The Female Sailor Trope

On March 28th, 1835, The Hereford Times proclaimed Ann Jane Thornton’s story was an, ‘extraordinary history which every other person in the empire had no doubt heard of’. Thornton, a seventeen-year-old girl who disguised herself as a male sailor to travel to America, achieved notable popularity in England in the mid-1830s. The depth of her recognition in public media, though embellished in the opening press clipping, is curious due to the assumption in prominent historical studies that such a phenomenon had ceased long before the time she was exposed. The female sailor trope, deeply present in the media of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was considered to have died out with the emergence of the more delicate ideas of femininity in

the nineteenth century. Thornton’s immense media presence however suggests otherwise. Through the excavation and recreation of the gender contexts and media in the context of the early nineteenth century, this research seeks to understand the portrayal and extent of Thornton’s stint in public sources. The increase in the proliferation of domestic ideology and feminine weakness corresponded with a media and literacy boom, which would have influenced both the way that she was portrayed and the number that would have had access to her story. In examining the way that Thornton’s depictions intersected with discussions of femininity, sexuality and culture, the analysis will reveal the extent to which she challenged the expectations of the era. The recovery of Thornton’s story also serves to contribute to the established history of female sailors in the media, by adding a nineteenth century example to the established timeline and models in the two centuries previous.
The historiographical base to be drawn from is wide-ranging as to cover the changes in gender ideal and social trends of the time, as well as the work done on the larger category of female cross dressers as a whole. The contemporary evidence with which to examine such historiography will be limited to news articles and other forms of media regarding Thornton written in the two years she was prominently featured, namely 1835-36. All press articles about her, in addition to her autobiography, a ballad, a broadsheet and an article in The Lady’s Magazine will provide a range of different media examples to draw from. The formation of a commercial trope, clearly present in the existing media literature, will be analyzed in terms of the social historiography of the 1830’s. The development of this trope will be built upon throughout the topic, beginning with the descriptions of Thornton’s physical presence and behavior and expanding outward. Chapter One explores the extent to which Thornton’s physical appearance and behavior corresponded to expectations of femininity in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chapter Two then moves outward to encompass the relationships presented with the various male characters appearing her tale. These relationships, in light of contemporary ideas of love, marriage and masculinity, served as overtly male figures and were used as foils to Thornton’s character. Finally, Chapter Three expands outward further by discussing how these representations of masculinity and femininity were received and filtered to the public through the changing media market of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The growth in many forms of public media will be used to establish the depth of Thornton’s presence as well as the makeup of the audience exposed to it. Addressing the three increasingly wider contexts that Thornton’s story relates to is essential for understanding the breakdown of this particular woman’s story and the reciprocal relationship that it had with contemporary society.
Historiography

This topic draws on research regarding social, political and gender trends of the 1830s to determine the ways in which they would have influenced the media construction of Ann Jane Thornton’s character and relationships.

By addressing the popular perceptions of the female sailor in a narrow context, Thornton becomes an optic into the relationship between contemporary media and the social context of the mid-1830s. The lack of studies on female sailors in the nineteenth century means that the descriptions of Thornton herself, her relationships and the reception by the reading public will be ascertained in association with secondary material on the prevalent social trends. In addition, focussing on a female sailor in the mid-nineteenth century will create a discourse of comparison between nineteenth century examples and the more extensively studied examples of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on the frameworks used in existing research on female sailors in previous centuries, this work seeks to test their applicability in an altered cultural setting. The existing historiography on female sailors often cover decades or centuries of examples, placing them as tangential to narrative that concentrate on discussing the larger relationship between women and the sea. Alternatively, relevant works also stem from an English literature base and therefore are more interested in text and language than historical context. Suzanne Stark’s Female Tars provided the most pertinent to the nature of this topic, as in Chapter Three, she sought to dissect the nature of public responses to female sailors through an examination of press reports. Her overarching argument was two-fold; the public responded with ‘tolerant amusement’ and accepted the narrative of cross-dressing to find a lost love. This ‘lost love’ narrative will be examined further in the second and third chapters of this work. The time period Stark addressed was from 1690-1850, though the bulk of her

examples are concentrated in the eighteenth century, characteristic of the female sailor genre.