LADY ALFRED DOUGLAS

    This last persona is, in many ways, Olive's most elaborately constructed and least congruous.  Though Olive was aristocratic by birth, she was undoubtedly an unconventional noblewoman, often completely defying Victorian norms and expectations.  There was a part of her which wished to fit into society, however, and it was these attempts, reluctant or not, to be a proper "Lady" that would be the eventual downfall of her art and her marriage. 

 "What though a sleepless dragon day and night
The great world watches, jealous of delight,
Strong Love shall stand with shining wings unfurled
Between you and the hatred of the world."
~Olive Custance, "The Fairy Prince II - The Coming of the Prince"

    Olive's marriage to Alfred Douglas, though it gained her a title, was not at all socially acceptable in the first place.  She was the eldest daughter of a noble, wealthy family, while he was a virtually penniless younger son, and scandal-ridden besides.  Social pressures tried to keep them apart at first and would continue to do so throughout their marriage.  In the beginning, the young lovers boldly defied convention in their determination to be together, though there were some complications along the way.  When Bosie went off to America in search of an heiress to marry, Olive consented to a laudable engagement to nobleman George Montagu.  When Douglas came back, she jilted Montagu for a runaway marriage, but she had been very near to "doing the right thing" socially.

    The other main social pressure on Olive's marriage was her strict, imposing, and very Victorian father.  He absolutely did not approve of Bosie at first, though he did come to accept him for a while.  Colonel Custance was ultimately the main instigator of conflict in the Douglases' marriage, as he tried to take their son, Raymond, away when Bosie decided to convert to Catholicism.  Caught between her husband and her father, Olive eventually succumbed to the overwhelming pressures of patriarchy, deserting Bosie and going to live with her father, who held her emotionally and financially under his thumb. 

"You never saw the prisoned soul
Behind the windows of my eyes,
Frantic to break from fate's control
And charm you with her flatteries . . .
And I remember and regret
O how I loved you when we met!"
~Olive Custance, "A Memory"

    Though they were both free spirits of the Aesthetic Movement in their youth, both Olive and Bosie seemed to express some desire to fit into society by the time they met and married.  Douglas in particular was running away from his homosexual tendencies, and Olive no doubt felt the effects of this repression.  The strain on their marriage began almost immediately after their honeymoon, as Douglas began making an effort to be, as he admits in his autobiography, "more and more manly."  This made him increasingly less attractive to Olive, who loved the feminine part of him, the thing which he was "always trying to suppress and keep under" (215).  As Douglas describes it, "she was always desperately trying to recapture the 'me' that she had guessed and seen and loved, and only occasionally finding it concealed under various cloaks" (216); clearly Olive was not the only one in this relationship adept at playing roles.

    Role-playing was actually not so uncommon in Victorian times as a whole, due to the severe social restrictions which were imposed during the era.  This created quite a hypocritical society, as people often wore the mask of propriety in public while playing a much less acceptable role in private.  Douglas himself followed this pattern for years, hiding his private homosexual inclinations behind a mask of aristocratic social conduct.  Perhaps the most significant difference between this type of role-playing and Olive's variety is that Olive did not necessarily use her personas as a means of pretending to be something she was not.  Her various identities may seem incongruous, and they were certainly constructed, but they were all a part of her - separate identities expressing themselves within an individual consciousness.  Unlike Bosie and his similarly hypocritical contemporaries, Olive dared to play several different roles in plain view of the public.  Through the combined effect of her personas, Olive asserted herself as a unique, individual voice, and in a place as restrictive as Victorian England, this type of defense of individualism was imperative.  It is unfortunate that in the end Olive's desire to fit into society as Lady Alfred Douglas became dominant, but ultimately this attempt at propriety was not a mask, as her husband's seems to have been; it was as much a part of Olive Custance as the innocuously subversive Opal or the sexually transgressive Page, and the three personas did manage to coexist for a time. 

"God pity me and give me back my voice!
God pity me and give me back my wings!"
~Olive Custance, "The Prisoner of God"

    Eventually, Olive submitted to a force that had been slowly assimilating members of the Aesthetic Movement for years, from her first love John Gray to her husband and even to Aesthete patriarch Oscar Wilde himself:  Catholicism.  The stark, conservative discipline of the Catholic faith seemed the antithesis of Decadent freedom of expression, and the religion's growing influence in Britain's former artistic circles did indeed change the social landscape.  Besides converting (or perhaps because he converted), Douglas also entirely renounced homosexuality, cursing it as a terrible sin and refusing to associate with his old friends who still practiced the lifestyle; it is unclear if Olive had a similar change of heart about her sexual proclivities (though her continued infatuation with Douglas's femininity might suggest not).  In any case, Olive ended up lapsing from the faith after just three years, but her conversion was still a sign of the defeat of her rebellious nature.  Religious faith was indeed in opposition to the Aesthetic Movement as a whole, but it was particularly antithetical to Olive due to the theological concept of the human soul.  The soul is, essentially, a static representation of self which one is expected to remain true to and dedicate to the entire service of God:  an idea clearly in fundamental discord with the nature of Olive's changeable identities.

    Olive was no doubt feeling the effects of the social outcry against the New Woman in the late Victorian era as well.  Even the dandies of the Aesthetic Movement, who were often considered the male counterparts of the New Woman, did not entirely support them.  The cultural politics during the fin de siecle were primarily concerned with instability, and "gender was arguably the most destabilizing category" (Ledger, qtd. in Ledger and McCracken 22).  As Elaine Showalter says in her book Sexual Anarchy, "the New Woman was an anarchic figure who threatened to turn the world upside down and to be on top in a wild carnival ride of social and sexual misrule" (38).  In other words, independent women like Olive were considered a severe threat to society, and quite a bit of energy was expended trying to silence them.  Olive herself was open to attack on several fronts:  her unacceptable marriage, her sexuality, her boldness in writing, her predilection for gender performance, and even her lack of interest in motherhood.  This was actually one of the chief concerns of those who spoke out against the New Woman:  "the interconnections between gender roles and contemporary anxieties pertaining to the continuation of the 'race' in the best interests of the British Empire" (32).  Olive did have a child, but she was apparently not very attentive to him; Bosie and Colonel Custance spent years arguing over who would be responsible for raising the boy, and Olive seemed to mostly stay out of the debate.  This would have been extremely troubling by Victorian standards, casting Olive as not only a danger to current society but to the future of the human race in Britain.  This was a difficult stigma to combat. 

    As an artist and a person, Olive could be said to have fallen victim to the expectations that her society held for women.  She tried (and in many cases failed) to be a good wife, mother, and daughter, and her art suffered.  Ultimately, this persona shows us just what she was fighting against as "Opal" and "The Little Page."  In the latter portion of Olive's life, when the persona of "Lady Alfred Douglas" seems to have won out in her psyche, Olive was not necessarily abandoning her individuality or ceasing to be true to herself, but rather allowing one part of herself to have precedence.  This adjustment is perhaps unfortunate, particularly since it signaled the end of the poetic career, but it makes her no less a remarkable woman and all the more an important embodiment of the complexities and tensions of her time. 

"Girl in the glass! you smile, and yet
                                                                        Your eyes are full of a vague regret,
                                                                        For dreams are lovely and life is sad,
                                                                    And when you were a child, what dreams you had!
                                                                    Now, over your soul life's shadows pass, Girl in the glass."
                                                                        ~Olive Custance, "Girl in the Glass"