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Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature

 | 
Jean-Michel Ganteau
, 
Christine Reynier

On Tears Shed at Brownlow Hill in the Summer of 1866: Alterity, Politics, and Style in Josephine Butler’s Writings

Frédéric Regard

Résumé

Very often deprecatingly dubbed a Christian feminist, Josephine Butler is mostly remembered for being the charismatic leader of the campaigns for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864-1868). If the radical alterity between the ladies and the prostitutes could be deconstructed to emphasise a shared humanity, if the appalling situations directly witnessed by Butler could be described, no longer from an ideological perspective, but from a political perspective, if the moral category of sinners could thus be redefined as forming part of a class of citizens, it was first and foremost because Butler had a secret weapon: literary pragmatics.

Texte intégral

  • 1 Saint Augustine, De ordine, 2.4.12.
  • 2 See Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Harvard: Harvard UP, 1982).
  • 3 Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, Essai sur les cloaques, ou, Égouts de la ville de Paris, envisagés sou (...)
  • 4 See Lesley A. Hall, ‘Acton, William John (1812/13–1875),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ( (...)
  • 5 See Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: (...)

1Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, England imported from France a system of prostitution regulation designed to curb the spread of venereal diseases by providing men with ‘safe’ extramarital sex. The foundations of this system had been laid by Parent-Duchâtelet, who had managed to modernise the Augustinian theory according to which prostitutes were a necessary evil, one without which good order could not be maintained in society.1 For Augustine, whose views would influence European sexual ideology for centuries and lend religious legitimacy to the madonna/whore dichotomy,2 two categories of women were required: the good, faithful wives to service men’s procreative needs, and the base, debauched prostitutes to cater to their desires and pleasures outside of marriage. Even though ‘healthy,’ the prostitute was thus presented as the other of the virtuous wife and mother—a specimen of radical alterity in Victorian ideology. In his effort to coat Augustine’s argument with a layer of modernity, Parent had drawn a telling comparison: prostitutes were to society what subterranean sewers were to the hygienised or sanitised modern urban centres, i.e. channels for discharging not waste water, but an excess of male sexual energy.3 In England, the major proponent of this theory was William Acton, a consulting surgeon of London, who was not concerned only with the technical aspects of the treatment of venereal diseases, but also with the wider social issues with which theses diseases were connected.4 Acton was therefore a great supporter of the Contagious Diseases Acts passed in 1864, 1866 and 1868, and a strong advocate for their extension from garrison and port towns to the rest of the country, and therefore to the general populace. The police would then be given the right to arrest any woman suspected of being ‘a common prostitute,’ submit her to forceful medical examination, keep her in detention in a ‘lock hospital’ if infected with syphilis, release her if in good health, provided with a ‘license’ officially declaring her to be fit for service.5

  • 6 See Jane Jordan, Josephine Butler (London: John Murray, 2001) 65.

2In January 1866, George and Josephine Butler began a new life in Liverpool. They had left Cheltenham College, where George had been vice-principal, to live at Liverpool College, where he had been offered the post of principal. The change was most welcome. The Butlers did not like the Tory atmosphere of Cheltenham, but more importantly the town had become associated for them with the terrible tragedy which had befallen their family: on the evening of Saturday, 20 August 1864, their only daughter, Evangelina, or Eva, five years old, had fallen from the banister at the top of the hall stairs in their home and killed herself in front of her parents. Josephine Butler thereafter entered a phase of deep depression. It was also at that time that she started dedicating her prayers to young prostitutes, whom she called in her spiritual diary ‘the slaves of lust in our own land, the poor women who are driven as sheep to the slaughter into the slave market of London.’6 Butler’s starting point for rescue work was the Brownlow Hill workhouse, the largest in the country, which dominated the skyline of Liverpool (demolished in 1931, it has now been replaced by a Roman Catholic cathedral). And it was to the ‘oakum sheds,’ the cellars where those depraved, diseased women picked oakum as a punishment for their sins, that she made her way.

  • 7 Josephine Butler, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (London: Horace, Marshall and Son, 1896 (...)

3My essay will take the form of a comment on Butler’s narratives of her first encounters with the girls of Brownlow Hill. I focus my study therefore on the precise moment of Butler’s awakening to the cause, on the exact origin of the national movement Butler would soon launch for the abrogation of the Acts, until their final repeal in 1886. My analysis deals mainly— but not exclusively—with two excerpts from Recollections of George Butler, a biographical memoir Butler dedicated to her late husband in 1892. The specificity of Recollections is that it juxtaposes two types of documents, notably a letter written during the summer of 1866, and later memories of the same period written more than a quarter of a century later, after George’s death (1890). A comparison of the styles characterising those texts shows that Butler’s first testimonies already evinced the features of the literature she would produce for more than twenty years. What I am interested in, therefore, is not only the intellectual genesis of what Butler called her’crusade,’7 but also the pragmatic tactics she designed at such an early stage of her war on the regulation system, to modify and mobilise British public opinion—her texts as made in order to effect responses in their audiences or readers. How did Christianity, feminism and a demand for democracy come to be so closely articulated in Butler’s thought and practice—by which I mean also her writing practice? What was the importance of writing letters to relate her doings to distant friends? When, and how, did personal testimony become political? I argue that Josephine Butler’s politicisation of classic rescue work could not be dissociated from her rhetorical talents. If the radical alterity between the ladies and the prostitutes could be deconstructed to emphasise a shared humanity, if the appalling situations directly witnessed by Butler could be described, no longer from an ideological perspective, but from a political perspective, if the moral category of sinners could be redefined as forming part of a class of citizens, it was first and foremost because Butler was a writer.

1 Towards Disinterested Communication

4One passage from Recollections may be analysed as a perfect illustration of Butler’s life-long tactics, and it is precisely when she gives an account of her first visit to the oakum sheds:

  • 8 Josephine Butler, Recollections of George Butler (1892; Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1900) chapter viii, 18 (...)

There was on the ground floor a Bridewell for women, consisting of huge cellars, bare and unfurnished, with damp stone floors; these were called the “oakum sheds,” and to these came voluntarily creatures driven by hunger, destitution, or vice, begging for a few nights’ shelter and a piece of bread, in return for which they picked their allotted portion of oakum. Others were sent there as prisoners. I went down to the oakum sheds and begged admission. I was taken into an immense gloomy vault, filled with women and girls—more than two hundred, probably, at that time. I sat on the floor among them and picked oakum. They laughed at me, and told me my fingers were of no use for that work; which was true. But while we laughed we became friends. I proposed that they should learn a few verses to say to me on my next visit.
I recollect a tall, dark, handsome girl standing up in our midst, among the damp refuse and lumps of tarred rope, and repeating without a mistake and in a not unmusical voice, clear and ringing, that wonderful fourteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel—the words of Jesus all through, ending with “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” She had selected it herself; and they listened in perfect silence, this audience—wretched, draggled, ignorant, criminal, some; and wild and defiant, others. The tall, dark-haired girl had prepared the way for me; and I said, “Now let us all kneel, and cry to that same Jesus who spoke those words;” and down on their knees they fell, every one of them, reverently, on that damp stone floor, some saying the words after me, others moaning and weeping. It was a strange sound, that united wail—continuous, pitiful, strong—like a great sigh or murmur of vague desire and hope, issuing from the heart of despair, piercing the gloom and murky atmosphere of that vaulted room, and reaching to the heart of God.8

  • 9 See Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-18 (...)
  • 10 Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990, ‘Points’) 222; Oneself as Another, transl (...)

5Although it gives itself to read as a simple description of the radical alterity of those vicious ‘creatures,’ as the plain, unadorned narrative of a respectable lady’s first encounter with an impoverished, plague-ridden community hidden away in the darkest, subterranean recesses of the edifice, the passage is in fact carefully constructed to produce a paradoxical effect. As the reader progresses through Butler’s account, the initial difference between self and other is blurred, first when Butler stoops to pick oakum, refashioning herself as an inmate among the others (an intimacy which the shared laughter emphasises); then when Butler’s suggestion that the girls learn a few verses is taken up by the ‘tall, dark-haired girl’; finally when all the girls end up sharing the same words, the same moaning, the same weeping, to the point of becoming interchangeable. There is of course no denying that Butler’s presence among the girls is still tinged with a hint of aristocratic privilege, and that her theatricalised description of the scene is still impregnated with a traditional deferential ideology.9 But what Butler also makes happen here, rather what her text makes happen, as the wretched of the earth enter into communion with the elect, is a sudden ethical suspension of the structure of radical alterity, which is to say a sudden abrogation of the law of social and moral categorising, whereby ‘solicitude,’ which Ricœur defines as a form of ‘benevolent spontaneity,’ is made to regulate the relation between self and other.10 The tableau is thus used to redefine intersubjective relationships: the code of asymmetric, interested communication, prevalent in the market economy of venal love, is invalidated by a new code of exchange, a code of reciprocity, or of disinterested communication. The ‘united wail’ heard in the damp cellars of the workhouse is the sudden, epiphanic manifestation of this new bond, and what the tableau dramatises in fact, much more than Butler’s moral or spiritual authority, is the sudden resurgence of something shareable between self and other, suggesting the permanence of a debt, not a financial or commercial debt, but an ethical, disinterested debt between self and other.

  • 11 Hélène Cixous, ‘Volées d’humanité,’ Rêver croire penser: autour d’Hélène Cixous, eds. Bruno Clément (...)

6This ‘disinterested debt’ is precisely what Hélène Cixous sees as being constitutive of ‘humanity.’11 Humanity, she explains, always manifests itself in the form of a disinterested ‘should,’ the English modal verb being according to her ‘the very auxiliary of humanity’ (l’auxiliaire même de l’humanité). For ‘should’ refers both to the German Schuld, a term meaning guilt as well as responsibility, and to the debt that the English verb suggests, a debt which we owe, Cixous adds, prior to the law of contracts, both to the other and to ourselves, an ‘owingness’ (une devance) which obliges us through what, following Derrida, she calls our ‘culpa-responsibility’ (Cixous 27–29). Humanity, she goes on to argue, is therefore never given; it cannot in fact be judged before what she calls ‘the Last Extremity’: if one always inevitably despairs of humanity’s guilt, the ‘should’ which nevertheless constrains all human beings—beyond knowledge, prejudice, ideology, beyond the structure of alterity—, has to accept the idea that humanity both ‘disfigures’ and ‘refigures’ itself, hesitating between damnation and redemption, despair and hope, blindness and vision (Cixous 25–26). In this sense, the girls encountered at Brownlow Hill were to Butler the sudden revelation of a secret, sacred bond of humanity between self and other: the text redefines the lost girls as humanity in the flesh, no longer the outrageous specimens of a lower category of British society, but the truly incarnated, disfigured figures of a common humanity, engaging therefore the onlooker’s responsibility to the plight of the suffering other, and making imperative the pursuit of justice. The tears shed—and shared—at Brownlow Hill become thus the visible and audible sign, the eikon, the iconic image of a higher ethical principle, calling for political action. What Victorian ideology had sought to conceal and to silence, that shameful, polluted fraction of the population, traditionally represented as being made up of monstrous, almost inhuman creatures, hidden away from sight and hearing under the ‘immense gloomy vault’ of the workhouse, is invited to express itself as the unpredictable, uncanny return of the lost and ultimately retrieved daughters of the nation, sharing a common humanity with an exemplary lady, herself abandoned by God and wandering in a valley of tears, but also finding in this first encounter with alterity cause for both despair and hope.

2 Giving Humanity to Read

  • 12 ‘L’humanité n’existe point encore ou elle existe à peine’ (‘Humanity does not as yet exist or hardl (...)
  • 13 See Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, 1982, transl. Channa Newman and C (...)
  • 14 For a detailed, stimulating reading of the myth in feminist terms, see Elissa Marder, ‘Disarticulat (...)

7It should be emphasised again that humanity—a term which Jean Jaurès, as late as 1904, still defined as a reality to come12 —is not here given, as a prerequisite of realist description, but that it issues forth from its textualisation, made indissociable therefore from literary description. It has been famously argued that one of the characteristic features of the literary is its ‘hypertextuality’ (any relationship relating a text to an earlier one13). And indeed, although this narrative purports to be nothing more than a factual report on an historical event, Butler’s account of her exploration of the vaulted cellars of the workhouse draws on a number of myths. One of the ‘hypotexts’ Butler’s narrative plays upon is the Greek myth of Philomela. The daughter of the king of Athens was raped by Tereus, a Thracian king. After the latter cut out her tongue to prevent her from revealing what he had done, she chose to represent her sufferings on a tapestry, which she wove and sent to her sister Procne. Tereus chased the two women, who then turned into birds—Procne into a nightingale, Philomela into a swallow. Latin authors, Ovid in particular, would reverse their positions, making Philomela the nightingale, which enabled the fabulist to explain why the nightingale sings the paradoxically plaintive song it is known for. Unsurprisingly, feminist readings of the tale see in it an allegory of the violence done to women: both the violation of the girl’s integrity and the semiotic violence which consists in depriving the victim of her speech, of the capacity to articulate her pain and suffering.14 The singing is taken to signify the expression of otherwise inaudible, inarticulate suffering, and by the same token, the tale seems to suggest that women create beauty because it is their way of expressing suffering: their singing expresses the inexpressible. That is why, I suggest, Butler’s account of her encounter with the lost girls of Brownlow Hill insists so dramatically on their ‘united wail.’ The OED notes that to wail is to express pain or sorrow, and that it is also said of birds which give forth mournful sounds. The girls’ ‘wail’ is both a lament and a song, in Butler’s terms: both ‘a great sigh’ and ‘a murmur of desire and hope,’ ‘issuing from the heart of despair’ while ‘reaching to the heart of God.’ To come back to Cixous’s essay, the ‘united wail’ on which the scene culminates both dis-figures and re-figures humanity.

  • 15 See Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1990) (...)

8Butler’s text also plays on a number of more immediately recognisable myths, notably that of the visit to ‘Hades,’ the abode of the dead. Like Demeter, Butler visits the underworld of Victorian society to see her lost daughter again, Persephone, and get her from a cave of darkness back to light and air. Judeo-Christian sacred writings would take up the same myth to conceive of death as a temporary abode, the perfect illustration of this recuperation being Christ’s resurrection: ‘I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! I hold the keys of death and Hades’ (Rev. I, 17–18). What is of even greater interest to us here, is that all four Gospels report that the risen Jesus chose first to appear to women, in fact to one woman in particular, Mary Magdalene. So that it is certainly no coincidence if the words the poor little philomels repeat, ‘in a not unmusical voice,’ are Jesus’s consolatory discourse, as reported in the fourteenth chapter of Saint John’s Gospel: ‘Fear not death, be not afraid of death, for death is the path to the Father.’ Perhaps it is no coincidence either if Mary Magdalene, the first and only woman according to John to see that the crypt—was now empty, that Jesus had risen from the dead, was also reputed to be a weeping sinner, a prostitute, which did not prevent her from being also portrayed as a visionary leader of the early Christian movement.15 I suggest that Butler used such a myth to structure her rendering of the scene, which enabled her to precipitate a collapse of traditionally opposed categories—the angel and the monster, the debauched courtesan and the faithful wife, etc.—, and at the same time to refashion herself as a charismatic Christian leader.

9There is no doubt that this layering of successive versions of what appears to be fundamentally the same story—Philomela, Jesus, and Mary Magdalene fused into one synthetic figure of suffering humanity—lends Butler’s testimony its powerful literary quality: the supposedly matter-of-fact description of the little ‘criminals’ is in fact subjected to a process of mythologisation, whereby the scene depicted yields a paradoxical figure of humanity: humanity brought to ‘the Last Extremity,’ to an absolute of misfortune, humanity when it least resembles itself, humanity disfigured, causing despair, having reached the point of no-return, and yet humanity when it also most resembles itself, humanity refigured, reenlightened, ‘piercing the gloom and murky atmosphere of that vaulted room,’ humanity no longer en-crypted therefore, but de-crypted, revealed to itself at the very moment it despairs of itself.

10But again, this revision of traditional dichotomies can only be achieved through textualisation. One might even argue that this sudden conjunction of opposites finds one of its most potent lexical translations in the closing lines of the excerpt, in the choice of the word ‘heart,’ used in two different senses: 1) ‘the heart of despair’ as the centre of despair, the innermost part of despair, the height of despair; 2) ‘the heart of God’ as the seat of God’s thoughts and feelings, the seat of God’s love. A perfect rhetorical illustration of the principle of interchangeability at work in the narrative, this homonymy is also linguistic evidence of the sudden conjunction of despair and love, absence and presence, darkness and light, death and resurrection. That one single word should mean both the height of despair and the seat of divine love is the lesson those Victorian Magdalenes teach us, and more precisely the lesson they give us to read. For if the lesson in humanity can be said to reside entirely in its textuality, it is first and foremost because it is given to read. Seeking to explain why Jaurès in 1904 chose to call the daily he had just founded L’Humanité, Cixous remarks that the one thing one can be sure of concerning Humanity, is that it is always a matter of reading: ‘In what are we human? In what can we say we are? In that we read’ (Cixous 15).

3 From Personal Testimony to Political Mobilisation

11A few pages further down in the Recollections, Josephine Butler tells the story of the first prostitute she took back home to allow her to die peacefully, Mary Lomax, a twenty-four year old, consumptive known only as ‘Marion’ in Butler’s papers (Jordan 70). The text presents itself as an earlier letter sent to a friend, reproduced in the 1892 memoir:

Among the first who came to us, to our own house, to die, was a certain Marion.... The following account of her was written to a friend after her death:
I send you this brief sketch of our poor Marion, feeling that it may be good for others as well as for ourselves to bear in memory such a trophy of the goodness of God. The first time I saw her was in a crowded room.... She was ill, her lungs fatally attacked. I went up to her, and with no introduction of myself said: “Will you come with me to my home and live with me? I had a daughter once.” She replied with a gasp of astonishment, grasping my hand as if she would never let it go again. I brought her home; my husband supported her upstairs, and we laid her on the couch in the pretty little spare room looking on the garden. She lived with us, an invalid, three months, and then died. It was difficult to suppress the thought, “If she had not been so destroyed, what a brightness and blessing she might have been in the world!”...
A few days before her death I telegraphed, at her request, to her father, who had had no tidings of his lost child for five years. He was an extensive farmer, well to do and honourable, living in a beautiful district in the midland counties. We were surprised, on his arrival, to see a very fine-looking country gentleman, as one would say, reminding us, in his noble height and figure and dignified presence, a little of my own father. He carried with him a valise and a handsome travelling rug. We took him to her room and retired. Their interview was best witnessed by God alone. After two hours or so, I opened the door softly. He was lying on a couch at the opposite side of the room from her, in a deep sleep, tired probably more by strong emotion than by his journey. She raised her finger for silence, and with the look and action of a guardian angel, whispered, “Father is asleep.” After her death her poor mother came to attend her funeral. I had filled Marion’s coffin with white camelias, banking them up all round her. With her hands crossed on her breast, and dressed as a bride for her Lord, she looked quite lovely. I found the mother alone, kneeling by the coffin, in an agony of grief and of anger. She said (her body rocking backward and forward with emotion): “If that man could but see her now! Can we not send for him?” and she added: “Oh what a difference there is in English gentlemen’s households! To think that this child should have been ruined in one and saved in another!” Yes, it might have been good for ‘that man’ to have been forced to step down from his high social position and to look upon her then, and to have known the abyss from which she had been drawn, to the verge of which he had led her when she was but a child of fifteen.... (Butler 1900, 189–191)

12The religious dimension characterising the relation of this nineteenth-century Mary (Lomax) Magdalene’s death is of course inescapable. This is perceptible even in the least conspicuous of Butler’s lexical choices, for example in the word ‘bride,’ most probably borrowed from the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21, 2: ‘And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.’ The fallen girl is once again presented as the visible manifestation of a spiritual truth. What changes in this second excerpt, however, is that the principle of interchangeability seems to be superseded by a principle of replacement, as the small community initially produced by the inmates and their visitor is now extended to the family circle, and notably as ‘Marion’ the lost (fallen) girl is made to replace Eva the lost (deceased) daughter. This is made obvious when Butler asks ‘Marion’ to come home with her: ‘Will you come with me to my home and live with me? I had a daughter once.’ What the reader inevitably surmises is that the spare room which ‘Marion’ is invited to occupy is certainly Eva’s former bedroom. Further down, even Marion’s father is portrayed as a replacement of Butler’s father. This implicit structure is rhetorically supported by a specific enunciative setup, which seems to dispense with the depersonalised citation system that characterised the first excerpt. Utterances in the first text were always borrowed (biblical) utterances; in the second text on the contrary the responsibility of the utterances is mostly delegated to the various individual speakers. Butler’s own plight is thus foregrounded, first when she quotes herself saying ‘I had a daughter once,’ then when she says of ‘Marion’ that ‘if she had not been so destroyed, what a brightness and blessing she might have been in the world,’ a statement which makes the reader wonder if the respective identities of the two girls are not once again collapsed. Still further down, when Butler opens the door of the bedroom to find ‘Marion’s father asleep on the couch, the girls become once again inextricably mixed, especially when ‘Marion’ is quoted whispering to her benefactor ‘Father is asleep,’ as if her father were also Butler’s spouse. The testimony thus reshapes itself into a ghost-story, a story of uncanny replacement. ‘Marion’ is not quite herself, an uncertainty intensified by the use of the pseudonym: she is also ‘Eva,’ itself but a diminutive of Evangelina. Eva’s absence is made up through Marion’s precarious presence, a dying lost girl being made to give life to a lost daughter, and vice versa.

  • 16 See for instance The Hour before the Dawn, 1876, in Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns(...)

13This process of recontextualisation is pushed even further when the Madgalene’s mother is ushered in and allowed to speak for herself, her words being used to put an abrupt end to the Gothic streak of the narrative. For the mother’s words quite clearly situate her daughter’s moral and physical degradation in a realist context, bringing in the responsibility of the gentleman who seduced the fifteen-year old and abandoned her. Here, the socio-political implication of the mother’s words are emphasised by Butler’s comments: ‘Yes, it might have been good for “that man” to have been forced to step down from his high social position.’ By explicitly approving of the accusation levelled at the gentleman—‘Yes, it might have been...’—, and by reiterating a segment of the mother’s utterance— ‘that man’—, the quotation marks putting even greater emphasis on the seducer’s immoral conduct, stressing the disparaging value of the demonstrative ‘that,’ Butler definitely underscores the socio-political dimension of the young prostitute’s tragic fate. The moral ‘double standard’ regulating gendered relations is here articulated on a social and political issue, a line of thought Butler would later develop much more explicitly, arguing that if some men in Britain behave immorally, it is because the system condones ‘high-class male profligacy.’16 The asymmetry of the British class system is thus made to appear somewhat complicit with the double standard central to patriarchal ideology: it is this order of things, in which girls abused by the upper classes are expected to remain silent, fall into vice and destitution, and finally die into oblivion, that is now openly contested.

  • 17 Jacques Rancière, ‘Dix Thèses sur la Politique,’ Aux bords du politique (1990; Paris: La Fabrique, (...)
  • 18 J. Butler, Truth before Everything, 1897 (Jordan and Sharp, vol. III, 343).

14It may be argued therefore that the letter sent by Butler to a friend of hers some time during the summer of 1866 to reveal Marion’s story beyond the family circle was the first step towards the translation of a moment of ethical responsibility into a process of political mobilisation for justice. Taking up the words of an angry mother and reporting them to a distant friend, who could in turn report them to relatives, or to other correspondents, was the first move towards the transformation of a personal testimony into a collective arrangement of utterances, a process the use of a pseudonym could only facilitate. The letter henceforth transforms itself into a potentially public indictment of gendered class differentiation, to be circulated among a potentially limitless audience, or reading public. This is what the book published in 1892, in which the letter of 1866 was eventually reproduced, would make even more manifest: from the start, Butler’s personal testimony had been meant to be circulated widely, reiterated by various speakers, taken up by various media, under various forms. As it takes up the mother’s accusation and breaks open from the closed circle of family conversation, the testimonial letter is evidence that Butler has ceased to speak in her own name, as a privileged, but isolated witness, addressing a private correspondent. The testimonial letter is in fact imbued with a ‘democratic’ or ‘political’ function as Jacques Rancière would put it17 : it expresses a ‘dissensus,’ or disagreement, the specificity of which is that it is now voiced in the name of a community of sharing, in the name of all the invisible, inarticulate victims of what Butler would much later call ‘a class war.’18

4 Categorisation, Class Formation, and Fiction

15The implicit distinction that I have been making between ‘category’ and ‘class’ needs now to be clarified. The Greek ‘categoria’ means ‘accusation,’ ‘assertion,’ ‘predication,’ a statement made against something or someone. A concatenation of ‘cate’—against—and ‘agora’—the place of public speaking—, the word ‘categoria’ refers more precisely to an accusation made in public. To categorise is to speak in public against. To speak in the name of a ‘class’ implies an altogether different procedure. For ‘class’ comes from the Latin ‘classis,’ which refers to a division of the Roman people on the basis of property. It may also define a group of students or pupils who are taught together. The other notion contained in ‘classis’ is that it always implies a summons, a call, to a body of citizens, summoned for military service for example, or for schooling. A ‘class’ is therefore a set of things or people having some attributes in common and being called forth, summoned on the public stage, for sharing that similar quality.

  • 19 See David R. Cameron, ‘Toward a Theory of Political Mobilization,’ The Journal of Politics 36.1 (Fe (...)
  • 20 Josephine Butler, The Constitution Violated, 1871 Jordan and Sharp, vol. II, 220); Government by Po (...)

16We are beginning to understand why it was not enough for Butler, throughout her prostitution campaigns, to address vast audiences in public, and why political agitation—the stirring up of public interest in a matter of controversy—was bound to gather momentum and transform itself into political mobilisation—an attempt to influence the existing distribution of power. From the very start, Butler’s carefully written texts— testimonial letters, speeches, lectures, etc.—were meant to be printed as pamphlets or articles and circulated to reach a large readership, so that the words of the otherwise inaudible crowds of the oppressed could be reappropriated by a much wider variety of readers, whose interests did not necessarily coincide with those of prostitutes, abused girls, poor women, or even bereaved mothers. Put differently, what made writing, and giving to read, such an integral part of Butler’s democratisation, or politicisation of speech, is that she made class formation a result of writing and reading, and to begin with, a result of letter-sending. Class formation did not for her precede narrativisation, like a preconstituted group, made up by a marginalised category of the British people, officially denounced as criminals or sinners both by the dominant ideology and by the law system. One of the most contested points of Karl Deutsch’s theory of political mobilisation has been his assumption that mobilisation was the result or end product of certain types of social cleavage and social change.19 David Cameron’s contention that two other intervening variables should be stressed, the role of public policy and that of a mobilising agent, is of course substantiated by the example of Butler’s repeal campaigns. But his point still leaves aside the pragmatic question of the rhetorical strategies deployed to deconstruct ideological cleavages and change public opinion. In the case that interests us here, class formation was made dependent on writing and reading insofar as it proceeded from the decision to allow various others to speak and share utterances: not as a monolithic set of others, but as a motley community of relative alterities, uniting various fractions of the British people into a surprisingly incongruous but nevertheless coherent whole, composed from the start of underprivileged girls and privileged ladies, abused daughters and pure ‘angels,’ angry farmers and bereaved mothers, and so on, all summoned to recognise themselves as a class of equally insulted citizens, irrespective of gender, status, origin, occupation, or denomination, called forth to fictionalise themselves, therefore, as potential political alter egos—with all the dialogical tension between ‘similitude’ and ‘dissymmetry’ inherent in such a notion (Ricœur 386; 335). At a more general level, this motley crowd of others were summoned to recognise themselves as forming a class of ‘dissident’ citizens, and thus to connect themselves with a long tradition of political non-conformism, to which Butler would soon give full prominence in two of her most famous pamphlets, Government by Police and The Constitution Violated.20

  • 21 Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible: esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000) 55; Th (...)

17Rancière’s theory according to which any political movement is also an aesthetic movement is of particular relevance here. For him, a political movement is always both an intellectual and an aesthetic adventure, insofar as politics is primarily interested in ways of ‘reconfiguring the sensible,’ i.e. ways of reconfiguring the framework of the thinkable and of the sayable.21 If the political is always predicated on aesthetic procedures, what remains to be identified is the literary tradition which Butler’s texts reappropriated in order to produce such a specific reconfiguration of the sensible. Elaine Hadley convincingly argues that Butler adopted the nineteenth-century codes of melodrama (Hadley 195–196). And indeed, most of her speeches or pamphlets deployed melodramatic scenarios and a melodramatic rhetoric, in order to communicate as successfully as possible with the vast audiences she aimed to convert to her crusade, and who were assumed to be familiar with what was then an extremely popular literary genre. The description of her first visits to the cellars of the Liverpool workhouse during the summer of 1866 was indeed proleptic of how the prostitutes she would later defend would all be turned into daughters and sisters, deserving of pity and protection. In Butler’s rhetoric, this classic narrative of the victimised heroine and estranged patriarchal family, wrenched apart by the evil doings of villainous family members, would be made into an allegory of class oppression, and further than that: an allegory of the aristocracy’s rape of the labouring classes.

  • 22 On this point, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and (...)
  • 23 Josephine Butler, ‘Great Public Meeting at Carlisle,’ 1870 (Jordan and Sharp, vol. II, 137–138).

18Butler simply enriched the vocabulary of melodrama, its basic repertoire, with scenarios and characters of her own, simply dictated to her by the current political context of injustice. But her aesthetic strategy retained the same’democratic’ objective: to shatter the national consensus about the regulation of prostitution, induce her audiences and readers alike to take sides, redefine their political loyalties, restructure their intellectual world, and finally ‘reconfigure’ it as divided between two classes, made internally coherent by the presence of different individuals sharing similar types of behaviour: the polluters on the one hand, and the victims of pollution on the other.22 That is why all of Butler’s later melodramatic heroines would seem to be interchangeable, as would all of her villainous characters. This new classification, or reclassification of British society would soon be collapsed with another, even more political redistribution of roles, opposing the medico-legal spheres of power and all the victims of ‘despotic legislation.’23 If villainous conduct was thus used to crystallise class conflict, a classic feature of melodramatic tactics according to Hadley, melodrama was also used therefore to facilitate transversal identification, notably by erasing personal psychological traits. This is precisely how, according to Rancière, all classes are ‘fictionally’—certainly not fictitiously—constituted in a democracy, when people from different origins, with different backgrounds, different occupations, different biologies, different creeds, are made to believe that they do share the same social and political preoccupations: when differences, therefore, are both recognised and transcended, when the other is suddenly perceived as a potential alter ego, when alterity is neither radically asserted nor radically negated, when a group of people across the nation overcome their differences to conceive of themselves as a community of interests, of ideas, and first and foremost of utterances (Rancière 2000, 62–63; 2004, 38–39).

19Such was the political achievement of Butler’s style. It managed to convince her audiences and readers—labourers, workers, craftsmen, small property-owners, extensive farmers, angelic daughters, fallen girls, angry or bereaved mothers—that their fates were inextricably bound up by the new legislation, that they had been turned into vulnerable alter egos in the face of a fundamental political injustice. Melodrama should not therefore be regarded as a facility which Butler granted herself for lack of individual literary talent. Butler’s various modes of writing—letters, memoirs, essays, lectures, manifests, pamphlets—made ample use of this popular literary form in order to summon on the same stage a wide array of externally dissimilar citizens, made to experience a similar political injustice, and invited to invent new forms of solidarity by dissenting from royal authority, demanding parliamentary reform, fighting for gender equality. This is also how Butler’s seemingly contradictory callings could be reconciled: Christianity, feminism and a demand for democracy were made to coalesce in the defence not of a category, but of an insulted, vulnerable class, constituted not only of fellow human beings, but also and above all of fellow citizens, whose political mobilisation could only be effectuated pragmatically, through a shared experience of reading. If Butler’s repeal campaigns were eventually successful in reversing public opinion, dissuading the crowds she addressed from seeing in the alleged ‘common prostitutes’ a morally reprehensible category of the British population, and finally in getting the government to reconsider the legislation, it was not only because she was an expert in political agitation. Nor was it simply because Butler judiciously restyled her ‘crusade’ as a more broadly appealing ‘class war.’ It was first and foremost because literary pragmatics was her secret weapon: humanity could only give itself to read, decate-gorisation could only take place, ideological blinkers could only be lifted, if the lost girls’ plight was narrativised into a recontextualised version of ancient and biblical myths, enunciative setups were carefully designed to grant audibility to the speechless, and the most popular dramatic genre of the Victorian era, melodrama, was made to serve an eminently political purpose, where the responsibilities of good and evil could effectively be redistributed.

Notes

1 Saint Augustine, De ordine, 2.4.12.

2 See Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Harvard: Harvard UP, 1982).

3 Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, Essai sur les cloaques, ou, Égouts de la ville de Paris, envisagés sous le rapport de l’hygiène publique et de la topographie médicale de cette ville (Paris: Librairie Crevot, 1824).

4 See Lesley A. Hall, ‘Acton, William John (1812/13–1875),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39445, accessed 8 July 2011].

5 See Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: CUP, 1980) part II.

6 See Jane Jordan, Josephine Butler (London: John Murray, 2001) 65.

7 Josephine Butler, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (London: Horace, Marshall and Son, 1896).

8 Josephine Butler, Recollections of George Butler (1892; Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1900) chapter viii, 183–184.

9 See Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-1885 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 197.

10 Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990, ‘Points’) 222; Oneself as Another, transl. Katherine Blamey (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992) 218.

11 Hélène Cixous, ‘Volées d’humanité,’ Rêver croire penser: autour d’Hélène Cixous, eds. Bruno Clément and Marta Segarra (2009; Paris: Campagne Première, 2010) 15–37. My translation.

12 ‘L’humanité n’existe point encore ou elle existe à peine’ (‘Humanity does not as yet exist or hardly so’ [my translation]). Quoted by Jacques Derrida, ‘Mes “humanités” du dimanche,’ L’Humanité, 4 March 1999 [www.jacquesderrida.com.ar/frances/humanites.htm, accessed 12 July 2011].

13 See Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, 1982, transl. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997) 5.

14 For a detailed, stimulating reading of the myth in feminist terms, see Elissa Marder, ‘Disarticulated Voices: Feminism and Philomela,’ Hypatia 7.2, Philosophy and Language (Spring 1992): 148–166.

15 See Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1990) 162.

16 See for instance The Hour before the Dawn, 1876, in Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns, eds. Jane Jordan and Ingrid Sharp, (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) vol. 3, 280.

17 Jacques Rancière, ‘Dix Thèses sur la Politique,’ Aux bords du politique (1990; Paris: La Fabrique, 1998) 179 (Thesis 8); ‘Ten Theses on Politics,’ transl. Rachel Bowlby and David Panagia, www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/cmcs/Ranciere.html, last accessed 13 July 2011.

18 J. Butler, Truth before Everything, 1897 (Jordan and Sharp, vol. III, 343).

19 See David R. Cameron, ‘Toward a Theory of Political Mobilization,’ The Journal of Politics 36.1 (Feb. 1974): 138–171.

20 Josephine Butler, The Constitution Violated, 1871 Jordan and Sharp, vol. II, 220); Government by Police, 1879 (Jordan and Sharp, vol. III, 108).

21 Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible: esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000) 55; The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, transl. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004) 35.

22 On this point, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976) 204–206.

23 Josephine Butler, ‘Great Public Meeting at Carlisle,’ 1870 (Jordan and Sharp, vol. II, 137–138).

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