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PERFORMING “AKIMBO” 37
The interjected phrase “I am old Beldam’s pinner” stands out, as if Ward was
remembering an improvisation by a particular molly. I cannot fully reconstruct
the meaning of the phrase. One thing seems apparent, however. Despite the
politicized rhetoric linking male homosexuals and obsolete aristocrats, the
mollies were not identifying with the bisexual rakes or the effeminate beaux of
the time. Rather, they were improvising an identification with another group of
marginalized agents—country midwives. The scene seems to have been an
improvisation of midwifery in which one molly was dressed as a country
midwife in a high crowned (witch’s?) hat. “Old Beldam” was a hag or a witch,
“a furious raging woman; a virago” (“Beldam” 1989); hags were associated with
midwifery before male doctors outlawed midwives. Was this molly improvising
the role of the hag or witch who oversaw a female homosocial network that had
increasingly come under scrutiny of male homosocialism? 12 The increasing
marginalization of midwives as prostitutes during the early modern period may
have made them an appealing object for sympathetic imitation by the mollies,
suggesting both deviant sexuality and a residual, nonbourgeois empowerment of
the body. “Pinner” may have meant “one who fucks.” By casting himself as “old
Beldam’s pinner,” the crossdressed Molly who was the target of Ward’s moral
outrage may have been suggesting that the homosocial bonds between these
demonized women had an erotic dimension which could be appropriated as the
basis of his enactment of his own marginalized sexuality. Perhaps the molly
improvisation may have enabled a refusal of the emergent norms of (heterosexual,
conjugal) masculinity: indeed, this is how Ward interpreted the practice,
claiming that molly parodies were enacted “on purpose to extinguish that Natural
Affection which is due to the Fair Sex” (c. 1709:28–29). It may be necessary to
interpret molly parodies within the context of the simultaneous glorification of
marriage and disempowerment of women by the bourgeoisie during the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Ward’s memory of his visit to the molly house suggests that it was precisely
the act of mimetically unidentifying with normative masculinity that most
infuriated him. Thus, when Ward met hyper-masculine sodomites elsewhere, he
was so unconcerned as to jostle in among them:
We then proceeded and went on the Change, turn’d to the Right, and
Jostled in amongst a parcel of Swarthy Buggerantoes, Preternatural
Fornicators, as my Friend call’d them, who would Ogle a Handsome
Young man with as much Lust, as a True-bred English Whoremaster would
gaze upon a Beautiful Virgin.
(1703:68)
During the same walk, the two “had squeezed [them]selves thro’ a Crowd of
Bumfirking-Italians” (69). There was nothing threatening about these sodomites.
It was when homosexuality set itself up as resistant masculinity, as in the case of
the mollies, that Ward was disturbed.