Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

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INTRODUCTION • xxxiii women’s sexual pleasure and the anatomy of women apart from their reproductive function. Some anatomists begin to investigate the clitoris, possibly as a response to the widely known existence of sexual relationships between women and the desire to understand how sex might occur in the absence of the phallus. 5 Poetry that celebrated a highly romanticized idea of friendship between women also flowered in the 17th and 18th centuries. Aphra Behn and Katherine Fowler Philips are good examples of this. This literature, created by literary circles of domestically educated, wealthy women who were widely read and often widely respected, created a space for female agency to express itself. The travel letters of Lady Wortley Montague famously describe women through an active and appreciative female gaze, significantly complicated by a discourse of race that exoticizes the women she describes. The combination of explicit descriptions of sex between women, evolving expressions of an active female gaze and a discourse of romantic friendship between women in literature created a lesbian space that might exist separately from the transgender movement. Still, the connection between active female desire and the transgression of the bounds of acceptable feminine passivity remained. Figures such as the English writer and actress Charlotte Charke are transgender women who are still claimed (uneasily) as part of a lesbian tradition. As today, lesbians and transgender women were conflated in the popular imaginary, whether or not the individuals in question inhabited both categories. By the late 18th century the diaries and journals of women like the famous Ladies of Llangollen show evidence of a subcultural group of wealthy women who chose to live independently of men. Sarah Scott’s utopian novel Millenium Hall (1762) describes a world where redemption might be achieved through such partnerships. The literature of this period makes it clear that lesbianism as we know it was not yet as fully imagined, and therefore was not as threatening as it would later become. Though it is difficult to conceptualize, we must realize that the lesbian identity is a convergence of a number of historical, economic and social developments, and that only a few of these had been reached at this point. The combination of independent and active sexuality with financial self-determination was achieved by only a very few, very privileged women in the 18th century.
xxxiv • INTRODUCTION The 18th century also saw the emergence of a decadent literature dominated by French and British male authors, which took lesbianism as a central theme. Mandy Merck has argued that a male-dominated discourse of art (she is speaking of art cinema) in a world where women are commonly objects of visual and imaginative consumption, will naturally focus on the lesbian. 6 Like later 19th-century decadent literature, pamphlets and poems produced in the 18th century present prurient descriptions of lesbian vice within a moral framework that simultaneously condemns it. Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse (The Nun, 1760) is possibly the first fully fledged example of the decadent literature of lesbianism that would proliferate in France over the next 150 years. It is clear that myths of the sexual repression and ignorance of the 19th century give a distorted picture of a reading public that in reality had access to a variety of images of lesbian sex and female same-sex romantic partnerships. This reading public was a much smaller segment of society than it is today and was disproportionately male. Still, a growing female readership clearly had access to ideas of lesbian “vice.” Both Jeanette Foster, in Sex Variant Women in Literature, and Lillian Faderman, in Surpassing the Love of Men, discuss a sensational court case involving two mistresses of a girl’s school who were accused of lesbianism in Edinburgh in 1811. Miss Woods and Miss Pirie sued their accuser for libel. One of the questions surrounding this case is whether and how lesbian sexual activity could be popularly imagined (the women were actually accused of tribadism). A young witness at the trial, a student at the school, provided quite specific detail of fully genital sexual encounters. During the case itself and in the nearly two centuries since, there have been persistent questions about whether this young girl might have invented such details, and about whether the two school mistresses might have had the sexual knowledge, ability and desire required to engage in such acts. The popular idea that lesbian sex was not imaginable at this period is belied both by this trial and by the existence of such widely (if privately) circulated texts as Fanny Hill and La Religieuse. It is significant, however, that these questions about visibility and the lesbian imaginary persist. A variety of theoretical arguments which might explain them will be discussed below. The diaries and letters of the early 19th-century landowner Ann Lister, first published in 1988, speak of an active and self-aware subculture of upper-class English women who pursued romantic and sexual relation
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