Olivia Williams as Jane Austen comforting Gretta Scacchi as Cassandra late in life: just after Cassandra has given Jane a sensual rub down (2008 Miss Austen Regrets)
Dear friends and readers,
This blog derives its suggestion that Jane Austen was possibly a lesbian spinster from a section on spinsterhood in Emma Donoghue’s book on lesbianism in women, Passions Between Women and my reading of Jane Austen’s letters up to Letter 39 — when there occurs the 4 year hiatus and probably a cache of missing letters. I know Terry Castle’s theory that Jane and Cassandra might have been incestuous lovers was stamped out with intense fury, looking at Austen’s life from Donoghue’s perspective, from 1801 Jane fits into a discernible pattern outlines as typically and recognizably (at the time) a lesbian spinster life and attitudes of mind.
I must first give a larger outline of Donoghue’s book into which her section on spinsterhood in the 18th century fits. Donoghue proposes to write a book about lesbian women and women who chose not to marry as well as bisexual women. She says the criteria uses for homosexual men is different that what one must use for women and her first chapter is a superb outline of why. Basically what emerges is even if lesbianism has not been a savagely punished crime, it has been erased; when it is brought up it’s treated with intense hostility, scorn, not believed in. It’s very hard to find evidence, and the first clear stories emerge in the 18th century. She wants to go beyond all the stories where doubt can be injected and the moralists and normalizers and just men do this repeatedly wherever possible.
What Donoghue shows is that the earliest records of lesbianism are intertwined with myths about women’s sexual organs where the persistent idea is the lesbian woman has a distorted one such that hers are a form of phallus. I can see how the threat of “adult” as a label is making it hard for me even to discuss this. Well it’s all so sordid. The stories reek with animosity and lurid glee. Otherwise you have to go to these enormous collections of tales and stories and ferret out sly details. Read against the grain.
And until the 18th century and beyond this idea that the woman lesbian is someone with equipment in her like that of a man (a smaller phallus) re-erupts. Men cannot believe that one can have sex or want it without a phallus. What these are are stories of female hermaphrodites.
The 18th century brings us the first relatively open frank depictions of sex. Clarissa is a landmark in this, and so too we have the first depictions of lesbianism. These are most often stories of cross-dressing women and begin in chapbooks and plays of the later 17th century. What permits this is really the rise of secularism The influence of religion on all this is usually omitted lest someone get offended, but it is central. No surprise that most of these are now larded with moral warning lessons and scorn and dislike, but nonetheless for the first time telling of female desires for other women and women finding sexual pleasure with other women. Two early texts Donoghue discusses are: by Henry Fielding, who as magistrate came across much transgression. A long (in effect) novella on Mary Hamilton called The Female Husband and a novella by John Cleland on another women who passed as a man and married other women, The True History of Catherine Vizzani.
When Donoghue moves to a long section on breeches’ parts in plays, she reveals telling patterns which make it hard for the reader to see what women are enjoying: what is written down repeatedly in response to breeches’ parts are how men enjoy them, men are titillated, without any reference to what women may have felt while they watched. Cross-dressing roles are described as tantalizing men, as men being roused by lesbianism. Again no reference to women. When masquerades are described, we learn of the dangers of heterosexual abduction they pose to women, not about how women characteristically went in male outfits.
The military biographies (of women soldiers) are hampered by this male outlook: the woman is usually married, and the challenge is for her to pass as a male, imitate male heterosexual behavior, and satires on duels ensue. This usually omits the obvious sexuality of the role – usually only treated in pornographic or erotic books. She’s assertive but we miss what went on sexually.
Romantic friendships among women necessarily take us to the woman’s point of view at long last, but here one is confronted by a demand that we have diary entries explicitly saying the women had sex or the equivalent of DNA evidence. I like how she begins with Katherine Philips — I wrote my first published paper on the “matchless Orinda” and makes an important distinction that for women sexual experience does not have to include penetration genital sex. That’s crucial in discussing how women’s books are permeated with sex say in the 18th century too.
Class gets in the way. Upper and middle class women handle themselves far more discreetly and performatively but if sincerity, tenderness, depth of feeling, generosity, commitment are what’s emphasized, that does not mean the physical self is forgotten.
Sally Hawkins as Zena and Rachel Stirling as Nan in rare love-making scene (2004 ITV Tipping the Velvet)
But Donoghue moves beyond these and she demonstrates that poetry and prose by women usually seen simply as writings of sentimental/sympathetic female friendship as instead rooted in a physical relationship, is that the writing suddenly comes alive in ways not seen before If we do not demand sex be “penetrative intercourse” only with nothing approaching that counting, but look at so to speak all the gestures of foreplay, physical playfulness and whimsy, the signs of caresses, the poetry becomes not (as it usually seems) somehow coy, embarrassing, but rather simply openly playful.
She goes over poems by Anne Killigrew, Elizabeth Singer Rowe (who she reminds us was very popular with women readers) and (I admit to my surprise) Anne Kingsmill Finch. I’ve read Finch’s “the white mouses petition to Lamira the Right Honble the Lady Ann Tufton now Countess of Salisbury (to whom the deeply felt often reprinted “A Noctural Reverie” is dedicated) and never considered it as a lesbian poem. But yes it’s about a mouse that has the run of her beloved’s body.
I sue to wear Lamira’s fetters
And live the envy of my betters
When I receive her soft caresse
And creeping near her lovely tresses
Their glossy brown from my reflection
Shall gain more lustre and prefection
And to her bosom if admitted
My color there will be so fitted
That no distinction cou’d discover
My Station to a jealous Lover.
The poem when visualized could be matter for one of the French erotic encounters between women and little animals, except then the mouse scampers merrily about, and watches out for male suitors. And it is at this point the book veers towards describing a pattern of behavior and outlook like that I have found in Austen’s letters — and life: 18th century spinsterhood, a way of life for which no recognition as a valid choice was given and hence no name.
*******************************************
Samantha Harker as Jane and Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth, living together (1995 BBC P&P)
Donoghue takes us through a group of treatises published in the later 17th and early 18th century and typical women’s poems to show sharp critiques — “blistering attacks” Donoghue calls them — of marriage: Mary Astell to Mary Chudleigh. The women dramatists of the 1690s with their fierce tragedies have heroines who marry but keep another women with them – rather like Holtby and Britain had one husband between them (belong to one of them, but also a front).
These sorts of poems gradually died out; it became unacceptable to write this way. At the same time the relentless interpretation of women who didn’t marry as not having done so
because no one asked them was stepped up. Any women saying she didn’t marry because she didn’t want to was scoffed at. Critiques were sour grapes.
But private letters continue and there we find the world and attitudes of an Austen. A woman who lives among women, who has special tight relationships with them (beyond Cassandra, especially Martha Lloyd). These sorts of letters arise in great numbers as works of art in the later 17th century when it seems (as George Eliot suggested) the first modern feminists are to be found. And they are saved, printed, and now exist in modern editions. Among these, we find Catherine Trotter’s letters which show intense physical and emotional passion for her friend such that it feels uncomfortable because she is not allowed to be franker about what she’s after or wants. Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill come to mind too. A little later it’s really striking the parallels between attitudes professed by Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot and Jane Austen. Epistolary novels mirroring such relationships appear (Lennox’s Euphemia is a 1790s example). Novels also now have ladies who run do-good institutions where they find husbands for other women, not themselves (Millenium Hall). The Bath group of women emerges — and that dread word, bluestocking begins to spread for the first time.
And what do we find in Austen: not just the same mockery of marriage and married people, but a rather daring send-up and compassion for continually pregnant women combined with intense affection for a specific woman, Martha Lloyd, and those times she spends with her and a narrow circle of women friends happiness. I take it the immense we see her experience over leaving her home and moving to Bath comes from leaving the privacy of her home, of her space, where unobserved and unpressured she could write on (what she wanted to do most) and remain among these women friends. Forced out, she would be driven, pressured to be constructed as someone looking for a man, which we see she does not do from around the later 1790s to the first arrival in Bath (when the letters cease for 4 years). It is striking how when she goes to dances starting in the later 1790s, she does not go performatively. She is not on the hunt; she is there looking askance at those who are. We hear nothing in the letters of this or that eligible male seriously; instead we hear parodic accounts applied to herself. I see this as a sort of instinctive cover-up and mockery.
I take the silent four years to include some kind of emotional crack-up, which like other families in this era I’ve come across (e.g., earlier, Anne Finch’s) was hidden. When she emerges from silence, it’s not a coincidence that her father has died. A new pattern of life must be found, one far away from Bath eventually, where she can return to living not so much in a fishbowl and by the time of Chawton spend all her hours writing. Not that she did not write in the interim: this is the time of The Watsons, Lady Susan, the attempt to publish Northanger Abbey as Susan, and revisions of the three novels from Steventon years, and new brief drafts and fragments towards Mansfield Park (begun I think in the later 1790s after Jane witnessed the painful flirtation of Eliza with Henry and James) and Emma (begun I agree with others in 1801-2).
Women openly not wanting to marry were attacked with fierce enmity; indeed we don’t hear of it except in fiction and then they are stigmatized (see above). A odd brilliant version of the type is Charlotte Lucas — married because she had to not at all because she wanted to. What did it matter who was in her bed or her partner as she wanted none of them anyway. And I think about D. W. Harding’s theory that Austen’s fiction arose out of her need to find some place desperately to express herself however muted and framed through ironies and conventional plot-designs.
Donoghue’s book would regard Castle’s later “clarification” as a retreat — Castle has retreated to say she was misunderstood, never meant that Jane and Cassandra had an overt sexual relationship or Austen with anyone else. But she did, that’s why she made a big deal about them sharing a bed, and that’s where she came to grief. She had not read the letters carefully enough. In them is evidence Jane and Cassandra had separate beds.. The point is they were experiencing lesbian spinsterhood (let’s call it): throughout her book Donoghue’s very purpose is to put the sex back. To day that the denial of sexual experience is to deny the woman their full reality.
She writes it’s “crucial” to “distinguish between the dominant ideology’s explanation of romantic friendship that it was sexless, morally elevating and no threat to male power” and “the reality of such bonds between women.” The better poems Donoghue quotes (by Behn, by Finch) do show strong sexual experience; the plays do, and (I’ve read these) letters of Catherine Trotter. Donoghue says the definition of sexual experience which demands genital penetration is a narrow male one, and once we allow for a full range of sexual fulfillments, we have entered the realm of women’s sexuality (which for heterosexuals includes pregnancy, breast-feeding.
I grant that in Austen’s case the one place I find intense passion is for Martha Lloyd and further grant there seems nothing sexual there, but remember that Cassandra destroyed the majority of the letters. I’d say her motives are both: she does not like the men on offer and did not want to marry, preferred not to, especially wanted no burdens of large numbers of children. Given the small number of people as intelligent as herself that she could meet, she met few people she could be attracted to. When young it was Tom Lefroy; later she bonded closely with Martha Lloyd who came to live with Jane, Cassandra and their mother (see her letter to Martha Lloyd).
Donoghue goes further: she suggests that the pattern was recognized and either deliberately ignored, or overtly denied (she’s a sour old maid, she didn’t marry because she couldn’t “catch” a husband, had no dowry, is a “bluestocking” — soon to be treated with harsh derision). The word “lesbian” was not used until much later — 1890s — as homosexual did not emerge until then. You find the word “tribade” in the later 17th century; sapphist was sort of understood. The slang of the day was “tom” – can you imagine Elizabeth Carter called a “tom”? the sexual terms were demeaning, undermining — like “Molly for men.
Keeley Hawes as Kitty and Rachel Stirling as Nan: 19th century “Toms” (2004 ITV Tipping the Velvet)
For the record, I’m not sure what was her relationship with Cassandra. That Cassandra was inferior to Austen intellectually (hers was an ordinary kind of mind, a more than a little rigid and obtuse) does not matter so much when it comes to a sexual physical relationship. Miss Austen Regrets is daring at the close of the movie when it suggests that Cassandra has not wanted Jane to marry at all, and kept her to herself, and we see Imogen Poots as Fanny watch Gretta Scacchi as Cassandra give Olivia Wiliams as Jane a very sensual rub-down (through a door). The film-makers are hinting there was physical release between the two. In 1801 we see in the letters a drawing together, with some of the old strains conflicts beginning to fade as Cassandra begins to see how much they will be fringe people and realizes to rigidly uphold the establishment gives her no advantage, works in fact to marginalize her. The scolding has ceased.
Consider how important are the sisters-in law in P&P, S&S (blood sisters), Mrs Weston and Emma, Persuasion and even NA (Eleanor Tilney a central relationship).
What we lack is what happened between them and to Austen, what her perception of experience and actual experiences were for four years. I now think perhaps there was a crack up for a while.
Hattie Morahan as Elinor hugging Charity Wakefield as Marianne (2008 S&S)
It’s hard to get a book or essay published about this — nowadays the attack (fierce) on Castle is remembered. But more: the general run of books now makes Austen into someone who loved and never married (boo hoo – that’s Spence’s concoction which is pro-family view at the same time) or makes her into a pollyanna (biographies of her for young people that win awards stress how she loved children — it’s ludicrous, she didn’t hate them, but she didn’t want any of her own). So the views I’m suggesting either do not appear or are expressed discreetly or really not at all. What happened to my book contract for JA and Bath is the publisher did not like the direction I was going in even then – and it was much milder than what I’d say today.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Although Donoghue’s book title is a play on Sedgwick’s Between Men, Donoghue’s book is necessarily quite different. Sedgwick has all literature before her when it comes to telling of plots where we have two men rivals — sometimes for a woman’s affection and body but for many other things too. And where sexuality is central, sometimes homoerotic as well as heterosexual. Until recently there were no lesbian books, and no women vying for sexual power over a man in the same way at all; between women conjures up visions of women’s novels which are cosy, spinsters, really Emma does fit the image for some, or better yet, Cranford where it’s a case of comical Amazonianism.
Quite interesting and probably more valid than many claims being made about JA. It has always struck me that her relationship to Cassandra was more intense than most sisters experienced.
few other females wrote as often to a sister or seem to have to hear from a sister quite frequently. Jane could have recorded the same material in a journal but appears to have needed to correspond with Cassandra when she couldn’t see or touch her. When one considers the cost of such a correspondence it seems as though she might have been driven to keep write so frequently.
I don’t think the relationship had to be more physical than was acceptable to the other party. Lesbians , like others in this world, can be victims of unrequited sexual passion, though affection is returned. That is , neither Martha nor Cassandra needed to have a tendency towards female love to be the object of such love. The person who felt such a pull towards a straight person, suffered more but made do with the ordinary touching and hugging acceptable by the other person and society. It wouldn’t be the first time in the history of literature that great works came out of frustration, nor would it be the first time that the works produced appear to have no connection what so ever to the author’s sexual orientation.
Diane Ry: “I read the blog on Donoghue and lesbianism–it sounds like an interesting book. It is true that it’s hard to “see” something that has not been named. As I was reading, I wondered too about Shakespeare, and his cross-dressing Viola, who disguises herself as a man–this thematic clearly predates the 18th century, though it may have come more to the forefront with the rise of women writers from the late 17th century onward.
I don’t know that I would label Austen a “spinster,” though I’m sure her contemporaries did–that word has a “sting” and stigmatizing twist even to this day. Ellen, perhaps you are being ironic, as you are saying in the blog that is exactly what Austen wasn’t–the pitiful, unattractive woman who could not “catch a man”–but was instead a woman who knew her own mind and her own sexual preferences and chose a single state despite other options.
Certainly we know that sexuality slides–she did love Tom Lefroy apparently and apparently she did love Martha Lloyd.
We foreground sexual identity so much in this culture–my sense is that under a veil of propriety, JA did what she wanted and wasn’t much concerned beyond that. In some ways, not having a vocabulary or identity around non-hetero-sexuality probably functioned as a liberation for her. And of course, not to forget–we have Emma and Harriet.”
I’m combining threads to save time. My blog’s readership has shot up today (the way it did the day I posted about Cleland’s Fanny Hill). First, I ask Diane R to send the title and author of that book. I’d love to read it. The account of trauma that Diane summarizes seems to me spot on: one can see (and experience) this in little in daily way — the obsessive repetition not only in waking but dream life — to rid the self of this poison one feels has been injected but across years and years.
Silence is a weak or feeble weapon. When immigrant women pretend not to speak a language, they lose far more than they gain; it is in a way the “flight” type person’s way of battling. If we say that Cassandra silenced Jane, or her scoldings drove Jane into writing only in circumscribed and limited ways, then she did show power over one person, but its purview is pathetic. Just one person — of course within families this is often enough.
Yes I see in letter 39 a continual effort to reassure: she really is better, she is bathing now, but we cannot know if the illness is something immediate or long range and persistent nor in what it inheres. There is nothing _in_ this letter to suggest nervous illness (in the way Edward Austen suffered – or thought he did).
On my use of the term spinster: I’ve had more emails direct protesting the use of that term than “lesbian.” That suggests to me what is operating is still a profound shame at not being married — or being a virgin. The word suggests virgin to most, but in the way Donoghue uses it, it does not. She argues that we must not limit sexual experience to genital penetration but for a woman it includes a whole plethora of physical gestures, embraces, kisses and orgasm can come without it (not even using a dildo or one of these leather objects that were in circulation in the 19th century at least).
I agree that everywhere today we look when an actress portrays a reading girl or “bluestocking” or girl who is a virgin without boyfriends, she is made ugly, flat chested too (see the way Davies’s P&P dressed up Mary Bennet), but should we buy into this. Let us not allowing photoshopping to be our model in our heads.
Further I don’t use it negatively. Maybe because I’ve been reading Graham’s historical novels, but he uses the term neutrally or to suggest a certain kind of activity found in married women: spinning. The old fashioned and older women in his fiction have spinning wheels in Cornwall. It takes on a delicate connotation there.
No more time for today on this one, back tonight or late tomorrow night for readings of Letter 39,
Ellen
On the word spinster, I probably was simply taking it over from Donoghue. Donoghue’s description of a lifestyle, of choices, of attitudes of mind, of writings of a group of women puts them under the category “spinsterhood” as that is the word used say of a Austen when not married. It was probably much less negative than “old maid.” Also reading these 18th century historical, multicultural, rewritten novels lately.
She then adds “lesbian” to the mix herself to signal what was unacknowledged but understand in the era. Tribade feels silly (not used then anyway) nor “sapphist” used (only the later 19th century).
In an earlier version of the blog I made a little joke. After I explained the slang terms “molly” and “tom,” I quipped (or tried to quip) imagine Elizabeth Carter called a tom. But when I thought about it, it seemed to me to make fun of Carter. The last thing I wanted to do was make fun of this woman for whom I not only have the highest respect, but since reading her letters a real fondness. I made her one of my foremother poets in my blog series :). So I cut my little joke which maybe would not have amused anyone anyway.
Ellen
I didn’t mean to put this debate on the list — where it has emerged on Austen-l and in part on WWTTTA. My conclusion about Donoghue’s thesis is tentative; it seems to me suggestive and in line with what we see in these remnants. I”ve had some good offblog replies with suggestions on what to read next or think about. This is not a popular stance at all so the people don’t want to come onto the blog.
Austen had the capacity to fall in love with Lefroy, and as far as we can see was falling in love, about to plunge in, and felt her feelings has been reciprocated; both young people were brutally cut off by the families. A couple of years later Austen is still hurting, at least too mortified to ask about him — perhaps she had been hurt by his acquiescence to his family. By 1801 we see a woman who has no interest in marrying; we have seen all along a woman who loathes what she sees happening to women who do — physically, the endless pregnancies, and she is very aware of the risks of death. At the same time we do have a few letters which show a deep engagement with another woman, a putting her ego into that intensely. I very much liked _Miss Austen Regrets_ because it is based on the letters; like many better movies it tries not to offend a larger audience while presenting its own point of view: for the larger audience is the maudlin feel of how terrible a woman should not get married; for the smaller I see in it in the main character a continual refusal and in both Cassandra and Jane a quiet delineation of deep love, even erotic: we are asked to interpret the refusal of Bigg-Wither as Cassandra’s doing.
I also think as a general trajectory across the letters which is reflected in the books a distinct discomfort with and dislike of social life as then constructed. I find it important that when she goes dancing she goes just to dance; there is no ulterior seeking out the right man and landing him. A good article by Troost and Greenberg is on how the movies are determined to squash the jaundiced (as they politely put it) approach to social experience in Austen’s books; D. W. Harding’s larger view out of which he wrote his “Regulated Hatred” is not that she detests or her family or anything like that but the view of independent people who struggle in society in _Social Psychology and Individual Values_.
My specific reply to Diana is she is normalizing and turning an interesting person into a paradigm that doesn’t make sense of the books unless we see in them dullish romances. I often quote both Tomalin and Nokes because they don’t do that; they take different stances, Tomalin a further development of Jenkins — Tomalin has Austen as really depressed these 4 years. Said discreetly but there, and it makes sense of _The Watsons_. Deborah Kaplan’s book leaves out the biographical background of depression — too discreet a scholar. Nokes is often wrong-headed by original and has a real living breathing woman in his book, and individual incidents across the whole life suddenly make sense. Most others of these biographies are various forms of stereotyping: Fergus turns Austen into a modern performative businesswoman which strikes me as hilarious; if so, she failed and she is sad at the time not only to be so ill but to see her _MP_ ignored and her _Emma_ boring people. Spence is a trimmer, and combines unreal scholarship (even bad faith) with what instinctively he likes (as a male) and thinks popular: the movie made out of his book is ludicrous piety combined with over-the-top romance; it does use the plot-pattern of P&P showing (I think) that if you lean too hard on the parallels between the books and life you end up with nonsense.
I’ll leave it at that, only stressing (as I did in the blog) that it is possible Austen did have real sexual experience with Martha (quiet) and a real physical relationship with Cassandra, one that satisfied both women physically — yes orgasm gained some other way than fucking. One need not go all the way. Between them I’m seeing a growing coming together. Early on they are conflicted — Cassandra’s every instinct is to be utterly conventional and she wants her sister, Jane, to be that way. Chance killed her lover, and as a poor woman, she is now marginalized and she and her sister draw together in Bath. I suppose I’d say Austen like many people was flexible, capable of bisexual experiences. She went the way her society pushed her in part. It denied her the heterosexual outlet for a while and then she saw she’s rather not; she preferred to write and have liberty of person and time, and liked her women friends, bonded with them.
My final idea that Austen has Aspergers traits makes sense to me and that she had some sort of serious crack-up in Bath too. I’ve no proof of these; we cannot diagnose Austen. Even if we had more letters, she’s long withered in her grave into ashes; the worms got to her long ago. But I see the reflections of this in the books: in Marianne, in Jane Fairfax, Fanny Price, Anne Elliot; Elinor is the character who hangs on, holds out, puts the guarded face up (I’m not alone in suggesting she is very much a surrogate — and James Austen saw this playfully). The males too reflect Austen in these lines: Mr Knightley is a very private man, and so too has Wentworth suffered much emotionally for his years away. Edmund is obtuse but well-meaning — very obtuse. I like that the movies build up portraits from Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon but in the books they are just sketches; Darcy is not consistent. Frank Churchill a superficial needling cad; maybe in the end Jane Fairfax was glad to escape him as Mrs Tilney and Lady Elliot escaped their bad choices.
Ellen
I’ve less than no wish to debate whether JA was a “lesbian spinster” or
not, either, Ellen; gosh, who could know? Though Donoghue’s book sounds
fascinating, and may open up some avenues of possibility. Yet I sense too much intense sexual/romantic passion for men coming from her books, to make genital sex with women seem very likely (most heterosexual women have an aversion to that). But I also sense, as you do, intense friendships for women, the sisterly relation in particular, and it’s possible something went on, some consolation that can’t really be seen in terms of modern orientations. (Somewhere between Queen Victoria thinking it was impossible, and Terry Castle!) Obviously, we can never know. Clearly she was hurt, perhaps by other rejections and disappointments in addition to Lefroy, and she made her mind up, perhaps at the time of Bigg-Wither, never to marry. If celibacy had no pleasures, marriage had many pains. “Deep engagement” with other women, friend, sister, a sororal community, might mean some what we now call lesbian feelings and activity; or equally it might not. The closest of women’s friendships are not usually sexual, though they may be, and here are no real indications one way or the other. The only caution I would make is that modern films like Miss Austen Regrets are not evidence. We are reading the Letters as a first source, to find out all we can about her life and how her mind worked. It may be interesting how a screenwriter interprets these things, as it can be illuminating to see what the various biographers made of her life. But the delineation of Jane and Cassandra’s “deep even erotic love,” and Cassandra being the force behind the Bigg-Wither thing, though
interesting interpretations, are not real *sources.* They may stimulate our
thinking however – certainly our imagination – but they are only somebody else’s thoughts, not facts, and only occasionally conclusive. At that, probably conclusive only for our age.
Do you mean that if we believe Jane Austen to be heterosexual and not to
have a mental illness, that makes her dull, and her novels dullish romances? You lose me there. I have no doubt JA was depressed during the “missing” years, I agree with you that it seems more and more likely. Interpretations of her as a modern performative businesswoman are ludicrous indeed; Fergus was simply wrong, and I wouldn’t consider such a viewpoint seriously. But that Austen depicted private, troubled, obtuse characters among her amazing array of personalities, is no indicator of mental illness at all. She was a brilliant, sensitive observer of human life; why *wouldn’t* she depict a vast array of subtle characteristics and types? It doesn’t mean she partook in, for example, Edmund’s obtuseness or Mr. Collins’ social ineptitude.
I do not want to stereotype Austen, I want to try to reach as close to the
real woman as possible. Yet I can see her – as a woman – finding some kind
of sexual solace with another woman (even though there is not evidence)
much more easily than I can make the autism label fit. It all comes back to
the way she uses feelings she has had in portraying so many of her
characters. As through a glass darkly, we see only in part. None of her characters *is* her, but who can doubt that she had some of young Fanny’s feelings when young, some of Marianne’s emotionalism at periods of her life, some of Elinor’s repressive qualities at other times (or even the same time!), some of Mary Crawford’s cynicism, some of Catherine’s innocence, and so on. But the bottom line is that we can never diagnose Austen through our dark reversed modern day spyglass; it’s absurd to try. One can say “it’s possible she may have had some lesbian experiences,” and “she undoubtedly experienced some depression in her life.” But seek though we may (and we will!) I don’t know that we will, or can, get any closer to the veritable woman than that.
The most amazing thing is that we all see Austen as a prism through what we individually are. The characteristics most like us that we see reflected
in her, come to the fore, in each reader’s mind. Some therefore see her
primarily as a detective story; others as a Christian; some writers may
wishfully see their own sexual traits in her; others their own weaknesses,
strengths, foibles, handicaps, leanings, sensibilities, and limitations (e.g.,
the Janeites who only see her as a romance writer). Others see her as
representing their political beliefs (often completely opposite!). What we
recognize in ourselves as familiar, we take as pre-eminent in her, what she was all about. I see her as a humorist; that is and was the first basis of her
appeal to me. But she was more than that alone…and none of some of the
others! (Not sure what sort of mind sees itself reflected back from the
prism of Jane Austen as a vampire, but a mercenary one, I conclude.)
Diana
I’ve less than no wish to debate whether JA was a “lesbian spinster” or
not, either, Ellen; gosh, who could know? Though Donoghue’s book sounds
fascinating, and may open up some avenues of possibility. Yet I sense too much
intense sexual/romantic passion for men coming from her books, to make
genital sex with women seem very likely (most heterosexual women have an
aversion to that). But I also sense, as you do, intense friendships for women, the
sisterly relation in particular, and it’s possible something went on, some
consolation that can’t really be seen in terms of modern orientations.
(Somewhere between Queen Victoria thinking it was impossible, and Terry
Castle!) Obviously, we can never know. Clearly she was hurt, perhaps by other
rejections and disappointments in addition to Lefroy, and she made her mind
up, perhaps at the time of Bigg-Wither, never to marry. If celibacy had no
pleasures, marriage had many pains. “Deep engagement” with other women,
friend, sister, a sororal community, might mean some what we now call lesbian
feelings and activity; or equally it might not. The closest of women’s
friendships are not usually sexual, though they may be, and here are no real
indications one way or the other. The only caution I would make is that
modern films like Miss Austen Regrets are not evidence. We are reading the
Letters as a first source, to find out all we can about her life and how her
mind worked. It may be interesting how a screenwriter interprets these things,
as it can be illuminating to see what the various biographers made of her
life. But the delineation of Jane and Cassandra’s “deep even erotic love,”
and Cassandra being the force behind the Bigg-Wither thing, though
interesting interpretations, are not real *sources.* They may stimulate our
thinking however – certainly our imagination – but they are only somebody else’s
thoughts, not facts, and only occasionally conclusive. At that, probably
conclusive only for our age.
Do you mean that if we believe Jane Austen to be heterosexual and not to
have a mental illness, that makes her dull, and her novels dullish romances?
You lose me there. I have no doubt JA was depressed during the “missing”
years, I agree with you that it seems more and more likely. Interpretations
of her as a modern performative businesswoman are ludicrous indeed; Fergus
was simply wrong, and I wouldn’t consider such a viewpoint seriously. But
that Austen depicted private, troubled, obtuse characters among her amazing
array of personalities, is no indicator of mental illness at all. She was a
brilliant, sensitive observer of human life; why *wouldn’t* she depict a
vast array of subtle characteristics and types? It doesn’t mean she partook
in, for example, Edmund’s obtuseness or Mr. Collins’ social ineptitude.
I do not want to stereotype Austen, I want to try to reach as close to the
real woman as possible. Yet I can see her – as a woman – finding some kind
of sexual solace with another woman (even though there is not evidence)
much more easily than I can make the autism label fit. It all comes back to
the way she uses feelings she has had in portraying so many of her
characters. As through a glass darkly, we see only in part. None of her characters
*is* her, but who can doubt that she had some of young Fanny’s feelings when
young, some of Marianne’s emotionalism at periods of her life, some of
Elinor’s repressive qualities at other times (or even the same time!), some of
Mary Crawford’s cynicism, some of Catherine’s innocence, and so on. But
the bottom line is that we can never diagnose Austen through our dark
reversed modern day spyglass; it’s absurd to try. One can say “it’s possible she
may have had some lesbian experiences,” and “she undoubtedly experienced
some depression in her life.” But seek though we may (and we will!) I don’t
know that we will, or can, get any closer to the veritable woman than that.
The most amazing thing is that we all see Austen as a prism through what we
individually are. The characteristics most like us that we see reflected
in her, come to the fore, in each reader’s mind. Some therefore see her
primarily as a detective story; others as a Christian; some writers may
wishfully see their own sexual traits in her; others their own weaknesses,
strengths, foibles, handicaps, leanings, sensibilities, and limitations (e.g.,
the Janeites who only see her as a romance writer). Others see her as
representing their political beliefs (often completely opposite!). What we
recognize in ourselves as familiar, we take as pre-eminent in her, what she was
all about. I see her as a humorist; that is and was the first basis of her
appeal to me. But she was more than that alone…and none of some of the
others! (Not sure what sort of mind sees itself reflected back from the
prism of Jane Austen as a vampire, but a mercenary one, I conclude.)
Diana
Brief (in response mostly to Diana B), I think the whole general portrait into which the idea of her as normatively heterosexual fits dulls her. She is was much more interesting, unusual, and individual than that. I didn’t say she was autistic, but had Aspergers traits. That’s a big difference. And these Aspergers traits, her attitude towards social life is actually more registered in these letters than her specific sexual orientation, though not her distaste for marriage, endless pregnanices, and the whole concatenation of sycophantic relationships by which social life is conducted. Not the social life itself here, but the dishonesty, hypocrisies (in language and feeling) and a kind of continual using of one another to gain advancement and preen it over other people. She dislikes all these regularly. Ellen
Here is a fascinating poem when made a kind of context for or comment on Jane Austen’s letters and the novels seen from the context of the letters.
“The Spinster”
Now this particular girl
During a ceremonious April walk
With her latest suitor
Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
By the birds’ irregular babel
And the leaves’ litter.
By this tumult afflicted, she
Observed her lover’s gestures unbalance the air,
His gait stray uneven
Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower.
She judged petals in disarray,
The whole season, sloven.
How she longed for winter then!
Scrupulously austere in its order
Of white and black
Ice and rock, each sentiment within border,
And heart s frosty discipline
Exact as a snowflake.
But here-a burgeoning
Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits
Into vulgar motIey-
A treason not to be borne. Let idiots
Reel giddy in bedlam spring:
She withdrew neatly.
And round her house she set
Such a barricade of barb and check
Against mutinous weather
As no mere insurgent man could hope to break
With curse, fist, threat
Or love, either.
—— Sylvia Plath
************************
“And round her house she set/Such a barricade of barb and check … ” or the line “Let idiots/Reel giddy in bedlam spring/She withdrew neatly.” It’s not only the “withdrew”, it’s the “neatly” that captures repeated aspects of the writer in Austen’s letters. She loves the landscape; the few (but there now and again) references to landscape show a real sense of consolation in the beauty of the landscape but it’s couched neatly. She would not use as many words as me nor speak of it in such an entangled way as I just have.
I quote this because the heart of Diana’s argument that lesbian sex did not go on (whatever forms these took) between Austen and say Martha Lloyd or later on with Cassandra is that people were different sexually in the 19th century because of social constructs. Not just Emma Donoghue in this book on lesbianism but Rictor Norton in his two on male homsexuality (one is on homosexuality as such, and the other on homosexuality in the 18th century) and others who write on male homosexuality — of which there is much more — are concerned to refute this “out.” The way in which the sexual experience is denied is to suggest it was unthinkable and therefore undoable. The sense I have about sexuality is reality works the other way. First there are our bodies and how we feel and interact bodily and then the social constructs. That’s why “first impressions” is such a loaded term. People often choose their partners apparently unexpectedly and oftentimes sexual preference will trump all social constructs. That’s why families have to intervene brutally to break couples up. Why such punitive measures are placed on illegitimate children in most societies still. (Not ours so much — for which we or I feel some progress has been made.)
I’m not moving into presentism and saying I feel such-and-such and therefore Austen must’ve, because clearly the social constructs forms the way the lesbian spinsterhood could be expressed. In fact that’s the point of Donoghue’s book — to outline what lesbianism looked like in previous ages, beginning in the 18th century where the first confessions and admissions and frank descriptions _in their terms_ appear.
And what’s striking is how the presentation of Austen to the public world we see resembles say that of Anne Damer, how there is a coterminous area of behavior with spinsterhood.
I see the first two paragraphs of Plath’s poem capturing that the girl is bored with the young man’s advances. She stands apart, slightly alienated, cataloguing his qualities — as we see Austen do with people in her letters. The third 7 fourth paragraphs are capable of many different exegeses too. But she does not want to be “pitched into vulgar motley,” to be forced to participate in the dull farce of daily life, the cant clowns (who say in Austen’s letters pretend to love music). It’s a waste of her.
The end no one breaks against her. She builds a wall — this is a kind of Aspergers trait in the literature.
And to conclude, I do not think that Plath means this poem to degrade, demean, or cause others to dislike unmarried women. She is describing a type of spinster and going rather deep into it. Now and again in the poem I think of Stevie Smith, the poet, who Glenda Jackson played in a deeply moving film.
Ellen
By sheer happenstance the use and negative connotations of this word were brought up on WMST-l two days ago and there have been a number of postings about how the word is used today. It was said several times that the central idea inherent in the term is a woman who is not married or partnered and a woman who is not a mother. Today it is not used of a woman who is necessarily a virgin; the term does not have to signify a woman who lives alone either; rather it’s a single woman, someone without a sexual partner and childless or childfree. Books were suggested: The Spinster And Her Enemies: Feminism And Sexuality 1880-1930 by Sheila Jeffreys is apparently about how feminism was undermined by an ideology deeply hostile to an independent woman.
There’s a press which takes its title name from the word “spinster:” Spinifex. And there is a book which might provide a larger or the same context as Donoghue’s for Austen’s life — and that of other spinsters today: _A Passion for Friends_. It’s a study of women’s friendships, passionate friendships, women who live through networks of communities of women (from say nuns to other communities) and again there is a study of the strong social forces operating to break apart such communities and put women into relationships with men as husbands/partners/lovers and have children by them.
There are online blogs where single women attempt to take back this term and reclaim it, turn it into a positive one, e.g., The spinsterlicious life:
http://www.thespinsterliciouslife.com/
We see here the connection between Bachelorette with spinster made here by (I think not sure) Jim. But as with many other such reclamations, it’s hard if not impossible to transform negative connotations and words to positive ones if the community values and norms underlying these do not change (failed attempts at reclamation [to my mind] include bitch and slut).
Ellen
I should have mentioned in the blog that Donoghue has long been interested in women’s issues and the abuse and erasure of women’s sexuality. I wrote a blog on her important novel of abduction and rape, nominated for a Mann Booker:
https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/emma-donoghues-the-room-abduction-live-burial-multi-rape-murder/
She has a novel on two lesbian women she deals with in Passions Between Women: Life Mask, about which I’ll write a separate blog.
I just love her _Slammerkin_ about a poor prostitute of the 18th century who was hung.
E.M.
I ought to have said Donoghue has long been interested in women’s issues, especially on the abuse and erasure of women’s sexuality. I had written a blog on her _The Room_, a tale based on a terrifying real life incident of abduction and rape:
https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/emma-donoghues-the-room-abduction-live-burial-multi-rape-murder/
Her _Life Mask_ is an historical novel set in the 18th century focusing on two women she deals with in this book: Anne Damer and Elizabeth Farren. I’ll write a separate blog on this.
And I just love her _Slammerkin_, about a prostitute in mid-18th century London, an impoverished orphan (yes) who was hung.
Ellen
[…] Plath’s “The Spinster” is a propos, especially the lines: Ice and rock, each sentiment within border, And heart s frosty […]
[…] (since they had not married, both girls were continually at risk of losing whatever status they had as genteel spinsters — allow me this word) and by extension […]
[…] from well-known documented lives to come alive. Like her superb non-fiction literary critical Passions Between Women, and several other of her fictions, either set in an earlier era, The Sealed Letter (set in the […]
Was Jane Austen a Black Lesbian?
The first chapters in the novel Emma about Miss Harriet Smith seem to be talking about a emotional and physical friendship between the two young women. The scene of the Highbury spinsters sitting down for a supper of scalloped oysters sounds to me like Austen is amusing herself by talking dirty. When Harriet starts her sleepovers at Hartfield I see only one purpose.
But at the same time Emma plots her marriage with Mr. Elton, which suggests no emotional involvement. So the description of this friendship has to be understood on different levels as if Austen is addressing different sets of Harriet’s and Emma’s in different universes. This I have observed also in Mansfield Park were Austen’s chapters can be understood in many different ways, as she writes allegories. The persons in her novel represent values, institutions, and social categories.
Mrs. Weston cautions Mr. Knightley not to discuss his worries about the friendship with Emma’s sister, in order not to alarm her. Which suggests there is something alarming, less obvious to the casual onlooker; in that friendship. Lesbianism was not yet defined and most people probably had never heard of such a thing. This could be going on in front of them, or even they could have been participating in what we have learned to call lesbianism, and they did not know it. I believe that in Austen’s age lesbians were freer, and ‘spinsterhood’ was only terrible for people who were not spinsters, themselves.
But Austen has bigger fish to fry, and after saying her piece on lesbian relations, she moves on. As we are discussing Jane Austen and lesbianism, I take courage to introduce my own research: Was Jane Austen Black? Persons who have immersed themselves in one type of discrimination might perhaps be more willing to hear about other types of discrimination.
The novel Emma is Black History. This is strictly based on the many pen portraits, personal descriptions in Austen’s novels, which say that her personages are light brown or sallow, brown, very brown and black. Emma’s ‘Mr. Elton, black, spruce and smiling.’ Or Mr. Crawford: ‘absolutely plain, black and plain.’ And to make sure: his sister Mary is ‘brown with a lively black eye.’ The Bertram’s are ‘fair’ but not white. Emma who was somewhat bothered by Jane Fairfax’s pale complexion concludes that ‘she cannot be called fair.’ And that Fairfax had ‘just enough colour for beauty.’ Emma must have been very dark, with hazel eyes. Like Jane Austen herself with a ‘rich colour’ and a ‘brown complexion.’
Like Terry Castle, I get some very strange responses, if any at all. While the only response I’m waiting for is of a person to immediately reach for their own copies and confirm these facts. These description of people as brown or black are also found in her letters. And in Eliza Comtesse de Feuillides letters who boasts about how she ‘heightened the native brown of her complexion with a Tan.’
In this case the explanation cannot be: there were no Blacks. Or the black meant something else. Black meant something else because I’m talking about blackness, in Europe, and before 1848. Not the Hollywood, post –colonial, post Civil Rights movement, images of Blacks harboured by whites. The difference is of course the same as how a lesbian views lesbians compared how a non-lesbian views lesbians. Or how these two groups would countenance a lesbian Jane Austen. The question is why these descriptions are ignored. As scholars have researched every iota in Austen’s books or letters, they remain dead silent when it comes to these descriptions. Whites Austen called ‘Pink:’ like in Mrs Blount, ‘fat neck & Pink husband,’ in a letter to Cassandra.
So she had a reason to clearly make Marianne Dashwood ‘very brown.’ And write that Emma Watson was ‘very brown,’ but ‘some saw no fault and some no beauty.’ Or to some ‘her brown skin was the annihilation of every grace.’
Moving on, I feel she is addressing colorism among people of colour, and she proposes unity, as her Blacks are threatened to be written out of history. Which to me already has come to pass. Elizabeth Bennet who is ‘brown’ and ‘tanned’ is played by white actresses. As is black Mr. Elton played by a white actor, so we do not see that Austen is talking about race-mixing, that upsets both Mr. Elton and Mr. Knightley, which Austen was against herself.
So please, before you attack, read ‘Northanger Abbey’ about the ‘sallow’ or light brown Catherine Morland who gets more colour as she grows up and falls in love with Mr. Tilney, who was brown. The Tilney’s were ‘superior,’ and no explanation given by Austen. My research answers that question. Find my articles in google: Was Jane Austen Black?
Are you making fun of the idea Austen could have been a lesbian? If you want me to read your articles, you will have to cite them.
Egmond Codfried has misunderstood what I wrote. I did not say I thought he or she was making fun of Jane Austen’s sexuality; I said I thought he or she was making fun of my idea.
It’s obvious that Austen’s characters are what is called white: they are part of the European gene pool and phenotype common to western Europe. Emma has a true hazel eye (green flecked golden brown) with light brown hair. Harriet is blonde.
I cannot find these articles. I ask Ms or Ms Codfriend to cite the name of the journal, volume, date, pages, and as for the book, I ask for the name of the publisher, ISBN number and date.
Ellen
Why do you think I’m making fun of Jane Austen’s sexuality? Point to the line, as this is not my intention. She herself does not seem to consider lesbianism as something to grieve about. My articles are titled ‘Was Jane Austen Black?’and “Update: was Jane Austen Black?,’ both by Egmond Codfried. Anything Jane Austen + Codfried in google, might be of interest. There is even a book by me, out. Her Blackness I have derived from her Black and brown personages, and her Black oriented theme’s like face bleaching, face painting, and Black beauty.
http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=15;t=003159;p=1
My blog is bluebloodisblackblood.blogspot.com
I needed to write this blue blood (1100-1848) theory in order to discover the revisionism of history, what her books are really about, and why there is all this nonsense about no portrait of Jane Austen. Her books and letters are full of personal descriptions as light brown or sallow, brown, very brown or black, and assessments of what Black beauty is, and bleaching the skin with Gowland’s, and colorism among people of colour, about which shade is best. As are those of her niece Comtesse de Feuillide who talks about her ‘native brown colour,’ ‘heightened with a Tan.’ If one can find the lesbianism where others see only heterosexuality, by synthesizing information, you should find the blackness as well. The lesbianism is more concealed, the Black activism shouts, yet even then was spoken of in hushed tones. Try not to be like the people who vilify you if you suggest Jane Austen a lesbian, when you are to discover her blackness. Jane Austen was a firm believer in Black Supremacy, and considered herself superior to real nobles because she was accomplished, while they had only their names and titles. What I noticed is that some people cannot understand the personal description of a real historical person or a fictitious personage; and next compare this to, and appraise an image, a portrait. A brown cat is not a white cat is not a black cat. And for humans this is not interchangeable. People who think this are strange, to say the least. My theory offers an explanation why there is a tension between white and black: cause and effect; where did it start? Those who do not take the supposed inferiority of Blacks for granted. Jane Austen saw the change, and never issued her tell-tale portrait, and offers reason for the lost of power, like Black Emma foolishly teaching white Harriet about equality, wanting her to marry Mr. Elton, who was ‘black, spruce and smiling.’ Black Mr. Crawford wooing the Bertram ladies who were light skinned and in need of colour. Allegorical Emma is also about race-mixing, which highly upsets Mr. Knightley. Mr. Elton is furious at Emma, insulted she wants him to marry a white woman. It’s all there in her books and letters.
My Book: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vesftDPLNmg/ThxwUotMxkI/AAAAAAAAABY/T_c0OV_YD8s/s1600/book+cover+A5.jpg
[…] Elizabeth Farren (1759-1829), 18th century actress, by Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830): she features in Emma Donoghue’s Life Mask as bisexual […]
[…] Then there is the combined interactive topic of how much Cassandra’s company probably means to Martha: “As a companion You will be all that Martha can be supposed to want; & in that light, under those circumstances you visit will indeed be well-timed, & Your presence & support have the utmost value.” The circumstances referred to are economic: very nice house but not owned or controlled by Martha at all and in letter 44 Jane refers to a scheme Cassandra had apparently brought with her: that all 3 women would set up life as partners, live together – Jane said she agrees it is bad policy to try to hide it; best to say it out and brave all comment for hiding it would give ammunition to anyone who wanted to oppose (what you see you are ashamed?). All of which helps support Donoghue’s thesis that Austen was living the life of a lesbian spinster. […]
I came across a review of a book on Shakespeare which repeats an important argument in this book which is the one Emma Donoghue in a non-theoretical manner makes about lesbian spinsterhood in the pre-20th century:
Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film
Madhavi Menon. Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60670-8; xi + 195 pp. US$85.00.
Reviewed by Ryan Singh Paul, Allegheny College
Madhavi Menon (Associate Professor of Literature, American University) is the author of Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (UToronto Press, 2004), and the editor of Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (Duke UP, 2010). Her second monograph, Unhistorical Shakespeare is an ambitious, theoretically sophisticated work about the study of desire. Like recent works from “presentist” scholars such as Hugh Grady, Terence Hawkes, and Evelyn Gajowski, Menon seeks to challenge the historicist methods that dominate early modern studies. Her ultimate goal is to queer the idea of history itself by promoting a fluid, open model of temporality, which she calls “homohistory.” As such, the book is more significant as a work of methodological inquiry than a study of Shakespeare; her individual readings of Shakespearean texts are often insightful, but her approach to the study of history is what scholars will find both useful and problematic.
Menon’s introductory “Argument” is, in its scope, the most comprehensive part of the book and thus will be of the greatest scholarly interest. It is also likely to be the most controversial because of the claims Menon makes about the faults of “heterohistory,” her term for the primary mode of historical scholarship on sexuality. She argues that most studies of early modern sexuality assume a paradigm of difference between past and present and offers as a spokesperson for this model David Scott Kastan’s Shakespeare after Theory (Routledge, 1999). Menon highlights Kastan’s stance that the study of the past must begin with the assumption of difference between then and now and that scholars should avoid the “narcissistic” search for elements of the present in Shakespeare. In other words, Kastan believes that to see Shakespeare as our contemporary is to project ourselves onto the past, committing the dreaded sin of anachronism.
But according to Menon, this hetero-temporal paradigm fixes lines of difference in accord with chronology: heterohistorians assume the present to be transparent, solidified, and complete, while in contrast the past is viewed as the scene of fluid desire, transient identities, and deviant pleasures. Here Menon seems to be weighing in on the debate in queer and LGBT studies between models of alterity and continuity, arguing that historicist methodologies by default assume that modern sexual “identities” are absolutely different from early modern “desires.” The problem, she claims, is that by assuming a distinction between fixed sexual identities in the present and polymorphous sexual desires and acts in the past, heterohistorians (gay and straight alike) reproduce a heteronormative (and thus homophobic) narrative of development and marginalize the complexities of desire in the present by shunting them to the past. Menon faults heterohistory for ignoring the complex desires that undermine modern distinctions between heterosexual and homosexual and for only seeing sexuality as a fluid continuum when looking at the past.
In response to the distortions introduced by heterohistoricism, Menon promotes the concept of “homohistory.” The homohistorian does not reject the idea of history; rather, she withholds judgments about similarity and difference, opening herself to modes of investigation that defy traditional chronologies and put unexpected texts into dialogue in ways that a strictly temporal analysis would not allow. And rather than taking an identarian stance wherein modern sexual subjects possess recognizable and fixed desires, the homohistorian acknowledges the incoherence of desire in the present just as the heterohistorian locates it in the past. Menon says that homohistory is not a method; one may think of it instead as a counter-method, a perspective that deconstructs the founding assumptions of the way we “do” history. As an intervention in the debate between alterity and continuity, Menon seeks to offer a third way that refuses to make a priori assumptions about the relationship between past and present, thus confronting desire in all its fluidity at all times.
This points to what I think is the main fault of Menon’s work. She criticizes heterohistory because its “paradigm of difference only reinforces the belief that difference is what marks a ‘proper’ sexuality” (14). Yet she is intent throughout the text to assert the difference of her project from what has come before, an irony that results in terminological confusion and at times forecloses on potentially insightful collaboration. Menon seems not to intend to simply replace a focus on difference with one on similitude, but to promote a study of history that is flexible and fluid in constructing a relationship between past and present. Her terminology, however, is restrictive, “homohistory” being a prime example: by her own definition, it is not just the study of sameness in the way that she asserts heterohistory is the study of difference, but by adopting oppositional language she risks obscuring the subtleties of her theoretical insights and making her argument appear to be simply the reverse of heterohistoricism. And again, heterohistoricism is not, I think, identical to historicism itself; to elide the difference between the two is to unfairly undermine an important mode of scholarship and accuse its practitioners of unthinking bias.
Some of the individual studies in her book are more successful than others at avoiding such problems. In each of five chapters, Menon marshals an eclectic collection of texts – theoretical, popular, and Shakespearean – to identify the contradictions, unstated anachronisms, and heteronormative biases of heterohistory’s foundational components: teleology, facts, citation, origins, and authenticity. I found chapter 4, on origins and originality, to be the most convincing. In it, Menon reads Titus Andronicus as a text that argues against the primacy of sources. The play wears its classical lineage on its sleeve, yet, as she points out, the references that appear to provide the framework within which both characters and audience can make sense of the play prove inadequate, even irrelevant. In a play on Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” Menon argues that Shakespeare’s “suspicion of causal certainty” (111) queers the directionality of inspiration. For example, Ovid’s story of Philomela “marks the textual and physical parameters within which we must read Lavinia,” yet it “never tells us anything about desire itself. . . . Shakespeare’s repetition of Ovid turns out to be in excess of its origin” (96, 101-102). As an argument about historicist methods, Menon makes the case that a text’s sources do not always provide a useful interpretive framework: a text may not only rebel against its apparent “origins” but sever itself completely from them. She provokes us to think about how heterohistorical analysis may desire for a too neat temporal progression that reduces textual intercourse to a one-way street.
Other chapters offer useful insights as well, each appropriating Shakespeare as a theorist intent on challenging heterohistory. Chapter 2, on facts in Cymbeline, is particularly incisive in uncovering the epistemological privilege granted to the fact: a unit of meaning taken for granted as “true,” the fact creates the very framework that gives it meaning. The final chapter on authenticity and the popular film Shakespeare in Love also points out the heterohistorical biases present in some scholarly responses to the film. According to Menon, Shakespeareans criticized the film for its lack of “authenticity” in presenting Shakespeare as unproblematically heterosexual, but, she argues, the film problematizes “hetero sex by linking it to the flexibility of homo texts” (128). That is, the heterosexual romance at the heart of the narrative is marked by misrecognition and is ultimately unreproductive, and it is fundamentally implicated in historical anachronism, the muddling of historical and textual facts, and other chronological and historical “lies.” She says that although the Shakespeare of the film is heterosexual, he is not heteronormative.
On the other hand, I thought her third chapter, on citation, was the most problematic because of its partisan logic. The chapter has many strong points, including an insightful analysis of the distinction between citation and quotation and a brilliant reading of the ambiguity of names and naming in Much Ado About Nothing. But the connections between these two parts are obscured as her critique of citation slides without comment into one on the concept of naming altogether. Citation may be a form of naming, but names do not always equate to citations. In addition, her reading of citation/quotation is one-sided; she argues that “citation always needs [quote] marks to mark the quotation as a hygienic unit whose constitutive anachronism and inappropriate desires are glossed over by its citational apparatus” (79). Yet quote marks also can foreground anachronism by making visible something taken out of its time. As much as they may enable the setting off of an original authority from which teleological progression has derived, citations and quotations also can enable the sorts of transhistorical “constellations” and conversations that she says are an essential part of homohistory. In other words, Menon claims that the quote mark embodies a certain meaning in itself, rather than challenging the way the apparatus is used to either contain or free desire. By constructing an ontological distinction between the heterohistorical citation and the homohistorical insistence on “not naming our sources” (93), Menon obfuscates what seems to be the main goal of the chapter: finding a way out of the debate over “proper” sexual terminology by confronting desire’s resistance to being named.
Additionally, the endgame of her analysis is at times unclear. For example, the Bollywood films she examines in chapter 3 as examples of homohistorical anti-citation are not the most interesting objects of study, at least in my opinion, and I question what lasting import her argument here will have for Shakespeare studies. A more significant example of the obscurity of Menon’s theories comes in the first chapter, where she reads Venus and Adonis as a text against teleology. According to her summary, heterohistoricist scholars read the narrative’s avoidance of sexual consummation as either a) a sign of Shakespeare’s still developing skills (thus a stop on the teleological path towards becoming “the Bard”), or b) a sign of the difference between the fluid perversity of early modern desire and the fixed productivity of modern sexuality. Menon’s reading recuperates the poem as a challenge to the teleological assumption of sex as the only “successful” end to erotic desire: the poem is neither an example of young Will’s untutored pen nor a remnant of an alien past but a sophisticated, transhistorical theory of sexuality. Her reading is sophisticated and provocative, but her criticism of other scholarship on the poem because it “fails to fail” is mystifying (49). She suggests that homohistory provides an “alternative to teleology . . . the study of failure” (50), yet one does not escape a teleological framework by studying failure. The concept of failure necessarily implies that of success, and if we conceive of, even valorize, an “end” as a failure, there must be one that is a “success.” Instead of deconstructing teleology and moving beyond concepts like success and failure, Menon adopts an anti-teleological stance that remains within the heterohistorical model.
Despite these problems, for the most part Menon brings together diverse sources quite effectively, and she uncovers provocative theoretical implications in Shakespeare’s works. Menon’s novel approach to history merits attention not only from those interested in the study of desire and sexuality but also from all scholars interested in “the past.” This is not because she overthrows historicism as a method or because it offers us a new model of early modern sexuality; if such were her intentions, I think she does neither. Rather, readers who can get past Menon’s sometimes polemical tone will find a call to methodological self-examination that, despite overreaching in its claims, can be a useful reminder of the need for thoughtful evaluation of scholarly assumptions. While many will disagree, perhaps vehemently, with Menon’s assertions, I think that articulating such disagreements is a productive exercise.
*********************
If one were to take up Menon’s point of view what new insights could we have into Austen’s novels is probably the real question to ask. As she poses it and looks, she opens up in new ways a whole host of texts by women, among them Sarah Fielding’s Governess. Unfortunately she does not go into Austen. My guess is she knew the likeness but did not want the controversy it would spark among the “Jane-protectors.”
Ellen
Madhavi Menon. Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60670-8; xi + 195 pp. US$85.00.
Reviewed by Ryan Singh Paul, Allegheny College
Madhavi Menon (Associate Professor of Literature, American University) is the author of Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (UToronto Press, 2004), and the editor of Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (Duke UP, 2010). Her second monograph, Unhistorical Shakespeare is an ambitious, theoretically sophisticated work about the study of desire. Like recent works from “presentist” scholars such as Hugh Grady, Terence Hawkes, and Evelyn Gajowski, Menon seeks to challenge the historicist methods that dominate early modern studies. Her ultimate goal is to queer the idea of history itself by promoting a fluid, open model of temporality, which she calls “homohistory.” As such, the book is more significant as a work of methodological inquiry than a study of Shakespeare; her individual readings of Shakespearean texts are often insightful, but her approach to the study of history is what scholars will find both useful and problematic.
Menon’s introductory “Argument” is, in its scope, the most comprehensive part of the book and thus will be of the greatest scholarly interest. It is also likely to be the most controversial because of the claims Menon makes about the faults of “heterohistory,” her term for the primary mode of historical scholarship on sexuality. She argues that most studies of early modern sexuality assume a paradigm of difference between past and present and offers as a spokesperson for this model David Scott Kastan’s Shakespeare after Theory (Routledge, 1999). Menon highlights Kastan’s stance that the study of the past must begin with the assumption of difference between then and now and that scholars should avoid the “narcissistic” search for elements of the present in Shakespeare. In other words, Kastan believes that to see Shakespeare as our contemporary is to project ourselves onto the past, committing the dreaded sin of anachronism.
But according to Menon, this hetero-temporal paradigm fixes lines of difference in accord with chronology: heterohistorians assume the present to be transparent, solidified, and complete, while in contrast the past is viewed as the scene of fluid desire, transient identities, and deviant pleasures. Here Menon seems to be weighing in on the debate in queer and LGBT studies between models of alterity and continuity, arguing that historicist methodologies by default assume that modern sexual “identities” are absolutely different from early modern “desires.” The problem, she claims, is that by assuming a distinction between fixed sexual identities in the present and polymorphous sexual desires and acts in the past, heterohistorians (gay and straight alike) reproduce a heteronormative (and thus homophobic) narrative of development and marginalize the complexities of desire in the present by shunting them to the past. Menon faults heterohistory for ignoring the complex desires that undermine modern distinctions between heterosexual and homosexual and for only seeing sexuality as a fluid continuum when looking at the past.
In response to the distortions introduced by heterohistoricism, Menon promotes the concept of “homohistory.” The homohistorian does not reject the idea of history; rather, she withholds judgments about similarity and difference, opening herself to modes of investigation that defy traditional chronologies and put unexpected texts into dialogue in ways that a strictly temporal analysis would not allow. And rather than taking an identarian stance wherein modern sexual subjects possess recognizable and fixed desires, the homohistorian acknowledges the incoherence of desire in the present just as the heterohistorian locates it in the past. Menon says that homohistory is not a method; one may think of it instead as a counter-method, a perspective that deconstructs the founding assumptions of the way we “do” history. As an intervention in the debate between alterity and continuity, Menon seeks to offer a third way that refuses to make a priori assumptions about the relationship between past and present, thus confronting desire in all its fluidity at all times.
This points to what I think is the main fault of Menon’s work. She criticizes heterohistory because its “paradigm of difference only reinforces the belief that difference is what marks a ‘proper’ sexuality” (14). Yet she is intent throughout the text to assert the difference of her project from what has come before, an irony that results in terminological confusion and at times forecloses on potentially insightful collaboration. Menon seems not to intend to simply replace a focus on difference with one on similitude, but to promote a study of history that is flexible and fluid in constructing a relationship between past and present. Her terminology, however, is restrictive, “homohistory” being a prime example: by her own definition, it is not just the study of sameness in the way that she asserts heterohistory is the study of difference, but by adopting oppositional language she risks obscuring the subtleties of her theoretical insights and making her argument appear to be simply the reverse of heterohistoricism. And again, heterohistoricism is not, I think, identical to historicism itself; to elide the difference between the two is to unfairly undermine an important mode of scholarship and accuse its practitioners of unthinking bias.
Some of the individual studies in her book are more successful than others at avoiding such problems. In each of five chapters, Menon marshals an eclectic collection of texts – theoretical, popular, and Shakespearean – to identify the contradictions, unstated anachronisms, and heteronormative biases of heterohistory’s foundational components: teleology, facts, citation, origins, and authenticity. I found chapter 4, on origins and originality, to be the most convincing. In it, Menon reads Titus Andronicus as a text that argues against the primacy of sources. The play wears its classical lineage on its sleeve, yet, as she points out, the references that appear to provide the framework within which both characters and audience can make sense of the play prove inadequate, even irrelevant. In a play on Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” Menon argues that Shakespeare’s “suspicion of causal certainty” (111) queers the directionality of inspiration. For example, Ovid’s story of Philomela “marks the textual and physical parameters within which we must read Lavinia,” yet it “never tells us anything about desire itself. . . . Shakespeare’s repetition of Ovid turns out to be in excess of its origin” (96, 101-102). As an argument about historicist methods, Menon makes the case that a text’s sources do not always provide a useful interpretive framework: a text may not only rebel against its apparent “origins” but sever itself completely from them. She provokes us to think about how heterohistorical analysis may desire for a too neat temporal progression that reduces textual intercourse to a one-way street.
Other chapters offer useful insights as well, each appropriating Shakespeare as a theorist intent on challenging heterohistory. Chapter 2, on facts in Cymbeline, is particularly incisive in uncovering the epistemological privilege granted to the fact: a unit of meaning taken for granted as “true,” the fact creates the very framework that gives it meaning. The final chapter on authenticity and the popular film Shakespeare in Love also points out the heterohistorical biases present in some scholarly responses to the film. According to Menon, Shakespeareans criticized the film for its lack of “authenticity” in presenting Shakespeare as unproblematically heterosexual, but, she argues, the film problematizes “hetero sex by linking it to the flexibility of homo texts” (128). That is, the heterosexual romance at the heart of the narrative is marked by misrecognition and is ultimately unreproductive, and it is fundamentally implicated in historical anachronism, the muddling of historical and textual facts, and other chronological and historical “lies.” She says that although the Shakespeare of the film is heterosexual, he is not heteronormative.
On the other hand, I thought her third chapter, on citation, was the most problematic because of its partisan logic. The chapter has many strong points, including an insightful analysis of the distinction between citation and quotation and a brilliant reading of the ambiguity of names and naming in Much Ado About Nothing. But the connections between these two parts are obscured as her critique of citation slides without comment into one on the concept of naming altogether. Citation may be a form of naming, but names do not always equate to citations. In addition, her reading of citation/quotation is one-sided; she argues that “citation always needs [quote] marks to mark the quotation as a hygienic unit whose constitutive anachronism and inappropriate desires are glossed over by its citational apparatus” (79). Yet quote marks also can foreground anachronism by making visible something taken out of its time. As much as they may enable the setting off of an original authority from which teleological progression has derived, citations and quotations also can enable the sorts of transhistorical “constellations” and conversations that she says are an essential part of homohistory. In other words, Menon claims that the quote mark embodies a certain meaning in itself, rather than challenging the way the apparatus is used to either contain or free desire. By constructing an ontological distinction between the heterohistorical citation and the homohistorical insistence on “not naming our sources” (93), Menon obfuscates what seems to be the main goal of the chapter: finding a way out of the debate over “proper” sexual terminology by confronting desire’s resistance to being named.
Additionally, the endgame of her analysis is at times unclear. For example, the Bollywood films she examines in chapter 3 as examples of homohistorical anti-citation are not the most interesting objects of study, at least in my opinion, and I question what lasting import her argument here will have for Shakespeare studies. A more significant example of the obscurity of Menon’s theories comes in the first chapter, where she reads Venus and Adonis as a text against teleology. According to her summary, heterohistoricist scholars read the narrative’s avoidance of sexual consummation as either a) a sign of Shakespeare’s still developing skills (thus a stop on the teleological path towards becoming “the Bard”), or b) a sign of the difference between the fluid perversity of early modern desire and the fixed productivity of modern sexuality. Menon’s reading recuperates the poem as a challenge to the teleological assumption of sex as the only “successful” end to erotic desire: the poem is neither an example of young Will’s untutored pen nor a remnant of an alien past but a sophisticated, transhistorical theory of sexuality. Her reading is sophisticated and provocative, but her criticism of other scholarship on the poem because it “fails to fail” is mystifying (49). She suggests that homohistory provides an “alternative to teleology . . . the study of failure” (50), yet one does not escape a teleological framework by studying failure. The concept of failure necessarily implies that of success, and if we conceive of, even valorize, an “end” as a failure, there must be one that is a “success.” Instead of deconstructing teleology and moving beyond concepts like success and failure, Menon adopts an anti-teleological stance that remains within the heterohistorical model.
Despite these problems, for the most part Menon brings together diverse sources quite effectively, and she uncovers provocative theoretical implications in Shakespeare’s works. Menon’s novel approach to history merits attention not only from those interested in the study of desire and sexuality but also from all scholars interested in “the past.” This is not because she overthrows historicism as a method or because it offers us a new model of early modern sexuality; if such were her intentions, I think she does neither. Rather, readers who can get past Menon’s sometimes polemical tone will find a call to methodological self-examination that, despite overreaching in its claims, can be a useful reminder of the need for thoughtful evaluation of scholarly assumptions. While many will disagree, perhaps vehemently, with Menon’s assertions, I think that articulating such disagreements is a productive exercise.
*********************
If one were to take up Menon’s point of view what new insights could we have into Austen’s novels is probably the real question to ask. As she poses it and looks, she opens up in new ways a whole host of texts by women, among them Sarah Fielding’s Governess. Unfortunately she does not go into Austen. My guess is she knew the likeness but did not want the controversy it would spark among the “Jane-protectors.”
Ellen
[…] Martha Lloyd, and Anne Sharp all show a pattern of life that in the era was silently identified as lesbian spintershood; then I wrote about it to discuss liberty and women and suggest that women are answerable with […]
[…] me place this foremother poet blog with my Austen Reveries in honor of Austen’s possible lesbian spinsterhood, and regard it as an overdue extension of my blog celebrating Jane Dowson’s Women’s […]
[…] dream of a modus vivendi was to live quietly with her sister and Martha Lloyd, that perhaps she was a recognizable lesbian type in her […]
[…] and an apparently beloved friend, Martha Lloyd (see Letter 26, 12-13, Wed-Thurs, Nov 1800 and lesbian spinsterhood), in Castle Square, with her brother, Frank and his wife — though the arrangement is becoming […]
[…] part of her oeuvre, the life-writing destroyed. I have suggested her there is a pattern of emergent lesbian spinsterhood in the letters which was cut off by the family. Diane has suggested the D. A. Miller finds […]
[…] patterns of life, partnerships, art and letters of lesbian spinsters, and it reinforces or further supports sense from Austen’s letters that she loved Martha Lloyd more strongly than un-erotic friendship and the depiction of Charlotte […]
[…] in Pullen’s perspective a rather different set of experiences emerges (also different from Emma Donoghue’s because Donoghue wants to prove she was a lesbian and active sexually). We see a hard-working life. […]
[…] also Lesbian spinsterhood, On being answerable with her body, […]
[…] and Frank (if he was aware) was made uncomfortable by. I was interested to see that the idea of lesbian spinsterhood has spread into pop books even if Ashford has the wrong […]
I recently realized Fanny Price is based on the life of Dido Elisabeth Landsay, a niece of Lord Mansfield. She was a mulatto. In my study ‘Was Jane Austen Black?’ (2011) I had already concluded she was Black. But with Austen the ‘lower ranks’ are the whites who were serfs till 1848. Frances Ward, Fanny’s mother was disowned for marrying a white man. This is never stated as this, but can be understood when Sir Bertram ‘refuses’ to advance Mr. Price, who is white, but Mr. Crawford is able to advance his mulatto son. When Mrs. Norris cautions Fanny not to forget who but most importantly ‘what’ she is, she refers to her mixed blood. From Emma we understand that race mixing, Miss Harriet Smith who is blond and Mr. Elton, black spruce and smiling: is a big no-no with Jane Austen. She is writing against the change in society with Blacks: the nobility who self-identified as Black with little Moors, losing out. She hid her person as a writer as she went against the prevailing social change, that began with the French Revolution and her cousins husband was beheaded.
Egmond Codfried
Curator Suriname Blue Blood Is Black Blood Museum
The Hague
Holland
[…] problem with Terry Castle’s thesis about Austen’s lesbianism is she had not read Austen with care. She leapt onto the obvious (Cassandra and Jane) and then did […]
[…] Finally how Austen’s letters show us a single woman’s world. They are filled with women, young and old, and alone. Sometimes aging and near homeless (Miss Benn), sometimes still at home or school and being shaped for the task of finding a husband while remaining chaste; Austen retreats from her defense of the Princess of Wales’s adultery, but only in part, and the servants are there, felt presences. Mrs Perigord who has left her husband (much relieved) and her mother, Mme Bigeon. (See Emma Donoghue and lesbian spinsterhood.) […]
[…] Her Rural Walks were not meant just for children, but contained available sound women’s delights […]
[…] and Martha spent the night on the floor together one fall evening at Steventon), to substantiate Emme Donoghue’s thesis about a type of individual recognizable in the 18th century (thought not openly admitted), the […]
[…] have suggested that Jane had a implicitly lesbian relationship with Martha around 1800 and a couple of years after that, including the time at Worthing: it was Martha she […]
[…] could also bring in Emma Donoghue’s theory that there is a pattern of lesbian spinsterhood — and Austen fits…. She hates marriage for shutting women down. An explanation for Charlotte Lucas not caring who she […]
[…] carves out a lesbian erotic aesthetic. Moore’s book might be considered a companion volume to Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women: Donoghue teases out and identifies clearly too some patterns of social and writing behavior that […]
[…] carves out a lesbian erotic aesthetic. Moore’s book might be considered a companion volume to Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women: Donoghue teases out and identifies clearly too some patterns of social and writing behavior that […]
[…] So, um… I actually thought that Charlotte Lucas was gay. Sylvia: looks exasperated, Bernie looks down, Prudie a bit stunned? Allegra: Really, I think that […]
[…] To understand her work, you have to recognize the strong lesbian aesthetic shaping it once she stopped the early brief abstract period — as outlined by Lisa Moore (Erotics of Lesbian Landscape). What’s called her eclectism makes sense when you see she belongs to the world of artists to which Jane Austen belongs (discussed by Emma Donoghue as part of a lesbian spinster world). […]
[…] To understand her work, you have to recognize the strong lesbian aesthetic shaping it once she stopped the early brief abstract period — as outlined by Lisa Moore (Erotics of Lesbian Landscape). What’s called her eclectism makes sense when you see she belongs to the world of artists to which Jane Austen belongs (discussed by Emma Donoghue as part of a lesbian spinster world). […]
[…] suggestion these are lesbian friendships (whether overtly sexualized in private or not), but unlike Emma Donoghue and others (see also Suzanne Juhasz on Emma in her Romance from the Heart), they steer clear of any […]