The Dangerous City

Contemporary debates around the position of women in the late-Victorian city suggest that by the last decades of the nineteenth century the male prerogative to the urban landscape (both real and imagined) as a space for adventure, self-discovery, and knowledge had been challenged in a variety of ways. As women moved into visibility in the public spaces of London as philanthropists, shoppers, and workers – valid pedestrians in the urban milieu – the actual and represented city no longer comfortably belonged to the privileged male spectator. Accounts of the urban space and the encounters within it became as Judith R. Walkowitz notes, “far less polarized and far more interactive than those imagined by the great literary chroniclers of the metropolis” (11). Levy herself articulates her own understanding of Thomson's London in The City of Dreadful Night from the position of one who has “trod its streets” (“James Thomson” 502). The city space offered new opportunities to women, as autonomous and active agents, not simply liberated from dominant narratives of gender roles and expectations, but able to insert themselves into and rewrite these narratives. For Levy, therefore, from the “suburban high-school mistress, in town for a day's shopping or picture seeing,” to the “busy [woman] journalist” London offers both opportunities and havens for women (“Women and Club Life” 535). She argues that the “woman who owns no interests beyond the circle of home” is “too expensive a luxury” and so “the most conservative among us must realize the necessity for women of leaving off weeping and taking to work, no less than man” (537).

This is not to assert that Levy's urban poetry, and the urban women of the fin de siècle, simply co-opted the male privilege of flâneurie. Indeed, as critics have argued the notion of a female equivalent to the flâneur – the flâneuse – is debatable, misguided, or even impossible.⁴

In Deborah Parsons's account, for example, the female street walker produced a markedly different perspective: “a particular mode of female urban vision”: “women were entering the city with fresh eyes, observing it from within” (6). I would emphasize the fact that the women of the fin de siècle are more “walkers” than “voyeurs” as Michel de Certeau describes them. The scopic drive of the voyeur “makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility into a transparent text.” By contrast walkers, “whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it,…make use of spaces that cannot be seen,” “everyday” spaces which are “‘another spatiality’ (an ‘anthropological,’ poetic and mythic experience of space)…a migrational, or metaphorical, city” (92). The very act of unprivileged walking can serve to destabilize, without ever getting outside, the panoptical organization of the city: In her essay on James Thomson, Levy highlights the presence of the “wanderer” who “goes down into the city” (503; my emphasis) and his nightmarish The City of Dreadful Night certainly does not attain to any panoptical, organizing perspective. However, for Thomson, the city eventually becomes, in part 2 of The City of Dreadful Night, what William B. Thesing calls “an emblem of a social, indeed a universal condition” (146). No such emblematic meaning accrues in Levy's urban poetic which remains within the “long poem of walking,” never rendering it or its subjectivities universally intelligible.

As a female city poet Levy is also closer to the different dangers besetting the urban woman, most particularly because of their perceived status as sexual objects and/or victims in the fin-de-siècle city that bristled with real or imagined perils. In Victorian Babylon Lynda Nead points to the “presence of unaccompanied middle-class women on the city streets” of Victorian London (67) and argues convincingly that women were not necessarily “passive victims of a voracious male gaze…they can be imagined as women who enjoyed and participated in the ‘ocular economy’ of the city” (71). But despite the reality that “Young, respectable women of the middle classes were present on the streets” (Nead 73) the connections between prostitution and the woman Street Walker continued to be reinforced through both media and poetic discourses of the late nineteenth century. Indeed the prostitute, or “Nora,” was a prominent feature in many male poets' vision of the city.⁵

Increasingly, “narratives of sexual danger” that were articulated and debated in the new media emerging at the time (perhaps even as an attempt to circumscribe and control the urban freedom of women) discursively constructed women in the public spaces of the city as being marked by sexual threats. It was the Ripper Murders of 1888 that served to coalesce the associations of sexuality and danger in the urban terrain, producing a heightened sense of sexual menace pervading the streets of London.

The media's role in producing “narratives of sexual danger” was of course fundamental, and the New Journalism,⁶

in a more general way, was responsible for creating and reinforcing a “sensational” London. In particular the East End becomes the overdetermined site of vice, crime, and degradation. So in W. T. Stead's Maiden Tribute pieces, for example, the references to “Mile-End road,” “Dalston,” and “Hackney” create an imagined map of sin, iniquity, and sexual predation. He claims, for example, “the East is the great market for the children who are imported into West-end houses” (4). The Orientalist overtones of this statement are apparent, symbolically colliding metropolitan and international connotations of the word “East” and potentially marking the East End as a racially othered space. But Stead is far from being alone in his representation; to journalists, novelists, and reformers alike the East End stood as “Darkest England.” According to Gareth Steadman Jones it was “an immense terra incognita periodically mapped out by intrepid missionaries and explorers who catered to an insatiable middle-class demand for travelers' tales” (14).⁷ The multiculturalism of areas such as Tower Hamlets, Whitechapel, and Spitalfield – the majority of whose new immigrant population in the 1880s and 90s were Eastern European Jews – was a key factor in the Orientalist mapping of the dangerous East End. Such mappings would be an unavoidable fact of the London that a late-nineteenth-century acculturated Anglo-Jew would experience and traverse. It is from within this contested, over-represented terrain of fin-de-siècle London that Levy's late poetry is written, a terrain that both enabled and signified freedom, license, danger, sexual uncertainty, public meaning, and private practice.

Lesbian Desire

The recognition of Levy as what we would today term a “queer” writer has emerged from recent engagements with her work, and from the details offered in Linda Hunt Beckman's Amy Levy: Her life and Letters about Levy's attachments to Brighton High School's young headmistress, Miss Edith Creak, and her probably unconsummated, profoundly disappointing relationship with Vernon Lee. Levy in no sense explicitly articulated or celebrated lesbian desire, but her letters and later work do demonstrate that “she conceived of same-sex desire as giving rise to an identification separate from and in opposition to that produced by heterosexuality” (Francis 196). The queer poetic that can be unearthed, particularly in A London Plane-Tree, attempts to express a desire that has no social, legal, or linguistic status, but this volume also explores the impossibility of the full enunciation of “lesbian poetry” and the impossible identifications that it produces. Sensitive to the anachronistic connotations of the term lesbian poetry, I use it as Virginia Blain does to refer to: “poetry written from a viewpoint that runs aslant to the usually assumed heterosexual position, and which might productively be associated with a lesbian position: albeit of course, a lesbian position within the closet” (138). I would also share Blain's caution about the “deeply problematic concept of a ‘lesbian position’” (158), turning to the support of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion of “nonce taxonomies”⁸

that can be accessed through attention to the “reader relations of texts” (23). A recognition of the multiplicities of identifications and desires that can be textually inscribed and a rejection of a simple assumption of a “lesbian position,” which would be anachronistic as well as reductive, is crucial for a nuanced reading of Levy's work. As some of Levy's novels and stories reinscribe versions of the heterosexual romance narrative – from the happy ending of The Romance of a Shop to a reworking of Bronte's Lucy Snowe in the figure of Miss Meredith – her texts clearly do not occupy a single position of either normative or dissident sexuality. But, given such caution and acknowledging the dispensability of “coarse axes of categorization” (Sedgwick 23), exploring the positionings of desire and gender in Levy's texts through a lens of “lesbianism” can serve to foreground, rather than foreclose, the radical ambivalences of these texts. Monique Wittig writes of the violence of lesbian language⁹ but the female warrior-writers of her Les guérillères are enabled by this violence, and the doubleness and ambivalence of the lesbian “I,” the “j/e,” is the productive ground for another language that escapes heterosexual normativity (Wittig, The Lesbian Body). In Levy's work the resonant dangers of non-heterosexual feminine desire, as a conflation of self and other and an appropriation of the other-as-self, amplify the indeterminacy and violence of the lesbian poetic voice.

In her insightful reading of the “Love, Dreams and Death” sequence from A London Plane-Tree Emma Francis highlights how Levy's poems of same-sex desire “are profoundly disconcerting in the way they describe the breakdown of all possibilities of limitation and structuration” (197). Poems like “The Dream,” “Borderland,” and “In the Night” evoke liminal states inhabited by a ghostly beloved, a “she” who persists as a fragrant memory of a consummation that is also a moment of death and loss. Such poems exemplify how the presence of death necessarily accompanies the undermining of oppositions and blurring of boundaries that Levy's poems of same-sex desire explore, emphasizing how such desire exceeds the limits of articulation. Indeed, in “Contradictions,” one of the most complex poems from “Love, Dreams and Death,” the collapse of identity into death – that is also the conflation of “you” and “I” in the nexus of lesbian desire – is an “absurdity” that cannot be brought into language:

Liminal states and the blurring of oppositions are also a feature of the opening (“A London Plane-Tree”) section of the A London Plane-Tree volume, most notably in pieces such as “Between the Showers” and “Straw in the Street.” That such poems, and other evocations of ghostly presence (in “London Poets” for example), appear in the first, city-focused section of A London Plane-Tree, while “In the Mile-End Road” features in the second, internalized, and eroticized “Love, Dreams and Death” section, may well suggest a connection between the indeterminate space of lesbian desire and the uncertain urban zone.¹⁰

But it is not the case that Levy directly explores the late-nineteenth-century city as a place where same-sex female desire could be articulated. Opportunities for female communities did arise in late-nineteenth-century cities (in women's colleges, boarding houses, and clubs) where spaces for women's friendship, creativity, intimacy, learning, and support were created and maintained.¹¹ Levy herself forged key friendships with women such as Eleanor Marx, Olive Schreiner, Dollie Radford (neé Maitland), and Clementina Black that were made possible by a metropolitan existence.¹² But despite the clubs, groups, lunchrooms, and literary dinners there can be no comparison to the Paris of a few decades later where Natalie Barney's Rue Jacob salon celebrated women-centered culture and desire, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas could entertain as genius-husband and wife in their Rue de Fleurus home. Fin-de-siècle London had uncertain spaces and places that single women could inhabit, but it did not liberate women wholesale from the restrictions of heterosexual domesticity. What emerges from Levy's late work, therefore, is that the “shadows and ambiguities” of the peripatetic city (as de Certeau describes it) announce the potential of other desires and models without ever simply outlining a map of their possibility. The contradiction here is that, unlike Thomson's universal emblem, the city that Levy walks/writes can never become fully legible, it is never representative of something and there is no external perspective from which this city can be made intelligible.

Stereotypes: The New Woman and “the Jew”

The voicing of a non-heterosexual female identity could be linked to the more explicitly feminist voice in Levy's work – such as in “A Ballade of Religion and Marriage,” “Xantippe,” “Medea,” and “Magdalen” – which critiques hegemonic conceptions of femininity and the social, legal, and cultural position of women. Levy herself, alongside Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden, and “Michael Field,” has been identified as a New Woman poet (for example Hughes, and Ledger and Luckhurst 75). Levy's celebration of the city and the opportunities it offered further serves to associate her with the new possibilities of independence and self-definition for women that lie behind the concept of the New Woman. Her Jewish Chronicle article “Women and Club Life” (1888) marks the liberation of women from the restrictions of domesticity into the “great stream” of life in the city:

The construction, representation, and deployment of the New Woman have been a focus of critical interest for some time, but particularly recent studies have sought to explore the ambivalences of this icon: as an image of freedom (sexual or otherwise) and female independence (the right to work, get an education, refuse traditional roles of femininity); or a warning of the dangers of cultural anarchy, decay, perversion, and sexual degeneracy.¹³

Texts of the period offer a variety of identities for the New Woman – the mannish Girton Girl, the embittered spinster, the bad mother, the oversexed vamp – and she figures in New Journalistic forums and prominently in publications such as Punch. Central to such representations, and crucial to the New Woman as Levy imagines her, is the urban terrain. As Deborah Parsons points out the New Woman “was a specifically urban character, the result of the circumstances and qualities of a growing metropolitan society” (82). There is, in Levy's poems “A London Plane-Tree,” “The Village Garden,” and “Ballade of an Omnibus,” a clear identification with and celebration of the city space. If A London Plane-Tree speaks the experiences of a New Woman, she is, as the volume's epigraph suggests, an urban writer: With this epigraph Levy demonstrates that she shares with Dobson's late-nineteenth-century urban poems a recognition of the inevitability of a metropolitan poetic. In his poetry Dobson, like his peer Frederick Locker-Lampson, rejects an omniscient metropolitan perspective both of them preferring instead “to record ‘humble’ [Locker-Lampson's word] personal impressions of what features of the town appealed to them” (Thesing 155). Levy's urban poetry is similarly humble and personal but her complex tracing of spaces and places for Other subjectivities sets her apart from their easy, light enjoyment of the city.

A further strong connection to the “paven ground” of the city can be traced through Levy's Jewishness and the increasing identification of “the Jew” with the urban space. With the influx of eastern European Jewish immigration in the 1880s and 90s, Jewish peoples became an increasingly visible presence in London. Already a key figure in many Victorian representations of the city, by the end of the nineteenth century the “Wandering Jew” of the Western imagination had become inextricably located amongst the city's streets. So, in her exploration of Levy's “urban muse” Parsons points out how the New Woman as urban figure shares a cultural and metaphorical place with the Jew as a crucial presence in late-nineteenth-century representations of the city: both are “cosmopolitan” in the sense of being fundamentally urban Outsiders within the metropolitan space (85ff). But they share a site of uncertainty in culture, not simply because they are “city dwellers”: just like the contradictory representations of the New Woman that abound in the fin de siècle, so too is the late-nineteenth-century Jew subject to inconsistent stereotypes. Levy herself criticized George Eliot's depiction of Jewish characters in Daniel Deronda,¹⁴

and in her essay, “The Jew in Fiction,” calls for novels presenting “the Jew as we know him today, with his curious mingling of diametrically opposed qualities; his surprising virtues and no less surprising vices; leading his eager intricate life” (13). In representations of the fin-de-siècle “Jew” this complexity is generally reduced to a set of conflicting types, as Brian Cheyette describes: Tamar Garb's suggestion that “the Jew” “marks the point of rupture” in the narrative of Western civilization (20) serves to pinpoint the “function” of such contradictory representations as attempts to fix the “indeterminate ‘Jew’” within a coherent account of the emergence of the modern nation.¹⁵ In a similar way, concerns about the New Woman can be understood as a projection of fears about the uncertainty of the modern. Thus, in the fin-de-siècle imagination, the New Woman and “the Jew” figure similarly as critical metaphors in the cultural and textual negotiation of the crisis of modernity. The contradictions and over-determinations of their construction as stereotypes in the newspapers, cartoons, fictions, and polemics of the period are obvious. Their oddness, the impossibility of their simple assimilation, appears as the necessary result of an attempt to offer a coherent narrative of the English nation in the face of modernity.

As her articles in the Jewish Chronicle, her novel of contemporary Jewish life Reuben Sachs, and her translations of Jehudah Halevi and Heine indicate, Levy connected with the Jewish community on a public as well as a personal and familial level. However, distinctions have been drawn between the “sophisticated sexual politics of Levy's poetry” and her New Woman identity, and her “profoundly politically insanitary” writing on Jewishness (Francis 201). For example her feminist article on “Jewish Middle-Class Women of Today” (Jewish Chronicle 1886), describing the patriarchal restrictions of the Jewish community, employs stereotypes of the “Oriental” “conservative,” “primitive” Jew, and contemporary responses to Levy's novel Reuben Sachs focused on a perceived element of “Jewish self-hatred” motivating its central characterizations. Levy certainly deploys stereotypes of “the Jew” in her novel and other pieces, but as recent sensitive readings of Levy's relationship to her Jewish racial heritage have shown (by Scheinberg and Beckman), her fictional and poetic texts voice, rather than endorse, stereotypes. She was, as Scheinberg argues, “cognizant that as a Jewish writer her poetic identity in England would always be judged in relation to her Jewish identity” (“Canonizing the Jew” 195) and thus “often wrote from a position of dual critique aimed at both her own Anglo-Jewish roots and the limitations of the Christian literary culture to which she was also connected professional and socially” (Women's Poetry 205). Levy does not simply reject Jewishness; indeed she closely identifies herself with the urban nature of “the Jew” in pieces such as “Jewish Humour” (Jewish Chronicle 1886). But again, this does not amount to a straightforward identification with the visible urban Jews of the wave of Eastern European immigration; Levy's work reveals that she shared the generally uneasy relationship of Anglo-Jewery to this community. Indeed the juvenilia/sketches from the Amy Levy Collection that Beckman reproduces and discusses (in “Leaving ‘The Tribal Duckpond’”) “conform to stereotypes” of the “comic and vulgar” Jew (192ff) and may well be part of Levy's own negotiation of her attitude to the perceived foreignness of recent Jewish immigrants.¹⁶

So Levy does use stereotypes, as much in her depictions of the New Woman as “the Jew.” In The Romance of a Shop (1888), for example, the central character of Gertrude Lorimer conforms to the normative representation of such independent and potentially unfeminine female characters. Thus she is typically possessed of the visible marks of “intelligence,” “an arching, unfashionable forehead, like those of Leonardo de Vinci's women, short-sighted eyes, and an expressive mouth and chin” (60), which rescue this (positively depicted) New Woman from the realms of lonely spinsterhood: indeed she is successfully married by the end of the novel.

But rather than endorsing stereotypes of Jewishness and the New Woman, attempting to recuperate them, or even opting for the alternative connection between unorthodox femininity and Jewishness embodied in the myth of the seductive Jewess, the belle juive of Decadent art and writing, I would argue that Levy's late poetry attempts to articulate a subjectivity between such points of fixity. As Homi Bhabba has argued, reading and understanding the “processes of subjectification made possible…through stereotypical discourse” rather than “subjecting its representations to a normalizing judgement” leads to a recognition of what is produced by this discourse; “that ‘otherness’ which is at once an object of desire and derision.” Reading stereotypes in this way “reveals…the boundaries of colonial discourse and…enables a transgression of these limits from the space of that otherness” (“The Other Question” 67).

The “figures” of Levy's work can thus be read as stereotypes which reveal in order to collapse, the boundaries of discourse; impossible, irreconcilable figures who nonetheless serve to delineate a space of possibility. The New Woman is an unrealizable ideal of urban female liberation and an object of desire in the urban zone (perhaps the urban muse that inspires the poems of A London Plane-Tree). She is also at odds with “the Jew” who stands as racial heritage and figure of patriarchal desires and restrictions.¹⁷

But the New Woman and Jew share, in their “otherness,” a non-place that can be understood also as the non-place of the city across which both types of visible pedestrians trace their dis-location: “To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper [sic]. The moving about the city multiplies and concentrates, makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place” (de Certeau 103). “The Jew” and the New Woman who inhabit and walk the city, brought into being by the very discourse that attempts to contain and control them, simultaneously delineate and disturb normative discourses of identity, sexuality, nation, and discourse. Thus, the complex subjectivity as articulated in A London Plane-Tree is neither one nor the other: it is a split/multiple articulation, a displaced/misplaced subject that crosses the liminal space between fixity. This space is simultaneously represented by Levy as the liminal space of the metropolis, the streets of London that are walked across and through, a space of movement, flux, excitement, change, modernity, danger; at once an overdetermined and unknowable place.

Walking/Writing the City

The confusing, exhilarating, uncertain city is explored in “London in July” from A London Plane-Tree:

This poem presents a confusion of identity and city in the first stanza, with both the speaker and the beloved (woman) becoming part of, or interchangeable with, the city. This confusion is extended through the poem until the “city's heart” becomes simultaneously the urban space, the beloved, and the place for “me.” The peripatetic journey that is traced through the “various and intricate” maze involves a total rejection of the bucolic (only the committed Londoners would stay there over the summer) that recalls Levy's descriptions of the Jew who “hardly has left…a drop of bucolic blood in his veins” (“Jewish Humour” 523). The poem also establishes a textual relationship to male poets, citing Wordsworth and Browning in stanza 3 and opposing their pastoral poetic with an urban one.¹⁸ However, the male poet that is perhaps evoked most closely through the structure of the poem and its celebration of the city is Baudelaire, a poet Levy probably encountered.¹⁹ Baudelaire's poetic of the passante – his symbolist idealization of the chance encounter – his representation of woman's familiarity with the modern city of spectacle and his blurring of self and city are all echoed in “London in July.” It would not be unusual for Levy to be drawing on a male writer in this way; “London Poets: in Memoriam” from the same section of A London Plane Tree evokes the “shadow” of previous (male) urban poets. This, and the close identification Levy maintained with James Thomson and the quotation she uses from Dobson,²⁰ may seem to suggest that she is adopting a male or masculine voice in “London in July” to express an active, desiring subject position. However, despite the intertextual relations, there is no reason why the speaker of this poem cannot be female. To read it this way though means recognizing the tropes that the poem plays with, a staging of identity (the poet seeking his lover in a strange place) that undermines the authoritative position of the flâneur-poet. At the same time such a reading could recognize the “me” and “she” of the poem as a split subjectivity seeking its other who turns out to be itself. The city of the “London Plane Tree” section of A London Plane Tree clearly enables such confusions and splittings, ambivalences of identity and desire that become more explicit in the second section “Love Dreams and Death” but seem particularly pertinent to the urban terrain.

The city itself is a crucial figure in Levy's late work where it is represented as a force which not only allows for transgression, but itself crosses the borders between private and public, interior and exterior. The poems of “London Plane Tree” offer the street music that invades the (archetypal) garret room of the poet-persona in “The Piano-Organ” and the streets which echo, map, and merge with the weary tread of the wanderer in “A March Day in London.” However, the voice of the newspaper-boy appears as the most striking image of the urban as a force that crosses the threshold between the public (masculine) and domestic (feminine) space. It is a recurrent image in Levy's work:

This scene, from the beginning of Levy's “Sokratics in the Strand” (1884) puts the newsboy at the center of a highly fin-de-siècle evocation of the city space, but his voice appears in a number of other texts invading the privacy of the home or personal sphere. In both The Romance of a Shop and Reuben Sachs the voice of the newspaper headlines is not merely the noise of the city, but the inescapable presence of the public world that invades and disrupts the lives of their respective female protagonists, presaging grief and death. In Chapter 17 of The Romance of a Shop, entitled “A Special Edition,” Gertrude Lorimer's musings on the autumn evening cityscape outside her window is ominously invaded by a “hateful, familiar sound – the hoarse shriek of a man proclaiming a ‘special edition’” (165). Described variously as “birds of ill-omen,” “carrion,” and “fiend” the newsboy announces a massacre in Africa of the expedition that Lucy's (Gertrude's sister's) fiancé had been accompanying. The newsboy's cry thus invades the Lorimer household with sorrow. Perhaps more strikingly in Reuben Sachs the newsboy appears immediately after Judith Quixano's symbolic deflowering by Reuben. Reuben has just unfastened the chrysanthemums on Judith's bodice when This death marks Judith's complete loss of Reuben as he departs, crushing the chrysanthemums underfoot, for a career in Parliament and an early death (the same news-hawker's cry comes to Judith at the close of the novel as she contemplates her loss and her new life). The presence of the newsboy in these novels can be linked to the use of the motif in “Sokractics in the Strand” where it also foreshadows the death of a friend. However, the motif also appears in a piece Levy wrote for London Society (1886) about a visit to Cornwall in which the “Genuine Cockney” Melissa (Levy's persona in the piece) asserts her preference for “chimney-tops” (“Out of the World” 55) and imagines she hears “a distant newsboy calling out Special Editions and terrible catastrophes!” (thankfully) interrupting the tranquility of the scene and calling her back to her “own place…among the struggling crowd of dwellers in the city” (56).

The motif of the newsboy's cry serves an important function in A London Plane-Tree, but here it seems to embody more generally the dangers of the opportunities offered by the city. The “London Plane-Tree” section includes “Ballade of a Special Edition” which exploits the tensions arising between the restrictions of traditional form (here the “ballade,” a form that Dobson, Swinburne, and W. H. Henley experimented with) and innovative subject matter (New Journalism). A similar effect is used in “Ballade of an Omnibus” where the tensions between traditional form and modern subject matter are further complicated with classical references. Here the speaker's rejection of “carriages” and “costly hansoms” also excludes her (and the lines “Princess, your splendour you require,/I, my simplicity” establish the gender of the speaker) from the classical realm of “Croesus” and “Lucullus.” “Busmen” recognize the speaker's “lyre” not the classical canon. Still, despite her identification with the “deep and delicate” pleasures of bus-tops and the “Bull-and-Gate,” the speaker refuses to accept any sense of hierarchy between her modern poetic and the classical one; “Neither to rate lower nor higher.” The city stands, democratized and mobile, as the source of the “desire” that this poem both articulates and sublimates. The paralleling of the epigram to the poem “To see my love suffices me” (a citation from Andrew Lang's Ballades in Blue China) in the similarly iambic tetrameter refrain “An omnibus suffices me” demonstrates how the freedoms of the urban terrain overlay a desire for the beloved. Throughout this poem, as in Levy's other urban ballade, the traditional or classical sits in tension with the modernizing force of the subject matter and point of view. I would suggest that a corollary exists with the tensions that arise from Levy inserting into the position of the male urban observer a new, non-heterosexual, feminine perspective.²¹

Immediately following “Ballade of an Omnibus” in A London Plane-Tree, “Ballade of a Special Edition” is set up to be a similar celebration of the non-elitist freedoms, space, and opportunities provided by the city:

In this poem the “Special Edition,” like the omnibus, serves as a marker for a more democratic or indeed demotic form of culture. The hawker of the “Special Edition” is, however, a “Bird of ill omen,” “herald and friend” to death, disaster, and horror. What he sells is the reduction of life and experience to a set of attention-grabbing headlines (one might recall the list from “Sokratics in the Strand”), statements devoid of complexity and intended to communicate through cliché. The repetition of “double murder in Mile End” as the refrain in this ballade invokes the actual hawker's cry. Its iteration also, however, serves to over-emphasize the statement, undermining its meaning. In a similar way that the overdetermination of the stereotype foregrounds its own boundaries, the “double murder in Mile End” becomes “apocryphal,” a textual construct. “Ballade of a Special Edition” can thus be read as a specific critique of New Journalistic or media constructs of Outcast London in which the East End (and the Mile End Road specifically) function as signifiers of the horrors of urban life and the depths of darkest London.

Dangerous City, Dangerous Desires, and Double Murders

Levy's poem “Ballade of a Special Edition” was to take on startling connotations soon after its first publication in the Star (5 March 1888). The mention of a “double murder in Mile End” is a crucial part of the poem's functioning, a “mimicry” of the construction of an Orientalized East End in the discourse of New Journalism that, in this mimicry of a colonizing discourse “continually produce[s] its slippage, its excess, its difference” (Bhabha, “Of mimicry” 86). But with events in Whitechapel in autumn 1888 the “double murder in Mile End” became an all too real fact. Proofs of A London Plane Tree in the Amy Levy collection show her deletion of a statement that had appeared with the publication of “Ballade of a Special Edition”: “This was written and published before the recent Whitehall murders.”²²

By demonstrating a sensitivity about the possible connection to the Whitechapel Murders, this statement (and its deletion) suggests an uncertainty about some of the connotations of the Ripper story and its implications for urban women and Jews.

Already in February and March 1888 two women had been subject to brutal knife attacks in the Mile End area of London: Annie Millwood was repeatedly stabbed in the lower torso and legs in late February and died on 31 March at the Mile End Workhouse (from unrelated causes) while Ada Wilson was stabbed twice in the throat by an unknown assailant at her home on the Mile End Road also on 31 March. Both these crimes were reported in the East London press and fear (and press attention) in the area was increased after the deaths of two East End women, Emma Smith (after a brutal multiple rape) in April and Martha Tabram (from thirty-nine stab wounds to the breast, belly and groin area) on 6 August. These deaths were reported in the Times and the Star headline after Tabram's murder was “A Whitechapel Horror” (7 August 1888). Thus, by the first actual “Ripper” murder on 31 August 1888 the Star was already claiming a maniac was responsible for at least three killings in the East End. The Ripper murders, seen as the actions of an individual who had killed up to nine women in the East End in the last year,²³

were reported widely in papers as diverse as the Daily Telegraph, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Evening News, and the Morning Post. As L. Perry Curtis, Jr. discusses in detail, even the Times devoted 113,000 words to the murders, and headlines (and one assumes hawkers' cries) such as “HORROR UPON HORROR/WHITECHAPEL IS PANIC-STRIKEN/AT ANOTHER FIENDISH CRIME/A FOURTH VICTIM OF THE MANIAC” (Star, 8 September 1888) were a common feature.

The resonance of the Ripper murders for Levy's A London Plane-Tree is reinforced in the poem “In the Mile End Road” from the “Love, Dreams and Death” section in which a dead woman's presence is evoked in the streets of the East End:

The desire that this poem articulates traverses the space between oppositions, blurring the distinction between life and death, between presence and absence. The speaker of the poem is static, almost absent from the scene of the “crowded street”: in contrast the dead beloved moves in and with the crowd. The poem also undermines the certainty of knowledge and identification, slipping from “like her” to “she herself,” the repetition of pronouns in the first line straining to bring “her/she” into being. In contrast the presence of the speaker of the poem is unsettled in the penultimate line whose syntax creates a peculiarly uncanny moment suggesting the elision or loss of the self in the recognition of the beloved other “For one strange moment I forgot,” which is also the death of the self in the death of the other “My only love was dead.”

By evoking the Whitechapel murders does this poem “[flirt] with the psychology of male sexual violence” (Francis 200)? I think there are further resonances to be explored here, ones that can be retrospectively read out of “Ballade of a Special Edition.” “In the Mile End Road” does explicitly reveal that there is violence and/or death/loss in the renunciation of an essential identity. Its placing within A London Plane-Tree, not with the other city poems but in the “Love, Dreams and Death” section immediately preceding the complex poem “Contradictions,” is crucial. It brings the sexual danger of London into the context of these poems of non-heterosexual desire in which subjectivity is pulled apart by the complexity of the lyrics: the “I” dissolves into the (dead/absent) you and, as “In the Mile End Road” hints, the “I” is also guilty of destroying the other by its address. Further, this poem suggests a cultural context for the dangers of refusing a fixed, essentialist, heterosexual identity and attempting to inhabit the non-space of the city streets, of otherness. The ambiguous space of “In the Mile End Road,” at once a space of multiculturalism, peripatetic pleasure, democracy, and progressivism (The People's Palace opened at the end of the Mile End Road on 3 October 1887), is simultaneously clearly the dangerous urban space. The dangers of this space as it is represented in hegemonic discourse – whether this be the discourse of reform, sensational journalism, or fin-de-siècle popular fiction – can be returned to threaten those Others who are identified with it.

The Ripper murders were a vivid illustration to women of the dangers of urban freedom, with the extensive newspaper coverage fuelling the growth of sensation journalism, producing various Ripper scares, and reinforcing what Curtis describes as “the Gothic and Orientalist images of Whitechapel” (257). “In the Mile End Road” does seem to refer to the dangers faced by the street walking woman around 1888 and the racial implications of the space of Mile End are moreover amplified by a specific aspect of the Ripper news story, which inadvertently echoes the fictional hawkers “double-murder in Mile End” cry in Levy's “Ballade of a Special Edition.” From the beginning Jack (or Leather Apron) was suspected of being Jewish (and perhaps conducting ritual or black magic murders). His official description reproduced the stereotype of the Eastern Jew and among the initial suspects were John Pizer, a Polish-Jewish shoe-maker, and Joseph Issenschmidt, a butcher. These suspicions came to a head with the fourth and fifth murders (the double-murder), perpetrated on 30 September. Of the victims (Catherine Eddowes and Elizabeth Stride), the latter's body was found outside the Working Men's International Socialist Club and a bloodstained scrap of Eddowes's apron was found outside a building in Goulston Street inhabited by Jews. On the wall above it was written in chalk “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing.” Such connections further reinforced anti-Semitic suspicions that Jack was a (Eastern European) Jew, and boosted anti-Semitic feelings in the East End: Curtis quotes how Reynold's Newspaper (9 September 1888) “reported, angry crowds were gathering in Whitechapel and shouting ‘Down with the Jews’; ‘It was a Jew who did it’” (130). The strength of anti-Jewish feeling after the “double event” may have motivated Chief Rabbis Herman Adler and M. Gaster's letters to the Times on 3 October defending their community,²⁴

and the Jewish Chronicle discusses the anti-Semitic ramifications of the Ripper murders on numerous occasions in late 1888.²⁵ There was a clear sense that the media and public representation of the Ripper murders functioned as a further weapon in attempts to project the Otherness of the Jews in England, for them to carry the burden of disease and death that had long been, as Sander Gilman describes (in “The Jewish Murderer”), a key part of their popular and media stereotype.

The racial resonances of the violence underlying the text of “In the Mile End Road” the poem are unavoidable and there is a real uneasiness in the poem: the speaker and addressee are not only self and dead other, but murderer and victim and/or evil Jew and urban woman. The poem is not in any real sense actually about Jack the Ripper and his victims, but its cultural and discursive context reveal how Levy is acknowledging the double-edged nature of deploying stereotypes in order to create a space of otherness between. To return to the newspaper boy; his cry could be read as the re-assimilation of the ambiguities of identity inaugurated by the liberation of the urban space. Uncertain, transgressive gender, racial, sexual identities are re-co-opted in a hegemonic act of representational violence. Thus the wandering, urban “Jew” (the indeterminate “Jew”) is returned as a menacing shadowy figure in the city landscape: identification with him means carrying the taint of his “crime.” The liberated New Woman is a threat to society, a disease or corruption: earning money makes her no more than a prostitute, walking the street makes her no more than a prostitute, therefore be wary of the fate of the prostitute.

Indeterminacy or oddness can easily be made intelligible by acts of simplification, i.e., by being turned into an (fictional) oddness constructed through contradiction and in opposition to specificity. So Levy's poem implicitly begs the question; how far is the New Woman from the street-walker, particularly given the associations between the New Woman and an autonomous sexuality outside heterosexual domesticity? How far is acculturated Anglo-Jewery from the foreign mass of East-End immigrants, given the essentialist features of Semitic representation? How different or complex are these subject positions in the eyes of the media and their audience? It seems that culture will work very hard to ensure that both women street walkers and “Jews” remain locked in a space of negation; both threaten to undermine Western civilization and so need to be contained and defined. Reading Levy's poems through such questions it becomes clear that “Mile End” itself functions in Levy's work as a metonym for the space of modernity: potentially liberating, potentially murderous, always already made intelligible and incorporated into a comprehensive narrative of Western culture.

What emerges from this reading of Levy's late poetry is an understanding of how completely it simultaneously participates in and resists the fin-de-siècle construction and representation of the city and its inhabitants. Levy's London is a peripatetic text, one written from the multiple perspectives of race, gender, and sexuality, perspectives that are dislocated from dominant city narratives and mis-recognised in the culture and texts of the period. The space of “Mile End” is a textual ambivalence, and the space of the “Jew,” the New Woman, the lesbian is equally ambiguous, unreadable in any abstract or general sense. It is this ambiguity of the city and its subjectivities that comes to dominate in the literature of a later generation of modernist women writers, but what Levy's work specifically serves to highlight are the dangers of this ambiguity. Her uneasy attempt to move between fixed points of stereotypical legibility means that her poems and the voices they echo and speak have no place to rest, no point of view; they are almost inevitably threatened by a collapse into non-being and silence.