In this chapter, then, I explore the second storyline of love between women: based on likeness, it springs up spontaneously, with no need for gender disguise as a trigger. Let us begin with this plot’s earliest source, a famous declaration of love that has been read at a million weddings.
Intreat me not6 to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.
The odd thing is that Ruth is making this promise not to her bridegroom, but to her former mother-in-law, Naomi. The story of this unlikely pair is told in the Old Testament book of Ruth, an anonymous Hebrew tale written down probably before the Babylonian Exile of 586 B.C.E. Since the death of Naomi’s son—Ruth’s husband—the two women have no legal relationship, and nothing obvious in common: not age, nor tribe, nor religion (Ruth is Moabite, Naomi Israelite). Yet “Ruth clave under her,” we are told, and the verb (dabaq, to cling, cleave, or hold fast to something), is used four times in two chapters to emphasize the seriousness of the younger woman’s purpose. For modern readers it is hard to grasp the enormity of Ruth’s plan to go with Naomi into Israel: think of a one-way trip to the moon. “Where thou lodgest, I will lodge” refers not to the location but to the quality of shelter: Ruth means that she is willing to be a vagrant and beggar. Her generosity even extends beyond this life, since she is giving up all hope of being buried with her ancestors. The vow at the end formally places Ruth in Naomi’s bondage and asks to be—in the more explicit original—struck with afflictions if she lets anything but death divide her from Naomi. By the end of this peculiar story, Naomi has helped Ruth elicit protection, and then a proposal of marriage, from one of Naomi’s kinsmen. But its climax is when Ruth puts her newborn son into Naomi’s arms. The women neighbors remark that Naomi has a son once more, “for thy daughter in law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons, hath born him.”
So what is this bond between two women which can surpass the love of seven sons? It has generally been glossed as daughterly affection—but it is quite different, because it is voluntary, not based on the duties of blood, law, or tradition. Over the centuries, many readers have seen the book of Ruth as a scriptural proof of the potential for a same-sex love that is as holy as it is romantic. One of them, in a Scottish poem7 written before 1586, offers Ruth and Naomi as a shining example to set against the more famous male-female and male-male couples that the poet lists. It is more than a little ironic that a story about two women reduced to begging for food became the touchstone for the ideal of love between leisured, literate ladies.
Perhaps what writers liked about this kind of bond was that it seemed so unlike the one between men and women as codified in marriage. They imagined it as pure emotion, soaring above the worldly concerns of law, economics, and reproduction. Sharon Marcus says of Victorian women that
as an ideal,8 friendship was defined by altruism, generosity, mutual indebtedness, and a perfect balance of power. In a capitalist society deeply ambivalent about competition, female friendship offered a vision of perfect reciprocity for those who could afford not to worry about daily survival.
So was this kind of love thought to be sexual? Well, that all depends. If sex is about penises in vaginas, then no, obviously. If sex is about the touching of genitals, then no, probably not, in most cases. The writers I look at in this chapter seem to share a working assumption that is subtly different from amor impossibilis. Not that women cannot have sex with each other, but that women (upper- and middle-class women, at least—educated and virtuous women) would not dream of such a thing. Whatever private views9 some authors may have held, this was the official line.
But (as we have already seen with cross-dressing plots) a safety net allows for free movement: if everything heroines felt for their friends was technically nonsexual, then it was acceptable to represent it as important, intense (whether idyllic or stormy), and expressed by passionate caresses as well as words. Sharon Marcus sums it up neatly: “Precisely because10 Victorians saw lesbian sex almost nowhere, they could embrace erotic desire between women almost everywhere.” Nowadays we tend to define sex much more broadly, which is why I will be reading certain passages about particularly ecstatic, private embraces as, effectively, sex scenes. Bear in mind, however, that in the world of these plays and fictions, the embraces are neither shocking nor the focus: it is the love they express that really matters to the story.
In French and English literature from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, such love goes by many names, from “romantic” or “tender” friendship to “amity,” “amitié,” or simply “love.” Typically, playwrights and novelists borrow the feelings of Ruth and Naomi, but not their situation: they are more interested in the charming scenario of a pair of girls whose bond emerges naturally from their similarity and mutual familiarity. The girls are either shown as growing up together or as being “kindred spirits” who fall in love at first meeting. Because of their likeness in age and background, they can act as mirrors to each other, although events will often reveal their characters as contrasting. Because of their youth, their bond can represent freedom and innocence on the brink of being lost in adulthood. The fervor of the girls’ love11 is often further justified—especially in Victorian fiction, with its cult of family—by their being cousins or sisters (full, step, half, or foster). In many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, two women passionately drawn to each other on sight will turn out to be—surprise!—sisters; as in the case of the male amazon disguise, we are supposed to assume that their unconscious recognition of each other prompted the attraction.
The shorthand I use12 for such love is inseparability, not only because inseparable was a common term for female pairs by the late sixteenth century, but because the word foreshadows the plot this kind of love tends to produce: a threat of separation, whether of the literal or emotional kind. Just as, in the scripture, we hear nothing of Ruth’s feelings until the moment Naomi tells her to go home, so in Western literature from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, love between two inseparables rarely moves into the spotlight until the moment someone tries to pry them apart.
SHALL WE BE SUNDER’D?
William Shakespeare’s comedy13 As You Like It (staged in 1600, published in 1623) is still the most famous portrayal of female friendship in the literary canon, and the prototypical inseparability plot. Rosalind and her cousin Celia have grown up together at the ducal court of Celia’s father (who has banished his brother, Rosalind’s father, as a traitor), and they delight everyone with their witty, warm sparring; “never two ladies loved as they do,” comments one man. When Duke Ferdinand, jealous of the niece who outshines his daughter, strips Rosalind of her fortune and sends her into exile, Celia stands up to him and insists that the two must be judged as one:
I know her. If she be a traitor,
Why so am I: we still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, eat together;
And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable.
Celia is insisting that what makes their bond unbreakable is not law, not blood (even though they are kin), but intimacy. “Shall we be sunder’d? Shall we part, sweet girl?” she asks Rosalind. “No; let my father seek another heir.” So they run away together in disguise, Rosalind (crossing gender lines) as a man and Celia (crossing class ones) as a shepherdess. Shakespeare borrowed his plot from Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), which has origins both classical (Lodge describes the girls, in an ancient phrase that has been attributed to Aristotle, as having “two bodies, and one soule”) and Christian (since her cousin’s vow to be Rosalynde’s “faithful copartner” and “felow mate” through all trials audibly echoes the book of Ruth). But Shakespeare added some interesting ambiguities. F
or all the heroic setup, the friendship has the flippant rhythms of a music-hall act. From her first few lines, Celia often (and only semi-teasingly) implies that their passion is lopsided: “I see thou lov’st me not with the full weight that I love thee,” she complains, and a few scenes later, “Rosalind lacks, then, the love / Which teacheth thee that thou and I am one.” Celia bears the weight of this friendship, does all the work. Again in that opening scene, she warns Rosalind to “love no man in good earnest,” and when her cousin does fall for the handsome Orlando, Celia’s teasing has a persistently dark edge (“his kisses are Judas’s own children”) that suggests her resentment of any suitor daring to encroach on their joint adventure. In the sketchy way that Shakespeare often winds up his subplots, he produces a brother of Orlando’s at the end who—offstage, with no warning—proposes to Celia. This ensures that the two friends will not be “sunder’d,” at least. But something has been lost; Rosalind and Celia could hardly be described as “coupled and inseparable” anymore, and Celia is given not a word to say in the fifth act. As a love story, theirs is anticlimactic. But the sparkling repartee and credible warmth of their rapport—and, of course, their adventuring in butch/femme disguise—make them an unforgettable duo, with an immense influence on later plays and fiction about love between women.
In her groundbreaking study14 The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, Valerie Traub argues that love between girls in plays such as As You Like It is only allowed to amount to a charming phase, a brief delay in the plot’s thrust toward a marital resolution. Certainly, in George Chapman’s Monsieur D’Olive (1606) and in The Two Noble Kinsmen (performed in 1613, published in 1634, probably a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher), one girl is already dead when the action begins, so the onus is on the survivor to get over her grief and grow up. Emilia15 in The Two Noble Kinsmen not only feels a commitment to her dead friend but a strong “persuasion” toward women, what Hippolyta criticizes as a “sickly appetite”; Emilia insists that she will never “love any that’s call’d man,” and argues “That the true love ’tween maid and maid may be / More than in sex dividual” (meaning “between opposite sexes”). In both plays the relationship has already been curtailed by death, but is still described in terms serious and erotic enough to disturb observers. Certainly this kind of love does not prevent marriage—since both characters will finally be persuaded to break the vows of virginity they made to their lost beloveds—but it has a lingering force.
Along the same lines as As You Like It, but often without humor to leaven the heroics, there are many plays and fictions in which young women go to extraordinary lengths for each other’s sake. Leading the field is William Davenant’s Love and Honor (written about 1634, published in 1649), about the “fond excess of love”16 between two kidnapped princesses. In a climax that verges on the ludicrous, when Evandra is under sentence of death Melora ties her up, borrows her clothes, and presents herself for execution in Evandra’s place “with / As liberall joy, as to the marriage priest”; the simile suggests that this is an ecstatic consummation of friendship.
Occasionally the friends are not a pair of similar young ladies but mistress and maid, their intense fondness based on sworn service but transcending it: examples include Chrétien de Troyes’s romance Yvain (1100s), adapted into the anonymous English Ywain and Gawain (1300s); Lodowick Carlell’s play The Deserving Favourite (1630); Jane Wiseman’s play Antiochus the Great (1702); and Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas (1759)—a short philosophical bestseller, composed in a week to pay for his mother’s funeral. John Fletcher’s play The Pilgrim (1622) gives a maid the startling declaration, “My Mistresse is my husband,17 with her I’le dwell still.” This kind of loyalty becomes pathological in Daniel Defoe’s novel Roxana (1724): the heroine both damages and is damaged by her fiercely protective maid, Amy, who ends up murdering Roxana’s long-lost daughter.
But perhaps the most extraordinary18 take on mistress-maid inseparability is Jane Barker’s brusque story “The Unaccountable Wife” (part of her patchwork-style fiction of 1723, A Patchwork Screen for the Ladies). Here a bond formed within the traditional family ends up destroying it. Because the (unnamed) wife is barren, the (unnamed) maid swaps roles with her and gives birth to the husband’s babies; the wife pampers her and does the housework, and all three share the marital bed. This arrangement, shocking though it is to the neighbors (mostly for its violation of class boundaries), lasts until the husband, feeling financially burdened by all these children, kicks them and their mother out. The joke is that the deal he thought was for his convenience turns out to have nothing to do with him: the wife makes the “unaccountable” choice to go with the woman she describes as her only friend in the world, and ends up begging on the street to support her and the children. This enigmatic tale has none of the gushy rhetoric of a play such as Davenant’s Love and Honor, but they sit side by side in a long tradition of women’s inseparability put to the test.
Hubert François Gravelot, “Lepremier baiser de l’amour” [“Love’s first kiss”] (1760), engraved by N. Le Mire, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloïse (1761).
A student under Boucher, a friend to Hogarth, and a teacher to Gainsborough during a thirteen-year sojourn in England, Gravelot was known for his illustrations to luxury editions of novels. Although his title refers to the famous first kiss between Julie and St. Preux in the little grove, arranged by Claire in complicity with Julie, what Gravelot actually shows is the moment just before it, when the man seems to be aspiring to share (or break?) the intimacy of the female couple.
In the novel as it had developed in England and France by the middle of the eighteenth century, such “unaccountable” devotions were to be fully accounted for in terms that may sound gushy to modern ears, but are no less burningly sincere for that. French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), probably the bestselling work of fiction of the century, sent many of its readers into frenzies of emotion; one of them wrote to tell Rousseau that it had worked so powerfully on him that it cured his cold. La Nouvelle Héloïse is one of the most famous treatments of a lasting passion between two women; plot summaries, which always focus on the men in Julie’s life, fail to capture the importance for Rousseau of love between women as an expression of pure, unworldly sensibility. Claire is our heroine’s “inseparable Cousin,”19 and, like Celia in As You Like It, the one who feels most. But as Janet Todd argues,20 despite her name there is nothing clear about her love for Julie: it is complicated throughout the novel by her urge to manipulate and dominate her beloved. Claire insists on being the intermediary in Julie’s courtship by their tutor St. Preux, for instance, and is outraged to hear that the couple thought of eloping without her: “To intend to abandon your friend! To plan to run away without me!” Through correspondence she keeps a close hold on Julie through the subsequent crises (pregnancy, miscarriage, renunciation, and an arranged marriage to Wolmar).
“As a woman I am a sort of monster,” Claire warns D’Orbe before their own wedding ceremony, “and by I know not what quirk of nature friendship for me takes precedence over love. When I tell you that my Julie is dearer to me than you, you merely laugh, and yet nothing is more true.” D’Orbe may laugh, but he does nothing to interfere with his wife’s prior commitment. Julie’s lover St. Preux, on the other hand, adores watching the young ladies together.
Ye gods! What a ravishing spectacle or rather what ecstasy, to behold two such moving Beauties tenderly embracing, the one’s face resting on the other’s breast, their sweet tears flowing together…I was jealous of such a tender friendship.
But this is jealousy without a sting, and years later he tells Claire that “my heart knows no difference between you, nor feels the least inclination to separate the Inseparables.” Although St. Preux’s21 titillated “voluptuous empathy” with the women’s love might seem to have nothing in common with D’Orbe’s laughter, the two men have come by different
routes to the same conclusion: that this overwhelming passion between women need not get in the way of men’s claims on them. Widowed, Claire arrives to finally live with her beloved and Wolmar and raise their children together—but instead, Julie dies in her arms. Claire
threw herself upon her body, warmed it with hers, endeavoured to revive it, pressed it, clung to it in a sort of rage, called it loudly by a thousand passionate names, and sated her despair with all these pointless efforts […] rolling around on the floor wringing her hands and biting the legs of the chairs, murmuring some extravagant words in a muted voice, then at long intervals uttering piercing cries […] the convulsions with which she was seized were something frightening.
Eighteenth-century readers, no less than twenty-first-century ones, would have registered the pornographic overtones of this passage; in 1959 Hans Wolpe commented nervously that “the ambiguity is preserved22 only by one fact: we are dealing with a dead body.” In this vast novel’s last letter the “inseparable Cousin” writes of her death wish: Julie’s coffin “awaits the rest of its prey…it will not wait for long.” Rousseau presents Claire’s lifelong refusal to be parted from her beloved as peculiar, in some ways destructive to both, and yet gloriously romantic.
Writing about the ways Rousseau’s and other eighteenth-century novels reconcile marriage and same-sex love, Susan Lanser calls the women’s friendships “consolatory adjuncts23 that enable the heterosexual plot.” But Sharon Marcus’s book on Victorian literature rethinks this enabling role: she comes to the conclusion that there is nothing subordinate about relationships between women in courtship novels. The friend is beloved, confidante, matchmaker, and permanent beloved family member rolled into one: “Marriage plots24 unite not only a man and a woman but two social institutions, friendship and marriage, which begin as separate but are finally united in a kind of Moebius strip or feedback loop.” Perhaps the most fascinating of Marcus’s examples is Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (1864–65), in which spinster Kate is not merely happy at the prospect of her brother George marrying her friend Alice, so they can all live together, but does the wooing for him, including the traditional proposal on bended knee: “‘Oh, Alice,25 may I hope? Alice, my own Alice, my darling, my friend! Say that it shall be so!’ And Kate knelt at her friend’s feet upon the heather, and looked up into her face with eyes full of tears.”
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