Ouida’s Female and Male Players from 1860 to 1880

Sir Walter Scott in his 1827 Chronicles of Canongate wrote about the futility of card-playing and gambling and how such activities place the player in a perpetual stasis, “dribble[ing] away life in exchanging bits of painted pasteboard round a green table, for the piddling concern of a few shillings.” Such behaviour, Scott indicates, “can only be excused in folly or superannuation” (28). Like card-playing, the sport of gambling and shooting were amongst the Victorians’ favourite games. These games seemed to have fascinated many Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Antony Trollope, and Benjamin Disraeli. Even though Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes warned of the temptation and danger in mere mindless activity, sports had always been a gentlemanly prerogative (Mitchell 326). What games one could play—and where one could play them—depended heavily on one’s gender.

What games one could play—and where one could play them—depended heavily on one’s gender. This separation extended past the gaming tables to affect women writers who addressed the issues of gambling, play, and sports. They could suffer damage to their reputations for breaking—or even simply highlighting the presence—of these gender conventions. In an 1865 article in The Nation, Henry James offers faint praise to Mary Elizabeth Braddon for her depiction of games: “Miss Braddon deals familiarly with gamblers, and betting men, and flashy reprobates of every description. She knows much that ladies are not accustomed to know” (594). Marie Louise de la Ramée (1839–1908), who wrote under the nom de plume Ouida, received similar commentary about her works. Her critics frequently accused her of knowing too much about men: her soirées held for her male society, included military men, and those critics thus perceived Ouida’s behaviour as scandalous and injurious.¹ However, unlike Braddon, Ouida does not shy away from a more vulnerable or effeminate description of men in many of her novels.

This separation between the expectations of men and women extended as well to what sorts of topics writers considered. Écarté, baccarat, whist, pigeon-shooting, illegal bets, steeple-chasing and a duel, all take place in Ouida’s works. The depiction of exclusively male-playing milieus in Ouida’s novels, the exclusion of Ouida’s female protagonists from the gambling tables in the 1860s, and the gradual immersion and acceptance of upper-class women players in the late 1870s and into the 1880s will be focal points of this paper. I concentrate on the way Ouida incorporated the leisurely activities of the Victorians such as gambling, shooting and card-games into her plots to highlight the desires and weaknesses of her characters and complicate the supposed distinctions between male and female behaviour.

One way that Ouida subverts characters’ anticipated gender roles and shows them recklessly wagering their own social status is through exposing those characters to the racetracks and faro-tables. Further, games that were considered masculine up until the middle of the nineteenth century become accessible to upper-class women in the novels, allowing them to avoid their daily ennui.

Additionally, Ouida’s representations of men complicate the general expectations of male behaviour in the nineteenth century. In his 1899 More, Max Beerbohm praised Ouida’s portrayal of men and their games. He notes that “She makes her protagonist a guardsman that she may describe, as she alone can, steeple-chases and fox-hunts and horses running away with phaetons. Or she makes him a diplomat, like Strathmore, or a great tenor, like Coreze, or a Queen’s messenger, like Erceldoune, or something else anything so that it be lurid and susceptible of romance” (111). Indeed, while the male protagonists in Strathmore, Under Two Flags, and Moths appear conventionally masculine by gambling, playing card games—such as baccarat and écarté—, enjoying pigeon-shooting and avoiding women during the shooting-season, in actuality they display sensationalism, sentimentality, gullibility around women and even cowardice. Thus, games in these novels function as a façade to conceal that which would have been considered at the time feminine flaws. Ouida’s men take...