Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #64 Haggerty 2010

(I explain the LHMP here and provide a cumulative index.)

Not all the articles in a collection will hit the theme dead-on. This is another example where it feels like a certain stretch was made to tie the analysis in to the larger theme of the volume. (I'm always curious to know -- in cases like this -- whether the article was written or solicited specifically for the collection, or whether it was something the author had lying around and was looking for a home for.)

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Haggerty, George E. 2010. “Women Beware Women: Female Gothic Villains and Victims” in Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century. Beynon, John C. & Caroline Gonda eds. Ashgate, Farnham. ISBN 978-0-7546-7335-4

Haggerty examines several examples of female villains in gothic romances to develop what strikes me as a rather weak theory of homoerotic attraction as subtext in the stories. Identifying a number of stories in which the heroine is persecuted and abused by a female villain (rather than the default male villain), he finds that they “suggest that the relations between women can be played out as potentially erotic, just as sado-masochistic relations between men and women are.”

While the analysis is detailed and interesting, it is unclear to what extent he posits that readers of the time would have seen these fictional interactions as erotic or whether this is being offered as a modern interpretation. The examples of female-female persecution that he offers up always involve a man at the center -- the evil prioress punishing a nun for wanting to run away with a lover, the smothering mother who persecutes the fiancee who isn’t good enough for her son -- and provide no overt evidence for desire directed by the villain toward her victim. In the absence of even a trace of evidence for the “evil lesbian” trope, it’s hard to see how this thesis fits into the theme of the collection (much less my project).

Random Thursday Blog: Further on Serafina Talarico's Abyssinian Background

I wrote previously on the general outlines of how I developed the character of Serafina and wove a historic and personal background for her that served the needs of my story. Here are some research notes gleaned from two travelers' diaries from the early 19th century that will provide cultural background. Very little of this material will be included explicitly in the story itself. As I noted previously, I'll be using Serafina's memories of various cultural practices that her family was able to retain in exile. And the context in which she received her education and became interested in studying mysteries also will be rooted in some of the material here.

I haven't yet had a chance to correlate this material with an insider's view of Ethiopian culture. I've done enough superficial online research to discover that things like names for particular foods have changed in some cases. I'll need to follow up on that further because if I'm naming specific 19th century items, I want to do better than using the undoubtedly corrupted versions of the words that appear in the English diaries. But those differences are why I consider Pearce's journals to be a useful resource, despite their cultural shortcomings. I imagine it's going to be a bit of a challenge to find a subject matter expert to beta-read for these topics. The intersection between people with the knowledge and people in my target readership may be … elusive. But I want to make a good effort to make sure I'm not stepping on any landmines, especially given the somewhat skewed viewpoint of my primary research texts.

( This is going to get long. )