![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(I explain the LHMP here and provide a cumulative index.)
With this entry, we conclude Lanser's examination of how public discourse about sapphic relations parallels larger social and political concerns in the 16-19th centuries. Despite its focus on literary theory, I felt this book was an important addition to the Project. One of the reasons for examining sapphic themes in literature and art is as an inspiration for re-creating those literary and artistic themes (as I do in my fiction inspired by medieval literature). But just as important is an awareness of what ideas and images real historic women were exposed to. How might the public--even the fictional--discourse around lesbians have helped women understand and contextualize their own desires and reactions? A key aspect of writing good historic fiction is to write characters that think and act in concert with their times. As the articles covered by the LHMP show, this does not mean that women in history were incapable of understanding themselves in terms of some sort of lesbian-like identity. But it does mean that their options for understanding that identity, and their visions for what form their lives might take, could vary significantly. A story set in the heyday of Restoration libertineism presents a character with very different models for her life than one set in the Regency. (And, of course, this holds true no matter what form her erotic desires take!)
* * *
Lanser, Susan S. 2014. The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830. ISBN 978-0-226-18773-0
Chapter 7 “Sisters in Love”: Irregular Families, Romantic Elegies, 1788-1830
The increasing divide between the derided image of erotic sapphic relations and the praiseworthy image of female domesticity, epitomized by non-erotic woman+woman couples, is played out in attitudes toward certain couples. The “Ladies of Llangollen” (Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby) were firmly established in the popular imagination as the model of non-sexual romantic friendship. This desexualization of female couples (at least, those belonging to the genteel classes and intellectual circles) enabled sapphic discourse to lay claim to the increasingly important field of domesticity, rather than being seen as antithetical to it.
Female couples could simultaneously support the values of “companionate domesticity” and of individualism, but as these sets of values began to diverge, it was hard to support both at the same time. Romanticism, in general, supported transgression to the extent that it privileged individualism over social conformity, chosen affinities over prescriptive ones. This would seem a natural context for chosen affinities between women to be celebrated. But they are celebrated in the isolated individual couple, not in the collective movement that had been discredited by the sapphic sects motif. By being isolated, these couples can be idolized safely as a dead end.
Lanser explores how these themes are set out in the novels Paul et Virginie (which concerns two women forming a family after being betrayed in various ways by heterosexual relations) and Het Land (similarly portraying two women forming an idyllic marriage-like bond, this time in rejection of heterosexual relations). The Ladies of Llangollen follow this same model, living together in rustic retreat as an inseparable couple, and other similarly idealized couples are noted. In true Romantic fashion, the Ladies were the subject of elegaic poems (by poets as noteworthy as Wordsworth) that focused, not so much on the joys of their life together, but on the projected image of their eventual shared grave. The sentimentalized image contrasts oddly with Wordsworth’s private account of meeting the Ladies in person, where he described them as “curious” and “odd”. All that is erased in the poem, which turns them into pure sentimental symbol.
The chapter concludes with a consideration of the poem “Rosalind and Helen”, celebrating a similarly idyllic female couple, but also with an examination of the concept of “irregularity” as appearing in the titles and structures of Romantic verses on female couples. This poem is viewed in contrast to Coleridge’s “Christabel” which begins with a clearly erotic encounter between two women (though one shrouded in vague language and metaphor). The negative reception to “Christabel” demonstrates the shift in public attitude toward depiction of the sapphic.
Coda: We Have Always Been Modern
In the concluding chapter, Lanser summarizes the themes of the study. One unifying feature of the period under study is the description of woman+woman as “new” and “unprecedented”, indicating the inability of social frameworks to resolve sapphic challenges. Sapphic relations were not the only challenge to the inherent contradictions of the age, such as the principle of consensual government coexisting with colonial slavery. But the close connection between sapphic discourse and debates about individualism, women’s rights, and the challenge to tradition and orthodoxy show the ways in which sapphic imagery was used to reflect and represent the extremes of those movements, for good or ill. Sapphic discourse could be a safety valve, an ideal, or a weapon of silencing and suppression. With the disruptions of the 18th century settling into the more solidified class and gender-specific identities of the early 19th century, the use of public sapphic discourse as a tool for engaging with those disruptions diminishes.
Lanser re-emphasizes that her concern here is with the use of the idea of the sapphic in public discourse, not with the lives of actual women in romantic or erotic relationships. But the changes in public discourse affected what strategies were available for those women to deflect dangerous interest in their private lives.
With this entry, we conclude Lanser's examination of how public discourse about sapphic relations parallels larger social and political concerns in the 16-19th centuries. Despite its focus on literary theory, I felt this book was an important addition to the Project. One of the reasons for examining sapphic themes in literature and art is as an inspiration for re-creating those literary and artistic themes (as I do in my fiction inspired by medieval literature). But just as important is an awareness of what ideas and images real historic women were exposed to. How might the public--even the fictional--discourse around lesbians have helped women understand and contextualize their own desires and reactions? A key aspect of writing good historic fiction is to write characters that think and act in concert with their times. As the articles covered by the LHMP show, this does not mean that women in history were incapable of understanding themselves in terms of some sort of lesbian-like identity. But it does mean that their options for understanding that identity, and their visions for what form their lives might take, could vary significantly. A story set in the heyday of Restoration libertineism presents a character with very different models for her life than one set in the Regency. (And, of course, this holds true no matter what form her erotic desires take!)
* * *
Lanser, Susan S. 2014. The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830. ISBN 978-0-226-18773-0
Chapter 7 “Sisters in Love”: Irregular Families, Romantic Elegies, 1788-1830
The increasing divide between the derided image of erotic sapphic relations and the praiseworthy image of female domesticity, epitomized by non-erotic woman+woman couples, is played out in attitudes toward certain couples. The “Ladies of Llangollen” (Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby) were firmly established in the popular imagination as the model of non-sexual romantic friendship. This desexualization of female couples (at least, those belonging to the genteel classes and intellectual circles) enabled sapphic discourse to lay claim to the increasingly important field of domesticity, rather than being seen as antithetical to it.
Female couples could simultaneously support the values of “companionate domesticity” and of individualism, but as these sets of values began to diverge, it was hard to support both at the same time. Romanticism, in general, supported transgression to the extent that it privileged individualism over social conformity, chosen affinities over prescriptive ones. This would seem a natural context for chosen affinities between women to be celebrated. But they are celebrated in the isolated individual couple, not in the collective movement that had been discredited by the sapphic sects motif. By being isolated, these couples can be idolized safely as a dead end.
Lanser explores how these themes are set out in the novels Paul et Virginie (which concerns two women forming a family after being betrayed in various ways by heterosexual relations) and Het Land (similarly portraying two women forming an idyllic marriage-like bond, this time in rejection of heterosexual relations). The Ladies of Llangollen follow this same model, living together in rustic retreat as an inseparable couple, and other similarly idealized couples are noted. In true Romantic fashion, the Ladies were the subject of elegaic poems (by poets as noteworthy as Wordsworth) that focused, not so much on the joys of their life together, but on the projected image of their eventual shared grave. The sentimentalized image contrasts oddly with Wordsworth’s private account of meeting the Ladies in person, where he described them as “curious” and “odd”. All that is erased in the poem, which turns them into pure sentimental symbol.
The chapter concludes with a consideration of the poem “Rosalind and Helen”, celebrating a similarly idyllic female couple, but also with an examination of the concept of “irregularity” as appearing in the titles and structures of Romantic verses on female couples. This poem is viewed in contrast to Coleridge’s “Christabel” which begins with a clearly erotic encounter between two women (though one shrouded in vague language and metaphor). The negative reception to “Christabel” demonstrates the shift in public attitude toward depiction of the sapphic.
Coda: We Have Always Been Modern
In the concluding chapter, Lanser summarizes the themes of the study. One unifying feature of the period under study is the description of woman+woman as “new” and “unprecedented”, indicating the inability of social frameworks to resolve sapphic challenges. Sapphic relations were not the only challenge to the inherent contradictions of the age, such as the principle of consensual government coexisting with colonial slavery. But the close connection between sapphic discourse and debates about individualism, women’s rights, and the challenge to tradition and orthodoxy show the ways in which sapphic imagery was used to reflect and represent the extremes of those movements, for good or ill. Sapphic discourse could be a safety valve, an ideal, or a weapon of silencing and suppression. With the disruptions of the 18th century settling into the more solidified class and gender-specific identities of the early 19th century, the use of public sapphic discourse as a tool for engaging with those disruptions diminishes.
Lanser re-emphasizes that her concern here is with the use of the idea of the sapphic in public discourse, not with the lives of actual women in romantic or erotic relationships. But the changes in public discourse affected what strategies were available for those women to deflect dangerous interest in their private lives.
