-
This essay examines the ways in which two women
whose social careers frame the Romantic period used
dress in the assumption that costuming the sexual body
could purposefully define social and political
identity.[1]
Neither Mary Robinson nor Princess Caroline aimed for
sexual liberation so much as for less restraint on
their gendered social destiny and participation in the
public sphere. In an age not yet regulated by the
fashion industry, but characterized by a rapidity in
shifting trends and fashion experimentation, it was
possible for women to costume as a means of continually
renewed attempts at self-definition. I argue that the
extent to which these two particular women succeeded or
failed in achieving the identities they toyed with was,
if undermined by the predetermined gendering of media
interpretation and presentation of both women for
visual consumption, nevertheless productive for both
women of unusual freedom from self-regulating social
checks for brief periods—Mary Robinson during her
heyday as the Prince's mistress, and Princess Caroline
while living in "exile" both at Blackheath and in
Europe. Granted, both women's attempt to use femininity
rather than subvert it—to manipulate flirtatious
play to attract the male gaze—backfired
dramatically when they tried to control the gaze's
interpretive direction. Unlike male contemporaries such
as Beau Brummell and Lord Byron, who more successfully
played dress off a defined sexual identity by staging
views that guided the interpretive process—so
successfully that each man found their fashioned role
inescapable—Robinson and Princess Caroline were
unable to completely manage or confine their media
image. Rather than redefine identity as style as
Brummell and Byron did, Robinson and Caroline employed
gendered expectations of indecorous feminine behavior
to straddle the divide between woman as décor
and woman as actant by toying with the doubling nature
of revealing fabrics, suggestive accoutrements, or
outlandish getups. Although these women's attempt to
use materiality to translate visual expression into a
more powerful discourse was more innovative in its ends
than the dandy's, the means was too aligned with
femininity and consumption to be truly freeing. Rather
than establishing a new behavioral style identified
with dress as did Brummell, or a poetic style equally
identified with dress as did Byron, Robinson and
Caroline played into rather than off of interpretive
norms that associated loose dress with loose politics,
and both with lax morals that had no place in the
public eye. Yet their exploits periodically provided
Robinson and Caroline with freedom from the unrelenting
self-constraints endured by other women playing queenly
roles, such as Queen Charlotte and Sarah Siddons, who
submitted to such rigor in order not to be negatively
stereotyped as ambitious or unlicensed women. Although
Tory cartoonists used these same stereotypes to indict
Robinson and Caroline, and even liberal Whigs perceived
both women through such models, each woman was also
able to influence public perception of herself so as to
destabilize such constraints.
-
A flirtatious relation to the dress code, aided by
the availability of the newer, body-revealing imported
fabrics such as thin silks, lawns and muslins[2],
and of rapidly shifting trends that made immediate use
of imported materials and motifs for decorative touches
and accessories, was as I see it a redressing of ancien
régime fashion play, considered by this time a
corrupt use of costume, and associated with masquerade
and disguise.[3]
Yet by flirting with sentimental conceptions of female
character, both Robinson and Caroline found themselves
falling out of romance fantasy (Prince's mistress,
Prince's bride) into the "realism" of the sentimental
domestic novel (tightly drawn sexual identity). This
was a bourgeois realism, but also a social one, and if
George could practice aristocratic privilege and escape
intact through fashionable dalliance and excess, the
women related to him could not. His sisters were kept
under tight rein by their royal parents, his mother
practiced strict surveillance of social codes, and his
mistresses from Maria Fitzherbert on heeded the
proprieties as appropriate. If Robinson and Caroline
gained periods of fantasy-fueled freedom from class and
gender constraints, their more frequent falls into the
penalizing realities of sentimentalism, realities
determined increasingly by bourgeois conceptions of
female sexual obedience, were necessitated by their
refusal to stop playing the coquette in public.
-
Furthermore, these two women's potential to be
undone was strengthened by their understanding of
themselves, and their self-expressions in their
autobiographical writings, as textual bodies as well as
linguistic agents.[4]
They both used self-expression to create more
flexibility in the tension between the roles they were
expected to inhabit and their practice of identity, yet
their reliance on genre markers created sexual pitfalls
as much as their flirtation with social codes provided
liberation. Both Robinson and Caroline interpreted
themselves as sentimental heroines whose romances were
deliberately unraveled, like the threads of one's
dress, by the animosity that inhabits the corridors of
sentimental realist fiction, thus exposing the female
personage as a vulnerable body. Such fantasies at once
exploited feelings of victimization, and liberated both
women from reality checks, as they interpolated textual
selves into public space. This
self-narrativizing—staging the self through dress
as much as through public or highly publicized bodily
acts—captured the popular imagination in ways
that extended both women's public presence beyond
expectation. Both women materially armored themselves
by costuming for public consumption, while defending
their honor to the public and in their memoirs through
various textual strategies that revised their
self-liberating social transgressions. The various
scandals each woman experienced through her association
with the Prince of Wales had lasting social
ramifications, causing emotional distress exacerbated
by associated financial insecurity, an increasingly
oppositional politics, and debilitating bodily
symptoms. Indeed, both Robinson's paralysis and
Caroline's intestinal disorders are readable as
excessive responses to gender codes that could not be
refashioned.
I. The Sentimental Heroine
-
Mary Robinson begins her Memoirs as a gothic
novel: "At the period when the ancient city of Bristol
was besieged by Fairfax's army . . . a great part of
the venerable minster was destroyed by the cannonading
before Prince Rupert surrendered to the enemy; and the
beautiful Gothic structure, which at this moment fills
the contemplative mind with melancholy awe, was reduced
to . . . [half ruin;] a monastery . . . which fell
before the attacks of the enemy, and became a part of
the ruin, which never was repaired or re-raised to its
former Gothic splendours." It was here that the house,
"partly of simple, and partly of modern architecture"
was built:
A spot more calculated to inspire the soul with
mournful meditation can scarcely be found amidst the
monuments of antiquity. In this venerable mansion
there was one chamber whose dismal and singular
construction left no doubt of its having been a part
of the original monastery. It was supported by the
mouldering arches of the cloisters, dark, Gothic, and
opening on the minster sanctuary, not only by
casement windows that shed a dim mid-day gloom, but
by a narrow winding staircase, at the foot of which
an iron-spiked door led to the long gloomy path of
cloistered solitude. . . .In this awe-inspiring
habitation, which I shall henceforth denominate the
Minster House, during a tempestuous night, on the
27th of November, 1758, I first opened my eyes to
this world of duplicity and sorrow. (1-2)
It is perhaps no accident Robinson sees herself
destined to be a gothic heroine. Gothic heroines wear
demur dress stuffs with well-wrapped bosoms and necks,
but as every reader knows the villain or ghost prefers
bedchambers at midnight when the nightgown and other
forms of undress are the rule, and when a heroine
fleeing barefoot through crypts will be most
titillating for the sense-heightened voyeur. As Horace
Walpole's Castle of Otranto revealed, the
underside of the sentimental realist novel was its
gothic attributes. Indeed, Clarissa Harlowe is
imprisoned for her desirability as a possessible body
(she uses a vigilant full dress for her only real
defense), and as such she represents the
over-determined value of things in a bourgeois
materialism that counts unmarried bodies for their
exchange value. Women's mastery of fashion and the
material intertext of dress and body signaled the
extent and extension of that value. Plumage could stand
in for coinage, a social fact Robinson would exploit to
the hilt. Female bodies in particular are metonymically
read through their accessories as a full package that
can be "taken." Walpole's prince, Manfred, will take
Isabella, his son's betrothed, in order to reproduce
his line and thus keep his estate. Isabella will be
imprisoned, raped, married, and otherwise bodily
trapped to ensure the generation of a body-estate
thing—an heir. The story of this possessibility
provides fodder for both domestic novels and the
sentimental underpinnings of gothic narratives; it is
also the stuff of real life. Mary Robinson was married
for reasons similar to Manfred's incestuous
logic—safeguarding property or getting it into
the family line. Thomas Robinson, a non-heir because
illegitimate and thus outside the body-estate
reproductive scheme, married Mary Darby in the hopes
that her beauty, middle-class status, and the
respectability that marriage represents, would persuade
his disowning father to reposition him in the family
heritage. Mary and her mother agreed to the marriage
because Mary had learned, through shifting cultural
expectations as well as her boarding school education,
to view marriage sentimentally as a companionate
arrangement between two affectionate partners rather
than a business arrangement (as the Darbys' marriage
perhaps was, her father deserting the family to conduct
business and love elsewhere).[5]
In Mary's most formative school experience with the
extraordinary but disappointed and alcoholic Mrs.
Lorrington, Mary read studiously, and "it was my lot to
be her particular favourite. She always, out of school,
called me her little friend, and made no scruple of
conversing with me (sometimes half the night, for I
slept in her chamber), on domestic and confidential
affairs." The somewhat lesbian [6]
overtones of this situation are associated with strong
female role-modeling, reaching beyond educative norms,
and composing verses: Mrs. Lorrington "frequently read
to me after school hours, and I to her; I sometimes
indulged my fancy in writing verses. . .love was the
theme of my poetical phantasies" (Memoirs
22-24). It is an associative complex that returns in
Robinson's late autobiographical sonnet-cycle,
Sappho and Phaon (1796), in which the expression
of female sentiment fuels the fantasy of desiring
textual bodies beyond the margins of propriety. Sappho,
of course, wears the body-draping Grecian shifts and
tunics self-consciously present in the poem's sonnets
as markers of her sexuality, availability, and desire.
The scene of women writing poetry was associated with
nighttime journal confessions and night dress/undress;
Sappho's robes correspond to the young Mary's fanciful
verses and female companionship "after school hours,"
as a kind of imaginative dishabille, a relaxing of
proper norms. And the contemporary reader would have
recalled Robinson's public appearances in muslins and
silks as a sex goddess, a woman of infinite desire and
desirability, in the staging of Sappho's love. Yet, as
much as Robinson's preface to Sappho and Phaon
attempts to redefine Grecian female sexuality to
overwrite "lesbian" into acceptable female friendship,
the scandalous punning on "finger twirlers" associated
with Marie Antionette and ancien régime
decadence could not be forestalled, nor might Robinson
entirely want to lose that titillating aspect of her
textual marketability.[7]
-
When Thomas Robinson's familial scheme failed, he
readjusted the male audience for what was publicly
thought of as pimping Mary, or at least a lucrative
idea of her as his wife, from his father to another
kind of potential "purchaser," his rakish London
friends. (While attempting to "sell" Mary first to Lord
Lyttelton, and then the more interesting George
"Fighting" Fitzgerald, he simultaneously entertained
his own paramour.) Mary is thus available when George,
Prince of Wales, falls in love with her in an act of
imaginative seeing, while watching her perform the
demur ingénue role of Perdita in a 1779 command
performance of The Winter's Tale. He "becomes"
Florizel and takes the slightly older Robinson as his
mistress for a single year, a year that would determine
her career for the rest of her life. Robinson is in a
single vision cast as both a scripted body, whose fancy
dress and role become her persona for the prince, and a
textualist who learns to write her own life and public
character, and reproduce this body-text enactment on
various public stages whether social or textual.
Through the prince's desirous sighting, Mary's
body-estate value has been transformed into a body-text
one, and she will ever after have a slippery relation
to financial security, for his desire has taken her out
of the circulatory schema of female propriety and
property transferal. She will also have a slippery
relation to self-constructing identities that attempt
to redirect desire.
-
Caroline of Brunswick can likewise be seen to fall
victim to sentimental realism while fantasizing her
heroine identity. Unlike Mary Robinson, she did not
marry young and resisted parental pressure to wed a
number of eligible European candidates, giving so
little reason for her refusals that her parents put
them down to a waywardness of character and
stubbornness of mind.[8]
Both qualities are ones Mary Robinson either veiled (at
least early on) or used to particular effect, as when
she heroically (by her account) resisted her husband's
friends' propositions and stubbornly clung to her
wifely chastity. Caroline finally agreed,
enthusiastically, to wed her cousin George, the right
man, the man destined for her through lineage and
property: her prince had come. Her expectations,
expressively revealed in her lack of preparations for
her move to England, show a young woman who had already
fallen in love through her fiancé's portrait and
who expected to be loved by this ideal man for the
ideal heroine she was. George, hoping to re-install
himself in his father's and Parliament's favor, both of
which were to lead to a substantially increased annual
allowance that he desperately needed to pay his
increasing debts for purchased goods, agreed to the
marriage in the self-blinding belief that the Caroline
portrayed in her miniature would be beautiful enough to
make him forget his beloved, Maria Fitzherbert, or his
current mistress, Lady Jersey. Caroline should have
been forewarned, however; her own sister Augusta was
victim to a gothically brutal marriage, from which she
gained sanctuary with Catherine of Russia but lost her
children in doing so. The gothic shoe (or in Walpole's
version, the giant helmet which becomes a useful
prison) descends on Caroline at her first meeting with
George, who on embracing her said, "Harris, I am not
well; pray get me a glass of brandy," and drowned his
disgust so well he was drunk throughout their wedding
ceremony. According to Caroline, he"passed the greatest
part of his bridal night under the grate, where he
fell" (qtd. in Fraser 54, 62). He cohabited with
Caroline long enough to get her pregnant while
insisting that his mistress, the ambitious Lady Frances
Jersey, be Caroline's head lady in waiting, which
allowed her to participate in the "Carlton House
system" (along with, as Caroline later told Lord Minto,
George's "blackguard companions. . . [who] were
constantly drunk and filthy, sleeping and snoring in
boots on the sofa" [qtd. in Fraser 166]). Then in true
gothic style he essentially kicked Caroline of his
house. Like Mary Robinson, George's desirous
sighting—this time, however, based on her
property-estate value as an heir-producer—also
creates for Caroline, like Robinson, a financially
insecure future that rescripts her from sentimental
beloved to gothically disowned wife. She acquires the
need to revalue her body in public for the enlargement
of her social bonds. This is nevertheless textually
valuable, a role to flirt with. Like Hippolita, the
wife Manfred hopes to divorce in order to ensure that
Otranto remains his, Caroline is in George's eye
expensive and expendable. Pursued by his agents for the
rest of her life to determine her as unfit mother and
wife, he wished to establish her as an unnecessary
expense on the privy purse (in her last years her
annual allowance was to have been £50,000, raised
from £35,000), to be cloistered outside the royal
habitus and rendered invisible (the destiny of
Hippolita and all unwanted women). She used his
manipulations to gain her own residence, determine her
own ladies in waiting, and compose her own social
circles. Playing on her victimhood, she believed that
the nightly dinners and parties she hosted created the
liberating space in which to shift from the naïve
to the sexual and back to the chaste wife, and despite
disgusting her guests and cycling through acquaintances
as a result, she successfully conducted numerous
affairs without being caught. When George and Maria
Fitzherbert sought custody of a young ward, Caroline
pretended to be pregnant in order to gain her own
"child," in fact the legally adopted Willy Austin (it
was his legitimacy that was at stake in George's
"Delicate Investigation" into Caroline's misdemeanors).
And when Caroline insisted on being seen both at her
own residence and in public independent of him, George
was outraged. His undesiring sighting of her body
achieved the same effect for her as his desirous vision
of Robinson: Caroline is disarticulated from the
body/property scheme so necessary to the realism of
sentimental narratives (to which the prince was himself
addicted, believing Maria Fitzherbert to be his
soulmate from whose bosom he had been torn by parental
pressure to marry against his nature). Thenceforth,
Caroline is free, like Robinson, to rescript herself,
and so she does through a constant redressing of her
public body. When she wanted to be freed from George's
vision entirely, she decamped to the Continent, where
she lived out various fantasies from holy pilgrim and
liberal chatelaine to marital bliss with her Italian
lover Bartolomeo Pergami, dressing accordingly.
Although her wily political supporters like Henry
Brougham and Spencer Perceval attempted to use her for
their purposes, writing letters for her and publishing
her documents, she continually frustrated them by her
unruliness—if she was not to rule by her
husband's side, neither would she be ruled by these
men. Rather, she toyed with them, letting their schemes
play into her fleeting, only half-serious scripts. Less
politically informed than the young liberal, then
radical Robinson, Caroline's politics were self-serving
and related to her fantasy identity as a sentimental
heroine. She wanted the money and the freedom to play
at royalty, especially when this allowed her to show
her largesse to the poor in another bit part (she
supported poor children at Blackheath and whole
villages in Italy). Politicians and pressmen were like
lovers, to be wooed and used to portray temporary
identities of chastity, liberality, and maternalism to
gain particular ends: Whig loyalty, the king's support,
the mob's love.
II. Mary Robinson's Self-performance
-
Robinson played her brief tenure as the Prince of
Wales's mistress to the hilt by riding in a carriage
with a faked version of George's coronet. If she did
this earlier, when as London's foremost actress she
rode in a carriage with a coronet-like emblem, while
she was George's mistress she rode in as many different
carriages as she could; it was a fashion begun by Marie
Antoinette that, through the fantasy associations of
movement with identity, swept the imagination. And it
persisted as a fashion statement: Caroline later also
used carriages while traveling the continent to role
play, indulging in fantasy and masquerade, and finally
also riding in a carriage with a faked royal coronet in
a semiotic attempt to claim her crown after George
III's death. For Robinson, riding in carriages,
dressing in the most recent fashions or costuming
à la Marie Antoinette's playful milkmaid[9],
allowed her to use various vehicles for self-portrayal,
especially the semiotic code of fabrics, to portray
herself as a variety of sexual characters that all had
queenly associations. Her society portraits and her own
descriptions of dresses used for stage performances and
significant events evince a careful attendance to
bodily messages: from sheer lawns to heavy silks and
velvets, she played the role of fashion leader while
using the purity of white cottons and the pinks of
luxury fabrics to enhance her own coloring, all the
time playing the edges of a chaste
vulnerability.[10]
These semiotic messages were not always under her full
control, however, and her attempts to queen it over the
fashionable set, if not to pretend to herself and
George that she was a version of the fashionable French
queen, was to prove her downfall. The press, in
particular, disliked such audacious pretensions from
the middling ranks and contemptuously read her playful
dressing as indelicate availability, whereas all of
Caroline's attempts to act the queen-to-be and finally
to claim her right to be recognized as the queen she
was at George's succession received widespread support
from the press.
-
Marie Antoinette was for Robinson, if not for the
German Caroline (who would identify with the deposed
Napoleon instead), the performative model par
excellence. In "Embodying Marie Antoinette: The
Theatricalized Female Subject," Judith Pascoe dwells on
Sarah Siddons's loss of a four-yard length of Marie
Antoinette's lace in the 1809 Covent Garden fire, an
article of dress that "covered me all over from head to
foot," which she reserved for Hermione's trial in
The Winter's Tale (95). Pascoe traces the
connections between maternity, treason, and trial
through this shared female article: "In invoking Marie
Antoinette through the use of her veil as a prop,
Siddons appropriated the performative power of an
actual queen to play a fictitious one" (96). Making
much of the cultural power of the mis-tried French
Queen's story to update that of the equally unjustly
tried Hermione, both accused on the basis of improper
maternal behavior, Pascoe plays with the edge between
factual and fictional heroines and the actress's
exploitation of this edge in order to dis-play and
displace queenship onto herself as an embodying agent.
While this appropriative act corresponds in fascinating
ways with Mary Robinson's blurring of the
fictional/factual interplay in her various stage and
"real life" roles and the blurring, semi-transparent
quality of lace, Marie Antoinette's theatricality is
crucial for connecting her sartorial reign to the
"sexualized body" of the pamphleteers' "paper queen"
that Pascoe unveils. Yet the anecdotal material
signifies: Siddons's lost lace was important to her not
only because it brought Marie Antoinette to life, at
least on stage, but also because it was lace—a
textile that veils in the same way as the
fictional/factual binary. Lace, especially of such
enormous quantity ("more than a yard wide" Siddons
remembers [qtd in Pascoe 95]) that it functions as a
dress, has a quality that hovers between opacity and
the translucence of a fine lawn. It teases with its
openings and closures, its peepholes and distracting
surface figurings: it both reveals and hides what may
or may not be there. In period plays such as Hannah
Cowley's 1783 A Bold Stroke for a Husband,
female characters wear veils in order to assume false
identities to confuse and manipulate their suitors and
stage-manage the plots of their own stories; Siddons's
Hermione, however, is veiled in order to produce
identity: "By wrapping herself in the vestige of one
persecuted queen in order to play another," the actress
could better "project that imagined self for an
audience" (Pascoe 97).
-
Robinson describes herself in her Memoirs in
the third person as appearing before Marie Antoinette
in 1783 dressed in "A pale green lustring train and
body, with a tiffany petticoat, festooned with bunches
of the most delicate lilac. . .while a plume of white
feathers adorned her head; the native roses of her
cheeks, glowing with health and youth, were stained, in
conformity to the fashion of the French Court, with the
deepest rouge" (Memoirs 2:93, qtd. in Pascoe
120). This attention to dress—the fine glossy
silk of lustring fabric creating a delicate verdure
that, in combination with dainty lilacs and a petticoat
of lustrous tiffany all creating a "natural" lady,
herself a pink bloom heightened through
coloring—is signal because the ability of women's
costuming to similarly aid in projecting identity and
manage their own social plots was one Robinson, like
Siddons and other public women, was intimately familiar
with, and one that such women ignored to their cost.
Princess Caroline of Brunswick alternately ignored and
exploited the potential of female dress to manipulate
perception, usually to her disadvantage. Yet once she
became Queen of England, estranged from her husband but
bent on sharing his throne, Caroline quickly
refashioned herself for the occasion, appearing in
appropriate costumes for public appearances. Like Marie
Antoinette, Caroline was the subject of malicious
judgments by her public and private detractors on her
dress and her sexual activity, the two combining to
project an unruly and thus unqueenly stature for both
women. Mary Robinson, too, was the subject of public
attacks on her choice of costume and her adulterous
relationships, most particularly because of what
gossips and caricaturists considered a misappropriation
of power for public display. As Adriana Craciun notes,
Charlotte Corday and Marie Antoinette were interpreted
in contradictory fashions in the 1790s, representing
female empowerment for radicals or fatal sexual excess
for conservatives. Women daring the public sphere
should instead exhibit a "masculine command of their
passions," according to The Anti-Jacobin (qtd.
in Craciun, 79); Robinson placed Marie Antoinette even
higher, as an exemplar of "transcendent genius," a
natural gift that enabled transport across strictly
gendered boundaries so that women could enter the
public sphere "on distinctly feminine (and fleshly)
terms" (Craciun 17). But Siddons represented herself as
non-ambitious, as not-quite publicly available, through
a properly maternal versioning of Marie Antoinette. The
actress evoked maternity not just in roles like
Hermione that reflected the French Queen's maternal
defense at her trial, but in defensively "trotting her
three children out on stage to explain her professional
decision to move to London" (Pascoe 97). If Robinson
trots out her daughter in her Memoirs as both a
prop for her maternal role and veil for her adulterous
ones, it is as much an apologia for her radical past as
it is a restitution of Marie Antoinette's fleshly
motherhood, her right to be publicly productive, and
her representation as the cosmopolitan woman.
-
However, both professional portraitists and print
cartoonists delved beneath Robinson's careful
costuming. When word first leaked out that she was the
Prince of Wales's paramour, the press was scandalized.
The Morning Post reported "A certain young
actress who leads the ton appeared in the side-box at
the Haymarket Theatre a few evenings since, with all
the grace and splendour of a Duchess, to the no small
mortification of the female world, and the astonishment
of every spectator!" and George's biographer would
later recount that "Mrs. Robinson now appeared in
indecent splendour, rendered still more scandalous by
the vile participation of her husband" (both quoted in
Bass 135). Robinson's self-stagings were interpreted as
her audacity, not George's (though it was he who
publicly gave her two rosebuds to wear before the
secret liaison was outed in the press). Her careful
costuming was interpreted as social-climbing
statements, a duchess and then a queen want-to-be, but
always as politically naive. James Gillray's depiction
of her as a tavern whirligig to signal the prince's
flipflop politics reads Robinson as a political sex
object offering herself to the prevailing winds, even
as her signage is meant to indicate the prince's
opportunism (his political shifts occurring to win
Parliamentary leverage over his father or Parliamentary
support of an increased annual allowance, depending on
what would provide most gain for his increasing debts).
[11]
Gillray's depiction of Robinson as a political
pawn—a reading later refuted by her strongly Whig
and radical publications—translate her costumed
self-portrayals as a chaste naïf or fashionable
lady into slutty ignorance, a body to be turned to
account in a fascinating replay of Thomas Robinson's
usage of Mary's marital body. Interestingly, in Thomas
and Mary's very first meeting (she was 15) she had worn
a dress of pale blue lustring with matching ribbons for
her chip hat (Memoirs 39), foreshadowing her
fabulous appearance later at the French court. But here
too she was not the innocent girl that 15 suggests: she
was already engaged to debut as Cordelia at Drury Lane,
and understood the codes of texture and color, lustring
proving to be a favorite dress fabric. Prevented by
illness she married instead, and when Thomas insisted
on a secretive wedding ceremony at St.
Martin-in-the-Fields, she dressed as a Quaker (of dull
brown, but of lustring nonetheless). She would pose in
this dress, coyly positioned as if self-absorbed and
innocently looking out at the viewer to see who he or
she is, while discreetly sheathed and bonneted and her
hands hidden by a small muff in a 1781 portrait by
George Romney.[12]
-
If not so aggressive in his semiotic strategy as
Gillray, Thomas Gainsborough also used the opportunity
in painting Robinson's portrait Mrs. Mary Robinson
("Perdita"), (also1781) to wrest semiotic control
from her, depicting her as a demi-rep, sexually
available and artfully self-posing.[13]
Gainsborough idiosyncratically painted his "sitters" by
candlelight standing with six-foot handled brushes.
"Sitter" is a misleading term for society portraits,
however, and Gainsborough was no different than Romney
or Reynolds in posing his clients for full-length
portraits standing, or in the case of his double
portrait, Mr. and Mrs. William Hallett (The Morning
Walk, c. 1785), strolling. Mary Robinson's seated
position in Gainsborough's 1781 society portrait is not
only unusual, but she reclines, her body cutting
diagonally across the composition, rather than sits
upright (as in Reynolds's 1783-4 half-length, more
intimate painting of her, in which in a melancholy but
upright seated pose she faces away from the viewer with
the sea behind her).[14]
Although portrait painters generally had to please
their clients while satisfying their own standards for
fine detail and expression, and although portraits have
"no unproblematic referent," Gainsborough "enjoyed a
degree of autonomy unusual for the period, employ[ing]
his wit and sharp intelligence in impressive displays
of polite but unyielding verbal skirmish," and was
quite capable of "convey[ing] a daring degree of
disdain for his patrons," but Gainsborough was also
capable of persuading his clients to his point of view
(Pointon 48-49).[15]
Gainsborough's portrait, commissioned by George, Prince
of Wales, emphasizes her beauty and sexuality, and
gives her the same odalisque pose that he also does for
a society portrait of another woman associated in the
popular imagination with the theatre, Mrs. Richard
Brinsley Sheridan (c. 1785-87).[16]
Certainly Gainsborough's choice for posing Robinson,
unlike any other portrait of her of the period, makes a
clear opposition to portraits of other women of
George's family and circle.[17]
In the portrait of Robinson, she sits holding the
Prince's miniature, of which she later wrote "I
received, through the hands of Lord Malden, the
Prince's portrait in miniature, painted by the late Mr.
Meyer. This picture is now in my possession. Within the
case was a small heart cut in paper, which I also have;
on one side was written, Je ne change qu'en mourant. On
the other, Unalterable to my Perdita through life,"
(Memoirs, 163).
-
Although an apparently flattering portrait of her,
Gainsborough's composition accentuates the miniature of
the Prince of Wales in Robinson's hand and her nearly
exposed bosom as her two fetishized bodily aspects. The
Prince is here seen to be her portable object, a fixed
identity whose movement depends on her bodily acts,
giving a suggestive nod to the media anxiety concerning
her control of the Prince. In addition, her languid
posture suggests the odalisque pose used by artists for
depicting nudes while, to indicate her moral character,
Gainsborough poses her in a chemise gown of sheer,
gauzy lawn such as he favored in his The Mall in St.
James's Park (c. 1783), rather than using the hard
lines of a heavy silk dress such as Robinson wears when
posed between the Prince as her lover and her husband
in Rowlandson's Vauxhall Gardens of just a year
later. Robinson's visible body beneath the fine layers,
and the focus on her bosom, is as unlike as possible
his 1785 portrait of the Halletts, in which Mrs.
Hallett is similarly dressed in sheer cotton and lace
layers, but lace politely sheathes her bosom while her
figure appears properly confined and her arms encased
in the three-layer "weeping ruffle" of the
sleeves.[18]
One ruffled hand is linked through her husband's arm,
confirming her controlled presentation and a quite
different message from Robinson's hand which actively
holds/controls the prince's "body." George's lack of
control was flamboyant—he had sent the
diamond-circled miniature (by the renown miniaturist
Jeremiah Meyer), as well as a lock of hair—to
Robinson along with innumerable love letters while she
resisted his advances, some of which were made in
public. His lack of decorum contrasted sharply with the
public perception of Robinson's utter control, indeed
manipulation, of the prince's mind and emotions.
-
Gainsborough seemed to know he was depicting a woman
at the height of her social and political career, for
in the fall of that same year she would go as the belle
Angloise to visit the new mother, Marie Antoinette, at
Versailles, where the queen specifically asked to see
and then borrow the prince's miniature, returning it
along with a purse she had netted herself. The net
purse, like the queen's lace that Siddons's later
obtains, provides a visual metaphor for Marie
Antoinette's and Robinson's identity play, its
metaphoric texture one that Gainsborough exploits as
fully as Robinson herself. In contrast to Mrs. Hallet's
dress, Gainsborough gives the filmy layers of
Robinson's costume the suggestively loose boundaries of
netting, implying flexibility rather than constancy,
and the demi-rep rather than the artist. And she
confirmed his interpretation, in 1782 taking up
residence with the dashing war hero, Banastre Tarleton,
who would become her long-term lover, and subject of
her later Sappho and Phaon (1796). In that
sonnet sequence, of course, Tarleton's eventual
disloyalty in love echoes George's rather than Thomas
Robinson's desertion of her. But for Robinson, Sappho's
dress—carefully described chitons that can reveal
the body through their draping silhouettes and exposed
shoulders or bared arms—shows her artistry.
Sappho is neither sexually loose, as Gainsborough's
chemise suggests, nor sexually innocent. As she reveals
a character who knows her own mind, her account of a
love relation gone wrong provides a vindication of
female sensibility that is radically like Mary
Wollstonecraft's declaration of the passions as a
female right. Her preface to the poem cites
Wollstonecraft, but more importantly, gives her own
intentions for using Sappho as her heroine: "because it
was impossible for her [Sappho] to love otherwise . . .
she expressed her tenderness in all the violence of
passion: your surprize at this will cease, when you are
acquainted with the extreme sensibility of the Greeks;
and discover, that amongst them the most innocent
connections often borrow the impassioned language of
love" (154). This is Robinson's vindication for loving
as she has done as well, and her reproof to those who
portrayed her against her own self-stagings.
III. Caroline's "Character"
-
Princess Caroline's biographer remarks that "all her
life, [she] took a childish delight in flouting
convention, even if this meant exposing her decidedly
lustful nature"; this rebellious streak, accompanied by
her "outlandish ways and bizarre dress sense" combined
to give Caroline an eccentricity not becoming in a
female member of the British court, let alone its royal
family (Fraser 28, 227). Refusing to accommodate her
self-stagings to others' interpretations of her
character, Caroline continually sought borders to
cross, refusing to abide by the strict parameters
allowed women. She longed for adventure and thirsted to
travel, entertaining and lionizing distinguished
travelers such as Richard Payne Knight whenever
possible. She also would do anything to get a rise out
of others, she enjoyed hearing of sexual misadventures
as much as engaging in her own real and imagined ones,
and loved teasing others about her own real and
invented improprieties. Her political allegiances
varied according to who befriended her and what would
most rankle her husband. Likewise, she formed
friendships with both the staid and the scandalous, but
was most intrigued by those who transgressed as much as
she would have liked to do. For instance, Fraser notes
that "Of the females who formed part of the Princess's
court [in 1810, once she was committed to the
Opposition], Jane Harley, Lady Oxford, whose love of
Radical men was as great as her love of radical causes.
. . was a regular visitor. Her children were by so many
different fathers that they were known as the 'Harleian
Miscellany'. . . ." (217). Caroline would emulate the
miscellany through her own adoption and fostercare of
nurslings when she realized Charlotte was to be her
only legitimate child, but she did so in such a way as
to raise scandalous gossip as to the children's
parentage, and to convince the Prince that he had a
right to continue spying on her activities. In the
"Delicate Investigation," Caroline's servants were
summoned for testimony and, as was later fictionalized
for the Book Itself! narrating her story, they denied
all charges against her of pregnancy or adultery,
charges that if substantiated constituted treason
against the crown. Caroline's and George's was the
"most undignified royal marriage in English history"
(Fraser 167, 320). In general, Caroline kept
acquaintances and members of her court who were either
level-headed (regardless of class, such as her
daughter's sub-governess, Frances Garth) or as
disregarding of boundaries as she, like Lady
Oxford—later she would combine both improprieties
in the love of her life, Pergami. The princess was also
so considerate, even affectionate, with her
ladies-in-waiting and other female members of her
ever-changing circle of intimates that suspicion was
sometimes aroused by her indecorous behavior that
hinted at a sexual desire not always finding
satisfaction in the opposite sex. Here the Sapphic
potential was not a literary (as for Robinson) but a
libidinous freeing of self-expression. Although there
has been no hard evidence to support such gossip, like
the gossip-mongering press surrounding Marie
Antoinette, the scandal-mongerers surrounding Caroline
found any hint of sexual faux-pas to be a threatening
expression of self-will and uncontained sexual
appetites. If her Brunswick background had ill-prepared
Caroline for the proprieties of the British
court—at least those expected of its female
members, whose sexual dalliance could seriously
threaten the monarchy's succession—she was also
high spirited and self-dramatizing, liking nothing such
much as an audience for trying on different roles for
herself. Aggravating this propensity was the fact that
she rarely thought anything through for herself,
reacting to events and others with an adolescent
disregard for how others perceived her, or for the
political consequences of her flights of fancy.
Similarly, she dressed herself in her own style and
taste regardless of expense, propriety, or others'
reaction to her appearance. If she was herself easily
persuaded, she was also highly enthusiastic, wearing
others out with her eagerness for entertainment and
conversation, costuming with abandon when it suited
her, and attempting (albeit on a necessarily lesser
scale) to match the prince in expensive outlays for
clothing, house renovations, and redecorating schemes.
Like him, she found herself constantly in debt, often
due to his laxity in paying even her annual
allowance.
-
Once she had removed to her own establishment at
Blackheath outside London, she was often seen by
neighbors improperly walking alone or unescorted except
by her ladies. She enjoyed teasing visitors when
considering adopting Willy Austin that she was indeed
pregnant by emphasizing her stomach with pillows at her
back to push her midsection forward, just as she gained
great pleasure in flirting with and actively pursuing
handsome adventurers who attended her dinner parties.
Some of these guests were certainly playmates if not
actual lovers, although she never again became pregnant
after delivering Princess Charlotte. In August of 1811
Caroline vacationed at Tunbridge Wells, keeping company
with the Berry family. Mr Berry became her escort and
the Berry sisters (Mary Berry was one of Caroline's
inner circle) attended balls and entertainments with
her, but by then out of political favor with the Whigs
who had themselves lost considerable power, the
princess was already being ridiculed for her behavior
and outlandish dress. On first meeting her in 1808,
Mary Berry had described the princess as "Such an
over-dressed, bare-bosomed, painted eye-browed figure
one never saw" (quoted in Fraser 209-10). Now ridicule
was more open, encouraged by the prince.
-
By the time Caroline had reached Italy in her voyage
abroad after the opening of Continent, and through the
ministry's relief to see her "safely" out of sight, she
had put on considerable weight, assumed a black wig she
purchased in Geneva, drawn in black eyebrows and
coarsened her skin to make it ruddy. Later, in 1819 she
would be described by Lord Essex as very dirty and
wearing liquid rouge (Fraser 337). Her attempts to look
non-British and yet theatrically royal only made her
look more eccentric than usual. One former acquaintance
on seeing her again wrote that her expression was
"alternately of studied dignity and of an insouciant
nonchalance," presumably her interpretation of her two
main roles: courtly lady and society hostess. He added
that "her toilette is rich but bizarre, and recalls the
dress of Guercini's sibyls" with their loosely fitting,
shoulder-baring costumes, again reminiscent of Sappho
and the Grecian-draped Emma Hamilton (qtd. in Fraser,
258). She gave a masquerade ball for the King and Queen
of Naples at their own court, dressing as Fame and
decorating one room as a Temple of Glory with a bust of
the King crowned with laurel. Her political enthusiasms
were matched by her sexual ones: during the Neopolitan
Carnival she costumed as a devil and as an "immodest
Sultana," her dress often improper and extravagant,
evidence of her peccadilloes later gathered by George's
agents to use against her (268). Meantime she devised
beautiful uniforms for Pergami as she promoted him from
one position to another. At Genoa, Caroline drove
through the streets in a phaeton with a child dressed
as a cupid leading two tiny horses who pulled the
shell-shaped carriage. Caroline was dressed in a
body-revealing pink gauze bodice, short white skirt and
pink-feathered headdress, with Willy Austin (whom
everyone believed to be her natural son) beside her,
and Pergami dressed as the Neopolitan King riding
behind. This procession "mark[ed] the high point of
her—not unsuccessful—attempt to make
England a laughing-stock abroad" (Fraser, 273). And
when Caroline attempted to raise money through the
Grand Duke of Baden to resolve some of her financial
difficulties, he was as astonished by her request as he
was by her insistence on wearing half a pumpkin on her
head to keep cool. Finally, on leaving Italy for her
Parliamentary divorce hearing, Caroline took her
clothes, jewelry, plate and china in order to create
the appropriately royal appearance in England: "Leaving
her more gauzy items at Pesaro, Queen Caroline
commissioned several new dresses from Alderman Wood in
London on the day she set out, sending him the patterns
for some silks. 'Them which are in gold [possibly those
she bought in Constantinople] should be made in all
sort of collers [colors],' she wrote. She recommended
that Mrs. Webbe, her former mantua-maker opposite Pall
Mall, send her a white silk gown and hat, 'made exactly
of the English fashion. . . as the present franche
[French] mode do not please me much'" (Fraser 254).
Heavy and stiff materials would replace gauze, body
hiding would supplant body teasing as she exchanged the
role of the flirt for that of queen.
-
Caroline's real and self-dramatizing character(s)
with their coquettish and outlandish behavior were
undoubtedly responses to her constant awareness that
she was out-landish, that is, not English. Her German
court manners were never up to English royal
expectations, and the London court was one where
mistresses could outclass her at every turn. To
rebalance the equation, she emphasized both her
alienation and her feminine dependency, rather than her
royalty. According her friend, the courtier Sir William
Gell, she was "sincere to nobody. . .mak[ing] false or
half confidences" that exposed her "to a thousand
misfortunes" (Fraser 258). This behavior continued that
of the giddy girl she had early fashioned herself into
and never outgrown; as a young woman it had won her
supporters but now it had increasingly disastrous
results. And in general Caroline was a poor judge of
others' character. Herself of a forgiving temperament,
she could neither understand George's and the Queen's
abiding dislike and distrust of her, nor their
inflexible reactions to her behavior and initiatives.
Having been raised in the utmost strictness verging on
neglect, and having held out against her mother's
attempts to arrange a marriage for her until her prince
literally came along, she imagined a fairytale princess
existence for herself in which she was either
victimized by wicked relatives or able to live out any
fantasy without paying attention to budgets, annual
allowances, or tradesmen's bills. She liked people who
exemplified the transgressions or adventures that she
herself, kept partially in check by her royal status,
longed to accomplish. Once she was permitted to escape
to Europe she felt herself uninhibited by the
behavioral constrains on British female royalty, and
indulged her fantastic imagination as much as possible.
When on sea journeys she preferred to sleep on deck
under a tent as would an Egyptian princess; she
undertook adventures that she thought might get her
romantically captured as a harem slave; she made
aristocracy out of nobodies (buying Pergami an estate
and title) and became the charitable lady of the manor
to an Italian region; she visited European courts for
their entertainments and left quickly if bored; and she
ignored the rumors and gossip surrounding her notably
improper intimacy with members of her traveling court.
"The Princess's lust for independence was astonishing"
(Fraser 269), and she was finally, at least in her own
imagination, truly free, but it was an independence for
which she would have to pay.
IV. The End of an Era: Caroline's Sex/Text
Politics
-
In the Whig-Tory tug of war over the Prince of
Wales's party affinity, Princess Caroline's gothic
marital experience achieved widespread press. Like the
anti-royalist Whigs, radical pressmen such as William
Mason, William Hone, and William Benbow used the
"Delicate Investigation" (1806-07) and the Queen
Caroline Affair in 1820 (George's attempt to divorce
Caroline) to rally popular opposition to George through
pro-Caroline propaganda that depicted George as "Old
Corruption." Iain McCalman claims that "the
loyalist-populist mythology of Queen Caroline" did not
arise spontaneously, but was the creation of radical
pressmen as much as of the opposition (162). Thus when
Caroline returned from her Continental travels, she
landed as a wronged woman, "already the heroine of a
gothic-romantic fantasy" (163) through press coverage
of George's sexual peccadilloes. This popular fantasy,
fed on the opposition's propaganda and the currency of
street mob symbols relating to "petticoat government"
and other images of an emasculated and decadent
monarchy. The radical press promoted Caroline's cause
through both fictional and iconic interpretive codes,
producing a barrage of pamphlets and caricatures to
counter the viciously anti-Caroline literature and
caricatures of the loyalist press concerning her sexual
relations with Pergami. But McCalman attributes
Caroline's mythic public character to a creation of
politicians and pressmen that sentimentalizes her for
popular consumption without asking what Caroline's own
contribution to that persona might be. He reads the
various publications surrounding the "Book" (the report
from the "Delicate Investigation" that exonerated
Caroline of producing an illegitimate son), including
all the scurrilous and fantastic spinoffs of that
publication which contributed to the fictionalizing of
her life, as solely the product of Grub Street hacks.
These sensational pamphlets, many semi-pornographic,
stemmed from Thomas Ashe's 1811 confessional
"autobiography," The Spirit of "The Book",
purported to be the Princess' private version of "The
Book." Although its subtitle indicated its literary
status ("A Political and Amatory Romance"), The
Spirit was read by most as deliciously
true.[19]
-
It seems to me important that while McCalman
discusses The Spirit's portrayal of a Princess
who is already in love prior to her marriage while the
Prince is not, and of a marriage forced on Caroline
rather than one forced on the Prince, as pertinent to
the pro-Caroline mythology, he makes nothing of these
factual marital inaccuracies. In considering Caroline's
contribution to and influence on her public image, it
is worth looking at least at one pro-Caroline pamphlet
that does not follow The Spirit's essential plot
(as McCalman claims all the spinoffs do), The Book
Itself! Private Memoirs, interspersed with Curious
Anecdotes of several Distinguished Characters, being a
complete answer to the Spirit of the Book
(n.d.).[20]
In this short version, the story turns Ashe's romance
into allegory, different names and different minor
characters appear (the Prince of Cumeria for Ashe's
Prince Albion; no prior lover of the Princess, and so
forth), and there are significant plot differences (the
King arranges the marriage to reform his son, as in
actual fact). It is important not to conflate these
publications as all part of the same campaign; in
attributing spinoffs of Ashe's
Spirit—especially The Book Itself, or
Secret Memoirs of an Illustrious Princess—to
radical hacks, McCalman does not examine the
differences between texts that represent different
ideologies.[21].
-
In The Book Itself!, Caroline's marriage is
depicted in the Walpolean terms that Caroline herself
viewed her marital relations with George. "One day,
sending for the prince into his closet, the venerable
monarch opened his design to him": that he should give
up his bachelor life and marry to produce heirs. The
king adds that, "as you have often represented to me
the insufficiency of your income to the liquidation of
your numerous debts, I promist you, in case of your
compliance with my wishes, that your most sanguine
expectations on this head shall be fully
satisfied.[22]
I will shew you the miniature of one well calculated to
give you happiness" (5). After the princess
arrives,
The nuptial ceremony was performed, and the people
were loud in their acclamations of joy, which was
universally hailed as the dawn of reformation in the
moral character of the prince, who paid every
attention to the princess.
So great a change alarmed the prince's old
companion's, and they soon felt it their interest, by
mysterious allusions, to alarm the jealousy of the
prince. In this they succeeded but too well, and with
the assistance of Doctor Scapegibbet, artfully
insinatued [sic] that Scarecrow had been seen
near the Princess'es [sic] chamber. (6-7)
"Scarecrow" will be scapegoated as the Princess's
lover (not a real lover, the Irish lord Algernon of
Ashe's story, but a creation of the Prince's friends)
and the true father of her baby girl. Trouble begins
when the faithful attendant tells the Princess that "I
have seen the prince talking very much with the female
domestics lately, and as he was never used to do so,"
and "I could see the prince shake his head in a furious
manner, when the servant whom he was questioning
answered in a trembling voice—"Indeed, your royal
highness, I never saw Mr. Scarecrow in the house, and I
do not believe that her royal highness knows any thing
at all about him!"(7). Trouble continues until the
Princess is avenged, as Caroline herself was in the
"Delicate Investigation", and the old king, albeit not
the disgraced prince, receives her again. The story
reflects Caroline's own penchant for literary fantasy
and revisionary self-portrayals.
-
As Caroline's most recent biographer notes, Caroline
liked to read with her ladies or be read to for hours,
and to surround herself with literati, especially if
they revealed an bold, adventurous streak: "A no less
colourful element among the Princess's favourites were
the writers like Mr Thomas Moore, Mr Matthew 'Monk'
Lewis and Mr Samuel Rogers. Caroline read omnivorously,
Lewis remarked, and she enjoyed the excitement of
publication. When Lady Oxford forsook Lord Archibald
for Lord Byron and brought the stormy one to
Kensington, the Princess was in ecstasy, though Byron
had savaged many of the other writers at her table in
his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (Fraser
217). While The Book Itself! seems to reflect
more directly Caroline's literary imagination,
McCalman's analysis of Grub Street politics and the
gutter press's fueling of the opposition is also
crucial to understanding how Caroline could feel
popularly supported, and necessary to seeing how she
could continue to weave fantasies about her privileges
and freedom despite continued constraints laid on her
by her husband's family and himself. But it is also
important to extend his analysis to the contribution
Caroline herself makes to her public persona, such as
her self-dramatizations as a gypsy, when she visited
Lady Douglas dressed in long red cloak, silk scarf
covering her hair, and worn slippers, or when she
played gothic victim by parading in front of her house
in a lugubrious velvet cloak, Spanish style, and huge
muff that made her seem at once emotionally distraught
and pregnant (by whom, she left it to the viewer to
guess) (Fraser 159, 162). Laura Engel has argued for
the symbolic status of the muff in daily promenades and
society portraits, its importance as a luxury accessory
vying with the sexual innuendos its furry, hand-warming
interior invited. The larger the muff, the trendier and
dearer, but also the more suggestive of an inelegant
double-entendre. This sexual suggestiveness is also
present in Mary Robinson's seemingly demure portrait by
George Romney (1781, discussed above), where her small
muff is centered below her sheathed bosom and her
modestly hidden hands suggest another story. Equally
important are Caroline's literary self-representations,
such as her own fictionalizing and sentimentalizing in
her private account of royal affronts, which she
proudly crowed about to others as her literary revenge.
In asserting that shorter spinoffs of Ashe's book were
gutter-press chapbooks targeting working-class
families, to which he would presumably say The Book
Itself! belongs despite its subtitle claim to be a
"complete answer to the Spirit of the Book,"
McCalman avoids discussing how such a narrative could
so closely mirror Caroline's own self-representations
as girlishly innocent and fascinating, and as
dramatically misrepresented and maltreated by
intriguing others. Furthermore, his focus on the
melodramatic emphasis in the chapbooks on Caroline's
being estranged from her daughter Charlotte does not
account for The Book Itself!'s use of allegory
rather than fairy tale, or its emphasis on the
gothic-style wronged maiden aspect of her story.
Instead, this story does not proceed past the child's
infancy (ending with Caroline's request for
reconciliation to George III), and unlike Ashe's
narrative, focuses on the Prince's accusation that the
baby is not his (conflating Charlotte and Willy Austin
into the same maligned child) through a conspiracy plot
rather than, as for Ashe, a chance spotting of
Caroline's supposed lover.
-
The Book Itself!'s pro-Caroline narrative is
eerily like a textual act of self-defense and
vindication, enacting a self-pity that determinedly
sentimentalizes the story's gothic frame. Echoing the
way that Caroline sentimentalized her life in her own
imagination creates a circulatory nexus between this
publicizing story and how she was able to live out
publicly the story/stories she told to herself. It
assuages the conflict Robinson experienced between
public and published versions of herself, allowing
Caroline freer play. If she did not feel constrained by
sentimental images of herself—which paradoxically
seemed to liberate her from social
restrictions—her public persona, so loved by the
mob, was already sentimentalized before Whigs like
Henry Brougham and radical pressmen published documents
purportedly by her, in order to set her popularity
against the prince's faction. This conflation works to
rob the "memoir" of its factual basis,
re-contextualizing it as part of the pamphlet wars
concerning her status and possible delinquency, and so
emphasizing its fictional nature over its biographical
base. Yet it was made believable by Caroline's playful
dress and public personae as she acted out her heroine
roles.
-
In Robinson's literary re-imaginings of her life
story, she similarly depicts herself as the heroine of
her own sentimentalized gothic romance not only in her
Memoirs but also in her other autobiographically
influenced works, like the Letter to the Women of
England (1799), that explore the gothic
consequences of a culture predicated on patriarchal
right. That her verse narrative Sappho and Phaon
was autobiographical her readers did not doubt, and
they read it and her posthumously published Memoirs for
their "tell-all" promise of Robinson's sexual exploits
with the young Prince of Wales and then with the famed
Colonel Banastre Tartleton. Sappho and Phaon
evinces a certain self-pity, but it strongly defends
the rights of a woman artist to feel and pursue
passion, and is more an attempt to flesh out the
irrational bases of the sentimental domestic novel
wherein heroines are rewarded for waiting until the
right man comes along. Here the gothic does not
intrude, so much as the negative consequences of a
realistic "sentimental realism" are followed to their
logical consequences: stepping out of conventional
boundaries of feeling and self-expression spells
desertion by the lover and the suicide of the heroine.
Nevertheless, the heroine's female
strength—reminiscent of Robinson's lessons at
Mrs. Lorrington's knees, but publicly enacted à
la Marie Antoinette rather than privately
absorbed—creates a freeing space for her art and
her voice. Similarly, the Memoirs were not just
a spirited defense, and like Caroline's The Book
Itself! a fictionalized self-narrative, but also a
gothically influenced recounting of sufferings at the
hands of husband, lovers, society, and others jealous
of her power over the prince and her social prominence.
Significantly her story pays exceptional attention to
her public costumings, especially when luxury fabrics
and accessories were worn. Robinson recalls that under
her husband's dealings, his friend "Fighting"
Fitzgerald attempted to abduct her at the entrance to
Vauxhall: "A servant opened a chaise door, there were
four horses harnessed to it," indicating a fast and
lengthy trip out of London. She also noticed a pistol
in the door pocket just as "Mr. Fitzgerald placed his
arm around my waist, and endeavored to lift me up the
step of the chaise" (Memoirs 85). Mary
heroically resisted, but she was notably dressed for a
night at Vauxhall. Perhaps her
allure overwhelmed Fitzgerald, a man dangerous enough
that he was later hanged for having killed a total of
18 men. In any case, the adventure confirmed her as a
gothic heroine, a role she would take up when fleeing
creditors with her husband, and again when hysterically
chasing after Tarleton late at night with borrowed
funds as he fled creditors. Later in her Letter to
the Women of England, she will recount the story of
Anne Broderick, who similarly escaped sexual violence
but who, in defending herself against her attacker
could not defend her act except through a plea of
insanity (Cracuin 52). Surely Robinson had her own
misadventure in mind when arguing not just for this
woman's right to self-defense physically and under the
law, but for those of all women threatened by legally
empowered men. If Sappho and Phaon does not so
easily mix the gothic with the sentimental as Caroline
does or as Robinson herself will do in her memoirs, it
may be because the liberatory space of Sapphic verse
functions for Robinson as circulating sentimentality
does for Caroline. Both narrative phenomena loosen the
contours of sexual identities and possessible
bodies.
V. Conclusion: Disciplined Women
-
Mary Robinson and Princess Caroline both considered
themselves to be experts at the social games women were
expected to play and to be easily trapped by. Both
considered themselves alternately trapped and
victorious, and both were surprised that their
victories never provided social or financial stability.
Robinson's hard-headed wrangling over the prince's bond
revealed its necessity and economic acuity in her
literary career as she assiduously catered to public
taste even while exploring her wide-ranging talents and
political beliefs through her works. A case in point,
Sappho and Phaon delivers a radical message
about female self-determination in the prefatory
materials, but the poem itself tantalizes with a
subject promising insights into Robinson's love
affairs, possibly through the lens of Sappho's lesbian
practice. Princess Caroline, on the other hand, was
alternately convinced of her gaming acumen and military
strategy, and was always shocked when it went awry, as
it inevitably did given her lesser intellect, court
intrigue, George's inordinate hostility toward her, and
her own implacable belief that in her personal affairs
nothing could be held against her. Particularly in her
dealings with the royal family, Caroline drew on her
own family heritage of military heroism and Caroline
herself used military language to her advisors in
preparing for various conflicts with George, and
particularly for the Parliamentary hearing that was
effectively her divorce trial.
-
Yet Robinson's practicality and Caroline's equally
impractical approach to her difficulties were both born
of a sentimental understanding of playing the heroine.
Their revisionary self-histories—Caroline's
red-leather bound notebook in which she delightedly
noted enemies' misdeeds (admitting outright her
accounts were less than truthful) and her letters,
Robinson's Sappho and Phaon and her
Memoirs—each perform a sentimental
interpretation of events in the same way as the women's
real-life enactments did. Robinson's sentimentality
(retaining George's miniature and becoming friends with
him later when, paralyzed from the waist down, she
entertained him at her house while reclining on her
day-sofa) contrasted sharply with her negotiations over
his promised love-bond of £20,000, payment for
the return of his letters, and her strategic display of
his miniature. Her ambivalent feelings were not the
desired conduct-book response of good-girl obedience to
an arbitrary patriarchy (such as Matilda initially
displays in Castle of Otranto), but the
sentimental heroine's response to gothic events and
structures (which Matilda displays when discovering
herself to be jealous of Theodore's attentions to
Isabella). These feelings were compounded when, in
echoes of her father's desertion and husband's rakish
interpretation of marital license, George arbitrarily
lost interest in Robinson (having spotted the widowed
Grace Dalrymple Elliott) and let her know by letter
that she was dismissed for a fabricated rudeness (a
strategy he would replicate with his wife). Robinson
was publicly humiliated after the affair's end was
finalized through a compromise payment on her promised
bond of a £500 annuity; a financial downgrade
foreshadowing those George would repeatedly inflict on
Caroline, who often chose to exceed her means in order
to live out queenly fantasies, even though she could
manage a limited income. And Robinson was publicly shut
out of St. James's Palace on the night of the Queen's
Birthday Ball just as Caroline would later be shut out
of Westminster Hall for George IV's coronation.
-
Sitting in a carriage as guests arrived for Queen
Charlotte's party, Robinson watched the society from
which she was now excluded, her beautiful dress noticed
by no one, her articulate body uninterpreted. Caroline
would face years of similar exclusions as first George
and then Queen Charlotte took immediate dislike to her;
as she dressed to impress and only provoked dismay; as
she had to negotiate with the king, her uncle, for
admission to the family circle; and as George and
Charlotte colluded to deprive her of her daughter.
Echoing Marie Antoinette's maternal symbolism, Robinson
and Caroline each understood their motherhood as a
public role as well as a private consolation; both
played this role against roles of sexual availability
and queenly status through careful costume choices and
bodily displays. Robinson's fashionable dress and
Caroline's sloppily eccentric interpretations of haute
couture aimed at the same end: to craft a way to get
their needs and desires met despite the gothic
overtones—half residual aristocratic decadence
and half reactionary middlebrow conservativism—of
a libidinous radical culture for Robinson, and Regency
culture for Caroline. Neither could, in the end,
control their destinies which were already determined
by each woman's sentimental rather than pragmatic
expectations for their careers as wives and mothers of
stature, meshed as these were with George's
extravagantly sentimental and yet tyrannical
behavior.
-
The press, echoing the mob's long-time love of
Caroline and dislike of George, generally supported
Caroline's attempts to be recognized as queen, but were
less receptive to her desire to have her Parliamentary
victory blessed at St. Paul's, and were puzzled by her
indecorous behavior in trying to gain access to
George's coronation in order to be crowned herself. In
this they repeated the "fan" response to Robinson when
as George's mistress she was followed everywhere,
watched from the street as she shopped, and worshipped
as a media star. Caroline was adored for different
reasons; her public persona had always been carefully
presented by herself and her Parliamentary supporters
(most especially Henry Brougham) as loving and lovable,
a proper princess gothically mistreated by her
mob-hated, arrogant husband. By the time George needed
a wife, the public was sated with the scandals of royal
mistresses and ready for matrimonial scandal
instead.[23]
-
Caroline, of course, was determined to prevent any
increase of George's prerogatives, since his sexual
arrangements had always been flexible, while hers were
supposed to be non-existent after he refused to cohabit
with her. She pursued or pretended to pursue lovers in
retaliation, or for her own desire; and she considered
her final lover, Pergami, to be her husband, acting
this fantasy out in a number of ways that included
using a plate service at their Italian villa with his
newly purchased arms. George, whose affairs were
legion, had been shockingly cruel to her, letting her
hear of her daughter's death by hearsay, setting spies
on her and setting up secret commissions to gather
testimonials and witnesses to her real or supposed
affairs.[24]
But when she learned of George III's death and that she
was by law now Queen of England yet George still
intended a formal separation and possibly a divorce,
she was outraged and determined to fight back, sure she
could win the Parliamentary hearing. Nevertheless,
being Caroline, she was less in control of her
appearance than she thought she was. For the first day
of her hearing Caroline appeared in the tall hat plumes
that were her trademark; when she removed this inside,
she wound white veiling around her head and over the
bodice of her "'richly twilled black sarsenet dress,'"
giving the intended dignified costume a bizarre effect.
Her appearance and demeanor were not regal; indeed, her
clumsy deportment and jerky movements made one MP liken
her to a "Fanny Royds" (a weighted Dutch doll with red
cheeks that jumps up to standing position) (Fraser
417-9). Caroline wanted a thanksgiving service at St.
Paul's to celebrate her victory when the exhausting
hearing was over, but the Dean, shocked, refused all
but an ordinary morning service. She appeared in white
to symbolize innocence: "a silk pelisse extravagantly
trimmed with white fur and 'a close turban covered with
a white veil'" (Fraser 449). Finally, for the
Coronation she dressed as befitted a Queen: while
George was ordering new jewels and crown and fussing
over his Coronation dress, Carolyn had her mantua-maker
attend both herself and Lady Hood and Lady Anne
Hamilton several times to outfit them for the occasion
should she be allowed to participate. But she was
resoundingly shut out of this ceremony, just as
Robinson had been from Queen Charlotte's Birthday Ball.
Caroline's exclusion was more humiliating than
Robinson's, of course, for so much more was at stake
for George. Robinson had been "cut" just as Beau
Brummell would be, effaced in public by George not
"seeing" her—his visual strategy of erasure now
the reverse of his initial desiring and scripting gaze.
So too would Caroline be erased from his life (indeed,
she would shortly die of a painful intestinal
disorder), but more resoundingly.
-
As Caroline exited her carriage at Westminster, she
scurried from one entrance to another as each was shut
in her face as she attempted to crash George's party
and claim her crown at his side. Gothic heroines are
dignified in their suffering while sentimental heroines
achieve their desires through moral victories. Neither
Robinson nor Caroline could countenance the discipline
involved in earning such outcomes for they were each
passionate women, convinced of their right to emotional
well-being; both suffering humiliatingly at men's
hands, with one prince's hands strongly influencing how
they interpreted their subsequent destinies. But both
women also felt empowered by the radicalism or laxity
of their times to tease the borders of expected roles
and rules engendering sexual expression, cunningly or
foolishly dressing these roles up to fabricate lives
that might match their dreams.
|
