Lesbian Dames

Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century

Caroline Gonda, John C. Beynon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317105664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How are romantic and erotic relationships between women represented in the literature of the long eighteenth century? How does Sapphism surface in other contemporary discourses, including politics, pornography, economics and art? After more than a generation of lesbian-gay scholarship that has examined identities, practices, prohibitions and transgressions surrounding same-sex desire, this collection offers an exciting and indispensable array of new scholarship in gender and sexuality studies. The contributors - who include noted writers, critics and historians such as Emma Donoghue, George E. Haggerty, Susan S. Lanser and Valerie Traub - provide varied and provocative research into the dynamics and histories of lesbianism and Sapphism. They build on the work of scholarship on Sapphism and interrogate the efficacy of such a notion in describing the varieties of same-sex love between women during the long eighteenth century. This groundbreaking collection, the first multi-authored volume to examine lesbian representation and culture in this era, presents a diversity of theoretical and critical approaches, from close literary analysis to the history of reading and publishing, psychoanalysis, biography, historicism, deconstruction and queer theory.

Chapter 1
‘Friendship So Curst’: Amor Impossibilis, the Homoerotic Lament and the Nature of Lesbian Desire

Valerie Traub1

In The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (2002), Valerie Traub traces discursive shifts in representing relations between women, from an assumption that such relations are innocent and insignificant, to a rhetoric of suspicion which brings together the figures of the chaste female friend and the tribade. She argues that ‘transformations in representations of female-female eroticism over the course of the seventeenth century … set the stage for Enlightenment attempts to link erotic desire and practices more tightly to gender and to personal identity’ (277). In the chapter from which this extract is adapted, Traub examines the close links between ideas of Nature and the thematic conventions of amor impossibilis, the supposed impossibility of sexual love between women, as seen in Ovid’s tale of Iphis and Ianthe (Metamorphoses Book IX) and in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure (1668). The poetry of Katherine Philips (1632–64), Traub argues, presents a transformed view of Nature and its relation to same-sex female bonds, becoming a pivotal moment in the representation of lesbianism. Throughout her book, Traub italicizes ‘lesbian’ and ‘lesbianism’ in order to defamiliarize these terms and to mark their ‘epistemological inadequacy, psychological coarseness, and historical contingency’ in relation to Early Modern literature, history and culture (16).

* * *

‘[W]e may generally conclude the Marriage of a Friend to be the Funeral of a Friendship; for then all former Endearments run naturally into the Gulf of that new and strict Relation, and there, like Rivers in the Sea, they lose themselves for ever.’2 So wrote Katherine Philips, in a letter to her literary friend, Sir Charles Cotterell, rejecting precisely the compromise between friendship and marriage that Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued Chastity so miraculously achieved (see Traub 2002, 292–95). Wed at age 16 to a man of 54, Philips not only sets up an opposition between these two forms of relatedness, but does so in terms that emotionally privilege friendship (the flowing River of an Endearment) while admitting ruefully the superior social power of that strict Relation, the marital Gulf or Sea.

Philips’s radical expression of the opposed claims of friendship and marriage registers, from the vantage of historical hindsight, a huge ripple in the waters of female love and friendship. Lauded posthumously as ‘the Matchless Orinda’ (the subtitle of the 1667 edition of her poems as well as the title of Webster Souers’s [1931] biography), Philips authored over 50 poems addressed to a succession of women, many of them passionate lyrics of love. Long relegated to an obscurity unknown in her lifetime, Philips has been reclaimed by feminist literary critics as an icon of seventeenth-century women’s writing.3 This status is based partly on Philips’s masterful appropriation and revision of masculine poetic conventions and partly on the communitarian impulse of her aesthetic practice. In the 1650s, she instituted a Society of Friendship in order to foster political, literary, aesthetic, and affective bonds among women (as well as select men). This circle of friendship (some aspects of which may have begun during her boarding school years) continued until her death in 1664. Self-consciously appropriating the imaginative resources of pastoralism, she and her coterie adopted pastoral names, wrote and circulated amongst themselves poetry extolling the virtues of friendship, and, in Philips’s case, explored a range of intense emotions toward women.

Many scholars have attempted to define the precise nature of Philips’s attachments to the various women with whom she was intimately involved, both during her adolescence and after her marriage, by analyzing the homoerotic content of her verse.4 Although biographical criticism has predominated, critics also have demonstrated Philips’s indebtedness to a discourse of classical male amicitia, to the genre of pastoral, and to the conventions of heterosexual love poetry, particularly the metaphysical conceits of John Donne. What is striking about all of this scholarship is that it seems to assume that no prior literary traditions of female homoeroticism existed. But Philips clearly was working within and through the tradition of amor impossibilis and homoerotic lament. Her attraction to pastoral was not simply a measure of her indebtedness to neoclassicism, as many critics contend, nor was it merely the means by which she merged concepts of Platonic love with heteroerotic conventions to ennoble female friendship. Rather, her appropriation of pastoral conventions interrupts and reconfigures the tradition of the amor impossibilis which, from Iphis and Ianthe to The Convent of Pleasure, had confronted the claims of Nature while remaining caught within a marital resolution. Philips’s Poems, published four years before The Convent of Pleasure, breaks the amor impossibilis apart into a diverse set of themes, including emotional longing, ecstasy, heartbreak, anger, bitterness, and betrayal. Central to her lyric repertoire is a homoerotic lament, which focuses not on the self-evident unnaturalness of female-female desire, but on the physical absence of the beloved and the inadequacies of what she calls the ‘rough, rude world’.

Philips’s translation of the amor impossibilis from a cry of pain about the body, desire, and Nature into a mournful negotiation of the lover’s absence marks an alteration in aesthetic sensibility, strategy, and subjectivity. Cavendish’s characters, for instance, are cardboard spokespersons for abstract concepts: Amity, Amour, and Sensuality (1656) operate like figures on a chessboard, and even Lady Happy (1668) functions more as an allegorical personification than a character possessing interiority. In contrast, despite her often allegorical language, Philips’s lyrics of female love cut much closer to the bone. Part of the reason is her choice of genre. Like Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser, Philips contributed to the construction of a lyric tradition that, at least since the Romantics, has been read under the auspices of the subject: as the exemplary expression of a subject’s interiority, as the authentic revelation of inward thought, as the immediate outpouring of intimate desire. Read within these terms, the lyric tends to be viewed as a fictionalized private utterance, as soliloquy or dramatic monologue or, in the words of Virginia Jackson’s critique of this concept, ‘privacy gone public’.5 The result is that poetic voice, persona, and author tend to be conflated at the same time that all three are sundered from history (and thus, the ‘individual voice’ is rendered timeless and universal).6

Philips’s production of a compelling homoerotic subjectivity, however, is not best understood as ‘self-expression’ at all, but rather as a ‘subjectivity effect’. I appropriate this phrase from Joel Fineman’s account of Shakespearean literary subjectivity to force a wedge between Philips as author and ‘Philips’ as lyric voice and persona.7 Such a dissociation Philips herself would have resisted, as she was passionately invested in her literary subjectivity (‘Orinda’ functions within her pastoral coterie as a proper name, a passionate identification, not a pseudonym or cover). Nonetheless, this disarticulation is crucial if we are to apprehend the extent to which Philips participates in a series of conventions that precede and define the terms within which, and against which, she writes. According to Fineman’s analysis of Renaissance poetry, the literary formation of the self occurs in the slippage between self-presence and representation; it is only through such slippages that the voicings of the lyric subject are interpretable as expressing a deeply interiorized desire. Although this fiction of self-presence is in fact predicated on loss and self-distance, it is no less powerful or constitutive for that. My appropriation of Fineman’s argument is both homage and critique. For, in Fineman’s relentlessly masculine and heterosexualizing account of Shakespeare, eroticism and subjectivity are always that of the male subject, whose desire is achieved only by misogynistically erecting a distance between himself and ‘woman’, the figure who thematizes the deceptiveness of literary language. Fineman’s rigid geometry of gender and sexuality, which apprehends the presence of sexuality only within the articulation of (gender) difference, necessarily elides as sexual Shakespeare’s poems to the young man, which are judged instead as ‘ascetic’.8 By suggesting that Philips manipulates in her epideictic poetry the terms of similitude that Fineman sees governing Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young man, I insist on the erotic power of what Paula Blank (1995) has called in another context, ‘homopoetics’.9 Philips’s love poetry attempts to articulate a homoerotic subject through the fictions and temporalities of lyric expression, deploying the lyric voice to disrupt those relations between ideology, causality, and sequence that, in the drama and prose narrative, propel the plot teleologically toward a marital conclusion. Philips bypasses the tradition of miraculous transformation (or the fortuitous replacement of a woman by her brother), crafting instead a strategy of legitimation that is at once profoundly confrontational and conventional: in addition to the idealizing similitude which she ascribes to her loving relationships, over and over again she insists that her love for other women is ‘innocent’.

Assertions of innocence in Philips’s poetry generally have been read by critics as an elevation of lesbian love into the spiritually lofty realm of Platonic friendship; proof positive that she did not carnally desire her friends; a phobic disavowal of the fact that she did desire her friends; or a strategic cover for a lesbian not yet ready to come out of the closet. None of these interpretations, I believe, adequately accounts for Philips’s appropriation of innocence as the proper term for passion among women.

We can gain some purchase on Philips’s deployment of a rhetoric of innocence by noting the way certain discriminations are negotiated in those masculine discourses of amicitia which Philips so deliberately regenders. The locus classicus for the uneasy if productive proximity of masculine friendship to eroticism in the early modern era is Michel de Montaigne’s ‘De I’amitié’. (Montaigne 1997, 205–19). Eulogizing with a keen sense of loss his intense friendship with Etienne de LaBoëtie, Montaigne idealizes the bonds of sympathy and equality among men. But while drawing on a web of classical allusion, Montaigne nonetheless distinguishes his concept of amitié from ‘that alternative licence of the Greeks’ which ‘is rightly abhorrent to our manners; [C] moreover since as they practised it it required a great disparity of age and divergence of favours between the lovers, it did not correspond either to that perfect union and congruity which we are seeking here’.10 The distance Montaigne would erect between his own pure, equal love and that of the licentious and hierarchical Greeks, however, does little to dispel the erotic force animating those passages articulated through somatic metaphors, as when Montaigne describes how ‘the same affection [was] revealed each to each other right down to the very entrails’, or through the use of penetrative tropes:

This friendship has had no ideal to follow other than itself; no comparison but with itself. [A] There is no one particular consideration – nor two nor three nor four nor a thousand of them – but rather some inexplicable quintessence of them all mixed up together which, having captured my will, brought it to plunge into his and lose itself [C] and which, having captured his will, brought it to plunge and lose itself in mine with an equal hunger and emulation. [A] I say ‘lose myself’ in very truth; we kept nothing back for ourselves: nothing was his or mine. (212–13)

Despite Montaigne’s own effort to delineate between the passion of men for women (which he describes as ‘active, sharp and keen’; ‘rash … fickle, fluctuating and variable’) and the love of men for men (a ‘general universal warmth, temperate moreover and smooth, a warmth which is constant and at rest, all gentleness and evenness, having nothing sharp nor keen’ (209), the salient difference seems to be less the gender of the beloved object than the relative state of ease experienced by the desiring subject. For as soon as ‘sexual love’, which is but ‘a mad craving for something which escapes us’,

enters the territory of friendship (where wills work together, that is) it languishes and grows faint. To enjoy it is to lose it; its end is in the body and therefore subject to satiety. Friendship on the contrary is enjoyed in proportion to our desire: since it is a matter of the mind, with our souls being purified by practising it, it can spring forth, be nourished and grow only when enjoyed. (209)

In Montaigne’s ecology of desire, it is less that male-male love is not of the body than that male-female love is not of the mind. Linking friendship to a desire that can never be sated, that is nourished and grows through its enjoyment, Montaigne’s metaphors for male friendship thoroughly eroticize it.

Such eroticized friendship is, as Alan Bray’s The Friend (2003) makes clear, one aspect of a widespread network of affects and obligations among men. Tracing the rituals of sworn brotherhood through a variety of medieval and early modern documents and artifacts, Bray provides an archaeology of masculine friendship that demonstrates its utility to other social institutions, including the family. Indeed, Bray’s research suggests that the early modern family, rather than providing the only basis of social cohesion, subsists within larger structures of relation, including the ‘voluntary kinship’ of intimate male friends.

Both the discourse of amicitia and the practices of voluntary kinship were predominantly masculine prerogatives. Montaigne provides one of the most potent ideological expressions of female insufficiency in this regard:

women are in truth not normally capable of responding to such familiarity and mutual confidence as sustain that holy bond of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn. And indeed if it were not for that, if it were possible to fashion such a relationship, willing and free, in which not only the souls had this full enjoyment but in which the bodies too shared in the union – [C] where the whole human being was involved – it is certain [A] that the loving-...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Friendship So Curst’: Amor Impossibilis, the Homoerotic Lament and the Nature of Lesbian Desire
• 2 A Crisis of Femininity: Re-Making Gender in Popular Discourse
• 3 Pornographic Homophobia: L’Academie des dames and the Deconstructing Lesbian
• 4 Unaccountable Women
• 5 Reforming the Coquette: Poly, Homo, Hetero in The Reform’d Coquet and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless
• 6 The Odd Women: Charlotte Charke, Sarah Scott and the Metamorphoses of Sex
• 7 ‘Random Shafts of Malice?’: The Outings of Anne Damer
• 8 Women Beware Women: Female Gothic Villains and Victims
• 9 ‘Do you not know the quotation?’: Reading Anne Lister, Anne Lister Reading
• 10 Tory Lesbians: Economies of Intimacy and the Status of Desire
• Bibliography
• Index