The Other Victorians

You know the Other Victorians?
The ones Foucault writes about in The History of Sexuality
The “frauds against procreation” who did “acts contrary to nature”
Like Michael Field, a Victorian gentleman poet
Who wrote 27 verse plays & 8 volumes of poetry
Who is not a man at all
But two women, an Englishwoman and her niece
And their chow dog they adored
They wrote poems about flowers pussy and the patriarchy
What else are you doing to do
When you are the Other Victorians
In whose hearts burn a fervent heat
And Virginia Woolf is only a Victorian baby in a bonnet
So cannot yet measure your entangled violence?

Katharine Bradley (1846-1914)
Lost her dad at two and when her mom died
She went to college in Cambridge & Paris
Then joined Ruskin’s Guild of Saint George
A small utopian society for art snobs
Kat pissed off Ruskin when she wrote to tell him
She lost God but found a Skye Terrier
Annoying Ruskin was necessary defiance, I’m sure
Look at what he did to pretty Effie Grey
Married her and then ignored and bullied her
Because a woman’s body wasn’t what he expected
Effie got a divorce due to his “incurable impotency”
And made off with a Pre-Raphaelite painter
What else can you do, Kat? When they call you
“An aberration of the genetic instinct”
And make you “an object of analysis and target of intervention”
You adopt your niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913)
When her mother dies, adopt a joint pseudonym
Properly anonymous and vaguely pastoral
To write poems like “Maids not to you my mind doth change”
In which between women exists “manifold desire”
Sounding a lot like French Feminist theory of the 70s
Together you write, “Men I defy, allure, estrange,
Prostrate, make bond or free”
Back to your medieval craft guild, John

What can you do?
When sex and its effects are to be “pursued
Down to their slenderest ramifications”
By doctors, clergy, police
You are financially independent that helps
Working side by side you wrote verse plays
Loyalty or Love, The Tragic Mary, or Attila, My Attila
And poems about sex behind parquet doors
Beneath bedclothes, under surveillance
Hiding from those other Victorians
Weeping over Tennyson in ferny parlors
You describe a girl with her “lips apart,
like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze”
Trembling! Leaflets! So lovely! So Victorian!
Now your “souls so knit, / I leave a page half-writ”
For a quickie in the hedges of St. James’ park

Robert Browning praised Michael Field’s work
Edith wrote to him about Katherine
“She is my senior, by but fifteen years
She has lived with me, taught me, encouraged me
And joined me to her poetic life”
An industrious writing team taking the scene by storm
With books of poems like Wild Honey from Various Thyme
Mystic Trees, and Poems of Adoration
Mixing with the heavies of the nineties
The Aestheticists, Pater, Wilde, young Yeats
Friends called you The Michaels, The Field, The Michael Fields
Yet you fought with Aubrey Beardsley
Over his “depraved” art, which is disappointing
Because I want interesting Victorian artists to get along
The Field begged Browning not to reveal their secret
Edith wrote that “would indeed be utter ruin to us”
“We have many things to say that the world
Will not tolerate from a woman’s lips”
They must maintain the disguise
A job of many Other Victorians
Unless you wanted to go the way of Wilde
Sentenced to two years’ hard labor
For “gross indecency” for the “Love that dare not speak its name”
He had to walk a treadmill pick oakum wear a hood
The wit of Europe called CC3, the number of his cell
Hunger, illness, and injury destroying his health
Upon release, he sailed for France never to return home
And never saw his sons again
His horrid young boyfriend betrayed him
And he died sick and broken, exiled to a filthy hotel
The Michael Fields mourned Wilde
So glam and sparkling, a raging diamond
A thousand vicious Victorian judges burn
In hell for harming him!

In the poem “Unbosoming” your breast “is rent
With the burthen and strain of its great content”
And the love breeding in your heart
Is like a “thousand vermilion-beads
That push, and riot, and squeeze, and clip”
And flowers have a “tremulous, bowery fold”
As if from Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which is Not One
My best friend, a real live lesbian
Thinks this poem is a little silly, which it probably is
She says I wish I were a lesbian, probably true
In that stupid way straight girls think it’s easier
To date women rather than men
As if the patriarchy doesn’t wreck us all
But she finds Michael Field moving
Knowing what it’s like to live hidden even from yourself
To walk into the grocery store at thirteen
And hear someone say, What is that?
To have your father say your dead mother
Would not have liked you to be gay
To not come out until after college
And finally to decide to live revealed

Michael Field, you dedicated your first book Long Ago
To Sappho, a girl’s best ancient friend
In the preface you said, “Devoutly as the fiery-bosomed Greek
Turned in her anguish to Aphrodite
To accomplish her heart’s desires
I have turned to the one woman
Who has dared to speak unfalteringly
Of the fearful mastery of love”
Another problem for Other Victorians
For all of us really, the fearful mastery of love
But especially hard for them
Locked up in asylums, sent to penal colonies & houses of correction
Punished for “moral folly” and “physical imbalance”
Or sentenced to bed like Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Or Woolf and most everybody dies tragically
The poor Brontës all died so terribly
What a second novel Emily would have written! So amazing!
Could her sister really have burned it? So unfair!
Emily had a dog named Keeper
(And so did my real life lesbian best friend)
And a falcon named Hero, now I’m distracted
By my desire to make the past
Palatable and comprehensible
Surely one of Power/Knowledge’s microtechniques

What on earth are you supposed to do?
You’re not the Lady of Shalott
Not trapped in a tower surrounded by a moat
Stuck inside to work on your weird weavings
Not under a vague curse that makes you
Kill yourself like a Victorian performance artist
The second you see Lancelot galloping outside
You bedeck your boat with flowers to float
Down to Camelot and perish on the spot
Only for Lancelot to say, “She has a pretty face”
But you too are “half sick of shadows”
You’re not Christina Rossetti either
Who rejects her suitors with a “No thank you, John”
And rejects chess, too, why not? So boring
And attends to fallen women at a prison
And writes lesbian incest poems about goblins
In which sisters lick each other’s faces
A Victorian badass that Christina
And Woolf is just a girl when you are writing
Her mother is dying and abandoning her
To her stepbrothers with their roving hands
And it’s before Freud says we’re all bisexual
Some more than others clearly
Long before Gertrude and Alice walk Basket around Paris
Who’s better? Their dog or yours? Yours
You’re Michael Field, dammit
You parade him through London’s parks
Write a book of poems for him, Whym Chow: Flame of Love
In class one of my student asks why all lesbians love dogs
I’m taken aback, but he explains his two moms
Have always had dogs & all their friends too
But all my lesbian friends adore cats, I protest
My best friend thinks this is funny
She has two cats, thank you, John

What are you going to do?
Publish your poems that claim
“If thou are beloved, oh then
Fear no grief from mortal man”
But it isn’t true, Edith’s dad disapproves
Of your love so she suffers from what Foucault
Says, “There is not one but many silences”
And when he dies, you buy a grand old house
With the money and when your dog dies
You both convert to Roman Catholicism
Get caught up in the majesty of it all
The rituals, candles, velvets, the dark places
And Katherine you don’t say anything
When Edith gets cancer and you do, too
You hold her tremulous hand and wipe her brow
Stay up reading to her when she can’t sleep for the pain
To ease her tempestuous heart
Perhaps reading H.D. Imagiste who just published
Her first poems also inspired by Sappho
And who would live in London with her wife during the Blitz
And Kat, you die just eight months after Edith dies
As the Suffragettes bomb churches
The Great War comes marching
And everybody will die those Other Victorians
Not just the frail crazy pretty ladies floating
Down the river with flowers trailing from their fingers
But two women bedside gazing at each other
Surrounded by the fruits of their labor
What are you going to do?
Write poems and resist silence and death