How to Make a Heterosexual Romance Queer: Anna Marsden’s Experiment and the Limits of Sexual/Gendered Inversion

Abstract

Anna Marsden’s Experiment builds on the generic conventions of New Woman novels in order to interject a radically queer character who first appears to follow the normative paths of cross dressing within the genre, but this novel plays with audience assumptions and sexological discourse in order to show the limits that still existed within this growing pseudo science. Williams successfully critiques the limited understanding of gender in New Woman fiction, sexology, and British society in general. Anna/Dick cannot be contained or understood singularly as a heterosexual woman, an inverted woman, a heterosexual man, or an inverted man. An academic reclaiming of this novel not only allows for a greater understanding of lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans characters in historical literature, but also provides an excellent case study in the connections between the “sexual anarchy” of the fin de siècle and the nonnormative female experience in early twentieth century modernist fiction.

AT FIRST GLANCE, Ellen Williams’s Anna Marsden’s Experiment (1899) appears to be another typical New Woman novel invested in gender inversion to show women’s capabilities in a masculine world. Williams seems to invite this reading from the very first sentence which links Anna with the symbolic latchkey as an “emblem of emancipated womanhood” and mentions her “superfluous” status.¹ The use of what were by this point New Woman clichés establishes this novel as working firmly within this genre, yet the mannish New Woman figure at its heart goes beyond convention to create a new possibility for turn-of-the-century gender and sexuality. The “experiment” of the title refers to Anna’s ability to pass as a man for the bulk of the novel. Although New Woman fiction frequently featured women who cross-dressed, none are quite as invested in queering the notions of gender as Williams’s Anna Marsden’s Experiment. Anna considers becoming a man after she realizes that she is “a failure [as a woman], both in love and ambition—a distinct, dreary failure; but as a man—.”² The unfinished nature of this sentence indicates that as a man Anna will be a success. This phrasing could imply that she will be a success in love as well as ambition, but the text never makes clear exactly what Anna seeks beyond living as a man.

Other New Woman novels which engaged in this trope presented the women’s ulterior motives as clear and finite. Sarah Grand’s interlude in The Heavenly Twins (1893) shows her protagonist to dress as a boy only at night, and for a short period of time before she is reclaimed back into a properly gendered domesticity. Lady Florence Dixie’s Gloriana, or, the Revolution of 1900 (1890) has the titular character live as a man for years in order to forward women’s rights. Gloriana, too, ends the novel as a married woman. In the same novel, a detective’s assistant, Leonie, passes as a man for a short period of time in order to track Gloriana. In Victoria Cross’s Six Chapters of a Man’s Life (1903), Theodora passes as a man so that she may travel with her lover. There are many more such examples in the New Woman canon, yet Anna Marsden is the only character to live and work as a man for an extended period of time solely because it suits her. Her reversion back to living as a woman at the end of the novel is not due to any self-conscious desire on her own part; rather, she is forced to “out” herself to an acquaintance and must thereafter resume her life as a woman. The sustained gender-crossing and invocation of New Woman tropes speak to Williams’s attempt to create a novel within this genre that takes inversion beyond any of the previous narratives. Through sustained analysis of the presentation of gendered fluidity, it becomes evident that this novel relies on the generic trope of the cross-dressing, mannish New Woman in order to separate Anna Marsden and present her as a character who is recognizably and innately queer.

The gender inversion that occurred in other New Woman novels was often a reaction to the popular press’s disparaging presentation of the New Woman as “mannish” and was actually adopted as a positive attribute stripped of its sexual connotations. These women were able to cross gender boundaries without being easily identified as sexually inverted through their eventual heterosexual ends. Heike Bauer has argued that “the New Women understood gender in terms of binaries that could be reversed” but that this reversal is not a uniformly progressive one as “their affirmative politics of female inversion, because it was understood as a form of rational female masculinity, marginalized same-sex desire.”³ Many scholars have discussed the homoeroticism that occurs from these cross-dressing episodes, but Bauer’s astute comment that the narratives still alienate the sexual inversion that was being discussed in the sexological texts of the time does not negate this potential. Her argument instead highlights the authors’ use of gender inversion at the expense of sexual inversion. The understudied Anna Marsden’s Experiment is an exception to this idea since it engages in sexual as well as gender inversion. Williams complicates gender inversion through her rejection of the binary understanding of gender that provided the foundation for a sexological discussion of inversion. She also invokes and similarly complicates sexual inversion through coded language and symbols that show the queer transgression of her novel’s titular character. Anna Marsden’s Experiment provides an intermediary between the gender-inverted characters in the New Woman genre and the sexually inverted Stephen Gordon of Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness. Although Hall’s narrative remains radical in its inclusion of an overtly inverted character, it does not appear without any literary predecessors, and an understanding of the ways that Williams queered notions of the heterosexual, mannish New Woman will aid in seeing the links between the New Woman fiction of the fin de siècle and the queer feminist modernism of the early twentieth century.

Anna Marsden’s Masculinity & Isolation

The plot of Anna Marsden’s Experiment lends itself easily to a rhetoric of gender inversion: Anna Marsden, dissatisfied with her life as a woman, decides one day to “become” an invented male cousin named Richard “Dick”⁴ Ward. She lives and succeeds as a man in the realms where she had earlier failed as a woman; however, her closest friend, Rupert Deane, becomes ill after a failed proposal to his love, Lottie Thorne. Lottie’s refusal is due to her romantic feelings for Dick, a problem that Dick “fixes” by revealing his secret to her. This revelation is intended to return her to the arms of Rupert, a plan which is only somewhat successful as it does not save the ailing Rupert. Once Rupert dies and Dick’s secret is revealed, Anna again reclaims her earlier gender status and relegates herself to a life of misery. The romantic entanglements that appear from this triangle seem to fit it comfortably into a rejection of sexual inversion: Dick’s rejection of Lottie is depicted as difficult only because Dick knows that once he reveals his secret he must give up the life as a man he has made for himself. The homoeroticism that pervades the relationship between Dick and Rupert could easily be undermined due to the audience’s knowledge that Dick is “really” Anna. However, Williams simultaneously provides this reading for her text and resists it. By allowing her audience to have this easy explanation, she is able to create a much more transgressive character.

As part of what seems her traditional description of a New Woman, Williams makes it very clear that Anna has many masculine attributes. Anna prefers masculine forms of writing: “Her tendencies were naturally intrinsically masculine, rather than feminine. She enjoyed reading strong, vigorous, dramatic prose; she loved to write it, whereas mild twaddle was all she could find a market for at this period, and she continued to despise it, even while despising the output.” She also has a “square, angular figure above the medium height”⁵ which is portrayed as ungainly and unfeminine; this same figure becomes attractive once she becomes Dick. Due to her mannish appearance Rupert is unable see her as anything but a friend—a fact which is sadly recognized by Anna who develops romantic feelings for him. At the age of twenty-one, Anna finds that Rupert is “the one man in whom she had ever felt more than a passing interest.”⁶ Throughout the text Williams vacillates between describing Anna’s feelings toward Rupert as mild, such as in this description, and as more impassioned. The latter tend to occur when the possibility of a relationship is least likely (such as when Rupert begins to court another woman).

Throughout her unrequited attraction, Anna begins to analyze what love and romance mean to her for the first time in her life. The narrator explains that “love to Anna Marsden was not, as in the case of most women, the one supreme fact of existence, but merely the means to an end, and that end personal happiness; her individuality was too strong to be merged entirely in that of a second person.”⁷ Williams separates Anna from “most women” in her desires. This reading could function easily either as cementing Anna as a New Woman who longs for more in her life than marriage, or as situating Anna’s desires as “other” early in the text. Bolstering this latter reading is a comment made by the narrator that immediately precedes this analysis of Anna’s difference: Rupert “had given her mere friendship, scarcely that, yet, inadvertently, he had rendered himself essential to her happiness.”⁸ The end goal of the personal happiness that the narrator defines as Anna’s ideal of love is tied to Rupert not because of an erotic attachment, but rather because of the friendship that he offered her. In a house in which Anna feels completely alone, Rupert was the first person to extend an offer of amity and it is this initial friendliness which Anna appears to have misinterpreted as romantic love. Rupert is not just her first male friend; he is her first and only friend.

Women have treated Anna particularly badly and are mean to her in a way that men often are not. The narrator describes how Anna had been relatively isolated from the greater world when she was growing up with her aunt. It was not until she moved into the boardinghouse that she experienced “the cruel little speeches which the majority of [women] took delight in making, for the mere pleasure of inflicting pain,” a skill which Anna eventually picked up and used “in self-defense.” Anna experiences only two forms of interaction with women: cutting cruelty and a pity which Anna despises. The few women who seem to talk to her without an intent to cause suffering only do so because they belong to a “Guild … the members of which pledged themselves to be kind to everybody indiscriminately.”⁹ Women’s reactions to Anna seem to call for a better, more inclusive feminist movement. All of the women described in the novel live at the same boardinghouse as Anna, and thus all have some form of freedom (as they, too, own the latchkey). Yet they have not progressed to proper New Womanhood (Anna alone has “advanced opinions”)—they all focus only on feminine accomplishments such as memorizing the language of flowers and using this knowledge to try and communicate with lovers.¹⁰ The lack of a community of women separates Anna Marsden’s Experiment from other novels which feature coteries of New Women such as those in Sarah Grand’s novels. However, without the alienation and isolation that surrounded Anna her decision to swap genders may not have been plausible. Anna sees no alternative way to embrace both aspects of her personality, and there is no one present who is invested enough in her life to question her sudden disappearance.

The First Appearance of Gender & Sexual Inversion

Cross-dressing and gendered inversion were not new tropes in New Woman fiction by 1899 when Williams published her novel. Indeed, one of the few recurring themes amongst New Woman fiction is the rejection of normative femininity, and this often occurs through appropriating male signifiers such as clothing. Because of its frequency in New Woman literature, it is not also new to discuss either the cross-dressing or its radical potential. More than fifteen years ago, Ann Heilmann noted the “recurring theme of transvestism [in] New Woman fiction” but argued that “while the cross-dressing plot served to destabilize the category of gender, many feminist writers went to extraordinary (and never wholly convincing) lengths to clear their heroines of any suspicion of deviance, sexual desire or even heterosexual awareness in their intimate friendships with men.” Heilmann continues in her article to show the queer potential of these cross-dressing narratives and concludes by arguing that the queer relationships that occurred between men and the women “masquerading” as men had two potential meanings: “Heterosexual men felt drawn to other men because these men were really women in drag; conversely, homosexual men masquerading as straight men confronted the true nature of their desire when falling in love with other men, irrespective of the fact that they were really women.”¹¹ Heilmann’s analysis is astute in discussing the ways in which men were sexually implicated in their relationships with cross-dressing women; however, what this concluding remark ignores is the sexuality of the women in these interactions. That is due both to her earlier assertion that the New Woman authors worked against their female characters being read as sexually deviant and the fact that the characters she discusses all ultimately see themselves as women. Grand’s Angelica from The Heavenly Twins perhaps provides the only instance which works against this reading, as she claims that she felt exactly like a boy when she dresses as one. Yet despite this claim, she always returned to her life as a woman at the end of each episode of crossing.

Williams’s novel and characterization of Anna/Dick work against these readings that proliferate in New Woman criticism. Dick only “becomes” Anna again when there is no possibility of remaining Dick, not because of any desire to return to a “true” gender expression. And, most importantly, Dick’s relationship with Rupert has a completely one-sided sexual desire. Rupert is neither the straight man “really” attracted to a woman, nor a closeted gay man who believes he desires a man. The queer desire that pervades the novel emanates solely from Anna/Dick (and, admittedly, Lottie’s attraction to Dick); while this queerness is in some way clearly due to her cross-dressing, it also seems to exceed her intentional gender presentation. Anna/Dick does not seem to alter much in herself when she introduces herself as Dick; she seems to have always embodied an intermediary gendered state.

This total rejection of a gendered binary is part of what sets Anna Marsden’s Experiment apart from Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Much has been said about the overt reliance on sexual inversion in Hall’s text; the bulk of the essays in Laura Doan and Jay Prosser’s excellent collection on Hall’s novel, Palatable Poison, focus on the role of inversion within the text. The focus on the sexual inversion seems to imply scholars’ acceptance of the gender binary that is necessary for this novel’s main argument to exist. In an article on the role of horses in the novel’s use of inversion, Mary Armstrong writes that “of course, The Well is so dependent upon gender binaries that (whether we find the novel gender-conservative or gender-radical) textual erotics may appear to be exclusively organized by the masculine/feminine binary.”¹² Deborah Cohler explains that “Hall relies on the inclusion of the ‘gentleman invert’-–the aristocratic, mannish, homosexual woman—within a transhistorically constant construction of British masculinity.”¹³ Stephen’s role in The Well of Loneliness does not upset normative views of gender in the way that Anna/Dick does. Nor does Anna/Dick seem to be easily classified as homosexual—she clearly desires men, but this desire is not purely heterosexual as she is not a cisgendered woman. Anna/Dick exceeds both gender and sexual inversion while Hall’s novel seems intent upon keeping the status quo of both gender and sexual inversion while upsetting the primacy of heteronormative sexuality.

Neither Masculine nor Feminine

When Anna realizes that her future holds the most promise if she is a man, she rapidly enacts a scheme that will allow Anna to disappear and Dick to appear. At first, Dick is utterly happy and at home in his presentation as a man. After completing his first day at the boardinghouse, he returns to his old rooms:

[A]nd locked the door, with a breath of profound relief. Then he threw himself into the worn easy-chair, with a woman’s abandon, a gesture of exultation, arms flung over his head.

“The worst of the ordeal is over,” he murmured, “and not one of the crowd suspects me. Anna Marsden’s cousin, Richard Ward, bids fair to prove a greater success socially than Anna Marsden. I have burned my boats. There can be no drawing back, even if I were not in love with my new identity—and I am.”¹⁴

Although Dick is much happier and more productive as a man than as a woman, he would be even more so if there were a larger spectrum that he could fall in which was not reliant on a binary for identifying both those who “fit” (feminine women and masculine men) and those who do not (masculine women and feminine men). In this passage, the narrator highlights Dick’s “woman’s abandon” while sustaining masculine pronouns. The language used here points to the instability of gender presentation in this era. Dick may be in love with his identity, but he still uses women’s gestures in private. Later in the novel, he still thoroughly enjoys his new identity, but he often finds excuses for his more feminine tendencies. He does not enjoy the club, staying out late, or drinking. While these habits are clearly not the sole markers of appropriate masculinity, his aversion to these activities is worthy of remark by both the narrator and his housemate, Rupert.

This inability to act “successfully” as either man or woman is integral to understanding the gender politics at play here. As Anna Marsden, she is too masculine to be adopted into society. As Richard Ward, he is described as rather feminine. Upon acquiring a new living situation with his friend, Rupert Deane, Dick rearranges the furniture in their shared sitting room. This change does not go unnoticed by Rupert: “‘What a handy young beggar you are,’ he observed to his companion. ‘Why, this room looks precisely as if a woman had arranged it.’” Dick also “blushed like a girl” when explaining that he does not drink.¹⁵ After living together for many months, Rupert noticed “there’s a feminine instinct about you, dear boy … a Je ne sais quoi which I can appreciate without being able to define.”¹⁵ Later on, as Rupert is dying, Dick nurses him better than any “female” nurse could have done. This nurturing, nesting image of Richard does not serve to emasculate him; rather, he is accepted as being a slightly odd boy.

Despite Dick’s acceptance within society as a man, there does seem to be something about him that is not fully “manly.” Anna is twenty-one, the age of majority, and so it seems fair to assume Dick is the same age. Yet he is often discussed as being a “boy” by the narrator and other characters. Part of this may be due to his coldness toward women—Rupert believes that Dick’s lack of attraction to any of the women betrays his status as a naïve country youth. The narrator, too, encourages this view of Dick as a boy rather than a man. Upon returning home from a date with Lottie, Rupert enters to see “a boyish figure, sleeping soundly in the easy chair.”¹⁶ The narrator had earlier described Anna in very masculine terms, so in one sense this is the logical extension of that appearance. Yet Dick does not appear here as a man, or as an effeminate man or boy. He is merely “boyish.” The lack of agency for Dick within this scene also speaks to an innate “boyishness” on Anna’s part. His hair is still short and he is still in masculine attire, but there is no other attempt to pass as a man. In a state of vulnerability, and with a lack of dissimulation, Anna/Dick is inherently “boyish.” The suffix “ish” is also important here; the Oxford English Dictionary explains that, when modifying a noun, this ending adds “the sense of or belonging to a person or thing, of the nature or character.”¹⁷ Anna/Dick’s nature is displayed as innately masculine. The text does not shy away from commenting on Dick’s feminine habits; therefore Williams could have narrated this sleeping appearance as another moment of femininity without disrupting Dick’s overall ability to pass. Instead, Williams ensures that her audience knows that even in repose, there is something about Anna which is inherently masculine.

The length to which Williams goes to make sure that her audience reads Anna as masculinized is undercut by the use of gendered pronouns. Although Dick passes as a man for most of the text, he is almost always referred to with the feminine pronoun. As is evidenced in other texts such as Lady Florence Dixie’s Gloriana, gendered pronouns can be switched in this period to reflect the gendered presentation of the referent. Although both Anna and the titular Gloriana end their respective novels as women, Anna does not marry nor is there any hint that she will do so. Perhaps, then, this was why Dixie was able to make her character more fully accepted as a male through the use of masculine pronouns. For Anna there was no saving marriage or focus on the grandiose effects of her transformation from woman-to-man-to-woman as in Dixie’s novel. At the end of Williams’s novel, when Anna is forced to out herself, she merely returns to her unfulfilling life. Therefore, although Anna is somewhat returned to a realm of heteronormative gender, she still stands outside as a non-(re)productive member of society. In order to make this return more palatable to an audience, Williams trod the line of gendering very carefully. Anna is depicted as unable to live fully as either woman or man. She can appear innately “boyish” while still retaining her status as a “she.” The feminine pronouns throughout may also point toward the limits for Anna that remain when she is Dick. Despite her appearance and male characteristics, she is not fully encapsulated within “he”-ness. There is something about her that is “other,” that cannot be safely incorporated into the constraining he/she binary on either side.

This view of Anna/Dick as existing outside of the gender binary, containable neither in masculinity nor in femininity, can also be seen in the way that Williams constructs Anna’s sexuality. Early in the novel we learn that although she prefers the company of men to women, she had never felt any affection for a man. This changes once she meets Rupert Deane. Anna believes that she is in love with him—the first man to show her any attention. Throughout the novel, her feelings for Deane seem a bit confused. At times she internally recognizes her love for him, at others acknowledging that she merely loves him as a friend. After her first day as a man, she thinks to herself that as a man she is “fated to achieve result—Rupert Deane’s friendship, for instance, since I am far too sexless to crave, as some women do, for love.” This “sexlessness” is belied several pages later once she has spent more time with Rupert as a man: “Daily, hourly intercourse with Rupert Deane under her assumed identity had convinced Anna there was more passion, more sexual susceptibility, in her nature than she had once imagined.”¹⁸ What had begun when she was a woman as a light crush for the first man who had paid her any attention has become a sexual passion once she “becomes” a man. Although the time spent with Rupert as man and woman is pleasant for Anna, it pales in comparison with the “intercourse” she shares with Rupert as between two men. Because of her status as one beyond the narrow confines of man or woman, her sexual attraction to Rupert is innately queer. Williams makes this clear through examples like the one depicted above, in which Anna sees her own sexual attraction for Rupert as one that is mediated through her masculinity.

Discussion of Anna/Dick as either homosexual or heterosexual in the way we understand these terms today would be chronologically inaccurate, and the text itself resists these easy definitions. Her attraction to Rupert is one that is based in her understanding of her gender as both masculine/male and feminine/female. She does not, as in other novels, see herself as a woman who is attracted to a man despite her appearance as a man. Her attire and gender presentation are not barriers that must be overcome in order to have a fulfilling relationship with Rupert. Instead, it is key to the interactions that she has with Rupert and to her own attraction to him. That the novel also rejects any heterosexual pairings also seems to hint that the readers are not meant to interpret Anna/Dick and Rupert’s relationship as being “really” heterosexual—they have no relationship as cis-man and cis-woman, and there is not even a model of a successful heterosexual pairing to aspire to for any of the characters. Anna/Dick’s attraction is not just queer because it exists outside the heteronormative fantasy of marriage and childrearing, but also because her gendered and sexual identities are constructed outside of the gendered binary which bars easily identifiable male/female or male/male sexual attraction.

Sexology & Anna/Dick

Williams’s narrative often seems to function in response to the period’s sexology, which is reliant on male/female, male/male, and female/female models of sexual attraction.¹⁹ In the 1894 English translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, cross-dressing is only discussed in relation to its impact on homosexuality and “psychical hermaphroditism.” He describes the “feeling, thought and the whole character” of those who do not correspond with “the sex which the individual represents anatomically and physiologically,” remarking that “this abnormal mode of feeling may not infrequently be recognized in the manner, dress, and calling of the individuals, who may go so far as to yield to an impulse to don the distinctive clothing corresponding with the sexual role in which they feel themselves to be.” Krafft-Ebing lists the “degrees of development” of the sexual instinct in those who pass, including only:

1. 1. Traces of heter-sexual, with predominating homo-sexual, instinct (psycho-sexual hermaphroditism).

2. 2. There exists inclination only toward the same sex (homo-sexuality).

3. 3. The entire mental existence is altered to correspond with the abnormal sexual instinct (effemination and viraginity).

4. 4. The form of the body approaches that which corresponds to the abnormal sexual instinct. However, actual transitions to hermaphrodites never occur, but, on the contrary, completely differentiated genitals; so that, just as in all pathological perversions of the sexual life, the cause must be sought in the brain (androgyny and gynandry).²⁰

In this progression, Krafft-Ebing allows no space for women who identify as men who are not attracted to women. Nor for men who identify as women who are not attracted to men. Anna/Dick is ejected from the sexology that seeks to understand and identify the characteristics of “the women who feel themselves to be male.”²¹ In contradistinction to the female Urnings and viragos, Anna rejects the company of women and seems to despise them, instead preferring the company of men. The affinity that she feels for men, however, is not based in their shared appreciation for women’s beauty (as would be predicted in Krafft-Ebing’s model). Unlike what one would expect coming from a sexological discourse, in Anna Marsden’s Experiment it does not seem impossible for Anna/Dick to be like men and simultaneously be attracted to them. Nor does Anna/Dick function like a male Urning. This figure is painted as effeminate in Krafft-Ebing’s writing; thus Anna’s predilection toward masculine writing habits is, again, in contradistinction to this figure. Williams’s depiction of Anna as a woman who “feels herself to be male” (to borrow from Krafft-Ebing) yet does not appreciate the company of women has no place in the established science that sought to categorize, define, and describe gender and sexuality.

Just as Anna/Dick cannot be clearly brought into a realm of normative gendering, her sexuality falls outside the established models as well. Anna Marsden’s Experiment does not merely borrow from logics of inversion in order to hypothesize a gender-inverted heterosexual woman as other New Woman novels have been accused of doing. One example of Anna/Dick’s existence outside of the dominant understandings of sexuality is her relationship with Rupert. Anna’s attraction to him initially appears to cement her sexual attraction to men and exclude her from “true” inversion. Anna is figured as being only attracted to Rupert, yet she plays with the notion of flirting with women once she becomes Dick. Although women avoided Anna “as Richard Ward, this indifference gave place to more or less avowed interest.”²² Anna/Dick is still not seen as particularly attractive, but “Richard Ward’s ugliness was of the kind which attracts rather than repels” showing the perversity of women and men regarding the concept of beauty. Because of this change of feeling about her looks, looks which remain not only the same but still coded as “ugly,” Anna/Dick becomes amused by inspiring romantic affection in those who had formerly ignored her. Richard “offered some flowers to Flo Brightling, who wore them all evening, at which some of the other girls looked jealous and Lottie Thorne sulky.”²³ This action causes strife between Flo and Lottie, whom Anna/Dick had encouraged by going boating together, and the girls begin to bicker jealously. The narrator remarks that “the fact of being able to set new forces in motion inspired a sense of power and free will, almost destroying previous fatalistic theories on the part of this daring mortal. It is one thing, however, to rouse a force, and another to guide and control its workings when once set in motion.”²⁴ Implied in the interactions that Anna/Dick has with women is the notion of frivolous play. Anna/Dick does not actually seem to be genuinely attracted to these women, but rather merely enjoys being able to inspire romantic feelings in another for the first time.

As a man, Anna/Dick is able to interact with all of the people around her more productively. Neither Anna’s motives for emphasizing her masculinity nor her comfort as a man is predicted in Ellis and Symonds’s Sexual Inversion. When discussing the masculinity of inverted women, Ellis first notes that “in the inverted woman the masculine traits are part of an organic instinct which she by no means always wishes to accentuate. The inverted woman’s masculine element may in the least degree consist only in the fact that she makes advances to the woman to whom she is attracted.”²⁵ The primary reason for women to adopt masculinity is in order to forward their relationships with other women. Although Anna/Dick is able to interact more comfortably with other women when passing as a man, this comes as a surprise to her and thus is clearly not her primary goal. Also based on Ellis’s explanation of inversion, one would expect Anna/Dick to be popular amongst women and avoid men: The inverted woman “treats all men in a cool, direct manner, which may not exclude comradeship, but which excludes every sexual relationship, whether of passion or merely coquetry. As a rule the inverted woman feels absolute indifference towards men, and not seldom repulsion. And this feeling, as a rule, is instinctively reciprocated by men.”²⁶ Instead of describing Anna’s relationship with men, Ellis’s “rule” is more easily applied to Anna’s relationships with women. Although she does not have any real friends in her boardinghouse, Anna (as a woman) prefers the company of men and repulses and is repulsed by the other women. The men in the house are not particularly attracted to Anna; however, they are not “repulsed” by her.

What emerges from reading Anna/Dick against the “science” of sexology that seeks to present the details of non-normative sexuality and gender is that Anna/Dick is completely unaccounted for. Although her gender is “inverted,” she contains none of the other markers of inverted sexuality. Yet she is neither encompassed in normative heterosexuality. Williams depicts Anna/Dick as being happiest and most comfortable when living as a man, yet this is not in the service of courting women; rather, Anna/Dick functions as a gender-fluid man who is attracted to other men. She is not entirely “properly” gendered as a man, as she still retains feminine interests and gestures. Her attraction to men is not universal, however, as it is only Rupert who instills a sense of passion in Anna/Dick. The queerness of this character then exceeds any representations either in the sexological or fictional literature of the time. Anna/Dick is a more radical character than either her New Woman contemporaries or the lesbians who would appear in the modern-ist literature decades later. Although she is not the “pure” invert like Radclyffe Hall’s Stephen Gordon, she emerges as a distinct and utterly new character and opens up avenues for queer women in literature. Despite the gender and sexual possibilities that Williams envisions through Anna/Dick, Williams seems incapable of imagining a world in which this character could succeed.

Queerness & Failure

The very existence of Dick indirectly causes the death of Rupert and closes off the heterosexual possibilities that emerge in the beginning of the narrative. Anna herself seems inevitably barred from any erotic attachment due to her plainness and masculinity, so the way the novel ends, with her spinsterhood, is not particularly shocking despite this not-inevitable conclusion. Without Dick’s entrance into the small world of the boardinghouse to make the romantic waters murky, Rupert would likely have married Lottie. Instead of allowing this heteronormative ending, Dick becomes attached to Rupert and forms a very real barrier to this conclusion as Lottie’s attraction to Dick blocks Rupert in his romantic quest, making literally true Judith Halberstam’s comment that “the queer subject stands between heterosexual optimism and its realization.”²⁷ After Rupert’s marriage proposal to Lottie is rejected, he wanders around London in the rain and catches the illness that will later kill him. In order to alleviate Rupert’s suffering, Dick reveals his “true” identity to Lottie in order to kill her love for him. Lottie then meets Rupert on his deathbed to give the dying man some comfort. However, Dick’s revelation comes too late to allow for any hetero-pairings, and Rupert dies in Dick’s arms. The end of the novel comes shortly after; Dick becomes Anna once again, and the last scene of the novel depicts Anna planting flowers on Rupert’s grave.

The fatal end of this novel, with Rupert in his grave and Anna sitting atop it planting flowers, lends itself particularly well to a queer reading. Both Lee Edelman and Halberstam have written on the failure/fatality of queerness. In No Future Edelman discusses the role of reproductive futurity and queer resistance to the heteronormative push toward a cyclical teleology. Through reproductive futurism, there is an insistence on a recurring cycle (birth, courtship, marriage, and then starting over once again with childbearing) that forms the central hold on most narratives. This endless cycle confirms the telos of progression as each new incarnation of the cycle is imagined as building on the last. Queerness through its rejection of this homogenizing narrative disrupts reproductive futurity and its insistence on the hopefulness and inevitability of the future: “Far from partaking of this narrative movement towards a viable political future, far from perpetuating the fantasy of meaning’s eventual realization, the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form.”²⁸ One might assume from the title that Anna Marsden’s experiment would have been a successful one; or, barring that, that Anna might have been reclaimed back into the heteronormative expectations that she initially rejects. Williams does neither as, to borrow from Edelman, the novel quite effectively “bars” the “realization of futurity.” The death at the end of the novel signifies the death of not only the queer future that Anna Marsden had hoped for, but also the death of the normative hetero-romantic telos.

Despite the queer success of ending a novel about queerness with the ultimate rejection of heteronormativity’s most obvious evidence (a child and the future it represents), the novel’s end is very much one of failure. Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure takes Edelman’s argument which “strands queerness between two equally unbearable options (futurity and positivity in opposition to nihilism and negation)” and instead pushes for “models of failure that do not posit between two equally bleak alternatives.”²⁹ Anna Marsden’s Experiment is precisely a model of failure that blocks the insistence on reproductive futurity while not negating the future. The future, albeit a child-free one, is hinted at through the flowers that Anna plants on Rupert’s grave. Even though there will be a future, Anna’s confession that it will seem “awfully stupid” after her experiences as a man makes it clear that this is no happy, hopeful ending. The experiment succeeded (Anna passed as Dick until she willingly abandoned her role), and yet that Anna ultimately failed will merely carry on with the results as she must. The ending of the novel, indeed the entire novel, seems to presage Halberstam’s notion of failure as powerful and meaningful in and of itself. In the introduction to The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam remarks that “where feminine success is always measured by male standards, and gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals, not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures.”³⁰ Anna begins the novel failing at womanhood; however, she ends the novel failing at manhood. Her expulsion from the dual-sexed and gendered system shows the flaws within this system. There is not yet any hopeful idea of “success” for Anna, merely a novel that upholds failure as potentially pleasurable and worthy.

Flowers & Pets as Ciphers

Williams makes it explicit that her audience needs to be savvy in the reading of symbols throughout the text in order to fully understand the novel. This is initially shown through the use of flowers by the other women in Anna’s boardinghouse, especially Lottie and Flo. After collecting and giving flowers to both Rupert and Dick, Lottie remarks: “Flowers have a language of their own, you know.”³¹ The text had already made previous comments on specific flowers and the act of giving of flowers, so this interjection by Lottie accomplishes two things. First, and most literally, she is telling the men what she thinks of them through her choice of flowers and wants to ensure that her message will be understood. Second, Williams is letting her readers know that she will assume they have knowledge of how symbols have functioned as a subversive sort of language. This comment appears relatively late in the text and alerts readers to the idea that to properly understand the novel as a whole, and not just this specific floral exchange, they will need to read the novel in its entirety with an eye to telling details. This specific moment of flowers is explained in the text when Rupert learns from The Language of Flowers that his flowers have meant “indifference” whereas the moss-rose that Dick received means “love on the part of the giver.” Although this instance of the meaning of flowers is spelled out for readers, looking back through the novel it becomes apparent that Williams was using these symbols before making sure her audience was reading her text accurately. Not long before Lottie gifts Rupert and Dick with her floral message she appears in a cream dress and hat with “a few scarlet geraniums”³² for color, a flower which means “stupidity.”³³ These flowers match her personality well; however, this is clearly not a message which Lottie would have chosen for herself. By looking back through the text in this way, Williams’s intention for her readers to decode the symbols available to them is apparent. Although this is most obvious in her floral language, it is also evident in her use of animals.

Following Monica Flegel’s study of the role of pets within domesticity and queer relations, the appearance of Rupert’s dog, Nap, halfway through the text ought to be read as a signifier to the audience of the impossibility of a heteronormative end. The first mention of Nap is after the failure of the play that Rupert and Dick have written. The play itself has already been identified in the text as the two men’s child: “The child of our brain will do credit to us yet, Dick…. It is not fated to perish still-born.”³⁴ The identification of literature as a child is not new, but Rupert’s labelling of it as such when it has two fathers is rather novel. After this shared progeny fails in its public reception the two men return to their shared home to commiserate over their failure. The dog then enters the room potentially becoming a new child for the two men. Flegel identifies many such sources in Victorian fiction in which animals serve as de facto children for their human owners/parents. This sort of identification would have been common by the end of the century, and would have signaled to the audience the lack of human children that Dick and Rupert could create. Animals are often useful in Victorian novels through their eventual replacement by children—it is a sign of rejection of heteronormative ends for this replacement to not take place.

According to Flegel, dogs function as “de facto male[s],” underscoring men’s need for homosociality. Therefore the dog “could provide much-needed masculine companionship within the domestic space … thus providing a masculine retreat within domesticity.” Flegel also argues for the “man/dog relationship as a form of romantic friendship.”³⁵ The dog in this narrative is not mentioned while Rupert lives at a boardinghouse with men and women. Nap’s entrance in the text appears when Rupert already thinks himself ensconced in a homosocial form of domesticity (Dick’s feminine tidying of their shared space aside). Nap then heightens the perceived homosociality of this space and actually forms part of an erotic triangle between the two men. In his entrance to the novel, Nap “licked the limp, nerveless hand hanging down over the old sofa. It was a mournful trio.”³⁶ The description of Rupert’s hand as limp and nerveless seems to serve as an obvious parallel for a flaccid penis. Nap’s attempt to cheer Rupert by licking this appendage then seems full of homoerotic tension for this (apparently) all-male trio. Rupert had hoped to end the night with Lottie, the woman he is attracted to, but instead enters this homosocial space. The replacement of his heterosexual hopes for a romantic night with Lottie with a homosocial space, which Nap turns into both an all-male erotic triangle and a symbol of male domestic familial space, signals to the audience in no uncertain terms that there will be no heteronormative end for this novel. Although within the narrative the dog is a living, sentient being, Nap functions as a commodity that cements the bonds between these two men. Nap rarely interjects himself into the narrative in a volitional way; instead, he appears as slightly more than decoration. His purpose seems singularly intended to identify the male homoeroticism of a space filled ostensibly by a man and a woman, underscoring the need to read Anna/Dick as a queer man.

Contemporary Reception

Before releasing it, the publishers seem to have advertised the novel as a story about “rational dress,” and two early notices of the book in periodicals mention this rather than any actual plot point. On 3 May 1899, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph mentioned that “The members of the Rational Dress Association will no doubt be interested in a new novel by Miss Ellen Williams … the plot of the story, we are informed, shows a remarkable development of the rational dress theory.”³⁷ The Speaker issued an even shorter notice three days later, also only mentioning the relevance of the novel to rational dress. By July, when reviewers were able to read the full novel, all mention of rational dress disappears. The reception turns largely to discuss how new the core idea of the novel is. The Spectator largely compiles its review as a series of quotes from other newspapers, writing that

Miss Ellen Williams is, says the Critic, “a powerful story, unconventional as regards both subject and treatment.… This situation is handled with extraordinary delicacy and skill, and the book is an admirable study of repressed emotions.”[sic] The Western Morning News says it is “a smartly written and deeply interesting story well out of the beaten track of the novelist.” “A very natural and interesting tale is,” says the Echo, “carefully set forth in Ellen Williams’s clever little book.”³⁸

Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper writes that “there is a somewhat novel idea worked out in an interesting fashion in this book.”³⁹ The newness that these reviews all comment on is worthy of discussion as, at first glance, this novel could pass as a rather conventional New Woman novel in which there is a masculine woman, masculine dress, and, to borrow from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, “the end is pathetic, and the book generally … is pessimistic and saddening in tone.”⁴⁰ Yet none of the reviews mention these generic elements, and instead all focus on the new direction that Williams takes in her novel. Despite the “pessimistic” end, this novel then seems to clearly offer an alternative for gender-queer women instead of the more stereotypical option of rational dress. Nor does this novel idea seem negative in any of the reviews mentioned—all seem to laud Williams’s unique vision.

All of the reviews were not so positive, however, as some instead focus hostilely on the radical queer underpinnings of the narrative. The Athenaeum takes the strongest stance against the perversity of the novel:

This crudely improbable and morbid little tale is obviously the work of a most inexperienced writer. Her heroine, a plain and unattractive girl, is enabled, by disguising herself in male garments, to become the admired friend of her unsuspecting former associates, and to solace her unrequited love by living as a bachelor companion with the object of it. Comment is obviously superfluous. Nevertheless, the writer may produce a readable book at some future time.⁴¹

The use of the adjective “morbid” speaks to the reviewer’s understanding that this novel’s themes are what we would today label as “queer.” Any comment is made “superfluous” through the obvious disgust and disdain which pervade this review; the early comment that the author is “most inexperienced” seems to be undercut by the last sentence which speaks to the author’s promise. The revulsion of the queer plot seems to be the primary cause for the reviewer to see the author as inexperienced, as the last line appears to begrudgingly admit that if Williams takes on a different plot the resulting book would be “readable.” This does not seem in itself like high praise, but given the tone of the rest of the review it actually appears kinder than what might be expected. Between this and the other reviews which largely laud Williams on her writing skill, it becomes evident that the primary concern was the radical notion that gender might not clearly binary, and that it might be easier to bend gender than the Athenaeum reviewer might wish.

Ellen Williams’s only novel builds on the generic conventions of New Woman novels in order to interject a radically queer character who first appears to follow the normative paths of cross-dressing within the genre. Upon closer inspection, it becomes evident that this novel plays with audience assumptions and sexological discourse in order to show the limits that still existed within this growing pseudo-science. Anna/Dick is ultimately ejected from the queer life that she builds for herself; however, her failure is not due to her inability to pass as a man. Instead, she gives up her project in order to make her male love happy, although he never learns of her sacrifice. Perhaps this sacrificial element is meant to display how thorough Anna/Dick’s success might have been if not for the (feminine) gendered pressure to renounce one’s own desires to please men. Anna’s ability to successfully pass as a man in society and in her profession does not here seem to serve the New Woman agenda of proving women’s capability alongside men. Instead, this is a unique narrative about one particular woman who cannot find her place as a woman within her restrictive society. The novel does not end with promises of future possibility and happiness, nor with the fatal end otherwise common to New Women characters. Williams ends with an image of her protagonist alive on the grave of her lover, resigned to a fate of dissatisfaction.

Williams successfully critiques the limited understanding of gender in New Woman fiction, sexology, and British society in general. Anna/Dick cannot be contained or understood singularly as a heterosexual woman, an inverted woman, a heterosexual man, or an inverted man. She contains elements that are associated with each of these figures but exists beyond the binary man/woman sexologists relied on in their effort to understand dissident sexualities. Although they found a place in their study for intersex people, there is no legible trans identity. Williams, without access to the language we have in the twenty-first century, envisioned the gaps in this literature and their effects on those who do not fit in neat boundaries. An academic reclaiming of this novel not only allows for a greater understanding of lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans characters in historical literature, but also provides an excellent case study in the connections between the “sexual anarchy” of the fin de siècle and the nonnormative female experience in early twentieth-century modernist fiction.