brideoffrankenstein | Entries tagged with work aesthetic tag

The thing is, right.

The Thing Is. The Thing Is.

Several critics (Koenraad Claes, Benedicte Coste I think, Flavia Alaya occassionally) suggest that the primary motivation for ol' Will Sharp to take on the pseudonym of Fiona Macleod is to escape the negative press associated with her birth name. Sharp vaguely suggested something akin to this with regard to the pseudonyms under which she wrote The Pagan Review.

Now. A lot (not all, by any means, but a lot) of writers who are remembered as women wrote under male pseudonyms at this time. A lot of women wrote under their own names, and it was suggested that Fiona Macleod was a married woman writing under her maiden name, so clearly that happened as well.

There is also still commercial good sense in writing under a male name. So many women write under male names, or names that are not identifiably male.

I accept, I fully accept, that Sharp was disappointed with her reception and wanted to write under a different name in order to be given a fair shake critically. Claes convincingly proved that that's what The Pagan Review was - testing out new names and styles to see what stuck. But given that many women wrote under male names, and that they still did, presumably to be both commercially viable or critically acceptable, why the everloving fuck would William Sharp, if it was only a matter of marketing, write under a female name. For heavens sake, that's part of the reason Macleod's reputation collapsed after her death! Because there was something Just Too Queer about a respectable male writer writing under a female name. Sharp must have guessed that would happen. She kept a tight hold of Macleod's true identity for years, after all.

And yet, and yet, she makes that choice, to write as Fiona Macleod and not as anyone else. Not under any of the names from The Pagan Review, not under any other name. She chooses to write under a name that could easily have proven even less viable than her birth one, that could and did shatter her reputation once she outed herself after she died.

No-one has explained this adequately to me yet within the commercial context. I'll accept it as a choice! I will! One thing I can think of is perhaps Sharp saw in her own writing a feminine quality that she felt hurt her critical prospects, but thought that if she wrote under a female name, she could work with those qualities rather than around them. Another option (which doesn't seem like it matches Sharp's character, but to cover my bases) is that Sharp recognised that she wasn't an excellent writer for a man, but might be good enough as a woman.*

But as it is? No-one has explained it. Of course, I don't think the Macleod name was a 'choice' in that way. And given that no-one has explained it, it comes across more as ciswashing than anything else.

*I really don't think Sharp was quite as misogynistic as that, but the Victorian press almost definitely was

1: Look a little more into Victorian Trans History

     - Specifically through an "Awareness" lens for the Victorians themselves. Do Carpenter, Addington Symonds or Ellis say anything, for example?

     - When do trans victorians start appearing in criticism?

2: When does trans academia start in general?

     - How much can I actually expect from an academic at Harvard in 1969?
     - How much of Alaya's rhetoric is casual, workaday, normal-for-1969 transphobia? All of it? Most? How much can I tear into her without sounding like someone who needs a lesson in context

3: Genderqueer things before 1969

     - What about the queer dynamics/rhetorics around at the time Alaya was writing?
     - What frameworks could she have read Sharp through?

4: Alaya says at one point that Sharp can't have had DID and to say so is to misunderstand what it is

     - Is she right?
     - Was she right in 1969 but has since been proven wrong?
     - Would Sharp's experiences read as DID to someone who has it? (long shot - requires asking people to do things that require Spoons of them)

Do you know what Flavia Alaya's book William Sharp / Fiona Macleod said to me today. Do you know what nonsense it told me?

That the increased sympathy for homosexuality in the 1890s was due to men getting worried about their social power because feminism.

Yeah.

Look Silke Stroh. Look I get what you're saying Sharp spewed a lot of racist nonsense that ultimately comes over as colonialist despite his being pro-celtic and writing celtic narratives. sure, calling the scottish people of the highlands as dreamy and irrational isn't on

but. buuut. a lot of the things Sharp says about the celtic "race" in Green Fire are things he both idolises and takes for himself, as aspects of his own personality and personhood.

He's constantly, consistently, crying out for a Celtic identity of his own and yes! when he takes or talks about that identity, he does it in a way that shows his rhetoric up as being very colonialism-infused

but. but. a) his work is clearly compatible with nationalist thought because he was big pals with Yeats and if you were an Irish nationalist would you stay friends with a colonial apologist and be an admirer of said apologist's work in which he does the apologising? no. or at least you'd publically acknowledge its complexity

b) sometimes people raised or existing in certain atmospheres do express themselves in the language of the coloniser because that's the only language they have access to

c) sometimes people cling to certain ideas about a quality in their heritage because it makes them feel connected and grounded as an individual

d) sometimes people use rhetoric they dislike or have a nationalist objection to because that's the only way that the English market will listen (see lots of Welsh literature)

Stroh says things about how it's unsurprising, given that Sharp and others (inc Matthew Arnold) go on about the Celtic People being feminine, that when Sharp takes on a lasting pseudonym it's female, but tbh I think that's the wrong way around

I think Sharp collected the parts of his self that he had to repress - his Scottishness, his genderqueerness, his patriotism - and shoved them into the identity of Fiona Macleod (this assumes that FM is a pseudonymous identity rather than an alter, but I think WS could have had an alter that found expression in FM /and also/ be a partly pseudonymous identity*).

Therefore I think Sharp leant into the Celt = feminine Thing because both of those were repressed parts, or at least difficult parts of his identity, and he sandwiched them together in a lot of his work because for him they were, perhaps subconsciously, sandwiched together.

To suggest as Stroh does that Sharp is a) expressing colonialist thought and reproducing colonialist rhetoric in a patronising and dismissive way and b) creating a female pseudonym in order to carry on doing that more conveniently, to quote the horse and his boy, in my opinion elides the vast and complex issues at play just in Sharp, let alone in the Celtic Twilight as a movement.

ETA: * For instance, Macleod was from the Highlands where Sharp was Lowlands. I can easily see a situation wherein Macleod (presuming she was an alter and thus an individual) recreated aspects of herself in order to separate and stabilise her identity

I promised research posts here sometimes - it'll probably mean my supervisor stays happy with me, impact and engagement and all that uk-government bullshit - so I figured I'd get myself into the swing of it by introducing my research and the kinds of things I'm interested in, what stuff might crop up in this series, things like that.

First off, my research is on someone called William Sharp, who was a Big Writer in the late-victorian period, pals with Rossetti, went walking with Walter Pater, emailed Swinburne and his bf on a regular basis, stuff like that. (Supervisor, if you're reading this, I promise I'll be more professional in the actual writing...) He was a reviewer, a prolific one, and by his own admission didn't make many friends doing that. So when his poetry and prose didn't get quite the reception he wanted, he took on the name Fiona Macleod and started publishing under her name, which was far more popular.

Cool interesting things happen when you look a bit closer. Sharp texted a friend once* that he was "sometimes more woman than a man", and his wife suggests that his death was caused by "the strain of his dual nature". He kept the identity of Fiona very close to his chest, going so far as having his sister write Fiona's letters so they'd be in a feminine hand (whatever that meant in 1894). Repeatedly, he shows a ""fascination"" with women and the feminine, and it's suggested in several places, including by Sharp himself, that William and Fiona are two distinct people. Once, he mentions "leaving [this letter] for Fiona to read when she wakes up" and feeling as if he can hear Fiona's footsteps elsewhere in the house. Whether Fiona is a straight-up pseudonym, an alter, or whether Sharp was trans, we don't know and can't definitively know. As that's not actually my research topic and just an introduction to why Sharp, I think it's not too terribly unprofessional for me to say that I'd be highly surprised if Sharp appeared to me and told me it was the former and he wasn't genderqueer in the least.*

Other cool interesting things Sharp did:

Publish a magazine where he wrote all the contributions under pseudonyms, then had a funeral for it in his garden when it failed
Get snarkily yelled at by Oscar Wilde for publishing a book on Rossetti after R died
Get into a big fight with his Good Pal Hall Caine over said publication (because Hall Caine was writing one too)
Edit what seems like every book in Victorian non-fiction, unless it was edited by Havelock Ellis or Ernest Rhys
Burst in on Ernest Rhys while ER was having a bath, just to tell him he should do an edition of Thomas de Quincey
Have hair like a Disney Villain

So after all that what on earth am I doing.

The thing is, William Sharp knew everyone. Anyone he didn't know, he knew someone who did. He had a finger in every single literary pie going around at the time, and several that weren't.

What I'm doing is that: the network, Sharp as networker, Sharp as influencer and Sharp as lens through which to see the angles and nuances of the Victiorian Literary Market. Does setting himself up as a Friend of Rossetti's help his poetry get published? Does bursting in on Ernest Rhys in the bath mean he gets Fiona published in the Savoy magazine? What kind of network is he using to prop up Fiona's career and what are the differences in expectations of female and male writing? What does his periodical-construction suggest about the periodical industry itself?

That is what I'm doing. I know it sounds dry and niche and terrible but honestly? I can look at anything through that lens because Sharp did everything.

I'm even considering comparing his magazine to a magazine like the Pearl (pornography) because of their similarities in materiality and design - did people not buy his magazine because it looked as cheap as cheap porn?

Which! leads me into my other interests, which might get a look in here - I'm big on Victorian sex culture, especially but not exclusively queer, especially but not exclusively its representation in fiction. I also do gothic - I still like the victorian period best there but my MA was on inter-war gothics so I'm a bit wider on that. Queerness in the late victorian to inter-war is also hugely of interest and I'll probably talk about that soon because I want to do an article on queer masculinity in Rebecca soon.

A couple quick things before I go - these will all be put under the party like it's 1899 banner, just for simplicity's sake, and I'll tag them "work aesthetic tag" because that's what I used on tumblr and I'd like to keep it all navigable.

*yes he did don't @ me
*occam's razor seems to suggest to me that Fiona is a trans woman, or transfeminine nonbinary - both the latter options lead to that answer where only the former shouts "cis!". There's also more evidence in favour of both those options than I've listed here.

Nobody should ever let me near indie purfume sites because I'm on Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs and let me tell you

My wishlist is already ten items long and I've only been here two minutes. I'm not saying anything is ever going to replace my Ravenscourt Apothecary Dorian Gray (vetiver, juniper, bergamot, lemon, hello) but also like. I am a merchandise fiend and a sucker for descriptive passages so a) perfumes that match my literary-criticism interests and b) perfumes that have long and gorgeous descriptions? I'm dead, I'm gone, take my money.

also interesting gender thing here, which is actually why I decided to post in the first place, is I seem to keep being far more drawn to the scents which call themselves masculine? that doesn't generally happen to me except in specific circumstances so it's just cool and slightly odd to be scrolling through like "yes, that, that, that one, that one too"

tbh I think it's to do with the specific variety of masculinity I like, that is, queer victorian masculinity. And BPAL is already there and ready with the "victorian" element half the time, so I just have to pick the decadent, ""french"" ones. Although this one I was just adding to my list says "Bourbon, black tobacco tar, dry bone, bay rum aftershave, and sleazy cologne" and I just want to wear a deep black 1890s suit and lean on an alley wall and smoke in response to that description, honestly.