LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender

in the Nineteenth-Century Archives

Simon Joyce
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/lgbt-victorians-sexuality-and-gender-in-the-nineteenth
-century-archives-simon-joyce/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in

Nineteenth Century Britain Lawrence Goldman

https://ebookmass.com/product/victorians-and-numbers-statistics-
and-society-in-nineteenth-century-britain-lawrence-goldman/

Affect, Gender and Sexuality in Latin America Cecilia

Macón

https://ebookmass.com/product/affect-gender-and-sexuality-in-
latin-america-cecilia-macon/

Scholarly Virtues in Nineteenth-Century Sciences and

Humanities

https://ebookmass.com/product/scholarly-virtues-in-nineteenth-
century-sciences-and-humanities/

Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the

Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas

https://ebookmass.com/product/yemoja-gender-sexuality-and-
creativity-in-the-latina-o-and-afro-atlantic-diasporas/
Discovering Human Sexuality 4th Edition Simon Levay

https://ebookmass.com/product/discovering-human-sexuality-4th-
edition-simon-levay/

Discovering Human Sexuality 4th Edition Simon Levay

https://ebookmass.com/product/discovering-human-sexuality-4th-
edition-simon-levay-2/

Tactical Publishing: Using Senses, Software, and

Archives in the Twenty-First Century Alessandro
Ludovico

https://ebookmass.com/product/tactical-publishing-using-senses-
software-and-archives-in-the-twenty-first-century-alessandro-
ludovico/

Gender and Sexuality in Stoic Philosophy 1st Edition

Malin Grahn-Wilder (Auth.)

https://ebookmass.com/product/gender-and-sexuality-in-stoic-
philosophy-1st-edition-malin-grahn-wilder-auth/

Gender, Sexuality, and Intelligence Studies: The Spy in

the Closet 1st ed. Edition Mary Manjikian

https://ebookmass.com/product/gender-sexuality-and-intelligence-
studies-the-spy-in-the-closet-1st-ed-edition-mary-manjikian/
LGBT Victorians
 LGBT Victorians
Sexuality and Gender in the
Nineteenth-Century Archives

S I M O N J OY C E
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in
certain other countries
© Simon Joyce 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932834
ISBN 978–0–19–285839–9
ebook ISBN 978–0–19–267420–3
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192858399.001.0001
Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only.
Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website
referenced in this work.
 Acknowledgments

If part of the purpose here is tell the origin story of the book, it has
more than one, and perhaps as many as three points of departure.
The most direct of these is that I see LGBT Victorians as a delayed
follow-up to Victorians in the Rearview Mirror, in which I charted
some of the afterlives of the nineteenth century in the culture and
politics of the subsequent century. In that book I tried to understand
and counter some of the hostility of twentieth-century modernism
and highlight some still-positive aspects of the Victorian period. Its
blind spot, as some reviewers pointed out, was its tendency to
accept more or less at face value that on issues of gender and
sexuality the Victorians have little to teach us. Correcting that
assumption is one of the points of origin for LGBT Victorians. While
I’m thinking about the relationship between the two projects, let me
also clarify something else they share, and that might trouble
readers: in both cases, I use the term “Victorian” quite loosely, to
designate a set of interlinked debates and competing positions
through which we can come to understand a larger cultural
formation. These can and do involve people who did not strictly live
during the years of monarchical reign (including Anne Lister, who
lived only a few years into the literal Victorian period) and
sometimes in places other than the United Kingdom (such as the
influential sexological writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who lived mostly in
what is now Germany). Even more than the earlier book, I also want
the word “Victorian,” with all of its everyday connotations, to jar
when set against the more contemporary—but these days already
slightly outmoded—acronym “LGBT,” about which I say more in the
introduction. One early working title was “Learning from the
Victorians about Sex,” because I wanted (and still want) readers to
wonder if—of all topics—this is the last thing we can expect to learn
about by studying the nineteenth century. If that’s the case, I hope
you think differently by the time you’re finished.
I’ve been fortunate and grateful to find a widening circle of
people who like to think about such questions as well, sometimes in
ways that I do and sometimes not. Some of these people are more
interested in the relation between the Victorians and the modernists,
some in the history of sexuality, some in aspects of LGBTQIA+
studies (to use a more up-to-date term), some in the individuals who
are the focus of particular chapters of this book. Without trying to
parcel out subgroups, I want to begin by registering my sincere and
unending gratitude to the following fellow travelers: Cassius Adair,
Joe Bristow, Colette Colligan, Renee Fox, Dustin Friedman, Ardel
Haefele-Thomas, Lisa Hager, Diana Maltz, Kristin Mahoney, Deborah
Morse, Mary Mullen, and Suzanne Raitt, who have all given me
significant help and insights throughout the many years I’ve been
working on this book. My deepest gratitude also to Cathryn Steele at
OUP, who has been a patient and considerate editor in these
pandemic times, and three anonymous readers who made excellent
suggestions for sharpening and clarifying parts of my argument that
have all made this a stronger book.
My second point of origin might register that this work for me has
involved learning, and sometime re-learning, how to think in
different disciplinary subfields than those in which I’ve tended to
locate myself—in particular, a reorientation to a field of queer/lesbian
and gay studies that bears little resemblance to the one I knew well
back in the 1980s and ’90s. In many ways, this book is a sorting
through and coming to terms with those changes, and besides the
people already named I want to express my gratitude to some
institutional supports. Two important William and Mary colleagues,
Tom Heacox and Terry Meyers, retired as I was writing this book, but
their bold steps to break down the reflex conservatism of a Southern
liberal arts college allowed my own work to happen with a minimum
of friction by having already fought and won battles I didn’t need to
engage. I also want to thank the many students (but especially the
queer, trans, and nonbinary ones) from whom I learned so much
while I was teaching and working through this material, especially
Meg Anderson, Kate Avery, Joel Calfee, Silvia Greer, Sam McIntyre,
Cristina Sherer, and Halla Walcott.
Because this work required more time in various archives than I
would typically need, I also want to acknowledge the institutional
support provided by William and Mary, in research funds made
available through the Margaret Hamilton professorship, the Plumeri
Award for Faculty Excellence, and the Sara and Jess Cloud
professorship, as well as a generous faculty sabbatical program. I
have greatly appreciated the help, kindness, and expertise of the
staff at the Kinsey Institute (Indiana University), the Public Records
Office (Kew), the Edward Carpenter archives (Sheffield), Shibden
Hall (Halifax), and all of those who are working on the Anne Lister
diary transcription project, which continues to transform the ways
we have thought about Lister. Many of these people also helped with
supplying images for the book; others are reproduced here thanks to
Lawrence Senelick, the Essex Record Office, the National Portrait
Gallery, and the Henry Sheldon Museum. Between researching Lister
and Edward Carpenter, I ended up spending a lot of thoroughly
enjoyable time in Yorkshire; for making those trips so memorable, I
want to thank Charlotte Booth and Tim Joyce, who has been almost
like a brother to me for so many years now.
I also want to pay tribute to two wonderful teachers and mentors
who died while I was completing this book and have influenced it in
ways I can hardly count. The courageous and politically engaged
example set by Alan Sinfield was a crucial gift from my years at the
University of Sussex that is visible in the many ways that LGBT
Victorians argues with, against, and alongside his later work. The
baton of mentorship transferred to Roy Roussel when I moved to the
University of Buffalo in the late-’80s. Chapter 6 is (among other
things) a very belated coming to terms with and putting into practice
things he taught my about erotic literature thirty years ago. I deeply
wish that he was still around to read it.
 A final point of origin. Living with and loving a trans child has
been a lifechanging experience without which this book would not
exist; among many other joys, it has upended most of what I
thought I knew about gender, sexuality, and the ways that they
intersect each other. Supporting and advocating for trans kids has
not been easy in these years of remarkable progress and vicious
reaction, but it is an experience that feeds into everything I am
trying to say in these pages. Others will, I’m sure, disagree with my
arguments and interpretive choices, but I like to think they are the
result of that distinctive lived experience as much or more than they
are the product of particular kinds of textual or archival reading. To
focus on experience in this way places a weight on what
distinguishes us in what is an ever-extending list of letters that get
strung together in an LGBTQ+++ alliance; in that sense, one insight
of sexology, that we might each have our distinctive identities that
could just as well end up carrying our own names (like sadism and
masochism do), feels true. The other part of such a thought,
however, is that coalitional alliances by their nature presume a
commonality of experience, perspective, and will—and none of us
(but especially trans kids) can afford to reject allies these days,
especially when they are sometimes to be found in unlikely places.
There is a lot of attention that’s rightly paid to the chosen family
over the biological one in queer studies, and we’ve definitely had our
share of these: people to advocate with, celebrate (pre-COVID)
Thanksgivings with, to cheerfully grow older around. But my
greatest fortunate is that my most immediate family is also my
queerest one, in the sense that it keeps teaching me new and better
ways to be and to be with others. My best love and biggest thanks,
then, now and always, goes out to Charley, Jenny, and Sam, who
have lived this book and lived with me while I conceived and wrote
it.
May the road rise with you all.
Parts of the introduction originally appeared as “The Perverse
Presentism of Rainbow Plaques: Memorializing Anne Lister.” In
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 41:5 (December 2019). An earlier
version of chapter 5 first appeared in Victorian Review 44:1 (Spring
2018), pp. 83–98. Copyright © 2018 Victorian Studies Association of
Western Canada.
 Contents

List of Illustrations
Introduction

PART ONE: COALESCING CONCEPTS

1. On or About 1820: Modalities of Lesbian Emergence

2. Ulrichs’ Riddles

PART TWO: VICTORIAN SEXOLOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF

EFFEMINACY

3. John Addington Symonds and the Problems of Ethical

Homosexuality
4. Toward an Intermediate Sex: Edward Carpenter’s Queer
Palimpsests

PART THREE: GAY MEN/TRANS WOMEN

5. Two Women Walk into a Theater Restroom: The Trial of Fanny

and Stella
6. Bodies in Transition: Trans-Curiosity in Late-Victorian Pornography
Coda: “And I? May I Say Nothing, My Lord?”

Works Cited
Index
 List of Illustrations

1. Two plaques commemorating Anne Lister, August 2018 and March 2019
(author’s photographs).
2. Google N-gram depicting uses of (from top to bottom) “lesbian,” “bisexual,”
“transgender,” and “LGBT” between 1994 and 2008.
3. Silhouette of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake (Collection of Henry Sheldon
Museum of Vermont History, Middlebury, Vermont).
4. “The Rt Honble Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Ponsonby ‘The Ladies of
Llangollen,’” lithograph by Richard James Lane, 1836 (courtesy of National
Portrait Gallery).
5. The published text of Homogenic Love, overwritten with corrections,
deletions, and amendments in Carpenter’s hand and then repurposed as “The
Homogenic Attachment” (a chapter in The Intermediate Sex), Edward
Carpenter Collection. Image courtesy of Sheffield City Archives.
6. Title page, reflecting new title and opening, Edward Carpenter Collection.
Image courtesy of Sheffield City Archives.
7. Stella Boulton, photographed by Olivier Sarony (Laurence Senelick Collection).
8. Stella and Charles Pavitt, photographed by Frederick Spaulding (Essex
Records Office).
9. Lord Arthur Clinton, Fanny, and Stella, photographed by Frederick Spaulding
(Essex Records Office).
10. Stella, photographed by Napoleon Sarony (Laurence Senelick Collection).
11. Stella/Ernest Byne, photographed by Napoleon Sarony (Laurence Senelick
Collection).
12. Two images of Stella by Napoleon Sarony (both Laurence Senelick Collection).
 Introduction

In the summer of 2018, as I was beginning to write this book, a

surprising number of people in Britain became unusually animated
about what to call someone who was born over two centuries earlier
and died three years into the reign of Queen Victoria. The argument
concerned Anne Lister, who is one of the subjects of my first chapter
and whose diaries have been variously described as the “Dead Sea
Scrolls” or the “Rosetta Stone” of lesbianism.1 The story of the
diaries, particularly the roughly 40 percent written in a code that
Lister called a “crypthand,” has intersected at various points with the
larger history of LGBTQ+ people in Britain. The code was first
deciphered by a descendent and closeted gay man named John
Lister, who inherited Anne’s Yorkshire estate in 1867 and began the
transcription of the diaries in the 1890s, only to put them back
where he found them behind wood panels, likely fearing that the
“Wilde decade” was not the moment for Anne to leave the closet.2
John’s friend Arthur Burrell provided a key to deciphering the coded
passages in the 1930s, but a local librarian who put it to use
similarly decided against any public disclosure less than a decade
after Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness had been banned as an
obscene publication. Transcriptions only began appearing in the late
1980s, beginning with the publication of Helena Whitbread’s I Know
My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791–1840 in 1988; by
2011, however, the diaries had received sufficient attention that they
were added to a Unesco “Memory of the World” register, one of only
twenty items from the United Kingdom on the list, and Lister was
more recently the subject of a BBC/HBO series, Gentleman Jack.
So why, given all this prestigious recognition, was she generating
new controversy? To initiate a series of LGBTQ-focused “rainbow
plaques” marking key sites of Britain’s heritage, the York Civic Trust
decided to commemorate Lister’s 1834 sharing of the sacrament
with a lover and neighbor Ann Walker at Holy Trinity Church in York
as an anticipation of marriage equality. The plaque placed outside
the church termed it a celebration of “marital commitment, without
legal recognition,” but the controversy was more concerned with the
language that was—and wasn’t—used to describe Lister herself:
“Gender-nonconforming entrepreneur.” What struck many observers
was the absence of the word “lesbian” to describe the woman who
just a short time earlier had been supposed to have written
lesbianism’s “Dead Sea Scrolls,” and a petition was begun to protest
what it termed an effort to “erase this iconic woman from our
history.”3 The York Civic Trust promised a new plaque with a wording
they hoped would “reflect as accurately as possible Anne’s own view
of herself” and “be based on the words Anne chose to describe
herself, her actions and her lifestyle.”4 In March 2019, seven months
after their first try, they unveiled this replacement, now celebrating
Lister as a “Lesbian and Diarist” (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Two plaques commemorating Anne Lister, August 2018
and March 2019 (author’s photographs).

In doing so, the Trust set itself an impossible task, because

Lister’s “view of herself” included terms and ideas that would now
seem incompatible with each other and she had no stable descriptive
language available to define herself—much less the modern concept
of a “lifestyle.” As Anna Clark has put it, she “had no access to a
cultural discourse that defined a lesbian” as “an exclusive love for
women that was her authentic self,” and instead “actively created
her own identity out of the cultural materials available to her” in an
improvised bricolage I examine in Chapter 1.5 The Civic Trust’s
retreat into a fantasized historical fidelity reads like a turning away
from the equally messy problem of anachronism, which it had
acknowledged in an earlier statement recognizing that the two terms
that were being placed in opposition (lesbian and gender-
nonconforming) had both “taken on their current meaning since the
time of Anne Lister.…and so neither term can be claimed to be a
perfect fit.” In response to the protest petition’s charge that referring
to Lister as “gender-nonconforming…has nothing to do with
sexuality,” which posed the issue as a zero-sum game in which a
person is either defined by their gender or their sexuality, the
statement helpfully clarified some forms of intersection: “trans
people can be lesbian, and lesbians can be trans,” it declared. “They
are not mutually exclusive: we do not accept the viewpoint that to
be a lesbian you must be assigned female at birth, nor that to be a
lesbian you must only be attracted to women assigned female at
birth.”6 By extension, Lister might be what some might now want to
claim as a trans man (but more likely genderqueer) and at the same
time a lesbian—a possibility that writers such as Patrick Califia and
Nan Anamilla Boyd have explored.7 If that was the Trust’s
understanding, however, it’s not clear why such a possibility could
not have been registered on either version of the plaque.
The Trust was implicitly admitting what was recognized by all the
participants in the controversy: that “gender-nonconforming” was
functioning as a substitute term for “transgender” and that the
debate about a Regency-era diarist was a proxy in an increasingly
tense set of battles between trans activists and a brand of radical
feminism typically referred to in Britain as “gender-critical feminism.”
Sometimes derided as “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists” (or
TERFS), supporters of the latter position have found a rhetorical
counterweight to the stress on exclusion in their warnings that public
gestures like the first Lister plaque signal a desire for “lesbian
erasure.” The chief executive of the York Civic Trust would have done
little to allay such apocalyptic fears in a clumsily-phrased defense of
the original wording that claimed the intent had been to be “factual
and ‘future-proofed’ so it’s understandable into the future without
changes in social connotations.”8 Imagining a future audience that
somehow will grasp the meaning of “gender-nonconforming” but not
“lesbian” perfectly resonated with fears of “lesbian erasure” and
would thus have done little to de-escalate tensions.
There is a larger context here that is worth briefly considering.
The Lister debate unfolded against the backdrop of proposed
changes to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, in which the ruling
Conservative government in Britain indicated an openness to moving
to a system of self-identification to replace the existing protocol
requiring documentation of a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and
ongoing medical treatment—a change they have subsequently
decided not to implement.9 For anyone familiar with arguments
concerning transgender people’s bathroom access or participation in
sports in the United States it may seem strange to see such ideas
emanating from a conservative party, and it is just as jarring to read
about feminist opposition to the proposed changes, even if gender-
critical views are actually in the minority and more likely to be held
by men.10 Echoing positions commonly advanced by evangelicals
and conservatives in the U.S., this opposition has conjured images of
predatory men disguised as transgender women intent on invading
safe spaces, with locations such as rape crisis centers replacing
restrooms as the privileged sites of these imagined violations. As the
Lister controversy was erupting, some gender critical feminist groups
campaigning against the principle of self-identification offered
disturbingly reactionary arguments, with one statement declaring
that “Women don’t have penises. This is not hate speech; it is not
transphobia. It is a simple argument of biological fact.”11 In such a
rhetorical context, proclaiming Lister as gender-nonconforming was
being read as another provocation in a perceived war against
women, one with trans women in its vanguard.
This discussion of how to celebrate and what to call Anne Lister
helps to introduce some key issues that I will be exploring in this
book. Most obviously, it points to a gap between past and present
concepts of LGBTQI+ identity that can be hard to bridge, and which
means that historical recovery work inevitably faces the same
difficult choices as the York Civic Trust: either to proceed
anachronistically, trying to find the best equivalence for historical
actors among a broad range of modern identity concepts and labels,
or respect the past’s difference from the present—as is implied by
the search for what Anne Lister might have termed herself—at the
risk that what emerges is incoherent to modern readers even after
its decoding. On the complicated issues of language and
terminology, some historical studies try to stay consistent with
concepts and identity labels that were available at a particular time,
sharing the Trust’s fantasy of understanding the past on its own
terms, while others are more focused on finding equivalences with
the options available today. In describing historical figures in this
book, I have used my best judgment about which terms are most
suited to which person, in part to sidestep what are often political or
interpretive arguments that masquerade as being simply about
historical realities. I discuss some of these arguments in the chapters
that follow, particularly about when and in what circumstances it is
appropriate to apply a label such as “lesbian” to nineteenth-century
people and about whether the existence of transgender individuals
pre-existed twentieth-century technologies enabling gender-
confirmation surgery. I readily admit, however, that my own
language is something of a “nonce taxonomy” (to use Eve
Sedgwick’s evocative phrase) and as such, I have not been overly
concerned about consistency or historical authenticity: sometimes I
have found it more useful to be self-consciously anachronistic in
calling somebody like Edward Carpenter (for example) a “gay man,”
whereas at other points it has made more sense to deploy an older
language and talk about Urnings or Uranians instead.12
The difficulties of hindsight have been foregrounded in a variety
of forms of politicized recovery work and modes of critical thinking,
from E. P. Thompson’s famous caution against exercising “the
enormous condescension of history” to Michel Foucault’s equally
well-known positing of genealogical reconstruction as “the history of
the present” which is different from “writing a history of the past in
terms of the present.”13 The difficulties they highlight are
interconnected: if it’s hard to imagine a project of reconstruction
being undertaken except from the vantage point of the
contemporary moment, it is just as hard to do so without inevitably
privileging current concerns and streamlining the heterogeneity of
the past so that only its anticipatory aspects come to matter.14 If
interest in a figure like Anne Lister stems from her capacity to
preview (however incompletely) recognizable forms of modern
lesbian identity, including but not limited to a form of committed
same-sex partnership that looks like marriage, it is inevitable that
other aspects of her life will be downplayed—her efforts to square
her desires with her religious beliefs, for instance, or her opposition
to electoral reform. In the process, however, there’s a risk of making
her into only a precursor figure, a proto-lesbian whose tendencies
towards gender-nonconformity can be made to seem historically
residual. This is the implicit claim that Terry Castle made in her
review of the first volume of the diaries, in which she speculated
concerning Lister’s masculine identification that “[i]n a society that
typically ghosts or occludes images of women desiring women, the
homosexually inclined woman will inevitably be attracted to the next
best thing: to images of men desiring women.”15 Cross-gender
identification is reduced on this account to what Jack Halberstam
has termed “a stand-in for a properly female desire for women,” and
thus rendered irrelevant now for understanding Lister’s sense of
identity.16 To return to the terms of the plaque controversy, Castle
might be said to be reversing the fault of the original wording by
occluding gender presentation as somehow irrelevant and
inauthentic in comparison to what she sees as Lister’s defining
quality: a same-sex desire that was not yet available as the ground
of her self-identity.
Two paths out of the problems of hindsight and presentism
suggest themselves, and each works by weakening the apparent
fixity of past and present so as to place them in a more dynamic and
mutually illuminating relationship. In his study of hindsight, Simon
Dentith suggests that one reason to recover the past is to
understand how “historical otherness…can operate upon us in our
present moment, and loosen up the deadening grip of the
utopianism of the present—our sense that we are the terminus of
historical development—to suggest other possibilities and
alternatives.”17 Dentith is thinking mainly about sexuality and how
what Foucault famously termed “the repressive hypothesis” operates
through the binary opposition between Victorian ignorance and
repression, on the one hand, and modern liberatory enlightenment
on the other. But another example he gives suggests the potential of
past alternatives to reassert themselves in the present. In an
analysis of William Morris’ Utopian novel News From Nowhere
(1890), Dentith highlights its focus on the finite supply of natural
resources that has recently forced itself into public consciousness as
a consequence of climate change. If, as he argues, “the increasing
intensity of our current ecological concerns leads us to re-evaluate
Morris’s writing, and in some instances to re-write it as anticipating
our very present vocabularies,” this is to do something other than
the interpretive violence that the charge of presentism typically
carries; instead, its value lies in “making Morris speak, partly in
terms which are historically other to our own, to the very matter of
ecological crisis which set the whole process off in the first place”
(142). Historically, Morris’ readers have focused attention elsewhere,
on his blueprint for socialist reconstruction, his advocacy of a
Ruskinian aesthetic of handicraft production, or his problematic
sexual politics. Now there’s a way to think about natural resources
that he could not have predicted would be useful to a future
moment, but that helps unsettle the teleological presupposition that
it is only at our own point in time—and on our terms—that we can
contemplate alternative ways of thinking and acting.
Halberstam has something similar in mind with the concept of
“perverse presentism,” in which we apply “what we do not know in
the present to what we cannot know in the past.”18 The focus again
is less on the present as a moment of confident certainty than on its
ongoing problems and deficiencies. In relation to the Lister
controversy, we might say that what we don’t know is how to
understand the current relationship between groups of people that
define their identities primarily in terms of gender and those that
primarily define them in terms of sexuality, even as they exist as
components of an established political alliance (LGBTQI+). This
uncertainty has partially motivated—and also complicated—the
desire to celebrate a precursor figure like Lister, but the other side of
Halberstam’s equation (“what we cannot know in the past”) would
stress the radical unknowability of her own self-understanding.19
Shuttling between these two forms of unknowing has the potential
to establish the dynamic relationship of past and present for which
Dentith is calling, which would have to refuse either the reified
solidity of the past (“Anne’s own view of herself”) or the assertive
superiority of the present (that, like Castle, we simply know her to
have been a lesbian on the basis of two centuries of accumulated
wisdom). Indeed, Lister’s apparent gender-nonconformity—as
expressed in clothing choice, nicknaming, and references to typically
male body parts and social roles—works like Morris’ ecological
consciousness, signaling an aspect of the text which seemed
relatively insignificant (certainly to readers in the 1990s such as
Castle and Clark) but has now risen to claim—however
controversially and temporarily—top billing in a retrospective
commemoration of Lister’s life.
The phrasing in the previous paragraph about identities primarily
defined in terms of sexuality or gender was intended to reiterate the
point made by the York Civic Trust, that the two don’t need to be
counterposed in a zero-sum antagonism, and indeed, that “trans
people can be lesbian, and lesbians can be trans.” LGBT Victorians
approaches this question historically, tracing how the idea of a
sexual identity emerged from and through a language of gender
nonconformity. This relationship feels like a question to which we
have recently returned without acknowledging that it is in fact a very
old one. As a snapshot of its apparent novelty, Figure 2 is a Google
N-gram that graphs use of the umbrella term “LGBT” against some
of its constituent terms—“lesbian,” “bisexual,” and “transgender”—in
the years 1994–2008.20
Figure 2. Google N-gram depicting uses of (from top to bottom)
“lesbian,” “bisexual,” “transgender,” and “LGBT” between 1994 and
2008.

Three aspects of this diagram stand out. First, the term

“transgender” almost exactly tracks the umbrella “LGBT,” suggesting
that what the latter term really effected was an inclusion of
transgender people in a larger social movement. Because both terms
are fairly close to zero at the left axis of the graph, the second
conclusion we might draw is that neither term was particularly active
in print before 1994, and both have been on a steady upward
trajectory since. Lastly, there is a comcomitant decrease in uses of
individualized terms such as “lesbian” or “bisexual” that is close to
an inverse proportion in the latter case, and a more precipitant drop
in the former. Although a term like “lesbian” continues to be used
much more frequently than “LGBT,” this graph might help to give
some context for the perception of “lesbian erasure,” even if the raw
data suggests that such a claim is vastly overblown.
I use “LGBT” here and in my title for a couple of reasons. If, as
the illustration suggests, it has become the popular acronym—as
opposed to the ones used by activists and scholars, which I typically
designate “LGBTQI+” to indicate an infinitely extendable range of
terms—it is also the shortest version that sets side-by-side the two
axes of identification whose historical and current intersections I am
exploring: identites (L,G, and B) that designate the orientation of
sexual desire, and a fouth (T) that instead refers to the person’s
gender identity. The T in this sense stands in for a set of other
gender identities (including intersex, nonbinary, bi- and agender)
just as the LGB presumes others (asexual, pansexual etc).
Historically, few of these terms would have been meaningful in the
nineteenth century, and certainly not as they register today—so the
other option, followed by some historians of sexuality, has been to
use the broad term “queer” to alleviate some of the difficulties of
retrospective definition, on the basis that all the people featured in a
book like this were nonconforming and non-normative in terms of
sexual preference or gender expression, and often both. The
difficulty of such an approach, however, is its tendency to flatten out
differences that become visible with designated initials, which in turn
can mask the reasons why they have come to be strung together in
the first place—as well as why, as we shall see, for some participants
they should not be. Not all the components fit the nineteenth
century very well, of course. I have difficulty retrofitting a term like
“bisexuality” in particular, even if it might technically feel like the
right one for people like John Addington Symonds or Oscar Wilde,
both married with children. The problem is that our sense of the
“bi-” as designating relatively equal and opposite directions, within
which we might opt for “either and/or both,” cannot be adequate for
a time when one was not only unsanctioned but criminalized—so
while it is hard to say whether Wilde would have chosen to marry
Constance had attitudes towards homosexuality been more tolerant,
it is just as difficult to insist that he would not have. For this reason,
I don’t discuss the B of LGBT as a distinct identity formation; if I
could dispense with it and still have a recognizable acronym, its
place would be given to the I of intersex people, given how crucial
they were—in both literal and metaphorical ways, and sometimes
both at the same time—in the historical development of ways of
thinking about sexual and gender nonconformity. I will have more to
say about this later.
To return for now, however, to thinking about the years covered
in Figure 2 (1994–2008) it was a period of contention in both
LGBTQ+ politics and academic study. Most obviously, it was when a
great deal of political capital was being invested in achieving
marriage equality, and for that reason when a normalizing—what
some have termed term a “homonormative”—image of
homosexuality was being projected.21 As Andrew Sullivan has
recalled about this period, “We emphasized those things that united
gays and straights, and we celebrated institutions of integration--
such as marriage rights and open military service. We portrayed
ourselves as average citizens seeking merely the same rights and
responsibilities as everyone else--Republicans and Democrats,
conservatives and liberals. We were largely gender-conforming,
which is not in any way better than non-gender-conforming, but this
helped get the conversation started and sustained.”22 Sullivan’s last
sentence indicates how this image inevitably found itself in tension
with the goal of trans-inclusion that the acronym “LGBT” was
intended to signify, and which (as Figure 2 shows) it to some extent
achieved. Two events in U.S. politics from either end of the period in
question suggest a pattern of disaffiliation that helped contribute to
the mutual distrust still evident in the Lister controversy. In 1993,
the March on Washington was explicitly signaled as supporting the
demand for “Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights” following a rejection
of calls for trans rights to also be included; and in 2007, a similar
decision was taken to exclude trans people from coverage in the
proposed Employment Non-Discrmination Act (ENDA) before the
U.S. Congress, on the argument, which turned out to have been
unfounded, that a majority might support the bill if limited only to L,
G, and B.23
As I explore in Chapter 2, transphobic discourse (as well as some
aspects of trans advocacy) can sometimes echo older frameworks
for thinking about homosexuality, which is why the idea of trans
women as predators or the sense that they are “women trapped in
men’s bodies” all sounds so familiar. These tropes are recycled not
only in conservative atacks but also within LGBT-positive politics, as
gender-critical feminism demonstrates. American conservatives
emboldened by the Trump election shifted their oppositional focus
from lesbian/gay to transgender rights in part because of popular
support for marriage equality, and there were some advocates who
agreed with Sullivan’s premise that defending the gains of the past
twenty years might require a loosening of the LGBT alliance, if not
the jettisoning of the T entirely. In Has the Gay Movement Failed?
Martin Duberman criticizes mainstream lesbian and gay
organizations for an “entrenched reluctance to consider what
connection if any exists between gender nonconformity and
homosexuality,” highlighting in particular gay male resistance to
seeing a common cause with “gender ‘outlaws’ like transsexuals,
drag queens, or trans people.”24 While there is some evidence—
including a more inclusive ENDA proposal in 2013—to suggest that
lessons have been learned about maintaining a collective alliance, it
is clear that tensions remained between components of the
LGBTQI+ coalition about how to respond to the backlash of the
Trump years. In one of the first responses to the 2016 election in
The Advocate, for instance, Mark Joseph Stern’s “Six Things We
Must Do to Survive Trump’s America” included as its penultimate
point that “I would not be so presumptuous as to advise trans
advocates that they should stop defending their rights in court. But I
fear that the current strategy may lead to disaster.”25 More recently,
one of the founders of the U.K.’s leading LGBTQI+ organization
Stonewall made arguments similar to Sullivan’s and Stern’s, in
opposition to its involvement in the heated discussions between
trans activists and gender-critical feminists: “there is something
perversely 20th century about linking gays to trans,” Matthew Parris
argued, because “our issues have nothing to do with identification or
changing our bodies: we know what we are and nobody disputes it.”
Based on that perceived difference, Parris can only recognize as a
possible basis for trans-affirming political positions “empathy with
anyone excluded, oppressed, marginalised or rejected,” using a
comparison of support for striking coalminers threatened with the
extinction of their industry in the mid-1980s.26
In academic lesbian/gay studies a version of these debates can
be heard in the exchanges between David Halperin and Eve
Sedgwick that occurred in the 1990s. Responding to Halperin’s
invoking of a new mode of homosexuality in the twentieth century
that was “independent of relative degrees of masculinity and
femininity” and took as its “highest expression…the ‘straight-acting
and –appearing gay male,” Sedgwick insisted that this was to
misread the Foucauldian model that Halperin was elaborating. “For
Halperin,” she argued, “what is presumed to define modern
homosexuality ‘as we understand’ it, in the form of the straight-
acting and – appearing gay male, is gender intransitivity; for
Foucault, it is, in the form of the feminized man or virilized woman,
gender transitivity.”27 Halperin sought to modify his claim in the
essay “How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality,” which
proposed four “pre-homosexual” paradigms out of which the modern
conception emerged, but from each of which it differs in significant
ways: effeminacy, pederasty, friendship, and inversion.28 The essay
clarifies that its taxonomy was developed in response to Sedgwick’s
critique: those four earlier paradigms were rooted in “an age-old
system that privileges gender over sexuality,” according to Halperin,
and he now understands modern homosexuality to have developed
“alongside” them. This is not, however, to suggest that he is no
longer interested in marking a paradigm shift; more that he now
sees it in terms of a relative weighting of factors, as an older
privileging of gender is said to give way to “a newer homosexual
model derived from a more recent, comparatively anomalous system
that privileges sexuality over gender.”29 Even this relative weighting
might not really be justifiable, however. As Halperin acknowledges in
the introductory chapter of How to Do the History of Homosexuality,
“it is looking more and more as if the model of (homo)sexuality with
which I grew up and whose genealogy I have tried to map in the
essays that follow, never had a more than a narrowly circumscribed
reach.” Among factors that propelled this further re-thinking, he
asserts that a definition focused on object-choice never managed to
wholly exclude “considerations of gender identity, gender
presentation, gender performance,” nor to wholly disentangle
“sexuality from matters of gender conformity and gender
deviance.”30
A second point of reference for these questions is the work of
Alan Sinfield, which in many ways charted a parallel trajectory to
Halperin’s but with the terms reversed. In 1994’s The Wilde Century,
he argued that male effeminacy did not necessarily connote
homosexuality until Wilde’s trials and conviction made the equation
unavoidable; subsequently, as I take up in my conclusion, gay men
are defined for him by the Wildean model, which is inevitably
effeminate, even when efforts are undertaken to depict a more
macho image. In the process, Sinfield critiques versions of
nineteenth-century sexology for their persistent essentialism and
misogyny, as even the most progressive models of same-sex desire
as a “higher type” were “still playing variations on the binary
structure of masculine and feminine attributes.” He has in mind in
particular Edward Carpenter’s theory of “the intermediate sex” that I
analyze in Chapter 4, and seizes on “a remarkable essay” by the
little-known Edwin Bab as making a superior constructionist
argument against a fixed gender binary; in the process, Sinfield
imagines a kind of steampunk alternative history, declaring that
“This…is the line gay men and lesbians should have maintained: we
don’t need masculinity and femininity.”31 And yet, there’s something
paradoxical about the appearance of such a critique in the mid-’90s,
at the moment when lesbian/gay politics was struggling to
incorporate transgender and intersex people within a wider umbrella
of LGBTQI+ given how hard it is to imagine how either could speak
of themselves without masculinity and femininity, however much
these terms can be redefined and stripped of their biological
essentialism.
Taking his cue in part from Halperin and Sedgwick, Sinfield would
rethink the relationship between sexuality and gender, most notably
in the opening chapter of 2004’s On Sexuality and Power. On the
strength of Freud’s distinction between the “desire-for” and the
“desire-to-be” he generates two basic models that he terms “gender
difference” and “gender complementarity” to indicate the co-
presence of Halperin’s temporally distinct paradigms. In the first
category are instances when “a person with at least some biological
male characteristics is apprehended, either by himself or by his male
partner, as feminine (and the other way about for women);” in the
second, cases where “two men and two women have both desire-for
the same gender and desire-to-be the same gender.”32 There are
inherent problems with Sinfield’s acknowledged “blunt instrument” of
taxonomic analysis, most of which (he admits) center on the figure
of the transsexual. At one point, for instance, he recognizes that
comparing the two models suggests that the path of gender
complementarity produces regularity (e.g. desire to-be M, desire-for
M) whereas that of gender difference can only establish one aspect
(desire to-be F, desire-for M/F) because “transsexuals are not
necessarily homosexual” (18–20). Of course, the logical corollary of
this would be to insist—as I have suggested in the instance of Anne
Lister—that not all homosexuals are cisgender either, but such an
insight would complicate and potentially undo the project’s
foundational division of gay men into normatively “masculine” (and
hence gender complementary) or “effeminate” (and gender
different) variations, in the process calling into question the
foundational positing of a “he” that desires and desires to-be (20).
Halperin’s and Sinfield’s revisions feel very much the product of
the cultural moment around the end of the last century when the
politics of lesbian and gay liberation was re-conceptualizing itself as
LGBTQI+ rights. Sinfield makes this explicit in a later chapter of On
Sexuality and Power devoted to “Gender,” which posits a recent
period in gay male culture that was dominated on the one hand by
the hypermasculine “clone look” (close-cropped hair, moustaches,
jeans) and on the other by a continuing commitment to gender
dissonance, as expressed through camp and drag: this arrangement,
he suggests, “was not coherent, but it seemed to suffice, until the
1990s when transgender people, by declaring themselves, made the
illogicality blatant” (93). This sense of an apparently comfortable
incoherence in gay male culture finding itself challenged by the
eruption of a new trans politics is, in many respects, consistent with
Halperin’s admission that it was the “straight-acting and –appearing”
moment that was anomalous and fleeting, a marked exception to a
much longer history in which gender transitivity has been central to
gay life, expression, and politics.
If, as I have tried to suggest, what we don’t seem to have figured
out in the present is exactly what grounds a coalition between
sexuality-based (L, G, or B) and gender-based identities (T or I), the
argument of LGBT Victorians is that the nineteenth century might be
a place to look for answers. This probably sounds counter-intuitive.
The period is, after all, typically viewed as one of intense sexual
repression and homophobic condemnation, and for historians of
sexuality such as Halperin and Sinfield it was marked by a
debilitating gender essentialism and a collapsing of the categories of
gender and sexuality into each other. To the extent that each of
them wants to mark, however tentatively, some form of paradigm
shift between then and now, part of that movement has entailed an
insistence on keeping the categories of gender and sexuality distinct.
We could take the 1905 publication of Freud’s Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality as a convenient starting point for a re-evaluation
of nineteenth-century sexology and especially the notion he glosses
as “a feminine brain in a masculine body” (a version of Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs’s Latin formula, anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa). Freud
questioned this account of same-sex desire, insisting that “however
well this applies to quite a number of inverts, it is, nevertheless, far
from revealing a universal characteristic of inversion. There can be
no doubt that a large proportion of male inverts retain the mental
qualities of masculinity, that they possess relatively few of the
secondary characters of the opposite sex.” This clarification was
necessitated by the more universalizing move that Freud would add
in a footnote a decade later, in which he claimed “that all human
beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have
in fact made one in their unconscious.”33
Ideally, Freud’s suggestions would have worked to decouple
cross-gender presentation from questions of sexual object-choice
and to disarm the equation between them that has formed the basis
for so much homophobic abuse—of straight and gay people alike.
Sinfield’s Utopian counter-history in which lesbians and gay men
could have insisted that “we don’t need masculinity and femininity”
situates itself within this realm of possibility, but it also recognizes
that unfortunately the twentieth century proceeded along a different
path. The shameful history of aversion and conversion therapy owes
much to the instinct not only to identify homosexuality through
cross-gender presentation but also to try to reorient dissident desire
by “correcting” it, in a therapeutic practice which assumes its
contingent relationship to sexual orientation. These efforts persisted
even after the mid-century popularizing of the idea of gender
identity, which accepted that for some people—straight or gay—the
sort of cross-gender identification that used to be presumed to be a
necessary component of homosexual identity was instead the
distinctive ground of their subjective self-understanding. As Joanne
Meyerowitz shows, the influential Gender and Identity Research
Clinic founded in California by Robert Stoller in the 1960s deployed
the concept of gender identity to very different ends than the
affirmation of transgender people, however, attempting instead to
correct its supposed misalignment with the patient’s anatomy: “The
clinic won its professional reputation,” Meyerowitz notes, “from its
attempts to get ‘sissy’ boys (and occasionally ‘tomboy’ girls) to
behave in masculine (or, in the case of girls, feminine) ways,” hoping
“to instill traditional gender roles in children with the explicit goal of
preventing transsexuality (and also transvestitism and
homosexuality) in adults.”34 This remains the goal of anti-trans
activists today, and its popularity among the religious right is
particularly ironic. If, after all, the idea of a gender identity might be
thought of as an updating of the soul or spirit, as it was being
construed by Ulrichs and others in opposition to the biological body
in which it was housed, then it substitutes for what the Christian
tradition has always considered an immutable and immaterial
essence; on such a view, it is clearly the latter that is really
important, which makes it jarring to hear conservative commentators
and politicians, many of whom profess a religious basis for their
arguments, loudly insisting in the case of transgender individuals
that it is the supposed biological body (as certified by a birth
certificate) and not the soul that makes the person.35
What this brief history suggests is that part of the basis for the
political alliance between lesbians and gay men, on the one hand,
and trans activists on the other, has been that traditionally they have
been mistaken for each other—as the apparent interchangeability of
trans- and homophobic attack lines would seem to substantiate. In
her essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Sedgwick noted the
largely unremarked “conceptual shift” that saw homosexuality being
removed from the 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual at
precisely the moment that a new category “Gender Identity Disorder
of Childhood” (subsequently renamed “Gender Dysphoria”) appeared
as evidence that homophobia was being rebranded in a new form.36
Patrick Califia has suggested along similar lines that “lesbians and
gay men should be especially sensitive to the way transsexuality has
been positioned as the property of medical and psychiatric experts”
because “it was not so long ago that a similar condition existed for
us…. we do share a common history with them of being viewed as
mentally ill people who require treatment.”37 The response to this
commonality of interests has been to simultaneously assert it—
through the imagining of an LGBTQI+ coalition and the implication
that attacking one component means an attack on all—and to work
to disarm it by insisting upon the hard distinction between gender-
and sexuality-based forms of identity.
This paradoxical political attitude thus shares a presupposition
that has become something like settled law in contemporary feminist
and queer theory, although it emerged within a very different
political context. As Jules Gill-Peterson notes in Histories of the
Transgender Child, neither the concept of gender nor its
differentiation from biological sex originated within feminism, but
was instead the invention of sexologists such as Stoller and John
Money in the 1960s who were not motivated to undermine the
binary system but instead to preserve it “from imminent collapse”
that they saw as one of the possible consequences of the work they
had been doing with intersex children.38 Within queer and feminist
studies, the most influential statements about the gender/sexuality
distinction derive from the work of Gayle Rubin and Eve Sedgwick,
each of whom was writing against what they saw as immediate
threats to their ability to pursue queer- and sex-positive work. As the
concluding call of Rubin’s 1984 “Thinking Sex” essay, the argument
that “it is essential to separate gender and sexuality analytically to
reflect more accurately their separate social existence” sought to
mobilize against what Rubin saw as a conservative turn within
feminism, especially in the anti-pornography movement, which
aimed to attack forms of deviant sexual pleasure from a gender-
based perspective by designating particular practices as male-
identified. In this context, it was certain forms of radical feminism
that were guilty of eliding gender with sexuality, most clearly in the
approved alternative to male-identified sex found in the slogan that
“feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.”39
Sedgwick was writing in a similar framework in 1990’s
Epistemology of the Closet, which saw itself in part as responding to
the widespread homophobia that the AIDS crisis had occasioned.
The book opened with a series of guiding axioms, which—precisely
because these were presented as axiomatic—have tended to be
cited out of context or taken to be generalizable theoretical
principles. This is especially the case for the second axiom, stating
that “The study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of
gender.” Sedgwick’s assertion is immediately qualified in two ways,
however, the first of which spells out what she saw as the pressing
stakes of separating them: “correspondingly,” she noted in an echo
of Rubin six years earlier, “antihomophobic inquiry is not coextensive
with feminist inquiry.” The second qualification takes back some of
the apparent certainty of the declarative/axiomatic statement by
specifying that the ways that the two inquiries—focused on gender
and sexuality—differ from each other is something “we can’t know in
advance.” Sedgwick proceeds to argue that questions of gender and
sexuality, while “not the same,” are nonetheless “inextricable from
one another…in that each can be expressed only in the terms of the
other,” which means that they are “usefully” but only “minimally”
distinct.40 This more qualified (and context-specific) argument for a
minimal separation is sometimes forgotten and the axiom
remembered as sounding more sweeping and definitive than it
actually was. It has accordingly generated considerable opposition
from feminist thinkers including Biddy Martin and Judith Butler, with
the latter especially arguing that separation artificially allocates to
feminism the analysis of gender (which in the process comes to
sound a lot like the more immutable concept of anatomical sex),
even as it reserves for queer studies the more capacious categories
of “sex and sexuality.”41
One possible consequence of the chasm that Butler sees as
opening up here is her observation that “to the extent that lesbian
and gay studies refuses the domain of gender, it disqualifies itself
from the analysis of transgendered sexuality altogether.”42 Even if
this is an oversimplification of the complicated fissures between the
analytical emphasis placed on sexuality or gender, it is worth
considering exactly where trans studies might fit into a schema in
which the two axes of identity are split off from each other. In “Do
Transsexuals Dream of Gay Rights?,” Shannon Price Minter has
traced the disconnect to two simultaneous developments. First, he
suggests, the gate-keeping mechanisms that policed access to
gender transition meant that “transsexualism was initially defined in
rigid, heterosexist terms, and access to sex reassignment was
conditioned on compliance with overtly homophobic and sexist
standards,” according to which “only transsexual people who
conformed to stereotypical gender norms and who were deemed
capable of ‘passing’ in their new sex were able to obtain treatment.”
The presumption here is the outdated one that imagined gender
confirmation as functioning to reorient same-sex desire in the
direction of heterosexuality, but its effects continue to be felt, as the
York Civic Trust’s need to clarify that “trans people can be lesbian,
and lesbians can be trans” vividly demonstrates. Secondly, Minter
points out that what we might see as an internal homophobia within
the framework of thinking about transsexuals was matched in the
latter part of the twentieth century by a movement within gay
culture in the direction of what Halperin termed the “straight-acting
and – appearing gay male.” The first of these developments meant,
according to Minter, the elision of LGB transsexuals who were “not
seen as ‘real’ transsexuals,” while the second threatened to break
the longstanding equation between homosexuality and gender non-
conformity.43 As one marker of this mutual suspicion, Minter notes
the invisibility of trans activists such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia
Rivera from popular understandings of the Stonewall Riots and the
origins of the modern lesbian/gay movement, most recently on
display in Roland Emmerich’s controversial 2015 film Stonewall.44 In
this context, Minter suggests that the crucial question to ask “is not
whether transgender people can justify their claim to gay rights,” but
“[h]ow did transgender people get separated at the birth of gay
liberation?”45
In some respects, the argument I make in this book is that they
were there much longer than Minter’s question suggests, and indeed
that the modern understanding of homosexuality itself depends
upon the visible and noted existence of people that would probably
now consider themselves transgender or intersex. This might seem
to restate one of the most commonly cited claims in Foucault’s The
History of Sexuality, one Halperin terms “so well known that it might
seem unnecessary to quote it.” “Homosexuality,” Foucault famously
observed, “appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was
transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior
androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul.” This formulation, and a
reference in the preceding sentence to “a certain way of inverting
the masculine and feminine within oneself,” is presumably Sedgwick’s
ground for claiming that homosexuality is defined by “gender
transitivity” in Foucault’s thinking, but it is not immediately obvious
how these phrases—“interior androgyny,” “hermaphroditism of the
soul,” “inverting the masculine and feminine within oneself”—line up
with one another, or indeed, what we should take them to mean.46
Each references a mode of gender transitivity, but in differing
combinations. A hermaphroditism of the soul situates an admixing of
genders within the soul itself, rather than assigning one gender to
the soul and another to the body as Ulrichs did (with significant
qualifications I discuss in Chapter 2) in anima muliebris virili corpore
inclusa. “Interior androgyny” might also express this idea or it could
be closer to Ulrichs’ suggestion that gender incongruity can be
internalized within the subject, at a deeper level than mere surface
appearance. “Inverting the masculine and feminine in oneself,”
however, seems less about mixing and more about prioritizing or
switching. In the language of sexology, if a putatively “female”
subject is marked by inversion, that person’s “masculine” qualities
are dominant rather than subordinated, in an inversion of common-
sense perception: “she” is, to this extent, actually a “he” and vice
versa.
By literalizing what are most likely a set of metaphors in
Foucault’s work we can begin to fill in its well-known historical
account with figures and identities beyond the sodomite and the
homosexual, and in the process see that there were gender
nonconforming people present at the birth of the modern gay rights
movement just as they were at Stonewall. Part One of LGBT
Victorians, “Coalescing Concepts,” considers this origin at length,
focusing on Anne Lister and her contemporaries as case studies of
pre-emergence and on Ulrichs’ writings as some of the founding
documents of the European homophile movement. In this sense, a
figure like Lister—who did not engage in any kind of advocacy work
on behalf of either sexual or gender dissidents, but who used some
still-recognizable rhetorical frameworks and terms to understand
herself—gives us one way to think about the possibilities and
obstacles in the way of various modes of identification in the
opening decades of the nineteenth century. Chapter 1 focuses on
three recovered stories of same-sex desire among women that were
developing independently of each other around the year 1820: the
Lister diaries; the Edinburgh libel case brought by two teachers,
Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods, who accused concerned parents of
ruining their reputation and livelihood; and the marriage in all but
name of two Vermont women, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake.
Reading across these stories helps us recognize lesbian identities in
formation decades before sexology posited the modern homosexual,
but it also highlights the fissures and fault lines in that identity.
Lister’s diaries foreground efforts to think about same-sex desire in
relation to gender nonconformity, asking whether lesbianism
necessarily assumed a “masculine” identification. Gender transitivity
played little role in the Pirie/Woods trial, however, which focused
more on the material anatomical implications of imagining same-sex
practices among women. Accounts of the Bryant–Drake marriage are
by contrast centered in community relations and religious affiliation,
posting what we might think of as a “homonormative” model of
lesbian coupling. Collectively these stories suggest something other
than a simple narrative of sexual identity and their conjunction
around 1820 helps to show a diversity of models for conceptualizing
same-sex desire in the early-nineteenth century and a set of
questions underpinning LGBT Victorians as a whole. How, for
instance, might emergent sexual identities ground themselves in
older forms of gender transitivity, and how might they not? How
were sexual practices thought to have been scripted on the body, or
to reshape the bodies involved? How does a gendered binary of
masculine/feminine reconfigure or obscure other relational inequities
that had their basis in factors such as age, class, or education?
Chapter 2 turns to the twelve pamphlets printed between 1864
and 1880 by Ulrichs, who is sometimes referred to as the “first
public activist” for homosexual rights or (in the translated title of a
recent German study) as “the first gay man in world history.”47
Reading these pamphlets now what is most striking is not the binary
essentialism of the female soul/male body duality for which they
have been widely criticized, but how Ulrichs’ early training as a
lawyer led him to approach issues of homosexual definition, etiology,
and rights by examining what he assumed to be adjacent and nearly
identical subject positions: those that are now articulated by intersex
and transgender people. One instructive example provided Ulrichs
with the ground for advocating same-sex marriage by approaching
the question via the limit-case of what the nineteenth century
termed the “genuine hermaphrodite,” who combined the
reproductive organs of two genders: his reasoning was that just as
the law would not arrogate to itself the ability to dictate which
gender such a person could and could not marry, but should instead
let them define for themselves their gender identity and appropriate
object of desire, so it should follow an identical course for the people
he termed “psychical hermaphrodites,” whose souls and natures
irrevocably drove them to seek partners of the ostensibly-same sex.
At other times, people assigned male at birth such as his Berlin-
based contemporary Frederike Blank, who identified themselves to
the fullest extent possible as women in a time before medical
intervention—including through preferred names, clothing,
mannerisms, and interests—became for Ulrichs the very epitome of
what he termed the Urning or Uranian, their differences from others
explained mainly as a refusal to make strategic compromises with
social norms. Figures such as Lister and Ulrichs are prominent, then,
in the first two chapters of LGBT Victorians because they embodied
two sides of the same confluence between gender transitivity and
same-sex desire, demonstrating that the two were enmeshed with
each other not simply at the level of Foucault’s metaphors but in the
more literal sense that there were recognized modalities of gender
variance and nonconformity through and against which any new
conception of homosexuality had to be thought.
Taking its cue from European sexology’s assumption that same-
sex desire was necessarily accompanied by forms of cross-gender
identification and expression (ranging from tastes and mannerisms
through to secondary sex characteristics), Part Two, “Victorian
Sexology and the Problem of Effeminacy,” uses the issue of male
effeminacy to consider how British homosexual men read, revised,
and sometimes resisted work by Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing,
Magnus Hirschfeld, and others. The standard narrative here is that
to the extent that we might identify a British sexology in the
Victorian period, it differed from the European model in at least
three significant ways. It was, first of all, based more in the
humanities than in scientific research, to the extent that Heike Bauer
has spoken of a tradition of “English literary sexology” that was
dominated by poets and literary critics such as John Addington
Symonds and Edward Carpenter.48 Second, these were privileged
men with a shared experience that was particularly marked by the
single-sex educational institutions of the major public schools and
Oxbridge: as such, they were exposed to a powerful intellectual and
pedagogical influence that sought to defend and justify male
homosexuality on the basis of a rereading of ancient Greek
pederastia. This had a number of implications for how they might
respond to sexology, but most crucially, it meant that its emphasis
upon cross-gender expression came into conflict with a vision of the
Hellenic tradition rooted in an ideology of manly and martial
comradeship. Thirdly, the issue of slavery in ancient Greece, coupled
with the privileged habitus within which British homophile advocacy
first developed, meant that male same-sex desire was invariably
theorized in terms of inherently asymmetrical partnerships,
structured on the basis of gender, class, educational, or age
differences.
As Chapter 3 outlines, Symonds’ efforts to define his
homosexuality in relation to a range of younger or less affluent
partners substituted a different set of asymmetries in place of
Ulrichs’ gender dynamic, but they could not resolve the fundamental
difficulty of imagining for himself a sexual identity that was
grounded in a partnership of non-coercive equals and a mirroring of
gender expression. In his Memoirs, this effort was authorized by
Ulrichs’ notions of the Mittel (middle) or Zwischen-urning (between),
but in the process Symonds only encountered a subsidiary
asymmetry because the ideal partner of such a man was a youth,
who was himself imagined as situated at a point of transition
between childhood and adulthood. Under the influence of Walt
Whitman, Symonds proceeded to rethink his sexual identity in terms
of a potentially more reciprocated love of male comrades, only to
encounter further problems in conceptualizing and justifying his love
of working-class men. Chief among these was the problem that
same-sex desire among the lower classes was imagined to be more
“natural” (in the sense of developing without the cultivating
environment of cultural and educational institutions) and also
“acquired” (in the sense that it contrasted with the congenital
homosexuality that higher class people such as Ulrichs and Symonds
claimed for themselves). Having exchanged a gender-based model
for one rooted first in age and then in class difference, Symonds
found a stubborn problem remained and was subtended by his own
social privilege: in each successive model, the ideal partner was
inevitably figured as somebody with a defining difference from
Symonds himself, which just as inevitably rendered each relationship
unequal and made his claim to a Whitmanite belief in “democratic”
relations ring hollow.
Chapter 4 focuses on the early works of homophile advocacy by
Edward Carpenter in the 1890s that were among the first published
sources to make the case for gay rights in Britain. Although the
product of a similarly privileged background as Symonds, Carpenter
lived well into the twentieth century, which meant that he
experienced the counter-reaction generated by Wilde’s trials that
occurred two years after Symonds’ death in 1893. The repressive
effects of Wilde’s conviction are well-known, and among its victims
was a project that Carpenter had begun imagining in 1894, a book
on “the Sexes” that originated with a series of lectures and essays
including one titled Homogenic Love. Because he could not find a
publisher for the project in the wake of the trials, Carpenter was
forced to publish Homogenic Love privately and to reconfigure the
book that was eventually published as Love’s Coming of Age; in the
process, he also rethought the basis on which he might argue for
homosexual rights, recognizing the need for forms of legitimation
that were not reliant on the now-discredited prototype of Hellenic
pederasty. In my reading of Carpenter’s earliest manuscripts and
their subsequent revisions, I trace out a before-and-after contrast
that complicates the received idea of British sexology as inherently
misogynistic and hostile to German influences. As Homogenic Love
was reworked as a chapter titled “Homogenic Attachment” and a
companion essay An Unknown People mutated into “The
Intermediate Sex,” Carpenter’s work increasingly engaged with that
of Ulrichs and Hirschfeld and also with the thinking of feminist “New
Woman” writers of the period.
In many ways, then, the logic of Part Two of this volume is the
one that Freud termed the return of the repressed, in which efforts
to purge homosexuality of its earlier associations with gender
nonconformity inevitably failed, just as they did in the late twentieth-
century moment that was analyzed by David Halperin and Alan
Sinfield. In lesbian/gay histories of nineteenth-century Britain, the
re-emergence of the issue of gender transitivity is typically tied to
the 1870–71 trials of Fanny and Stella, which are at the center of
Part Three of LGBT Victorians, “Gay Men/Trans Women.” My reading
of the transcripts and press coverage of the trial in Chapter 5 runs
counter to the standard account, which views Fanny and Stella as
having been put on trial for making publicly and spectacularly
apparent the guilty secret of male homosexuality’s effeminacy,
thereby putting into question (among other things) the very
arguments that were being made by Symonds that British
homosexuality was immune from such a Continental taint. This is a
reading that has now extended across two distinct waves of queer
history, having been argued first in the 1980s and ‘90s by Jeffrey
Weeks, Neil Bartlett, Alan Sinfield, and William Cohen and more
recently by a new generation of historians of sexuality including
Charles Upchurch and H. G. Cocks.
In their collective interpretation, these critics make two
assumptions that seem to have gone uninterrogated, even as we
might have expected their echoing of Victorian-era prosecutors to
have given pause: the first is that Fanny and Stella were
crossdressers and therefore unquestionably male, and the second is
that their cross-gender presentation was intrinsically linked to the
felony for which they were being prosecuted (conspiracy to incite
others to commit sodomy) either as one part of a mutually-
confirming network of signification or as a flimsy screen and alibi.
The exoneration of Fanny and Stella was, on this argument,
consistent with the strained efforts on the part of Symonds and
others to repudiate gay male effeminacy and the European
sexological work that had theorized and documented it. Insisting on
the supposed equation between same-sex desire and cross-gender
expression as the open secret that the trial could not publicly admit,
however, has the same effect as Terry Castle’s argument that for
someone like Anne Lister gender nonconformity was merely the
closest proxy for a homosexual subjectivity that could not yet be
affirmed: what each assertion disqualifies a priori is the possibility of
a gender-variant identity for its own sake. As I suggested earlier in
relation to Foucault, my counter-reading of the trial in many respects
proceeds through a process of de-metaphorization, starting from an
assumption that in key respects both Fanny and Stella and their
witnesses—the doctors who disputed physical evidence that
supposedly indicated anal sex, family members who testified to
cross-gender expressions dating back to early childhood,
acquaintances who still struggled to see them as anything but
women—were telling the truth and not engaged in an elaborate
cover-up of something that everybody supposedly already knew.
Fanny and Stella also provide the link to my final chapter, which
shifts focus to the representation of sexed and gendered bodies in
late-Victorian pornographic texts from Britain and France. The trial’s
ending was an anticlimax for those in the press and the prosecuting
agencies for whom the defendants had seemed unquestionably
guilty before the evidence was offered; as Chapter 5 details,
photographs of the accused (some of which I reproduce) failed to
assuage a desire for sensation that had been incited in advance. If
the prosaic details of Fanny and Stella’s lives disappointed, their
names were soon attached to imaginary characters on whom
different imaginings of cross-gender expression could be projected
with no need to conform to actually existing lives or bodies. Chapter
6 takes its cue from Lisa Sigel’s observation that pornography lets us
glimpse a period’s “social imaginary” of sex in a space that allows for
imaginary configurations and permutations, and in this way might
help us to see why an event such as the trial excited so much
curiosity and excitement.49 As fictional figures, Fanny and Stella first
appeared in 1881’s Sins of the Cities of the Plain, purporting to be
the memoirs of a real-life male prostitute Jack Saul. Saul finds
himself participating in one of the trial’s most anticlimactic events, a
ball held at Haxtell’s Hotel that is here reimagined as an orgy that
Saul, Fanny, and Stella (now respectively renamed Eveline, Selina,
and Laura) attend dressed as women. Having read Saul’s supposed
sexual autobiography to this point, we know that he is a cisgender
male and thus cross-dressing at the ball for economic purposes; in
what I describe as a contagion narrative, however, Eveline comes to
adopt a transgender identity through her interactions with Selina and
Laura in both Sins and its supposed sequel, Letters from Laura and
Eveline (1883), a transformation that is signaled in particular by
feminine pronouns that initially denote only a cross-dressed alter ego
but are later used exclusively.50 In the sequel, moreover, Laura and
Eveline are described as having a seemingly unique anatomical
configuration, the “arse-quim,” that indicates a gender transition
occurring at the level of the somatic body. The text is ambiguous,
however, about whether the “arse-quim” is real or imagined and an
effect of what contemporary sexology termed heredity or
environmental acquisition. The latter possibility suggests it might be
an effect of anal penetration bringing about a transition in those
affirmed male at birth, thereby signaling a literal elaboration of the
conjoining of homosexuality and cross-gender expression that
Symonds and others sought to reverse. In a powerful emblem of
bodily contagion, Letters ends with a fantasy orgy in which all
participants have “arse-quims” and thus can penetrate and be
penetrated simultaneously as bi-gendered subjects.
These two texts that elaborate fantasies based on the Fanny and
Stella trial are bracketed in Chapter 6 by two others that imagine
different—and, in some ways, more forward-looking—possibilities for
LGBTQI+ subjects. The collectively authored novel Teleny (1893)
that is sometimes credited in part to Oscar Wilde develops a same-
sex couple that is characterized by the forms of reciprocity and
sameness that theorists such as Symonds and Carpenter aspired to,
positing two male lovers who are relatively unmarked by contrasting
or complementary gender expression or by differences of class, age,
or education. Given the long history I trace out in Part Two whereby
same-sex couples were persistently structured along these various
axes of asymmetry, it is telling that pornographic fantasy is a space
in which such a reciprocal partnership can emerge, consisting of two
“straight-acting and – appearing gay” men who each embody the
type that David Halperin wanted to install at the center of modern
gay male self-representation. Anticipating a different model that has
arguably displaced Halperin’s, a fourth fin-de-siècle text, The
Romance of Violette (1891), proceeds along a different trajectory,
offering up a range of straight, bisexual, lesbian, and intersex bodies
that are clearly demarcated from each other and yet also capable of
arranging themselves into a succession of erotic couplings. For the
first time, we can glimpse here the idea of an alliance that is not
predicated on a sliding between categories in which one subject
position is presented as an intensification of another or as producing
new possibilities through the forms of contagion that are
predominant in Sins and Letters. A short coda concludes LGBT
Victorians by setting this range of possibilities in contrast to the
figure who looms largest in the public perception of queer life in the
nineteenth century (Wilde) and explains why he is a relatively minor
figure in the book on account of his commitment—much like
Symonds’—to a narrow and backward-looking model of pederastic
relations that maintains a strong commitment to personal privilege
and asymmetrical relationships.
My final chapters return us in some ways then to our
contemporary moment, which is caught between twinned impulses:
on the one hand to subordinate other identity positions to that of a
homo-normative image of sameness and on the other to celebrate
and value a proliferation of differentiated options that lack an
obvious commonality. I focus mainly on tensions between the
homosexual man and the trans woman in part because the latter
bears the brunt of transphobic attacks, but also because the space
between the two is more easily visible in the nineteenth-century
archive. To think historically about the equivalent tension—so
evident in the struggles over commemorating Anne Lister—between
lesbian and transmasculine affirmations runs into the difficulty that
Jack Halberstam has termed a “project of rationalization,” in which
cross-gender expression is typically “assigned an economic motive”
in order that the potential trans subject can be re-installed within
“the comforting and seemingly inevitable matrix of hetero-
domesticity.”51 As Julia Serano has remarked, “most people cannot
fathom why someone would give up male privilege and power in
order to become a relatively disempowered female,” which means
that instances of living and working with a conventionally masculine
expression (whether as soldiers, professionals, husbands, or actors)
can be easily reprocessed as women making the best of misogynistic
life choices.52 As a consequence, Jules Gill-Peterson has noted, the
“border wars” that have more recently erupted between butch
lesbians and trans men—within which we might position the Lister
controversy as an epiphenomenal skirmish—have come to be viewed
in terms of a “generational presumption of temporal sequence” that
sees transmasculinity as a problem that only emerges within
lesbianism in the late-twentieth century.53 Issues of historical
reclassification—whether of key historical figures such as Lister, jazz
musician Bill Tipton, radiologist Alan Hart, or a pivotal literary
archetype such as The Well of Loneliness’ Stephen Gordon—thus
come to be viewed as a retroactive process of violent erasure rather
than a re-engaging of a longstanding historical debate.54
Restoring that sense of history is one of the central purposes of
LGBT Victorians. It is often said that problems raised by the new
visibility of trans people and their demand for rights—whether in
education, access to public spaces, or regarding the use of preferred
names and pronouns—are a form of social experiment for which
there are no guidelines. Reading that Fanny and Stella were arrested
immediately after the former used a women’s cloakroom, that their
lawyers each asked the court what other facility they ought to have
used to provoke less of a public response, or that popular
newspapers of the period used “she” and “her” in their trial coverage
tells us that historical precedents are there if we choose to look for
them. In a similar sense, objections within the mainstream
lesbian/gay movement to an alliance with transgender activists (like
those I cited earlier from Matthew Parris and Mark Joseph Stern)
sometimes operate on the principle of “last hired, first fired,” as if
that alliance is placing new and unreasonable demands on an
established and unified gay movement. To think about the key role
played by a figure such as Frederike Blank in the very earliest
conceptualizing of a homosexual identity is then also to think again
about what Gill-Peterson terms “temporal sequencing.” It would take
surprisingly little analytical work to reverse the order and suggest
that for somebody like Ulrichs, gender nonconforming people were
there first and created the conceptual framework within which a
homosexual identity could emerge and be asserted. In an effort to
reclaim the nineteenth-century term “inversion,” for instance,
Meredith Talusan has posited that “homosexuality is a form of
gender variance” on the basis that “all gay people fall within a
gender-nonconforming space whose borders are demarcated by
‘transgender’ in the current Western model,” an assertion that
echoes Kate Bornstein’s provocative reversal of order in Gender
Outlaw. “It’s the transgendered who need to embrace the lesbians
and gay,” she writes, “because it’s the transgendered who are in fact
the more inclusive category.”55 The reading I offer of key sexological
works in Chapter 2 would substantiate such a statement, at least for
the first century of the struggle to recognize the rights of sexual and
gender nonconforming people.
Simply reversing the sequential order keeps discussion locked
within a zero-sum game, however, much like the one with which I
began about whether to think of Anne Lister as gender
nonconforming or a lesbian—and as with that controversy, it misses
the possibility that she could be both without either category
attempting to erase or eradicate the other. Historically, such debates
often play out with little attention to principles or periodization,
which means, as I suggest in relation to Fanny and Stella, that
different criteria are in operation when it comes to deciding if they
can be thought of as trans women, as opposed to gay men.
Ultimately, as was the case for Lister, these arguments are trying to
choose between anachronisms, but only one set of terms is being
acknowledged as such. (Perhaps the most common designation of
Fanny and Stella, as “cross-dressers,” deploys a term that the OED
dates from around World War I). Each chapter in this book examines
ways in which people in the nineteenth century were able to think
and articulate that possibility of both, working on the assumption
that gender expression and sexual orientation were intimately linked.
It is only when we assume their non-identity that difficulties emerge,
in turn exacerbating internecine feuds within the LGBTQI+ coalition
and exhausting fights about how to retroactively identify somebody
as option x or option y—but rarely, if ever, as both.

LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives. Simon

Joyce, Oxford University Press. © Simon Joyce 2022. DOI:
10.1093/oso/9780192858399.003.0001

1 As Chris Roulston has noted, such phrases, in conjunction with the

increasingly routine acknowledgment of Lister as the “first modern lesbian,” have
produced a bifurcation in which she is “simultaneously aligned with ‘ancient’ codes
that can decode and transform lesbian history for us, if we can interpret her
correctly, and with the proto-modern lesbian subject who does not require
decoding as she is already ‘one of us.’” See Roulston, “The Revolting Anne Lister,”
267–8. It is also worth noting what’s embedded in each of these metaphors: one
story of origins (the Dead Sea Scrolls) and another one of translation (the Rosetta
Stone).
2 Jill Liddington’s best estimate is that John Lister and Arthur Burrell’s decoding
of the diaries was around 1892, which would place it at a midpoint between the
passage of the 1888 Criminal Law Amendment Act (with its infamous Labouchère
Amendment) and the Act’s most notorious application, the Oscar Wilde trials of
1895. See Liddington, “Anne Lister of Shibden Hall,” 74 (footnote 25).
3 Change.org petition, “Anne Lister Was a Lesbian: Don’t Let Them Erase Her
Story,” at https://www.change.org/p/to-york-lgbt-history-month-york-civic-trust-
anne-lister-was-a-lesbian-don-t-let-them-erase-her-story (accessed July 2021).
4 “Statement on Anne Lister’s Rainbow Plaque,” issued September 2018, at
https://gallery.mailchimp.com/d75e42de126fedb389cf4f417/files/0d6bf24a-8d10-
4ded-9755-
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
III

Kokonaisen kuukauden Žilin eli näin tovereineen. Isäntä yhä vain

naureskeli: »Jos sinu, Ivan, hyvä, — minu, Abdulin, hyvä». Mutta
ruoka oli kehnoa, — ainoastaan hapattamatonta hirssileipää joskus
hiukan kakkaraksi paistettua, toisinaan taas aivan pelkkää taikinaa.

Kostylin kirjoitti uudelleen kotiinsa, odotteli rahakirjettä ja ikävöi.

Päiväkaudet hän istui vajassa ja laski päiviä, milloin kirjeen pitäisi
saapua, tahi nukkui. Mutta Žilin tiesi, ettei hänen kirjeensä tullut
perille, eikä toista enää kirjoittanut.

»Mistä äitimuori semmoiset rahat ottaisi minun lunnaikseni», hän

mietti. »Tähän asti on enimmäkseen elänyt minun lähettämistäni
rahoista. Ja jos saisikin miten kokoon viisisataa, niin sitten olisi puilla
paljailla. Ehkäpä hyvässä lykyssä suoriudun tästä omin neuvoin.»

Kaikki paikat hän tutki ja tarkasteli, miettien miten pääsisi

karkaamaan.

Hän käveli vihellellen kartanolla, välistä istuutui jotakin

näpertelemään; teki savinukkeja ja punoi koreja vitsaksista. Žilin oli
ihmeen kätevä, oikea mestari kaikkeen tällaiseen.
 Muovailipa hän kerran savesta nuken, jolla oli oikein nenä, kädet
ja jalat, vieläpä tatarilainen mekkokin yllä, ja pisti sen seisomaan
katolle.

Tatarilaistyttöjä kulki ohi, he menivät kaivolle. Talon tytär Dina

huomasi nuken ja kutsui toverinsakin sitä katsomaan. Kaikki laskivat
astiansa maahan, katsoivat ja nauroivat. Žilin otti nuken ja tarjosi sitä
heille, mutta he vain nauroivat, eivätkä uskaltaneet siihen koskea.
Hän pani sen takaisin katolle ja meni vajaan nähdäkseen, mitä
seuraisi.

Dina juoksi nuken luo, vilkaisi ympärilleen, sieppasi lelun ja livisti

tiehensä.

Aamulla päivän sarastaessa Žilin näki Dinan tulevan portaille

nukke kädessään. Nukke oli nyt koristettu punaisilla tilkuilla ja hän
tuuditteli sitä kuin lasta ainakin, hyräillen sille kehtolaulua.

Kohta tuli äitikin ulos, alkoi torua häntä, tempasi nuken hänen
kädestään, löi sen kappaleiksi ja lähetti Dinan jotakin toimittamaan.

Žilin teki vielä toisenkin nuken, entistä paremman, ja lahjoitti sen

Dinalle. Tyttö toi kerran ruukun Žilinille, laski astian maahan ja
istuutui katselemaan häntä. Hän osoitti nauraen astiaa.

»Mikähän sitä niin huvittaa?» ajattelee Žilin. Hän otti astian ja

rupesi juomaan luullen astiassa olevan vettä. Mutta siinä olikin
maitoa. Hän joi maidon ja virkkoi: Hyvää oli!» Tästäpä tyttö vasta
riemastui!

— Hyvä, Ivan, hyvä! — sanoi hän hypähtäen seisoalleen, taputti

käsiään ja juoksi pois.
 Siitä lähtien hän toi joka päivä salaa Žilinille maitoa. Ja kun tatarit
tekivät vuohenmaidosta juustoja, joita kuivatettiin katolla, kiidätti hän
niitäkin varkain Žilinille. Kerran isäntä tappoi pässin, ja tyttö toi
hihassaan viipaleen lampaan paistia vangille heittäen sen ovesta ja
juosten heti tiehensä.

Sattui kerran kauhea ukonilma; vettä satoi tunnin ajan kuin

saavista kaataen. Purot pursuivat sameina. Mistä ennen pääsi
kahlaamalla, siinä oli nyt vettä kolmen arssinan syvyydeltä ja virta
käänteli kiviä. Kaikkialla virtasi puroja, ja vuorilla kävi veden pauhu.
Sadekuuron mentyä ohi virtasi ojia kylän joka haaralla. Žilin pyysi
isännältä veitsen, teki telan sivulaudat ja niiden väliin veisti rattaan.
Rattaan kummallekin puolelle hän kiinnitti nuken.

Tyttöset toivat hänelle tilkkuja, ja hän vaatetti niillä nuket; toisesta

teki tytön, toisen puki pojaksi. Sitten hän kiinnitti vehkeet telaan ja
asetti puroon. Ratas alkoi pyöriä ja nuket hypähdellä.

Koko kylä oli kohta siinä koolla: poikia, tyttöjä, vanhoja eukkoja ja
ikämiehiäkin. Kaikki solkkasivat vierasta kieltään.

— Ai urus, ai Ivan!

Abdulilla sattui olemaan rikkinäinen kello. Hän kutsui Žilinin

luokseen, näytteli hänelle kelloa ja melskasi jotakin.

Žilin sanoi heti:

— Annahan tänne, niin korjataan.

Hän otti kellon, väänteli veitsellä rattaat auki, pani ne jälleen

paikoilleen ja antoi kellon takaisin. Kello käydä naksutti.
 Isäntä ihastui tästä; toi vanhan, rikkinäisen alusmekkonsa ja
lahjoitti sen Žilinille. Mitäs muuta kuin ota — kelpasihan se yöllä
peitteeksi.

Tästä lähtien Žilinin kätevyydestä kulki maine, että hän oli oikea
mestari. Alkoi tulla väkeä hänen luokseen kaukaisista kylistä; ken toi
pyssyn tai pistoolinlukon, ken kellorähjän korjattavaksi. Toipa isäntä
hänelle työkalujakin, hohtimet, poran ja viilan.

Kerran eräs tatari sairastui, ja heti tultiin Žiliniä pyytämään:

»Tulehan parantamaan!» Žilinillä ei ollut aavistustakaan miten oli
lääkittävä, mutta hän meni kuitenkin katsomaan potilasta tuumien:
»Tottapahan siitä omia aikojaan paranee.» Hän meni vajaan, otti
vettä, sekoitti siihen hiekkaa ja lausui puoliääneen jotakin tatarien
kuullen, antaen sitten juoman sairaalle. — Onneksi hänen
maineelleen potilas parani.

Žilin alkoi jo vähän ymmärtää heidän kieltäänkin. Toiset, jotka jo

olivat tutummiksi käyneet, kutsuivat häntä tuttavallisesti nimeltä:
»Ivan». Muut taas pälyilivät häneen kuin villipetoon.

Punapartainen tatari ei sietänyt Žiliniä. Heti kun hän vain sattui

tämän näkemään, synkistyivät miehen kasvot ja hän kääntyi
poispäin tai alkoi ärhennellä. Olipa täällä vielä eräs ukkokin, hän ei
tosin asunut itse kylässä, vaan tuli aina jostakin vuoren juurelta. Žilin
näki hänet vain silloin, kun hän kulki talon ohi moskeijaan Allahia
kumartamaan. Tämä oli lyhyt mies, lakin ympäri oli kierretty valkea
liina, suipoksi leikattu parta ja viikset olivat valkeat kuin untuva.
Kasvot olivat ryppyjä täynnä ja tiilenpunaiset. Nenä oli käyrä kuin
haukan nokka, harmaat silmät kiiluivat ilkeästi ja hampaattomasta
suusta törrötti vain kaksi torahammasta. Turbaani päässään hän
mennä köpitteli sauvaansa nojaten ja tähyili ympärilleen kuin susi.
Huomatessaan Žilinin hän murahti ja kääntyi pois.

Kerran Žilin lähti vuoren juurelle katselemaan ukon asuntoa. Hän

kulki polkua pitkin jonkin matkaa ja näki kiviaidan ympäröimän
puutarhapahasen; aidan takana kasvoi kirsikka- ja persikkapuita ja
vähän etempänä oli pieni, tasakattoinen hökkeli. Hän astui
lähemmäksi, näki oljista punottuja mehiläispönttöjä vierekkäin;
mehiläiset lentelivät suristen niiden ympärillä. Ukko oli polvillaan
maassa, hääräillen mehiläispesän ääressä. Žilin nousi siitä hiukan
ylemmäs katsomaan ja sattui kolistamaan jalkapuitaan. Ukko vilkaisi
taakseen, älähti, vetäisi vyöltä pistoolin ja laukaisi Žiliniä kohden.
Tämä ehti töintuskin painautua kiven taakse suojaan.

Ukko tuli kantelemaan isännälle. Tämä kutsui Žilinin luokseen ja

naurussa suin kysyi:

— Mitä sinulla oli tekemistä ukon luona?

— Kävinpähän vain katsomassa, miten ukko siellä elelee. En minä

hänelle mitään pahaa tehnyt.

Isäntä kertoi ukolle Žilinin vastauksen.

Mutta äijä oli vain kiukuissaan, murisi jotakin torahampaat törröllä

ja pui nyrkkiä Žilinille.

Kaikkea Žilin ei ymmärtänyt, sen hän kuitenkin tajusi, että ukko

käski isäntää tappamaan venäläiset eikä pitämään heitä talossaan.
Lopulta ukko lähti kotiinsa.

Žilin alkoi kysellä isännältä lähemmin ukosta, mikä hän oikein oli.
Isäntä selitti:
 — Siinä vasta mies oli! Ei olekaan hänen veroistaan džigittiä näillä
mailla, monta venäläistä on ottanut hengiltä ja rikas oli aikoinaan.
Kolme eukkoa on ukolla ollut ja kahdeksan poikaa. Kylässä asuivat
kaikki yhdessä. Saapuivat sitten venäläiset, hävittivät kylän ja
tappoivat seitsemän poikaa. Yksi poika vain jäi henkiin ja antautui
venäläisille. Ukko matkusti perästä ja heittäytyi itsekin venäläisten
armoille. Eleli heidän parissaan kolmisen kuukautta, löysi sieltä
poikansa, surmasi hänet omin käsin ja sitten pakeni. Sen päivän
jälkeen ei ole enää sotaa käynyt, vaan Mekkaan matkusti Allahia
rukoilemaan. Siksi nyt turbaania kantaa. Mekassa käynyttä sanotaan
Hadziksi, ja sellaisilla on turbaani päässä. Ukko ei suosi teikäläisiä.
Käskee tappamaan sinut, mutta minun ei käy sitä tekeminen, kun
olen maksanut sinusta rahat. Pidän sinusta, Ivan, en hennoisi
tappaa, en edes luotani laskea, ellen olisi antanut sanaani. — Isäntä
nauraa virnisteli virkkaessaan venäjäksi: »Sinu, Ivan, hyvä, minu,
Abdul, hyvä.»
IV

Žilin eleli näin jälleen kuukauden päivät. Hän käveli päivisin ympäri
aulia (kylää) tai askarteli jotakin. Mutta kun yö saapui ja aulissa
kaikki äänet vaikenivat, hän vajassaan tonki maata kaivellen. Kivet
tekivät kaivaessa vastusta, mutta hän kuopi kivet irti viilan tyngällä ja
sai lopulta kaivetuksi seinän alle aukon, josta sopivana hetkenä voi
ryömiä ulos. »Kunpa vain tuntisin, seudut ja tietäisin, mihin päin
lähteä», hän mietiskeli. »Tataritpa eivät virka mitään.»

Žilin päätti käyttää tilaisuutta hyväkseen, kun isäntä lähti matkalle.

Hän meni iltapäivällä aulin taa vuorelle seutua tarkastelemaan. Mutta
isäntä oli, lähtiessään käskenyt poikansa vartioida Žiliniä eikä
päästää häntä näkyvistä. Poika juoksi nyt ihan Žilinin kintereillä
kirkuen:

— Älä mene! Isä kielsi laskemasta. Taikka minä huudan ihmisiä!

Žilin rupesi poikaa taivuttelemaan.

— Enhän minä kauas mene, virkkoi hän, — nousen vain tuonne

vuorelle; haen lääkeruohoja, niitä tarvitaan. Tule mukaan. Enhän
minä jalkapuissa pakoon pääse. Huomenna sitten teen sinulle
jousen ja nuolia.
 Poika taipui ja he lähtivät. Vuori näytti olevan lähellä, mutta
jalkapuissa oli työlästä kompuroida. Kiipeäminen oli kova urakka.
Viimein oltiin vuorella, Žilin istahti ja alkoi tarkastella seutua.
Eteläpuolella, vajan takana notkossa, oli parvi hevosia, ja alempana
syvänteessä näkyi toinen tatarilaiskylä. Sen takana kohosi toinen
vuori, vielä jyrkempi, ja sen takana taas vuori. Vuorten välissä siinsi
metsä ja sitten oli taas vuoria, yhä korkeampia, ja kaikkein
korkeimmat olivat lumipeitteisiä, valkeita kuin sokeri. Yksi niistä
kohosi muita korkeammalle; sillä näytti olevan aivan kuin hattu
päässä. Katsoipa itään tai länteen, aina vain näkyi samanlaisia
vuorenhuippuja; siellä täällä pilkotti rotkoista tatarilaiskyliä, joista
nousi savu. »Tämä kaikki on nyt sitä heidän puoltaan», mietti Žilin.
Sitten hän alkoi silmäillä venäläiselle puolelle: alhaalla virtasi joki —
ja sen rannalla näkyi tatarilaiskylä puutarhoineen. Joella oli naisia
pyykkiä huuhtomassa, he näyttivät pieniltä kuin nuket. Kylän takana
alempana oli vuori ja sen takana vielä toisia metsän peittämiä vuoria.
Mutta kahden vuoren välitse siinsi etäällä tasanko, ja siellä hyvin
kaukana näkyi aivan kuin savu nousevan. Žilin koetti muistella ja
palauttaa mieleensä mistäpäin aurinko nousi ja mihin se laski silloin
kun hän oli linnoituksessa. Hän katseli yhä ja hänestä tuntui
varmalta, että heidän linnoituksensa oli juuri tässä laaksossa.
Tuonne, noiden kahden vuoren väliin oli siis koetettava paeta.

Aurinko alkoi jo mennä mailleen. Punertava hohde levisi vuorten

lumihuipuille, ja lumettomat vuoret tummenivat. Notkoista kohosi
sumua, mutta tasanko, jossa linnoituksen täytyi olla, leimusi
pelkkänä tulimerenä laskevan auringon valossa. Žilin terästi
katseensa, jotakin häämötti etäällä alangolta, sieltä nousi todellakin
savua rakennuksesta. Hän uskoi nyt varmasti, että sen täytyi tulla
juuri heidän linnoituksestaan.
 Jo alkoi olla myöhä. Tatarilainen mulla huusi iltahuutonsa. Karjaa
ajettiin kotiin, — lehmät ammuivat. Poika kirkui yhtenään:
»Lähdetään jo», mutta Žilin ei olisi vielä tahtonut lähteä.

He palasivat kotiin. »Hyvä on», ajattelee Žilin, »nyt tunnen tien, ei

muuta kuin karkuun!» Jo samana yönä hän tahtoi karata. Yöt olivat
pimeät — oli uudenkuun aika. Pahaksi onneksi saapuivat tatarit
yöksi kotiin. Näin retkiltään palatessaan he tavallisesti ajavat laumaa
edellään ja pitävät iloa. Mutta nyt he eivät olleet saaneet mitään
käsiinsä, ainoastaan erään tatarin ruumis roikkui satulassa; —
vainaja oli punaparran veli. He olivat kokoontuneet kuljettamaan
vainajaa hautaan ja olivat äkeissään. Žilinkin tuli katsomaan. Kuollut
käärittiin palttinaan, kannettiin kylän taakse plataanipuiden alle ja
laskettiin nurmelle. Mullakin saapui siihen, ja kaikki sitoivat liinan
lakkiinsa ja kävivät istumaan kyykkyyn vierekkäin kuolleen ääreen.

Etumaisena oli mulla, hänen takanaan kolme turbaanipäistä ukkoa

ja näiden takana vielä muita tatareja. Kaikki istuivat äänettöminä,
päät painuneina rinnalle. He olivat kauan ääneti.

Vihdoin mulla kohotti katseensa ja lausui:

— Allah! — Hän sanoi vain tämän ainoan sanan, ja kaikki

painoivat jälleen päänsä ja olivat kauan vaiti istuen liikkumatta.

Mulla kohotti taas päänsä:

— Allah! — ja kaikki toistivat:— Allah! — vaieten jälleen. Kuollut

makasi nurmella liikkumattomana, ja toverit kyyköttivät ympärillä.
Kukaan ei hievahdakaan. Tuulenhenki ainoastaan hiukan leyhytteli
plataanin lehtiä. Sitten mulla luki rukouksen; kaikki nousivat ylös,
nostivat kuolleen ja kantoivat käsillään haudan reunalle. Hauta ei
ollut tavallinen, se oli kaivettu kellarin tapaisesti törmään. Miehet
tarttuivat kuollutta sääriin ja kainaloihin, laskivat hiljalleen hautaan
istuvaan asentoon ja asettivat kädet vatsalle.

Nogaijilainen toi sylyksen vihreitä kaisloja. Näillä täytettiin hauta,

se luotiin kiireesti umpeen, kumpu tasoitettiin ja pään puolelle
pystytettiin kivi. Sitten maa tallattiin, ja kaikki istuutuivat taas
vierekkäin haudan ääreen ja olivat kauan ääneti.

— Allah! Allah! Allah! — Saattajat huokasivat ja nousivat.

Punapartainen tatari jakeli ukoille rahaa, hypähti ylös ja

sivallettuaan kolme kertaa piiskalla otsaansa lähti kotiinsa.

Seuraavana aamuna Žilin näki punaparran taluttavan tammaa

kylän taakse ja kolmen muun tatarin kulkevan hänen perässään.
Tultuaan kylän taakse punaparta heitti takin yltään, kääri
paidanhihansa ylös — käsivarret olivat vankat — veti tikarinsa
vyöltään ja hioi sitä kovasimeen. — Tatarit tempoivat tamman päätä
taaksepäin, punaparta astui luokse ja viilsi eläimeltä kurkun poikki,
kaatoi tamman pitkälleen ja alkoi nylkeä elukkaa tunkemalla
nyrkkinsä nahan alle. Tuli akkoja ja tyttöjä suolia ja sisälmyksiä
puhdistamaan. Miehet paloittelivat sitten hevosen kappaleiksi ja
laahasivat tupaan. Ja koko kylän väki saapui punaparran taloon
vainajan muistoa viettämään.

Kolme päivää syötiin sitten tamman lihaa, juotiin tatarilaisolutta ja

vietettiin vainajan muistoa. Kaikki tatarit olivat kotosalla. Neljäntenä
päivänä Žilin näki päivällisen tienoissa miesten hommaavan lähtöä
jonnekin. Talutettiin hevosia pihalle, varustauduttiin. Kymmenkunta
miestä lähti matkalle, punaparta heidän mukanaan. Ainoastaan
Abdul jäi kotiin. Yöt olivat vielä pimeät, uusi kuu oli vastikään
syntynyt.

— Nyt, tuumi Žilin, on tullut karkaamisen hetki. — Hän puhui

asiasta
Kostylinillekin. Mutta tätä yritys peloitti.

— Mihin me tästä karkaamme? Kun emme tunne edes tietäkään.

— Minä kyllä tunnen tien.

— Mutta yössä ei ehditä perillekään.

— Ollaan metsässä yötä, jollei ehditä. On minulla jokunen

kakkarakin säästettynä. Sitäkö tässä rupeaa istumaan? Kuka tietää
lähettävätkö rahojakaan. Ja tatarit ovat nyt kiukuissaan, kun
venäläiset ovat tappaneet heidän miehensä.

Kostylin tuumaili kotvan aikaa.

— No, olkoon menneeksi.

Žilin ryömi aukon suulle ja kaivoi sitä suuremmaksi, jotta

Kostylinkin mahtuisi. He istuivat sitten odottamaan, kunnes kylässä
äänet vaikenivat.

Kun ei koko aulista enää kuulunut ihmisääntä, Žilin ryömi vajasta

seinän alitse. Hän kuiskasi Kostylinille: »Ryömi!» Kostylinkin pääsi
reijästä, mutta jalallaan tuli potkaisseeksi kiveä ja kolistelleeksi.
Isännällä oli talon vahtina kirjava koira, hyvin äkäinen, Uljašin
niminen. Tätä Žilin oli jo etukäteen vartavasten syötellyt. Koira kuuli
nyt kolinan, ärähti haukkumaan ja ryntäsi vajan luo perässään vielä
muitakin koiria. Žilin vihelsi hiljalleen ja heitti piirakan palan koiran
eteen. Uljašin tunsikin jo hänet, alkoi heiluttaa häntäänsä ja lakkasi
haukkumasta.

Isäntä kuuli tupaan haukunnan ja huusi sieltä koiralle: — Uskii!

Uskii!
Uljašin!

Mutta Žilin syyhytteli koiran niskaa. Koira oli ääneti, hankasi

itseään hänen polviansa vasten ja heilutteli häntäänsä.

Nurkan takana he sitten istuivat odotellen. Kaikki oli taas hiljaista;

kuului ainoastaan lampaan yninää karsinasta ja alhaalla kivien
lomitse virtaavan veden kuohu. Oli pimeä, tähdet kiiluivat korkealla
taivaalla; vuoren takaa alkoi uusi kuu punertavana kohota, sakarat
ylöspäin. Notkoissa leijaili maidonvalkeana sumu.

Žilin nousi ja virkkoi toverilleen: »No, veliseni, nyt!»

He lähtivät astumaan, mutta juuri kun he olivat päässeet liikkeelle,

kuulivat he katolta papin huutavan: »Allah! Besmillah! Il rahman!»
Väki siis meni moskeijaan. Miehet istuutuivat taas, painautuen
seinän viereen. He istuivat kauan ja odottivat, kunnes kaikki
moskeijaan menijät olivat kulkeneet ohi. Taas oli hiljaista.

— No, Herra meitä auttakoon! — He tekivät ristinmerkin ja

läksivät. He kulkivat pihan poikki jyrkkää rinnettä alas joelle,
kahlasivat sen poikki ja kulkivat notkoa pitkin eteenpäin. Alhaalla
laaksoissa leijaili sakea sumu, ylhäällä pään päällä tuikkivat tähdet.
Niiden mukaan Žilin ohjasi suunnan. Sumu oli viileää, ja oli kevyt
kävellä, saappaat vain olivat epämukavat, länttään astutut. Žilin heitti
ne jalastaan menemään ja kulki paljain jaloin. Hän hyppelehti kiveltä
kivelle ja katsahti tähtiin. Kostylinin oli vaikea seurata.
 — Älä mene niin kovasti, pyysi hän. Kirotut ruojut kalvavat jalkani
verille.

— Heitä menemään, niin on kevyempi kulkea.

Kostylin käveli avojaloin, — mutta entistä huonommin kävi kulku.

Hän löi jalkansa kiviin, ja jäi yhä jälemmäs. Žilin virkkoi:

— Vähät naarmuista, ne paranevat; mutta jos saavat kiinni, niin

leikki on lopussa, tappavat.

Kostylin ei virkkanut mitään, kulki vain ähkien. He kulkivat kauas

notkoa pitkin. Yhtäkkiä kuuluu oikealta koirien haukuntaa. Žilin
pysähtyi, katseli ympärilleen, kiipesi vuorelle, kopeloiden käsillään.

— Ohhoh, harhaan olemme menneet, sanoi hän.

— Me olemme kulkeneet liiaksi oikealle. Tuolla on vieras kylä, näin

sen vuorelta; on mentävä takaisin vasemmalle, vuoren rinnettä.
Tuolla täytyy olla metsä.

Mutta Kostylin sanoi:

— Odotahan toki hiukan, levähdetään; jalkani ovat ihan verillä.

— Voi veikkoseni, kyllä ne paranevat; koeta hyppiä kevyemmin.

Tällä lailla.

Ja Žilin juoksi takaisin ja kääntyi vasemmalle vuoren kylkeä pitkin

metsään. Kostylin jäi jälkeen ja kulki ähkien. Žilin hoputti häntä
vähänväliä eikä pysähtynyt.

He nousivat jälleen vuorelle. Aivan oikein — siinä olikin metsän

reuna. He painautuivat metsään ja repivät okaihin siekaleiksi
viimeiset vaaterääsynsä. Lopulta he osuivat polulle ja lähtivät
kulkemaan sitä pitkin.

— Seis! — Tieltä kuului kavion kapsetta. He seisahtuivat

kuuntelemaan. Kuului kuin hevosen askelten töminää. Sitten oli
hiljaista. He lähtivät liikkeelle, ja töminä kuului uudelleen. He
pysähtyivät, ja sekin taas lakkasi kuulumasta. Žilin heittäytyi
pitkälleen maahan ja koetti katsella valoa vasten, — tiellä seisoi
jokin. Se näytti ihan hevoselta, ja oli kuin sen selässä olisi joku
istunut, mutta se ei näyttänyt oikein ihmiseltä. Kuului hevosen
korskumista. — Mitä ihmettä! — Žilin vihelsi hiljalleen, — se ryntäsi
metsään ja ryske kävi, kun se tuulispäänä katkoi mennessään oksia.

Kostylin aivan lyyhistyi maahan. Mutta Žilin virkkoi nauraen:

— Se oli hirvi. Kuuletko miten se sarvillaan katkoo oksia. Me

pelkäsimme sitä ja se meitä.

He kulkivat yhä eteenpäin. Linnut alkoivat puissa liikehtiä, aamuun

ei ollut enää pitkälti. Miehet eivät oikein tienneet, olivatko he oikealla
tiellä vai ei. Žilinistä tuntui kuin hänet olisi tuotu tätä samaa tietä
kylään ja että toverien luo oli noin kymmenkunta virstaa. Varma ei
hän tiestä kuitenkaan ollut, kun yö oli vielä pimeä. He tulivat vihdoin
aholle. Kostylin istuutui ja puhui:

— Tee niinkuin tahdot, mutta minä en jaksa enää astua, jalkani

eivät nouse.

Žilin alkoi häntä innostaa. — Ei tule mitään, vastasi Kostylin. — En

jaksa.

Žilin kiukustui, sylkäisi ja alkoi sättiä:

 — Lähdenpähän sitten yksin. Hyvästi!

Kostylin hypähti pystyyn, alkaen kiiruhtaa jäljestä. He olivat

kulkeneet noin neljä virstaa. Sumu metsässä tiheni tihenemistään, ei
mitään voinut erottaa ympärillä, tuskin tähtiäkään enää näkyi.

Yht'äkkiä kuului taas hevosen kavioiden töminää. Kengät

kilahtelivat kiviä vasten. Žilin heittäytyi vatsalleen ja kuunteli korva
maassa.

— Tosiaankin, joku ratsastaa tänne meihin päin.

He juoksivat tieltä pensaikkoon odottamaan. Žilin ryömi tielle päin

katsoakseen, — tatari ajoi ratsain lehmää edellään, mutisten jotakin
nenäänsä itsekseen. Nyt hän oli ohi. Žilin palasi Kostylinin luo.

— No, ei hätää, — nouse, lähdetään!

Kostylin yritti nousta, mutta kaatui jälleen.

— En voi, — jumal'auta, en jaksa; voimani, ovat lopussa.

Pullea, tukeva mies oli helposti hiestynyt. Kylmässä sumussa jalat

kolhiutuneina verille hän nääntyi tyyten. Žilin koetti auttaa häntä
pystyyn, mutta Kostylinilta pääsi tuskanhuuto:

— Älä, koskee!

Žilinkin oli jähmettyä.

— Hittoako sinä huudat? Tatari tuossa lähellä vielä kuulee. —

Samalla hän ajatteli: »Onpa mies tosiaan uupunut; mitä oikein olisi
tehtävä? Ei käy ystävää jättäminenkään.» Hän virkkoi Kostylinille:
 — No, nousehan, käy selkääni, — minä kannan, koska sinä et voi
kävellä.

Hän nosti Kostylinin selkäänsä, piteli reisistä kiinni ja lähti tietä

pitkin laahustamaan.

— Älä kurista kurkkuani. Herran tähden; pitele olkapäistä!

Žilinin oli raskasta kulkea, hänenkin jalkansa olivat verillä ja hän oli
ihan uupumaisillaan. Hän kumartui, kohotteli Kostylinin paremmin
selkäänsä ja kantaa retuutti häntä pitkin tietä.

Tatari näkyi kuulleen Kostylinin huudon. Žilin kuuli jonkun

ratsastavan perässään ja huutavan jotakin tatarin kielellä. Hän
heittäytyi pensaikkoon tien viereen. Tatari tempasi pyssynsä ja
laukaisi. Ei toki onneksi sattunut. Tatari vihelsi omalla tavallaan ja
ratsasti pois tietä pitkin.

— Nyt kävi hullusti, veikkoseni, virkkoi Žilin. — Se koira kerää heti

tatarit ajamaan meitä takaa. Ellemme ehdi vielä kolmisen virstaa,
niin olemme hukassa. Hän ajatteli itsekseen: »Piruko minua riivasi
ottamaan tuon pölkyn niskaani? Yksin olisin jo kauan sitten ollut
turvassa.»

Kostylin kehoitti häntä:

— Lähde yksin, mitä sinä jäät minun takiani kuolemaan?

— En, en lähde yksin, en jätä toveriani!

Žilin otti taas Kostylinin selkäänsä. Virstan verran he kulkivat näin

edelleen. Metsää jatkui yhä, ei laitaa näkynyt. Sumu alkoi jo hälvetä
leijaillen kevyinä hattaroina ilmassa, eikä tähtiäkään enää näkynyt.
Žilin alkoi tuskastua.

He joutuivat tien vieressä olevalle lähteelle, joka oli kivillä

reunustettu. He pysähtyivät sen ääreen ja Žilin laski Kostylinin
maahan.

— Annahan, kun hiukan juon ja huoahdan. Maistetaan kakkaraa.

Varmaankin ollaan jo lähellä.

Kun hän kumartui juomaan, kuulivat he jälleen takanansa

kavioiden kapsetta. He painautuivat tieltä oikealle pensaikkoon ja
heittäytyivät jyrkänteen alle pitkälleen.

Kuului tatarien puhetta. Nämä olivat pysähtyneet samaan kohtaan,

mistä Žilin ja Kostylin olivat poikenneet tieltä. He keskustelivat
hetkisen ja sitten usuttivat koiria. Toverukset kuuntelivat, pensaissa
rapisi ja samassa juoksi vieras koira suoraapäätä heitä kohti. Se
pysähtyi äkkiä ja alkoi haukkua.

Tataritkin tunkeutuivat pensaikkoon — vieraita näkyivät olevan.

Pakolaiset otettiin kiinni, pantiin köysiin, kiskottiin satulaan ja
toimitettiin matkaan.

Kun he olivat ratsastaneet kolmisen virstaa, tuli Abdul isäntä

vastaan kahden muun tatarin seuraamana. Tulijat puhuivat jonkin
sanan, siirsivät karkurit omien hevosten selkään ja lähtivät viemään
takaisin kylään.

Abdulin suu ei vetäytynyt nauruun eikä hän virkkanut heille

sanaakaan koko matkalla.
 Päivän koittaessa tultiin perille auliin, ja karkurit jätettiin pihalle
istumaan. Heidän ympärilleen kokoontui heti lapsilauma, joka
kirkuen heitti heitä kivillä ja huitoi raipoilla.

Tatarit kokoontuivat piiriin pihalle; heidän joukossaan oli

vuorenjuurella asuva ukkokin. He alkoivat puhella. Žilin kuuli, että
puhe koski heitä ja että pohdittiin mitä vangeille oli tehtävä. Toiset
neuvoivat lähettämään heidät kauemmaksi vuorille, ukko taas
kehoitti tappamaan. Mutta Abdul ei suostunut:— Minä olen maksanut
heistä rahat ja tahdon saada lunnaat! Ukko vain vakuutteli: — Eivät
maksa kopeekkaakaan, tuhoa vain tekevät. Synti on ruokkia
venäläistä. Parasta on tappaa — sillä pääset!

He hajaantuivat. Isäntä astui Žilinin luo ja alkoi puhella hänelle:

— Ellei teidän lunnaitanne parin viikon päästä lähetetä, pehmitän

nahkanne piiskalla. Mutta jos vielä kerran karkaamaan rupeat, tapan
sinut kuin koiran. Kirjoita kirje ja tee se kunnollisesti.

Vangeille tuotiin paperia, ja he kirjoittivat. Heidät kytkettiin

jalkapuuhun ja laahattiin moskeijan taakse, missä heidät heitettiin
viiden arssinan syvyiseen kuoppaan.
VI

Heidän elämänsä oli nyt niin tukalaa kuin suinkin. Jalkapuista ei

päästetty eikä heitä laskettu ollenkaan raittiiseen ilmaan
jaloittelemaan. Heille heitettiin kuoppaan kuin koirille melkein
paistamatonta taikinaa ja tuotiin ruukussa vettä. Kuopassa oli
raskas, kostea, löyhkäävä ilma; Kostylin tuli ihan sairaaksi, rupesi
pöhöttymään koko mies, ja ruumista alkoi kovasti särkeä; hän milloin
voihki, milloin taas yritti nukkua. Žilininkin mieli oli ihan lamassa;
asiat olivat nyt huonolla kannalla. Eikä hän keksinyt keinoa, millä
olisi täältä selvin nyt. Hän ryhtyi kuopimaan reikää, mutta ei tiennyt
minne mullan heittäisi. Isäntä huomasi sen ja uhkasi tappaa.

Kyyröttäessään kerran kuopassaan hän muisteli taas entistä

vapaanaoloaan ja ikävöi. Samassa putosi piirakas suoraan hänen
polvilleen, pian senjälkeen tipahti toinen ja kirsikoita vielä lisäksi.
Hän katsahti ylös ja huomasi siellä Dinan. Tämä katseli häntä
hetkisen, nauroi ja juoksi sitten tiehensä. Žilinin päähän juolahti heti:

— Jospa tuo Dina auttaisi!

Hän puhdisti kuopan nurkan, kaivoi esiin savea ja alkoi muovailla

nukkeja.
 Hän valmisti ihmisiä, hevosia, koiria ja ajatteli itsekseen: — Kun
Dina taas tulee, heitän nämä hänelle.

Dinaa ei kuulunut koko seuraavana päivänä. Sen sijaan Žilin kuuli

kavioiden kapsetta; ratsastajat ajoivat ohitse, ja tatarit kokoontuivat
moskeijan luokse. Siinä he kiistelivät, huusivat ja puhuivat jotakin
venäläisistä. Žilin erotti ukon äänen. Hän ei saanut sanoista tarkoin
selvää, mutta sen verran hän arvasi, että venäläisiä oli tullut
lähitienoille ja että tatarit pelkäsivät heidän saapuvan kylään ja olivat
nyt ymmällä mihin panisivat vangit ja mitä näille oli tehtävä.

He keskustelivat Žilin kuuli kopinaa ja näki Dinan hetkisen ja

poistuivat. Äkkiä ylhäältä. Hän katsahti ylös kyykistyvän kuopan
reunalle; tytön polvet olivat korvia korkeammalla. Tyttö kurottautui,
kaulahelmet riippuivat, heiluivat kuopan yläpuolella, ja silmät loistivat
kuin kaksi tähteä. Hän vetäisi hihastaan kaksi juustopiirakkaa ja heitti
Žilinille. Žilin otti ne ja virkkoi:

— Miksi et ole pitkään aikaan käynytkään? Minä olen tehnyt

sinulle leikkikalujakin. Ota! — Hän alkoi viskellä niitä yksitellen
tytölle.

Mutta tyttö pudisti vain päätään eikä katsonutkaan niitä.

— En minä tahdo! — virkkoi hän. Hän oli ääneti ja istui.

Sittenhän jatkoi:— Ivan, he tahtovat sinut tappaa! — Hän osoitti

kädellään kaulaansa.

— Kuka tahtoo tappaa?

— Isä. Ukot yllyttävät. Mutta minun on sinua sääli.