Trials of Passion by Lisa Appignanesi Page A

features the reporter gives her falls into the period’s typology of potentially dangerous women: those whose intelligence or sexuality shows, arousing anxieties about their gender. According to popular phrenological lore, the lower part of the face – lips, chin, jaw – gave evidence of ‘appetite’, the larger the first, the greater the second. Like Wilkie Collins when he first conjures up an uncannily double-gendered Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White, the reporter attributes both masculine intelligence and feminine weakness to Christiana:
    From the configuration of the lips the mouth might be thought weak, but a glance at the chin removes any such impression; and Christiana Edmunds has a way of compressing the lips occasionally, when the left side of the mouth twists up with a sardonic, defiant determination, in which there is something of a weird comeliness, that gradually hardens, and passes into absolute grimness. Of perception and intelligence the prisoner has no lack.
    Through most of the first day’s proceedings Christiana is utterly composed, bar a certain weary lassitude which creeps in with the afternoon. But everything changes when her beloved Dr Beard comes to the witness stand at the end of the day. Then, ‘her bosom heaved convulsively, and her face flushed scarlet. But a moment after it had faded to a leaden pallor, and she had regained her composure.’ The only other time that she manifests spontaneous feeling is when the last witness of the day is being examined, a woman who has lived in the same Brighton house as Christiana and her mother: the woman testifies to her ‘uniform kindliness and womanly demeanour’. Christiana yields for a moment and appears to be moved to tears. Reputation and passion are ever at war in her.
    Christiana Edmunds folded into herself the tensions that characterized what it meant to be woman in her time: the desire for virtue and reputation collide with wayward desire; the need for feminine passivity abuts on the wish – perhaps inevitably unconscious or at least repressed through time – for freedom of movement and action. All this cohabits with a restless dissatisfaction with the dividing lines between the secret and the licit.
    John Ruskin, one of the period’s leading moralists and critics – a man who, from the evidence of his own unconsummated and annulled marriage to Effie Gray, was terrified of women’s ‘living’ as opposed to idealized bodies – underlines the forces that prey onwomen and the taxing demands they must strive to meet. From 1 January 1871, just before Christiana’s trial, Ruskin began to publish the widely quoted and argued pamphlets that became his multi-volumed Fors Clavigera. Addressed to ‘the workmen and labourers of Britain’, these ‘letters’ both analytic and didactic on how to be and behave so as to attain the good life, mark out Ruskin’s social and moral mission. Britain had, he was convinced, become too materialistic, a land governed by the trains he so loathed and everything that came with them. Instead of food, England now produced only ‘infernal’ goods: ‘iron guns, gunpowder, infernal machines, infernal fortresses floating about, infernal fortresses standing still, infernal means of mischievous locomotion, infernal law-suits, infernal parliamentary elocution, infernal beer, and infernal gazettes, magazines, statues, and pictures’.
    Ruskin’s catalogue makes an equivalence between infernal guns, lawsuits, magazines, statues and pictures, the products of material production and media. All these latter seem to be particularly hazardous to women. He pictures a mother who may not be able to feed her children but who can ‘get to London cheap’, though she has no business to be there. Even though she has no concern for any of it, she can ‘buy all the morning’s news for a half-penny’. For a shilling, she