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Spies and Experts
- Ohio University Press
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It remains a scholarly commonplace to assert that Victorian sexuality was dominated by an ever-expanding regulation of the body. Even when the rise of the New Woman challenged gender norms, or clandestine but assertive communities organized around shared homosexual identity, the discursive impact of these movements—according to current scholarly consensus—inevitably culminated in, or capitulated to, dominant social forces of discipline and subjugation. This agrees with a concept of subjectivity as the product of cultural encoding rather than an expression of a deep interiority existing prior to structuring principles. This paradigm also insists that subject formation entails subjugation. Jeffrey Weeks details how Victorian Spies and Experts - 3 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. preoccupations with strict moral hygiene worked in tandem with increasing state regulation. A bureaucracy of civil servants concerned with monitoring sexuality generated, in Weeks’s words, “intricate methods of administration and management, . . . a flowering of moral anxieties, medical, hygienic, legal and welfarist interventions” with an elitist valence.1 In a pathbreaking study, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White treat the police and Hudson’s Soap as nearly interchangeable agents of “discipline, surveillance, purity”; their work begins with, and expands on, Michel Foucault’s suggestion that social and institutional practices found their typical nineteenth-century expression in the “privileged form [of] Bentham’s Panopticon,” with subjects haplessly policing their own behavior in response to unseen observation.2 Judith Walkowitz’s landmark study Prostitution and Victorian Society () traces a surprising historical bloc of antistatists, advocates of personal rights, police officials, and medical authorities, all agreed on the need to regulate the sexual mores of the poor. Even after the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act (), the police enforced the segregation of prostitutes from the laboring poor and promoted “a more rigid standard of sexual stability.”3 Walkowitz ominously concludes that, after the Criminal Law Amendment (), “the police had become the missionaries of the new age.”4 For all these scholars—and they are among the very best in the field—the desire to survey and regulate “impurities” in the social body, whether the nonlaboring poor, the “fallen woman,” or unpleasant sewer odors, clearly structures the terrain of mid- and late-Victorian culture and discourse. The controversy that surrounded Laura Ormiston Chant’s attempt to close the promenade of the Empire music hall because of prostitution troubles this scholarly consensus.5 Born in , Chant taught, nursed, and worked as assistant manager of a private asylum before she became a noted public lecturer on woman’s suffrage, temperance, and Liberal politics. She was a member of the National Society of Woman’s Suffrage, a merger of various suffrage groups in . Like many women involved in the struggle for suffrage, Chant had ties to social purity movements concerned with regulating sexual behavior. These ties were a legacy of the coalition politics that united moral reformers, medical professionals, and women’s rights activists in the aftermath of the Criminal Law Amendment.6 Chant also had formal ties with the National Vigilance Association, although her efforts to close the Empire promenade were initiated independently from the organization. That Chant and her cohorts who testified before the London County Council protesting the Empire, the women dubbed by the press “Prudes on Spies and Experts You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Parade,” faced such virulent public disapproval remains something to be explained . Surely a purity reformer’s attempt to bring a disreputable space to order would have been amenable to late-Victorian common sense; Richard Dellamora, for example, details how sexual scandal often called forth professionals , activists, and administrators who agreed on the necessity of monitoring and regulating sexual conduct.7 Controversies in the daily press; the commentary of literary intellectuals like Arthur Symons, George Bernard Shaw, and Clement Scott; the attempt of young Winston Churchill to tear down the partition blocking the Empire’s promenade: all suggest the failure of Chant’s protest to reassert sexual decorum.8 The disparity between our retrospective certainties in regard to fin-desi ècle sexual conduct and the libertarian opposition to Chant suggests we have greatly oversimplified late-Victorian...
