Theodora – A Fragment

Background-

Victoria Cross is a writer who was known for venturing into unexplored territory in lit,
leading her to writing about subjects that were taboo- her main selling point was sex, and
the various attitudes that surround it. Obviously in those times it garnered her scathing
reviews, and as a modern audience we would mostly be inured to the fictional treatment of
such subjects. She was essentially emancipated from the general norms expected of her in
the period, and this comes across in her work Theodora.

Story
The main theme of her is established in ‘Theodora’, published (1895), which describes the
building up of sexual attraction between a man and a woman, both of whom are happy
with themselves in relation to their indifferences to conventional morality. It is narrated
throughout by a first person male narrator: Cecil Ray. He and Theodora carry a sense of
being both excluded and included in their lives, but they scorn to partake in English society,
and are ripe for adventures into the unknown, whether in the sphere of travel, spiritualism,
literature, or morals. The book is full of details about clothes, furniture, decoration,
indicating an interest in the fashionable topic of the sex instinct, but rejects the explanation
that desire exists for the procreation of the species, as in sex should be had to carry on the
human race, preferring, as it were, a doctrine of sex for sex’s sake.

The quote “My inclination towards Theodora could hardly be the simple, natural
instinct, guided by natural selection, for then surely I should have been swayed
towards some more womanly individual, some more vigorous and at the same time
more feminine physique” …

and a little later he says

“In me, it was the mind that had first suggested to the senses, and the senses that had
answered in a dizzy pleasure, that this passionate, sensitive frame, with its tensely-
strung nerves and excitable pulses, promised the height of satisfaction to a lover”

Cecil is self-consciously perverse, preferring the artificial to the natural. He feels a faint
aversion to conventional femininity, which Theodora does not arouse; he likes her body’s
unfitness for childbearing, her neuroticism and her moustache. Cross explores, with some
subtlety, the attempt of these two young people to challenge the ideologies of gender and
race in which they have been brought up. Cecil is an androgynous name, and it is implied
that he has had homosexual experiences with oriental boys; and his sketches in his book
reflect this. There seems to be a connection in which the artefacts, his paintigns are all
presented, the element fo foreigness suggest that I show he feels, he as a homosexual feels
foreign in himself, and the acute detail which Cross adds about Digby hiding one of the
objects underneath the table relates to the wider context, what is not covnetional, normal
etc, like his homosexuality, msut be hidde.

Theodora who possesses a ‘hermaphroditism of looks’ (78) runs away with him dressed in
man’s clothes. By endowing the heroine with a legacy from a man-hating aunt, which
means she has £6000 a year if she does not marry, Cross makes her a kind of unusual
representation in relation to the power structure which we owudl expect to see in Victorian
marriages. From the male point of view, she is neither a financial prize nor a woman who
needs that support that chracters like Arabella we’ve discussed in the past is looking for.
She does not need that security, and herself has no financial incentive to marry. Sexual
desire and romantic expectation are thus shown deliberately freed from familiar contexts.
There is an attempt to imagine a new kind of love affair: they get drunk together; she
excites him by flirting with other men; she asserts her independence:

‘You have half a knack of speaking as if I were one of your Kashmiri women, bought at a few
hundred rupees”

This capability to create a situation which radically challenges the reader’s assumptions is
what I found most interesting about Cross.

But the denouement of the novel strikes the tragically sordid note so familiar in the
highbrow fiction of the 1890s: Theodora ends by committing suicide, after she has been
gang-raped and infected with disease by some non-white locals to whom she has sacrificed
herself to save her lover’s life. Cross emphasizes how unexamined and artificial are
concepts like honour, purity and shame which govern relationships between men and
women, even those who, like her protagonists, are self-consciously modem and
unconventional. Theodora dies deliriously muttering, “‘Men only care for a woman for what
they can get out of her.’” The narrator observes that ‘when she came back to me disfigured
and degraded—I loved unselfishly’ and he has been afforded ‘a dim realisation of the
intense egoism of men’s love’ By the end circumstances have reduced Theodora to the
condition of female victim of male violence and desire. The experiment has failed, but Cecil
is left to tell the world.