• 1 The book narrates her lonely childhood as the twelfth child of a rural clergyman. Linton lost her m (...)
• 2 This is particularly problematic in the pages which describe Linton’s interview with her first edit (...)

2Linton’s paradoxical identity is best reflected in the fictionalized story of her life, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885), which she wrote at the age of 62. Using the three-decker form, Linton tells her life story through that of a male persona named Christopher Kirkland. She mixes real-life characters with fictional ones, and inverts the sex of some of the characters, but not all of them.1 The book contains no dates and little factual information. It often resembles an essay in form and does not contain the slightest suggestion that Linton ever takes an ironic stance. Christopher’s development is mainly described in emotional, intellectual and inter-relational terms, so that if taken as a roman à clef, even to its Victorian readers, the book was “a puzzle” (An, The Athenaeum, qtd. in Linton Christopher Kirkland 389). The book is as much a novel as an autobiography, although, as the editors of the Victorian Secrets edition of her work observe, “after Layard, all critics and biographers writing about Linton have worked with CK as a major biographical source, despite the tension inherent in the sex reversals.” (8) Thus Herbert Van Thal included in his biography whole sections of Christopher Kirkland, changing the pronouns and gender markers so that they could apply directly to Linton.²

• 3 Letter from Linton to G. Bentley (1885).
• 4 In the essay “Beauty and Brains”, many paragraphs start with a masculine subject, and Linton occasi (...)
• 5 “Her definition of ‘feminine’ seems to have been based on what the culture believed, and not necess (...)

3Linton claimed that, in Christopher Kirkland, she had consciously used cross-gender narration as “a screen which takes off the sting of boldness and self-exposure³” (qtd. by Vicinus 150). Recent scholarship has interpreted this case of literary transvestitism as evidence of her identification with men, denoting a form of feminine self-hatred: “masculinity was the forbidden and longed for identity”, Martha Vicinus writes (150). Her “Girl of the Period” essays, which were published anonymously, are indeed written from a male perspective. Linton often slips into the first-person plural in order to mark her solidarity with men, and she calls upon women “to consider themselves in relation to men’s liking” (The Girl 2, 241).4 Replacing Linton’s work within the context of the late-nineteenth century commodification of the author figure, Lee Anne Bache has shown that Linton “shield[ed] herself as Christopher” and thus “achieve[d] a separation of public authorial persona and private individual” (30). Christopher Kirkland has also been described by Deborah Meem and Kate Holterhoff as an “autobiography-in-drag” (7), encoding Linton’s lesbian desires through fictional displacements.5 Understood in these terms, it appears as a confused form of coming-out narrative.

• 6 The preface is signed by Christopher Kirkland. This preface is written in a rather impersonal style (...)

4My analysis will build on the fact that even in the first edition, Linton was presented on the first page as the author, and that she also signed the dedication.6 Since the name of the author did not coincide with the name of the autobiographical subject, she problematized the autobiographical contract by dissociating the author (Linton) from the narrating self (Christopher Kirkland) and by creating an overlap between two different narrated selves (Linton and the fictional Christopher). “Enacting the restraint, the withholding of self she so often advocated,” Lee Ann Bache writes, “Linton problematizes and endlessly refracts ‘true identity’ in her autobiography.” (30) Having abandoned the position of anonymous female author in favour of that of female celebrity, Linton positioned herself as the author, a place that she had fought hard to occupy and had found highly marketable, but she also created for herself an internal second voice. I call it a second voice because the Victorian middle classes were so familiar with her works that nobody could have read the book without having her antifeminist essays at the back of their minds.

• 7 The concept of double-voicedness was introduced by Mikhaïl Bakhtin in his essay “Discourse in the N (...)
• 8 According to George Somes Layard, “[It] was to her friends her most interesting work.” (vii)

5One consequence of this double signature is that the issues of anonymity and disguise are somehow sidelined and what prevails is rather what I regard as a case of double-voicedness,7 bridging over the gender divide. Following Judith Butler, who characterizes the “I”, as “one who is constituted through the act of taking its sexed place within language that insistently forces the question of sex” (95), I want to explore the ways in which Christopher Kirkland enacts strategies for evading the necessity of positioning oneself in definite or clear terms along gender lines, and to tentatively explore and subvert some of the ways in which language enforces the question of sex and gender. Reading the text as a form of feminist experiment would obviously be to over-interpret it. However, by reading Christopher Kirkland in the light of recent writings in feminist narrative theory, I would like to attempt to suggest a queer reading of what she rightly believed to be “the best [book] of her career” (Anderson 179).8 Relying on textual evidence of how gender is marked in the text, I will show that Linton’s fictionalized autobiography unsettles the kind of truths about gender roles and gender identity that can be found in her essays. As a consequence, Christopher Kirkland is an “open work”, as defined by Umberto Eco, in that it requires the reader to oscillate between two readings, depending on the sex they assign to the narrator.

• 9 The expression “as a girl” is also the only sign that the narrator of the introduction to Willa Cat (...)
• 10 The last direct designation of Christopher as a “boy” occurs half-way through the book: “’I have se (...)
• 11 “Many lesbians, rather than fully embracing an impossible adult masculinity, identified with the ad (...)

7Linton’s adoption of a male persona was likely to wear thin as readers progressed with the narrative and with their increasing awareness that Linton was telling the story of her own life. The use of expressions like “when I should be a man” (33), “when I was a grown man” (36), “if I were a true man” (268), “as a man of honour” (313), or simply “as a man” suggests that Linton may even have wanted to remind her readers and herself that she was indeed speaking in a man’s voice.9 Other indications that the narrator is male include the use of the word “boy” until very late in the book.10 As Martha Vicinus has observed, the figure of the “boy” was loaded with homosexual connotations in the late-Victorian context.¹¹ The term “boy” was used to express a gap between the hero or heroine and conventional representations of heterosexuality. Understood as a lesser kind of man, the “boy” also offers an equivalent for Linton’s stance as a woman journalist in a world of men, having to endure the contempt, prejudices and limitations to which women in the profession were subjected. However, instead of conceiving her autobiography as a sample of feminine lived experience, Linton selected the genre of the male novel of self-development, and complied with many of its codes.

• 12 The whole of the first chapter does not contain any gender-marked form, but its first words (“I was (...)

8Outside the cases of explicit gender-marking I have mentioned, Christopher’s masculine voice and Linton’s own voice blend in an indiscernible manner. First-person narration in English allows gender undecidability in ways that would only be possible within the limits of a single sentence in a language like French. French autobiographical texts are placed under more constraints than English since they are generally written in the passé composé, a tense in which the past participle agrees in gender with the subject.12 Vast sections of Christopher Kirkland are written with very little grammatical or semantic evidence of gender marking. The combination of a male persona and of first-person narration allowed Linton to create a form of gender fluidity, with the result that sexual identity is occasionally left in suspense. One could speak of a form of epicene writing, an expression borrowed from Laurie Finke’s reading of anonymous medieval romances. Finke uses the word “epicene” “to indicate the ways in which textual clues in the poems suspend readers between male and female without ever resolving the uncertainty” (152). Linton’s own use of the word “epicene” was always pejorative. In her essay “The Epicene Sex”, she attacked mannish women; in Christopher Kirkland, she refers appreciatively to the “epicene costume” worn by Christopher’s wife’s children, but once Christopher has become the children’s father and taken on his feminine role, he dresses them in gender-specific clothing and also puts an end to their mixed home schooling: “The boys were sent to school, a governess taught the girls at home.” (271) However, what justifies, to my mind, the use of the word “epicene” is that Linton’s narrative technique opens up a space of possibilities for the two alternatives and hence for two possible readings.

• 13 “In these outcast days I used to dream a strange dream – strange, considering my age – how that I w (...)
• 14 In the case of “The boy is father to the man” (54), Linton has re-masculinized Wordsworth’s line “T (...)

9Further textual encouragement to envisage the two identities in turn is provided by Linton’s tendency to consider events and situations from both female and male perspectives. In the childhood section, the lack of gender marking of the text is reinforced by the mention of epicene alternatives, which include phrases such as “tramps of either sex” (33), “our half-witted men and women […] were as happy as kings and queens” (34), “The choir was composed of a few young men and women”, “the High school boys and girls” (34), and “the ladies tucked up their skirts and the men turned up their trousers” (35). Chapter 3, which narrates some childhood reminiscences, is almost entirely epicene. Christopher is called a “child”¹³ and wears a pinafore and frocks, which were worn by boys and girls alike until the Edwardian period (44-47). Apart from the clauses “when I was a very small boy” (45) and “in my early boyhood” (53), there is no way of knowing whether the speaker is male or female in this chapter.14 Towards the end of Christopher’s life story, the epicene alternatives give way to a desire for substitution, which opens up alternative lives: “had I been a woman” (340), or “[h]ad I not been an Englishman” (362).

• 15 “I think now, as I thought then, that the sphere of human action is determined by the fact of sex, (...)

11To what extent does a voice of undecidable gender help challenge ideological assumptions about what constitutes a man’s life and a woman’s life, and the ways in which they are written? Can Christopher’s life story be read as a tale of human progress, defying notions that sexual identity is an essential ingredient in life writing? This would run counter to the views Linton expressed in her essays15 and to Christopher’s declaration that “[p]ersonally, what we are is determined by two things – age and sex; and we can no more go beyond their influence than the earth can free itself from the law of gravitation. […] What determines the very ground-work of society, and its moralities, but this material fact of sex, with its secondary modification, age?” (325, 326)

• 16 The writing of her autobiography must have tested Linton’s well-set gender binaries for she argues (...)

13A few features of this list of sexual binaries suggest that antitheses are not so “easily” made as Linton would have it in her journalism: the use of the comparative (“freer”, “chaster”) and of the past participle (“narrowed”), as well as the convoluted syntax of some of the descriptions, indicate that it cannot have been so easy to fit individual idiosyncrasies into pre-existing categories. One may add that Linton’s own professional self-representation also defeated such categories, for she evidently considered herself as a brave and rational woman, and clearly dissociated herself from feminine religious thinking.16

• 17 In an essay entitled “The Epicene Sex”, she writes of “these women of the doubtful gender” who “hav (...)
• 18 See also “My new old friend, John Crawford, had married the eldest sister of all – one of the most (...)

15Linton’s gendered descriptions in her fictionalized autobiography tend to assess gender in relative terms. In her antifeminist essays, Linton had graded feminine types along a scale of womanliness17 and denounced the parallel emasculation of the males. In Christopher Kirkland, the women’s intellectual and social power matches that of men, and many women even outshine them. Since Linton turns few women into men, in the novel, apart from herself and her sister Emily, Christopher appears to have been fashioned largely by female influences, including a surprising number of feminists. Such a sense of feminine power is unexpected in a male Bildungsroman. Christopher has countless surrogate mothers, “social godmothers” (151), substitute sisters, patronesses and lovers who guide him on his way to fame and to an established literary and social position. Two of these formidable women are described as “virile” (119, 207). One of Christopher’s friends is “a tall, large, strikingly handsome woman, almost stone deaf, and of a singular mixture of qualities. With certain virile characteristics – witness her personal courage, and her constancy […]; her self-respect […]; her power to command and her ability to obey – she had the most ultra-feminine notions of propriety […]” (119). Christopher’s social circle, such as it is presented in Chapter 11, is composed of at least twelve powerful women, whether derived from real-life counterparts in Linton’s life or fictional.¹⁸ The “most intrinsically remarkable of all [Christopher’s] friends” is a Mrs Hulme who “wanted only that energy which springs from respect for humanity and consequent regard for success – the energy we call ambition – to have become as famous in her own way as a second Madame du Deffand or another Madame de Stael. […] I date many of my after-views in life to my acquaintance with her and hers.” (153) Christopher/Linton is acknowledging his/her debt to real-life women and to literary models, as well as suggesting that some of his/her female contemporaries still lack ambition.

• 19 “I, the strong one, par excellence, of the family – the young lion of the brood – the Esau, the Nim (...)

16Conversely, Christopher describes some remarkable men as feminized without letting his admiration and approval of their characters diminish. Christopher’s brother Edwin, who corresponds to Linton’s sister Emily, is endowed with a femininity that arouses the narrator’s jealousy, because it paradoxically makes him attractive to women (96). Emily was thus transposed into a male, only to be grudgingly re-feminized. Christopher is described as strong and resolute,19 but yearns for more femininity and is occasionally overwhelmed by tears and overtaken by a “strange effeminacy” (94). He very aptly describes himself “as sensitive as a girl underneath his controversial armour” (379). The attendant at the British Library who befriends Christopher at his arrival in London is described as “[h]onest as the day, true as steel, tender-hearted as a woman” (117). Christopher’s friend Cavanagh Morton, a picture of passiveness and weakness, is feminized to the point of being married by force to his lodger’s daughter. The “delightful” Dr Travis, an associate of Robert Owen, is described as “one of the loveliest flowers of humanity”, “singularly well-bred and as pure as a good woman” (176). The unidentified Arthur Ronalds “combine[s] the strength of a man with the purity of a woman. He was essentially a measure of the highest standard to which humanity can attain under its present conditions.” (354-55)

• 21 Similarly, Christopher has admitted earlier that his dislike of the women’s emancipation movement l (...)

21In expressing feelings of “shame”, “disloyalty to [his] flag” as well as “fastidiousness”, Christopher seems to side with these female “sinners” at the very moment when, seeking a wife, he is positioning himself as male. The word “unwomanliness” would here make more sense than “unmanliness”, a word which is only used at this precise moment of the narrative. Linton confesses her shame at her lack of feminine solidarity, before safely returning to a male perspective (“not trustworthy as future wives”). Her confused answer to the questions of what makes a good wife, and of how the two sexes are supposed to complement one another leads her to an ambiguous form of self-fashioning.²¹ But Christopher’s choice of a spouse gives Linton an opportunity to resolve her ambiguous feelings of guilt, shame, admiration and love. Christopher’s elect, Esther Lambert, is a “Woman’s Rights woman from head to heel”, who is made attractive by her belief in the cause of women (262). “I felt her to be a kind of dynamic power to which others must apply the direction – but she was always that power. I used to attend her lectures – I, the declared enemy of the whole tribe of lady lecturers! – and I always vigorously applauded her.” (266) By transposing her husband’s strong republican principles into Esther’s feminist convictions, Linton voices an admiration for a type she hated, a variety of the “post-prandial orator” denounced in her essay on “The Epicene Sex” (The Girl 2, 235-42). Christopher’s preference for Esther is expressed in an epicene formulation that reaches further than his own liking: “No man or woman who knew her could have failed to love and reverence Esther Lambert.” (264) Christopher’s marriage question thus opens up a space for a tribute to women’s idealism and energy, as well as for same-sex love. Simultaneously, Christopher’s summary of the women’s movement’s principles slips into a description of Linton’s own autobiographical posture:

• 22 In her study of women writers and old age in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Devoney (...)

22One cannot help wondering whether Linton remained insensitive to the irony of these lines when she wrote them. Could she so consciously have perceived herself as the embodiment of what the defiance of gender roles and norms led to? Her self-designation as the “strangest” animal in a “strange menagerie” (Christopher Kirkland 122) invites us to provide a positive answer to this question. Since autobiographical writing should be taken, less as the exposition of a self which is already constituted and known than as an act of self-creation as well as self-discovery (Eakin), it is probable that the writing of Christopher Kirkland made Linton realize that Christopher’s ambitions reflected her own unvoiced feminist aspirations. In a letter to George Bentley, who had published her collection of “Girl of the Period” essays in 1883 and was still dithering over whether to publish Christopher Kirkland, she wrote: “I have put my very Soul, my Life into those pages, and I feel as if I am being slowly killed through them.” (quoted by Anderson 179) The final vision we are given of the ambitious Christopher at the end of the book is arresting. Once intractable, intolerant and impulsive, and having laboured in a “state of mind [which] was conviction, not knowledge” (287), Christopher feels as he grows older that his “absolutes [are] beginning to dissolve” (158) and he comes to a realization that “nowhere has been said the final word, and that nothing has received its last and unchangeable form – that everything on earth is relative” (159). Speaking of his faith and principles, he remarks: “When I spoke of the absolute, I was met by the relative, the evanescent, the apparent” (164). The mature Christopher appears as dejected and broken, forsaken as he is by all the godmothers, goddaughters and lovers who have contributed to fashion him. He is now a picture of dismemberment: “I have stood by the graves of those I have loved most and honoured most; by the graves of my own people, whose lives seemed to be part of my own, so that when they died it was as if some member of my body had been detached and buried out of sight.” (368) The narrative closes on the celibate and childless Christopher’s sad realization of the incompleteness of his solitary self: “I stand absolutely alone, both spiritually and personally” (380). This representation of old age contains some of the clichés that can be found in nineteenth-century descriptions of elderly women. By writing her autobiography in the guise of a male character, Linton was spared the necessity of depicting herself as an old lady in decline. The difficulties she had in getting her autobiography published were in themselves evidence that her appeal was on the wane. At the age of 62, Linton was on the brink of what doctors called “the great climacteric”, a time of life when women’s productive powers and mental acuity were thought to be at greater risk of falling off than men’s (Looser 9)22 and when Linton went on the attack again in 1891-1892 with her articles on the “Wild Women”, a few of her critics did indeed treat her fierce diatribes as the ravings of a garrulous old woman.