Virtue in Miss Marianne Woods and Miss Jane Pirie Against Lady Helen Cumming Gordon

2005; Routledge; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905490500133113

1477-2663

Geraldine Friedman,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] Moore’s thesis is most clearly stated on back cover of the book: “Moore demonstrates that intimacy between women was vividly imagined in the British eighteenth century as not only chaste and virtuous, but also insistently and inevitably sexual.” Stuart Curran provides a brief but helpful overview of the extant positions on whether romantic friendship was a lesbian relationship and how the term “lesbian” is understood, but his major intervention is to call for a new focus on the meaning and dynamics of lesbian attachment in its reflections on itself (222–23). [2] For the legal treatment of women accused of performing sexual acts together in Europe, Britain, and America through the eighteenth century, see Faderman, Surpassing 35–36, 419n14, and 50–54 and Crompton, “Myth.” Nonetheless, there are few instances in which women’s same‐sex sexuality enters British legal history in a central way (Moore 6–7). This paucity of material perhaps accounts for the paradox that although Woods and Pirie has been a crucial text for the study of lesbian history, the two women denied that they had a sexual relationship (67–69). The documents relating to Woods and Pirie have been collected in Miss Marianne Woods and Miss Jane Pirie against Dame Helen Cumming Gordon, which will hereafter be cited as WP. Since the pagination begins anew in each document, citations will give section numbers and page numbers. I have numbered the sections as follows: 1) the Petition of Lady Cumming Gordon of Altyre, 2) State of the Process, Miss Marianne Woods and Miss Jane Pirie, against Dame Helen Cumming Gordon, 3) Authorities with Regard to the Practice of Tribadism, 4) The Additional Petition of Miss Mary‐Ann Woods, and Miss Jane Pirie, 5) Answers for Dame Helen Cumming Gordon to the Additional Petition of Miss Marianne Woods and Miss Jane Pirie, 6) Speeches of the Judges, 7) Notes of the Speeches of Lords Robertson, Glenlee, Newton, and Polkemmet, 8) Petition of Miss Mary‐Anne Woods, and Miss Jane Pirie, May 1812, 9) Humble Petition and Appeal of Dame Helen Cumming Gordon, 10) Answers for Lady Cumming Gordon to the Petition of Miss Mary Anne Woods and Miss Jane Pirie, 11) Petition of Miss Mary Ann Woods and Miss Jane Pirie, November 30, 1819, 12) Condescendence for Miss Mary Ann Woods, and Miss Jane Pirie against Lady Cumming Gordon, 13) Answers for Lady Cumming Gordon to Condescendence for Miss Mary Ann Woods and Miss Jane Pirie, 14) Replies for Miss Mary Ann Woods and Miss Jane Pirie to the Answers for Lady Cumming Gordon. [3] I use the term “half Indian” rather than “Anglo‐Indian,” because, as Jenny Sharpe explains, “Anglo‐Indian” has historically designated the British residents of India (165n4). See also Collingham 204n7. [4] The inspiration for these comments comes from Sedgwick, Epistemology 2–8. [5] “Pursuer” is a Scottish legal term whose American equivalent is plaintiff. Similarly, the Scottish term “defender” is equivalent to the American “defendant.” I use the Scottish terminology throughout. [6] To be precise, the Court of Session also had “a criminal jurisdiction in all actions such as perjury, forgery, and fraud, which had a close connection with civil law” (Phillipson 43). For an extremely helpful overview of the Scottish legal system at the time of Woods and Pirie, I would like to thank Paul T. Riggs. [7] The Lord Chancellor states: “Undoubtedly, it will require a very temperate and a very prudent consideration what damages should be given, regard being had to all the circumstances which occur in the case” (qtd. in WP 13: 6–7, original italics). [8] Woods and Pirie asked to be reimbursed for their losses, which, according to the statement they submitted to the court, came to 9,473 pounds (WP 12:5). Based on the latest extant records of negotiations between the parties, Faderman estimates that they eventually settled for an amount between 3500 and 4000 pounds (Scotch Verdict 283–89, 292–93, 299–312). [9] The specific feature of the Scottish form of process to encourage full discussion is that arguments are made in writing, and each side provides “answers” to the general strategies and specific points of the other. See Boswell 228, qtd. in Phillipson 54 and Maconochie (Lord Meadowbank), one of the judges who hears Woods and Pirie and acts as Lord Ordinary in the case (35). [10] For the continuity between and proximity of the most sanctioned forms and the most reprobated forms of same‐sex relations, see Sedgwick (Between Men 89) and Elfenbein 27. [11] Thus Meadowbank early on takes the tale as “probably originating from the malignity and arts of some corrupt domestic” (WP 2:10). The most likely suspect here is Charlotte Whiffin, whom he calls “a domestic of little conscience” and whom Lady Cumming Gordon’s counsel accuse of perjury. Marianne Woods is potentially vulnerable to charges of immorality because of family associations with the theater, and the pursuers call two witnesses who swear she was never on the stage (WP 2:122, 125). For the efforts of Lady Cumming Gordon’s counsel to refute these character references, see WP 5:26 and 64. [12] The distinction between Christian and heathen lands draws on a climatic theory of national moral character in which sexual character plays a key role, which I shall discuss in more detail below. One of the clearest articulations of this theory takes the form of Richard Burton’s concept of the Sotadic Zone, a geographic and climatic region where sexual vice supposedly flourishes (“Terminal Essay” in Arabian Nights 10: 206–46; see also Crompton, Byron 53–56; Bleys; and Doyle 32). For the place of religion, specifically Protestantism, in English nationalism, see Crompton, Byron 53, 56–58; Wheeler 821–61; Colley 18–55, 369; and Newman 233–38. [13] Commentators on the case mimic the judges finding for the schoolmistresses in taking up this argument with particular enthusiasm. The ease with which this argument circulates could be seen as a kind of contagion that is a counterpart to the “contagion” of Jane Cumming’s story. For this latter issue, see below. [14] In so doing, they reject the testimony on this score not only of Jane Cumming, but also of Marianne Woods’s student bedmate, Janet Munro. Where the former claims that one of the maids in the school, Charlotte Whiffin, imparted the stories to her (WP 2:72), the latter reports that she first learned of the significance of the stories from her nursemaid (WP 2:47). Lord Boyle says that Munro contradicts her own testimony in her deposition (WP 6:47–48). Eliza Stirling, another student to whom Jane Cumming tells her stories, depones that “Miss Cumming seemed … to understand” “the singular behavior between the pursuers,” while Miss Stirling and her mother did not (WP 2:113, 109). In addition to Jane Cumming, only the maid Mary Brown admits to understanding the meaning of Woods and Pirie’s actions (WP 2:64–68). Jane Cumming herself testifies that her suspicions “first arose in her own mind from her own reflections, before she had any conversation with any person on the subject” (WP 2:81), and this statement proves particularly damaging to her. For Justice Robertson and Glenlee’s opposing views, see WP 7:4 and 9. [15] Tukhanen also makes this point (1005–06), but he sees the hypersexualization of the Indian female body in Woods and Pirie, specifically the belief in clitoral enlargement, as anticipating the late‐nineteenth‐century discourse of sexology (1006–07). [16] For more on Ramabai, see Grewal 179–214. [17] As Moore remarks in another context, the visibility allowing for this selective attribution makes for the manageability of deviance (49 and 54). [18] The special status accorded to Jane Cumming as sole possessor of sexual knowledge among the students can be understood according to Žižek’s concept of the ideological symptom (Sublime Object 126). For an analysis of enjoyment in one particular Oriental site, see Grosrichard and especially the Introduction by Dolar, which makes Grosrichard’s Lacanian framework explicit. [19] On the “publicity” of women in eighteenth‐century England, see Cohen 45. [20] Dalrymple documents a number of cases in which intermarriage led British men in India to convert to Islam (23–24, 27–28, 34–39) and treats the case of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the Resident at the court of Hyderabad from 1798 to 1805, in fascinating detail. Kirkpatrick is notable in that he eventually switched his political loyalties from the East India Company, which he increasingly came to see as “an untrustworthy and aggressive force in Indian politics,” to the Hyderabad rulers, whom he had earlier viewed as “‘effeminate’ and ‘luxuriant’ tyrants” (77). [21] For the environmental theory of perversion, see Bleys 65. For British views of the Anglo‐Indian nabob as a figure in need of reform, see Viswanathan 24, Collingham 34–36 and 50–92, and Dalrymple 409–13. [22] Jane Cumming is considered a flawed witness because of her race, her illegitimate birth, and her dependence on the defender, which is seen as an incentive for her to maintain her story regardless of its truth or falsity (WP 6:1). Her propensity for changing key parts of her story and falling silent for long periods of time during her interrogation also damage her credibility. [23] In this quotation two contending theories of the symptom in Woods and Pirie, one based on class and the other based on nation/race, converge to overdetermine “the lower natives of India” as Jane Cumming’s source of sexual knowledge in the view of the judges who find for Woods and Pirie. [24] Donoghue offers this passage among others as support for the claim that social theories and biological theories “coexisted and overlapped, rather than one replacing the other” (53). In so arguing, she takes issue with Trumbach’s claim that the biological conceptualization of the lesbian as a hermaphrodite died out after the mid‐eighteenth century (120–21). [25] According to Bleys, biological theories of female sexuality first focused on the labia and nymphae, as in the cases of the various “Hottentot Venuses” displayed in European cities in the 1810’s. Tukhanen suggests that the display of one of these women, Saartje Baartman, in London shortly before Woods and Pirie first came to trial may have directly influenced the court’s decision on the case. [26] Moore notes that in the “almost millenarian shift in the organization of society” from 1748–1816, representations of virtue and femininity adapted “to fit the ideological needs of the newly powerful British professional class” (5). These needs include the legitimation of British rule in India. [27] For the full rheumatism interpretation, see WP 2:105, 120 and 4:66–69. The counsel for Woods and Pirie present Jane Cumming’s certainty that the word was “in” as evidence of the girl’s depravity (WP 4:68). Lady Cumming Gordon’s counsel present a case for the contrary sodomy interpretation in WP 5:41. [28] Lord Justice‐Clerk Boyle echoes this view when he refers to “circumstances perfectly consistent with innocence, the slightest variation in any one of which would give a totally different appearance to them” (WP 6:112). [29] The statements of Jane Pirie’s character witnesses subvert themselves in similar ways. For example, in attempting to make up for her failure upon giving evidence to do Pirie justice (WP 2:133), Mrs. General Campbell of Strachur ends up censuring Pirie’s “too great warmth of feeling” and her attachment to Miss Woods, which “appeared to me to be enthusiastic” (WP 2:134). The effort to compensate for that failure seems doomed to repeat and exacerbate it instead. [30] Once one becomes aware of this second perspective in Woods and Pirie, the words of many of the justices come to sound like straight lines, as when Lord Justice‐Clerk Hope declares: “I have no more suspicion of the guilt of the pursuers than I have of my own wife” (WP 6:55). [31] At least one known Romantic‐era English lesbian, Anne Lister, thinks of exploiting this cover. Referring to a revealing letter she wrote to a long‐time woman lover, she reassures herself: “Yet there is nothing … I could not manage to explain away to warm friendship if I had the letter before me & was obliged to defend myself” (138–39). Moore also comments on the epistemological problem posed by this lack of suspicion (80). [32] Consequently, “intercourse between women” is not subject to the same technologies of visualization that are so prominent in the sodomy trials of the time. For a fine discussion of these technologies, see Robinson 45, 47, 79–80, 83–84, 141, 181. [33] Jane Cumming omits the detail of the keyhole upon her first narration of the story, and she is closely interrogated on that omission (WP 2:72, 75). Charlotte refuses to corroborate under oath that she ever saw any such thing, thus dealing the defender’s case a serious blow. [34] The open secret of romantic friendship between women is what William Roughead misses in his popular version of the case, suggestively entitled “Closed Doors.” This open secret can also be understood in terms of Slavoj Žižek’s concept of double inscription, in which subjects exploit the conventional social forms of the symbolic order in order to pursue their own non‐socially sanctioned ends (Looking Awry 71–73). [35] Meadowbank links this pathology of the imagination to sensibility as a moral quality: “The very virtues of a mind of high sensibility are apt to feed this disease of the imagination” (WP 6:3–4). Meadowbank implies not that imagination has both erotic and moral aspects, but that morality itself has a tendency to become eroticized. [36] Kabbani offers Woods and Pirie as a case in point (53). Her work is inspired by Said’s Orientalism but gives the association between the Orient and sex a more prominent place than Said does. For other Orientalist visions of the zenana as a hotbed of lesbianism, see Grewal 64–65 and Alloula 95. [37] Meadowbank’s extreme concern to prevent news of the case from leaking out from the court to the public adds to this sense of a secret inner space with illicit connotations. For the methods by which he attempted to preserve secrecy, see WP 2:8, 9, 13, 18, 34; and 6:2. [38] Interestingly, the case contains two passing references to sodomy, which show that male desire could become the object of legal scrutiny when it was not heterosexual (Additional Petition 22, 38). Richard Francis Burton also suffered such a fate. He was thrown out of government service when he fell under suspicion of consorting with male prostitutes in Karachi (Nights 10:205–06; Brodie 66, 69–70; Kabbani 58; Grewal 92). Burton confirms the existence of the “double unnatural crime” to which Hope understands the story of the “wrong place” to refer (10:209). [39] My guides in discerning the erotic possibilities in this scene of “coming behind” are Sedgwick, Between Men 111–12, 113, and 169; and Edelman. [40] In the following account, I draw on Daiches 52, 55, 56; Scott 49, 74; and Bowers. I would like to thank Bowers for calling Daiches’s and Scott’s work to my attention and for assistance in locating the instances of the metaphor of the “backdoor” discussed below. [41] I draw here on Žižek, Looking Awry 165. For the erotics of nationalism, I have also found Newman suggestive, although he does not dwell on the complex relation between Britishness and Scottishness. [42] For a broader treatment of Scotland’s integration into Great Britain in the course of the eighteenth century, see Phillipson 1–41, Colley 114–32, Shaw, and Devine. To my knowledge the only work on Woods and Pirie that investigates the Scottish context at all is Faderman’s Scotch Verdict (30–31, 39–40), but these are passing references that do not figure significantly in her treatment of the case. [43] Another aspect of the reform program involves the reorganization of the Inner House into two divisions to help reduce the work loads of individual judges and thereby speed up the progress of causes through the Court (Phillipson 43, 112–13). At the time of Woods and Pirie, this reform is already realized, and the case was heard in the Second Division. [44] From the Whig perspective, Scottish political culture even after the Union is dominated by the power of the legal corporations, the legal hierarchy, the office of the Lord Advocate, and the influence of the Dundas family (Phillipson 147–48). Like Scotland, India, along with the “Orient” as a whole, is associated with despotism. See, for example, Viswanathan 30 and Dalrymple 77. [45] Phillipson (30) and Colley (123) note Scotland’s unprecedented economic expansion, which outpaces commercial growth in England. In addition, Colley traces some of this growth to imperial trade, which is fostered by the control over patronage enjoyed by influential Scottish politicians such as Lord Bute and Henry Dundas (123, 127–31). In fact, George Cumming’s father, himself a former East India Company servant, drew upon his friendship with Dundas to secure George a lucrative position with the Company in Patna (Phillipson 13–14; Kay’s Portraits 76–77; Scotch Verdict 37). [46] Meadowbank acknowledges the public support for the measure and views it as inevitable but wants jury trial to be instituted “under due precautions against rash or destructive innovation” (Considerations 5–6). [47] See also Baron David Hume, who states that his aim is to “rescu[e] the law of my native country from that state of declension in the esteem of some part of the public, into which, of late years, it seems to have been falling” relative to English law (3–4). [48] See Lords Hermand and Balmuto: “But it becomes every man who regards the interest of the Law, and the people of Scotland, to remonstrate against incautious expressions particularly when they come from the most capable of judging and most desirous of supporting the dignity of the Court” (qtd. in Phillipson 120).