I.

The title of George Egerton's first collection of short stories, Keynotes (1893), announces a concern with the beginnings of sequences, the first principles from which larger patterns are orchestrated. The stories introduce premises from which new social and sexual relations may be engendered and individual existential choices made, a philosophical intent that harks back to the preoccupation in classical Greek thought with the nature of the Good Life and how to live it, which Friedrich Nietzsche renews for modern Western philosophy. Egerton's broad but nonetheless radical engagement with Nietzschean thought can be traced through the references she makes to the philosopher in Keynotes, which are widely credited with being the first in English literature.Footnote ¹ Indeed, such allusions are, as Iveta Jusová observes, “the most frequent literary reference[s] in Egerton's texts” (53). They were also recognised and mobilised against her by some of her earliest critics.

Jusová notes that Nietzsche became known to the English public through the translation in early 1895 of Max Nordau's Degeneration, and that Egerton's reputation as a Nietzschean came in its wake through Hugh Stutfield's essay “Tommyrotics,” which appeared later that year in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Jusová 53). This essay makes an especially nasty association of Nietzsche and Egerton, as Stutfield, following Nordau, makes the mentally diseased Nietzsche the emblem and proof of contemporary “Degeneration.” He adopts Nordau's pathologising approach to fin-de-siecle culture, focusing his essay on naturalistic New Woman fiction, which he diagnoses as “pathological,” “neuropathic,” and “erotomaniac,” “beyond question a symptom of the mental disease from which civilised mankind is suffering” (835). Such tropes of mental illness occur throughout the essay, as in the following comment, which clearly has Egerton in its sights: “the woman of the Ibsenite neuropathic school is not only mad herself, but she does her best to drive those around her crazed also.” Stutfield singles out Egerton as the translator of the Swedish writer “Ola Hansson, whose aim is to go one better than Ibsen.” Egerton's translation of Hansson's Nietzschean parables Young Ofeg's Ditties (Ung Ofegs Visor) had been published in February 1895. She introduces them in her edition as “these beautiful prose poems, which are an exposition of Friedrich Nietzche's [sic] triumphant doctrine of the Ego” (Hansson 5).Footnote ² Stutfield seizes upon the latter phrase to draw together his essay's early preoccupation with Egerton and its thematic trope of madness through a cruel reference to Nietzsche, who had been lost to mental illness since 1889: “By the way, the ‘triumphant doctrine of the ego,’ which Miss George Egerton finds so comforting, appears to be the theory of a German imbecile who, after several temporary detentions, was permanently confined in a lunatic asylum” (838).

Stutfield's critique is drolly undermined by its excessive rhetoric. In applying his pathological categories and tropes so readily and hysterically to Egerton, he risks illustrating (and indeed may be reacting to) one of the main consequences of her reading of Nietzsche, which the following essay argues is to extend, indeed largely relegate, the province of sexual neuroses to the masculine psyche. Nietzsche's famous description of man as “the sick animal” is for Egerton evidently more gender specific than generic (On the Genealogy of Morality 94). The essay endeavours to complement the “post-colonial focus” of Jusová's pioneering work on what she calls Egerton's “Nietzschean Feminism” (53) by tracing some of its sources and its consequences for relations between women and men, specifically its depiction of heterosexual male sexuality as proceeding through a logic of fetishism.

“A Cross Line,” feted by being the first of the stories in Keynotes, a keynote to Keynotes, is well known for the passage describing the fantasy of its unnamed female protagonist as she “fancies she is on the stage of an ancient theatre,” the self-aware image of desire for her audience of men: “she can see herself with parted lips and panting, rounded breasts, and a dancing devil in each glowing eye, sway voluptuously to the wild music that rises, now slow, now fast, now deliriously wild, seductive, intoxicating, with a human note of passion in its strain” (19; 20). Her “wild song, . . . a song to the untamed spirit that dwells in her” (19), is predicated upon a female “keynote” that, the woman maintains, most men do not allow themselves to acknowledge:

Writing in 1932, Egerton describes the conception of woman she introduces here as the principal achievement of her first book: “I recognised that in the main, woman was the ever-untamed, unchanging, adapting herself as far as it suited her ends to male expectations” (Ten Contemporaries 58). While the woman's wildness and yearning for new experience invite comparison with the independence and boldness with which Egerton lived her early life, this characterisation of woman was also sanctioned by her acquaintance with Nietzsche's thought. The autobiographical origins of “A Cross Line” can be discerned also from the reference its protagonist makes in the above extract to Nietzsche and August Strindberg, whose works and thought Egerton knew from her time living in Norway from 1887 to 1890. Indeed these provocative references to Nietzsche's and Strindberg's ideas about women mark the culmination of the passage and accordingly suggest cues for further readings of it. While the outcries against Strindberg and Nietzsche that Egerton describes presage the popular reputation those writers have since attained as the great misogynists of their age, she presents them as influential allies for her brand of feminism, who offend men's ideas of women more than those held by women themselves.

In the more directly autobiographical story “Now Spring Has Come,” which is based upon a relationship Egerton had with Knut Hamsun, the female and male protagonists share a particular enthusiasm for Nietzsche, whose thought the woman, like her counterpart in “A Cross Line,” associates with Strindberg's opinions on woman: “Did we not talk about anything? Of course we did. Toltstoi [sic] and his doctrine of celibacy. Ibsen's Hedda. Strindberg's view of the female animal. And we agreed that Friedrich Nietzche [sic] appealed to us immensely” (63). The linking of the two in these stories points to the influence of the Danish critic Georg Brandes, the friend and champion of Strindberg who introduced Nietzsche's thought to Scandinavia through a widely reported lecture series in April and early May of 1888 and the essay he developed from them, “On Aristocratic Radicalism,” which was published in August 1889. Brandes was a hugely influential literary critic across Europe in the 1880s, whose insistence that modern literature should bring social problems to public attention and debate gave a fillip to Ibsen and his peers, theorising and consolidating an ethos that Egerton develops in Keynotes.

Brandes's essay on Nietzsche also recognises the philosopher as a literary artist and, in its last lines, reciprocally insists that artists generally must be distinguished independent thinkers: “great art demands intellects that stand on a level with the most individual personalities of contemporary thought, in exceptionality, in independence, in defiance and in aristocratic self-supremacy” (56). He argues here for the personal, idiosyncratic, and impassioned mode he encountered in Nietzsche's works, most forthrightly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85). The autobiographical inflections of Keynotes are consistent with Nietzsche's personalised exposition and exploration of ideas, while a stronger affinity is evident from Egerton's use of the lyrical monologue, which he establishes as a philosophical form most clearly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the combination of personal fantasy and reflection in which the protagonist of “A Cross Line” develops her passionate thoughts about the nature of women and men. That Egerton chose Young Ofeg's Ditties as the first of Hansson's texts to translate indicates not only that she shared what he refers to as his “Nietzschekult,” but also that she was especially interested in the literary achievement and possibilities of Nietzsche's texts (Borland 53; 64–71). In describing her protagonist's monologues as “songs” she appears to follow not only Young Ofeg's Ditties, but more fundamentally the model for Hansson's work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which includes such chapters as “The Dance Song,” and “Night Song,” and several lyrics that Zarathustra sings and dances to.

Brandes corresponded with both Strindberg and Hansson, and it is through him that Strindberg became acquainted with Nietzsche's ideas and came to read his works. He recommended Nietzsche and Strindberg to one another in 1888, partly because he saw they shared views on women and the woman question.Footnote ³ The comment that the protagonist of Egerton's autobiographical story “Now Spring Has Come” makes about “Strindberg's view of the female animal” suggests that Egerton and Hamsun discussed his 1888 play Miss Julie, the preface to which describes its tragic heroine as a type of animal, an example of “the man-hating half-woman . . . an inferior species who cannot endure,” the antithesis of “the strong and skillful species” that has the monopoly on happiness (Strindberg 68). This taxonomy suggests the distinction that Nietzsche makes in the seventh chapter of Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886) between the feminist and the life-affirming woman. Indeed this text was the only work by Nietzsche that Strindberg had read at the time he wrote the play, and he acknowledges that “the first influence” of the philosopher upon him can “be traced to the preface of Miss Julie.”Footnote ⁴Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is important to Brandes's essay on Nietzsche and foundational for Hansson, and Beyond Good and Evil, the first book by Nietzsche that Brandes and Strindberg read and the origin of their enthusiasm for him, appear to be original sources also for Egerton, who was a fluent speaker and reader of German.

Gerd Bjørhovde writes of Egerton that, “at least to a Scandinavian it seems . . . natural to emphasize her affinity with writers like Knut Hamsun . . . and Ola Hansson” (130). Hansson furnishes the clearest and most direct vector of Nietzschean thought for Egerton. His Young Ofeg's Ditties was first published in 1892, the year before Keynotes. Egerton recalls that she wrote Keynotes very rapidly (de Vere White 138), while what she refers to in introducing her translation as her “individual admiration of Ola Hansson's writings” (Hansson 6) makes it likely that she read Young Ofeg's Ditties upon first publication, at the time, or even before, she wrote her stories. She corresponded with Hansson and his wife, the literary journalist and writer Laura Mohr, who wrote under the pseudonym of Laura Marholm (Brantly 105). Indeed Marholm effectively reciprocated Egerton's public appreciation of Hansson's work. In a letter dated April 29, 1894, Egerton casually informs her publisher, John Lane, of an article by Marholm on Keynotes that had appeared a week earlier in the Frankfurter Zeitung and includes “some very flattering things about the poor little writer” (de Vere White 37). The article was part of a series by Marholm that was subsequently published in 1895 as Das Buch der Frauen, and in English translation by Lane in 1896, where the chapter on Egerton bears the title “Neurotic Keynotes.”

In the “Introductory Note” to her translation of Hansson's Young Ofeg's Ditties, Egerton speaks of her “desire to make known to others one of the most remarkable writers of our day” (Hansson 6). The “Note” indicates that she had read all of Hansson's major works and states that she is currently translating his essay “Interpreters and Seers, . . . before undertaking his novels” (12). Amongst the essays by Hansson she catalogues is the first of two he wrote on Nietzsche, “Friedrich Nietzche [sic], His Personality and His System.” The essay was written at the same time as Young Ofeg's Ditties, in a few weeks in 1889, with versions being published later that year and in 1890 in German and Norwegian. Egerton's reading of the essay would have accordingly enhanced her appreciation of the ideas that informed and shaped Young Ofeg's Ditties. In a similar defence to that offered by Brandes, who contrasts Nietzsche's experiences of, and views on, women with the happier case of John Stuart Mill, Hansson's essay also offers an apology for the philosopher's anti-feminist attitudes, and so may have eased the way for Egerton to draw his thought into her incipient, idiosyncratic feminism.

II.

Hugh Stutfield was not the only, or the first, of Egerton's contemporaries to read her as a Nietzschean. In early January 1894 Thomas Hardy copied into his notebook part of the lyrical monologue from “A Cross Line” cited earlier on “the eternal wildness” of woman, one of various entries from the 1890s and early 1900s that, as Eugene Williamson and Barbara De Mille each observe, document his interest in Nietzschean ideas at this time (Williamson 404; De Mille 6). In a marginal note to the copy of Keynotes she gave to John Lane, Egerton glosses this “wild song” as “One of hundreds of dreams” (so allowing her publisher to, as Margaret D. Stetz argues, “identify the sexual fantasy as hers,” [99]). As well as demonstrating Egerton's rejection of repressive middle-class morality, which she shared with Nietzsche, the orgiastic performance that her protagonist envisages, as she “sway[s] voluptuously to the wild music that rises, now slow, now fast, now deliriously wild, seductive, intoxicating,” offers an artistic expression of the Dionysian spirit, which Nietzsche describes as “play with intoxication, with the state of ecstasy” (“The Dionysiac World View,” in The Birth of Tragedy 120). Its intoxicating nature stimulates the will to power, the drive to self-mastery, to self-overcoming, the “secret” that Zarathustra says “life itself spoke to me: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must always overcome itself’” (TSZ 89). This principle, of constantly creating one's selfhood by embracing change and impermanence, is the overarching theme that draws together Thus Spoke Zarathustra and must also be what Egerton understands by her phrase “Nietzche's [sic] triumphant doctrine of the Ego” (Hansson 5). Indeed, that she was able to recognise this doctrine as the main theme of Young Ofeg's Ditties indicates a confident familiarity with Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Complementing the autobiographical male personae of Nietzsche's and Hansson's respective works, Egerton explores Nietzsche's “doctrine of the Ego” through her female protagonist, effectively bringing into the first person the dancing female figure of Life that Zarathustra invokes in “The Dance Song” and in “The Other Dance Song” (TSZ 83–85; 181–82). Brandes discusses the latter song in his 1889 essay, where he summarises its dramatic situation: “Life appears to Zarathustra as a woman; she strikes her castanets and he dances with her” (49–50). The dynamism of a life of perpetual becoming, impelled by the protagonist's will to power, her “thirst for excitement, for change, this restless craving for sun and love and motion” (21), is a corollary of the trope of the keynote, the locus from which a series of movements proliferate that are by degrees unexpected but ultimately coherent and often entrancing. In the case of the dancer that Egerton's protagonist identifies herself with, and from which she abstracts her formula of the “keynote” of woman's being, such movements are of course not only musical but also (in keeping with Zarathustran values) bodily.

Egerton's protagonist suggests a counterpart to Zarathustra not only early in her monologue, where her Dionysian fantasy recalls the female figure of Life he dances with, but also at its close, where she aligns herself with Nietzsche and Strindberg and their radical accounts of woman against “the men [who] shriek out louder than the women, because the truth is at all times unpalatable” (23). The opponents that they so outrage are, like the Christian Europeans that Zarathustra attacks, identified by their religion, “the gods they have set up [that] are dear to them.” Her suggestive resemblance to Zarathustra as an iconoclast and prophet is brought further to the fore at this point with the appearance of the sympathetic man in grey, who, chorus-like, chimes in: “Dreaming, or speering into futurity? You have the look of a seer. I believe you are half a witch!”

The woman's fulfilling fantasy sequence is predicated upon female independence and strength, “Cleopatra sailing down to meet Antony”; she does not wish to sail with a lover. Her “great longing [that] fills her soul to sail off somewhere too – away from the daily need of dinner-getting and the recurring Monday with its washing” (18–19), is not satisfied by the man offering an escape to a new life together on his yacht. The element she objects to in this plan is, she informs him starkly, “You!” (27). She decides to end her relationship with the man, not, as Martha Vicinus, Ann L. Ardis, and Lynn Pykett suggest (Keynotes, “Introduction” xvii–xviii; Ardis 115; Pykett 170), because she is pregnant, but, as she explains to him, because it no longer satisfies her will to power: “Can't you understand where the spell lies? It is the freedom, the freshness, the vague danger, the unknown that has a witchery for me, ay, for every woman!” (Egerton 27). Acting from the Nietzschean imperative of becoming, which her further meetings with the man would only frustrate, she asserts the prerequisite need that Zarathustra describes for the spirit “to create freedom for itself for new creation” (TSZ 17). Becoming occurs in the present tense, the temporal instant of the moment, which Nietzsche affirms most emphatically with his doctrine of eternal recurrence, where “this gateway Moment” focuses all that has passed and is to come (126). Egerton's protagonist describes herself in her last meeting with the man as “a creature of moments,” while the man invokes this characterisation as he realises that for her his “moment is ended” (24; 30).

In making her decision to break with the man, the woman in Egerton's story is firm, but not unequivocal. Her nature is presented here not simply as Dionysian and masterful, but also as emotionally vulnerable, a duality that replicates Nietzsche's peculiar characterisation of woman. Having outlined “where the spell lies” for her, the woman explains to the man what she regards as the disabling counterpart in her nature to the female “keynote,” a defining capacity for giving and requiring affection: “‘I share’ (bitterly) ‘that crowning disability of my sex’” (27). Similarly, she explains to her husband, a little tactlessly, that for a woman “It isn't the love, you know, it's the being loved; it isn't really the man, it's his loving!” (16) that is the crucial thing. She elaborates upon this sobering principle further in her exchange with the man in grey: “‘this untameableness of ours is corrected by our affections. We forge our own chains in a moment of softness, and then’ (bitterly) ‘we may as well wear them with a good grace’” (28). The balanced structure of her characterisation of woman, both in this passage and that on the Dionysian “spell” and her concomitant “crowning disability,” corresponds suggestively to Nietzsche's concluding account of the gender in the seventh chapter of Beyond Good and Evil:

The vulnerable side of woman's character inhibits the force of the will to power that Nietzsche maintains gives them “their power and their dominance over men.” Egerton's protagonist appears to take her cue from Nietzsche, who presents Napoleon's mother as an example of uncompromised female mastery (and indeed expresses an enthusiasm for Napoleon throughout BGE), when she declares that “the qualities that go to make a Napoleon – superstition, want of honour, disregard of opinion and the eternal I – are oftener to be found in a woman than a man” (28).Footnote ⁶ If not for their capacity and need for affection, she continues, “we women would master the world.”

Woman's power is for Egerton, as it is for Nietzsche, inhibited only by this emotional nature, not by childbearing, as some of her critics assume. That her pregnancy, more than anything the man in grey can offer, is presented as fulfilling, rather than inhibiting, the woman's “eternal wildness,” is a further indication that her character is modelled upon Nietzsche's Dionysian woman, whose creative commitment to flux is embodied in her capacity to give birth; “the will to power” is, says Zarathustra, “the unexhausted begetting will of life” (TSZ 88). The male gender is disadvantaged here by being, as Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil, “‘the sterile animal’” (69).

The feelings that Egerton's protagonist has after realising she is pregnant are expressed by her “soft, cooing little laugh,” her “flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes” (35), her movements as she rises from a kneeling position, “careful of herself as a precious thing” (36), and the clear note that the story ends on, as she declares that she will hang out the white gown on the lilac bush herself, the final sign to the man in grey that she has ended their relationship. These inflections suggest an enhanced vivacity and dignity, a happiness that is brought into poignant relief by her maid Lizzie's disclosure that she had a child who died. Such circumstantial evidence sits uncomfortably with Pykett's fatalistic reading, according to which the woman “becomes resigned to her lot when she discovers (or belatedly acknowledges) that she is expecting her husband's child, and accepts the maternal role” (170).

Several of Egerton's stories recognise the homogenising stereotype of what Pykett calls “the maternal role” by breaking with it. This occurs most conspicuously in “The Spell of the White Elf,” a story that suggests a veiled sequel to “A Cross Line.” Like the first story in the volume, “The Spell” has as its protagonist a lively and adventurous woman who reads Nietzsche (85) and has a domesticated husband given to growing vegetables. Indeed her husband, George, stays at home taking care of their “elf” with the housekeeper Belinda, while she, a writer, travels for her work. The husband in “A Cross Line” is introduced to the reader full of such parental promise, displaying a tender enthusiasm for some newly hatched chickens, a maternal “cluckiness” that is not shared by his wife. The acknowledgement that the fly-fisher makes to the woman of “that free gipsy nature of yours” (26) is made by her husband also, affectionately and habitually through the pet-name he gives her of “Gipsy” (an identification of the Dionysian heroine that is elaborated further in “A Shadow's Slant”). His appreciation of her Dionysian nature, combined with his complementary predilections for nurturing and domesticity, allows her current independent wanderings and fishing trips and, after the baby is born, could facilitate the larger freedoms that her counterpart enjoys in “The Spell.”

“A Cross Line” comes to a close with gestures of renewal, in which the heroine redeploys and reconstitutes the props, indeed the very materials, of conventional femininity, “[a] heap of unused, dainty lace trimmed ribbon-decked cambric garments,” clothes for which she has had no use but which become functional here, first as one is hung on the lilac bush to signal the end of her relationship with the man in grey, and then by making others into “elfin-shirts” for the baby (35–36). While earlier, in resolutely breaking with the man, her “eyes are filled with tears” and she is “infernally miserable” (25), she emerges from this moment into a new life. Elaborating upon what Egerton advocates as “Nietzche's [sic] triumphant doctrine of the Ego,” the will to power that impels the self's constant becoming, Zarathustra maintains that “In order for the creator himself to be the child who is newly born, he must also want to be the [female] birth-giver [die Gebärerin] and the pain of giving birth” (TSZ 66). The creative power is not exclusive to women, but endemic to them, it is for Nietzsche and Egerton a female prerogative. Indeed, in Egerton it can be seen to give women a power over men that men struggle to understand and control.

III.

The female protagonist in “A Cross Line” notes of men that “[e]ach one of them sets about solving the riddle of the ewig weibliche” (“eternal feminine”) (21), a phrase from Goethe's Faust (II, l. 1211) that Nietzsche uses repeatedly in Beyond Good and Evil (124; 126; 129). At issue here is, as Nietzsche puts it, “men's belief in any veiled, fundamentally different ideal in women, in any sort of Eternal or Necessary Feminine” (128–29). “[T]he riddle of the ewig weibliche” requires man to, as Egerton's sphinx-like woman glosses it, “find out the key to our seeming contradictions” (22). The man evidently “sets about solving the riddle” upon first meeting her, as “his cold grey eyes scan the seated figure with its gipsy ease of attitude,” evaluating her as a kind of prey. He is attributed with the kind of taxonomising drive that informs “Strindberg's view of the female animal” in “Now Spring Has Come”: “Persistent study, coupled with a varied experience of the female animal, has given the owner of the grey eyes some facility in classing her, although it has not supplied him with any definite data as to what any one of the species may do in a given circumstance” (3).

The man's abiding efforts to classify “the female animal” exemplify the logocentric will to truth that the woman in the story sees to typify men and distinguish them from women: “At heart we care nothing for laws,” she declares to him, “nothing for systems. All your elaborately reasoned codes for controlling morals or man do not weigh a jot with us against an impulse, an instinct” (28). Like the fisherman's cross line, in which several hooks hang from a line that traverses a stream or river, the masculinist laws and predatory will to truth cross over the fluctuant impulses of woman's Dionysian nature, vicious but (at least in this story) ultimately ineffectual in their purpose of fixing and capturing her protean being.

Egerton's story may be seen to proceed from a premise offered by the opening line of Nietzsche's preface to Beyond Good and Evil, which directly affronts the entrenched traditional assumption that truth is a masculine object:

The will to truth in “A Cross Line” is focused upon the possibility of a fixed understanding of “the female animal” and ultimately directed, as Nietzsche maintains here, towards winning a woman. The final part of the woman's reflection on the more reverberant principle of a female “keynote” focuses upon woman and truth, from which its closing references to Nietzsche and Strindberg follow by association. While Egerton, like Nietzsche, maintains categories of “woman” and “truth,” her critique of a reductive masculine quest for “the ewig weibliche,” predicated upon a more fluent, dynamic and open conception of woman's “eternal wildness,” makes it difficult to dismiss her as a simple essentialist, to ascribe to her, as Heilmann does, a “celebration of the ‘eternally feminine’ principle [that] replicated rather than challenged patriarchal thinking about women” (45).

In his essay Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, Derrida argues influentially that the figure of woman in Nietzsche radically destabilises the traditional philosophical category of truth. The aptness of this position can be seen from the extract cited above, which suggests that there is a truth to woman but that it is not accessible to the dogmatic masculinist will to truth, for it is dynamic and perspectival, exceeding the bounds of truth conventionally defined by philosophers as the binary opposite of untruth or lies. Consequently, we read also in Beyond Good and Evil that “[n]othing is so utterly foreign, unfavorable, hostile for women from the very start than truth, – their great art is in lying” (125). While the unnamed woman of “A Cross Line” is endowed with a Dionysian nature, the relation of this innate, ostensibly essentialising truth of woman's nature to its utterance is presented as teasingly paradoxical: “for the woman who tells the truth and is not a liar about these things is untrue to her sex and abhorrent to man” (22–23). In telling the truth about her sex she is untrue to it, enacting a lie, so that conversely, in telling lies about herself she is enacting the truth of her sex. The truth of woman is at once a lie. This corresponds to the Nietzschean woman who, as Peter Burgard observes, by being inscribed on both sides of this binary hierarchical opposition “that Nietzsche made it his life's work to question and go beyond” is the figure of its subversion (11).Footnote ⁷

Nietzsche's approach to moral philosophy follows from his recognition of the untruth of truth: “To acknowledge untruth as a condition of life,” he writes, “clearly means resisting the usual value feelings in a dangerous manner; and a philosophy that risks such a thing would by that gesture alone place itself beyond good and evil” (BGE 7). In the fantasy she has of dancing in the ancient theatre the woman in Egerton's story places herself beyond the categories that belong to what she calls men's “reasoned codes for controlling morals,” as, echoing the title of Nietzsche's book, she “gives to the soul of each man what he craves, be it good or evil.” It seems that her “wild song” also offers men some release from their restrictive “codes.”

Egerton makes a woman's truth about her being and experience the “keynote” of her story, in relation to which the man's being in the world strikes a dissonant note. “A Cross Line” does not open with the seminal clarity of a keynote: “The rather flat notes of a man's voice float out into the clear air, singing the refrain of a popular music-hall ditty” (1). Their “slangy, vulgar tune” is presented both as “incongruous” with nature, as profaning “the lovely freshness of this perfect spring day,” and also as ruining the analogous clarity of the woman's fantasies here, which are later referred to as her “songs”: “it is like the entrance of a half-tipsy vagabond player bedizened in tawdry finery – the picture is blurred” (2). The woman's lines of melody correspondingly bring the man's discordant “flat notes” into relief as “A Cross Line.”

Having established a tension between the unnamed man and woman at the start, the story's musical imagery and tropes gesture toward the possibility of a harmony between these principles of gender. The quality of sportsmanship that informs the man's early reflections about woman's unpredictable nature (“you are never safe in laying odds on her” [4]) leads him to tentatively accept the woman he has just met as an equal, asking her to reciprocate his recognition of her: “fishing puts people on a common footing, don't it?” (5). His respect for her both as another sporting person and a member of the unpredictable “species” holds within it the answer to the riddle that woman poses for his gender, namely, a recognition of her “eternal wildness,” her Dionysian likeness to Life, the dancing woman in Zarathustra's “Dance Song,” who is similarly equipped by her author with a fishing rod (TSZ 84).

While the flat and grubby notes of the male's song appear to have functioned adequately, like a rather drab mating call, to gain the woman's attention and initiate their relationship, they need to be refined and expanded if they are to be brought into accord with the female keynote, and so harmonise with the woman's song. For much of the story the man wants the intimacy of understanding, but the woman frustrates this residual will to truth, remaining “as impenetrable as a sphinx.” (25). Understanding, in the sense of extracting the unchanging truth of the ewig weibliche, is recognised as a radical and fatal misunderstanding of woman's multivalent being.Footnote ⁸ She accordingly values him for not misrepresenting her in this way, for he is “the grey-eyed man who never misunderstands her” (32). The extent to which his kinship with her develops can be gauged from their late summer meeting, where he ostensibly acknowledges the feminine identity she has just distilled from her recent fantasies, “the keynote of woman's witchcraft,” by referring to her affectionately as a “witch woman” (30). In describing her nature as occult he acknowledges not only the sexual power she continues to hold over him but also that her nature is inaccessible to the scientific will to truth he applied to her on their first meeting.

The harmony that develops between the couple in “A Cross Line” is emblematised by the changes that the man's voice undergoes over the period he has known the woman, as he abandons some of his masculine “flat notes,” having, as the narrator observes early in the account of their final meeting, “dropped his drawl long ago, in midsummer” (23). This is an especially significant achievement as he was originally defined by this pitch of voice, “the drawling tone habitual with him” (4). Indeed “[t]he rather flat notes of a man's voice” with which the story opens initially suggests a generic attribute. The other man in the story, the woman's husband, is also identified with this vocal dullness, a quality that distinguishes him from his wife: “There is a singular soft monotony in his voice; the organ with which she replies is capable of more varied expression” (11). Corresponding to this creative expressive capacity, she is introduced as having a “busy brain . . . [that] is always producing pictures and finding associations between the most unlikely objects” (1). In contrast to the uniform note of the masculinist will to truth, the affirming Dionysian woman can express her being and address the world through her libidinally charged “songs” in a full range of registers. Especially in relation to the repressed vocal range of the men, “the organ with which she replies” defines this woman confidently on her own terms as the sex that cannot be castrated.

IV.

In her 1932 “A Keynote to Keynotes” Egerton writes that the respective bodily functions that distinguish the sexes directly determine individual experiences and character, a premise that she believes imbued her earliest stories with a proto-Freudian psychology:

In 1908, at one of several meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society dedicated to discussing the philosopher's works, Freud remarks upon “the resemblance of Nietzsche's intuitive insights to our laborious investigations.” At another meeting he acknowledges Nietzsche as a precursor for his thought, although not an influence upon it: “In spite of the similarities which many people have pointed out,” the minutes record, “he can give the assurance that Nietzsche's ideas have had no influence whatsoever on his own work” (Nunberg and Federn 32; vol. 2 and 359–60; vol. 1). Later works contain similarly defensive denials of influence; however, as Stauth and Turner point out, Freud studied works by Nietzsche whilst a member of the University of Vienna between 1873 and 1877, and they argue that “the basic assumptions of Freud's psychoanalytical theory had been clearly worked out by Nietzsche long before Freud formalized his clinical experience into a theory of the psyche, society and civilization” (6–7. See also ch. 6). It is likely that Egerton's acquaintance with Nietzsche's thought gave her a suggestive prepossession of Freudian psychology, encouraging her to form her own kindred observations and theories. It does not, however, occur to Egerton to see woman's genitalia negatively as a lack that suggests castration, as Freud will do. Rather, she makes the more obvious observation of man's peculiar vulnerability to castration, recognising it as an important premise for the physiological determination of masculine subjectivity.

Derrida's essay Spurs characterises relations to woman-truth in Beyond Good and Evil in terms of castration, an analogy that he finds implicit in this work, and to foreshadow Nietzsche's explicit use of it two years later in his discussion of Christian morality in Twilight of the Idols (1888), where he writes that “[t]he church combats the passions by cutting them off in every sense: its technique, its ‘cure,’ is castration” (The Anti-Christ 172). Viewed from this perspective, the Dionysian life-affirming woman continuously renews her passion and so maintains her integrity; she is not a candidate for castration. Clayton Koelb discerns another, positive, view of castration in Nietzsche, in which he presents creative artists and philosophers as figures of castration, who draw power not from the phallus but more completely from its absence, which signifies the absolute power of creation. In these terms woman becomes the object of castration envy (71–81), and the phallus the sign and assurance of castration in the traditional symbolical sense of extirpated power, so that it is in itself a fetish object. Nietzsche accordingly castigates those women, the followers of the only form of feminism he acknowledges, who renounce their power of creation by emulating men and their will to truth in a “feminine scientificity and self-disclosure”: “The stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, is enough to make any woman who has turned out well (which always means a clever woman) thoroughly ashamed” (BGE 128). Echoes of this Nietzschean attack on the new intellectual and career woman were available to Egerton also, as was noted earlier, through Strindberg's Miss Julie (68) and, less hysterically and crassly, in Marholm's Das Buch der Frauen. Consistent with Nietzsche, Egerton does not see woman to be by nature constrained by such a will to establish “laws” and “systems,” which her protagonist suggests is the hallmark of masculine weakness: “We learn those things from you,” she says to the man, “you tamed, amenable animals; they are not natural to us” (28).

The woman's characterisation of men as like eunuchs, “tamed, amenable animals,” is largely fulfilled by her husband. The second section of the story is set in his garden, where he is staking peas and keeps chickens. His tame nature, and dedication to domesticating external nature, is brought into clear relief in this section, not least by the complementary characterisation of his wife that precedes it. In contrast to his civilised domestic setting of the garden, she is introduced amongst a “wilderness of trees” near a river, a Darwinian milieu in which sexual attraction and predatory passions, a shared enthusiasm for fly-fishing, draw her and the man she meets together. The complementary conceptions of generic man's place in nature established by the first two sections of the story are brought together in the third, central, section of the story, where the dialectic between wildness and domesticity is explored more directly through the intimate interactions of husband and wife at home together. The identification of woman as a cat, that Nietzsche makes in Beyond Good and Evil, is made also in Egerton's story, where the protagonist's fondness for having her hair brushed leads her to declare to her husband “I'd purr if I knew how,” while she also rubs “her chin up and down his face” (15). Such domestic pets retain a latent wildness, as Nietzsche's recurrent metaphor for woman, “this dangerous and beautiful cat,” makes clear: “women above all are essentially not placid, just like cats, however much they have rehearsed the appearance of placidity” (BGE 67).

The nature of the tamed male animal is brought into relief most clearly in “A Cross Line” when the husband insists upon doing the maid's job of removing his wife's boots, after which “he pulls the rocker [in which she sits] nearer to his chair and rests the slipperless foot on his thigh. He relights his pipe, takes up his book, and rubs softly from ankle to toes as he reads” (12). Like the narrator of Egerton's 1897 story “A Nocturne,” the husband appears to “belong to the race of men to whom temptation comes in the guise of little feet” (cited in Jusová 69). The sexual fetishism of this scene, the odd phallic displacement of the husband's rubbing her “slipperless foot on his thigh,” is amplified and glossed by the remainder of this middle section of the story, in which they kiss each other in turn and she bites him as they talk. The kisses he bestows upon her are depicted as unremarkable, while she reciprocates with “a fierce little kiss” (16) and by “biting his ear,” a playful but nonetheless symbolically castrating gesture that is repeated more emphatically soon after, when she “bites his chin and shakes it like a terrier in her strong little teeth” (17). Once again the residual wildness of the ostensibly domesticated pet, the civilised woman, discloses itself in a demonstration that the protagonist will reflect upon and theorise in the next section of the story. Her active and aggressive love-making, however, disturbs conventional gender categories, so that she is no longer identified with the cat, but rather with its complement, the conventionally masculine-gendered dog. The Dionysian virility of the will to power, “the untamed primitive savage temperament,” belongs to woman here.

The husband's mild and wife's wild displays of affection are integral to the discussion they are having, in which both repeatedly liken her to a man, the symbolic role she plays here. She jokes about wishing to be a man, saying that she would be a disgrace to her family and “go on a jolly good spree!” (15), the irony here being partly that she requires the social freedom allowed to men to fulfil her primal female nature and partly, as her summer relationship with the man in grey demonstrates, that she already has a strong element of this freedom. He declares to her “(enthusiastically), being married to you is like chumming with a chap!” and recalls “admiringly” the worldly understanding with which she handled the discovery soon after their marriage of a card he had received from another woman. Happy to be likened by him to “a chap,” his wife recoils only when his recollection of her subsequent kindness to the other woman leads him to call her “a great little woman!”: “Don't see it! (she is biting his ear). Perhaps I was a man last time, and some hereditary memories are cropping up in this incarnation!” (17).

The scene with the husband culminates in him taking his wife off to her bedroom: “His eyes dilate and his colour deepens as he crushes her soft little body to him and carries her off to her room” (17–18). All that happens in this central episode of “A Cross Line,” from the man's submissive behaviour in removing his wife's shoe and stroking her foot against his thigh, through to their kissing and biting, and talking about her as a man, turns out to be sexual foreplay, and it may well be from this queer coupling that she becomes pregnant. Sexual interactions are facilitated here by fluid gender identifications and roles, a logic that is announced by the book's eponymous keynote, which in accordance with the requirements of melody is renewed and fulfilled through variations upon the constituent themes it grounds. The man's sexual neediness is seen here to proceed from a symbolic castration, a need to be completed by the powerful woman, for her wildness to compensate for his tameness. In keeping with this differential relation between the genders, all women in the story are represented as mistresses. While the husband enthusiastically usurps the maid's role, the maid herself, Lizzie, like the protagonist of the story, is nonetheless a mistress over men: “the mistress, who is a wife, puts her arms round the tall maid, who has never had more than a moral claim to the name” (35). In quietly acquiescing to men's patronising labels of mistress, the Dionysian woman savours the irony of their aptness, her feline ambivalence, as she baffles the masculinist will to truth, and draws out from it the libidinal inadequacy and neediness that impels it.

V.

Introduced alone and unselfconscious in nature, and left unnamed throughout the story, the characters introduced at the start of “A Cross Line” assume an allegorical significance as man and woman. In their setting and situation they establish the narrative premise and promise of an epigram from Oscar Wilde that furnishes the epigraph for the fourth story in the collection, “A Little Grey Glove”: “The book of life begins with a man and woman in a garden and ends – with Revelations” (91). Indeed the characters and situations in the first story are effectively reconstituted in the later one. The identification of the woman with the symbolically potent male in “A Cross Line,” which both she and her husband make in the middle of the story, is enacted in the surrounding episodes through the equality she has with her fellow fly-fisher. Correspondingly the strong female protagonist in “A Little Grey Glove” does not simply renew the Dionysian nature (and enthusiasm for fishing) of the woman in “A Cross Line,” but is something of a composite figure. The physical attributes that render the man in the first story, the “cool, neat grey-clad figure” with “his cold grey eyes,” are transposed here, as if through the husband and wife's badinage, into this “slight grey-clad woman holding the rod” (99) whose “eyes are grey” (101). To the man she meets, the narrator of the story who shares her passion for fly-fishing, is allocated the masculinist will to truth and predatory nature that the man exercises in “A Cross Line,” along with the husband's submissive and fetishistic tendencies. The narrator sketches an unhappy history of his relations with women in the opening pages of the story, recalling that as “an only child, I never had the opportunity other fellows had of studying the undress side of women,” so that consequently, as he observes somewhat ominously, “[t]heir most ordinary belongings were sacred to me” (92). This original mystery informs a will to truth that is focused upon “the female species,” which he compares to the family “salmonidae.” He has made his own study of the ewige weibliche: “I pursued the Eternal Feminine in a spirit of purely scientific investigation” (93). Unsuccessful in this venture, he returns to what he sees as parallel but less dangerous sports, “I took to rod and gun instead, pro salute animae; it's decidedly safer” (94).

“A Cross Line” sounds the keynote of the collection, furnishing the point of reference for all that follows it with its post-Darwinian Rousseauist idyll, in which men and women demonstrate and explain immanent natures that are basically defined by sexual physiognomy and libido and a residual instinct for survival, which they exercise recreationally by either fishing, as the woman and the man do, or more mildly, by cultivating food agriculturally, as the husband does. Although “A Little Grey Glove” focuses more tightly than the earlier story upon its two principal characters and similarly places them in a natural setting, “the great book of nature” (94), where they can express their fundamental natures in narrative form, this story does not fulfil the Edenic promise of its epigraph, for their interactions are more heavily framed and constrained by social ideologies and institutions than is the case in “A Cross Line.” Its “Revelations” are post-lapsarian, like those made about the woman in the divorce case and its attendant newspaper reports, where as an “adulteress” she is made to receive the ancient stigmata of Eve.

“A Little Grey Glove” opens with the narrator's careless construal of the text from Wilde: “Yes, most fellows’ book of life may be said to begin at the chapter where the woman comes in” (91). The narrator prepares for his first such meeting by studying representations of women in novels and other books, apparently schooling himself in the a priori “female idea” that men are described as being so devoted to in “A Cross Line”: “I laid in a stock of books in different languages, mostly novels, in which women played title roles, in order to get up some definite data before venturing amongst them” (92). The first woman who comes into his life is presented as a collaborative fiction, being “not all my fancy painted her,” for a complementary “artificial reality” belonged to her blushing cheeks, while the “garden” in which this man and woman meet has a correspondingly crude and faux pastoral charm: “she had her bower in the bar of the Golden Boar” (91). Furthermore, while he “was madly in love with her,” she rejects him “for a neighbouring pork butcher.” The Circean inflections to this episode bear comparison to Félician Rops's aquatint Pornocrates (1879), which depicts its eponymous allegorical figure as a commanding naked woman in gloves, black shoes and blind-fold with a golden-tailed pig on a leash. The gilded tail of the pig suggests that lust is determined in part by filthy lucre, a value that also facilitates sexual interest and desire in “A Little Grey Glove,” where the dull protagonist receives attention from women only after he becomes “beastly rich” (i.e., a Golden Bore), and, until his meeting with the woman in this story, knows only the “paid caress” of a woman (92; 100). Sexual attraction and satisfaction is mediated here by the abstract materiality of money, a systemic ethos of fetishism.

Although, as was suggested earlier, the qualities of independence, fishing prowess, and sexual confidence and charisma that the woman in grey displays recall the Dionysian protagonist of “A Cross Line,” she is not permitted the same freedom as her counterpart to fulfil this nature. While the woman in the earlier story emerges not only unscathed but stronger from her summer affair with the man, and can declare to him with impunity on behalf of her gender that “[a]t heart we care nothing for laws,” the female protagonist of “A Little Grey Glove” falls victim to such masculinist “codes for controlling morals,” as she is dragged through the divorce courts and branded publically as an “adulteress.” She is subjected to the institutional vengeance of the male furies alluded to in the first story, the “men [who] shriek out louder than the women.” The male protagonist's first-person narration in “A Little Grey Glove” complements the sympathetic foregrounding of the woman's thoughts in “A Cross Line,” but it also parallels the husband's power to control the record of events in the divorce proceedings. The woman's narrative could stand by itself, like Egerton's other stories of women's tragic marriages, such as “An Empty Frame,” which follows it in Keynotes, or “Virgin Soil” in Discords. Here, however, it is only disclosed tangentially to the man's preoccupations and story, which begins with what appears to be a self-indulgent discussion of himself, the relevance of which even he comes to question.

The narrator interrupts his autobiographical disquisition with a rhetorical question that calls him back to the intriguing title of his story: “What has this to do with the glove? True, not much, and yet it has a connection – it accounts for me” (94). The intimate relation he asserts here between a lady's grey glove and himself, the masculine identity he has been outlining, is represented literally soon after, as he informs the reader that he always keeps the glove close to him: “If it isn't in my breast-pocket or under my pillow, it is in some place where I can see it.” He introduces the glove and his relationship to it before even mentioning its owner and his relationship to her. The fetishism that this order of precedence implies is confirmed by his description of the glove itself, which further conflates his parallel passions for women and fly-fishing: “It has a delicate grey body (Suéde I think they call it) with a whipping of silver round the top, and a darker grey silk tag to fasten it. It is marked 5¾ inside, and has a delicious scent about it, to keep off moths. . . . It reminds me of a ‘silver-sedge’ tied on a ten hook” (96). In contrast to the husband's jovial and largely unselfconscious fetishism in “A Cross Line” and the playful queered relations he has with his wife, the primary relationship that the man in “A Little Grey Glove” has to his fetish object gestures toward autism and, through the association it has for him with the fishing fly and hook, masochism also.

The intimate connection that the narrator makes in describing the glove, of feminine delicacy and softness with cruelty, which Leopold von Sacher Masoch observes definitively in his novella Venus in Furs (1870), is elaborated in the early episode that takes place in the sitting room of the inn, where he finds himself alone and drawn to a work-basket, the womanly counterpart to the fisherman's creel. He appreciates the conventional feminine softness and prettiness of the objects made from the contents of the basket, which he nevertheless construes as materials for making fishing flies:

A “sense of uneasiness” (97) he experienced earlier gains shape here as the conventionally feminine materials he discovers, like the glove introduced earlier, undergo in his mind something of a semiotic gender reassignment, reconstituted imaginatively as potentially masculine and predatory. Indeed, as he will discover later, the work-basket and the glove belong to the same person, another fly-fisher. Evidently unsettled, he drops the basket that prompted him to relax his binary ideas of gender difference, perhaps seeing himself as feminised in the eyes of the person ascending the stairs behind him. Having confused what he sees as the respective leisure pursuits of women and men, he leaves the feminine sphere of the sitting room for the great outdoors, where it is early evening and an involuntary memory restores to him the uncomplicated pre-adolescent sense of his masculine identity: “There had been a shower, and somehow the smell . . . brought back vanished scenes of small-boyhood, when I caught minnows in a bottle, and dreamt of a shilling rod as happiness unattainable.”

This reassuring memory is, however, immediately assaulted. His uneasy premonition and the affinity he finds between the contents of the work-basket and what he thinks of as the masculine pursuit and refuge of fishing come to fruition here, as he is caught by a woman's fishing line:

The man confesses earlier to having “been shy as a chub at the shadow of a woman” (95); now he is effectively interpellated as a fish. The incident radically confuses the conventional gender relations of prey and predator that this hunter has been in the habit of assuming, a confusion that has its emblem in the duplicitous fishing fly, which looks like the prey but represents the predator, a significance that the little grey glove has for the man insofar as it reminds him “of a ‘silver-sedge’ tied on a ten hook.” Having declared his Victorian masculinist credentials earlier in the story as the adventurous hunter and the scientist, who identifies his prey as “the Eternal Feminine,” the narrator is now confronted with a similarly conventional counter representation of a female predator, the spider. The German word for spider, the feminine-gendered spinner, highlights a submerged pun that informs the early part of the story, for the woman was a spinner when she cast her fishing reel and made his acquaintance by stinging him, but also, as he learns later, when she made the lacework he encountered earlier, “like cobwebs seen from below, spun from a branch against a background of sky.” Indeed, she informs him that the treacherous fly that became his “assailant was a partridge spider.” He has become the prey of “[a] slight, grey-clad woman,” symbolically emasculated by the woman with the rod, his ear lobe pierced, the protuberant organ penetrated.

VI.

The imagery of the cobwebs that the woman's lacework summons from the narrator introduces the story's thematic, and indeed emblematic, concern with the colour grey, which blends the antithetical principles of black and white, the chromatic analogue for the narrator's distinct gender categories that begin to dissolve for him at this point. It is the silver grey of the lady's needle and of its corresponding form, the fishing hook, which is like a needle roundly bent at its pointy end. The colour is extended cosmologically through “the silver grey evening” (98) and “gathering dusk” the narrator ventures into. It then becomes focused in both the figure of the “slight, grey-clad woman” (99), whose “voice . . . matched the evening, it was so quiet and soft” (100), and her synecdoche, the little grey glove, with its “whipping of silver” that replicates the “silver gleam” he sees as she casts the line (and indeed represents the sport they share, which the man in “A Cross Line” describes as “whipping a stream” [5]). Egerton's short story collections are akin to James MacNeill Whistler's paintings in their use of musical titles: Keynotes, Discords, Symphonies (1897), and Fantasias (1898). In “A Little Grey Glove,” grey is a visually chromatic keynote that is orchestrated in the story much as similar tonal values are arranged in such paintings by Whistler as The Little White Girl: Symphony in White No. 2 (1864) and Composition in Grey and Black (1871). The pervasive use of grey in the story, more so than the thematic colours in Whistler, gestures beyond aestheticism to its sibling, symbolism. As Barthes observes, “the symbolic is the field of the neurosis” (190).

While it is flanked by realist accounts of the narrator's history with women and the woman's divorce proceedings, the story of how the protagonists meet is suffused by the strange moods and symbolic suggestiveness of the fairy-tale. It can be described, borrowing the provisional title for Fantasias (announced in the preliminary pages of Symphonies), as one of Egerton's Fairy Tales for Grown Ups. Feeling a peculiar sense of foreboding, to “‘ware danger’ of some kind” (97), the narrator discovers a mysterious box and is charmed by its contents, from which seems to spin a world of grey and the greater more forcible enchantment of its owner, “a slight, grey-clad woman holding the rod.” Caught by the fishing line in the manner anticipated by his description of the lace that she has also spun, by female “fairy work, like cobwebs,” he writes that he is “held by something less tangible but far more powerful than the grip of the Limerick hook in my ear.” This mysterious spell is consistent with the imagery of witchery used to describe female sexuality in “A Cross Line” and indeed throughout Keynotes, a dominating occult power over men that is suggested early in “A Little Grey Glove” by the Circe-like woman from the “Golden Boar” and later attributed directly to his assailant in his description of her as “a grey-clad witch with a tantalising mouth!” (102). Later in the story she acknowledges that she has a primal magnetic attraction for men, a glamour that for the narrator becomes invested in the grey glove she gives him (110).

The significance of the fetish object that Egerton explores in her story can be historicised and further clarified by comparison with Freud's brief discussion of a lady's glove in his 1895 “Project for a Scientific Psychology” and its more calibrated treatment in a series of ten etchings dating from 1881, The Glove, or Paraphrases on the Finding of a Glove by Max Klinger, one of the middle European symbolist artists whose work offers suggestive parallels to Freud's thought. Freud presents a lady's glove as an example of the conventional symbol he wishes to distinguish from the principle of hysterical displacement he is developing:

This example, and the other he gives before it, of the soldier and his flag, ground normal healthy symbolisation in conventional masculine paradigms, akin to the models of Victorian manhood that the narrator of Egerton's story represents as scientist and hunter. The narrator of “A Little Grey Glove” appears to have a similarly clear understanding of the glove's exchange value, as the final words of the story indicate, where he dreams of the woman's return, like Proserpine, in the spring, when she may “come with her grey eyes shining to exchange herself for her little grey glove” (114). The grey glove is like a chivalric token that has been left with the man, although there are no implications of valour on his part, as it is the women who goes off to battle here, having to face a hostile world after the public scandal of her divorce. Freud distinguishes the knight's conscious understanding of the glove as a synecdoche for its owner from the submerged and hence uncontrollable associations that such an object has for the hysteric. However, while he makes man's chivalric idealisation of woman, the knight's “worship of the glove,” normative and unadulterated, a standard against which to appreciate the nature of the hysterical symbol, Egerton's story does not condone such a cleanly polarised distinction, but sees it to move along a scale of meanings, as Klinger does also in his etchings.

As the title of Klinger's series indicates, Paraphrases on the Finding of a Glove draws attention to the discretionary role that the subject plays in shaping its experience, a hermeneutic consideration that is fundamental also to Freud's pioneering work during the 1890s on dreams and hysteria. The series presents a spectrum of fetishistic transpositions, in which the glove takes on various lives of its own. Like Egerton's story, the first of the etchings, Place (Figure 10), establishes a tone and expectation of realism that will be disrupted by the psycho-sexual symbolism that the glove acquires. It depicts a cast of representative, well-dressed bourgeois at leisure, a generic image that recalls contemporary paintings by Renoir, Manet and Cailleboite. The idyll is, however, disturbed by an understated dramatic incident, in which an adolescent girl has fallen on her bottom, causing her legs and skirt to be thrown up in the air and subjected to the shamelessly direct gaze of two men. The girl's exposed legs throw into relief the roller skating boots she is wearing, which lead the viewer to notice that other people are also wearing them. Teamed with their Sunday-best outfits, the skates furnish bizarre and evidently precarious pinions for such civilised personae. Skating is an odd and suggestive form of play, not least for Freud, who identifies what he sees as its contemporary psycho-sexual significance in his observation that “[t]he symbolic representation of onanism by sliding or gliding . . . is very typical” (Introductory Lectures 131). Such indulgences of personal sexual psychology, like the oblique trajectory of the voyeurs’ gaze here, cut across the morally “upright” nature of modern civilisation, rendered here in the insistent and decorous verticality of the composition, with its posturing personae, row of Thonet chairs, and dominating architectural structure of columns, long windows and balustrades. Place announces the proto-Freudian concern of the Paraphrases with Civilisation and its Discontents.

Figure 10.

Max Klinger, Place (Ort), Plate I from A Glove, Opus VI (Ein Handschuh, Opus VI). Etching and aquatint, 1881. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

The second etching Action (Figure 11) illustrates quite literally the Finding of a Glove, as one of the dark-suited voyeurs from the first etching picks up a white glove on the skating rink, which a young woman skating ahead of him has presumably dropped. In his rush to grasp the glove the man has lost his hat, an object that Freud maintains has currency for his contemporaries as a male sexual symbol; indeed he insists that its “symbolic meaning is quite unquestionable.” It marks a loss of physical integrity, akin to the penetration of the fly-fisherman's ear by the woman's hook in Egerton's story. This loss is underlined by a white pavilion in the background of the etching that has a roof like a hat, its peak modulating into the contours of a phallus, which, with several round lamps on their poles, echo the circular outline of the woman's headwear and the whiteness of her outfit. Viewed from the back, angled but erect, the figure of the woman furnishes the model of phallic integrity that has its synecdoche here in the outstretched and similarly slanted length of the white glove on the rink, much as in Egerton's story, the “slight grey-clad women” has hers in the “delicate grey body” of the glove. The self-contained character in Klinger's etching keeps his left hand in his pocket (where both hands are kept in Place), while his right hand reaches for the glove with an urgency that indicates its object is a prize that will travel swiftly to his pocket, from where it will be given life as a fetish object and transplanted into a series of fantasies in the subsequent plates, further Paraphrases on the Finding of a Glove that spring from the psycho-sexual milieu of sliding and gliding.

Figure 11.

Max Klinger, Action (Handlung), Plate II from A Glove, Opus VI (Ein Handschuh, Opus VI). Etching and aquatint, 1881. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

The hard surface of the skating rink in Klinger's etching brings into relief the softness of the white glove that the man reaches for, a quality that fascinates his counterpart in Egerton's text. As was noted earlier, the narrator of “A Little Grey Glove” explains that as a child he dealt with female sexual difference through displacement. The powerful mystery that “the undress side of women” had for him is sacralised fetishistically in their “most ordinary belongings.” Just as he savours the contents of her work-basket in the episode that proved to be foreplay to her violent coupling with him, so similarly when the woman subsequently comes close to him the narrator focuses upon the details of her clothing; “Her gown is of some soft grey stuff, and her grey leather belt is silver clasped. Her hands are soft and cool and steady, but there is a rarely disturbing thrill in their gentle touch” (100). These are the thoughts that occur to him as she removes the hook from his ear. He associates the “soft grey stuff” of her gown with the “gentle touch” of her “soft” hands that work to restore his bodily integrity, an association that becomes condensed for him in the little grey glove.

The fourth of Klinger's Paraphrases, Rescue, focuses upon the phallic significance of the hand, which is, as Jusová has noted, the part of a woman's body most often noticed in Egerton's stories and favoured by her male characters (Jusová 69–70). It depicts a man in both a hat and a sail-boat, who, striving to rescue a white glove from the sea, extends the length of his rigid arm with a rod, the effect of which is reinforced by the parallel lines of the boat's mast and rigging. Similarly, in “A Little Grey Glove,” the woman's hand in its hard extended form, casting the fishing rod, perpetrates the man's symbolic emasculation. Her hands remind the narrator “of white orchids I saw somewhere” (103), a type of flower that bears strong sexual associations. The English word orchid comes from the Latin for testicle, orchis, due to the shape of its tubers, and so shares its etymology with the term for surgical castration, orchidectomy, which was coined in 1870. The flower's almost predatory sexual enticement of insect pollinators had at this time recently been brought to the fore by Charles Darwin's book The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects (1862). At once dainty and savage, the woman's hands are like the “tiger's claws inside their glove” that Nietzsche uses to characterise the Dionysian woman, while of course correspondingly the “little grey glove” itself reminds the narrator of “a ‘silver-sedge’ tied on a ten hook.” The glove is a riven symbol, which with all its digits is over-determined, hysterically phallic, but without the informing principle of the hand is left deflated and limp. This fetish object accordingly functions as at once the repudiation and reminder of castration, “the horror of” which Freud writes in his 1927 essay on “Fetishism,” “sets up a sort of permanent memorial to itself by creating this substitute,” so that “[i]n very subtle cases the fetish itself has become the vehicle both of denying and of asseverating the fact of castration” (Collected Papers 200, 203; vol. 5). Klinger's third etching Yearning, which pictures a despairing man with his head in his hands, the limp length of the white glove on the ground before him and the upright form of a candlestick next to him, suggests the ambivalent significance of this fetish object, as does also the ninth etching, Abduction (Figure 12), which enacts a second emasculation through its loss, as a man's arms reach through the broken panes of a window in an effort to grasp a pterodactyl that is flying off with the glove in its beak. Klinger represents the restoration of the fetish to phallic form in the fifth of the Paraphrases, Triumph, which pictures the glove's apotheosis, reinstated in a curiously clitoral pose within a clam-like chariot, harnessing and directing the force of a pair of galloping stallions, a force that is both phallic and oceanic as (following the classical Greek conceit exemplified in the Parthenon marbles they appear to be modelled upon) these animals image waves.

Figure 12.

Max Klinger, Abduction (Entführung), Plate IX from A Glove, Opus VI (Ein Handschuh, Opus VI). Etching and aquatint, 1881. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

The man's experience in “A Little Grey Glove” of “a sudden sting in the lobe of my ear” as he is “caught” by the woman's fishing hook intensifies the suggestive vagina dentata imagery of “A Cross Line,” where the woman bites her husband's ear and chin as part of a playful sequence that ends with him carrying her off to the bedroom. The idea of masculine incompleteness suggested by the husband in the first story is represented directly with the symbolic castration of the narrator in “A Little Grey Glove,” who accordingly looks to the phallic woman to make him whole and invulnerable. It is only after the hook is removed and he has placed this memento of his emasculation, as he records, “surreptitiously in my coat sleeve,” that they “both laugh, and,” he writes, “I look at her for the first time” (101). The relationship that develops from this point is, like that of the wife and husband in “A Cross Line,” grounded in a generic masculine castration anxiety, upon which is built a personal affection, which in the woman's case does not amount to love. Whereas the husband, and indeed his wife, in the first story appear satisfied with their queered play, the man in “A Little Grey Glove” falls masochistic victim to his binary conception of sexual relations as a contest between prey and predator. Consequently, in his personal story, much as in the vicious legal and journalistic narratives of the divorce proceedings that her husband has steered, the Dionysian woman is cast in the role of destructive siren. The narrator's feelings, however, appear to include some conscious appreciation of the woman herself, which Freud distinguishes from hysteria with his example of the knight's “worship of the glove,” while for Egerton the two coalesce neurotically through man's “chivalrous conservative devotion to the female idea.”