The article begins by tackling the complicated question of the correspondence between 19th-century, intensely affectionate, same-sex friendships and current understandings of same-sex desire. Based on the emotional language (and domestic arrangements) of many 19th-century, same-sex pairs, the urge to identify these feelings and people as “homosexual” is strong. And (the question I always want to ask.) does it matter whether we can clearly categorize people in this way?
romantic friendship
Romantic friendship refers to a specific set of behaviors and social circumstances, largely confined to the 17-19th centuries, where close and intensely emotional “friendships” between women were normalized by society and even considered expected or desirable. Romantic friendship were generally considered not to preclude heterosexual marriage although they were often seen in conflict with it.
LHMP entry
Introduction
In the second half of the 18th century, women established themselves as writers of novels in dramatic numbers, thus the genre is imbued with a diverse array of women’s concerns. The novels discussed in this book tell stories often at odds with the official cultural narrative. Within that diversity, they contribute to a common tale of women’s options and how they negotiate them.
Introduction
In the later 18th century, there is a conflict in the English imagination between the foreign, dangerous, “female friends,” personified by the image of sapphic Marie-Antoinette, and the positive image of such celebrated English female couples such as Ponsonby and Butler, Seward and Sneyd. Hester Thrale personified this conflict, expressing deeply negative views of sexualized female relationships, but praising and even engaging in intimate (but not overtly sexual) relationships between women, such as Frances Barney.
The focus of this article, in Andreadis’s words is “a class of women and behaviors described by their contemporaries in ways that coincide with our modern ‘lesbian’.” There is still much uncertainty within that description as to how these women and their society understood these concepts, and Andreadis’s thesis is that as such behaviors begin to be framed in public discourse as transgressive, women who engaged in the same behaviors but wished to be viewed as “respectable” developed a coded language to express sexual feelings in the language of female friendship – a shift that Andreadis labe
Tvordi’s article digs into the importance of female alliances for characters in early modern drama, and how those alliances represent a whole range of relationships including family, friendship, service, marriage resistance, and even desire. [Note: the topic of f/f desire in early modern drama is even more deeply examined by Walen 2005 https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4373] But given the imperatives of the “marriage plot,” these alliances are often broken or left behind in the play’s resolution.
Ballaster uses the lens of Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis, and especially its “New Cabal” as a lens for exploring knowledge of, and attitudes toward, female same-sex eroticism in 17th and 18th century England. (Manley’s book was published in 1709 and so speaks to both centuries.)
Diggs begins with a review of recent (in 1995) work on the relationship between romantic friendship and lesbian history, especially Smith-Rosenberg 1975 and Faderman 1981.
The idea of “modern lesbian identity” and when it can first be identified is a question that has preoccupied many historians in the field. In this article, Vicinus tackles the question. Keep in mind that this article was written in 1992, so it was still rather early in terms of current lesbian history scholarship.
This chapter examines several lives in the context of sexological theory and the rise of the binary homosexual/heterosexual model of desire. Psychologists pathologized previous models and patterns of same-sex relationships and focused on the sexually adventurous, dominating, “mannish” woman as the core prototype of the lesbian. At heart, these models revolved around “gender inversion” seeing the homosexual (male or female) as someone whose entire life and personality partook of a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth (to use the current terminology).
Part IV – Modernist Refashionings
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