Inseparable

by Emma Donoghue

  In this long, restless sentence, Phelps allows Eunice’s silence to speak with eloquent if frustrated desire. Eunice is found dead of heart failure later that day, as if seeing Christina depart has literally broken her heart.

  An 1899 story by Mary E. Wilkins (later Freeman), “The Tree of Knowledge,”48 has an odder premise but a similar resolution. In a hole in a tree, young Annie keeps finding letters from her secret admirer—but it turns out they have been written by Cornelia, her devoted elder sister. Cornelia claims that she went to these bizarre lengths in order to give her little sister an idealized standard of manhood, and prevent her from falling prey to some lowly suitor—but to a modern eye, it seems obvious that Cornelia has adopted a male persona to express the kind of passion for Annie that goes beyond what even inseparable sisterhood would allow. What Cornelia hid in the biblical “tree of knowledge,” once revealed, will expel her from the paradise of sisterly love. By the time Annie does marry her admirer, however, Cornelia has wrestled herself into submission, and earned a role (if a humble one) in her sister’s life again. In a moving image that alludes to the gospel parable of the bridesmaids, Wilkins tells us that Cornelia “had thrust herself and her own needs and sorrows so far behind her trimmed and burning lamp of love that she had become, as it were, a wedding-guest of all life.” Such painful denials49 and hints of a secret wish to compete with the male suitor are far from uncommon in the fiction of female inseparability.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Rivals

  THREE IS A CROWD, and often an uncomfortable one. We have looked at the fraught triangle of two women friends and one man, but it is when the neat distinction between opposite-sex “love” and same-sex “friendship” starts to break down that the triangle really teeters. What happens when the tension between a man and a woman who adore the same woman reveals itself as rivalry, a duel for her heart? If two is company, three can be war.

  Let us begin with a poem of Sappho’s variously known as “Fragment 31,” “Peer of the Gods,” or “To the Beloved,” in which a speaker watches in agitation as a male rival talks to a beloved woman. In the Greek, the speaker reveals herself as female only in the fourteenth of the seventeen lines. Here is an English version of 1711.

  Blest as th’immortal1 Gods is he,

  The Youth who fondly sits by thee,

  And hears and sees thee all the while,

  Softly speak, and sweetly smile.

  ’Twas this deprived my Soul of Rest,

  And rais’d such Tumults in my Breast;

  For while I gaz’d, in Transport tost,

  My Breath was gone, my Voice was lost:

  My Bosom glow’d; the subtle Flame

  Ran quick thro’ all my vital Frame;

  O’er my dim Eyes a Darkness hung;

  My Ears with hollow Murmurs rung.

  In dewy Damps my Limbs were chill’d,

  My Blood with gentle Horrors thrill’d;

  My feeble Pulse forgot to play;

  I fainted, sunk, and dy’d away.

  This lyric2 is one of the few surviving out of what is thought to have been an oeuvre of about twelve thousand lines by Sappho (born 612 B.C.E. on Lesbos; it was because of this famous Lesbian that the Greek word for her people came to be used of women-loving women as early as the tenth century C.E.). Fragment 31 happened to be saved for posterity because Longinus quoted it entire in his treatise On the Sublime, so it had more influence on literary history than anything else she wrote. But for all its popularity, the triangle of erotic rivalry in Sappho’s poem has made many of its translators and editors deeply uncomfortable. Anne Le Fèvre Dacier,3 for instance, titled her toned-down 1681 version “A son amie” to present its subject as mere female friendship. Taking a different tack, Joseph Addison added a note to Ambrose Phillips’s frank translation (1711, quoted above) to soothe his audience: “Whatever might have been4 the Occasion of this Ode, the English Reader will enter into the Beauties of it, if he supposes it to have been written in the Person of a Lover sitting by his Mistress.” (Addison is both hinting that the poem is about desire between women, and advising readers to banish this idea from their minds.) François Gacon5 in 1712 heterosexualized the poem itself, rewriting it—to make it “natural,” he explained in a footnote—as a woman’s jealous denunciation of the woman who sits beside the man they both love, and in 1768, E. B. Greene did the same thing in his English translation. In 1795,6 Abbé Jean-Marie Coupé offered a different but equally bold rewrite, converting it into a poem of worship of the goddess Aphrodite. And in 1855,7 in what Joan DeJean calls “the nadir of Sappho’s repression in France,” Paul-Pierre Rable despaired of this knotty problem and simply cut the poem off after the fifth line.

  But over the period8 in which these scholars struggled to disguise Fragment 31’s scenario, a surprising number of playwrights and novelists were taking the risk of laying bare the same triangle. In a competition between a male and a female character for the same woman, the issue is not who gets to sleep with her—as the women in these premodern texts are generally not sleeping with their male suitors anyway—but who gets her primary attention, who wins her heart. Which means that,9 long before there was widespread familiarity with the concept of a same-sex preference, it was possible to write stories in which male and female rivals duke it out on the battlefield of love.

  Obviously this motif is a variation on the ancient plot of two men competing for a woman—but it works rather differently. The two roads are not evenly matched, nor do they wield the same weapons. The woman in the middle stands at a crossroads, and in a sense it is not just an individual, but a whole sex, that will win her.

  RAKES VS. LADIES

  The eighteenth century was boom time for the novel, and this new genre offered ample room for psychological analysis of complicated situations such as rivalry between a woman and a man for the love of a woman. I want to look at four contrasting works of fiction in which ladies must choose between charismatic but unscrupulous rakes and passionate female friends.

  Printer-turned-novelist Samuel Richardson’s masterpiece Clarissa (1747–48) follows, over eight compelling volumes, a rake’s plot to seduce a virtuous beauty. Lovelace (a pun on loveless) aims to strip Clarissa of all her armor: her home, her family, her self-respect, and, not least, her Anna. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought Clarissa the most extraordinary novel ever written, borrowed its structure of a correspondence between the angelic heroine and her tougher, proto-feminist adorer for his La Nouvelle Héloïse [1761].) When Lovelace steals some of the letters the two women constantly exchange, he is disconcerted to encounter “so fervent a friendship.”10 It is most fervent on the side of Anna, who boasts of loving Clarissa “as never woman loved another,” and refers mockingly to male suitors: “How charmingly might you and I live together and despite them all!” But Lovelace clings to the traditional belief that love between young women is only a brief flame, not a “steady fire”; a feeble alliance between the weak, “One reed to support another!” He derides it as a childhood game,

  a cork-bottomed shuttlecock, which they are fond of striking to and fro, to make one another glow in the frosty weather of a single state; but which, when a man comes in between the pretended inseparables, is given up like their music and other maidenly amusements.

  Although he would never admit to taking Anna seriously as a rival, Lovelace treats her like one. Having tricked Clarissa into running away with him, he keeps the two women apart and at times even manages to disrupt their correspondence and make them misunderstand and suspect each other.

  Their friendship survives all these obstacles—but the problem is that it is of absolutely no practical use in saving Clarissa from her fate. Like Shakespeare’s Celia, Anna at several points shows a wistful awareness that her friend, far from returning this passionate love, is made uneasy by it. Anna wants to take bold action along the lines of As You Like It, telling Clarissa, “If you allow of it,11 I protest I will go off privately with you, and we will live and die tog
ether.” But the problem with her gallant offer of “knight-errantry”—only one of many she makes in the novel—is the qualifying phrase “if you allow of it,” because Clarissa never will. Echoing the book of Ruth, Anna insists she would “accompany you as your shadow whithersoever you go,” but Clarissa returns Anna’s gifts of money, will not run away with her in case it damages her friend’s reputation, and—finally drugged and raped by a desperate Lovelace—refuses to let Anna tell the authorities. She effectively starves and wills herself to death (a ladylike, sinless form of suicide), and will not even allow Anna to visit her on her deathbed. The way Clarissa sees it, the noblest act of friendship she can perform is to keep Anna at a safe distance from all these shameful horrors—and keep up the pressure until Anna reluctantly agrees to marry the suitor who has been waiting faithfully for her. “Love me still, however. But let it be with a weaning love,” Clarissa advises. “I am not what I was when we were inseparable lovers.” Lovelace has failed to tear the friends apart, but he has subtly alienated them, with the result that Anna only gets to embrace her beloved when she finds her laid out dead in her father’s house. It is only in this scene that Anna’s desire can safely declare itself as both possessive and physical (though in a chaster, more English way than we saw in La Nouvelle Héloïse):

  Why […] was she sent hither? Why not to me?—She has no Father, no Mother, no Relations, no, not one!—They had all renounced her. I was her sympathizing friend—And had not I the best right to my dear creature’s remains—And must Names, without Nature, be preferred to such a Love as mine?

  Again she kissed her lips, each cheek, her forehead;—and sighed as if her heart would break.

  Despite being the longest novel in English, Richardson’s Clarissa was a huge success, and had a strong influence on British and other European literatures until well into the nineteenth century. So who wins this, the original duel between rakish rapist and devoted friend? Nobody, really. By the end of the novel, one of the male characters comments that Clarissa and Anna have thoroughly proved “the force of female friendship,”12 but it is only a spiritual victory. The irony is that Anna could have saved Clarissa by ignoring her friend’s reservations, overruling her, turning up with a carriage and dragging her away—in fact, by acting rather like Lovelace. The exquisite goodness of the women’s friendship—its egalitarian, sensitive, honorable quality—wins it a place in heaven (where Clarissa fondly expects to be reunited with Anna), but in this world, it achieves very little.

  One of the first stories in which a man openly acknowledges that he has a female rival is found in a very different kind of eighteeth-century text, Anthony Hamilton’s Mémoires de la Vie du Comte de Grammont (1713; in English, Memoirs of the Life of Count de Grammont). This rambling, fictionalized biography by the count’s brother-in-law includes a cruelly satirical tale of competition between the sexes in the erotically experimental Restoration court.

  Lord Rochester (a rake notorious, incidentally, for his poems about sex with boys as well as women) goes head-to-head with a senior maid of honor, Mistress Hobart. Ugly, and so obviously drawn to women that the ignorant spread rumors that she must be a hermaphrodite, Mistress Hobart has “a tender Heart,13 whose Sensibility, some pretended, was in Favour of the Fair Sex.” (Hamilton’s phrase “some pretended” is a classic example of an author hedging his bets by presenting lesbianism coyly as an unproved hypothesis.) She wins the affection of young Miss Sarah—but quickly loses the girl to the seductive Lord Rochester. In the next round, Mistress Hobart is prepared to play dirty. Charged by her duchess employer with protecting the silly young maid of honor Mistress Temple from Rochester, she sets about it with zeal, offering the girl sweetmeats and flattery, and inviting her to retire with her to the privacy of “the bathing closet.” (Terry Castle points out14 that sweets have been a staple of lesbian seduction in literature ever since the seventeenth century, to be joined by nude bathing in the early eighteenth.) She also tries to poison the girl against the whole male sex, and turns Rochester’s reputation as a pornographer against him, convincing Mistress Temple that one of his poems was written to expose the girl’s physical flaws; this has the incidental benefit of prompting the girl to strip naked to prove to her friend that the rake lied. But Rochester sends his former conquest Miss Sarah to spy on the two women, and then counterattacks by using the old rumor of hermaphroditism to scare Mistress Temple into the belief that Mistress Hobart has impregnated her own maid! Finally he ensures that the girl overhears an explicit denunciation of Mistress Hobart:

  H. Gray, “Miss Temple Rejecting Miss Hobart’s Caresses,” in Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Count de Grammont [1713] (1889).

  This is one of a series of etchings added to the eighteenth-century satire in a limited edition for the delectation of late-Victorian readers.

  Your Passion and fond Desire for Mrs. T——e are known by every Body but herself […] ’Tis a scandalous thing that all the Maids of Honour should pass through your hands, before they know where-abouts they are.

  It is more than a little ironic that Mistress Hobart is being denounced as a lesbian rake here, when in fact she has had no luck getting any woman into her bed. Anthony Hamilton’s tale reaches its ludicrous climax when Hobart, bewildered by Temple’s flight, slips into her chambers to embrace the girl while she is changing her clothes. Temple screams for help, Hobart is suspected of attempted rape—and only the intervention of the duchess saves her from being exiled from court. We are left to assume that, having ousted the lecherous chaperone, Rochester will have his way with the girl.

  Perhaps the most interesting thing about this story in Memoirs of the Life of Count Grammont is how similarly Hamilton presents the two rivals, rake and lady: lusty, unscrupulous liars, for whom court gossip is a double-edged sword that they grasp even when it cuts them. Of course, Rochester is a powerful male courtier whereas Mistress Hobart is a butt of mockery and no match for him—but she does get to take advantage of the female privileges of private access to, and influence over, girls.

  Pierre Choderlos de Laclos15 offers a much more suave take on the rivalry motif in his famous novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; in English, Dangerous Liaisons). In an intriguing anecdote, Valmont admiringly recounts one of the triumphs of his fellow rake, Prévan, who “separated ‘the inseparables.’” In this case it is not two but three beautiful, talented women whose devoted intimacy arouses general hostility. Some accuse the ladies of sharing their male lovers, but others claim that

  while the three gallants need fear no male rivals they had female rivals to contend with, and even went so far as to say that, having been accepted only for the sake of appearances, they had acquired a title without a function.

  It is typical of Laclos’s light touch here that he goes no further than citing gossip about the possibility of “female rivals”; sex between women is invoked only indirectly, as the possible reality behind the “appearances,” the invisible love, of which the redundant “gallants” only wear the “title.” This mysterious bond between the three ladies offends the all-conquering Prévan—not because of its perversity, we gather (since rakes are not prudish), but because it excludes men, or worse, sets them up as merely puppet rulers. He decides to give these inseparable women a double punishment, by splitting them up and destroying their reputations. On the principle of divide and rule, he seduces each woman in turn, then tells the “gallants” and persuades them to abandon their lady friends and broadcast the story. The women are exiled from Parisian society; one retreats to a convent, the other two to their own estates. This nasty little story suggests not just that female “inseparability” could look like sex to sophisticated observers, but that some men were starting to resent it: Prévan’s triumph is not just personal but patriarchal.

  One remarkable American novel that takes its lead from Richardson’s heartfelt Clarissa, rather than from Hamilton’s and Laclos’s cynical anecdotes, is Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (1799). But Brock
den Brown—a Gothic novelist of Quaker background and distinctly feminist views—goes well beyond Richardson in spelling out what is at stake in a duel between obsessed rake and devoted lady. The narrator, Sophia, and her childhood companion Constantia have been out of touch for more than three years, when, despite being newly married to Courtland, Sophia leaves him in England and comes back to America on a quest to find her friend. She hopes to persuade Constantia to return with her, but if not, it is Sophia’s “inflexible purpose16 to live and to die with her” in America, and Courtland will just have to “wait patiently” till he finds out in which country this three-way marriage will take place. As Sophia sums up this heroic narrative of female friendship, “We imagined ourselves severed from each other by death or by impassable seas; but, at the moment when our hopes had sunk to the lowest ebb, a mysterious destiny conducted our footsteps to the same spot.” After an ecstatic reunion, the women spend three days

  in a state of dizziness and intoxication. The ordinary functions of nature were disturbed. The appetite for sleep and for food were confounded and lost amidst the impetuosities of a master-passion. To look and to talk to each other afforded enchanting occupation for every moment. I would not part from her side, but eat and slept, walked and mused and read, with my arm locked in hers, and with her breath fanning my cheek…O precious inebriation of the heart! O pre-eminent love!