Yesterday Vox printed I Love the Victorian Era. So I Decided to Live in It, an essay by Sarah Chrisman, a woman who has turned her life (and her husband’s) into an elaborate Victorian-era cosplay/roleplay. Because it includes lines like “Gabriel said watching me grow accustomed to Victorian clothes was like seeing me blossom into my true self,” the internet predictably went bonkers.
A lot of questions spring to mind about Chrisman’s decision to live as a Victorian, particularly since she’s far more specific about the modern conveniences she’s giving up than which ones she’s holding onto. Has she forsaken smoke detectors? Antibiotics? ATMs? What’s her stance on fluoride toothpaste? Does she take public transportation? How do they handle birth control? As I suggested on Twitter yesterday afternoon, you can’t actually live like a Victorian in 2015, because our society isn’t a Victorian society, and Chrisman’s project of mashing up the technologies of today with those of the Gilded Age — she prints out old newspapers from the internet to read in the tub! — marks her definitively as an enthusiastic citizen of our own miraculous age.
Chrisman and her husband are white, and the simulacrum of Victorian life they’ve chosen to enter is a decidedly upper-class one (though without the extensive staff her forbears would have enjoyed — kerosene has gotten cheaper since 1890, but servants have become a lot more expensive, what with minimum wage laws and child labor regulations and so on). This gave rise to another, more pointed, set of questions yesterday: Does Chrisman’s nostalgia extend to lynching? To eugenics? Phrenology? And what about Chrisman’s own role in society — what about the advances the last 125 years have brought to women? Does she want to throw those away too?
It turns out she kind of does.
Chrisman wrote a book a couple of years ago about her experiences as a Victoriankin, and though it’s mostly about corsets and how everybody’s a bunch of jerks for not understanding how awesome they are, she does find time in its pages to share her views on the social environment of the fin de siècle, and on that era’s women’s rights movement specifically.
Chrisman isn’t a big fan of the suffragettes, whom she considers violent and uncouth, and she’s unimpressed with the franchise itself. (She voted Gore in 2000, and regards that experience as an indication that Votes For Women have been oversold as a liberatory development.) As for more contemporary feminism, she writes that
“the really important work was done a long time ago, and a lot of what people have been trying to do more recently has been sort of counterproductive. I think that in a lot of the efforts that women have made to try to prove they’re the same as men, a lot of the power that women used to have has gotten lost along the way … in the past there was a lot better understanding that women can be different than men and still be very powerful.”
So there’s that.
The words “child labor” are missing from Chrisman’s book, as are “tuberculosis,” “pellagra,” and “cholera.” She mentions racism twice — once in the course of bemoaning the fact that modern audiences who are sophisticated enough to reject the racial caricatures of Gone With the Wind are hoodwinked by its calumnies against corsetry. (In another passage she compares myths about corsets’ ill effects to “the idea … that Jews eat babies.”)
But it’s the second reference to racism in her book that reveals her worldview. “Those who denounce contemporary cultures are denounced as xenophobes or racists,” she writes, “yet we have no word for those who treat the cultures of the past in this same manner.” She continues: “It is difficult for many people to grasp that lifestyles may have been different in the past, and yet still completely satisfactory to those living them.”
This is cultural relativism of the most simpleminded sort — an assertion of cultural equality via an erasure of cultural difference. (At one point in the book she denies that “any given generation or culture is truly either more or less prudish than any other.) And it cuts against the grain of her larger argument, too — if it’s bigotry to denounce aspects of past cultures, surely it’s also bigotry to denounce the values and habits of the present day that she herself repudiates.
Chrisman’s essay yesterday was mocked as a manifestation of privilege — the privilege of a woman who could look back at an era marked by tremendous suffering and injustice and see only her imagined self, happily occupying a position of wealth and comfort. As her book demonstrates, that solipsism wasn’t just a feature of the essay — it pervades her understanding of the era she longs for.
Chrisman argues that we should view the Victorian era a “completely satisfactory” time for those who lived through it, but of course that era wasn’t completely satisfactory, and of course no era is. The defects of the present day are acutely visible — and endlessly irritating — to her, while the defects of the past are effortlessly erased.
Because today, as much as she enjoys pretending otherwise, is where she lives.
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September 10, 2015 at 10:56 am
Lavender Blume
“the really important work was done a long time ago”
Okay, so this erases all of the feminist work that women of colour have done and all the work that continues to be done today. Stupid. But this:
“a lot of what people have been trying to do more recently has been sort of counterproductive. I think that in a lot of the efforts that women have made to try to prove they’re the same as men, a lot of the power that women used to have has gotten lost along the way … in the past there was a lot better understanding that women can be different than men and still be very powerful.”
She’s right. Liberal feminism is so focused on women having the same rights as men that what gets lost in the discourse is an acknowledgement that setting the status of women against a male standard is inherently limiting. Equal pay, etc. is important but so are abortion and other issues specific to women. We are different. Women need liberation, not inclusion in a system that’s designed by and for men. We don’t have to go out of our way to prove that everything Chrisman says is wrong.
September 10, 2015 at 12:57 pm
literally who
i think you should be more tolerant, it’s not that she harms anyone with her life style
September 10, 2015 at 3:30 pm
One Thing We Can Learn from the Modern-Day Victorian Couple : We All Live Downstream
[…] have many excellent criticisms of the essay that I agree with, most of which center around privilege and class. The […]
September 10, 2015 at 3:55 pm
Angus Johnston
Lavender, I think the key passages from that quote are “a lot of the power that women used to have has gotten lost” and “there was a lot better understanding that women can be different than men and still be very powerful.” She’s not talking about the importance of including gender-specific planks in a liberation platform, she’s arguing that modern feminism represents an abandonment of the “power” that women wielded in the US in the late 1800s.
September 10, 2015 at 3:56 pm
Hershele Ostropoler
If you consider the only true or valid kind of feminism to be the kind seeking what 19th-century feminists wanted, it makes sence that you think the important battles have been won. Mary Wollstonecraft would be quite happy with today’s society, provided she didn’t look too closely.
Of course, anti-feminists often say they support Wollstonecraft and her peers, in much the same way racists of a certain stripe praise King nowadays.
September 10, 2015 at 9:09 pm
Aesthetics and Ideology | Oi! Spaceman: A Doctor Who Love Story (The Blog)
[…] a bit more context about herself and her criticisms. In that second Storify, Krisandry links to a blog post by Angus Johnson of Student Activism which is worth reading, and several of his tweets in which he […]
September 10, 2015 at 11:09 pm
Kevin T. Keith
I have a friend who actually lives in the town this woman lives in. I forwarded her the article when I came across it today. She describes Port Townsend as a kind of hotbed of self-consciously “unique” individuals – there’s a “Feral Pagan” community, a lot of off-gridders, an annual steampunk festival, a whole community of people who build and ride weird bicycles (she says Victorian pennyfarthing bikes are looked down on as too mainstream) . . . and more. The town gets a lot of tourist money from its Ren-Fair reputation.
She says the author of this article is well-known around town and not notably weirder than most people there, except for her corset obsession.
September 11, 2015 at 2:34 pm
anonymous
This is one of the things that drives me mad about identity politics. If you’re a member of an established minority, your difference counts. If you’re just eccentric or psychologically-different or your niche identity is too small or clashes with more established identities, the identity politician will respond to you the same dismissal, the same realist epistemology, the same contempt for your identity that the mainstream displays to you – and to the larger, better-known identity-groups.
For example, time is treated as a realist absolute: someone lives in the present, whether they like it or not. This is exactly the same argument that is used in other kinds of essentialism – e.g. to declare trans* people’s identities illegitimate because they “are” a man or a woman (based on bodily characteristics) whether they like it or not. The present is a miracle which is validated by its amazing technologies, medicine and so on. This is the same argument used to justify exterminating indigenous people both in the past and today, because they don’t fit into ‘modern’ life. It’s the argument used to justify forced ‘modernisation’ of non-western societies and the condemnation of Muslims.
Ultimately the key move of identity politics is to deny hybridity, to deny becoming-other, to deny secession from the mainstream, because the totality of the system is deemed absolute and unavoidable (we still have “privilege”, whether we exercise it or not; we’re still “inside”, even if we form drop-out communities; etc). The logic of this political position is that the system cannot be changed, so it is no wonder that identity politics degenerates into reformism, and undermines the real emergence of lived alternatives – witness the attacks on Occupy, CrimethInc, dropout culture and so on.
Identity politics is not liberation from social oppression. It is simply the replacement of one totalising normativity and etiquette with another, of one set of absolute categories and hierarchies with another. The hostility directed towards a harmless eccentric whose worst offence is to libidinally invest history in a nonstandard way is proof of the basically totalitarian logic of identity politics.
September 11, 2015 at 3:32 pm
Lois Matelan
I do not object to the lifestyle she chooses to live (not my right to do so, provided she acquiesces to the strictures of law) I DO object to the tone of her article, which seems to seek to require that I APPROVE OF her lifestyle (my right not to do so.) I do not approve, because I do not believe it to be either authentic or rational for her to cherrypick certain facets of white upper-class life of the late nineteenth century and then claim to be in any sense truly Victorian.
September 11, 2015 at 3:35 pm
LifeofMisAdventure (@JlnFrancisco)
Thanks, internet! Whenever I need a reminder people who complain about identity politics typically have no idea what oppression means or is, you always deliver.
September 11, 2015 at 7:41 pm
anonymous
Identity politics = essentialism. It is a dogma of identity politics that only members of authentically oppressed groups can be oppressed, or know what oppression is. For this very reason, supporters of identity politics cannot apply a consistent definition or theory of oppression, but simply resort to arbitrary ingroup-outgroup distinctions and attempts to shut down other viewpoints because they “just don’t understand”. Opponents of identity politics carry on confirming these suspicions of ‘not understanding’ by the simple expedient of continuing to disagree.
Unfortunately for identitarians, logic doesn’t work that way. If the world is made up of real, objective things, then they are real and objective whether their existence is racist/sexist or not, and whether admitting it is racist/sexist or not. If, on the other hand, the world is not made up of real, objective things but varies with standpoint and positionality, then it’s not possible to distinguish between really and not-really oppressed groups, people who do and don’t “get it”, etc.
As far as I’m concerned, people telling you what to do, how to live, what to think or say, using violence or trickery or structural power or silencing discourses or limiting someone’s opportunities to make them live the way they want or do or say what they want, is oppression. Identity politics does not free people from oppression because it imposes an alternative dogma of what we should think and do and how we should live, and uses the usual means of silencing, exclusion, discursive denial (e.g. ‘not authentic’), and even violence and censorship to suppress anything outside its narrow definition of authenticity. It seeks liberation for abstract categories, and therefore ends up oppressing real people. Just because a group is oppressed at one point in time, does not prevent their becoming oppressors the moment they have political power. Look what happened in Palestine, when the oppressed Jews made their own state. Look what happened in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when the Red Guards started enforcing hierarchies of underprivilege. Look what happened when the Hutu turned on the ruling Tutsi in Rwanda. Identity politics cannot end oppression because it simply inverts oppression, using the same devices as other oppressive regimes – epistemic privilege, denial of difference and recourse to exclusion and violence to silence dissent. This absurd attack on someone who chooses to live differently from you is further proof of this fact – a world ruled by identity politics apparatchiks would be no more open to free becoming than is today’s capitalist world.
A passionate attachment to an idealised virtual or archetypal image of the Victorian era is just as much a legitimate pursuit of one’s desire and becoming as any other personal truth. Maybe this woman is wrong to conflate the virtual image with an actual history, or maybe she’s just taking the history in a different direction. Simply following her own path does not make her ‘racist’, ‘sexist’. You may think she’s ‘privileged’, but that doesn’t mean she’s oppressing you (it’s not her fault a cop picks on you or a boss won’t hire you). In fact, if she’s got what’s usually mis-termed a mental illness, she’s probably many times more oppressed than you are.
And by the way, you’ve no idea what my life has been like or even what my positionality is, so don’t you dare say I don’t understand oppression.
September 13, 2015 at 7:04 am
The Week in Review: September 13th, 2015 | The Literary Omnivore
[…] how about that lady who lives in that elaborate Victorian roleplay, eh? Historian Angus Johnston looks into the books she’s written on the subject and, surprise, she’s …. And Rebecca Onion at Slate pokes holes in the concept of being able to access the mental landscape […]
September 14, 2015 at 11:38 pm
Christopher Hazell
Okay, so, here’s a question:
Do people realize that ripping apart some dumb Vox article is itself an expression of privilege?
Victorian times may have been hard for a lot of people, but the Twitter Epoch ain’t exactly brilliant for poor people and minorities, either. You sit there enjoying your comfortable job and your laptop and education and the leisure time to rip on dumb Vox articles without acknowledging that much of what you have comes from sweatshop labor, and that when you spend your time ripping on one self-absorbed woman from Washington you are doing approximately jack and shit to address any of the structural problems plaguing the disenfranchised people of your own time.
Actually, real talk: How much do you think this Victorian lifestyle does to promote sweat-shop labor and unsustainable and dangerous extraction of limited resources? Do you think this couple gives more or less money to unscrupulous, unsustainable businesses than J. Average Twitteruser?
Look, very few of us have what it takes to be saints; we don’t have what it takes to spend every penny on the poor and devote all our free time to charity work. Sometimes we just want to shut out the world and play with our toys. Her toys are pretty dresses and dumb looking bicycles. A lot of the rest of us play with plastic electronics and twitter jokes, and I want you to tell me with a straight face that the latter are more moral than the former.
Not that Chrisman’s article is very good; it’s mostly just a list of cool shit she owns, like, great, you have too much money and you like pretty dresses. What am I supposed to do with that?
Like, even if I were a Victorian cosplay enthusiast, very little in that article delves into the mechanics or reality of owning that stuff. I don’t get a sense of what would help me choose a fountain pen or the pitfalls to watch out or where to find this stuff. There’s very little of the detail that I get from most writing by nerdy hobbyists.
September 14, 2015 at 11:50 pm
Angus Johnston
Christopher, I’m a historian. Talking about how we understand the past and what uses we make of it is kind of my thing.
October 14, 2015 at 1:26 pm
bookworm659
I am a fan of Victorian culture as well but I guess I simply chose to ignore the negative points and only wish to emulate and absorb the positive ones. But, to start living the Victorian life is I think taking it a bit far!