Inseparable

by Emma Donoghue

At the same time, I know that you love me very much.

  I have not heard anywhere of

  Two young women loving each other in such a way.

  But I don’t think I would love

  any man as much as I do you,

  nor would I have so much pleasure, I think,

  In the act of kissing, if a man were to kiss me.”

  Her speech is reminiscent of the one Iphis makes in Ovid’s story. But where Iphis clearly identifies her desire for a girl as a problem with no precedent in nature or culture, Lyriopé mulls over the difficulty of knowing exactly what constitutes girls “loving too much,” and she weighs its various pains and pleasures. Her conscience is troubled; such love is something she seems to think she should be able to rein in somewhat, but then again, on both Florie’s side and hers, it seems too strong to resist. Lyriopé even goes beyond Iphis in seeing this as a permanent preference, because she doubts any man could move her as much. It is only at this point in the romance that Robert de Blois, having put his heroine through the wringer, has his hero unmask and prove her wrong by bedding her, to their great mutual satisfaction.

  Though never as popular as the female bridegroom, the male amazon would linger for six centuries. He is utterly seductive; interestingly, although the amazon or female knight persona lets him show off his muscles, physical courage, and gallantry, it is usually his womanly qualities (such as beauty and gentleness) that clinch the deal. The male amazon often appears alongside the female bridegroom—or back to back, rather, as we saw in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516–32), in which Ricciardetto cross-dresses to get into bed with the woman who loves his cross-dressing sister. The title of Walter Hawkesworth’s Latin play of 1603, Labyrinthus, neatly describes the kind of erotic tangle that can ensue.

  Just as we saw66 in adaptations of the Callisto story, women characters in satirical fiction can be amazingly relaxed about undefined physicality with their female friends. In a chaster way, heroines in the much loftier genre of romance—for instance, Emanuel Ford’s very popular Ornatus and Artesia (1607)—generally take it in their stride when they find themselves (as they think) kissed and caressed by another woman. The great example of a heroine embarking on what she believes is a same-sex relationship is Honoré D’Urfé’s vast, and vastly influential, pastoral romance L’Astrée (1607–27). Set outside Lyons in the fifth century C.E., it features hundreds of characters, a dozen of them in gender disguise; the Amadis de Gaule cycle was a key source. Joseph Harris points out67 the irony of the fact that D’Urfé, like other seventeenth-century romance writers, features cross-dressing so regularly as to render it banal, but always insists on calling it unprecedented; Harris describes this as the “constitutive amnesia” of cross-dressing plots.

  D’Urfé must have been particularly fascinated by the situation of a man in skirts, because his main hero, Céladon, appears in three different female personae right through thousands of pages of L’Astrée, and in fact is shown dressed as a man in only a couple of scenes. (This constant skirt-wearing did not stop Céladon’s name from becoming a byword for amorousness by the eighteenth century.) Having been banished by his beloved Astrée, Céladon approaches her as a Druidic priestess called “Alexis” and instantly wins her devotion, partly because “she” looks so like Céladon, whom Astrée believes drowned. Céladon has the bittersweet pleasure of being “cherished and caressed”68 as a beloved woman friend by the naïve heroine—and unable to reveal himself to her without losing all he has gained. Bed-sharing is agonizing enough, but one day, seeing Astrée half naked as she changes her clothes, “Alexis” cannot help seizing her

  and pressing her against her breast, and feeling her almost stark naked, it was just as well then that the shepherdess [Astrée] had little suspicion of her or she would have realized that these caresses were a little tighter than those that girls customarily share; but she who thought nothing of it, freely gave her kisses, just as she received them, maybe not as if to Alexis but as if to the living portrait of Céladon.

  But to analyze their relationship as if it is a private one would be misleading, because everything happens within Astrée’s circle of intimate female companions—so intimate, in fact, that they all seem to embrace each other frequently, flirtatiously, and jealously.

  We get the impression that the invisible masculinity of “Alexis” has somehow turned up the temperature in the group, even if the women do not understand why. Other texts that support69 this reading include a 1635 play by Jean de Rotrou, Agésilan de Colchos (based on Amadis de Gaule), in the third act of which Diane and Ardénie compete in a titillating “duel of kisses” for the affection of “Daraïde,” a man in female disguise.

  But in L’Astrée, the grand passion between the heroine and her new friend “Alexis” distinguishes itself sharply from the general mass of female intimacy. Astrée is in love, and proud of it; it does not occur to her that anything could be wrong with such a lofty, platonic form of passion. There is a key moment in the fourth volume, when she has been with her beloved “Alexis” for five years. “Alexis” (clearly hoping to play the same trick as in Orlando Furioso) asks if Astrée would love “her” if the gods changed “her” into a man. Astrée hates the idea, because she is sure she could never love another man after Céladon, and she would be losing the woman she adores: “From then on70 I would say farewell to all forms of pleasure and contentment.” Weeping at the thought of ever losing “Alexis,” Astrée makes a formal vow of eternal fidelity.

  Nothing—not parental pressure, financial crisis, nor any other consideration whatsoever that can be imagined, will ever separate me from my dear mistress, whom I embrace now—she said, flinging her arms around Alexis’s neck—and who I’ll never loose from the chains of my embrace until she has made this promise, unless she wants me to drop dead of sorrow!

  “Alexis” matches this marital-style vow, swearing on what “she” calls the holiest place in the world, Astrée’s bosom. Interestingly, when they hear people coming in the door, the two jump apart “so as not to be seen.” This suggests a new awareness that their embraces, if not a cause for shame, at least require privacy. But Astrée will not admit that her choice of life-mate is in any way peculiar.

  As Joseph Harris argues, Céladon’s taste for cross-dressing verges on transvestism in the modern sense of a fetish; at one point “Alexis” even swaps costumes with “her” beloved, and sings a madrigal to express jealousy of Astrée’s clothes. So this most famous of cross-dressing romances actually breaks the rules of the genre by refusing narrative closure: Céladon’s disguise, although initially adopted for a good heterosexual reason, stalls the flow for a thousand pages. His female persona, “Alexis,” starts to take over from him; the narrator increasingly uses “her” name and feminine pronouns to refer to Céladon, and the frontispieces to the third and fourth volumes feature “her.” Our hero, clinging to a fantasy of spending the rest of his life as “Alexis” in blissful union with Astrée in an all-female Druidic temple, is frozen, unable to act. Perhaps unsurprisingly, D’Urfé left this vast saga unfinished at his death. When his secretary Baltazar Baro published a fifth volume, he let a Druid scold the hero: “My plan, said the Druid,71 was to help you marry Astrée, not this costume.” In Baro’s ending, it requires a direct order from the Druid to make Céladon take the risk of revealing himself to Astrée—who, as she predicted, is robbed of all “contentment.” Mortified that others will think she was complicit in the trick all along, she rages at “her” (still using the name Alexis): “Perfidious and deceitful Alexis, die for the expiation of your crime.” Even when Astrée is finally brought to accept Céladon as her husband, she expresses no regrets about the long years she spent (as she thought) loving a woman.

  But perhaps the most interesting moments in L’Astrée are when characters become self-conscious about the idea of romantic love between women. Just as the men enjoy the novelty of trying on femininity, so they seem to relish making eloquent speeches to prove that, when it comes to
loving women, women just do it better. (The game is temporary, after all, and so perfectly safe.) Notably, Filande72—disguised as his married sister “Callirée”—makes a declaration of love to Diane that takes up Iphis’s famous complaint from Ovid’s Metamorphoses but manages to make a virtue of impossibility.

  Are you astonished that, being Callirée, I speak to you with such affection? Remember that none of the impotence of my condition could ever diminish it in me; far from it, rather, it will preserve my love and make it more violent and more eternal, because nothing diminishes the ardour of desire so much as the enjoyment of what one desires, and that being impossible between us, until I am in my coffin you will be always loved, and I always the lover.

  He alludes to the possibility of a divine sex change—not Iphis’s (perhaps because it will already be in the readers’ minds), but that of Tiresias.

  And besides, if Tiresias having been a girl became a man, why may I not hope that the gods might favour me equally, if you are agreeable? Believe me, my lovely Diane, because the gods never do anything in vain, it does not seem that they have instilled in me such a perfect love, to let me struggle vainly with it, and if nature has caused me to be born a girl, my extreme love might well make it so that it has not been done pointlessly.

  “Callirée” seems to be leaving it open as to whether the gods might turn “her” into a man, or simply let “her” and Diane discover some way to express their “extreme love” that will not be “in vain.” Perhaps the strangest thing about this speech, for modern readers, is that the men who hear it are described as being left in ecstasies. One suitor irritates “Callirée” by exclaiming that the exquisite pathos of this love between women makes him love “her” all the more. “She” tells him coldly that he offends “her” honor as a married woman—whereas “her” own passion for Diane is so pure it does not threaten Diane’s honesteté (chastity).

  But in other works both before and after Honoré D’Urfé’s L’Astrée, women do become confused and troubled when they find themselves falling for their friends. Amadis de Gaule (published from 1540 on) features several male amazons. In the eleventh volume, “Daraïde” (really Agesilan)—aware of being the object of infatuation of a woman called Lardenie—offers a new spin on amor impossibilis: “For a girl to love a girl,73 alas, what is that except to be in love with the moon and try to take it between your teeth?” But when courting another woman called Diane, “Daraïde” turns more optimistic, claiming Sappho as a glorious precedent for lesbian love. (His friend Arlanges, disguised as “Garaye,” claims that they come from the land of Amazons, where women both fight like and love like men.) The Amazon’s kisses, “sucking the honey from her purpled mouth,” throw Diane into confusion; she cannot “understand such violent love from one girl to another.” But she cannot resist it either, and she carries on allowing “Daraïde” all the privileges of friendship, including nude bathing. And when Agesilan finally reveals that he is a man, Diane’s fury and refusal to speak to him except through an intermediary suggest that her sense of self has been badly shaken by the episode.

  By far the most psychologically probing74 treatment of a woman’s response to a male amazon is found in Sir Philip Sidney’s tragicomic pastoral romance, the Arcadia (1593)—a work of such lasting popularity that Charles I is said to have quoted it as he mounted the scaffold. Its male amazon subplot is hinted at before it is told: an oracle warns the prince and princess of Arcadia that their daughter Philoclea and her sister are going to fall prey to “strange loves,” so they hide them away. But young Prince Pyrocles invades their sanctum in the persona of an Amazon, “Zelmane”; with his golden helmet and velvet buskins, Pyrocles may well be the most gaudy hero in English literature. Interestingly, the narrator75 refers to him as “Zelmane” and “she” throughout, even when the prince is talking to his friend Musidorus, who knows about the disguise—so the feminine names and pronouns act as a sort of prose costume, letting readers forget that the Amazon is really a man.

  “Zelmane” displays such a glamorous combination of feminine and masculine traits—being witty, singing love songs, killing a lion that scares Philoclea, kissing her hands with “more than womanly ardency”—that not only Philoclea but both her parents are attracted. Her mother is shrewd enough to guess the visitor’s secret, but for the innocent Philoclea, these “burning kisses” have troubling implications. She gradually becomes aware that her friendship with the Amazon is “full of impatient desire,76 having more than ordinary limits.” First she finds herself wishing that they were sisters, or that “they two might live all their lives together like two of Diana’s nymphs” (which indirectly reminds readers of what happened to Callisto when she mistook a man for a woman)—but then she realizes that she could not bear to share with the other nymphs “who also would have their part in Zelmane.” No, what she wants is an exclusive love, and here again Sidney gestures to a classical source (Ovid’s legend of Iphis and Ianthe) without naming it.

  Then, grown bolder, she would wish either herself or Zelmane a man, that there might succeed a blessed marriage betwixt them—but when that wish had once displayed his ensign in her mind, then followed whole squadrons of longings that so it might be, with a main battle of mislikings and repinings against their creation that so it was not.

  Notice that the moment Philoclea realizes that her love is erotic, the language becomes military: an internal war. Dreams of her friend by night “did make her know herself the better” by day, and Philoclea starts to panic. This desire has crept up on her like a “disease” which is “impossible to be cured,” or “like a river, no rampires being built against it till already it have overflowed.” Sidney’s dazzling succession of metaphors culminates with an image of Eros which hints at the Amazon’s true nature: “for now indeed love pulled off his mask, and showed his face unto her, and told her plainly that she was his prisoner.” This unmasking of desire—stripping off the guise of friendship—comes long before Prince Pyrocles’s unmasking as a man.

  Angst-ridden, Philoclea alternates between “paleness”77 and “extraordinary blushing,” Sidney says, “desiring she knew not what, nor how, if she knew what.” Kept by her jealous mother from talking to “Zelmane” alone, she walks in the moonlit wood and delivers a long soliloquy which recalls that of Iphis but is far more analytical. The sight of a marble stone on which Philoclea once wrote a vow of virginity shames her now; a cloud passing across the face of the moon (symbol of Diana) stands for the “outrageous folly” blotting her chastity. She asks the stars to judge: did she choose to catch this “plague,” did she leave herself open to this “sin” and “shame” by lustful daydreams—or did it just happen to her with “unresistable violence”? Though she calls herself an “unfortunate wretch,” Philoclea proves surprisingly tough-minded. However it may have happened, the important question is: what next? “It is the impossibility that doth torment me,” she admits. “Alas, then, O love, why doost thou in thy beautiful sampler set such a work for my desire to take out?” The plague/sin/shame has become a piece of art, embroidery too intricate to unpick. Philoclea is not only coming to terms with her desire, but questioning whether it really is the amor impossibilis that tradition calls it. After all, her own mother is clearly panting for the Amazon. “Either she sees a possibility in that which I think impossible, or else impossible loves need not misbecome me.” Sidney shows a wonderful comic touch here in having Philoclea play the dutiful daughter, following her mother in everything, even lesbian lust. At this point she goes beyond the wide-eyed heroine of Isaac de Benserade’s Iphis et Iante (1637), who merely, vaguely wished that she could marry a woman without offending natural law. In the whispered but defiant conclusion of Philoclea’s speech, she seems to conclude that natural law does not matter:

  “Away, then, all vain examinations of why and how. Thou lovest me, excellent Zelmane, and I love thee!” And with that embracing the very ground whereon she lay, she said to herself (for even to herself she was ashamed to speak it
out in words), “O my Zelmane! Govern and direct me, for I am wholly given over unto thee.”

  Sidney puts the lovers through many more complications and embarrassments (including the obligatory bathing scene) before “Zelmane” finally reveals his sex. Philoclea’s shock gradually gives way to relief—but, interestingly, she is not ready to deny the same-sex desire that led her to this point. In fact, she harps on it.

  Though the pureness of my virgin mind be stained, let me keep the true simplicity of my word. True it is (alas, too true it is), O Zelmane (for so I love to call thee, since in that name my love first began, and in the shade of that name my love shall best lie hidden), that even while so thou wert—what eye bewitched me, I know not—my passions were fitter to desire than to be desired.

  It is as if she is almost nostalgic for the old “stain,” the time when she was the active desirer rather than the passive desired, and is not yet ready to let go of the imaginary “Zelmane” who first won her love.

  One of Sidney’s sources was Jorge de Montemayor’s pastoral romance Diana (1559), an influential bestseller not only in Spanish but in French, Dutch, German, and English translation, which includes a remarkable twist on the male amazon plot. At a party of shepherdesses, Selvagia finds herself “suddenly enamoured”78 with a visitor whose face—except for her beautiful eyes—is veiled.

  But she seeing me sitting in this perplexitie, pulled out the fairest, and most dainty hand, that ever I did see, and taking mine into it, did with a sweete and amorous eie a little while behold me: whereupon being now so striken in love, as toong cannot expresse, I said unto her. It is not onely this hand, most faire and gracious Shepherdesse, that is always ready to serve thee, but also her hart and thoughts, to whom it appertaineth.

  This is a spontaneous passion in one woman for another, not prompted by cross-dressing. But the crafty Ismenia immediately “complotted in her minde to mocke” Selvagia, as one of her “fonde prankes,” we are told: Ismenia assures her she returns her feelings. What amazes Selvagia is not that her beloved is a woman, but her own luck in winning a woman of whom she is so unworthy: “How can it be, gentle Shepherdesse, that thy selfe being so passing faire, shouldest fall in love with her, who wants it so much,” i.e., who lacks that beauty. After the usual vows of eternal love, “our mutual embracings were so many” that the two are completely distracted from the singing and dancing. When Selvagia pleads to see behind the veil, Ismenia reveals a “somewhat manlike” but beautiful face, and makes a startling declaration: