Between Women

Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

Sharon Marcus

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400830855
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: LGBT Literaturkritik

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law.
Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.

PART ONE

Elastic Ideals: Female Friendship

CHAPTER 1

Friendship and the Play of the System

IN THE MOST INFLUENTIAL conduct book of the nineteenth century, Sarah Stickney Ellis identified The Women of England (1839) as daughters, wives, and mothers ensconced in a familial, domestic sphere. She also assigned women another obligatory role we may now be surprised to find so prominent in a guide to correct feminine behavior: friend.¹ Ellis returned to friendship between women in The Daughters of England (1842), where a chapter on “Friendship and Flirtation” affirmed the importance of a woman’s “circle of . . . private friends” as the site where “she learns what constitutes the happiness and the misery of woman.” Just as Ellis had established codes of behavior for daughters, wives, and mothers, she set out rules of conduct for female friends, stating that flirtation with men should never set women asunder: “I cannot see why [male attentions] should ever be so much the subject of envy amongst women, as to cast a shade upon their intercourse with each other.”² Ellis assigned equal value to female friends and male suitors, making friendship between women as essential to proper femininity as a woman’s obedience to her parents, subservience to her husband, and devotion to her children. Yet despite the prominence and complexity of friendship in Ellis’s works, contemporary scholars who cite her as representative of Victorian gender ideology consistently overlook her articulation of female friendship as a basic element of a middle class organized around marriage, family, and Christian belief.

I begin this book with friendship for two reasons. First, female friendship is an excellent test of the arguments that women’s relationships were central to Victorian society, that women were not defined only in relation to men, and that they formed legible and legitimate bonds with one another. Second, understanding the divergent uses of the term “friend” among Victorian women allows us to distinguish between two distinct relationships that often went under the same name: sexual and nonsexual intimacies between women. It is a common misconception that Victorians were confused about the differences between sexual and nonsexual bonds between women, not least because of an ambiguity embedded in the word “friend” itself, which in Old English meant both “a near relation” and “a person joined by affection and intimacy to another, independently of sexual or family love.” By the time of late Middle English, “friend” could mean a beloved who was neither kin nor lover, but also a relative or “a romantic or sexual partner.”³ Before the nineteenth century, “friend” was a capacious term that included kin, patrons, neighbors, and spouses, along with freely chosen confidants to whom one was not bound by blood, political obligations, physical proximity, or sexual intimacy.⁴ Twentieth-century Western societies define friendship more narrowly, but the term remains ambiguous: “friend” still refers to a sexual partner, an acquaintance with whom one shares a relatively indiscriminate sociability, and a close connection with whom one forms a dyad based on exclusivity, disclosure, and commitment.⁵ Likewise for Victorians, a friend was first and foremost an emotional intimate who was not a relative or a sexual partner, but the term could also be a euphemism for a lover. Only through a discreet but marked rhetoric did Victorians qualify that some “friends” were not friends, but special friends, life friends, and particular companions who in private communications could as easily be called wife or husband.

Victorians accepted friendship between women because they believed it cultivated the feminine virtues of sympathy and altruism that made women into good helpmates. But the embrace of friendships that trained women for family and marriage was not simply, as one might darkly conjecture, an attempt to press women’s bonds into patriarchal service. It also indicated a shift in the spiritual and emotional definition of marriage from a hierarchical bond dictating that inferior wives obey their superior husbands to a more egalitarian conception modeled on friendship. A society that defined the social bond between husband and wife in terms of affection, companionship, and equality—alongside the persisting economic, legal, and political dependence of wives on husbands—easily made room for friendship. Female friends were integrated into the domestic realm as marriage brokers who helped facilitate courtship, but female friendship was defined in terms of affection and pleasure, not instrumental utility. Female friendship reinforced gender roles and consolidated class status, but it also provided women with socially permissible opportunities to engage in behavior commonly seen as the monopoly of men: competition, active choice, appreciation of female beauty, and struggles with religious belief. As friends, women could comport themselves with one another in ways forbidden with men, without compromising the respectability so prized by the middle class.

The complexity of friendship supports this book’s central claim that Victorian society, in which marriage between men and women was a supreme value, did not suppress bonds between women but actively promoted them. Neither a celebration nor a rebuke, my argument takes the history of women and sexuality beyond models of subversion and containment to explore the complexity of systems in which constraint was inseparable from liberty, action, and recreation, from a degree of give built into social rules, offering those who lived by them flexibility, if not utter freedom. I call this give “the play of the system,” adopting a term from Roland Barthes. In Sade/Fourier/Loyola, a study of three writers obsessed with social structures, Barthes contrasted logically fixed, closed, orthodox “systems” with infinitely open, destabilizing, ambiguous “systematics,” which he defined as “the play of the system.”⁶ For Barthes, the play of the system is external to the system, a utopian alternative to the oppressive, self-contained structure from which systematics take flight. Unlike Barthes, I use “the play of the system” to conceptualize the yield built into systems. Play signifies the elasticity of systems, their ability to be stretched without permanent alteration to their size or shape; it thus differs from plasticity, which refers to a pliability that allows a system or structure to acquire a new shape and be permanently changed without fracture or rupture. The Victorian gender system, however strict its constraints, provided women latitude through female friendships, giving them room to roam without radically changing the normative rules governing gender difference.

To understand what Victorians meant by the word “friend,” and to explore how women negotiated the rules that governed them, I turn to lifewriting, a genre that includes manuscript diaries, published diaries, correspondence, biographies, and autobiographies. Female friendship, utterly absent from the philosophical discourse on amity, was the very stuff of lifewriting: women wrote about friends in their diaries, regularly addressed letters to female friends, and were memorialized in print by friends as well as relatives and spouses. This chapter is based on over one hundred published and unpublished sources, many by or about women so ordinary they left no other historical traces. A few were authors, actresses, activists, nurses, or teachers; two-thirds were married at some point in their lives. Almost all were alive between the 1830s and the 1880s. The corpus includes women from all classes and all denominations, though the majority cited were middle-class Anglicans. Around ten were working-class women, who remain drastically underrepresented relative to men in the current archive of working-class lifewriting from the middle decades of the century.⁷ The rest of the sample includes the daughters and wives of shopkeepers, professionals, clerics, industrialists, gentry, rentiers, politicians, and aristocrats; girls educated at home, at day schools, and at boarding schools; and girls raised within families small and large, in London, other urban centers, and every provincial nook and cranny of the United Kingdom. I draw on unpublished sources, primarily manuscript diaries, and on published books, some intended for sale, some printed for private circulation. Because lifewriting tends to appear in print years after its subject has died, roughly 70 percent of the works discussed here were published between the 1870s and the 1940s (about ten in each decade).

The period I focus on here, 1830 to 1880, was not homogeneous: The 1830s and 1840s were more politically and economically uncertain than the prosperous and stable 1850s; the Evangelical piety, fervor, and introspection of the 1830s gave way in the 1860s to a more athletic and irreverent generation of girls who had professional and educational options their mothers had lacked. Lifewriting reflects those changes: one finds more Evangelical anxiety about sin, salvation, and duty in the 1840s and 1850s, while in the 1860s and 1870s, women of all ages expressed themselves more through socializing, education, and aesthetic practices—visiting, reading, writing, studying visual and musical arts, attending to dress and interior decoration, frequenting theaters and galleries, instructing children, or pursuing knowledge in their own right. Writing in the 1860s about smoking, cross-dressing, flirting with men, and the bodily transformations of adolescence, Laura Troubridge (1853–1929) exhibited a boisterous playfulness rarely seen since the Regency, when Anne Lister (1791–1840) recorded her seductions of numerous women in Parisian boarding houses and English country homes.⁸ But lifewriting also frustrates the impulse to view individual lives as exemplifying historical trends and social position, because the genre emphasizes idiosyncrasy. For instance, missionary Caroline Head (1852–1904) was far more religious in the relatively secular 1870s than the young Anne Noel King (1837–1917) in the 1850s, despite the fact that King was raised by a grandmother devoted to Evangelical philanthropy.

Varied as the women who left records of their lives between 1830 and 1880 were, they nevertheless had an understanding of friendship not shared with those who came before and after them. The relatively unchanged discourse of amity between 1830 and 1880 identifies those decades as a coherent period within the history of friendship. Female friendship existed as a social category and practice before and after this period, of course, but the era from 1830 to 1880 was the heyday of sentimental friendships legitimated in terms of affection, attraction, and pleasure and federated into marriage and family ties. In the eighteenth century, aristocratic women viewed friendship as an alternative to marriage and justified it as the cultivation of reason, equality, and taste; in the wake of Romanticism and Evangelicalism, nineteenth-century women defined friendship as the expression of emotion, affinity, personal inclination, and religious faith.⁹ In the 1880s, friendship merged with altruistic activism and became a model for bridging class differences to forge a better world.¹⁰ By the twentieth century, the increasing importance of school, the emergence of adolescence as a life stage, anxiety about lesbian deviance, and the popularity of developmental models that equated maturity with heterosexuality made it almost inevitable that same-sex friendship would come to be defined as antithetical to the family and the married couple.

FEMALE FRIENDSHIP IN FEMINIST STUDIES

Victorians recognized women’s friendship as a social bond comparable to kinship and conjugal love, but the last several decades of scholarship on marriage and the family have defined female friendship as external to family life. Studies of family and marriage place friendship outside the purview of their analysis or define it as a social relationship at odds with the isolated nuclear family. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall dismiss female friendships as irrelevant to their study of familial gender politics, and John Gillis argues that by the nineteenth century, the married couple existed in opposition to the collective world of friends.¹¹ Lesbian studies place women’s friendships on a continuum with lesbian relationships and equate both with resistance to the family and marriage. As Adrienne Rich influentially argued, women’s friendships and lesbian sexual bonds both defy “compulsory heterosexuality.”¹² The move to valorize women’s friendships as a subset of lesbianism and as a subversion of gender norms continues to be the dominant paradigm. In Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928, a series of richly documented case studies in lesbian history, Martha Vicinus identifies “heterosexual marriage” as a “strong impediment to same-sex intimacy” and argues that an “undefined continuum” linked “erotic friendships” in particular with “women’s friendships” in general. Rich’s continuum becomes the apposition in Vicinus’s title: “intimate friends” are “women who loved women,” and both terms stand for lesbians who risked “social ostracism” and posed “an unnamable threat to social norms.”¹³

The concept of a lesbian continuum, once a powerful means of drawing attention to overlooked bonds between women, has ironically obscured everything that female friendship and lesbianism did not share and hidden the important differences between female friends and female lovers. Female friends and female lovers alike expressed affection, shared confidences, and idealized one another’s physical and spiritual qualities. But friends differed significantly from female lovers who threw themselves into obsessive passions or lived together, functioned socially as a couple, merged finances, and bequeathed property to each other. Indeed, although the lesbian continuum posits female friends and lesbian lovers as united in their opposition to patriarchal marriage, many nineteenth-century lesbian relationships resembled marriages more than friendships—and as a result shared with friendship a high degree of acceptance by respectable society.

Rather than valorize an invisibility or transgressiveness that all women’s relationships share, or define women’s relationships in terms of an intrinsic ambiguity that blurs the line between friendship and sexual partnership, we need distinctions that allow us to chart how different social bonds overlap without becoming identical. The question of how to conceptualize friends in relation to same-sex lovers is not unique to women, and it has haunted modern gay discourse since its inception. At the outset of the twentieth century, Edward Carpenter advocated expanding gay and lesbian history by incorporating the history of friendship, while Magnus Hirschfeld insisted on “drawing a sharp line between friendship and love” and, in so doing, documented many “marriage-like associations” between men and between women.¹⁴ Scholars who have subsequently studied women’s friendships have often replicated Carpenter’s strategic decision to conflate friendships with sexual relationships. The single most influential study of female friendship, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual” (1975), argued that before psychiatrists popularized the concept of the deviant lesbian, passionate friendship between women was not only accepted among a few female couples but was a norm for many women and an integral aspect of family life. Smith-Rosenberg’s prescient identification of the social prominence of female friendship in the United States shaped lesbian studies, but scholars of the Victorian family, while often citing her essay, have not heeded its call to incorporate the study of friendship into the history of family and marriage.

If Smith-Rosenberg’s argument has not affected the theorization of family and marriage as she intended it to, the cause lies partly in the way she herself contradicted her primary claim. Even as “The Female World of Love and Ritual” argued that female friendship was “an essential aspect of American society,” considered “both socially acceptable and fully compatible with heterosexual marriage,” it also segregated intimacy between women in a “female world.”¹⁵ Smith-Rosenberg saw female friendships as compensatory, valued because they supplied the emotional warmth missing between wives and husbands in a society premised on separate gender spheres (366, 372, 373). The ideology of separate spheres in fact valorized the domestic intimacy of husband and wife, and we now know that men and women in Victorian England mingled far more than they do in Smith-Rosenberg’s characterization of the antebellum United States. Letters and journals attest to genuine affection and intimacy between husbands and wives, alongside conflict and hierarchy, and women had contact with men before and after marriage. The twenty-year-old, unmarried Anne Noel King, for example, spent much of the 1857 London season going out at night with groups of men and women, and married women frequently entertained their husbands’ ...