Bound women: the plight of the other in Florence Nightingale's "Cassandra".

Maynard, Lee Anna

In Cassandra, Florence Nightingale argues against the English woman's relegation to the domestic sphere by imaging her as Other, most vividly through allusions to Chinese footbinding, a statue of the Archangel Michael, and the mythic figure of Cassandra. By thus creating another Other, Nightingale demonstrates both the relative homogeneity of English women and men, as well as the barbarity of English men and the cultural institutions they promote.

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The central lament of "Cassandra," Florence Nightingale's manifesto, is that women in England have passion, intellect, moral activity ... and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised" (205). The relegation and confinement of women to the domestic sphere effectually contrives to prevent Nightingale and women like her from achieving or even attempting work in the public sphere. In her essay, Nightingale utilizes three images to call attention vividly to this plight: Chinese footbinding, the statue of the Archangel Michael, and the figure of Cassandra. Within the flame-work of a text concerned with the situation of women in England, these images operate by creating an Other, which functions in two ways: first, it unites English men and women through their shared locale and historical period, therefore lessening the perceived chasm between their respective spheres and abilities; and second, it lends English women biblical and mythic properties, while attributing barbarity and ignorance to English men and the cultural institutions they promote. Nightingale further demonstrates the Other-ness of English women by shifting gender roles in circumstances varying from the everyday to the extraordinary. Nightingale assumes the mantles of sage and of prophet in "Cassandra," both revealing contemporary culture as it really is and envisioning a future relieved by another Christ.

By the time Nightingale composed "Cassandra" in 1850-51, the idea of the domestic sphere was firmly entrenched in the English consciousness; in fact, as she wrote the essay (which she first conceived as a largely autobiographical novel), she was despairing of ever being allowed by her family to pursue the nursing career she considered her calling. Throughout the essay, Nightingale inveighs against the very notions and strictures she herself struggled with. Nancy Armstrong, in Desire and Domestic Fiction, argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conduct manuals and domestic fiction actually created the private sphere and the figure of the domestic woman, Patmore's "Angel in the House": In representing the household as a world with its own form of social relations, a distinctively feminine discourse, this body of literature revised the semiotic of culture at its most basic level.... that the relative number of conduct books appeared to decrease as the eighteenth century came to an end was not because the female ideal they represented passed out of vogue. To the contrary, there is every reason to think that by this time the ideal had passed into the domain of common sense.... (63)

A sage, George Landow posits, is a "forthspeaker about present events" (33), and Nightingale fulfills this definition as she cogently realizes and articulates the change in the perception and treatment of women. She writes that "there is perhaps no century where the woman shows so meanly as in this.... there is no longer unity between the woman as inwardly developed, and as outwardly manifested.... In the last century it was not so.... In the succeeding one let us hope that it will no longer be so" (228). Nightingale recognizes that it is, in large part, conduct books that have given rise to this (for women) sad state of affairs, saying that "women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted ... and women themselves have accepted this, have written books to support it" (211).

Self-abnegation is the refrain of these conduct books, which "[enjoin] young girls to submissiveness, modesty, self-lessness; reminding all women that they should be angelic" (Gilbert and Gubar 23). Ideologue Sarah Stickney Ellis preached that since she "is 'the least engaged of any member of the household,' a woman of right feeling should devote herself to the good of others" (Gilbert and Gubar 24). Nightingale sees the pervasiveness of the ideas of Ellis, Sarah Lewis, and the other conduct book writers, by whom women "are taught from their infancy upwards that it is wrong, ill-tempered, and a misunderstanding of 'woman's mission' (with a great M.) if they do not allow themselves willingly to be interrupted at all hours" (214). Instead of being taught to perform "those conventional frivolities, which are called her 'duties,'" Nightingale wishes for "experience, not patch-work experience, but experience followed up and systematized" (214, 218). In this desire for a comprehensive education and real occupations, Nightingale slights marriage, which was "virtually the only respectable 'occupation' for women," to favor learning and writing, which "were frequently seen as threats to domestic duty" (Poovey 35). She notes that, under the influence of conduct books, women have "accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their 'duty' to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves" (212). Women are barred from intellectual pursuits by the rules of conduct books and the demands of society.

The inanity of women's daily existence is brought into sharp focus when Nightingale examines and exchanges gender roles in a few situations. She tells the story of a young man who, after being summoned from his reading by his mother to meet with some of her visitors, says to her "Now, remember, this is not to happen again.... I came that you might not think me sulky, but I shall not come again," and contrasts this to the reception a similar message from a young girl would receive--"how impertinent it would be!" (212). In the same vein, she explains how an hour-long social visit to a "professional man ... costs him the earnings of an hour, and therefore he has the right to complain ... but women have no right, because it is 'only their time'" (214). Reversing this trope, she envisions men in women's roles: If one calls upon a friend ... and sees her son in the drawing-room, it strikes one as odd to find a young man sitting idling in his mother's drawing room in the morning ... there is no end of the epithets we have; 'Knights of the carpet', 'drawing room heroes', 'ladies men'. But suppose we were to see a number of men in the morning sitting round a table in the drawing room, looking at prints, doing worsted work, and reading little books, how we should laugh! (211)

After comparing the lots of men and women in common English life, she tackles the exceptional. She asks, rhetorically, if Christ is considered "a complainer against the world?" The answer of course, is "no," and she goes on to assert that "Christ, if He had been a woman, might have been nothing but a great complainer" (230). If he were a woman, his "discourse would have been impotent; his audience would have heard and dismissed his message as only a complaint" (Kahane 142). Just as the men knitting worsted would be ridiculed for descending to the domestic or female sphere, so Christ would be heckled and his teachings disregarded if he were, by benefit of sex, an inmate of that sphere.

These exchanges and comparisons serve to show explicitly how strongly differentiated men and women--and masculine and feminine--are in Victorian culture. Nightingale clearly demonstrates that women are cast as the Other. French feminist Simone de Beauvoir writes that woman "is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential.... he is the Subject, he is the Absolute--she is the Other" (xxii). Consequently, "woman is riveted into a lop-sided relationship with man.... Man's dominance has secured an ideological climate of compliance: Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth" (Selden and Widdowson 210). While her gender swappings are overt examples of English woman as Other, Nightingale also creates more subtle images, the first of which is Chinese footbinding.

Nightingale only mentions the Eastern practice twice, but the image bears directly on the entire content of "Cassandra." First, in raging against the idea passed from men to women and mothers to daughters that "women have no passions," she interrogates, "What are these feelings which they are taught to consider as disgraceful, to deny to themselves? ... What form do the Chinese feet assume when denied their proper development?" (206). Later, she declaims the impossibility of pursuing intellectual or artistic endeavors when one is "bound, under pain of being thought sulky, to make a remark every two minutes" (220; emphasis added). Once denied this privilege of abstaining from the demands of polite society, a woman is never able to "make use of leisure and solitude if [she] had it!" because, "like the Chinese woman, who could not make use of her feet, if she were brought into European life," the woman's ability to concentrate has been constricted into virtual nonexistence. By aligning English women with Chinese women, Nightingale plays upon the nineteenth-century relationship between England and the Orient: "The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other" (Said 1). Nightingale thus both conflates and replaces English female Otherness with Oriental Otherness; the result is that her audience can both congratulate itself on its civility and question the English practices that it finds so acceptable. The barbarity of footbinding (Figure I) was shuddered at by Europeans and reported by missionaries in such popular periodicals as the Times and, as in the example below, the Graphic: The pain endured while under the operation is so severe and continuous that the poor girls never sleep for long periods without the aid of strong narcotics, and then only but fitfully; and it is from this constant suffering that the peculiar sullen or stolid look so often seen on the woman's face is derived. (370)

Such a thing would never happen in England, only in that uncivilized Other place, the Orient. Nightingale agrees, in a way, because she feels that women's "bodies are the only things of any consequence" in British society (220; emphasis added). Although "one would think we had no heads nor hearts, by the total indifference of the public towards them" (220), women's bodies are valued as the site of their most obvious Otherness. De Beauvoir argues that "everything that accentuates difference in the Other makes her more desirable, since what man wants to take possession of is the Other as such" (192). The purpose and effect of conduct books (that Nightingale had to combat) was to make Victorian women even more Other in their actions and experiences than corsets made them in body.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Unlike the origin of the corset, the origin of footbinding is somewhat difficult to trace. The practice seems to date back to the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-24 A.D.), when it may have been introduced to circumscribe women's sphere: "Some say that the strong-minded amongst the ladies wanted to interfere in politics, and that there is a general liking for visiting, chattering, and gossip ... both and all of which inclinations their lords desired, and desire, to stop by crippling them" ( The Graphic 370). The popularization of footbinding is ascribed by several sources to Li Yu (937-978), the second emperor of the Southern Tang Dynasty, who ordered his favorite concubine, Yaoniang, to dance with small bound feet on the image of a lotus flower (Hong 22). The practice was only outlawed in 1902, and flourished for over a thousand years. The tiny foot it produced was "appealing, valuable, and respectable," the best way "into a man's arms, heart and hearth" (Hong 46). It was considered a necessary condition for success in the marriage market, and many parents, convinced that they would seriously hinder their chances if the practice were omitted, forced footbinding on their daughters.

Just as Victorian parents scold and shame their daughters into sacrificing their intellects to become what Nightingale would call a slave to society, Chinese parents would, when their daughter was between four and eight years old ... speak harshly to her and frighten her with severe expressions. They would oppress her in every conceivable manner so that the bones of her feet might be broken and the flesh putrefy. They would tell her that she would then be happy in her parents' hearts, knowing that when she later got married, they would be very proud of her. (Huang 26)

While Victorian society does not advocate manually breaking its women's bones, breaking and repressing their spirits is commonplace. Footbinding can be seen as merely an exaggerated and extreme version of the Victorian inculcation of domestic ideology: both are, to some degree, implements of control in a male-dominated society. While the Chinese woman is physically prevented by her two- to three-inch feet from moving about freely and without chaperones, the British woman is morally, religiously, and culturally prohibited from moving outside the home, her assigned sphere. Euphemized as the "golden lotus," "golden lily," "perfumed lily," "precious article," or "pure article," the bound foot was created by tightly wrapping young girls' feet with bandages in a specific manner which turned the four small toes under the sole and drew the arch toward the heel (fig. 1). Losing toes was a common result, but the girls were assured that their pain was a small price to pay for attractiveness to men and happiness in marriage. Likewise, in English homes, the destruction of "the individual life" is considered a necessary but small sacrifice in the "great victory [that] has been accomplished, when, at last, [the woman] is able to say that she has 'no personal desires or plans'" (Nightingale 216). Chinese footbinding, while barbaric and quite Other, is also, Nightingale implies, an appropriate metaphor for the treatment women undergo in England.

Nightingale refers to the domestic (or domesticated) woman created by this treatment of conduct books and morning social calls in terms of another foot-bound metaphor later in "Cassandra." She writes that woman is "now ... like the Archangel Michael as he stands upon Saint Angelo at Rome. ... she has an immense provision of wings, which seem as if they would bear her over earth and heaven; but when she tries to use them, she is petrified into stone, her feet are grown into the earth, chained to the bronze pedestal" (7.28). Although characterized by conduct book writers and poets as angelic and of superior morality and compassion, her "present position" is "painful" and offers only two options: she can "[renounce] all outward activity and [keep] herself within the magic sphere, the bubble of her dreams," or she can surrender "all aspiration ... [and] give herself to her real life, soul and body" (228). Why, one might ask, would Nightingale choose a relatively obscure statue, such as the Michael in Rome, instead of one of the most famous sculptures in the world (both in the nineteenth century and today)--the Nike of Samathrace? This victory monument of the early second century B.C. depicts a goddess whose "great wings [are] spread wide; she is still partly air-borne by the powerful head wind against which she advances" (Janson 198). The Hellenistic sculpture hails from Greece, a culture Nightingale will evoke in her next image, and, most importantly, is of a woman, a goddess. By selecting the statue of Michael, though, Nightingale is able to align British women with another startling image of the Other: Michael is gendered male, but, more importantly, he is an angel, a nonhuman, not a man.

Nightingale's likening of the British woman of the nineteenth century to the statue of the Archangel Michael suggests that women could do fantastic, amazing things with their "immense provision of wings, which seem as if they would bear [them] over earth and heaven"--if their feet were not bound, "chained to the bronze pedestal" (2:28). By choosing the Archangel as representation of British women, Nightingale is able to draw upon the religious and historical power of the Bible to strenghten her argument. Michael is capable of "contending" and "disput[ing]" with the devil "about the body of Moses" (Jude 9). This verse refers to an Apocryphal account of the assumption of Moses: Michael wishes to take Moses' body as well as his soul into heaven. This noble effort seems significant to the plight of women in England, whose souls are supposedly already halfway to heaven, while their bodies are circumscribed to a sphere that is both restrictive and dross--characteristics more appropriate to hell. Michael is also a protector, "the great prince" who will deliver the people of Israel in "a time of trouble" (Daniel 12:1), as well as a warrior, who, in the "war in heaven," fought with his angels "against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven ... [for] the great serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him" (Revelation 12:7-9). These momentous and sacred actions are a far cry from the British woman's idealization of "the sacred hearth," which Nightingale descries as "sacred to their husband's sleep, their sons' absence in the body and their daughters' in mind" (229). Instead of enabling them to do great, biblical things, women's Otherness prevents them. Nightingale finds that their "reality is so narrow and conventional [that] there is no more parallelism between life in the thought and life in the actual than between the corpse, which lies motionless in its narrow bed, and the spirit, which, in our imagination, is at large among the stars" (228).

This division between reality and potential is illustrated most strongly in the image that pervades the entire essay, even to its title--Cassandra. This figure from Greek mythology was given the power of prophecy by Apollo, who expected sexual favors in return. Cassandra refused to comply, and the punishment Apollo meted out upon her was that no one would ever listen to or believe her. Agamemnon took the Trojan princess as his concubine, and although she foretold both of their deaths, he refused to believe her (Nightingale 243). In his insightful critique of the title, George Landow sees the figure of Cassandra as "an embodiment of the fate of the woman who tries to speak forth and save others" and reasons that by "thus entitling her work, Nightingale also aligns herself with a mythic figure who blends the Old Testament prophet and a Victorian woman's version of the experience of privileged but suffering isolation" (41). Although Cassandra is mentioned only in the title of the essay, in Nightingale's original novel form the name is taken by her fictionalized alter-ego, Nofriani (Snyder 23). Nightingale in fact referred to herself as "poor Cassandra" in letters to her friends, feeling that by "rejecting marriage and the common lot of woman, [she] had doomed herself to silence, hysteria, and futility" (Showalter 319). Although the mythic figure is absent from the body of the essay, Nightingale seems to be channeling Cassandra's prophetic voice throughout.

Cassandra, as a part of Greek myth, is as foreign and Other as the Chinese women and the angelic Michael are to the English people. However, she is like English women, and particularly like Nightingale, in that her voice is unheard and devalued. (Although Nightingale was ultimately to be hailed by the press and the public for her efforts in the nursing arena, at the time she composed "Cassandra," she obviously felt as though very few people were listening to her complaints about the limitations of female existence in nineteenth-century England, if we may judge from the frequency with which she called herself Cassandra in both private and public writings.) At least Cassandra suffers, while Nightingale must plead, "Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts--suffering rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing...." Nightingale assumes that British society, and especially British men, will prove just as deaf and ignorant as Agamemnon. In drawing a connection between the upbringing of proper Victorian ladies and Chinese girls, she highlights the barbarity of British cultural norms. By alluding to an angelic guardian and warrior, Nightingale unveils the potential powers for good in women that are suppressed by their upbringing and environment. Through her gender-swapping anecdotes, she explicitly bemoans the ridiculously large gap between the male British experience and the female British experience. British women, as these ingenious images of the Other illustrate, are crippled, restrained, and ignored--in short, bound.

University of South Carolina

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