Ann Heilmann Neo-/Victorian Biographilia James Miranda Barry & AA SSttuuddyy iinn TTrraannssggeennddeerr && TTrraannssggeennrree Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry Ann Heilmann Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry A Study in Transgender and Transgenre Ann Heilmann Cardiff University Cardiff, UK ISBN 978-3-319-71385-4 ISBN 978-3-319-71386-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71386-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963555 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. Cover illustration: Aspect, Old illustration depicting Capetown in South Africa in 1880, drawn by J. Vanione in Emil Holub’s Seven Years in South Africa, published in Vienna, 1881, Shutterstock Standard Licence, image ID 80580226. Foreground: Portrait of Dr James Barry, reproduced courtesy of Western Cape Archives and Records Service, Cape Town, South Africa (reference number M774). Design by Paul de Bruin, Limelight Design. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland v P reface This book took shape a civilisation ago. It was 2015, and James Barry had been born into his afterlives a century and a half earlier. The British Empire had long dissolved, or so it seemed. I enjoyed my trans-European, hybrid Continental-British identity even more than Barry appears to have enjoyed his hybrid/transgender self. Having grown up in a firmly European cul- ture, I had turned into a committed internationalist during my university years and especially my studies abroad. My elective affinities with British culture and Anglophone literatures, above all my passion for the Victorians and the first women’s movement had long settled me in my second home country, where I had by then lived and worked for the longer part of my life. Academically, I had moved across several disciplines (Modern Languages, Women’s Studies, English Literature) and different universi- ties in two of the four nations of the UK as it is currently constituted. Perhaps it was this experience of straddling languages, cultures, nationali- ties, disciplines, and (in intellectual, imaginative ways) time periods that drew me to Barry. But it was not until 2016, when completing the first draft of my book, that I started to share Barry’s sense of utter alienation and anger in the face of the enormity of the irresponsibility and dishonesty of the prevailing powers. That is when I realized that the world and values I had considered to be unassailable and self-evident had ceased to exist. Raised in Ireland, educated in Scotland, and trained in England, Barry crossed several continents in his postings to multiple territories (the Cape Peninsula, Mauritius, the West Indies, St Helena, Malta, Corfu and Canada). In doing so, he bestowed dignity on the position of citizen of the world before this identity came to be disparaged as ‘unpatriotic’ and subversive vii viii PREFACE in the words of a (then) unelected Prime Minister. As a medical officer of the British army, Barry operated from within, yet in his unswerving defence of the rights of Othered individuals and groups of people remained resistant to the imperial mindset, a worldview that has resur- faced with such atavistic force in our own time. When he saw indigenous female patients subjected to abuse by male hospital attendants, he appointed a black matron. Incandescent, he stepped in to stop the institu- tionalized brutalization of prisoners and leprosy sufferers. It was this determination to call out injustice, cruelty, corruption and professional misconduct wherever it occurred that led to his court-martial, from which he emerged fully vindicated. If he were to live today, Barry would scoff at the mindlessness (and worse) of those who want to Make Us Great Again and Take Back Control by breaking away from our nearest neighbours and our shared histories and rights cultures to return to the toxic delusions and violations of a Glorious Empire. He would lobby for sheltering children displaced by war and stand up against hate speech, refugee vilification, detention camps, night-time deportations, ethnically motivated family partition and racialized travel bans. He would be appalled by the ethical, intellectual and emotional impoverishment and rising fundamentalism at the heart of our brave new world. His life was a political statement. So is ours, and the afterworld will judge us. Cardiff, UK Ann Heilmann 29 March 2017 a cknowledgements It is a convention of James Barry life-writing to refer to the irresistible allure of this extraordinary personality and story: once encountered, so the trope goes, they possess and haunt the biographilist for evermore. Barry, as I explore in this book, touches a nerve in our thinking about sex and gender. While the roots of my interest go back to my early work on Victorian feminism, in particular the New Woman and fin-de-siècle cross- dressing narratives, my entanglement with Barry himself began with Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry and the research into biographies and earlier biofictions that it inspired, resulting in a conference paper on ‘Doctored Lives’ in 2005. Since this coincided with a change of post, the new curriculum took over, and I did not get back to Barry until one of my PhD students devoted part of a chapter of her thesis on ‘Neo-Victorian Impersonations’ on the subject; I am grateful to Allison Neal for the long conversations we had, not least about the tricky question of pronouns. Another professional move inspired me to return to my expanding Barry archive in 2012 for a plenary lecture at a workshop on ‘Gender, Genre and Identity’; this focused my attention on the conceptual connections between Barry’s gender crossing and the genre crossings of Barry life- writing. By then I knew the subject deserved further development, but again other demands and commitments intervened. That is why, when I started preparing a keynote in 2015, I decided that this time I would write the article before the actual paper – and ended up with 18,000 words. When following the conference I presented my work-in-progress to col- leagues, hoping for advice on how to condense the over-long essay, the unanimous suggestion was to extend it into a short book. In the drafting ix x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS process, as more and more source material caught my notice, this project grew into the current monograph. It is tempting to conjure up parallels with Barry himself: maybe that’s how it all started, as a temporary adven- ture, and then it became the life. But that, of course, would mean indulg- ing in the representational self-constructions of biographiliacs that this study seeks to investigate. Writing this book became an adventure – and like an adventure it was beset with difficulties, predominantly those that pertain to mystery tales. For just as Barry remains elusive as a personality, so does some of the early source material. Madeline’s Mystery (1882), Mary Braddon’s single- volume edition of Ebenezer Rogers’s rambling three-decker A Modern Sphinx (1881), proved particularly hard to track down, until, with the aid of Janine Hatter and the Mary Braddon Society, I found one of two extant library copies at the Harry Ransom Center (which kindly sent me the novel in digitized format). An even greater mystery arose around George Edwin Marvell’s story ‘The Mystery of the Kapok Doctor’, published in the Cape Times Christmas Annual of 1904, an issue that is not held in the British Library and that a worldwide inter-library loan search failed to discover; thanks to Mark Llewellyn it was subsequently located in the National Library of South Africa. Following the complex histories of pub- lishing houses on their journey of regrouping, merging and being absorbed into one another made the permissions process in some cases a detective story in its own right. Final complications involved tracing the where- abouts of the one Barry portrait I knew my book could not forego because, in contradistinction to all other pictorial representations, it features a serenely self-assured man at the culmination point of his professional suc- cess. When later struggling to arrive at the best design for my book cover, I realized that representing the subject (and subject matter) was not quite as ‘straight’ as I had imagined. Many thanks go to Megen de Bruin-Molé for putting me in touch with Paul de Bruin, Limelight Design; I am tremendously grateful to him for making the trans/formation possible. It was Paul who, responsive to my explanations, arrived at the ‘perfect’ representational play on this book’s reflections of (and on) the cultural processes of inflecting Barry’s story through the pictorial traces of his material body and this body’s performances. The idea was to depict Barry as a man eminently comfortable in his body against a Cape Town and Table Mountain background, while at the same time visualizing the tropes of Barry life-writing in the doubling and mirrored ghosting of the figure of the transcender – hence the opening illustration to this book. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT S xi Countless further individuals not mentioned above and also institu- tions assisted me in researching and writing this book. I want to begin by thanking Cardiff University and the School of English, Communication and Philosophy for sabbatical leave awarded for the autumn semester of 2015–16, when a first part-draft of the book was written. In addition to the regular staff research budget the School’s Strategic Research and Research Innovation funds offered generous support for conferences, engagement opportunities, archival trips, digital resource acquisition and permissions and reproductions arrangements across a number of years. Of the many people who made this book possible I am most grateful to my colleagues at Cardiff who gave invaluable hands-on advice on the initial draft-in-progress – Sophie Coulombeau, Jane Moore, Becky Munford – and who read, copy-edited and provided comprehensive feedback on later incarnations of the full manuscript: Catherine Butler, Holly Furneaux and Martin Willis. Their comments ranged from Dickens’s potential involve- ment in the composition of the first biostory to women in trousers and from Laqueur’s one and two-sex theories and nineteenth-century science to trans narratives. I also benefited tremendously from the wide-ranging support of colleagues from further afield – Linda Anderson, Kate Mitchell and Nathalie Saudo-Welby – who all read the manuscript and offered enormously helpful suggestions; many thanks in particular to Nathalie for her astute comments and assistance with translations from the French. Neil Badmington and Damian Walford Davies inspired me by example to experiment with creative openings and to cultivate the aesthetics of style; any shortcomings are my responsibility only. Jenny Hulin expertly han- dled incoming research admin to shield me from work flows in the most intense period of finalizing the book. Warm thanks go to Angela V. John for her serendipiditous rediscovery of a 1988 article that alerted me in the final revision stage to Jean Binnie’s 1988 biodrama Colours, a play that would otherwise have escaped my notice. Mel Kohlke was a constant well- spring of information generously shared and vibrant stimulus for exchange of ideas on neo-Victorian life-writing; her essay-collection on Neo- Victorian Biofiction (co-edited with Christian Gutleben in the Brill imprint) is much-awaited. Rachel Carroll’s excellent book on Transgender and the Literary Imagination (Edinburgh University Press) was com- pleted just in time for me to consult it during the proofing stage of mine; I am grateful to Rachel and the publisher for giving me access to the manuscript. Equally, thanks go to Kirsti Bohata for drawing my attention to Kate Milsom’s No Man’s Land exhibition, which includes a (2017)