"There You Will See Your Page": Olive Custance, Alfred Douglas, and Lyrics of Sapphic Boyhood

Abstract

"There You Will See Your Page":Olive Custance, Alfred Douglas, and Lyrics of Sapphic Boyhood Joseph Bristow (bio) Oh to be a man for a fortnight, your younger brother for a fortnight ! … If you will only be nice and kind, and help me to some Rosalind's clothes … and then we could start, like two comrades, seeking adventures … Richard Le Gallienne, The Quest of the Golden Girl (1896) Why can't you dress as a boy and come with me? Alfred Douglas to Olive Custance, ca. February 1901 Sometime in the late fall of 1900, the Paris-based American poet Natalie Clifford Barney stepped into the famous Bodley Head bookshop in Vigo Street, London. What happened next, as I explain in this essay, has much to tell us about some of the most striking intersections between differing types of unconventional desires that we find in English and French lyric poetry at the turn of the twentieth century. Especially significant here are the forms of passion that involve women's sexual adventures in the guise of a Renaissance page. This figure became a significant motif, if not an alluring type of transmasculine embodiment, in the cross-Channel exchanges that were about to occur in and around the twenty-two-year-old Barney's social circle. The image of the cross-dressed page, as we can see in Richard Le Gallienne's popular 1896 novel, had an enduring appeal because of the freedoms it afforded, especially in the figure of Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It (ca. 1599), a part that was of course originally played by a boy-actor. In 1842, to give a well-known example, Elizabeth Barrett Browning confided to Hugh Stuart Boyd that as a "little girl" she used to "think seriously about dressing up like a boy & running away to be Ld. Byron's page."1 The interest intensified six decades later, when we consider the impact of Elizabeth Fortescue-Brickland's painting, The Little Foot Page (1905). This fine work adapts an episode from Thomas Percy's version of the ballad "Child Waters" (1765), in which the pregnant Ellen [End Page 265] complies with her cruel lover's wish that she should serve him as a page. In the moment that Fortescue-Brickland has chosen, the boyishly attired Ellen is about to cut her locks.2 Historians have noted that this picture inspired a vogue for shorter hairstyles among women art students, a trend that became much more common at the time of World War I. At the very end of Victoria's reign, when Barney (not without controversy) established herself as a woman-loving poet writing in French, the iconic girl in page's garb had also taken a decisively Sapphic turn, in ways that created intimate links among three other sexually dissident poets: Renée Vivien; Olive Custance; and Alfred Douglas. Each of these writers expresses a strong interest in the seductive and sexually subordinate properties of the beautiful boy, although the erotic valences attached to this figure vary among them, especially the degree to which the boy's attractions lie in his male homoerotic, his lesbian, or his transmasculine qualities. Moreover, the boy can also, for the purposes of Barney and Vivien, be modeled upon a female body. Their poetry, however, not only intimates that iconic boyhood found its greatest poetic power in the lyric genre; their lyrical poetry also recognizes that this type of masculinity, which has the potential to slide between male and female guises, is a perfect figure for poetic exchanges. Here I show that Barney's delight in the Sapphic boy opens our eyes to the dynamic way in which a page-like presence became a point of reference in creating unorthodox forms of affection between same-sex and other-sex sexual partners. Further still, the seductive boy serves their lyrics as a touchstone for articulating their indebtedness to as well as difference from classical and English poetic traditions. It makes sense to dwell for a moment on the reason that led Barney to enter The Bodley Head, so that we can fully appreciate the erotic plurality that engaged each of these poets in distinctive ways...