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The Craziest F/F Regency Romance Plot You Ever Heard

Monday, October 1, 2018 - 08:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

You ever imagine one of those so-crazy-no-editor-would-ever-buy-it romance plots? F/f regency romance with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as a significant supporting character. Bastard daughter of a Scottish earl. Beautiful socialite whose baby-daddy fled to America. Marriage of convenience. Secret baby. Gender disguise. Beauty and the beast. Making a living by publishing under multiple pen names. Foreign travel. Brittle witty people engaging in flirtation and back-biting gossip in Parisian salons. Over-the-top Gothic poetry about dead loves. Mysterious chronic illness. Fleeing one step ahead of the creditors. Dying in a squalid debtor's prison.

One of the most consistent experiences I've had while working on the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has been: "How could I have had a book this marvelous sitting on my shelf for 20 years and never realized it?" I mean, really. I buy a lot of books. Books that look interesting, but then they get cataloged and put on the shelf and boxed and moved and boxed and moved. And then one day, for some reason, I pick them up and say, "Let's see what you've got." And sometimes what they've got is fireworks.

I knew--vaguely--what the topic of this book was. What I didn't realize until I started reading it was how wonderfully it was structured as a guided tour through the research process. What began as a quest to fill out the details of two footnotes turned into a research project that took over a decade and turned up a story so implausible that I'd have to tone it down to write it as fiction. I'd like to be clear that the story of Mary Diana Dods has not been proven to be a lesbian story--no more so than any early 19th century life involving romantic friendships, female husbands, and women's communities supporting each other. But it provides a model for how you could write a lesbian Regency romance that would blow expectations out of the water. I've previously emphasized how surprisingly easy it was to accomplish gender disguise in previous centuries. But Dods' story also points out how plausible it is for a passing woman to be supported in her disguise by friends and family. Too often, in historical fiction, we isolate our protagonists and depict them as struggling alone with a dangerous secret. Understanding that such protagonists could have been supported, encouraged, and protected by a community that knew all their secrets opens up a lot more plot possibilities. It also points out several avenues other than gender disguise that women could use to arrange to share independent lives together. Like: the number of women who seem to have moved to a new community and simply announced that they were wives of absent or deceased husbands and who thereafter achieved widow's privilege and respectability.

If, like me, you come out of the end of this academic mystery tour and want to look at the timeline of Dods' life in a more straightforward manner, I'll be posting my attempt at a rough timeline in a day or two and linking it both here and in the book entry below.

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LHMP #215 Bennett 1991 Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar

Full citation:

Bennett, Betty T. 1991. Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. ISBN 0-8018-4984-5

[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]

# # #

This is not so much a biography or historical study as it is a mystery novel. Rather than taking the results of a years’ long research project, organizing it logically, and then presenting it in a systematic manner, Bennett leads us step by step through the process of her research, from the first dangling threads that she tugged on, all the way through to pinning down the last details.

One thing this means is that the reader’s understanding of the historic events will shift and change along with Bennett’s pursuit through archives, publications, libraries, graveyards, and so forth. Occasionally she’ll slip up and foreshadow later discoveries, but mostly we get the same slow and confusing unfolding experience that she did. [Note: I’ll also caution that my write-up is based on the unfolding reading, so earlier material may be “wrong” in the context of the full story.] If you want to get a sense of the shape and nature of an academic research project—no matter what your subject matter interests are—this is an excellent and very readable example.

This research project began when Bennett was editing a collection of Mary Shelley’s letters. [Note: I’m going to assume that the reader either knows, or can refresh their memory, on who Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was, along with her historic and social context. To save my typing, I’m mostly going to abbreviate her as MS.] In compiling the footnotes to provide background and biographical information on the various people mentioned in the letters, she ran across two loose ends: David Lyndsay, an author of books, poems, and short stories with a growing literary reputation, and Walter Sholto Douglas, the husband of Shelley’s close friend Isabella Robinson Douglas, and an aspiring diplomat.

Lyndsay was mentioned in MS’s letters in 1822, Douglas in 1827. Around 1830, both disappeared from her letters, but left traces in history. Lyndsay continued to be mentioned in Romantic literature studies and Douglas was mentioned in various legal and biographical documents, primarily as the father of Adeline Douglas Wolff. All Bennett needed was a few more details to add to the footnotes for context. What she found connected the two men in an unexpected way. The other primary figures in the story are Mary Shelley, her beloved friend Isabella Robinson—described by many as the most beautiful woman they knew, and Mary Diana Dods, a brilliant, well-educated woman, though described as physically deformed in some way. The three women probably met around 1825 when they were all involved in salons held in London by Dr. William Kitchener. But they had other acquaintances in common, so other contexts are equally possible. By early winter of 1825, the three were close friends. By two and a half years later, the nature of their relationships were transformed. Mary Diana Dods had become both David Lyndsay and Walter Sholto Douglas.

[Note: For reasons that may not become apparent until the end of the book, it seems most reasonable to understand Mary Diana Dods as a woman who took on a male persona for economic and social reasons, rather than due to gender identity or for reasons related to sexuality. Although this is something of a “spoiler” for the book’s conclusion, I mention it here as context for how I treat Dods’ gender in this summary. I’ll be referring to Dods’ various aliases by their apparent gender with respect to the point in the unfolding story. However this is also a context where I'd like to note that Bennett’s handling of discussions of sexuality, gender identity, and possible intersex identity are not always up to today’s standards of sensitivity. While I don’t recall anything that was outright offensive, the terminology she uses is of the ‘90s, and some of her basic assumptions are narrow.]

Bennett’s research considers this story in the context of emerging studies of gender and sexuality, including the work of Helena Whitbread regarding Anne Lister, and studies of the “female husband” concept, which was not necessarily motivated by sexuality or gender identity, but often simply by economic pressure. There is a surprising amount of data on “female husbands”, which is important for the social and historical context of Dods’ life, in that the concept would have been quite familiar. Further evidence of familiarity comes from MS’s own writings involving cross-dressing (heterosexual) heroines, in her novels The Last Man and Perkin Warbeck.

Bennett began tracing the puzzle because she couldn’t find any basic biographical data for Douglas or Lyndsay. MS had written to Lyndsay’s publisher, saying that he was out of the country and acting as his go-between, so clearly he was someone she knew personally. Bennett then reviews the various works attributed to Lyndsay that he was trying to find publishers for. Bennett traced Lyndsay via those titles and found potential Scottish connections. This led to the National Library of Scotland, who turned up correspondence between Lyndsay and the publisher William Blackwood, mentioning other associates. In one of the letters, Lyndsay noted that author Charles Lamb knew him “but not as Lyndsay.” This was a clue that Lyndsay might well be a pen name, hence the lack of other references.

Having started down the track of David Lyndsay, Bennett now shifts her attention to Walter Sholto Douglas. An 1827 letter from MS mentions her good friend Isabella Douglas and her concerns about Mr. Douglas attending the funeral of “Lord M” from whose will “certainty will come” regarding their financial situation. The context suggests that the Douglases are relative newlyweds.

Bennett moves on to a general discussion of the financial difficulties that women faced at the time, as well as the pressures toward single-sex socializing. (It took more money to be able to host mixed-sex gatherings in a respectable fashion.) In addition, a male escort was necessary for a wide variety of public activities, such as attending performing arts events or travel. The near-impossibility of divorce also created difficulties. A woman who was separated from her husband and cohabiting with another man might present herself as married to her current partner in order to avoid ostracism. This, of course, was far more possible if one relocated and avoided former acquaintances.

Another of MS’s close female friends was Jane Hogg, who apparently knew all the details about the Douglases as her correspondence with MS mentioned them. MS wrote her about her emotional attachment to Isabella Douglas: “who I dearly love and who feels the liveliest affection for me.” [Note: Bennett presents herself as seeing these sentiments as potentially erotic at the time, then walking back the conclusion at a later date when she becomes more familiar with the conventions of romantic friendship.] Another letter of the time was to a male friend in London, asking a favor relating to passports. The Douglases were about to travel abroad and passports must be claimed in person in London to avoid the extra fee at the port itself. Could the friend find someone of appropriate description to go with him to the passport office in the names of Walter Sholto Douglas and his wife Isabella? MS provided examples of their signatures to forge when picking up the documents. The traveling party included on the passport consisted of the Douglases, their daughter, Sholto’s sister Mrs. Carter and her two sons, and originally was to include Shelley herself, though as it happened she traveled later.

Among other puzzles, in another letter around the context of these travel plans, MS mentions that Sholto “now seriously thinks of les coulottes” using the French for “the trousers.” Was this simply a reference to their French destination? Was it slang of some sort?

MS went to join the Douglases in Paris in 1828 in company with Isabella’s father and sister. MS had a large circle of acquaintances in Paris, some of whom mention Isabella in their letters of the time, calling her “coquettish and bored.” MS’s attachment to Isabella seems not to have extended to Sholto, whom she blamed for Isabella’s restlessness. And then after June 1828, her letters no longer mention the Douglases, although they do appear later in her journals.

The bond with Jane Hogg had begun as a romantic friendship, disrupted by Jane’s marriage. MS similarly seems to have had a romantic friendship with Isabella and later reflects that she could have been happy with her but “that dream is over.” By 1830, MS now sees Isabella as having “lost her fascination” and “not the being she once was.” What could have happened?

With regard to how MS and Isabella met, we go back to correspondence where she is speaking of her friendship with “the Robinsons” and her new delight in the friendship of Isabella’s sister Julia. MS’s father’s diaries mention entertaining “Robinson, père de Douglas” [i.e., father of Isabella Douglas] in combination with Julia Robinson and a Miss Figg. [Note: Miss Figg will become relevant again much later.] Background: Joshua Robinson was an Oxford graduate and a builder, who with his wife Rosetta had a large family, at least 5 girls and 4 boys. While poking around in various biographical dictionaries, Bennett also comes across the information that Adeline, daughter of Walter Sholto Douglas and Isabella Robinson Douglas married one Henry Drummond Wolff.

Bennett now turns to tracing the identity of the “Lord M” whose funeral and will were of interest to the Douglases. The dates and names matched that of George Douglas, earl of Morton. He left a widow but no male heirs and the estate went to his cousin George Sholto Douglas. The conjunction of names jumps out as intriguing, but a bit of research determined that the combination “Sholto Douglas” was popular in a number of Scottish families. There was no likely candidate for Walter in the Morton line. Could he be illegitimate? Bennett set out to track down Lord M’s will.

While that was in motion, Bennett had gained access to a collection of 32 letters from David Lyndsay in the Scottish archives, covering correspondence between 1821 and 1829 with the publisher Blackwood. Lyndsay’s tone is enthusiastic—a debut author flattered by the publisher’s attention and encouragement. Lyndsay suggests that correspondence to him be sent in care of a Mrs. Carter in London. He mentions various proposed publishing projects with themes that he acknowledges are parallel to some that Lord Byron was also working on, along with other authors – the Romantic authors were a bit notorious for such parallels.

A complex picture of Lyndsay emerges from the letters. He discusses publicity strategies and the importance of timing and the support of critics. He changes his in-care-of mailing address to a James Weale. He makes reference to his Scottish origins and “our nation” when addressing Blackwood. He proposes doing some theater criticism for Blackwood’s magazine, though none was ever published. In August 1822, Lyndsay makes reference to Lamb “not knowing him as Lyndsay” implying that Lyndsay was a pseudonym. He makes some snide references to Byron, Percy Shelley, and Hunt, implying that he is in their social circle. A month later Shelley dies. Lyndsay proposes providing some works translated from German, indicating fluency along with the fluency in French, Italian, and Latin that he’s already demonstrated. He refers to “my old friend Kitchener” the host of a prominent salon.

In 1825, Lyndsay mentions being acquainted with Lady Byron (in the context of Byron’s death) and “well acquainted” with Mary Shelley. He provides evidence for the latter in his discussions of her work.

And then comes the end of Lyndsay’s correspondence with Blackwood. He expresses disappointment that Blackwood hasn’t been interested in publishing any of his recent works. He spells his name Lindsay rather than Lyndsay. And the handwriting of the letter is entirely different.

Now we move to a different track. When encountering a letter to MS from a “M D Dods”, whom Bennett believed at the time to be a man, she noted that the signature had an elaborate “D” that was identical to that used by David Lyndsay. Comparing the handwriting of the two on a letter-by-letter and whole-word basis, Bennett came to the conclusion that the two hands were identical. The letters from Dods to MS were very intimate in tone, addressing her by her first name and calling her “meine Liebling” (my darling). Was Dods a previously unknown secret lover of Mary Shelley? Bennett started looking for candidates.

Now we’re back to the Blackwood correspondence, trying to find out more about Lyndsay. Blackwood contacts James Weale (Lyndsay’s mail drop) who denies being Lyndsay’s alias. Other historians had concluded that Weale wrote the Lyndsay letters himself, but that would mean that he also wrote the M D Dods letters. There were reasons to doubt that line of thinking. There follows a detailed discussion of Lyndsay’s works and thematic influences. Bennett suspects that Lyndsay (= M D Dods) may actually be the Reverend Marcus Dods, but what would the Reverend Dods, a respectable middle-aged married minister, be doing calling the widowed Mary Shelley “my darling” in German? [Note: the "Reverend Dods" connection was eventually found fruitless, but this isn't clear from the following summary.]

The earl of Morton’s will is identified and obtained, but it’s the wrong will! Dated 1858, it can’t be the will of the “Lord M” mentioned in 1827, but must instead be his heir. (This turns out to be due to a difference in how earls are numbered in Scottish records as opposed to English ones.) The will documents the magnitude of the Morton estates and includes references to lots of men named Sholto, but no Walter Sholto Douglas. The prior earl (who is the relevant Lord M) left bequests to his wife and to two married daughters, aside from the estate that went to the next earl. [Note: It is eventually determined that the earl married in 1814, so the "two married daughters" referenced in 1827 are highly unlikely to be his wife's offspring! Also, as we later see, only one of the daughters had been married at this point.] No mention of any brother or son named Walter Sholto, legitimate or otherwise. It’s the right will, the right Lord M, but no Walter Sholto Douglas granted the annuity whose continuance was eventually confirmed in the 1827 correspondence.

The pursuit of the identity of Dods was meeting with dead ends and the publication date for the edition of Shelley’s letters was approaching, so it would be left with incomplete data on the mystery correspondents.

Bennett had been pursuing the contexts for Lyndsay and Douglas as separate problems, but when the draft of the book went out for feedback, all the data was arranged in chronological order. The readers came back with a couple of questions. Bennett had tentatively identified the “Doddy” of the Douglas letters as the Reverend Marcus Dods appearing in the Lyndsay letters. But at one point MS referred to Isabella’s husband as both “D” and “Doddy,” clearly meaning Walter Sholto Douglas. But if Doddy was also the Reverend Dods, did that mean he’d left his family to elope with Isabella in a pretense of marriage? And based on the handwriting, that would also mean that Dods = Douglas = Lyndsay. Was that a possible association, much less a plausible one? And if so, what in the world was the connection with the earl of Morton?

The second review question pointed out that an 1827 letter from MS to Jane Hogg appeared to have female pronouns for a person referred to as “D” associated with Isabella Douglas. The context was possibly ambiguous. Bennett’s assumptions had led her to connect the female pronoun with Isabella but fresh eyes noted that it was much more naturally read as meaning D. But that would mean that D was a woman.

Bennett went back and read through all the evidence looking to falsify the possibility that David Lyndsay, Walter Sholto Douglas, M D Dods, Marcus Dods and Doddy were not only all the same person but that that person was female. Working through all the references in MS’s letters, only the specific references to Isabella’s “husband” and “sposo” conflict with the possibility. And to balance that, there were references such as “les coulottes” and the episode with the passport imposture that would suddenly make more sense if a cross-dressing woman were involved.

The 1827 letters build a picture. MS is in the south of England nursing an anxious and ailing Isabella until Mr. Douglas arrives with the results of Lord M’s will. Douglas is in company with a Mrs. Carter (the same name as Lyndsay’s mail-drop) who will travel with the Douglases to France, pending the arrival of the aforementioned passports. The travel party, as described in the letter talking about the passports, was to be Mr. and Mrs. Sholto Douglas (with Sholto described as “slim, dark with curly black hair”), a Mrs. Carter and her two children, and Mrs. Shelley and her son. If the passport dodge was not simply to save a little money and a trip to London, might it be to avoid having Mr. Douglas recognized as a woman? And the signature on the passport letter for Walter Sholto Douglas that their agent was to forge had the same elaborate capital D that appears in the letters of David Lyndsay and M. D. Dods.

There is a gap in the letters: the Douglases have gone on to Paris but MS arrives later and immediately falls ill with smallpox. There are rising irritations among the circle of friends. Isabella informs Shelley that Jane Hogg has been spreading gossip about the Shelleys (remember that Percy Shelley is dead at this point). MS records that she feels guilt about being “in some sort the cause” of Isabella’s “sufferings” which are not elaborated and that she will “try to extricate her”. What does she need extricating from? The Douglas marriage? But if MS is cooling toward Walter Sholto Douglas, at the very same time she is writing letters in support of David Lyndsay’s literary career.

In June 1828 we find the last reference in MS’s letters to the Douglases—a rather strange reference, written to Jane Hogg (who evidently was somewhat forgiven for the gossip?):

You speak of beings to whom I link myself—speak, I pray you, in the singular number—if Isabel has not answered your letter, she will—but the misery to which she is a victim is so dreadful and merciless, that she shrinks like a wounded person from every pang—and you must excuse her on the score of her matchless sufferings. What D. now is, I will not describe in a letter—one only trusts that the diseased body acts on the diseased mind, & that both may be at rest ere long.

It is two years before MS mentions Isabella again, and then it is in her private journal wondering, “is this the being I adored—she was ever false yet enchanting—now she has lost her fascinations—probably, because I can no longer serve her she take[s] no more trouble to please me—but also she surely is not the being she once was.”

More questions pour in. Did Joshua Robinson know that his daughter had married a woman? Why didn’t Isabella simply separate from “Doddy” if the marriage was unhappy? What was the falling out between Isabella and MS? There are no clear answers, but the many details do not falsify the hypothesis that Dods/Douglas/Lyndsay was a woman. And that hypothesis would make sense of some of the more cryptic references.

Bennett returns to the question of Lord M’s will. If Walter Sholto Douglas was a woman, how would she have been mentioned in the will, if at all? Bennett asks another researcher who has been studying the Douglas daughter Adeline and asks about anyone named Dods in connection with her research. She is immediately pointed to Miss Dods (Doddy) who is a character in Eliza Rennies book Traits of Character. The book describes Miss Dods in detail and notes that she is a good friend of Mary Shelley.

This new line of research turns fruitful after some sifting through the (non-indexed) book to determine that the reference is in the section on Viscount Dillon, not the one on Mary Shelley or the one on Dr. Kitchener. Eliza Rennie was an acquaintance and fan of MS, a member of the Kitchener circle, and makes reference to meeting MS in the company of “one whose romantic history, were it written, would transcend all of English or even French fiction” as well as a man who died before the “mystery which shadowed and surrounded him was elucidated.” Bennett speculates, could this be a reference to Mrs. and Mr. Douglas?

Looking through the decidedly gossipy memoir, there are continuing references to “a girl of the greatest beauty I ever saw” who must be Isabella, but no clear reference to Mr. Douglas. Finally, in the chapter on Viscount Dillon, the viscount urges Rennie to go to MS’s to meet Miss Dods, an “extraordinary person staying with her…so wonderfully clever and so queer-looking.” Rennie then describes Miss Dods: “Nature, in any of its wildest vagaries, never fashioned anything more grotesque-looking than was this Miss Dods.” Her hair is cropped, curly, short, and thick, “more resembling that of a man than of a woman” and Dods looks like “some one of the masculine gender” who had “indulged in the masquerade freak of feminine habiliments, and that ‘Miss Dods’ was an alias for Mr. ----.” Was this, then the answer? That Dods actually was a man but was at that time presenting as a woman? Rennie turns away from that description and continues the description of Miss Dods: “She had small petite features, very sharp and piercing black eyes, a complexion extremely pale and unhealthy, with that worn and suffering look in her face which so often and so truly—as it did, poor thing, in hers—tells of habitual pain and confirmed ill-health; her figure was short, and, instead of being in proportion, was entirely out of all proportion—the existence of some organic disease aiding this materially.” This general description does not conflict with the one given for the passport or with Lyndsay’s self-description to Blackwood. But the physical “disproportion” becomes a key clue.

[Note: I haven’t been able to find anywhere that Bennett goes into more detail on what this “disproportion” may have been, though goodness knows she speculates on a number of other points. While the description is far too meager for any hope of diagnosis, I confess that the combination of physical descriptions and “habitual pain” made me wonder if some sort of scoliosis were possible. But this is pure speculation on my part.]

Despite Dods’ physical appearance, Rennie is impressed with her talent, intellect, and faculty with languages (which correspond to Lyndsay’s skills). Rennie makes a cryptic reference that she will not “enter upon or touch” Dods’ “own wild and wonderful subsequent career.” That Dods “resided many years at Paris where ‘she died and was buried’.” (Scare-quotes on “she died and was buried” in the original text.)

Rennie describes Doddy as a woman who appears awkwardly masculine in appearance and accomplishments. This feeds into the theory that there was gender-crossing going on, but in which direction?

Additional documents relating to Lord M’s will arrive, with a codicil granting an annuity “for the love, favor, and affection which I have and bear to my reputed daughters, Mary Diana Dods and Georgiana Carter (formerly Georgiana Dods) widow of Captain John Carter.” Dods and Carter were to have equal shares of an annuity of 200 pounds. [Note: Despite the reference earlier to "two married daughters," this language makes clear that only one of them was married at the time the document was drawn up.]

That settles the question of what gender Dods was assigned at birth [note: my wording, not Bennett’s]. M D Dods and Mrs. Carter (who accompanied the Douglases to France) were both “reputed” (i.e., illegitimate) daughters of the earl of Morton. And there is the result of his will that the Douglases were waiting to hear before the traveled to France. And in the midst of it, clear proof that Mrs. Carter was quite aware of the gender-change that produced Walter Sholto Douglas, with a very sound argument that Isabella and MS were certainly aware as well. Yet the Douglases' marriage was clearly accepted by their acquaintances in Paris. Other than those who were a party to the gender change and marriage, was Douglas’s presentation a complete success? [Note: Bennett never seems to entertain the possibility that Douglas’s masculine identity was simply an accepted performance. That people might have known and chosen not to make an issue of it.] This does leave the idle question of just who was the biological father of Isabella’s daughter Adeline.

The next chapter digresses to examine the historic context of female same-sex relations, covering the illegality of male homosexuality (but not female) in England, the Ladies of Llangollen, and the separate axes of identity, desire, and performance with regard to both gender and sexuality. There is also a discussion of the position of aristocratic bastards in this era. They were typically raised in circumstances similar to that of legitimate children. The Dods sisters clearly received a quality education, even if they weren’t raised directly in their father’s household.

The topics are jumping around a bit now as Bennett works to fill in the remaining gaps in the story she’s trying to uncover. From here on out, the narrative will be a lot less coherent and much more repetitive as small bits of information are added to the existing framework.

In the next chapter Bennett explores social connections to the philanthropist Frances Wright who may have been one of the Douglases’ connections to Parisian society. Some of her interactions may shed light on the context of how MS fell out with the Douglases. Wright had become a close friend of the Douglases and picked up from them a negative impression of MS, despite being a great admirer of both of Mary Shelley’s parents. But when Wright met MS herself, that initial impression warmed and the implication is that the Douglases may have been estranged from MS and been trash-talking her. From Wright, the trail continues to her friends the Garretts, also in Paris.

The next chapter discusses a poem, handwritten on the endpaper of a copy of Lyndsay’s work that eventually ended up in MS’s possession. The poem is a lament on the death of a beloved and originally was attributed to Shelley herself, but both the date inscribed for the poem (before Percy Shelley’s death) and the handwriting convince Bennett this isn’t possible. The handwriting she now recognizes as Lyndsay’s/Dods’ own. This copy of Lyndsay’s work has annotations in two different hands, one clearly Dods (including the poem) which is largely corrections of the published text, and some notes by another hand (but not MS’s). The volume was probably Dods’ own copy, later given to MS. The poem is a Romantic cry of anguish about a “secret sorrow” that can be disclosed to none since the beloved is gone. It’s dated February 1822. [Note: I’m going to include the full text of the poem because it’s illuminating to read it through the lens of all the possible interpretations of Dods’ identity and orientation.]

There is an anguish in my Breast
A sorrow all undreamed, unguessed--
A war that I must ever feel--
a secret I must still conceal--
I stand upon the Earth alone
To none my secret spirit known
With none to sooth[e] the speechless stings
Of my wild heart’s imaginings
With none to glory in my fame
Or halo with sweet joy my name--
The Star of Love for me hath set
And I must live yet not forget
How once it shone upon my Brow
Though I am lorn and lonely now
A blighted Herb a blasted Tree
A living lie, a mockery--
A Lump of Earth that still, still glows
With so much perfume of the Rose
As will not let it meanly mete
With aught less lovely or less sweet--
Yes--thou art gone! O what to me
Can others admiration be
Then silent--sacred--on thy Bier
I place the strain thou canst not hear
To none the smile thou canst not give
My buried Love will I receive--
Genius and Taste, if such there be,
Too late, I consecrate to thee.
O what have I to do with pride
It withered when mine Angel died
And but one thought remains to me
My heart’s lone deep dull agony--

Bennett sees in the poem possible secret lesbian sentiments, disclosed in the poem knowing it would come to MS’s attention [note: but the book seems to have ended up in MS's possession much later and by chance?] or possibly imagining sentiments she believed MS might feel [note: same objection, and feel about whom at this particular date?]. But the language is hard to distinguish from that of romantic friendship and the hypothesis is put on hold. [Note: Bennett appears to draw a much stronger distinction between romantic friendship and lesbian love than I consider warranted. But see also my extensive comments on Faderman on the same topic.]

[Note: I think this is a dangling thread that Bennett failed to pursue sufficiently on its own, having picked a hypothetical interpretation already. If the poem is not simply an imaginative effort at effusive Romantic sentiment, who might Dods have felt this way about in February 1822 who had died at some date recent enough to inspire these feelings? Is the “secret I must still conceal” the literary masquerade? The date is long before Dods became Douglas in the flesh to be Isabella’s husband. Dods wished she had taken the chance to consecrate her work to...someone who is no longer alive to enjoy the honor. And Dods did have works out in the world that could have been dedicated to someone if she’d chosen to do so (and felt it appropriate). But by 1822 she felt her “star of love...had set” and she would be forever “lorn and lonely”. The relation to the poetic beloved has the solid feel of someone speaking of a woman--but perhaps I’m prejudiced in that line. One woman who appears regularly in Dods' correspondence is Charlotte Figg, but she was very much alive at this date. In any event, I think a closer consideration of this poem and the context in which it was written might shed more light on Dods’ internal life than all of Bennett’s speculations...on which more comments later.]

Returning to the salons of Paris, the evidence from the Garnett correspondence is provided via excerpts by a researcher on that topic which Bennett uses to track down the original context in the extensive correspondence. She notes that profusion of affectionate and intimate language used between women in these social circles. Bennett now recognizes that this style of language is simply the typical unmarked emotional register and not evidence of possible erotic relationships.

The next section and following chapters include a significant amount of imaginative speculation by Bennett on how various events might have happened and how those involved in them might have felt. While it makes for more interesting reading, it begins to detract from the scholarly nature of the book. We circle back again to the gathering in the south of England when the Douglases are preparing to present themselves to the world as a married couple.

Dods had perhaps a month to become accustomed to les coulottes before traveling to France. Not very long to learn a male presentation, but most people would be inclined to take clothing at face value. Bennett indulges in some dramatization of how those initial days of practice might have gone. As Isabella’s daughter Adeline was about a year old at this point, they would need to behave as if they’d been married for about two years to “make an honest woman” of Isabella. But their Parisian circle all seem to take Mr. Douglas’s gender at face value and the marriage as real and valid. We have one of the Garnetts describing Mr. Douglas as “a little deformed, but clever” (a description that echoes Rennie’s) and that the marriage is “a love match, he worships his little wife.”

Was Dods in love with Isabella? How did Isabella feel about the marriage other than relieved? Adeline is proof that Isabella had a previous hetrosexual encounter, but of course says nothing about its nature or Isabella’s desires. And Isabella’s later behavior indicates a hunger for male attention to the detriment of her female friendships.

In Paris, the Douglases are drawn into prominent intellectual circles, including that of Mary Clarke, whose letters give later evidence of their activities. There are regular references to health issues. Isabella “suffers” and Mr. Douglas “has wretched health...and may never be well.” (David Lyndsay’s letters to Blackwood made reference to suffering from a “liver ailment.”) Rennie had described Mary Dods as having “some organic disease” that contributed to her distorted body. When MS disparages Mr. Douglas later, she speaks of his “diseased body” acting to produce a “diseased mind”.

Harriet Garnett (who was at first much attached to the Douglases) now thinks Isabella “vain and affected” but notes that Mr. Douglas is “very clever and very kind” but “much out of health” and that he hopes to obtain a diplomatic position in Germany. As 1829 passes, the Garnetts are becoming less enamored of the Douglases. Isabella is becoming recognized as an incorrigible and dangerous flirt. Gossip and backbiting begin to sow discord among the various friends. Bennett speculates on Isabella’s motives: is she simply a hopeless flirt or is she actively tired of the pretense of her marriage? Is Douglas genuinely hurt by Isabella’s flirtations in front of him, or is he only concerned about how it affects his masculine image?

We again get much imaginative and fictionalized speculation from Bennett about how the Douglases might have behaved and how they might have felt about it.

After July 1829, the Douglases seem to disappear from mention among their Paris circle. There had been mentions of their plans to go to Hannover, but there is no reference to either of them by people in Hannover connected with their Paris circle, with whom they might reasonably have made connections. 1829 is also when David Lyndsay has his last correspondence with Blackwood--the letter that spells his name Lindsay and is not in his handwriting.

Isabella and her daughter are known to be in England in 1830 when MS makes a journal entry about encountering Isabella there. Bennett is about to turn her research to Parisian sources, but first there’s a literary digression and a consideration of the role that Mrs. Carter, Dods’ sister, played.

It is absolutely certain that Georgiana Carter knew about and abetted Dods’ transformation into Sholto Douglas. She traveled with the Douglases to France and was known there as Sholto’s sister. Sholto Douglas provided social cover and protection to Mrs. Carter just as he did to Isabella and Adeline. Even aside from any family loyalty, there were benefits to Mrs. Carter from going along with the marriage.

In 1828, Mrs. Carter indicated that she planned to say in Paris to be with her sons while they were in school there. But it was in Paris that she died, over a decade later, in 1842. Why did she stay well after her sons must have finished school?

Bennett searched the Paris death records for any possible trace of Dods or Douglas. There was a death certificate dated 1845 in the same set of records as the one for Mrs. Carter for a man named Douglas (no further name) born in Scotland, aged 46 years old. While the name, origin, and approximate age would work for Dods/Douglas there is no other information and no positive proof.

The last reference found for Mary Diana Dods (as opposed to any of her other identities) appears to be in June 1828 when Lord Dillon (remember it was he who introduced Rennie to Miss Dods in MS’s company) wrote to Mary Shelley sending regards to “Miss Dods” and asking her to send Dods’ contribution for a publication he was organizing. MS sent him some verses credited to “a friend writing as David Lindsay [sic].”

In November 1829, Lyndsay wrote his last letter to Blackwood in Scotland, giving a London reply address, but this letter is the one not in Lyndsay’s handwriting. So where was Lyndsay/Douglas at that time? Were they involve in writing that letter at all?

In November 1830, Isabella is back in London and MS calls her “false” and notes she’s of no further use to Isabella.

Looking through an index of Blackwood’s articles, Bennett finds an entry for a story called “My Transmogrifications” credited to a Mrs. Sholto Douglas in August 1826. This is striking because the Douglases first appear as a married couple in the fall of 1827. But a journal entry in May 1826 by Thomas Moore makes reference to Isabella being married. [Note: this would be around the time that Adeline may have been born, which would be the key date at which Isabella would want to put it about that she had been married in time for the conception.] Was the reference to a Mrs. Sholto Douglas a nonce invention by Dods for marketing purposes, or had Sholto been designated to be Isabella’s husband as early as May 1826, with the shift to Mr. Douglas making a physical appearance waiting for August 1827?

Note that by 1826, David Lyndsay’s work had stopped being accepted by Blackwood’s magazine. Perhaps that was why his writing (assuming it was his, which seems reasonable) was now being submitted by Douglas? The Douglas piece was a short first-person story of a boy growing to manhood. (A synopsis of the story is given.) The story may echo some aspects of Dods’ childhood, if she were something of a wild and transgressive child, although clearly not true in all elements. The letter from “Mrs. Sholto Douglas” accompanying the manuscript to Blackwood was found in the National Library of Scotland archives along with replies by Blackwood. Blackwood declines another story and makes reference to Mrs. Douglas’s planned trip to the continent. A June 1826 letter from Blackwood to Mrs. Douglas informs her that he’s accepted two works for publication. The July 1826 response from Mrs. Douglas is signed “Isabel Douglas” but she states that she is not the author of the work, but is only the secretary for her husband to whom she’s been married 6 months. (Having Isabella correspond with Blackwood may simply have been to avoid having him recognize Lyndsay’s distinctive handwriting.)

This date for their marriage is as false as any other (as it differs from the information given to Moore and Rennie) but is evidence that the idea was being entertained at that date. It may, however, indicate the date at which Isabella went into seclusion due to her pregnancy. In any event, they were acting as a married couple to some degree by the time Adeline was born ca. May-June 1826, though at that time there was no need for Sholto to have a physical presence. And no need to put the marriage about at all until Adeline was born alive and looking likely to survive. (Not at all a certain thing at the time.) In 1828, Isabella’s father appears to be on friendly terms with the Douglases, though there is evidence of a falling out between him and his daughter some time earlier. Due to the pregnancy? Due to knowing about the sham marriage?

The next chapter delves into the financial records of the earl of Morton and a cache of letters to him from Mary Dods and Georgiana Carter, as well as J. Aubin, one of his financial agents. The sisters take turns writing their father in begging and abject terms, asking for the regular payment of their allowance (which evidently was irregular), or for arrangements that fit better with their situation, or for lump sum payments or loans to settle their debts, which were complicated and constant. There are 39 letters in total dating between 1818 and 1824, but it took Bennett some time and access to the earl’s account ledgers to put them in order due to the lack of clear dates.

This minute accounting of the financial transactions between father and daughters is interrupted by the review of a set of copies of Blackwood’s end of the correspondence with Lyndsay dating to 1821-1829. (Blackwood kept copies of all of the letters he sent.) Initially he praises Lyndays work. He specifically notes that he’s fine with pen names (perhaps indicating he suspects Lyndsay is one such). He asks for more pieces to publish. The discussion of publishing details dovetail precisely with Lyndsay’s side of the conversation. But in early 1822, Blackwood’s enthusiasm begins to wane somewhat and he buys less of Lyndsay’s material. He has lost money on Lyndsay’s book and is hesitant to lose more, but rather than saying so outright, Blackwood more or less “ghosts” him, responding with longer delays and apologetic refusals. In mid 1824, Lyndsay mostly stops trying with him and finds another publisher. Bennett notes that there seems to be a gendered failure to read signals in the correspondence. Blackwood meant his politely distant replies to be clear refusal, but Dods failed to recognize the code and kept taking the “soft nos” as encouragement.

We return to the correspondence between the earl and his daughters which, though dry, is illuminative of their financial difficulties and the strategies they used to try to maintain themselves in the face of parental indifference. In their early life, they seem to have lived with their father in London and stayed in his home there in his absence, sometimes also living with him elsewhere, perhaps including Scotland. But around the time of his marriage (to a woman younger than themselves) in 1814, they seem to have been cut loose to live on their own. Georgiana left earlier, of course, as she married John Carter somewhere between 1808 and 1810. The Carters lived in India until at least 1815, but by 1818 Georgiana had returned to England. Her husband died that same year in India and she was left with two young sons.

After that, the two sisters mostly shared lodgings in various locations, sometimes with others. The letters are a constant litany of debt and begging for assistance, in part because of the unreliable receipt of their allowances. The Diana Dods who comes through in these letters is in strong contrast to the brash and confident persona of David Lyndsay who is being established at the same time. Dods regularly tells her father of her efforts to provide for herself financially. In addition to the writing (“not under my own name” she assures him) the two sisters set up a musical academy for young ladies with their friend Miss Figg. (Remember Miss Figg who was invited to dinner in company with Miss Robinson by Mary Shelley’s father in 1828?) In 1822, Dods mentions plans to her father for her and Miss Figg to move their music academy to Paris (around the same time that Lyndsay mentions going to France in one of his letters to Blackwood). The letters are a long tale of constant hand-to-mouth debt and dependence on a father who either had no idea what they needed to live on at even a minimal level, or simply didn’t care.

Having dipped into the early part of Dods’ life, Bennett now jumps back to the end and tries to put all the pieces together into a coherent story. She obsesses a little about trying to pin down the gender and sexuality issues, which involves a fair amount of imaginative speculation that I think she doesn’t have the theoretical background for. (Or that didn’t exist at the time she was writing about it.)

She tracks down Isabella’s fate: as Isabella Falconer, who died in Italy in 1869 at the age of 59. This item is somewhat out of place in the chronology, but I’m simply noting things in the order they appear in the book.

Bennett speculates that one purpose of the trip to Paris was to be able to establish new identities that could be based on personal contacts rather than on documentary history (that didn’t exist).

Isabella’s career in Paris in 1828 is traced by the commentary of Mary Clarke who was in love with a man who was enamored of (and evidently involved with) Isabella. So we get plenty of letters where Clarke complains to him about how much time he’s spending with Isabella. (Since Clarke had more or less proposed to him and he declined, she comes across as a bit stalkerish at this time.) In November 1829, Clarke writes her love interest with the news that Mr. Douglas is in prison for debt. She notes what appears to be a pointlessly frivolous request to a friend that he obtain for him false moustaches and sideburns--fashion accessories that were something of the rage at the time, but perhaps were more important to Douglas in maintaining the facade of masculinity.

Here Bennett includes some pointed speculation on Douglas’s mental state, deciding that he was more or less a broken man and no longer cared what happened to him. It is unclear where this diagnosis comes from. She is doing this sort of speculation more and more as the book comes to its conclusion.

Clarke’s note about the debtors’ prison comes two months after Lyndsay’s last vain letter to Blackwood offering a long poem for publication. But this is the letter that isn’t in Lyndsay’s handwriting, so Lyndsay/Douglas/Dods may not have been directly involved in writing it.

Clarke’s letters continue the complaints about Mrs. Douglas in 1832, after which neither Douglas is mentioned again among Parisian circles. But Isabella pops up again, at least in retrospect, when 1840 is given as the date of her marriage to Falconer. (Though no marriage record can be found for them and there is perhaps a question whether the marriage was formalized.) In any event, the presumption is that Walter Sholto Douglas is dead by then.

There are some interesting tidbits in British Record Office items relating to Isabella. They have her death certificate (mentioned above), a death certificate for her daughter Adeline in 1916, giving her age then as 89, and Adeline’s marriage certificate dated 1853 that lists her as a minor. But Adeline was born in 1826 (which aligns with the age given at her death) which would have made her around 27 at the time of her marriage. Why the completely implausible lie? Bennett suggests it was due to the lack of a birth record. To marry as an adult, Adeline would have needed to prove she was of the age of majority. But to marry as a minor, she only needed to prove she had her mother’s consent. Adeline’s marriage certificate includes a couple other benign fictions: the identification of Sholto Douglas as her father, and referring to him as “an officer in HM’s service.”

So, all in all, what was the reason and purpose for the various identities of Mary Diana Dods? Bennett discusses the place of women in Georgian society and how they struggled to establish identities of significance and independence in the face of legal and economic dependency. Women formed bonds to support each other emotionally and economically. The story of the “Douglases” paralleled that of Mary Shelly in a fashion, stepping outside the bounds of society, engaged in an irregular relationship, constrained in its options by the existence of an illegitimate child. MS was devoted to Isabella, perhaps seeing in her a kindred spirit as a single mother. But Isabella seems to have felt little in the way of faithfulness to any friendship or partner. MS may also have identified with Dods as a struggling author.

The bulk of this last chapter is speculation about motives. Bennett returns to the question of the relationship between romantic love (between any pairing of genders) and sexual desire. She seems determined to dismiss the possibility that Mary Shelly may have felt erotic desire (whether realized or not) for the female friends she expressed clear romantic feelings for. Bennett’s conclusion is that Isabella entered into marriage as Mrs. Douglas purely for the security and respectability it gave her, even though she immediately began violating those hypothetical marriage vows with other men.

Bennett engages in speculation about who the biological father of Adeline was, and comes up with a plausible candidate.

There is a discussion of passing women in general and the relatively minor overlap with lesbian identity. There is a sketchy high-level overview of the history of AFAB [my label] persons living as men, and their array of motivations. There is a discussion of the differences in British attitudes toward lesbian relationships versus passing women/trans men. Within the context of the 19th century, Bennett suggests that if Isabella Robinson and Diana Dods had been motivated by lesbian desire, their relationship would have been much more secure and discreet without any gender disguise. [Note: although this ignores Isabella's need to regularize her motherhood.] But when considering Dods as a possible trans man, Bennett finds no suggestion of masculine identity before the marriage other than Dods’ use of male pen names, which was relatively common among female authors at the time without any suggestion that it routinely indicated gender identity. And she notes that within the context of the 19th century, Dods would not have needed to envision herself as male to recognize and act on sexual desire for women (see, e.g., Anne Lister).

Unlike her sister Georgiana, Mary Dods never claimed a place in society via marriage. The regular reference to a physical “deformity” suggests a possible reason for not marrying, but whatever the reason, taking on a male identity gave Dods a place in the world and an independent role other than as her father’s dependent daughter. Walter Sholto Douglas and David Lyndsay were her own creations through which she could act in the world unconstrained by the limits on women.

And then we close with more imaginative speculations about how Dods may have understood herself.

* * *

For my own reference, I’ve put together a timeline of key dates and events. I’ll be posting it separately and linking it here.

Time period:

Place:

Misc tags:

Mary Diana Dods/David Lyndsay/Walter Sholto Douglas

gender disguise f>m

female husband

Event / person:

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 26e - Peaceweaver by Jennifer Nestojko

Saturday, September 29, 2018 - 11:00

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 73 (previously 26e) - Peaceweaver by Jennifer Nestojko - transcript

(Originally aired 2018/09/29 - listen here)

Welcome to the third story in the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast original fiction series!

Each of the stories we’re presenting this year has a different mood and flavor. We started with daring adventure, then shared the stumbling adventures of young love. This time, our characters are mature women, looking back at a lifetime of devoting their lives to others and wondering if there is still space to find personal joys. The story comes to us from Jennifer Nestojko, a writer and poet who lives in central California. She is a part time medievalist as well as a high school and college teacher. Jennifer likes to translate Anglo-Saxon English and write alliterative poetry, sometimes in Anglo-Saxon. She takes one of her classes through Beowulf every year, and in addition to wanting to write an epic poem about the women who have to clean up the great hall of Heorot after every one of the monster’s attacks, she has always been intrigued by the side story of Hildeburh. That interest led to this story, “Peaceweaver.”

Tiana Hanson returns to narrate this episode, having previously contributed to our debut fiction episode. Tiana was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, and came to the San Francisco Bay Area to chase her lifelong dream of being a professional actress. She has narrated fifteen audiobooks (available on Audible), mostly lesbian romances, and is delighted to find a new creative outlet that allows her queer light to shine.

This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.

* * *

Peaceweaver

Jennifer Nestojko

Peaceweaver: that had been her task. She had held to it, a young bride married off to a foreign folk, but her husband had been kind and she had been given her place as queen by his side. She brought the welcoming cup to visiting guests, she was a goldfriend to guests and nobles and the jarls; she was queen and her word carried weight. There was peace between her people, both the people of her birth and the people of her womanhood. Her son grew strong and tall, learning the ways of a warrior and a leader.

Threads break over time; sunlight frays the working of warp and weft. All things end, and peace itself never lasts long. Hildeburh had hoped, though, that the peace she had brokered with her youth and her body would have outlasted her age. Her son was seventeen when he fell in the same battle that also left her brother for the ravens to pick over and feed upon.

Hildeburh looked at the rising coastline of the land of the Danes. She had never seen it from this vantage point, and it felt strange to be seeing it now as a form of coming home. She closed her eyes to the soft light of spring, breathing the air deeply. She would not show her grief now, not in front of her kinfolk, the ones who had betrayed her husband and were carrying her home as part of the spoils of war. Finn had shown them honor in the hall, given them treasure from his own hand, and they had waited until the bonds of frost and ice had been loosened for this, their return to this coastline, this homeland. It had been a bitter winter, but spring brought no ease to her heart.

When she opened her eyes, she could make out the fort cresting the hill by the beach where they would land. She remembered rides down to the coast from her father’s hall when she was a girl; the sky here had opened up and the smell of salt and sea spoke of possibilities. She used to dream of sailing off to new lands in one of the proud ships with its sail bright against the sky and returning with new treasure. She stood up straight in the bow of the ship she now rode upon; the warriors within had to maintain its pride, as it was worn by winter winds and still carried marks from the previous fall’s battle. She was returning from another land; who knew the fulfillment of such a girlish dream would gall so? There was treasure in the hold, certainly, some given in faith, more wrested from the hands of the slain.

Son and brother both burned on a pyre, and her husband was left behind to be mourned and buried, though she was taken before the funerary rites were even begun. What was she? Was she treasure returned, or wrested from the hands of the dead? No longer was she a peaceweaver; she was the tattered remnants of the hangings above her now cold hearth.

It was in this mood that Hildeburh set foot once more upon the shores of the Spear Danes. She was silent when Ingi, who had been a small boy of three when she had been wed, helped her down the plank onto the sand. He was a warrior now, having slain Ronne, her husband’s counselor. He lifted her carefully up to the waiting horse; she stared at him impassively. Ronne had helped her when she was a new queen to the Frisians. She had learned much under his tutelage. Ingi nodded to her briefly, also offering no words, leading her horse to the road. She knew the way from here, but it was clear that she would have the courtesy of an escort within the larger group. Whether it was courtesy or caution, she cared not.

Her silence was broken only when she was escorted to her chamber within her nephew’s hall. There was no point in being rude to the handmaid who came to offer her water and a change of clothing. When she had washed and dressed and had the tangles combed from hair that was then braided with woven bands, the girl left her to sit in her room and look out the window. It was the same view that had been hers as a child; it seemed to have become smaller. She no longer recognized the figures crossing the courtyard.

There was a brief knock on the door; she turned to see it open, allowing a woman of middle age to come in. “Dota,” she cried, standing up suddenly. “I thought you had married Kaj and left for his lands long ago.” Dota smiled, the calm, secret smile that had been hers all through their growing up together.

“You,” she replied, “were the one who left for farther lands. I crossed no sea.”

“Now you have returned?” asked Hildeburh. “Shouldn’t you still be tending those closer lands?”

Dota snorted. “Do I look like a farmer to you?”

“Kaj was no farmer,” Hildeburh retorted, a bit sharply. “He oversaw farmers.”

Dota shrugged. “He oversees them no more. He died in a feud with a neighbor. The neighbor’s son now sits by my hearth and I am here.” Her shrug was dismissive, and there was a look in her eye that let Hildeburh know, from almost forgotten experience, that she would get no more out of Dota for now.

“Have you come, then, to welcome me back, now that I myself have returned,” Hildeburh asked, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice. Women tend the hearths, but they are easily ousted from them.

“I have come to get something from my room,” Dota replied, calmly. “It seems that we are to share once again. Just as when we were girls.” Dota opened one of the boxes on the lower shelf on the wall, pulling out a skein of wool. “I will see you in the hall at eventide.” It was not a question.

That a feast was held in honor of the returning warriors that evening was inevitable. The hall was bright with candles and the shining gear of the jarls. Cups of gold and silver at the high table reflected back the light, and Hildeburh recognized a brooch on Hoc’s shoulder as one belonging to her husband. Hoc, named after his father, was king now. He had been much younger when she had left home; she had scolded him for stealing sweets from the kitchens.

Hoc stood, silencing the hall in that motion, bringing all eyes to him. “We welcome you back,” he began. “You have kept faith with your people, bringing glory to the spear Danes and erasing the shame of the winter’s long exile.”

There was much clattering of shields and cheering from the men. Dota, who was sitting at a lower table, quirked an ironic eyebrow at Hildeburh. Hildeburh smiled to herself. She was used to sitting at high tables, her face schooled to the proper expression, but she found herself close to tears.

Hoc had been going on, praising his warriors, and he was giving out treasure, golden rings, and torques, and blades scrubbed clean of blood so that they too reflected the light. Ingi, Hildeburh saw, was given praise and a fine sword. Hoc came to the end of his gift giving and then turned to her.

“This night also gives us cause for joy,” he intoned, “for our royal princess, Hildeburh, has also been returned to us. She too is a great treasure of our house. Welcome back, dear aunt.”

Hildeburh stood. “I thank you for your welcome, and I accept the hospitality and protection of your hall.” It was a short, and to her ears, stilted speech, but the warriors applauded and Hoc looked gratified. She sat back down, toying with her cup of mead, looking into its golden depths as the skald began his rhyming.

Her returned childhood seemed to be not such a bad turn of fate later that night, when she once again shared a bed with Dota. In the darkness came the familiar touch once again, and Hildeburh turned to her old friend, embracing her as she so often had when they were younger. Then there was no harm in two friends sharing affection; now that they were both widowed, there was again no harm.

The next morning Dota was gone before Hildeburh awoke, and she spoke little to her throughout the day. They sat in the solar, weaving in silence, while the younger girls chattered about them. In the hall at supper they sat at different tables, though Hildeburh was not given a place at the high table again. She did not miss the high table, but she wanted Dota’s company. Hildeburh was sure that Dota regretted their previous night’s caresses, but that night she was woken once more in the darkness to Dota’s touch and sweet kisses.

This became the pattern of Hildeburh’s day; working in the stillroom, weaving in the solar, and wondering if the night would bring a closeness that was shunned during the daylight hours. Dota did not reach for her every night, and Hildeburh wondered what would happen if she reached out for her. She tried one night, but Dota rolled away. Hildeburh lay still in the darkness, wondering what she had done wrong.

The only time their tasks crossed was in the solar, and there was little privacy amongst the young girls weaving or plying their needles. Dota did not always come to the solar, however; she found tasks elsewhere. One afternoon, with the pale sunshine making its way across the floor, one of the young girls sat next to her. Her golden hair hung in long braids, and her clothing was modest, but of good weave. She smiled shyly, naming herself Edela. “I know you are a friend of Dota’s,” she said, after having glanced about the room. “She used to speak much of you.”

Hildeburh smiled back encouragingly. “We were childhood friends,” she said. The girl was no more than sixteen, she judged.

Edela looked down at her embroidery. “I was the daughter of one of her landholders,” she said. “I served in her household from a young age.” She hesitated. “She cared for me. “

There was more to what the girl was saying. “Is that why you followed her here?” she asked.

The girl blushed. “I could not go home. Farthin, he that took Kaj’s place, had plans to marry me to one of his men.”

Hildeburh shook her head. “Was he not a good prospect?” she asked.

Edela shrugged, a gesture very similar to Dota’s. “He had land, he was well respected. He was like Kaj, though. All temper. Dota claimed me as hers and took me away. I saw,” she faltered a bit, and lowered her voice, “I saw what Kaj did to her. I came willingly. My father died in the feuding. No one else would speak for me.”

Dota had spoken for Edela, and Hildeburh knew what courage that must have taken, so she was out of sorts at being avoided. Dota had taken to staying up late enough that there was no question of conversation or anything else in the reaches of the night. Tired of being avoided, she woke one morning before the dawn. Dota was snoring lightly beside her; for once she had not stolen away early. Her face in the new light was more wrinkled, and her body was softer now with age, but Hildeburh knew that she herself had the same marks. Dota was still beautiful to her, and Hildeburh recalled watching her in the same way so many years before. When Dota showed signs of stirring, Hildeburh turned her face away, not wanting to be caught looking.

Dota opened her eyes and frowned. “Awake so early?” she asked grumpily. She had never been fond of rising early and Hildeburh had been waiting for the morning her natural patterns to reassert themselves. The fact that Dota had been coming to bed so late had worked in her favor.

“I wanted to speak with you,” Hildeburh replied. “The day seems to bring too many tasks, so I thought to make time when all is quiet.”

“What is there to speak of?” Dota sat up and grabbed for her under tunic. She put it on and began to unbraid her hair.

“I have missed you,” Hildeburh began. Dota brushed her hair silently, her face turned away. “It is good to be sharing a room with you again.” Still Dota remained silent. She began to plait her hair, which had a few strands of grey in it now. The grey had not shown beneath her veil.

“Dota,” said Hildeburh, “why won’t you talk to me?”

Dota deftly pinned her wimple and veil into place. “What do you want me to say?” she asked.

“Anything! Here we are, once again, and I know so little about the years between. I know you, Dota, or I knew you once before. Who are you now?”

“There’s a riddle no skald can answer,” said Dota, almost angrily. “I am a widow, and that is good enough for most. My husband died dishonored, and thus I carry that mark myself.”

“My husband is now deemed an enemy; but I am not one,” Hildeburh said sharply.

“Oh,” Dota replied, “I refuse to feel stained, as a good woman should. His choices were all his own. Still, what is there for me now? Shamed widowhood and the sufferance of the king.” She shrugged, “You are a princess and therefore something to be retrieved after battle.”

“Like a gold coin lost beneath a chair, but once found thrown into the pouch,” Hildeburh agreed.

Dota looked at her finally, hearing the echo of her own bitterness in Hildeburh’s voice.

“So we have both returned,” she said, standing up. “You, however, are the only one who is the gold coin.” She moved to leave. Hildeburh grabbed her by the hand, but Dota shook her off, walking firmly out the door.

Later that afternoon the solar was quiet; it seemed that the young girls and the other women were helping with the spring cleaning of the hall. Only Dota and Hildeburh were present, each at her own loom. Dota made no move to speak. Her silence was woven between them, each thread laid down by time and distance, until Hildeburh felt wrapped in it, stifled. She wanted to rend it into pieces, but did not know what words to choose.

“Dota,” she began, “why are you angry with me?”

Dota said nothing, but continued with her weaving. Hildeburh stood up and went to her side, putting her hand on Dota’s arm. “Do not ignore me!” she cried.

“You are not my queen, to order me so,” said Dota. “You are queen only to the dead and broken, and they do not speak.” She shrugged off Hildeburh’s hand, continuing with her work, her eyes on the emerging pattern.

Hildeburh sat down, looking at her empty hands. After a long moment she said, “The broken can speak, Dota. I am queen no longer, but I learned that much.”

“The broken can scream, for all I care,” replied Dota. “They still are not heeded.”

“Who broke you?” asked Hildeburh.

“Who says I am broken?” replied Dota, looking up from her loom, her eyes fierce. Despite their fierceness, they held remembered pain. Hildeburh had seen such a look from one of her attending ladies, one who served at court as an escape from a drunkard of a husband.

“Kaj?” she whispered.

Dota held her eyes for a moment and then looked back to her loom. She once again began to weave, but her silence had changed. Instead of wrapping Hildeburh, it seemed to wrap around Dota, as if it were a shawl protecting her from the cold.

“I did not know,” Hildeburh said. “You were so far away and we heard so little news from you. Then I too was gone, across the sea. I did not know.”

Dota snorted. “We heard about you – reports reached even our holdings of your wisdom and kindness.”

“If you revile me so much,” said Hildeburh heatedly, “then why hold me at night? Or are you like a husband who ignores his wife during the day only to seek out favors in darkness?”

Dota flinched, the arrow having made its way to the right target. She studied her weaving, as if looking for flaws or dropped threads. “You responded when I touched you,” she said.

“I welcomed you,” Hildeburh agreed. “You are more of a homecoming to me than anything else could be.” She found a gap in her own pattern and carefully began to pick it out, dismayed at her lack of attention.

The light was beginning to wane. Dota carefully tidied her space and then stood up. She paused by Hildeburh’s side before leaving the room. “A poor homecoming, then,” she said.

“No,” said Hildeburh, “a rich welcome. I know your value, and always have. You are treasure beyond compare.”

Dota stared at her a moment; there were tears in her eyes. “Of course I have missed you. I have always missed you. What choices did we have?”

The tears Hildeburh would not shed in her husband’s hall, the ones she would not shed on the ship or at the high table, began to stream down her face. Dota reached out and caressed her cheek.

“I do not know,” she said, “what choices I have now.”

That night Dota came to their room quite late. Hildeburh was awake, listening for her arrival. Dota undressed, crawled beneath the blankets, and then lay on the edge of the bed, her back to Hildeburh. Hildeburh turned to face the wall, the one with the window in it, though now it was covered. She stared into the shadows all night, until dawn came creeping in. Then she rose silently, getting dressed, and leaving the room. She knew Dota was awake; there was no sound of gentle snoring, only silence.

Hildeburh made her way to the keep’s herb garden, which at this point was only a promise and hope of things to come. She sat down on a bench; the stone was not yet warmed by the sun, and its cold seeped into her. She felt a twinge in her hip; this winter’s cold had brought her ached in her joints, reminding her that her body was aging. It had been a hard winter in many ways, and spring had brought no relief. Was there any point in trying to warm Dota’s winter? Perhaps it would be best to live with frozen silences. Spring had brought death, once the thaw came. Dota’s anger brought its own pain. Hildeburh scuffed at a bit of frost on the ground by the bench. She had spent many hours in this garden as a young girl, learning herblore and tending to the plants. She loved the smells that rose when the sun warmed the plants. Those days seemed so far away, and in the cold sunshine, Hildeburh found she could not imagine the coming of summer.

There was a step behind her, and before she could look, Dota sat down on the cold bench. There were circles under her eyes, but she looked more at peace. She put her arm around Hildeburh, lightly at first. When she was not rebuffed, she moved in closer.

“Remember old Una?” she began. “We thought she was so ancient, puttering about the stillroom, telling us that happiness came later in life.”

Hildeburh smiled at the memory. “We thought she was crazy.”

“She always had a treat for us, though. And a smile. I now realize that she was not all that old,” Dota said.

“She would tell us, when I got restless, that we were going to do battle against the encroaching weeds, and that the treasures we would return with were more valuable than gold, since they cured illness.” Hildeburh rested her head against Dota’s shoulder.

Dota took a deep breath and held it for a moment, then exhaled with a sigh. “I think,” she began slowly, “I think that I am still waging war, but with no spoils worth bringing home.”

“I am one of the spoils of war,” Hildeburh said, with her own sigh. “I would be worth more if I could heal rather than harm.”

There was a long silence, while the sun warmed the garden and their bodies warmed the bench and each other.

“You brought no harm,” Dota said, finally. “I left first, those many years ago, and I would not have told you about my marriage had you been able to ask. I missed you fiercely, but we had each followed the road fate set for us. “

“Now we are back, where we started,” said Hildeburh.

“Yes,” said Dota.

“I do remember Una,” said Hildeburh. “She and Gunild shared quarters.”

Dota leaned into Hildeburh. “And much more. Right now, I have no more answer for you than that.” She stood up, once again stiff and aloof, and walked back into the keep. Hildeburh stayed for a while, trying to see the garden as it had been on summer days, as she would see it soon in the coming months.

Later that afternoon the solar was filled with chatter once more. The young girls were excited; one was now betrothed to a jarl in Geatland, strengthening bonds between the Danes and the Geats. Dota pursed her lips and looked up at Hildeburh, her eyes ironic.

Despite the gossip, the girls were attentive to their weaving, working as they were taught to mind the weft, to gauge the tension, to take thread and make it into something whole and beautiful. Hildeburh attended to her own work, warmed by Dota’s presence. She smiled to herself as she thought of the coming night, when tasks could be laid aside. She was certain that, despite last night’s cold and sleepless vigil, this night would be warmer.

She had not failed; she had woven peace between two nations as best as she could, but there could be no lasting peace when grudges were held more closely than gold. She glanced over at Dota, who was frowning in concentration and then she looked to her own pattern. There were many forms of battle, she thought, and Dota had survived a long and grievous war. They both deserved a better spring. Peaceweaver: all her life she had been taught that this was her task. Perhaps there was more than one way she could weave peace.

Show Notes

The third story in our 2018 fiction series. Written by Jennifer Nestojko and narrated by Tiana Hanson.

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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LHMP, podcast, 2018 Fiction Series

Sexual Identities in The Roaring Girl

Monday, September 24, 2018 - 09:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

This article makes a nice palate-clenser to last week's piece by Ungerer. It primarily focuses on the dramatic character of Moll Cutpurse within The Roaring Girl, but also notes how Mary Frith (by way of her post-show performance) acted to underming the play's attempt to rehabilitate her character, and to re-claim her identity as a disruption to existing gender identities.

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LHMP #214 Kranz 1995 The Sexual Identities of Moll Cutpurse in Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl and in London

Full citation:

Kranz, Susan E. 1995. The Sexual Identities of Moll Cutpurse in Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl and in London in Renaissance and Reformation 19: 5-20.

[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]

This article makes a nice palate-clenser to last week's piece by Ungerer. It primarily focuses on the dramatic character of Moll Cutpurse within The Roaring Girl, but also notes how Mary Frith (by way of her post-show performance) acted to undermine the play's attempt to rehabilitate her character, and to re-claim her identity as a disruption to existing gender identities.

# # #

Krantz primarily focuses on the character of Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl, with a secondary consideration of how that image relates to the historic Mary Frith. [Note: to keep the two clear with the least effort, in this summary I’ll use “Moll” for the dramatic character and “Frith” for the historic person.] She examines Moll’s ambiguous identity through three framings: prostitute, hermaphrodite, and bisexual ideal.

Moll Cutpurse stands out in the context of cross-dressed female characters in Renaissance theater in using the trope not for complete gender disguise, as with the girl-disguised-as-a-boy leads in romantic comedy, but in depicting a hybrid “hermaphroditic” character who has both male and female characteristics at the same time. The character of Moll is also complicated by the historic Mary Frith, who also challenged gender boundaries, but within a different context. The portrait of Moll in the frontispiece of the printed edition of The Roaring Girl show her key masculine signifiers: short hair, a pipe, a drawn sword, and wearing loose “slops” breeches. But neither for the historic Frith nor for the character Moll are these used for gender passing or disguise. And both in the play and in real life, her default outfit combined a feminine skirt with masculine upper garments.

Women wearing masculine garments were subject to various interpretations in 17th century England. The one that came foremost to mind, especially from official sources, was an assumption of immorality and uncontrolled sexuality, i.e., either prostitution or at least sexual impropriety. When Frith was arrested for going about wearing garments of mixed genders, but clearly not trying to pass as a man, the central suspicion and charge was that she was involved in prostitution, a charge she vehemently denied.

The character of Moll is explicitly described in a similarly hybrid outfit: Enter Moll in a frieze jerkin and a black safeguard [i.e., a protective outer skirt]. With the addition of the props of a sword and tobacco pipe, the audience is given a contradictory set of signifiers to read. Moll doesn’t fit easily (or at all) into Jacobean social and sexual hierarchies and thereby points out the deficiencies and flaws in those hierarchies. She disrupts the gender binary, but does so by claiming male privilege and opting out of the marriage economy, rather than by sweeping away the existing social order.

One can’t read The Roaring Girl as a straightforward transvestite plot, with characters moving within the gender binary while reaffirming it. Standard female transvestite characters temporarily claim the independence and privileges of a man, but participate in a heterosexual marriage resolution that inevitably re-establishes the gender binary and gender hierarchy. But Moll doesn’t return to a normative feminine role at the conclusion. She neither marries nor undergoes personal transformation. Her interaction in marriage sub-plots works to establish her comic unsuitability for marriage, thereby supporting the positive outcome for the designated romantic leads.

Moll’s simple existence creates a category crisis: she exists as a gender enigma, neither adopting nor shedding her hybrid costume. The other characters recognize this crisis by engaging with her via three different sexual identities, as well as with the character’s refusal to identify herself as a sexual being. She is approached via both standard poles of female sexuality, the virgin and the whore, but also as standing outside binary gender as a “monster” or hermaphrodite, either an ungendered being who is neither male nor female, or a bisexual being who is both simultaneously.

Moll is given the attributes of a dramatic hero: physical prowess, a noble spirit, and moral certitude--but she succeeds in claiming them only by removing herself from the question of sexual identity. In the end, she is allowed to transcend gender by reference to a philosophical bisexual ideal that makes her self-sufficient and unconnected to sexuality.

Another continuing theme in the play is for other characters to misread Moll’s transgression as sexual promiscuity. Women assume she is a rival for their husbands’ sexual attention. Men assume she is available for their sexual conquest. Moll’s resistance to these assumptions is not as a virtuous and chaste woman, but as a martial champion of all women’s virtue. She confronts the male sexual aggressors, defeats them by force of arms, and chastises them for thinking that women are their natural prey. But in doing so, Moll removes herself from the category she defends. She is not susceptible to male flattery and she cannot be subjected by force.

This feeds into the reading of Moll as a “third sex” outside the gender binary. The character of Sir Alexander labels her a monstrous gender hybrid in response to Moll’s deliberate emphasizing of her masculine dress (deliberately done to deceive him). Other characters speculate on her possible physical hermaphroditism, or at least on her bisexual potential: “she might first cuckold the husband and then make him do as much for the wife.”

Renaissance culture was obsessed with the concept of the hermaphrodite. In terms of ordinary bodies, this manifested as a need to force ambiguous individuals into one binary category or the other. But on an abstract philosophical level, it allowed for the envisioning of a sexually self-suffient ideal being who combined the best attributes of male and female, thereby transcending the need to unify with a gender opposite to achieve perfection.

Moll rejects the reading of her as physiologically indeterminate, as monstrous. The play then invokes this hermaphroditic ideal, turning her transgressive masculine signifiers into an outward sign of her male-coded virtues. One of Moll’s speeches invokes this sexual self-sufficiency when she rejects a suitor’s overtures saying she, “likes to lie a-both sides of the bed herself”. Being both male and female, there is no place in her bed for any other.

The mythologic origins of Hermaphroditus may be alluded to in various astrological discussions of Moll (and of Frith) which invoke the sign of Mercury (Hermes) in the context of her criminal activities and her service to Venus (in Frith’s case, in running a bawdy house later in life; in Moll’s case, in helping the young lovers to their happy conclusion). But in doing so, the question of Moll’s own sexuality is removed from the question, and her performative status as a “third gender” is instead idealized as a metaphorical ideal.

The confusing contradiction of Moll’s various identities in the play is disrupted further by the appearance of Frith on stage after at least one of the performances of the place, wearing her hybrid-gender outfit, singing, and giving “immodest and lascivious speeches” including an offer to prove her female gender to anyone who would return to her lodgings with her. Frith rejects the metaphoric idealized hermaphrodite posited by the play, and invokes a physiological-essentialist position that prioritizes her genitalia over her gender performance. [Note: This framing by Krantz should be noted as speculative. Frith could just as reasonably be read as identifying as female and offering her body as contradiction to the accusation of hermaphroditism and comfortable in embracing her hybrid gender expression.] While the playwrights used Moll to advocate for social liberality and the incorporation of transgressive gender identities into society, Frith herself raises the question of whether she wanted to be so incorporated and normalized, or whether she preferred to continue as a disruptive force.

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17th c

Place:

England

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cross-dressing

Mary Frith aka Moll Cutpurse

hermaphroditism

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 26d - Moll Cutpurse

Saturday, September 22, 2018 - 10:45

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 72 (previously 26d) - Moll Cutpurse - transcript

(Originally aired 2018/09/22 - listen here)

The 17th century English woman Mary Frith, known to posterity as Moll Cutpurse--“Moll” was a common nickname for “Mary” at the time--has become something of a queer icon--quite rightly, though the image of her that has been popularized doesn’t entirely align with the historic evidence. It is less clear that she could reasonably be called a feminist icon, despite some of the proto-feminist speeches attributed to her as a theatrical character. And there is almost no evidence for considering her a proto-lesbian icon, with due deference to the lovely novel by Ellen Galford that presents her as both.

But the Moll Cutpurse that comes through to us in the messy, complicated details of the historic record is no less fascinating than the idealized figure that some have tried to paint her. In this, she stands as an excellent symbol, not only for the ways in which early 17th century England was grappling with shifts in gender expression and sexual dynamics, but for the ways in which modern people have fastened on certain historic figures to represent the past they want to imagine.

This tour through Frith’s life story and its fictionalizations will draw on a variety of sources: legal records, observations of her contemporaries, depictions of her in popular culture. Perhaps most fascinatingly--though not necessarily most reliably--we have a memoir that presents itself as being Frith’s own record of her life, written toward the end of that life and published shortly after her death. The fact that the narrative presents itself as being autobiographical needs to be interrogated. The genre of criminal biographical narratives was becoming popular in the mid 17th century, including many that were clearly works of pure fiction, created to cash in on the subject’s notoriety, especially if there were a public execution involved. Frith escaped any significant legal penalty for her admittedly illegal activities, so her memoir deviates from the genre to that extent. Historians Todd and Spearing--who analyze and edit the memoir in the book Counterfeit Ladies--considers it to be a genuine reflection of Frith’s own narrative, though we can easily believe that she herself fictionalized her life in the telling. While another of my sources considers it to be a formulaic outlaw biography, leavened with a few specfics from Frith’s legend. In large part, the memoir can be aligned with more objective historic records in the details, but there are also odd points of contradiction. I’m not going to obsess too much in this podcast about the strict accuracy of the work, but rather to treat it as solid evidence of beliefs and attitudes of the time.

After her lifetime, Frith joined the ranks of legendary outlaws around whom stories accumulated, such as the certainly apocryphal one about her briefly turning highwaywoman to rob General Fairfax, a leader on the Parliament side of the English Civil War. Frith was remembered as a staunch and enthusiastic royalist, including a story that she paid for a fountain to run with wine to celebrate the entrance of King Charles into London. The farther we get from her own era, the more legends get attached to her, as in works like the late 19th century A Book of Scoundrels by Charles Whibley. This makes sorting through the myths to find the truth of her life a bit challenging.

A Brief Overview

We can begin with the basic outline of her life, though I’ll elaborate on certain themes in more detail later in the podcast. Mary Frith was born at Aldgate Street in London in or around 1585, working backwards from the age and date given for her death (though the framing text of her diary gives the date instead as 1589, making her somewhat younger). Her father was a shoemaker and she spent her life embedded in London’s working class culture of taverns, theater, violent spectacles such as bull-baiting, and the stirrings of a gender and sexual revolution that would find its heyday later in the century among the libertines of the Restoration. She spent much of her adult life in the Bankside neighborhood of Southwark, famous for its playhouses. And whether she was drawn there due to her own theatrical leanings, or whether it was residence there that brought her into contact with playwrights and actors, she left her mark on several early 17th century plays. Religious and political conflicts were another element in the backdrop of her life, not only the outright conflict of the English Civil War, relatively late in her life, but the conservative social and religious forces of Puritanism.

Her nickname of “cutpurse” was -- if you will forgive the expression -- honestly come by. The first traces of her in official records were in 1600 and 1602 when she was arrested for that very act, in partnership with two other women. There is no mention of her wearing men’s garments at that time, which would likely have been added to the charge if she were. By this time she was living in the Southwark neighborhood famous for theater and other entertainments that would shape and augment her reputation. In 1608 and 1609 she again appears in court records for “suspicion of felony” and burglary respectively, though not convicted on those occasions. By 1610, Frith had solidly established cross-dressing as part of her public presentation and had become enough of a public figure to be written about in pamphlets and plays. At this point she was also noted as a stage performer, although not a regular actor. (This was still the era when women were not permitted to act on the English stage, though other countries were not similarly restrictive.) For example, Frith seems to have participated in a sideshow-like performance after at least one performance of The Roaring Girl, where she appeared on stage in masculine garments and played the lute among other activities.

The combination of this public defiance of social norms, combined with suspicions of her continued criminal activity and a general official discomfort with unruly behavior by an unmarried woman--which reflexively brought accusations that she must be a prostitute, or at least a “bawd”, a term covering any female sexual indiscretions--this combination finally brought the weight of the law down on Frith in a meaningful way. In late 1611 she spent some time in Bridewell prison, and early in 1612 she made a public confession and penance, though witnesses interpreted it as very much an insincere theatrical performance and noted that she was drunk at the time.

If the authorities hoped the punishment would have a permanent sobering effect on Frith, they were mistaken, but she did make two significant life changes in the wake of the experience that may well have been intended to give her a more secure position in life. She set up in business as a fence, or perhaps more delicately put, as a licensed professional go-between for recovering stolen property. And in 1614 she got married. Marriage has no place in the larger legend of Moll Cutpurse--her marriage is nowhere mentioned in the biography and diary published shortly after her death, though she clearly identified herself as a widow, and used her married surname alongside her maiden name, in her will. But the marriage seems to have been purely a legal strategy and there’s reason for believing that the two never lived as man and wife.

In 1618 Moll Cutpurse once again appears as a character in a play, though this time a brief walk-on role. It’s possible that the part was written for Frith to play herself. There are scattered references to Frith in her occupation as fence during the 1620s but she largely disappears from surviving records, perhaps indicating that her various activities kept just within the bounds of what the authorities were willing to permit. Her reputation for cross-dressing certainly persisted throughout her entire life. In 1644--this would be when she was around 59 years old--there is a record that Frith was discharged from the Hospital of Bethlem -- the notorious Bedlam insane asylum -- though the reason for her stay there is not recorded. Some historians speculate that she may have been shamming to avoid trouble during the political turmoil of the English Civil War, which was in full swing at the time. Her diary attributes royalist sympathies to her. A satirical pamphlet written in 1647 names Moll Cutpurse as one of the leaders of a band of women who protested against parliament, though the nature of the text raises questions about its accuracy. But the conditions at Bedlam were dreadful enough that if her stay there was a ruse, the alternative must have been dire indeed.

In June 1659, a month before her death, Mary Frith, alias Mary Markham, drew up a will “being aged and sick and weak in body,” that dispensed a rather comfortable fortune for a woman in her position, giving sums to two male relatives and the rest to a niece whom she named as executor. Although her later years may have been relatively quiet, as far as attention from legal authorities goes, she was still enough of a celebrity to warrant the publication, three years later, of a work purporting to be her autobiography, prefaced by another writer’s biography and analysis of her life. There is dispute over the accuracy of this diary and to what extent Frith may have been involved in its authorship. At the most generous, it may be a transcript of the rambling, spotty, and frequently exaggerated reminiscences of a woman recalling her adventurous life and quite willing to sometimes trade truth for a good story. At the most conservative, it may be an entire fiction, written after her death to insert key parts of her legend into a somewhat formulaic “criminal biography” -- a genre newly becoming popular, and in some cases demonstrably utter fiction. In the following discussion of Frith’s life, I’ve taken the text as indicating at the very least what her contemporaries believed about her life, and quite possibly as expressing her own attitudes towards topics such as gender transgression and sexuality. But take all with a grain of salt, as many of the specific details are contradicted by the historic record.

Themes of Her Life

The major theme in Moll Cutpurse’s life was a rejection of the normative life path expected of a woman. This manifested both in her criminal career--and particularly her participation in activities as a fence undertaken as an independent single woman--and in her gender performance. This rejection of traditional femininity was perceived and framed as being “masculine” both by the larger culture and by Frith herself. She embraced masculine signifiers in dress and behavior and overtly rejected the interests and career paths expected for women. She doesn’t appear to have rejected female identity itself, for example, defiantly offering to prove her gender to anyone who would come to her residence for the purpose. The discussion of issues of gender identification and performance in her diary makes that a valuable document for examining the images and attitudes of the time, regardless of whether it reflects Frith’s own words. The question of her sexuality is unresolved. There’s a fair amount of ambiguous and contradictory evidence on that point but even the ambiguity provides a valuable window on her times.

For the rest of this episode, I’ll be expanding further on three themes from Frith’s life that help build a picture of who she was, or who she might have been: her criminal activities, her gender performance, and her sexuality. I originally was planning to include some extensive excerpts from two of the plays that feature her as a character, but this episode became so long that I decided to include much shorter clips from them instead. But I will have links in the show notes to the most famous play that was based on her character, The Roaring Girl.

Frith’s Criminal Career

As noted previously, Frith first enters the historic record in contemporary accounts in 1600 when she would have been about 15 or 16, when she was indicted in Middlesex for cutting purses. There were also indictments for burglary. Frith is represented as being ambivalent about her nickname of Cutpurse. In one anecdote she played an elaborate prank to punish a woman overheard referring to her by that nickname. But around the date when she spent time in prison, or perhaps after and because of that, she moved on to the somewhat safer profession of fence.

The cutting of purses aside, theft in early 17th century London more often involved goods than coin. And as mass production had not yet made goods interchangeable, the items being stolen were usually easily identifiable by unique characteristics. But conviction for theft could result in the stolen goods being confiscated by the law. This meant that the most desirable outcome on both sides of a theft was for the thief to receive a “finder’s fee” for returning the object to its original owner, who might lose the goods entirely if the case were instead resolved in the courts.

Thieves were understandably wary of claiming this fee themselves. Enter the profession of fence. Unlike the modern image of the fence who re-sells stolen goods to an independent party, the 17th century fence was something of a “professional finder,” a person who had plausible deniability as simply being really good at tracking down “lost” goods. And such a person might be recognized as an essential component of the justice system by being licensed to investigate and question suspects. The following description appears in a court record from 1621 in one such case.

* * *

He “...came to this defendant [i.e., Frith] and desired her to do her endeavor to try if she could by any means find out the pickpocket or help him to his money, he being before of this defendant’s acquaintance and having heard how by this defendant’s means many that had had their purses cut or goods stolen had been helped to their goods again and divers of the offenders taken or discovered...”

* * *

Many of the activities Frith was criticized for, were not illegal, per se, but were traditionally restricted to men, and suspect when engaged in by a woman. Even “walking abroad alone while female” could be cause for being brought into court on suspicion. On one occasion, Frith was charged with being abroad at night engaging in “unseasonable and suspicious walking; aggravating that offence with the strange manner of [her] life.” A charge that she was able to evade by claiming that she had been going to assist a woman in childbirth, but then in an aside during the telling of this anecdote, she laughs at the idea that she would do any such thing.

In late 1611 and early 1612, she received the only criminal sentence that stands out in her record, resulting in prison time and requiring her to make a public confession and do public penance. The nature of her offence is the nebulous charge of public immorality. She kept bad company, including that of thieves and blasphemous drunkards. She went about in men’s clothing, a charge we’ll examine in more detail. But she denied the charge that she was a prostitute, or even simply that she was a bawd--a term for any sort of unruly sexual behavior by a woman.

Frith made her public confession, but the superficial penitence she shows in the court record is undermined somewhat by a contemporary record of the event that notes “...and this last Sunday Moll Cutpurse a notorious baggage (that used to go in man’s apparel and challenged the field of diverse gallants) was brought to the same place, where she wept bitterly and seemed very penitent, but it is since doubted she was maudlin drunk, being discovered to have tippled of three quarts of sack before she came to her pennance.” Note that the phrase “it is doubted” here means “it is thought”. The word “doubt” has somewhat flipped in meaning since that time.

In any event, it seems that after this experience, Frith shifted her activities to the safer and evidently more profitable role of fence, taking advantage of the connections and experience of her more overtly criminal days. In later years, her diary claims that she engaged in managing sex workers, and became something of an advisor and banker to her criminal associates. But these activities fall in one of the more questionable sections of her diary. In any event, she seems generally to have made a comfortable living at her various endeavors.

Moll Cutpurse on Stage

In the first couple decades of the 17th century, Frith had a close association with the theater community in London. One of my sources suggests the possibility that her gender performance itself was nothing more than a deliberate and calculated theatrical performance, either for the sake of attracting notoriety, or for the more practical purpose of gathering and distracting audiences the better for her accomplices to pick pockets. This theory feels week to me on two points: because the degree of cross-dressing she engaged in brought far more risk from the attention than it was likely to create benefit, and because she appears to have continued to engage in cross-dressing well after she moved out of the more direct criminal trades it could have assisted. Whatever meaning her cross-dressing had to Frith personally, it does seem most likely that it was an expression of her relationship to gender in some fashion, even if only as a rebellion against the economic and legal constraints on women at the time.

By 1610, when Moll would have been about 26, she was notorious enough to have had a play written featuring a character based on, and named after, her: The Roaring Girl by well-known playwrights Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker. Although the depictions may not seem very complimentary by modern standards, they’re fairly positive within the context of early 17th century theater, which was consistently misogynistic when depicting everyday women rather than noble heroines. In The Roaring Girl she is given a speech defending the honor of women against the accusation that all women are whores, and pranking men who considered her a potential target of seduction. The plot--to vastly oversimplify--involves a young man and woman who wish to marry but are being thwarted by the man’s father who rejects his potential daughter-in-law for her poverty. To convince him otherwise, the two enlist Moll Cutpurse to pretend to be the fiancée instead, in order to convince the father that his son’s beloved is the far preferable choice.

Moll’s character is a bit less virtuous in the 1618 play Amends for Ladies by Nathan Field. Here she has only a brief cameo appearance--perhaps played by Moll herself on at least one occasion. The play is structured as a dispute between three female type-characters, the wife, the maid, and the widow, regarding whose life is best. Various other characters enter and leave the scenes to interact with these three, largely to put the lie to each of their claims about the benefits of her particular state. Moll Cutpurse has a walk-on role in the second act where she serves primarily as comic relief.

Though Moll is portrayed in these works as immodest, rude, and transgressive, she is also depicted as a figure of courage, integrity, and virtue. Even so, she resists incorporation into society. In contrast to Shakespeare’s disguised heroines like Rosalind or Viola, Moll is always openly female despite wearing male clothing. Disguised stage heroines of this era normally abandon their male roles in the end in order to achieve the expected heterosexual resolution. Moll, in contrast, stands outside this resolution, remaining contradictory but acting as an agent to enable the other characters' happy heterosexual couplehood.

Frith’s Gender Performance

One of the clearest themes regarding Frith’s gender identity as described by her biographer (and to a lesser extent in the first-person section of the diary) was that she was Not Like Other Girls, and if we try to set her up as a proto-feminist icon, I think we easily trip over the problem that she expressed not simply disdain but contempt for the expected course of women’s lives. An extended passage from her biographer catches the spirit of this attitude.

* * *

A very Tomrig or Rumpscuttle she was, and delighted and sported only in Boys play and pastime, not minding or companying with the Girls: many a bang and blow this Hoyting procured her, but she was not so to be tamed or taken off from her rude inclinations; she could not endure that sedentary life of sewing or stitching, a Sampler was as grievous as a Winding-sheet, her Needle, Bodkin and Thimble, she could not think on quietly, wishing them changed into Sword and Dagger for a bout at Cudgels. For any such Exercise, who but she! ...

Her Head-gear and Handkerchief (or what the fashion of those times were for Girls to be dressed in) was alike tedious to her, wearing them as handsomely as a Dog would a Doublet, and so cleanly, that the driven Pot-hooks would have blushed at the comparison, and always standing the Bear-garden way, or some other Rabble-rout Assemblies. ...

She was too great a Libertine, and lived too much in common to be enclosed in the limits of a private Domestic Life. A Quarter staff was fitter to her hand than a Distaff, stave and tail instead of spinning and reeling ... She could not endure the Bake-house, nor that Magpie Chat of the Wenches; she was not for mincing obscenity, but would talk freely what ever came uppermost ... Washing, wringing, and starching were as welcome as fasting days unto her; or in short, any Household work; but above all she had a natural abhorrence to the tending of Children, to whom she ever had an averseness in her mind, equal to the sterility and barrenness in her womb, never being made a Mother to our best information.

* * *

Among all this, the most consistent notable observation by Frith’s contemporaries was her habit of wearing “men’s apparel.” But before we envision her striding around routinely wearing the swashbuckling outfit of a male cavalier, we need to understand how early 17th century English people talked about gendered clothing, and what they meant when they accused women of wearing male attire, or men of wearing feminine attire.

Hic Mulier

The most useful single source on this point is a polemical tract Hic Mulier, subtitled “The Man-Woman,” published in 1620, right in the middle of Moll’s heyday and possibly written in response to King James’s exhortation at the beginning of that year that preachers should write sermons against “the insolence of our women, and theyr wearing of brode brimed hats, pointed doublets, theyr hayre cut short or shorne, and some of them stilettos or poniards”. The publication rails against women who adopt clothing, behavior, and rights that conservative forces considered to be exclusively masculine. There were earlier publications along the same lines, such as Joseph Swetnam’s 1615 The araignment of lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women. The difference between a male and a female garment could seem subtle indeed to our eyes: the difference between a jacket cut straight across at the waist, versus one with a point, between a garment that laced and once that had buttons, between a bonnet-like cap and a wide brimmed hat.

The subject of Hic Mulier was not simply and only gendered clothing. The pamphlet calls out all manner of gender-transgressive behavior, but it begins with, and continually emphasizes, dress and ornament as a physical sign of inward nature. Whether in terms of gender identity or of virtue. The catalog of garments gives us a picture of how these items were gendered, as surely as the modern difference between a man’s necktie and a woman’s scarf. What’s interesting is how the moral defects of the garments in these sets of comparisons are gendered. Features that presumably are entirely innocent if the item is worn by a man are now lascivious or shameful if worn by a woman.

The women were accused of “in apparel, exchanging the modest attire of the comely Hood, Caul, Coif , handsome Dress or Kerchief, to the cloudy Ruffianly broad-brimmed Hat, and wanton Feather, the modest upper parts of a concealing straight gown, to the loose, lascivious civil embracement of a French doublet, being all unbuttoned to entice, all of one shape to hide deformity, and extreme short waisted to give a most easy way to every luxurious action.”

Long hair had always been considered an essential feminine attribute in western culture, and a bit suspect when worn by men. And here the writer compares, “the glory of a faire large hair, to the shame of most ruffianly short locks.”

So when Moll Cutpurse is described as wearing masculine clothing, we needn’t necessarily envision her wearing a completely male outfit. Only that she wore specific garments that were as solidly coded as masculine as a necktie still is today. So what did Frith wear that gave her this reputation?

An arrest record of 1611 that specifically charged her with cross-dressing as one of the offenses described her as appearing “with her petticoat tucked up about her in the fashion of a man, with a man’s cloak on her, to the great scandal of diverse persons who understood the same, and to the disgrace of all womanhood.” Although the word “petticoat” has had a number of shifting meanings across the centuries, in the early 17th century it was definitely a feminine garment, most usually indicating a skirt attached to a sleeveless bodice. To wear a petticoat “tucked up about her in the fashion of a man” means that she was wearing skirts but tucked up so that they appeared to be loose trousers. One might perhaps visualize her with the back hem of the skirt brought between her legs and tucked into a belt or some such. Or perhaps, simply the skirts hiked up to be more knee-length rather than floor-length. This would not be a male garment, as such, but wearing a woman’s garment in an inappropriate manner. But the “man’s cloak” would refer to a garment specifically associated with one gender, presumably the shorter, hip-length style we see worn by fashionable men of the day, rather than the longer, ankle-length feminine style. In Frith’s diary, this same hybrid outfit is described in several places, once straightforwardly as “a doublet and petticoat”, and once when describing her final illness as resulting in changing her doublet “for a waistcoat and her petticoats for a winding sheet.”

Around the same time, a pamphlet was registered to be published--although it may not have actually appeared--titled “A Book Called the Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside, with her Walks in Man’s Apparel and to what Purpose.” If the pamphlet ever did exist, it might have given more particulars of her clothing, but alas we have no information on that point. When Frith was promised to put in an appearance on stage following a performance of The Roaring Girl, it was advertised that she would appear “in man’s apparel and in her boots and with a sword by her side.” As noted previously, the man who commented on her public confession described her as “a notorious baggage that used to go in man’s apparel.” (Note that the wording “used to” doesn’t imply that she no longer did so, but may be read as “was accustomed to.”) None of these references give any sense of what the extent of her male clothing was.

In the play Amends for Ladies, Moll Cutpurse has a brief walk-on role that has little to do with the main plot. It strikes me as being the equivalent of a celebrity cameo in a sit-com: the celebrity appears within some incongruous situation and draws laughter simply by being present, then walks off. In this scene, Moll seems meant to be instantly recognizable. It’s possible (though pure speculation) that Frith herself may have played the part. Her garments are not described, but another character addresses her saying “I know not what to term thee, man or woman.” There is also a comparison made to Mary Ambree, the subject of a popular broadside ballad who took part in the siege of Ghent in men’s clothing, although openly as a woman.

Clothing plays a much more important role for the Moll Cutpurse character in the play The Roaring Girl, and the distinction between Moll’s everyday outfit and what she wears to disguise herself as a man is a significant plot point.

One character describes her clothing to another by comparison to the expected woman’s garments: “her black safeguard is turned into a deep slop, the holes of her upper bodice to button-holes, her waistcoat to a doublet, her placket to the ancient seat of a cod-piece, and you shall take 'em both with standing collars.” This needs a bit of translation for the modern listener. A “safeguard” was a rough overskirt worn over a gown to protect it while traveling or doing dirty work. Here it is compared to “slops”, a type of very full, loose trousers, that could almost look like a skirt if you weren’t paying attention. The lacing holes of a woman’s bodice are contrasted with the button holes on a man’s doublet. The moralizing aspect is that a laced bodice took effort to unfasten, and had to be unfastened as a whole, while a buttoned opening could easily be opened partially for access. A placket would have been an overlapping cloth where the skirt was fastened, while a codpiece was the protruding part of a man’s breeches that covered his genitals. A standing collar could be worn by either sex. The character then adds as a afterthought, “they say sometimes she goes in breeches.”

But when the stage directions herald Moll’s arrival, they say, “Enter Moll, in a frieze jerkin and a black safeguard.” That is, a man’s jacket but paired with a skirt. The greater significance of wearing breeches is noted in a scene where Moll is deliberately trying to outrage her target. (To summarize the rather convoluted plot, Moll is helping out a pair of thwarted lovers by trying to convince the man’s father, Sir Alexander, that she is the actual intended bride. So in this scene, she has a conversation with her tailor for the benefit of the eavesdropping Sir Alexander.)

* * *

Enter Tailor.

Tailor: Mistress Moll, mistress Moll ! So ho, ho, so ho!

Moll: There, boy, there, boy ! What dost thou go a-hawking after me with a red clout on thy finger ?

Tailor: I forgot to take measure on you for your new breeches.

Sir Alexander (as an aside): Hoyda, breeches ? What, will he marry a monster with two trinkets? What age is this! If the wife go in breeches, the man must wear long coats like a fool.

Moll: What fiddling's here ! Would not the old pattern have served your turn !

Tailor: You change the fashion : you say you'll have the great Dutch slop, Mistress Mary.

Moll: Why, sir, I say so still.

Tailor: Your breeches, then, will take up a yard more.

Moll: Well, pray, look it be put in then.

Tailor: It shall stand round and full, I warrant you.

Moll: Pray, make 'em easy enough.

Tailor: I know my fault now, t'other was somewhat stiff between the legs ; I’ll make these open enough, I warrant you.

Sir Alexander (aside): Here's good gear towards! I have brought up my son to marry a Dutch slop and a French doublet ; a codpiece daughter!

* * *

There are, of course, many sexual innuendos in this speech, such as the reference to the slops being “somewhat stiff between the legs.” This is pretty typical of the level of humor in 17th century plays.

This contrast between the partial and fully masculine appearance is also made when Moll agrees to meet a man for what he believes to be a sexual assignation, in order to teach him a lesson. The man is looking around for Moll, saying, “I see none yet dressed like her; I must look for a shag-ruff, a frieze jerkin, a short sword, and a safeguard, or I get none.”

That is, once again, Moll is expected to be in a hybrid costume consisting of various male garments and accessories but paired with a woman’s skirt. However Moll arrives in disguise. The stage directions announce, “Enter Moll, dressed as a man.” The other character fails to recognize her, taking her for some young male lawyer, until Moll tells him of her identity.

An anecdote in Frith’s diary makes this same distinction between her habitual apparel of a doublet worn with skirts, and the entirely male outfit she wore on a bet, as described in the following passage:

* * *

I shall never forget my fellow humorist, Banks the Vintner in Cheapside, who taught his horse to dance, and shooed him with silver. Among other fantastic discourse, one day he would needs engage me in a frolic upon a wager of 20 pounds which was that I should ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch a-straddle on horseback in breeches and doublet, boots and spurs, all like a man cap a pie. I was all for such sudden whims .... Just so it took me, I accepted the condition and prepared me with all the before named particulars against the day, and to do something more than my bargain, I got a trumpet and banner and threw it behind my back as trumpeters used to wear it.

* * *

To summarize, Moll, who is notorious for wearing “men’s apparel”, accepts a challenge to ride though London wearing an entirely male outfit--cap a pie, head to foot. At first, despite deliberately calling attention to herself, people are surprised to see a trumpeter, but take Moll for a man and so see nothing amiss in the clothing. Not until a woman of the streets recognizes her personally is Moll identified as a woman, which provokes a hostile and even violent reaction from the crowd.

If Moll went “all like a man cap a pie” on an everyday basis, why would this particular act result in such a different reaction? The answer is that the description “going in men’s apparel” meant that she wore one or more male-coded garments, but was not meant to be understood as being a form of gender disguise or a full male outfit.

While this may seem a minor thing to a modern imagination, accustomed as we are to women wearing pants, it’s hard to emphasize how differently the two would strike a 17th century viewer. A woman wearing a masculine-style doublet and tall hat, rather than a bodice and cap, was the sort of person one wrote frothing polemics about. A woman wearing breeches was the sort of person who might be assaulted by a mob and thrown in jail.

What was it about a particular style of doublet or hat that drew condemnation? The moral literature about dress and fashion attacked the topic from a number of angles, including fashion as a symbol of discontent with the status quo (or with one's social status) and as an example of wastefulness. Women's fashions were also attacked as designed to inspire lust. But concerns about women in men's clothing were distinct from these more general concerns.

Looking somewhat earlier, texts from the first half of the 16th century rarely addressed cross-dressing seriously, only occasionally forbidding it in terms suggesting it was too transgressive to be considered seriously. The wording used in later 16th century texts suggests that they were primarily concerned with "masquing" or with the appropriation of individual male-coded garments such as doublets or certain styles of hat. This use was felt to erase the distinctions between male and female that clothing was intended to signal.

In the early 17th century, these attacks increased in number and hostility, as represented by works such as the aforementioned Hic Mulier. Critics felt that women’s use of male garments represented "the world...very much out of order". Appeal was made directly to "husbands, parents, or friends" to restrain the women's actions if their own shame did not. The target of these polemics was generally fashion-conscious middle-class women. Behavioral literature aimed at upper class women tended to provide more abstract and philosophical advice rather than critiques of specific behaviors. And working class women weren’t considered susceptible to persuasion, but were more often targets of legal sanctions.

The reaction against women’s adoption of male styles is generally viewed as a response to women claiming more personal and social independence, and the virulence of the moral literature indicated the extent to which those claims were successful. The tract Hic Mulier focused on two categories of danger. Firstly, that the breakdown of gender differences in clothing would encourage illicit sexuality (symbolized by the proximity of male and female garments "in embrace"). But more than that, cross-dressing is felt to foreshadow the breakdown of all category distinctions, including that of class. The use of male dress among women is seen as leveling crucial class distinctions.

A counter-polemic titled Haec Vir--reversing the grammatical word-play by combining the feminine article with the word for "man," thus being “the feminine man--begins by framing these challenges to the social order as desirable, although that message is undermined by the tract's equivocation. In this responding work, a character identified as Hic Mulier supports women's claims to the same rights as men and equates choice of dress with freedom of choice in life generally. Alas, this position is then satirized and abandoned as the focus of the pamphlet moves to the moral hazard of the "womanly man" (represented by Haec Vir), with the implication that women are only becoming more masculine in reaction to men's abdication of their proper "manly" role.

Frith’s diary includes an anecdote that echoes this disdain for effeminate men, as follows:

* * *

There was also a fellow, a contemporary of mine, as remarkable as myself, called Anniseed-water Robin, who was clothed very near my antic mode, being an hermaphrodite, a person of both sexes. Him I could by no means endure, being the very derision of natures impotency, whose redundancy in making him man and woman had in effect made him neither, having not the strength nor reason of the male, nor the fineness nor subtlety of the female, being but one step removed from a natural changeling, a kind of mockery (as I was upbraided) of me, who was then counted for an artificial one. And indeed I think nature owed me a spight in sending that thing into the world to mate and match me, that nothing might be without a peer, and the vacuum of society be replenished, which is done by the likeness and similitude of manners: but contrariwise it begot in me a natural abhorrence of him with so strange an antipathy, that what by threats and my private instigating of the boys to fall upon, and throw dirt at him, I made him quit my walk and habitation, that I might have no further scandal among my neighbors, who used to say, "Here comes Moll’s Husband."

* * *

If I had time, I might digress on the topic of Aniseed-water Robin who, like Moll Cutpurse, appears to be a combination of history and myth. If historic, Robin may have been a trans woman, as suggested by Frith’s description, or may have been intersex but assigned as male and therefore treated as a deficient man. In any event, this is a lesson that being a gender outlaw did not necessarily make one sympathetic to other types of gender outlaws.

Frith’s Sexuality

There’s a certain amount of data relevant to Frith’s possible sexuality, but it’s open to vast differences in interpretation, depending on one’s assumptions and point of view. The most obvious example of this ambiguity is the simple fact of her marriage. Despite a public image--as reflected in the depiction of her on stage--as a woman who rejected marriage and had no sexual interest in men, the simple fact is that she did marry a man and made reference to her married state when it suited her purpose. But on the other hand, there’s also strong evidence that it was a marriage in name only and that she never cohabited with her husband or had much, if anything, to do with him after the wedding.

Peculiarly, her biography makes no mention at all of any marriage, neither in the introductory third-person discussion, nor in the anecdotal first-person diary. It goes so far as to say that the idea of the wedding of Moll Cutpurse was something of a proverbial expression for something that would never happen. The third-person discussion includes an anecdote that is meant to specifically explain her antipathy to marriage, involving a close emotional friendship with a man who took financial advantage of her. And in the diary section, there are several passages that portray Frith as contemplating the idea of sexual desire for men, and shrugging it off. Here’s one example, discussing a friendship with a man she had known since they were children.

* * *

Among those Keepers I had contracted a firm and close friendship with Ralph Briscoe the Clerk of Newgate [prison], a notable and famous person, and the best and ablest to go through that place, they ever had or are like to have. He was right for my tooth, and made to my mind in every part of him; insomuch that had not the apathy and insensibleness of my carnal pleasure even to stupidity possessed me. I should have hired him to my embraces.”

* * *

The third-person biographer is somewhat more bombastic and less nuanced in discussing Frith’s relationship to sex, attributing her evident chastity simultaneously to being undesirable to men, and to her own masculine temperament, but presenting this state as a type of virtue. A very little of the following description will suffice to give the sense of it.

* * *

At this Age we spoke of before, she was not much taxed with any Looseness or Debauchery in that kind; whether the virility and manliness of her face and aspect took of any mans desires that way (which may be very rational and probable) or that besides her uncompliable and rougher temper of body and mind also, which in the female Sex is usually persuasive and winning, not daring or peremptory (though her Disposition can hardly find a suitable term for an indifferent expression of the manage of her life) she her self also from the more importunate and prevailing sway of her inclinations, which were masculine and robust, could not intend those venereal impurities, and pleasures: as stronger meats are more palatable and nutritive to strong bodies than Quelquechoses and things of variety, which may perchance move an appetite, provoke a longing; but are easily refrained from by any considerate good fellow, that knows what is the lastingest Friend to good Drink and good Company; her Motto.

* * *

OK, I confess I got a little lost in the rhetoric there. And this passage is followed by the biographer’s opinions on cross-dressing in general among the sexes, which he mostly finds offensive and disgusting. Regarding Frith, he concludes by noting that at least she had the love of a good dog, as seen in this passage:

* * *

So that by this odd dress it came, that no man can say or affirm that ever she had a Sweet-heart, or any such fond thing to dally with her. A good Mastiffe was the only thing she then affected and joyed in, in whose fawnings and familiarity, she took as much delight as the proudest she ever gloried in the courtship, admiration, attraction and flatteries of her adored beauty. She was not wooed nor solicited by any man, and therefore she was Honest, though still in a reserved obedience and future service either personally or by Proxy to Venus.

Her Nuptials and Wedding grew to be such a Proverb, as the Kisses of Jack Adams, any one he could light upon, that is to say, as much design of love, in one as in the other: all the Matches she ever intended was a Bear-baiting, whose pastimes afforded not leisure or admittance to the weak recreations and impertinencies of Lust.

She never had the Green sickness, that Epidemical Disease of Maidens after they have once past their puberty; she never eat Lime, Oatmeal, Coals or such like Trash, nor never changed Complexion; a great Felicity for her Vocation afterwards that was not to be afraid nor ashamed of anything, neither to wax pale or to blush.

* * *

This last gets back to the whole “not like other girls” theme, as “green sickness” was supposed to be a malady of women who weren’t getting enough sexual fulfillment, and for which the symptoms (or perhaps alternate treatment) were the eating of odd substances. It is, of course, a blind spot of her biographer that he would view Frith’s lack of sexual relations with men as a form of virtue, but doesn’t seem to have considered the possibility of other interests.

Frith’s diary provides two anecdotes with somewhat contradictory evidence regarding the possibility that she experienced desire for women. The first involves a sexually charged encounter with a woman who had a habit of kissing men aggressively as a form of prank. Frith describes her as a “natural”, implying some sort of intellectual disability.

* * *

There was a shameless Jade, as noted in this town as my self at this time, but for far more enormous actions; she was called Abigail, her way of living (she being a kind of Natural) was by ringing the bells with her coats for a farthing, and coming behind any gentleman for the same hire, and clapping him on the back as he turned his head, to kiss him, to the enraging of some gentlemen so far as to cause them to draw their swords and threaten to kill her. This stinking slut, who was never known to have done so to any woman; by some body’s setting her on to affront me, served me in the same manner. I got hold of her and being near at home, dragged her to the conduit, where I washed her polluted lips for her, and wrenched her lewd petticoats to some purpose, tumbling her under a cock, and letting the water run, till she had not a dry thread about her, and had her soundly kicked to boot.

* * *

Mary Frith was not a nice person. Did you know that?

When the woman turned her attention to Frith, it may have been in tribute to her masculine performance. Frith’s reaction could be interpreted as being sexually disinterested in women, but as the anecdote indicates that men reacted negatively to the woman as well, she may simply have treated it as a hostile act the same as the men did.

A similarly ambiguous encounter with a woman is related from later in Moll’s life when she has turned her hand to managing a house of prostitution. The passage is worth quoting extensively because it includes a digression where Moll discusses a joking proposition to a man.

* * *

[This is during a period when the events of the English Civil War were making the fencing trade less profitable. Frith turned her hand to keeping a bawdy house.]

...there being always, which I considered both in war and peace, good vent of such commodities. The voluptuous bed is never the less frequented for those hard and painful lodgings in the camp. I saw also, that the former traffickers this way were very straitlaced and too narrow in their practice, as confining their industry in this negotiation to one sex, like women tailors, that if they were to be hanged cannot make a doublet for themselves. In this I was a little prosperous, though to make good the simile, I could never fit my self.

[Frith digresses for a bit on the question of her own sexuality.]

One time...as I was going down Fleetbridge I espied one of my neighbors Mr. Drake, a tailor God bless him, and to my purpose, he was altogether for the women, quoth I in droll, Mr Drake when shall you and I make ducklings? He quacked again, and told me, that I looked as if some toad had ridden me and poisoned me into that shape, that he was altogether for a dainty duck, that I was not like that feather, and that my eggs were addled. I contented myself with the repulse and walked quietly homeward.

[Frith returns to the story of managing sexual services of diverse types. But although one might jump to the conclusion that she’s talking about providing male prostitutes to men, she makes it clear that she’s providing them for women.]

I chose the sprucest fellows the town afforded, for they did me reputation at home and service abroad; my neighbors admiring what this retinue and attendance meant, nor would I now discover it but to unburden my conscience, and shame the private practices of some great women, who to this very purpose keep emissaries and agents to procure stallions to satiate their desires, as confidently as they entertain grooms and laundries. I will stir this puddle no longer, nor dive into the depth of it any further, lest I pollute and inquinate the reader with the filth thereof.

[Despite this disclaimer, she continues to describe how, even when not providing organized sexual services, she lent herself as a private go-between to do sexual match-making. The following encounter was to the benefit of a “noble friend” who later would put in a good word for Moll when she was in legal trouble, as thanks for her services here.]

There was a noted lass a married wife of this time, whose story shall serve to conclude all the amorous tricks and pranks that were wrought by me, for indeed it sums up all that belongs or attends to such doings, and the account I promised; want and shame never failing to bring up the rear of lust and wantonness. She was in her youth a very curious piece indeed, but wanting a fortune competent and proportionable to it, arrived no higher at her marriage than an ordinary citizen, yet of good fame and reputation. For a while in the beginning of this state she lived continently at home, but the flies buzzing about her as they resort always to sweets soon corrupted and tainted her; this was not unknown to me, and thereupon I resolved that she was as free for my turn as for anybody’s, and forthwith I accosted her, using such caresses, promises and invitations as I knew the market would bear, so that I made her entirely mine, and gratified a friend with her first acquaintance, who in short, was that noble friend that preserved me out of the hands of the people at Westminster who had resolved on my mind. He had not long after occasion to leave London, and then I bestowed her on another, and so to a third, fourth, and fifth, etc. according to my best advantage, till such time she had contracted those distempers which not long after brought her to her grave.

* * *

Despite those caresses, promises, and invitations that made the woman “entirely hers”, this doesn’t read like a story of homoerotic desire. The characters of The Roaring Girl speculate on this point, suggesting a bisexual Moll Cutpurse who “might first cuckold the husband, and then make him do as much for the wife.” But in the end, there seems as much suggestion that Frith may have been asexual as any other option.

So what are we to make of Mary Frith, aka Mary Markham, aka Moll Cutpurse? She was a woman of complexity and contradiction. She was forthright, unprincipled, and gave no fucks. She would have been a great companion to go out drinking with, and probably a fiercely loyal friend, but when it comes down to it, she probably wasn’t a very nice person. She took the expectations of gender and twisted them around to serve her own purposes, but she also absorbed and reflected the misogyny that pervaded her times, even as women at all levels were reaching out to seize greater opportunities and to demand rights over their bodies and their lives. She was as queer as they come, but had an uncertain relationship with sexual desire. Just the sort of person who makes a great inspiration for a fictional character--which isn’t surprising, given how much of what we know of her may well be fiction itself. But if so, it’s a fiction rooted in her time and place and reflecting an age that is bursting with possibilities for historical fiction.

Show Notes

A look at the life, legend, and literary figure of Mary Frith, aka Moll Cutpurse, 17th century English gender outlaw.

In this episode we talk about:

A brief biography and its sources
Moll’s criminal and theatrical careers
Moll’s gender performance and its reception
The ambiguous evidence regarding Moll’s sexuality

This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here:

Mary Frith/Moll Cutpurse

Books mentioned

The edited edition of Mary Frith's attributed diary is published as: Todd, Janet & Elizabeth Spearing ed. 1994. Counterfeit Ladies: The Life and Death of Mary Frith Case of Mary Carleton. William Pickering, London. ISBN 1-85196-087-2
Ellen Galford's novel Moll Cutpurse depicts her as enjoying a long-term same-sex relationship. I reviewed the novel here .
The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker. The link is to a version of the text at archive.org, but the OCR version has not been cleaned up and is difficult to read.
A full-cast audio production of The Roaring Girl is available from librivox.org. Based on a brief sample, the performance appears to be highly professional and easy to follow.
title by author
title by author
I found two complete (although not necessarily unabridged) productions of The Roaring Girl on YouTube. Both are amateur productions and of highly variable quality.
- The Roaring Girl - Noah McBrayer Jones' MFA Candidacy Presentation Fall 2007 at American Shakespeare Center's Blackfriars Playhouse
- The Roaring Girl - performed by by the Students of West Suffolk College (sound volume is variable)

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

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Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
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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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Book Review: A Study in Honor by Claire O'Dell

Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - 07:00

It’s funny what reputation can do: if you’d handed me A Study in Honor knowing nothing except what’s in the blurb, I’d probably have told you that I’m not really into near-future dystopian political thrillers, even one that’s re-visioning of Holmes and Watson featuring two queer black women. But tell me that [author I love] is coming out with a new series under a new nom de plume and I’ll give anything she writes a try. I would have missed out on a great book if I’d gone just by my usual genre and setting preferences.

O’Dell has created two strong personalities with just enough of their literary antecedents that you know what your getting in terms of interpersonal dynamic. One has clawed her way up from a working class background, one was born of privilege. One is damaged to the edge of breaking by her experiences in the war, one is smooth and polished and always so very much in control. But you believe that these two can be thrown together, can survive the initial distrust and conflict, and can begin to forge what we recognize as the enduring Holmes/Watson partnership that has made its way into legend. As with the original canon, we see the events through Watson’s eyes, leaving the internal workings of Holmes’s mind (and her backstory) enough of a mystery to be intriguing.

I’m not going to lie about the setting: the line that can be drawn between where were are today and the terrifying vision the book offers of political turmoil and civil war is too believable to be enjoyable. The tech is just the far side of futuristic but the sociology is entirely too familiar. But the story is about human beings and how they make it through, first and foremost by caring about truth, honor, and each other. And that makes all the difference in envisioning how we might recover from such a future.

The icing on the cake is that both protagonists are casually and unapologetically queer without needing to insert a romance plot into the dynamic. I long for the day when I can pick up any random book and consider that a possibility. Until then, I’ll always be seeking out books like this that combine representation with rock-solid writing.

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Erasing Queer Identity: Moll Cutpurse

Monday, September 17, 2018 - 07:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

Sometimes this blog is a dispassionate and intellectual summary of academic research. Sometimes it's a total squee-fest about a great source or a fascinating piece of historical evidence. And sometimes it's the equivalent of rage-tweeting. This one has turned into the last. Ungerer's article is a valuable single source for most of the documentary evidence of Mary Frith's life. And it's a maddening morass of unsupported and contradictory prejudice, directed at the goal of erasing any trace of queer identity from that life (plus some snide and snarky comments directed at other researchers on the topic). Historians are human beings like the rest of us, and sometimes you just want to smack them upside the head. This is one of those times.

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LHMP #213 Ungerer 2000 Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature

Full citation:

Ungerer, Gustav. 2000. “Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature” in Shakespeare Studies, 28:42-84

[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]

# # #

It was hard to escape two underlying themes in this article, neither of them speaking directly to the scholarship: the author appears to have something of a personal grudge against Elizabeth Spearing’s edition of Frith’s biography, and he seems determined to conclude that there was nothing particularly queer or transgressive about Frith’s life—she just thought dressing in men’s clothing was a useful career move. Now, it’s not as if I don’t have personal interests in the interpretation of Mary Frith’s life, but I’m startled at the amount of evidence Ungerer feels compelled (and willing) to brush away to come to this conclusion. So this will be one of those summaries that involves a number of editorial asides, clearly identified in square brackets.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of this article is the catalog of documentary references to Mary Frith, under her various names.

Ungerer notes that one of the difficulties in sorting out Mary Frith’s sexual and gender identities is the fragmentary nature of the evidence and that it is filtered through male-oriented and prejudiced records. He early stakes out a position that the memoir attributed to Frith is a complete fiction representing the “criminal biography” genre. With regard to gender and sexuality, she is contradictorily presented as “a transvestite usurping male power, as a hermaphrodite transcending the borders of human sexuality, as a virago, as a tomboy, as a prostitute, as a bawd, and even as a chaste woman who remained a spinster.” [Note: these are not as distinct and contradictory identities as he implies, regardless of their accuracy.] Ungerer goes further to suggest that the question of whether Frith might have been an entirely fictional figure is not adequately addressed, although the question isn’t treated as seriously in doubt within the rest of the article.

Ungerer’s first serious dig at Spearing comes in suggesting that she had made a mistake in doing her analysis of the full version of Frith’s memoirs and not considering the chapbook version “extracted from the original” published by G. Horton in the same year, which sensationalizes the material further. I haven’t had a chance to compare the two editions, but neither does Ungerer discuss specific points of difference. Mostly he delves into Horton’s treatment of other criminal biographies, such as that of highwayman James Hind, that include a suspicious amount of royalist propaganda. Frith, too is given a highway robbery incident in Horton’s work, which clearly seems unlikely to be truthful. But I can't seem to find that reference in the full biography. Additional mythologizing can be found in later works, such as Alexander Smith’s A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Shoplifts, and Cheats of Both Sexes (1719), who seems to be the inventor of the story that Frith robbed the Parliamentarian General Fairfax on Hounslow Heath. Ungerer points out that obvious fictions such as this can’t be used to answer questions about Frith’s actual life and character.

The author then lays out the program of his arguments: that the 1662 “diary” of Mary Frith was structured to add a few historical facts to a standard template for the criminal biography genre. And that therefore the 1662 document presents a mythic construct that tells us little about Frith’s life. And that the fact that Frith is recorded as having married a man contradicts more transgressive theories about her gender and sexuality. [Because, of course, no person ever entered into heterosexual marriage who had anything other than a cis identity and heterosexual orientation.] And lastly, that Frith’s cross-dressing was entirely a deliberate professional theatrical performance and not an expression of personal identity. [Note: Ungerer argues so strongly, in the face of the evidence, against viewing Frith as a queer figure—though the word “queer” doesn’t figure in the terminology here—that it makes me curious to know what it would have taken to convince him.]

Ungerer argues (somewhat in contradiction) that the hypothetical author of Frith’s biography (rejecting the possibility that it was, indeed, based on Frith’s own dictation) didn’t have access to the archival data that modern scholars have identified (though presumably they had living memories to work from) but that on the other hand, whatever data they had was reshuffled to fit the genre, so it didn’t matter. The following points are presented as arguing against the biography’s accuracy: that it includes a standard “sinner turned penitent” speech, that it frames Frith as a royalist, that it presents her as the mastermind behind two other highwaymen, that it presents her as a popular defender of the poor, and that in contradiction to all that, it presents her as a “sexual monster”.

[Note: The suggestion that these features undermine the truthfulness of the work as a whole runs up against similar themes in documents not derived from the biography. For example, Frith’s will uses similar “penitent sinner” language. Middleton and Dekker’s fictionalized Moll Cutpurse, penned four decades earlier, present her as a defender of the downtrodden and an enemy of hypocrites. And I would argue that the degree to which Frith is presented as “monstrous” in any of these texts is simply a product of the limits of how her contemporaries could envision gender roles, not a personal indictment.]

Ungerer agrees with Spearing that the full text of Frith’s biography constitutes three separate authors, corresponding to the three separate sections of the work. (I.e., the address to the reader, the third-person introduction to Frith’s life, and then the first-person section presented as her own story which is referred to here as the "diary" section.) He notes that the structure is “three incoherent, uncoordinated, and at times contradictory parts”. [Note: It’s unclear to me how the addition of what is self-identified as a different person’s introduction to the diary is proof of the fictional nature of the diary itself.] The address to the reader acknowledges the discontinuous nature of the text, saying, “excuse the abruptness and discontinuance of the matter, and the several independencies thereof…it was impossible to make one piece of so various a subject, as she was both to herself and others, being forced to take her as we found her, though at disadvantage.” [Note: it would seem to me that this would argue for the validity of the “diary” part of the text, as otherwise why not simply write it to be more continuous and coherent?]

The second section of Frith's biography presents an analysis and commentary on Frith’s life and person with an insight that suggests personal familiarity with her. However there are clear errors and omissions. Some dates don’t align. [Note: the second writer also fails to include several facts—like Frith’s marriage—that are also absent from the diary section.] The third section is framed as a first-person narrative, forming an autobiographical confession. It begins by running through a number of pranks and anecdotes, then there is a break and the setting shifts more towards the later part of Frith’s life and includes more contemporary political events and diatribes against Cromwell and the Puritans.

The numbers for birth and death dates and for Frith’s age, as given in the various sections of the work, do not entirely align. She died in 1659 and the diary has her claim (when ill, shortly before her death) that she was 72 years of age, placing her birth in 1585. But the second writer in the work assigns her a birthdate in 1589.

Frith left a will, written in June 1659 a month before her death. But in the diary Frith asserts, “I did make no will at all,” and then relates various disbursements of her fortune that she had made while living. [Note: these wouldn’t be contradictory if the dictation of her diary occurred before the drawing up of her recorded will. But the person named in the diary to receive the remainder of her estate is not mentioned at all among the various people listed in her recorded will.]

One of the most curious omissions from the diary in any of its sections is reference to Mary Frith’s marriage in 1614 to Lewknor Markham, esquire. For all that it seems to have been a marriage in name only, quite possibly for legal advantages, Frith made reference to her status as a widow and used “Mary Markham” as an alternate name in records throughout her life (including in her will). There are several references in the diary and the 2nd writer’s discussions that refer to Frith as not only unmarried but deliberately so. This would seem to be the strongest argument undermining the diary’s authorship. [Note: Though it’s possible that Frith-as-hypothetical-narrator simply didn’t consider it interesting or relevant to mention when relating the more adventurous events in her life.]

Ungerer suggests that the strongest argument for the fictional nature of the diary section is how it follows the pattern of the fictionalized biography of highwayman James Hind, as shaped by author George Fidge in 1651-2. And that the encoding of Mary Frith as another “royalist criminal” is evidence of the deliberate fictionalization of her life as given in the diary. An “origin story” given in the diary for her nickname as “Mary Thrift” that connects it with a political event in 1639 is contradicted by evidence of the nickname being in use perhaps two decades earlier. Frith asserts various politically pointed activities and inveighs against various various parliamentarians in the diary section covering events in the 1640s. The insertion of the anecdote about Frith masterminding the robberies of James Hind and Richard Hannam is suspect, if only because Frith’s sphere of expertise was London and not the region where they operated. These highwayman exploits were expanded in Alexander Smith’s (aforementioned) 1719 treatise on highwaymen, in which Frith is credited with robbing General Fairfax. [Note: however the implausibility of this anecdote doesn’t reflect on the diary, as it is a later work.]

Another feature of the fictionalized criminal biography was the “penitent sinner” motif. This element in the opening of the diary section is offered as evidence against its fictionalization. [Note: But similar language appears in Frith’s will, and the use of penitential language is pervasive in texts of this era. So it seems a weak thread to hang an accusation of untruth on.] Similarly, the presentation of Frith as a protector of the poor against injustice is a standard feature of criminal biographies. [Note: But see similar themes in The Roaring Girl, suggesting that this motif had been a part of Frith’s legend all her life.]

In considering theories about Frith’s gender identity and sexual orientation, Ungerer entirely discards the diary and its accompanying material as evidence and turns instead to the record of her marriage in 1614 to Lewknor Markham, possibly a son of author Gervase Markham. He says that marriage, “imparted an air of cultural normalcy” to her status and erases the framing of her as unmarriageable, as monstrous, or as a hermaphrodite who refused to marry. Ungerer’s position (which he spends some effort to support) is that “She turned out to be a self-fashioning individual who had taken to transvestism as an alternative strategy for economic survival. … she was a scheming and calculating woman with an ingrained instinct for upward social mobility and determined to exploit to the full the ambiguous legal position of women under common law.”

[Note: I’m going to come back to this. Hold that thought.]

Marriage provided several changes to Frith’s legal status. A married woman could either be a feme covert, a woman whose legal identity was “covered” by her husband and who could take no independent legal or financial actions. Or, even though married, the marriage contract could specify that she would remain feme sole, in effect, a legally single woman, able to run her own business and take actions in her own name. Frith acted regularly as feme sole, especially with regard to her business as a fence. But on other occasions, she claimed to be feme covert, when it was convenient to dodge legal consequences by claiming to have no ability to act independently under law. So, for example, in 1624 when a hatmaker sued her for money owed, he was warned not to sue her as feme sole because she would only respond by claiming to be feme covert and that therefore he must apply to her (long-absent) husband for redress.

In point of fact, the testimony in that case provide strong evidence that the marriage was a polite fiction. Frith claimed that she couldn’t even remember how long she’d been married to Markham, and the attorney for the other side asserted that she had not lived with her husband “these ten years or thereabouts” (i.e., the entire period of the marriage).

Ungerer notes that engaging in marriage is in direct contradiction to the character portrayed in Middleton and Dekker’s play who rejected the very concept of marriage. [Note: As the play was published in 1611 and Frith’s marriage was in 1614, this needn’t be considered a contradiction. At the time The Roaring Girl portrayed Moll Cutpurse as disdaining marriage, the character’s namesake was, in fact, unmarried and perhaps had every intention of remaining so at the time.]

Documentation concerning Frith’s career as a licensed broker of stolen goods (a fence) makes her status as a legally independent woman clear. The article returns to her criminal and crime-adjacent career, starting with her arrests in 1600 and 1602 for theft (the literal cutting of purses for which she was nicknamed), along with the absence of any reference to cross-dressing at that time. Ungerer then asserts that Frith’s cross-dressing correlates specifically with the beginnings of her involvement with the Bankside entertainment industry and he speculates, “that her transvestism was a commercially and professionally motivated ploy to increase her income.” He continues, “It would definitely be dangerous to diagnose the case of Mary Frith as that of a lower-class woman in quest of her sexuality; hers is far more likely to be the case of a pickpocket turned transvestite for gain.” The reasoning was that Frith’s appearance on the streets in male clothing would draw and distract a crowd who would then be victims of pickpockets who would presumably share the proceeds with Frith.

[Note: the flaw I see in this reasoning is that Frith’s cross-dressing would make her highly memorable and identifiable, which surely would be the opposite of the desired effect.]

Ungerer concludes that the conjunction of her cross-dressing and her association with criminal elements means that the cross-dressing was a professional strategy, and further that this “confirms that there was a relationship between transvestism and crime.” He claims that Dekker and van de Pol’s study of female cross-dressing in the Low Countries demonstrates a “paradigm of the criminal female transvestite”.

[Note: I have no idea how one could draw this conclusion from Dekker and van de Pol’s work. They discuss a wide range of contexts and motivations for female cross-dressing, and although a few examples involve criminality, the majority do not. To focus on this one specific context and then claim that there was an inherent relationship in 17th century northern Europe between female cross-dressing and criminality is the strongest tell that Ungerer has a preconceived conclusion here that he is working hard to “prove.” Whether that preconceived conclusion stems from his own prejudice against gender transgression in women, or whether he feels a need to erase gender/sexuality as a factor in Frith’s life, I don’t know. But this was the point when I decided to discount his conclusions entirely and to flag this article as “useful only when quoting primary source material.” So from this point on, I’ll add my back-talk without bothering to flag it in brackets.]

Ungerer supports his conclusion that Frith’s appearances in male clothing were a deliberate performance with such things as her confession in the Bishop’s court that she “had long frequented all or most of the disorderly and licentious places in this city as namely she hath usually in the habit of a man resorted to alehouses, taverns, tobacco shops, and also play houses there to see plays and prizes.” Of course, many other people frequented this same list of locations and activities without doing so for the purpose of performing as an entertainer, or of participating in criminal activity. Frith certainly engaged in “pranks” like the wager that led her to ride horseback in a fully male outfit through the streets of London, as well as the sort of rude practical jokes that make up much of her biography. But Ungerer spins an invented scenario where he depicts Frith singing bawdy songs in a tavern and distracting patrons with the startling sight of a woman smoking a pipe, solely to enable her confederates to pick their pockets more easily, and then he uses this invented scenario as proof of his interpretation regardin her motivations.

The direct evidence for Frith as a professional entertainer is limited: an announcement at the end of the script for The Roaring Girl that Frith herself would appear on stage “some few days hence” to perform, and a corresponding confession in court records that she appeared “at a play...at the Fortune in man’s apparel and in her boots and with a sword by her side...and also sat there upon the stage in the public view of all the people there present in man’s apparel” during which she sang to the lute and made speeches. Ungerer plumps this up with speculative elaborations and then concludes that, “She seized the opportunity to bring home to the audience that her self-fashioned cultural identity as a public persona, that is, as a female entertainer in male disguise, was not identical with her private self. Thus, she let it be known in unmistakable words that she was not a transvestite, nor a hermaphrodite, nor a sexually ambiguous character of any kind.” The sole evidence he gives for this conclusion is Frith’s declaration that she knew many in the audience thought she was a man, but she’d be happy to disabuse them of that idea if they came with her to her lodging. As if identifying as a woman were incompatible with having a “sexually ambiguous character.”

To push further on the erasure of Frith as a gender outlaw, he argues that Frith’s message was that crossing gender boundaries was not transgressive or disruptive, not immoral or reprehensible. But the authorities clearly disagreed (just as they considered the wearing of cross-gendered clothing by non-criminal women to be morally suspect--a factor that Ungerer doesn’t seem to consider).

The crackdown on Frith after her stage appearance in connection with The Roaring Girl was not aimed at her alone or even at cross-dressing women in general. In October 1612, there was a legal ban on theaters staging the performance of “jigs, rhymes, and dances after their plays” because of the disruption to the peace they often caused. (Though Ungerer implies that it was Frith’s performance in particular that drove this action.) Ungerer discusses Frith’s shift to working as a fence, accompanied by a lot of speculative “whether X was a factor is unknown” and “it would also seem logical” and “she conceivably had opportunity”.

Ungerer sums up the preceding with his predetermined conclusion: “[Mary Frith] had made a name for herself as a street and tavern performer, as a light-fingered instrumentalist and dancer of jigs, who apparently sensed that the time was ripe to confide to her audiences that her cross-dressing had nothing to do with her sexual identity and should be taken for what it was: a simple trick of the trade consisting in a costume change. In her promotion of this view, her male dress or playing apparel had become, as it were, her signature as a popular entertainer.”

The next section of the article discusses gendered aspects of the tobacco trade and the act of smoking. Frith’s pipe-smoking was part of her masculine performance, and her social presence in tobacco shops was another example of entering male-coded spaces. But despite a claim in her biography, she was hardly the first English woman to engage in smoking.

The last section of the article is the most useful, as it provides transcripts and source annotations for pretty much all the documentary references to Mary Frith’s life. If one sifts out Ungerer’s commentary and unwarranted assumptions about the various documents, this is the only part of the article that I can whole-heartedly recommend as useful to the researcher.

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17th c

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England

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cross-dressing

Mary Frith aka Moll Cutpurse

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The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 26c: Book Appreciation with K Aten

Saturday, September 15, 2018 - 20:00

lhmpodcast.jpg

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 71 (previously 26c) - Book Appreciation with K. Aten - transcript

(Originally aired 2018/09/15 - listen here)

Heather Rose: This week, we welcome back author Kelly Aten to talk about some historically-based stories with queer women that she’s particularly enjoyed. Glad to have you back, Kelly.

Kelly Aten: Hi, it's great to be back. Thank you.

H: Let's dive right into the books. What would you like to tell us about?

K: Okay. As a warning, I am not normally a historical fiction fan. However, I do love books that put a lot of detail or dive into different historical periods that I'm a fan of. I will start with the two books that are not speculative-fiction based, because that is my typical fandom. One of the books I'd like to talk about is Other Girls by Diane Ayres. It's actually set around 1978. I picked up this book early on, it's decades ago, two decades and a half maybe. [Heather laughs] I picked it up fairly early on in my lesbian fiction collection. I haven't been collecting that long. But it's set at Willard College for Women around 1978. It's all women, and it's just a big gay... every iteration of a lesbian relationship. I mean, it kind of throws everything in there, when you have all these women together. You know, you have an upper-class woman who's having an affair with her feminist professor and then sleeping with her [unclear] roommate. Then you have this younger woman coming in. The upper-class woman, Pip, she is her big sister, right? Who…they're drawn together. I have to say that one of the things is, the story is a good size novel. The story was really engaging. It is an emotional roller coaster and has some sad parts and attacks. It's supposed to be a happily-ever-after ending, but you kind of wish that some of the other characters had ended up together instead of the ones that did. [Heather laughs] I just know that sometimes when I read the historical fiction especially some of these ones set in the ‘70s and ‘80s, they're not as happy as I'd like. While they're amazingly written, I find them very good engaging novels. They're not necessarily my favorites because to be a favorite typically, I'd like that happily-ever-after which I know seems trite, but--

H: I’m curious about that because--and of course, here's where I'm coming from. I'm counting back…set in the ‘70s, 40 years ago. I guess that is historical fiction. Wait a minute, I was in college in the ‘70s. [both laugh] I'm wondering, is it that there's a particular type of happy ending you're looking for that maybe wasn't as possible back then? I'm not sure when this book you're talking about was written. Was it written recently talking about the historic era or was it written in the ‘70s?

K: No, it wasn't written recently. It was written in 2002 which is 16 years ago still. It's contemporary, it's 2002, but it is written about 1978. And you're absolutely right, I think maybe that's why some of the more accurate books written about a certain time period, I'm not necessarily as happy with. Because to me, before women, before lesbians, bisexuals, transgender, queer, before you started seeing all of these rights, and we still obviously have our ways to go, but we have so many more rights now than you had 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago or more, right? I mean, just looking at the age of when women themselves had rights. And now you start looking at us gay women or queer women, it's a different time period now than it was in the ‘80s or in the ‘70s. But you're right, you're absolutely right. Maybe that's why some of my displeasure with some of these more accurate portrayals of historic fiction as far as during the time period when women had rights as women but they didn't have rights as gay women. The endings aren't as much what I would like to see knowing what I know now, but you can't have that.

H: Yeah, this is a reaction that I've run across about historical fiction further back where modern readers say, “I don't like the options that were available to women back then. I don't enjoy these stories because I don't want to read about anybody who doesn't have what I have now.” It's fascinating because that's true for any kind of historical fiction and I have to confess I find it frustrating when lesbian readers say, “I don't want to read historical fiction at all because I would not want to live then, and therefore I don't like these stories.” I've always seen historical fiction as a chance to understand how people could be happy on their own terms in any context. But that's a thing I've got that is just interesting, thinking about how my life in the ‘70s... well, of course let's not talk about my life in the ‘70s. [Kelly laughs] My life in the ‘70s is not something that a let’s say 20-something lesbian today would consider acceptable. If lesbian romance means you have to get married and live happily ever after, it's like you can't set anything earlier than the last decade.

K: You're right. And I think it comes down to relatability, right? I mean, it's hard for the younger generation with everything they have to relate to that time period. And maybe they don't want to relate. Because to have all of these privileges and all of these rights and to suddenly go back because you do put yourself into a book. When I read, I am in that book. That is me. That's my time. And to have all of these rights abruptly ripped away because suddenly you're in a time period where you're treated terribly or you're not allowed to openly love who you love, it's hard. It can be hard, and I think that's why some people maybe avoid. But like you said, there are reasons.

H: It cuts us off from our history. I mean, I shouldn't be preaching to you about this bit, but for me as being so interested in the history of non-normative sexuality, it was different. It wasn't the same as what we experience, but to cut ourselves off from that is to take away our history entirely.

K: I agree. I really agree. I think that one of the things that if you don't occasionally take a look back to see what we didn't have, you won't appreciate what we have now and you will stop fighting to gain more, to really be equal, right? You're like, “Oh, this is good. We have it good. We don't have to worry. We can get married. It's all great.” Well, it's not great. People are still getting fired from jobs, you know? They're threatening women's rights daily. So, I think if you don't look and see how much fight we had to do just to get here, you forget how to fight because history is about showing the fight that people had as humans, as women to get where they are now. It's a constant change. And I think that actually takes me into the other book, which is Alma Mater by Rita Mae Brown. Rita Mae Brown, obviously, is a classic, right? I read Rubyfruit Jungle. Again, and when I read Rubyfruit Jungle, it's a great book, well-written, but it didn't even stick with me so much because for me, it was hard to relate to it. It was set in a time period that was hard for me to relate to. I remember reading Alma Mater though and I really loved the book and then I got to the end, and the book is well-written. But for me, it was not a satisfying end. Because at the time, that was set in 1980, so two years after Other Girls and it’s set in the time period 1980 and still women did not have these options. And you think of it as barbaric now, but women, they were expected to get married, have your little dalliance on the side, but you need to maintain the family name. And some of it it's just a trope, right? But still, it had that implication that women were worth less unless you've settled with a man and it was hard for me to imagine happiness if I was forced to include settling with somebody I couldn't love romantically. So, both really good books. I mean, I recommend them because they're great books to read. They weren't necessarily an ending to my taste, but they were very good books. Obviously, they're on my list. [Heather and Kelly laugh]

After that, the rest of the books that I have on my list as far as some favorites, they are not historical fiction necessarily. They are maybe a variety of fantasy. Cinder and Smoke by Geonn Cannon set in the 19th century New York and it's about a female criminal who has to make her own family. She's a thief. The police call her the Smoke because she’s been targeting the wealthy. She's born in prison, stolen from her mother, raised by runaways and pickpocket and she meets her match in Pinkerton Agent Shelby Button who earned the moniker Cinder for running into a burning building to capture a criminal, right? So obviously, it's not completely accurate, you wouldn't have a female Pinkerton at the time, but it's still in that time. So, it's like a mystery. So, Cinder and Smoke set in 19th century New York, it's about this female Pinkerton who's trying to catch the Smoke which is a pickpocket, a thief. That is another book that the ending wasn't necessarily to my preference, but it is an excellently written book. The author paints a great picture of 19th century New York that the way they spoke, the clothing they wore, just what life was like. So again, it's set in the past. It's not necessarily my thing and you don't necessarily have an ending that you would look at a contemporary piece and say, oh, this is a happy ending. But I think it does a good job of showing these two women and showing what they're facing together. It almost has a Jean Valjean and Javier… [Kelly and Heather laugh] So, like that dynamic.

H: Yeah. And Geonn Cannon specializes in, I think, later 19th century. They're not literary historical stories, but most of them are more historical than fantasy I think that, just genre adventure more.

K: Yes, I agree. So, this one really stuck out because it was set. I mean, Geonn Cannon has a couple others that were more adventure, almost like a Lara Croft/Indiana Jones kind of adventure or so, you know? So, those ones I think are more almost steampunk, but also set in probably what 19th century but more modern, I think. So just really good books, not necessarily romance adventure for sure, but just reading the dynamic between the Pinkerton and the thief in Cinder and Smoke is well worth it and just seeing that time period come alive with Geonn Cannon’s words, it's just truly amazing.

Another one I have, let's go back further Medieval Europe during the Black Plague 1349. That one is by Kim Pritekel, it's called Storm. I mean, I've read some comments. It's not, oh, well, you wouldn't have had this during the plague. I mean, I wouldn't say it's 100% accurate historical fiction, but they try. It's definitely on verge of fantasy because of, we have Merryn, a thief, a street rat, and Cara, a village girl. They end up traveling together. Cara is a healer. She was trained by her mother. Her mother died of the plague. Her sister died of the plague. And they traveled together when they're younger, they fall in love, and something happens and they get separated and they meet again years later. So, at the beginning, it's set during the time of the plague and it comes back later where Merryn’s life has changed significantly. She has much higher status. Again, it's fantasy and that you're not going to see many female knights or people that are ruling an area, but if you like a medieval time period piece, if you like some of the details and the gruesome gory [Heather laughs] facts about what it's like to die from the plague, then it's a good read if you'd like to go that far back. I believe the Kim's story was originally an uber-Xena fanfiction, so the descriptions of the two main characters may seem familiar, but the story itself I found highly entertaining. So even if it's not strictly historically accurate, there's a lot of detail in it.

Another one that is like a fantasy, it's set contemporary but then it has continuous flashbacks to the late 1600s, Cobb Island by Blayne Cooper. I don't know if you've read that one.

H: Okay, I'm not familiar with it, but the name sounds at least familiar.

K: So, you have older sisters agree to supervise their younger siblings, so a couple of young lovestruck teens, right? So, they go to this house on Cobb Island and what happens is the two older sisters end up being descendants of the star-crossed lovers from the late 1600s. So, they keep having flashbacks to the 1600s to these two women that were living then and all the things that happened to them. I'm trying to remember. I think the one was married and then the other one, they were star-crossed. It's late 1600s, it's not going to turn out well necessarily. [Heather laughs] But it has a lot of these flashbacks to the time period to the house that they were living in on this island and what they were going through at the time because obviously women couldn't be together, but it also set contemporary with the two chaperones--inadvertent chaperones. And it's just one of those fate things where the two women just happen to be descendants of the original two women that had died on this island in the late 1600s. So, I always thought that that was a pretty interesting dynamic going back and forth like that. It wasn't set solely in ancient history.

H: Yeah, that's a technique that I see regularly in lesbian historicals where--I tend to call it time-slip, but I don't know if that's a term that other people use--or where you're connecting the reader to the story via a modern character, but then either past lives or an astral projection type time travel type thing and you get into the history. It's kind of fun, the entire genre of that.

K: Yeah, I have actually heard of time-slip as well. But you're right, there are quite a few books that do that even not just in lesbian fiction, but in contemporary fiction. I mean, look at Outlander, [Heather laughs] Right. I mean, my girlfriend, fiancée, sorry, my fiancée now, she loves Outlander. She reads the books. She watches the show. [Kelly laughs] So, I just ignore it. [Heather laughs] She's like, “I don't like fantasy books.” I'm like, “Oh, what's this story about?” “Oh, it’s about this woman that goes back in time.” I'm like, “Okay, you can stop there.” [Heather laughs] “I don’t like romance books.” “Oh, what's it about?” “Oh, this woman that falls in love with this man and goes back in time.” And I'm like, “Okay, you can stop there.” So, [Heather laughs] yeah. But you're right, it is a very popular genre and I think it's the way for the author to connect people that don't want to connect with history against their will and draw them in, in a subtle way, you know? So, I have two more. This one, it's just a quick mention. It's the series Balance of Forces by Ali Vali. In the first book, you have this main character, Kendal Richoux, she actually began life in ancient Egypt as the only female Pharaoh. And I know it's not like a dedicated historical fiction, but one of the things I loved about this book was the references to some of the Egyptian mythology, Egyptian culture, stuff like that. I thought that was cool. It's just a tiny little blip on the radar there and I'll move on from that. And the other series which I don't even know what this genre is When Women Were Warriors. Have you have you read those in like series?

H: I haven't read them. But if you look at the initial acknowledgments, I get a mention for providing her with some name research. It is inspired by, maybe, Bronze Age Celtic society, but my interpretation is it's much more, much more, fantasy than historical but inspired by that era, definitely.

K: So, I remember reading this book. I actually read this book the series before I wrote any of my books and I remember just being blown away by how good this author was. And for a lot of people that I've seen, some people are like, “Ah, like it was too slow, there wasn't enough action.” But for me, it was just a wonderful look into the life, the day-to-day life, the things that the character had to go through, Tamras, just the different things that she had to go through. And it's set in, like, an ancient time period so it's not modern, but it just really reminded me of the ancient history. And I think it helps me with the world building and the putting all of those details in and the things that I appreciate when I do read a historical fiction type book which is the details and, just set the scene for me, create this world for me so that I'm there and I can imagine myself there where, normally, you wouldn't be able to do that, if it's something that is historical fiction and you can't relate. So, I really think it helps. She did a great job of setting the scene and bringing me into this world that was so very different from my own.

H: Yeah. Well, thank you so much Kelly for sharing some book love with us and I'll put links to all the books you mentioned into the show notes.

K: All right, thank you very much. It's been wonderful to discuss some of my book loves. I will always discuss book love. So, if somebody contacts [Heather laughs] me and they're like, “Well, what is your favorite book?” Be prepared for long conversations.

Show Notes

In the Book Appreciation segments, our featured authors (or your host) will talk about one or more favorite books with queer female characters in a historic setting.

In this episode Kelly Aten recommends some favorite queer historical novels:

Books mentioned

Other Girls by Diane Ayres
Alma Mater by Rita Mae Brown
Cinder and the Smoke by Geonn Cannon [Note: in discussing the book, there is an assertion that having a female Pinkerton agent in the 19th century made the story non-historic, but see for example Pinkerton agent Kate Warne one of the first women hired by Pinkerton in the 1850s]
Storm by Kim Pritekel
Cobb Island by Blayne Cooper
Balance of Forces: Toujours ici by Ali Vali
When Women Were Warriors by Catherine M. Wilson

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 K. Aten Online

Website: http://www.katen-author.com

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Book Review: Awake Unto Me by Kathleen Knowles

Thursday, September 13, 2018 - 22:00

Two young women in turn-of-the-century San Francisco come of age, struggle to find their feet, and find each other. Kerry had a rough beginning, often on the far side of the law, and more comfortable taken for a boy in trousers than playing the girl. Only a chance alliance between her father and an up-and-coming doctor gave her a chance at a way out of the rough Barbary Coast neighborhood. Beth’s strict middle-class upbringing gave her a surer future, but one where she struggled to make her own choices even as a brilliant nursing student. Both are drawn to each other, but only Kerry knows the truth of the desire they both feel.

Although Awake Unto Me is marketed as a romance, it feels much more like a bildungsroman in structure--a coming of age story that only happens to include romantic and erotic encounters as part of the two women’s exploration of the world. It may sound odd to say so, I but I would have found the story equally satisfying if those encounters had not been structured as the culmination of the plot, but had simply been an integral part of Kerry and Beth’s growing understanding of their identities and desires.

The writing style is spare and straightforward. The historic background was solidly researched if occasionally explained in more detail than necessary. I did wince a few times at historically-accurate but unchallenged bigotry expressed by secondary characters with regard to ethnicity and religion and the secondary characters tended to function primarily as setting.

Awake Until me does a good job at providing a window into a variety of women’s lives in historic San Francisco, for those interested in exploring history through women-centered lives.

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Moll Cutpurse: 17th Century English Gender Outlaw

Monday, September 10, 2018 - 07:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

In conjunction with this month's podcast essay, I'm covering a couple of publications, both scholarly articles and primary sources, about Mary Frith, aka Moll Cutpurse. Moll is a great example of what I'm talking about regarding the details of actual history being far more fascinating than the tropes they often evolve into in popular culture. Moll wasn't simply "a woman who habitually wore male clothing," she was a woman (and proclaimed herself a woman, without any denial or concealment) who used maculine-coded garments to negotiate her relationship to society and to the misogynistic culture of 17th century England while still absorbing and reflecting that culture's attitudes and beliefs about women's nature and place. She knew exactly where the several boundaries were regarding what would be tolerated and flirted with their edges out of a spirit of daring and rebellion. But she was also socially and politically conservative, a staunch royalist during the English Civil War, expressing disgust for men who she perceived as taking on feminine attributes, and disdainful of all parties involved in sex work, even when she herself was willing to profit from them. In popular culture of her day, she was depicted both as a figure of mockery and as a champion of feminist principles. One gets the impression that Moll would have been an entertaining companion to go drinking with, but not necessarily the most restful person to have as a friend.

Stay tuned for this month's podcast essay which will include excerpts from a number of those contemporary records, including the memoir discussed here.

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LHMP #212 Todd & Spearing 1994 Counterfeit Ladies

Full citation:

Todd, Janet & Elizabeeth Spearing ed. 1994. Counterfeit Ladies: The Life and Death of Mary Frith Case of Mary Carleton. William Pickering, London. ISBN 1-85196-087-2

[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]

# # #

This book is a study and edition of two 17th century “real life memoirs” of women who attracted mythologizing stories due to their unusual lives and criminal contexts. The label “counterfeit” women would seem to apply more obviously in the case of Mary Carleton, who passed herself off as a foreign noblewoman and used that image to acquire financial support and attract advantageous suitors. As there are no overt queer elements to her story, I won’t be discussing that part of the book in detail. Mary Frith (Moll Cutpurse), on the other hand, would seem to fit the category if one views her as a counterfeit of a woman, due to her habitual gender bending, both in dress and in profession. [Note: “Moll” was a common nickname for “Mary” at the time, part of a range of nicknames derived by a set of regular sound changes used to create variants from many base names. In this case, it’s part of the group: Mary > Molly > Moll.]

Their two biographies were published a year apart in the 1660s, shortly after the restoration of King Charles II to the throne. Both women were openly royalist and associated with images of cavalier “glamour”. Autobiography was not an established genre at the time. Both texts are framed as “novels” or “Romance”. Mary Frith refers to the picaresque tradition in literature, into which her life definitely fits! The two texts also suggest the genre of “criminal biography” that became popular in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Criminal biographies often straddled fact and fiction, echoing anecdotes and tropes from previous works in the field that are quite likely borrowed rather than true.

Moll Cutpurse appears as a character across a number of publications, but this is the only text that attempts to portray a real woman, rather than a mythic figure. It was published within three years of her death and survives in a single copy. The events in the text can be traced and corroborated with known events and places with great precision, supporting the accuracy of the contents.

The work contains three sections: an address to the reader, an introduction, and the first-person “diary.” The introduction frames the genre as moral instruction and gives a commentary on Frith’s life. Despite the work’s evident general accuracy, it’s uncertain what level of direct participation Frith had in its composition. The “diary” does appear to have a consistent and distinctive voice, similar to that found in Frith’s will. It is a distinctly oral style, suggesting that the text may have been taken down from her dictation.

Mary Frith was already notorious by the time she was in her 20s and is mentioned in a variety of contemporary texts. In popular culture, Moll Cutpurse is most familiar from Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s play The Roaring Girl (1611), named after a term used for young women of transgressive and assertive behavior. The play’s protagonist wears masculine clothing, uses a sword, hangs out in taverns with thieves, but is also a supporter of the women in the play. The play’s epilogue suggests that Moll herself appeared on the stage while it was playing (although perhaps not in the eponymous role).

The Stationers’ Register (a record of texts authorized for publication) has an entry in 1610 for a work titled A Booke called the Madde Prancks of Merry Mall of the Bankside, with her Walks in Mans Apparel and to what Purpose. Written by John Day. No copy of the work survives and it isn’t certain that it was actually published.

Legal records from occasions when Moll was brought into court include her “confession” that she went about in “the habit of a man,” with boots and sword, to attend plays and taverns. This was not for the purpose of gender disguise. Moll not only openly proclaimed her female sex but offered to prove it to people. “[S]he told the company there present that she thought many of them were of opinion that she was a man, but if any of them would come to her lodging they should finde that she is a woman.” She admitted to swearing and drinking in this recorded confession and promised to reform, but she denied that she was a “bawd” (a term referring to any woman exercising uncontrolled sexuality, not necessarily a prostitute) or that she had “drawn other women to lewdness.”

But the superficial penitence she shows in the court record (and the moralizing tone of Moll’s diary) is undermined somewhat by a contemporary record of 1612 noting “...and this last Sonday Mall Cut-purse a notorious bagage (that used to go in mans apparell and challenged the feild of divers gallants) was brought to the same place, where she wept bitterly and seemed very penitent, but yt is since doubted she was maudelin druncke, beeing discovered to have tipled of three quarts of sacke before she came to her penaunce.” [Note: "doubt" here means "thought, believed" rather than negating the idea.]

Moll also briefly appears as a character in Nathan Field’s 1618 play Amends for Ladies (subtitled With the merry prankes of Moll Cut-Purse: Or, the humour of roaring) and in this case it’s quite possible that Moll played the role on stage herself. The role is very brief and mostly consists of some pointed banter on her gender presentation that is otherwise unrelated to the content of the play.

There is no doubt that Moll made her living by largely criminal means, though not necessarily as directly as her nickname of “cutpurse” suggests. Crime in early 17th century London more often involved goods than coin. And as mass production had not yet made goods interchangeable, the items being stolen were easily identifiable by unique characteristics. This meant that the most profitable outcome of stealing an item was to receive a “finder’s fee” for returning it to its original owner. Thieves were understandably wary of claiming this fee themselves. Enter the profession of fence. Unlike the modern image of the fence who re-sells stolen goods to an independent party, the 17th century fence was something of a “professional finder,” a person who had plausible deniability as simply being really good at tracking down “lost” goods. The following description appears in a court record from 1621 when Moll was defending herself against a different charge.

“...became to this Defendant [i.e., Moll] and desired her to doe her endeauour to try if she could by any meanes fynd out the pickpockett or helpe him to his monie, he being before of this defendant’s acquaintance and hauinge heard how by this defendant’s meanes many that had had theire pursses Cut or goods stollen had beene helped to theire goods againe and diuers of the offenders taken or discouered...”

In contrast to the officially sanctioned feminine virtues of silence and modesty, Moll was brash, outspoken, and assertive. One feature of her diary is her rejection of the usual domestic skills expected of a woman, such as sewing. (In fact, she expresses a clear disdain for women’s lives, someone in contrast to the proto-feminist stance she is given in The Roaring Girl.) Having early rejected marriage and the usual alternatives for a single woman (food service trades, domestic service, prostitution, thieving) Moll created her own role on the edges of the criminal world.

Her life played out in a time of enormous political and religious upheaval, but also social and sexual upheaval. The structures relating the genders were being challenged and Frith’s life could be considered a representation of that. Frith’s adoption of male clothing is recognized by her contemporaries as a claim to male social power. Many of the activities she was condemned for, were not illegal per se for a woman but traditionally restricted to men. Even “walking abroad alone while female” could be cause for being brought into court on suspicion. On one occasion, Frith was charged with “unseasonable and suspicious walking” for being out alone at night, compounded by a charge of a “strange manner of...life.”

In 17th century English, full cross-dressing was illegal, but only on a few occasions did Frith wear an entirely male outfit. Her diary notes that typically she wore male-style upper garments with a skirt, a style that was not technically illegal. This was the sort of mixed signifiers in clothing that had become common enough to have inspired polemic pamphlets calling the fashion out, such as Hic Mulier. King James is recorded as having issued instructions for sermons to be given against this sort of gender mixing in clothing: “the insolencie of our women, and theyre wearing of brode brimd hats, pointed dublets, theyre haire cut short or shorne, and some of them stillettaes or poinards, and such other trinkets of like moment.”

While Frith’s presentation resulted in descriptions of her as being “masculine” or “hermaphroditic” (a term that at the time didn’t necessarily imply intersex anatomy, only the use of a mixture of gender signifiers), she was far from unique (though perhaps extreme) in her style of dress.

There is little evidence for Frith’s sexual interests, if any. The tone of her relationships with men in her diary is one of non-sexual camaraderie. There is an episode related of a prostitute teasing Frith by accosting her and kissing her as she was wont to do with men, to which Frith reacted violently. On another occasion, Frith tells a story of seducing a woman of ill repute with kisses and caresses in order to provide her to a third party. [Note: this is a motif that occurs in plays of the era and is one of the contexts on stage for the appearance of female homoeroticism without implying the reality.] But in both cases, Frith expresses hostility and disgust for the other women, so it would be difficult to see either incident as evidence of homoerotic interests. Although the Moll Cutpurse of The Roaring Girl is sympathetic to the social plight of women, the voice of the diary is generally hostile to conventional femininity and carries a strong “not like other girls” tone, verging on outright misogyny.

Below are some excerpts from Mary Frith’s diary that particularly speak to questions of gender performance and sexuality. These excerpts do not provide a full and balanced picture of her biography but are most relevant to forming an understanding of her relationship to gender and sexuality.

* * *

From the address to the reader:

She would fight with boys, and courageously beat them, run, jump, leap or hop with any of them, or any other play whatsoever: in this she delighted, this was all she cared for, and had she not very young, being of a pregnant docible wit, been taught to read perfectly, she might well through her over addiction to this loose and licentious sporting have forgot and blotted out any easy impression. But this Learning stood her much in stead afterwards.

She could not but know moreover (for I suppose her of a very competent discretion and sagacity of mind as well as maturity and suitable growth at those years) that such Prostitutions were the most unsatisfactory, that like an accidental scuffle or broil might end in danger, but never in Love, to which she was no way so happily formed; nor was so much a woman as vainly to expect it.

[This is followed by a discourse on the topic of cross-dressing in general among the sexes, which the author of the introduction generally finds offensive and disgusting.]

No doubt Moll’s converse with her self ... informed her of her defects; and that she was not made for the pleasure or delight of Man...she resolved to usurp and invade the Doublet, and vie and brave manhood, which she could not tempt nor allure.

I have the rather insisted on this, because it was the chief remark of her life, as beginning and ending it; for from the first entrance into a competency of age she would wear it, and to her dying day she would not leave it off, till the infirmity and weakness of nature had brought her a bed to her last travail, changed it for a waistcoat and her Petticoats for a Winding Sheet.

These were no amiable or obliging vests, they wanted of a mutual correspondence and agreement with themselves, so unlikely were they to beget it abroad and from others: they served properly as a fit Covering, not any disguise of her, (according to the Primitive invention of apparel) wherein every man might see the true dimensions and proportions of body, only hers showed the mind too.

So that by this odd dress it came, that no man can say or affirm that ever she had a Sweet-heart, or any such fond thing to dally with her. A good Mastiffe was the only thing she then affected and joyed in, in whose fawnings and familiarity, she took as much delight as the proudest she ever gloried in the Courtship, admiration, attraction and flatteries of her adored beauty. She was not wooed nor solicited by any man, and therefore she was Honest, though still in a reserved obedience and future service either personally or by Proxy to Venus.

[Note: although not mentioned at all in this publication, there is documentary evidence that Moll did marry at one point, although it seems to have been in name only.]

[Note: "Green sickness" was a supposed malady of women resulting from lack of regular sexual satisfaction.]

[Mention of a close friendship with a shoemaker who took financial advantage of her, resulting in her breaking off the friendship.]

...she resolved to set up in a neutral or Hermaphrodite way of Profession, and stand upon her own legs, fixed on the basis of both Concerns and Relations; like the Colossus of Female subtlety in the wily Arts and ruses of that Sex and of manly resolution in the bold and regardless Rudenesses of the other, so blended and mixed together, that it was hard to say whether she were more cunning, or more impudent.

From the diary

[regarding her attitude toward gender-bending men]

There was also a fellow a contemporary of mine, as remarkable as myself, called Anniseed-water Robin, who was clothed very near my antic mode, being an hermaphrodite, a person of both sexes. Him I could by no means endure, being the very derision of natures impotency, whose redundancy in making him man and woman had in effect made him neither, having not the strength nor reason of the male, nor the fineness nor subtlety of the female, being but one step removed from a natural changeling, a kind of mockery (as I was upbraided) of me, who was then counted for an artificial one. And indeed I think nature owed me a spight in sending that thng into the world to mate and match me, that nothing might be without a peer, and the vacuum of society be replenished, which is done by the likeness and similitude of manners: but contrariwise it begot in me a natural abhorrence of him with so strange an antipathy, that what by threats and my private instigating of the boys to fall upon, and throw dirt at him, I made hi quit my walk and habitation, that I might have no further scandal among my neighbors, who used to say, here comes Moll’s Husband.

I shall never forget my fellow humorist, Banks the Vintner in Cheapside, who taught his horse to dance, and shooed him with silver. Among other fantastic discourse, one day he would needs engage me in a frolic upon a wager of 20 pounds which was that I should ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch a straddle on horseback in breeches and doublet, boots and spurs, all like a man cap a pie. I was all for such sudden whims .... Just so it took me, I accepted the condition and prepared me with all the before named particulars against the day, and to do something more than my bargain, I got a trumpet and banner and threw it behind my back as trupeters used to wear it.

The day appointed being come I set forward, none suspecting me, yet every body gazing on me, because a trumpeter in those days was as rare as a swallow in winter, every body wondering what it meant, and taking it for a prodigy. I proceeded in this manner undiscovered till I came as far as Bishopsgate, where passing under the gate, a plaguey orange wench knew me and no sooner let me pass her but she cried out, Moll Cutpurse on horseback! which set the people that were passing by, and the folks in their shops a hooting and hollowing as if they had been mad; winding their cries to this deep note, Come down thou shame of women or we will pull thee down. I knew not well what to do, but remembering a friend I had, that kept a victualling house a little further, I spurred my horse on and recovered the place, but was hastily followed by the rabble, who never ceased cursing of me, the more soberer of them laughing and merrily chatting of the adventure. In my own thoughts I was quite another thing: that I was Squiresse to Dulcinea of Tobosso the most incomparably beloved Lady of Don Quixote and was sent of a message to him from my mistress in the formalities of knight errantry, that I might not offend against any punctilio thereof which he so strictly required; and also to be the more acceptable to my lovely Sancho Pancha, that was trained up by this time in chivalry, whom I would surprise in this disguise. These quirks and quillets and that instant possessed my fancy, but presently I had other representations. ... [the crowd is distracted by the passing of a fancy wedding party] I paced the same way back again to the winning of my wager, and my great content, to see myself thus out of danger, which I would never tempt again in that nature.

[her encounter with a flirtatious prostitute]

There was a shameless Jade, as noted in this town as my self at this time, but for far more enormous actions; she was called Abigail, her way of living (she being a kind of Natural [i.e., intellectually disabled]) was by ringing the bells with her coats for a farthing, and coming behind any gentleman for the same hire, and clapping him on the back as he turned his head, to kiss him, to the enraging of some gentlemen so far as to cause them to draw their swords and threaten to kill her. This stinking slut, who was never known to have done so to any woman; by some body’s setting her on to affront me, served me in the same manner. I got hold of her and being near at home, dragged her to the conduit, where I washed her polluted lips for her, and wrenched her lewd petticoats to some purpose, tumbling her under a cock, and letting the water run, till she had not a dry thread about her, and had her soundly kicked to boot.

[During a period when the events of the English Civil War were making the fencing trade less profitable, Moll turned her hand to keeping a bawdy house.]

[Moll digresses for a bit on the question of her own sexuality.]

[Moll returns to the story of managing sexual services of diverse types. But although one might jump to the conclusion that she’s talking about providing male prostitutes to men, she makes it clear that she’s providing them for women.]

I chose the sprucest fellows the town afforded, for the did me reputation at home and service abroad; my neighbors admiring what this retinue and attendance meant, nor would I now discover it but to unburden my conscience, and shame the private practices of some great women, who to this very purpose keep emissaries and agents to procure stallions to satiate their desires, as confidently as they entertain grooms and laundries. I will stir this puddle no longer, nor dive into the depth of it any further, lest I pollute and inquinate the reader with the filth hereof.

[Despite this claim, she continues to describe how, even when not providing organized sexual services, she lent herself as a private go-between to do sexual match-making. The following encounter was to the benefit of a “noble friend” who later would put in a good word for Moll when she was in legal trouble, as thanks for her services here.]

There was a noted lass a married wife of this time, whose story shall serve to conclude all the amorous tricks and pranks that were wrought by me, for indeed it sums up all that belongs or attends to such doings, and the account I promised; want and shame never failing to bring up the rear of lust and wantonness. She was in her youth a very curious piece indeed, but wanting a fortune competent and proportionable to it, arrived no higher at her marriage than an ordinary citizen, yet of good fame and reputation. For a while in the beginning of this state she lived continently at home, but the flies buzzing about her as they resort always to sweets soon corrupted and tainted her; this was not unknown to me, and thereupon I resolved that she was as free for my turn as for any bodies, and forthwith I accosted her, using such caresses, promises and invitations as I knew the market would bear, so that I made her entirely mine, and gratified a friend with her first acquaintance, who in short, was that noble friend that preserved me out of the hands of the people at Westminster who had resolved on my mind. He had not long after occasion to leave London, and then I bestowed her on another, and so to a third, fourth, and fifth, etc. according to my best advantage, till such time she had contracted those distempers which not long after brought her to her grave.

Time period:

17th c

Place:

England

Misc tags:

cross-dressing