Flights from Feminized Domesticity

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I have mentioned the debate between conservative domesticity and rebellious flights from domesticity in the works of Potter; the former is proposed by Wynn William Yarbrough and the latter by M. Daphne Kutzer and Mandy L. DeWilde. In the following I am about to observe Potter’s representations of conservatism and rebellion in her works by analyzing stays in and flights from feminized domesticity in The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes.

Since colors have been gendered, characters who wear in red in Potter’s books, such as the sisters of Peter, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and Mrs.

Tittlemouse, are either mild daughters or motherly housewives, representatives of Victorian feminized domesticity. Hence, Timmy Tiptoes, a major male character, is notable because he wears a red jacket, unlike Peter Rabbit, Tom Kitten and Johnny Town-Mouse who all wear blue ones. This probably implies that Timmy is a

bourgeois married man of feminized domesticity. Timmy owns a snug nest on the top of the tree and makes a store of nuts with his wife Goody, who is dressed in pink. This reflects a harmonious marriage and domestic life.

A life of feminized domesticity, however, does not thoroughly cover the potentials of Timmy in male domesticity. When he collects nuts with his wife, his unclothing of red jacket hints such potentials. In contrast, Goody does not take off her clothes as the sisters of Peter Rabbit do when they start gathering blackberries in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Her clothing emphasizes her sexuality as a mature woman and thus differs her from these girl rabbits. However, her clothing also highlights her husband’s unclothing, which later foreshadows his literal “fall” into a world of pure male domesticity through homoerotic cohabitation.

The other scene which hints Timmy’s male domesticity is that he is bullied by a group of bachelor squirrels. Since they do not establish the families of bourgeois feminized domesticity, which clothing and nut-collecting symbolize, these bachelor

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squirrels neither wear clothes nor remember where they hide the collected nuts. Hence, they end in fights when they “f[i]nd some nuts that d[o] not belong to [them]” (Potter Tale 16). The bachelor squirrels signify the fin-de-siècle working-class mob, raising strikes against the bourgeois class and its feminized domesticity.¹⁴⁸ Falsely accused of stealing the nuts of bachelor squirrels, Timmy is chased, taken and brutally thrown upside down into a tree hole for incarceration. Kutzer questions the inconsistency of Timmy’s clothing in these scenes: his red jacket seems gone when he is stuck in the tree hole but it re-appears after he is at the bottom of that hollow tree (131). For me, that jacket is always on Timmy and it just seems disappear because it does not cover the lower part of Timmy’s body. Kutzer’s viewpoint, however, evokes me to ponder why Potter chooses not to present Timmy’s red jacket in the picture. The

disappearance of Timmy’s red jack, I believe, implies his loss of middle-class dignity under the working-class riots of the bachelor squirrels, similar to Toad’s loss of his gentleman’s suit when he escapes from prison by cross-dressing in The Wind in the Willows. The reappearance of Timmy’s red jacket suggests the retrieval of his social status when he enjoys male domesticity by cohabiting with Chippy in this hollow tree, virtually a bachelor’s apartment or a gentleman’s club.

Unlike Timmy, Chippy Hackee is like one of the deviant fin-de-siècle

gentlemen and “boy-men,” so tired of heterosexual relationship that they sometimes retired to their “second home” for a break (Chudacoff 42), as I have delineated in the introduction. His goal is to set up an all-male space that excludes female presence and resembles the late-Victorian and the Edwardian bachelor’s apartments or gentleman’s clubs. This reminds me of two models of clubman in Potter’s life. One is her father

148 Peter Hunt claims that since the late-Victorian era the bourgeois class has been “shaken by major strikes, such as the Dock Strike in London in 1889, and the Engineers’ Strikes of 1897.” Therefore, both Liberal and Conservative parties began to “placate the demands of the increasingly powerful working class and to attract their votes” (4).

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Rupert, who often spent time in a gentleman’s club called “the Reform,” where he lingered long to chat with his Liberal friends (Meyer 127). The other is her husband William Heelis (nicknamed “Willie”), a solicitor and adept golfer who preferred to stay in the golf club with Dr. Parsons. And Heelis-Parsons friendship inspired Potter to depict friendship between Johnny Town-Mouse and Timmy Willie in The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse (Taylor, Whalley, Hobbs and Battrick 158).

The hollow tree where Timmy and Goody store their nuts is also the home of Chippy and his wife. In this story the tree hole that stores the nuts is compared to a

“money-box,” so the stored nuts crystallize stability of bourgeois feminized domesticity. Ironically, it is also these nuts that destroy the already problematic marriage of the chipmunk couple. Flooding into the passages and sitting-room of their house, the nuts disrupt their last domestic peace. Mrs. Chippy Hackee later tells Goody, “my husband . . . has run away and left me” (Potter Tale 36). In fact, what Chippy, who is hostile to his wife, actually plans is to fly from both feminized

domesticity and heterosexual marriage altogether.¹⁴⁹ This is why he becomes the only animal major character who remains unclothed in the whole story. After his wife leaves the nuts-flooded house to search for him, Chippy secretly returns and leads a carefree life of male domesticity. Intriguingly, the tree of feminized domesticity (the storeroom of Timmy and Goody and the home of Chippy and his wife) now turns out to be a residence of a male animal, and later becomes, after Timmy falls in, a

cohabited home for Chippy and Timmy, two fin-de-siècle bourgeois pseudo-bachelors.

In the third part of the second chapter, I have stated the representations of male domesticity in the Tom Brown series and Sherlock Holmes, mentioning episodes such

149 When Goody advises Mrs. Chippy Hackee to go into the tree hole to find Chippy, the latter answers,

“Yes, I could . . . but my husband, Chippy Hackee, bites!” (40) This reveals the hostility of Chippy to her in their marital life.

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as Tom’s nursing of the fevered Arthur or Holmes’ preparing meals for the hungry Watson. In The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes, homoeroticism in the representations of male domesticity is even more apparent, since Chippy displays strong possessiveness.

When Timmy wakes up from his fall, he finds himself “tucked up in a little moss bed”

with ribs broken, and Chippy appears to “hope[] he fe[els] better” (Potter Tale 30).

When Chippy hears Timmy’s coughs and groans, he even lends Timmy a night cap, trying to prevent his friend from catching a cold. Here Potter again does not illustrate Timmy’s red jacket, the symbol of feminized domesticity, because this is a scene where feminized domesticity is overpowered by homosocial male domesticity.

What transforms their homosociality into homoeroticism is the way in which Chippy reactsto the heterosexual tendency of Timmy. WhenChippy hears of Timmy’s description of his fall into the tree hole and the forced separation from Goody, he “laugh[es] and chuckle[s]” (32), disclosing his contempt for heterosexual marriage, as Holmes does in Sherlock Holmes.¹⁵⁰ Ignoring Timmy’s cry, “but how shall I ever get out through that hole unless I thin myself? My wife will be anxious!”

(Potter Tale 32), Chippy keeps feeding Timmy with nuts, making him too fat to get out of the tree hole. By forcing Timmy to stay with him, Chippy achieves homoerotic male cohabitation he desires. Meanwhile, Timmy’s wish to reunite with Goody may suggest his own homophobia. Such representations of homophobia is similar to Watson’s dilemma between his homoerotic friendship with Holmes and his heterosexual marriage with Mary Morstan in Sherlock Holmes.

The most homoerotic scene occurs at the moment when Goody and Mrs.

Chippy Hackee find their husbands singing inside the tree:

150 Holmes in The Sign of Four remarks against heterosexual marriage, claiming that “love is an emotional thing, and whatever emotional is opposed to that true cold reason . . . I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment” when Watson is engaged to Mary Morstan (Vol I 235).

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Down below there was a noise of nut crackers, and a fat squirrel voice and a thin squirrel voice were singing together—

“My little old man and I fell out, How shall we bring this matter about?

Bring it about as well as you can, And get you gone, you little old man!

… For the diddlum day Day diddle dum di!

Day diddle diddle dum day!” (Potter Tale 38, 40)

The part “[m]y little old man and I fell out . . . you little old man” is a poem in Andrew Lang’s The Nursery Rhyme Book. It reads: “[m]y little old man and I fell out;/ I'll tell you what 'twas all about:/ I had money, and he had none,/ And that's the way the row begun” (268). In the original version, this nursery rhyme describes the financial clashes between two men; in the Potterian version, however, the clashes are about homoerotic friendship in male cohabitation. As Holmes wants Watson to live with him rather than to go out for a wife, Chippy also wants Timmy to stay, while Timmy, who grows fatter, has no choice but to cohabit with him. Though Chippy sings “get you gone” with Timmy, since that they do not know their wives are listening outside, Chippy actually does not want to get his friend out but wishes this cohabitation to last forever.

Likewise, the part “For the diddlum day . . . diddle dum day” can be traced back to an American folksong, Jake Heggies’ “The Leather-Winged Bat,” inspired by an old English song collected by Francis Child and published in the late-Victorian era in Child Ballads. The poem reads,

Hi, said the little old leather-winged bat, I will tell you the reason that,

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The reason that I fly in the night:

I've lost my heart's delight.

High-oh day-oh diddle-oh dum, High-oh day-oh diddle-oh day High-oh day-oh diddle-oh dum Diddle Diddle dum! Dah day oh...¹⁵¹

Hi, said the woodpecker sittin' on the fence, Once I caught me a handsome wench, She got sassy and from me fled,

and ever since then: my head's been red!*

Hi, said the bluebird as he flew, Once I caught me a young girl, too, She got sassy and wanted to go-- So I tied a new string to my bow.*

Hi, said the robin as he flew,

When I was a young man, I'd court, too, If a one didn't love me, the other one would, Now, don't you think my notion's good?*

The original song was often sung by woodpeckers and miners in the Victorian era. It focuses on their courtship for the girls, their failures, and their mutual comforts by

151 The part “High-oh day . . . Dah day oh…” will be repeated thrice after the following stanzas, so I marks it as “*” whenever it is repeated.

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singing. Hence, it suggests an all-male atmosphere. This to a certain extent echoes male homoeroticism in Timmy-Chippy relationship, probably explaining why Potter adapts this song in The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes.

Together, Timmy and Chippy cohabit with male domesticity. Such cohabitation in Edwardian context can be seen as an euphemism of homosexual relationship.¹⁵² This definition of cohabitation may explain why Potter narrates Timmy and Chippy as

“a fat squirrel and a thin squirrel” (38) instead of a squirrel and a chipmunk. Thus, male domesticity in the late-Victorian and the Edwardian era almost belonged to male homosexual couples only (Brady 200-1).¹⁵³ Since there is no further evidence of homosexuality in Timmy-Chippy relationship, at least I can make sure homoeroticism in their cohabitation, which the homophobic British society then could not endure.

3.3 Homophobia: A Return to Heterosexual “Normalcy”

To dissect the representations of homophobia, which eventually causes the separation of Chippy and Timmy at the end of The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes, I first explain the coinage of homosexuality and the origin of homophobia in Britain. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the sexual intercourse among men was not called

“homosexuality” but “sodomy,” and the British sodomites had been convicted of death penalty until 1861 (Foldy 81). Meanwhile, not until 1892 in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis had the term “homosexuality” entered English, though it was coined in 1869 by Hungarian writer Karoly Benkert and used in the Continent (Brady 11; Showalter 171). From 1861 to 1892, therefore, there was only “sexual inversion”

instead of homosexual phenomena, and it was hard to identify whether a man did a

152 For example, when Edward Carpenter, one of the homosexual pioneers in Britain, cohabited with his working-class lover Merrill in 1898, all his friends considered male domesticity with absence of women was against nature, for the Victorian beliefs suggested that men needed wives or females to manage domestic affairs for them.

153 The Victorians and the Edwardians’ definition of wife was an “female valet, who is to wait upon him. . . live for the sole purpose of seeing him well-fed, well-lodged, and well-pleased” (Flanders 232).

This evidences inevitability of female presence in households at that time. This is why in note 152 Carpenter’s friends viewed his life of male domesticity with Merrill as being against nature.

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homosexual act through his conversation, writing or photograph with other men (Brady 11).

Even after the term “homosexuality” is introduced into Britain, at first it was merely categorized as an insanity or a disease, which could be cured while being discovered in the early period (for example, when men preferred to cross-dressing) (Foldy 83). Apart from this, despite the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), which

“prohibited any male person from committing in public or private . . . any act of indecency with another male person” (Arata 56), the parliament had been unwillingly to enact the specific punishment of such “indecency” until the 1895 trials of Oscar Wilde.¹⁵⁴ Hence, the definition of sexual relationship among the Victorian

aristocratic and bourgeois men remained vague before the late-Victorian era, which brought about its popularity in some spaces in the West End of London (Kaplan 19).

As I have indicated in the previous chapters, these spaces included the Turkish bath houses and the gentleman’s clubs (particularly “Molly clubs”),¹⁵⁵ where people celebrated male decadent aesthetes before the doomed 1895.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was the most famous decadent aesthete, due to not only his claim, “art for art’s sake” but his tragic end of imprisonment and exile for sexual indecency, thereby making male decadence “a fin-de-siècle euphemism for homosexuality” (Showalter 171). Intriguingly, Doyle, regardless of his (and Holmes’) reputation as a Victorian masculine paradigm, was a friend of Wilde,¹⁵⁶ and even

154 This may be because the Victorian sexologists viewed sex between men as a natural aberration instead of a crime (Brady 14).

155 The Victorian “Molly clubs” in London could be traced from the early eighteenth century. In

“Molly clubs” dozens of cross-dressed men danced, kissed, caressed, hugged, and had sexual intercourse (with) one another. They sometimes walked on the streets (the Strand, the Quadrant, Holborn, Charing Cross, Fleet Street, etc.) to challenge the conventional gendered construction and tempted the male passers-by (Kaplan 20-1).

156 Doyle and Wilde met in 1889 for writing stories for Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine and became friends. In 1890 Doyle published The Sign of Four, a story noted for Holmes’ misogynism and jealousy for Watson’s engagement, while Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray, his classic homoerotic work of celebrating male beauty as superior to femininity (Arata 144).

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among the few who dared defend Wilde after Wilde was imprisoned (Arata 219).

Thus, as I have broached in the introduction, representations of male decadence can be found in the characteristics of Holmes in Sherlock Holmes. For instance, he

“loath[es] every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, . . . alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition” (Vol I 239).¹⁵⁷ He plays the

Stradivarius violin in A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four and The Mazarin Stone. He attends musical concerts or operas with Watson in A Study in Scarlet, The Red-headed League, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Red Circle. As the offspring of Vernet, the French artist, he displays an artistic taste in The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear. Also, he uses “art for art’s sake” to describe his detective career in The Copper Beeches, The Valley of Fear, Black Peter, The Red Circle, The Dying

Detective, Thor Bridge and The Retired Colourman. These clues add homoerotic overtones to Holmes and his friendship with Watson.

In 1895, however, Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas brought about his fall. In Wilde’s trials, Sir Edward Carson (Queensberry’s attorney) blurred the boundary between literary works (Wildes’ letters and The Picture of Dorian Gray) and reality by linking effeminate aestheticism of Wilde with homosexuality. He described Wilde as a corrupted, decadent old man who seduced innocent youths.

Though Wilde defended the justice of homosexuality by tracing back to its Biblical and Hellenistic origin,¹⁵⁸ the public was persuaded by the words of Edward Carson,

157 Dick Riley and Pan McAllister indicate that the Victorian male decadence was symbolized by opium, morphine and cocaine (86-9). Watson witnesses that Holmes thrice a day uses cocaine and morphine in The Sign of Four, and complains Holmes’ addiction in A Scandal in Bohemia and The Engineer’s Thumb. In Missing Three-Quarter Watson states that he has helped Holmes quit the drug mania, yet he knows that “the fiend [addiction] [i]s not dead but sleeping” and “the sleep [i]s a light one and the wakening near when in periods of idleness” (Vol I 988). In fact, Holmes resumes his cocaine addiction later in this case.

158 Wilde claims that “[t]he love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection . . . as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect” (Kaplan 224). John Addington Symonds in his “A Problem in Greek Ethics”

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which led to both the two-year incarceration of Wilde and the turn-of-the-century homophobia in Britain (Kaplan 226-7).

Wilde’s trials left such a great homophobic impact on Britain that the literary works concerning homosexuality, including the memoir of Tennyson, of Symonds, and Carpenter’s series Love’s Coming of Age, were edited before or withdrawn from publication.¹⁵⁹ What is worse, as I have stated in the introduction, romantic male friendship without homosexuality, which had aroused no suspicion, was publicly disallowed after 1895, since any emotional disclosure or physical intimacy between men was then interpreted as a sexual one (Nardi 2). Without the blood link family members provided, close male friends hardly maintained their friendship if one of them got married. Apart from this, having emotional and physical intimacy with a wife would be more acceptable than with a same-sex friend (Nardi 120-1).

With the above studies in homosexuality and homophobia, in the following pages I am going to analyze the collapse of homoerotic cohabitation in the inevitable return of Chippy and Timmy to heterosexual relationship in the Edwardian

homophobic context. I will also provide the similar representations of homophobic

homophobic context. I will also provide the similar representations of homophobic