Fanny and Stella (26 page)

Second, erasure of the
rugae
, the characteristic puckerings and ridges around the anus. The mechanics of sodomy eroded and erased these
rugae
, literally wore them away, partially or completely, and when such erasure was present, sodomy must be presumed to have been the cause. When, as a young man, Professor Taylor had examined the anus of ‘Miss Eliza’ Edwards post-mortem, the
rugae
had been entirely obliterated. Such was the alchemy of sodomy that the anus resembled female labia.

Third and most tellingly, excessive or extreme dilation of the anus was invariably apparent to the naked eye. Again, at the post mortem of Eliza Edwards in 1833, it had been ‘noticed by all present’ that his/her ‘anal aperture’ was greatly enlarged, ‘much wider and larger than natural’.

But in cases where anal dilation was not immediately apparent to the naked eye, it was necessary to test the dilatability of the anus, to discover how quickly it would dilate when stimulated by the repeated insertion of the physician’s lubricated finger, imitating, in so far as it was possible, the repeated insertion of the sodomite’s erect
membrum virile
. The quicker the dilation, the greater the likelihood that sodomy had been practised.

‘Beware,’ Tardieu warned doctors. Some sodomites were skilled in evading the detection of anal dilation. ‘They clench their buttocks, but it will suffice to quickly change position, or put them on their knees in a kneeling position, or simply prolong the examination until they tire of contracting their muscles, to triumph over this gross fraud.’

There could have been little danger of Fanny and Stella clenching their buttocks so as to deceive the doctors. Six doctors, six fingers, and multiple insertions by each doctor meant that by the end of the examinations, which lasted well over two hours, the dilatability or otherwise of their anal sphincters became almost meaningless.

The examinations were conducted in almost complete silence. There was no discussion, no commentary, no exchanges of opinion, save one when Dr Barwell pointed out to Dr Johnson a scar on the prisoner Park’s anus which, he said in a triumphant tone, was the scar left behind by the syphilitic chancre he had treated some months earlier.

But Dr Johnson politely begged to differ. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That is only a small varix,’ a varicose vein. ‘It was quite small. It was not so big as a marrow fat pea – hardly so large as an ordinary garden pea,’ he said later.

Dr Johnson used his magnifying glass and examined the supposed scar more closely. ‘What you see is nothing but the light reflected from the glistening side of the varix. There is no scar whatever,’ he told Dr Barwell. ‘I then handed him the glass to look for himself and he declined it, implying that he could see as well, I suppose, without a magnifying glass as with one. At any rate he declined it.’

By the time the examinations were completed, the heads of all those nineteen persons present were spinning with the heat and the stench and the strangeness of the task they had been engaged in.

Of the six doctors present, five were agreed that there were no signs of sodomy present upon the bodies of the prisoners, no scars or cicatrices consequent upon a syphilitic chancre, no evidence to suggest unnatural practices – apart from a certain feyness, a certain delicacy, a certain femininity (more marked in Boulton than in Park, but nonetheless present in both). Dr Barwell alone dissented.

All six were however agreed that the
rugae
had been partially obliterated around Park’s anus, with five of them reading little or nothing into this state of partial destruction, and Dr Barwell again dissenting. Equally, all six agreed about the presence of a crop of condylomatous warts around both young men’s anuses, but disagreed as to the origins and meaning of these warts, with Dr Barwell, as usual, dissenting most violently.

Unpleasant, humiliating and painful as the prolonged examinations had been, this was good news for Fanny and Stella. A majority of the six eminent medical gentlemen had found in their favour. ‘It may be relied upon as a positive fact,’
Reynolds’s Newspaper
reported breathlessly, ‘that the result of this examination undoubtedly tended to throw some doubt upon the medical evidence adduced before the police magistrate.’ It now seemed doubtful, at least to
Reynolds’s Newspaper
and to some others, that the prosecutions of these two young men could or should proceed. For a brief, shining moment it almost seemed possible – perhaps even likely – that Fanny and Stella might be released without charge.

20

He, She or It

There is not the slightest doubt that England is hastening towards the border which divides the sexes; already persons have over-stepped and stand alone, hated and despised.

The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine
, 1871

D 
r Henry James Johnson, one of the six eminent medical gentlemen who examined Fanny and Stella in Newgate Gaol, had been most forcibly struck by the startling, the really quite startling,
womanliness
of their bodies, especially about their bottoms. They were men, and yet they were not men. They were women, and yet not women. They were something indeterminate, somewhere in-between. The whiteness and smoothness and translucency of their skin, with their slender waists, the gentle curve of their hips and their shapely buttocks, all bespoke womanliness. Above and beyond the womanliness of their bodies, there was an indefinable aura of femininity about them, he could not put it more precisely than that, which was all the more powerful because it was so mysterious, so hard to pin down.

Of course Dr Johnson was only too well aware that these young men had regularly dressed themselves as women, wearing corsets to give themselves wasp-waists and tight-laced bodices to squeeze and push their breasts upwards and outwards. They had tweezered their eyebrows and plucked their beards and used every artifice: wigs, paint, pads and God only knew what else to create a convincing illusion of womanliness. There could be no doubt that such practices, long adhered to, long indulged in, might very well lend a permanent air of womanliness to any young man. Constant tight-lacing, quite apart from constricting and deforming the disposition of the internal organs to an alarming and dangerous degree, did have the effect of permanently altering the bodies of young women, giving them impossibly small waists and shapely hips and buttocks. But even making allowances for the effect of such practices, Dr Johnson still found these young men troublingly womanly.

‘The smallness of the anus, the tightness of the sphincter, and the smallness of the rectum’ were all, Dr Johnson said, what he might expect to find in a healthy young woman. These characteristics were, he added, most marked in Frederick Park’s posterior, ‘if possible more so even than in Boulton’.

Was it possible that the womanliness of Fanny and Stella was actual, rather than assumed? Could there be a biological explanation for the troubling emanations of femininity that both these creatures exuded? Were they, perhaps, a species of hermaphrodite? An amalgam of male and female? Not masculine and not feminine, but a combination of the two genders commingled to produce a strange hybrid?

From the moment of Fanny and Stella’s arrest, attitudes were divided, like the Red Sea. There were those who regarded them as wicked and wilful sodomites, all the more wicked and all the more wilful because they deceived, they tricked men into thinking that they were women. And then there were those who took the view that Fanny and Stella were indeed hermaphrodites, bodily or mentally, or most probably a mixture of both: degraded certainly, but also unfortunate and to be pitied, because their actions – however reprehensible and however offensive – were the consequence of instincts ordained by a freakish and perverse Nature.

As the details of the case against them began to unfold,
Reynolds’s
Newspaper
had gone from calling them ‘the Young Gentlemen in Woman’s Clothes’ to describing them as part of ‘the Hermaphrodite Clique’ and ‘the Hermaphrodite Gang’. Other newspapers implied their innate duality by calling them ‘men-women’ or ‘he-she ladies’ or variations on this theme. Even before their arrest, many found it impossible to believe that Fanny and Stella – particularly and most especially Stella – were men. Wherever they went, whoever they met, in drag, or out of drag, as Fanny and Stella, or as Frederick and Ernest, there were always those who had their doubts as to their exact gender. Were they men? Or were they women? Or were they a rare and remarkable matched pair of hermaphrodites?

In January of the previous year, Fanny and Stella, in company with Charles Pavitt, had formed a small touring theatrical company called ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’. They made their debut on 27th January 1869 at the tiny but grandly named Theatre Royal in the small Essex town of Stock. ‘By special request’, the actors performed ‘Mr. H. J. Byron’s comedy of
One Hundred Thousand Pounds
, the characters of Alice and Mrs. Barlow being played respectively by Boulton and Park, who are designated in the programme, Miss Ernestine Edwards and Miss Mabel Foster’.

 ‘During the piece Miss Edwards sang “Fading Away” with a care and taste that brought down the house,’ the
Essex Herald
reported, clearly not able to fully grasp the fact that Miss Ernestine Edwards was, in truth, Mr Ernest Boulton. Other newspaper correspondents could only marvel at the perfect illusion of femininity that Stella/Ernestine created: ‘Listening to his extraordinary voice, and criticising, however narrowly, his wonderfully feminine appearance and manner, it is really difficult for a moment to believe that he is not a really charming girl.’ Indeed, Miss Ernestine Edwards was so perfect and so charming that the anonymous correspondent went on to hint orotundly that Miss Edwards had to be a species of hermaphrodite. ‘Certainly,’ he declared, ‘if some of Nature’s journeymen had not been at work, “Mister” Boulton, we hesitate almost to write this prefix, would have incontestably been a woman.’

Later that same year, Stella and Charles Pavitt toured Essex and Hertfordshire with
A Drawing-Room Entertainment
, devised and written by themselves and designed to be performed in country-house drawing rooms, assembly rooms and village halls. ‘We agreed to share the profits and divide the expenses,’ Charles Pavitt recalled. ‘The entertainment usually comprised a short opera, a humorous dialogue, and a laughable sketch. In all these the ladies’ characters were represented by Ernest Boulton.’ Sadly, there was no role for poor Fanny.

Wherever they went, Stella shone, and even though the playbills unambiguously declared that all the female parts were performed by Mr Ernest Boulton, all who saw her could hardly believe that she was not in reality a beautiful and charming girl. ‘We may add that Mr. Boulton very cleverly personates female characters,’ wrote one reviewer, ‘and that it is difficult for a spectator to realise the fact that he is a “make-up” for the occasion. His song, “Fading Away” is exceedingly feminine.’

Off stage, as well as on stage, Stella had more than her fair share of admirers who seemed unable to comprehend that the beautiful young woman they saw singing and swooning on stage was in reality a young man. Bouquets were invariably the order of the day.

‘On one evening,’ Charles Pavitt recalled, ‘Boulton had as many as
fourteen
bouquets thrown to him.’ And there were any number of invitations to supper from gentlemen, and from ladies. All of them wanted Stella to attend ‘in his female costume’, and ‘several sporting gentlemen wanted him to go in his lady’s costume into the hunting-field, but he would not go.’

Even when Stella was dressed as a man, even when she introduced herself as Ernest, even when she shook hands as manfully as she could and spoke as gruffly as she could manage, many men simply refused to accept that she was a man. The delicacy of her body, the softness of her voice, the brilliancy of her eyes, the smoothness of her skin, the lustre of her hair, the sweetness of her scent, the smallness of her hands and the daintiness of her feet were all, and in every way, female, feminine, womanly.

Quite apart from those gentlemen admirers who simply could not or would not believe that Stella was a man, even when it was written in black and white, even when Stella protested that she was indeed a man, even when she dressed in men’s clothing, there were also those with no conceivable amatory interest in her who were equally convinced that she was a woman.

A few weeks before her arrest, dear, dull Louis Hurt wrote to Stella from a remote inn in Scotland, where they had spent a night or two in the course of Louis’s interminable inspections of post offices. Stella had worn male clothing, but had signally failed to convince anyone that she was a man. ‘My darling Ernie,’ Louis began:

The landlord of the inn from which I write tells me that all the men whom we saw here the other day were positive you are a woman. He assured them you were not, although he seems not to have been certain himself. He said you moved about and stood like one but that your thighs, which he examined when you were going upstairs, were not so plump as a woman’s.