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Saturday, July 28, 2018 - 09:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 64 (previously 24d) - Women and Same-Sex Marriage in Western History - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/07/28 - listen here)
The topic of same-sex marriage has seen enormous changes over my lifetime. I can still remember that when I was coming out in the late ‘70s, one of the things I felt I had to come to terms with was the acceptance that marriage would never be an option for me. Back then I couldn’t imagine society changing enough to see legal same-sex marriage in the USA in my lifetime. Then came the formalization of domestic partnerships, the beginning of individual states legalizing same-sex marriage on a local basis, and in my home state of California the drama of how Gavin Newsom’s bulldozer approach in San Francisco helped drive an initial legalization, followed by the heartbreak that was Proposition 8, and then the long slow slog through the courts to establish marriage equality as a right. And then finally the Supreme Court decision that made marriage equality the law of the land for the United States. Many other countries have progressed along similar paths, in recent decades. And though there are still forces trying to nibble away at the edges of those rights or to sweep them away entirely, it can be worth sitting back and marveling at the wave of change.
Within the field of historical romance, marriage is usually a major plot element. Marriage legitimizes the developing relationship. It sets the seal on the couple’s story arc. Traditionally it has provided the concluding event of the novel, though modern fashions in historical romance are a bit more liberal in whether marriage is required for a Happily Ever After ending, or where in the relationship’s timeline it needs to occur.
But what does that mean for same-sex couples in historical romance? For that matter, what does it mean for same-sex couples in near-contemporary romance? Certainly, lesbian romance novels were possible before mariage was an option. I’ve seen some interesting reactions around the importance of marriage to romance novels, especially regarding the historic options. That combined with a question that Sheena had on one of her recent podcasts about what it meant when women in the late 19th century talked about being “married” to each other. So it seemed a good subject for a podcast.
To map out the scope of today’s discussion, I first need to define the concepts mentioned in the title: “women,” “same-sex,” and “marriage”. Although the topics in this podcast often engage with the ambiguities of gender identity and sexuality in history, in this case, it’s a bit simpler to find a useful definition. Because western culture has historically made a strong connection between marriage and heterosexual relationships, and because western culture has historically placed significant weight on physiology in defining the sexes, and because one of the central concepts of marriage has been about the recognition of a relationship by its community, I think that in this context we can reasonably use “same-sex” to mean “two persons to whom society would assign the same physiological sex.”
So although some of the historic cases I’ll talk about may very well be reasonably classified as a heterosexual relationship between a woman and a trans man, within their historic context, those relationships would have been evaluated by contemporaries as being same-sex.
Marriage can most generally be understood as a socially-recognized personal contract. And therefore the understanding that society had of the people involved is relevant to whether and how they recognized a particular contract. So in this episode when I talk about “female husbands” or about marriage involving gender disguise, I’m defining how contemporaries understood the people involved. This isn’t to say that these historic societies didn’t have an understanding of transgender concepts, but that’s an entirely different show that maybe I’ll be tackling at some point.
“Marriage” is actually the trickiest concept to define of the three. While all of the cultural contexts that I’m going to consider today had a core, prototypical model for marriage, those models could vary enormously and could have extremely different methods of recognizing or controlling the institution.
Marriage might be a personal contract between two individuals, or the familial equivalent of a business merger involving two extended families. A significant theme is the recognition and provision for any children produced by the couple and defining their relationship to the larger kin group. This focus on establishing the legal status of any children is one of the aspects that has continued to tie the concepts of marriage and procreation together up to the present day. One type of argment raised against the legalization of same-sex marriage in the present century was that same-sex couples had no need to use marriage as a framework for legitimizing children. (Never mind that the argument ignored shifts in the understanding and mechanism of parenthood. The point is that the concepts are still closely associated in people’s minds.) But while sexual relations are typically asociated with marriage, they have never been considered an absolute deal-breaker. Some versions of Christianity have considered the most desireable form of marriage to be a chaste one in which the partners don’t engage in sex at all. So in looking for historic examples of same-sex marrige, I’m not concerned with whether the relationship was sexual or not.
A marriage contract might be religious in nature, or secular, or both. The religions considered in this review were not always the familiar major monotheistic ones. Marriage might involve a formal legal contract or a personal commitment or even simply a recognition that the couple were behaving as if married.
There might be different types of marriage within a culture, and people might be allowed to engage in more than one at a time. Despite the general emphasis on marriage as a relationship relevant to procreation, there have been cultures with formally recognized institutions of same-sex marriage between women, although those are largely outside the scope of what I’m looking at today. Entire volumes have been written about the history and institution of marriage and no matter what characteristics you identify to define it, you’ll find some culture that breaks that rule.
So the question of determining whether a given relationship is or is not a “marriage” can be complicated. A few historic shifts in the practice of marriage within Christian Europe can show some of these complexities. The early Catholic church, although it frowned on sex outside marriage, had no interest in administering marriages and declined to be involved in formalizing them. Marriage wasn’t recognized as a sacrament until the late 12th century and it wasn’t until the 13th century that it became required practice for marriages to be announced in church. Only in the 16th century did it become a requirement that a priest be a witness for a Catholic marriage to be valid. And, of course, by that time the emerging Protestant cultures established different structures, largely shifting management of marriages to the state. In England it wasn’t until the mid 18th century that marriage required a formal registration and witnesses. Before these various formalizations, a marriage could be contracted simply by the two parties making a statement to each other. Or, in the case of common-law marriage, by behaving publicly as if they were married.
Apart from these questions of what the boundaries of formal, recognized marriage were, there’s the question how couples understood a private relationship that used the forms and language of marriage, such as the exchange of rings and vows. Even in cultures where the common understanding was that marriage would involve a heterosexual couple, there was not always an obvious legal bar to same-sex marriages. Often because it wasn’t considered necessary.
So with all that as background, let’s look at some of the broad issues in same-sex marriage between women in Western culture before moving on to specifics.
It can be useful to identify three general categories of same-sex marriage. The first is when the institution of marriage is openly available to a same-sex couple and is acknowledged or accepted as such.
The second is when individuals participate in the formal institution of marriage by means of presenting themselves as an acceptable couple. Here we’re talking about one member of the couple being accepted as fulfilling a male social role. As we’ll see later, this didn’t necessarily mean complete secrecy about that individual’s physiological sex. Remember that one of the central themes of marriage is recognition and acceptance by the community. There are cases where a couple’s community tacitly accepted the legal fiction that allowed two women to marry by this means. It was a precarious acceptance, but there are cases where such couples were recognized as married.
The third situation is where the couple themselves viewed their relationship as the functional equivalent of a marriage, often with community support for that understanding, but without the backing of formal approval by the relevant legal or religious institutions. One might argue that these cases aren’t “real” marriage, but in that case one could similarly argue that there were no “real” marriages in eras or cultures where marrige wasn’t under formal administrative control.
So let’s look at some historic examples of same-sex marriages.
Same-Sex Marriage Openly Available
There is a repeating theme in several classical-era Roman texts referring to women engaging in same-sex marriage in Egypt. Keep in mind that, throughout history, it’s been common to associate women’s same-sex relationships with foreign locations--whatever “foreign” meant in that particular context. So when Roman writers indicate “this is a thing that those foreign people in Egypt do” we should keep a certain level of critical awareness. But at the least, these are practices that Roman culture believed about Egypt. A novel by the 2nd century Greek author Iamblichos that is known only through secondary references tells a story about a woman named Berenike (that is, Bernice), the daughter of the king of Egypt, who loved and married a woman named Mesopotamia. Within the context it’s clear that this is an allegorical story about the personifications of various regions, but it presents marriage between women as possible.
In support of the possibility that this represents an actual Egyptian practice, Jewish writings of the classical era refer to marriage between two men or two women as “following the practice of Egypt or Canaan”. Other writers of the 2nd century also associated Egypt with marriage between women.
The lack of a central authority over marriages in classical Rome raises the question of the status of some satirical references to female marriages. In Lucian’s Dialogs of the Courtesans, one story tells about a masculine-presenting woman named Megilla who refers to her female partner Demonassa as her wife. Was this a case where such a partnership was recognized as a marriage specifically because Megilla’s trans-masculine presentation was considered sufficient to meet the cultural expectations? Or was this a situation where women had access to marriage as a de facto status despite the social and economic pressures against it?
Classical Roman culture shared with ancient Greek culture a strongly binary and performative definition of masculinity and femininity that corresponded to active and passive roles in sex. This meant that Roman writers (and we’re inevitably talking about male writers here) found it hard to conceptualize an erotic relationship between women that wasn’t, in effect, a butch-femme couple. What isn’t entirely clear is to what extent couples who matched that image would be accepted as being married. And keep in mind that we aren’t talking about the Roman elite here, where familial power structures were solidly partriarchal. So when we’re considering possible candidates for Roman same-sex marriage, we’re talking about the lower classes and foreigners, not patrician families.
One other piece of tantalizing Roman evidence involves a visual representation associated with married couples. The depiction in art of a man and woman with their right hands joined was a solid, unambiguous symbol that they were married. This pose, called dextrarum iunctio, literally “the joining of right hands” was a part of the marriage ceremony and was often used on tombstones to indicate the married status of the people being commemorated. Tombstones were not casual and informal artifacts and were a very public statement regarding their subjects. So the Roman tombstone from the 1st century BCE showing two women, Eleusis and Helena, with joined right hands is either an official public recognition of their married status, or at the very least a proclamation that they considered their relationship to be a marriage.
Same-Sex Marriage By Gender Disguise
At the other end of the scale of public acceptance we have those cases where women married by fitting themselves into a heterosexual template by means of one of them taking on a male persona. This is the topic where I need to emphasize most strongly that I’m talking about two individuals who would have been classified as being women by their contemporaries. There were a wide variety of reasons why a female-classified person would choose to take up a male social role. There are also a variety of reasons why such a person would add marriage to a woman to the performance of that role. The topic of this discussion doesn’t involve motivations or self-identity but simply the fact that this was one context in which same-sex marriage occurred. And from the point of view of writing fictional characters in history, it’s the most obvious option if you want your characters to be able to marry. Furthermore, as we’ll see, taking this option did not mean that the “husband” was restricted to performing a male role in public for the rest of their life.
There are so many examples of this type of marriage that I’m only going to skim the surface. And by definition, we only know about the ones where someone found out about it and recorded the case for posterity. So I’m not going to dwell on the sometimes unpleasant context in which the marriage was recorded, except to note that the question of marriage itself wasn’t always considered a problem. Sometimes there is a mention of crimes against the institution of marriage, but more often the negative reaction involved forbidden sexual practices, or the use of marriage for fraudulent purposes. In many cases, the “wife” in the couple was perfectly aware and accepting of her husband’s female physiology but there may have been other interpersonal problems that led to making the matter public. In other cases, the wife raised an objection due to this discovery. And in some cases, the matter came to light only after death.
The earliest recorded marriages of this type date to the 15th century. That doesn’t mean they weren’t happening earlier. There’s a great deal of variation in how much interest and attention was given to same-sex marriages. So the numbers in the historic record aren’t a certain guide to actual demographics. But circumstances like easy movement between communities, and the relative anonymity of town life as compared to more rural communities, mean that the 15th century may well have been a turning point for the ability to successfully engage in same-sex marriages by gender disguise.
In fact, we have clear evidence that people understood the idea of this sort of marriage earlier, because they wrote stories about it. The earliest version, and the one that gave rise to several later variants, is the Greek author Ovid’s story about Iphis and Ianthe, although the original version doesn’t quite count as a same-sex marriage as the goddess Venus changes the gender-disguised Iphis into a biological man before the wedding takes place. But Benserade’s Renaissance version of the story has the two women marrying and enjoying a happy wedding night before the transformation. And one of the annotated medieval manuscripts of the story offers support for its plausibility in an anecdote about a same-sex marriage involving gender disguise where the “husband’s” mother assists in the plan.
Similarly, some versions of the medieval tale of Yde and Olive, in which the disguised Yde wins the heart and hand of Olive, the emperor’s daughter, show them going through with the marriage, and only later does the story resolve to eliminate the problematic same-sex aspect of the marriage.
This also happens in the romance of Tristan de Nanteuil, where the gender-disguised Blanchandine goes along with marriage to the Saracen princess Clarinde and only afterward is magically transformed into a biological man to solve the dilemma.
But getting back to the 15th century and real life, Katherina Hetzeldorder may not technically have been married to the woman she identified as her wife when they arrived in Speier, Germany in the 1470s. And in any event, she didn’t behave in a very married fashion as she got into trouble due to making advances to other women there. We don’t have a record of the name of her male identity, as is often the case.
The 16th century sees an expanding number of same-sex marriages in the records. Examples are recorded in Germany, between Agatha Dietzsch and Anna Reulin, in France where a group of seven or eight women began traveling together as men, one of whom married a local woman, and another case in Switzerland where the couple is not named.
In the 17th century, we have the marriage of Amy Poulter, using the identity James Howard, to Arabella Hunt. Unlike the more scanty descriptions in the previous century, here we learn how they met, and something of their life together before Arabella found out that her husband was a bigamist, being previously married to a man. This isn’t the only case where a same-sex marriage raised the question of bigamy, which would seem to strengthen the idea that these were considered valid marriages of a sort. Bigamy was a fairly common legal problem in the context of opposite-sex marriages, and it’s interesting to see the number of cases where it was treated as the central problem in same-sex marriages, rather than the central problem being that of the identity of the participants.
Another 17th century case was recorded in Spain in private records, where a woman escaped an abusive marriage by becoming a man and marrying a woman in that guise. The record appears to indicate that she disclosed her story to the writer, but was not otherwise discovered in her lifetime.
18th century English records offer a wealth of examples of same-sex marriage, commonly known at that time as “female husbands”. Some of our knowledge of them comes from newspaper accounts where they were popular fodder for tabloids. We often get quite touching stories in these cases, with a sense of sympathy from the reporters.
In 1760, a woman named Barbara Hill tried to enlist in the army under the name John Brown but was recognized by a former acquaintance. It came out that she was married to a woman “with whom she has lived very agreeably ever since.” The account further notes that after the discovery, her wife pled not to be separated from her, and the writer appears to be sympathetic to their position.
When Mary East and her female friend decided that marriage to each other was the most practical way to arrange their lives, they said they drew lots to decide which of them would become the “husband”, with Mary being assigned the male role as Mr. How. They kept a public house together for many years.
A similar long-term marriage, lasting 20 years, was recorded in 1764 after the death of farmer John Chivy who was discovered to be a woman.
Although reports of female husbands were common, one was elevated to celebrity status due to her story being adapted by novelist Henry Fielding as The Female Husband. The true story of Mary Hamilton is only slightly less sensational than the novel. She began living as a man at age 14 and apprenticed to a quack doctor. Practicing medicine on her own under the name Charles Hamilton, she married Mary Price who somewhat belatedly raised objections to the match. It appears that Charles Hamilton may later have traveled to America as a person matching that life story appears in legal records there.
In addition to sensational news reports, another source of data on same-sex marriages comes from parish marriage registers. Curiously, the clergymen keeping these records sometimes recorded suspicions about the identity of the couple they were marrying but didn’t feel compelled to refuse to perform the ceremony. A pastor recorded his suspicion that John Smith who showed up to marry Elizabeth Huthall was actually a woman, noting “I almost could prove them both women, the one was dressed as a man, thin pale face and wrinkled chin.” But he performed the ceremony nevertheless.
The ceremony for John Mountford and Mary Cooper, however, was cancelled as the clergyman suspected John of being a woman. Whereas John Ferren and Deborah Nolan married successfully and then John was later discovered to be a woman, though we don’t have any evidence of whether the marriage was annulled because of it.
The Dutch woman Maria van Antwerpen began living as a man to make a living as a soldier, and then courted and married a woman. When the disguise was discovered due to encountering someone who had known her in her previous life, one of the charges brought against her was “mocking laws concerning marriage” indicating that the authorities did consider this to be an offense in and of itself.
After the 18th century, records of “female husbands” decline in number, though it’s unclear whether this was due to stricter scrutiny of couples, because the image of same-sex marriages was no longer considered to be entertaining news, or because women no longer considered this a desirable or necessary path to spending their lives together.
Cross-over Cases with Elements of Gender-Crossing and Overt Same-Sex Marriage
But it isn’t always the case that same-sex marriages involving a male persona were entirely concealed from the authorities. Some female couples lived openly as women either before or after the marriage.
The 17th century Dutch couple, Bertelmina Wale and Maeyken Joosten began their relationship openly as women. Maeyken began wearing male clothing and using the name Abraham in order for them to marry. Another Dutch couple in the 18th century took a similar path. Cornielia Gerrits van Breugel and Elisabeth Boleyn began their relationship as a female couple. Cornelia took on a male persona in order for them to marry but returned to a female presentation afterward.
In 18th century Germany, Catharina Margaretha Lincken moved back and forth between female and male presentations. She became engaged to Catharina Margaretha Mühlhahn while living as a man and identified her mother as one of the witnesses that she was legally free to marry. Although Mühlhahn seems not to have been aware of Lincken’s physiological sex at the time of the wedding, she later supported her spouse when questions arose. When the matter finally came out and went to trial, Lincken testified that regarding her marriage, “she thought she would be well able to answer this before God.”
In some cases, people who had been living as female went to the authorities and requested to be reclassified as male so that they could marry their chosen female partner. Eleno de Céspedes, in 16th century Spain, had been living a male identity for a number of years, though raised as female and with a previous marriage and pregnancy as a woman. Eleno requested to be examined and certified as male in order to marry María del Caño. Some time after the marriage, suspicions were raised that resulted in a second examination that contradicted the first. Ironically, this was one of the cases where one of the charges against Eleno was that of bigamy, as there was no proof that the father of Eleno’s child was dead prior to Eleno’s marriage to María.
A similar case occurred in early 17th century France, where a person who had been raised as female asked permission to be reclassified as male to marry their lover. The request was evidently successful. Less successful was the request of 18th century Dutch prisoner Elisabeth Wijngraaff to be reclassifed in order to marry a fellow female prisoner.
The situation of Anne Grandjean in 18th century France demonstrates the confusing contortions that the authorities were willing to go through to re-define same-sex relations as heterosexual. There seems to have been no reason for anyone to classify Anne as male except for the fact that she’d fallen in love with a woman. But on that basis, Anne was ordered to dress and behave as a man and eventually married a woman in that guise.
And sometimes, inexplicably, we may have evidence of two women being recorded in a marriage register under female names and with no comment at all. This is the case in 18th century England for Ane Norton and Alice Pickford, and for Hannah Wright and Anne Gaskill. We know nothing at all about their stories except for the records of their marriages. Was this a case of a liberal minded local pastor? Or perhaps one who simply couldn’t be bothered to make an objection, similarly to the ones who suspected a disguise but performed the marriage anyway? We also have to accept the possibility that the female names in the register don’t correspond to female persons. Name gender isn’t a fixed and certain thing. In medieval records, forms of names that we would consider masculine were used by women. And in some Catholic cultures, names of female saints were sometimes given to men. I don’t know if any local historian has tried to scour the records for more information about these four apparent women. But in the mean time, we’re allowed to imagine just what those records might mean.
Same-Sex Relationships Treated as Equivalent to Marriage
Once the institution of marriage came under government administration and there are formal authorities determining what does and does not count as a legal marriage, some of the less formal avenues became closed off to female couples. But there have always been couples who decided to consider themselves married and use the symbolism and language of that legal status. In countries that had a formal institution of “common-law marriage”, such relationships might even have legal status...as long as they fit the acceptable paradigm of man and woman. But especially from the 18th century onward, we find many examples of female couples behaving publicly as if they were married and being accepted by their associates as having that status, if not that legal state.
The famous “Ladies of Llangollen”, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, used the language of marriage to describe their relationship, referring to each other specifically as husband and wife, as well as more obliquely with language like “my better half.” And their friends and associates described them in similar terms.
Butler and Ponsonby’s contemporary, Anne Lister, invoked marriage as the nature of her relationship with her longtime lover Marianne. In one diary entry she writes, “Went upstairs at 11. Sat up lovemaking, she conjuring me to be faithful, to consider myself as married, & always to act to other women as if I was Marianne's husband.” Later she writes a very loving letter to Marianne and addresses her as “my wife”. And a few months afterward, visiting Marianne at the home of her brother in Newcastle, Anne records two important events: they exchange “an irrevocable promise for ever” and symbolize it with the exchange of a ring that Anne had previously given Marianne. Although, note that all of this happens in a context where Marianne has an existing marriage to a man.
The marriage-like pairings of women in the later 19th century were so widely known and accepted that terms like “Boston marriage” and “Amherst marriage” were in common currency, the latter named for teachers at the women’s college of Amherst who frequently set up households in pairs.
While such relationships may have had no legal standing, they had the social recognition and acceptance that has always been one of the organizing principles of the institution of marriage. Such social recognition might be commemorated after death just as it was in life, as I discussed in a previous podcast on grave memorials. The visual and descriptive symbolism of marriage was sometimes used to commemorate female couples after death even when the specific terminology was not used, as in the joint memorials of Mary Kendall and Catharine Jones, or Katharina Bovey and Mary Pope, both in the early 18th century.
Conclusions
This survey may not be entirely satisfactory for those looking to validate their historic female couples with the blessings of matrimony. The circumstances in which two women, living publicly as women, could enter into a legally binding and legally recognized marriage were few and not always solidly documented.
A more universal option, in nearly all time periods, was for one member of the couple to play a male role and gain access to marriage in that way.
But even the strategy of having one partner present as male for the sake of the marriage did not necessarily mean a lifelong masquerade or require the ignorance of their community, even though communal acceptance was certainly rare and tenuous.
And women across the ages have entered into personal oaths and commitments, using the symbols and rituals of marriage regardless of the opinions of their contemporaries--though sometimes with their blessing and acceptance as well.
So if you feel that your lesbian historical romance requires a marriage for its happily ever after, know that you have a variety of options to choose from, and go ahead and have your characters start shopping for rings.
Show Notes
A survey of strategies for getting your historical protagonists hitched across the centuries.
In this episode we talk about:
- How the concepts of “women”, “same-sex”, and “marriage” are being defined for the purpose of this discussion
- Cultures that may have supported marriage between women as an equal option
- Cases of same-sex marriage enabled by presenting as an opposite sex couple
- The permeability of the “opposite sex” requirement in actual practice
- Using the forms and rituals of marriage, even when the legal status was not available
This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here:
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Twitter: @heatherosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
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Monday, July 23, 2018 - 09:45
One of the themes mentioned by several authors in the collection The Lesbian Premodern was that social understandings of gender/sexuality in Western culture behave in cyclic ways, not as a linear evolutoin of understanding and expression. Lanser's article here looks at one of those cycles: the association of female homoerotic discourse, feminist philosophy, and woman-centered socializing. Understanding cycles such as these can be critical to grounding fiction in a particular time and place. I could easily see a historic novel set in early modern England that deliberately evoked resonances with aspects of lesbian-feminism of the '70s while still remaining true to it's own time.
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LHMPFull citation:
Lanser, Sue. 2007. “The Political Economy of Same-Sex Desire” in Structures and Subjectivities: Attending to Early Modern Women, ed. Joan Hartman and Adele Seeff. University of Delaware Press, Newark, DE. ISBN 0-7413-941-4 pp.157-75
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
One of the themes mentioned by several authors in the collection The Lesbian Premodern was that social understandings of gender/sexuality in Western culture behave in cyclic ways, not as a linear evolutoin of understanding and expression. Lanser's article here looks at one of those cycles: the association of female homoerotic discourse, feminist philosophy, and woman-centered socializing. Understanding cycles such as these can be critical to grounding fiction in a particular time and place. I could easily see a historic novel set in early modern England that deliberately evoked resonances with aspects of lesbian-feminism of the '70s while still remaining true to it's own time.
# # #
Lanser opens her article with the bold hypothesis that “in or around 1650, female desire changed.” That there was a conceptual shift in gender relations reflected in literature, politics, religion, and individual behavior in which private intimate relationships between women became part of public life, and that this shift shaped women’s emergence as political subjects claiming equal rights. The mechanism for this was an appropriation of the emerging importance of elite same-sex friendships between men and the use of parallel friendship structures among women to support struggles for autonomy and authority. Although these friendships were enacted in the context of an erotically-tinged discourse, elite women often deflected suspicions of lesbianism by developing a class-based conservatism.
In this article, Lanser goes beyond her previous analysis of the social results of this shift, and argues that the shift may be considered a collective strategy to create a context for emerging feminist consciousness and actions, not simply a reflection of individual, pre-existing desire. A “sapphic” consciousness (encompassing both private and public expressions of same-sex desire) acted to dismantle the logic of patriarchy and thus formed the basis for the emergence of modern feminism.
One objective observation is that in the 17th and 18th centuries, the representation of female same-sex intimacy in print experienced something of an explosion. Sapphic scenarios in the late 16th century were primarily generated by men and tended to express male anxieties and fantasies (i.e., that women could “become” men and lay claim to male spaces and privileges). Female same-sex desire was attributed to abnormal physiology, moral degeneracy, or the mistaken direction of an underlying heterosexual desire. The most positive representations in that era tended to invoke abstract and distanced images of desire between women, as in John Donne’s “Sapho to Philaenis”.
But with the 17th century, women’s expressions of same-sex desire begin to come into print circulation. Lanser offers the following catalog, focusing strongly but not exclusively on poems addressed by one woman to another:
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz - Mexican nun who wrote poems addressed to her patroness, the Condesa de Paredes
- Sor Violante del Cielo - Portuguese nun who wrote love sonnets addressed to “Menandra”
- Marcia Belisarda - Spanish nun who wrote love poems to women, using both male and female personas
- Anne de Rohan - French poet who addressed a poem to a female “beloved”, distinguishing her love from friendship
- Madeleine de Scudéry - French writer who described female friendship in ecstatic and erotic terms
- Louise-Geneviève de Sainctonge - French writer whose letter urging a widowed friend not to re-marry closes with an expression of romantic love
- Pauline de Simiane - French poet who expresses anxiety over her erotic response to a woman’s kisses
- Catharina Questiers - Dutch poet who uses suggestive Ovidian allusions in a poem about a woman who left a garter in her room
- Titia Brongersma - Dutch poet who writes of her desire for a woman’s kissses
- Katharyne Lescailje - Dutch poet who uses a male persona to write love poems to women
- Elizabeth Rowe - English religious poet who expressed desire for an absent friend
- Aphra Behn - English poet who, among other topics, expressed desire for “the fair Clorinda” in gender-blurring terms
- Katherine Philips - English poet who addressed love poems to a number of women
- Margaret Cavendish - English writer who embedded homoerotic scenes in her novel The Blazing World
- Anne Finch - English poet who wrote of her desire for a woman’s caresses
- Mary Astell - English writer who dedicated her published letters to her close friend using sensual language
Scholarship has traditionally attempted to explain the homoerotic elements in these on the basis of individual biography, but taken as a whole, this literature calls for a more systemic analysis. Why would this explosion of women into published literature include such public expressions of private same-sex desire. [Note: Lanser doesn’t quite state it outright, perhaps assuming her readership doesn’t need it pointed out, but the 17th century is when women began having their personal writings published in significant numbers are all. So this isn’t a case of the body of published woman-authored literature suddenly introducing same-sex desire as a topic, but that the expression of same-sex desire is part and parcel of women entering the world of published literature.] The question is not simply “do these works represent their authors’ personal desires?” but “why would the authors choose to include representation of same-sex desire in their published work?”
One traditional argument has been to connect sapphic topics with women appropriating masculine forms and conventions, i.e., inhabiting an underlyingly male authorial position addressing a female object because that was how the literary genre was structured. This strategy works to erase the sapphic potential by essentially transforming women writers into “male” voices. [Note: this is, of course, a strategy with a long history in western culture for managing anxiety around same-sex activity. If you can re-define anyone who expresses desire for a woman as inherently masculine, then you don’t need to acknowledge same-sex desire.] This position is difficult to maintain in the face of women’s literature that explicitly elevates same-sex relationships over cross-sex ones.
From a different angle, more recent arguments have been that the homo-desiring elements in this work are used to re-direct the authors’ same-sex desires into an acceptable literary form, creating an image of “chaste femme love” (per Valerie Traub) to distinguish and distance themselves from the “taint” of both tribadism and masculinity. But this explanation fails to support why the authors would include same-sex desire in their work at all if the goal was to avoid attracting suspicion.
Scholarship around the poetry of Katherine Philips and whether it can be read as “lesbian” is a useful lens for examining all the various academic approaches to the topic. Was Philips simply imitating an existing heterosexual “poetic love language” that did not reflect her personal desires? Does her work provide unquestionable evidence that both Philips and her poetry can be classified as “lesbian”? Whether one considers Philips’ poetry to represent only homoerotic desires, regardless of her behavior, the history of Philips scholarship is an object lesson in methods of erasing lesbian possibilities.
Lanser returns to the argument that the inclusion by Philips and other writers of sapphic themes in publicly circulated work must be viewed as a communal reshaping of discourse that operated on levels beyond the simply personal. This argument holds even more strongly for authors who included sapphic themes in their writing with no corresponding motivation in their personal life, such as Margaret Cavendish and Delarivier Manley. Assuming that homoerotic content in their writings necessarily corresponds to homoeroticism in their lives erases women’s agency in using literary themes for public ends.
Perhaps the pertinent question is, “why would women--regardless of their individual private lives--include sapphic themes in their public writing?” Here Lanser returns to her thesis that those themes represent and support a larger social and political movement towards women’s equality and empowerment. And specifically that those themes are part of a deliberate (if diffuse) strategy to create that movement. Simone de Beauvoir is cited as noting that one barrier to women’s collective agency is that individual women are dispersed among patriarchal structures that hinder the ability to see themselves--much less act--as a unified group. But Lanser points out the “agency of print”--the ways in which creation of a published body of literature can become a collective act and can represent itself as the voice of the larger population. Print technology offered a new and powerful means of constructing a collective voice.
Pre-modern literature that made feminist arguments did so largely by comparing women to men and begging for men’s good will and recognition of women’s worth, as in Christine de Pisan’s City of Ladies. Beginning around 1600, feminist treatises (such as the pseudonymous Jane Anger’s 1589 Protection for Women or Moderata Fonte’s 1600 treatise The Worth of Women) argue from the premise that women’s social power can only derive from separating themselves from men and focusing their resources in support of other women. Other authors who took a “women first” stand included Lady Mary Chudleigh, Marie de Romieu, and a semi-anonymous group of six London maidservants who published an open letter in 1567 appealing to their female employers to make common cause.
All of these texts highlight the idea of a homosocial economy of women that allows for equality in relationships (an equality not possible between women and men) that can stand against patriarchal structures. The specific activities of constructing these homosocial bonds point out the inequality of male-male friendships and female-female ones: men’s same-sex friendships act within and support patriarchy while women’s same-sex friendships act to subvert and negate its power. For women to create non-marital bonds outside the family was an inherent act of challenge to the status quo which expected women’s loyalties to be to husband, household, and extended family in that order.
Such female alliances were not necessarily or inherently erotic, but given the ways in which women’s oppression was enacted through control of female bodies, for women to claim control of the disposition of their own bodies in ways that excluded men had significant symbolic importance. This sentiment is embodied in the ca. 1700 poem “Cloe to Artimesia” which praises love between women as being above “the dangerous follies of such slavish love” (i.e., love of men) and urges women to “scorn the monster (i.e., man) and his mistress too,” staking out a position reminiscent of late 20th century feminist arguments that the only true feminist position was to reject relationships with men entirely.
Thus female same-sex relationships became almost a pre-requisite for envisioning women’s equality and empowerment, even when such relationships were not practical to enact, and regardless of whether the women envisioning them had an individual erotic orientation toward women. The vision of utopian sapphic relationships created the framework for the practical and material enactment of “friendship as kinship” when other shifts in the social and economic landscape put its realization within reach. That utopian vision might be limited, as in Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure where the premise of the female-only society ultimately resolves into heterosexual marriage, but one could argue that the disguised prince who marries Lady Happy must “become as a woman” to earn that goal. Other works by Cavendish, such as The Female Academy, create women’s separatist communities without the same overt frisson of homoeroticism, but still operating on the premise that women best support women by operating outside of male structures. And her works are regularly infused with the images of female friendships and female intimacies as utopian spaces.
These are only some of the texts that create a direct connection between female homoeroticism and resistance to male authority. Within this context, personal homoerotic desire may have been awakened within the context of political rhetoric, rather than necessarily the other way around.
One parallel theme that emerges from these writings is the depiction of female homoeroticism as driven by an appreciation of similarity. While authors such as Valerie Traub caution against taking this “erotic similitude” as the only theme within early modern sapphic discourse, Lanser considers it plausible that the emphasis on similarity enabled women to construct themselves as authoritative agents by recognizing that authority in other women. This is not to deny the material embodiment of the homoeroticism of these early modern texts, nor to suggest that their imagery is only metaphorical or that none of these writers were reflecting their own romantic and erotic lives. But the expression of those images and ideas could also have political purposes and consequences. And the expression of those ideas could, in turn, give women a context for recognizing and expressing their personal erotic desires. Here Lanser returns to her somewhat tongue-in-cheek proclamation at the start that “female desire changed around 1650.”
In closing, Lanser notes that the ideas she presents here were at play in the 1970s in the concepts of “political lesbianism” and “cultural feminism” as well as the (re)introduction of similitude as a model for female homoeroticism (alongside the earlier 20th century butch-femme model that invoked the concept of desire being driven by difference). Just as the dynamic interplay of lesbian discourse and feminist political action created a synergy for women’s empowerment in the later 20th century, there is evidence for that same interplay in the 17th century.
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Saturday, July 21, 2018 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 63 (previously 24c) - Book Appreciation with Justine Saracen - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/07/21 - listen here)
Heather Rose: This week, Justine Saracen joins us again to talk about some favorite books she's read that feature queer women in history. Welcome back, Justine.
Justine Saracen: Thank you for having me back. This is just a very brief remark. I was so impressed by Sarah Waters that I recommend her wholeheartedly. She writes primarily about Victorian England. Her two most famous books take place in the Victorian era. But she wrote one World War II novel. I'm not sure. Do you remember the name?
H: Is that The Paying Guests? Is that the one? No.
J: No. I appreciate The Paying Guests, and I don't have it in my library, so--
H: Something about a child.
J: Well, she starts post-war and then goes back. She moves backwards in time. She's an enormously creative inventive writer. She's full of surprises. I just admire her as a-- she's a writer's writer. So I would recommend her without reservation. And I want to add that when I was just starting to write, I only had about two or three novels out, I was at a book fair in England. I was signing books, I was sitting at a table and she was sitting right next to me. And I think two people came-- because no one heard of me yet-- [Heather laughs] Two people came and they bought books and wanted me to sign them. And she had a long-- about 40 people! But she was so gracious about it. Yeah. We joked about it at the time.
H: [Justine laughs] Yeah. She has a technique of completely overturning your expectations like five times in a book.
J: Right. I think it's in-- it's not even important which one it’s in I suppose--but midway through you think you're have it figured out. You know? You follow the twists and turns and you think, "I got this one." And then, boom! You're dead wrong.
H: Yeah. Fingersmith is the one I was thinking of where--
J: That was it, yeah. She's very good. So, all you out there hearing my voice, read Sarah Waters.
H: Yeah. I think your readers would especially like her because she does the same thing where, yes, there is a romance thread through it, but it's a different genre. It's the adventure or the mystery or something like that with the romance threaded through it. Very sharp-edged in many cases
J: She's just smart. She's a smart writer. I like to read smart writers.
H: Do you have another book?
J: Well, the one I mentioned earlier. It doesn't have an author and it's not LGBT, it's just a wonderful book that everyone should read. It's A Woman in Berlin, and it's not LGBT at all. Just about a woman and her fate of living through the years after the war. If you like a war-context story, then this is an autobiographical. It's non-fiction. It's a wonderful book. The author is anonymous so you have to look for it by its title. It exists in about four or five languages, and I just can't recommend it enough. Except read my book first. Read Berlin Hungers first [Heather laughs] before you read A Woman in Berlin and then you realize how much I plagiarized.
H: Right. It's sort of like watching the movie before you read the novel. [laughs]
J: Right. Yeah. I read a lot of historical books but no they're not LGBT so that's really my only recommendation, Sarah Waters.
H: She is certainly definitely an author to recommend highly. Thank you so much, I'll put links to the titles of the books in the show notes. And thank you for sharing your book love with us.
J: Thank you very much for inviting me. It's been a real pleasure.
Show Notes
In the Book Appreciation segments, our featured authors (or your host) will talk about one or more favourite books with queer female characters in a historic setting.
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Twitter: @heatherosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
Links to Justine Saracen Online
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LHMPMonday, July 16, 2018 - 07:00
The unfortunate fact is that one of the best sources of detailed information on pre-modern same-sex eroticism comes from legal records when those relationships came under scrutiny either by religious or secular authorities. This not only means that those case histories often are accompanied by tragic fates or at least unhappy ends, but it means that we can get an image of the participants as viewing their own experiences negatively.
Marina de San Miguel was eventually bullied into labeling her erotic experiences as sin and heresy, the result of having been misled and tempted by the devil. But if we read past and beyond the text on the page, we get a glimpse of a religious community that considered "free love"--including homosexual relationships--to lie outside of the question of sin or innocence. The Alumbrados were certainly not the first or only religious sect to take this view. I wouldn't hold up the Alumbrados as any sort of enlightened philosophy--it had its deeply peculiar aspects as much as any other religious philosophy--but beliefs such as theirs provide an interesting counterpoint to the common belief that homosexuality was universally condemned by those considering themselves Christians.
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LHMPFull citation:
Holler, Jacqueline. 1999. “’More Sins than the Queen of England’: Marina de San Miguel before the Mexican Inquisition” in Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, ed. Mary E. Giles. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. ISBN 0-8018-5931-X pp.209-28
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
The unfortunate fact is that one of the best sources of detailed information on pre-modern same-sex eroticism comes from legal records when those relationships came under scrutiny either by religious or secular authorities. This not only means that those case histories often are accompanied by tragic fates or at least unhappy ends, but it means that we can get an image of the participants as viewing their own experiences negatively.
Marina de San Miguel was eventually bullied into labeling her erotic experiences as sin and heresy, the result of having been misled and tempted by the devil. But if we read past and beyond the text on the page, we get a glimpse of a religious community that considered "free love"--including homosexual relationships--to lie outside of the question of sin or innocence. The Alumbrados were certainly not the first or only religious sect to take this view. I wouldn't hold up the Alumbrados as any sort of enlightened philosophy--it had its deeply peculiar aspects as much as any other religious philosophy--but beliefs such as theirs provide an interesting counterpoint to the common belief that homosexuality was universally condemned by those considering themselves Christians.
# # #
In 1599 in Mexico City, a 54 year old Dominican “beata” concluded her confession to the Inquisition by indicating she had nothing more to say “even though she might have more sins than the queen of England”. Marina de San Miguel was accused of heresy (specifically the “alumbrado” heresy) but also that she was considered a “holy woman” by her neighbors, known for her visions and raptures, that she acted as a prophet and mystic, and that she had engaged in sexual misconduct, “so abominable and lewd that even the devil himself would be offended by [her actions]”--a charge that Marina’s own testimony supported.
[Note: The connection between heresy and sexual transgressions had a long history at this point. One need only point out that the word “bugger” in its sexual sense was a corruption of “Bulgar” in reference to a heresy attributed to Bulgaria.]
The connection of these three themes is not coincidental. For the Inquisition, they presented a seamless and coherent case. Rapturous visions were strongly associated with the alumbrado heresy, as was sexual license. But these features also demonstrate both the potential advantages and delicate balance of the life of a beata. Because of her reputation for holiness, Marina enjoyed an important position in her community and held authority among her religious peers. Her position also gave her a context for enjoying her sensual desires. But those benefits only existed so long as the legal authorities took no notice.
The article gives a detailed history and context for the Inquisition in New Spain, which I won’t summarize. In general, Inquisitors were concerned narrowly with inhabitants of European origin, not those of native ethnicity, and covered an enormous geographic scope. Due to the temporal scope of the Inquisition in the New World, they were more concerned with intra-Catholic religious doctrine than with the pursuit of crypto-Jews or outright heretics, although those were concerns as well. Investigations of heresy were far less common than trials for bigamy, blasphemy, superstition, and witchcraft. But beginning in 1598, there was a concerted action against an organized, clandestine cell of alumbrado heretics in New Spain, which included Marina de San Miguel.
Marina was born in Spain to a reasonably well-off middle-class family, some of whom had New World connections, and her biography is typical of Spanish immigrants to New Spain. As a child, her father moved the family there for the financial opportunities. Having earned “something to live on” they returned to Spain and squandered the money. Marina was more interested in spiritual matters and at 16 took a vow of chastity in the convent of La Merced in Seville. That is, she became a beata, but not a nun. She had more freedom of choice in where she lived and the nature of her vows, as well as how she might earn her living. But she had committed not to marry and was expected to engage in a spiritual life. These freedoms also involved hazards if one were considered to have gone astray.
Due to financial considerations, Marina’s family returned to Mexico. Her mother died and her father wanted her out of the way so he could re-marry. Mexico City had few options for cloistered nuns, which required a substantial dowry for entrance, but life as a beata was an option, just as it was in Spain. Marina was sent to the Colegio de las Niñas (College of the Girls) which was not quite a convent, but at least was a placement outside the home, but this was no longer an option after her father killed his wife’s lover and fled to Peru. Marina went to live with a tradeswoman and then later took a house with her sister where they earned a living sewing and teaching girls. After that they took lodgings with a wealthy patron who became Marina’s spiritual advisor. Their father died and Marina used her inheritance to buy a house in that same wealthy neighborhood, where she took in lodgers. At the time of Marina’s inquisition, she testified that she had been living there for thirteen years.
Marina was well-educated and religiously observant. She had achieved financial independence. So why did she come under the scrutiny of the Inquisition?
The role of the beata in the community had a lot of latitude. Marina’s personal reputation came in part from being a sort of spiritual social worker, providing counseling to neighbors with medical or psychiatric concerns. But Marina’s own life included visions, trances, and episodes involving physical manifestations of religious experiences. This seems to have enhanced her reputation as a holy woman in her community, though there were occasional concerns that she profited from the “gifts” given her in exchange for her services.
Relations between men and women in the context of mysticism fell into some regular patterns. Female mystics might enjoy guidance, support, and protection from male patrons while those patrons gained access to an “exciting realm of direct revelation.” Such relations were not necessarily suspect with regard to sexuality.
The alumbrado heresy was not a coherent belief system, but more of a mystical tradition. [Note: This article assumes familiarity with the topic, but Wikipedia linked above supplies the information that it involved belief in the ability to perfect the soul such that it could comprehend the essence of God without need for mediation. Those in this state had no need of sacraments and were incapable of sin. They could fulfill any desires, including sexual ones, without risk to their souls.] The late 16th century alumbrado group in Mexico involved both men and women in roughly equal numbers. Marina was, perhaps, typical in her experience. She felt she had a direct link to God which enabled her to prophesize and dispense God’s favor.
But Marina was not an oblivious innocent in dealing with the Inquisition. She was very cautious in what she confessed, and admitted to next to nothing that would condemn her. She did indicate that she received “gifts” and visions during her trances but initially seemed to rely on her questioners accepting her sanctity. However, two months after her initial questioning, she requested an audience and reported that she felt the need to make confession of her sins.
She had experienced a temptation of the flesh, she said, and had performed “dishonest acts with her own hands in her shameful parts” at the urging of the devil who had come to her in the form of an angel and in the form of Christ. In this, she echoed the testimony of other religious women with ecstatic sexual experiences, including Bendetta Carlini. Marina also testified that her relationship with her spiritual sponsor had been carnal as well, including tongue-kissing, fondling of the breasts and genitals, though not intercourse. And they would discuss these experiences as being part of God’s will.
She had engaged in hugging and kissing with another man who lived with her, and recalled feeling desire for him to touch her breasts, but had not done that with him. And she recounted an erotic relationship with another beata, deceased by that time, with whom she had engaged in kissing, hugging, fondling of the breasts, and with whom “she came to pollution ten or twelve times, twice in the church.” [Note: “come to pollution” is a way of describing orgasm.] Marina described using a mirror to examine her own genitalia while masturbating, saying that she had done these things “not to delight in them” but as a way of giving thanks to God for the wonder of his creation.
Through it all, Marina asserted that she had never believed she was sinning at the time. That “to the clean, all things are clean” (part of the alumbrado heresy). So why confess them as sins now? Holler considers that it may have been a deliberate strategy to distract the Inquisitors from the accusations of heresy by offering them lurid sexual details to pursue instead. But this approach would be unlikely to succeed, given that her account scarcely paints her as a passive, innocent victim. Another possibility is that her time in prison genuinely gave her visions of hell, as she claimed, and that her psychological trauma now seemed to her to be retroactive proof that she had sinned.
Marina’s stubborn insistence that she had not considered her actions to be sin at the time she was engaging in them presented a problem for her accusers. Penitence required an acknowledgement of willful wrong-doing not simply an admission that one had been mistaken. The trial transcript shows the inquisitor’s frustration and impatience with Marina’s attitude through extensive questioning until he managed to frame the questions in such a way she was led to accept the official framing of her actions, with the sole exception that she would not admit to faking her visions, but that they had been a true experience. After that, Marina proclaimed that she had nothing more to say “even though she might have more sins than the queen of England”--a symbolic touch-point, as the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I must have been something of an icon of heresy to Spanish Catholics.
This confession made conviction and sentencing finally possible. Marina received possibly the harshest penalty of her alumbrado community--being paraded naked to the waist while her crimes were read out, public confession, one hundred lashes, a fine, and then ten years public service in a hospital. She appears in the records again, shortly afterward, being urgently summoned to give testimony against her mentor because she was “very ill and at risk of dying” after which she is not mentioned again.
A number of familiar themes thread through Marina’s story: the close conflation of heresy and sexual transgression, the precarious social position of women who gained a reputation for sanctity, especially outside of formal church structures, and the differential treatment of men’s and women’s sexual activity. What makes her of interest to this Project is that the “free love” embraced by the alumbrados seems to have encompassed some rather modern-feeling openness toward same-sex love and sex-positivity, along with the mysticism.
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Saturday, July 14, 2018 - 08:00
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 62 (previously 24b) - Interview with Justine Saracen - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/07/14 - listen here)
Heather Rose: This month, The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast welcomes Justine Saracen, a prolific writer of historical fiction. Although her work has touched on a number of areas. She has a special interest in World War II and its aftermath, including her most recent release Berlin Hungers, which came out in April. Welcome, Justine.
Justine Saracen: Well, thank you. I'm so pleased to be here.
H: Why don't you start by telling us about your most recent book?
J: Berlin Hungers is sort of a slight off-shoot because it doesn't take place in World War II. I have four novels that take place in World War II and that's sort of my micro niche.
H: Is it five now? My list has five. Counting the new one. Yeah.
J: That's because of the Airlift, the Russian blockade and the Berlin Airlift took place in 1948. But it counts because it's still in war torn Germany, all the images that one associates with the war other than the deaths, although there's death too. But they remain the same and it takes place in Berlin. It's another war story, even though it's post-war.
H: What's the plot?
J: Well, the plot actually, as with all my novels, I cheat because the plot is the plot that history provides. I try to weave around an interesting story that shows depth about the event itself, but then weaves in women and then at some point romance, but I don't write romances. I write historicals that include as a subplot, a romance. So the plot of the Berlin Hungers is: a young British woman who has flown planes in World War II, after the war wants to keep on flying but cannot. So she joins the RAF, although she would have been called WRAF. She joins in the hopes of being around planes. The only way that she can get anywhere near them is to be a controller, air traffic controller. She is sent her Berlin to do that. And so we witness the blockade and the Airlift through her eyes because she's part of the machinery that lets it happen. While she's there, she's in Berlin, we get to meet the other female character. And we see a little bit of her background. She's a Berliner, Berlin woman. When we we're first introduced to her, she's being gang raped. I do not prefer that. I don't want to. And I couldn't, but because so many hundreds of thousands of women were, it would be false to create a woman in Berlin who had not been so abused. So we meet her right after she's been gang raped and we watch her development. And at some point, she meets the British woman who's controlling traffic and together they endure... That's about a year. They endure the year of the Airlift. I meant endure because it was almost like a war initiative because the planes were coming in and men were dying. Pilots were dying. There were lots of accidents and the people of Berlin were still suffering a great deal because it was not quite enough to sustain them. That's the plot.
H: Yeah. It occurs to me that we may well have listeners young enough that they don't know the context for this brief synopsis. [laughs]
J: Yes, I'm sure. One of the reasons I started writing-- there are several reasons-- But one of the many reasons I started writing about World War II in general is the discovery that there are in fact many Americans, a shocking percentage of our young Americans who know nothing at all about World War II. They think of the war as having one villain- Germany, one victim- the Jews, and one hero- the Americans. That's all they know because they've seen one or two movies about it. And I write about the nuances, the gray areas and all the populations involved, all the suffering in all directions that went on. But I suppose, same people will even know less about the Airlift. So I suppose--
H: Yeah. They may have seen the wall coming down but they don't know why the wall was there necessarily.
J: Well, the wall actually is unrelated to the Airlift. Let me give you two or three sentences. After the war, you have to imagine Germany totally devastated, occupied by four armies. The most aggressive of which was the Soviet army, because it had also lost the most. It lost about 20 million men. 20 million people, men and women, both. So it wanted nothing but revenge and reparations. The Western countries had suffered much-- The Western allies had suffered much less. So they were more benevolent towards the Germans. And so they wanted to develop a democracy to have a buffer zone with the Russians. This tension increased-- I mean, that's the core issue. Because tension increased until the Russian said, "We don't want you in Berlin. Berlin is in our zone. Was actually fought into the Soviet zone, so you can't come anymore." They blocked traffic, train traffic and road traffic and water traffic. Fortunately, there was already an agreement in writing for three narrow air corridors. And so using those, the Western allies managed to sustain Berlin for about a year with coal and food, but it was also to stand their ground. If they relinquished Berlin, they would relinquishing the capital of Germany. Would have changed Germany's fate very much.
H: Yeah. So in your bio, you call yourself a "recovered academic" I'm curious, was history your focus in academia, or did history seduce you away from your original field?
J: Well, I was seduced by a woman, [laughing] but I'll come to that later. My academic background is German, Germanistik, it's called German studies. The language, the literature, including back to the middle ages and its history. But of course, most people think of Germany and they think of the war because they were-- We most notice them during the war. So I was interested in that in general, the moral issues about Germany in the war, but then I met and fell in love with and lived with for 10 years with a Jewish woman whose ex-husband's, whose father-in-law, her ex-father-in-law had been in Dachau. So I suddenly had a personal interest in Germany's role in the war. And having lived in Germany, I was already aware of the German perspective, what the world looked like to Germans. And now I was seeing how it looked to Jewish survivors. So I found it so fascinating. There were just so many stories to be told that I wrote my first World War II book about that called Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright. And then I was there and I realized that I had a font of information already packed into my brain because of studying so much of German history that I went on writing other perspectives on the world, having already a very strong background in German and European history and a Jewish partner.
H: So that answers the next question I had on my list, which was what is the special appeal of World War II? You were there, you were interacting with people who had lived it and it was immersive and I can see how the appeal of fictionalizing that, processing it through fiction would be very attractive.
J: It's very vivid to me. I lived in Germany for a year when I went to university, before I met my partner, I speak German. I speak it almost like a native, I've been told. And so I know what it's like to be German. And I know what it's-- Now with creeping fascism in America, I know what it's like to be the, "The good German."
H: Yeah. It's so easy to look the other way. I feel that in my everyday life of having the privilege to not go out there on the front lines and put my body on the line and I try to do what I can, but I can see how it happens. Yes.
J: Yeah. And those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't want them to repeat it.
H: And like you said, we know so much about the war mostly through Hollywood. And in Hollywood, it's all very black and white. It's villains and heroes.
J: Villains and heroes and always The Holocaust. I don't want in any way to diminish the profundity, the catastrophe of The Holocaust, absolutely. But that cannot be the story of World War II. World War II was not about The Holocaust. World War II was about this horrible disease that overtook Germany and then Europe of national [cross-talk] frenzied activism.
H: The Holocaust was what they used to worm their way into people's brains and say, "Hey, you know, hate these people and let us do what we want." And that's what we're seeing again.
J: Yeah. There's definitely a parallel and several parallels. Because I was professor I have a pedagogical urge that never goes away. [Heather laughs] And I realized that the burden is on me to write a novel that first of all, someone wants to read, someone has paid money to buy my book. They don't want to be lectured to, and they didn't buy a history book. They bought a historical novel, historical romance looking to be entertained and that's what I have to do it. But second to that, when I try to, is I sort of sneak in. I weave in, sneak in the things that I want them to know, but mainly about the gray areas in the war and all the people involved in the war.
H: So you mentioned earlier that you've got romance arcs in your stories, but they are not romance novels as a genre. And knowing how thoroughly attached Lesfic readers are to their romances. I'm wondering, do you get pushback about that? Do you get people saying things like, "No, no. I want more romance in my story."
J: Not so much pushback as…just that I don't-- I have a very strong readership, but they're a small readership. Because especially new lesbians, young lesbians who are just-- they just want a quick read. They don't want anything that's going to require thinking. I don't say that as an accusation, they want it to be kind of a lesbian candy bar. They want a quick image. They want to see women falling in love and falling into bed and they pay money for that. And that's fine. That's wonderful. The people who want to see that happen more slowly in an informationally dense context, they're rare. And I can't do anything about that. That's who I write for. It's never going to be all those who simply want a quick romance.
H: This is, of course, one of the reasons why I started this history podcast, is to let people know more about historical fiction and lesbian fic and let people know the types of stories and why they might want to read it. But yeah, I was wondering if you'd had that experience of people thinking that they're not interested because it's not genre romance.
J: Well, I have discovered, interestingly, because one of the questions that you asked me earlier was, "Are there very many others writing in this genre?" And the answer is sort of yes. But they're making much more of a concession to the romance anecdote, because I've read a few. And even though yes, it's historical, right away we have the romance beginning. I think it's just people moving closer to what the readership wants, and I'm a grumpy old lady. [Heather laughs] I write what I want to write, and I think I write it very well. I think I make it entertaining. You do have to slow down to read my novels. I could have the romance beginning early on, but then I'd have to detract a lot of the history. And I don't want to do that. I think the history is too important, too exciting. The details that surround all the events of World War II and the post war time, the Airlift, are fascinating. They're riveting. You just have to look at them. And I want people to look at them.
H: Although, I think people are attracted to the two 20th century major wars or-- well, let me be clear--the two 20th century major wars that America and Western Europe were involved in, because of the way that war disrupts social expectations and creates opportunities. And there are a lot of historic romances I've seen where the opportunity of women to move into traditionally masculine roles, to be active, to be independent, the way the economics of the war effort in America allowed women to have independence and therefore to explore new social models. I think that's attractive to people who are writing historic romance.
J: That is a fact of history that it did open up opportunities for women. A very significant example of that is in Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had, even though it had communism, theoretically proposes the equality of the sexes. In fact, women had very traditional roles. But with the outbreak of war and with the invasion, the astonishingly rapid invasion of Russia, Ukraine and Russia by the Germans, caused that all to reverse. And suddenly these women who are housewives and students and young ladies, they were put in uniform and put into every single part of the military. They were pilots, they were tank commanders, they were in infantry that had artillery that had barrage balloons. The war opened up the possibility for them to do anything that they were capable of doing. Less so, of course, in the West, but still you did have women flying planes.
H: I would like to talk about your non World War II novels for a bit. It seems to me when you've written about earlier eras, you use this technique that-- I call it a cross-time approach. That may be the wrong term in general, but where stories are either involving a modern character who was delving into the past, and that's how the historic aspect comes in, or stories that actually take place across multiple eras where it's either people who live in that era and there's a parallel in the story or, you know, sometimes I use this term, especially to cover ones that have a time travel aspect or past lives aspect. And I'm curious what is the appeal of that approach to you in writing about history?
J: You've identified something that I wasn't aware I was doing, but you're quite right. It is cross-millennial or something like that. I can think of three of my novels where I did that. You're making me articulate something which I haven't articulated before.
H: Oh, good.
J: I think what was happening is the sense that there are human behaviors which are timeless. They occurred in antiquity and they occurred in the middle ages and they occur now. The most vivid example I can think of, it just popped into my mind right now and I'm not prepared, is that Beloved Gomorrah that duplicates the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the 21st century with the husband of one of the protagonists basically reenacting Sodom and Gomorrah mythology. I suppose that behind that is the notion that there is an absolute set of behaviors. Oh, this is worth an article, an entire article. There's a set of behaviors that we as human beings repeat, and some of them are dastardly and some of them are heroic, but there are mythical patterns and they are in our DNA. I had no idea that I was writing for that reason, but--
H: Well, I was noticing that in Sarah, Son of God, you've got the multiple eras brought in and in Beloved Gomorrah and in the Ibis Prophecy duology. You get that as well. Oh, and Mephisto Aria as well. So, I saw this definite pattern.
J: What is the last thing you said?
H: Mephisto Aria?
J: Oh, Mephisto Aria. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah.
H: So, to me, it jumped out as there's this very strong pattern. So, I'm glad that that suddenly it's, like, huh! You didn't know you did that. [laughs] [Justine laughs]
J: Yeah. Yeah. And of course that gives depth to the novel and that separates it yet again from the standard romance novel, where you put your reader into a certain era, any era you wish, and you have a character in that era, meet another character in that era and they fall in love. So it's a very straightforward romance. Some of the novels that I've read, they call themselves historical romances do just that. There's only one level of reality, and that's fine. Those are the quick pleasure romances, but I don't seem to be able to do that. I think the other things always roll out along with it with my story.
H: Well, I think another reason some authors use that technique is that it gives the reader more of an anchor. It gives the reader a character, a modern character to connect with who then takes them on a tour into history as it were in. And they can, you know-- there there's a connection with the more familiar.
J: That's true. In Sarah, Son of God, that's certainly the case. The message of Sarah, Son of God, was that we think we have this new phenomenon called the trans…the trans man or the trans woman. When in fact, it existed in the book, in the Italian Renaissance. [laughs] And look here, it exists also in antiquity, in biblical antiquity. I don't want to give away the shock element in that novel. [laughs] That's what I wanted to say. It is this modern thing--these things that we think of as modern phenomenon are not. So we carry with us the baggage of millennia.
H: And I know that I find, in talking about the historic research I do, that expressing that parallelism while not being absolute-- so talking about the overlap between homosexuality and trans identity in history--can get really intricate because these are people who are living lives very different in all ways from ours and having different images of what they were doing. And it's fascinating and an enormous minefield as well.
J: One also has to be careful doing that to try to be faithful to the period. One of the traps that one falls in easily is to go to another century but then have all the mannerisms, have the attitudes, have even some of the phraseology of the modern time. Why bother to go to the other era if you're bringing in modern notions?
H: Yeah, especially in the area of sexuality. I'm always interested in how authors who are writing historical characters approach that question of researching and portraying understandings and attitudes towards sexuality in the past. Did you have any particular challenges in this area?
J: No, because I assumed initially universal hostility to homosexuality or its invisibility. Especially for women, homosexuality has always existed, but it's been under the guise of friendship, even in very intense friendship, women get away with it. So I haven't really addressed the subtleties of the way homosexuals are treated throughout history, because I assumed they would have been abused.
H: What are some of your favorite research sources? So I'm not talking necessarily about the most comprehensive ones or the most useful ones, but what are some of the research sources for your writing that you were delighted to find? That you just said, "Oh my God, this is fabulous. I have to use this somehow."
J: Well, let me answer that in two levels. On a general level, for all of my novels, whenever possible, I go to the place I'm talking about, because I want to write in such a way that the reader will feel like they are there. I need to know what it's like to be there. What it smells like, what the background sounds are like, what the atmosphere is like, what the people passing me by look like. When I went to Venice because of the Venetian novel, because those buildings are still there, I'd imagine living in some of the houses and I imagined my friends living in some of the houses. So my research there was simply being there. As for specific researches, research sources, my best one for Berlin Hungers was a book called-- I recommend it to anyone hearing this podcast, A Woman in Berlin.
If you read this book, you will realize how much I plagiarized it. [Heather laughs] It's by anonymous, and there's no author named. She was a journalist who suffered through the period right after the war. She also was gang raped from the very beginning of her diary, which is very articulate because she was a journalist and she happened to have spoken Russian. This is so much information. I mean, it was like a feast of information and I was able to put a great deal of it into my own novel, because she gave me the most vivid idea of what it was to live in Berlin in 1945 and 1946, and up through the blockade. So I'd recommend that book. I mean, it's available now in about six languages. She wrote it and with-- And her publicist agreed to not publish her name until after she died. And even after she died, the publicist said, "No, I want to respect her privacy." And still has not. So the book always has a little description in the back, but anonymous doesn't mean that it's fictionalized. It was a real journal written by a real woman, but she does not want to have her name known.
H: So you've had a book come out really recently, but I know how the schedules of these things go. So you're presumably already working on the next project. Want to talk about that or do you not talk about in-process books?
J: No, that's fine because this one is going more slowly. Not for lack of inspiration, but just I get tired of pushing myself every day to have to do a certain amount and I don't need to do that. I'm getting too old for that. [Heather laughs] [Justine laughs] Plus living in a globally warmed Europe, I never see snow or I barely see snow. So, I made a trip to Finland with a friend where they had snow up to your booties. And I got to know about the Sámi people. We call them Laplanders. We Americans call them Laplanders. And I've decided to write yet another war novel, but primarily about Norway in the war with a lot of information about the Sámi. I think they're very-- they're native inhabitants of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and a small part of Northern Russia. They're stretched across all those four countries. And they are like-- they were for a while like Native Americans on kind of reservations, isolated from the mainstream culture. But now they've been-- Now they're very much caught up in the tourist industry. The Sámi way of life is like the Native American way of life, pretty much eradicated. But I don't write about that. And snow, did I mention the snow? [Heather laughs] [Justine laughs]
H: And this again, I think you said will be another World War II novel?
J: Yes. It would be both Norwegian resistance, of which there was rather little, but there were some major events that happened, resistant events that happened. There's even a movie made about one of them. I will include that because I steal from history. I'm allowed to. [Heather laughs]
H: Are there any historical stories that you want to tell some time that you just haven't gotten there yet?
J: Yes. There are a couple but they're way too dangerous. At some point maybe if I feel like it's my last novel, I'll write about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because I find them horrifying. Only one nation in human history has obliterated an entire city with an atomic weapon, and that was the United States and they did it twice. And I feel that needs to be talked about, but I'm afraid it's such a minefield to write about it and not get a lot of blowback. The same with Israel, Palestine.
H: Oh yeah. Yeah. Talk about minefields. That one is a really tough knot.
J: I would lose a significant portion of my Jewish readers and I don't have very many Palestinian readers, so I better stay away from that until I'm ready to stop writing, then that'll be the last one.
H: If listeners wanted to follow you on social media or keep up with you online, where should they go?
J: Well, I'm on Facebook but lately I'm much more on Twitter. But I do not encourage them to go there to look for my political opinions because I'm pretty adamant about them. And I'd rather be liked [both laugh] if you don't know the real me. Facebook is fairly safe. I have pictures of my garden and my dog and occasionally political remarks, but don't look for me on Twitter.
H: Okay. With that in mind, I will put up links to your books and to your social media, but I'll leave Twitter off of it.
J: Thank you. Yeah.
H: Thank you so much Justine Saracen for joining us on The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast.
J: It's been lovely talking to you. It's very strange to think that I'm seeing you and you're seeing me, but all that's going to be offered to the public is my voice. I'm trying to make my voice sound interesting, but I don't know how to do that. [Heather laughs]
H: Yeah. I mean, I know a lot of people really like the video format and could put it on YouTube, but it would make the editing a lot harder. It's easier to conceal edits when the person isn't jumping around. [laughs]
J: Right. That's true. But it's been a pleasure talking to you and your questions have been really brilliant.
H: Thank you.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- The Berlin Airlift and its historic context
- Why Justine started writing about World War II
- Political parallels with current politics
- The hazards of writing non-romance novels in history
- How wartime disruption of social roles creates a useful setting for lesbian fiction
- Justine’s non-WWII novels and the “cross-time” approach to historical fiction
- Using historical fiction to show repeating human patterns
- Favorite research sources: location, location, location
- Justine’s current project: The Sami in Norway in WWII
- Books mentioned
- Berlin Hungers by Justine Saracen (Bold Strokes Books)
- Tyger Tyger Burning Bright by Justine Saracen (Bold Strokes Books)
- The Witch of Stalingrad by Justine Saracen (Bold Strokes Books)
- Beloved Gomorrah by Justine Saracen (Bold Strokes Books)
- Sarah, Son of God by Justine Saracen (Bold Strokes Books)
- The Ibis Prophecy: The 100th Generation by Justine Saracen (Bold Strokes Books)
- Vulture’s Kiss by Justine Saracen (Bold Strokes Books)
- The Mephisto Aria by Justine Saracen (Bold Strokes Books)
- A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Twitter: @heatherosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
Links to Justine Saracen Online
- Website: Justine Saracen at Bold Strokes Books
- Facebook: Justine Saracen
Major category:
LHMPMonday, July 9, 2018 - 07:00
One of the serendipitiously enjoyable things about deep dives into history is discovering personal connections between unexpected people. When I did my podcast on actress Charlotte Cushman, I was stunned by how she fit into an enormous network of literary, political, and artistic women of the mid 19th century, operating across Europe and America. My imagined "girl gang" here is purely one of the imagination. Fanny Hill was a fictional character--the protagonist of John Cleland's novel about a "woman of pleasure" (i.e., prostitute) whose sexual initiation by another woman brings her under the scope of this project. Catherine Vizzani was a real person--a cross-dressing woman-loving adventuress--immortalized after death in a biographical and medical treatise by the Italian anatomist her performed her autopsy. Cleland produced a heavily abridged translation of that treatise for an English audience. Lady Mary Whortley Montagu was a traveller, a writer on Ottoman Turkey, a feminist, and a proponant of women's rights and freedoms, including sexual freedom (as practiced in her own life). Donato's article explores the intersection of those figures and puts forth a theory that one purpose of Cleland's translation of Vizzani's story was as a thinly disguised satire on Montagu. But I'm imagining a different intersection, somewhere in the historico-literary afterlife, where the three women get together to dish, compare stories, and laugh at the men who tried so hard to thwart them.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Donato, Clorinda. 2006. “Public and Private Negotiations of Gender in Eighteenth-Century England and Italy: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Case of Catterina Vizzani” in British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29. pp.169-189
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
One of the serendipitiously enjoyable things about deep dives into history is discovering personal connections between unexpected people. When I did my podcast on actress Charlotte Cushman, I was stunned by how she fit into an enormous network of literary, political, and artistic women of the mid 19th century, operating across Europe and America. My imagined "girl gang" here is purely one of the imagination. Fanny Hill was a fictional character--the protagonist of John Cleland's novel about a "woman of pleasure" (i.e., prostitute) whose sexual initiation by another woman brings her under the scope of this project. Catherine Vizzani was a real person--a cross-dressing woman-loving adventuress--immortalized after death in a biographical and medical treatise by the Italian anatomist her performed her autopsy. Cleland produced a heavily abridged translation of that treatise for an English audience. Lady Mary Whortley Montagu was a traveller, a writer on Ottoman Turkey, a feminist, and a proponant of women's rights and freedoms, including sexual freedom (as practiced in her own life). Donato's article explores the intersection of those figures and puts forth a theory that one purpose of Cleland's translation of Vizzani's story was as a thinly disguised satire on Montagu. But I'm imagining a different intersection, somewhere in the historico-literary afterlife, where the three women get together to dish, compare stories, and laugh at the men who tried so hard to thwart them.
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Two figures provide a lens for the complexity of British systems of gender and sexuality in the mid 18th century: John Cleland (most famous for his novel Fanny Hill, or The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) and Mary Wortley Montagu (poet and correspondent, most commonly mentioned in the LHMP for her descriptions of life in Ottoman Turkey as the wife of the British ambassador there). The intersection of these two illustrates a dynamic whereby prominent literary women were attacked via an archetype that merged sexual looseness and literary productivity--an archetype that held up the classical poet Sappho as its core model.
Montagu’s reputation as an independent traveler, a writer on “questionable” subjects, and a person of suspect sexuality drew the abuse of male writers such as Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole, and Horace Mann and made her a subject of gossip among the British community in Italy where she lived for some time. Montagu, in turn, responded assertively to these attacks and continued to champion the sexual rights of women, especially single and widowed women, against the hypocrisy of both social and legal strictures.
John Cleland was another of the figures who made Montagu a target of satire and bile, using her as part of a general strategy of profiting from the public fascination with female desire and agency. His attacks generally were camouflaged via anonymity, innuendo, or by indirect representation as in the subject of this article.
The story of Catterina Vizzani was written up by the Italian anatomist Giovanni Bianchi, recounting the story of a woman who lived for a number of years as a man, engaging in romantic and sexual relationships with women, and was revealed to be a woman in the context of her violent death. [Note: there seems sufficient evidence from her request to be buried in female clothing to identify her as a cross-dressing woman rather than a trans man, but both framings should be kept in mind.]
Cleland translated (and heavily edited) the Italian text for an English audience, adding his own commentary and spin to pique ribald interest, as when he expanded on Bianchi’s descriptive title “Brief History of the life of Catterina Vizzani, Roman, who for eight years wore the clothing of a male servant and who, after many vicissitudes, was killed and discovered to be a maiden during the autopsy performed on her cadaver” to add the details “was killed for an amour with a young lady”, that she “narrowly escaped being treated as a saint by the populace”, and appending “with some curious and anatomical remarks on the nature and existence of the hymen.” He also adds editorial remarks to emphasize the exploration of Vizzani’s anatomy, lifestyle, and sexual practices so that his readership would know what they were getting. It is via this emphasis on transgressive sexuality, the Italian context, and the parallels of Vizzani’s and Montagu’s movements driven by discovery and critique of her sexuality that Cleland’s apparently straightforward translation can be viewed as a personal and political attack on Montagu.
[Note: At this point in reading the article, I was a bit skeptical about the connection, but let’s follow the logic as it is laid out.]
To understand Cleland’s “spin” of the Vizzani text, we must first examine Bianchi’s text and his purposes. Bianchi’s text was first published in 1744 and was intended to secure his reputation as an author of solidly objective scientific and social analysis. Bianchi had performed the autopsy on Vizzani and had taken pains to research her history and correspond with people she had interacted with who had direct information about her. To some extent, Bianchi made the narrative as much an autobiographical study of his own career as a study of Vizzani’s life. His research included correspondence with fellow anatomist Antonio Leprotti who tracked down information about Vizzani’s family and travels.
Leprotti’s correspondence also makes reference to two key points: Bianchi’s motivations in documenting and presenting Vizzani’s case history, and mentions of Horace Walpole as a friend and patron who was interested in the case. Walpole had a personal animosity against Montagu for her friendship with his father’s mistress and second wife, and his probable role in the transmission of Bianchi’s text to England makes this relevant.
Bianchi’s own motivations for writing the treatise had a large element of self-promotion. He was engaged in a struggle with colleagues to move the study of anatomy from a paper exercise to a direct experimental study and was losing that struggle, in part due to personality issues. Vizzani’s case presented the opportunity to show the importance and relevance of the direct study of anatomy and how it could be used to explore both social and medical questions. In particular, Bianchi was interested in debunking the belief that associated women with sexual interest in other women with deviant anatomy. [Note: see the topic tags “enlarged clitoris” and “hermaphroditism”.] He also presented arguments for tolerance with regard to sexual preference and argued for a theory of gender identity that was divorced from physiology.
Both of these angles were lost on Cleland, and his work, rather than following Bianchi’s enlightened position, remained entrenched in a focus on prurient interest in women who loved women, and an expected association with “monstrous” anatomy. And he turned Vizzani’s story into a roman-à-clef intended to be recognizable as a satire on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. At least, this is what Donato argues, saying that contemporary readers were expected to easily see a connection between the two figures due to the intersection of the Italian location, traveling, and gender transgression.
Cleland had already made a name for himself with the erotic novel Fanny Hill and was looking for opportunities to exploit that reputation while maintaining the superficial appearance of moralizing. Translation of existing texts was an efficient means to that end, and Vizzani’s story was only one of a number of texts that allowed him to editorialize on “gender, failed masculinity, and deformed female sexual taste and practice.” Where Bianchi’s text had argued for acceptance and open-mindedness, Cleland framed his translation as condemnation of lesbian or transgender figures such as Vizzani. [Note: Donato specifically includes the potential transgender framing here.]
Bianchi used his discussion of the treatment Vizzani received for her ultimately fatal gunshot wound as an indictment of the two distinct groups who interacted with her. The nuns at the hospital to which she was brought, on discovering her anatomical sex, celebrated her attributed “virginity” even in the face of her possession of an artificial phallus and awareness of her sexual adventures with women. The medical faculty of the University of Siena who were called in also focused on the sensational aspects of Vizzani’s case, and in particular their fascination with her anatomical “virginity” (i.e., intact hymen) that they failed to provide any useful medical treatment for her injuries, thus helping to precipitate her possibly needless death. Bianchi portrays them as lascivious thrill-seekers, only belatedly concerned with medical matters after the patient was dead. His call for physicians to treat patients without regard to the patient’s identity and behavior aligned with his other attempts to reform the profession, including his support of fellow anatomist Laura Bassi, the first woman to graduate from the University of Bologna.
Although Bianchi’s text includes references to Vizzani’s sexual activities (including her sexual aid and her positive reputation among her female partners), his focus is not on titillating descriptions but on showing her attempt to develop a role in society that would enable her to live her desired life and experience a stable and happy romantic relationship. These attempts included a surprising level of support from her family, friends, and employers, although that support was confined to helping her express her desires within a heteronormative framework. Bianchi’s discussion of anatomy in this context is to debunk the notion that abnormal female desire was associated with abnormal bodies and genitalia.
Donato moves on to the parallels in Vizzani’s story that could be correlated with Montagu’s life. 1) Vizzani dressed and lived as a man, while Montagu had picked up the habit of wearing Turkish trousers for their comfort (and possibly to provoke reactions). 2) English literature of the time was fond of using the “medical case history” genre as a cover for the publication of erotic texts that otherwise would be taboo. 3) As early as the Renaissance, English people had developed and embellished a stereotype of Italians involving sexual license in general and homosexuality in particular. 4) Further, Venice was in many ways the western portal to the Orient and picked up some of the fascination with orientalist sexual fantasies. (Remember that Montagu had a strong connection with Ottoman Turkey.) Italy became a “sexually suspect space” where gender was reconstructed and which was a dangerous source of potential contamination of “foreign” sexual mores--an image that was both threatening and arousing.
Montagu’s personal life was certainly rich in events that created an air of gender and sexual transgression. Her “Turkish letters” included frank observations on Ottoman women’s lives that had not been accessible to male writers and visitors. Her entrance into Italian society was via a relationship with the bisexual Venetian philosopher Franceso Algarotti, for whom she left her estranged husband. But of more concern to her contemporaries was her independent travel and vociferous support for women’s independence and freedom. Her smallpox scars were converted by rumor into the symptoms of syphilis, implying punishment for these adventures. (As a side-note, she helped introduce an early version of smallpox inoculation that she encountered in Turkey into English practice.)
Donato provides a detailed chronology of how Bianchi’s text could have come to the attention of Cleland and issues around censorship and suppression of sexually explicit texts both in Italy and England.
If Vizzani’s story is a commentary by Cleland on Montagu, it is not the only one. Somewhat more transparently, the figure of “Lady Bell Travers” in his Memoirs of a Coxcomb is intended to represent her, with a strongly parallel backstory.
Cleland’s editorializing on Bianchi’s text shows a bewilderment with Bianchi’s neutral attitude toward Vizzani’s life and actions. He wonders about Bianchi that “it does not appear that he has assigned any cause whatever, or so much as advanced any probable conjecture on this extravagant turn of her lewdness” and then adds his own speculations on the “cause” of Vizzani’s sexual orientation: that she “had her imagination corrupted early in her youth, either by obscene tales...or by privately listening to the discourses of the women who are too generally corrupt in that country”. Also perhaps “she received an incitement from her constitution...to those vile practices which, being begun in folly, were continued through wickedness.” And finally that “nor is it unreasonable to believe that by degrees this might occasion a preternatural change in the animal spirits and a kind of venereal fury, very remote, and even repugnant to that of her sex.” Cleland could not abide Bianchi’s open acceptance that some women enjoyed sex with women and ran through the entire litany of popular explanations: corruption through exposure, an unnatural constitution, sin, madness. (The one popular explanation that he was unable to claim was abnormal anatomy, since Bianchi made a significant point of refuting this.)
Cleland’s additions also betray anxiety about the possibility that Vizzani’s example could lead other women to consider men unnecessary and superfluous, either by imitating men themselves or by satisfying themselves with female lovers who did so. He appends another anecdote about a “female husband,” framed as being motivated by deception and greed, and adds a reference to a similar case involving “a very vicious woman, in a country that it is not necessary to name” which Donato takes as referring directly to Montagu.
[Note: while I am not entirely convinced by the strong version of Donato’s theory that Cleland’s work was understood at the time as a direct reference to Montagu, this discussion of the deeper background of Bianchi’s work and intentions, as well as the analysis of Cleland’s motivations and his distortions of the text, are a valuable addition to the understanding of Vizzani’s story. I am now desperately interested in whether a more scholarly and literal translation of the original has ever been done. I did a podcast on Vizzani that includes extensive excerpts from Cleland’s edition.]
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Saturday, July 7, 2018 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 61 (previously 24a) - On the Shelf for July 2018 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/07/07 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for July 2018.
I’d like to give a shout-out to all the listeners currently at the Golden Crown Literary Society conference, even though I doubt any of them will be listening to this podcast until later. It’s a pretty jam-packed event.
July is actually a quiet month for me this summer, after the scramble that was May and then catching up from that scramble in June. And then August gets busy again, with the World Science Fiction Convention, although at least this time it’s in driving distance for me rather than involving international travel. I hope to pick up some author interviews at Worldcon, though I haven’t sorted through the details yet.
Author Guest
And speaking of author interviews, this month’s guest will be Justine Saracen, who is a prolific writer of historical and historically inspired fiction. These days she’s best known for her World War II novels, but we also talk about some of her other books that explore earlier eras and the connections they make in history across time.
Publications on the Blog
During June, the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog presented some primary source material about lesbians and love between women, with a few other topics brought along for the ride. I started out with excerpts from the 16th century German Zimmern chronicle, which includes an account of a peasant girl who was known for courting other girls. Her life presented a puzzle for the chronicler, but she doesn’t seem to have been condemned or subject to legal prosecution. The chronicle also includes an account of a trans woman serving as a cook which is equally fascinating in the apparent lack of significant consequences.
This article was followed by extensive excerpts from Brantôme’s Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies. Brantôme was a bit more interested in titillating gossip and sensation than in sober sociological observations, but he provides what is likely to be reasonably reliable information about how lesbian activity among the 16th century French aristocracy was viewed, and even more interestingly, what sort of vocabulary was used to talk about sexual activity. Sorting through the various translations of his work also gives a useful picture of how historical material about women’s same-sex relationships has been quietly suppressed and erased from the historic record.
I took a break from the series of primary texts to celebrate entry number 200 with an article on queer material in Welsh literature over the centuries, and then continued with two excerpts from a sourcebook on 17th century English women’s lives that illustrate same-sex experiences and gender transgression.
July’s accidental theme will be a focus on the 17th and 18th centuries, and in many cases an examination of how same-sex sexuality was used as a social and political tool for managing women’s public lives.
Emma Donoghue looks at how 17th and 18th century texts re-envisioned of lesbians as hermaphrodites and how the association of same-sex activity with physiological otherness was used to manage public understanding.
Clorinda Donato looks at how John Cleland’s translation and revision of the account of Italian lesbian and passing woman Catherine Vizzani can be seen as a veiled attack on his contemporary, celebrity traveler and writer Mary Wortley Montagu.
The next article, by Jacqueline Holler, connects with the previous in terms of how society pathologizes women whose actions they want to condemn for unrelated reasons. It looks at the trial and confessions of a 16th century holy woman, heretic, and sexual outlaw being investigated by the Inquisition in Mexico, and examines the ways that sexual transgression has been linked to heresy and witchcraft across the ages in order to increase the condemnation of each of them.
Susan Lanser’s work has focused on the early modern period, and in the article I cover here she looks at the political implications and uses of women’s same-sex relationships--both platonic and sexual--in 17th century England. How women used networks of same-sex friendships to build political agency and how those networks could also be a context for expressing and normalizing, or concealing, sexual relationships.
Tim Hitchcock’s study of sexualities in 18th century England includes the chapter I cover on the development of homosexual subcultures, with an examination of how men’s and women’s experiences differed during this era.
I’m almost at an end of the collection of short articles that I scheduled for this summer so I’m starting to look ahead to tackling some longer books in preparation for the fall.
Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction
And speaking of books, what do we have coming out this month in the way of new historical fiction?
J B Marsden tackles the fuzzy and difficult intersection of passing women and trans men in the American West in The Travels of Charlie from Sapphire Books. I describe it that way because the blurb identifies the character as becoming “the man she always thought she should have been” and then shifts to masculine pronouns. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t provide a personal evaluation of how this is handled, but if you’re looking for a historical novel that acknowledges the gender issues as well as the sexuality issues, you might want to check this one out. Here’s the blurb: “In 1884, Charlene Dieter needs a new life, away from unwanted male suitors and from Jo, her best friend who has rebuffed her romantic overtures. Charlene finds her new self in “Charlie,” the man she always thought she should have been. Charlie decides to start a new life in Illinois, motivated by letters from a cousin of Charlie’s deceased dad. Kitty McIntire, a young woman managing her prairie farm after her father’s death, also fends off a suitor, John Cameron. John, however, presses on, despite a rival for Kitty’s attentions in cousin Charlie, newly arrived in their small town. Charlie does his best to be a farmer, but sustains injuries that lay him up. Kitty attends him while he recuperates, and they begin to fall in love, when circumstances force Charlie to let Kitty in on his secret. Charlie and Kitty together face the escalating verbal and physical attacks from John, as he tries to get Kitty and her farm for his own purposes. Will John come between the love that Charlie has found with Kitty? How can they, two women in a time that men rule, bring John to justice?”
The two World Wars are always a popular setting for lesbian fiction due to the social disruption and opportunities that wartime afforded. Kelly Wacker’s Holding Their Place from Bold Strokes Books takes advantage of that setting. The blurb says, “It’s 1916 and the end of World War I seems nowhere in sight. Dr. Helen Connery, a reserved British doctor at a field hospital in northern France, knows that a woman surgeon is as good as any man. Working tirelessly to save the lives and limbs of soldiers brought to her from brutal battlefields, she finds herself unexpectedly attracted to a vivacious and enigmatic volunteer ambulance driver. Julia March awakens feelings Helen thought she’d buried long ago. When they are offered a four-day stay by the ocean, a private reprieve from the war provides an opportunity for sexual awakening. Together Helen and Julia discover that goodness, love, and passion can be found in the most unlikely and even dangerous places.”
When dealing with fantasy novels that have a setting inspired by history, but are clearly not set in our own world, I always have the question of where I should draw the line of whether to include them. The next two books fall within that questionable zone and, as usual, I’ve leaned in the inclusive direction for the selfish reason of having more content for this episode.
The third installment of Rebecca Harwell’s “Storm’s Quarry” series, Shadow of the Phoenix from Bold Strokes Books, looks like it falls solidly on the fantasy side, though using imagery inspired by the middle ages. Here’s the blurb: “Nadya and Shay have built a quiet life together away from the island city-state of Storm’s Quarry and their outlaw vigilante identities, the Iron Phoenix and the Shadow Dragon. When that idyllic life is shattered by the arrival of desperate news from home, Nadya and Shay make the difficult choice to return to Storm’s Quarry. They find Storm’s Quarry razed, the blood of the Duke drenching its stone, and the fragile peace with the powerful Kingdom of Wintercress destroyed. With their home in need of its masked protectors once more, Nadya and Shay join the resistance, infiltrate enemy lines, and seek the aid of an old foe in a mad plan to save the city that endangers both their lives and their future together. But in the final battle for the fate of Storm’s Quarry, even their powers may not be enough.”
Natalie Debrabandere’s self-published Thyra's Promise is also a fantasy, but one claiming a specific time and place for the setting, as noted in the blurb. “897 A.D - in the Highlands of Scotland. Thyra of Asger, wild, tough, and beautiful, has just turned twenty-one. Raised like one of the boys by her older brother Bjarke, she has become a strong and proud Viking warrior. Now, all she wants to do is live a life of adventure and travel. When the moody and violent Bjarke fails to take her seriously, Thyra finds someone else who does. Kari Sturlusson, of the Volsung clan, is older, wiser, and commander-in-chief of her people. Over the course of a magical summer, she becomes Thyra’s mentor, her teacher, and her lover. But the Asger and the Volsung share a bitter and cruel history. Winter will bring with it blood, destruction, and devastating heartache. The end of a cycle, and the beginning of a journey; transformation, and a startling choice to make. In the end, will Thyra’s promise hold true?”
And I’m going to claim podcaster’s privilege to mention a book that is not at all historic, being a dystopian near-future thriller. But the author is a good friend of mine whose work I’ve loved in the past, and because it’s coming out from a mainstream press, readers who only follow lesbian publishers may not be aware of it. The book is A Study in Honor by Claire O’Dell, coming out from Harper Collins. The basic premise is a gender-bent Sherlock Holmes re-visioning, with both Holmes and Watson being queer black women. Here’s the blurb: “Dr. Janet Watson knows firsthand the horrifying cost of a divided nation. While treating broken soldiers on the battlefields of the New Civil War, a sniper’s bullet shattered her arm and ended her career. Honorably discharged and struggling with the semi-functional mechanical arm that replaced the limb she lost, she returns to the nation’s capital, a bleak, edgy city in the throes of a fraught presidential election. Homeless and jobless, Watson is uncertain of the future when she meets another black and queer woman, Sara Holmes, a mysterious yet playfully challenging covert agent who offers the doctor a place to stay. Watson’s readjustment to civilian life is complicated by the infuriating antics of her strange new roommate. But the tensions between them dissolve when Watson discovers that soldiers from the New Civil War have begun dying one by one—and that the deaths may be the tip of something far more dangerous, involving the pharmaceutical industry and even the looming election. Joining forces, Watson and Holmes embark on a thrilling investigation to solve the mystery—and secure justice for these fallen soldiers.”
Ask Sappho
Back in May, my sister podcast Les Talk About It had an episode about drag kings, that prompted a historic question about whether there were earlier examples of anything similar to drag king performances before the 20th century, or at least before the burlesque and music hall era that featured cross-gender performers of all types. So this month’s Ask Sappho question is credited to Sheena, our fearless leader here at the Lesbian Talk Show.
Any time you ask the question, “Did X exist in history?” it’s essential to start out by defining, “What do you mean by X?” If the question here is, “Did performers using the term ‘drag king’ exist before the 20th century, the obvious answer is no. The term “drag” to refer to male actors wearing female clothing hasn’t been dated earlier than 1870. The named occupation of drag queen came later, and the use of the parallel term drag king even later than that. So we can set aside the question of terminology and come up with a functional definition.
Here’s the definition that it seems most useful to use in searching for earlier examples: a type of performer who identifies as female and has a physiologically female body who creates an explicit performance portraying a male character, usually in a theatrical context, where the audience is aware of the performer’s gender and where part of the attraction of the performance is the contrast between performer and role.
There are some other aspects to the current drag king phenomenon that are better treated as optional if we’re looking for historic roots. Currently, the target audience for drag kings is typically assumed to be female, but we’re going to exclude a lot of interesting historic examples if require that. Another aspect is the question of whether one purpose of the performance is erotic attraction. I think we can make this optional, because it would be hard to argue that erotic attraction has been an essential historic aspect of drag queen performances. So it seems unfair to require it of the female equivalent. But it does seem to be the case that drag king-like performers in past ages inevitably bring an aspect of erotic attraction, due to gendered differences in how cross-gender play is interpreted.
Given these parameters, we can exclude examples where a physiologically female person moves through the world in a male role, either for reasons of gender identity or to enable economic or romantic goals, where the people they’re interacting with are not meant to be aware of the performance. Another category that we may want to examine more closely would be women playing male theatrical roles in an all-female context, such as schools or convents, where it is less of a specific professional choice to play a cross-gender role. But that line gets tricky to draw.
This survey isn’t going to be exhaustive by any means. It’s just a set of examples I can call up easily from my existing research.
One of the recent articles I covered in the blog looks at a social role that developed in the Caliphal court of Baghdad beginning in the 9th century. The story goes that the Caliph had such a definite sexual preference for young men and eunuchs that the hereditary succession was in danger. So his mother took action and had some of his concubines dress up in male clothing to see if they could better entice him. The word ghulāmīyāt means “boy-like” but the aesthetic that developed for the ghulāmīyāt aimed for the transition from boyhood to adulthood, including painting on false moustaches among other cosmetic idiosyncrasies like writing poetic verses on their cheeks. In general, these institutionalized cross-gender roles--both the ghulāmīyāt and a parallel role of men performing female roles--did not aim for “passing” as such, but for a blending of gender signifiers. For a ghulāmīyā, this included license to behave in masculine-coded ways, in addition to the visual presentation, as indicated in praise poetry addressed to them which mentions intellectual, musical, and sporting pursuits more usually associated with men.
Ghulāmīyāt were almost always slaves attached to the court or to the aristocracy, though there are rare mentions of free ghulāmīyāt. This means that the role was normally an imposed one, rather than a personal gender expression, and it was separate from accounts of “masculine” free women who adopted male attire and pursued martial exploits (a category not associated with same-sex interests), or with accounts of female same-sex behavior which are most typically mentioned in connection with enslaved women. There are no references to the ghulāmīyāt being associated with lesbian behavior.
So with the exception that the target audience of the ghulāmīyāt being men and not women, I think we can count them as playing a similar role to drag kings.
A recent article I covered discussed gender play in the context of medieval tournaments, and how men would perform cross-gender roles as part of pageantry along with roles that crossed the class boundary and the secular-religious boundary. Examples of women participating in gender play at tournaments are rarer, but here are two that fit our guidelines of an overt cross-gender performance.
The first is literary rather than historical, being part of a 13th century German chivalric romance. In this story, the men of a town are away negotiating a peace treaty and the women decide to hold a tournament in their absence, each taking on the name and appearance of a male relative and participating in the tournament as a man. I’m not so certain that I’d count this as a proto drag king performance because the intent doesn’t seem to have been to perform as a man, so much as to perform as a knight. And to be a knight, at least in the usual sense, one needed first to be a man. But it does fit the requirement that the performance was overt rather than for the purpose of disguise, and that they women involved were deliberately playing a role rather than expressing an identity.
The second tournament example comes from real life (at least as presented), and was discussed recently on the blog where I included the original primary source. In the mid 14th century, in Britain, a group of women showed up at a tournament “as though they were a company of players, dressed in men's clothes of striking richness and variety.” If we take the account at face value, this was not a serious attempt to be taken for men, but rather to be clearly women dressed as men--just as the male cross-dressing at tournaments was never meant to be taken literally. And here we seem to have the element of erotic attraction as part of the performance. Or at least the chronicler felt this was a consequence, for he notes they “wantonly and disgracefully displayed their bodies.” We should keep in mind the stark differences in male and female fashion in this era, with women’s dresses being long and loose, concealing the legs entirely, while men’s clothing had recently become short and very revealing of the legs, which were encased in skin-tight hose. So a female body in male clothing was far more revealed in shape than expected.
In pre-modern times, it was unusual for a woman to openly wear male garments in her everyday life. At least, unusual for her to do so with no consequence. But sartorial gender transgression might mean adopting specific garments that were coded as male. There is a long history of women adopting male upper garments while continuing to wear skirts and this was often treated as if it were as daring as wearing an entire male outfit. In late 16th and 17th century England, there was something of a “gender panic” around people of both genders wearing specific styles and garments that were considered to belong to the other.
Few went as far in this regard as Mary Frith, more commonly known as Moll Cutpurse. Given how she was portrayed on stage in her own lifetime, this does seem to have gone as far as wearing trousers rather than skirts. But if we’re considering Moll Cutpurse as a proto drag king, I think we have to question whether this counts as a theatrical performance, as opposed to being a full-time expression of personal identity. On the other hand, she often treated her life as a theatrical performance, so perhaps we should credit her after all.
In my initial definition, I’ve more or less excluded women who passed as men in the context of military service, since by definition it was not an overt performance but a covert one. But there’s one context where I think such women might be considered to cross over into proto drag king territory. Reactions to such women, if they were discovered, where mixed. Sometimes being strongly negative, but sometimes viewing their actions as praiseworthy and patriotic, although still unacceptable. Some women, such as Hannah Snell, who served in the British military in the mid 18th century, turned her forced retirement into a theatrical profession. She appeared on stage in her male uniform, performing military drills and singing songs. She also sold her story to a publisher and found other ways to parlay her history into something of a living. So although she may have entered military service for economic reasons--and there are no clear indications that there was a question of gender identity--I think we can consider that her conversion of that notoriety into theatrical celebrity puts her squarely into the drag king camp.
When people think of cross-gender performance in the context of medieval and Renaissance theater, they most often think of the prohibition on women on stage in 16th century England that laid the groundwork for some of the convoluted gender play in Shakespeare’s works. But it didn’t take long after women entered the profession for them to turn the tables and begin playing male roles on stage. Beginning at least in the 18th century, actresses began claiming male parts openly. In many cases one of their goals was to use the erotic attraction of the ability to display the shape of their bodies more fully in order to advance their careers. But there are also notable examples where the female audience were eager consumers of that display.
18th century English performer Charlotte Charke was famous for playing male roles on stage. And if she doesn’t perfectly fit the guidelines set out for our proto drag kings, it’s only in that masculine performance shaded over into her everyday life as well. In fact, there are valid arguments to consider whether she may be reasonably classified as trans-masculine rather than viewing her masculinity purely as theatrical performance. She spent several periods living as a man full time in various non-theatrical professions, and at other times went about in male clothing semi-openly, or at least with the awareness of the women she associated with. She definitely used her masculine presentation to flirt with women, even apart from as possible long-term romantic relationship. I think she’s in a gray zone for several reasons, but somewhere in the drag king ancestry.
I did a previous podcast about 19th century American actress Charlotte Cushman, who was also celebrated for her male roles on stage. I think she fits the guidelines much more clearly, as there is little question that she identified as a woman, and her sartorial gender play off-stage tended to be limited to accessories rather than full outfits. Her male roles, and especially her Romeo, can definitely be viewed as drag king-like performances. A great deal of the appeal--especially for her female fans--was the dual knowledge that she was a woman performing a male role.
For a more direct precursor to the drag king profession, Clare Sears, in her study of cross-dressing in 19th century San Francisco, looks at the whole range of professional cross-gender performance, from tourist-oriented burlesque and “freak” shows that focused on shock and titillation, to “gender illusionists” who held a tenuous position as respected artists. This included performers such as male impersonator Ella Wesner appearing in 1871--about whom the newspapers lamented that perhaps it was better that she was performing in male-only venues or all the women would certainly fall in love with her.
I hope this gives a few snapshots of theatrical gender impersonation across the centuries that gives a rich and deep background to the profession of drag king.
Show Notes
Your monthly update on what the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has been doing.
In this episode we talk about:
- Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- The Zimmern Chronicle
- Brantôme’s Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies
- “From Huw Arwystli to Siôn Eirian” by MIhangel Morgan, queer Welsh literature
- Primary source material for the study of 17th century English women
- Emma Donoghue looks at the intersection of the motifs of hermaphrodite and lesbian in 17-18th century England
- Clorinda Donato considers John Cleland’s translation of the life of Catherine VIzzani as a satirical attack on Mary Wortley Montagu
- Jacqueline Holler considers the trial confessions of a 16th c Mexican holy woman, heretic, and sexual outlaw
- Susan Lanser discusses the political implications of women’s same-sex relationships in 17th century England
- Tim Hitchcock looks at homosexual subcultures in 18th century England
- Announcing this month’s author guest, Justine Saracen
- New and forthcoming fiction
- Ask Sappho: Sheena asks, "Were there 'drag king' performances before the 20th century?"
- Rowson 2003 Gender Irregularity as Entertainment: Institutionalized Transvestism at the Caliphal Court in Medieval Baghdad
- Westphal-Wihl 1989 “The Ladies’ Tournament: Marriage, Sex, and Honor in Thirteenth-Century Germany”
- Knighton 1995 Knighton’s Chronicle 1337-1396
- Mary Frith aka Moll Cutpurse
- Hannah Snell
- Straub, Kristina. 1991. “The Guilty Pleasures of Female Theatrical Cross-Dressing and the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke”
- Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 19d - Charlotte Cushman
- Sears, Clare. 2015. Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco.
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Twitter: @heatherosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
Major category:
LHMPMonday, July 2, 2018 - 07:00
This article, written in 1993 (which I will remind readers is 25 years ago) feels rather outdated with regard to both the language and views of the topic. This article was published two years before Donoghue’s masterwork Passions Between Women and no doubt represents some of the contributory research and thought that appears there. But given that the topic would be best considered through multiple lenses--not only a lesbian lens, but a transgender one and and intersex one--it should be considered an introduction to a topic that deserves deeper interrogation. That said, some of the primary sources that create the early modern image of the tribadic hermaphrodite are worth a closer look for those interested in portraying not only views of women who loved women in that era, but the context of ordinary interactions that they were considered to deviate from.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Donoghue, Emma. 1993. “Imagined More than Women: Lesbians as Hermaphrodites” in Women’s History Review 2:2 199-216.
Publication summary:
A survey of the intersecting concepts of the hermaphrodite and the tribade in 17-18th century British writing.
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
This article, written in 1993 (which I will remind readers is 25 years ago) feels rather outdated with regard to both the language and views of the topic. This article was published two years before Donoghue’s masterwork Passions Between Women and no doubt represents some of the contributory research and thought that appears there. But given that the topic would be best considered through multiple lenses--not only a lesbian lens, but a transgender one and and intersex one--it should be considered an introduction to a topic that deserves deeper interrogation. That said, some of the primary sources that create the early modern image of the tribadic hermaphrodite are worth a closer look for those interested in portraying not only views of women who loved women in that era, but the context of ordinary interactions that they were considered to deviate from.
# # #
The general topic of this article is the ways in which women who had sex with women in 17-18th century Britain were marginalized from the category of “women” via the imagined figure of the hermaphrodite, combining in the image of the tribade who was endowed with a penis-equivalent, either in the form of an enlarged clitoris or sometimes a prolapsed vagina capable of performing penetration. This article traces that image through various genres of literature, both popular and professional.
In early modern Britain “romantic friendships” between women were tolerated and even encouraged as long as they were considered non-sexual, and prosecutions for lesbianism, per se, were practically unknown. But a variety of other means were available for persecuting women who had sex with women, especially social satire. Women who passed as men, including those who married women--of which there are a surprisingly large number, when you dig though the evidence--were obvious targets for overtly transgressing the rigid gender boundaries. But lesbian activity was a motivation for accusations of gender abnormality even when cross-dressing wasn’t involved.
The idea of the hermaphrodite as a person with intermediate or indeterminate physiological sex had a long tradition with many changes over the centuries in how hermaphrodites were understood, defined, and regarded. Homophobia was a regular factor in attitudes toward hermaphrodites due to the problem of defining what constituted “natural” sexual activity for a hermaphrodite.
[Note: The historic concept of the hermaphrodite sometimes focused on physiology and thus corresponds to intersex conditions, but sometimes it focused on gender performance that transgressed heteronormative norms, and thus encompassed homosexual behavior. Because of these shifting definitions, it’s more useful to use the outmoded--and admittedly potentially offensive--term “hermaphrodite” as used in the historic texts under consideration, than to try to substitute a less offensive modern term that would fail to reflect the necessary ambiguity.]
In the early modern period, where “sodomy” had shifted to being used almost exclusively for men, the sexual implications of hermaphroditism had become attached almost exclusively to women, and specifically to the image of the tribade. That attachment went both ways: persons identified as hermaphrodites were assumed to be involved in tribadism, and women who engaged in sex with women were assumed to have hermaphroditic anatomy. Within this conflation, contradictory positions were asserted that female homosexual activity caused hermaphroditic anatomy, but also that hermaphroditic anatomy drove one to desiring homosexual relationships. By this means, women who had sex with women could be classified out of the category of “normal women” thus isolating them as freaks of nature and protecting the category “woman” as being inherently heterosexual.
But there is no clear progression of theory. Both contradictory positions regularly show up in the same texts. At the same time, many of the authors express doubts over whether “hermaphrodite” as a physiological category actually existed at all. (There are regular cases of women who had sex with women being examined to determine if they were hermaphrodites with a negative result, but the lack of the expected physiology never seemed to undermine the theory.) Medical manuals sometimes tried to develop specific metrics for how the “normal” clitoris should appear.
The primary category of texts discussing hermphroditism are medical manuals (or sometimes pseudo-medical literature that was intended more to titillate). Although these can be a useful source of information about lesbian activity in history, the works themselves are generally hostile in tone. Classical sources such as Lucian and Martial contributed to the position that if a woman made love to a woman she was, by definition, imitating a man. These texts also laid the groundwork for the confused causality. (Is a woman called a hermaphrodite because she has sex with women or does she have sex with women because she’s already a hermaphrodite?)
The legal implications of these theories, as well as the law’s role in enforcing gender performance, can be seen in an anecdote reported in the Supplement to the Onania about a person living in Toulouse who was initially described as having a prolapsed vagina that “some pretended...she had abused it that way.” That is, that she had used it to perform penetrative sex. Examining physicians gave their opinion that the organ was actually a true penis and that therefore the person was male, at which the magistrates ordered the person to “go in man’s habit.” Evidently the visual evidence was questionable enough that the subject of this pronouncement began making a living by exhibiting themself as a freak, whereupon contradictory medical opinions asserted that they were a woman after all and the prolapse could be cured. This cure was apparently effective, but “she [was] forced to resume her female dress, to her great regret.”
This anecdote demonstrates many of the confusions and contradictions around the topic. [Unremarked in the commentary is the role of personal gender identity suggested by the phrase “to her great regret”. But transgender readings were not as much a part of the awareness in sexuality research of the ‘90s.] The focus of the anecdote is on the question of correct diagnosis, based not only on anatomy but on desires and behavior. The subject must either be fit into the box of “male” and their behavior presentation required to match their apparent anatomy and desire for women, or they must be fit into the box of “female” and the anatomy treated to conform to expectations (and presumably the sexual desire be suppressed).
A similar case of shifting requirements and definitions imposed on an ambiguous person by the medical, legal, and religious authorities is that of Anne Grandjean in 18th century Grenoble. The teenaged Anne told her confessor that she experienced sexual desire for girls, whereupon her confessor told her that if she desired women she must actually be a man and should dress as one. (This approach follows a metric for hermaphrodites that dates back to Aristotle, where he directed that a hermaphrodite’s gender should be defined based on how they could best be fit into a heteronormative paradigm.) [Note: Anne Grandjean’s example is a good place to consider the difficulties of distinguishing transgender identity from an imposed transgender performance, whether it was imposed by external authorities as in this case, or by the paradigms available in the society for expressing same-sex desire.]
Stories like these are found in English literature in increasing numbers in the late 17th century. The 1678 publication Wonders of the Little World had a chapter entitled “Such Persons as have changed their Sex” detailing 24 cases from classical to contemporary sources. All but one of the 24 cases involved a change from female to male--a direction that was framed as the more logical as it was consider a change from the “less perfect (woman)” to the “more perfect (man)”. Donoghue notes that focusing on female-to-male stories also avoided the anxiety-provoking image of the loss of a penis. [Note: As is often the case, this observation is not discussed in the context of several hormonally-based intersex conditions which can, in fact, result in an assigned-female body developing a penis in adolescence.]
Medical theories on women with a hermaphroditical “penis-analogue” organ shifted from considering the organ to be a prolapsed vagina in the 16-17th centuries, to considering it to be an enlarged clitoris in the 17-18th centuries. Several stories in Wonders of the Little World involved the prolapsing of the vagina during sex and especially in connection with the breaking of the hymen (with both heterosexual and homosexual activity being possible of causing this). But this motif disappears from the literature after the early 18th century.
The clitoral theory appears in parallel earlier, but becomes the predominant model beginning in the late 17th century in texts such as Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book (1671). This theory focused on the understanding of the clitoris as a source of sexual pleasure and assigned it the ability to become enlarged and erect due to stimulation, moving into hermaphrodite territory if it became large enough to be capable of penetration.
Authors, such as Sinibaldus in his Rare Verities (1687), did not necessarily assert this as a change of sex, even when it offered the possibility of enacting what was considered a man’s role in sex. He notes, “Wherefore heretofore there hath been laws enacted against feminine congression, because it is a thing that happens too common and frequent.” Despite the presence of a penis-analogue, but act is still considered “feminine congression”. But Sinibaldus, like Sharp, considered that lesbian desire was caused by deviant anatomy.
The opposite position--that deviant anatomy was caused by lesbian activity--was a concern of moralists such as the Italian monk Sinistrari, who discussed the definition of female sodomy, concluding that sodomy could only occur between women if there were a clitoris large enough to accomplish penetration. This became a significant preoccupation of the “enlarged clitoris” school of thought. The Onania has several stories (purportedly reported by the women involved) of how excessively engaging in trabadism resulted in permanent enlargement of the clitoris.
[Note: Donoghue mentions that the idea of clitoral penetration lingered “well into the nineteenth century” but the motif showed up being treated as a serious medical observation even as late as the 1960s in David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. Doing a fact-check on that item has reminded me of just how awful that book was, and now I need to go bleach my brain.]
Racism was another aspect of “othering” lesbian activity in the early modern period. British writers who wanted to mock lesbianism as decadent would assign it to the Italian or French aristocracy. When they mocked it as a product of gender segregation, they would locate their stories in Turkish baths, Persian harems, or French convents. The normalization of women driven by enlarged clitorises was transposed to India or Africa. (Stories of female genital mutilation were used as “proof” that the women in question must have enlarged genitalia that required removal. But note that one of the stories in the Onania about a woman with an enlarged clitoris in England ended with a claim that she had needed to have it surgically removed. And this is not the only example of female genital mutilation performed as "medical necessity" in early modern Europe.) By this means, the examples of lesbian activity in Britain could be dismissed as isolated eccentricities, not part of a normal range of variation.
With the rise of the enlarged clitoris theory of lesbianism, the term “tribade” became equated with clitoral penetration (in contrast to its earlier implication of simply rubbing the genitals together). But the question of causation was still unresolved. Donoghue quotes a number of different sources that alternate (often within the same text) between considering that lesbian activity resulted in enlargement of the clitoris, or that an enlarged clitoris--stimulated by regular casual rubbing by clothing--resulted in excessive desire (which evidently could only be satisfied by women?). In addition to a number of stories from The Supplement to the Onania, anecdotes are offered from Giles Jacob’s A Treatise of Hermaphrodites (1718). The latter in particular includes a number of detailed near-pornographic stories that suggest the normality of women engaging in sexual relations together with only penetration becoming problematic, although the anecdotes can’t be considered positive in any way.
The “lesbian as hermaphrodite” also appears in literature of the 18th century, as in Anthony Hamilton’s Memoirs of the Count Grammont with its predatory, mannish Mistress Hobart. Mistress Hobart’s desires are treated as fairly harmless by the other court ladies until rumors circulate implying that Hobart was a hermaphrodite with an organ that might be capable not only of penetration but of causing pregnancy.
Hermaphrodite imagery also features in William King’s vicious satire The Toast in which “Myra” (a transparent stand-in for his target, the Duchess of Newburgh) is mocked as a bisexually promiscuous hermaphrodite, surrounded by a train of “tribades and lesbians,” and described in terms of physical monstrosity. Toward the end of the poem, Myra is granted an actual penis by the goddess Venus, to better suit her desires.
Donoghue concludes with one more positive literary take on hermaphroditic imagery in connection with same-sex desire: the poem by Aphra Behn that is the source of the article’s title. Behn praises her subject as being desirable both as woman and as a youth, framing this as a way to excuse desire by a woman for another woman. This turns the hermaphrodite argument around, as gender ambiguity becomes the basis for being desired by both genders, rather than desiring both.
Event / person:
Sunday, July 1, 2018 - 11:29
Still catching up on my review backlog.
Agnes Moor’s Wild Knight by Alyssa Cole (self published?, 2014)
When I was reading Bernadette Andrea’s The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture, I spotted a reference to Elen More, a black woman in the early 16th century Scottish court, and instantly realized, OMG, that’s the inspiration for that story I saw among Alyssa Cole’s publications! And then the chance of spotting the ebook on sale led me to pick it up, because I loved Cole’s story in the collection Hamilton’s Battalion.
So...this is not at all a criticism of Agnes Moor's Wild Knight itself, but it was a useful calibration of what my tolerance is regarding the ratio of story to sex in historical fiction. This is a relatively short novella. The writing is technically excellent and the history is solidly portrayed. The depiction of the experience of a black woman in 16th century Britain felt solid and nuanced. But structurally, the story felt like it had just barely enough world-building to justify setting up the sex scenes. And since I wasn’t there for the sex scenes, I didn’t get my story fix. It isn’t at all a criticism of the story because clearly there are a lot of readers who are looking for exactly this sort of balance. But it’s not for me and I’ve adjusted my buy-reflexes accordingly.
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ReviewsSaturday, June 30, 2018 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 60 (previously 23e) - Inscribed by V. M. Agab - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/06/30 - listen here)
Welcome to the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast’s second original fiction offering! This story comes to you from the Italian Renaissance, set in Venice. The gender politics of 15th century Italy were, in some ways, very rigid and circumscribed, but in the places where those structures fractured, there was space for people to claim a space of their own. Inscribed is a story of just such a space, when two women find that the world doesn’t have a place for the directions their lives have turned, but perhaps--just perhaps--they can create one together.
We are immensely proud that our author, V. M. Agab, is making her professional fiction debut on the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast. She lives in Brooklyn, with her parents and three wonderfully annoying siblings. When she isn’t babysitting, she writes fanfiction to soothe the soul, and occasionally blogs for Women and Words. She is currently working on a novel of the queer persuasion and is getting ready to start graduate school this fall to pursue writing as a career.
Our narrator for this story is Ann Etter. She is an avid reader who finds that narration is the perfect blend of her love of acting with her love for the printed page and she, too, blogs occasionally for Women and Words. Her day job involves numbers and tax forms. She says, she especially enjoyed this story as it hearkened back to her college days studying medieval history. Ann has three children and two grandchildren and loves home improvement projects. She is a native of New Hampshire and has lived in Minnesota for over 25 years.
This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.
Inscribed
By V.M. Agab
The small room smelled of paper and ink, and salt from the canals and waterways. Every surface sat covered in stacks of documents, precariously leaning against each other and the walls. The early morning sunlight fought a losing battle to get through a particularly large stack resting before the window, only slivers managing to get through, making the papers look orange and glowing where the light touched them.
Luca sat at the table, the only cleared surface in the room, a feather in her grip, the bristles reflecting the light of the small candle that illuminated her work. The knife slid through the tip with a skillful flick of the wrist, and the translucent shavings fell to the floor as she shaped the pen’s nib. She could hear the thick crowds of Venice outside her study, and the creaking of her father’s footsteps echoed from the front of the shop. He was probably sweeping the entrance as he usually did around breakfast time every day, his swollen joints making it painful to hold even the broom. She pictured her father at this very table only a couple years ago, hands already worsening by the time she was old enough to retain memories. She wondered if her own fingers would grow crippled with age, bent and mangled.
She sat back when the feather tip was to her liking and stretched her arms over her head, intertwining her black, ink-stained fingers as she groaned in relief, before leaning in and taking a blank sheet of paper. She took out a near empty jar of powdered lampblack and the mortar, the smooth rock familiar in her palm, and mixed the ink, diluting the black dust and stirring it as skillfully as she wielded her knife and pen. She took comfort in the familiar movements, her eyes scanning the document she was about to copy. The lettering on the paper in front of her was faded and the parchment had seen better days. Wherever the owner of the documents stored them made a mess of them, and Luca had spent the past week working for hours to rewrite the stack of records. She put the mortar on the table and started scribing, mentally noting to stop by the cartolaio and purchase more paper from the merchant.
She wrote until the mixed ink ran out and wiped the tip of the feather on a rag. The carefully laid out sheets dried on the side as she tidied her workstation, rinsing out the mortar and pestle in the small bowl she kept on the floor by one of the table legs. The water swirled with the dredges of dried ink and darkened as it diluted. She looked outside and noticed the sun. Her stomach growled as the aroma of yesterday’s stew drifted through the door. She carefully placed the mortar and the jar of lampblack back in their places, stretched again, and went to join her father for the meal.
He sat in the same chair he had sat in for nearly twenty years, and Luca took her own seat, the two of them glancing at the only other chair in the room, empty for nearly three months now. Luca ignored the grief for her dead mother and set about pouring her father the wine she picked up last week. They ate in silence until her father finished his cup and reached for the wine pitcher, nearly dropping it as his weak grip carried it to him.
“We need help, Luca,” her father said, watching the red liquid swirl in his refilled cup. Luca watched a few bubbles pop and then glanced back at her father.
“You know why we can’t. If anyone finds out I’m not a man, who will the business go to?”
“You can run it as a woman. You can get married. Have children. You can live happily,” he said, his rough voice getting rougher by the moment. “I regret ever making this ridiculous plan. We would have been okay with you as yourself, not as this…this boy.”
“No, we would have been poor and starving, and I would never be as happy as I am now. I don’t want a husband anyway.”
“Then what will we do? You can’t work alone forever. We’re scribes, we will always be busy.”
“Don’t worry about it, papa. I’ll figure it out. We’ll be fine.”
The rest of the meal went by in silence. The empty space that Luca’s mother left felt larger than ever, and the pain of watching her father’s regrets made her stomach ache. She stood up and grabbed her doublet. She checked that the rolled-up fabric in the crotch of her hose didn’t shift, rearranging it slightly, and when she looked sufficiently manly she walked out of the room and through the front door of the house.
“I’m going to the paper merchant,” she yelled to her father, who still sat at the table, his food barely touched.
The streets were crowded, and the smell of the water was strong enough to distract her as she walked down the walkways, and over a bridge. The small store sat nestled between two others, the graceful arches of the buildings looking worse for wear. The windows seemed grimy in places and a door hinge was loose enough for the door to get stuck as Luca walked in. The familiar smells of paper and parchment greeted her, and she heard people move around in the back.
“Signore Rosso,” Luca called out.
Boots resounded on the wooden floor and a portly man, a head shorter than Luca, walked in. His colorful hose left very little to the imagination as they strained against his belly and legs, and his linen shirt was soaked through with sweat. Luca felt hot just looking at the man with his red face and somewhat labored breathing.
“Luca!” Francesco Rosso greeted, “what can I do for you?”
“I need some paper, Signore Francesco,” Luca said, grinning.
“You’re a funny boy, Luca, a funny boy.”
Francesco went into the back room again, bringing out a roll of pristine sheet, rolling it out a bit. “This one is good, holds the ink nicely.”
“Do you have any from my last order left? I need a few more pages of that one.”
“I’ll check, but I’m telling you, this one is better. And I got it for cheap, so I’ll sell it to you for twenty-five soldi,” Francesco said, his voice receding as he shuffled around in the back.
“How about twenty,” Luca asked. She was sure she heard the man mumble ‘funny boy’, but before she could argue farther Francesco’s daughter walked in, carrying a plate with her father’s food. Luca watched her pause a moment as Coletta realized that Luca was by the counter. “Hello, Coletta,” Luca said, voice growing softer as the girl’s brown eyes met her own.
“Good day, Signore Zancani.”
“Just Luca is fine.”
The two looked at each other, Coletta holding the plate, and Luca fiddling with hands, unable to keep them still. Francesco walked back in, holding a few cut pages out for Luca to see. Snapping back to attention, Luca took the papers, hoping Signore Rosso didn’t notice her reddening cheeks, and nodded.
“I’ll take both.” Luca watched from the corner of her eye as Coletta put the plate on the table, and after her father kissed her temple affectionately but in dismissal, briskly left without another glance, her head down.
“Twenty-three soldi,” Francesco said.
“You’re a funny man, Signore Rosso,” Luca said and put the coins on the counter, taking the loose pages and the roll of new paper with her as Francesco laughed.
Once she got back home, her father nowhere to be seen, Luca got back to work. She mixed more ink, using the last of the lampblack, and scribed more pages. When her right hand grew tired, she switched to her left. The comfort of using her dominant hand gave her small boost, and the last pages were done before she even realized it. She reached over to put her pen down, praising herself for a job well done, when her palm grazed against the still wet ink, smudging several lines. She jerked her hand away and hit the inkwell, tipping it over. Black stains spread on the drying pages, puddles growing as the ink seeped through the pages.
“Damn, rotten table!” Luca growled as the ink trickled onto her hose, staining the fabric around her thighs. She grabbed the bowl on the floor and swept the ink into it, getting as much of it as possible into the water and away from her work. She patted the ruined pages dry and salvaged what she could.
Hands stained and hose ruined, Luca kicked the chair, its clatter thundering against the floor as it fell. An entire day of work ruined. The sun was nearly set, and Luca was sure that she could get a page or two redone tonight if only she could get some more ink powder. Signore Rosso would be closing soon if he weren’t already. She put the bowl back and hastily rolled down her sleeves before throwing on her doublet on her way out of the house.
The Venetian streets were still crowded, young men coming out in droves to taverns and brothels. Luca walked briskly down the street, steering clear of already inebriated groups littering the walkways, swaying over ledges and under threat to drop into the waterways at any moment. Several gondolas drifted by, and birds flocked over the exposed evening sky visible from between the narrow streets. Luca rushed across a bridge and towards the familiar building, its windows dark and the door closed. She jogged up to it, trying the door, and leaned her forehead against it when it didn’t move, her short hair tickling her jaw and cheeks.
The sounds of distant laughter and faint music in the streets drifted away as the voices from within the house reached her ears. The voice belonged Signore Rosso, she was sure, and he sounded mad. She never heard the portly man raise his tone above the jovial conversational one Luca grew so used to, and it was in her confusion that she didn’t immediately move away and give them the privacy they obviously thought they had.
“What will people say, who will marry you now?” he shouted, “Give me a name, I’ll strangle the bastardo with my own two hands.”
Jealousy punched Luca in the gut, and irrational anger flared. She felt stupid for liking Coletta. She felt stupid for not thinking what liking her meant, and just how broken hearted she would end up. Luca really should have left, she really wanted to.
Francesco kept shouting at his daughter, the sounds of his palm slamming on furniture to punctuate his words interspersed the argument. With each moment his voice got louder and louder.
“You useless, shameful woman. No dowry in the world will fix this. You ruined this family!” The sharp crack of wood replaced his words and then silence. Luca’s heart pounded, and her hand reached for the door knob.
“Go to your room. And I want his name,” he said, voice growing loud again.
Luca heard the fast steps on the stairs, and then the voice of Francesco’s wife.
“Francesco,” Signora Rosso said softly enough that Luca could barely hear it. And then Francesco began to weep.
Luca turned away from the door, the shame of having overheard the private conversation overshadowed by the disgrace of the plan forming in her head. She shook her head, told herself it wasn’t a smart idea, that it would only cause more problems. Then with a deep breath and an exhaled groan she turned back and looked up at the building. The dancing light from a candle illuminated one of the windows and with a glance around the empty street, Luca began to climb, cursing herself with every handhold, and praying that she’d slip and fall, and go home instead.
As her stained hands reached the window, fingers aching and tiny scrapes leaving red and white streaks in the blackened skin of her palm, she pushed on the glass, nearly losing her grip. Her fingers squeaked against the surface and she cursed as she clung on. A face appeared in the window and she nearly screamed, if only she wasn’t breathless and strained. Coletta’s shocked face stayed in place as she opened the window, and Luca pulled herself up, remembering at the last moment to soften her steps.
“Well that was a climb,” she whispered airily, bending over and heaving. She straightened up after a moment and wiped the sweat off her face with her sleeve. The room was miniscule, and there was barely any space for the two of them to stand in a comfortable distance. A bed sat in one corner, and a small stool that doubled as a shelf was next to it. A chest stood at the foot of the bed.
“What are you doing here, Signore Zancani?”
Luca looked up at her, raising a brow.
“Fine, what are you doing here Luca?”
Now that she really was here, and doing this, all sense of panic she’d felt in her climb changed into trepidation. Coletta stood before her, eyes red-rimmed, and cheeks splotchy. She looked smaller than she did this afternoon, scared and helpless. This was a terrible idea. It was beyond terrible, but Luca’s father was tired, Luca was drowning in isolation, and Coletta’s life was about to change no matter what happened.
“I overheard your family,” she said cautiously, “and I want to help you.”
“What?” Coletta’s voice broke, voice growing hoarse with new tears. “Were you eavesdropping? You- you…!” She stared Luca down angrily, an uneasy feat with how much taller Luca was.
“I didn’t mean to, I swear,” Luca said. “But look, I… I think we can try something. Something that might fix all this.”
“What?” Coletta asked, tears rolling down her furious face.
“First, I just want you to know that I am serious about this, and that what I’m about to propose is just as important to me as I feel it will be to you. You might not think so now, but I will have everything riding on this plan if I share it with you, so please, hear me out.”
Coletta turned away and moved to her bed, sitting on its edge. She leaned her head into her arms and rocked once before sitting back up and wiping her tears away. Luca took a moment to herself and leaned against the window frame instead of coming closer to Coletta. She figured Coletta would need as much space as Luca could offer after her plan was revealed.
“My name is Luca, and I am a scribe, but I’m not…a man.”
Luca waited for Coletta’s reaction, watching her closely. The young woman looked back at her, brows furrowed, face confused.
“My father needed an apprentice, and we couldn’t afford one, so he raised me as his son.”
The silence stretched. The shuffling of Coletta’s parents downstairs was muffled by the walls and the gentle sound of rippling water drifted in from the window.
“You see why I can’t get a wife, yes?” Luca asked, palms sweating. Coletta wasn’t saying anything, just boring her gaze into Luca’s. “And now we can, I don’t know, work together maybe?”
Coletta watched Luca, and Luca watched Coletta. Nothing moved. Blood rushed in Luca’s ears as her heart beat fast. She could feel her temples and throat pulse. And then, Coletta looked down to Luca’s hose.
Red seeped into Luca’s cheeks and the tips of her ears were burning. She shifted in her spot, leaning her weight from one foot to another and refrained her hands from covering herself. “It’s, uh, it’s just fabric.”
“What happened to your hose?” Coletta asked, pointing to the dark stains on Luca’s thighs.
“That’s why I came here in the first place, I spilled all my ink.”
Coletta nodded, and then slowly looked down at the floor, thinking.
Luca cleared her throat. “My shop gets good business. The church wants to hire me to scribe an antiphonary, and I have regular contracts with the court and a few important families. I can provide for you, and you can help me keep up appearances. …I can help you raise this child.” Luca realized she said the wrong thing as she was saying it, and the anguish on Coletta’s face as she cradled her waist was enough for Luca to change her mind. She dropped her gaze, unable to look Coletta in the eyes any longer. “Just forget it. I’m sorry for asking, I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll leave you alone.” She turned back to the window and just as she was about to climb back over she stopped. “Please,” she whispered into the night, “just keep my secret.”
She swung her leg out, bracing herself for the climb down, when she felt a hand on her arm.
“How will this work?” Coletta asked. It was a plea, and Luca exhaled and got back inside.
“Tell your father it was me.”
“He’ll murder you,” Coletta said urgently.
“Well, how else can we do this?” Luca asked. She felt exasperated and exhausted. She just wanted to buy some ink.
Coletta rubbed her forehead and then her head shot up. “Do you have enough for a dowry?”
“I can scrape together maybe twenty ducats,” Luca said, worry pulling at her. Would it be enough for Signore Rosso?
“Twenty?” Coletta said in a breathy voice.
“I’m sorry, that’s all I have right now.”
“No, that is more than my father ever hoped to get,” she whispered, and Luca shrugged, not knowing what to say. Colette gestured to her stomach, still flat as far as Luca could see. “You have to tell him about this yourself.”
“Me?” she squeaked, “Why me?”
“Because if I tell him, he’ll go to your house with an axe, but if you come here yourself then maybe he’ll be okay with it. You have to pretend that you don’t know he knows, and then ask him for permission to marry me. That way it seems like you’re taking responsibility.”
Luca ran her hand through her hair, the wavy strands falling back around her face. “Okay, tomorrow I’ll come and talk to your father.”
The silence stretched, and with a final nod, Luca climbed out the window, giving Coletta a final smile she didn’t necessarily feel before disappearing into the night.
The next day came too fast despite the lack of sleep, and Luca put on her best hose and, over the linen shirt, the expensive doublet her mother made her get last year. She walked to her father’s room and knocked. A loud snore penetrated the door. She was going to be in so much trouble for this she thought as she left her father to slumber.
The walk to the paper shop was the longest short walk Luca ever walked. The shop seemed more ominous than it did the day before, and while there were people walking down the streets and traveling by gondolas Luca had never felt so alone or so scared. Maybe she should have left her father a letter in case Signore Rosso really did end up killing her for getting his daughter pregnant. Luca was at the door when she nearly lost her resolve, but then she remembered the argument, and Coletta’s tear-streaked face. With a deep sigh she pushed the door open and walked inside, locking the door after herself.
Signore Rosso sat at his counter, cutting the roll of paper into sheets. His brow was heavy and his demeanor dark. He didn’t look up when Luca approached him. She looked at the knife in his hand as it sliced through the paper smoothly, gulped, and cleared her throat.
“What is it Luca?” Francesco asked, not looking up from his work.
“I wanted to talk with you, Signore Rosso. About something important.”
The man put the knife down and gave Luca all his attention, palms flat on the counter. His eyes looked sad and Luca thought about how she was about to irrevocably shatter his image of her. And then she thought about how, maybe, possibly this would work out.
“I want to marry your daughter,” Luca said and held her breath. She fiddled with her hands and watched him.
She couldn’t tell what the exact emotion that passed his face at that moment was, but the pain in her face from the punch he threw was potent enough that in the moment she didn’t much care about what he felt. She stumbled backwards, knocking over a few rolls of paper, and clutched her cheek as hot pain laced through her skull. Her cheekbone felt like it was on fire, and the entire left side of her face throbbed in tandem with her heartbeat. She groaned and stood back up. Francesco stood with his fist raised, angry and heaving deep breaths, but then he lowered his hand and fixed his ruffled clothes.
“Were you the bastard who defiled my daughter?” The calmness in his voice was chilling.
Luca didn’t know what to say. This was all happening very fast, and her head was stalling. She stuttered, her mouth working but no sounds coming out, and then decided it was better not to say anything on that matter.
“Please, Signore Rosso. I…” Luca said, swallowing her panic and steeling herself for another punch, “I love her.”
When he rounded the counter, brandishing a heavy roll of paper, and thankfully not the knife, Luca was more prepared. She caught the roll as he swung it at her, backing up and trying to keep the man from hitting her again. “Signore! Signore Rosso, please! Let’s just talk about it.”
The clatter and ruckus from their fight got the attention of Signora Rosso and her daughter. The two of them rushed into the room, and Coletta gasped when she saw that it was Luca that her father was wrestling with. The two of them rushed over to Francesco, pulling him away with effort. Coletta’s mother fussed over her husband who was still trying to get to Luca, and corralled him back behind the counter, sitting him down on his chair and soothing him with her words. Luca stood frozen, a roll of wrinkled paper in her arms and her clothes in disarray. Coletta walked over, tilting Luca’s face and touching the reddened skin as Luca tried not to flinch.
She fixed Luca’s doublet, rebuttoning the few buttons that had come undone. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to Luca.
“It’s okay, I think I’m wearing him down,” Luca joked. The two of them looked over to Coletta’s parents and turned right back when they saw Francesco’s furious gaze aimed at Luca. “I think I should try talking to him again.”
Coletta stayed where she was, taking the roll of paper, while Luca walked back over to the counter, cautiously moving the knife that still rested on the paper away. She nodded in greeting to Signora Rosso, and then turned her attention back to Francesco. “Signore Rosso, let me fix this. I want to marry her.”
“It was you?” Signora Rosso yelped. “Francesco, he needs to marry her. What else can we do? Where will she go otherwise?” She seemed a little green to Luca, and Luca was worried that she would faint at any moment judging from the paleness of the Signora’s face.
“I can get twenty ducats as a dowry, and I have a good business, she’ll live comfortably,” Luca said, wishing Signora Rosso was here to begin with if this was how the conversation would have gone.
“I want you out of here,” said Signore Rosso, pointing a finger at Luca threateningly, “and you have a week to set the wedding up or I will strangle you myself.”
A week. Luca could do that. She walked to the door, giving Coletta a smile and a nod, and went home.
***
It wasn’t quite a year, but Luca’s life wasn’t particularly normal and so she figured celebrating the anniversary of their union a little earlier than the actual anniversary wouldn’t hurt. She strolled home, a bundle of fabric she’d seen her wife eye last week in the market under one arm, with a wooden figurine in one hand and a palm sized package wrapped in burlap in the other. The gondolas swam by her and the comforting swell of the water against the rocks followed her through the streets, putting a serene smile on her face as she walked. The rising sun shone against her tan face, broken only by the arches framing the streets she passed by in her happy haste.
Her house came into view, and she rushed inside, running to the second floor two steps at a time. She slowed down and lightened her steps when she saw her wife in their room. Coletta rested in bed, their son leaning against her breast, grunting as he fed, his tiny hand wrapped around the fabric of Coletta’s nightgown. Her eyes were tired, but she looked up at Luca when she walked into their room and smiled. Luca snuck over, settling on her side of the bed, and gave the tiny head a kiss, grinning when Nicolo slipped off the nipple and immediately began to nose for it again, his tiny grunts and exhales familiar and comforting.
Coletta pushed her a little with her shoulder in annoyance and she helped Nicolo latch back on, wincing a little, but Luca could see a dimple forming in her cheek despite Coletta’s effort to keep frowning.
“Good morning my little king,” Luca whispered to her son, letting her finger slip into his fist as he gripped tightly. “You’re getting strong,” she said as she felt his nails cut into her skin, his white fingers contrasting against her blackened ones.
“Yes, he is,” Coletta whispered back, “and I think his teeth are starting to grow in.”
“I got you something,” Luca said, showing the roll of fabric and the small package to Coletta. “And every king needs a steed,” she said as she placed the wooden horse figurine onto the end table next to the bed.
She took Nicolo from Coletta and waited for her wife to pull her nightgown up over her chest and shoulder. Nicolo wiggled fitfully in her hold, tiny legs kicking out. Luca cradled him to herself, cooing at him as he grunted and growled, tongue peeking out and eyes scrunching up. “Don’t cry, baby,” she said at him, smiling down and rubbing his tummy. She kept her hand on his torso rubbing gently and turned her attention to Coletta as she finished tying up her nightgown. “I was thinking we’d go to the tailor today and measure you for a dress,” Luca said, nodding to the fabric roll.
“A dress?” Coletta asked, dimples in full view as she unfurled the material a little, her cheeks showing a dusting of red. She ran her fingers over it reverently. “For what occasion?”
“We will have been married for a year at the end of the month and with your dowry robbing me blind,” Luca said not hiding her teasing grin, “I couldn’t exactly do things properly. Open your gift.”
Luca watched Coletta narrow her eyes at the burlap-wrapped package and after a moment, she slipped the twine holding it together off, and pulled the covering off. A beautifully carved wooden box sat in her palm, varnished edges glistening in the ever-rising sun and highlighting the intricate etchings on its sides.
The weight of her son in her arms, and the smile on her wife’s face when she saw the ring in the box made Luca aware of just how light she felt. The forgotten feeling of isolation hadn’t resurfaced for a long time, her chest felt free, and her life felt full. She took the ring from the box while Coletta took off the simple one Luca had to get for their wedding and put it onto the now vacant finger. The sculpted, intertwined, dark, metal hands clasped each other, contrasting with Coletta’s skin in their luster. The ring looked proper, felt right.
Her wife pulled her in, kissing her as Nicolo wriggled between them, his voice getting louder as he fought against the pressure of his parents on either side of him, and his wails pierced the moment. Luca leaned back, laying him onto her chest, and watching as his eyes searched her face while he cried. “And what about you, my little man? Do you like mama’s ring?” she asked, pecking his nose.
“Alright, stop making him cry,” Coletta laughed, taking her son back, as Luca stood back up. “Go finish up work and we’ll meet you downstairs when I get him ready.”
“And then off to the tailor?”
“And then off to the tailor,” Coletta agreed.
Luca walked out of the room, turning back around and leaning over the door frame, lingering for a moment. She watched her family for a moment longer, and then turned and walked down the stairs, walking into her study, and settling into her chair.
The familiar scent of paper and ink and saltwater greeted her. The stacks of papers blocked the light in the window, and the lone candle sat unlit in its holder. Her father seemed to have already brought in the bowl with the water for her, and she smiled at the freshly mixed ink and the shaved feather pen. She ran her finger over the tip, checking to see whether it was to her liking, and grabbed a page she was working on the day before. She dipped the pen into the ink, and set it to paper, her blackened fingers flowing over her work, and a serenity she had only just gotten used to surrounding her in easy companionship.
Copyright © 2018 V. M. Agab
Show Notes
The second story in our 2018 fiction series. Written by V.M. Agab and narrated by Ann Etter
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
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