For this
round, I decided to do some research on Maud Allan’s life. I was most interested in learning more
about the queer aspects of her life, both personally and in the context of the
infamous “Cult of the Clitoris” case.
My partial trip down this research rabbit hole was, well, pretty trippy.
Reading about Maud Allan’s life was like
reading the tabloids, but from the early 1900s. Super sensationalistic. Most of what I’m going to summarize below is based on Philip
Hoare’s book, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand:
Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century, as well as Lucy Bland’s
book chapter, “Trial by Sexology: Maud Allan, Salome and the ‘Cult of the Clitoris’” case in the book, Sexology in Culture. I apologize that I’m not as thorough
with citations as I’d like to be – please don’t quote anything in this blog post.
Maud
Allan was born Beulah Maude Durrant. Many
folks believe that part of the reason that she changed her last name was
because her brother Theo was involved in a high profile murder case. He was convicted of killing two white
women, Minnie Williams (23 yrs) and Blanche Lamont (21 yrs) who were discovered
naked in the Baptist church that the Durrant family attended on April 13,
1895. One was hacked to death, and
the other was laid out as if for a medical exam (Theo had attended medical school,
but later had an illness that the press termed “brain fever” (Hoare 66). Theo was sentenced to death by hanging, and according to the
press, his mother, Isabella, kissed her son’s lips in public right after his
death (Hoare 69). There were
rumors of mother-son incest that circulated.
A common
interpretation is that this traumatic event served as an inspiration for
Allan’s later work, The Vision of Salome,
whereby Salome kisses the lips of John the Baptist after he has been beheaded –
this aligns with Oscar Wilde’s interpretation of Salome as in love with John
the Baptist in his play, Salome,
based on the biblical story.
According to Hoare, Isabella, wrote her daughter Maud: “You have an
opportunity that you must not overlook, for in it lies your whole future
success. Your sorrow with your
personality ought to give your playing a charm that cannot be taught. Now doen’t lose the opportunity to
allow the public to judge what you can do” (69). Hoare interprets these words as Isabella advising her
daughter to take advantage of family trauma in order to inspire her performance
career (69).
Both the
changing of Maud Durrant’s last name to Allan and her moving to Europe to
establish her career seem related to an attempt to escape the sensational
nature of her brother’s murder. My
impression is that Allan was quite conscious of shaping her own public image
and willing to reshape the truth (i.e., lie) to suit her needs. For example, in her autobiography, My Life and Dancing, she says that her parents were educated
doctors, which was not the case.
She
originally moved to Berlin to train as a concert pianist (some reviewers
compared her to Isadora Duncan, but with greater musicality) and eventually
ended up in England. Her early
prolific performances of The Vision of
Salome later led to being invited to perform the title role of Wilde’s
play, Salome, in 1918. This would lead to the controversial
“Cult of the Clitoris” trial that contributed to the downfall of her career.
To back up for a moment and
provide some context, England was in the depths of WWI at the time, and as a
result, there was strong anti-German sentiment in the air. Politicians suspected of being
pro-German, such as Allan’s friends and patrons, the Asquiths (the former prime
minister and his wife), were vilified by other politicians. Moreover, foreignness – and
specifically Germanness – were associated with homosexuality and elite
decadence, in part due to the early work of German sexologists as well as the
cabaret scene. Allan’s sensual
Orientalist performances, with her almost nude body covered in little more than
pearl beads, fit into this world.
She was also suspected of being a lover of Margot Asquith, who funded
her palatial living quarters for twenty years. It seems well documented that Allan had romantic and sexual
relationships with people of varied genders, including her assistant and
secretary, Verna Aldrich.
To return to the “Cult of the
Clitoris” trial, an MP named Noel Pemberton Billing (a former actor who
invented “flying boats” and who ran on a platform of airpower for England, so
that its air-force would be as strong as its navy had been historically)
published an article, “The 47,000” that was essentially a conspiracy theory in
his newspaper, The Imperialist
(formerly The Vigilante). Based on information given by Capt.
Harold Spencer, an American who had been discharged from the military due to
mental illness, this article claimed that there was a black book with 47,000
names of powerful highly connected British subjects, ranging from politicians
to other kinds of elite, who were vulnerable to blackmail by the Germans
because they were homosexual. (It
was suggested at the trial that Margot Asquith was in this book.) A good dose of anti-Semitism infects
the anti-German, homophobic stew, since evidently a powerful Jewish cabal working
behind the scenes is responsible for much of this. I haven’t been able to locate the full original article, but
here’s a taste: "There exists in the cabinet noire of a
certain German prince a book compiled by the Secret Service from the reports of
German agents who have infested this country
for the past 20 years, agents so vile and spreading debauchery of such a
lasciviousness as only German minds could conceive and German bodies
execute." Shortly thereafter,
Billing published a short enigmatic paragraph related to the performance of
Wilde’s Salome (which was to be
performed privately, in part because biblical stories couldn’t be performed
publicly):
"The Cult of the Clitoris
To be a member of Maud Allan's private
performances in Oscar Wilde's Salome one has to apply to a Miss Valetta, of 9
Duke Street, Adelphi, W.C. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of those
members I have no doubt they would secure the names of several of the first 47,000."
In response, Maud Allan sued
Billing for libel – basically, because his article accused her of being a
lesbian, since only lesbians or medical doctors would know what a clitoris was. The trial was something of a circus,
highly attended and covered in the press.
Similarly to Wilde’s libel trial a couple decades earlier, Allan ended
up being trial for her queerness, even though she was the one who brought the
suit. Billing basically argued
that his article wasn’t libel because it was true. The earlier trial of her brother was brought as “evidence”
that sexual perversion ran in the family.
A key witness, Eileen Villiers-Stuart,
who was also Billing’s mistress, perjured herself by claiming to have seen the
Black Book firsthand when she had not (there was never any evidence that the Black Book was real); she went on
to claim that the names of both Margot Asquith and the judge presiding over the
case were in the book. Billing was
found not guilty, and Allan’s career never fully recovered from the negative
press.
There’s more interesting
stuff to excavate from Allan’s life – notably that she toured India and more on
her own same-sex relationships – but that’s what I’ve got to share for now. One major takeaway I had was the importance of press and publicity: both the rampant fake news of the era and the importance of shaping one's self image in a way that feels resonant with today's social media saturated world. It strikes me that the way we use the camera and media could be informed by this.
