Table Of ContentAnn Heilmann
Neo-/Victorian Biographilia
James Miranda Barry
&
AA SSttuuddyy iinn TTrraannssggeennddeerr && TTrraannssggeennrree
Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James
Miranda Barry
Ann Heilmann
Neo-/Victorian
Biographilia and James
Miranda Barry
A Study in Transgender and Transgenre
Ann Heilmann
Cardiff University
Cardiff, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-71385-4 ISBN 978-3-319-71386-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71386-1
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Cover illustration: Aspect, Old illustration depicting Capetown in South Africa in 1880,
drawn by J. Vanione in Emil Holub’s Seven Years in South Africa, published in Vienna, 1881,
Shutterstock Standard Licence, image ID 80580226. Foreground: Portrait of Dr James
Barry, reproduced courtesy of Western Cape Archives and Records Service, Cape Town,
South Africa (reference number M774). Design by Paul de Bruin, Limelight Design.
Printed on acid-free paper
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v
P
reface
This book took shape a civilisation ago. It was 2015, and James Barry had
been born into his afterlives a century and a half earlier. The British Empire
had long dissolved, or so it seemed. I enjoyed my trans-European, hybrid
Continental-British identity even more than Barry appears to have enjoyed
his hybrid/transgender self. Having grown up in a firmly European cul-
ture, I had turned into a committed internationalist during my university
years and especially my studies abroad. My elective affinities with British
culture and Anglophone literatures, above all my passion for the Victorians
and the first women’s movement had long settled me in my second home
country, where I had by then lived and worked for the longer part of my
life. Academically, I had moved across several disciplines (Modern
Languages, Women’s Studies, English Literature) and different universi-
ties in two of the four nations of the UK as it is currently constituted.
Perhaps it was this experience of straddling languages, cultures, nationali-
ties, disciplines, and (in intellectual, imaginative ways) time periods that
drew me to Barry. But it was not until 2016, when completing the first
draft of my book, that I started to share Barry’s sense of utter alienation
and anger in the face of the enormity of the irresponsibility and dishonesty
of the prevailing powers. That is when I realized that the world and values
I had considered to be unassailable and self-evident had ceased to exist.
Raised in Ireland, educated in Scotland, and trained in England, Barry
crossed several continents in his postings to multiple territories (the Cape
Peninsula, Mauritius, the West Indies, St Helena, Malta, Corfu and Canada).
In doing so, he bestowed dignity on the position of citizen of the world
before this identity came to be disparaged as ‘unpatriotic’ and subversive
vii
viii PREFACE
in the words of a (then) unelected Prime Minister. As a medical officer of
the British army, Barry operated from within, yet in his unswerving
defence of the rights of Othered individuals and groups of people
remained resistant to the imperial mindset, a worldview that has resur-
faced with such atavistic force in our own time. When he saw indigenous
female patients subjected to abuse by male hospital attendants, he
appointed a black matron. Incandescent, he stepped in to stop the institu-
tionalized brutalization of prisoners and leprosy sufferers. It was this
determination to call out injustice, cruelty, corruption and professional
misconduct wherever it occurred that led to his court-martial, from which
he emerged fully vindicated. If he were to live today, Barry would scoff at
the mindlessness (and worse) of those who want to Make Us Great Again
and Take Back Control by breaking away from our nearest neighbours and
our shared histories and rights cultures to return to the toxic delusions and
violations of a Glorious Empire. He would lobby for sheltering children
displaced by war and stand up against hate speech, refugee vilification,
detention camps, night-time deportations, ethnically motivated family
partition and racialized travel bans. He would be appalled by the ethical,
intellectual and emotional impoverishment and rising fundamentalism at
the heart of our brave new world. His life was a political statement. So is
ours, and the afterworld will judge us.
Cardiff, UK Ann Heilmann
29 March 2017
a
cknowledgements
It is a convention of James Barry life-writing to refer to the irresistible
allure of this extraordinary personality and story: once encountered, so the
trope goes, they possess and haunt the biographilist for evermore. Barry,
as I explore in this book, touches a nerve in our thinking about sex and
gender. While the roots of my interest go back to my early work on
Victorian feminism, in particular the New Woman and fin-de-siècle cross-
dressing narratives, my entanglement with Barry himself began with
Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry and the research into biographies
and earlier biofictions that it inspired, resulting in a conference paper on
‘Doctored Lives’ in 2005. Since this coincided with a change of post, the
new curriculum took over, and I did not get back to Barry until one of my
PhD students devoted part of a chapter of her thesis on ‘Neo-Victorian
Impersonations’ on the subject; I am grateful to Allison Neal for the long
conversations we had, not least about the tricky question of pronouns.
Another professional move inspired me to return to my expanding Barry
archive in 2012 for a plenary lecture at a workshop on ‘Gender, Genre and
Identity’; this focused my attention on the conceptual connections
between Barry’s gender crossing and the genre crossings of Barry life-
writing. By then I knew the subject deserved further development, but
again other demands and commitments intervened. That is why, when I
started preparing a keynote in 2015, I decided that this time I would write
the article before the actual paper – and ended up with 18,000 words.
When following the conference I presented my work-in-progress to col-
leagues, hoping for advice on how to condense the over-long essay, the
unanimous suggestion was to extend it into a short book. In the drafting
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
process, as more and more source material caught my notice, this project
grew into the current monograph. It is tempting to conjure up parallels
with Barry himself: maybe that’s how it all started, as a temporary adven-
ture, and then it became the life. But that, of course, would mean indulg-
ing in the representational self-constructions of biographiliacs that this
study seeks to investigate.
Writing this book became an adventure – and like an adventure it was
beset with difficulties, predominantly those that pertain to mystery tales.
For just as Barry remains elusive as a personality, so does some of the early
source material. Madeline’s Mystery (1882), Mary Braddon’s single-
volume edition of Ebenezer Rogers’s rambling three-decker A Modern
Sphinx (1881), proved particularly hard to track down, until, with the aid
of Janine Hatter and the Mary Braddon Society, I found one of two extant
library copies at the Harry Ransom Center (which kindly sent me the
novel in digitized format). An even greater mystery arose around George
Edwin Marvell’s story ‘The Mystery of the Kapok Doctor’, published in
the Cape Times Christmas Annual of 1904, an issue that is not held in the
British Library and that a worldwide inter-library loan search failed to
discover; thanks to Mark Llewellyn it was subsequently located in the
National Library of South Africa. Following the complex histories of pub-
lishing houses on their journey of regrouping, merging and being absorbed
into one another made the permissions process in some cases a detective
story in its own right. Final complications involved tracing the where-
abouts of the one Barry portrait I knew my book could not forego because,
in contradistinction to all other pictorial representations, it features a
serenely self-assured man at the culmination point of his professional suc-
cess. When later struggling to arrive at the best design for my book cover,
I realized that representing the subject (and subject matter) was not quite
as ‘straight’ as I had imagined. Many thanks go to Megen de Bruin-Molé
for putting me in touch with Paul de Bruin, Limelight Design; I am
tremendously grateful to him for making the trans/formation possible.
It was Paul who, responsive to my explanations, arrived at the ‘perfect’
representational play on this book’s reflections of (and on) the cultural
processes of inflecting Barry’s story through the pictorial traces of his
material body and this body’s performances. The idea was to depict Barry
as a man eminently comfortable in his body against a Cape Town and
Table Mountain background, while at the same time visualizing the tropes
of Barry life-writing in the doubling and mirrored ghosting of the figure
of the transcender – hence the opening illustration to this book.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT S xi
Countless further individuals not mentioned above and also institu-
tions assisted me in researching and writing this book. I want to begin by
thanking Cardiff University and the School of English, Communication
and Philosophy for sabbatical leave awarded for the autumn semester of
2015–16, when a first part-draft of the book was written. In addition to
the regular staff research budget the School’s Strategic Research and
Research Innovation funds offered generous support for conferences,
engagement opportunities, archival trips, digital resource acquisition and
permissions and reproductions arrangements across a number of years. Of
the many people who made this book possible I am most grateful to my
colleagues at Cardiff who gave invaluable hands-on advice on the initial
draft-in-progress – Sophie Coulombeau, Jane Moore, Becky Munford –
and who read, copy-edited and provided comprehensive feedback on later
incarnations of the full manuscript: Catherine Butler, Holly Furneaux and
Martin Willis. Their comments ranged from Dickens’s potential involve-
ment in the composition of the first biostory to women in trousers and
from Laqueur’s one and two-sex theories and nineteenth-century science
to trans narratives. I also benefited tremendously from the wide-ranging
support of colleagues from further afield – Linda Anderson, Kate Mitchell
and Nathalie Saudo-Welby – who all read the manuscript and offered
enormously helpful suggestions; many thanks in particular to Nathalie for
her astute comments and assistance with translations from the French.
Neil Badmington and Damian Walford Davies inspired me by example to
experiment with creative openings and to cultivate the aesthetics of style;
any shortcomings are my responsibility only. Jenny Hulin expertly han-
dled incoming research admin to shield me from work flows in the most
intense period of finalizing the book. Warm thanks go to Angela V. John
for her serendipiditous rediscovery of a 1988 article that alerted me in the
final revision stage to Jean Binnie’s 1988 biodrama Colours, a play that
would otherwise have escaped my notice. Mel Kohlke was a constant well-
spring of information generously shared and vibrant stimulus for exchange
of ideas on neo-Victorian life-writing; her essay-collection on Neo-
Victorian Biofiction (co-edited with Christian Gutleben in the Brill
imprint) is much-awaited. Rachel Carroll’s excellent book on Transgender
and the Literary Imagination (Edinburgh University Press) was com-
pleted just in time for me to consult it during the proofing stage of mine;
I am grateful to Rachel and the publisher for giving me access to the
manuscript. Equally, thanks go to Kirsti Bohata for drawing my attention
to Kate Milsom’s No Man’s Land exhibition, which includes a (2017)
