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Saturday, October 13, 2018 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 75 (previously 27b) - Sappho of Lesbos: The Woman and the Legend (reprised) - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/10/13 - listen here)
Scheduling gets tricky sometimes, and I found myself putting together the October podcasts without an author guest. Rather than scramble and try to pull someone in at the last minute, I decided instead to reprise the two episodes I did on Sappho back in the first year of the podcast. They’ve been among my most popular shows. It also gives me an excuse to finally get the transcripts for these two episodes posted. This week, you’ll hear what we know about the historic Sappho and her times, as well as how her story was changed and mythologized across the ages. Next week, you’ll get to hear a tour through translations of Sappho’s most complete works in different eras, as well as poems inspired by the style and sensibility of her poetry. I hope you’ll enjoy these shows, either as a new listener or returning to some favorite episodes.
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Looking back at the long history of neglect, erasure, and condemnation of women who desire women, one of the few bright spots is the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Think how marvelous it is that we--as women who love women--have an icon like Sappho who has not only given us a vocabulary to identify and talk about our experiences, but entirely apart from that, who was so talented that even the long centuries could not dim our knowledge of her genius.
I like to try to do some sort of special feature in the Lesbian Historic Motif Project to celebrate Pride Month. It was June 2014 when I first started the blogging project and here we are, three years and 140 publications later! This time I thought I’d cover a handful of the books about Sappho that are on my to-do list, and do two special podcasts to book-end the month.
The first one will be about what we know of the historic woman named Sappho and the society she lived in. Then I’ll look at what Greek and Roman writers said about her, and how some of the myths about her life sprang up.
The second episode will look at the legacy of Sappho from the Middle Ages up through the 19th century. I’ll look at how she was used as an example of such different things as decadent sexuality and female literary genius. And I’ll trace the history of how her poetry was translated into everyday languages, and how poets used her themes and imagery in their own work.
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For this first episode, I give a great deal of credit to André Lardinois, whose 1989 article “Lesbian Sappho and Sappho of Lesbos” provides a detailed and even-handed look at the historic and literary context of Sappho’s life. Other sources are listed in the show notes.
The association of the name Sappho and the word Lesbian with female homoeroticism is so well entrenched that we rarely question what evidence we have that Sappho actually was a lesbian (in the orientation sense, rather than the geographic one)? How would such an orientation have been understood in her time and culture? There isn’t a large amount of data, but there’s enough to draw a few conclusions.
Sappho lived around 600 BC on the island of Lesbos in the eastern Aegean sea, very close to the coast of modern Turkey. Other than her own poetry, every record we have of her was written centuries later.
The earliest source materials for Sappho’s life are the remnants of her poetry (mostly in the form of fragments quoted by later writers); an assortment of fiction that included her as a character, salacious gossip and a few more reliable facts about Sappho and her poetry that are found in the works of Classical authors; and general circumstantial evidence regarding the social and historic context in which she lived.
Sappho’s body of work includes songs celebrating the beauty of young girls, ceremonial songs (including cultic hymns addressed to deities and wedding songs), satires, and songs about members of her immediate family. There is also a fragment of an epic poem.
It is the songs in praise of girls that form the primary evidence for Sappho’s erotic interests, but the ceremonial songs provide important evidence regarding the social context. Sappho’s authorship of cultic hymns demonstrates that she was an established and respected member of her community. This is the functional equivalent of writing hymns for church. Therefore if her songs in praise of girls are evidence of sexual interest, then that interest must have been acceptable to her community. Similarly, her satirical works that focus on rivalries and jealousies between women indicate that whatever relationships were involved, they were known and accepted by the community.
There are other clues in Sappho’s poems regarding social and political relationships on the island of Lesbos in her time, and the respectable position held by both Sappho herself and the girls she addressed. And yet there is a pattern of references to the girls named in the songs leaving Sappho, either with her consent or to her regret. The personal and individual nature of these references suggests the songs were works written for specific occasions. In contrast, her poems of praise tend to be generic, and don’t mention specific names, either for the narrator of the verse or its subject. (Though it should be noted that most of what survives is fragmentary and we can’t know what was in the parts that weren’t preserved.)
If you take the content of these poems at face value, they suggest a context of female pederasty in the technical, classical Greek sense. That is, a social pattern where an adult is a mentor and lover of an adolescent of the same gender, and where this relationship is expected to change in nature when the younger person “graduates” to adulthood. Sappho’s poems indicate that whatever form this pattern of relationships took, it was compatible with her respected social standing. Over the centuries, these bare facts have often been interpreted in many different ways, according to the prejudices of the interpreter.
Sappho’s poetry never touches explicitly on sexual activity with the possible exception of one fragmentary reference to a dildo--a reference that is insufficient to determine the context. But it does use the forms and tropes of erotic love poetry. There are references to activities associated with courtship, such as the making of flower wreaths, as well as ones that are suggestive of physical expressions of affection, such as the line ”on soft beds...you would satisfy your longing”. For context, these themes should be compared to poems written in the context of male pederasty, which similarly avoid mention of sexual acts (but where no one doubts their existence).
Songs praising the beauty and attractiveness of girls--even those where Sappho notes her own response to that beauty--must also be understood in the context of the songs’ performance, often as part of marriage ceremonies. Themes of praise in this circumstance may be conventional rather than personal. But turning the argument around again, later male poets such as Catullus had no qualms about quoting Sappho’s work to express their own erotic response to a woman. So there was a clear context where her work was understood to represent erotic desire.
Among the later supposedly biographic stories regarding Sappho’s life, the one used most prominently to argue against her homoeroticism (or at least to argue for her eventual and inevitable “conversion” to heterosexuality) concerns Phaon, the man for whom she is said to have made a suicidal jump from the Leucadian rock. The earliest surviving source for this is from Ovid, who wrote in the 1st century BC, and takes the form of a letter purportedly in Sappho’s voice. There is some question whether Ovid was the actual author, but no question at all that Sappho was not.
Sappho’s work also refers to a daughter, and, given that, it is unlikely that she could have held the social position she did without being married--to a man, that is. Can all these elements be compatible with homoerotic desire? References to her desire for women (albeit, often disapproving references) are common in later classical commentaries. Athenian comedies sometimes satirized her, but never for homoeroticism, rather for heterosexual promiscuity. It can reasonably be supposed, however, that the authors of the comic plays were as unfamiliar with the historic context of 6th century BC Lesbos as modern authors are. The only difference is that they most likely had a much larger corpus of Sappho’s work available to them.
So, for example, when classical authors assert that Sappho had a daughter named Cleis, a certain amount of confidence can be placed on this (the name appears in fragments of her work, and she wrote about other family members) even though the existence of a daughter by that name could not be confirmed from what survives of her work today.
What, then, are we to make of the story of Phaon and the Leucadian rock?
One strong possibility is that this is a mythic reference and a poetic trope. Phaon was the name of one of the legendary men beloved by Aphrodite (who figures prominently in Sappho’s songs). It is possible that the story arose from a poem that was intended to be understood in the voice of the goddess.
For another possibility, a near-contemporary poet of Sappho, Anacreon, mentions a “leap from the Leucadian rock” as a proverbial remedy against the pain of love. As love-pangs feature regularly in Sappho’s work, it is not unlikely that she, too, may have made use of it as a rhetorical device. From such references, a later legend of Sappho’s leap of despair for the love of Phaon could have been constructed by someone not familiar with the literary motifs that were being used.
Could Sappho’s reputation for loving women also have originated in a mis-reading of poetic tropes? For this, such tropes would need to exist. And if they existed, then they would reflect prevalent and accepted practices. Did such practices exist? (And if they did, would they not be support for a position that homoeroticism was compatible with Sappho’s professional reputation?)
Sappho’s sexual reputation in pop culture changed radically over time. Sappho flourished around the early 6th century BC. In Athenian comedies of the 4th century BC, she was satirized as excessively heterosexual. Snide references by Roman writers to her “disgraceful friendships” with women began appearing around the 1st century AD.
Slang uses of the term “lesbian” in classical literature underwent similar shifts. The word always had a primary sense of “a female inhabitant of Lesbos”, but it picked up a variety of erotic connotations. Aristophanes (in the 5th c BC) used a related verb to mean “to practice fellatio” and this sense continued through late antiquity. The first known explicit association of the word “lesbian” with female homosexuality comes from Lucian (in the 2nd century AD) who writes, “They say there are women in Lesbos with faces like men, and unwilling to consort with men, but only with women as though they themselves were men.” There are early medieval Byzantine references to the word “lesbia” explicitly meaning a female homosexual.
Were the shifts in Sappho’s sexual reputation a result, or a cause, of shifts in the senses associated with the word “lesbian”? Or is it entirely the wrong question to ask whether Sappho was homosexual, given that a categorical distinction and division between homosexual and heterosexual eroticism arose long after her era?
We can get some sense of what the answers might be by looking at the social and historic context of Ancient Greece. The first consideration is the social institutions that brought young girls together in groups for the sort of education in song, dance, and other activities referenced in Sappho’s works. The second consideration is the evidence in other parts of Greece of that era for institutions of female pederasty, in parallel with the more familiar male institutions.
There is copious evidence for organized institutions of young women who learned music, singing, dance, and other activities to “serve the Muses.” In addition to serving as education for the girls, these institutions would participate in religious and social rituals as a group. This organization and these activities are perfectly compatible with the many references in Sappho’s poetry, including references to beautiful clothing and other adornments. Therefore the context of Sappho’s interactions with the subjects of her poetry could easily be in one of these institutions.
Although later Roman authors generally treated the subject of female homoeroticism with distaste and disapproval, they provide occasional references suggesting that earlier Greek attitudes were different. Plutarch describes a Spartan custom whereby “distinguished ladies” had sexual relationships with younger women or girls, in direct parallel to the pederastic relationships between adult men and adolescent boys.
This claim is corroborated by other authors as early as the 4th century BC. The Greek poet Alcman wrote songs for Spartan “maiden choirs” in the 7th century BC (that is, slightly earlier than Sappho). He used the word “aïtis” for a girl in a sexual relationship, as a direct parallel to male “aïtas”, which was the official term for a boy in a pederastic relationship. Alcman’s songs for the maiden choirs include language that suggests erotic interactions (or at least erotic desires) between the girls themselves.
For visual evidence, a vase from the Greek island of Thera from the time of Sappho’s life shows two women in a stylized interaction similar to depictions of male erotic couples.
From all this, we can envision a scenario where a married female poet of high social status and impeccable reputation could enjoy and openly celebrate erotic relationships with the young women under her guidance. Such relationships could even have been an important part of the extensive social and political networks on the island of Lesbos. Only with the loss of that institution were later writers left with the need to try to make sense of Sappho’s erotic expressions in the context of her life and times.
And the next episode of this podcast will take one of Sappho’s most complete poems and use it to trace how later western cultures understood Sappho, both as a poet and as a woman.
Show Notes
As a special Pride Month celebration, I’m recording a pair of episodes talking about the poet Sappho: what we know about her life and context, the legends that sprang up about her, what people of various ages thought of her, and most especially what they knew of her poetry, how they interpreted and even imitated it.
In this episode we talk about:
- The known facts of Sappho’s life
- What classical Greek and Roman writers said about her
- Possible explanations for some of the contradictory stories about her
- The social context for Sappho’s expressions of love and desire for women, and what sort of relationships were most likely involved
This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here:
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Twitter: @heatherosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
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Wednesday, October 10, 2018 - 07:00
There is nothing quite so frustrating to me as coming late to a wonderful book because the cover synopsis deliberately concealed the information that would lead me to put it on my TBR list. And given my reading habits, that usually happens when the publisher has decided to erase all but the vaguest hint of queer content.
I loved Molly Tanzer’s weird western Vermillion, so I’d idly glanced at Creatures of Will and Temper a few times in hopes of something similar, but put it down again thinking about the stacks of books already waiting for me that cheerfully embraced and telegraphed their queer female characters. Then, one day, I happened to encounter clear confirmation that some of the female characters were involved in a same-sex romance and found myself shaking my fist at the sky shouting, “Why did you think this was not important information?”
Ahem.
The book bills itself as inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, but other than the rather obvious naming of one character Dorina Grey, and the minor plot point of a painting that is not entirely what it seems, in a Victorian setting, I don’t see a particularly strong connection. Instead we get two ill-matched sisters: the beautiful free-spirited young aspiring art critic Dorina who is fond of smoking, scandal, and girls; and the older, plainer, more strait-laced Evadne who has just been Disappointed In Love and drowns her sorrows in fencing practice. (I love how my expectations were upended by making Evadne the dashing swordswoman.) Evadne becomes an unwilling companion on her sister’s jaunt to take in the sights of London, in care of their Uncle Basil the painter. And when Dorina becomes enraptured by Basil’s outrageously decadent friend Lady Henry, Evadne is only distracted from her growing protective outrage by the prospect of being welcomed into a prestigious London fencing school and winning the respect...and perhaps more...of one of the personable instructors.
And then there are the demons.
There are a lot of things to like about this fantasy adventure: the painfully realistic relations between the sisters in which neither is hero nor villain, The gradual revealing of who or what the demons are and the part they have to play in the eventual climax, but most especially the way the plot twists and turns and tumbles about. I was never entirely surprised that the twists happened, but I couldn’t predict what they were going to be. If I found any flaw, it would be that the climax felt ever so slightly off balance--not rushed, not slow, but like that last step that turned out not to be as tall as you thought it was.
If you want your paranormal Victorian demonic romp with a delightfully non-tragic queer encounter, this is your book. (There’s also a sequel, but I’m back to trying to guess whether it hits my “must buy” marks.)
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ReviewsMonday, October 8, 2018 - 07:00
Since I'm beginning a series of publications relating to classical Rome, it only makes sense to begin with a book that reviews the vocabulary of sex in Latin. It isn't a work that is of particularly direct use for the topic of love or sex between women, as the author gives away his attitude toward the topic with words like "abnormal." But especially given how difficult it is to extract reliable information about female homoeroticism from the surviving Latin texts, the need to understand Roman attitudes toward sex in general is unavoidable.
I should probably note that the entire series of publications that I'm covering this month will be strongly focused on the mechanics of sex as understood and discussed in Roman culture and that much of the language will be explicit and...well...vulgar. Content warnings apply.
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LHMPFull citation:
Adams, J.N. 1982. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. ISBN 0-8018-4106-2
Content Note: This book's topic is the vocabulary of genitalia and sex acts. These will be discussed straightforwardly using language that might ordinarily be considered crude or offensive (especially when a crude term best represents the original sense in Latin).
Both the structure of this book and the author’s attitude toward the material work to erase any specific consideration of terminology relating to sex between women. The book is organized thematically, first considering vocabulary relating to specific body parts, then considering vocabulary for actions done with or to those body parts, with a briefer discussion of the sociological context at the end. There are scattered references to terms relating to sex between women, but in a few cases Adams discounts or dismisses homoerotic contexts in favor of focusing on potential male-oriented interpretations. (For example, he discusses two ambiguous instances of frictrix without any consideration that it gave rise to words unambiguously meaning “tribade” in later Romance languages and without discussing a homoerotic interpretation at all.)
This is the sort of book that assumes that, if you are reading it, you are fluent in Greek and Latin and therefore don’t need any of the contextual citations to be translated. While this avoids adding an interpretive layer from the author, it’s a somewhat old-fashioned approach to classical studies with a tacitly gate-keeping function. It’s also worth noting that the scope of the book is not “vocabulary relating to love and affection” and the scope of “sexual” is interpreted somewhat narrowly. For example, although some vocabulary relating to non-genital contact (touching, embracing) is mentioned, generally it is included when used as a euphemism for genital acts. I don’t think kissing gets discussed at all. So the vocubulary shouldn’t be taken as a roadmap to how Roman people experienced their romantic and erotic lives as a whole.
# # #
The general scope of the work is language used to describe or refer to sexual and excretory acts, either as the primary meaning of the words, as a standard euphemism, or as ad hoc metaphorical or poetic reference. From the context of usage, especially the nature and formality of the text, one can identify hierarchies of offensiveness. (For example, formal, neutral terms are less likely to show up in the graffiti on whorehouse walls, while crude, offensive terms are less likely to show up in love poetry.) The types of body parts and acts that appear in the texts, as well as how they are treated, provide evidence of cultural preoccupations. For example, classical Latin had an extensive and specific vocabulary to identify penetrative sex involving different orifices, distinguishing whether the act was viewed from the “active” or “passive” partner. This detailed specificity reflects the significance of social hierarchies of different roles and acts. The book primarily covers Classical Latin, but also looks at medieval Latin and vocabulary in Romance languages in some cases.
Numerically, the majority of the terms covered are metaphoric or euphemisms--suggestive rather than direct. The metaphoric language may be isolated examples reflecting an active underlying metaphor that has not yet settled into fixed expressions. In other cases, originally metaphoric language may have shifted to becoming the primary referential sense of the word, and may displace older standard language as it becomes considered dated or too offensive.
In addition to language directly about sex, or using sexual contexts for the purpose of insult or innuendo, obscene language might be used in ceremonial/magical contexts either to ward off evil influences or to invoke fertility.
The cultural focus on male sexuality (and the filtering effect of who did the writing and which writings were preserved) mean that the majority of the book is focused on terms for male anatomy and male involvement in sex acts. A great deal of the male-oriented material is preoccupied with the negotiation and maintenance of masculine status with regard to “approved” sex acts, especially when performed between men. Although it’s safe to say that an understanding of Roman attitudes toward gender and sexuality cannot but grasped without that male-centered understanding, I’ll be skipping over large amounts of that material and only touching on female-relevant vocabulary.
Gender-Neutral Genitals
The first set of terms are those that can be used for either male or female genitalia (which are listed at the end of the chapter of male genitals). Veretrum (derived from a root meaning “respect”) can be found occasionally for female genitals, but in other cases clearly is restricted to men. By the early medieval period, it seems to have become scholarly and obscure. Similarly neutral in tone is verenda (plural) meaning “that which inspires awe” which is found in late Classical Latin and medieval contexts, though somewhat rare. Verecunda has as it’s primary meaning “modesty” but can also be applied to genitals of any type with a neutral tone. In contrast, pudenda (shameful thing) is gender-neutral but conveys a sense of shame or disgust. The euphemism genitale, genitalia (generative parts) can be used in polite contexts but wasn’t typically used as a technical or medical term.
Other general euphemisms indicate the saliency of sexual organs: natura, naturalia (natural parts) occurs for both sexes but most commonly for women’s genitals in medical contexts; necessaria (necessary parts) occurs for both sexes; sexus (sexual part) is fairly rare but used for both men and women. [Note how many modern English technical terms were the ordinary words in Classical Latin.]
There is a disproportionate number of different terms referring to the penis, perhaps because writers felt freer to talk about that organ, or because it had greater cultural meaning. To understand the range of euphemisms, it’s important to understand the different concept of “modesty” in Roman culture. Casual public display of depictions of the penis reflect both a lack of generalized “shame” attached to genitals (as opposed to specific uses of them) and the use of the penis as a symbol of power. In contrast, female genitals were not used (either physically or symbolically) as a threat or boast in the same way that male genitals were. When female genitals were discussed in vulgar contexts, they were often associated with disgust or revulsion. Reference to the clitoris was typically in abusive contexts focusing on unnatural size.
Female Genitals
Vocabulary for female genitals may distinguish between the external genitals, the vagina, and the uterus, or may conflate some subset (especially the latter two) or all of those.
The basic and most common obscene term for the female genitals is cunnus. [Note: despite the similarity, there isn’t a clear connection with the germanic word that appears in English as cunt, although that is probably the best functional translation.] Cunnus can be derogatory or abusive, but occasionally seems to be neutral if used in a non-derogatory context, though it would not be used as a polite term. It appears primarily in graffiti and in satirical epigrams. [Note: the epigram was a short poem that usually satirized or poked fun at the subject. Although often written by “serious” poets, the tone of the language was typically vulgar.]
Animal metaphors can be found for male genitals but are less common for women, though this may be an artifact of the types of surviving texts. One exception is the use of porcus (pig), which seems to have been used by women to refer to the genitals of young girls in a sort of “nursery talk” register. [Note: my guess is that this is a image-metaphor based on the smooth, rounded appearance of the hind end of a female piglet.]
Agricultural metaphors with meanings like “field, garden, meadow” are common, not only inspired by visual appearance (i.e., pubic hair seen as vegetation) and the implication of fertility, but also in connection with using metaphors of ploughing and sowing of seeds for the act of sex. Some specific terms include eugium (having good soil, fertile), a Greek borrowing associated with the language of prostitutes and considered vulgar. Sulcus (furrow) also comes from this field of meaning and appears to have been inoffensive.
Similarly, from the image of interior spaces in the landscape, words like specus (cave--it could also be used for the anus), fossa (ditch), piscina (pool, fish pond), barathrum (pit, but with a negative connotation “abyss”), with the latter two mostly appearing in epigrams.
Household objects were another source of metaphor, especially ones relating to cooking. The external genitals might be called a hearth and the vagina or womb an oven. A round cookpot (olla) was another word used for “female parts” (though I wonder if the rounded shape might also be an allusion, not just the “container” aspect?). Referring to the female genitals as an altar (ara) seems to have been an ad hoc coinage rather than a standard term. Other “container” words used for the interior genitals include bulga (bag) and vas (vessel, container). [Note: somewhat surprisingly, the book does not indicate that vagina (sheath) was used for the organ with that name today, although vagina was used in a few cases as part of a metaphor for anal sex to accompany the more common euphemism of penis=sword.]
A few other metaphoric terms are mentioned that may be ad hoc coinages: the external genitals called a door (ianuam), the vagina a path or road, or a sinus (hollow space), and possibly one instance of female genitals called a ship (navis) but in a context of word-play.
Another technique of euphemism was to refer to a taboo organ with the name for some nearby body part. Thus the female genitals may be called a “lap” (gremium) or especially in Biblical Latin, a navel (umbilicus) or thigh (femur). Somewhat more pointedly, words used for the anus might be applied to the vagina as well (longuo, culus).
Similarly to some of the generic terms that could mean either male or female genitals, there are terms meaning “female parts” (muliebria, feminal) or simply “the place” (loca) or “the inner place” (interior pars, viscera).
Somewhat more crudely, we find words meaning “crack, fissure” (rima, fissa). The term hiatus (cleft, gap) appears in offensive contexts implying “a loose vagina" (presumably from excess use).
The term spurium is mentioned by classical authors as an obsolete term for the female genitals and is attributed to the Sabine or possibly Etruscan language. By the classical period, the sense had been transferred to “illegitimate (spurious) child”.
The remainder of the chapter on female genitals covers references to specific anatomic parts (whereas the above terms can have more general use).
Classical Romans understood the function of the clitoris in sex and envisioned tribades using it like a penis for penetrative sex. For this reason, identifying a clitoris as “large” was derogatory and implied pseudo-masculinity. The ordinary “proper” term for it was landica but in Classical Latin this was considered too indecent to use (although it survived into Old French). The Greek borrowing nymfe occurs but not in common use. The image metaphor nasus (nose) or crista (crest, [rooster’s] comb) appear in ad hoc use.
The labia might be called a mouth (orae) in medical literature. Terms meaning “wings” (pinnacula, pinnae) are noted as obsolete.
In addition to general terms that could be applied to the womb, the words uterus, venter, and aluus could mean either “womb” or “belly” generally. Of these uterus was the “proper” term but considered a bit too formal for everyday use. Aluus was somewhat obscure. Venter became the everyday term used in colloquial or vulgar contexts but was later replaced by more specialized words. Vulva eventually replaced uterus for everyday reference to the womb and both appear in formal poetry. Later, vulva became generalized to the female genitals as a whole. There’s an isolated example of vulva being used for the clitoris, identifiable because the object is described as tentigo (erect). In the late empire, medical works sometimes use matrix (“the breeding part”, derived from mater “mother”) for the womb.
Vocabulary for Sex Acts
[Note: Because of the way the book is structured, there isn’t a clear and separate discussion of vocabulary for sex acts between women. Also, the vocabulary of sex acts primarily focuses on penetrative sex and distinguishes the orifice, and whether the act is being considered from the point of view of the “active” or “passive” party, regardless of gender. I’m going to borrow from Williams Roman Homosexualities, which I’ll be covering shortly, to lay out the basic structure here. He uses “insertive” and “receptive” rather than “active” and “passive”. Obviously, the acts default to assuming the presence of a penis. The verbs (from which other vocabulary is derived) are as follows:
Vaginal - futuere (insertive), crisare (receptive)
Anal - pedicare (insertive), cevere (receptive)
Oral - irrumare (insertive), fellare (receptive)
[There are also nouns used for the receptive participant. Obviously, the usual noun for a vaginally receptive partner is “woman”. The case of the anally receptive partner is complicated and I’m going to skip it for now because it's mostly relevant to male-male relations. Note that both terms in the “oral” category are only referring to stimulation of the penis. See below for the complexity of cunnilingus, oral sex that stimulates a woman.]
The only context in which futuere (which can reasonably be considered equivalent to “fuck”) is used with a woman as the agent is when a woman is having penetrative sex with another woman. But Adams does a bit of reaching when considering the equivalent noun (fututor (m), fututrix (f)) in the feminine form. The entire discussion of this context is worth quoting, if only to demonstrate the author’s attitude toward the topic. I’ve added translations in brackets.
* * *
[quoted from book]
Except in the passive, futuo was not as a rule used of the female role. The woman in Martial [epigram] 7.70 (‘ipsarum tribadum tribas, Philaeni, / recte, quam futuis, uocas amicam’ [Philaenis, tribade of the tribades themselves, you rightly call the woman you fuck your ‘girlfriend’]) is a tribas who behaves like a man (cf. Seneca Epistle 95.21, where ineo [enter] is applied to the activities of similarly abnormal women); compare fututor at Martial [epigram] 1.90.6 (‘at tu, pro facinus, Bassa, fututor eras’ [But you, a crime, Bassa!, are a fucker]). But at Martial [epigram] 11.7.13 futuo (active) is definitely used of the female part in normal sexual intercourse: ‘quanto tu melius, quotiens placet ire fututum, / quae uerum mauis diere, Paula, uiro’ [Whenever you have a mind to go fuck, Paula, you prefer to tell your husband the truth]. There is no evidence that the supine was treated as indifferent in respect of voice. This example anticipates the intransitive use of fotre in Old French, of the woman. It is typically in the intransitive that verbs of this sense are transferred to the female role (cf. English she fucks).
There is also some evidence that fututrix had acquired a corresponding use (= ‘ea quae futuitur’ [she who fucks]): [examples skipped] Note too CIL IV.2204 Mula foutoutris [transcribed from Greek - Mola (female) fucker]. It is suggested at TLL VI.1.1664.61f that the reference here may be to a tribas, but that is unlikely: note CIL IV.2203 ‘futui Mula hic’ [I fucked Mula here], and for Mula see also 8185. CIL IV.4196 (‘Miduse fututrix’ [Miduse the (female) fucker]) and 4381 are impossible to interpret.
* * *
[Note: Observe how the author considers homoerotic interpretations “unlikely” or “impossible to interpret” without further comment. As well as the assumption that if Mula has been fucked (by a man presumably) she could not also be a fucker of women. The location of the graffiti in a brothel isn’t proof one way or another. The conclusion that fututrix cannot mean “a woman who fucks women” is simply assumed rather than demonstrated.]
Aside from the above examples, the vocabulary for penetrative sex acts are not relevant to this blog. So we’ll move on.
Lingo (to lick) can be used for any sex act performed with the mouth. It can default to being the standard term for cunnilingus but can be used for other acts when one wants to specify the part being stimulated (other than a penis, for which there is specialized vocabulary). The word order in the compound cunnilingo indicates that it was established early as a fixed phrase. Much less commonly, lambo is used with the same meaning for oral sex involving the cunnus, but it was not established as a standard sexual term.
The verb criso specifically meant “the movements made by a woman during vaginal intercourse” (and had a counterpart in ceveo for the movements of the receptive partner in anal intercourse). These are the basic meanings of the words in their earliest recorded examples, rather than being transferred from some other meaning. Their usage contexts indicate they were not particularly offensive. A less established term was crispo (to wave, brandish) which was used generally of lascivious movements but not associated with a specific sex act.
Metaphors for oral sex are unsurprisingly drawn from the act of eating. Many begin as vulgar slang but are then established in some of the less formal literary registers (such as epigrams). But eating can be applied to other penetrative acts where the receptive orifice “devours” the penis. This metaphor is expressed through the entire vocabulary of consumption rather than focusing on specific words.
Vocabulary for the experience of orgasm include generic verbs of accomplishment or reaching a goal. (It isn’t clear whether these apply only to male orgasm or to women’s experience as well.) These include patro (to accomplish [it]), perficio (to finish, achieve [it]), as well as more ad hoc metaphors such as sedeo (to sit, stay), pervenio (to arrive), ibo (to go), propero (to hurry), agito (to drive, impel).
Verbs referring to grinding (molo) or similar motions may be used in general for masturbation, but can also carry an implication of adultery “grinding your meal in someone else’s mill”. Similarly, to knead (depso) which appears in somewhat offensive contexts. [Note: interestingly, Adams appears to mention no examples of these verbs referring to sex between women, although cross-culturally, these activities appear regularly with that meaning. I don’t know if that sense simply wasn’t used in Classical Latin, or if examples simply didn’t survive, or if Adams has overlooked or ignored them.]
While the verb subigo (to master, subdue) was used only for the active role in penetrative sex, the derived form subigito had a more general sense of “fondle, lay hands on” as used in comic drama.
The lighter side of sex can be seen in the use of ioceri (to joke, play) as a sexual euphemism. Similarly ludo (to play a game or sport) can be used with any gender or role as the subject in contexts when sex is framed as a mutually pleasurable activity. These terms are often associated with youth.
Phrases that generically mean “to be/sleep/lie with” tended to have a neutral implication: esse cum (be with), dormio cum (sleep with), iaceo cum, con-cumbere (lie with, the latter being the source of “concubine”). Biblical Latin used phrases such as maneo cum (stay with) and noctem promittere (spend the night with).
The phrase co-eo (come together) was a standard term for the act of marriage but was also a euphemism for sex of all types and combinations (see: coitus). Verbs meaning “join” (iungo, coniungo) can be used with metonymic body parts (latus “side”, femur “thigh”, caput “head”) to refer to sex. Even more vaguely, verbs of holding and embracing (teneo, complector, amplector) can refer to sex.
As noted previously, verbs of rubbing or grinding can indicate a variety of sexual activities, not only intercourse. In addition to molo (to grind, mill) we find tero (similar in meaning but more general). Frico (to rub, the root of “friction”) is primarily used for masturbation. Adams expresses doubt that the female noun frictrix (woman-who-rubs) is (as generally assumed) a calque (i.e., literal translation) of Greek tribas and he appears to dismiss the possibility that it refers to sex between women (despite that being the dominant meaning in medieval Latin). [Note: it's also odd that Adams doesn't directly discuss tribas itself as used in Latin, despite including it in several quotations. If for no other reason, I have strong doubts that this book is a reliable guide to vocabulary specifically relevant to relations between women.]
The verb tango (to touch) is generally interpreted as “caress” but can also be used as a euphemism for intercourse. Verbs for the emotional experience of love could also be transferred to referring to sex acts: amo (love), libido (lust), venus (desire). There was sometimes a contrast between the use of venus as a neutral term for sex in contrast with stuprum which is the standard pejorative term for “shameful” types of sexual experience. But venus was an elevated word and doesn’t show up in this sense in vulgar literature.
Euphemisms for pleasure can indicated nuanced types of experience: deliciae (pleasures) had a fashion as slang for extramarital affairs, delecto (to please) referred to the pleasure a woman enjoys during sex, especially framed as something her partner does, and voluptas (pleasure) is the enjoyment that an active partner achieves in the act.
Derogatory euphemisms for sex include vitio (to spoil, violate) but doesn’t necessarily imply something imposed on a person, as Christian moral texts use it to indicate persons “defiling” themselves by participating in sex. Pecco (to sin) is also bound up with the emerging Christian view of sex. Under the Classical Roman moral system, the standard and common negative term for “shameful” sex was stuprum which originally meant something like “disgrace” in general but shifted in meaning to be specifically sexual.
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Saturday, October 6, 2018 - 09:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 74 (previously 27a) - On the Shelf for October 2018 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/10/06 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for October 2018.
Is it the fourth quarter of the year already? How did that happen! Just last week we released the third short story in our fiction project. Have you listened to it yet? I loved this early medieval story of older women finding love and comfort after a lifetime of putting other people’s needs first.
The Fiction Series
And as I mentioned in passing last month, it’s time to officially announce that the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast will be continuing the fiction series next year. I thought about maybe widening the scope of what sort of stories we’d be considering, but when it comes down to it, I’d like to continue focusing on supporting straightforward historic stories, without fantastic elements, so I’m keeping the same submission guidelines as last year.
The key points--and I’ll be posting the full call for submissions on the website for you to refer to--are as follows. Length can be up to 5000 words. Stories must be set prior to 1900 in an actual, real-world time and place. If you pick a very popular setting like Victorian England or the American West, you should be doing something new and interesting that stands out from the crowd. I love seeing stories from less used eras and cultures, but I want to see cultures treated knowledgeably and with respect. Romance is optional. Romance stories should have some other strong element in addition to the romance and I’m not looking for erotica.
Let me explain that a little, because last year some people tried to second-guess why I didn’t want erotic stories. The simple fact is that 5000 words isn’t much space to introduce characters, setting, and plot, and then come to a satisfying resolution. When sex scenes come into the mix, they tend to push the other elements aside and the rest of the story often becomes stage dressing for the sex scene. Sex may be implied in the story, but leave it off the page so you have room for the story itself.
And, of course, the story should center on lesbian themes. By this, I mean that it should feature protagonist(s) whose primary emotional orientation within the scope of the story is toward other women. This is not meant to exclude characters who might identify today as bisexual or who have relationships with men outside the scope of the story. But the story should focus on same-sex relations.
Authors of all genders and orientations are welcome to submit. Authors from traditionally marginalized cultures are strongly encouraged to submit, regardless of whether you are writing about your own cultural background. Like last year, we’ll be paying industry standard professional rates of 6 cents a word--we pay our narrators industry-standard rates too. Check out the full details of the submission guidelines on the alpennia.com website and start brainstorming your stories. Submissions will be accepted during the month of January 2019. I’m looking forward to seeing what gets submitted this time!
Conference
Here’s an item that might be of interest to some. In March 2019 in France, there’s going to be an academic conference entitled “Sapphic Vibes: Lesbians in Literature from the Renaissance to the Present.” I heard about it through a call for papers, but by the time this podcast goes out the due date for submissions will be past. But if you happen to be in the vicinity of the Université de Haute-Alsace (Mulhouse) next March 14-15 and have a yen to listen to research papers on lesbian themes in historic literature (in English and in French), check out the link in the show notes for more details. It looks like they’re planning to hold a second conference on the theme in 2020 in Iceland. If I were the sort to pop off to Europe for the weekend for an academic conference, I’d be there (even though the papers in French would be lost on me).
Publications on the Blog
In September the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog covered several publications relating to the subject of last month’s essay, 17th century English gender outlaw Moll Cutpurse. And while I was on the subject of gender-crossing I decided to start this month with a delightful surprise that’s been lurking on my shelf for two decades: Mary Diana Dods: A Scholar and a Gentleman by Betty T. Bennett. This is best described as an academic mystery quest, tracking down the identity of two men mentioned in the letters of 19th century author Mary Shelley--she of Frankenstein fame--only to discover that the two men were the same person, and that person was a woman. I loved this topic so much, I’ve turned it into this month’s Ask Sappho segment.
For the rest of the month, and possibly into November, I’ll be working through some books and articles I’ve accumulated on sexuality in classical Rome. From which, you might guess that I’ll be finishing up the month with an essay on women’s same-sex relations in that historic context.
Book Shopping!
There’s only one new purchase for the blog to report this month. In fact, it’s actually a book that I ordered back in June but it never arrived and I only recently realized that and inquired. So I have a replacement copy now. The title is Same-sex Desire in Early Modern England, 1550-1735: An Anthology of Literary Texts and Contexts by Marie H. Loughlin. It’s a collection of excerpts and selections from a wide variety of genres, both literary and non-fiction. There’s a lot of redundancy with material I already have in other sources, but also some material that I’ve seen discussed but haven’t seen in the original previously.
No Author Guest
I don’t have an author guest lined up to interview this month. I’ve been putting out a lot of feelers but didn’t get any nibbles that panned out with the right timing. So rather than scrambling to try to nail down an interview at the last minute, I’m going to reprise a pair of shows on the Greek poet Sappho and her work that have been particularly popular.
This is my chance to remind people that I’m always looking both for authors to host on the show and for enthusiastic readers of lesbian historical fiction to talk about their favorite books. My contact information is in the show notes.
Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction
When compiling the list of new and forthcoming historicals, I’ve been rather dismayed at how few historicals--especially plain historicals without any fantasy element--are coming out from the major lesbian presses. I haven’t been doing these lists long enough to have a sense of what “normal” looks like, but the current state of the field is disappointing.
There was one book I had my eye on with an uncertain publication date that seems to have come out in August when I wasn’t looking. Devan Johnson’s Any Other Name is an erotic Regency romance with gender disguise and a marriage of convenience. I’m going to give a couple of caveats because the cover design is absolutely atrocious and it doesn’t say “Regency” at all to me. And reviews on Goodreads indicate that there are some problems with editing and narrative structure. But for those who are hungry for your Regency fix, here’s the blurb:
It’s 1834 England. Following the sudden and tragic deaths of her father, the Duke of Ashebourne, and her twin brother, Rose Marsden disguises herself as a man and assumes her brother’s identity and father’s title. Her deception works for almost a decade, but she knows that eventually she’s going to need to find a way to procure an heir. Lady Margaret ‘Maggie’ Clayton is in trouble; her fiancé has been killed, leaving her pregnant and unwed. If society finds out, she’ll be ruined. When the Duke of Ashebourne learns Maggie’s secret and reveals her own, the two women hatch a plan that may solve both of their problems: the ultimate marriage of convenience.
There are a couple of September releases that I hadn’t noticed earlier because they came out from mainstream YA imprints. As is usual for mainstream books, the queer content isn’t very obvious from the jacket copy, but I’ve confirmed it through sources. Monica Hesse’s The War Outside, published by Little, Brown Books is a YA historical rather than a romance, tackling political questions that are unfortunately relevant to us today. Here’s the blurb.
It's 1944, and World War II is raging across Europe and the Pacific. The war seemed far away from Margot in Iowa and Haruko in Colorado--until they were uprooted to dusty Texas, all because of the places their parents once called home: Germany and Japan. Haruko and Margot meet at the high school in Crystal City, a "family internment camp" for those accused of colluding with the enemy. The teens discover that they are polar opposites in so many ways, except for one that seems to override all the others: the camp is changing them, day by day and piece by piece. Haruko finds herself consumed by fear for her soldier brother and distrust of her father, who she knows is keeping something from her. And Margot is doing everything she can to keep her family whole as her mother's health deteriorates and her rational, patriotic father becomes a man who distrusts America and fraternizes with Nazis. With everything around them falling apart, Margot and Haruko find solace in their growing, secret friendship. But in a prison the government has deemed full of spies, can they trust anyone--even each other?
The queer content in Amy Lukavics’ Nightingale, from Harlequin Teen, is similarly obscured in the publicity, but present when you check out some of the Goodreads reviews. This one has a bisexual protagonist who has relationships with both women and men in the story. It wanders through the genres of horror and science fiction, as well as having a historical setting. Here’s the blurb:
At seventeen, June Hardie is everything a young woman in 1951 shouldn’t be—independent, rebellious, a dreamer. June longs to travel, to attend college and to write the dark science fiction stories that consume her waking hours. But her parents only care about making June a better young woman. Her mother grooms her to be a perfect little homemaker while her father pushes her to marry his business partner’s domineering son. When June resists, her whole world is shattered—suburbia isn’t the only prison for different women. June’s parents commit her to Burrow Place Asylum, aka the Institution. With its sickening conditions, terrifying staff and brutal “medical treatments,” the Institution preys on June’s darkest secrets and deepest fears. And she’s not alone. The Institution terrorizes June’s fragile roommate, Eleanor, and the other women locked away within its crumbling walls. Those who dare speak up disappear…or worse. Trapped between a gruesome reality and increasingly sinister hallucinations, June isn’t sure where her nightmares end and real life begins. But she does know one thing: in order to survive, she must destroy the Institution before it finally claims them all.
Another book that overlaps both history and speculative fiction is Jane Fletcher’s Isle of Broken Years from Bold Strokes Books. It starts out looking like yet another typical lesfic pirate adventure, but takes a sharp turn somewhere in the middle. The blurb sticks to the historic setting:
Catalina de Valasco’s parents have her future fully planned. The most important step for a seventeenth century Spanish noblewoman being, of course, an advantageous marriage. Unfortunately, a series of setbacks has left Catalina unwed. On a galleon bound for the Americas and her latest husband-to-be, Catalina again finds her marriage plans frustrated. Pirates capture the ship, and she is held for ransom. The danger intensifies as they sail into seas which, one day, will become known as the Bermuda Triangle. Catalina enters a terrifying world that she could never have imagined or planned for. Yet of all the surprises awaiting her, the most unexpected one is love.
Rebecca Wilde’s Libertine, self-published through Amazon, is a very short erotic work about a highwaywoman in 17th century England. The blurb should give you a sense of what to expect.
In 1669, England’s first female highwayman robs stagecoaches, and hearts, throughout London. Armed with her flintlock pistol, the masked “Libertine” successfully seduces England’s female nobility while at the same time, attempts to rescue her longtime lover from the hangman’s noose. Join the notorious highwaywoman in her erotic adventures as she matches wits with both the local constabulary and the established criminal underworld, lending new meaning to the phrase, “Stand and deliver!”
Ann Aptaker’s Cantor Gold gangster series has a fourth installment with Flesh and Gold from Bold Strokes Books.
Havana, 1952, a city throbbing with pleasure and danger, where the Mob peddles glamor to the tourists and there’s plenty of sex for sale. In the swanky hotels and casinos, and the steamy, secretive Red Light district of the Colón, Cantor Gold, dapper art thief and smuggler, searches the streets and brothels for her kidnapped love, Sophie de la Luna y Sol. Cantor races against time while trying to out run the deadly schemes of American mobsters and the gunsights of murderous local gangs.
And to finish up the October listings, Tammy Lynne Stoner’s Sugar Land, from Red Hen Press, has a more literary feel. Here’s the description:
It’s 1923 in Midland, Texas, and Miss Dara falls in love with her best friend―who also happens to be a girl. Terrified, Miss Dara takes a job at the Imperial State Prison Farm for men. Once there, she befriends inmate and soon-to-be legendary blues singer Lead Belly, who sings his way out (a true story)―but only after he makes her promise to free herself from her own prison. Sugar Land is a triumphant, beautiful novel about the heart’s refusal to be denied what the heart wants.
If you know about forthcoming historicals, remember to drop me a note, just in case they aren’t on my list yet.
Ask Sappho
I had so much fun sorting through the story of Mary Diana Dods, mentioned earlier, that rather than answer a listener question this month for the Ask Sappho segment, I thought I’d give you a run-down on her story.
Imagine all your favorite Regency romance tropes, then toss in a few more tropes as dessert. The bastard daughter of a Scottish earl. A false cross-gender pen name to publish plays and poetry. A glamorously beautiful unwed mother. A woman living as a man. A marriage of convenience. Parisian literary salons filled with brilliant and witty people. And in the middle of it all, Mary Shelley as matchmaker. Mary Wollstonecraft Frankenstein Fucking Shelley. If this were a historical romance novel, your editor would tell you to tone it down a bit to make it more believable.
Professor Bennett’s book on Mary Diana Dods is structured as an academic mystery, tracing the story from the first dangling threads all the way through the process of teasing those threads out and then tying them up neatly. But here’s the more straightforward story.
At the very beginning of the 19th century, Mary Diana Dods--known to her friends as Doddy--and her sister Georgiana were the illegitimate daughters of the earl of Morton, a prominent and wealthy Scottish aristocrat. They were brought up amidst luxury and privilege, though never publicly acknowledged as the earl’s children. Dods certainly had an extensive education and was fluent in French, German, Italian, and Latin. Dods also seems to have had some sort of physical disability, though it’s never described beyond being a “disproportion” of her body and references to a liver ailment. She had dark short curly hair, sharp piercing black eyes, was of small stature, and looked worn down from chronic pain--and no doubt chronic worry about finances as well. For when the earl of Morton finally married--a woman younger than either of his daughters--they were kicked out of the house with an allowance that was nowhere near enough to maintain the life they’d been brought up to expect.
Georgiana was married by that time, as Mrs. Carter, and living in India with her husband, but when she returned to England, a widow with two young sons, she and Dods found themselves endlessly struggling with debt, in part due to their father’s carelessness with regard to the regularity of payment of their allowance. The sisters did their best to find means to support themselves in line with the expectations for well-bred women of the Regency era. Georgiana tried to find a position as a paid companion to some wealthier woman. Dods set up a day school with her good friend Charlotte Figg and another woman to give music lessons and such like.
Like most single women of that era, they socialized primarily with other women and were part of a complex network of friendships and support systems that provided lodging, loans of money, professional references and leads, and simple companionship and emotional support. For Dods, part of that network included the writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and through her, entrance to a larger literary world that included Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and the London salon of Dr. Kitchener. Moving in literary circles, it’s not surprising that Dods decided to try her hand earning money from writing. And having seen the experiences of other literary women, it also isn’t surprising that, like many others, she decided to create a male pen name for the purpose. A male author would be taken seriously and paid accordingly. Female authors were treated as dilettantes when noticed at all. Thus, Mr. David Lyndsay was born. And Mary Shelley was happy to help Dods begin her career by writing letters of recommendation to publishers for Lyndsay.
Lyndsay had an initial burst of success, having multiple works published in Blackwood’s Magazine, over the course of a couple of years, and then a collection of dramas, also put out by Blackwood who was a prominent Scottish publisher and may have been influenced by the opportunity to feature a fellow countryman. But Lyndsay’s book flopped on the market. Blackwood lost money and therefore lost interest, though it took Lyndsay several years to get the hint when Blackwood failed to buy any more of his submissions.
When that pin finally dropped, Blackwood received a submission from another aspiring Scottish writer, one Walter Sholto Douglas, whose work was sent for consideration by his wife, Isabella Douglas. And now, we need to circle back and ask who Isabella was.
Isabella Robinson was generally acclaimed to be one of the most beautiful women in existence. Her father was a good friend of Mary Shelley’s father, Mr. Godwin, and the two families socialized regularly. Mary Shelley (who by now has been widowed by Shelley’s tragic drowning) doted on her, being on the rebound from a close romantic friendship with another friend whose marriage created distance between them.
And then Isabella Robinson became pregnant by a lover who decamped to America without having the courtesy to marry her. Having a child out of wedlock wasn’t entirely fatal--after all, Mary Shelley and any number of women in her radical circle had done so--but if there were no man in the picture, marriage or not, life became very difficult. And the lack of an assigned father for the child would be a significant handicap for its future.
In that age of the near impossibility of divorce, it was a normal--if not particularly common--practice for a woman to simply proclaim herself the wife of her current lover, adopt his name, and be accepted as such, with the assistance of geography, foreign travel, or simply the separation of non-overlapping social spheres. Official certificates of marriage or birth were useful, but one could manage without them with a bit of cleverness.
And so, somewhere around the time that Isabella’s pregnancy would have become evident, she went into seclusion away from London, began mentioning in correspondence with friends that she had married, and took up the role of Mrs. Douglas to act as secretary for the new pen name of Mary Diana Dods, that of Walter Sholto Douglas.
From the bits and scraps we know, it’s impossible to tell how long and how extensive they intended the fictitious marriage to be. In that era, pregnancy was uncertain and post-natal mortality was significant. If Isabella’s child failed to survive to birth or much beyond, it’s possible that Isabella would have returned to her London haunts remaining Isabella Robinson with only her immediate circle of friends the wiser. But her daughter Adeline was healthy and thriving, so some more long-term identity needed to be established. Mr. Sholto Douglas had a literary existence but not a physical one. For Isabella, one possible path might have been a convenient widowhood, but Dods was counting on Mr. Douglas as her new source of writing income.
And so, a daring plan was hatched. And Mary Shelley was in the middle of it. Shelley wrote to a friend of hers in London asking for a favor. She was about to travel to France in company with a group of friends: Mr. and Mrs. Douglas and their infant daughter, Mr. Douglas’s widowed sister Mrs. Georgiana Carter and her two young sons. It was inconvenient of them to travel to London to pick up passports, but passports must be picked up in person. The friend had a passing resemblance to Mr. Douglas -- could he find a woman with a similar resemblance to Mrs. Douglas and pick up the passports? Why yes, he’d be happy to. And in the mean time, Mary Diana Dods put on trousers and began practicing to be Mr. Walter Sholto Douglas.
If we were writing this as a romance novel, what follows would take a different path. But the Douglas’s marriage ran onto the rocks of some insurmountable difficulties. In particular, even though it was possible for an English couple to live more cheaply in Paris than in London, the Douglases still had the slimmest of incomes and yet wanted to move in the high-fashion society of Parisian literary salons. And the beautiful and engaging Isabella Douglas eagerly flirted with anything in pants. Anything except her husband, Sholto Douglas.
In October 1827, the Douglases move to Paris where they are accepted as what they appear to be--a married couple with extensive connections in English literary society. Two years later, Mr. Douglas is in a French prison for debt and in extremely poor health. Isabella Douglas has lost the friendship and support of her female friends with her romantic and sexual antics and returns to London the next year. Without her husband.
There is no trace of what happened to Mary Diana Dods, aka Walter Sholto Douglas. If Douglas had died in debtor’s prison, one might expect that the discovery of his underlying sex would have been worth a note in the archives. But possibly not. Or possibly friends took up a collection to cover the debts and then Mr. Douglas decided to disappear, along with Mary Diana Dods. The only later trace was that Mr. Douglas went down in historical records as the father of Adeline Douglas, a fact that most might consider relevant only because Adeline married a prominent enough man that she appears in biographical dictionaries.
Is there a love story anywhere within this tangle, much less a same-sex love story? Unclear. This is an era when romantic friendships between women were considered the norm, and the language Mary Shelley uses to talk about her relationship with Isabella is certainly emotional and romantic. Did Shelley convince her friend Dods to go to the extreme of living as Mr. Douglas for the sake of love? Dods--under the name of Lyndsay--left a manuscript poem written on the flyleaf of a copy of Lyndsay’s book that mourns a tragically dead beloved and speaks of being forever alone. But this was well before Douglas was invented and there is no clue to whether the poem’s subject was a real person or what gender they might have been, if so. Certainly Isabella seems to have had no particular emotional attachment to the person she presented as her husband, or if she did, she certainly didn’t act like it, though observers described Mr. Douglas as being devoted to her.
But if the life of Mary Diana Dods fails to provide us with a conventionally happy ending to this adventure, that doesn’t mean that we can’t see, in her life, the structures and themes of how two women might have constructed an adventure with just such a happy ending as we might crave. Just make it a little more believable than this true life story if you expect to sell it as a historical romance novel!
Show Notes
Your monthly update on what the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has been doing.
In this episode we talk about:
- Announcing the 2019 audio fiction series
- A conference next March in France: “Sapphic Vibes: Lesbians in Literature from the Renaissance to the Present”
- Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- Publications about Moll Cutpurse
- Mary Diana Dods: A Scholar and a Gentleman by Betty T. Bennett
- Publications about sexuality in ancient Rome
- Book Shopping for the Blog
- Same-sex Desire in Early Modern England, 1550-1735: An Anthology of Literary Texts and Contexts by Marie H. Loughlin
- Instead of an author guest, a reprise of two shows about Sappho
- New and forthcoming fiction
- Ask Sappho: The most outrageous, tropiest Regency same-sex relationship...and it’s all true
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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LHMPFriday, October 5, 2018 - 10:00
As I hinted in last month's On the Shelf podcast and will be announcing officially in tomorrow's episode, The Lesbian Historic Motif Project and Podcast will be repeating this year's exciting audio fiction series in 2019! Please publicize this to anyone you think might be interested in submitting. There's a lot of buzz out there from readers who are hungry for f/f historical fiction. I'd like to do my part to give readers what they're clamoring for. As you can see from the selections we've published this year, I'm eager to support stories that take chances, stories that aren't the same thing you've read before, stories that embrace the diversity of queer women's experiences throughout history. Maybe you've been thinking of dipping your toe into historical fiction waters and just needed the excuse. Maybe you've had a story kicking around but didn't think there was a market for it. Maybe you've been reading the LHMP blog and listening to the podcast and been inspired by some real-life history. We want to see your stories so we can put together an even more stunning series in our second year.
Major category:
LHMPThe Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast will be open for submissions in January 2019 for short stories in the lesbian historic fiction genre, to be produced in audio format for the podcast, as well as published in text on the website.
Technical Details
- We will accept short fiction of any length up to 5000 words, which is a hard limit. We will be buying a total of four stories. (If we get some really great flash fiction, there’s the possibility of more.)
- We will be paying professional rates: $0.06/word.
- The contract will be for first publication rights in audio and print (i.e., the story must not have appeared in either format previously) with an exclusive one year license. (Exceptions can be arranged by mutual consent for “best of” collections within that term.)
- Instructions on how to submit are given below. NO SUBMISSIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED OUTSIDE THE SUBMISSION PERIOD OF JANUARY 2019.
What We’re Looking For
- Stories must be set in an actual historic culture--i.e., a specific time and place in history--and the plot and characters should be firmly rooted in that time and place. (No time-travel or past memories, please. And no supernatural elements, just ordinary history.)
- Stories must be set before 1900. We’d love to see stories that reach beyond the popular settings of 19th century America and England unless you do something new and interesting in them.
- Romance is optional, and romance stories should have some other significant plot element in addition to the romance.
- We are not looking for erotica. Sex may be implied but not described. (It’s difficult to include both a substantial non-romantic plot and erotic content in short fiction. I’d rather that stories focus on the plot and characters.)
- Stories should feature lesbian themes. What do I mean by that, especially given the emphasis the LHMP puts on how people in history understood sexuality differently than we do? This is where we get into “I know it when I see it” territory. The story should feature protagonist(s) whose primary emotional orientation within the scope of the story is toward other women. This is not meant to exclude characters who might identify today as bisexual or who have had relationships with men outside the scope of the story. But the story should focus on same-sex relations.
- Stories need not be all rainbows and unicorns, but should not be tragic. Angst and peril are ok as long as they don’t end in tragedy.
- Authors of all genders and orientations are welcome to submit. Authors from traditionally marginalized cultures are strongly encouraged to submit, regardless of whether you are writing about your own cultural background.
Please feel free to publicize this call for submissions.
Submission Information
- Do not send submissions before January 1, 2019 or after January 31, 2019. Submissions sent outside this window will not be considered (with allowance for time zones).
- Send submissions to alpennia@heatherrosejones.com
- Submit your story as an rtf or doc(x) file attached to your email
- The file name should be “[last name] - [story title, truncated if long]”
- The subject line of your email should be “LHMP Submissions - [last name] - [story title]”
- There is no need to provide a synopsis or biographical information in the cover letter.
- By submitting your story, you are verifying that the material is your own original work and that it has not been previously published in any form in a publicly accessible context.
- Submissions will be acknowledged within 2 days of receipt. If you haven’t received an acknowledgment within 5 days, please query.
- I may begin responding to submissions during January as I read them, but final decisions will not be made until after the submission period is complete. If I haven’t responded by mid-February, please query as the response may have gone astray.
Formatting
Use your favorite standard manuscript format for short fiction with the following additions:
- In addition to word count, please provide the date/era of your setting and the location/culture it is set in. (These can be in general terms, but it helps for putting the story in context, especially if it uses a very tight point of view where the time/place are not specifically mentioned in the story.)
If you don’t have a favorite manuscript format, here are the minimum essential elements it should have:
- Use courier or a similar monospaced serif font, 12-point size
- Lines should be double-spaced with paragraphs indented. (Use your word processor’s formatting for this, do not use tabs or manual carriage returns.)
- Do not justify the text, leave a ragged right margin.
- Margins should be at least 1-inch or equivalent all around
- On the first page, provide the following information:
- Your name (legal name, the name I’ll be putting on the contract)
- email address
- (standard formats generally require a mailing address but I don’t need one at this point)
- word count (please use your word processor’s word count function, rounded to the nearest 100)
- date/era of story
- location/culture of story
- Centered above the start of the story, include the title, and on the next line “by [name to appear in publication]”. This is where you may use a pen name, if you choose.
- Please use actual italics rather than underlining for material meant to appear in italics.
- Please indicate the end of your story with the word “end” centered below the final line.
As I will be reading stories electronically, there is no need to include page numbers or a header on each page. (If this is part of your standard format, you don’t need to remove them.)
Tuesday, October 2, 2018 - 11:00
Complicated historic stories tend to send me either to drawing up genealogies or timelines. When I finished doing my LHMP summary of Bennett's book on Mary Diana Dods, I needed to sort it all out in my head by coming up with a chronology of her identities and movements. One startling aspect is how short the time was between the first inklings of creating Walter Sholto Douglas as a husband for Isabella Robinson, and Douglas's probably fatal end in a French debtor's prison. Bennett never seems to interrogate the various references to Dods' physical ailments and Mary Shelley's rather abrupt turn from assisting in the creation of Mr. Douglas to treating him as some sort of villain with a "diseased mind". I'm not going to add my own speculations to the question of what Dods thought about the Douglas marriage project, or how she felt personally about Isabella Robinson. As story fodder, those details don't matter and as history they may be unknowable.
In the following timeline, keep in mind that Dods, Lyndsay, and Douglas are all the same person. "MS" is Mary Shelley because she appears so often I got tired of typing the whole thing.
* * *
Pre-1790 (maybe)
- Georgiana Dods born
1790 (maybe)
- Mary Diana Dods born?
1807
- Evidence that Mary and Georgiana Dods are living with their father, Lord Morton in London.
Ca. 1808-1810
- Georgiana Dods marries John Carter and goes to India with him.
Ca. 1814 (maybe)
- Mary Diana Dods leaves her father’s household when he marries (a woman younger than herself!).
1815-1819
- Mary Diana Dods is living in Swansea and racking up debts. This appears, in part, to be a result of her father having no idea what sort of allowance is necessary for the minimal support of the bastard daughter of an earl, and the irregularity of the payment of that allowance which puts Mary into a debt spiral where she's constantly borrowing from friends to pay off creditors and then begging for money to pay the friends.
Ca. 1818
- Georgiana Carter (Mrs. Carter) is back in London with 2 children, her husband dies in India. She joins Dods in Swansea sometime in 1819.
1820 (roughly)
- Dods and Carter move to London, one step ahead of their creditors (who eventually track them down). They are borrowing money from Miss Figg to pay debts and beg their father for money to settle them.
1821
- February - References to Dods having “scholars” in London as a reason for remaining there. She appears to be giving music lessons among other things. Mrs. Carter is looking for a post as a paid companion. The sisters appear to be living separately for a time.
- March - There are references to Miss Charlotte Figg in Dods’ accounts. (Miss Figg appears to be a close friend who has slightly better access to funds than Dods has, though see later notes on that.)
- August 27 - David Lyndsay’s first letter to publisher William Blackwood. The return address is care of Mrs. Carter in London. (In the midst of all of the anxious letters from the sisters to their father about money, it's clear that Dods is taking clear positive action to try to bring in more income, both from writing and from the teaching venture with Miss Figg and others. Dods' choice to pubish under a male pen name need not be seen as anything to do with gender identity--simply a means of being taken seriously. It may also be that her father woudn't take kindly to her publishing under her own real name. She reassures him on that point in one letter.)
- August - Publication of Lyndsay’s Plague of Darkness in Blackwood's Magazine
- October - Publication of Lyndsay(?)’s The First Murder in Blackwood's Magazine
- November - Dods writes to her father telling of the success of the academy she runs with her associates Miss Figg and Miss Aleworth who teach piano and singing. Mentions that she is writing for newspapers and magazines including the Edinburgh Review. Mrs. Carter is boarding with them. (Mrs. Carter's concerns largely have to do with making sure her sons are placed in good boarding schools and that she's able to locate herself nearby to visit them. I'm feeling a lot of personal echoes of my Luzie Valorin from Mother of Souls in reading about their struggles.)
- December - Publication of Lyndsay’s Mount of Olives in Blackwood's Magazine
- December - Lyndsay’s collection of dramas published by Blackwood. (The collection of dramas, alas, did not sell well. Blackwood lost money on the venture and this seems to be the point when he cools significantly towards Lyndsay's work. Lyndsay/Dods, on the other hand, quite naturally feels like things are looking up.)
1822
- January - Publication of Lyndsay’s The Ring and the Stream in Blackwood's Magazine
- January - Lyndsay mentions to Blackwood that he is about to leave town for his health.
- February - (for several months?) Dods (and David Lyndsay) and Mrs. Carter possibly leave London. Lyndsay’s mail drop is Mr. Weale.
- February - Lyndsay/Dods inscribes a poem of loss on the flyleaf of a copy of his collection of dramas. The book later finds itself in the hands of MS. (This is the context where I'm intensely curious about who the poem might have been mourning if it referred to a genuine real-life personal loss. The friend most commonly mentioned by Dods in this era is Charlotte Figg, but she is clearly still alive and thriving after this date, so it can't be her. But might the period away from London be connected with grief? All pure speculation on my part.)
- April 1 - Lyndsay tells Blackwood he has been at Cheltenham for the waters due to a complaint of the liver.
- April - MS writes that she admires Lyndsay’s Cain. (This is the first hint that Dods had become part of the Shelleys' circle. Lyndsay's claims to Blackwood of having been their intimate also support a serious friendship around this date.)
- May - Publication of Lyndsay’s Horae Gallicae in Blackwood's Magazine
- May - Lyndsay continues writing to Blackwood but his material is no longer being accepted for publication.
- June - Dods is in London. She writes her father of her disappointment that he won’t help her unmarried friend Miss Figg to get a pension in honor of her father's military service. Describes Figg as “her friend and partner” who earns what she can by teaching music (but may receive an inheritance when her mother dies). (One shouldn't read anything into the word "partner" as they had been business partners in the musical academy. It's easy to lose track that "partner as euphemism for same-sex lover" only really cropped up in the later 20th century.)
- June - Lyndsay writes to Blackwood with an air of desperation, noting the very moderate nature of his allowance from his father. Blackwood rejects his proposed projects.
- July - Percy Shelley dies, as well as Edward Williams (common-law husband of Jane Williams)
- August - Lyndsay tells Blackwood he is about to go to France with a friend and collect materials for his writing. (Unclear if Dods did travel to France with Figg at this time.)
- August - Publication of Lyndsay’s The Death of Isaiah in Blackwood’s Magazine.
- September - Dods writes her father about the poor state of the education industry. She and her friend Miss Figg are looking into setting up the academy in Paris instead, which her friend’s mother is looking into. (Miss Figg appears to have traveled to Paris to assist with this exploration, but it isn't clear that Dods accompanied her.)
- November - Lyndsay writes Blackwood with a new proposal after a long gap.
1823
- February - Lyndsay complains to Blackwood of not hearing from him. He proposes a set of German translations, perhaps a connection with those MS mentioned to Colburn.
- March, April, June, July - Lyndsay continues to offer works to Blackwood but no indication of any interest.
- August, September, October, December - Lyndsay and Blackwood have a spat and reconciliation, Lyndsay continues to express disappointment that Blackwood is not taking his works. (After the successes of 1821 and the slow decline of her situation in 1822, there's a sense that Dods must have been coming to wit's end with regard to finances during this period.)
1824
- February - Lyndsay requests Blackwood to return material via Weale if not usable.
- February - Mrs. Carter, writing their father on Dods’ behalf, tells of her desperate finances which involve entangled loans with Miss Figg and her mother.
- March, May - Lyndsay still receives no response from Blackwood.
1825
- Some time this year - MS, Isabella and Mary Diana Dods all attend Dr. Kitchener’s salons. Dods and Shelley almost certainly were friends for several years before this, but Isabella may be a new acquaintance.
- January - Lyndsay’s first contact with Blackwood since the previous May. Notes his goblin tales will be published by Hurst and Company and asks if he may dedicate them to Blackwood. (The answer was no.) He mentions in passing that he is “well acquainted with Mrs. Shelley.”
- May - Lyndsay writes to Blackwood mentioning that his Tales of the Wild and the Wonderful is being published by Hurst and Robinson and asking Blackwood to include a book announcement for his new books.
- Oct/Nov - Lyndsay writes Blackwood on several subjects and includes anecdotes about his friendship with MS, calling her a “fine creature” too good for the party she belongs to and providing gossip for which MS was certainly the source.
1826
- June - Blackwood writes to Mrs. Sholto Douglas accepting two works for publication. (Presumably there was previous correspondence from her offering them.) This is around the time when Isabel’s daughter Adeline is born. (It's a reasonable presumption that Isabella is doing the actual writing here, rather than just allowing her name to be used. What isn't clear is whether there was already a plan at this point for Isabella to be Mrs. Douglas permanently for her own benefit, as opposed to filling the role for the sake of Dods' writing career.
- July - Mrs. Sholto Douglas (Isabel Douglas) responds to Blackwood, disclaiming authorship in favor of her husband, to whom she says she’s been married 6 months.
- August - Blackwood’s Magazine publishes a story credited to “Mrs. Sholto Douglas”.
- October - MS writes to publisher Alaric A. Watts, acting as go-between for David Lyndsay while he was abroad (no direct evidence of Dods going abroad), and sending a packet of his writing, but it is too late to be included in his publication
- October - MS writes to publisher Henry Colburn promoting David Lyndsay’s new collection of dramas to him
1827
- June 27 - MS first mentions the Douglases in her letters. (But since she is most likely the context of the Douglases meeting, one assumes that she has been aware of the fictitious marriage from the very start.)
- July - MS’s friend Jane Williams becomes common-law wife of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, MS feels Jane has betrayed her by gossiping about her past, especially her relationship with Shelley.
- July 23 - George Douglas, Lord Morton dies.
- July 30 - Funeral of George Douglas, Lord Morton.
- July - MS letter to Jane Williams Hogg mentions Walter Sholto Douglas, he is attending the funeral of Lord M, he and Isabel are newlyweds. MS others are in the south of England with Isabella Robinson Douglas, who is anxious about “D” who is off at the funeral of Lord M whose will is relevant to the Douglases’ fate. MS is there until October 1827. (It's important to note that the financial consequences of Lord Morton's will are not the possibility of receiving some substantial inheritance, but rather the possibility that Dods and Carter will lose their allowances entirely -- a possibility mentioned by Lord Morton in his previous correspondence with them. The confirmation that the annuity will continue is a relief, but not any sort of solution to their financial difficulties.)
- August 11 - Date of the codicil of Lord Morton’s will that confirms an annuity to his “reputed” daughters, Mary Diana Dods and Georgiana Carter.
- August 20 - MS writes a friend that Mr. Douglas is coming in “a few weeks” after which the Douglases will leave for Paris.
- August 26 - MS and Isabella Douglas are evicted from rooms in Sompting and move to Arundel.
- August 28 - MS refers that Douglas “seriously thinks of les culottes.” (That is, Dods has decided to live publicly as Mr. Douglas. It isn't clear whether this was intended as a permanent life-long project or a temporary experiment.)
- September 23 - Dods has joined MS, Isabella, and Mrs. Carter. Dods is now living publicly as Mr. Douglas.
- September 23 - MS commissions John Howard Payne to impersonate Douglas to pick up passports for the Douglases’ trip to Paris.
- September 25 - MS writes publisher Alaric A. Watts about a delay in sending him some work of hers. She includes a packet “from Mrs. Douglas.” (This doesn’t appear to be material for publication?)
- October 1 - The passports are received.
- October - The Douglases and Mrs. Clark travel to Paris. (The removal to Paris served two functions. It enabled the Douglases to establish their new married identities away from anyone who might call foul. And English people were finding that living abroad was less expensive that staying at home. It isn't clear what the Douglases' finances are at this point. Dods would appear to be receiving very little in the way of writing income, but had her annuity. There's the annuity. Isabella has reconciled with her father and might possibly be receiving an allowance from him but I haven't seen any mentions of this. And whatever their income is, it's certain that their expenses outstrip them.)
- November 12 - Mr. Godwin dined at MS’s joined by Mr. Robinson. (There are a large number of entries from Mr. Godwin's (MS's father's) journals that mention social events involving Mary Shelley and various other people in the Douglases' circles such as Isabella's father and sister, or Dods' friend Miss Figg. These are very much side issues, but show that the larger social circle continues on interacting with each other, even as the Douglas marriage runs onto the rocks and fails. I've included only a few of them.)
- December 5 - MS records in her journal that she has lost one friend (Jane Hogg) and is divided from another (Isabella Douglas) but "divided from" might only refer to the geographic separation.
1828
- February 12 - MS’s journal records a visit from the Robinsons.
- March 2 - Mr. Godwin joined Miss Figg and Miss Robinson at MS’s house.
- April 11 - MS leaves for Paris to stay with the Douglases, with Mr. Robinson and Julia Robinson (Isabella’s sister) who is her new companion. She comes down with smallpox on arrival.
- May - MS returns to England
- June 5 - MS writes Jane Hogg about Isabella and refers to Isabella’s “sufferings [that] transcend all that imagination can portray” and speaks of trying to “extricate her.”
- June 13 - MS receives a letter from Viscount Dillon with compliments to Miss Dods and a request for her to send stories for inclusion in his publication. MS sends some of her own work and that of “a friend writing as David Lyndsay,” though it is too late for inclusion.
- June 22 - MS writes to an unnamed editor promoting Lyndsay’s work. (It's very interesting that even as Mary Shelley is commiserating with the "sufferings" brought on Isabella by her marriage, she continues to promote Dods' literary endeavors under various names.)
- June 28 - MS writes to Jane Hogg about Isabella and blames herself for some problem possibly having to do with the marriage. She blames Sholto, referring to his “diseased body” and “diseased mind”. Last mention of the Douglases in her letters
- July 5 - A Paris friend writes MS that Isabella Douglas is bored.
- October 5 - A Paris friend writes MS that Isabella Douglas is involved with Claude Fauriel and criticizes her for it.
1829
- February 4 - A Paris friend refers to the Douglases’ marriage as an argument against the institution.
- May 13 - MS’s journal says she might have been happy with Isabella but “that dream is over”. (Is this because she now sees through Isabella as shallow and self-centered? Or because the Douglas marriage is a bar to MS and Isabella having some sort of romantic friendship relationship? Unclear.)
- May 15 - Mr. Godwin dines at MS’s with Julia Robinson
- July - After this, the Douglases are no longer mentioned by their previous friends in Paris. There is no evidence that they go to Hannover as planned.
- September - Lyndsay’s last letter to Blackwood proposing a long Scottish historical poem. He spells his name “Lindsay” and the handwriting is not his usual. (Although Bennett doesn't comment on any matches to the handwriting, one might guess that this is Mary Shelley continuing to act as a go-between for Dods' literary hopes.)
- November - A Paris correspondent notes that Mr. Douglas is in prison for debt. (The law at the time considered the husband to be the only "legal entity" in the marriage. So Isabella wouldn't be under threat of imprisonment, though one must assume that she would lose any lodgings and might be importuned by creditors. Was she staying with friends? Had she skipped off back to England? No clue.)
1830
- May 10 - Mr. Godwin dines at the Robinsons with MS and others.
- June 7 - Mr. Godwin has tea at MS’s with Thomas Moore and the Robinsons. (I've included these notes to point out that whatever Isabella was doing, she wasn't socializing with her family back in London.)
- November - Isabella Douglas and Adeline are back in London.
- December 1 - MS’s journal records her disillusionment with Isabella Douglas. “She has lost her fascinations.” The two are clearly estranged. There is no mention of Sholto
1832 Mary Clarke continues to complain about the behavior of Isabella in Paris.
1840 (maybe) Isabella marries Mr. Falconer.
Note: On 2023-11-12 I was contacted by Linda Davies, who is researching genealogies for several families associated with Mary Shelley (Robinsons, Beauclerks, Pauls). She has found two marriage records for Isabella Douglas and William Flaconer recorded via Ancestry.com: one in 1836 and one in 1839.
1842 Mrs. Carter dies and is buried in Paris.
1851 Mary Shelley dies.
1853 Adeline Douglas is married. The license lists Walter Sholto Douglas as her father.
1869 Isabella Robinson Douglas Falconer dies in Italy.
Major category:
LHMPMonday, October 1, 2018 - 08:00
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.
Major category:
LHMPFull 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.]
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.
# # #
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:
Event / person:
Saturday, September 29, 2018 - 11:00
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
by
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
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- Email: Heather Rose Jones
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LHMPMonday, September 24, 2018 - 09:00
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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LHMPFull 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.
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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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Saturday, September 22, 2018 - 10:45
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.
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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...”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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. ... [the crowd is distracted by the passing of a fancy wedding party at this point, and Moll continues] 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.
* * *
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:
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.
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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