Victorian Latitude: Lifewriting, Blogs and Technology

When I was in the second grade, I had three crushes:

#1: Justine Bateman from Family Ties – sadly, this is not my autographed picture, nor do I own one.

#2: Jem from Jem and the Holograms – I wasn’t allowed to watch Jem, which made her all the more intriguing.

#3: Carrie from Mrs. Steinhook’s second grade class.

Looking back on my childhood, I wonder if my parents picked up on the fact that I wasn’t liking boys “the way I was supposed to” and were consciously trying to steer me toward them. My dad used to weirdly tease me about liking the men on the TV shows we watched. He would screech in a high-pitched voice, “Jillian’s in love with MacGyver,” or when watching Family Ties, “Jillian wants to have sex with Michael J. Fox” (emphasis mine). I was seven years old and didn’t really understand what sex was, but I knew enough to be embarrassed. Eventually my dad grabbed me by the shoulders and told me that if ever turned out to be gay, he’d murder me. That he didn’t say “kill,” and used the word “murder” felt more real to my child’s brain. The fact that he physically abused me and my brother only added to the weight of his words. I felt like it could happen.

Then I read Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” last semester for the first time and felt exhilarated. The notion of compulsory heterosexuality was alive and well in my head, but I never had the words to articulate it. There’s always been something missing. I was never quite homosexual, never quite heterosexual, but my social relationship lifestyle is, by heteronormative standards, ordinary. So the idea of a lesbian continuum, which could include me (a woman who ended up marrying a guy), and all women, was wonderful to contemplate in a Utopian sense. Nonetheless, even though the phrase “compulsory heterosexuality” gave me words with which to describe the sinewy underpinnings of my childhood, I still felt like there was something missing. An idea like quicksilver–rolling around in beads, poisonous to the mind, so never fully explored: How am I supposed to identify? Who am I?

I feel like Sharon Marcus inspired an idea that could put words to that slipperiness. Marcus admits that she, too, was so ensconced in Rich’s theoreom at first that it was hard for her to break free of that framework. “As Adrienne Rich influentially argued, women’s friendships and lesbian sexual bonds both defy “compulsory heterosexuality.” The move to valorize women’s friendships as a subset of lesbianism and as a subversion of gender norms continues to dominant the paradigm” (29). Instead, where most scholars/critics of the Victorian era see repression, and perhaps accuse women of complying with that repression, Marcus sees freedom in the ordinary: in friendships and in lifewriting. “The Victorian gender system, however strict its constraints, provided women latitude through female friendships, giving them room to roam without radically changing the normative rules governing gender difference” (27). I find it a little disheartening that today, in this world that I inhabit, this kind of lateral movement feels impossible, and I started to wonder why.

I started to think about blogs and lifewriting, and the similarities shared between the two. Sharon Marcus defines lifewriting as “the heterogeneous array of published, privately printed, and unpublished diaries, correspondence, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, reminiscences, and recollections that Victorians and their descendants had a prodigious appetite for reading and writing” (33). She goes on to say that,”Some diarists even explicitly wrote for others, sharing their journals with readers in the present and addressing them to private and public audiences in the future” (35). Funny that. It sounds like a definition for blogs. So I started to wonder about the proliferation of blogging and how did this come to be possible? Sure, with the formation of diary hosting sites like WordPress, LiveJournal and Xanga, the availability of blogs became accessible to the common user not fluent in languages of HTML or CSS. But I am looking for a more social/cultural answer.

Granted, I don’t know as much about the kind of technologies available during the Victorian period–most of my knowledge comes from a small amount of research I did for a Dracula paper I wrote as an undergrad, so my knowledge is dusty and limited at best. But I do know they didn’t have computers (ha!). And with computers came binary and thinking in binary oppositions. 011001. I realize the differentiation of masculine and feminine spheres throws a kink in my grand scheme for theoretical world domination, but without computers, could we have Hélène Cixous’s Newly Born Woman or Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto? Judith Butler says that heterosexuality (0) is predicated on the notion that there is a homosexuality (1), but without binary or different spheres would there be differences between homosexual and heterosexual?

So yes, the Victorians lived before the Digital Age, but they had different spheres, however I think spheres is a more forgiving (read: elastic) theory than binary.

So I wonder if there was no binary, would sexuality be more lateral?

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Fun With Binary Here