Gentle Ladies and ‘Gipsie’ Queens: Constructing and Performing Gender in the Glasgow Necropolis

Authors

• Vanessa L. Smith Independent scholar

Abstract

The Necropolis in Glasgow, Scotland stands as a classic example of a Victorian-era garden cemetery. Opened in 1833, the site is home to 50,000 burials, of which only an elite few are marked with an array of gravestones, tombs, and mausoleums. Not surprisingly, the numerous monuments to Glasgow’s merchants, middle classes, and gentlefolk predominantly conform to the expected Victorian models of appropriate mourning and memorialisation, with distinct parameters for men and for women. Throughout the cemetery, the graves signal the appropriate social roles, attitudes, and final remembrances appropriate to Glasgow’s ‘merchant patriarchs’ and for the women associated with them. The stones demonstrate not only how nineteenth-century Glasgow saw fit to remember its dead, they were also intended to inspire and instruct the living mourners and cemetery visitors in the suitable ways that gender should be performed in the public eye. An elevated monument to Protestant reformer John Knox dominates the cemetery, an overarching figure of proper religious and social masculinity. Men are well represented throughout the Necropolis. Their names are fully recorded on the tombs, as are often their deeds and social position. In some cases, their faces and forms may be immortalised in stone, showing them looking sober, masterful, and wise. Proper Victorian femininity centred on the ‘Angel in the House’ archetype – a docile nurturer who devoted herself to her husband and the domestic sphere. Women’s markers regularly assigned priority to their relationship with a male relation: husband, father, and sometimes son. Female images appear infrequently. However, within this defined world of gender, a number of memorials stand in opposition to convention and defy societal ideals through their unexpected variation. Through a selection of case studies, this paper will explore the ways in which the Victorian society of Glasgow performed and resisted gendered roles in death through the monuments of the Necropolis cemetery. By highlighting both standard and non-standard funerary choices, a more nuanced sense of the Victorian perspective on gender can be found.