60. “He feeleth oft”: William Warner, Albion’s England (London: 1586), 51.
61. The man-in-skirts motif: For instance, James Shirley’s play The Bird in a Cage (1633) starts with a group of women locked up together, who are already acting out a lewd play about Jove’s rape of Danaë by the time the disguised hero breaks in; see Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism, 59–61, 175–77.
62. The disguised man: Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism, 1.
63. In many texts: Examples include the thirteenth-century French fable Trubert; Heldris de Cornuälle, Le Roman de Silence (1200s); Raoul Lefevre, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1474 translation of 1454 French original); G. B. della Porta, La Fantesca (1592); W. Haughton, Englishmen for My Money (1598); John Marston, Antonio and Mellida (1602); Thomas Artus, L’Isle des Hermaphrodites (1605); James Shirley, The School of Compliment (1631); Anon., The Pastoralle of Florimene (performed 1635). There are more overtly misogynistic plays about men invading and subverting all-female Amazon societies: John Fletcher, The Sea Voyage (1622); Anon., Female Rebellion (1659); Joseph Weston, The Amazon Queen (1667); Edward Howard, The Women’s Conquest and Six Days Adventure (both 1671); and Thomas D’Urfey’s A Commonwealth of Women (1685). A late example of this storyline is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s long poem The Princess (1853), 37.
64. The earliest example: Guillaume de Blois, Alda [c. 1170], summarized and quoted in Paul Barrette, Robert de Blois’s Floris et Lyriopé (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 60–65. This penis-as-dildo motif shows up in eighteenth-century erotica, such as Gilles Jacob (attrib.), A Treatise of Hermaphrodites (London: E. Curll, 1718), 40–45, and the anonymous A Spy on Mother Midnight (London: E. Penn, 1748), 32–34.
65. “I don’t know”: Robert de Blois, Floris et Lyriopé [1200s], ed. Paul Barrette, 106 (lines 999–1013). “‘Ne sai,’ fait ele, ‘que je die. / Trop amer me samble folie. / Nos nos davons bien entramer, / Mais amors me fait sospirer, / Estandre, baillier et doloir. / Ce ne tien pas a savoir. / Ne sai se ce me vient d’amer / Que sovant m’estuet sospirer. / Si me debrise, si m’en duel, / Si t’ain mout plus que je ne suel. / Et de ce tant ne quant ne dot, / Ains sai bien que tu m’aimmes mout. / Onques mais n’an oï novales / Que s’entramassent dous puceles. / Mais n’ameroie pas, je croi, / Nul home tant con je fais toi, / Ne tant, ce cuit, ne me plairoit / Li baisier, s’uns hons me baisoit.’” I am deeply grateful to Professor Mario Longtin of the University of Western Ontario’s French department for the translation.
66. Just as we saw: Two examples are Agnolo Firenzuola’s Ragionamenti (1555) and Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s 1669 Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (in English, The Adventurous Simplicissimus).
67. Joseph Harris points out: Harris, Hidden Agendas, 103–4.
68. “cherished and caressed”: Honoré D’Urfé, L’Astrée [1607–27], ed. Hugues Vaganay, 5 vols. (1925; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1966), 3:548, 598, 605. “Chéry et caressé.” “Et se la pressant contre le sein, et la sentant presque tout nue, ce fut bien alors que pour le peu de soupçon que la bergere eust eu d’elle, elle se fust pris garde que ces caresses estoient un peu plus serrées que celles que les filles ont accoustumé de se faire; mais elle qui n’y pensoit en façon quelconque, luy rendoit ses baisers, tout ainsi qu’elle les recevoit, non pas peut-estre comme à une Alexis, mais comme au portrait vivant de Céladon.” All translations from L’Astrée are by Emma Donoghue; no complete English translation exists. Several dozen plays were adapted from the romance by the 1650s. Eric Rohmer has filmed it as Les Amours d’Astrée et de Celadon (2007).
69. Other texts that support: See Harris, Hidden Agendas, 114–16.
70. “From then on”: D’Urfé, L’Astrée, 4:264–66. “Dé là je dirois un adieu à toute sorte de plaisir et de contentement.” “Ny violence de parents, ny incommodité d’affaires, ni consideration quelconque qui puisse tomber soubs [sic] la pensée, ne me separeront jamais de ma chere maistresse, que j’embrasse, dit-elle, luy jettant les bras au col, et que je ne laisseray point sortir des liens de mes bras qu’elle ne m’ait fait ce serment; si pour le moins elle ne veut point que je meure a cette heure mesme de desplaisir.” “Pour n’estre veues.” Interestingly, women in some other texts, more focused on sex, respond with enthusiasm to the prospect of such a transformation; see Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1516–32), Barnaby Rich, “Of Phylotus and Emelia” (1581), and an anonymous Scottish adaptation for the stage, Philotus (1603).
71. “My plan, said the Druid”: D’Urfé [actually B. Baro], L’Astrée, 5:97, 259. “Mon dessein, di le Druide, estoit alors de vous faire epouser Astrée, et non pas cet habit.” “Perfide et trompeuse Alexis, meurs pour l’expiation de ton crime.” See Harris, Hidden Agendas, 117–23.
72. Notably, Filande: D’Urfé, L’Astrée, 3:72–75, 275, and 1:222–23. “N’en soyez point en doute, et n’en accusez que la nature, qui veut que chacun aime son semblable.” “Vous estonnez-vous qu’estant Callirée, je vous parle avec tant d’affection? Ressouvenez-vous qu’il n’y a impuissance de condition qui m’en fasse jamais diminuer; tant s’en faut, ce sera plustost ceste occasion, qui la conservea, et plus violente et eternelle, puis qu’il n’y a rien qui diminue tant l’ardeur du désir, que la jouissance de ce qu’on désire, et cela ne pouvant estre entre nous, vous serez jusques à mon cercueil tousjours aimée, et moy tousjours amante. Et toutesfois si Tiresias, après avoir esté fille, devint homme, pourquoy ne puis-je espérer que les dieux me pourroient bien autant favoriser, si vous l’aviez agréable? Croyez, ma belle Diane, puis que les dieux ne font jamais rien en vain, qu’il n’y a pas apparence qu’ils ayent mis en moy une si parfaite affection, pour m’en laisser vainement travailler, et que si la nature m’a fait naistre fille, mon amour extrême me peut bien rendre telle, que ce ne soit point inutilement.” María de Zayas y Sotomayor took up this piquant notion of a man in skirts defending lesbian love in Neoplatonic terms; see the sixth of her set of ten gritty novellas about how men trick women, “Love for the Sake of Conquest” in The Disenchantments of Love [1647], trans. H. Patsy Boyers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 203–43 (214, 224, 227, 232, 236).
73. “For a girl to love a girl”: Feliciano de Silva, Amadis de Gaule, XI, trans. Jacques Gohory (Paris: for Vincent Sertenas, Libraire, 1556), 33, 59, 82, 139. “Fille aymer fille, hélas qu’est-ce sinon estre amoureux de la lune qu’il faudroit prendre aux dentz?” “Ne pouvoit comprendre ceste violence d’Amour de fille a fille.” Translation by Emma Donoghue. The available English translations of Amadis de Gaule are incomplete, and tone down the love scenes.
74. By far the most psychologically probing: Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia) [1593], ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987). The so-called Old Arcadia circulated in manuscript from about 1577 but was not published till 1912; the much longer New Arcadia was left unfinished and published posthumously in 1590. The text I am discussing is the one that had the most influence, a patchwork of the other two known as The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia because it was edited by his sister. See Kathryn Schwarz’s Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 175–201. There were at least three dramatic adaptations of Sidney’s Arcadia—John Day’s The Isle of Guls (1606), James Shirley’s The Arcadia (1640), and the anonymous Love’s Changelinges Change (1630–40)—but they all underplay the female homoeroticism.
75. Interestingly, the narrator: Sidney, Arcadia, 22, 106. In a neat allusion to the female bridegroom motif, Sidney’s narrator tells us that Pyrocles chose the name as an act of homage to a woman called Zelmane, who disguised herself as a man and died for love of him, long ago.
76. “full of impatient desire”: Sidney, Arcadia, 82–85, 111–13, 48, 87, 144–49.
77. “paleness”: Sidney, Arcadia, 189, 230–33.
78. “suddenly enamoured”: Jorge de Montemayor, Diana [1559], trans. Bartholomew Yong [1598], in A Critical E
dition of Yong’s Translation of George of Montemayor’s Diana and Gil Polo’s Enamoured Diana, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 93–103, 32–48 (36–39). The Selvagia storyline was borrowed by Isaac du Ryer for his play Le Mariage d’amour (1621), and similarly in Gilbert Saulnier Du Verdier’s parodic novel Le Chevalier hypocondriaque (1632), a woman pretends to be “Daraïde,” a man-disguised-as-a-woman from Amadis de Gaule.
79. Philosophically: See Winfried Schleiner, “Male Cross-Dressing and Transvestism in Renaissance Romances,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 19:4 (Winter 1988): 605–19 (619).
80. “O my Jewell”: John Fletcher, The Loyal Subject [1647], ed. Fredson Boyers, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, vol. 5, ed. Fredser Boyer, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5:151–288 (161, 194, 247, 250, 256).
81. Denise Walen makes: Walen, Constructions of Female Homoeroticism, 132.
82. “act Lovers-parts”: Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure, in Plays, Never Before Printed (London: A. Maxwell, 1668), 14–16, 22–23, 32–33, 37–38, 48. See Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England, 83–88, and Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism, 177–80.
83. But Joseph Harris makes: Harris, Hidden Agendas, 176.
84. It lingered: See Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2000), 190–93. Other late examples are Elizabeth Inchbald, The Widow’s Vow (1786, based on a French farce), L. B. Louvet de Couvray’s best-selling Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas (1785–87), and the anonymous novel Anecdotes of a Convent (1771), in which a boy raised as a girl has no idea he is male.
85. It is hard to date: See Harris, Hidden Agendas, 153.
86. “makes love”: Anon., The Actor (London: R. Griffiths, 1750), 202.
87. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s: It is significant that Gaskell’s Amante is masculine long before she cross-dresses to pose as husband to her beloved employer; see “The Grey Woman” (1861), in Cousin Phillis (New York: AMS Press, 1972), 300–361 (318–19, 333, 341, 349, 354–55, 358).
88. “What she said or did”: Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin [1835], trans. Helen Constantine, intro. by Patricia Duncker (London: Penguin, 2005), 220–44, 332–33.
89. Patricia Duncker points out: Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, 270–71. Duncker, introduction, xxvii–xxviii.
90. “I am of a third, separate sex”: Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, 318, 336.
91. In the preface: Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, 23. Duncker, introduction, xxvii.
92. In the twentieth century: Perhaps the first was Renée Vivien in “Prince Charming” (1904), in The Woman of the Wolf, trans. Karla Jay and Yvonne M. Klein (New York: Gay, 1983), 23–28.
93. “I went back to her house”: Jeanette Winterson, The Passion [1987] (London: Penguin, 1988), 59–60, 65–66, 71, 94–96, 144–46. Carolyn Allen does a thoughtful reading of The Passion in Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 52–62. Winterson gives another wink to the female bridegroom tradition in The PowerBook (2000), whose sixteenth-century heroine, Ali, has a tulip bulb in her codpiece that—shades of Ovid—turns to flesh as required. Her 1992 Written on the Body received much attention for its refusal to specify the rakish narrator’s gender, but earlier experiments in this line include Brigid Brophy’s In Transit (1969), Maureen Duffy’s Love Child (1971), and—in French, a much trickier task—Anne Garréta’s Sphinx (1986). June Arnold’s The Cook and the Carpenter (1973) goes one better by using the invented pronouns “na” and “nan” for all her characters.
Chapter Two: Inseparables
1. So why is it: Denise Walen, Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 54.
2. Like calls to like: See Laurie Shannon, “Natures’s Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness,” Modern Philology 98:2 (2000): 183–210. It is significant that the newly created Eve in Book IV of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), glimpsing her own reflection in the water, is naturally drawn to this female image, and offers it her “sympathy and love”; God and Adam have to rebuke her for her “vain desire” (“vain” meaning foolish and useless, rather than conceited) before she learns to live “inseparably” with her husband instead. See Paradise Lost [1667], ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin, 2000), 85–86.
3. “Have no doubt about it”: Honoré D’Urfé, L’Astrée [1607–27], ed. Hugues Vaganay, 5 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1966), 3:72–75, 275. “N’en soyez point en doute, et n’en accusez que la nature, qui veut que chacun aime son semblable.” All translations from L’Astrée are by Emma Donoghue.
4. “Equality and Sympathy”: Leonard Wallen, Astraea; or, True Love’s Myrrour (London: for Henry Cripps and Lodowick Lloyd, 1651), 67–69.
5. More than two centuries: See Walen, Constructions of Female Homoeroticism, 143: “Homoeroticism and heterosexuality are constituent forms of romantic love.” Likewise, Elizabeth Wahl finds no sharp distinction between female same-sex and opposite-sex desires in the eighteenth century; see Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 7–8.
6. “Intreat me not”: The book of Ruth, 1:14–17, 4:15–17. The King James Version of 1611 is not the most accurate translation, but I quote it because it had the greatest influence on literature in English.
7. One of them, in a Scottish poem: Poem XLIX, The Maitland Quarto Manuscript [1586], ed. W. A. Craigie (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1920), 160–62. A modernized version is given in The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall, ed. Terry Castle (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 82–85.
8. “as an ideal”: Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 4.
9. Whatever private views: There are exceptions, for instance in seventeenth-century drama: Thomas Dekker’s Satiro-Mastix (1602), John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize (1610), Philip Massinger’s The Bondman (1623), and Richard Brome’s The Antipodes (1638) all include strong hints that women can have sex with one another. Denise Walen argues interestingly that Renaissance writings on relationships in general draw the line not so much between friendship and sex as between love (a generous, loyal, tender, and uplifting relationship, which can include sex) and lust (deceptive, abusive, uncontrolled, and only about sex); see Constructions of Female Homoeroticism, 19–20, 149–53. Similarly, Elizabeth Wahl refuses the usual classification of women’s relationships as either sexual or blandly sexless; she suggests instead a “sexualized” model and and an “idealized” or “polite” one, which sometimes overlapped; see Invisible Relations, 9–10, 14.
10. “Precisely because”: Marcus, Between Women, 113–14. She suggests a helpful definition: “Erotic relationships involve intensified affect and sensual pleasure, dynamics of looking and displaying, domination and submission, restraint and eruption, idolization and humiliation.”
11. The fervor of the girls’ love: For passionate relationships between sisters, see Germaine de Staël, Corinne (1807); Frances Burney, The Wanderer (1814); Harriet Martineau, Deerbrook (1839); Geraldine Jewbury, The Half- Sisters (1848); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852); Ann S. Stephens, Mary Derwent (1858); Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859–60; discussed in chapter 5) and No Name (1862); Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1862); Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Hedged In (1870); and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, By the Light of the Soul (1907). To complicate the matter, one of the sisters is mixed-race in some titles: James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826); Dinah Mulock Craik, Olive (1850); Emily C. Pearson, Ruth’s Sacrifice (1863). See Sarah Annes Brown, Devoted Sisters: Representations of the Sister Relationship in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003). Passionate friends of different ages may also be r
evealed, at the last minute, as mother and daughter, as in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849).
12. The shorthand I use: Some of my thoughts in this chapter were developed in collaboration with Chris Roulston during the writing of her paper “Separating the Inseparables: Female Friendship and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32:2 (1998–99): 215–31 (216). The term inseparable was so enduringly fashionable that some writers used it mockingly; see Wahl, Invisible Relations, 207.
13. William Shakespeare’s comedy: As You Like It [1623], in The Complete Works, 254–83 (255, 259–60, 272, 275) (I.i.103; I.ii.6, 20; I.iii.35, 68–74, 92–95; III.iv.19–28; IV.i.112). Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde [1590], 2nd ed. [1592], facsimile reprint (Menston, U.K.: The Scholar Press, 1972), no page numbers. See Jessica Tvordi, “Female Alliance and the Construction of Homoeroticism in As You Like It and Twelfth Night,” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 114–30 (117–18).
14. In her groundbreaking study: Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 18, 174. Traub calls this “femme-femme love,” and argues that it is the orthodox femininity of the inseparables that blinds readers to the homoeroticism (80).
15. Emilia: William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1634], ed. Eugene M. Waith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 102. Laurie Shannon offers a thorough reading of this play in Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), chapter 3.
16. “fond excess of love”: William Davenant, Love and Honour [1649], in Love and Honour and The Siege of Rhodes, ed. James W. Tupper (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., 1909), 63, 118, 122.
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