OPAL

   I have identified Olive Custance's literary persona as "Opal" because that was the nickname adopted by Olive in her literary circle of friends.  One of Olive's signatures was opal jewelry, which she wore to mock the superstition that the stones brought bad luck.  The title of her first book of poetry was also entitled Opals. 

"Why was I given a child's wild heart?
I am tired of acting a woman's part . . ."
~Olive Custance, "The Heart of a Child"

    The unique, transfixing beauty and mischievous attitude towards fate that Olive's interest in opals embodied was an integral part of her "Opal" persona.  Another important aspect was the little-girl voice she adopted in much of her poetry.  Though Olive was a sophisticated woman in her twenties at the start of her literary career, many of her poems portrayed the emotions of a young girl.  Several of her verses cast her as a young princess:  lovely, idealistic, and innocent.  This was a role she played in her social life in London as well, charming many of the city's young men with her "flower-like loveliness" (fellow poet Richard Le Gallienne's description).

    In many ways, this perpetual girlishness was an unassuming cover for more radical themes in Olive's poetry itself.  First of all, Olive was very much a part of the milieu of Aestheticism, a movement in art and literature occurring during the late nineteenth century, which embraced the concept of l'art pour l'art - "art for art's sake."  The Aesthetic Movement was a reactionary avant-garde which presented a direct affront to many of the social conventions of the time, specifically restrictive Victorian codes of social behavior and the prevalent idea of "author as prophet."  The Aesthetes sought to separate art from moral pedagogical use, arguing that art and artists should be autonomous and, in essence, purposeless.  Ironically, of course, despite the Aesthetes' mantra that art should have no bearing on morality or politics, their art did indeed have a great moral and political effect in their time.  With this brand of avant-garde artistic statement, social transformation is inherent, perhaps even inevitable.  This at least partially accounts for the radical nature of Olive's poetry; some of her themes may seem relatively innocuous, but in her insistence on prizing beauty over direct moral or instructive purpose, she was indeed, like her fellow Aesthetes, making a powerful statement about the moral and social conventions of the Victorian era. 

    The Aesthetic Movement was also associated with the idea of Decadence, and quite a few of Olive's poems clearly reflect this.  According to Matei Calinescu, Decadence promotes "such notions as decline, twilight, autumn, senescence, and exhaustion" (156).  Olive's poetry is truly a part of the Decadent tradition - take, for example, her poems "Twilight," "Autumn Night," "A Lament for the Leaves," etc.  Her poems express the Decadent themes of nature and the cycle of life, and interestingly, Olive's work also seems to run in a natural cycle, from the youthful exuberance of Opals to the utter exhaustion of her later works.  This made her an important feminine voice in a movement (and an era) so dominated by men, though "with her, Decadence was more of a fleeting phase or mood than a deliberately cultivated attitude" (Sewell, Selected Poems 13).  Whether or not her Aesthetic sense was deliberately cultivated, the persona with which she conveyed it certainly seems to have been. 

   Olive was also bold enough to rebel against some of the conventions of Aestheticism, particularly the attitudes that the male members of the movement held towards women.  For a liberal avant-garde group, the Aesthetes could be quite sexist, and women had a limited place in the Aesthetic Movement.  In their quest to appreciate all beautiful things, the male Aesthetes wanted to look on women as passive objects, reducing them to "nothing more than beautiful 'occasions' for masculine discovery, theorizing, and reverie" (Stetz qtd. in Schaeffer and Psomiades 31).  There was, unsurprisingly, a substantial outcry against these standards from the women who styled themselves female Aesthetes, and Olive can certainly be aligned with that movement.

"For I would dance to make you smile and sing
Of those who with some sweet mad sin have played,
And how Love walks with delicate feet afraid
'Twixt maid and maid."
~Olive Custance, verse written to Natalie Barney 

    One of the chief ways in which Olive subverted these standards was the use of lesbian undertones in her work.  Olive herself was ultimately bisexual; she had at least two homosexual affairs (with Natalie Clifford Barney in 1901, and later with Natalie's former lover, Renee Vivien), but eventually married Lord Alfred Douglas.  Her poetry makes no mystery of this, as her love verses are addressed to both men and women and Opals begins with a quote from the famous lesbian poet Sappho.  It should also be taken into consideration that the homoerotic sentiments of her poetry may even have been somewhat censored, as her publisher, John Lane, was under fire for "immorality" after the Oscar Wilde trials and was doing his best to avoid controversy. 

    By openly using lesbianism in her poems, Olive was effectively subsuming the male gaze, making women a beautiful "occasion" for her own feminine discovery.  Victorian sexologist Havelock Ellis's theories of sexual inversion offer an interesting analysis of Olive's poetic admiration of female beauty.  Because of her lesbian relationships, Ellis would have identified Olive as "sexually inverted," and the inverted woman is typically "an enthusiastic admirer of feminine beauty, especially of the statuesque beauty of the body, unlike in this the normal woman whose sexual emotion is but faintly tinged by aesthetic feeling" (Ellis 98).  One technique that Olive employed frequently to incorporate her lesbian leanings into her poetry was the presentation of personified representations of women, which she portrayed in an erotic sense.  For example, in her poem "A Song of Youth," the idea of Youth personified is presented as an attractive young woman who begs the poem's speaker to kiss her.

    Some of Olive's poems directly addressed lesbian love affairs, though; several are known to have been intended for Natalie Clifford Barney.  Barney was an intriguing member of the Aesthetic Movement in her own right, a notorious lesbian author who established a "Sapphic circle" and intellectual salon in her home in Paris.  Barney made a hobby of artistically subverting sexual norms and gender roles by performing various "masquerades":  she would have herself photographed in costume, often with her lovers, and sometimes dressed as a man.  Her daring, flamboyant personality and sharp wit won her many comparisons to Oscar Wilde.  During their short-lived romantic relationship, Olive and Natalie used each other as muses in their writing, and from this partnership came some of Olive's most striking Sapphic poems, including "The White Witch."

    Though they are in accord with the Aesthetic "tendency to celebrate nonnormative sexuality" (Schaeffer and Psomiades 9), the homosexual undertones of Olive's poetry show quite a bit of boldness, considering the repressive time in which she lived.  Lesbianism was never actually illegal in Britain (the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 ensured that her husband was taking a much larger risk when he wrote of the "love that dare not speak its name"), but it was certainly a "nonnormative" sexuality and therefore socially taboo.  The overall physical candour of her work alone (which was actually at the time becoming a staple of poetry written by women) was daring as an overt challenge to Victorian sexual codes. 

    Olive also experimented with gender terms in her work; her trilogy of poems about statues - "The White Statue," "Statues," and "Antinous" - are perhaps the best example of this, as they cleverly switch the gender roles of the Pygmalion myth.  Brocard Sewell describes them as "among her best, full of a strong 'perversity' that makes her a true poet of the fin de siecle" (Life and Work 14).  With these poems, Olive was even more blatantly subverting the male gaze which was such a central part of Aestheticism, daring to move from the admiration of women to the objectification of men.  Significantly, Olive told Natalie Barney that the statue of the Roman god Antinous which she immortalized in her poem reminded her of Lord Alfred Douglas. 

"I play with life on different days
In different moods . . . "
                                  ~Olive Custance, "Life"

    The Aesthetic Movement was, in many ways, obsessed with the abnormal and the unnatural.  Beauty was not to be found in nature, as the Romantics proposed, but in the artificial creations of man (and, in Olive Custance's case, woman).  Therefore, the "total aesthete" will "congratulate himself whenever he is able to make outside or inner nature deviate from its norms and laws.  Attracted by all that is aberrant, his imagination will voluptuously explore the realm of the abnormal in search of a beauty that is supposed to be both antinatural and new" (Calinescu 172).  Olive's Decadent poetry was just one of the ways in which she tried to find an antinatural and new beauty in her life, but it was certainly the one most associated with this unique artistic movement.  Olive Custance's literary persona of Opal was a natural child of Aestheticism, one who "opposed the limitations of nature and lauded the individuals power to fashion new, limitless selves" (Stetz, qtd. in Schaeffer and Psomiades 30).  Olive was constantly fashioning new selves, both in her work and in her personal life, and it seems that at least a portion of her impetus can be found here, in the complex philosophical workings of Aestheticism.