<1>Lady Florence Dixie née Douglas was born in 1855 in Dumfries, Scotland, to Caroline Margaret Clayton and Archibald Douglas, Eighth Marquess of Queensberry.(1) A member of the Victorian aristocracy, Dixie flouted gender norms beginning at an early age and spent her adult life working to loosen the strictures of women’s bondage. Dixie was a noted suffragist and industrious author, publishing eleven books in her lifetime. Along with Gloriana (1890), Dixie published other women’s rights novels, a travelog covering her time in Patagonia,(2) her reports as a war correspondent in South Africa, interviews with African kings, support for Scottish and Irish Home Rule, an autobiography, as well as numerous politically charged children’s books. Dixie’s publications reveal an active, imaginative, and expansive political life. They chart Dixie’s widespread engagement with and support for multiple Victorian causes such as women’s emancipation;(3) Boer, Zulu, and Irish independence efforts;(4) and animal welfare.(5) Though she did not live to see women’s emancipation, nor the culmination of the other liberatory causes she supported, Dixie embodied the precepts of feminist utopianism in her quest for a better world.
<2>In Gloriana, Dixie imagines how women’s political liberation might lead to a utopian society. Gloriana is presented as the dream of a young Italian woman named Marenma and details a feminist revolution in fin-de-siècle England led by the novel’s eponymous, gender-bending hero Gloriana de Lara. At the age of twelve, Gloriana convinces her mother, Speranza, to send her to a boy’s school. At Eton, Gloriana assumes the identity of Hector D’Estrange and distinguishes himself as an unrivaled athlete and academic as well as an ardent supporter of women’s rights. Hector earns considerable fame in influential London circles with his “Essay on Woman’s Position,” and he parlays this fame and his success at both Eton and Oxford into a seat in Parliament. With ever-growing political power and assistance from aristocrats such as Flora Desmond and Evelyn, Duke of Ravensdale, Hector leads multiple feminist endeavors such as founding women’s educational institutions across England and Ireland and creating the Woman’s Volunteer Corps, a militant group of nearly 200,000 suffragists. Eventually, Hector is elected Prime Minister, but after a spurious murder charge, he is forced to reveal himself to be Gloriana. During a subsequent clash between the Volunteer Corps and the British police, Gloriana/Hector escapes and goes underground. A reactionary government is established to quell the rise of “D’Estrangeism.” Ultimately, supporters of Hector D’Estrange lead the D’Estrangeite party to a parliamentary victory, passing a bill for the “complete emancipation of women” (318–19). At this point presumed dead by all, Gloriana reemerges and resumes the post of Prime Minister. After a failed assassination attempt, Gloriana leads the United Kingdom into utopia, a brief view of which is offered in the novel’s concluding chapter.
<3>The future utopia thus springs forth from women’s entrance into and control of Parliament. In this sense, Gloriana typifies British feminist utopian literature of the late nineteenth century. “Typically,” writes Nan Bowman Albinski, “British women’s utopias are urban societies where a handful of democratically inclined Boadiceas or Queen Elizabeth the Firsts are Members of Parliament, cure poverty and crime, and run exemplary social welfare legislation through the House of Commons” (Women’s Utopias 16). Albinski even names Gloriana as “the woman politician par excellence” (Women’s Utopias 30). For Matthew Beaumont, this quality of the text exemplifies the novel’s “conservative emphasis on parliament as the preserve of aristocratic politics” (111). Despite this, Beaumont argues, the novel “is contemptuous of ‘men who think the world must be coming to an end if women are to be acknowledged as their equals’” (111–12). Beaumont here highlights the tension between the novel’s conservativizing belief in the power of parliamentary politics with its more stringent critiques of misogyny. As this essay demonstrates, however, it is not just misogyny that Gloriana critiques; rather, the character of Gloriana/Hector, in their androgyny, unravels the threads of stable cisgender and heterosexual identities. Such a critique of gender and sexuality politics is far more progressive than simply critiquing misogyny and is one that outpaces or even overshadows Gloriana/Hector’s parliamentary success.
<4>Dixie’s gender-bending plot argues that, when women are given the same opportunities as men, they are men’s equals. To make this argument, the text must treat Hector as a façade and Gloriana as the character’s “true” identity, essentializing gender even as it critiques it as artificial.(6) Critics such as Albinski and Beaumont accept Gloriana as the character’s true identity. Albinski uses the phrase “true sex” to refer to Gloriana (“Victorian Feminist Utopias” 57), while Beaumont treats Hector simply as Gloriana’s disguise (112).(7) Grace Borland Sinclair is more sanguine about the novel’s potentially transformative gender politics: “Dixie demonstrates the limitations of imposed gender binaries and advocates the inclusion of sexual and gender politics as central to any liberatory movement for socio-political reform” (79). Pushing back against earlier critics of the novel, Sinclair argues that “despite Dixie’s preoccupation with the public sphere and institutions of democracy, Gloriana gestures radically at the complexity, nuance, and variable nature of both gender and sexuality in this period” (78).(8)
<5>In this essay, I argue that such complexity, nuance, and variability is represented by the novel’s hero Gloriana/Hector as the figure of the utopian Victorian androgyne. To read Gloriana/Hector as the heroic androgyne, this essay first explores the repeated moments of concealment and revelation of Gloriana/Hector’s “true” identities to demonstrate that once the text undresses gender as discursive it cannot redress it as essential. This first section, titled “Gender, Desire, and Revelation,” traces how the narrative repetition of Hector’s masculine achievements as well as the multiple revelations of Gloriana/Hector’s “true” identity are echoed by the insistence on repetition as an integral act in Judith Butler’s famous theory of performativity. Titled “The Pleasures of Confession,” the essay’s second section moves from gender identity to sexual desire, beginning with a Foucauldian analysis of the medico-juridical nature of Gloriana/Hector’s confessions of womanhood and the multiple forms of pleasure the text takes in restaging these confessions. These pleasures propagate, infuse, and inform the queer love story between Gloriana/Hector and Evelyn, Duke of Ravensdale—a story that, try as it might, the text cannot ever straighten out. Finally, in “Androgynocracy” this essay concludes by considering how the figure of Gloriana/Hector that emerges from these readings of gender and desire might be understand as utopically androgynous. This conclusion begins with a discussion of how androgyny operated as both a democratically inflected term as well as a quality of Christ in the nineteenth century, before turning to the queer context of Gloriana/Hector’s particular androgyny. Ultimately, this section explores how the androgynous Gloriana/Hector embodies a utopian democratic dream, a newly resurrected sectarian Christ, and a queer utopianism that is irreducible to, and in conflict with, the novel’s more conservative overtures.
I: Gender, Desire, and Revelation
<6>Gloriana/Hector’s first unveiling takes place in Chapter IV. Although the scene functions as a moment of identification—revealing that Hector is, in fact, Gloriana—it also reveals gender’s radical instability. During a private conversation between Hector and Speranza, Hector abruptly calls Speranza “‘Mother’” and Speranza responds by calling Hector “‘Gloria’” (48). Immediately following, Gloriana’s narrator claims that “the reader must have had no difficulty in recognizing” Hector as Gloriana, only to continue switching between the two identities. Oscillating between naming the character Gloriana and Hector after this unveiling, the narrator declares, “She is no longer Gloria de Lara, but popular, successful Hector D’Estrange” (53). The text thus produces Gloriana/Hector as both Gloriana and Hector in its attempt to re-conceal Gloriana under the guise of Hector. In this way, Gloriana/Hector’s first unveiling not only establishes gender’s fluidity and instability but also marks the first moment in the novel that androgyny emerges as a viable identity category. The androgynous character Gloriana/Hector complicates the purview of women’s equality with men by introducing a way of thinking about gender that is not restricted to such a binary and can usher in more incisive critiques about the accretion of identities around presumably stable cultural markers.
<7>To stage this first unveiling, the text works dutifully throughout its first four chapters to obfuscate any connection between Gloriana and Hector (49). This obfuscation takes three forms. First, Speranza de Lara’s personal history serves as a wedge between the introduction of Gloriana in Chapter I and the introduction of Hector in Chapter II. Second, the text spends all of Chapters II and III, as well as much of Chapter IV, cataloging Hector’s masculine exploits. Third, ancillary characters speculate in Chapters III and IV on the potential romantic nature of the relationship between Hector and Speranza. Thus, despite the narrator’s claim that “the reader must have had no difficulty in recognizing” Hector as Gloriana, the difficulty in recognizing Hector as Gloriana is explicitly manufactured by the text to stage this and subsequent melodramatic moments.
<8>These three forms of obfuscation also operate as important facets of Dixie’s treatment of gender and sexuality in the novel. Until the moment Hector calls Speranza “‘Mother’” and Speranza calls Hector “‘Gloria,’” Gloriana has not been mentioned since the opening pages of Chapter I. Set in 1885 on the shores of the Adriatic Sea,(9) Chapter I begins with a twelve-year-old Gloriana imploring her mother Speranza de Lara to send her to “‘a boy’s school’”—Eton, to be exact (9). The text, however, immediately ends this conversation and transitions to a lengthy overview of Speranza de Lara’s personal history. Speranza’s backstory places distance between Gloriana’s desire to attend Eton and the emergence of Hector D’Estrange in Chapter II, and it also dramatizes the effects of oppressive marriage laws. Orphaned at birth and adopted into a wealthy English-Scottish family, Speranza is forced into marrying her adoptive brother Lord Altai: “Being a girl,” Speranza “had no chances thrown out to her” except this marriage (11). Speranza lives six years with the abusive Lord Altai, “sold by the law which declares that however brutally a man may treat his wife, so that he does not strike her, she has no power to free herself from him” (15).(10) Dixie uses the metaphorics of slavery to argue that punitive marriage laws and a lack of opportunities to join the labor force create the conditions of women’s subjugation. In so doing, Dixie begins her argument that gender difference is socially and politically motivated.
<9>Dixie critiques more than the social and political motivations of gender inequity; she recognizes that gender itself is a set of acts and accomplishments that has its origins in social and political discourse. Chapter II opens in the year 1890 and introduces readers to the previously unmentioned Hector D’Estrange. Hector is introduced as the topic of conversation between Lady Manderton (known as Dodo) and Mrs. de Lacy Trevor (known as Vivi). Dodo tells Vivi of a boy “‘simply too lovely for words’” who is “‘sure to break some of our hearts some day’” (19). Piquing Vivi’s interest, Dodo explains that this boy, Hector, is “‘taking Eton by storm’” and “‘is a splendid batsman, bowler, oarsman, wonderful at racquets, undefeatable at books,’” to which Vivi responds, “‘Oh, Dodo! I must meet this Adonis! I love pretty boys’” (19). Adding to Hector’s masculine prowess, Dodo also tells Vivi that “‘a good many attempts were made to bully him, but he soon settled his tormentors, and gave one of them . . . such a drubbing that he never molested him more’” (20). While Dodo highlights Hector’s masculine talents, strength, brilliance, and bravery, Vivi’s response highlights Gloriana/Hector’s androgynous fluidity. Both an “Adonis” and “pretty,” Hector is, in Vivi’s imagination, both masculine and feminine—a combination of traits that do not clash but rather blend harmoniously in a desirable figure that is neither just man nor just woman but is potentially both. At this point, readers do not know that Hector “is” Gloriana, though the mention of Eton might be enough for readers to make such an inference. Even if readers do draw this connection, however, it would be a mistake to treat either Gloriana or Hector as the character’s sole, discrete identity. Dodo and Vivi’s conversation about Hector reveals gender’s performativity, and once gender is revealed to be performative, neither Gloriana nor Hector can be considered that character’s “true” gender. Because Gloriana/Hector has no gender other than what is created through performance, Hector’s acts and feats while at Eton produce Hector as a man to Dodo, Vivi, and his classmates. Because gender works to conceal its illusory core in service of producing discrete, legible categories of identity, Judith Butler famously claims that “genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity” (186).(11) In Gloriana, gender operates this way: Hector is a truth effect of an already established discourse with social and political origins.
<10>To convince readers of Hector’s “true” masculinity, as well as to provide narrative distance between the characters of Gloriana and Hector, not only must Chapter II involve a repetition of Hector’s successful masculine acts but Chapter III must also reaffirm Hector’s masculinity through repetition. In Chapter III, Hector is now twenty-one, has graduated from both Eton and Oxford, and is a prominent member of British society. Hector wins six horse races, another grand declaration of his athletic prowess. Dixie uses this evidence of Hector’s athletic aptitude to reiterate his masculinity. Repetition, writes Butler, “is at once a reenactment and re-experiencing of a set of meanings already socially established” (191). This repetitive action of gender’s performance “is a public action” with “temporal and collective dimensions” (191). Gender’s performance produces the subject because the reenactment and re-experiencing of publicly and discursively established norms means that the subject as such does not exist prior to those norms. Because of this, Gloriana/Hector cannot haphazardly adopt activities, tasks, and goals; rather, to produce “Hector” as a legible, discrete subject, Gloriana/Hector must thrive in sports, excel academically, and assert his dominance over other men. As exemplified by the conversation between Vivi and Dodo above, these are precisely the arenas of success—athletic prowess, academic excellence, bravery and physical violence—that make Hector a true man. The identity of “Hector” is thus consolidated through the reiterative performance of an already-established set of what Butler names “specific codes of cultural coherence” intending to ensure or reify stable cisgender identities (178).
<11>Successfully producing “Hector” as the torchbearer of masculinity is Gloriana/Hector’s most significant accomplishment, and the crux of Dixie’s feminist critique about gender norms. What makes Gloriana/Hector “Hector” is the successful and reiterative performance of those norms—not an internal or even eternal truth, as Dixie clearly recognizes. Before Gloriana/Hector wins all six races at Melton Hunt Steeplechase, the text presents Hector’s own thoughts for the first time:
Hector D’Estrange would marvel often at himself. He had gone out into the world in what was mere childhood, prepared to combat with the many difficulties which he knew must beset his path. He was over modest was this boy. He had not sufficiently estimated his great and surpassing genius, but it had shone forth, been recognized and approved of, because he was a man. (38)
This passage’s concluding clause, “because he was a man,” explicitly acknowledges the public and political production of gender norms. It does so by making at least three interrelated arguments: that only men can succeed under the strictures of patriarchy, that success is a socially constructed idea predicated along gender lines, and that Hector is a man because of these successes. Gloriana/Hector’s infatuation with these successes imbricates success, gender, and identity as three contingent, constitutive, and socially established acts, all granted legitimacy through their endless repetition. In the novel’s rhetorical strategy of repeating and insisting on the gender norms that produce “Hector” as a coherent identity, Gloriana provides the stage for the drama of gender’s performativity.
<12>Dixie also understands gender’s bearing on sexuality. In Chapter II, part of what confirms Gloriana/Hector’s masculinity is Dodo and Vivi’s shared desire for Hector. Presumed to be a man, Hector figures the proper heterosexual object of desire for the two women. When Hector appears in Chapter III riding horses alongside Speranza, Dodo, Vivi, and others speculate on the nature of the relationship between them, presuming it to be romantic. Though none of the characters save one knows Speranza, the rest believe her to be Hector’s lover. “‘Hector D’Estrange, by all that’s holy! And with a woman, too,’” declares Jack Delamore when first espying the two riding horses side by side (40). Delamore continues, “‘Cunning dog, young Hector, to have kept her out of sight so long. Now we can understand why he is so cold to women. Of course that’s where his heart is, without a doubt’” (42). The presumed romantic relationship between Hector and Speranza both reiterates Hector’s male gender and continues to obscure the connection between Hector and Gloriana. Delamore’s comments, along with Dodo and Vivi’s conversation, demonstrate the co-contingency of gender and sexuality: each constitutes and confirms the other to produce the legible cisgender heterosexual subject. Thus, even if readers know Hector “is” Gloriana at this juncture before the first unveiling, gender can still be seen as contingent upon sexuality’s ability to make it true. In Gloriana, legible gender identities function in the service of a compulsory heterosexuality.
<13>It is the occasion of Hector and Speranza riding horses together at the Steeplechase in Chapter III that leads to Gloriana/Hector’s first unveiling in Chapter IV. More specifically, it is the presumption of a heterosexual relationship between the two that necessitates such an unveiling. The only character to recognize Speranza is Lord Westray. Formerly known as Lord Altai, Westray is part of Dodo and Vivi’s riding party and immediately recognizes Speranza as the wife he abused and divorced 22 years earlier (41). After seeing Speranza at the Steeplechase, Westray falls “prey to a consuming passion to regain that which he had lost” and seeks out his former bride (43). Westray confronts Speranza in her home and asks her to remarry him. Once Speranza refuses, Westray presses Speranza on the nature of her relationship with Hector, presuming that the two are lovers. Happy to “let him believe what he likes, so that he does not know the truth,” Speranza attempts to put off the villainous Westray herself before being rescued by Hector’s timely appearance (47). Hector “is head and shoulders taller than” Westray and dispatches him with a “calm, disdainful look” (47, 48). Contrasting the shorter, cowardly Westray with the taller, braver Hector, this scene again emphasizes Hector’s masculinity while simultaneously emasculating Westray. Once the emasculated Westray retreats, the text reveals Hector “to be” Gloriana in the conversation cited above.
<14>This first of two separate unveilings respond to different demands made by gender and (hetero)sexuality. Ostensibly, the revelation of Hector as Gloriana allows Dixie to stake her claim that women can thrive in equal ways to men when given the opportunity to do so. It seems, however, that Dixie stages this revelation as a direct response to multiple characters’ presuming that Hector and Speranza have a sexual relationship. Gloriana/Hector’s first unveiling treats Gloriana as the true feminine subject that belies a performance of contrary masculine cultural markers, a “real woman” simply masquerading as a man to prove the injustice of an imbalance in gender relations. If Hector “is” Gloriana, then we must consider the ramifications on Dodo and Vivi’s earlier conversation. Already at play in their conversation is Gloriana/Hector’s androgynous beauty—both as an Adonis and as a “pretty boy”—troubling the boundaries of heterosexual desire for both Dodo and Vivi. Even if we acknowledge that Hector “is” Gloriana, as this unveiling requests but cannot ultimately make true, it complicates even more explicitly Dodo and Vivi’s desire for Gloriana/Hector. That is, Dodo and Vivi’s desire for Hector would be an explicitly nonheterosexual one. Since, however, gender is revealed in this scene as a set of discursive cultural markers and not an internal truth, the desire swirling around the androgynous Gloriana/Hector is neither heterosexual nor nonheterosexual but more capaciously queer. In using gender to stabilize Gloriana/Hector’s identity, Dixie unwittingly reveals sexuality’s inability to accomplish this goal. In turn, by attempting to ensure Gloriana’s and Speranza’s heterosexuality only to queer Dodo and Vivi, Dixie reveals desire’s ineluctable slipperiness.
<15>In the following section, I move from narrative unveilings of Gloriana/Hector to the trial in which Gloriana/Hector “confesses” to being Gloriana de Lara and not Hector D’Estrange. This trial, one of national interest, results from a convoluted plot brought about by Lord Westray and his hired man Mr. Trackem. After the confrontation with Westray in Chapter IV, Speranza leaves her home and is relocated in secret by Gloriana/Hector; Evelyn, the Duke of Ravensdale; and the Duke’s personal secretary Rita Vernon.(12) To make Speranza his wife again, Westray enlists the services of Mr. Trackem, who in turn hires two men to kidnap Speranza. Fortunately, Rita Vernon tracks the kidnappers to their destination. Rita then alerts Hector and the Duke, and the three set out to save Speranza. The three find Speranza lying gagged on a sofa in the derelict quarters of London with “that monster, that petted roué of society, that ‘fiend in human shape,’” Lord Westray, standing above her (115). Book I of Gloriana ends with a melodramatic cliffhanger: “There is a loud cry as a shot rings through the silent house” (115). As will be discussed below, this literal smoking gun becomes evidence in a spurious trial brought against Hector D’Estrange for the murder of Lord Westray, who, the text reveals, is very much alive and attempting to ruin Hector D’Estrange and to re-take Speranza as his wife. Gloriana/Hector’s confession during the trial is in no small part a direct response to the prosecution’s insistence that Hector and Speranza are lovers, an echo of the second unveiling just discussed. In this way, Gloriana/Hector’s confession, along with its public reiteration, will be read as the contingent entanglement of identity, gender, and sexuality.
II: The Pleasures Of Confession
<16>Book II opens in 1900 with Hector D’Estrange elected to the post of Prime Minister at the age of 28. Yet it is the relationship between the Duke of Ravensdale and Gloriana/Hector that takes center stage. Evelyn, Duke of Ravensdale, is introduced to the novel following Gloriana/Hector’s first unveiling.(13) The Duke is an influential member of the aristocracy and a vocal proponent of D’Estrangeite politics. Over the course of the novel, the Duke becomes Gloriana/Hector’s main confidant, eventually marrying Gloriana/Hector after Gloriana/Hector’s public confession and second succession to the post of Prime Minister. What is immediately striking about Evie—and what will be so critical to both the novel and this essay’s analysis of Gloriana—is his love for Hector. We learn earlier in the text that Evie’s “heart has gone out to Hector D’Estrange, and he loves him with that devoted admiring love which some men have been known to inspire in others” (58, emphasis mine). Evie’s name and love for Gloriana/Hector mark the beginning of the novel’s decidedly queer romantic subplot. Those observing the change in Evie’s countenance cannot decide whether this passion is political or personal but clearly presume it must be romantic. Lady Tabbycat remarks to her friend Mrs. Moreton Savage, “‘[j]ust look at the duke . . . one would think there wasn’t a pretty girl in the room, or a heart aching for him, by the way he stands there doing nothing and saying nothing. . . . He was all fire just now when he was telling us of Hector D’Estrange’s triumph; and now just look at him, my dear’” (58). This opinion is shared by others as well: “men wondered at the change in the young Duke of Ravensdale. It was such a sudden one; they could not make it out; it mystified them altogether. Some put it down to love, and wondered who was the lucky one” (60). As the novel bears out, it is love Evie feels for Gloriana/Hector, an erotic love that finds its “correct” object when Gloriana/Hector is publicly revealed as Gloriana, but that nevertheless remains queer in the ultimate instability of Gloriana/Hector’s androgynous identity.
<17>In the opening pages of the first chapter of Book II, Evie confesses his love for Gloriana/Hector. “‘Ah Hector!,’” Evie laments lovingly, “‘if you were only a woman how madly I should love you; for love you as I do now, it can never be the same love as it would be if you were a woman’” (123–24). The humor, pathos, and dramatic irony of this scene relies on “knowing,” as the reader, that Hector “is” Gloriana, but the scene cannot be straightened even with the help of such “knowledge.” Hidden in the shade of the Duke’s study, Gloriana/Hector’s blushing face cannot be scene, but Gloriana/Hector does query the Duke, “‘So I am your woman’s ideal, am I, Evie?’” (124). Evie responds bluntly and quickly, “‘Yes, Hector, you are. Your face is too lovely for a man’s. You ought to have been a woman. And yet if you had been, the glory of Hector D’Estrange would be an untold tale’” (124). Harking back to the earlier conversation between Dodo and Vivi, Gloriana/Hector is both Adonis and pretty, both a man and Evie’s ideal of a woman. Yet this “both” is not owing to Gloriana/Hector’s “real” gender; rather, it stems from the androgynous both exemplified by Gloriana/Hector. For Sinclair, Evie’s articulation indicates “‘the cultural anxieties of the time regarding sexual ambiguities of women and men and the nature of their mutual relationships’” (78). More than simply a piece of dramatic irony, this scene reveals how gender norms and contingent erotic desire flow between bodies ambiguously and with no regard for any stable core of sexual identity. This scene also reveals the text’s motivations for trying to stem this overflowing tide: the only reason Hector ought or should be a woman is to straighten out Evie’s queer feelings for him.
<18>Following this conversation, Gloriana/Hector delivers to Parliament a rousing speech in favor of a new bill that would extend the franchise to women. This speech, which lasts fourteen pages, lays out the political stakes of Gloriana, as Albinski (Women’s Utopias), Duangrudi Suksang, Qingyun Wu, and Beaumont all note: in Gloriana/Hector’s own words, the goal is that “‘the emancipation of women will . . . lead up to the creation of the great and the beautiful, to higher morals and noble aims’” (137). “‘We submit,’” Gloriana/Hector concludes their speech, “‘to honorable gentlemen that the first step towards the regeneration and upraising of mankind is the emancipation of woman, and with her emancipation the careful training of the sexes together’” (138). This is the political project of Gloriana made explicit, both in the terms of Gloriana/Hector’s speech and in the disguised life of Gloriana “as” Hector, “proving” that such “careful training of the sexes together” will eliminate all socially imposed restrictions on gender but also lead to a utopia of regenerated and upraised humanity. Upon the bill’s rejection by a majority of 120 votes, Prime Minister Gloriana/Hector is charged with the murder of Lord Westray (140–41). Gloriana/Hector sends Evie to protect his mother, recognizing that this charge is an extension of the plot earlier enacted by Lord Westray to kidnap Speranza de Lara. The trial and confession are meant to legitimate Gloriana/Hector’s Prime Ministerial declarations about the emancipation of women and the results of equal gender dynamics. Even more importantly, and also similarly to how the second unveiling of Hector “as” Gloriana acts in service of straightening out the relationship between Gloriana/Hector and Speranza de Lara, the ensuing courtroom confession that becomes the catalyst for the rest of the action of Gloriana should be understood as acting in service of ensuring, albeit unsuccessfully, that the love between Evie and Gloriana/Hector is heterosexual.
<19>The prosecution maintains that Hector D’Estrange murdered Lord Westray in a fit of jealousy after finding his lover Speranza in the arms of Westray. Gloriana/Hector reveals that Speranza de Lara is his mother and not his lover, and, as part of his defense, calls to the stand the doctor who attended his birth. Dr. Merioneth relates to the court that Speranza de Lara gave birth to a girl in Ancona, Italy. The prosecution, unbothered by Dr. Merioneth’s testimony, dismisses it quite handily: “‘So much for that portion of the defense, as I do not suppose Mr. D’Estrange is going to pose before us as a woman’” (164).(14) This additional piece of irony only heightens the drama that unfolds after the jury quickly returns a verdict of guilty and Gloriana/Hector responds with the first, and perhaps most significant, confession of the text. When the judge inquires, “‘Hector D’Estrange, have you any reason to give why sentence of death should not be passed upon?’” Gloriana/Hector responds, “‘Has it never struck you, my lord, and gentlemen of the jury, that a girl could do what I have done in youth, a woman accomplish what I have accomplished in maturer years? No. I plainly see that this has not struck you, for you are men’” (172, 173). Gloriana/Hector concludes, “‘I confess my sex. In Hector D’Estrange, the world beholds a woman—her name, Gloria de Lara’” (173).(15)
<20>Gloriana/Hector’s confession causes confusion and excitement but does not undo the death sentence. Taken into custody by the police, Gloriana/Hector is then rescued by Flora Desmond, the leader of the Women’s Volunteer Corps.(16) Emerging from the police van, Gloriana/Hector addresses an ever-expanding crowd of supporters and again confesses: “The time has come when I must confess myself. Before you, you see one of the despised and feeble sex, the unfitted to rule, the inferior of man. I am a woman! Henceforth I am no longer Hector D’Estrange, but Gloria de Lara’” (181). This second, public confession must bear the weight of two truths. First, it must prove Gloriana/Hector’s innocence to the public. Secondly, in unveiling that the Prime Minister Hector D’Estrange “is” a woman, it legitimizes Gloriana/Hector’s Parliamentary proclamation that women can be and are men’s equals. As such, Gloriana/Hector cannot simply tell or declare their sex; rather, they confess it because confession bears the mark of avowal, revelation, and truth, bridging as it does religious and juridical forms of expression and knowledge. Additionally, Gloriana/Hector’s use of Dr. Merioneth’s testimony lends a medical legitimacy to their confession, yoking together body and identity through a medico-juridical discourse that seeks to establish the innate truth of binary gender and sexuality.
<21>For Foucault, confession operates as a primary discursive tool of the scientia sexualis. As Foucault explains, scientia sexualis is, along with ars sexualis, one of “two great procedures for producing the truth of sex” (57). Western societies practice a scientia sexualis, a set of “procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret” (57). According to Foucault, the hallmark of these procedures is the confession. The confession is the West’s “main ritual . . . for the production of truth,” and the truth produced in confession is “the truth of sex” (58). “It is in the confession,” Foucault claims, “that truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individual secret” (61). More than simply proof of his innocence in the murder of Lord Westray, Gloriana/Hector’s confession works to establish “Gloriana” as the character’s “true” identity, medically, legally, and publicly. This confession treats gender as something natural and original, open to some modification, but closed to total deconstruction. This is the tepid, conservative undercurrent to Dixie’s critique: the revitalization of gender’s eternal truth in the face of its dissolution. Gloriana/Hector’s confession becomes an epistemological testimony to the innate, internal reality that gender is presumed to have. As this essay contends, however, this “knowledge” or this “truth” is not innate but rather a discursive set of cultural, historical, and material values that the novel attempts to legitimize and make real, though ultimately cannot.
<22>Truth and gender are enjoined under the ritualistic parameters of the confession because the confession is a mode of subjectivization. As both the confession’s subject and Gloriana/Hector’s “true” identity, Gloriana is produced simultaneously alongside and within the absolution of Hector’s crimes against gender. Along with legitimizing the subject, the confession provides a form of absolution for the subject, because confession is “a ritual in which expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation” (Foucault 62, emphasis mine). The subject that emerges from the confession is pure and wears its purity internally. Gloriana is thus born again—cleansed of sins against gender and state—making a medical, legal, and public fact of women’s equality with men. Perhaps more importantly, though, Gloriana/Hector’s confession also bears on Gloriana/Hector’s relationship with the Duke of Ravensdale. By attempting to essentialize Gloriana’s identity, Hector’s confession works to straighten out the queer romance between them. Because Gloriana/Hector’s multiple confessions only ever reveal gender to be discursive and not intrinsic, however, their relationship cannot be heterosexualized.
<23>Gloriana/Hector’s confession attempts to legitimize the intrinsic truth of Gloriana/Hector’s identity to produce the intrinsic truth of Evie’s heterosexuality. The project of transforming gender relations thus transforms into a project of heterosexualizing desire’s unruly tendencies. Evie’s love for Gloriana/Hector becomes an impetus for a fantasy made true by Gloriana/Hector’s grand confession. However, like the set of acts that constitute gender, the confessional act operates discursively. This means that the subject produced through the confession is similarly discursive and hence not naturalized. This holds true for not only the subject and the subject’s gender but for the subject’s sexuality as well. Reading the confession through Foucault, this essay aims to highlight this particular tension in the text between its conservation assertion of the truthfulness of gender and a more contemporary understanding of gender as a set of discursive acts and beliefs that the text also explicitly makes clear through the character of Gloriana/Hector. That is, once the gender binary is unveiled as something that is simply created by and upheld through political, educational, social, and cultural means, it cannot ever be reassembled as an intrinsic truth. Gloriana/Hector’s confession cannot fully legitimize either Gloriana as Gloriana/Hector’s true identity or Evie’s heterosexuality. The confessional act also fails to offer any such stability because of its obsession with pleasure. While Foucault originally casts ars erotica against scientia sexualis as mutually exclusive and opposed categories, he eventually wonders if scientia sexualis “ has not functioned, at least to a certain extent, as an ars erotica” (71). Foucault claims that “the production of pleasure” at the center of the confessional act “multiplied, intensified, and even created its own intrinsic pleasures” (71). This leads to a multitude of new pleasures:
Pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing that truth, of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open—the specific pleasure of the truth discourse on pleasure. (71)
Foucault helps us point to the multiple nodes of pleasure Gloriana takes in Gloriana/Hector’s confessions, in Evie’s slippery queer desire, and in the irreducibility of Gloriana/Hector’s androgynous identity. The secrets of both gender and sexuality continuously ebb and flow in the text, discovered and exposed over and over again as an endlessly repeatable act. This repeatable act finds its pleasurable expression in Evie’s queer desire for a person whose body and identity makes knowledge erotic. Importantly, this pleasure is not limited to Evie; it is the pleasure the reader takes in “knowing” Gloriana/Hector’s “real” identity even as the text can never stabilize that identity. This destabilization amplifies the pleasures of knowing, as the scenes of Evie’s queer desire intensify the reader’s need to know or hold on to the truth about Gloriana/Hector.
<24>The disruption of heteronormativity caused by the androgynous Gloriana/Hector can also be found in Evie’s queer desire for Gloriana/Hector, as expressed just after Gloriana/Hector’s courtroom confession:
Often, when in loving commune with his friend Hector D’Estrange, the thought would flash through the young duke’s mind, that if Hector had been a woman, the great love of which he felt himself capable, would have gone out to her absolutely and without reserve. What was the subtle power that had attracted him to Hector D’Estrange, which had made him pause on the verge of pleasure’s precipice, and, casting to the winds his hitherto selfish existence, had made him body and soul the devoted adherent of the young reformer? (221)
Here, Evie reflects on the love he felt for Hector D’Estrange before learning Hector’s “true” identity. Evie believes that it is the truth of Gloriana/Hector’s identity that made him “pause on the verge of pleasure’s precipice”: “From the moment that he learnt that in Hector D’Estrange was embodied the person of Gloria de Lara, he understood that the influence of a noble, high-minded, and genuine woman . . . had given him an aim in life” (221). The text itself pauses on the verge of pleasure’s queer precipice, pulling Evie back from “the false glare and glitter of the world,” but it does so in a way that avoids replacing Hector with Gloriana (221). Instead, the text presents an image of Hector housing Gloriana. The text has used this language before, as when Gloriana/Hector confesses in court: “‘In Hector D’Estrange, the world beholds a woman’” (173). As discussed above, Gloriana/Hector’s confession attempts to interiorize Gloriana as Gloriana/Hector’s “true” identity that then subsumes Hector’s entire existence. This is the conservativizing gesture that suffuses the confession but is actually undone by the confession itself. Read as an androgynous figure, however, Gloriana/Hector cannot be reduced to either identity, nor can either identity be granted interior or exterior status. Rather, Gloriana/Hector is an allegorical duality, an indivisible and irreducible figure. For Sinclair, this scene typifies how Dixie uses “cross-dressing” and “same-sex romance” to create an “alternative reality” within the broader utopian narrative of the story (78). As this essay argues, Gloriana/Hector’s androgyny and the queer romance between Gloriana/Hector and Evie both emerge as progressive trends in Gloriana that subvert its more overt and conservative focus on the importance of parliamentary procedures and a traditional marriage plot to bring about its utopian future.
<25>While Gloriana/Hector’s courtroom confession appears to rescue Evie from the perdition of homosexuality, the Duke cannot help but queer things. After receiving the death sentence and escaping from the police, Gloriana/Hector goes into hiding and attempts to leave England by way of ship. Because of the machinations of Westray, Mr. Trackem, and Mr. Trackem’s “human bloodhound,” Lëonie, however, Gloriana/Hector’s vessel crashes just offshore and Gloriana/Hector is presumed dead in the wreck. But before Gloriana/Hector’s subsequent resurrection, we find a melancholic Evie fantasizing about Hector: “What does Evie Ravensdale see in that flickering firelight which appears suddenly to arrest his gaze? It must be some cherished object indeed, judging by the happy smile which for a few brief moments lights up the otherwise sad face, on which melancholy has stamped its mournful features” (317). Above Evie’s fireplace “hangs the oil painting which represents his first meeting with Hector D’Estrange. It is only when alone that Evie Ravensdale draws those curtains aside, and then none can see the emotion which the picture arouses in him” (317). Explicitly, it is not Gloriana arousing these private emotions in the Duke, returning us to his urgent insistence that Hector ought to have been born a woman. Even granting that Hector “is” Gloriana and that these emotions are meant for “her,” it is not just Gloriana that makes Evie feel this way: “It almost seems to him as though the figure of Hector D’Estrange portrayed therein, stands there in living life. He can hardly realize, as he looks at the beautiful face, that the spirit which made Gloria so noble in life, does not animate it now” (320). Evie’s desire for Gloriana/Hector does not restrict itself to the correct instantiation of the subject; rather, the entirety of Gloriana/Hector, the androgynous subject that is simultaneously both and more than Gloriana and Hector individually, enthralls him.
<26>The queerness of Evie’s desire for Gloriana/Hector creates a tension the text simultaneously intensifies and releases. This tension also finds its expression in the novel’s overlapping progressive and conservative attitudes. This arises from the conservative gesture of making Gloriana/Hector “truly” a woman. As discussed above, this move is critical for Dixie’s feminist utopianism, as the political stakes of Gloriana hinge on Gloriana/Hector’s ability to prove that women and men are equal. While Albinski (Women’s Utopias) and Beaumont critique Gloriana as possessing a conservatism reliant on the belief of and maintenance of parliamentary powers, it is a congruent and overlapping conservatism that requires that the categories of “man” and “woman” are resealed in order to champion gender equality and not a more radical queering of gender itself. When we finally see the utopia brought about by Gloriana/Hector’s revolution, it is in the year 1999 with Gloriana/Hector and Evie in their graves. From the basket of a hot-air balloon overlooking utopian London, one traveler tells another, “‘There is a beautiful grave overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, on the shores of Glennig Bay. It is there where Gloria sleeps, by the side of her husband Evelyn’” (346). Consecrated by marriage and the grave, heterosexuality and legible gender categories lie together in national tribute to Gloriana/Hector’s revolution.(17)
<27>Perhaps, though, we should resurrect Gloriana/Hector one last time. By way of concluding this essay, I consider Gloriana’s androgynous impulses as an avenue away from the novel’s more conservative instincts. Alongside scenes of Evie’s desire for Gloriana/Hector, the conclusion considers the array of contradictory responses to Gloriana/Hector’s courtroom confession. These reactions frequently disregard the “truth” of Gloriana/Hector’s confession, replacing this singular “truth” with the potential of multiplicity. Rather than view Gloriana/Hector as “the woman’s ideal” as does Evie, I read Gloriana/Hector as an androgynous potentiality. Read in this way, Gloriana/Hector emerges as the persona utopia, not as a woman who legitimizes a conservative gender equity, but rather as an androgynous figure whose radical instability marks a space outside and against a rigid gender binary.
III: Androgynocracy
<28>Though there is now a wealth of vocabulary for non-normative genders and sexualities, such lives were still being led in the nineteenth century. Nor does it mean that the nineteenth century did not have its own vocabulary that might still be of some import today. One such term, “androgyne,” was readily available and widely used in the nineteenth century and still holds value for describing gender in Gloriana. It is unnecessary, however, to fit Gloriana/Hector into this category unequivocally; rather, androgyny in Gloriana is a contested category, oscillating between openness and limitation, and as a historically and culturally malleable term. As Johannes N. Vorster argues, androgyny “appears to acknowledge the possibility of a middle position, a transgression of boundaries, a blurring of genders” (97). Though discussing androgyny in relation to early Christianity, Vorster’s definition still holds water for the nineteenth century, as androgyny tended to retain its allegorical significance even if the androgynous Christ-figure was more secularized.(18) The term ranges, Vorster continues, “from a depiction of deviant sexuality to an idealized, utopian form of oneness” (97). Vorster’s focus on androgyny’s ability to blur genders, transgress boundaries, and to depict utopian forms of wholeness informs and echoes this essay’s insistence that Gloriana/Hector’s own androgyny blurs the gender binary that Gloriana both attempts to undo and maintain, transgresses heterosexual boundaries in the relationship between Gloriana/Hector and Evie, and embodies a utopian potentiality.
<29>The concept of androgyny held a significant position in Western thought in the nineteenth century. As Aaron Shaheen demonstrates in Androgynous Democracy, an array of Western philosophers thought through the significance and possibilities of androgyny. In post-Revolutionary France, Shaheen notes, Pierre-Simon Ballanche “conceived of the mysterious male-female figure as an embodiment of emerging democracy and social equality” (2); Ballanche’s German contemporary Johann Gottfried von Herder argued that human development was a constant “movement away from a primitive androgynous harmony into a present world of division and sexual inequality” (2). In the United States, a panoply of influential voices advanced Ballanche’s and Herder’s arguments about androgyny and democracy, including those of John Locke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman (3, 4). According to Shaheen, these philosophers, poets, and activists all use the androgynous figure to represent the still-unrealized ideal of American democracy, believing the androgyne figured a utopian future in which hierarchical differentiation no longer prevented national success.
<30>The popularity in the nineteenth century of the term “androgyne” and its potential impact on feminist politics were probably not lost on Dixie, a committed suffragist and someone who “‘thought of herself as a boy[,] . . . spoke of herself as a boy,’” and throughout her life “‘rode astride her saddle like a man’” (McKenzie 35). We can see, too, how Gloriana’s conclusion, which features a representative and equitably federated United Kingdom, resonates with Shaheen’s overview of androgyny’s relationship to democratic ideals across the West. As the progenitor of the feminist revolution that leads to the concluding chapter’s future utopia, Gloriana/Hector can be read as the androgynous figure embodying those political ideals. Returning to Vorster’s interpretation of androgyny as a representation of “utopian oneness,” we might also understand the harmonious affiliation of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales as this Federated Empire as the politico-national instantiation of the androgynous Gloriana/Hector.(19)
<31>To solely think of Gloriana/Hector in such politico-national terms, however, is to rely too heavily on understandings of androgyny that focus on wholeness, oneness, or cohesion. Throughout the multiple unveilings and both courtroom and public confessions of Gloriana/Hector’s “true” identity, we cannot so easily concede that Gloriana/Hector represents such a stable, coherent androgynous figure. Rather, Gloriana/Hector, as the queer androgyne, repeatedly reveals the messy, porous boundaries of gender and sexuality. As Tracy Hargreaves argues, this idealistic harmony of androgyny “[comes] to seem naïve and misconceived” when androgyny operates simply “as the balanced equation of binary gender constructions” (3). Even so, Hargreaves demonstrates that some “versions of androgyny . . . foreground the androgyne’s power to disrupt and disturb hetero-normative relationships, a power that seems at once desirable and to be feared” (9). One such post-confession moment in Gloriana disrupts both heteronormative relationships and the gender binary’s legibility. This moment involves Lëonie—Mr. Trackem’s “human bloodhound” and “female Judas”—and a loyal D’Estrangeite named Miles Gripper (232). Following Gloriana/Hector’s escape from the London police, Mr. Trackem hires Lëonie to find Gloriana/Hector. Cross-dressing as a young man and disguised as a D’Estrangeite, Lëonie convinces Gripper to divulge Gloriana/Hector’s whereabouts. Before exposing this information, Gripper exclaims, “‘Least they say Mr. D’Estrange is a woman. I don’t know, and I don’t care. I don’t see what it matters whether Mr. D’Estrange is a man or a woman, sir. He’s the people’s friend’” (242). Gripper’s response is representative of the general attitude following Gloriana/Hector’s courtroom revelation. As Suksang puts it:
Gloria’s disclosure of identity does not have any effect on her followers who had been faithful to her in the guise of Hector D’Estrange. They become even more strongly united, for Gloria in her action has proven to them what she had been advocating as Hector—that women and men are naturally equal, and that women’s wretched condition is artificially created by society’s patriarchal norms. (89)
Indeed, the D’Estrangeites are more strongly united in the aftermath of the courtroom confession, but Suksang misses the potency of both Gloriana/Hector’s confession and Gripper’s telling response. Gripper gives up the artifice of knowing the truth about Gloriana/Hector, going so far as to dismiss the value of a knowable Truth. This is one moment where the androgyne is not “always bounded by the binary categories it also seeks to challenge” (Hargreaves 9). Here, Gloriana/Hector is unbounded from such categories entirely. While Gripper does use the masculine pronoun “he” to call Gloriana/Hector “the people’s friend,” his intention remains clear: Gloriana/Hector is something different, someone for whom neither category “man” nor “woman” fits. The scholar Katherine Mansfield argues that “dual pronouns serve to destabilize gender binaries and emphasize the volatility of gender as a category” in Gloriana (5). This scene, which also happens to occur while Lëonie is cross-dressing as a boy, reveals the multiple layers of artifice attempting to conceal gender as an intrinsic truth and, in so doing, dissolves the prescriptive and socially produced boundaries of the gender binary.
<32>Allegorical and androgynous, Gloriana/Hector thus calls to mind other potentially androgynous figures such as Jesus Christ or Adam. Regarding Adam, Carolyn Heilbrun demonstrates that his androgyny held a significant position in mystic traditions that still operated in the nineteenth century such as Gnosticism, Jewish Kabbalism, and Christian Hermetics (xvii–xvx). Followers of Christian Hermetic lore, for example, believed “that when Paradise returns the new, the renewed man, will, like Adam, be androgynous” (Gelpi 152). While the novel makes it obvious that Gloriana/Hector is meant to be Christlike,(20) taking Gloriana/Hector to be the androgynous Adam provides more evidence for the queerness of Gloriana/Hector and Evie’s relationship. If Gloriana/Hector is Adam, then Evie is the Eve his name so obviously references.(21)
<33>Reading Gloriana/Hector and Evie as Adam and Eve participates in a long tradition of viewing androgyny as a critical—and queer—aspect of the story of Genesis. As Karen Jo Torjesen discusses, androgyny has long been treated as a metaphor for the end of sexual difference (87). In an androgynous accounting of Genesis, “both Adam and Eve, both male and female, must be reunited with their alter ego, their lost companion, in order to be restored to their original nature” (Torjesen 87). This view of androgyny, Torjesen makes clear, relies on a delimited binarism and aims for the reunification of two discrete gender identities. As this essay aims to show, however, androgyny defies such reunification, offering up alternative gender and sexual possibilities that cannot be reunited seamlessly. In its concluding chapter, Gloriana entombs Gloriana/Hector and Evie in a shared grave and celebrates them as the progenitors of utopia. As such, they are the Adam and Eve of a future paradise. Gloriana’s Edenic couple, however, is decidedly queer, and this queerness impacts any understanding of the novel’s utopian politics. Rather than a relationship that stands as testament to the reproductive capacity of heteronormativity, Gloriana/Hector and Evie’s queered version of Adam and Eve antagonizes heteronormativity from beyond the grave.
<34>Gloriana/Hector’s androgyny and their queer romance with Evie exceed the explicit political project of Gloriana’s feminist utopianism precisely because they exceed the terms upon which the novel founds its revolution. Gender relations built upon a stable gender binary and compulsory heterosexuality can only transform so much. Once destabilized, binary notions of gender and sexuality no longer dictate a conservatizing utopianism. The androgynous possibilities opened by the text create a fissure in the presumed harmony of Gloriana’s utopian order. Gloriana/Hector lives a viable life in Gloriana not because her “real” gender proves women’s equality to men, but because Gloriana stages a productive and alternative life for a character whose “real” gender is as indiscernible as the presumed original of which gender is only ever an endlessly repeating copy. In death, Gloriana/Hector is the Duchess of Ravensdale, but in life, Gloriana/Hector is a constantly shifting matrix of identities, bodies, and desires. This is the feminist utopianism that the text makes possible, and tries but fails, to delimit. Androgyny, an operable concept and ideal in the nineteenth century, exemplifies one extant alternative to the fixed gender relations that feminist utopian novels worked to disrupt.