THE LITTLE PAGE

   In his 1904 book Man and Woman, noted Victorian sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote that "it is the womanly qualities of the woman which are attractive to the man, the manly qualities which are attractive to the woman."  This can hardly be said to have been the case with Olive Custance and her husband, Lord Alfred Douglas, however.  Their relationship seems to have been based on his attraction to her boyishness, and hers to his barely-repressed femininity.  "The Little Page" was the name Olive used for herself in much of her correspondence with Douglas, and it is a definitively male voice.  With this persona, Olive goes beyond simply questioning the nature of romantic love and appropriate sexuality:  she purposely and specifically subverts accepted gender roles.

"I believe that everyone is more or less bisexual."
~Lord Alfred Douglas

    Olive's letters to Douglas set up a specifically homosexual fantasy relationship, with her little boy page acting as devoted romantic admirer of his handsome "Prince."  This was only partially in innocent, flirtatious fun.  Both Olive and Bosie were aware of each other's homosexual predilections, as well as the unconventional gender relations at work in their romance, and they seemed to wholeheartedly embrace them.  In many ways, they were the perfect marriage of the Aesthetic Movement:  the union of the effeminate dandy with the masculinized New Woman. 

    One has only to read Olive and Douglas's correspondence to get a sense of the unconventional gender terms within which their relationship operated.  As I have already pointed out, in casting herself as the "Little Page," Olive was identifying herself as male:  ". . . tell me you love your little page and that one day you will come back to 'him,'" she wrote in one letter.  Douglas's letters are even more revealing.  In one which he wrote her just before leaving on his trip to America, he wondered why she could not just dress up as a boy and come with him.  Another letter read, "You are a darling Baby and you are exactly like a boy and you know perfectly well that I love you better than anyone else, boy or girl . . . I used to wish you were a boy, now I am glad you are not."  Douglas also made it clear that his love for Olive was an exclusive exception to the rule of his nature:  "You don't seem to realise that you are the only girl I have ever loved or even looked at seriously.  Do you imagine that because I have found out how sweet and lovely one girl is I shall immediately go and fall in love with others?  It is far otherwise I assure you."  Though Douglas officially gave up homosexual relations after his marriage to Olive, he could not yet seem to shake the inclination; and though their marriage was technically heterosexual, it always displayed many homosexual tendencies.  Still, as Douglas Murray writes in his biography of Bosie, ". . . in falling for a woman who looked like a boy and wanted to act like one, Douglas found himself at last able to have a love affair that was not damned by society" (126).

"When Adam delved and Eve span
No one need ask which was the man.
Bicycling, footballing, scarce human,
All wonder now, 'Which is the woman?'
But a new fear my bosom vexes;
Tomorrow there may be no sexes!
Unless, as end to all the pother,
Each one in fact becomes the other."
~ "An Angry Old Buffer," Punch magazine

    Olive and Bosie's marriage simply switched expected gender roles, casting Olive as the masculine figure and her husband as the feminine one.  This absolutely distorted Victorian sexual norms, which called for a clear delineation of male from female, and also for the male to be the instigator of all romantic overtures; at the start of their relationship, Olive certainly pursued Douglas, not the other way around.  Olive and her husband saw precedents for their relationship in the work of Shakespeare, however, often citing the examples of Shakespearean lovers in their romantic and poetic discourse with one another.  Plays such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It, with their plucky cross-dressing heroines, were particular favorites, as Olive, in her youth at least, liked to dress up as a boy. 

    Havelock Ellis and other scholars of sex at the time associated such attempted emulation of masculine behavior in woman with unfortunate "external masculine characteristics, such as ugliness, facial hair, masculine body, a deep voice, and the like" (Pearsall 487).  Olive, though, was very attractive and indeed feminine in appearance, though perhaps a little boyish in her slim build when she was a young girl.  Olive chose to adopt masculine clothing and characteristics on occasion, but she was always trying to be boyish, never "manly."

    It is unclear why, exactly, Olive Custance was so interested in cross-dressing and gender subversion, beyond its appeal as a means of personal expression.  In the Aesthetic Movement, personal expression easily translated into avant-garde political statement, though, and simply through her status as a prominent bold female in the Victorian era, Olive must have made an impact.  To members of the Aesthetic Movement, gender and personality were means of personal artistic expression just as surely as pens and paintbrushes were.  Many Aesthetes constructed elaborate public personas - consider Oscar Wilde's gaudy clothing and finely tuned wit, which made him the epitome of the Victorian dandy and the talk of all London society - but Olive's uniqueness seems to have been contingent on her ability to manuever between several distinct identities.  This skill can be seen, though, as an integral part of her abilities as an artist.  The Aesthetic body could be philosophically thought of as a manuscript to be written on or a canvas to be decorated, and whatever one thinks of her as a poet, Olive Custance was certainly a master artist (and a masterpiece) in this sense, able to creatively invent and reinvent herself as she saw fit.  In this use of herself as a part of her art, Olive was following the Aesthetic dictate of "art for art's sake" by creating something beautiful without overt moral directive while simultaneously making a strong statement which challenged the conventions of her times.  Particularly in her capacity as the Little Page, Olive demonstrated that identity was not static, but rather a material so pliable that it could even be used as an effective artistic medium.  Subverting gender gave Olive a great deal of additional creative freedom, allowing her to appropriate both female and male characteristics as tools of her artistic trade, which in turn enhanced the variety of representational techniques at her disposal.

    Further theoretical Insight into Olive's subversion of gender (and particularly her occasional cross-dressing) can also be found in Judith Butler's writings on gender performance, which, though they do not fit Olive's situation exactly, are still relevant enough to offer some fascinating insight.  In her book Gender Trouble, Butler explains that "In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself - as well as its contingency.  Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary.  In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity" (138).  In other words, all gender is a performance - changeable, culturally-motivated, and ultimately false.  Performing a gender that is not expected (for example, through cross-dressing) breaks down the concept of normative gender, revealing all signifiers of gender for what they are:  a performance.  Therefore, in taking on aspects of the masculine gender, Olive Custance was openly challenging the very fabric of gender expectancy and role-playing in the Victorian era.  Interestingly, Havelock Ellis points out that sexual inverts like Olive are necessarily "always actors" (123) because they must be adept at hiding their true sexuality.  As a consequence, sexual inverts are known to have an aptitude for the dramatic arts; so, indeed, such gender performance should come naturally to someone like Olive, as should the creation of various personas.  As per Butler's theories, Olive's gender was not something she was, but rather something she did.

    This persona of the Little Page, in combination with Olive's identity as Opal, allows her to be, on some level, both female and male, and this was considered an artistic asset by some circles in the Victorian era.  One such group was the Uranians, poets who advocated homosexuality and the combination of the masculine and the feminine.  They referred to people like Olive who embodied this combination as the "intermediate sex."  Similar to this is the concept of the "androgyne," which Theopile Gautier explores in his Mademoiselle de Maupin as a "transgressive figure, in which dichotomies have melted away, [who] posits not only the question of sexual identity but also provokes the limits of representation."  Olive's transgression of typical gender roles, particularly in her relationship with her husband, allowed her, in many ways, to enjoy the best of both worlds, and with this came a unique perspective on the artistic and political implications of her era.