Inseparable
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28. “differing depictions”: Walen, Constructions of Female Homoeroticism, 149.
29. “the historical search”: Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 44, 47. David Michael Robinson comes to the same conclusion about continuity; see “The Metamorphosis of Sex(uality): Ovid’s ‘Iphis and Ianthe’ in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture, ed. Chris Mounsey (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 171–201.
Chapter One: Travesties
1. “transvestite theatre”: Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London: Routledge, 1992), 39. See also Laurence Senelick’s The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2000), which studies cross-dressing in many forms of performance across cultures and time.
2. Since all the roles: On the viewer’s simultaneous awareness of all these levels, see Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 4–5.
3. “an ideal in which the erotic charge”: Winfried Schleiner, “Le feu caché: Homosocial Bonds Between Women in a Renaissance Romance,” Renaissance Quarterly 45:2 (Summer 1992): 293–311 (296).
4. A helpful mnemonic: In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” a girl passing as a boy marries a naïve girl and, the author tells us enigmatically, finds “a way to deflower the bride” before running away; see Short Friday and Other Stories (New York: Fawcett, 1978), 131–59 (149). The 1983 film Yentl starring Barbra Streisand replaces the deflowering with a spilled glass of wine to fool the families. In Tootsie (1982), Dustin Hoffman plays an actor who puts on drag to land a TV role as a prim middle-aged spinster, then falls for his female co-star.
5. Marjorie Garber has argued: Garber, Vested Interests, 9.
6. “Women in seventeenth-century literature”: Joseph Harris, Hidden Agendas: Cross-Dressing in 17th-Century France (Biblio 17, 156) (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2005), 102.
7. Passionate attraction: Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6.
8. In both drama and prose: For instance, in the romance that was Shakespeare’s main source for As You Like It, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde [1590], 2nd ed. [1592], facsimile reprint (Menston, U.K.: The Scholar Press, 1972), no page numbers.
9. “something in cross-dressing”: Harris, Hidden Agendas, 125.
10. In Aelfric’s Lives of Saints: Aelfric, “Saint Eugenia,” in Lives of Saints [990s], ed. Walter W. Skeat (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 24–50. The accusation of rape by a rejected woman is known as the Potiphar’s Wife motif (see Genesis 39); it shows up in later works such as Pierre-Corneille Blessebois’s tragedy Eugénie (1676).
11. For the last thousand years: Examples include Heldris de Cornuälle, Le Roman de Silence (1200s); Anon., Le Roman de Cassidorus (c. 1270, part of the cycle Les Sept Sages de Rome); Giovanni Fiorentino, Il Pecorone (1300s); Anon., Miracle de Théodore (1300s); Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Piacevoli Notte (1550); Matteo Bandello, Novelle (1554); Jean-Pierre Camus, L’Iphigene (1625); Giambattista Basile, Il Pentamerone (1634).
12. “Iphis loved a girl”: Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1955), 221–24. David Robinson offers very interesting readings of this and other tales by Ovid alongside seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts in Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature: Classical, Early Modern, Eighteenth-Century (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing, 2006). The story gets a charming commentary in Ali Smith’s novel of contemporary Inverness (part of Canongate’s The Myths series), Girl Meets Boy (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), 82–101.
13. Without the benefit of modern biology: Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
14. The Iphis story was radically reworked: Anon., La Chanson d’Yde et Olive [before 1311], trans. Lord Berners, in The Ancient, Honorable, Famous, and delightfull Historie of Huon of Bordeaux [c. 1534], 3rd ed. (London: for Edward White, 1601), chapters 167–70, no page numbers. This brilliant work has received very little attention till recently; see Anna Roberts, Queer Love in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
15. Ide and Olive: This popular fairy-tale motif is found in, for instance, Perrault’s “Donkeyskin.”
16. Interestingly, three other medieval romances: See Michele Szkilnik, “The Grammar of the Sexes in Medieval French Romance,” in Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature, ed. Karen J. Taylor (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 61–89 (67).
17. Joseph Harris shows: Harris, Hidden Agendas, 166–67.
18. “I will wed her”: By contrast, the disguised heroine in Tristan de Nanteuil stalls by insisting her bride convert from Islam to Christianity.
19. She makes the traditional claim: In the anonymous fourteenth-century Roman d’Ysaïe le Triste, “he” explains that “he” is not “equipped as a man and does not perform what Nature requires and neither do his brothers”—which begs the question of how impotence can be hereditary. See Roman d’Ysaïe le Triste, ed. André Giacchetti (Rouen: Press of the University of Rouen, 1989), 179. Translation by Emma Donoghue.
20. Intriguingly, their crime: Diane Watt, “Behaving Like a Man? Incest, Lesbian Desire, and Gender Play in Yde et Olive and Its Adaptations,” Comparative Literature, 50:4 (Autumn 1998): 265–85.
21. Ide and Olive may have been shocking: Robert L. A. Clark, “A Heroine’s Sexual Itinerary: Incest, Transvestism and Same-Sex Marriage in Yde et Olive,” in Gender Transgressions, ed. Taylor, 89–105 (97).
22. But his basic impulse: Vergil, Eclogues X.69: Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori (Love conquers all; let us all yield to love).
23. “too innocent”: Isaac de Benserade, Iphis et Iante [1637], ed. Anne Verdier with Christian Biet and Lise Leibacher-Ouvrard (Vijon: Editions Lampasque/Desclée de Brouwer, 2000), 52 (I.iv.: Ils sont brulés tous deux d’un feu trop légitime, / Et sont trop innocents pour savoir faire un crime), 55 (II.i.: “Un saint hymen succède à cet amour bouffon”). All translations from Iphis et Iante by Emma Donoghue.
24. “do the impossible for her”: Benserade, Iphis et Iante, 74 (II.vi., “Quoi, je m’endormirais auprès de cette belle, / Et je ne ferais pas l’impossible pour elle?”), 93 (IV.i., “Je meure de soif auprès d’une fontaine”).
25. “Possessing her”: Benserade, Iphis et Iante, 112–13 (V.iv., “Son mécontentement me donnait du souci, / Mais la possession me ravissait aussi, / Et quique mon ardeur nous fut fort inutile, / J’oubliais quelque temps que j’étais une fille. / Je ne reçus jamais tant de contentements, / Je me laissais aller à mes ravissements, / D’un baiser j’apaisais mon amoureuse fièvre, / Et mon âme venait jusqu’au bord de mes lèvres, / Dans le doux sentiment de ces biens superflus / J’oubliais celui même où j’aspirais de plus, / J’embrassais ce beau corps, dont la blancheur extreme / M’excitait à lui faire une place en moimême, / Je touchais, je baisais, j’avais le coeur content.” “Honteuse de se voir la femme d’une fille.”) Another play in which the female bridegroom cannot bear to break the news until she and her bride are in bed is G. Gilbert’s Les Intrigues amoureuses (1667; in English, The Love Intrigues).
26. “This marriage is sweet”: Benserade, Iphis et Iante, 105 (V.i., “Ce marriage est doux, j’y trouve aussez d’appâts / Et si l’on n’en riait, je ne m’en plaindrais pas,” “Sans offenser le ciel et la loi naturelle”).
27. Iphis et Iante is an odd play: See Marianne Legault, “Iphis & Iante: traumatisme de l’incomplétude lesbienne au Grand Siècle,” in Representations of Trauma in French and Francophone Literature, ed. Nicole Simek and Zahi Zalloua, Dalhousie French Studies 81 (Winter 2007): 83–93.
28. “I will make their paines”: John Lyly, Gallathe
a 1592 (Malone Society Reprints, no. 161) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 29, 41. Theodora A. Jankowski offers a good reading of the situation in Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 14–27.
29. “You must leave these fond affections”: Lyly, Gallathea, 52–53.
30. Sometimes the deceived woman: Denise Walen, Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 58. On punishment of the mistaken women, see Harris, Hidden Agendas, 168.
31. “Make me a willow cabin”: William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night [pub. 1623], in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1978), 349–76 (355, I.v.252–60). Terry Castle points out that because of Shakespeare’s play, “After Sappho and Diana, Olivia is perhaps the most ‘lesbian-sounding’ name one can give a female character in English literature”; see The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 100.
32. “The virtuous Oronce”: Anon., Amadis de Gaule, XX:213v, translated in Schleiner, “Le feu caché,” 301.
33. “What thriftless sighs”: Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 356 (II.ii.37). Similarly, the widow in Barnaby Rich’s tale “Apolonius” (1581) has no hope of “recompence” for her desires; see Rich’s Farewell to Military Profession [1581], ed. Thomas Mabry Cranfill (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1959), 75.
34. “I pitty both of you”: Abraham Cowley, Love’s Riddle (London: for Henry Seile, 1638), I.i., II.i.
35. Cowley’s play: The best example is a joke about “a flat bargaine” (alluding to a slang phrase for lesbian sex, “the game of flats”) in Richard Brome, The Mad Couple Well Matched [1653], in The Dramatic Works (London: John Pearson, 1873), 1:1–99 (96). See also Thomas Middleton and John Webster’s Anything for a Quiet Life (1620–21).
36. As Joseph Harris points out: Harris, Hidden Agendas, 51.
37. “If sight and shape be true”: William Shakespeare, As You Like It [pub. 1623], in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1978), 254–83 (III.v. and V.iv., 273, 282).
38. In the twentieth volume: Anon., Amadis de Gaule,, XX:211v (misnumbered 122v in the original), 319–319v, translated and discussed in Schleiner, “Le feu caché,” 303: Schleiner argues that Licinie’s “shudder” here has “proto-features of homophobia.”
39. In some plays: John Ford, The Lover’s Melancholy [1629], ed. R. F. Hill (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1985), 71, 103, 108–9, 106. See Walen, Constructions of Female Homoeroticism, 84–85.
40. “Madame”: Anon., Amadis de Gaule, XXI: 148v, translated and discussed in Schleiner, “Le feu caché,” 306.
41. “Blush, greeve and die”: Robert Greene, James the Fourth [1598], in The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, ed. J. Churton Collins, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 2:79–158 (150). I have modernized the spelling here from u to v and from i to j. Another character who admits to painful difficulty in converting desire to friendship is Bellula in Cowley’s Love’s Riddle (1638).
42. “In passed times”: Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso [1516–32], trans. John Harrington [1591], ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 279–83 (Canto 29, v.21–54). For a full and subtle reading of the Fiordispina episode, see Mary-Michelle DeCoste, “Knots of Desire: Female Homoeroticism in Orlando furioso 25,” in Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, ed. Gary P. Cestaro (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 55–70. The English poet Edmund Spenser borrowed but rather deeroticized the episode for his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1589–96).
43. The substitute-brother ending: Interestingly, it is not always necessary for the bride to be tricked; sometimes, as in Barnaby Rich’s tale “Apolonius” (1581), on learning that her beloved is female, she makes the best of it and accepts the cross-dresser’s brother as a substitute.
44. Often, as in the case: Anon., Gl’Ingannati [1537], fragmentary translation by Thomas Love Peacock published as Gl’Ingannati: The Deceived [1862] in The Works [1875] (New York: AMS Press, 1967), X, 231–324.
45. “I lov’d you well”: Thomas Middleton, No Wit, No Help like a Woman’s [written c. 1611, pub. 1653], ed. Lowell E. Johnson, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), V.ii.369–70.
46. “A sister!”: Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, V.i. 374–75.
47. But Denise Walen argues: Walen, Constructions of Female Homoeroticism, 60.
48. The motif of the female bridegroom: Examples I lack space to discuss include Lording Barry, Ram Alley (1611); John Fletcher, Love’s Pilgrimage (1616); Peter Hausted, The Rival Friends (1632); Shackerly Marmion, The Antiquary (1634–36); James Shirley, The Sisters (1642); Margaret Cavendish, Love’s Adventures (1658); Robert Stapylton, The Slighted Maid (1663); William Killigrew, The Siege of Urbin (1666); Thomas Betterton, The Counterfeit Bridegroom (1677); William Wycherley, The Plain Dealer (1677); Thomas Corneille and Jean Donneau de Visé, La Devineresse (1678); Thomas Shadwell, The Woman Captain (1680); Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter (1689) and The Younger Brother (1696); Thomas Southerne, Sir Anthony Love (1690) and Oroonoko (1695); George Farquhar, Love and a Bottle (1698) and The Recruiting Officer (1706); William Burnaby, The Ladies Visiting-Day (1701); Colley Cibber, She Would and She Wou’d Not (1702) and The Lady’s Last Stake (1707); Richard Steele, The Tender Husband (1705); William Taverner, The Artful Husband (1717); Eliza Haywood, A Wife to Be Lett (1723); George Colman the Elder, The Female Chevalier (1778); Alicia Sheridan, Ambiguous Love (1781); Baroness Craven, The Miniature Picture (1781); Hannah Cowley, A Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783); William Macready, The Bank Note (1795); William Mason, Sappho (1797).
49. “would love to be forced”: “Voudroit bien se voir un peu forçée,” IV.ii. quoted in Harris, Hidden Agendas, 51.
50. A novelty in Jacobean treatments: Examples of this delayed revelation include George Chapman, May Day (1601); Thomas Middleton, No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (performed c. 1611) and The Widow (performed c. 1616); Anything for a Quiet Life (1620–21), by Middleton and John Webster.
51. In Margaret Cavendish’s Matrimonial Trouble: Margaret Cavendish, Matrimonial Trouble, in Playes (London: John Martyn et al, 1662), 422–88 (428).
52. Similarly, in Antoine Jacob Montfleury’s: Antoine Jacob de Montfleury, La Femme juge et partie [performed 1669], analyzed in Harris, Hidden Agendas, 163–65, 170.
53. “But shall I not expose”: James Shirley, The Doubtfull Heir, in Six New Playes (London: for Humphrey Robinson and Humphrey Moseley, 1653), 36, 44, 49–51, 55.
54. “Look, the day breakes”: Sir John Suckling, Brennoralt (London: for Humphrey Moseley, 1646), 44, 46–49. As Denise Walen points out (Constructions of Female Homoeroticism, 89), plays in which two women become more erotically bonded to each other than to the man they were fighting over could be considered seventeenth-century examples of what Terry Castle has identified in some twentieth-century fiction as the “lesbian counter-plot” (The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], 72–73).
55. The storyline spread: Examples include Penelope Aubin, Life and Amorous Adventures of Lucinda (1722); Sarah Scott, A Journey Through Every Stage of Life (1754); Mary Robinson, Walsingham (1797); Anon., A General History of the Pyrates (1724); Anon., Life and Adventures of Mrs Christian Davies (1741); Anon., The Female Soldier; or, The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750); Charlotte Cibber Charke, Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke [1755], intro. by Leonard R. N. Asheley (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1969).
56. My favorite female bridegroom story: Anon., The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu, 3 vols. (London: for M. Cooper, 1744). This edition claims to be translated from the French. A different version appeared as The Entertaining Travels and Surprizing Adventures of Mademoiselle de Leuri
ch, 2 vols. (London: McLeish, 1751). In her essay “‘My Heart So Wrapt’: Lesbian Disruptions in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction,” Signs 18:4 (1993): 838–65, Carolyn Woodward suggests Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as a possible candidate for authorship (854–55), and argues that the travelogue material, within which the love story is inserted in installments that only amount to about a sixth of the travelogue’s length, may be “camouflage” for the lesbian themes, but also gives erotic liberty a context of freedom of movement (849). Susan Lanser groups Mademoiselle de Richelieu with other texts from the first half of the eighteenth century (Eliza Haywood’s The British Recluse, Mary Delariviere Manley’s The New Atalantis, Jane Barker’s “The Unaccountable Wife,” and Charlotte Cibber Charke’s Narrative of the Life) under the heading of “sapphic picaresque,” since they all associate same-sex love with mobility (and sometimes with cross-dressing), and offer it as a satisfying alternative to marriage; see “Sapphic Picaresque, Sexual Difference, and the Challenges of Homo-Adventuring,” Textual Practice 15:2 (2001): 251–68.
57. “How happy do you make me”: Anon., Richelieu, 2:229, 245, 34, 328, 3:124, 358. One possible source may be the faux autobiography Mémoires de la vie de Mademoiselle Delfosses (Amsterdam: 1696), in which two cross-dressed women—one of whom declares that she cannot stand men—end up embracing in bed (179, 186).
58. “None of the nymphs”: Ovid, Metamorphoses, 61–63. Kathleen Wall, in The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood: Initiation and Rape in Literature (Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), sees rape as punishment for Callisto’s retreat into a world of women (5), but is curiously uninterested in the homoerotic consequences of Jove’s disguise. On sixteenth- and seventeenth-century versions of the Callisto story, see Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550–1714 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 160–70, and Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism, 234–57.
59. “coupled / And twinn’d”: Thomas Heywood, The Golden Age [1611], in The Golden and Silver Ages, ed. J. Payne Collier (London: Shakespeare Society, 1851), 1–87 (30, 32).