A review by kitnotmarlowe
The Petticoat Men by Barbara Ewing

emotional sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.75

The Petticoat Men is peak straight people writing about queerness, which is, unfortunately, a running theme in my worst books of the year. Technically, I think you could classify this book as a social history of the connections between gender non-conformity, power, and oppression in Victorian England, but it's a domestic drama more than anything.

 

The eponymous Petticoat Men, Ernest Boulton and Freddie Park, aka Stella and Fanny, were real people. Sir Arthur Pelham Clinton was a real person. The case the whole book was built around was real, and yet the narrative holds Boulton and Park at arm's length, alternatively pitying their circumstances while scolding them for being such bad friends to our narrator. Barbara Ewing gets into the heads of several major characters (an issue which I will elaborate on later), but never considers how Ernest and/or Freddie feel and never gives them the chance to defend themselves in their own words.

 

In fact, Freddie and Ernest disappear for a sizeable chunk of the novel, which in no way earns its 400-page count. They're either in prison or on trial, while our narrator tries to chase down a "mystery" that goes nowhere. While Ewing's narrative is ostensibly sympathetic to Freddie and Ernest (and, by extension, anyone suffering under the restrictive social mores of the Victorian age), that sympathy is predicated on two conditions. The first condition is that Freddie and Ernest are nice people. They're good tenants and good gays; the prospect of them having any sort of intercourse, let alone engaging in sex work, is treated as far more of a shock than the cross-dressing. They have no interior lives, defined entirely by people who know one side of their story but not the other. The Victorian legal system is cruel, not because it was built on a foundation of homophobia going back hundreds of years, but because Freddie and Ernest aren't that sort of gay people. They're not queer; they're Uranians within the acceptable confines of the upper class. They're quiet and clean and well-educated and wealthy. And that is why the trial is unfair—not because it's happening at all, but because it's happening to these particular people.

 

The second condition of this sympathy is that it is filtered through other people. We're supposed to feel bad for Freddie and Ernest, obviously, but won't anyone think of how the scandal affects the straight people around them? Bad things trickle down as a result of this deviancy: our narrator, Mattie, is called a crippled whore, and her home is graffitied and accused of being a bordello. Her brother and a family friend lose their cushy parliamentary jobs because they're too close to the Gentlemen in Female Attire. Apparently, these things are as bad as being outed, humiliated, sexually assaulted by the police, imprisoned for months at a time, and ostracized from society. Maybe this is my 2023 gay person brain speaking, but I think there might be a false equivalency here.

 

Freddie and Ernest narrowly avoid being sentenced to potentially lethal hard labour, but we're supposed to be a bit cross with them for being emotionally distant from Mattie. No spoilers for history, but by the end, Freddie is dead from syphilis, and Ernest is living in exile. In fact, every named gay person in this book is either dead or exiled by the end. Meanwhile, all three members of Mattie's family end the book in heterosexual wedded bliss.

 

Okay, I'm getting off my soapbox now. So, the issue of perspective. This is a bit of a wonky one. Our main narrator is Mattie, who is ostensibly writing all this down in first person, though the epistolary gimmick is unbelievable and quickly forgotten. Then we have Mattie's mother, Isabella, also using epistolary first person, and Ewing puts even less effort into maintaining the format. These chapters are never differentiated with headings or anything, so you literally have to guess or pick up on context clues to understand who's narrating, and half the time your guess will be wrong. Rounding out the Stacey family is Mattie's brother, Billy, who gets a few chapters told in limited third person. Why is Billy the only major character who uses this point of view? Great question; there's no reason for it. And then, as if that weren't confusing enough, sometimes we get chapters following Mattie or Isabella (or, on occasion, a different character entirely), also in third person limited. Why? I don't know! And then, there are chapters of third-person omniscient narration focusing on the Prime Minister or members of the aristocracy, just to make things extra confusing. Oh yeah, there's an entire other subplot about Lady Susan Vane-Tempest and William Gladstone and the Prince of Wales that technically makes thematic sense but is so clumsily sprinkled throughout that it falls flat.

 

If you read that last paragraph and thought, Hey, that sounds confusing, then imagine what it was like to actually read the book. This is not a post-structuralist masterpiece; this is a book your mom mentions she read for her book club because she wants you to know that she read a book about gay people. Who edited this, and were they asleep (I'm liable to think they were on account of the multiple typos)? There is no earthly reason for this book to be 400 pages long, and I think Barbara Ewing knows that because characters constantly speak in meandering, page-long monologues that regurgitate the same points over and over again. No corners are ever cut concerning showing rather than telling information; it's as though these corners don't exist at all.

 

If there's anything I want to commend Ewing for, it's her excellent historical recreation. The use of period letters, news articles, and other print media from the trial, while occasionally overbearing, shows off her immense dedication to research. I only wish the rest of the story were worthy of applause.