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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
This essay considers representations of the sculptural body in the work of Olive Custance (1874-1944), a regular contributor to the Yellow Book, and one of the characteristic poets of the fin de sidle. Like H.D. later, Custance appropriates the Dorian aesthetic employed by her precursors and contemporaries Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde in order to express homoerotic desire. However, her bisexuality, it is argued, leads her to explore an alternative aesthetic that manifests itself in her use of colour, thus embracing the Ionian aesthetic H.D. rejected and combining it with the Dorian in order to express the fluidity of her own erotic desires.
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Olive Custance (1874-1944) is frequently mentioned in passing in critical works on late nineteenth-century poetry. Born to a distinguished family, she lived her early life at the family estate at Weston Longville near Norwich, and later, in London, moved in both aristocratic and artistic circles. In the early 1890s she concentrated her talents on poetry, becoming a regular contributor to the Yellow Book and gaining recognition as one of the characteristic poets of the fin de siecle. Published collections of her works include Opals (1897), Rainbows (1902), The Blue Bird (1905), and The Inn of Dreams (1911). (1) Brocard Sewell, in his brief study of Olive Custance, names her as one of the 'three principal women poets' of the period alongside Dollie Radford and Alice Meynell. (2) The status afforded by such female company is consolidated by her standing among male contemporaries such as Ernest Dowson, Theodore Wratislaw, Arthur Symons, and Richard Le Gallienne. Her poems appeared with those of Dowson and Wratislaw in the third volume of the Yellow Book, and Holbrook Jackson, in his review of the 1890s, makes the prophetic judgement that she, together with Symons, Le Gallienne, and Wratislaw, though 'giving expression to moods more attuned to the end-of-the-century emotions [...] will [nevertheless] command a select group of admirers in most periods'. (3)
While this is true, Custance's work is more often to be found today in anthologies than in individual collections; and if she is known at all outside academic circles, it is usually as the wife of Oscar Wilde's lover 'Bosie', the notorious Lord Alfred Douglas with whom she eloped in 1902. As Thornton and Small point out in the introduction to their modern edition of Opals and Rainbows, her name is frequently seen in 'books about the 1890s, but she remains a figure who appears in lists rather than one who is looked at as an individual writer' (p. i). However, the 1990s seem to have triggered a minor revival of interest in Custance: a year before Thornton and Small's edition appeared, a selection of her poems, edited by her biographer Brocard Sewell, was published by Cecil Woolf. In his introduction Sewell attempts to distance her work from the more controversial aspects of the late-Victorian period. He concedes that a number of her poems 'have given her a place among the "Decadent" writers of the Eighteen-Nineties', but tempers this with the observation that 'with her, Decadence was more of a fleeting phase or mood than a deliberately cultivated attitude'. (4)
This 'mood', according to Jackson, is discernible in what he calls a 'minor note' and experienced collectively by those who epitomized the period, giving the poetry of the hour 'a hothouse fragrance; a perfume faint yet unmistakable and strange' (p. 197). The use of the word 'strange' in this context is suggestive; as Ruth Vanita notes, it is a word that in the works of Walter Pater appears to encode homoeroticism, and is often appropriated by his contemporaries and followers to complicate expressions of desire. (5) Jackson's 'minor note' is therefore seemingly associated with transgressive sexuality, a connotation that becomes increasingly clear in his discussion. He argues that:
The eroticism which became so prevalent in the verse of the younger poets was minor because it was little more than a pose [...] where the minor poets were both minor and poets was in that curious lisping note which many of them managed to introduce into their poems. This was a new note in poetry, corresponding with the minor key in music [...] There was an unusual femininity about it; not the femininity of women, nor yet the feminine primness of men; it was more a mingling of what is effeminate in both sexes. This was the genuine minor note, and it was abnormal--a form of hermaphroditism. (pp. 196-97)
Jackson's book, published in 1913, demonstrates a retrospective consciousness of the clinical discourses that had begun, continued to define, and, in turn, construct homosexuality. As Michel Foucault reminds us:
We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized [...] less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of those forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. (6)
Here Foucault is referring more specifically to the attention paid by sexologists to male homosexuality, but lesbianism, while legally non-existent, had also begun to attract considerable attention. (7) In 1889 Richard von Krafft-Ebing included lesbianism among the sexual perversions he discussed in Psychopathia sexualis, and, according to his formulations, female homosexuality was to be suspected in women who wore their hair short, partook in male pastimes or sports, and enjoyed cross-dressing on or off stage. (8) In women, it appears, Foucault's 'hermaphroditism of the soul' swiftly becomes an 'hermaphroditism' of the body. In 1908 Edward Carpenter suggested that lesbian women, along with homosexual men, belonged to an 'Intermediate Sex'; and Havelock Ellis, in his discussion 'Sexual Inversion among Women', which appeared in the first volume of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1896-1928), argued that while lesbianism was primarily hereditary, women born with the potential for inversion were more likely to develop it when exposed to close contact in same-sex environments. (9)
Given the seemingly homoerotic subtext of the poetry of the 1890s, and the public denunciation of Lord Alfred Douglas's poetry published in the December 1894 edition of The Chameleon, which was cited by the prosecution at the first Wilde trial of 1895 as amplifying 'a defence of the vilest immorality', it is perhaps unsurprising that Sewell tries to distance Custance from her more 'disreputable' contemporaries, despite the fact that she married Douglas and that Natalie Clifford Barney (with whom she had a brief liaison) was known for her energetic sexual exploits with women, took Sappho as her model, and presided over a salon in Paris, where, we are told, one was certain to meet lesbians. (10)
Custance's friendship with Barney developed as a result of the latter's visit to the offices of The Bodley Head in search of a new translation of Sappho, during which John Lane encouraged her to purchase a copy of Opals. (11) Sewell tells us that Barney, 'much pleased with these poems', wrote to Custance expressing her admiration and sent her a collection of her own work, Quelques portraits: Sonnets de femmes (1900). (12) Barney records in her memoir that Opal (as Custance liked to be called) responded warmly ('avec feu'), and quotes an extract from a poem that Custance addressed to her in her reply:
For I would dance to make you smile, and sing Of those who with some sweet mad sin have played, And how Love walks with delicate feet afraid 'Twixt maid and...
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