Abstract
In 1875, just three years after the Royal Academy of Music enrolled its first female violin student, Punch called its readers’ attention to this new development with a drawing by its lead artist, George du Maurier.1 The picture’s prominently featured, two-part title, “ The Fair Sextett (Accomplishments of the Rising Female Generation),” identified female violin-playing as part of the movement that sought a wider scope for women’s talents, even as the artist called attention, both in his title and in the comically juxtaposed string ensemble-cum-giant brass instrument that together comprised the “sex-tett,” to the sexual dimension of female musical performance. In addition to an indefinably haunting quality, several aspects of the drawing call attention to it as more than merely casual satire. Perhaps most striking is the combination of the statuesque feminine beauty that du Maurier admired with an ambience that seems claustrophobic and even threatening. The women stand, crowded together, at the very front of the stage and are totally absorbed in their music-making—with the exception of the brass-instrument player, there is no eye contact either with audience members or with the Punch reader.2 The cellist, whose left arm is distorted in the drawing, holds her instrument straight up against her body; a glimpse of a lifted skirt inside her right leg and the hint of her left knee on the other side of the cello suggest that she uses the male cellist’s position, one that would be considered shocking for women players for at least the next two decades.
She thought of the story of the fisherboy who listened one night on the shore to the wind-dances of the water-nixies, and afterwards wandered through the world with his violin, charming all mankind… .
Bertha Thomas, The Violin-Player, 1880
“A village Norman-Néruda?” whispered the guest to the host… . Rose’s figure was standing thrown out against the dusky blue of the tapestried walls, and from that delicate relief every curve, every grace, each tint—hair and cheek and gleaming arm gained an enchanting picture-like distinctness… .”How can that man play with her and not fall in love with her?” thought Lady Charlotte, to herself, with a sigh… .
Mary Augusta Ward, Robert Elsmere, 1888
There is nothing more pleasing to look at, just now, than a girl playing the violin.
Walter Besant, Armorel of Lyonesse, 1890
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Notes
Stephen Kern, Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Culture: 1840–1900 (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 10.
Craig Howes, “Periodicals: Comic and Satiric,” in Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, ed. Sally Mitchell (New York and London: Garland, 1988).
Joseph Conrad, Victory: An Island Tale, ed. Cedric Watts (London: Everyman/ J. M. Dent, 1944), 59. Victory was written between 1912–14 and published in 1915.
On the symbolic use of hair in literature and art, see Elisabeth G. Gitter, “The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination,” PMLA 99 (1984): 936–54.
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Penguin, 1990), 3.
Mrs. Humphry [Mary Augusta] Ward, Robert Elsmere (1888; reprint, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 574.
Elizabeth Godfrey [Jessie Bedford], Cornish Diamonds, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1895), 1:102.
Walter Besant, Armorel of Lyonesse: A Romance of Today, (1890; London: Chatto and Windus, 1934), 317.
Bertha Thomas, The Violin Player: A Novel, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1880), 1:148–49. Thomas and the musician Florence Marshall were sisters.
M. E. Francis [Mrs. Francis (Mary) Blundell], The Duenna of a Genius (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1898), 290.
“Sarah Grand” is the adopted name of Frances Elizabeth Clarke (1854–1943), who married Surgeon-Major David McFall, a widower with two sons, when she was 16. Her husband’s work at an institution for prostitutes with venereal disease influenced her feminist beliefs and provided her with subject matter she later included in her fiction. After the success of her first book, Ideala (1888), Grand separated from her husband but continued to live with her two stepsons. Among the admirers of her fiction were Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw. Although controversial, The Heavenly Twins was a great success; 20,000 copies of the book were sold in its first year. See Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, eds., Feminist Companion to Literature in English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990);
and Joan Huddleston, Sarah Grand: A Bibliography (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1979), 11–13.
Cecily [Ullman] Sidgwick, A Splendid Cousin, Pseudonym Library Series (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892), 10.
George Gissing, The Whirlpool, ed. and introduction Patrick Parrinder (1897; reprint, Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977).
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 334. 1897, the year The Whirlpool was published, was also the year that Philip Burne-Jones, son of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, exhibited “The Vampire” at the New Gallery, an image of a lovely woman, dressed in a clinging nightgown, crouching menacingly over the body of her male victim. After visiting the exhibition, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled “The Vampire,” in which he bemoaned the useless expenditures of energy and talent that men make for the sake of women. (Quoted in Idols of Perversity, 35l)
“Freund Hein (the devil) spielt auf.” Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin, ed. and annotation Peter Franklin (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 179, n25. Mahler told friends he had composed the scherzo movement as a “Dance of Death.” Constantin Floros, Mahler:The Symphonies, trans. Vernon Wicker (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1993), 122. Mahler used the word “Fiedel,” a medieval forerunner of the violin.
H. F. Redlich, Bruckner and Mahler (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1963), 194. Mahler had the first violinist tune his instrument a tone higher than the normal tuning in order to accentuate the harsh character of this passage.
Henry-Louis De La Grange, Mahler (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1973), 646.
Keller, the author of the story on which Delius based his opera, regarded the Dark Fiddler as a representation of evil, but Delius saw him instead as a figure close to nature. Delius perhaps identified with him as a social outsider and symbol of freedom. Christopher Palmer, Delius: Portrait of a Cosmopolitan (London: Duckworth, 1976), 113–15;
Christopher Redwood, “Delius as a Composer of Opera,” in A Delius Companion, ed. Christopher Redwood (London: John Calder, 1976), 228–29. The opera was completed in 1901 and had its British debut in 1910.
The story, about a fiddling contest between the devil and a young hillbilly, “the best damn fiddle player in Monroe County, possibly … in Georgia” is published in Charlie Daniels, The Devil Went Down to Georgia: Stories by Charlie Daniels (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers Ltd., 1985). The hillbilly proves his boast, saves his soul, and wins the devil’s gold fiddle. The musical version is found on CD; The Charlie Daniels Band:A Decade of Hits, Epic EK 38795.
Anne Rice, Violin: a Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
Anna Wickham, The Writings of Anna Wickham: Free Woman and Poet, ed. R. D. Smith (London: Virago Press, 1984), 134.
Ethel Sidgwick (1877–1970) was educated in England. She studied music privately and lived for much of her life in Paris. In addition to children’s plays, she wrote 14 novels (of which Promise was the first published) and a biography of another aunt, Eleanor Sidgwick, the principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1892 to 19l0. See the entries on Ethel Sidgwick in Blain et al. eds., The Feminist Companion to Literature in English; and in Janet Todd, ed., British Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide (New York: Continuum, 1989).
Ethel Sidgwick, Promise (1910; reprint, Boston: Small, Maynard and Co., 1920), 4.
Harriette Russell Campbell, Is It Enough? A Romance of Musical Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1913)
See the essay on Cobbett by H. A. Scott in H. C. Colles, ed., A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, (London: 1927–28). Cobbett encouraged the work of the Society of Women Musicians and, in 1924, made it a gift of his collection of British chamber music.
Nicholas C. Gatty, “Society of Women Musicians,” in H. C. Colles, ed., A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: 1927–28).
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© 2000 Paula Gillett
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Gillett, P. (2000). The New Woman and Her Violin. In: Musical Women in England, 1870–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299347_5
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