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Saturday, March 20, 2021 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 197 – Hey Hollywood! Historic Couples who would Make Great Happy Movies - transcript
(Originally aired 2021/03/20 - listen here)
This episode was inspired by twitter chat about some new movie—honestly, I don’t recall the title at this point—that explores a female same-sex relationship in history that ends in violent tragedy, in this case, murder by an abusive spouse. This comes on the heels of Portrait of a Lady on Fire which ended in tragically wistful separation, and Ammonite which ended in…well I think there are different opinions as to what it ended in, but a happily ever after for the female couple was not in view.
And that’s what had people riled up. Not that unhappy stories aren’t interesting. Not that tragedy doesn’t often inspire great art. But that if we are never allowed to see sapphic stories in history that have a genuinely happy ending, it leaves people thinking that such endings didn’t exist. I’ve run into this belief often enough: “I don’t want to read f/f historicals because it wasn’t possible for a female couple to live happily ever after unless one of them was pretending to be a man.” And, yes, that’s usually how it’s phrased: “pretending to be a man” which is another issue because it erases the complexities of the “female husband” phenomenon and implies it doesn’t count as a happy ending.
And yet, women did have happily ever after endings together, or extended periods of happy for now. Real women with real lives. Many of whom had interesting enough lives to be made into movies. In some cases, we know a great deal about those lives. In other cases, we know just enough that we could elaborate a happy romantic story around the basic facts.
For this episode, I’ve chosen female couples who met, loved, and established a happy life together. I make no judgements about whether that life included a sexual relationship as long as there was a loving partnership. For some pairs, it was indeed an “ever after” not parting until death. For others, personalities and circumstances intervened and the happiness turned out to be only “for now.” But any of them could be given a non-tragic, non-depressing treatment on the silver screen. And these are just the women who also did something interesting enough to end up in historic records. Quiet happy couples don’t attract much notice, but quiet happy movies could be made about them nonetheless.
I started out with a list of three dozen couples, but I didn’t have time for quite that many, and some get just a brief mention. These lives are drawn from the 17th through the early 20th century, and as usual lean heavily on England and the US. My criteria were: did two (at least) women live together or present to the world as a romantic couple for an extended period of time? And do we know enough about them to tell a story about their lives?
I have a file of random bits of story text that come to me without knowing what project they’re going to land in. I’d like to use one of them to introduce the women I’m featuring in this episode. This snippet may end up being the opening—or the closing--of a medieval story I’m writing tentatively named “My Three Jehannes”—it has the feel of how a medieval woman might think.
“Whether a tale is comedy or tragedy depends so often on where one stops in the telling. Follow any man's life long enough and it ends in the grave. This is my story. For now, it is not a tragedy. And that is as much as anyone can hope for.”
Courtesans Just Wanna Have Fun: Isabella de Luna & Pandora
The Sieur de Brantôme was, in essence, a professional gossip monger in the French court of the late 16th and early 17th century. He had a fascination with sexual escapades outside of marriage, and recorded stories of lesbian sex for the shock value. But while he may not have been particularly sympathetic to his subjects, we can take a different view.
Isabella de Luna was a courtesan in Rome, but though her living might depend on her relationships with men, her heart was given to another courtesan named Pandora. Pandora eventually left the profession and married a butler in a cardinal’s household but her relationship with Isabella held fast. Isabella was known to boast of how they gave Pandora’s husband more cuckold’s horns that Pandora ever did in her former profession. Their story might not seem like a traditional romance, what with the sex work and marriage and all, but just imagine them swanning through Renaissance Rome, daring to love each other openly and giving the finger to conventional expectations. Brantôme describes Isabella as “old and wily” so we can assume that she knows her way around and has figured out how to make the system work for her.
Joined Even in Death: Mary Kendall and Catharine Jones
A century later in England, and from a much different level of society, we have the barest sketch of a love story that lasted until death parted them. Lady Catharine Jones and Mary Kendall lived lives that were praised on their tomb as virtuous and courteous to all, but praised especially for the “close union and friendship in which they lived” such that they desired not to be parted in death, and were interred next to each other. Mary Kendall left this life first, at the age of 33, while Catherine Jones survived her by another 30 years. Neither woman married—at least, no husbands are mentioned in their memorials. And their relationship was recognized and praised by their families, who were responsible for setting up the memorial that provides us their story.
What else may we know about them? There was a disparity of rank—Catharine’s parents were the Earl and Countess of Ranelagh --but that did not prevent their friendship. Together they would have seen the reigns of William and Mary, and then Anne. Ranelagh was an Irish title, but Catharine’s father was active in the government in London and that’s likely where she and Mary met. (Mary was born at Westminster.) We may imagine Mary joining the Ranelagh household in some function and the Ranelaghs must have approved of their bond, for their acquiescence would have been needed for the placement of Mary’s grave in a location reserved for their family.
We know nothing else of their individual lives, but a story could be told of the history they witnessed.
Female Husbands
As we move into the 18th century, there are enough biographies to sort them out into topics. This century was the heyday of the “female husband”—of female couples, usually working class, who married by virtue of one partner taking on a male role. If we could see into their minds, some might fit better into a transgender narrative, but I’ve chosen examples where there’s some evidence that the “husband” was not motivated by an internal sense of gender.
What Might Have Been: Sarah Paul (Samuel Bundy) and Mary Parlour
Sarah Paul had something of a traumatic youth. In 1753, at age 13, she was seduced—which may well be a polite way of saying raped and abducted—by a traveling painter. To avoid pursuit and identification by Sarah’s mother, her seducer dressed her in male clothing and passed her off as his son, renaming her Samuel Bundy. After a year, she got away and spent a year as a sailor. But evidently she had learned something of the portrait trade, for she apprenticed herself—still passing as a boy—to a painter named Mr. Angel in Surrey for a year or so. That brings her up to age 16 or so, at which time she attracted the romantic attention of a young woman named Mary Parlour in Southwark. After courting for some time, they were married. The chronology is perhaps a bit fuzzy, for elsewhere it’s recorded that she was age 20 at the time of the marriage.
Sarah Paul—that is to say, Samuel Bundy—had some conflict with her employer and quit, which put the maintenance of their household entirely on Mary’s shoulders, who scraped by on savings and by pawning her clothing. Samuel Bundy tried to make a go at the sailor’s life again, but was now worried that she couldn’t succeed in the disguise any more in the close quarters of a ship, and so returned to her wife. Mary later testified that her spouse had initially claimed illness as a reason not to consummate the marriage, but she soon became aware of her spouse’s sex and chose not to go public with the discovery. But evidently some of their neighbors became suspicious and did their own investigation, at which Sarah’s disguise was revealed. This resulted in Sarah being brought to court on a charge of fraud. There wasn’t actually any law in England against gender disguise or sexual relations between women, but the charge was that Sarah had entered the marriage for the fraudulent purpose of gaining access to Mary’s possessions.
The problem with this charge? Mary doesn’t seem to have had any objections. The court record notes that “there seems a strong love and friendship” between them, and Mary kept Sarah company while she was in prison. And when the case came to trial, Mary declined to appear to testify against her which left no case to try. At that time, Sarah appeared before the court in female clothing and was noted to be a “very agreeable woman, a very good workwoman at shoe-making and painting…and a very sensible woman.”
The judge ordered Sarah’s male clothing to be burnt and ordered her never to appear in disguise again.
And then what? Sarah and Mary loved each other. Mary had supported her spouse throughout the legal ordeal and ensured her release by refusing to testify. We could easily imagine a future for them. Perhaps Sarah could return to the work of painting portraits. During the period of the trial, she had gotten back in contact with her mother. Perhaps Sarah and Mary could go to live with her while they sorted things out and got their feet back under them again.
Alas, we do have a later data point. Seven years later, Sarah Paul is recorded as dying in the workhouse of Saint Sepulchre in London, at age 27, still notorious for her marital adventure. But if we end our story shortly after the trial, we can imagine that other ending for them.
On the Flip of a Coin: Mary East (Mr. How) and Mrs . How
A few decades earlier, starting around 1730, we have a much different and happier story of a “female husband”. And once again, it has come to us in enough detail to provide good fodder for a movie. The initial parts of the story may have been a convenient fiction, designed to make the rest palatable to the general public, but it could just as easily have been true. This is the story of Mary East, who took on the identity James How, and of her wife Mary Snapes. (The contemporary news reports never mention the wife’s name, however Jen Manion tracked down their marriage certificate when researching the book Female Husbands: A Trans History.)
As the story goes, Mary East had been courted by a young man who turned his hand to highway robbery, and so was sentenced to transportation, which took him out of the picture. At age 16, East decided after that to remain single. A single woman was at an economic disadvantage. But she knew another young woman, a year older, who had similarly determined to live the single life after “many crosses in love”. This, as we now know, was Mary Snapes.
As the report says, the two “being intimate, communicated their minds to each other, and determined to live together ever after.” I’ll note that since many single women did not take this sort of approach, we can probably guess that they had an attachment of some sort to each other and expected to rub on well together. Their solution to the economic disadvantages was that one of them should put on men’s clothing, they’d move to another community where they weren’t known, and they would live as husband and wife. Who would be the man? They flipped a coin and the lot fell to Mary East who then became James How. (Which makes keeping track of references much easier than juggling two Marys.)
If true, that element in the story argues against viewing James How as a trans man. But let us also keep in mind that 18th century understandings of gender performance are not the same as 21st century ones. In including their stories among a list of female couples, I don’t mean to argue that all “female husbands” had identical experiences and understandings of their identities.
James and Mary pooled their resources and found they had 30 pounds between them, not a lot of money, but nothing to sneeze at. They left their original home and, while traveling, came across a public house in Epping that was looking for a proprietor. They rented it and set up as tavern keepers.
Then came an unfortunate event that turned into a blessing. James became involved in a quarrel with another man and one of his hands was badly injured. Between the resulting disability and presumably the clear fault of the other party, James brought a successful lawsuit against the attacker and was awarded damages of 500 pounds. Now that was very much not a sum to be sneezed at. With that as a nest egg, James and Mary found a much better location for their tavern-keeping at Limehouse-Hole. They lived there as husband and wife, prospered in their business, saved up money, and were able to purchase the White Horse tavern in the town of Poplar free and clear, evidently later acquiring other properties.
By all later accounts, they were pillars of the community. James took his turn serving in almost all the parish offices, being exempted only from that of constable due to disability. James served on juries, including several times as foreman. Their neighbors admired and respected them, and they had savings of between four and five thousand pounds, which was quite a comfortable fortune at that time.
They lived and thrived as husband and wife for 34 years until Mary Snapes fell ill and died. If that were all there was to the story, it might not be quite dramatic enough for a movie, but we need to step back a little.
When James and Mary had been a couple for about 18 years, a woman recorded as Mrs. B, who had known them back before Mary East became James How, bumped into them, recognized them, and decided that their wealth and situation made them an attractive target for a little blackmail. Mrs. B wrote to the Hows and suggested that 10 pounds would keep her mouth shut about their little gender disguise thing. Afraid of what disclosure would mean, James paid up and Mrs. B seemed to be satisfied.
Sixteen years passed with little to trouble the couple, and then over a short period of time, disaster threatened from multiple sides. Mary fell ill and went to stay with friends in the country for her health, but rather than recovering she was soon on her deathbed. She sent for James but he wasn’t able to join her. In what happens next, we might want to think a bit about who’s telling the story and what their interests are. Evidently Mary told her friends the truth about her and James. And later those friends claimed that Mary had promised they should inherit her half of what she and James had accumulated. And they wanted more besides.
Now how likely was it that Mary had actually promised this? Or is it likely that these supposed friends, having been confided the secret, became as greedy as Mrs. B? Oddly, the resolution of that conflict seems to be omitted in the very detailed reporting.
Shortly before Mary’s death, Mrs. B comes into the story again. Perhaps Mrs. B’s circumstances changed, or she got greedy. Perhaps she heard of Mary’s illness and figured it was a good time to make a move. In any event, she wrote to James again demanding another 10 pounds for her continued silence. Having received it, she wrote again two weeks later demanding another 10 pounds. James sent her five.
And then Mary died. It’s reasonable to assume James is grieving as well as concerned with how to keep the business going on his own. To keep their privacy, the couple had never employed servants, which would have been a heavy burden of labor in those times, to brew and cook and serve meals and clean up. And Mrs. B figured it was time to step up her demands.
She sent two bully boys pretending to be constables who accosted James How, claiming to come from the famous Justice Fielding, to take James into custody for a robbery committed 34 years earlier when she was living as a woman. Oh, and also threatening to expose her masquerade.
James called on a passing neighbor, Mr. Williams, for help and explained the whole, including that she was a woman, and demanded that she be taken before the local Justices, not hauled off to Justice Fielding. Mr. Williams agreed to help but said he needed to go home for a moment to put on a clean shirt. A trivial detail, perhaps, but one should put on a best appearance before the court.
While he was gone, the two thugs upped the ante: give them 100 pounds and they’d leave her be, otherwise she’d be hanged for the robbery in 16 days and they’d get only 40 pounds apiece for bringing her in. James resisted, but before the neighbor Mr. Williams could return, they dragged her off to Mrs. B’s house to continue the harrassment.
At this point, James seems to have hit on a clever stratagem. She couldn’t pay the money directly on the spot, but she’d give them a draft to be paid by Mr. Williams, the neighbor.
Mr. Williams, in the mean time, had come back to find James gone, and ran around to the local Justices and then to Justice Fielding to search for her. Coming back home, he found James there, who told him everything that had happened.
A few days later, Mrs. B shows up with her two thugs and the draft for 100 pounds…and the three are promptly arrested. When James How showed up to testify against them, along with Mr. Williams, she had returned to women’s clothing and to using the name Mary East, though evidently the mannerisms of a man were noticeably hard to shake.
The three conspirators fell out on the stand and accused each other and were sent off to Bridewell for trial and sentencing.
Mary East, for her part, decided it was time to retire from keeping a public house, and given the fortune that she and her wife had built, it would be a comfortable retirement indeed. Perhaps not as happy an ending as it might have been had Mrs. How not fallen ill and died, but a triumph for justice at the very least. Mary East lived for another 14 years, which by my calculations would make her in her mid-60s. Not bad for a hard-working woman in the 18th century. Enough of her fortune remained to leave money to relatives, friends, and the poor people of the parish.
Perfect Friendship: Katherine Bovey and Mary Pope
Not all couples left quite as complex a story for us to envision. The interesting details of Katherine Bovey’s life, and the exact nature of her relationship with Mary Pope, can only be teased out in part from the conjecture that she was the woman satirized as “the perverse widow” in an early 18th century magazine, though scholars are confident about the identification.
Katherine was born in 1669 and was widowed young at age 22 in 1692. Evidently that’s when the interesting part of her life began. Her epitaph reads that “it pleased God to bless her with a considerable estate”. Not only did she inherit her husband’s estate, since there were no children, but she was also her wealthy father’s sole heir. And evidently there were any number of men who felt that a young, wealthy widow owed a debt to society that could be made good by marrying one of them.
After her husband’s death, she retired to her estate in Gloucester and led a life of scholarship, contemplation, and good works. But our satirist complains, “You must understand, Sir, this perverse Woman is one of those unaccountable Creatures that secretly rejoice in the Admiration of Men, but indulge themselves in no further Consequences. Hence it is that she has ever had a Train of Admirers, and she removes from her Slaves in Town, to those in the Country, according to the Seasons of the Year. She is a reading Lady, and far gone in the Pleasures of Friendship; she is always accompanied by a Confident, who is witness to her daily Protestations against our Sex, and consequently a Barr to her first Steps towards Love, upon the Strength of her own Maxims and Declarations.”
That sure sounds like a jealous jilted suitor to me! But who was this confidante who poses a bar to Katherine’s remarriage? That would be Mary Pope, the woman whom Katherine named as her executor and who commissioned the memorial to her that stands in Westminster Abbey, overflowing with praise and adulation. The epitaph notes that the two women “lived near 40 years in perfect friendship never once interrupted” until Bovey’s death at age 57.
The math suggests an intriguing backstory. If Katherine and Mary had been living together in perfect friendship for almost 40 years when Katherine was 57, then they must have begun that friendship when Katherine was around 17, five years before she was widowed. Her husband was only 2 years older than her, and is described as being given to excess both in debauchery and ill-humor. This might go some distance to explaining her disinclination for a second marriage. I’ll note that there is absolutely no reference to her husband in her memorial inscription, which is a noteworthy fact.
So two years into an unequal and possibly unhappy marriage, Katherine begins a deep and abiding friendship that will last her entire life. That friendship sustains her through the remaining five years of marriage. When she is unexpectedly widowed, Mary remains as her companion, likely already being a member of her household. The satire that sniped at Catherine for declining re-marriage was published when she was 42 years old, at which time one might imagine she had plenty of practice in shrugging off unwanted attentions. After Katherine’s widowhood, she and Mary were together for another near 35 years, after which Mary Pope was left to administer her wishes after death.
We have a few glimpses of Katherine. Delarivier Manley, in The New Atalantis, depicted her under the poetic name Portia and describes her as “One of those lofty, black, and lasting beauties that strike with reverence and yet delight." The memorial that Mary Pope commissioned for her touches on personality rather than physical appearance. She was a good conversationalist, well-read, a philosopher who “ventured far out of the common way of thinking” except in the realm of religion where she was solidly orthodox. She was frugal but generous, cheerful and compassionate. Open-handed both in hospitality and charity.
We know less about Mary Pope. She was the daughter of a Bristol merchant and so, if not as wealthy as her friend, was probably used to comfortable circumstances. She was about 4 years older than Catherine, which must have helped her be a steady and stable companion to the young bride. Her own memorial describes her as “the friend of Mrs. Bovey and partner of her virtues.” There is no evidence that she ever married. Mary lived for another 19 years after Katherine’s death, surviving to age 81.
If theirs were not exactly lives of drama and adventure, there is no question that they lived happily ever after.
Literary Collaborators
In the 19th century, there was something of an explosion of partnerships that paired romance and literary collaboration. Since this episode is starting to get a bit long, let’s skim over a few.
19th century Irish writers and cousins Edith Somerville and Violet Martin wrote together under the pseudonym “Somerville and Ross”. (Violet Martin used the pen name Martin Ross.) They led an active life and their political sympathies leaned toward women’s suffrage and Irish nationalism. After Violet’s death, Edith continued the literary collaboration with her via seances.
English authors Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper were also both close relatives and literary collaborators, as well as having a relationship that their friends considered equivalent to a marriage. They wrote together as “Michael Field”.
Late 19th century English novelist Marie Corelli (a pen name of Mary Mackay) outsold the combined work of her contemporaries Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling—and that you’ve probably never heard of her is a striking example of the erasure of women’s literature. Her childhood has the stuff of drama, as her mother was a servant in her father’s household and she was shipped off to be educated in a French convent, perhaps to avoid the embarrassment of having a bastard daughter underfoot. Her fiction featured melodrama and the supernatural and she may have been the originator of the “curse of the Pharaohs” that was said to strike British archaeologists who excavated Egyptian tombs. Marie shared her life for 40 years with Bertha Vyver, who was named her heir. The two had met as girls at that Parisian convent school. Bertha’s family had done a lot of self-fictionalizing. Her rather feckless father at one time had a business selling fictitious hereditary titles and decided to create himself and Bertha’s mother a Count and Countess. When Marie Corelli and Bertha Vyvyr were just short of 20 years old, well before Marie’s writing career took off, Bertha became caretaker for Marie’s invalid father. She also took up photography, though little of her work has survived. In a short space of time, Marie’s father and Bertha’s mother died, leaving the two free to pursue their own careers. Throughout Marie Corelli’s blazing literary career, Bertha Vyver was at her side, supporting her. Truly happily ever after.
The Cushman Circle
I did an entire episode on 19th century American actress Charlotte Cushman and her rather tangled love life. Despite the drama and occasional infidelities, I don’t think it can be argued that Cushman had anything other than a happy and positive life. She was a blazing star on the stage, the center of a vibrant and creative artistic circle of queer women, and finished her life in a series of triumphal performance tours even while suffering from breast cancer, resting at last with her life partner, sculptor Emma Stebbins at her side. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it is a crime and an embarrassment that we don’t have an entire extended mini-series about Cushman and her circle. This is a community packed full of female couples with happy endings. Let’s look at a couple more of the stories that can be told here.
Matilda Hays was a journalist, writer, and translator of the works of George Sand. She was an activist for women’s rights and economic opportunities. She participated in the creation and support of a series of periodicals focused on women’s rights, though these efforts were often hampered by clashes of strong opinions among the partners. She also tried her hand at acting, which is how she met Charlotte Cushman. Matilda and Charlotte had a 10 year relationship that contemporaries recognized as a type of marriage. But Cushman’s need for the spotlight and star status eventually undermined the relationship. A romantic polygon formed, with Matilda engaging in an affair with sculptor Harriet Hosmer and Cushman secretly beginning her relationship with Emma Stebbins. Matilda brought a palimony suit against Charlotte and won a settlement for having set her own career aside to support Charlotte’s. Matilda then had some sort of relationship with poet and feminist Adelaide Anne Proctor, who dedicated love poems to her, but it was cut short by Adelaide’s death. Matilda’s final romantic partnership was with Theodosia Blacker, Lady Monson, another activist for feminist causes. In Matilda Hays we see the intersection of Charlotte Cushman’s circle of artistic women, many of them in relationships with other women, and British feminist circles, also chock full of female romantic partnerships.
The community of female sculptors studying and working in Rome that Cushman was deeply involved with also included Anne Whitney and Abby Adeline Manning. Whitney created a number of portrait sculptures of prominent historic and contemporary figures, many of which are featured in public locations in Boston and Washington DC. She was politically active in abolition and women’s rights, and many of her sculptures celebrated women in non-traditional positions of leadership. She and fellow artist Abby Adeline Manning shared their life for nearly 50 years, though Manning’s career evidently took second place to supporting Whitney’s. They were recognized as having a “Boston marriage”.
Boston Marriages
All it takes to open the floodgate of fascinating female couples in 19th century America is to utter the phrase “Boston marriage.” A Boston marriage was a recognized long-term domestic partnership between two unmarried women, typically of the educated middle class, that was understood to be a committed and romantic arrangement. The phrase was coined to recognize the phenomenon, and in turn the existence of a label for the phenomenon gave it legitimacy and substance.
The women in Boston marriages were often involved in higher education for women—an alternate name was “Wellesley marriages” in reference to the female couples among both the faculty and graduates of that women’s college. They tended to have progressive politics: women’s rights, abolition, support for immigrants. Here are just a brief sampling of some of the women of Boston who combined the personal and the political in their partnerships.
Writer and poet Sarah Orne Jewett was known for works depicting the coast of Maine. She was cited as a literary influence by Willa Cather. Jewett formed a friendship with Annie Fields, the wife of the publisher of the Atlantic Monthly. After Mr. Fields’ death, Sarah and Annie moved in together and shared the rest of their lives. Annie Fields was not merely the wife of a publisher, she was a writer herself, producing poetry, essays, and biographies of her contemporaries. And both before and after her husband’s death, she was the center of the literary community of Boston, supporting a network of connections between the prominent writers of the day.
Mary Woolley was an educator first and last, having been one of the first female students at Brown University (after considering Oxford) while simultaneously teaching at Wheaton Seminary. Within 4 years of beginning teaching at Wellesley College she was made a full professor. That was also the year she met Jeannette Marks, a student at Wellesley, 12 years her junior. Marks was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist and engineering professor. She was 24 and just finishing her degree at Wellesley when she met Mary Woolley. The two hit it off and from there on their lives and careers ran in parallel. That same year, Woolley was offered a job heading the women’s college at Brown University and offered the presidency of Mount Holyoke College, a prominent women’s college. She chose the latter and after spending a couple years winding things up at Wellesley, became one of the youngest college presidents when she took over at Mount Holyoke. Meanwhile, Marks had finished her degree at Wellesley and then, while simultaneously completing her Masters degree there, became a professor of English at Mount Holyoke the same year that Woolley started as president there. The complexities of a two-academic-career household were simplified somewhat by Woolley’s ability to pull strings. Wooley’s philosophy of women’s education at Mount Holyoke was radical: she thought that education for women should be an end in itself, just as it was for men, and not viewed simply as a preparation for social service. She networked with other women’s colleges and worked to raise the academic standards at Mount Holyoke, both for faculty and students. She increased the college’s endowment ten-fold and greatly expanded the facilities. Both Marks and Woolley were active in progressive political causes, including women’s suffrage, pacifism, and racial equality. Over 36 years, Woolley made a significant mark on Mount Holyoke, but when she retired from the college presidency, the board of directors deliberately worked to reverse the “feminization” of the Mount Holyoke faculty and administration, despite the opposition of that faculty. The successor that the board chose to replace her was seen as a deliberate slap in the face. After Marks’ retirement 2 years later, they never returned to Mount Holyoke. They enjoyed their retirement together (aside from political activities) at the Marks family home in New York.
Ada Dwyer Russell was born into a newly-converted Mormon family in Utah in the 1860s but went to school in Boston. She took up the profession of actress, performing many roles in New York beginning around age 15, as well as touring in England and even Australia. She married late—at age 30—to a Boston actor, presumably met through their mutual profession, but the marriage lasted barely past the birth of their daughter the next year and they separated permanently after that. Why? The answer may come from the central romance of her life, with a woman she met in Boston, 17 years later when she was 49.
Amy Lowell was born into the Boston aristocracy, part of a talented and prominent family. But in her early years she considered herself a social outcast and had a reputation for being overly opinionated and outspoken. She was largely self-educated, a book collector and European traveler, and took up writing poetry, being inspired by Eleonora Duse. She was 38 when she met and fell in love with Ada Dwyer Russell and from then on, Ada was her muse and the subject of extensive erotic love poetry. Amy embraced free verse and became a major figure in the Imagist school, somewhat to the annoyance of Imagist founder Ezra Pound who felt that Lowell had horned in on his personal territory, especially when she published a three volume collection of Imagist poets.
Although Ada and Amy felt they had to hide the nature of their relationship, to the extent that they destroyed most of their correspondence, there is one fascinating angle on how that relationship was received. The year after the two women met, and before they moved in together for the rest of their lives, Ada Dwyer Russell’s father was asked to resign from the Mormon religion for telling people that same-sex sexual activity was not a sin. All is speculation, but could it be that Ada had earlier lesbian relationships that influenced her father’s opinions on this topic? Did his open-mindedness extend to welcoming Amy Lowell as his daughter’s spouse? Amy treated Ada’s daughter and grandchildren as her own, so whatever the family may have officially known, the two women were clearly loved and accepted as a couple.
Ada and Amy enjoyed 13 years together, including traveling to Europe during the most prolific time of Amy’s career. The year after Amy’s death from a stroke, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Do you want an all-American patriotic story? How about featuring Katharine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful”? But she was much more than simply a songwriter. After studying at Oxford in England, she became a professor of English at Wellesley College. She was also a prolific author and speaker on social reform, with interests in feminism, racial relations, immigration, and poverty. After World War I she campaigned for America to join the League of Nations and was active in the peace movement. In her 30s, she was inspired to write the lyrics for “America the Beautiful” after a trip to the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado.
Historians have debated the nature of the relationship between Bates and her life-long housemate Katharine Coman, given that the majority of their correspondence was destroyed by Bates. Note: destroying correspondence happens an awful lot among women who shared their lives with other women. Funny thing. But mostly the historians seem to be quibbling over the question of whether they had a sexual relationship. The few surviving letters speak of their love, and that Coman was a significant reason for Bates’s return to Wellesley after her stint at Oxford. What is certain is that they met in 1885, when they were in their mid-20s, lived together for 25 years, traveled together, and supported each other’s careers. Coman was a professor of history and political economy, founding the Wellesley Economics department and was as well-known and influential as Bates during their lifetimes.
There are so many interesting couples among the Boston marriages that I’m going to have to cut this short, but you can track down social workers Edith Guerrier and Edith Brown, writers Louise Imogen Guiney and Alice Brown who were involved in the Aesthetic artistic movement, and socialists and immigration activists Vida Scudder and Florence Converse.
Can we get a little diversity?
This has been an awfully white list, and the reasons for that are many, but have a lot to do with whose lives get recorded in detail. I previously did a podcast on a late 19th century Black couple, Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, whose partnership was treated as a marriage by their friends and family. To fit them into the happily-ever-after mold you’d need to close the curtain before Addie decided to marry a man for the sake of security. But it could be done.
You could definitely build a happy story out of the entwined lives of playwright and teacher Mary Burrill, poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimké, and Lucy Diggs Slowe, all prominent Black intellectuals in the era of the Harlem Renaissance, with lives centering around Washington D.C. Both Burrill and Grimké wrote works engaging with the Black experience in turn of the century America, but also touching more broadly on social issues important to women. They had an intensely romantic friendship in their youth. Sixteen year old Angelina wrote to Mary about her hope that Mary would become her wife. Their correspondence is filled with passion, yearning, and expressions of love that also found their way lifelong into Grimké’s poetry. But the two don’t seem to have found their way to a shared life. Mary Burrill, however bought a house together in DC with Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first Dean of Women at Howard University and they lived together until Slowe’s death. Slowe had attended Howard University—the most prominent of the historically Black colleges—as a student, and after a career developing educational institutions and programs in DC, she was tapped for the Dean position. Oh, and along the way she won the American Tennis Association’s first tournament and was the first American Black woman to win a major sports title. You think we could build an exciting and positive bio-pic from the lives of these three women?
But Wait, There’s More
There are a lot more stories that would make great happy-ending movies that I haven’t had time to go into, or that I’ve presented in previous podcasts. Look at how successful the Gentleman Jack series about Anne Lister is! And there have been treatments of the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, though nothing like what they deserve. While a bit complicated for a traditional romance happy ending, why don’t we have a major production celebrating Nathalie Barney, Romaine Brookes, and Rene Vivien and the rest of their circle in Paris?
If a film maker wants to start with a book to adapt, how about Emma Donoghue’s novel Life Mask about sculptor Anne Damer, ending with her definitely happy partnership with writer Mary Berry? Or Donoghue’s novel The Sealed Letter about the scandalous divorce trial that feminist publisher Emily Faithful got entangled in, before redeeming her reputation and finding her way to a long-term romantic partnership later in life. Want a story of long pining that is eventually rewarded? How about the lives of socialite Rose Cleveland (who served as first lady when her unmarried brother Grover was president) and Evangeline Simpson Whipple, which lasted through Evangeline’s marriage until fate allowed them to spend their later years together.
And why, oh why, have we never been given a big screen treatment of that most iconic of 18th century couples, Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the “Ladies of Llangollen,” whose adventures to elope together and life-long happy romance was celebrated by their contemporaries as the epitome of true love?
There is no reason to think that we can’t have happy movies about female couples in history. It certainly isn’t for a lack of source material. Go out there and demand more realism in our lesbian costume dramas—and realism means our share of happily ever afters!
Show Notes
A tour through the lives of some f/f couples in history who would make great “happily ever after” movies and tv shows
Find more information about the primary couples discussed in this show at the following links:
- Isabella de Luna
- Mary Kendall and Catharine Jones
- Sarah Paul (Samuel Bundy) and Mary Parlour
- Mary East (James How) and Mary Snapes
- Katherine Bovey and Mary Pope
- Marie Corelli
- Charlotte Cushman
- Matilda Hays
- Anne Whitney & Abby Adeline Manning
- Sarah Orne Jewett & Annie Fields
- Mary Woolley & Jeannette Marks
- Amy Lowell & Ada Dwyer Russell
- Katharine Lee Bates & Katharine Coman
- Addie Brown & Rebecca Primus
- Angelina Weld Grimké & Mamie Burrill
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, March 15, 2021 - 21:00
Not much to say on this one. Also: my brain is a bit knocked out from the Daylight Savings Time change, so I'm not up to being clever tonight. Just glad I got the blog done on Monday this week! I hate letting things slip past their delivery targets, because that way lies chaos.
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LHMPFull citation:
Nord, Deborah Epstein. 1990. "'Neither Pairs nor Odd': Female Community in Late Nineteenth-Century London" in Signs vol. 15, no. 4 733-754.
I almost didn’t blog this article, once I started reading it. The title suggested more relevance than the content ended up providing. It falls into the category of “what are the options for women who aren’t in conventional heterosexual marriages” which can be useful for character development. But there’s a lot of content on that topic and I try to stick to more general demographics. This article is more a biographical sketch of a specific set of connected individuals.
Nord takes a deep dive into the lives of three single women who made lives for themselves in 1880s London outside of conventional family structures, but also apart from organized women’s communities and institutions. Nor were these women in unrecognized female partnerships. All three intersected the field of social work in some way, but without approaching it as a female-coded vocation. And all three were loosely connected to each other (as well as to other single women) socially, but in a somewhat loose fashion that did not assume mutual support.
These women occupied a somewhat ambiguous and contradictory position. They chose to marginalize themselves in society by stepping outside the conventional structures of middle class life, but often found their vocations in promoting and encouraging those conventional structures for other women, as in the administration of settlement houses (structured housing for the poor). They fell in an intermediate temporal position between earlier Victorian female homosocial communities who operated within traditional domestic structures, and the independent 20th century “new women” who deliberately embraced singlehood and female community as a political position.
The women in this study did not specifically reject marriage, though they might set it aside for a time. And they pursued individual emancipation from the restrictions of female roles, but did not necessarily embrace feminist politics in general. But choosing to spend some portion of their lives single, in professional pursuits, enabled them to envision new roles for women in society.
Three women who are the focus of this article. Beatrice Potter Webb developed an interest in sociological research via working as a rent-collector and administrator of a slum tenement. From her observations of the lives and struggles of the residents she wrote a number of studies of working class dynamics and the causes of poverty. Webb’s cousin Margaret Harkness was also involved with the tenement that Webb administered but converted her observations and experiences into novels criticizing various social conditions. The third woman in the study is poet and novelist Amy Levy, who brought a particular focus to the Jewish community in London.
This loose network of women dissolved at the end of the 1880s, due to personal conflicts, death, or emigration. Nord suggests that the lack of an accepted social niche for single middle-class women in this transitional era was a driving cause of this social fragmentation (though I wonder if she’s generalizing too much from a specific set of women). And yet, though rejecting the idea of participating in a formal female community, they were able to produce their best work specifically because of the support of that informal community.
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Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - 07:00
A regular experience in the random nature of how I encounter and summarize articles is the sense of whiplash when I think, “Wait, haven’t we already dealt with this question?” And, of course, I’m thinking of other publications that came after the one I’m reading. Diggs’ analysis is in correspondence with some of the early challenges to Faderman’s view of romantic friendship. I have to keep reminding myself that it was published a quarter of a century ago, and the ideas being presented here were fairly new at the time.
I sometimes try to envision a “family tree” of work on lesbian history—something that traces not only the chronology of the publications, but the specific chains of connection showing what each is reacting and responding to. (It might be an amusing project, but mostly it’s a dangerous rabbit-hole. One I need to avoid at all costs!)
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LHMPFull citation:
Diggs, Marylynne. 1995. “Romantic Friends or a ‘Different Race of Creatures’? The Representation of Lesbian Pathology in Nineteenth-Century America” in Feminist Studies 21, no. 2: 1-24.
Diggs begins with a review of recent (in 1995) work on the relationship between romantic friendship and lesbian history, especially Smith-Rosenberg 1975 and Faderman 1981. Those publications presented a view of women’s intimate friendships in the 19th century as socially acceptable and treated as “innocent.” She discusses the social context of the 1970s as it influenced the interests and motivations of academics approaching the topic of romantic friendship.
But, Diggs notes, the view of a lost innocent era of romantic friendship that gave way sharply and universally to a pathologized view of homosexuality was being contradicted by scholar such as Vicinus, who argued both that the romantic friendship model survived well into the 20th century, and that it was never as universally accepted as Faderman suggested (as well as suggesting that it was a peculiarly American interpretation of the evidence).
Interpretations of women’s same-sex relationship as pathological can be identified well before the later 19th century, and Diggs notes that despite the recency of the terms “lesbian” and “homosexual”, other vocabulary for women who desired women can be found as early as the 18th century. [Note: And, of course, the alleged “recency” of the word lesbian can be disproved.]
Domestic fiction of the early 19th century (as well as material like Anne Lister’s diaries) identify spaces in which women could construct a concept of female homosexual desire that might hide under the veneer of nonsexual romantic friendship. Diggs doesn’t contradict the theory that “homosexual identity” as we understand it arose out of a specific historic context, but she argues that threads of anxiety, distrust, and pathologizing around women’s intimate friendships in early 19th century American culture depict a more complicated and layered understanding of how romantic friendship was viewed and experienced.
Examples are drawn from Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ A Mortal Antipathy, and the genre of “advice manuals” which warmed about hazards that could be associated with female friendships. (One interesting text is quoted as recommending that “kissing and caressing of your female friends should be kept for your hours of privacy, and never indulged in before gentlemen” lest the gentlemen get the wrong idea about the girls’ level of erotic knowledge.
Women writers sometimes engaged in a more complex view of romantic friendships, acknowledging the hazards but not necessarily pathologizing those hazards. Works cited include Margaret J.M. Sweat’s Ethel’s Love-Life: A Novel in which the protagonist recounts past romantic/erotic relationships with women in a confession to her (male) fiancé, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s story “The Long Arm” in which the jealous and possessive love of one woman for another becomes a motivation for murder, without presenting the relationship as inherently pathological. These works clearly depicted women’s intimate friendships as in conflict with heterosexual marriage, not simply as a “practice” for that state.
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Monday, March 8, 2021 - 16:34
I've been posting about this on twitter, but maybe it's time to mention it in my actual Alpennia blog? For two weeks now, I've written at least a paragraph every day on Mistress of Shadows. So far I've been working on chapter 2 (in which I do emotionally traumatic things to Barbara and make her cry) because chapter 1 involves a new character and new setting (Zobayda in Marseilles) so I worried about getting bogged down by tackling it first.
One of the hardest parts of writing for me is making that transition from getting the last book out and starting the next book. I wish I had the time and energy to start writing the next book with the last one is in edits and whatnot, but I don't. The pandemic took out a number of my productivity habits, simply because I'm very much a creature of habit--having the time doesn't mean that I'll use that time for a specific task if my context for that task has been removed.
But I very much need to be writing again. For the sake of my self-identity as a writer, I need to get the next work out into the world. And that starts with getting back in the habit of writing every single day, no matter what.
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Writing ProcessPublications:
Mistress of ShadowsSaturday, March 6, 2021 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 196 - On the Shelf for March 2021 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2021/03/06 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for March 2021.
It’s tempting to open with some comment on how it’s now been an entire year for me of living under threat of Covid. A year of working from home and having only minimal face-to-face socializing. But honestly, I’m just tired. Not too tired to keep on plugging away at what it takes to help fight transmission, but tired of having our shared experiences all revolve around this ongoing disaster.
Have you ever read a novel about the Spanish Flu pandemic a century ago? They’re out there, but for the most part it’s like the world collectively flinched away from it and moved on to the Roaring 20s. But part of what made those 20s roar was a manic relief at having survived. Survived World War I, survived the pandemic, survived the historic changes that happened in parallel with them.
One of the interesting things about historical fiction is how it can fasten itself to specific events—specific stories that can only happen in one particular time and place. Oh, you can have historical fiction with somewhat generic settings. I’ve read books where it was hard to tell what century the story was set in, the details were so generic! But there are events that nail a story down to a specific time. If you set a story during the Stonewall riots, there’s only one time and place you could be talking about. And there are settings where the omission of key features says a great deal about how we, collectively, have chosen to process and remember history. If you read a Regency romance that never mentions servants—or never mentions where the wealth that supported those balls and gowns came from--the author has failed to grapple with essential truths about their characters.
A hundred years from now, if people write novels set in the ‘20s and gloss over both the immense disruption this pandemic caused, and the societal failures that made it worse, they will not be writing historical fiction so much as fantasy. Will they choose to forget? To omit? To look away? Will someone, some day, write a novel set in 2020 that mysteriously fails to take note of what we’re going through? I wonder.
2021 Fiction Series
The podcast schedule means that last month’s episode was recorded too early to be able to announce the line-up for the 2021 fiction series. And presumably those who were eager to find out what stories we selected have already read about it on the blog. But for completeness’ sake, here’s what you can expect. The first story of the year, of course, was Diane Morrison’s “A Soldier in the Army of Love” which we bought last year. So this year’s picks include what will be the first story of the 2022 season, due to the same scheduling.
Selecting stories is a complex process. Is the story well written? Is the prose solid and competent and good at communicating the author's ideas? Does the story fit with the theme of the program? You might think that would be a given, but there's a lot of room for interpretation and differences of opinion. Does the story grab me and keep me reading? Does it start and end at the right places and is the chunk of story the right size for the word-count? Does the language of the story sing to me?
I'm a sucker for just plain beautiful writing. And by that I don't necessarily mean "pretty" writing, but the ability to use words not just to explain what's going on, but in the way that an artist uses brush strokes. This aspect can be very much a matter of personal taste, and very often it's the feature that helps me make that difficult choice between two excellent stories.
And finally, how does the story fit into the overall program? Do I have a balance of settings and themes? Have I made the series as diverse as possible, given the available materials? So: here are the stories that sang to me from this year's crop.
"Palio" by Gwen Katz - The fierce competition of the famous Siennese horse race, set in the 17th century.
"Moon River" by Mandy Mongkolyuth - Two young women join forces in the aftermath of the third Anglo-Burmese war in the late 19th century.
"Abstract" by Kat Sinor - Set at the dawn of history, two artists share their visions deep in a torch-lit cave.
"The Adventuress" by Catherine Lundoff - The further adventures of the pirate Jacquotte Delahaye and the courtesan-spy Celeste Girard as they hunt down a certain Englishwoman who may be in a similar business.
I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I have!
Publications on the Blog
On the blog, I finished up the last article in the collection Homosexuality in French History and Culture, which was Leslie Choquette’s “Homosexuals in the City: Representations of Lesbian and Gay Space in Nineteenth-Century Paris.” It’s particularly interesting to see Paris developing as a center of a public and self-conscious queer culture during the era that we associate with sexual repression in the English-speaking world.
After that, I went back to my stock of downloaded journal articles, which will probably take up the next several months and be somewhat random in topic. First is Martha Vicinus’s “They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong” which takes an interesting look at the difference between the history of modern lesbian identity and the history of women loving women.”
Another article that contrasts historic and modern experiences is Katherine Binhammer’s "Thinking Gender with Sexuality in 1790s' Feminist Thought,” which finds some interesting parallels between the sexual insecurities of early proto-feminists, and the “sex wars” of second wave feminism.
I’ll finish out the month with Nan Alamilla Boyd’s very brief essay "The History of the Idea of the Lesbian as a Kind of Person” which also addresses the idea of what it is we study when we study lesbian history.
Book Shopping!
Book shopping for the blog has picked up again, since I was looking for an unrelated second-hand book and decided to pick up enough titles to get free shipping. (The unrelated book is America’s First Lady Boss by Curtiss S. Johnson, which is a biography of my great-great-grandmother, Margaret Getchell LaForge.) One book I’ve had my eye on for a while, but wanted to find second-hand is Norman W. Jones’s Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction: Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular Narrative. It’s an academic study, and probably started life off as a thesis or something, so I have no idea how interesting it will be for the lay person. But I’m rather tickled at the idea of queer historical fiction being a topic of study.
The second is Anna Clark’s The History of Sexuality in Europe: A Sourcebook and Reader which is a collection of articles on a variety of themes, probably meant for use in a college class. The third title will be a bit of a challenge for me: Marie-Jo Bonnet’s Un choix sans équivoque. Recherches historiques sur les relations amoureuses entre les femmes xvie-xxe siècle, with a title that translates to An unequivocal choice. Historical research on romantic relationships between women of the 16-20th century. Have I mentioned that I’ve never actually studied French? But depending on the topic, I can muddle my way through, and this is said to be the definitive work on the history of lesbianism in France.
Last Month’s Essay
I was reminded of Bonnet’s book when doing the background research for last month’s essay on 17th century salonnière and fairy tale author Madame de Murat. (I was also reminded that I can muddle through French a little, when I found the French Wikipedia page on Murat more useful than the English one.) And speaking of that essay on Murat…
Interview with Mari Ness
Heather Rose Jones: Sometimes life hands you convenient coincidences. Right before last week’s episode on Madame de Murat came out, I saw an announcement that Mari Ness’s new collection of essays on French salon fairy tales and their authors had just been released. Since Mari’s essay on Madame de Murat was one of the sources I used, it seemed only right to invite her on the show to plug her book and chat about the queer side of the Contes des Fées. Welcome, Mari, and sorry for mangling the French there.
Mari Ness: My own French will be probably very mangled during this. I learned what little French I did from a British woman in Italy who taught me how to mispronounce everything, so we’ll have to be a little cautious with my French.
H: Yes, I sometimes only realize that I’m about to delve into a language I have not mastered when I start pronouncing a book title or a name. So, in your book you dig rather deeply into how the social mores of seventeenth-century France and the personal lives of the authors come out through fairy-tale tropes. How do you think that the very different attitudes towards sexuality in that era are expressed in the stories?
M: So, I wanted to answer this, or I should say, to start with, to give a little bit of the overall weird background of queerness at Versailles, which is that it was illegal, very illegal, but the king’s brother was also blatantly participating in it.
H: Yeah.
M: We see in these fairy tales a lot of hints, particularly in, for example, the long version of Beauty and the Beast, not the condensed version or familiar one, but the long version that is a full-length novella. It’s very tedious; it’s very boring. It has a number of women and men caressing each other at interesting intervals. Could, of course, assume that they’re all doing this in a friendly way. After a while, it becomes increasingly difficult to assume that they’re just friends. You know, one time, this is friends; second time, this is feeling a little less friendship, so—and this is what you typically see in these fairy tales, is many hints of particularly royals who do end up in very straight heterosexual relationships at the end of the story. But as they progress through the story, they are very often doing queer things or things that we would read as queer and which I personally think: these French salon fairy-tale authors—they were intelligent people; they knew what they were doing. Many of them had seen the brother of the king with the men he was very strongly associated with, and many of them also participated in their own, or at least were accused of participating in, same-sex relationships. And it’s very hard for me, at least, to read these—many of these stories and think, oh, no! They were all completely straight at all times and never had any other thoughts. They were all, you know, very, very straight people. That was true for some of them, but I really have a hard time reading all of them as purely straight, and I think they used fairy tales in many ways to express that in something that was more acceptable because it’s fiction.
H: Yes.
M: It’s for children. That belief that fairy tales are for children was part of the French salon fairy-tale tradition even as they were all entertaining themselves at the salons with tales, and this, I did not get into this in my book as much as I wanted to, but some of the tales that we have that have not been translated into English are very, very adult in the sense of being very sado-masochistic; they involve bondage, they involve all kinds of fun stuff, they involve all kinds of alternative—I don’t want to use “sexualities” here because that’s not really what’s going on, but there’s a lot of alternative approaches to gender relationships that happen in many of the stories that have not been translated yet into English.
H: Uh huh.
M: And that adds another layer. You know, you also have a lot of cross-dressing people in fairy tales, and it’s acceptable; it’s a fairy tale. That didn’t appear, even as this happens in stories that very specifically mention real-life places, which is—you know, you have that long version of Beauty and the Beast which I just mentioned. It has that place where they stop and discuss Turkish palace revolutions. And Beauty is right there, she’s watching. So it is very much, okay, is this a fairy tale? Yes, this is mentioning a lot of fairy lands. But are these rooted in real life? Fairy-tale writers knew what they were doing.
H: Uh huh. So, other than Madame de Murat, whom our listeners have heard a great deal about in the previous show, who were some other striking personalities among the authors of fairy tales?
M: So, I love them all, and I feel that even the ones that sound boring are fascinating. So, like, I really, really want to know what was going on with Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier. I told you, my French is terrible. She was the niece of Charles Perrault. She seems to have lived a very quiet life, but then you find out about all this money she’s getting from aristocrats, and you start wondering, wow, this is a lot of very wealthy people giving her money for reasons that are hard to understand. I want to know what was going [on] there—I don’t, but I really want to know. But, you know, on the surface she had a kind of dull life. So the more interesting ones that had the really scandalous lives that were fun—the author of The White Cat, Madame d’Aulnoy, she’s great. She was very probably a spy, for different people at different times in the world. She slept with a number of people, she hated her husband, she went in and out of France, she wrote all kinds of fabulously incorrect histories—if you can call them histories. She came back and said, “Hello, I am an intellectual!” It was great. She set up her own salon, she kept fighting with her husband because she unfortunately couldn’t divorce him, and by unfortunately, I mean that was his point of view, so she was awesome. Definitely. She wrote a lot of—a huge number of short stories. The English translations are sometimes a little iffy, so you do have to be careful. Try for the Jack Zipes one—he has not translated all of them—but the ones you will find on the internet, unfortunately, very often soften the original French.
H: Uh huh.
M: Not necessarily what we really want out of our stories. She also has a tendency to go on at length, which has made her perhaps a little less popular than she could be. And then the other one that I really love is Charlotte Rose de la Force because she was imprisoned for writing poetry. I’m like—the reason for the poetry—it wasn’t just that she was writing poetry, but it was considered to be impious, so Louis XIV said, “Nope, this is very anti-religious, very impious, so we’re going to toss you into jail.” What’s great about this is, from that experience she wrote Rapunzel, or rather, the original of Rapunzel that, when the Germans—the Grimm brothers—collected it, they did collect it from a German version that really resembles the French version quite closely. They realized it and made changes and later additions so that the Rapunzel that we know of, that we know today, would sound more German and less French. That was their plan. But she had very high connections to royalty because she worked for Louis XIV’s second secret wife, so she had seen it. She saw the secret marriages.
H: Uh huh.
M: She had seen all the affairs of the aristocrats, she was involved in seeming—you know, her correspondence was apparently mostly destroyed, so we don’t have all the details, but we can tell from the edges that she saw things. And she fascinates me.
H: Uh huh.
M: Absolutely. And it’s fascinating to find out that the Rapunzel story that we’re aware of actually had its roots in real life. That is probably the most realistic fairy tale that we have because it was based more or less on a true story.
H: Oh!
M: Her own imprisonment, so.
H: Well, thank you. So, the book Resistance and Transformation: On Fairy Tales by Mari Ness is available from Aqueduct Press, either directly or through your favorite book dealer. And I’ll have links to the book and to Mari’s social media in the show notes. Thank you.
M: Thank you! This was really fun.
This Month’s Essay
I enjoy doing the in-depth biographical essays like the one on Murat, but sometimes you want to remind people of the richness of the history out there with more of a brief skim through history. This month’s essay was inspired by a discussion online about yet another historical movie with sapphic themes that seems to have gone out of its way to pick a tragic story. One big problem with the love affair filmmakers have with tragic stories is that they leave the audience with the mistaken impression that there were no happy endings in history for women who loved women. So for this month’s essay, I’m doing a shopping list of actual historic women who lived interesting lives, loved other women, and did not have those relationships end in tragedy and misery. Hollywood, take note!
Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction
Time for the new book announcements! Newly published sapphic historicals are unevenly distributed across the calendar at the moment. When I ran my searches for this month, I found only one title published in March, but a good half-dozen February books that hadn’t turned up last month.
And we’ll start by casting back to January. S.W. Andersen has a self-published series set in the wild west with a fierce gun-toting loner heroine. A Call to Justice is the third book in the series. I’m not sure if the series as a whole has a title. The protagonist, Sarah Sawyer, has settled down at last, but a thirst for justice, when tensions rise between settlers and the native population, leads her to pin on a badge.
The first February book is one I postponed from last month’s show because it’s an Audible Original and didn’t have a pre-order link until it came out. The Wife in the Attic by Rose Lerner is a gothic story inspired by Jane Eyre, in which the new governess is confused and intrigued by the mysterious woman confined in her employer’s house. Next month, we’ll have Rose on the show to talk about her book. If you love audio books, this story was designed for the audio format, though it will be available in print at a later date.
It's hard to evaluate how a memoir-style novel fits into historical fiction when it spans a long era culminating in the present. Sally Bellerose’s Fishwives, published by Bywater Books, sits in the Southern fiction tradition, following a life-long couple from their first meeting in the ‘50s through a lifetime of love, conflict, and growth.
Another book set in the ‘50s is G.B. Baldassari’s self-published Flying High, which looks to be riffing off the once-popular genre of flight attendant romance, but this time matching British Chief Pursar Charlotte Thompson with Californian Claire Davis—a meeting that perhaps wasn’t meant to have happened.
For a short-story treat, try Lara Kinsey’s self-published Victorian-set “Bump in the Night,” in which a desperate wallflower has a spooky encounter with an unexpected intruder. The cover copy suggests a supernatural encounter but is it truly magic or only illusion?
We go back to a wild west setting for Ruth Hanson’s The Railwalkers from JMS Books. In the lawless aftermath of the American Civil War, rebellious heiress Violet Donovan finds escape from the expectations closing in on her when a false murder charge puts her in the hands of a diverse group of vigilantes for justice, called the Railwalkers.
I’m not quite sure how to describe this next book: The Ledge Light: New London by Diana Perkins from Shetucket Hollow Press. It appears to be set in an unspecified time maybe in the 19th century, in Long Island sound, when a farm girl seeks her fate in gender disguise and that fate takes her to a lonely lighthouse. The cover copy isn’t very clear about what the sapphic content might be, so it might be a gamble. But I’ll note that the real Ledge Light was said to be haunted, so perhaps this story explains that.
The last February book is a French title: Eleutheria: Chronique des Amazones, by Helena Manenti from Homoromance Éditions, which has been the source of several French-language titles we’ve mentioned before. Set in classical Athens, the young, aristocratic Nyssa has a chance to leave the golden cage of her marriage for the chance to escape to a feminist utopia when she encounters an enslaved woman who will turn her existence upside down.
And there’s one lonely March release in my list at the moment. A supernatural adventure slipping between times and worlds: Girls in Black, book 2 in the Ranger Paraversum series by Vesna Kurilic from Shtriga. The aftermath of World War II is complicated enough, but Lina needs to figure out how to keep her parallel-world doppelganger secret from her landlady and her employer. And then there’s the problem of how long she can stay in this world at all…
What Am I Reading?
And me? What am I reading? I’m still struggling with my fiction reading habits (and I’m making a big push to get caught up on my reviews, which I think will help) but one book that easily broke through my reading block is Aliette de Bodard’s brand new Vietnamese-inspired historic fantasy, Fireheart Tiger. This is a bright little gem of a novella, set in a Vietnam-inspired fantastic past, in which an undervalued princess meets a former lover in very awkward circumstances, and…but let’s just move on to hear what the author has to say about it.
Author Guest: Aliette de Bodard
Heather Rose Jones: Aliette de Bodard writes speculative fiction that draws on her Vietnamese heritage and blends queer characters in both fantasy and space opera. I’ve been longing for her to write something that intersected the themes of this podcast solidly enough to ask her on the show, and with Fireheart Tiger, I finally got my wish. Welcome, Aliette.
Aliette de Bodard: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
H: So, could you give our listeners a brief synopsis of Fireheart Tiger?
A: Yes, so, Fireheart Tiger is a romantic fantasy that’s set in a secondary world that’s very directly inspired by pre-colonial Vietnam. It’s set in the fictitious country of Bình Hải, which is currently under siege both by its neighbors and by a colonizer country, and it follows Thanh, who’s a royal—an imperial princess, sorry, and who got sent to the colonizing country as a hostage and came back as kind of damaged goods because—she didn’t really achieve much, obviously, because she was never going to achieve much. The only thing she brought back is an intensive, torrid love affair with the princess of the colonizing country, which becomes a problem when she gets put in charge of negotiations with said colonizing country and the head of the delegation is said former princess, who’s like, I would really, really like to reconnect in a very significant way. And she finds herself caught between issues of love, loyalty to country, loyalty to family—and re-questioning where she thought her life was headed.
H: Yeah, I can see that could be complicated.
A: Relationships. You have to work at them, apparently.
H: So, what was the inspiration for this particular story?
A: So, it’s been a mixture of things. So, the fire itself was a history of—I mean, the one I can think of is Denmark, but you know, there’s a history of royal palaces burning down. Denmark, I have to say, was pretty spectacular because the palace burned three times, I think, in a two-century interval. I wanted to write a story that was focused on pre-colonial Vietnam because to me it’s a fascinating time period. It’s also a very frustrating time period because when I read the history as history— You know, that’s the problem with reading histories: you know how it’s going to end, and you kind of know that all those characters who are bickering with each other about what it means—so you have French interference in Vietnamese politics, then you have more and more missionaries coming, more and more Americans making inroads—is not a good thing. And that anybody who actually thinks that they can throw in their lot temporarily with the French is sadly mistaken as to their intentions, right? So, to me, it’s a period of great uncertainty and great change, and I guess I wanted, you know, I kind of wanted to rewrite history in a different manner and think on how it might all have come about a bit differently and under what terms. At heart, though, it’s a very personal story about relationships, you know, both familial and romantic, about history, magic, and it’s also a story about some pretty dark places. I mean, I should put up front the trigger warnings for abuse, an attempted rape late in the book, which is implied but not—you know, still there. So, I guess, yeah—I kind of threw that together, and the miracle is that it remained novella length, rather than become a whole novel.
H: Yeah, I can see there’s a lot going on. I mean, your works are full of queer characters, and it feels like most of your books carry through these themes of colonization as apocalypse. And—I don’t mean this to be a silly question because I think I know the answer, but what do these themes mean for you? I mean, you have your fairy-tale sapphic fantasy, In the Vanishers’ Palace, which is set after the departure of an incredibly destructive alien occupation; you’ve got the Dominion of the Fallen series that deals with the very literal fallout of a magical war between fallen angels and their allies— So, these themes of colonization and apocalypse are really through-lines in much of your work.
A: Yeah. I mean, I guess where I come from is being a child of a particular war, right? My family fled the Vietnamese American War when they were by and large—well, I mean, it depends on which generation, but let’s say the generation just above me was teenagers when it happened. And it’s a very peculiar feeling to grow as part of a diaspora that’s not—you know, it’s not an economic one. It’s a very particular feeling. You don’t always have a choice about migrating for economic reasons, but war makes it a little different in terms of urgency—
H: Yes.
A: —and no return. There’s what I was raised with, was stories of a world that had passed because it had been destroyed. What I’ve been raised with is a dialect of Vietnamese that in some cases is very much no longer extant. There’s words that I know that are not in the dictionary. They refer to customs that are not that followed anymore, either. Right. So it kind of feels in many ways, like, I mean—first off, terrible devastation and an accelerator of history, but it also feels very much like: [as] a child, I guess that my main feeling was growing up in the ruins of something I didn’t really know, right? Because, I mean, what I got was mostly stories filtered through the lenses of my family, and not all the stories. Oh, when the kid enters the room, we’re going to shut up about the things we’re actually talking about because those are not subjects for kids, right? So it’s only as an adult that I find out things that, you know—I went to my grandmother to learn some Vietnamese because I felt like I needed to speak the language a little more in order to—I speak it a little but I wanted to become more fluent in order to reconnect. And then she drops, like, bombshell after bombshell in the middle of the conversation, and she’s like, “Yes, we hid in the marshes after they bombed our new year’s!” And I was like, what! I’m sorry, what!! “When we came back, they thought I was dead!” And I was like, yup, I can see that—can see that! And I think, you know, although I didn’t know that growing up as a child, it’s still there, no matter how well adults try to hide it. So I feel as though this whole apocalypse—because in many ways the war was that, to my family. And I’m not, per se, concerned with the actual apocalypse happening, right? You’ll notice that, for instance, there are no stories set during the great houses’ war in Dominion of the Fallen. I haven’t written a whole lot of war stories in the Xuya universe, either. Because most of what I’m concerned with is what do you do afterwards. I guess it’s the concern of, I mean, my concern, but also the concern of my generation, which is the one immediately after that, is where do we go from there? And different points of views depending on whether you stayed or left.
H: You deal with the complications of a multicultural background. So, you’ve got the Vietnamese family heritage, you are French by nationality, and you’re writing in English. And I’ve heard you talk on Twitter a lot about, sort of, translation challenges, where you’re trying to represent specific cultural concepts in a language that doesn’t have a useful shorthand for those concepts. But what are some of the joys of writing from such a multi-layered cultural background?
A: I guess, I mean—well, I mean, first off it’s hard not to do otherwise, right? And I feel like, you know—I remember having these conversations with a friend when I was just—I mean, not when I was just starting out, but about, like, three or four years into my writing career, I mean, depending on how you count “writing” and “career” per se, but—let’s not go there. But anyways, we were having a conversation about writing our own cultures, and I said, but, you know, and we’re both scared of doing it. But if we don’t do it, who is going to do it? Actually, what I said was, if you don’t do it, who is going to do it? And then I hung up. But then I was like, like, hang on—is she the only one it applies to? No, she’s not the only one it applies to. Riiiight. You two sit down and do a bit of soul-searching here; I’ll be back in a week or so. So, I mean, there’s that to me, which is—it’s impossible for me to write being informed by something else. And the other thing is, I guess I’m always very aware of how things are relative, how things are—it’s very easy for me just to go, like, this thing that you think is a bedrock and absolutely indispensable and absolutely universal actually is not at all, right? Because especially, you know, coming from Vietnamese and French backgrounds that they’re kind of further away, I would say, than you know, I don’t know, French and Spanish because they were neighbors for centuries. Right, so it’s easier for me to go, like, for instance, the assumption that a woman is going to take her husband’s last name upon marrying, yeah, nope. Why? What makes it, you know— So I guess to some extent it makes sense to some extent worldbuilding a little easier for me because I don’t have those kneejerk assumptions, and I tend to question everything, which is not terrific in everyday life, but it’s great for worldbuilding. And the other thing is, you know, being actively aware of language and how you use language, and which languages you use in which circumstances as well, that’s something I’m very interested in. Also interested in, you know, what I think of as liminal spaces. People who—hey, wonder how that happened—but anyway, people who don’t belong to one culture or the other, and what it means to not be in that space, and what it means to, I guess, code-switch—I’m not sure if that’s really the right term technically, but kind of, like, switching, you know, attitudes, mindsets, and that sort of thing as you navigate. That’s something I’m always terribly interested in, and something that a lot of my characters tend to have as well, right? For example, Thanh is also navigating between what she knows of the colonizing culture through being there from ages 12 to 16 or 18—I can’t actually remember my own timeline: going to say 18—and her own country, and you know, this sort of disconnect between coming back to a country where she only spent half her childhood, but it is her homeland so, kind of, alienation from her own culture—
H: Mm hm.
A: —which I think also comes from what I navigate, because my culture very much rubs against, into French culture. It’s very—I mean, you know, again, things that they take for granted, I don’t really, right? So, there’s that, that I have to navigate in everyday life, and so my characters tend to do that as well. And it makes it easier for me to understand what that would mean.
H: Uh huh. So, I’m going to preface this next question with an apology for making reference to “Asian” fantasy, as if the entire continent had, you know, some universal factor. But when I’ve been compiling the new book listings for my podcast, I have been seeing a lot of sapphic historic fiction—historic fantasy—with various Asian-inspired settings or historical Asian settings, and a lot of it has been own-voices, or at least, written by people whose cultural roots are in the culture they’re writing about. So, I hate to call it a trend, but it is something that has jumped out at me as, maybe more like a pattern in the clouds. Do you have any thoughts on that?
A: I mean, I’m very happy about it, personally. You know, that makes my—I’m going to take that book, and that book, and that book. Oh yeah, yeah, a lot of reading sorted for next year. Yeah, I mean—you see, there’s been—okay, I hesitate to call it a trend as well, but there’s been a resistant buildup in lifting up and publishing more own voices, right. I certainly know that when I started publishing, around ten years ago, there’s things I’m publishing today that I could not have sold. And I know this because I know we had the chat with my agent, who was like, okay, I love you, I know you want to write this, I know it means a lot to you; I don’t think I can sell it, though, so we need to have a chat about what you think I can actually sell and the intersection with your interests. So I think that that’s—at least that barrier to entry has been reducing. It comes with a lot of other issues. Like, I’m not saying we’ve solved racism in publishing; we have not. But, you know, notably sustainability of careers comes to mind, right, because there I am going to call it a trend, which is publishers very often feel to me like they’re jumping on the bandwagon of oh!—the next shiny thing, and I guess that’s how publishing works, but I’m a little concerned that this is also going to apply to authors of colors more than it does to white authors, and I guess time will tell there, right.
H: Yeah, that is the problem with trends: they come in and then they go out again.
A: Yeah, exactly, and I’m a little, you know—that’s where I get…. We’re not a trend, right? We’re kind of hoping to stay. We’re there to stay, actually, but we would like to not to have fight so much, to stay. And the same thing has been happening for own-voice –I was talking about people of color, but you have the same trend—the same, well, general direction going for own-voices queer narratives. So I think to some extent it’s kind of: get the con big enough and then you’re going to have to have the—you’re going to have the Venn diagram intersection of these two things. Being published is what I think is happening, I think. And also, I think, you know, to some extent, it’s been particularly highly visible because especially sapphic has not exactly—there’s been a dearth of highly visible—not saying that they weren’t there, but they tended to get less visibility than other stuff, or be self-published, or to be published by smaller imprints. Or, you know, the list is endless. But it’s not a question of existence; it’s really a question of, how, you know, what Big Five publishing, and then marketing budget in Big Five. I think—correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the Ladies’ Guide to Celestial Mechanics was the first sapphic romance to be published by a Big Five, I think, or something?
H: I have heard that. I think the author said something about that.
A: Yeah. I have not—I mean, you know, I’m encroaching, so I don’t know, but there certainly haven’t been 25,000 before that, right.
H: No.
A: And I think you also have that in fantasy and SF, so they’re also particularly visible because they’re being pushed and they weren’t there before, so there’s a real appetite for them. Which is good, right? So again, I’m not complaining, but—
H: Time will tell.
A: Yeah, time will tell, and maybe there’s this big invisible factor that I’m missing. Oh, and sorry, you also have—there’s a lot of editors that are starting to be hired, you know, in marginalized—from marginalized demographics.
H: Which certainly helps.
A: Yeah, they’re starting to make their mark, rather than [only] being hired. They’ve been there, again.
H: So, do you have any current projects that you’re working on that our listeners might be particularly interested in—that you’re allowed to talk about?
A: Well, I’m working on a space pirates project that’s directly informed by the South China Sea pirates. So, the South China Sea pirates were in the tail end of the seven—eighteenth century, tail end of the eighteenth century, in the boundary zone between China and Vietnam. Ching Shih—sorry, my pronunciation, however, is terrible—is the main known one, the pirate queen. There have been a number of them spread over different periods, and what I’m doing is mostly coming at it from, you know, the Vietnamese history angle, which is that the Tây Sơn dynasty actually financed itself through piracy, partly. And so I’m kind of telling a science fiction version of this, which also involves, like, you know, sapphic shenanigans because one has to put these in. Continuing with themes. And so that’s the main one I’m actually allowed to talk about. There’s another one of interest that I’m actually not allowed to talk about, so we’ll wait until I actually have permission.
H: We’ll wait eagerly to hear about that one.
A: That’s about all I’ve got going at the moment.
H: Uh huh.
A: It being, you know, 2020—gesturing, cursing, that sort of thing.
H: Yes, that we’re being productive at all is a miracle. So, I like to ask guests to talk about something they’ve read or watched recently that they think the listeners might be interested in. Would you have anything to share?
A: If I’m allowed to get, like, you know, recent—like, some time ago, so—I read Kate Elliott’s Unconquerable Sun, which is a genderbent Alexander the Great in space, with Alexander being Sun, who’s in a relationship with another woman, so, you know. And it’s also—I mean, I don’t know all of the history, but there’s a lot of historical parallels that Alis [i.e. Elliott] and I were talking about. It’s set in the—if you’re interested in history, you should check that out. It’s a very chunky book, so you’ve also got plenty to read, but it’s, like, one of the best books I’ve read in 2020—ooh, this is the year that felt like forever. And the other one that I can think of—that I really, really like—is Nghi Vo’s When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, which is— So it’s partly about history, but it’s also about the love between a scholar and a tiger, who are both women, and how that plays out for the tigers and for the humans. It’s kind of short, so, you know, that’s at the other end of the spectrum of, like, if you have time to read, or if you have less time to read. I found it quite delightful both because of the themes being explored and because of the way it nails oral history. And obviously, you know, I’m biased there because it draws on Vietnamese lore, so it sounds very much like, you know, the queer version of what—something my grandmother might have told me, which is very high praise, and so forth.
H: Uh huh. Well, that’s lovely. So, if people wanted to follow you online, where should they look?
A: I have a website, which is aliettedebodard.com, which is mostly for the official news and stuff. The newsletter as well. I’m on Twitter as @aliettedb, which is mostly where a lot of the linguistics kind of things, tearing my hair out over unexpected developments, and all that stuff happens. Also, book promotion, but you know, that’s not the great majority of the timeline, and if you just want to hear about the new releases and stuff, I really recommend the newsletter, which is really the best way to get that in your inbox. I mean, I am solo parenting, so it’s not like I have time to spam people with newsletters. I really send it when I have news! So, that’s where I am mostly. And if you’re more interested in the recipe side of things, I have a Patreon, which has a tier which mostly features—I mean, there’s a bunch of tiers, depending on whether you’re interested in the writing, the recipes, or both, but that has the goods on how to make pancakes, my experiments in making tartes and pastries and all that sort of thing.
H: Well, I will include links to all of those in the show notes. And thank you so much for sharing your time with the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast.
A: Thank you.
Show Notes
Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.
In this episode we talk about:
- The topics that historical fiction flinches away from
- Stories picked for the 2021 Fiction Series
- Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- Choquette, Leslie. 2001. “’Homosexuals in the City: Representations of Lesbian and Gay Space in Nineteenth-Century Paris” in Merrick, Jeffrey & Michael Sibalis, eds. Homosexuality in French History and Culture. Harrington Park Press, New York. ISBN 1-56023-263-3
- Vicinus, Martha. 1992. "'They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong': The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity" in Feminist Studies vol. 18, no. 3 467-497.
- Binhammer, Katherine. 2002. "Thinking Gender with Sexuality in 1790s' Feminist Thought" in Feminist Studies vol 28, no 3. pp. 667-690.
- Boyd, Nan Alamilla. 2013. "The History of the Idea of the Lesbian as a Kind of Person" in Feminist Studies vol. 39, no. 2 362-365.
- Interview with Mari Ness about Madame de Murat and the salon fairy tales
- New and forthcoming fiction
- A Call to Justice (series #3) by S.W. Andersen
- The Wife in the Attic by Rose Lerner
- Fishwives by Sally Bellerose
- Flying High by G.B. Baldassari
- ”Bump in the Night” by Lara Kinsey
- The Railwalkers by Ruth Hanson
- The Ledge Light: New London by Diana Perkins
- Eleutheria: Chronique des Amazones by Helena Manenti
- Girls in Black (Ranger Paraversum Book 2) by Vesna Kurilic
- Interview with Aliette de Bodard
- The inspirations for using a pre-colonial fantasy-Vietnam as a setting
- Themes of colonization and apocalypse
- Future plans for space pirates inspired by Ching Shih and other pirates of the south China Sea
- Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard
- In the Vanishers’ Palace by Aliette de Bodard
- Dominion of the Fallen series by Aliette de Bodard
- Xuya Universe series by Aliette de Bodard
- Recommended work: Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott (gender-bent Alexander the Great in space with sapphic subplot)
- Recommended work: When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo (historic fantasy with f/f tiger-human romance)
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 Aliette de Bodard Online
- Website: AlietteDeBodard.com
- Twitter: @aliettedb
- Patreon: Blogging with Dragons
- Essays: Mari’s essays at Tor.com
- Twitter: @mari_ness
- Patreon: Mari Ness
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LHMPTuesday, March 2, 2021 - 19:00
This is a fascinating article and I only skim through the concrete examples it touches on. What is the relationship of pain to pleasure? And why is that relationship specifically focused around women's same-sex encounters? Is there a logical connection or are they simply tools in defining "normative" sexuality in contrast?
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LHMPFull citation:
Binhammer, Katherine. 2003. "The 'Singular Propensity' of Sensibility's Extremities: Female Same-Sex Desire and the Eroticization of Pain in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Culture" in GLQ 9:4, 471-498.
In this article, Binhammer compares the social meanings of three parallel forms of “sexual excess” in late 18th century British literature, and how the three are linked structurally in the popular imagination. Specifically: sex between women, sexualized whipping, and the emotional experience of extreme “sensibility”.
She begins with a familiar recounting of the difficulties of defining and studying lesbian concepts during the 18th century. She argues that female same-sex desire (in its various manifestations), rather than being scarce in 18th century contexts, is central to the development of late 18th century bourgeois models of sexuality, by participating in mapping the boundaries of acceptably moderate sexual conduct.
Same-sex desire could be viewed as a “propensity,” that is, a personal taste, among other non-normative sexual tastes catalogued at the time. But increasingly, sex was being defined around a central “acceptable” model of moderated heterosexual intercourse between married partners for the purpose of reproduction. Extremes of many sorts were felt to detract from or interfere with this goal, including excessive sexual activity, excess desire that could only be satisfied by alternative activities, or even an excess of emotional response.
Within this context, female same-sex desire became a signal of when moderate experiences and feelings became unacceptably immoderate. This is examined in three specific contexts. One is the rise of scenes of female erotic flagellation in pornographic literature, and possibly in actual practice. Another is the culture of sensibility and the fetishization of empathic emotional pain. Tying these together is an association of each specifically with female same-sex contexts.
The emerging fascination with sexual flagellation in pornography in the 18th century coincided with the rise of the culture of “sensibility”, especially within the novel. In both contexts, there developed an understanding of pain (both physical and emotional) as obscene and deviant. Pornography deliberately violated social taboos around sex, and the eroticization of pain defined it as forbidden and therefore obscene.
[Note: Perhaps because of the focus in this article on the specifics of the 18th century, Binhammer doesn’t touch significantly on the potential erotics of both physical and sympathetic pain in the medieval context of penance and contemplation of the passion. A religious connection is made in 18th century flagellation pornography, but within the context of anti-Catholic sentiment. And there is a comment that the flagellation scene in Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is considered a turning point in the depiction of whipping as being primarily for erotic stimulation.]
Flagellation, like f/f sex, was commented on and described as an arbitrary taste. That is, something that an individual might indulge in and prefer for illogical reasons. And sexual flagellation came to be strongly associated with women, and especially with same-sex erotics, to the point where the two were intertwined. Such scenes typically involved a woman in authority over other women (governesses, schoolmistresses, the mistress of servants) where some excuse is found to require punishment. The erotic aspect might be present for the agent alone, or there might be a male voyeur in the scene, but the most common formula was for two women to act as partner in “disciplining” a third, subordinate woman or girl.
Within female institutions, the instigating event might be depicted as “innocent” sexual play between girls that then is punished by an authority. The whipping is then sometimes blamed for the awakening of an excess erotic desire in the victim (or in the agents) which then requires more extreme actions to satisfy.
Somewhat more unusually, one text described a female “flagellant club” in London in which the members drew lots for who would take each role, and then would trade off “when the sensation became too intense.” This was depicted as the equivalent of male social clubs, complete with meetings, speeches, and such. [Note: compare with the French depictions of the Anandrine Sect from a similar era.]
Such depictions in literature have been a source of contention among historians, on the one side declaring that they should only be understood as male fantasies, and on the other side noting that some women (in modern times) do engage in sexual discipline and one shouldn’t reject the possibility of actual female flagellant clubs on a “but women don’t do that sort of thing” basis.
The depictions of f/f sex in pornography contradict the heterosexist ideas that such activity is inconsequential, is only a precursor to heterosexual activity, or necessarily involves gender role-play. Contrary to the “precursor” image, sex between women is often depicted in these texts as a consequence of women being bored or unsatisfied by m/f sex. Pornographic flagellation involving men often depicted it as a way to excite a flagging desire, but with women it’s seen as a way to satisfy an excess of desire. The same theme is seen for f/f sex generally: that it’s a natural consequence of excess. [Note: the motif that f/f sex would merely stimulate women to a point of unsatisfied arousal that could only be requited by m/f sex was more dominant in a slightly earlier era.] This is one motif that we see in the depictions of Marie Antoinette as being sexually voracious and therefore turning to women when men were insufficient.
The final theme in this conjunction is the culture of “sensibility”, that is, a heightened emotional response including empathy for other’s distress and pain. While sensibility was considered a desirable characteristic, if taken to extremes it could be viewed as self-indulgent and generating perverse pleasure in suffering. [Note: This is exactly what Jane Austen is depicting in Sense and Sensibility in the character of Maryanne.] A key connection with erotic flagellation is the concept of excess, of going beyond accepted boundaries in one’s sensations. Excessive sensibility created erotic pleasure out of emotional pain, rather than physical.
This excess of sensibility in novels is evoked most often in relations between women, most often as depicted by female authors. Particularly in scenes of illness or suffering, one women will experience intense emotions in identifying with or caring for the sufferer. Even when women writers warn against this excess, they represent it in their work for the vicarious pleasure of the reader. One of the reasons women were warned against the reading of novels was due to the intense emotional reactions they were thought to provoke. The sympathy and care for a suffering loved one, when recorded in diaries and letters, may in some cases either encode or displace same-sex erotic feelings that could not be recorded directly, as in the scenes of tender care in Eleanor Butler’s journal.
In summary, Binhammer sees connections and parallels in the ways that “painful pleasures” are used to define and police the boundaries of acceptable eroticism, and how the excess of feeling associated with them was depicted as a uniquely female same-sex experience. In this, these connections do not define a “lesbian” experience, but show how same-sex erotics are part of a more general contrast with the narrow, bourgeois sexuality as it was being defined in the late 18th century.
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Sunday, February 28, 2021 - 07:00
Set in the same magical-Regency world as Cho’s earlier Sorcerer to the Crown, but overlapping only slightly in characters, this book tells the story of two sisters in Malaysia, struck by a curse that sends one on a quest to England and fairyland to find a cure for her sister’s fading. Along the way, she must conceal her own lack of magic, enlist the aid of the sorceress royal and a dragon, and untangle the mystery of her own identity.
The story was utterly delightful, full of brash and daring women, incidentally queer relationships, unexpected magic, and a couple of plot twists that were no less enjoyable for me having predicted them from the beginning.
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ReviewsSaturday, February 27, 2021 - 07:00
This is a psychological study of the confined lives and expectations of women in post-WWII England. Using flashbacks, it traces the lives of a mother and daughter as every turn seems to snatch away what they felt they were promised, constantly requiring them to have less, to do less, and to be less (manifested as anorexia by the daughter).
I wouldn’t call it an “enjoyable read,”—it’s very much a literary novel rather than the genre literature I usually pick up. But there’s a strong artistry in the character depictions and an immense depth of understanding of the psychology of the times.
There are hints of queer elements in the story (the daughter is rescued by a lesbian friend, and there are some episodes in the flashbacks that I read as homoerotic, though they may not have been intended as such). But it’s very background and subtle.
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ReviewsFriday, February 26, 2021 - 07:00
On a whim, I picked this up in audio because I wasn't sure when I'd get to it on the page. Given how late I am to the party, I'm aware that there's now an entire series of the "wayward children" stories, involving those who have gone through portals to another realm...and now can't find their way back. But this first story is less a classic portal fantasy than it is a classic murder mystery. And when all the inhabitants of the mysterious spooky mansion are more than a little odd, sorting out the suspects can be a problem.
I really enjoyed the worldbuilding behind McGuire's version of portal fantasy. And the protagonist captures the desperation and angst of being a Strange Child doomed never to find her way to the place she belongs. (Been there, though a different flavor of Strange.)
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ReviewsThursday, February 25, 2021 - 07:00
I don't quite know why, but this book just didn't grab me and I ended up not finishing it. Maybe it's because I'm enough outside the online culture being depicted that it felt both alien and over-explained. Maybe I had too hard a time trying to get inside the protagonist's head.
The basic premise is that a lonely teenage girl, dragged on the run by a mother who has genuinely excellent reasons to want to move invisibly through society, finds illicit friendship and connection through an online chat board (that is, her participation is illicit, not the chat board in general). But the Presence behind the board isn't at all what it seems, and Things Start Happening. If you enjoy imaginative stories about plugged-in culture, you may well like this much more than I did.
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