[In the following essay, Cullens examines Mary Robinson's novel Walsingham in light of her Memoirs.]

The “real” and the “sexually factic” are phantasmatic constructions—illusions of substance—that bodies are compelled to approximate, but never can. What, then, enables the exposure of the rift between the phantasmatic and the real whereby the real admits itself as phantasmatic? Does this offer the possibility for a repetition that is not fully constrained by the injunction to reconsolidate naturalized identities? Just as bodily surfaces are enacted as natural, so these surfaces can become the site of a dissonant and denaturalized performance that reveals the performative status of the natural itself.

—Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Sometimes she'd play the Tragic Queen,
Sometimes the Peasant poor,
Sometimes she'd step behind the Scenes,
And there she'd play the W—.

—“Florizel and Perdita” (1780)

In 1780 the young Prince of Wales (later George IV) saw and became enamored from afar with the older actress Mary Robinson when she was playing the role of Perdita in The Winter's Tale. Their ensuing affair destroyed Robinson's successful career as an actress and her name. In fact, she was rechristened by the public and forever after tarred with the romantic notoriety of being known as “Perdita,” the lost one.

When the prince's passion cooled as rapidly as it had commenced, Robinson found herself truly living a winter's tale. Doubly humiliated, facing poverty, banished from polite English society, separated from her dissolute husband, supporting a daughter, and chronically ill with the rheumatic fever that finally left her paralyzed, she turned to a literary career, churning out poetry, plays, and novels until her death in 1800. Although most of her works enjoyed a moderate popular success, Robinson's literary reputation in her lifetime and after rested primarily on her poetry. Very little attention has been paid to her novels, although M. Ray Adams, grouping her with the Jacobin writers of the 1790s whose political tenets she shared, devoted a chapter to her in his pioneering work on English radicalism.¹

This neglect is unfortunate because Robinson's last novel contains what is not only one of the wildest plots in eighteenth-century fiction but also one which plays out that script of the exposure and multiple losses by which the female body fixed in the public gaze is threatened, a script Robinson herself enacted in exemplary fashion for her contemporaries. For Robinson's trouble was clearly, to invoke the title of Judith Butler's recent study, specifically “gender[ed] trouble.” Caught in the double bind endemic to the “masquerade of womanliness,” she paid for her unmasking by being nominally reassigned another demanding cultural role of embodiment. For flaunting the rift between the phantasmatic construction of desirable femininity she incarnated repeatedly as an actress and the “real” or “sexual factic” of an apparently irrepressible female sexuality, “the lost one” ended up functioning as a publicly identified sign of lost womanhood (see the epigraph from Butler). The Robinson affair stayed firmly lodged in the mass cultural imagination, not just because of the masses' traditional fondness for tales of dalliance between royalty and pretty commoners, but because of precisely this gratifyingly symmetrical representational alignment pertaining between Perdita's text, her initially coveted and finally crippled body, and her iconic significance. Robinson herself added another textual layer to her own legend with the life story retailed in her Memoirs, in which she set out to defend herself: “I know that I have been sufficiently the victim of events, too well to become the tacit acquiescer where I have been grossly misrepresented.”² But, before that, she responded to the drama of misrepresentation she found herself living by writing a novel that itself represents, in Butler's words, a partial “exposure of the rift between the phantasmatic and the real whereby the real admits itself as phantasmatic.”

On the one hand, Walsingham, Or the Pupil of Nature (1796) accomplishes this in the most spectacularly literal way: I know of no other eighteenth-century novel featuring a male protagonist who, at the end of four volumes, is revealed to narrator and readers to be a female transvestite. On the other hand, the author of The Pupil of Nature did indeed ultimately “bow to the injunction to reconsolidate naturalized identities,” precisely through this unmasking revelation, which identifies the exposure and belated acceptance of womanliness with a string of accepted losses (of title, fortune, and, nearly, life) and which appears, moreover, to posit this situation as a necessary precondition for the restabilization of an epistemological order based, in the first instance, on binary sexual difference. We can label this a subvertingly grim exposé, a foreclosed fantasy, or an ideologically enforced capitulation. At any rate, it dramatically recapitulated the script of female coming-of-age that Robinson had lived.

In what follows, I propose to read Walsingham against both Robinson's own Memoirs and the historical context in which she constituted a readable sign and popular culture event herself. In doing so, I would like to look most closely at how the novel “discourses” masquerade, maternity, and what Butler has explored as “the melancholia of gender” by which both female and male subjectivities are bodily “inscripted” and achieve, or fail to achieve, textual representation via language—a medium that, for Robinson, itself seems marked by an originary melancholia. Furthermore, this reading will also be carried out against the backdrop of the thesis that the eighteenth century produced a crucial paradigm shift in the model of the body, a shift by which bodies came to be figured and categorized first and foremost on the basis of a universalized, essentialized sexual dimorphism. This thesis has recently been supported by the work of Tom Laqueur, who, in Making Sex, posits that precisely this period witnessed the rise of “a biology of incommensurability in which the relationship between men and women was not inherently one of equality or inequality but rather of difference that required interpretation.”³ In the view of this scholar, an older “one sex” biological model, which presented the female body as the anatomically inverted but otherwise not dissimilar version of the male body, was gradually superseded by a two-sex model. “As the natural body itself became the gold standard of social discourse, the bodies of women—the perennial other—thus became the battleground for redefining the ancient, intimate fundamental social relation: that of woman to man” (p. 152).

However, as Laqueur points out, the consolidation of this model did not proceed evenly or unchallenged. Moreover, it initially had less to do with key discoveries in anatomy, histology, and embryology (many of which did not take place until the mid-nineteenth century) than with the political, economic, and cultural agendas of the Enlightenment and post-revolutionary decades. Rather, it “was produced through endless micro-confrontations over power in the public and private spheres” (p. 193). Mary Robinson's Pupil of Nature is so fascinating precisely because it allows us to trace, in bizarre detail, how one such micro-confrontation was played out and dubiously resolved in the public and private sphere of popular fiction. As even the barest plot summary makes clear, the novel does indeed undeniably contribute to the construction of a social discourse in which the natural body and sexual otherness become the defining standard. But it could also be said to gesture back, almost nostalgically, to an older model of gender as theatrical construct or masquerade. It likewise makes clear that the biology of incommensurability, in spite of its own rhetoric, remains intimately tied up with material inequality, and testifies to the high price exacted, in the form of psychic trauma and residual melancholy, by the cultural mandate to produce sexed bodies.

At the outset, it should be noted that the general figure type of the cross-dressed female featured in Walsingham was by no means the invention of the author. Walsingham's transvestite character has literary roots in such scandalous eighteenth-century treatments as Charlotte Cibber Charke's autobiographical Narrative and Fielding's The Female Husband, as well as in the English theater's old and uniquely popular tradition of both male and female cross-dressing (just as Robinson's own autobiography belongs to a popular genre of sometimes scurrilous, sometimes sentimental accounts of actresses' lives and loves that goes back to the Restoration).⁴ Robinson herself had played male roles with notable success on stage, and even came near to playing that role privately at a crucial point in her life. As she recalls in her Memoirs, the Prince of Wales was kept on such a short leash by his disapproving father that his desire to bring about an initial private meeting with her hatched some wild plots: “A proposal was now made that I should meet his Royal Highness at his apartments, in the disguise of male attire. I was accustomed to perform in that dress, and the Prince had seen me (I believe) in the character of ‘the Irish Widow.’ The indelicacy of such a step, as well as the danger of detection, made me shrink from the proposal” (Memoirs, 2:50). The underlying rationale here is amusing: It's wrong, and besides it wouldn't work. But the ambiguity of this response runs through the novel Robinson wrote fifteen years afterward: Is drag unnatural because it constitutes a crime against nature, or because it is simply over the long haul an unsustainable and hence dangerous act?

The Pupil of Nature suggests that such an act can at least be sustained for eighteen years, not to mention four volumes. Specifically, the novel's eponymous hero and narrator, Walsingham Ainsworth, loses both his rightful inheritance and his future bride through the machinations of his cousin Sir Sidney Aubrey, a girl brought up and presented to the world as a boy. Her mother, Lady Aubrey, did this to keep the Welsh family estate, Glenowen, under their control. The girl's father, having died shortly before the birth of his only child, had stipulated that if the child was female, the bulk of his estate was to pass to the next living male relative. Lady Aubrey, by raising the girl abroad, in isolation, and with the help of a conniving governess, Mrs. Blagden, and then extracting an oath from her adolescent daughter to maintain the male disguise indefinitely, on pain of her own and her parent's disgrace, thus manages to hold on to her husband's fortune for a further eighteen years. But her plot begins to unravel when mother and daughter finally return to England, where Sir Sidney meets and falls helplessly in love with a man—her own supplanted and hostile cousin Walsingham, to be exact.

Walsingham, already smarting at the effects of Lady Aubrey's dislike (a dislike dictated by a guilty conscience over her treatment of her only sister's orphaned child), resents the dazzling impression that the Continental polish and education of the newly returned family heir make on everyone. Walsingham is an individual of brooding personality and awkward behavior, and he reacts with puzzled distrust to the affection his cousin shows him. His worst suspicions, and his own firm conviction that he is destined to be the continual object of inexplicable family persecution, are finally confirmed: he flees the estate in fury and embarks on a catastrophic series of adventures in Bristol, London, and Bath, when he discovers Sidney interfering repeatedly to alienate the affections of, first, his tutor's sister, Isabella Hanbury, whom he has grown up expecting to marry, and then of other women he encounters in the course of his ill-fated peregrinations. The narrator is naturally unable to understand this behavior as Sidney's desperate attempt to make sure that, if she cannot have Walsingham, no one else will. When Isabella, who has been let in on Sidney's secret and gladly resigns any interest she might have had in the narrator, announces her intention to travel alone with “Sir Aubrey” to the Continent, Walsingham can only interpret this as proof that his libertine cousin has made her his mistress. The life-threatening illness of Lady Aubrey, and then of Sidney, brings all the characters back to the estate, ushering in the denouement that reestablishes the natural order through Sidney's unmasking. Mrs. Blagden, the governess who started out as Lady Aubrey's domestic accomplice and has since become her blackmailer, dies a grotesque death at Walsingham's hands, leaving the remorseful Lady Aubrey free to renounce her claims on her daughter, rather than watch Sidney waste hopelessly away as the result of a psychosomatic illness caused by her guilt and frustrated passion.

“Hear, hear it then, Walsingham, and let the agonizing confession touch your heart to pity—I have no son! the wretched, the ill-fated Sidney is my daughter!”⁵ Lady Aubrey then immediately proceeds with commendable sangfroid to practical matters: “The amiable Sidney has been educated in masculine habits; but every affection of her heart is beautifully feminine; heroic though tender; and constant, though almost hopeless. She will, nevertheless, demand some time to fashion her manners to the graces of her sex” (4: 388). This “refashioning” is subsequently effected with such promptness as to raise once again the possibility the novel has just gone to extraordinary lengths to discredit: taking on an unaccustomed sex is more or less akin to assuming another fashion or learning a new role. And within ten pages, Walsingham, reunited with his cousin on the Continent, is singing “the virtues, the heroic virtues of my transcendent Sidney!” (and soon-to-be wife). “Indeed, so completely is she changed, so purely gentle, so feminine in manners; while her mind still retains the energy of that richly-treasured dignity of feeling which are the effects of a masculine education, that I do not lament past sorrows, while my heart triumphs” (4: 398). Nature has finally triumphed along with the narrator, vanquishing “dissimulation” and representational vertigo through the apparently irrepressible instincts of maternal resignation and heterosexual desire. This victory having been effected, the novel then quickly pairs off or otherwise benevolently settles its whole supporting cast in the last two pages.

The plot by itself is remarkable enough; but the temporality and the narrative structure of the fiction's sujet lend it even odder twists. The Pupil of Nature is technically an epistolary novel: a short correspondence between Walsingham and Rosanna, an acquaintance he has made in Germany, prompts him to send her an account of his strange life, to explain to her the sources of the mysterious “dejection of mind” and “poisonous melancholy” that she and others have observed in him (1:10-11). The genesis of the account is thus rooted in the emotional dynamic of sentimental confidentiality, but also in an act of grotesque bodily violence. For Walsingham composes it while under the impression that the misfortunes of his life have culminated in his inadvertent murder of his cousin. Immediately after Lady Aubrey's revelation, which should have cleared everything up, the already gravely ill Sidney falls unconscious after Walsingham, instead of delivering to Sidney's attendant a requested vial of medicine, distractedly gives her the unmarked bottle of laudanum he has procured and kept with him for his own self-destruction. Curiously, rather than sticking around the estate to see if his cousin actually dies, the near-mad narrator is precipitously hustled to the Continent, where he is wandering gloomily around in ignorance of Sidney's miraculous recovery when Rosanna meets him. Meanwhile, Sidney is in Switzerland, undergoing her feminizing metamorphosis, upon completion of which Walsingham is informed of her survival and reunited with her.

In other words, the text of the novel, which is also the story of the narrator's life, is fashioned during precisely that interval in which Sidney's refashioning as female occurs offstage—and whether Sidney is actually alive during this interval seems oddly irrelevant to narrator and author. Indeed, in terms of the novel's psychosexual dynamics, this state of suspended animation her character is placed in during the stage of narrative generation literalizes the physical finality of gender assumption: the transvestite Sidney must “die” as a male, or at least be confined to the passivity of unconscious immobility, in order to be reborn female.

Furthermore, this near-death effected by Walsingham's vengefully operating unconscious places his cousin under a condition of double erasure: during the temporal interval of the text's composition, her physical existence is uncertain, and narratively the crucial story of her refashioning, the transcendent Sidney's traumatic Aufhebung into adult female subjectivity, remains untold. What we get is a kind of Portrait of a Lady, or What It Takes to Make a Lady—without the Lady, as if the essence of womanliness, and the process required to refine this raw material into the finished product “Woman,” were not finally textualizable from the inside.⁶ Womanliness makes itself felt precisely through its effects on observers. Hence, when a female body refuses to represent femininity, that refused assignment triggers a general crisis of apprehension in the empire of signs that gender differentiation underwrites. This is the moral of the story we are told.

The master plot of Walsingham is thus the plot of a belatedly won male mastery. The narrator, presenting his own life story in the spirit of an exemplary case study, starts with infancy: “As it is to the events of my childhood that I owe those indelible prejudices which have attended me, from hour to hour, each darker than the former, I will not omit the slightest incident that may serve to prove, how strongly the earliest impressions take hold on the senses” (1: 21). What Walsingham's account “proves” is how effectively the natural powers of prehension are indeed steered by “prejudice” or social construction. Even in looking at another body, we see what we expect to see, reading that body not just through its attire and deportment but, even more tellingly, through the name, title, education, property, and past invested in it. Even before her birth, Sidney's existence is completely overcoded, for everyone, by one socially crucial signifier, namely, that of the long-awaited and overdue family “heir.” Indeed, the narrator recounts his childhood as the story of a traumatic expulsion from Paradise into a brutish world of inequality and indifference, an expulsion occasioned not so much by his cousin's actual birth as by his own prior introduction to the material significance of this one crucial term, and to how social processes of denomination and entitlement operate to class and classify even infant bodies.

As long as Lady Aubrey and her husband remain childless, Walsingham, the only child of Lady Aubrey's dead sister, reigns unchallenged as His Majesty the Baby: “I became the little sovereign of Glenowen; every wish was anticipated, every word was law: I traversed the domains of my patron, uncontrolled, exulting, happy!” (1: 50). But the child's traumatic dethronement commences with his aunt's anxiously awaited pregnancy, and is completed after his kindly uncle has died in a riding accident, his aunt has departed to bear and raise Sidney in France, and he has been left, isolated and neglected, to the care of the estate's loutish domestics. “Nothing was [now] talked of but the little stranger, the young Lord of Glenowen, who was expected to be more wise and more beautiful than any thing mortal. … My little bosom swelled with grief, while the bath, the paddock, the plantations, and the ponies, were by anticipation bestowed on the expected heir of Glenowen, and, for the first moment in my life, I began to feel the miseries of dependence” (1: 56-57). Such laments dramatize an originary infant encounter with lack: the first perceived experience of maternal insufficiency coincides with a rudely abrupt introduction to a social order organized around the conjunction of male body, family name, and inherited property that Sidney is predestined to incorporate. For the narrator, this traumatic encounter together with the ensuing neglect “implanted the first roots of that melancholy which has never ceased to be the prominent characteristic of my nature” (1: 70).

This resentful melancholy reinforces in the narrator that curious astigmatism which renders him unable really to see the cause of his misery. As early as his ninth year, when he meets his cousin for the one and only time during his childhood, the narrator receives intimations from a suspicious domestic that all is not as it seems in the Aubrey household; but it simply never occurs to him, then or later, to view his rival's confusing behavior as anything other than the use and abuse of the prerogatives to which Sidney's status as “heir” entitles “him.” The only close physical description of Sidney is given of him/her as an infant, at a point when flowing dark ringlets and a soft complexion are sexually undifferentiated traits. Later, when Walsingham encounters the adult Sidney, his description is mediated through others' laudatory reports (“Born to embellish society, Sir Sidney comes among us like a constellation”) and steered by his own jealous interest in whether his cousin has acquired the education and character that would make him worthy of the high station he was “born to.”

To his own chagrin, he must concede that his rival does indeed conform to all preconceived expectations (preconceived inasmuch as they literally predate and supersede the biological outcome of Sidney's conception): “Sir Sidney Aubrey was exactly the being whom Isabella had described—handsome, polite, accomplished, engaging, and unaffected. He sang, he danced, he played on the mandolin, and spoke the Italian and French languages with the fluency of a native.” But in addition to displaying these graces, which could be ascribed to either a male or a female education, Sidney also proves to be “expert at all manly exercises; a delightful poet; and a fascinating companion” (1: 269). The narrator views and presents his cousin to readers not in terms of physical appearance (other than “handsome”) but rather in terms of “polish” and self-assured sociability, the lack of which seals his own marginalization. Hence, even after Sidney begins behaving with inexplicable inconsistency, alienating the affections of the women Walsingham covets and making them his own confidantes and allies, the narrator accounts for this ambiguity, not without satisfaction, by exchanging one descriptive category of conventional, recognizable masculinity for another: the perfect young gentleman has turned out after all to be a “gay, capricious, trifling libertine.” Sidney's revealing declaration, “Wherever I go, I make a woman my companion; whatever I meditate, I consult a woman: in short, when I abandon the sex, I must cease to live” (1: 275), though nothing less than the literal truth, can thus only be interpreted by Walsingham as a typical rake's credo.⁷

In short, what the narrator's astigmatic occlusion of physical detail makes clear is that it is not bodies in the flesh, described in their corporeal specificity, that are the object of inspection in this novel; rather, it is the significatory categories that they embody, by which they are invested, predicated, and assigned a social place in “the eyes of the world.” The existence of a Sidney questions all these categories precisely because “he” challenges the conventional terms of what Michael Moon and Eve Sedgwick, in an article on celebrity and transvestism, have called “the representational contract between one's body and one's world.”⁸ Transvestism, as Moon and Sedgwick point out, offers one potential means for the individual to renegotiate that contract. But Walsingham (the character, as opposed perhaps to Walsingham the text) is interested not in renegotiation, but rather in reconfirmation of his fixed place as recognized, entitled man among men in a world already marked by a lethal representational flux. Although Walsingham (echoing Robinson's sentiments) argues vehemently for the abolition of class and hierarchical distinctions and for the precedence of merit over birth, he cannot dispense with the fundamental organizing distinction of incommensurable sexual difference. In this respect, the novelist follows the pattern of other liberal polemicists and writers of the revolutionary and postrevolutionary decades, for whom the classic social contract argument for the revision of the old order did not countermand but rather dovetailed with this new “biology of incommensurability.”⁹La petite différence turns out to be the big difference, the difference par excellence that underwrites the narrator's ability to distinguish, to distinguish himself, and to assume a distinguished position within a social and semiotic field in which both he and the now-identified object of his desire can finally be accommodated as bivalent terms that complement, rather than cancel out each other.

Prior to this felicitous resolution, however, Walsingham wanders cluelessly through a world pervaded by a creeping miasma of misrecognition, of which his own blindness is only one element. From the hidden nucleus of Sidney's secret a virus of contagious destabilization seems to spread out, for the use of the transvestite motif in the novel is directly linked to the more general epistemological breakdown of social semantics portrayed in it. Walsingham labels himself “the victim of appearances,” and in a sense this appellation could be applied to most of the work's figures. In the world of this text, simulation is inseparable from dissimulation and “personality” gets read as a variety of strategic impersonations. The only character in the novel endowed with the status of infallible moral arbiter is named Mr. Optic, whose moniker underscores the equation of corporeal clear-sightedness and ethical perspicacity. But Optic is an allegorical fragment, as out of place in Walsingham as Squire Allworthy would be in Vathek, because he constitutes an isolated trace of that dream of semiotic transparency the text can invoke but, given the ubiquitous scotomization the rest of its characters labor under, not itself envision.

Although Sidney constitutes the epitome of corporeal impersonation, the narrator's story, too, once he has left his Welsh home, unfolds primarily in the mode of a tragicomedy of mistaken identities: he is repeatedly arrested or suspected as a result of being taken for someone else. He in turn compounds the confusion by continually committing the same mistakes with others (or with other things, as in the case of the laudanum he hands on to Sidney) and then absconding from a compromising situation before he can explain himself. This confusion climaxes in fratricide when, at the end of the novel, Walsingham fatally injures a mysterious highwayman who has been dogging his steps, and for whom he himself has been mistaken, only to discover that the man is his own illegitimate half-brother, the product of a short-lived affair between his father and the hated Mrs. Blagden (see 4: 348-69). Walsingham's remorse over this death is explicable in terms of the novel's psychodynamic structure, for Edward Blagden is clearly his own double, an even more dispossessed, marginalized, and hence more dangerously peripatetic and rootless version of himself. Walsingham may be a poor relation and Sidney a transvestite heir, but neither of them must live out the stigma of incorporating that particular clash of fleshly facticity and patriarchal social order signified by the word “bastard,” and by the ensuing denial of access to the name of the father. In this sense the legitimate/illegitimate opposition constitutes a cultural moment of corporeal differentiation prior perhaps even to compulsory sexual differentiation—the “first cut” inflicted by a social system in the ongoing process of inscribing naturally fungible individual bodies by granting or refusing to grant them recognition. Given the operation of this imperative, as it is reproduced in the text, Edward Blagden, a character who seems to be hastily inserted into the novel only to have his doubly disgraceful existence revealed on his deathbed, functions structurally as a scapegoat for the ongoing tension between social signification and recalcitrant bodies that would otherwise discharge itself on both Walsingham and Sidney.

The historical prototype for the sort of dizzying interpretational disequilibrium The Pupil of Nature incorporates is of course the masquerade (a social and literary locus that, as Terry Castle has shown, is linked to eighteenth-century transvestite subcultures). Hence, it is not surprising that the work contains two major masquerade episodes, even though, by the mid-1790s, the popularity of organized masquerades had long since peaked. Castle has examined how, in some eighteenth-century novels, the masquerade, with the carnivalesque freedom it provides to act out and try on unfamiliar identities, functions as a crucial site of éclaircissement.¹⁰ However, in Robinson's hands the masquerade motif has grown not just superannuated but morbid, and even sadistic, since its setting condenses the malice and corruption of the urban beau monde, as well as the threat of corporeal dissimulation and of the communal crisis of indifferentiation to which the novel's characters are continually subjected. To the disgusted narrator, commenting on the masked balls, the majority of celebrants, cloaked in their basic black dominoes, “presented a sombre similarity, which levelled all forms and features to one gloomy mass of insipidity” (3: 39), and those participants who can be identified are recognizable precisely because they have selected disguises grotesquely out of keeping with their true character and appearance. Furthermore, in Walsingham, masquerades, far from contributing to improved understanding or resolution, intensify frustration or usher in tragedy. For instance, the narrator's first masked ball ends when his frantic pursuit through the crowd of a figure he thinks is Isabella is arrested by the “most unzephyr-like hand” of a loud and portly Venus who proceeds to make laughingstocks of them both by berating him for tearing off one of her tinfoil wings in passing. After this, the narrator recovers his self-respect by foiling a dissolute nobleman's attempt to abduct the innocent Amelia Woodford, Walsingham's London landlady's daughter, whom he has accompanied to the ball—but with the result that he must go into hiding the next morning to escape the nobleman's wrath (see 3: 28-50).

In addition, his good deed proves to have even more uncomfortable consequences. Amelia, to whom Walsingham has been attracted primarily because she reminds him uncannily of Isabella, has fallen in love with her mother's romantically melancholy boarder. Shortly thereafter, she accompanies him to another masked ball, where Walsingham has again gone in search of Isabella. Instead, he meets an insultingly persecuting figure, who turns out to be Sidney; although the narrator is not in a position to appreciate the ironies of encountering a disguised transvestite, Sidney's provoking assurance that, even if he should find Isabella, she will never be his, drive him mad. Furious (as well as drunk), he again glimpses the costumed female figure whom he had earlier taken for Isabella. Catching up with her, he discovers that the lovely lady will neither unmask nor speak to him. But she does not refuse his attentions. Bundling her into a coach, he dashes with her to his lodgings, where they fall into bed together (the lady still apparently veiled). When he wakes up to find that the face on the pillow belongs to a wretched and remorseful Amelia Woodford—who, in a rash attempt to wring some soft words out of the object of her hopeless attachment, has exchanged her disguise at the second masked ball for the costume of the female figure she observed Walsingham pursuing at the first masquerade—morning-after chagrin acquires a new meaning (3: 72-95).

It is an extraordinary episode, one that would not be out of place in, say, a medieval fabliau or even in earlier eighteenth-century satire, but it contrasts jarringly with the generally decorous tonal and descriptive range characteristic of later eighteenth-century women's fiction. Of course, a novel featuring a transvestite protagonist has already clearly placed itself beyond that range. In addition, the episode does nothing more than “flesh out” the century's fears and fantasies about the masquerade's transgressive appeal, the putative encouragement the setting offered to “forget oneself” temporarily, throw the usual behavioral constraints overboard, and, at worst, embark on an orgy of anonymous coupling. However, more than anything, the incident functions to foreground once again to what an extent bodies are phantasmatically fungible, marked by the place they have been preassigned in the beholder's representational economy, even (or precisely) in a moment that seems to guarantee the maximum of unmediated corporeal transparency.

The episode also suggests specifically to what an extent the masquerade of womanliness makes women interchangeable units in the eyes of the paradigmatically male beholder—even one operating within a representational economy that has been turned upside down by the forces of dissimulation and destabilization. Amelia, who finally dies, constitutes the quintessential female victim of this destabilized significatory economy. And yet, this World Turned Upside Down, whose exemplary locus is the masked ball and whose exemplary figure is the transvestite Sir Sidney, also takes on the aspect of a paradis des femmes, in which events are generally precipitated by the force of female desire. Indeed, the novel portrays women as more masculinely rakish than men; during his brief, disastrous sojourns in Bath and London, the narrator is thoroughly fleeced by a circle of female gamblers, and subjected to the aggressive attentions of old and young female admirers. One, the aged Lady Amaryllis, after inviting him with a leer back to her estate to enjoy “the sporting season,” even tries later at the first masked ball to bundle him off in her coach. In addition to bearing the brunt of Sidney's lovingly active persecution, which determines the whole course of his wanderings, Walsingham must also cope with Amelia Woodford's fall into manipulative wantonness, with Isabella's apparently hardened pride in being Sidney's “companion,” and with the lively Lady Arabella, who, in the last volume, alternately taunts and blandishes him into a half-hearted, strangely befuddled proposal. Unable to protect himself against the sex he desperately wants to believe requires his protection, the narrator is continually placed in a frustrating and comical position of prudish passivity that might be characterized as more typically feminine.

The narrator's overdetermined vulnerability is connected to a general breakdown of masculine, and specifically paternal, authority at work in The Pupil of Nature. In this vacuum, women rule. And the rule of women, both within and outside the domestic sphere, is connected, as already shown, to that carnivalesque disordering of semantic, sexual, and social axioms characteristic of the World Turned Upside Down that the masquerade emblematizes.¹¹ Although paternal authority is to a certain extent represented by benevolent tutors and advisers, fathers themselves are practically absent from the novel. Sir Edward Aubrey's death sets up the preconditions for his daughter's parodic fulfillment of his last wishes, and Walsingham's own father, finally revealed to be Mrs. Blagden's seducer, simply abandons him after his mother's death. Mothers, on the other hand, are very much present, even if the power they exercise, especially within kinship systems, has been inherited or usurped from men. The text valorizes an ideal of self-sacrificing maternity which its characters fail spectacularly to live up to, since its plot is actually steered by the machinations of a matched set of monstrous mothers, Lady Aubrey and her accomplice and ultimate blackmailer, the governess Mrs. Blagden, through whose perverse pedagogy Sidney is formed in the requisite male mold.

Indeed, in the novel, female power is inseparable from, and ultimately seems to rest on, the potentially monstrously absolute and abusable power of the mother as the primary formative agent of the infant body and psyche. Walsingham himself, as already mentioned, associates that traumatic early experience of social marginalization, which has left him locked in a depressive position with insufficient maternal solicitude: “I had never known a mother: I had been thrown on the wide world, like a garden flower, transplanted to a desert; all around me was barren, or overrun with weeds! … I had never tasted the balmy kiss of maternal fondness, except when I was incapable of appreciating its value” (1: 145). As this and other similar narratorial laments attest, The Pupil of Nature incorporates a contemporary pedagogical discourse in which motherhood is invested with a new importance, as a force of (at the very least, preliminary) acculturation and individuation. Through the initial maternal intervention the child can be decisively placed or displaced in relation to the larger paternal symbolic order that underwrites the stability of representation, lines of inheritance, and sexual identity. And woe to the child that has been placed, through maternal neglect, illegitimacy, or systematic inculcation, at odds with that order.

At this point, we might pause to consider what motivates the curiously schizophrenic structure of this text. The Pupil of Nature obeys the imperative, loosely inscribed in its own subtitle, of enforcing a realignment of body and sign, nature and culture, invoking, as its outer limits, the utopia of a paternal but benevolent representational economy that can assign every body its rightful, differentiated place without that assignment inscribing itself in the individual flesh and psyche as wound, stigma, exclusion, or lack. The major portion of the narrative, however, unleashes, with undeniable Schadenfreude and manic relish, a patently unnatural dystopia of semantic instability, female misrule, and perpetual masquerade. The novel's split structure of aggression—figured by a female who usurps and uses a male persona and privileges, primarily against men—and belated deference to the need for containment itself in fact mimics the structure of the “masquerade of womanliness,” as first described in Joan Reviere's classic case study.¹² According to Reviere, such a masquerade occurs when a woman uses an exaggerated display of femininity—coquettishness, helplessness, deference, maternal solicitude—to fend off the retribution she fears for desiring and acting out the prerogatives of masculinity—professional competency, aggression, the chance to compete with and triumph over men. As Reviere admitted, this phenomenon complicates any attempt to “draw the line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade’” (p. 37), i.e., to distinguish between substantive sexual identity and the mimicry of a social construct. Theorists working in Reviere's wake have continued to develop the thesis that the masquerade figures the constitutive aporetic structure of femininity itself. They suggest that femininity takes shape first and foremost as spectacle (its privileged register that of the visual, of Schein), as a dramatization, aimed at both entrapping and securing the male gaze, of “the sexual division [that] is the crucial articulation of symbolic division. … The masquerade is a representation of femininity but then femininity is representation, the representation of the woman.”¹³

Measuring this equation against the roles Robinson played in her own life and in the public life of her era, we can see more clearly how this particular author could have written a text riven with the very contradictions of bodily constitution and representation that it explores. Moon and Sedgwick have underscored how “our puritanical rage against representation itself” redounds on those who do the work, “the wearing, wasting, perhaps necessary, in any case exacted labor,” of representing culture to itself, specifically through embodying (or, as in the case of the fat woman, embodying the opposite of) a culture's normative body types (p. 29). In her earlier life Robinson belonged to one category that has, to a disproportionate extent, borne the brunt of that puritanical rage. Actresses have historically been lavishly rewarded but also stigmatized for making the masquerade of womanliness their business, thereby flaunting both the hold the display of desirable femininity has on the gaze and the artificial, manipulable, reproducible nature of that display as precisely “unnatural” representation. In turn, they pay for the resentment their de-essentializing role-playing arouses by being subjected to a re-essentializing refusal to distinguish between the public and the private female self, when the professional versatility displayed on stage is equated with offstage promiscuity. Robinson's career was caught and ruined by a particularly vicious application of this equation. This left her painfully well situated to appreciate both the penalties as well as the rewards of publicly representing womanliness.

On the one hand, the Memoirs attests strikingly to what a desperately needed source of narcissistic gratification, as well as income, acting offered Robinson. When she discusses her profession in the Memoirs, Robinson generally sounds like the pro she was, one who learned swiftly to master opening-night jitters and a huge range of roles, and to glory in contact with colleagues of Garrick's and Sheridan's caliber. On the other hand, her autobiography also shows, much more ambiguously, how its author both gloried in and shrank from being in the public eye. In fact, the Memoirs has been derided for displaying traces of ridiculously disingenuous personal vanity. That derision attests to the uneasiness aroused by a woman whose awareness and management of her appearance were obviously so keen as to often seem to verge on a dispassionate appraisal of herself as visual object.

For instance, Robinson seems intensely sensitive to how even everyday dress functions as costume, and how costume, in turn, functions on- and offstage as the signifying metonymy of the individual female's substance. The author of the Memoirs, with a corporeal specificity so notably lacking in Walsingham, repeatedly includes extended descriptions of her own dress on important occasions. Nothing more clearly illustrates the sometimes dizzying possibilities of phantasmatic emancipation from one's natural state that costume holds out than the fact that, as Robinson delicately commented to her readers, she made her debut in the role of Juliet, wearing “pale pink satin, trimmed with crepe, richly spangled with silver, … some months advanced in that situation which afterwards … made me a second time a mother” (1: 189). But to play to the prying gaze, albeit in order to deceive or subdue it, entails the risk of inciting it. Even innocuousness can backfire: “The first time I went to Ranelagh my habit was so singularly plain and quaker-like, that all eyes were fixed upon me” (1: 95). It is difficult to determine whether consternation, gratification, or simple detached appraisal shapes such a statement. In a later episode, when Robinson remembers how, at the Pantheon, she was “disconcerted” by the “fixed stare” of several “men of fashion” who followed her about, asking bystanders who she was, she reports: “My manner and confusion plainly evinced that I was not accustomed to the gaze of impertinent high breeding” (1: 98). Clear evidence of having made an impression coexists with discomfort; but, most tellingly, the author herself describes her response from the exterior, the point of view of a spectator, in terms of the effect it produced.

Robinson spent the rest of her life as the victim and prisoner of that gaze of high breeding she had not only played to but internalized. Never did it operate more destructively than in the wake of the scandal that left her marked as Perdita, and inaugurated her career as author under the sign of “lost” womanhood. Journalists and satirists, as well as common gossip, reveled, with an avidity anything other than “high-bred,” in the spectacle of this celebrity's fall. For instance, a contemporary satire, entitled “Florizel and Perdita” (meant to be sung to the tune of “O Polly Is a Sad Slut”) proclaims:

A tender Prince, ah, well-a-day!
Of years not yet a Score,
Had late his poor Heart stol'n away
By one of many more;
As many more (at least) she is,
As might have been the Mother
(You'd say it if you saw her Phiz)
Perhaps of such an other.
Her Cheeks were vermeil'd o'er with Red,
Her Breast Enamelled White,
And nodding Feathers deck'd her Head,
A Piece for Candle Light.
Sometimes she'd play the Tragic Queen,
Sometimes the Peasant poor,
Sometimes she'd step behind the Scenes,
And there she'd play the W—.
Two Thousand Pounds, a princely Sight
For doing just no more,
Than what is acted every Night
By ev'ry Sister W—.(14)

This endearing squib is interesting precisely because it aims to hit the public nerve by activating most of the anxieties about female power, inherently theatrical womanliness, and the at once pathetically exposed and diabolically dissimulating female body that Robinson herself later incorporated in Walsingham. The actress, though in actuality only twenty-one when she met the prince, is nonetheless presented as a predatory, even incestuous crone. Belittled for displaying signs of age, she is subsequently belittled for resorting to artificial means to efface them. Her profession likewise tells against her: the common cosmetics and ornaments she uses to participate in the masquerade of womanliness are also the tools of her trade—the actress's trade, but also the prostitute's. The satire implies that the two businesses are fundamentally coextensive, since both are based on the ability to enact over and over a charade of enhanced, submitting femininity. Among the woman judged guilty of wanting to appeal to (or simply appealing to) the male gaze, the professional actress, and the “working girl,” the distinctions blur, because “playing the W—[hore]” clearly entails some of the same performative skills and the same double bind that “playing the W—[oman]” does.

In the print sold to accompany this satire, Robinson is shown standing grandly in the middle of a circle of boxes labeled “carmine,” “whitewash,” “pomatum,” and “dentifrice.” The actress is clad in Welsh national costume (born in Bristol of Welsh parentage, Robinson favored this garb). With a tall crowned hat perched on her already impressive tower of powdered hair, she looms over an enamored prince, who looks no less foolish for being clothed in classical armor. Overtones of the dominatrix and the hypocritical woman of letters, who uses her intellectual pretensions to cloak her amorous knowledgeability, merge in the female figure that grasps what looks like a long staff in one hand while with the other she holds out to her adorer a book entitled Essay on Man. Other scurrilous prints circulated at the time likewise emphasize the specter of unnatural female domination and petticoat government that the figure of Mrs. Robinson seemed to conjure up in the public eye. In one, Robinson is shown riding in a carriage drawn by a pair of goats, to which the prince plays driver, and Lord North, who should have prevented this demeaning arrangement, snores obliviously atop the vehicle. In another, which comments on the actress's supposed later affair with Charles Fox, the lovers are pictured driving in a chaise; she holds the reins and flourishes a whip, and he leans back wearing a stuporous, vaguely tormented expression.

But another penny print circulated at the time furnishes perhaps the oddest and, for the purposes of this analysis, most intriguing testimony to the role of virulent phobic object women like Robinson took on in the English mass-culture imagination during the revolutionary decades. … In what may well be intended to mimic the layout of a playing card, say, the king or queen of hearts, it features a central figure, split and conjoined in the middle, compounded of the half-face portraits of a bare-breasted Robinson and the Prince of Wales. Down on one side a coroneted George III comments, “Oh, My Son, My Son”; above him the Hanoverian motto “Ich dien” (“I serve”), appended to the family's three-plumed crest, comments ironically on the prince's amorous enthrallment. On the lady's side, a tiny antlered face identified as “King of Cuckolds Robinson” supports, on its horns, another crest, consisting of a plate bearing the heads of his wife's three most famous conquests.

Clearly, a public drama of the mourned wayward son is being iconographically enacted here, one of a misled youth who, through his unworthy entanglement, threatens to blight not just his own future, but the country's as well. Likewise, in robbing the monarch of his son, the Robinsons, commoners and habitués of the demimonde, are challenging not just paternal but national authority. What really lends the print its crudely effective charge, however, is the transgressive sexual amalgamation of the hermaphroditic central figure, its power to affront condensed and intensified in the ample female breast that protrudes above the otherwise fully clothed lady's ruffled bodice. This defrocking of course works in the first instance to expose Robinson as a woman who will defrock herself for the highest bidder. However, the dominant sexual feature, the breast, also hints at the power of the enthralling, infantilizing phallic mother. Moreover, the men's heads piled on the plate associate Robinson with another exhibitionistic female performer and, not coincidentally, traditional prototype of the castrating woman, Salome. The print thereby suggests (and suggests all the more fearfully by not providing explicit captions for this part of its message) that the prince, rather than being viewed as having “come into his manhood” with this his first affair, has surrendered some portion of it. At any rate, the illustration's at once desexed and bisexed central figure manifestly incorporates those anxieties about the break-down of the cosmic order, which included a powerful latent hysteria over the blurring of gender roles, as well as about the distinctions upon which the class order, lines of inheritance, and the separation of public and private interests are based, that the publicly flaunted mésalliance of royal heir and actress obviously triggered.

In looking at this print, as well as at the masquerade milieu and transvestite protagonist of The Pupil of Nature, one could choose to insist on its transgressive appeal. For it would certainly be tempting to remain with the kind of currently popular reading by which (in the critical summation of Moon and Sedgwick) the “understanding of transvestism can take on a utopian tinge: as a denaturalizing and defamiliarizing exposure of the constructed character of all gender; as a translation of what are often compulsory gender behaviors to a caricatural, exciting, chosen plane of arbitrariness and free play” (p. 16). But in Walsingham the masquerade of gender simply does not transpire in a mode of the exuberantly carnivalesque, much less of the titillatingly bawdy.¹⁵ This particular World Turned Upside Down presided over by a duo of monstrous mothers and a cross-dressed Princess of Misrule ultimately constitutes not a funfair but a gothic nightmare for all of its participants, and most signally for its narrator, for whom the displacement, disorder, and disorganization that world celebrates represent merely the continuation of his own “natural” condition. Thus, to redress this prevailing disorder the transvestite's transgression, which epitomizes this disorder, is neither valenced as unilateral liberation nor simply dismissed as punishable perversion. Rather, it is psychologized as blockage—that is, as a temporary liberation purchased at the price of prolonged infantilization, a maternally imposed arrested development for both male and female.

Sidney's renunciation of masculine privilege thus anticipates the script of ontogenetic sexual development elaborated by the human sciences in the course of the nineteenth century, and given programmatic formulation by Freud in the Three Essays on Sexuality. In fact, the literary account prefigures the medico-psychiatric account in the most radical way, by grotesquely literalizing it. The pubescent girl, caught in a phase of development that, for males and females alike, is undifferentiatedly “phallic,” confidently assumes the role of her mother's “little man,” until adult femininity emerges via what is “actually a type of regression”—Rückbildung—“characterized by a new wave of repression.” Freud concludes: “Es ist ein Stück männlichen Sexuallebens, was dabei der Verdrängung verfällt” (“It is a piece of masculine sexual life which thereby yields to repression”).¹⁶ In Walsingham femininity is likewise figured as a reversion entailing a necessary surrender—of unthinkingly assumed but nonetheless inappropriate prerogatives. The threateningly undifferentiated sexuality of the maiden must be fixed in adult femininity so that the female little man does not make permanently infantilized, impotent, displaced little men of the adult males around her.¹⁷ Her loss, literalized in this novel in the near-death, disentitlement, and disentailment that accompany Sidney's belated accession to womanhood, constitutes their libidinal and financial gain, by reinstating that “signifying economy of masculinity” enforced by the exclusionary terms of her late father's will.¹⁸

The female power represented by maternity in The Pupil of Nature is, through a similar strategy, punitively checked and then positively revalenced in terms of the capacity for submissive resignation. The structural pairing of the two monstrous mothers, Lady Aubrey and Mrs. Blagden, allows this symmetrical resolution. At the end, the scheming governess is punished for her crimes against the class and “natural” order by a grotesquely carnal death, reminiscent of the brothel keeper Sinclair's end in Clarissa. In the same encounter that leads to her son's demise, she is panicked by Walsingham's pistol shot and jumps out a window. The narrator's last sight of her dwells on the spectacle of the corporeal disorder that she has disseminated and now graphically incorporates: “Almost every bone in her body was shattered by the concussion;—her arm and leg were broken—her skull fractured, and her flesh bruised, while the agonies of a violent death wrong her heart in every fibre” (4: 359-60). Lady Aubrey, by contrast, is belatedly rehabilitated by her decision to let her daughter drop her male persona, rather than see her waste hopelessly away. Hence, she is allowed to escape with a mere confession: “I am criminal, dreadfully criminal;—but I will lay open my heart, bleeding with contrition, before the tribunal of my Maker, and bow to the chastening scourge, till I have expiated my offences” (4: 373). The “instinct” of mother love thus finally wins out, however impeded or absent it may have been during the course of the novel; and its triumph assumes the exemplary form of a resignation by which the mother, surrendering her hold on her female child, re-signs her in the very act of designating her as not-male and reassigning her the roles of soon-to-be woman and wife.¹⁹

So, by the end of the novel, the hasty unveiling and reveiling of Sidney as the absent but systematically crucial Key Signifier of sexual difference have epistemologically stabilized the universe of misrecognition in which the novel's characters have wandered. And yet nature itself, the work's master sign, somehow remains a slippery and bivalent notion. It is never made completely clear in Walsingham whether the novel's subtitle implies an originary condition or a pedagogical project. Sometimes it seems to function as a shorthand reference to Jacobin determinism's emphasis on how the individual will be decisively shaped by environmental factors, especially during the formative periods of infancy and adolescence. Hence, Walsingham can lament his lack of “that resisting quality, which imposes self-denial, even where our passions and our interests impel us on to mischief. But I was the pupil of nature: my mind was permitted to form its bent, before I had judgment to discriminate the paths which led to reputation or dishonour. … I had no prospect of happiness; and a perpetual scene of sorrow disheartened me, till fortitude and hope seemed weary of the contest” (1: 252). On this level, the author actually denaturalizes an older concept of nature.

Yet Robinson obviously stops short of a complete deconstruction of the terms she sets out to problematize. By the end of the novel, “nature,” formerly annexed to a “perpetual scene of sorrow,” has, like maternity, apparently been rehabilitated. Taking leave from “those trifling vicious reptiles whom you have met with during the progress of my disastrous story,” Walsingham proclaims: “If they continue to triumph over the children of worth and genius, it will only prove that, in this undefinable sphere, where the best and wisest cannot hope for happiness, the demons of art are permitted to oppress with wrongs, while they lift the empty brow of arrogance and pride above the illustrious pupils of genius, truth, and nature!” (4: 401). Fittingly, the character who has presented his life story as one exemplifying the trials of the doubly motherless child remains in his own words a “pupil” and “child,” but one who can finally define his place within “this undefinable sphere” through a strategy of affiliation that makes both nature and him members of an abstract family of personified symbolic values.

By the terms of the narrator's final judgment, “nature” has belatedly taken its place on the side of the angels by being pitted against the worldly “demons of art”—meaning apparently, in the first instance, hypocrisy, social pretension, falsity. Where, however, does this antinomy leave this text qua work of art? The category of “art” it belongs to may be debatable, but it surely has some demons driving it: can we therefore employ the description its transvestite heroine applies to herself, and label it a “monster of dissimulation”? If nothing else, the narrative has certainly carried on its own pronominal masquerade with the reader, pending the hasty terminological tidying-up that re-predicates Sir Sidney as “daughter” and apotheosizes “nature” as “nature.” Linked, moreover, to this rather malicious if entertaining masquerade are the spectacular, and sometimes seemingly gratuitous, violence of the novel, as well as an excess of melancholia that it cannot finally completely absorb.

This disfiguring excess of both violence and melancholia remains as symptom of the text's irresolvable uneasiness about figuration—as a process by which the raw material of bodies takes on socially and sexually recognizable contours, and by which linguistic articulation is aligned with modes of representation. For in this text language itself seems to serve as the carrier of a primal desolation and isolation it inscribes in its user: Walsingham's depressive subjectivity is shaped by his traumatic childhood lesson in what the word “heir” means for those to whom it does not apply, and in turn shapes a narrative that undulates largely within an affective range extending from sullen dejection to suicidal frenzy. Robinson's Memoirs in fact contains a scene of primal language acquisition which is in keeping with this view, when the author describes how her own daughter first “blessed [her] ears with the articulation of words.”

The circumstance made a forcible and indelible impression on my mind. It was a clear moonlight evening; the infant was in the arms of her nursery maid; she was dancing her up and down, and was playing with her; her eyes were fixed upon the moon, to which she pointed with her small fore-finger;—on a sudden a cloud passed over it, and the child, with a slow falling of her hand, articulately sighed, “all gone!” This had been a customary expression with her maid, whenever the infant wanted any thing which it was deemed prudent to withhold or to hide from her. These little nothings will appear insignificant to the common reader; but to the parent whose heart is ennobled by sensibility, they will become matters of important interest.

(1: 169-70)

This elegiac scenario invokes, however sentimentally, an entry into language that marks the elegiac mode itself as the founding form of linguistic expressivity, since this entry is activated by the recognition and internalization of lack.²⁰ The natural world naturally withholds; the social world also, whether protectively or punitively, withholds. Operating in tandem, they imprint in the child an understanding of loss, of authority as the agency of deprivation, that is acknowledged in the first articulate sigh. Growing up—at least as one grows up in The Pupil of Nature—the child will find this primal loss consolidated by a series of deprivations, dependences, resignations, and confrontations with the lethal reality of “all gone.” The body count in Walsingham is simply horrific—perhaps not surprising in a narrative that climaxes in an act of bodily self-abandonment. One character accedes to the position of being cut out, “dis-incorporating” the masculine identity she has grown up with, so that another may finally be enabled to “cut a figure” as full-fledged gentleman. But learning to cut a figure in this text always appears to involve some infliction of loss on someone. For, whatever brief moment of triumph the narrator may enjoy at its end, The Pupil of Nature, taken in total, also consists of an articulate sigh, as well as an at times numbingly monotonous howl of rage, directed against a world in which representation itself finally seems to be a no-win game.

Notes

1. See Stuart Curran's “The I Altered” (in Anne Mellor, ed., Romanticism and Feminism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], pp. 185-207), which includes Robinson's poetry in the consideration of work by other female poets of the later eighteenth century. See also M. Ray Adams, Studies in the Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism (London: Franklin and Marshall Press, 1947).

2. Mary Robinson, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, completed and edited by Maria Robinson, 2 vols. (London, 1801), 2: 122. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the text.

3. Tom Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 154.

4. See Kristina Straub's Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), for analyses both of Charke's Narrative and of the type of actress's autobiography that presents its subject as “sentimental victim.” Straub also offers an excellent discussion of many issues relevant to Robinson's career and to Walsingham, most notably the eighteenth century's attempt to control and contain (while continuing to enjoy) the often untidy spectacle provided by actors and actresses on- and offstage. Straub summarizes:

   Up to the nineteenth century, discourse about players in Britain shows marks of a struggle to subject them to the decorous order of an idealized spectatorship; these marks make clear both the force of that order and its inability to totalize. Players in popular theatrical literature constitute a discursive site that complements—indeed, is necessary to—the epistemological authority of the spectator. At the same time, this discourse about players reveals the often less-than-effective cultural and linguistic means by which that authority is constructed and maintained as a “natural” category.

   (pp. 4-5)

   Straub, together with Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (The Politics and Poetry of Transgression [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986]), likewise emphasizes how the site of the theater presents a particularly disturbing challenge to the imposition of not just a politics of the gaze but also a politics of the gazed-upon, exhibited body—a body often figured, in the cases of both male and female players, as ambiguously classed, ambiguously or monstrously sexed, and suspiciously vagrant.

5. Mary Robinson, Walsingham, Or the Pupil of Nature: A Domestic Story, ed. Gina Luria, 4 vols. (New York: Garland Press, 1974), 4: 386. All subsequent references are to this edition, part of the Garland series The Feminist Controversy in England (1788-1810), and appear in the text.

6. See Jacques Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of the Woman” and “A Love Letter” (in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Rose [New York: Norton, 1992], pp. 137-61), which employ the concept of erasure to explore the structural contradictions pertaining to the construct of femininity.

7. See Francette Pacteau, “The Impossible Referent: Representations of the Androgyne” (in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan [London: Methuen, 1986], pp. 62-85), for an analysis relevant to the novel's presentation of Sidney, since in the attempt to visualize this character (an effort the text both discourages and teases the reader to undertake), one alternative that emerges is androgyny. For Pacteau, the androgyne paradigmatically figures both the fear and the fantasy of pre-oedipal sexuality, the disavowal of sexual difference, whereas the transvestite would figure the culturally more threatening refusal via parody of sexual difference—but the readerly attempt to imagine Sidney brings up some of the same issues of the impossible referent.

8. Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Divinity: A Dossier, a Performance Piece, a Little-Understood Emotion,” Discourse 13 (Fall/Winter 1990-91): 27.

9. See Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 152; as well as Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780-1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); and Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Energies of the Mind: Novels of the 1790s,” in idem, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 175-202.

10. See Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).

11. For relevant background on the carnivalesque, see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetry of Transgression, esp. pp. 1-26; and Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 213-29.

12. Joan Reviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” reprinted in Formations of Fantasy, pp. 35-44.

13. Stephen Heath, “Joan Reviere and the Masquerade,” in Formations of Fantasy, pp. 52, 53.

14. Quoted in Marguerite Steen, The Lost One: A Biography of Mary (Perdita) Robinson (London: Methuen, 1937). Unfortunately the only full biography of Robinson now in circulation, Steen's account does not consider her literary production at all and is gratingly condescending, sensationalistic, and silly as well. It does, however, contain interesting contemporary material pertaining to the various scandals of its subject's life, since that is clearly the biographer's primary interest. See pp. 122-23 for full text of the satire, as well as for illustrations of all the prints discussed later in this paper. See also the entry on Robinson in The Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1600-1800, ed. Janet Todd (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985).

15. This judgment is based heavily on the novel's dominant depressive affect and the recontaining operation carried out by its conclusion. And yet, to touch on an issue largely ignored in this essay, the reading experience of Walsingham does potentially extend an invitation to enjoy not only the spectacle of cross-dressing but also more than one transgressive scenario of same-sex desire, depending on what the individual reader may or may not suspect prior to finishing the book. Readers who take Sidney at face value as male are left to ponder the motivations for the mixed signals sent by “his” alternately kind and cruel, but clearly obsessive behavior toward his cousin; the two “men's” tormented pattern of flight from / pursuit of each other lends an implicitly eroticized impetus to their relationship, suggesting the classic uncanny configuration of homosocially bonded doubles. On the other hand, readers who suspect the truth about Sidney's gender have another field of potentially transgressive speculation opened up, namely, the nature of the attachment between her and her “companion,” Isabella, and whether Isabella herself is a dupe, accomplice, or lover. At any rate, the novel plays actively with the responsive register of “knowingness,” specifically knowing or bringing a “knowing” suspicion to bear on the secret of someone else's concealed sex and sexuality, that Moon and Sedgwick discuss in their article “Divinity” and that Sedgwick also deals with more fully in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). As Sedgwick notes, the appeal to this epistemological modality can either serve to consolidate homophobic condescension and control or, by contrast, usher in the possibility of readerly complicity and/or identification.

16. Sigmund Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie und verwandte Schriften (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985), p. 90, my translation.

17. Straub notes, likewise, the potential threat embodied in the figure of the cross-dressed actress in Charlotte Charke's Narrative, who “is also capable of holding a mirror up to masculinity that reflects back an image of castration which cannot be entirely controlled by the mechanisms of projection” (Sexual Suspects, p. 134).

18. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), on the “politics of sexual discontinuity” characterizing the position of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, in which Robinson's transvestite Sidney also ends up caught:

    Herculine's pleasures and desires are in no way the bucolic innocence that thrives and proliferates prior to the imposition of a juridical law. Neither does s/he fully fall outside the signifying economy of masculinity. S/he is “outside” the law, but the law maintains this “outside” within itself. In effect s/he embodies the law, not as an entitled subject, but as an enacted testimony to the law's uncanny capacity to produce only those rebellions that it can guarantee will—out of fidelity—defeat themselves and those subjects, who, utterly subjected, have no choice but to reiterate the law of their genesis.

    (p. 106)

19. Robinson's own Memoirs also furthers that discourse on the affective centrality of maternity that was emerging during her lifetime and has climaxed in the psychoanalytic (particularly object relation theory's) preoccupation with the mother-infant bond. The Memoirs testifies to her own belief in motherhood as the most rewarding of female experiences (1: 143-44) and to her maternal solicitude (emphasis on breast-feeding, caring for her children through their illnesses herself, keeping them by her constantly, and her desolation at the death of her second child). This emphasis on maternity may have served as one of the more powerful of the defensive strategies available to the author; as Robinson's biographer says, “Even her worst enemies could not deny her the two virtues which she possessed in extravagant degree: she was a devoted mother and a most courageous woman” (Lost One, p. ix). On the other hand, she did raise and support her one surviving child, Maria, alone, and that child stuck by her scandalous parent loyally, acting as her amanuensis, and in her work on the Memoirs added many testimonies to Robinson's maternal affection. The Memoirs, in other words, portrays the mother-daughter relationship, otherwise singularly absent in eighteenth-century women's fiction, as positive, enduring, and mutually protective, and Walsingham offers the negatively strong, pathologized version of this bond's endurance.

20. The many pieces of poetry scattered through Walsingham are themselves almost all of the elegiac or graveyard school. Usually dashed off by the narrator under the pressure of overwhelming emotion while the described events were unfolding, they are subsequently inserted into the chronicle he later assembles. This body of poetry, commemorating isolated moments characteristically marked by feelings of abandonment, isolation, or desperation, thereby offers the only textual primary evidence left over from the actual interval in which the recounted events occurred. Indeed, the verses, given their frequently suicidal, hallucinatory, incoherent, or simply bathetic intensity, do serve to disjoint the chronological life story retrospectively imposed to order and contain that “kernal of the Real,” the originary trauma, of which the poetry constitutes the most telling trace within the prose's master, albeit melancholic, narrative.