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"Edleston
and I have separated
for the present," Byron
laments from Cambridge
in a letter of 1806, "and
my mind is a chaos
of hope and sorrow.
. . . I certainly
love him more than
any human being,
and neither time
nor distance have
had the least effect
on my (in general)
changeable disposition.
In short, we shall
put Lady
E. Butler and Miss
Ponsonby to
the blush, Pylades and Orestes out
of countenance,
and want nothing
but a catastrophe
like Nisus and Euryalus,
to give Jonathan and David the
'go by'"(30).
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When
Byron includes a
pair of women in his
mythography of friendship,
he marks a new moment
in the long history
of same-sex bonds.
By 1806 the public
image of friendship
had undergone something
of a sex change,
and Eleanor Butler
and Sarah Ponsonby,
the so-called "Ladies
of Llangollen" who
eloped to Wales
in 1778 and lived
together until Butler's
death in 1829, became
the first female
emblem for the kind
of classical friendship
that early modernists
such as Michel de
Montaigne and Jeremy
Taylor had resurrected
as an affair between
men. As I have written
elsewhere, in the
seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries
private intimacies
between women became
public relations:
European gentlewomen
appropriated the
cultural capital
already attached
to friendship between
elite men as a resource
in their struggle
for autonomy, authority,
and class privilege
(Lanser 179-98). [1]
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Yet
notice the asymmetry
of Byron's tropes.
He doesn't speak
of putting any of
the male couples "to
the blush," but
imagines irritating
and besting them
as he flaunts his
love for Edleston.
Does the blush merely
echo the cultural
commonplace that
renders men combative
but women merely
delicate? Do Butler
and Ponsonby blush
only because Byron's
love would best
theirs, or does the
blush hint at something
more than friendship
between Butler and
Ponsonby, as was
possibly the case
between Byron and
Edleston? Whatever
Byron's logic, his
gendered tropes
underscore the limits
of imagining female-female
relations within
a male-male lineage.
For when two men
choose one another,
patriarchy may be
altered but is not
overturned, but
when two women do
so, structures of
male dominance are
potentially compromised.
As David Halperin
reminds us, in patriarchal
systems "women
must submit to
a system of compulsory
heterosociality" in
which "the
dominating feature" is "the
inescapability
of sexual relations
with men." Thus "sexual
relations among
women represent
a perennial
threat to male
dominance,
especially
whenever
such relations
become exclusive
and thereby
take women
out of circulation
among men" (Halperin
78).
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This
threat is recognized
in contemporary defenses
of Butler and Ponsonby.
Mary Pilkington's Memoirs
of Celebrated Female
Characters (1804),
for example, comments
that "so
completely gratified" were
Butler and Ponsonby "in
the society
of each other,
that they entertained
the determination
of never becoming
wives." But
she acknowledges
that their
families thought
this decision "very
unnatural" and
that the
two
women had
to "def[y]
the opinion
of the world" in
order to "reside
in the
harmony
of true
friendship." Pilkington
then
uses
Butler
and
Ponsonby
to refute
the assertion "that
females
are
incapable
of a
permanent
attachment" and
to
argue
that
women
cannot
to
be "disqualified
from
feeling
a passion
which
is
calculated
to
dignify
the
human
mind" (Pilkington
64-5).
Anna
Seward's
heroic
poem Llangollen
Vale (1796)
likewise
recognizes
Butler
and
Ponsonby's "sacred
Friendship" as
having
been "assail[ed]" alike
by "stern
authorities" and "silken" efforts
at "persuasion" (5).
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These
tributes to Butler
and Ponsonby suggest
that Byron's blush
might stand in for
both delicacy and defiance,
characterizing exclusive
female coupling
at once, and paradoxically,
as an epitome of
virtue and a transgression
of social and sexual
norms. This paradox
may explain why,
especially during
the last quarter
of the century, an
eruption of bawdy
and satiric texts
coexisted uneasily
with, and could
potentially undermine,
idyllic representations
of female friendship
that seemed to be
their opposite.
Where friendship
was a substitute
rather than a supplement
for marriage, and
thus a transgression
of the heterosexual
order whether or
not the relationship
was itself "sexual"—and
who could know?—the
lines separating
virtuous from transgressive
alliances were
often literally
paper thin: a public
word could make
or break a reputation,
especially after
what Katharine Binhammer
has called the
'sex panic' of the
1790s when Marie
Antoinette's putative
sapphism helped
to pave her journey
to the guillotine
(409-35).
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It
is this light that
I want to explore
the place of women's
erotic affiliations
in the Romantic imagination
and the tensions
around which they
get configured in
Romantic verse. In
the larger project
from which I draw
this discussion,
I argue that in the
seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries female
intimacies become
a charged site for
working out the epistemic
changes of modernity.
By the late eighteenth
century, when Butler
and Ponsonby had themselves
become a charged site,
the fragile lines
separating chaste
friendship from suspect
sapphism were heavily
class-inflected, favoring
gentlewomen who did
not transgress external
codes of propriety
and femininity. In
the end, though, the
fine lines of distinction
depended on the words
and images that surrounded
a particular relationship
and on the interpretive
conventions through
which these could
be read.[2] As
with Gestalt psychology's
famous figure of
the vase that is
also two faces in
profile, or the "ingenue" who
can turn into a "hag," the
alternative reading
lurks—and
becomes startlingly
obvious once the
figure-ground system
is reversed though
a perceptual shift.
On paper, Butler
and Ponsonby were
thus variously
celebrated (for
the most part)
and denigrated
(privately and
sometimes publicly)
for a way of life
that itself did
not change: in
1790, for example,
fully twelve years
after their elopement,
a newspaper story
suddenly appeared
mocking Butler
as "masculine" and
the couple as
odd and implying
that they had something
to blush about.
Not surprisingly,
women like Butler
and Ponsonby and
defenders like
Pilkington and
Seward also took
part in manipulating
representations,
in what sometimes
amounted to an
elaborate public
relations scheme
(Lanser 179-98).
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I
want to suggest that
the transgressive
potential of female
friendship, with
its tenuous distinction
between virtuous
friendship and sexual
sin, urged the inscription
of female intimacies
into the ambiguities
of figuration and
hence into poetic
forms. One can argue,
of course, that in
Romantic poetry all sexuality
is so figured, that—to
cite Stuart Curran—in
Britain "there
is little sex,
seldom an actual
body, and virtually
no romance in
Romanticism" ("Of
Genes").
But for two
somewhat contrary
reasons Romantic
writings may
be especially
important to
the history
of female homoeroticism.
First, it is
arguably the
Romantic moment
that spawned
the modern
constructions
of sexual subjectivity
and the attendant
values of individual
difference,
self-fulfillment,
the fatedness
of attraction
and the primacy
of desire that
have legitimated
modern same-sex
bonds. It is
no accident
that Anne Lister
(1791-1840),
the first Englishwoman
known to have
left explicit
records of
a
self-conscious,
actively
sexual,
and
firmly
homoerotic
orientation,
looked to Rousseau's Confessions and
Byron's poems
for the self-authorization
that enabled
her to see
the love of
women
as her proper
state, the "straight" path
that "nature
seemed to
have set
out" for
her (qtd.
in Liddington
182).
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Secondly
and somewhat contrarily,
however, female intimacies
may offer a limit
case for Romantic
sexual ideology.
It is a commonplace
that many Romantic
writers were accused
of libertine sexual
beliefs and practices,
yet (or perhaps for
that reason) as Richard
Sha has observed,
a notion of Romantic
transcendence, along
with Foucauldian
sexual chronologies,
have also tended
to erase sexuality
from Romanticist
scholarship
(Sha). Now that scholars
have begun to restore
sexuality to Romanticism
in the process of
historicizing "Romantic
ideology," it
becomes important
to investigate
the specific contours
of Romantic values
about sexual forms
and
alliances. Andrew
Elfenbein's Romantic
Genius: The Prehistory
of a Homosexual
Role gives
the most fully
articulated expression
of this new project
when he suggests
that "sexual
transgression" underwrites
the genius
of Romantic
art and that
homoeroticism
in particular
became a way
for writers
to mark their
superiority.[3] Elfenbein's
study explores
the association
of sapphism
with genius
in Anne Damer's
life, in Anne
Bannerman's
poetry, and
in Coleridge's
self-fashioning
through "Christabel." Here
I want to
ask what
we can learn
about the
place of
sapphism in
the Romantic
imagination
by looking
at poetic
tropes—that
is, at the
uses of
language
and form
in "a
sense other
than that
which is
proper" to
them.[4] If,
as I implied
above,
poetic
discourse
is a fertile
site for
transmuting
suppressed
content
into symbolic
form and
for inscribing
the ambiguous,
the contradictory,
the unspeakable,
then it
may hold
a significant
place
in
the history
of sexuality.
Parsing
out the
poetic
contours
of sapphism
in Romantic
poetry
could
thus help
us accomplish
one piece
of the
history
of female
homosexuality
that,
as
David
Halperin
recognizes
in his "History
of Male
Homosexuality," must
be pursued
separately
in recognition
of the
enormous
difference
patriarchy
makes
in the
social
construction
of same-sex
bonds.
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As
one contribution
to such a project,
I will focus here
on a loosely interconnected
set of poems about
the nature and implications
of female coupling.
I'll begin by revisiting "Christabel" (1816)
and its exclusion
from the second
edition of the Lyrical
Ballads (1800),
where it was hastily
supplanted by William
Wordsworth's "Michael." I'll
then explore an
implicit contest
about female intimacies
carried out in
poems by two Wordsworths:
an occasional
sonnet published
in 1827 that William
composed while
visiting Eleanor
Butler and Sarah
Ponsonby during
an 1824 tour of
Wales with his
wife and daughter,
and a longer work
titled "Irregular
Verses" that
Dorothy began
in 1826 or 1827
for the daughter
of her beloved
friend Jane
Pollard but which
was not published
until 1987.
Finally,
I will take
up a metrical
figure present
in "Christabel," "Irregular
Verses" and
Percy Shelley's "Rosalind
and Helen" (1818),
with a bow
as well to
Anne Lister's
diaries.
Without arguing
for
direct influence,
I want to
read these
poems as
an implicit
Romantic conversation
that advances
different
models of
sapphic sublimity
in a tropological
contest about
the nature
and place
of
female affinities.
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"Christabel" is,
of course, the best
known of these poems
and also the most
openly sexual. Although
the encounter between
Geraldine and Christabel
is shrouded in mystery,
the poem makes clear
as much through its
silences as through
its images that something
sapphic happens in
Christabel's bed
that fateful night.
Both Geraldine and
the scene of seduction
are represented primarily
through metonymy
and synechdoche: we
know Geraldine as
a "faint
and sweet" voice,
as white garments
and a whiter neck,
bright eyes, a "bosom" and "half
[a] side";
we know that
both
women undress
and become the
objects of one
another's gaze;
that Geraldine "had" her "will" with
Christabel after
a psychic struggle
with Christabel's "wandering
mother";
that Geraldine's "spell" becomes "lord" of
Christabel's "utterance";
and that
the "touch" of
a "bosom" reveals
a "mark" of "shame" that
creates
a tightness "beneath
[Christabel's]
heaving
breasts." We
know
that
Christabel
recognizes
that
she
has "sinn'd," but
experiences
only "perplexity
of
mind" about
its
occasion.
Of
what
passes
in
the
bed
we
know
only
that
Geraldine
held "the
maiden
in
her
arms" and "worked" her "harms." The
scene
carries
images
of
both
pleasure
and
danger:
that
it
is "a
sight
to
dream
of
not
to
tell" suggests
that
sapphism,
though
unspeakable,
may
also
be
desired.[5] Herein
lies
the
transformation
into "forbidden
mystery" of
which
Elfenbein
writes:
in
contrast
to
a
text
like
Henry
Fielding's Female
Husband (1746),
which
makes
sex
between
women
only
a
matter "not
fit
to
be
mentioned," "Christabel" transmutes
sapphic
silence
into
the
stuff
of
fantasy.
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Elfenbein
has argued persuasively
that "Christabel" marks
at once the culmination
of eighteenth-century
anti-sapphic satiric
discourse and a
transmutation of
that discourse into
a "lesbian
sublime" (Elfenbein
177). But the
fullness
of this transmutation
depends on a reader's
ability to suppress
the satire, and
thus the referentiality,
that underwrites
the poem. Arguing
that "the
poem is virtually
immune to historical
allegory of the
kind that has
traditionally
been associated
with lesbianism," Elfenbein
dismisses Hazlitt's
and Wordsworth's
readings of "Christabel" as
obscene—and
indeed one
anonymous
reviewer called
the poem "the
most obscene
poem
in the English
Language"—as
lapses of
judgment
to which "more
discriminating
readers" with
a "finer
aesthetic
taste" would
not succumb
(Elfenbein
188,177).
I would
suggest,
however,
that
literalized
readings
of "Christabel" point
to an
inability
less
aesthetic
than
social,
and
one
encouraged
by the
poem's
own
recourse
to the
very
tropes
it seeks
also
to transcend.
What
I find
transgressive
about "Christabel" is
the
way
in
which
it
treads
upon
the
fine
line
of
external
appearance
that
separates
the
gender-bending
sapphist
from
the
virtuous
friend.
By
figuring
both
Christabel
and
Geraldine
as
beautifully
feminine
on
the
surface,
the
poem
suggests
that "surpassingly
fair" women
of
high
birth—and
not
only
the
potentially
demonic
Geraldine
but
the
innocent
Christabel—might
be
harboring
homoerotic
desires.
When
Coleridge
makes
Geraldine's
body
only
half
visible,
he
exploits
and
arguably
plays
with
old
fears
that
women
who
desired
women
were
hermaphrodites,
and
some
of
Coleridge's
reviewers
did
imagine
Geraldine's
hidden
side
as "terrible
and
disgusting" and "all
deformity."[6] Moreover,
in
a
perverse
doubling,
Geraldine
seems
to
be
exploiting
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