Transgender

Forum












Book Reviews

D'Eon & Cornbury:
TG Icons Under Scrutiny

by Emily Alford

Transgender desire and transgender expression seem nearly universal among human beings. Almost every society and every culture provide instances. Transgender history is another matter. The fundamental phenomenon of crossing gender lines may be the same. Where a given time draws those lines and what it makes of crossing them is not. That's why finding transgender behavior in the past is only the beginning of serious transgender history.

Chevalier/Chevaliere Charles-Genevieve
-Louise-Auguste-Andree-Timothee
d'Eon de Beaumont, (1728-1810)

Here are two books that go well past that beginning. One deals with Chevalier/Chevaliere Charles-Genevieve-Louise-Auguste-Andree-Timothee d'Eon de Beaumont, (1728-1810), the French soldier and diplomat who transitioned to the fullest extent possible in her time and spent the last half of life as a woman. The subject of the other is Edward Hyde (1661-1723), Lord Cornbury and later Earl of Clarendon, the royal governor of colonial New York whose supposed cross-dressed portrait hangs in the New-York Historical Society.

The similarities between d'Eon and Cornbury are considerable. Both were eighteenth-century nobles who ranked among the adventurers and the movers of their time. Both were the subjects of gender speculation. Each has become a transgender icon. Havelock Ellis borrowed d'Eon's name as a label for transgenderism ("eonism") in Studies in the Psychology of Sex and in England the Beaumont Society honors the Chevaliere's memory. The Cornbury story also is well known, and a Canadian group has honored the governor by taking his name. Yet, as these fine monographs by Gary Kates and Patricia Bonomi show, d'Eon and Cornbury were very different figures.

Both authors are highly regarded professional historians, Kates teaching at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, and Bonomi a professor emerita at New York University. Each has a distinguished bibliography of previous eighteenth-century scholarship, and both books are published by highly reputable presses. I have heard a rumor that Kates received a whopping advance from Basic Books. Bonomi's publisher does not give that kind of money, but it is the most prestigious imprint in its field. Each book, then, has passed "peer review" and deserves serious attention, not just in its transgender dimensions but for its contribution to the general history of the eighteenth century.

Gary Kates draws most of Monsieur d'Eon is a Woman from the enormous trove of d'Eon manuscripts now housed at the University of Leeds, England. (I find that personally ironic, having spent a whole year at Leeds long ago, wrestling privately with gender confusion and completely unaware of what the University's Brotherton Library, where I was working, held.) Because after death d'Eon was found to be biologically male, Kates uses the masculine pronoun throughout. But he establishes that his subject did become a woman in every respect that was possible at the time, including within her own mind. The Chevaliere was a genuine transsexual. But she was a figure of the eighteenth century, not the twentieth. Enormously appealing in some ways, she also held attitudes that a modern sensibility would regard as repellent. Not the least was a profound anti-Semitism, including a strong condemnation of ritual circumcision as a violation of the body. Given that attitude toward one cut upon the penis, one can only wonder what she would make of the miracles that endocrinology and surgery make possible now. (Even raising that speculation, of course, is to jerk d'Eon out of her own time, and Kates' whole point is to show how entirely she was a person of that time.)

D'Eon also came to her gender transition from a stance that our time would regard as strange. Kates locates the contents of her vast library and her own writings within a long-running European debate known as the Querelle des Femmes ("argument about women"). One of the central themes in that debate was the problem presented by women warrior figures. These included mythical Amazons and ancient Goddesses. But central to d'Eon's own imagination was the genuinely historical cross-dressed French heroine, Joan of Arc.

The Chevalier d'Eon was a warrior and diplomat at the highest level, and Joan's image provides the key to the peculiarities of transition that Kates reveals. It is not true that a cross-dressed d'Eon became a companion to the Empress of Russia, though the Chevalier did serve in St. Petersburg. It is true that d'Eon was involved in a private spy service run by King Louis XV, carrying out espionage in both Russia and England. That involvement caught the Chevalier up in a complex web of double-dealing and skullduggery that finally came undone at the King's death, leaving d'Eon stuck in London as the possessor of extremely valuable and dangerous state secrets. Though parts of Kates' account (including a murder plot by French officials against d'Eon) seem like a James/Jan Bond story, the supporting documentation cannot be denied. It does make for a good, suspenseful read. To Kates, d'Eon transitioned after and because his career in the secret service of His Most Christian Majesty came to its untimely end. Becoming a woman provided a means of self-protection, a way of getting even, and in d'Eon's mind the choice of a better way of living. Joan of Arc figures in the transition because of how d'Eon did it. Most modern transsexuals can hardly wait to assume the clothing and the social role of the desired gender. D'Eon, however, deliberately started the rumors that spread through London and Paris of his always having been a woman, and then insisted on a continuing right to wear the uniform and decorations and carry out the role of a Captain of the King's Dragoons (no pun intended). In effect, the emergent Chevaliere was casting herself as a latter-day Joan, female in body and identity, but acting and dressing male. Only when King Louis XVI insisted on her wearing feminine garb as a condition of safely returning to France did she put on skirts. Apparently she made no effort to present herself in a particularly feminine way even then, beyond the normal extent to which the males of the ancient regime aristocracy did so as a matter of course. Yet (astonishing to the eye and in the experience of a modern gender-crosser), she never was read. Her world simply accepted her own claim that she was a woman.

After transition d'Eon found herself without a role, and after the fall of the French monarchy (which paid her a handsome stipend to keep quiet), she also found herself without an income. Living the last years of her life in London, she wrote and wrote, primarily about herself. She constructed a false autobiography telling of female birth, male upbringing, heroic public service, and finally emergence into public womanhood. She wrote it because she needed the money, but given the actual facts of her birth as a boy it is not surprising that she never completed it, let alone published it. By that time deeply religious, d'Eon also did her best to construct a feminist Catholic theology. At that too, she failed in the end.

Nonetheless, she did become entirely a woman in her own mind and in her public identity. Before transition and after it, she lived amidst her time's most fascinating characters: Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour, Catharine the Great, Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, Caron de Beaumarchais (author of The Marriage of Figaro), George III, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin. Even after assuming female identity in 1777, she tried to join the French forces aiding the American Revolution. (In that regard, Kates recounts a widely-spread English rumor that George Washington was also a female-to-male Joan of Arc figure). Kates tells a story of true and full gender transition, against a very rich background of a monarchical world that was heading for collapse. But it was a transition that only could have happened the way it did two hundred years ago.


Patricia Bonomi's book is different, because her subject was different. Edward Hyde lived a generation before d'Eon. In his world, as in d'Eon's, aristocrats did play at gender transgression, especially at balls and revels at which cross-dressing by both sexes was not merely permitted but required. Bonomi also reconstructs the world of gay early eighteenth-century London, especially the region around Holborn, where "Mollies" wore women's clothes frequently. In effect, she shows an England that was getting ready to receive d'Eon when s/he appeared a few decades later. (She also notes the George Washington story and reproduces a splendid cartoon from 1783 of "Mrs. General" Washington chastising Britannia.)

Lord Cornbury?

What Bonomi also shows in The Lord Cornbury Scandal is that there is simply no reliable evidence linking Lord Cornbury to that world. The whole story springs from a few letters written by Cornbury's enemies long after the supposed fact, and from rumors that circulated even later, themselves based on the recollections of very aged people. A full scientific examination of the famous portrait and an equally full exploration of its provenance reveal nothing that links it positively to Cornbury. In artistic terms it does date from Cornbury's time. But it is too advanced technically to have been painted in early eighteenth-century New York, and Bonomi regards it as simply an ordinary painting of a middling gentlewoman. She also compares the face with the few known definite Cornbury portraits and finds little resemblance. (Having looked at the painting closely, I'd suggest that there is beard shadow and that the subject has her knees wide apart under her skirt, as a man but not a woman might sit). Besides being a reputed cross-dresser, Cornbury also has a reputation as an extremely venal bribe-taker. Bonomi rescues him from that charge too.

In the most convincing aspect of her argument, Bonomi supports the case against Cornbury's supposed cross-dressing by invoking the very milieu that Kates uses to demonstrate the specifically eighteenth-century quality of d'Eon's transition. This is the swirl of gossip and rumor and reputation in which aristocrats of Cornbury's and d'Eon's era lived their very public lives.

As Kates demonstrates, d'Eon made very effective use of that milieu, much as a modern London or Washington politician would use spin. With an eye on the larger goal of making a public transition on her own very specific terms, the Chevaliere even issued challenges to duel to people who were spreading the very rumors that she wanted to have spread. As a result, the extent to which she was discussed was simply enormous, which is what she wanted. The absolute absence from Cornbury's own time of evidence regarding any similar discussion, particularly in England, provides a striking contrast. Even the New York evidence is framed in terms that the eighteenth century would have regarded as very weak. Kates presents a story of full social transition before modern medicine made morphological transition possible. Bonomi shows that the Cornbury tale is not much more than an urban myth.

Both volumes, however, are evidence that transgender is now a serious historical subject, and that understanding a specific instance in its own time contributes to an understanding of that time itself. Both authors have made use of the best clinical, psychological, and gender-theory scholarship available. Neither regards the transgender phenomenon as illegitimate or prurient or a matter of studying freaks. D'Eon was a genuine transsexual who acted in terms of her own time, as Kates shows. Cornbury was not transgendered at all. But in showing that point, Bonomi adds to our knowledge of the world in which the noble lord would have been a cross dresser, were the rumors true.


Bibliography:
  • Gary Kates, MONSIEUR D'EON IS A WOMAN: A TALE OF POLITICAL INTRIGUE AND SEXUAL MASQUERADE (New York: Basic Books, 1995)
  • Patricia U. Bonomi, THE LORD CORNBURY SCANDAL: THE POLITICS OF REPUTATION IN BRITISH AMERICA (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1998)
  • TGF's Home Page