Valerie Sanders

The Brother and Sister Culture

In 1841 the British Royal family became a young symmetrical unit again, with a father, mother, and two children — a brother and sister. Victoria, the Princess Royal, was born in the first year of her parents’ marriage, in November 1840, while her brother, Albert Edward, known as ‘Bertie’, followed almost exactly a year later. Not since the early years of George III’s reign, in the 1760s and 70s, had there been a young family in Buckingham Palace; and though Victoria and Albert quickly added to their stock of sons and daughters, until there were nine in all, there remained something significant about the first two as a brother and sister pair.

‘Pleasant, easy work, -& not useless, I hope’: Harriet Martineau as a Children’s Writer of the 1840s

Harriet Martineau was one of the few Victorian women authors writing children’s literature in the 1840s, and the four stories in The Playfellow (1841) register the instability of the genre. Exploring the dynamic relations between boy heroes and older female figures, Martineau takes a disunited community as the setting of her tales of endurance. In each of these overtly shocking stories, the boy hero must learn to renegotiate his place in the world. Above all, Sanders argues, Martineau respects children in a way that was unusual for critics and writers of the 1840s.

Book Review: Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film, 1850-1950

(Elaine Morgan’s idea of human evolution, Marshal McLuhan on communication and Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon among others) as ‘nomad or minor sciences’, which does not say more than that they ‘follow the singularities of matter’ (p. 193, n. 4). The book ends with an outline of ‘microfeminine warfare’, which is said to avoid a re-essentialization of feminine desire. This book is written in a way that alienates me as a reader. This is a pity because Parisi’s rearticulation of sex shifts the perspective from reproduction to communication, a very interesting idea that deserves better.

The Family Revenge Novel

‘A young man and his sister; the former characterized by a diseased imagination and morbid feelings; the latter beautiful and virtuous, and instilling something of her own excellence into the wild heart of her brother, but not enough to cure the deep taint of his nature/ The beginning of Hawthorne’s short story, ‘Alice Doane’s Appeal’ (1835) sounds like the opening of a fairy tale, the usual way of recounting stories of deeply ingrained sibling rivalry. In fact, Hawthorne’s characters are the sole survivors of a night attack by Indians, living a life of intense attachment and ‘lonely sufficiency’ together, until their sibling paradise is threatened by the sister’s feelings for another man, Walter Brome, Leonard Doane’s counterpart, who, unlike the brother, has the right to sexual relations with the sister: ‘Now, here was a man, whom Alice might love with all the strength of sisterly affection, added to that impure passion which alone engrosses all the heart/3 Ironically, Walter Brome turns out to be Leonard Doane’s twin brother, destined by the machinations of a wizard to ‘tempt his unknown sister to guilt’ (p. 277) and be killed by his brother. The story weirdly incorporates all the classic ingredients of the Romantic sibling horror story: an intermingling of sex and death, incest and fratricide, frustrated desire and mistaken vengeance. The brother as ideal companion and lover quickly transforms into the jealous murderer; the virtuous sister into a sexual prize for another man.

‘One of the Highest Forms of Friendship’: Brother-Sister Relationships in Women’s Autobiography

Traditional Victorian autobiography by men is dominated by the difficulties of the parent-child — especially father-son — relationship. None of the great names in the field has much to say about sibling relationships. This was something that largely disappeared with the last of the Romantics, Thomas De Quincey and Leigh Hunt. John Stuart Mill, for example, though the eldest of a large family of brothers and sisters, focuses almost entirely on his intense relationship with his father, while Anthony Trollope mentions his five siblings in passing, but four died of tuberculosis, and he seems not to have been particularly close to any of them. Charles Darwin recalls being taught by his sister Caroline, and being slower in learning than his younger sister Catherine,3 but Newman says nothing about his family relationships in childhood (indeed very little about his childhood altogether), despite his close relationship with two of his sisters, Harriett and Jemima, and the death of a third, Mary, in her late teens. There is no sense in any of the major male autobiographers of the period that relationships with brothers or sisters were at all significant. With their female contemporaries, however, the picture is markedly different, as Harriet Martineau explains in her Autobiography: Brothers are to sisters what sisters can never be to brothers as objects of engrossing and devoted affection. The law of their frames is answerable for this: and that other law — of equity — which sisters are bound to obey, requires that they should not render their account of their disappointments where there can be no lair reply. Under the same law, sisters are bound to remember that they cannot be certain of their own titness to render an account of their own disappointments, or to form an estimate of the share of blame which may be due to themselves on the score of unreasonable expectations.4

The Brother as Lover

In Book IX of the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Byblis, daughter of Miletus, who falls in love with her own brother, Caunus. Although she feels ashamed and embarrassed, she also finds it impossible to control her feelings. The relationship seems ideal, as she argues: ‘Oh, if only I could change my name, and marry you, what a good daughter-in-law could I be to your father, Caunus, what a good son-in-law you could be to mine!’ As she recognizes, however, ‘the one thing we shall have in common is the thing which keeps us apart.’ The father and father-in-law would be one and the same. Horrified by the letter Byblis sends him, her brother Caunus flees the country; Byblis, fleeing, too, weeping, and never catching up with him, is transformed into a spring of water. Ovid comments that the story ‘affords a warning to other girls to love only what is permitted’.3 Nevertheless, the story is told with some sympathy, and Byblis is given a long, emotional monologue in which she bewails the misfortune of having fallen in love with her own brother — which, however, seems to her not entirely unreasonable. The story serves as a fitting introduction to the nineteenth-century idealization of the brother as the lover most women would choose if only it were not forbidden.

Brother-Sister Collaborative Relationships

From the Lambs to the Sitwells, the late eighteenth to the twentieth century produced a succession of literary families whose collaborative relationships generated poems, novels, journals, letters, legends, mysteries, and speculative psychoanalytical responses. The most common configuration of these family groups was the brother-sister pair or trio: hence Henry and Sarah Fielding, Charles and Mary Lamb, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Benjamin and Sarah Disraeli, Branwell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, Dante Gabriel, Christina and William Rossetti, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, and in the United States, Gertrude and Leo Stein, and William, Henry and Alice James. Sister-sister pairs, by contrast, are rare — unless one breaks down the Bronte group, or looks at minor writers such as Maria and Geraldine Jewsbury; brother-brother equally so, unless one separates the Rossettis, or looks to Germany for the Brothers Grimm. In most cases, there was something about the interaction of the sexes that was more fruitful of literary achievement than the same-sex partnership.

Changing Places: Siblings and Cross-Gendering

Elizabeth Gaskell sounds an unlikely person to be writing about cross-dressing, and Cranford (1853) an improbable place to find it, but here, in fact, is one of the best examples in Victorian literature of a brother dressing up as his sister. Peter Jenkyns, a successful ‘hoaxer’, emboldened by his success in disguising himself as a lady visitor who admires the Rector’s sermons, goes one step too far and walks up and down the garden dressed in his sister Deborah’s clothes, apparently nursing a baby. His father is so appalled at the disrespect shown to Deborah, that he strips and publicly flogs him: an act which breaks up the family as he flees abroad until his parents and Deborah are dead, and his surviving sister, Miss Matty, well into middle age. As for Miss Matty herself, retelling the story to Mary Brown, she becomes momentarily confused as to whether she should call Peter a man or a woman: ‘Peter said, he was awfully frightened himself when he saw how my father took it all in, and even offered to copy out all his Napoleon Buonaparte sermons for her — him, I mean — no, her, for Peter was a lady then.’

‘Most Unwillingly Alive’: Brothers and Sisters in the First World War

By the turn of the century sisters apparently no longer needed to feel disadvantaged alongside their brothers. Oxford and Cambridge now had women’s colleges, and several other universities, including the medical schools, were prepared to accept women on degree courses; serious school examinations had been available to girls since the reform of the Cambridge examinations system in the 1860s; employment opportunities were gradually widening, following pressure from organizations such as the ‘Langham Place’ set, and influential articles in the press.2 Gender crises, of the type discussed in the previous chapter, threw into question the precise nature of male identity and masculinity in ways that should have made relations between men and women more equal. The reality for the brother and sister relationship in middle-class families, however, is that things went on in much the same fashion, at least until the First World War, when tight-knit sibling groups were shattered as never before.