The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Another Interesting Literary Coincidence (2024-06-17)

Photograph of Williamina Fleming dated to circa 1890 from special collections of the fine arts library at harvard university, sepia tone added by Margarita Contreras for her biography of Fleming at salientwomen.com.

Between the real world and literary world coincidences abound, not least because authors of novels shamelessly pillage what actually happened for scenarios to build their stories on. This is the nature of things, after all. In this case, while happily rambling through several different websites recounting the biographies of women in various fields and countries, I happened on the story of Williamina Fleming. For those who have convinced themselves that "single mothers" are a new phenomenon and all about supposedly irresponsible women who refuse to get married properly, Williamina Fleming's case probably won't change their minds. They are too committed to nonsense. Abandoned by her husband not long after her confirmed post-marriage pregnancy, Fleming did what many women in the late 1800s did when faced with such circumstances. Thrown on her own resources, she sought the most accessible "respectable" work for a single woman at the time, serving as a maid and housekeeper. This led her to an unexpected opportunity to work at the harvard university mapping stars, developing into a highly skilled manager and astronomer. Unfortunately, hiring women like her was not particularly good-natured on the part of the male administrators, who ruthlessly exploited brilliant women for the lowest wages they could get away with. Andrea J. Buchanan provides a solid overview of Fleming's life and career in The Maid Who Mapped the Heavens, posted at narratively. com in july 2019. Like the classicist Alice Koeber who bore an insane teaching load during long teaching days at brooklyn college in new york, carrying out her research almost wholly on her own time, Fleming struggled to do her research around an ever-growing burden of administrative and teaching tasks. Both died young, Fleming in 1911 at age 54 of pneumonia, her groundbreaking star research and mentorship of many brilliant women astronomers cut short. Just 40 years later, Kober died suddenly at the age of 43, having completed a critical portion of the work necessary to decipher Linear B, a syllabic script adapted to use with an ancient greek dialect on the island of crete and the adjacent greek mainland. That's the real world parallel, a bittersweet one to be sure. The literary parallel is not nearly so close, and hinges very much on Fleming's unusual first name.

Well, I should modify the "unusual" descriptor, because it seems on further research that feminized variants on the name "William" were not necessarily uncommon in the late nineteenth century. At least in fiction, its more german-shaped form is probably indelibly associated with the paradoxical figure of Wilhelmina Murray created by Bram Stoker for his hit 1897 potboiler novel, Dracula (available to read in a fine scan at the internet archive). Wilhelmina, generally referred to as Mina for short is another of those fascinating female characters who began ever so inexorably to get away from the author, so much so that later writers could not resist revisiting her character and expanding her story in various ways. In the original novel, she is a sort of "new woman" who is a self-supporting teacher and a keen learner of the newfangled typewriter and transcription from shorthand. In the novel Stoker presents her as building these skills for the sake of supporting her fiancé Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor who is still working his way up in the field. The indications that she has a mind of her own and serious interests are there all the same, and she is clearly prepared to continue making her way on her own in the world if she must. Stoker strives constantly to reduce Mina Murray to a pliant and passive character by means of entangling her with Dracula, hypnotism and so forth. Yet a major part of what keeps Stoker's novel built out of the obsessive diarizing and newspaper-clipping productions of his main male characters from collapsing is Mina Harker. He can't manage to make the "damsel in distress" and "new woman" characters coalesce in Mina Murray herself or by pairing her with her beloved (and I think genuinely lovable) upper class twit friend, Lucy Westenra (whose fictional diary also features in the novel). I suspect this is a major part of why Dracula is another novel with adaptations on film and stage with so many changes to plot and character. How else to try to get an easily recognizable good guy against Dracula's evil, and sort out these baffling women?

Opinions about Dracula as a novel are inevitably diverse, and to some extent it has faded out of current popular culture. With the accidental resonance with Williamina Fleming's name in mind, and her quick-thinking and hard-working capacity to meet grave setbacks, including a serious attack on her respectability by her own husband, a different perspective on Dracula's original popularity appears. Yes, its inclusion of overtly erotic content outside of materials restricted to men's access or only to such "common" publication modes as pamphlets, chapbooks, and penny dreadfuls piqued wide interest. So did Stoker's skillful deployment of orientalizing tropes and armchair tourism in southeastern europe. He picked up on many social anxieties about "the new woman" and the increasingly unsupportable social issues fuelled by bluntly irresponsible men. Today we could also point to his remarkable encapsulation of british paranoia about immigration and "invasion" by outsiders from the east whose very being and culture would somehow be contagious and so sexually alluring all the british women would drop british men at the first opportunity. The worries and issues must always be externalized of course, and never a product of perverse social incentives for men to behave in ways that are self-destructive and drive away even the women who would be interested in them, as well as both complaining women are supposedly burdens while exploiting them to the point of snuffing them out with the best of their work left undone.

Previous Thought Pieces