“A class act: Constance Lytton and the political, literary and dramatic dynamics of suffrage prison writings”

ABSTRACT

In 1910 suffragette Lady Constance Lytton disguised herself as a working-class seamstress, Jane Warton. Her cross-class masquerade revealed the snobbery and injustice of prison authorities’ treatment of suffragettes: as Lady Constance Lytton she was diagnosed with a weak heart and placed in the hospital wing, but as Jane Warton she was put in the Third Division and force-fed until her health gave out. Lytton’s memoir, Prisons and Prisoners. Some personal experiences. By Constance Lytton and Jane Warton, Spinster became one of the most celebrated suffrage texts. This article reveals the literary and political sophistication of Lytton’s writings, and argues that her innovative use of metaphor and her deployment of contemporary dramatic techniques and theories are crucial to appreciating the power and influence of her memoir. Drawing on contemporary feminist and suffrage theater and using the relation between actor and role as a framework for her account of her disguise and imprisonment, Lytton’s memoir is both a skillful feminist negotiation of class tensions within the suffrage movement, and an example of how suffrage narratives can expand the extant canon of modernist writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Suffrage
• memoir
• feminism
• force-feeding
• prison
• class
• suffragette
• theater
• political
• Lytton

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Sos Eltis is an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, and specializes in Victorian, modern and contemporary literature, with a particular interest in theater and performance. She is the author of Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (OUP, 1996) and Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (OUP, 2013), and of numerous articles on Wilde, Shaw, Coward, Beckett, Pinter, and women’s suffrage literature and theater.

Notes

1. Roberts, Pages from the diary, 137.

2. Christian Commonwealth, 11 March 1914, in Haslam, ed. Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, Appendix D, 321.

3. Christabel Pankhurst, “A Prisoner’s Book”, The Suffragette, 13 March 1914, quoted in ibid, 325.

4. For recent studies of suffrage narratives concentrating centrally on Prisons and Prisoners see e.g. Mayhall, “Creating the ‘Suffrage Spirit’”; Howlett, “Writing on the Body?”; Hartman, “What Made a Suffragette”.

5. Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, 162.

6. “Questions in the House”, 20. See also “Suffragist Women Prisoners”, Home Office Papers and Memoranda 1889–1910 (London, 1910), in Haslam, Prisons and Prisoners, Appendix E.

7. See e.g. Billington-Greig, The Militant Suffrage Movement, 69–70, 74–5, and Hamilton, Life Errant, 73, 68.

8. Delap and DiCenzo, “Transatlantic Print Culture”, 48–65.

9. Park, “Political Activism and Women’s Modernism”, 174–5.

10. Seshagiri, “Making it New”, 241–87.

11. Park, “Political Activism”, 181. For further discussion of “voice” in relation to women’s suffrage writing and literary cultures, see Chapman, Making Noise, Introduction.

12. Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, 14.

13. Betterton, An Intimate Distance, chap.1.

14. Ibid., 67.

15. For an extreme expression of anti-suffragist medical opinion on the subjection of women’s reason to their biological and hormonal fluctuations, see Wright, “On Militant Hysteria”, and his expanded treatise, The Unexpurgated Case.

16. Colmore, Suffragette Sally, 73–4.

17. See e.g. ibid., 82, 119, 170.

18. See also e.g. 83, 170, 278.

19. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Parts 3 & 4 for the classic study of prison as panopticon.

20. See e.g. Mulvey-Roberts, “Militancy, Masochism or Martyrdom?”, 170, 171; Myall, “Only be ye Strong”, 61–84; Thomas, “Scenes in the Writing”, 60.

21. Rebellato, “When We Talk of Horses”, 25.

22. Examples of suffrage plays about conversion include Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women! (1907), Beatrice Harraden’s Lady Geraldine’s Speech (1909), Gertrude Vaughan’s The Woman with the Pack (1911), and Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John’s How the Vote was Won (1911). For posters depicting forced feeding see “The Modern Inquisition” by Alfred Pearse, published by the WSPU in 1910, and, for the sensational and supposedly comic depiction of women’s suffering, see “The Prevention of Hunger Strikes” by R. F. Ruttley, and “Feeding a Suffragette by Force”, reproduced in Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, Figs.VII, 53 & 54, 109.

23. For the role of narratives of force feeding in building a sense of suffrage community, see Mayhall, “Creating the “Suffragette Spirit”.

24. Letter from G. S. Street to Lord Chamberlain’s Office, 9 January 1914, accompanying Robson, The Suffragette.

25. Robson, Suffragette, I, 45.

26. Ibid., II, iii, 40–43.

27. Ibid., Letter from G. S. Street to Lord Chamberlain’s Office, 9 January 1914.

28. Ibid.

29. Report by Charles Brookfield, 11 March 1913 on Middleton-Myles, The White Slave Traffic.

30. Ibid.

31. Hamilton, A Pageant of Great Women, 31.

32. Glover, A Chat with Mrs Chicky, 110.

33. Pall Mall Gazette (13 February 1908); Stage (13 February 1908), reproduced in Hamilton, Diana of Dobson’s, 173, 171.

34. See Davis, Actresses as Working Women for details of actresses’ working conditions and rates of pay.

35. Howlett, “Writing on the Body?”, 33–4; Green, Spectacular Confessions, 86–7.

36. See Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, 237–8. On symbolism of Joan of Arc, see Betterton, Intimate Distance, 52.

37. Green, Spectacular Confessions, chap. 1; Haslam, “Being Jane Warton”, 48.

38. Howlett, “Writing on the Body?”, 32.

39. Mulvey-Roberts, “Militancy, Masochism or Martyrdom?”, 170, 171. Michelle Myall similarly ascribes psychological rather than political motives for Lytton’s own actions, see e.g Myall, “Only be ye Strong”, 61–84, thereby perpetuating anti-suffragists’ diagnosis of female hysteria behind the characterization of suffragettes’ endurance of physical assault, imprisonment and forced-feeding as “mock martyrdom”, unnecessary suffering sought through motives of masochism or self-publicity.

40. Thomas, “Scenes in the Writing”, 60.

41. Campbell, My Life and Some Letters, 70.

42. Barnes, “How It Feels”, 5.

43. Ibid.

44. Green, Spectacular Confessions, 175–83.

45. Lutes, Front-Page Girls, 154.

46. Barnes, “How it Feels”.

47. Ibid.

48. In a strikingly similar experiment, on 15 June 2013 the human rights organization Reprieve recruited rapper and actor Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) to submit his body and fame to force-feeding in order to campaign against the use of force-feeding at Guantanamo Bay and its designation as medical treatment. As Ben Ferguson recounts,

There was no rehearsal: after all, no acting would be required. He swapped his black leather jacket, jeans and designer shoes for an orange jumpsuit. In an instant, he was no longer Mos Def – rapper and Hollywood star – but a powerless prisoner. https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/jul/09/yasiin-bey-force-fed-guantanomo-bay-mos-def - accessed 25 September 2017.

Bey is in increasing pain as the nasal tube is inserted, and it is withdrawn and prepared for reinsertion. At this point Bey repeatedly begs “No, stop, please, stop”, but those performing the procedure continue to restrain him, until he says “It’s me. Please stop. I can’t do it.” – at which point they call a halt and release him. Though Bey is not performing a character or taking part in any form of pretence, the default framework for the participants’ understanding of one body standing in for other less powerful bodies is thus clearly that of actor and role. It is only when those performing the procedure abandon their assumption that Bey is play-acting and realize his genuine distress that they abandon the experiment. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jul/08/mos-def-force-fed-guantanamo-bay-video for Asif Kapadia’s video of the event.

49. Times, 10 February 1910, 10.

50. Times, 30 March 1910, 3.