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)
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