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AWKWARD APPENDAGES: COMIC UMBRELLAS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PRINT CULTURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2017

Maria Damkjær
Maria Damkjær*
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
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Extract

In a letter “To the Editor of the Times,” a G. S. Hatton of Brompton writes furiously in May 1850:

[This afternoon] three ladies, a member of my family with two friends, visited the Society of Arts in John-street, Adelphi, having ridden all the way from their own doors in a private carriage. Shortly after they had entered the society's rooms, they noticed a tall man of a shabby genteel appearance, with an umbrella in his hand, who was studiously watching their movements, and every now and then placed himself in their way and pushed past them, much to their annoyance. As they were on the point of leaving, he came close to them, and they distinctly felt his umbrella rubbed against them. On regaining their carriage, two of them found the skirts of their dresses bespattered with a most filthy and disgusting semi-fluid, as if propelled from a syringe, emitting a most noisome and sickening odour, and at the same time effectually staining and damaging the material. The ladies have not the slightest shadow of a doubt but that the umbrella carried by this man was the vehicle of the abominable filth. (6)

Immediately, certain interpretive possibilities present themselves. I am sure most of my readers are struck by the possibility of bawdy jokes about an ejaculating umbrella; twenty-first-century eyes will struggle to unsee the “disgusting semi-fluid,” “propelled [as if] from a syringe” out of the tip of the leering gent's loathsome umbrella. Is Mr Hatton using the umbrella as a euphemism? If so, is that not a rather odd way of masking a sexual assault in a national newspaper? Or is this a literal account of an unpleasant occurrence? If this is truly what happened, how can we determine whether the outraged Mr Hatton was aware of the sexual connotations that present themselves so easily to us? Our modern inexorable sexual reading of the sticky umbrella stems from two circumstances: the very real sexual menace posed by a stranger who rubs himself against women's skirts in a public place (nothing funny about that), and more than a hundred years of being conditioned to notice, and snigger at, elongated objects. Since the popularisation of Sigmund Freud's theories of dream interpretation, the umbrella has been repeatedly interpreted as an unconscious substitution for the male genitals. Freud specifically mentioned umbrellas in his 1916–17 publication of A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, along with trees, poles, firearms, pencils, nail files, etc. (Freud 154–55). It was perhaps this which led Katherine Mansfield to quip in 1917 of E. M. Forster's 1910 novel Howard's End that: “I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella” (121). Mansfield's joke is on the umbrella as a phallic substitution. She equates Leonard's insecure grasp on middle-class respectability with a lack of sexual virility, while also casting aspersions on the probability of E. M. Forster's plot. But that is only half the joke. The other half of the joke is much older, that of the “fatal forgotten umbrella.” This refers back to a long tradition, as I shall show, of the unassuming umbrella as a catalyst, a plot engine with a will of its own which pitches its owner into social embarrassment, romantic entanglements or worse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 475 - 492
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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