“Sex Is an Accident”: Heterosexual Celibacy in the Political Writings of Eva Gore-Booth

Abstract

Eva Gore-Booth (1870–1926) was a significant contributor to the Celtic Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century; however, her literature differed immensely from that of her male counterparts. Gore-Booth’s writings had a prevailing feminist message, while her later works were manifestly concerned with the study of sexuality and the deconstruction of gender. Gore-Booth’s literature remained vastly overlooked and undervalued until recent times. In the twenty-first century, her poetry and plays are experiencing somewhat of a resurgence. Amid Gore-Booth’s modest literary revival, this article examines her writings from a fresh perspective. Tracing Gore-Booth’s social reform work and later devotion to the New Age religion of Theosophy, it is evident that her writings increasingly endorsed celibacy. This article will highlight how Gore-Booth advocated for celibacy as a radical practice with the potential to dismantle the social construction of gender and of presumed heterosexuality. Notably, Gore-Booth only advocated for heterosexual celibacy, placing same-sex relationships as the ideal, especially lesbian partnerships. This research centers on readings of Gore-Booth’s lesser-known writings including a neglected play Fiametta, her theological writings and the journal Urania which clearly express her revolutionary ideas.

1. Introduction

Eva Gore-Booth was born in Lissadell House, County Sligo in 1870. She became a respected and successful author in her lifetime, publishing no less than nineteen volumes of philosophical prose, plays and poetry. During her early years, Gore-Booth published individual verses of poetry in esteemed publications contributing to the Celtic Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century. From the onset, Gore-Booth’s literature showcased female imagery which disrupted patriarchal and heterosexual dominance. Emma Donoghue observes that “For centuries male poets had cast themselves as suitors in relation to a feminine personification of nature. Simply fitting herself into this tradition, Eva lesbianised the couple.” (Donoghue 1997, p. 18). This is evident in poems such as “A Love Song” in which Gore-Booth expresses her love in feminine terms. She does not hide behind male pronouns; rather, as a female poet she conveys her love towards a female muse, describing the glory of nature as “My lady of spring/My Lady of the Hills” (Tiernan 2016, p. 16).

In 1896, while recuperating from illness in Italy, Gore-Booth met Esther Roper, a working-class suffragist from Cheshire. Gore-Booth immortalised their meeting with a poem entitled “The Travellers,” dedicated “to E.G.R,” Esther Gertrude Roper. The concluding verse expresses how Gore-Booth experienced their meeting:

Was it not strange that by the tideless sea

The jar and hurry of our lives should cease?

That under olive boughs we found our peace,

And all the world’s great song in Italy?

(Tiernan 2016, p. 219)

Gore-Booth viewed this as an encounter so intense that even the course of nature was disrupted, the tide ceased, as did those meaningless events of their own lives. After their first meeting, Gore-Booth and Roper were almost inseparable until Gore-Booth’s death thirty years later (Tiernan 2012, pp. 29–30).

In 1897, Gore-Booth moved to the poor industrial quarters of Manchester to live with Roper. From that point, Gore-Booth’s literary career took a new direction. Months after moving, she completed her first book, Poems (Gore-Booth 1898), a compilation of seventy-two verses. Like Celtic revival poetry of the time, a preoccupation with national identity and political independence for Ireland is dominant in the volume. Shortly after publication, Gore-Booth began to concentrate on social and economic reform, and this activist work would come to shape her writings.

This article examines Gore-Booth’s writings after she moved to England. It traces how her lesbianism, her social reform work and her devotion to the New Age religion of Theosophy influenced her to endorse celibacy in her writings. Notably, Gore-Booth’s advocacy for women to remain unmarried, was tied into a supposed and socially expected state of heterosexual celibacy. Her writings placed same-sex relationships, such as her own relationship with Roper, as the ideal.

This research centers on readings of Gore-Booth’s lesser-known writings beginning with a forgotten play entitled Fiametta. This assessment is informed by Benjamin Kahan’s assertion that “Understanding celibacy as a prelesbian pattern will clarify not only the historical forces that enable and constitute the invention of homosexuality (broadly conceived) but also the specific collision between friendship and lesbianism” (Kahan 2013, p. 36). Fiametta exhibits Gore-Booth’s early thoughts on political spinsterhood before she began representing female same-sex love as the ideal in her writings.

Finally, I will examine how the principles of Theosophy, especially reincarnation and karma, influenced Gore-Booth’s thinking about celibacy evidenced in readings of the journal Urania and other poems and plays including The Buried Life of Deirdre.

2. Marriage, a Social Melodrama

Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, many female activists successfully argued that marriage was a form of sex slavery, including Frances Power Cobbe, Josephine Butler, Mona Caird, Jessie Boucherett, Harriet Taylor Mill, Jeanne Deroin and Annie Besant. Not surprisingly, by the early twentieth century women began to choose a career and independence in favour of matrimony. Gore-Booth’s play Fiametta examines the contemporary debates surrounding heterosexual marriage.

Fiametta is an exciting departure from Gore-Booth’s later customary Celtic and mystical themed dramas. (Tiernan 2012, p. 54). It is a social melodrama set in England. It is a five-act play including a cast of ten; three male and seven female characters. Female-positive gender imbalance became a feature of Gore-Booth’s plays. The male characters are all portrayed with negative features. The lead female characters are depicted as emotionally and spiritually superior, which connects with Cathy Leeney’s observation that Gore-Booth “places the female subject at the centre of the symbolic order, both linguistic and theatrical” (Leeney 2010, p. 86).

The overarching message in Fiametta is clear, marriage is a negative institution, especially for women. The title of the play has a particular feminist significance. The name Fiametta can be traced to the Italian prose-writer Giovanni Boccaccio. Many of Boccaccio’s early stories are narrated through the character of Fiammetta, who cautions women as to the dangers of unwise romantic love, “addressing an exclusively female audience” (Boccaccio 1990). Similarly, Gore-Booth’s Fiametta is written with a female audience in mind.

The theme of marriage is introduced as soon as the curtain is raised for Act I. Gertrude, the main character, enters the stage in conversation with Wilfrid. Through the dialogue, it is apparent that men and women have two radically different opinions of marriage. When Wilfrid begs Gertrude to marry him, she rejects his idea as “foolish marriage” (Gore-Booth 2010, p. 28). Wilfrid presents an idyllic view of marriage describing how, “Love will bring us such glorious sunshine, we should never be in the dark or cold again either of us” (p. 28). In contrast, Gertrude’s response positions a negative, almost damning, description of the institution. She describes marriage as a monotonous ordeal stating that it “is so final and yet it never ends. It goes on hour after hour day after day, year after year” (p. 28). By the end of the first scene, Gertrude relents and consents to marry Wilfrid, on one condition. Wilfrid must agree that if Gertrude leaves, he will never attempt to pursue her. The marriage between Wilfrid and Gertrude allows the drama to unfold as friends and family react to their unconventional relationship.

When Gore-Booth wrote Fiametta for the women of the Ancoats Elizabethan Society to perform, Christabel Pankhurst was her assistant (Tiernan 2012, pp. 60–62). In 1900, Gore-Booth met the twenty-year-old at a debating society event and mentored her until they parted ways in 1905. Gore-Booth was vehemently opposed to Pankhurst’s militant suffragette tactics associated with the Women’s Social and Political Union (Tiernan 2012, p. 93). Nonetheless, Pankhurst would later echo Gore-Booth’s condemnation of heterosexual marriage as expressed in Fiametta. Pankhurst published The Great Scourge and How to End It, a book examining sexual immorality in which she declared that “there can be no mating between the spiritually developed woman of this new day and men who in thought and conduct in regard to sex matters are their inferiors” (Pankhurst 1913, p. 98).

3. A Radical Journal

Lauren Arrington observes that by the early 1910s, Gore-Booth and Roper had developed views about women’s labour that linked with their dedication to Theosophy to inspire their further rejection of sex difference (Arrington 2016, pp. 220–21). This rejection is best appreciated through an assessment of the journal Urania. In 1916, Gore-Booth led a group of militant thinkers to establish Urania. Along with Roper and three other members of the radical feminist movement, the Aëthnic Union (Thomas Baty known as Irene Clyde, Dorothy Cornish and Jessey Wade), Gore-Booth advanced her campaign to overcome all distinctions based on sex. An unsigned article in the journal positions her as the inspiration behind Urania’s establishment, “Eva Gore-Booth formulated a concise statement which we have adopted […] as the nearest and clearest expression of our views. It declared that sex was an accident and formed no essential part of an individual’s nature” (Science confirms intuition 1921, p. 1). Gore-Booth, motivated by a line from Katherine Cecil Thurston’s novel, Max, had established a journal which called for nothing less than the elimination of gender as a category of difference (Cecil Thurston 1910, p. 303).

This pioneering journal was privately printed and circulated until 1940, advocating for the elimination of sex/gender and proposing to reform the categories of men and women into one ideal feminine form. This central argument was consistent throughout every issue, challenging mainstream feminism, medical sexology and society’s gender norms. Urania disseminated newspaper reports relating to cross-dressers, individuals who transgressed gender roles and, in later issues, cases of intersex and transgender individuals. Editorial commentary stressed that such cases exposed gender as a mere social construction which was enforced through the institution of marriage. Urania presented celibacy, spinsterhood and asexuality as a radical challenge to the system of compulsory heterosexuality which would in turn eliminate gender differences. While heterosexual celibacy was promoted, same-sex female partnerships were presented as the ideal.

When Urania was launched, the rise in the number of spinsters was causing societal concern, especially in relation to a falling birth rate. The 1851 UK census had included marital status as a category for the first time as there was social concern about a rising number of spinsters across England and Wales. The situation was intensified by the reduction of available men in England from the late nineteenth-century onwards. Lillian Faderman points out that “the ‘redundant’ or ‘superfluous’ woman, which is what unmarried women were called in nineteenth-century England, became a social problem of vast proportions” (Faderman 1981, p. 183). The sexologists’ writings contributed to an anti-spinster sentiment, which used medical evidence to pathologize unmarried females as deviant. “Sexology and psychology also categorised lesbian sexuality for the first time but created an ambiguous overlap with spinsterhood” (Oram 1992, p. 415). Prominent British sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote frequently about women who rejected marriage in place of career and then happened into a life of lesbianism. Ellis warned that “Marriage is decaying, and, while men are allowed freedom, the sexual field of women is becoming restricted to trivial flirtation with the opposite sex, and to intimacy with their own sex” (Ellis 1901, p. 148).

While the sexologists’ theories gained acceptance in mainstream society, Faderman notes that these theories, “frightened, or attempted to frighten, women away from feminism and from loving other women by demonstrating that both were abnormal and were generally linked together” (Faderman 1981, p. 240). The editors of Urania were not frightened to embrace the idea of female partnerships; rather, they presented lesbian relationships as superior. The journal launched a campaign to face the fear expressed by the feminist movement and took a radical approach by advocating for the dissolution of heterosexual marriage altogether. The goal of the journal was to eliminate sex distinctions so that individuals could achieve their full potential, employing a systematic plan to prove that gender is socially constructed. Within this context, marriage was viewed as an institution which relied on gender difference. The mission statement, addressed ‘To our friends’printed on every issue of the journal testifies to its subject matter. It began “Urania denotes the company of those who are firmly determined to ignore the dual organization of humanity in all its manifestations… (To our friends 1919, p. 1).

Original articles in the publication are often signed by Irene Clyde. A series of essays was published by Clyde in 1934, Eve’s Sour Apples, which attacked the construction of sex (gender) and critiqued heterosexual intercourse and marriage. One line from this collection of essays animates Clyde’s position: “the genuine maiden does not abstain from marriage as an exercise in denying herself what she desires, but because it revolts her to think of it” (Clyde 1934a, p. 24). Clyde was not opposed to life-unions once these unions were not based on the joining of two opposite genders. An article in Urania signed by I. C, confirms that this view is shared by the editors:

Marriage does not create a tyrant and a slave. But no one will stoop to marriage who passionately desires to eradicate a system which tinges character with “manly” or “womanly” defects.

(Clyde 1934b, p. 1)

From the onset, articles relating to marriage appeared in Urania, one of the earliest recorded in a 1919 issue, one year after Marie Stopes published Married Love. Stopes’ book carried the subtitle A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties and was popularly viewed as a sex manual for heterosexual married couples. Although controversial at the time of publication, Married Love portrayed marriage as the ideal state for women and in turn “marriage should be crowned by children” (McKibbin 2004, p. xlv). As if in response to Stopes’ book, Urania reprinted an article from the London News, “Do Unmarried Women Miss the Half of Life?” The commentary argued that single women have a rounder, fuller life than their married counterparts:

It is the married woman who too often only sees one side of life—the domestic side. The single woman sees all the others, and she knows as much as she wants to know of the married woman’s preserve.

(A Single Woman 1919, p. 6)

The editors of Urania offered an alternative to heterosexual marriage which they argued was dependent on gender difference. Articles celebrated love between women as the ideal and they acknowledged a physical aspect to lesbian relationships. A detailed account of Queen Christina of Sweden was written by I. C. [Irene Clyde] and printed in the centenary issue of Urania, describing how the Queen had an “absorbing affection” for Countess Ebba Sparrë, who was just one of many women the Queen courted (Tiernan 2011, p. 64). The article relates how Queen Christina “picked up a young girl of Lyons in 1656, kissed her ‘très amoureusement’, and wanted to have her sleep with her… Two years earlier, a chronicler … relates how she fell in love with a Jew girl, ‘whom she allowed publicly to ride in her carriage, and with whom she occasionally slept on the journey’” (Clyde 1933, pp. 2–4).

An earlieraccount is reprinted from Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences, written by Gore-Booth’s friend and fellow Irish author, Katherine Tynan. The story, simply titled, “An Irish School-Girl,” presents Sapphic love as natural and idyllic:

We had our little passions, sometimes for a nun, sometimes for each other. […] Mine was a passion for an elder girl about to become a nun. […] I used to cry a great deal at night because she was going away, and she used to come and comfort me. […] Once, on a dark winter morning, washing in cold water as was our ascetic custom, and groping my way by candle-light, I was told she had come back the night before. […] In the dark corridor on the way to mass, as we passed the warm kitchen, delightful on a cold winter morning, she came behind me and kissed me. Oh, rapture! Oh, delight! Oh, ecstasy! Was there anything in more mature passions quite as good?

(Tynan 1919, pp. 6–7)

The central argument for the elimination of gender was consistent throughout every issue of the journal; consequently, Urania engaged in a further challenge to a system at the core of Western society, compulsory heterosexuality and the institution of marriage. The existence of Urania questions the history of feminist movements and thought. Mainstream feminism during this era was working towards a goal of emancipation and equality within marriage, while Urania “was apparently the only journal of its kind, and is important in challenging assumptions about the history of sexuality, taking a line on sex, gender and sexuality which was significantly at odds with the dominant politics of feminism and sexology in the interwar years” (Oram 1992, p. 226). This radical philosophy was not, however, unique within theosophical circles.

4. Theology and Theosophy

The Theosophical Society emerged in England and Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century, influencing both the suffrage and Irish nationalist movements. “Feminist spirituality was a crucial component of much feminist politics,” in the first-wave suffrage movement, while theosophical writings of the same era placed the practices of people who dissolved gender in an exalted position (Dixon 2001, p. 3). Gore-Booth formally joined the Theosophical Society in June 1919, and during her later years, she delivered papers to the society’s lodges, relating to reincarnation in the New Testament. However, Gore-Booth was an avid student of theosophy long before she officially joined its ranks. She contributed many articles, poems and essays to both the Occult Review and The Herald of the Star, two of the most distinguished theosophical journals of the time. From as early as 1908, The Occult Review published reviews of Gore-Booth’s writings, indicating a theosophical theme in her works.

The ethos put forward in Urania was undoubtedly inspired by theosophical debates about reincarnation. Theosophists employed an avant-garde reading of reincarnation and the Law of Karma to advocate for the fluidity of gender and sexuality. (Tiernan 2012, pp. 233–35). Theosophy maintained that through reincarnation a ‘soul’ or ‘ego’ does not remain the same sex throughout multiple incarnations; a soul must experience life as both sexes to learn life’s lessons. President of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant, noted that the division of society into male and female was only a provisional system, stating that, “the separation of humanity into two sexes […] is but a temporary device for the better development of complementary qualities” (Justice Madras 1918, p. 257). The principle had deeper significance when connected with the Law of Karma. The theosophist Jerome Anderson highlighted this significance in his essay, “Reincarnation as Applied to the Sex Problem,” where he states that

The Law of Karma, ever restoring our disturbed equilibrium, is omnipotent and inviolable; and by our very attitude towards the opposite sex, be it that of man or woman, we are creating character traits which may have to be sharply corrected by unpleasant experiences in that opposite sex during our next life.

(Anderson 1893, p. 63)

Such reasoning had deep significance for the suffrage movement. If a man denied women the right to vote, for example, he may return as a woman in the next incarnation and suffer the consequences of having no political franchise.

It is evident that members of the Theosophical Society read Urania. In a 1919 issue, Urania announced that they had received “a most encouraging letter from one whose name is a house-hold word—Mrs Mona Caird” (Clyde 1919, p. 3). Caird was a member of the Theosophical Society and a regular contributor to an associated magazine, Quest. Urania regularly paid homage to their “Indian Friends,” a term which referred to members of the Theosophical Society at their headquarters in Adyar, India. Other articles noted that the theosophist and Irish feminist Margaret Cousins supported the work of Urania. (Recent Poetry 1938, p. 6).

Comparable to the ethos of Urania, theosophical writings placed people who dissolved gender in an exalted position. Charles Lazenby considered Havelock Ellis’ sexological theory of an “inverted sex” too simple an explanation. He set about to prove that gender, sex and sexuality were fluid through the basic principle of reincarnation. Lazenby explained that when the ego made a conversion from one sex to another it could result in the birth of a person whose personal identity still belonged to one sex, while their physical body took the form of another sex; in other words, an intermediate sex or homosexual.

Not only did theosophy provide a sensitive explanation for homosexuality, but theosophists also placed homosexuals in an exalted position as the superior race of the future. Along with Besant, Lazenby believed that through spiritual evolution, the division of the sexes would become obsolete, resulting in Urania’s androgynous ideal. To position androgyny as superior, theosophists used the term the “divine hermaphrodite”. Lazenby explained that “the reproduction of the species will be by the spiritual will of the divine hermaphrodite impregnating his own womb, and the children will be born instruments for loving human service” (Lazenby 1911, p. 235). A pupil of Leadbeater’s, Fritz Kunz wrote of this envisioned evolution: “All sorts of adjustments will come in the New Age. We are going to have this queer, intermediate sex that is now appearing very rapidly […] boys and girls that don’t know they are boys and girls, that only know they are souls” (Kunz 1926, p. 30).

Gore-Booth’s literature testifies to her belief in the transition from one sex to another through reincarnation. In her play The Buried Life of Deirdre, originally written in 1908, the protagonist, Deirdre is the reincarnation of a male Irish king. Deirdre announces to her foster mother, Lavarcam in Act 1:

I, even I, whom you call a young and innocent maiden, was an old and jealous King. I, too, had a deep grave dug in the forest, and slew my own heart’s happiness because of the jealousy of love, and buried her whom I loved, in the deep grave under the oak trees.

(Gore-Booth 1930, p. 13)

While a range of Irish authors re-wrote the Deirdre story, including W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge and Douglas Hyde, Gore-Booth’s play was distinctive. She re-wrote ancient Irish tales to explain the current theosophical and sexological debates, using the ancient Celtic myth of Deirdre of the sorrows to explain the principles of reincarnation and the law of Karma. Gore-Booth presents her protagonist—in myth the most beautiful woman in Ireland—as a gender-bending figure through incarnations, much like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. In the play’s introduction, Gore-Booth declares that “the idea of re-incarnation is not exclusively an Eastern doctrine as many people think.” She continues by noting that “Mr. Douglas Hyde, in his ‘Literary History of Ireland,’ points out its place in Irish literature, and explains that it seems to have been part of Druidic teaching” (Gore-Booth 1930, p. ix).

Gore-Booth expanded on this theme in a poem published in The Occult Review which noted that although the person to which it is directed is now a “woman of the world,” she is still influenced by, and recognisable as, a man from a past life.

You seem to be a woman of the world,

Gorgeous in silky robes of blue and green,

Hair in soft shining coils, white throat be-pearled,

It is not true—you are what you have been.

I know you for the Umbrian monk you are,

Brother of Francis, and the sun and rain,

Brother of every silver pilgrim star,

And white oxen on the golden plain.

(Gore-Booth 1917, p. 35)

Gender-bending reincarnation appearing in Gore-Booth’s literary works is certainly an indicator of her acceptance of this theosophical principle.

5. Conclusions

Gore-Booth dedicated the final years of her life to the study of theology and theosophy. She published essays, articles and poetry on biblical interpretations and mysticism; her theological work culminated in her largest and final publication before her death, A Psychological and Poetic Approach to the Study of Christ in the Fourth Gospel (Gore-Booth 1923) This large volume is a powerful feminist approach to the Bible and religious doctrine, which can now be read as a pre-cursor to current feminist theology.

Gore-Booth contributed to the Irish literary revival, which marked an important phase in the production and international reception of Anglo-Irish literature. However, her work was out of publication for much of the twentieth century and thus ignored or forgotten. This article exposes how Gore-Booth employed a range of other writings to advocate for the erasure of gender and the biologically sexed body, through a promotion of heterosexual celibacy. Gore-Booth’s adage that “sex is an accident” was replicated by the theosophical belief that the physical body is only a temporary vessel, on the path of spiritual evolution. This radical ethos distinguishes her writings as innovative, as they can now be identified as a pre-cursor to current postmodern theories of sexualities and deconstruction politics.