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18th c

LHMP entry

Chapter 5: Condemnation and Praise

Two extremes show the range of reactions to women passing as male soldiers who were discovered only after death. Aal the Dragoon was handed over for medical uses (a fate reserved for serious criminals) and ended as a taxidermy display. Trijntje Simons (serving as Simon Poort) was buried with full military honors with both military and civic dignitaries in attendance.

Robinson uses the pornographic L'Academie des dames to explore the portrayal of sex between women and of non-procreative sex in general in the later 17th century. The work is structured as a dialogue between two women: the older, experienced Tullie and her younger cousin Octavie who moves from fiancée to wife in the course at the book. It is a French adaptation of Chorier's Latin Satyra Sotadica which was published two decades earlier.

O' Driscoll looks at changes in attitudes toward female sexuality and same-sex desire through the lens of the dildo in popular culture.

Lanser opens with a letter from the intellectual Elizabeth Montagu in 1750 deploring the plan of two female friends to live together as it will "hurt us all" if women "make such a parade of their affection" leading to suspicion regarding all female friendships. Lanser argues that Montagu's objection is unlikely to be to romantic friendships as such. The sister to whom the letter was addressed would later pen Millenium Hall, a celebration of separatist female friendship.

Haggerty examines several examples of female villains in gothic romances to develop what strikes me as a rather weak theory of homoerotic attraction as subtext in the stories. Identifying a number of stories in which the heroine is persecuted and abused by a female villain (rather than the default male villain), he finds that they “suggest that the relations between women can be played out as potentially erotic, just as sado-masochistic relations between men and women are.”

The 18th century saw a polarization in attitudes, both in popular culture and in real life, between the "safe" de-sexualized romantic friendship (associated with educated and upper class women) and the "dangerous" sexual, gender-transgressing lesbian (associated with lower-class or socially marginalized women). Gonda looks at two women who--although their lives and careers show striking parallels--could be considered prototypes of these poles.

Beynon studies fictional (and biographic) narratives of "accounts" as a window on the gendering of economic competence in the 18th century. This specific article concerns two relationships between women that are framed or viewed in terms of their economic logicalness and success: Barker's embedded story "The Unaccountable Wife" in A Patch-Work screen for The Ladies, and Defoe's Roxana. The former is an odd tale of a married couple and their female servant who is, apparently, also the mistress of the husband.

This article examines two texts in the "reformed coquette" genre to look at changes in views of women's romantic agency and how romantic relationships between women were both presumed by, and a challenge to, the notion of marriage as based on mutual affection.

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