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This finishes up my short series on some basics of metaphor theory with a closer look at the pitfalls of this aspect of the human brain. And--to be clear--the answer to those pitfalls isn't "stop using metaphoric thinking" because that is not biologically possible. As before, this brief summary is built on the work of a large number of other people who are not necessarily going to get credited by name here. Just take it as a given that none of this is my own original work.

To recap briefly, metaphoric thinking arises because we process concepts and systems that we experience (the target domain) by creating mental models that relate them to other concepts and systems (the source domain), and then use what we know (or believe) about the characteristics, relationships, and implications of the source domain to reason about the target domain. Within this framework, the standard way of describing a metaphorical mapping is "[target domain] is [source domain]", for example, "Anger is a Pressurized Hot Liquid" or "A Business is a Sports Team" or even fairly simple mappings like "More is Up".

Most of the failure modes of metaphoric thinking can be summed up as "the map is not the territory", that is, that the target domain that we're reasoning about is not the source domain, and things that are true about the source domain are not necessarily true for the target, or at least not for the same reasons. (Another set can be summed up as "you're looking at the wrong map", but "wrong map" is a tricky concept here given that, in one sense, all maps are the wrong map.)

Conceptualizing a business in terms of a sports team can cause us to assume/assign properties or relationships that don't hold. Is the CEO the "coach" whose primary goal is to ensure the success of the team and the personal development of the workers? Or is the CEO the "franchise owner" who gains prestige and income from the "team's" accomplishments but has little direct involvement? Or is the CEO a fellow team member--a quarterback, perhaps--who works on an equal level with the other players, though in a specialized position? Each of these create expectations about what the CEO will do and how they will relate to the other participants.

In a previous post, I mentioned similar issues with Anger is a Steam Boiler, where a user of this metaphor is led to view the stimulus of the anger as an external force over which the experiencer has no control.

A more pernicious version of this (mentioned by a commenter on a previous post -- or maybe it was on facebook?) is when unrelated properties of the source domain affect our judgment about appropriate participants and actions in the target domain. For example, team sports have traditionally been considered a male-dominated field. Therefore the use of sports metaphors for business can prime us to assume that men will be better at business than women will be.

A related failure mode comes when a metaphoric framework is used in conflict with a more straightforward interpretation of the target domain, making counter-intuitive conclusions seem "natural". A very simple example of this is the usual visual presentation of quantitative information in graph form. The metaphor More is Up is grounded in the everyday experience is seeing that if you have a stack of a larger number/amount of X, that stack will be taller than a stack of a smaller number/amount of the same thing. This is such an ingrained concept that visual representations of quantity in terms of height are rarely examined or questioned.

So, for example, a graph that reverses the direction of the vertical axis scale, with smaller (or negative) numbers higher on the axis than larger (or positive) numbers can leave the viewer with a different emotional understanding of the data than the standard orientation. One can't just argue that this is because we're accustomed to one format. Logic would dictate that a clearly labelled axis should override habit, and yet even if the difference in the axis is pointed out, the different presentation affects what conclusions people take away.

Another example of this failure mode is when subjective or sensory experiences are treated metaphorically as physical forces. For example, if a person's internal response to a visual stimulus is interpreted metaphorically as a physical force acting on that person. This is where you get someone reasoning, for example, that the sight of a particular person or thing is the equivalent of a physical assault that must be countered with literal force, such that a non-physical event is treated as "more physical" than the response. (There's a very disturbing study of the metaphoric language used by certain subsets of rapists to justify to themselves how the rape was actually "self-defence" against the "attack" of a woman declining to respond to their advances.)

But attributes and relationships are not the most hazardous area of metaphoric reasoning. The most prevalent failure mode is one of implication and consequence. If anger is pressurized steam within the experiencer, then some sort of "outlet" is imperative to avoid physical damage to that experiencer. Therefore some sort of violent or aggressive action to "let off steam" is not simply excusable, but a matter of self-preservation. Similarly, if an angry person "explodes", it isn't a personal choice regarding how the emotion is expressed, but an inevitable consequence.

If Business is a Sports Team, then there must be an opponent. And success for one's own company must require the failure of your opponent. Furthermore, success will be expected to be measured in relatively simple numeric terms (goals, runs, finish times). If Business is a Sports Team, then all participants share equally in the benefits of a "win". (Hence, low-level workers can be pressured to be "team players" and "take one for the team" for the overall goals, with no other compensation than the collective "victory".)

All this is only a very brief overview of the topic. And, as noted, we can't avoid using metaphoric thinking. It's how our brains are wired. But we can pay attention to the metaphors that we're using (or that others are using around us) and question whether we're being misled into irrational or harmful conclusions based on those frameworks.

I’m still promoting my free e-story “The Mazarinette and the Musketeer”, so I thought I’d cheat a bit on Squib Day and do one of my little topical round-ups from the Lesbian Historic Motif Project.

Unlike the “long 18th century”, there doesn’t seem to have been a concerted look at lesbian-like themes in the 17th century as a narrow focus, but the period does get covered regularly both under an “early modern” rubric, and sometimes as the tail end of the Renaissance, as well as in longer-term general surveys of post-medieval material.

General Studies

A particularly excellent introduction to the topic is Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (link is to the first of a series of posts) as well as her more literature-oriented Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (again, the link is the first of a series of posts).

Susan Lanser’s The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830 includes significant coverage of the 17th century, focusing on how the image of the lesbian was used in social and political discourse (link is to the first of a series of posts).

A similarly in-depth work is Valerie Traub’s The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England covering the 16-17th centuries (link is to the first of a series of posts).

In the collection Singlewomen in the European Past 1250-1800 (eds. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide), the following articles include 17th century material: “Singlewomen in Early Modern Venice” (Monica Chojnacka), demographic surveys in “Singlewomen in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Demographic Perspective” (Maryanne Kowaleski), and studies on the available circumstances for singlehood in “Having Her Own Smoke: Employment and Independence for Singlewomen in Germany 1400-1750” (Merry E. Wiesner). The only article specifically addressing lesbianism in this collection, however, focuses on the 18th century.

Beynon and Gonda’s collection Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century includes material covering the end of the 17th. Valerie Traub’s “’Friendship So Curst’: Amor Impossibilis, the Homoerotic Lament and the Nature of Lesbian Desire” traces the rise of a motif that women’s same-sex desire was socially acceptable because it was “impossible” to carry out. Sally O’Driscoll’s “A Crisis of Femininity: Re-Making Gender in Popular Discourse” traces a shift in popular attitudes towards women’s sexuality beginning from the later 17th century. David Robinson’s “Pornographic Homophobia: L’Academie des dames and the Deconstructing Lesbian” examines a foundational pornographic text of the later 17th century that foregrounds sex between women as part of a much wider variety of transgressive sexual activity.

Historic Source Materials

Kenneth Borris’s survey of historic source materials, Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470-1650 includes some early 17th century material. Of particular relevance are the chapter on Medicine and some of the material in Love and Friendship. A similar survey of source materials covering France is found in Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan’s Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection which covers the 16-18th century and in particular has an extensive catalog of the sapphic material in Brantôme.

Special Topics

The dramatic stage is a context for portrayals of relationships between women, though often via gender-disguise motifs. Works from the 17th century are discussed in Douglas Bruster’s “Female-Female Eroticism and the Early Modern Stage”. Mary Beth Rose’s article “Women in Men’s Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl” looks at both the real life and dramatic portrayal of Moll Frith. And a nearly exhaustive catalog of 17th century English plays with any trace of female homoeroticism is included in Denise Walen’s Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama (link is to the first of a series of posts, which are still in process at this time).

The motif of the “female husband” or the use of gender disguise to enable two female-bodied persons to establish a romantic or sexual partnership is prevalent in the 17th century. One interesting case is covered in Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson’s article “Sexual Identities in Early Modern England: The Marriage of Two Women in 1680". A more general study of gender-disguised women (with a variety of motivations) is found in Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte van de Pol’s The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (link is to Part 1 of 3). Another take on the general motif, focusing on pop culture representations, is Dianne Dugaw’s Warrior Women and Popular Balladry 1650-1850 (link is to the first of 2 posts).

In addition, there’s my previous link-post on Julie d’Aubigny.

All in all, quite a wealth of inspirations for those who want to write stories about 17th century western European women loving each other!