Recent reading

[regshoe]

Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present by Lillian Faderman (1981). As a New Year's present to myself I went and ordered a small stack of books on lesbian history, and this was the first one that arrived. It's all about the various sorts of relationships between women which existed in Europe and North America from the sixteenth century to the 1970s, and was interesting and thought-provoking in its interpretations. Faderman's argument goes something like: Throughout the early modern period, passionate and romantic relationships between women were common and were not seen as deviant or wrong, partly because they were assumed not to be sexual (and in most cases probably weren't), and partly because the women involved ultimately mostly had to marry men for economic reasons, so they weren't a threat to the heterosexual order. This changed in the late nineteenth century with the rise of the feminist movement, when women started to become more economically independent; now more women could choose to form relationships with each other instead of with men, and were seen as usurping men's roles in society through this and through their work. Thus relationships between women began to be criticised and pathologised—partly, with the contemporary emergence of sexology and the scientific view of homosexuality, through increasingly being portrayed in terms of deviant sexuality. In the twentieth century, many lesbians internalise the gloomy view of themselves as pitiable deviants; but with the second wave of feminism, women are reclaiming the personal and political significance of lesbian relationships. All very interesting stuff! I most enjoyed the early, historical parts of the book, which were quite thought-provoking in their presentation of romantic friendship and ideas about how the types of feelings and relationships people have can depend on culture—the book argues that, with the twentieth century's increased acknowledgement of sexuality as an element in people's lives, the borders of acceptable friendship have narrowed, whereas in the eighteenth century passionate, romantic feelings and a desire for exclusive commitment were seen as normal elements of a certain kind of platonic friendship. (I thought this could perhaps benefit from the perspective of the modern asexual community, insofar as the relationships described are basically what might now be called queerplatonic partnerships). The later part of the book is more political argument than history, and it's not a very convincing one—it's very much the perspective of second-wave feminism and political lesbianism, it really doesn't seem like a good idea to mix politics and one's personal relationships to quite that extent, and at times Faderman almost seems to be denying the idea of lesbianism as a distinct type of experience vs. relationships between women as a political choice that any woman can make. There's some of this earlier on in the book too, where I did think the divisions made between lesbian sexuality as something written and theorised about by men vs. real women's platonic relationships were perhaps overstated.

...next in the stack is Passions Between Women by Emma Donoghue, which I've just started reading and which looks like being an interesting counterpoint to this book! We shall see...

Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories by Juliana Horatia Ewing (1884 for both title stories; I'm not sure of the date of the collection). Some Victorian children's stories—a recommendation from Edward Thring, who was a friend of Ewing's and admired her writing. 'Jackanapes' is a story about a child growing up during the Napoleonic Wars, and the relationship between the military and English society (Ewing is keen on the army, in the patriotic 'dulce et decorum est' way); 'Daddy Darwin's Dovecot' is about a boy from the workhouse who Improves Himself through virtue and industry, and also pigeons; and then there are several shorter stories, of which my favourite was 'The Trinity Flower', a fairytale-style story involving a lot of meaningful religious imagery and symbolism and also a lot of botany. On the whole, very good stuff—Ewing's writing is lovely, the stories are fun and enjoyably Victorian. I especially liked the nostalgic 'the old days' presentation of the Napoleonic War era in 'Jackanapes', and the mystical imagery and nature/botanical descriptions of 'The Trinity Flower'. And, the latter being a fairy tale, I was just in time to nominate it for once_upon_fic!

('Juliana Horatia Ewing' is a very D. K. Broster character-ful name, isn't it).

Mrs Farrell by William Dean Howells (1921, but first published in an earlier version in 1875). I decided to try another Howells, and this one sounded especially interesting. It's about Rosabel 'Belle' Farrell, a young widow who, lodging for the summer in a New England farming village, befriends the landlady's daughter Rachel, who has some artistic talent, and captivates the hearts of both Gilbert and Easton, a pair of devoted friends who fought together in the Civil War and had a dramatic backstory of honour and betrayal and probably lots of tender and fraught hurt/comfort, and who are now so inseparably attached that Howells and the other characters repeatedly compare them to lovers. What the book is really about is Howells's views on the tension between love and friendship, as played out in the drama between Mrs Farrell, Easton and Gilbert. Mrs Farrell provokes a falling-out between the men by dredging up the sore points of their Civil War backstory; subsequently Easton, who has now declared his passion for Mrs Farrell, falls ill and Gilbert starts being tortured and passionate about his own feelings for Mrs Farrell while Easton can't do anything about it. Mrs Farrell is torn between the two; meanwhile, Rachel is off to the side being consistently sensible and quietly artistic. (Rachel provides an opportunity for Howells to talk about some of the same 'art and gender' thoughts that play a more prominent part in The Coast of Bohemia; here they never really go anywhere definite). The book's conclusions about love and friendship and how the one inevitably interferes with, destroys and triumphs over the other might have been depressing; in fact they are pretty interesting as a development of one set of views on the matter, but really the Drama of it all was too much fun for me to be very upset. And the ending is interestingly ambivalent. I also enjoyed the setting—a farming community which has seen better days, and which now provides lodgings for ladies from Boston and New York escaping to the country for the summer—which is described in colourful detail.

Comments

[oursin]

Doesn't that tenderness between men also go with a different model of acceptable male emotionality? 'He shed manly tears' - and no-one thinks the worse of him for it - Crimean veterans soaking their whiskers as they sobbed over The Heir of Redclyffe.

(I think John Tosh in A Man's Place talks about a shift quite late in the C19th to a more stiff-upper-lip mode)

[osprey_archer]

Oh yeah, American Civil War soldiers in general were just balls of emotion. They lose a battle and they cry! They win a battle and they hurrah! They get a letter from home after a long pause in the post and they're so happy that they cry! And then they write home to tell their family how they wept over the letter, confident that their family will consider this a loving display of tender feeling and not at all a distressing failure of stiff upper lip.

But as well as unrestrained grief and joy, there's also unrestrained anger - the 1826 Eggnog Riot at West Point sounds like an American counterpoint to the schoolboy uprisings you mention above, for instance.

[regshoe]

Those changes in acceptable emotionality are very interesting too... Although when I was looking up the line I quoted below, I noticed that the sentence continues, a groan broke from his own lips—the anguish of the sex which our race forbids to weep, which suggests those 'stiff upper lip' conventions did exist to an extent. There's also the bit where Gilbert came and laid his arm across his shoulder—the nearest that an American can come to embracing his friend, although that suggests differences between countries rather than gender rules!

[osprey_archer]

I would love to check the 1921 text against the original 1876 serialization and see if those lines are in the original, or if they're later interpolations, but ALAS the relevant issues of The Atlantic are not online.

Howells lived in Venice as American consul during the Civil War, so he was well aware that Venetian men, at least, were allowed to kiss and embrace their friends! There's a scene in A Foregone Conclusion in which a dying Venetian priest kisses his frenemy the American consul, Ferris: "He took Ferris’s hand, hanging weak and hot by his side, and drew him gently down by it, and kissed him on either bearded cheek. 'It is our custom, you know, among friends. Farewell.'"

The emphasis on friends is in the original, and I think it refers to the fact that the priest doesn't think the consul has lived up to their friendship. (And yes, Howells absolutely DID straight up give a character his own old job. In fact, he refers to Ferris as "one of my many predecessors in office at Venice.")

[regshoe]

That's a very interesting possibility, that those bits might have been changed between the two editions! Alas indeed.

Aww, I love Howells giving a character his own old job—those little moments when authors place themselves in their fictional universes are great. I'm reminded of Edward Prime-Stevenson (also an American living in Europe, as well) having his characters read his own books...

[osprey_archer]

I wonder if Howells and Prime-Stevenson ever met. Howells was at the absolute center of the American literary scene and knew everyone who was anyone, as well as a great number of writers of lesser renown, so it's certainly possible!

In particular, one of Howells' many dear friends was Charles Warren Stoddard, a man who would be forgotten today but for the fact that his South Sea Idyls were VERY gay. And Stoddard spent a lot of his adult life in Europe, so he might well have known EPS...