And because thou maist knowe (faire Shepherdesse) the summe of this paine which thy beautie hath made me feele, and that the words which have passed betweene us but in sport, are true, knowe, that I am a man, and not a woman.
Selvagia “then was so far besides my selfe, that I knew not what to answere her”—possibly because she had not been thinking of their wooing as “sport” at all. Notice that she cannot help still using feminine pronouns for her beloved: “I felt my selfe so intangled in her love.” She issues only a gentle rebuke:
Faire Shepherdesse, that hast (to make me live without libertie, or for some other respect, which fortune best knows) taken upon thee the habit [costume] of her, who for thy love hath entirely vowed her affections to thee, thine owne hath sufficed to overcome me, without making me yeelde with mine own weapons.
The male amazon trick is here described oddly as a matter of overpowering a woman with her own weapons—taking advantage of her natural appreciation for the beauties of her own sex. But of course, the real trick is that Ismenia is only pretending to be a man in disguise; she is conquering Selvagia with the borrowed weapon of (putative) manhood. Once again, it seems as if the motif of the male amazon has the primary purpose of revealing the erotic potential in women’s friendship.
The sheer length of Renaissance prose romance, and its accommodating structure, derived from Greek fiction as well as chivalric sources; the intertwining of different plots, and the nesting of distinct episodes within the text, could be said to make it an obvious home for a subject that required some explanation, such as desire between women. Philosophically,79 too, it was the right form; it is in works with a Neoplatonic emphasis on lofty emotions, including Amadis de Gaule, L’Astrée, the Arcadia, and Diana, that we find extended dialogues and monologues devoted to a heroine’s awareness of her growing involvement with (as she thinks) another woman.
But what theater lacks in leisurely analysis, it can make up in excitement. John Fletcher’s gripping tragicomedy The Loyal Subject (written 1618, published 1647), for instance, hinges on a lady’s tormented attraction to her maid. Olympia falls for the “handsome wench,” “Alinda,” so hard and fast that she cannot convince herself it is merely friendship, especially since it involves breaching age and class boundaries. She reacts with fierce jealousy when her own brother, the duke, starts making up to “Alinda.” The context of war heightens everything, and intensifies the play’s theme of loyalty under fire: as an enemy army approaches, “Alinda” vows to defend “her” mistress to the death, and Olympia hovers on the verge of acknowledging her feelings as sexual: “O my Jewell,80 / How much I am bound to love thee: by this hand wench / If thou wert a man—” She cannot finish her sentence, but she and “Alinda,” take the pseudomarital step of exchanging rings. When a misunderstanding over the duke parts them, the maid’s “too much loving Mistris” is thrown into into what is described significantly as a “monstrous melancholy.” The inappropriateness of this relationship borders on the monstrous, and certainly on the insane: “Sure she was mad of this wench,” comments one woman. Enter a man called Archas, claiming to be the identical brother of “Alinda,” and announcing her death. Olympia’s devastated, guilty speech uses curiously gender-neutral pronouns for the maid who was her “best companion”:
I saw all this, I knew all this, I lov’d it,
I doated on it too, and yet I kil’d it:
O what have I forsaken? what have I lost?
It is as if she cannot dare to say, “I loved her, I killed her.” Only at this point are any anxieties the audience may be feeling about this same-sex passion relieved by the revelation that this is a man-in-skirts plot after all. Like Shakespeare in Twelfth Night, Fletcher winds up his daring storyline with a jarringly pat transition; Archas admits to Olympia that he was “Alinda” all along, and she accepts the news—and Archas—with a readiness that in no way matches the turbulent complexity of her feelings for his “sister.” Denise Walen makes81 the interesting suggestion that the last-minute introduction of the brother-who-was-only-pretending-to-be-the-sister does not nullify the women’s love, but acts as an Ovidian sex change, turning an officially impossible relationship into a marital one.
That argument helps explain the reader’s experience of Margaret Cavendish’s drama The Convent of Pleasure (1668), which was never performed in her lifetime and languished in obscurity for centuries but is attracting great attention today. Lady Happy and her rich friends have withdrawn from the world to give themselves over to the pleasures of the senses in an all-female community. Their friendship becomes erotically heightened when some of them dress up in men’s clothes to “act Lovers-parts”82 in private theatricals. Then comes a visitor, a “Princess” whose “Masculine Presence” makes her particularly good at wearing breeches and wooing Lady Happy. Like Diane in Amadis de Gaule, Lady Happy confronts her dilemma head-on: she fears her desire is against “Nature”—but then starts wondering, “why may not I love a Woman with the same affection I could a Man?” This kind of explicit analysis is more commonly found in romance (Orlando Furioso, Arcadia, Amadis de Gaule, L’Astrée) than in drama. The persuasive “Princess” assures Lady Happy that love between women is innocent. (An eavesdropper who watches them kiss, Madam Mediator, mutters that “Womens Kisses are unnatural.”) The blissful couple exchange vows to “Join as one Body and Soul,” with the whole community dancing in celebration. Only then, after this same-sex wedding, is the “Princess” revealed as a prince in disguise. By keeping the disguise a secret from the audience/readers, as Fletcher did in The Loyal Subject but with more open eroticism, Margaret Cavendish effectively creates a play about passion between women, with an Ovidian transformation ending.
If the delayed revelation of a female bridegroom’s true sex, in seventeenth-century drama, has the effect of allowing audiences to take a courtship seriously because they believe it to be a heterosexual one, then the postponed unmasking of a male amazon has the opposite effect: it forces watchers or readers to confront the idea of same-sex desire for quite a while before soothing them with a last-minute transformation. But Joseph Harris makes83 the interesting point that both motifs stress “the contiguity of female desire and friendship,” whether by “de-sexualising inter-female desire” in female bridegroom stories (presenting it as jokey, platonic, or easy to tone down into friendship) or by “eroticizing inter-female affection” in male amazon ones (letting the hero discover a discreet world of flirtatious kisses and caresses between women friends). Once again, we must conclude that it is impossible to completely separate the cultural history of desire between women from friendship; not that it is “all the same thing,” but that it is in the vast territory where they overlap that the most interesting works are written.
The male amazon motif seems to have peaked in the seventeenth century. It lingered84 for a while: a popular example is the legend of Deidamia competing with her own father for the love of “Artamene” (Achilles in female disguise), which was the subject of more than thirty operas performed between 1663 and 1785. But it effectively died out of Western literature during the eighteenth century, probably because its feminizing of the hero and the scenes of self-conscious same-sex eroticism it provoked became more troubling to audiences and readers.
The female bridegroom, too, began to arouse some unease in the eighteenth century, at least on the public stage. (It was still thriving in fiction.) It is hard to date85 this shift, but according to playwright Nicolas Boindin, the Princesse Palatine banned his comedy Le Bal d’Auteuil (1702) purely because of a scene in which two mutually duped female bridegrooms made advances to each other. Laurence Senelick, in his study of cross-dressing and theater, quotes an English review of 1750 complaining about a scene in which Peg Woffington, in one of her famous “breeches parts,”
makes love;86 but there is no one in the audience ever saw her without disgust; it is insipid, or it is worse; it conveys no ideas at all, or very hateful ones; and either the insensibility, or the disgust we conceiv
e, quite break in upon the delusion.
This does not signal the end of female bridegroom roles, only a new uncertainty about whether such scenes were merely unrealistic or actually perverted. Lasting in highly conventionalized forms (think of the Principal Boy, hero of the traditional British pantomime, always played by a woman), this kind of cross-dressing has never been entirely banished from the stage.
In English fiction, nineteenth-century authors did not quite give up on the female bridegroom, but those few who did write about her felt obliged to provide her with armor against her critics. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s87 Gothic story “The Grey Woman” (published by Dickens in All the Year Round in 1861), Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life (1874), and Dorothy Blomfield’s “The Reputation of Mademoiselle Claude” (Temple Bar, July 1885), for instance, the cross-dressed woman must have an altruistic motive for her disguise, to make her intense romance with another woman acceptable, and at least one of the two must die.
A notable French exception is Théophile Gautier’s philosophical novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). (Gautier is said to have been inspired by his friend George Sand, by the seventeenth-century actress Madeleine de Maupin, and also by Henri de Latouche’s influential novel of 1829 about a hermaphrodite, Fragoletta.) Critics have focused on the book’s interest in aestheticism and androgyny, but what they often fail to point out is how central the theme of same-sex desire is. Mlle de Maupin, finding herself liberated by male disguise as “Théodore,” is strongly attracted to both the Chevalier d’Albert and his lover, Rosette, and she befriends and flirts with them both. In a graceful nod to the female bridegroom tradition, Gautier has them act out As You Like It, with Maupin playing Rosalind to d’Albert’s Orlando and Rosette’s Phebe. Neither is sure whether Maupin is a man or a woman, and both have to face the likelihood that their desires are same-sex ones. Maupin claims to have no idea how she might satisfy Rosette, but in a nice irony, it is heterosexual initiation that enlightens her about the whole range of possible techniques: once d’Albert has bedded Maupin, “Théodore” goes into Rosette’s room. Here follows a paragraph of tongue-in-cheek circumlocution, beginning with “What she said or did88 there I have never been able to ascertain, though I have done the most conscientious research.” The narrator claims to have grilled the chambermaid, who not only described the way Rosette’s sheets were “rumpled and untidy and carried the imprint of two bodies,” but produced two pearls (just like the ones “Théodore” was wearing onstage) she found in the bed.
I pass this piece of information on to my wise readers and leave them to make of it what they will. As for myself, I have made a thousand conjectures on the subject, each more preposterous than the one before, and so outrageous that I really don’t dare to set them down on paper, even in the most respectable, euphemistic words.
The negative space of the mark left by two bodies; the clitoral symbolism of two pearls: that is all Gautier sets against the seven pages of joyous lovemaking he has given us between Maupin and d’Albert.
Patricia Duncker points out89 that Gautier could have written an erotic scene between the women here if he had wanted to; by 1835 French readers had encountered such things before, in literature as well as pornography (see chapter 4), and earlier in Mademoiselle de Maupin we have been treated to elaborate descriptions of nipple-stiffening embraces between Rosette and “Théodore.” She argues that Gautier is able to show us d’Albert in bed with Maupin-as-a-woman, but not what happens in Rosette’s room, because s/he who finally satisfies Rosette is “the cross-dressed lover, the woman who is also a man,” the third term, which cannot be “made visible” but lives in the reader’s mind. Duncker’s reading accounts for the tantalizing oddity of the scene, but we should also remember that Gautier, for all his iconoclasm, was writing within a literary tradition. A tradition in which, for at least three centuries, amor between women, whether cross-dressed or not—perhaps impossibilis, or perhaps not—had been routinely called (to borrow Gautier’s words) “strange,” “preposterous,” and “outrageous,” and veiled by language coy, “euphemistic,” and downright deceptive.
Even so, Maupin could be called the last great female bridegroom. Unlike most of her predecessors, she refuses to settle in the end for the pleasures of one gender role or one sexual preference.
I am of a third, separate sex90 which does not yet have a name…My dream, a chimera, would be to have both sexes in turn, to satisfy this dual nature. Man today, woman tomorrow, I should reserve for my lovers my loving tenderness, my submissive and devoted attentions, my softest caresses, my sad little sighs, everything which belongs to my feline, feminine nature. Then with my mistresses I should be enterprising, bold, passionate, dominant, with my hat pulled down over my ear, with the demeanour of a captain and an adventurer.
Although the phrase “third sex” would be borrowed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to describe “inverts” as male minds trapped in women’s bodies (or vice versa), its original meaning here is much less tragic. Maupin seems to have no objection to her female body, she just does not want to have to pick one sartorial, behavioral, and sexual style. Or, God forbid, one lover. Unlike in Fragoletta (1829), or later works in the same line, such as Rachilde’s Madame Adonis (1888), this promiscuous androgyne does not die. Gautier lets Maupin ride confidently off into the dawn, writing to d’Albert and Rosette (with, as Duncker points out, a blasphemous echo of Christ’s words in the Mass) that they should “love one another in remembrance of me.”
In the preface,91 Gautier declares, “The only things that are really beautiful are those which have no use,” which is applicable both to his artistic credo and his heroine’s playfully nonreproductive sexuality. Though Mademoiselle de Maupin invokes the spirit of Shakespearean comedy, its readers found it breathtakingly modern. It would become the bible of decadent literature half a century after publication, and influence many other novels—including Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), in which the title character gets to literally fulfill Maupin’s dream of living as a man and a woman in turn.
In the twentieth century,92 lesbian writers began to rework the female bridegroom motif self-consciously. Jeanette Winterson’s postmodern fantasia of Napoleonic Venice, The Passion (1987), is an excellent example of a text that can be illuminated by an awareness of the long tradition in which it sits. Winterson may have had all sorts of reasons for centering her story on a girl dressed as a boy (to work as a croupier), but what is undeniable is that this erudite author was also giving her own spin to the ancient motif of the female bridegroom. Having won the love of a married woman, our heroine-in-breeches decides to risk being honest with her by means of a classic gesture.
I went back to her house93 and banged on the door. She opened it a little. She looked surprised. “I’m a woman,” I said, lifting up my shirt and risking the catarrh.
She smiled. “I know.”
I didn’t go home. I stayed.
What is new is not the smile—we saw that in some eighteenth-century novels such as Mademoiselle de Richelieu—but the “I know,” which demolishes the cliché of the naïve bride. The Passion simultaneously takes part in the old game of gender-bending, and takes it apart.
CHAPTER TWO
Inseparables
FROM A TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY perspective it is easy to see why women dressing as men would trigger desire in other women, because opposites attract: it is one of our culture’s most beloved truisms. So why is it1 that in most of the texts we have been looking at, it is the female bridegroom’s beauty, sweetness, delicacy, politeness, and compassion—more or rather than her borrowed masculinity—that other women find so irresistible? And why, if it is opposites that attract, would female characters be equally drawn to men (gentle, polite, beautiful men) disguised as women?
The fact is, in Renaissance literature, love was very often thought to be based not on contrast but on similarity; the classical model was the romantic bond between two men. Like calls to like;2 birds of a feather f
lock together. There is an intriguing exchange in Honoré D’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607–27), when a jealous man called Hylas asks sneeringly if “Alexis” (a man disguised as a priestess) finds shepherdesses more appealing than shepherds, and “she” answers proudly, “Have no doubt about it,3 and blame no one but nature, who wants everyone to love his own kind.” When Leonard Willan dramatized D’Urfé’s saga as Astraea (1651), he included a debate between a woman and a man, to be judged by their mutual object of desire, Diana. Phillis argues that same-sex passion is strongest because love grows from “Equality and Sympathy”;4 Sylvander counters that mating requires difference.
You plead th’advantage of yoor Sexe, as bent
To love semblable were natures Intent;
In Beasts see where her motives simple be,
Their preservations shall t’each contrarie.
Impressed by both arguments, Diana declares a draw between her two lovers. More than two centuries5 before the invention of sexual-identity words such as “heterosexual” or “homosexual,” this obscure English playwright recognized distinctions between the love of the same sex and the love of the opposite sex, but presented both as valid, in the dialectical form of a civilized debate.
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