Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment 9780804765459

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Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age (!f Enlightenment

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Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment

Elizabeth Susan Wahl

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 1999

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Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 1999 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data appear at the end of the book

To Raul Antonio D{az Zegers

Acknowledgments

In the years that I have spent researching and writing this book, I have enjoyed the support and encouragement of many people whose contributions I can only begin to enumerate. My deepest thanks go to those who have read this manuscript in its many incarnations-Terry Castle, whose abilities as a scholar and as a writer of clear, elegant prose continue to astonish and inspire me; and John Bender, who asked the difficult conceptual questions that helped me refine my arguments, and whose support was unstinting in every respect. Patricia Parker shared her work on early materials and shaped my reading of a number of texts. James Grantham Turner directed me to invaluable primary resources and volunteered to read my work on several occasions. Lise Leibacher-Ouvrard offered me copies of rare materials in French. Pamela Cheek and Vilashini Cooppan generously provided their friendship throughout; their willingness to help with everything from questions of translation to proofreading has made me realize what I value most about an academic community. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to share sections of this work in progress with the Bay Area Eighteenth-Century Studies Group, the Seminar on Enlightenment and Revolution, and the Northeastern Association of Eighteenth-Century Studies. I have also obtained advice on many research questions from the members of the eighteenth-century electronic discussion group, or ci8-l, which has put me in touch with scholars from around the globe. I am also very grateful for the support of the Lurcy Foundation, which allowed me to pursue archival work at the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Bibliotheque de I' Arsenal. In my efforts to locate sources and materials, I have received material assistance from Sonia Moss at Stanford's Green Library and from the research staff at the William Andrews Clark Library. In the past year, my colleagues at the Research Libraries Group, Inc., have also Vll

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Acknowledgments

helped me find the time and materials to finish my research and have deepened my appreciation for the generosity and dedication of the library community in supporting scholarly endeavors. Any project that requires as much investment of the mind and the heart as a book does will inevitably become part of one's personal life, and this project has often been materially linked to other facets of my life. I spent the first year writing in a room that served as both my office and my son's nursery; and my children, Alejandro and Tomas, have helped me achieve a sense of balance in my life and a refreshing if equally demanding alternative to the pressures of the academic world. But my final and most important acknowledgment must be given to my husband, Raul Antonio Diaz, whose constant faith and understanding helped me sustain the energy and drive I needed to complete this book. E.W

Contents

Introduction

Part I.

The Tribade, the Hermaphrodite, and Other "Lesbian" Figures in Medical and Legal Discourse

17

2.

Representations of the Tribade in Libertine Literature

43

II.

Idealized Models of Female Intimacy

3·

'L'Amour Galant' and 'Tendre Amitie': Love and Friendship Outside the Bonds of Marriage

I.

Part

Sexualized Models of Female Intimacy

4·

Female Intimacy and the Question of "Lesbian" Identity: Rereading the Female Friendship Poems of Katherine Philips

75 130

Part Ili. The Politics of Intimacy 5· 6.

Female Intimacy and the Problem of Female Communities: Salons, Satire, and the Mystery of the 'Precieuses'

173

Regulating the "Real" in Fictional Terms: The (Auto)biography of the Tribade in Erotic and Documentary Texts

2I2

Notes

255

!40rks Cited

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Index

35 I

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Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age cif Enlightenment

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Introduction

The term "female intimacy" suggests an ambiguous, even dichotomous, set of meanings because it automatically raises questions about the nature of the relations it describes. Intimacy evokes closeness, familiarity, and kinship, but the kinds of associations it encompasses can range from the familial or confidential to the erotic or sexually illicit. Intimacy reveals what is most cherished and essential to one's identity as an individual, but it is usually marked by a sense of privacy, even secrecy, that transforms the language of intimacy into a kind of code not easily penetrable or comprehensible to those outside its boundaries.' Historically, intimacy has always conveyed these paradoxical qualities of openness and concealment, of innocence and improbity. The Oxford English Dictionary attests to this dichotomy through its conflicting definitions-"any other noble, and lawful! familiarities of intimacie, and deerenesse" for the word's primary meaning of "friendship" or "familiar intercourse," followed by "She stayed the night with Wood at his father's house .... Intimacy took place on that occasion" for its secondary usage as a euphemism for sexual intercourse. I first began to examine the connotations and contradictions of female intimacy in the cultural discourses oflate seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France in an effort to understand the correspondence between Denis Diderot and Sophie Volland, a woman whose intimacy and friendship with other women Diderot found troubling, and who aroused his jealousy on several occasions. In one letter Diderot wrote: "Your mother says that your sister likes pretty women and it is certain that she is very affectionate towards you; then think of that nun she was so fond of, and the voluptuous and loving way she sometimes has of leaning over you, and her fingers so curiously intertwined with yours!" 2 In his letters to Sophie Volland, and also in his novella La Religieuse, written during the same period, Diderot struggled with

2

Introduction

the problem of how to understand and, by implication, how to regulate and control female intimacy. In the novella, Diderot assumes the voice of a young woman, Suzanne Simonin, who is forced to take orders against her will and details her brutal treatment in a series ofletters. One of these experiences relates her encounter with a lesbian mother superior who tries to seduce her but is eventually driven mad by her "unnatural" desires. Although Diderot never directly accused Sophie of harboring such desires, the fact that he composed this gothic tale during a period when he was experiencing increasing jealousy of her intimacy with other women encouraged me to read La Religieuse as a cautionary tale about the dangers of female intimacy, particularly within a same-sex institution such as the convent. 3 This conjunction of circumstances also made me wonder about the possible homoerotic resonances of female intimacy within mainstream literature of the period. To what degree were friendships between respectable, middleclass women like Sophie Volland seen as suspect, and under what circumstances? Were other same-sex or even feminocentric institutions such as the school or the salon subject to the same kind of critique that Diderot directs against the convent? While women were usually perceived to be incapable of pure friendships, particularly with the opposite sex, how did they themselves view their relations with other women? Did they seek to form intimate bonds with one another in order to circumvent the obstacles they faced in seeking personal or intellectual autonomy or simply to find a kind of companionship they could not enjoy with men? And to what extent did these friendships, which were so often couched in the amorous language of love poetry, conceal a substrate of homoerotic or even lesbian attraction? In order to encompass the full range of these questions, I chose not to focus on representations of the "lesbian" per se, with all of the evidentiary and anachronistic problems that the term implies, 4 but rather to reframe these issues in broader terms that would not exclude questions of female homosexuality but would try to recast those questions as much as possible in terms of the models of sexuality and gender that predominated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this respect I have followed the groundbreaking work of Michel Foucault, who first argued that the eighteenth century marked the beginning of an epistemic shift when "sex was driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence," 5 although I have tried to avoid duplicating Foucault's tendency to efface the figure of the lesbian by privileging discourses on male homosexuality. In the wake of Foucault's study of the history of sexuality, critical debate over the cultural politics of the body has un-

Introduction

3

covered a number of contradictions and instabilities inherent in attempts to produce and maintain a binary division between the categories of male and female in the face of changing perceptions of anatomical and evidentiary categories. Thomas Laqueur has even gone so far as to argue that "in or about the late eighteenth [century] human sexual nature changed." He sets the eighteenth century apart as a pivotal historical "moment" in which an older phallocentric, one-sex model, that " [arrayed] men and women according to their degree of metaphysical perfection . . . along an axis whose telos was male, gave way ... to a new [two-sex] model of radical dimorphism, or biological divergence."6 Laqueur contends that not only gender but even something as apparently material as sex could be culturally produced to represent a legitimate social order, countering the prevailing tendency to perceive sex as purely anatomical and thus biologically constrained. Laqueur's work has been adapted to explore sexually ambiguous and potentially homoerotic figures like the female hermaphrodite or female transvestite, but it also raises broader questions about changing attitudes toward female sexuality and female autonomy. In a culture that could no longer simply define the female body as a failed image of masculinity, femininity was also increasingly perceived as a category separate from but in many ways opposed to the masculine, and therefore a category open to redefinition. The fashioning of a normative middle-class female sexuality to fill in the "blanks" of this newly amorphous category resulted in the reembodiment of the feminine in a new middle-class "domestic woman," a figure that would act both to demarcate and to mask bourgeois power in the (en)gendering of eighteenthcentury culture. As Lisa Moore suggests, the very "dyad 'female sexuality,' which weds gender and sexuality in a marriage of convenience for patriarchal culture ... [forms] one of the connections that ... culture works hardest to make us forget .... To speak of 'female sexuality' at all is already to capitulate to one of the culture's central narratives of self-legitimation." 7 Like the essentialist category "woman," which has proved so vexing for feminist critics, 8 the category of "female sexuality" has remained embedded in the context of middle-class, heterosexual norms that make it difficult to talk about female-female desire without speaking from a position of marginality or pointing to an obvious transgression of gender boundaries. Teresa De Lauretis has called this the "paradox of sexual (in) difference," arguing that '"sexual difference' is the term of a conceptual paradox corresponding to what is in effect a real contradiction in women's lives: the term, at once, of a sexual difference (women are, or want, something different from men) and of a sexual

4

Introduction

indijference (woman are, or want, the same as men)." 9 Lisa Moore makes an analogous argument about the shortcomings of feminist criticism, arguing that within the category of female sexuality, sex tends to collapse into gender and thus " [obscure] differences of sexuality among women by assuming that by virtue of their shared gender, women's sexual identities and practices will be similar. This assumption prevents the feminist critic from attending to the erotic codes present in representations of relationships between women" (89). Moore points to the "scandalous" figure of Charlotte Charke, whose autobiographical narrative teasingly refers to her tendency to dress in male attire both on and off the eighteenth-century stage, as an example of a "polymorphous sexual identity that documents the disunity and disruption out of which binary gendered norms must be wrenched" (94). But Moore admits that the transgressive symptom, Charke's cross-dressing, merely acts as a cover for a far more coded representation of female intimacy in the form of Charke's scattered references to her partnership with another woman, so that two fractured narratives "seem to exist in some necessary economy in which the hint of scandal in the cross-dressing secret constitutes a visible substitute, a mask, for the text's quiet elision of [their] two-woman marriage" (98). While I examine the epistemological debate over hermaphroditism as well as the prosecution of reputed female hermaphrodites and female transvestites on charges of sodomy, I am even more interested in the less "visible" forms of female intimacy that have largely been ignored. The problem oflesbian "invisibility" has remained a matter of contention in recent scholarly debates not only within literary criticism but also within literary theory. Jackie Stacey argues that "lesbian experiences are not only fragmented within 'lesbian cultures,' but also within cultures dominated by heterosexuality, in which lesbians are ascribed the contradictory positions of the invisible presence." 10 Diderot himself offers one example of how easily a lesbian "presence" can be acknowledged only to mark its effacement in one of his letters to Sophie Volland: "I put my lips to yours and kiss them, even if your sister's kisses are still there. But no, there's nothing there; hers are so light and airy." 11 Diderot's allusion to Sophie's sister and her kisses betrays his anxiety about the hidden nature of (emale-female desire and constructs a reassuring narrative that not only erases the kiss but transforms it into an erotic trace, altering the dynamics of its exchange from the homoerotic and incestuous dyad of the two sisters to the more conventional heterosexual pairing of Diderot himself with each sister in turn. 12 Terry Castle stresses this persistent tendency to record lesbian desire as a spectral presence I absence in the title of her critical study,

Introduction

5

The Apparitional Lesbian, in which she contends that lesbian invisibility, particularly in juridical terms, is a result not of cultural "indifference" but of "morbid paranoia." She notes that "once the lesbian has been defined as ghostly-the better to drain her of .any sensual or moral authority-she can then be exorcized" (6). My own attempt to render the dynamics of female intimacy "visible," without denying its erotic possibilities, has drawn on Castle's premise that the "embodied and erotic aspects oflesbian experience" are not a recent and infrequent exception to the rule, despite the ingrained scholarly habit of viewing lesbianism as "simply another form offemale 'homosocial' bonding" (u). Moreover, as a "straight" scholar working on both sides of the often fluid boundary separating gay and lesbian from feminist criticism, I am keenly aware of the many instances where feminist scholarship has remained blind to potential readings of female-female desire, nervously skirting questions of sexuality as "irrelevant" or "unanswerable," or even adopting a defensive posture to protect the alleged "heterosexuality" of individual historical and literary figures. 13 My own critical approach assumes that lesbianism has existed as a specifically sexual practice across boundaries of time, culture, and class, but it also recognizes that sexual practices between women have been culturally and historically inflected, even to the point where it is difficult for the modern scholar to recognize them as such. 14 For this reason, I concur with Teresa De Lauretis's reading of Adrienne Rich's well-known concept of a "lesbian continuum" as "less a factual description than a passionate fiction ... about imagining the existence of lesbians in spite of all that conspires to obliterate, deny or make [lesbianism] unimaginable" (Practice (if Love, 191). In her analysis of some of the epistemological issues facing those who have been trying to recover a "lesbian" history, Liz Stanley points out that a critical insensitivity to such a range of erotic and affective meanings can "lead to a temporal chauvinism [if we assume] that women's relationships and behaviours have a meaning which has remained constant over the last two hundred years or more" (169). Stanley makes a similar point about the term "sexual" and the tendency to maintain a "clear distinction between 'the sexual' as genital acts of various kinds and 'the non-sexual,' thereby defining much erotic behaviour as non-sexual ... [and applying the term] 'lesbian' [to] a very narrow set of genital sexual relationships" (163). This kind of distinction has led scholars like Lillian Faderman to argue that "lesbian" relations could not have existed before the nineteenth century and to place the intimacy of women prior to this period under the rubric of "romantic friendship," a term she

6

Introduction

coined to describe "women whose love relations were nongenital." 15 As Stanley's critique of Faderman's concept of "romantic friendship" suggests, making a direct correlation between the behavior of women in earlier periods and the modern practice oflesbianism and simply claiming that" 'the lesbian' did not exist then" (163) are both inferences fraught with the danger of anachronism. These kinds of a priori definitions can work insidiously to hinder a scholar's sensitivity to how women of earlier periods may have viewed or thought about their relations with other women if the language they used does not conform to contemporary expectations about what signifies as "sexual" or "romantic," "heterosexual" or "lesbian." In my own case, I have deliberately chosen not to follow the convention of using "romantic friendship" as an alternative descriptor to "lesbian" for relations of intimacy between women whose genital aspect is indeterminable, precisely because this term remains so rooted in the context of nineteenthcentury sociosexual relations. Moreover, the concept of "romantic friendship" has also proved problematic because it so easily lends itself to a depreciation of female intimacy, allowing critics not only to efface any sexual or erotic aspects of women's relationships but to avoid treating any relation between women as a bond that warrants serious attention. 16 Emma Donoghue offers one such example when she argues that "Elizabeth Mavor resurrected the phrase 'romantic friendship' in 1971 specifically to shield the Ladies of Llangollen from being called lesbians" (109). Bonnie Zimmerman observes that many historians have used the term "with an audible sigh of relief, to explain away love between women, instead of opening our eyes to the historical pervasiveness" of such loveY Using the term "lesbian" also poses problems because it requires a disclaimer of any contemporary connotations. But it often proves an essential term if I want to avoid the euphemistic connotations that can too easily be attached to more ambiguous terms such as "romantic friendship" or "female intimacy." Moreover, I remain deeply aware of how difficult it is to rely on texts from the period to provide a vocabulary to describe relations of intimacy between women, partly because women rarely refer to their own sexual experiences in explicit terms and partly because many of them were struggling to find a language with which to define their love for one another in opposition to the strongly hierarchical and phallocentric model of heterosexual relations. Since neither the term "romantic friendship" nor "lesbian" entirely suffices to describe intimate relations between women prior to the nineteenth century, critics will need to continue to develop new conceptual models and

Introd11ction

7

a more nuanced vocabulary to define the sexual, social, and psychological dimensions of early modern culture, particularly in cases like that of Katherine Philips, where the "lesbian" sensibility of the poetry she wrote to her friends remains at odds with her own idealizing discourse of female friendship, a discourse that has too often been assimilated to the model of "romantic friendship." Recent critical interest has discerned a number of emergent "lesbian" discourses and uncovered evidence of passionate attachments as well as sexual relations between women from the English Renaissance through the eighteenth century. Scholars like Valerie Traub, Emma Donoghue, Randolph Trumbach, Rosalind Ballaster, Lisa Moore, and others have begun to delineate a period in which conceptions of female-female relations were gaining increasing importance in public discourse and expanding from a narrow realm of classical erotica accessible only to an elite, male audience to permeate the public consciousness of women and the working classes. 18 At the same time, the expansion of discourse about female homosexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also reflected changes in the ways friendship, intimacy, and sexual relations between women were viewed and should caution us not to make sweeping assumptions about relations between women over the course of the 200 years that separate more idealized representations of female intimacy in the romances of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare from the overdy sexualized depictions of lesbian prostitutes and actresses in the "scandal" literature and pornography of the 1780s and 1790s. In a study of female intimacy over such a span of time, and from the distance of the late twentieth century, I remain conscious of the dangers of anachronism. In determining to what degree a contemporary, post-Freudian understanding of sexual practice and erotic desire can be applied to early modern culture, I have been particularly concerned not to impose the latetwentieth-century assumption that individuals generally gravitate toward a "homo" or "hetero" sexual "identity" upon a historical period when such conceptions of a sexual object "choice" or even of a sexual "identity" had barely surfaced within cultural discourses. Nor have I applied the kind of binary opposition between heterosexuality and homosexuality that runs throughout late-twentieth-century discourse to this period, although I do not discount the emergence of this idea as an underlying discursive thread. Instead, I argue that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture encompassed a more fluid, variable, and often contradictory model of sexual behavior and erotic sensibility in which desire and practice might not even necessarily coincide. If Randolph Trumbach offers the striking Restoration portrait of the

8

Introduction

"young man about town who was to be found with his mistress on one arm and his catamite on the other," 1 ~ I might offer an analogous example of a married female poet like Katherine Philips, who wrote passionate poetry to her female friends, or an actress like Charlotte Charke, who married twice but engaged in her longest domestic partnership with another woman. Drawing on examples like these, I have focused on what Eve Sedgwick terms "the inexplicitness or denial of the gaps between long-coexisting minoritizing and universalizing ... understandings of same-sex relations." Indeed, I share Sedgwick's concerns about the dangers of placing too great a reliance upon "the historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift" in documenting the emergence of the modern "homosexual." 10 However, I have also been conscious of the tendency within critical studies to subsume the figure of the "lesbian" within a universalizing discourse about (male) homosexuality, rendering her doubly "invisible" in some instances, and I have therefore been wary of uncritically adopting theoretical or historical models of male homosexuality or indeed "homosocial" relations to my investigation of female intimacy in both its social and sexual dimensions. 21 The challenge of trying to understand these earlier models of sexuality in their own terms has been my first concern in this project of recovering and unentangling past discourses about female intimacy that have been not only obscured by changes in historical, social, and cultural constructions of sex and gender, but also often deliberately obscured by intervening hands. In reexamining seventeenth- and eighteenth-century models of sexuality, many scholars have focused their energies on the investigation of transgressive categories like hermaphroditism and female-to-male cross-dressing as a way of documenting homoerotic relations between women. 22 Such studies reveal an emergent, if fragmented and often ambiguous, cultural anxiety about the dangers of unregulated contact between women fostering aberrant social, political, and sexual behavior. Yet this focus on the physical signs of sexual anomaly, particularly within the male-dominated discourses of law, theology, and medicine, ignores a wide range of representations of homoerotic or homosocial relations between women, which did not elicit a direct juridical or medical condemnation. These representations of a less transgressive form of female intimacy nonetheless offer evidence of a culture that was not only increasingly conscious of women's capacity to form strong emotional and social bonds with one another but also beginning to attach a sexual meaning to these ties, even in the absence of overt signs like the adoption of male dress or the use of a dildo. In her study of what she terms the "femme-

Introduction

9

femme" bonding benveen characters like Hermia and Helena in Shakespeare's A ,~fidsummer Night~' Dream, Valerie Traub explores one such "insignificant" form of homoerotic desire between women, a desire she claims evaded censure and perhaps even recognition by most viewers because it did not disrupt the patriarchal "traffic in women" enacted by the play's teleological focus on heterosexual marriage. Others have argued that such depictions of homoerotic attraction prior to marriage could not have been culturally threatening because they constituted a temporary, adolescent phase of development and were usually presented in an elegiac form that diminished their sense of sexual disruption by confining it to the past. However, by assuming that marriage, either as an institution or as the teleological focus of many early modern narratives, automatically precludes the possibility of homoerotic and homosocial attachments, critics and historians have not only left unexplored a large portion of women's experience but have also failed to examine the tensions within early modern attitudes toward marriage and its potential conflict with already established homosocial ties. In order to examine a broader range of depictions of intimate relations between women, I do not view marriage as an absolute heterosexual category that cancels the possibility of homoerotic attachments but as a discursive category in which heterosexuality is strongly linked to reproductive sexuality but not to sexual identity per se. For this reason, I have chosen to use the more inclusive idea of "female intimacy," which I have conceived broadly as a nexus of relations not limited to sexual practice but also including social and economic ties that can operate within or cross the boundaries of heterosexual institutions such as marriage and prostitution in order to demarcate and analyze kinds of female experience that have remained largely unexplored within critical discourse. As a way of exploring the contradictions as well as the cultural asymmetries that characterize cultural attitudes toward female intimacy, 1 have outlined two characteristic models of relations between women, one of which I term "sexualized" and the other "idealized." The apparent asymmetry benveen these two terms represents a deliberate attempt on my part to avoid the tendency to view relations between women as either exclusively sexual in nature, and therefore subject to different degrees of cultural regulation and censure, or utterly lacking any sexual dynamic, and therefore blandly innocuous and unworthy of note. Thus my "sexualized" model not only takes account of how sexual relations between women were conceived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but also examines the kinds of cultural

To

lntrodt~ction

fantasies that emerged to explain, regulate, and caution against female homosexuality and, in some cases, to deny that sexual relations between women could even occur. In the first part of this study, I delineate this sexualized model of female relations by analyzing medical and juridical texts by such writers as Ambroise Pan\ Jacques Duval, Michel de Montaigne, and Jane Sharp, among others, that document an increasing cultural awareness oflesbian practices, particularly for cases in which women were prosecuted on charges of sodomy or were suspected of being hermaphrodites. At the same time, I focus on the emergence of a closely related genre of erotic and paramedical literature in which sexual relations between women appeared as an early and enduring set piece ranging from the more salacious passages of Jacques Duval's medical treatises to the openly erotic histories ofBrantome as well as the anonymous Onania and pseudoscientific pornography like Rare T/erities: the Cabinet if Ven11s Unlocked, and Her Secrets Laid Open. Drawing on the work of social historians such as Thomas Laqueur, I argue that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptions of female intimacy were shaped by the contest between an older model of sexuality, which conceived of the male and female sexes as mirror images of a single body, and an emerging biological model that posited two distinct "opposite" sexes and helped to enforce a more rigid definition of gender roles. Because of this dynamic shift, the late Renaissance works of Shakespeare, Sidney, d'Urfe, and Benserade could depict homoerotic relations between young women without disrupting patriarchal authority since such desire signaled a necessary stage in a woman's psychosexual development, functioning almost as a rite of puberty that would "naturally" give way to heterosexual "maturity" in marriage. Around the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, a different kind of discourse about female-female desire emerges that is not limited to this "femme" model of adolescent homoeroticism but openly depicts lesbian desire as a force equal to or surpassing conventional heterosexual desire. Such portraits of female-female desire that coexists with or challenges the primacy of heterosexual relations can be found in a number of extraordinary and provocative works such as Donne's "Sapho to Philaenis," Benserade's "Sur 1' Amour d'Uranie avec Philis," and Aphra Behn's "To the Fair Clarinda, who made love to me, imagin'd more than woman." By contrast, my "idealized" or "polite" model designates a culturally sanctioned version of female fi·iendship as a relationship practically devoid of sexual expression and closely linked to the emerging ideology of domesticity

Introduction

rr

and a new emphasis on the idea of "companionate marriage." In the second part of this study, I argue that attitudes toward female intimacy were profoundly affected by the developing ideology of domesticity, which idealized the nuclear family to the detriment of older kinship structures and emphasized a woman's maternal rather than conjugal role within the family structure. The predominance of arranged marriages throughout the seventeenth century in England and into the eighteenth century on the continent led women to form a network of social and affective bonds with one another that were as important, if not more so, than those with their husbands. Even as an ideology of" companionship" began to emerge in the discourse of marriage, women remained profoundly aware of the gender hierarchy implicit in this concept, which emphasized the need for women to make themselves fit companions to their husbands but did not offer a reciprocal emphasis on the fitness of men as companions to their wives. In addition to exploring the effects of an emerging ideology of" companionate marriage" and its own internal contradictions upon idealized representations of female intimacy as female friendship, I also examine the inherent conflicts between women writers' attempts to construct idealized models of female community and the misogynist assumptions underlying a masculine tradition of platonic friendship. Analyzing the poetry of Anne de Rohan as well as exchanges ofletters and poetry between precieuse writers like Madeleine de Scudery and Catherine Descartes, I argue that as these writers tried to elevate the idea of intimate, platonic relations between women to a higher status, the very rhetoric of courtly love that they employed inevitably imbued their writing with homoerotic overtones that critics have generally dismissed as mere affectation or barely acknowledged as romantic sentiment. In the case of Katherine Philips, whose poems of female friendship point to a palpable "lesbian" sensibility at odds with her status as the "Chaste Orinda," a highly praised woman writer who was also a respectable wife and mother, I explore the ramifications of this model in a culture where the idea of female homosexuality was gradually acquiring the ambiguous status of an "open secret." For this reason, I have devoted a full chapter to Philips's work, examining posthumous editorial efforts to obscure the narrative of female intimacy she constructed in the manuscript versions of her poems as a particularly fascinating case study of an emerging conflict between these two models of female intimacy. Throughout this study I have tried to delineate ways in which a sanctioned model of female intimacy might represent an attempt to conceal or counter

12

Introduction

cultural anxieties about sexual relations between women that could not be openly acknowledged. 23 I argue that while these two versions of female intimacy might appear at first glance to be mutually exclusive, both operated as defining parameters not only for literary representations of intimate relations between women but also for cultural responses to and representations of those spaces and institutions in which women could gather together, including the salon, convent, bordello, and theater. Indeed, erotic convention tended to focus on such feminine spheres as the convent, girls' school, or seraglio 24 where women had little access to men in order to explain sexual exchanges between women and simultaneously render them nonthreatening to a phallocentric culture by arguing that they operated as a mere substitute for "real" sex, that is, sex with men. In addition, the images and practices delineated by medical, juridical, and libertine texts not only created but also disseminated a cultural mythology of the lesbian "tribade." 2 s Such a figure could simultaneously inhabit the sexual underworld of the demimonde and yet exemplifY a form of aristocratic decadence that would come under increasing attack both in England and in France from a middle-class ideology that conceived of women's obligation within the patriarchal family unit as primarily maternal and reproductive. At the same time, the tribade also operated as a discursive figure that reified and projected fears about female homosexuality onto a monstrous feminine Other-the racially marked Asian or Mrican woman whose hypertrophied clitoris hung outside her body like a penis and whose reported submission to the operation of clitoridectomy served as a cautionary tale for European women who might seek to satisfY their sexual desires through autoerotic or lesbian practices. In the final chapters of this study, I try to show how these troubling intimations of female autonomy inevitably provoked increasingly satiric representations of female intimacy as a bond that might claim to be platonic but that concealed some kind of mysterious and disreputable activity. Once the idea that women might be subject to homoerotic desire gained currency within French and English culture, it unleashed a whole constellation of anxieties that centered upon the disturbing spectacle of female sexual autonomy. If it were possible for women to satisfy their desires without recourse to men and without the fear of pregnancy, it seemed only "rational," according to Enlightenment thinkers, that they might refuse to participate in a reproductive economy. In France, this kind of satire had already emerged as a dominant cultural discourse by the second half of the seventeenth century. There the female-dominated realm of the salon encouraged intellectual and emotional

Introduction

I

3

affiliations between women even as its inhabitants were satirized as precieuses who were thought to constitute a kind of female cabal. Writers ranging from Moliere to Michel de Pure attacked the precieuses for allegedly proposing sexual reforms that included the right of women to refuse sexual relations in order to limit their pregnancies, putting forward these claims as proof of their rejection of heterosexual as well as maternal norms. Such claims allowed a writer like Saint-Evremond to accuse the precieuses oflesbian tendencies and lent credence to an implicit ideological link between sapphic desire and the failure to mother. By tracing the incorporation of this ideology into English culture after the Restoration, I show how a writer like Delarivier Manley both drew upon and yet distanced herself from French models of female intimacy by attempting to delineate female-female desire as a "foreign" practice associated with the more intemperate and licentious nations of the European continent. By the early eighteenth century, literary works were far more likely to take ajaundiced view ofany"excessive"form offemale intimacy as a potential danger to conjugal ties, as Manley demonstrates in the New Atalantis, where the members of a female cabal warn those who have husbands "to reserve their heart, their tender amity for their fair friend, an article in this well-bred, wilfully undistinguishing age which the husband seems to be rarely solicitous of" (I 56). In delineating these models, I have also tried to confront the historical and evidentiary limitations that complicate any inquiry into the past, but which are particularly challenging when the subjects of inquiry are those of ideology and sexual practice. While my "sexualized" category of female intimacy includes representations of female intimacy ranging from the homoerotic to the pornographic, much of the material that falls under this rubric was written by men, raising an interpretative crux that is compounded by the scarcity of women's first-person accounts of homoerotic or homosexual experiences before the latter part of the eighteenth century. 26 This is particularly true in the final section of this work, which explores the "political" implications of female intimacy, partly through an examination of satiric and pornographic attacks on women who were public figures, such as Abigail Masham, a ladyin-waiting to Queen Anne, or the actress, Mademoiselle Raucourt. In many instances, my use of the term "pornographic" is at least partly intended as a reminder of the desire to titillate and arouse a male audience or to defame or coerce a particular female subject that often underlies these accounts as well as a reminder of our own ignorance of how female subjects in these accounts might have understood or felt about the acts that were attributed to them.

r4

Introduction

In the final chapter of this study, I argue that sexualized representations of female intimacy were not necessarily limited to the underworld of the demimonde but also offered means to target aristocratic "decadence," as in the case of Rene d' Argenson's polic;e reports on the alleged lesbian liaisons of Henriette de Castlenau, the Comtesse de Murat. Drawing upon parallels with satiric attacks on the figure of the precieuse in the rhetoric of early pornographic works such as Charier's Satyra Sotadica, I suggest that representations of sexualized intimacy in satire and in pornography tended to link the dangers of female homosexuality with the dangers of female community and women's aspirations for intellectual and personal autonomy, particularly as more and more individual women were identified within both satiric and erotic discourses as "sapphists" or lovers of other women. While a burgeoning growth of pornographic and paramedical texts demonized female intimacy as an explicitly sexual practice documented in the ancient texts of Martial or Juvenal, or located in distant and exotic cultures like those of Africa and India, works such d' Argenson's police reports and Anthony Hamilton's Memoirs rf the Count de Grammont added a far more immediate and disquieting aura of authenticity to this cultural portrait of the lesbian, making this figure appear all too real. By juxtaposing a fictional work of pornography, such as Cleland's Memoirs rf a Woman rf Pleasure, which placed itself within the genre of the memoir or "true history," with Cleland's later account of an actual woman, Catherine Vizzani, whose assumption of a masculine identity was not fully disclosed until her death, I reexamine the ways in which a writer such as Cleland attempted and finally failed to contain lesbian desire within a "normalizing" and "reassuring" narrative of heterosexual conversion. In effect, I argue that over the course of the eighteenth century, the increasing materiality and contemporaneity of the tribade and other "lesbian" figures made it difficult to maintain an impermeable boundary between sexualized and idealized representations of female intimacy. By the end of the century, an emerging mythology in the late eighteenth century attempted to insulate the middle-class "domestic" woman from any unseemly intimations of lesbian desire by assuming that respectable women were both sexually passive and "passionless." 27 But once the idea of female homosexuality had become embedded and even coded within a multiplicity of legal, medical, literary, and pornographic discourses, it was no longer possible to maintain the figure of the lesbian as a fictional erotic presence safely confined to a distant, even mythological, past or to ignore the "open secret" that female intimacy might entail lesbian desire.

I.

The Tribade, the Hermaphrodite, and Other "Lesbian" Figures in Medical and Legal Discourse

Men leave behinde them that which their sin showes, And are as theeves trac'd, which rob when it snows. But of our dallyance no more signes there are, Then fishes leave in streames, or Birds in aire. And betweene us all sweetnesse may be had; All, all that Nature yields, or Art can adde. My two lips, eyes, thighs, differ from thy two, But so, as thine from one another doe; And, oh, no more; the likenesse being such, Why should they not alike in all parts touch? Hand to strange hand, Iippe to Iippe none denies; Why should they brest to brest, or thighs to thighs? Likenesse begets such strange selfe flatterie, That touching my selfe, all seemes done to thee. My selfe I embrace, and mine owne hands I kisse, And amorously thanke my selte for this. Me, in my glasse, I call thee; But alas, When I would kisse, teares dimme mine eyes, and glasse. -

J

0 H N

D 0 N N E ,

"Sapho to Phi!aenis," 39-56 1

I7

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Sexualized Models

if Female Intimacy

Donne's elegiac description of the poet Sappho's desire for her female lover, Philaenis, conveys a strange mixture of fascination and erotic titillation, and an anxious desire to redefine female homoeroticism as ultimately autoerotic and barren if it succeeds in evading the "proper" heterosexual ending of a conventional romance narrative, 2 This desire to contain or redefine female homoerotic desire within the framework of a heterosexual teleology pervades the early modern rediscovery of tribadism, the term most commonly used to denote sexual relations between women in this period, 3 As several critics have observed, the surprising tolerance with which Donne seems to treat his lesbian alter ego stems precisely from his ability to confine female homosexuality within the boundaries of a safely distant antiquity. Since Sappho and her female lovers belong irrevocably to the past, her history and even her voice remain open to manipulation through the poet's ventriloquistic play. 4 Even as Donne's poem acknowledges that its own phallocentric model of heterosexuality may be sinful and corrupt, it still maintains that this form of sexuality can signifY in a material way that Sappho's idealistic model of union can only impotently long for and eulogize. In this sense, Donne's poem expresses a response characteristic of the largely male-authored discourses on female homosexuality that led early modern writers to an ambivalent assertion and denial of the pleasures of "tribade" or "lesbian" sexuality. 5 This perceived need to control or suppress female homoerotic desire by containing it within a narrative of heterosexual conversion may be measured in part by the seventeenthcentury struggle to interpret the history of Sappho herself~ whose persona was ultimately remolded from that of a tribade poet to the far more conventional figure of the abandoned woman, punished for her illicit desires by turning to men too late. 6 Only recently have examinations of early modern and enlightenment discourses of gender and sexuality begun to disclose these efforts at erasing signs of homosexuality and to discern instead an emerging cultural consciousness of homoerotic relations within sexual categories, focusing in particular on figures such as the sexually passive and effeminate male "molly" and the bisexual hermaphrodite. 7 Instead of focusing on a particular transgressive figure, I have instead outlined a combination of cultural and historical circumstances that contributed to or were symptomatic of an increasing consciousness of female homosexuality. These include a sharp rise in the prosecution of women for sodomy in France and on the Continent; the translation into the vernacular of classical sources discussing tribadism; 8 the (re)discovery of the clitoris by Italian anatomists, 9 as well as a growing fascination with all types

"Lesbian" Figures in i'viedical and Legal Discourse

I

9

of genital anomalies; an increasing concern with the regulation of nonprocreative sexual practices, especially masturbation; the translation of such anxieties onto the figure of the African or Indian tribade, whose monstrous clitoris hung outside her body as a visible sign of her sexual licentiousness; 10 and the emergence of a whole genre of pornographic literature in which sexual relations between women appeared as an early and enduring set piece. By relating these various conditions, I am attempting to recover an incipient discourse of female homosexuality and to discern cultural fantasies and fears about unregulated contact between women. Despite the long-held presumption in literary and historical studies that desire between women was rarely if ever represented before the nineteenth century, a closer examination of early modern texts reveals numerous responses to a multiple rediscovery of tribadism and other sexual practices between women by lawyers, classical scholars, physicians, and the writers of the libertine, erotic, and pseudoscientific texts that would soon coalesce into the new genre of pornography. 11 French sources, in particular, offer evidence of a rich, if often fragmentary, awareness oflesbianism that had begun to permeate Western European culture during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly through the interconnections of legal, gynecological, and erotic discourse. Among aristocratic and intellectual elites, these texts helped transform the tribade from a historical character, safely confined within the pages of Lucian or Martial, into a disturbingly contemporary figure. While often invoked as a mere specter, the tribade in this more contiguous figuration implicitly threatened a patriarchal society predicated upon masculine control of the sociosexual "traffic in women" (and any traffic between them). A growing belief that women were capable of desiring other women generated a whole range of cultural anxieties centered around the fear of female sexual autonomy. The idea that sexual relations between women could satisfy women's erotic desires and liberate them from the dangers of venereal disease or pregnancy intensified this fear that women might therefore choose to avoid marriage and refuse to participate in a reproductive economy. For example, Pierre Bayle argued that marriage was an irrational choice for women and that they were lured into marriage, and the inevitable course of pregnancies that followed in its wake, merely through prejudice and sentiment. 12 It was precisely this fear of an antimaternal impulse fostering sexual practices between women that helped to promote an associative link between the specter of tribade sexuality and the expression of "feminist" writing on behalf of women, which often argued not only in favor of women's moral superiority

20

Sexualized Models of Female Intimacy

to men but also in favor of their freedom from marital and maternal burdens, in order to give them a greater intellectual autonomy. 13

Tribades and Hermaphrodites on Trial: Prosecutions and Social Sanctions in France Of all the Western European societies that prosecuted or enforced social sanctions against women for engaging in sexual relations with one another, France has perhaps the longest history of legal prohibitions against female sodomy within both its civil and ecclesiastical codes. The earliest secular law penalizing sexual relations between women consists of a thirteenth-century French code entitled Li Livres di jostice et de plet, which rather grotesquely transfers the standard statutes against male sodomy to the female body, demanding that a woman lose a "member" for each instance of sodomy and that she be burned alive for a third offense. Despite this attempt to apply an equivalent punishment across genders, the wording of the law remains vague as to what female "member" was to be deemed analogous to the testicles. 14 The ambiguity of this legal language and its dependence upon a preexisting definition of male sexual practice can be traced all the way back to the primary religious source for these injunctions, St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, which states, "For this cause [that they worshipped God in the images of corruptible men and beasts] God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another" (Rom. 1:26-27 KJV). While many Church writers interpreted these verses as a reference to female homosexuality, 15 they varied widely in how seriously they categorized this practice; some included it under the rubric of sins of lust but not of those against nature, while others excluded it from the category of sodomy altogether and placed sexual relations between women among the sins of fornication, which included adultery and rape. However, it was in French convents that these legal condemnations of female sexual relations began to find expression in ecclesiastical policy, such as the injunctions issued by the Councils of Paris and Rouen in the thirteenth century that prohibited nuns from sleeping together and warned them "to avoid special ties of friendship within the convent." 16 As in later examples of legal sentencing, for which the traditional public pronouncement of the crime committed was often suspended in the case of female sodomy, an enigmatic

"Lesbian" Figures in l'vfedical and Legal Discourse

2 1

silence enshrouded these regulations, whose purpose was never publicly declared. Such unwillingness to publicize these prohibitions suggests that if the idea of sexual relations between women elicited a degree of cultural anxiety, the prospect that women themselves might become conscious of these sexual possibilities and seek to emulate them evoked a far more deep-seated reaction of fear and repression. 17 The tendency to view erotic desires between women as a matter to be addressed within the regulative framework of civil or ecclesiastical law also surfaces within French literature at an early date. While the French romance Huon Legacy to His Daughters, and Fordyce's Sermons to Young T;f/omen, Ellen Pollak illustrates the aestheticizing of a companionate ideal that "celebrates female piety as the basis of women's erotic appeal." She writes that within these representations of a woman's proper role in the ideal companionate marriage, "woman's ornamental status [is] not established solely by her

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Idealized Models of Female Intimacy

economic uselessness; it [is] also determined by her cultural construction as an accessory to masculine desire ... the sign or token of her husband's plenitude."54 Ruth Perry comes to a similar conclusion in her discussion of" companionate marriage" when she observes that this ideology may also be perceived as "a more thoroughgoing psychological appropriation of women to serve the emotional needs of men than ever was imagined in early divisions oflabor by gender. Educating women to be more interesting companions for men rather than as individuals with their own economic or intellectual purposes is an ambiguous advance, not one that moves very far along the path toward equality." 55 Such a radical change in the nature of what female labor ought to be did not so much challenge the notion of companionate marriage as transform the cultural understanding of what a female companion should be, shifting the implicit mutuality of the companionate ideal away from a possible egalitarian relation between the sexes toward an emerging notion of separate spheres in which the "domestic" realm would be gendered as feminine and increasingly regarded as distinct from the more masculine "public" sphere. In France the ideology of companionate marriage found even less fertile ground for its reception. Both the greater honor the Church had traditionally accorded to virginity 56 and the aristocratic ethos of galanterie prevented the idea from achieving much influence until well into the eighteenth century. 57 As late as 1784, the French writer Franc;:ois de la Rochefoucauld was still struck that in England among the upper classes, "husband and wife are always together and belong to the same society." 58 Indeed, Jean-Louis Flandrin has suggested that the increasing popularity of the idea of "married love" in France in the second half of the eighteenth century resulted largely from the fact that "Anglo-mania had made [it] fashionable" (Families in Former Times, I 69). Among the clergy, a current of antimarriage sentiment also flourished. Despite his advocacy of "friendship within marriage," Franc;:ois de Sales, Bishop of Geneva, wrote to a young woman who was about to be married, warning that "the marriage state is a perpetual penance." 59 Indeed, clerical writing retained a note of lingering suspicion toward conjugal affection even toward the close of the eighteenth century. For example, in his Catechisme des i-tem maries, Father Feline criticized the "excessive obligingness of husbands towards their wives" and rebuked them for their complaisance in allowing their wives to persuade them to practice the "sin of Onan" as a means of contraception.

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They become too sensitive to the complaints that the wives make about all that it has cost them to bring children into the world. [The husbands] deal gently with their excessive delicacy, they consent to spare them this trouble, without, however, renouncing the right that they believe they possess.w In the wake of Counter-Reformation reforms, the Church began to give more weight to the idea of companionate marriage, 61 but even this guarded shift in attitude was slow to take hold in a culture where aristocratic ideology predominated over religious injunctions and where aristocratic families remained dependent on marriage as a means of cementing economic and political alliances. As Flandrin points out, the distrust of an excessive affection between husband and wife can be found not only in Catholic doctrine but in secular writing as well, where he argues that it reflects a cultural anxiety that such attachments might cause families to "forget their other social obligations" (Families, 165). Both Montaigne and Brantome argued that conjugal relations should be limited to the obligation to produce children. Indeed, despite his tolerant attitude toward erotic attraction outside the bonds of marriage, Brantome adopts an unusually severe tone in taking husbands and wives to task for giving way to sexual desire within marriage: I myself have seen many a woman who has loved her husband to such excess and he has also loved her that they both completely forget their obligations to religion and to God; so that the time that they ought to spend in these devotions, they consume in lewdness and profligacy."" Yet it was not only men who wrote about the ills of marriage; many women also took a jaundiced view of matrimony, particularly among the aristocracy. As the anonymous poet Mlle. de *** remarked: "Whatever perfect happiness a marriage may display I The safest is to live and die a vestal." 63 Fear of the debilitating effects of multiple pregnancies and the ever present threat of death in childbirth provided one source of the disfavor women evinced toward the married state, but others drew on a vein of asceticism in Cartesian philosophy and the religious ideology of the Jansenists in order to promote "hetero- or homosocial spiritual friendship [as an] alternative ... to the commodification of the female body in the traditional upper-class marriage for the reproduction of heirs." 64 In her analysis of female authorship during this period, Joan DeJean notes that writers like Scudery and Lafayette gave their heroines the capacity to refuse marriage and that women writers in the

90

Idealized Models of Female Intimacy

generation after Lafayette were even more explicit in their attacks on the ways the practice of marriage often victimized women. 65 Apart from these fictional representations, there were many instances of women eschewing marriage or remarriage in favor of remaining single or widowed, including Scudery and Lafayette. Mlle. de Montpensier remained unequivocal in her opposition to marriage and its inherent evils for women, telling her friend, Madame de Motteville: Marriage has given men their superiority over women and the dependency that men have enforced upon women has made them call us the fragile sex. We have been the victims of this dependency, often against our will and for reasons of family interests. Finally, let us withdraw ourselves from this slavery so that there might be a corner of the world where one can say that women are their own mistresses and do not possess all the faults that are attributed to them. And let us make ourselves celebrated in the ages to come by leading the kinds oflives that will make us live eternally''''' Although she expresses herself with the rhetorical flourish of a manifesto, Mlle. de Montpensier's denigration of marriage as a form of slavery does not grossly exaggerate the degree of control that families were able to exert over their children's ability to marry, particularly as the regulation of marriage began to shift from ecclesiastical to secular authorities. Flandrin writes that this change in the regulation of marriage practices represented one facet of a larger effort to control sexual behavior, particularly among the young. Beginning in the sixteenth century, these reforms included closing down public brothels, treating rape as a serious offense, and barring the young from contracting marriages against the will of their parents. 1'7 As secular authorities were able to wrest control of clandestine marriages away from the Church, the civil courts and Parlements began to exert an increasingly restrictive jurisdiction over marriage, dissolving unions that had been consummated without parental consent and allowing parents to disinherit or imprison children who had contracted secret marriages. In addition, clandestine marriage was subsumed under the categories of forced abduction or elopement (rapt de violence and rapt de seduction), creating a powerful deterrent to those seeking to evade paternal authority since the act of rape was a capital offense. Sarah Hanley points out that in clashes betvveen parents and children, women suffered the most when a clandestine marriage was dissolved, often losing their dowries and risking confinement in a convent, par-

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ticularly if they had already conceived a child; however, courts were often reluctant to apply the capital penalty for rape to men. 6 ~ By the late seventeenth century, memoir novels written by such women as Henriette de Castlenau, C01ntesse de Murat, or Anne-Marguerite Du Noyer offered a powerful indictment of marital abuses against women and a cultural "obsession with the alleged proliferation of women judged notorious because they threatened the ruin of families" with their demands for legal separation (a de facto divorce in this period) or their refusal to acknowledge their husband's authority. 69 Jurists writing in defense of the prerogatives of the state argued that "marriage functioned as a sacrament only when it was founded on a valid contract," a theory intended "to guarantee that the state had the last word in determining when and if a union could be dissolved-all in the hope of preserving secular control over the transmission of estates." 70 Viewed as a necessary evil in the preservation of property and inheritance, marriage among the upper classes thus offered little prospect of fostering intimacy or a sense of companionship between husband and wife. Such aristocratic disdain for conjugality persisted well into the eighteenth century, when it eventually was perceived as yet another piece of evidence to indict the upper classes for libertinism and decadence in pre-Revolutionary propaganda. 71 Only among the bourgeoisie and the philosophes did the idea of companionship in marriage take on real importance, creating a more sentimental ideology to counter the practices of a culture in which marriage remained an economic transaction and where civil authorities ruthlessly supported the abilities of a father or a male head of a family to control the alliances of both male and female children even into adulthood. 72 For the new middle-class intellectuals, the ideal of conjugal love represented a rejection of an older theological notion of original sin in favor of a more optimistic idea of personal happiness that did not exclude sexual pleasure.7 3 Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique argued that "marriage makes man more virtuous and more wise," while the author of the article "Locke" in the Enryclopedie rhapsodized about the act of conceiving a child as the highest point of marital bliss: "I wish that the father and mother should be healthy and happy ... and that the moment when they are ready to bring into existence a new life should be one when they feel the most satisfaction with their own lives." 7 " The reaction of the philosophes against aristocratic privilege and avarice fueled their criticism of marriages made solely for economic gain or to strengthen family alliances. Instead, they advocated allowing love a place in

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Idealized Models

if Female Intimacy

the choice of a spouse, even across class lines, a view that was taken up in bourgeois comedies such as Marivaux's Le jeu de /'amour et du lzasard and Voltaire's Naninc, and in such sentimental plays as Sophie ou L'Amour conjugal. However, Flandrin cautions against placing too great a reliance on such literary evidence, suggesting that there may simply have been "a passing fad for marital love ... among the elite of the time." He does admit that the "attitude of the elite towards marrying for love changed during the eighteenth century," noting that in the Dictiormaire de l'Academic Jranfaise "from 1798 onwards ... the expression 'a love match [mariage d'inclination]' appears under the headword MARIAGE, an expression which it had until then been judged unnecessary to include" (Sex in the T#stern World, 77, 79). However, while the writings of Montesquieu, Diderot, and others began to adopt a more open perspective toward marriage, their ideas of reform remained primarily aimed at increasing the liberty and happiness of men. 75 Their advancement of a companionate ideal in marriage tended to conceive of women in less emancipatory terms, suggesting that a woman's natural place was in the home and that her sole function was to assume the role of wife and mother. In his study of representations of the nature and role of women in eighteenth-century France, Leonard Friedman observes: "Overwhelmingly, the writers of the Age of Enlightenment, both male and female, and including even those most favorably disposed to the cause of the opposite sex, insisted that women belong in the home, and their chief glory and ultimate source of contentment resided in their devotion to husband, children, and household duties." 76 If the philosophes were willing to entertain the notion that love "might be realized within the context of middle-class domesticity" (Traer, 70), they also found it difficult to reconcile their progressive notions of individual liberty with a deeply felt need for a hierarchy within marriage to preserve the stability of the social order. Thus, they adapted the ideal of mutual affection, friendship, and "rational" love to counteract the potential volatility of individual passions and desires while refusing to acknowledge the subversive potential of this essentially egalitarian ideal to overturn the patriarchal model of the husband as governor of his wife. At the same time, the increasing cult of maternity with its emphasis on the benefits of women nursing their own children and the need for a mother to act as a guardian of her children's physical and moral well-being did much to reinforce cultural beliefs that women ought to participate in a reproductive economy by entering into marriage and bearing children, thus replacing religious prescriptions of female inferiority with a less misogynist but no less

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coercive invocation of natural law. 77 Even the relatively "feminist" writer Riballier subscribed to this belief that a woman's place was in the private, domestic sphere of the home: It is women who, in the order of nature, are burdened with the labors of pregnancy, of childbirth, and of feeding and caring for the young.... Moreover, by a general agreement which is completely natural and whose origins no doubt go back to the first ages of the world, they are charged with all the details of the interior of the home. These occupations demand most of their time, and, to be carefully performed, allow oflittle else. 78 This new emphasis on motherhood as a vocation facilitated the acceptance of the ideal of companionate marriage as an ideological construct underpinning the social order of family and state. For a bourgeoisie that was no longer bent simply on assimilation within the nobility, this conjugal ideal also offered a weapon to attack aristocratic mores and to redefine xalantcric as a debased code of behavior that promoted adultery and sexual license. Translating the bourgeois attacks on aristocratic hegemony into gendered terms, Rousseau attacked aristocratic women for their relative social autonomy and argued that they indirectly ruled the men of their class, creating a pernicious current of effeminacy within the state by their refusal to fulfill their own maternal obligations. "Not content to have ceased breast-feeding their infants, they have ceased to want to have them at all," he wrote in Emile, suggesting that the refusal to nurse a child was tantamount to a refusal to conceive. 79 Rousseau's anxiety that social and political freedom might lead women to reject n1otherhood as too constraining reflects a current running throughout philosophical rhetoric in the eighteenth century that centered around the fear of depopulation. 80 The implicit recognition among many philosophes that women had no good "rational" motive for entering into matrimony and bearing children within its confines proved a powerful factor in deterring these writers from applying their ideas about individual liberty across gender lines. 81 Even in Diderot's utopian description of Tahiti as a paradise of sexual freedom, the only defect that can disrupt the sexual economy is that of sterility. For women, then, the companionate model seemed to offer a greater degree offreedom in their relations with their husbands but only at the price of placing more subtle but equally binding constraints through the redefinition of their role as mothers. Although none of the other philosophes went as far as Rousseau in arguing that social and political status should keep women in

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Idealized Models of Female Intimacy

a subordinate position, their awareness that marriage and childbearing placed women at a political and social disadvantage did not prevent them from tacitly or explicitly upholding this hierarchy within the family. In his Encyclopedic article "Femme," Louis de Jaucourt admits that natural law does not necessarily favor the subordination of a wife to her husband but argues that men should retain this authority "since ordinarily men are more capable than women of managing their affairs." Even such dissimilar writers as Laclos and Rousseau concurred in linking feminine artifice and affection to a need to control men indirectly because of their physical weakness and social inferiority. Only Condorcet was radical enough to argue that a hierarchy within marnage was unnecessary: I see only one necessary and just inequality in the society of two persons, which arises from the need to come to an agreement in constructing a single casting vote in those few matters where one cannot permit a separate set of wills to act .... Still it would very difficult to maintain that this casting vote necessarily ought to belong to only one of the two sexes. It would appear more natural to share this prerogative and to give the casting vote, either to the man or to the woman, for those cases where it is most probable that one of the two would make their will conform to reason. 82 Yet Condorcet proved no more successful in countering the prevailing sentiment that a hierarchy of male over female ought to prevail in a marriage of companionship than he was in arguing the case for women to be given the right to vote in the Revolutionary Assemblies. As James Traer points out, despite the literary vogue for portraying women in unhappy marriages, there was little demand for the reform of the institution itself before the Revolution, although many vehemently opposed the use of the lettre de cachet as a means of enforcing parental authority (82). It was not until I 792 that the new Revolutionary government promulgated its laws lowering the age of consent to 25 for men and to 21 for women and forbidding parents to disinherit children who married after attaining their majority. In its most radical departure from tradition, a second law also provided for the registration of acts of divorce based on mutual consent, incompatibility of temperament, mental illness, or desertion after five years. Yet even this reform was motivated less by a desire to foment individual liberty than to encourage a growth in population that would equal that of Protestant nations. In fact, public acclaim for this liberty to dissolve marriages under such liberal circumstances proved relatively short-lived. Under the Executive Direc-

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tory, a more conservative reaction set in as a high number of divorces were recorded, some by wives of emigres who wished to protect themselves and their property. Authorities began to condemn divorce as act of social irresponsibility, and the fetes that had been instituted to honor !'amour conjugal became mandatory events. The issue of divorce began to fimction as more of a political symbol than a component of marriage and family law as the Directory found it ideologically imperative to reinforce an older, more conservative view of marriage in which the duties of husband and father, wife and mother were closely linked to those of the citizen. By the time the Napoleonic Code of 1804 all but revoked the legal right to divorce, much of its promised liberty for women had already been undermined by this new ideological focus that judged women according to the standards of a maternal ideal that required their submission within marriage. Napoleon's legal reforms once again established marriage as the sign of a woman's subjection within the domestic and civil order; not only did a woman lose her civil identity upon marrying, but she was allowed no authority over her children and was required by law to obey her husband and cohabit with him wherever he chose to live. 83 By the end of the eighteenth century, the ideology of companionate marriage had indeed emerged as a dominant discourse, particularly within middle-class or bourgeois culture in both England and France. Yet the rhetoric of companionship, which proved so popular in literary and philosophical discourse, should blind us neither to the gap between ideology and practice, particularly in the lavvs governing marriage, nor to the ways in which the ideology of companionship failed to include an idea of egalitarian relations between husband and wife. Indeed, the implicit gendering of"companionate" as a feminine quality reinforced a belief in a natural hierarchy in marriage in which the burden of proving a fit companion was placed firmly on women as guarantors of civil order and moral purity within the family. If, by the end of the eighteenth century, companionship appeared to be firmly entrenched as a conjugal ideal, it could not efface the sense of tension and precariousness so evident in Rousseau's failed utopian vision of the family in La Nouvelle Heloise, which continued to permeate discussions of women's roles within marriage. In a recent study of American popular discourses on companionate marriage in the early twentieth century, Christina Simmons illustrates yet another recurrence of the ongoing debate over the nature of companionship in marriage and the persistent sense of cultural anxiety over women's resistance

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Idealized Models

of Female Intimacy

to an ideology that "directed female sexual energies toward men and marriage" (55). Yet Simmons also sees in this advocacy of companionate marriage a defense against women's sexual and economic independence, which it was feared would lead women to remain single or engage in relations with other women as alternatives to the heterosexual institution of marriage. She writes: "Whether female resistance to heterosexual relationships actually occurred or not, the recognition of sexual inequality engendered in the culture a male fear of resistance, often expressed as a fear oflesbianism" (55). While eighteenthcentury culture does not contain the sexual or psychological language to identifY such fears of lesbianism as explicitly as the discourses of a postFreudian age, I argue that an incipient anxiety is already evident in these discourses of an earlier age and that strong emotional or homoerotic ties between women were beginning to be perceived as a potential threat to the institutions of marriage and the nuclear family unit, especially as those institutions were considered to be the locus of a nation's cultural and political identity.

(Re)constructin,l!. the Bonds if Female Intimacy: 'Tendre Amitie' and the Appropriation of a Masculinist Tradition of Same-Sex Friendship For those women who were seeking a degree of autonomy outside the traditional institutions of marriage and family, the possibility of constructing their own homosocial network of intellectual and affective bonds offered an alternative to a heterosexual companionate ideology that had yet to gain full acceptance. Ove·r the course of the seventeenth century, first in France and then in England, women began to turn to one another for encouragement of their social aspirations and for those emotional ties that were largely absent in other aspects of their lives. In constructing a discourse of female friendship that would describe and strengthen this often utopian enterprise, women writers and intellectuals staked their claim to a classical tradition of amicitia despite the fact that this practice of platonic friendship had long been considered an exclusively masculine preserve, whose intellectual, moral, and affective qualities were beyond the capacity of women to comprehend or practice. Writers as diverse as Brantome and Montaigne had scorned the idea of passion or any egalitarian relation between husband and wife 84 and had suggested that men should seek solace for their intellectual and emotional needs through their friendships with other men, a practice long idealized as far su-

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perior to either sexual or platonic relations between men and women. Openly acknowledging the homoeroticism of this tradition, the libertine poet Pontus de Tyard lists some of the most famous of these relations between men in order to "prove" that no such comparable affection or friendship is possible between women: Un Damon a Pythie, un .!Enee a Achate, Un Hercule a Nestor, Cherephon a Socrate, Un Hoppie aDimante, ont seurement monstre Que l'Amour d'homme a homme entier s'est rencontre, De 1' Amour d'homme afemme est la preuve si ample, Qu'il ne m'estja besoin d'en alleguer exemple, Mais d'une femme a femme il ne se trouve encor, Souz l'empire d'Amour, un si riche thresor, Et ne se peut trouver, 6 trap et trap legere! 85 [A Damon to Pythius, an Aeneas to Achates, a Hercules to Nestor, Chaerephon to Socrates, a Hopleus to Dymas, have surely shown that a deep love of man for man has been met with from time to time. Of the love of man for woman, the proof is so ample that there is scarcely any need to cite examples. But love between women is still not found within the empire of Love, and such a rich treasure cannot be found-it is too weak, too slight, too trivial!] Montaigne also explicitly excluded women from the practice of an idealized friendship, affirming that "this sex in no instance has yet succeeded in attaining it, and by the common agreement of the ancient schools is excluded from it" (I.28). This asymmetrical emphasis on friendship as a masculine practice not only reinforced the idea that women were incapable of forming an intellectually or emotionally intimate relationship with men but also occluded the possibility that women could form such idealized bonds with one another. Edmund Waller, who wrote poems praising Queen Henrietta-Maria and the vogue for platonic friendship that characterized her Court, even went so far as to mock the pretensions of female friendship as a deliberate ruse: Tell me, lovely, loving pair! Why so kind, and so severe? Why so careless of our care, Only to yourselves so dear?

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By this cunning change ofhearts, You the power of love control; While the boy's deluded darts Can arrive at neither soul ... Debtors thus vvi.th like design, When they never mean to pay, That they may the law decline, To some friend make all away. 86 Like his libertine counterparts in France, Waller suggests that this "friendship" between two ladies operates as a "cunning" ploy to dupe their male lovers of their sexual due by allovving the two women to withdraw from the marketplace of heterosexual relations. Waller sees their bond as a usurpation of power over amorous relations that can only properly be constituted between the sexes, but in no way does he ever recognize their relationship as a legitimate bond of amity in and of itself. Given this inimical response to the possibility of female friendship, one can argue that women's appropriation of this masculine tradition of friendship constituted an even more radical challenge to misogynistic beliefs than the idea of companionate marriage had ever posed. Since no comparable tradition of either heterosocial or homosocial friendship existed for women to emulate, they had perforce to borrow, redefine, or more often invent their own formulations of how women might participate in such an ideal. 87 This is not to suggest that women writers and intellectuals set out consciously to formulate a theory of friendship exclusively for their own sex as a kind of mirror image of the male-centered tradition of platonic friendship. But given that women were traditionally allotted a position of passivity and self-constraint within erotic discourse, women themselves seemed to discern within the idea of friendship an emancipatory ideology, which they might use not only to put themselves on a more equal footing in their relations with men but also to claim a degree of cultural visibility and moral value for their relationships with other women. 88 The difficulties women writers faced in articulating an ideal of female fi·iendship were complicated by the fact that the conceptual models available to them tended to focus on women almost exclusively in terms of their relations to men. Traditional discourses tended to classifY every woman either according to the tripartite categories of maid, wife, or widow or the binary oppositions of virgin and whore. Moreover, since the demands of patriarchy

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presumed that a woman's essential cultural function was to guarantee the homosocial structure of relations between family and state, it seemed scarcely possible that women should ever function as autonomous subjects. In order to achieve any kind of autonomy they would first need to surmount the restrictions imposed on them through their cultural construction as individuals whose primary function was that of sexual reproduction. Thus the mutuality and egalitarianism which characterized friendship and the erotic/reproductive function to which all women were implicitly linked appeared to place mutually exclusive demands upon women or at least to confront them with a choice of either participating in or excluding themselves from the reproductive economy, a choice which their own society was unwilling to accord to women except in a few limited cases. It is little wonder, given such pressures, that many women who sought to fulfill their own individual aspirations would either attempt to avoid the social and sexual obligations of marriage or hope for an early widowhood to release them from their reproductive debt. 89 Nor were the dangers associated with pregnancy and childbearing any negligible source of fear in a period when a considerable number of women died in childbed. 90 The question of women's obligations to fulfill their maternal role posed a problem for both conservative and liberal thinkers over the course of the Enlightenment. Friedman writes that while many philosophers "professed a theoretical belief in the moral, the intellectual and even, to a certain extent, the physical equality of the sexes ... [they] continued to insist, as in all times past, that the most suitable place for woman was in the home, fulfilling her destiny there as wife, mother and housekeeper" (228). Despite these inherent conceptual and cultural obstacles, -..vorncn not only

succeeded in appropriating an established masculine tradition of friendship but also fundamentally reshaped its character. If d'Urfe 's L'Astree had attempted to construct a heterosocial version of friendship by applying the masculine ideal of honnetete to relations between the sexes as a way of transcending the carnality of heterosexual passion, women writers would modifY the nature of these bonds even further by linking friendship to the feminine attribute of tendresse or "tenderness." 91 This simultaneous appropriation and transformation of the status of friendship as a moral and aesthetic ideal emphasized its traditional association with platonism. At the same time, it created a space for re-eroticizing relations of intimacy by placing them in a far greater conceptual proximity to the unrestrained emotions, uncertainties, and ambiguities that defined amour as a category of passion.'!-' The term "tendre ami tie" thus paradoxically came to designate a type of intimacy whose con-

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ceptual core embodied ideals that had traditionally been coded as "masculine" even as its expressions, rituals, and gestures acquired a "feminine" aspect of fragility, delicacy, and sensibility. Since most of the female adherents of this ideology of friendship were barred by lack of education and social convention from entering into the philosophical and scientiftc debates which dominated the masculine realm of the academic, they tended to construct an epistemological field of inquiry around "questions of the heart," which had traditionally been associated with the medieval courts of love. While the subject matter of these debates appeared to operate with the nominally "heterosexual" category of romantic passion, their interrogation of the social deployment of relations between the sexes and the restricted ways in which women were allowed to communicate their feelings through words or behavior tended to reinforce an unfavorable contrast between heterosexual amour and the platonic bonds of amitie. Conceding that love within marriage was an unlikely possibility, they also perceived that the alternative model of extramaritalgalanterie could only injure a woman's heart and her reputation. As Harth observes, "Neoplatonic tendre amitie was applied to hetero- as well as to homosocial relations, but the heterosocial was marked by inequality" (93) since men possessed a great deal more freedom in what they could say or write, while women always had to be mindful of appearances (bienseances). In this respect, the emergent ideology of tendre ami tie appeared to offer a way of safeguarding women from the dangers of erotic relations with men as well as of preserving their own autonomy. However, the strength of the misogynistic and hierarchical conventions . governing heterosexual relations suggested that any attempt to reshape these relations along the lines of a more egalitarian and heterosocial version of platonic friendship would prove a daunting task. So ingrained were these assumptions about women's sexual vulnerability that they tended to produce a countervailing current of skepticism. These suspicions fostered an underlying expectation that such idealized friendships must always be superceded by heterosexual passion with its presumptive impetus toward a conventional utopian conclusion in marriage or a dystopian termination in seduction and abandonment. For example, in Charles Sorel's LA Mascarade d'amour ou LA Nouvelle des precieuses prudes, a young widow refuses to have anything to do with men but invites a number of masked nymphs to her home only to find herself falling in love with one of them. All turn out to be men who have disguised themselves as women in order to gain access to the women they desire. 93 This asymmetrical bias toward a "return" to a conventional heterosexual mode of

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relations produced the further effect of obscuring the idea of friendship between women, which remained a more occult subject within the theory of tendre amitie, even as it seemed to operate in practice as a locus for a multiple and often contradictory coding of cerebral, spiritual, and erotic expressions of intimacy between women. In response to this presumption of any inherent carnality in any relation involving women, the salonnieres and femmes d'esprit who were engaged in constructing an ideology of friendship tended to emphasize their intellectual and spiritual aspirations over any physical claims of the body. They recognized that women had traditionally been defined by their reproductive capacity and denigrated for the presumed physical, emotional, and intellectual weaknesses engendered by their sexual physiology. 94 In their attempt to place female friendship on a par with its masculine platonic counterpart, such proponents of tendre amitie tended to turn to Cartesian ideology with its dualistic emphasis on the split between mind and body as a way of reinforcing their contention that the "mind has no sex" and fostering their own ambitions to reconstitute themselves as "thinking subjects," who could legitimately free themselves from the physical constraints of their bodies. 95 It is impossible in many instances to distinguish between such women's desire for intellectual autonomy and their desire to be free from the constraints of conventional heterosexual relations, as formulated in the institution of marriage or in the social practice ofgalanterie. 96 For them the construction of tendre ami as a platonic, spiritual ideal provided a means oflegitimating their attempts to realize both of these aims: to obtain the freedom to form attachments based on a presumption of mutuality and egalitarianism and the freedom to pursue their desire for learning. Since the aristocratic ethos of "worldliness" and galanterie promoted extramarital and extrafamilial bonds, women often looked for the social and emotional freedoms that they could not find within marital relations, within the largely heterosocial sphere of the salon or ruelle. For this reason, Harth argues that when aristocratic women like Mademoiselle de Rambouillet began to receive visitors of both sexes from a daybed, this practice "came to define [the] ruelle [as] both the space for visitors between the bed and the wall, and, synecdochally, the social gatherings that we call salons" (18-19). In contrast to the nineteenth-century doctrine of separate spheres for men and women, this construction of an independent space ~l!ithin the home for conversation, intellectual debate, and the pleasures of social intercourse created what Harth terms "a feminine atmosphere of intimacy and sexuality" that paradoxically marked the ruelle as a woman's "public sphere," one which took her away

tie

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from her private domestic role as wife and mother (19-20).'J7 In their history of private life during this period, Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel also argue that the salon's constitution of privacy was "defined by its distance from both the res publica and the family order" and by its members' consciousness that the salon allmved individuals to associate with one another freely without the formal constraints that structured marital bonds or the protocols that governed court behavior. 98 As Harth points out, both love and learning remained "two of the most problematic spheres of activity for women" (89), and even if a woman chose to devote herself to learning at the expense of all amorous attachments, she could not expect that such an exclusive adherence to things of the mind would insulate her trom public censure. At the same time, these women, whom Harth characterizes as precieuses, 99 resisted the tendency of Cartesian ideology "to drain the thinking subject of all feeling and emotion connected to the body and to reduce the body to a mere machine" (82). Indeed, the very women she identifies as "cartesiennes" did not direct their intellectual skills toward the writing of learned philosophical treatises or seek admission to the emerging masculine domain of the academie 100 but instead confined the bulk of their writing to exchanges of verse and letters which circulated not only in the largely heterosocial world of the salon but also in a more private homosocial interchange among female correspondents.

T1u' Rhetoric of Female Intimacy: Professing Friendship in the Langua,~e of Courtly Love Apart from the obstacles posed by the obscurity of female friendship within the platonic tradition of amicitia, those writers who wished to express their feelings of affection for or attraction to other women faced the thornier problem of developing or appropriating a language of intimacy that would allow women to speak as autonomous, desiring subjects and not remain within the confines of silence and passivity dictated by their conventional role as objects of desire. Whether women looked to a homosocial tradition of male friendship or to literary representations of erotic relations between the sexes, particularly within the form of lyric, they inevitably confronted a denial or erasure of female presence. For a woman to assume the position not only of a speaking but also of a desiring subject risked a disruption of the fundamental assumptions upon which both the two dominant representational systems of erotic, heterosexual and platonic, (male) homosocial relations were based,

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since both systems gendered such a position as "male." Within such a representational framework, it would not be possible to "recognize," much less theorize, a place for "female desire for the self-same, an other female self," a conceptual blindness which Teresa de Lauretis describes as "sexual indifterence."1111 Borrowing this term from Luce lrigaray, she also draws from Irigaray's critique of Freud's incomprehension oflesbian sexuality to conclude that "the phallic regime of an asserted sexual difference between man and woman ... is predicated on the contrary," a complete indifference toward woman as the "other" sex and toward her sexual desires. This phallic regime presumes that any sexual impulse on the part of one woman toward another is '"determined by a mascuEne desire and tropism'-that is precisely, the turn of so-called sexual difference into sexual indifference, a single practice and representation of the sexual." 102 As a result of this conceptual "indifference" toward female-female desire or indeed any bond of intimacy between women, the woman writer's appropriation of a traditional language of intimacy to express her feelings for another woman not only disrupts the conventional structuring of desire itself but also creates a peculiar interpretative problem for the reader. On one level, the conceptual bias which defmes a desiring subject as male makes it difficult, even for a "neutral" reader, to imbue her language with a specifically erotic valence. One might imagine a male "libertine" reader, whose response to such a representation of female-female desire might be constructed along the dual axes of pity I contempt and of titillation/repugnance, as the poetry of Saint-Pavin and others demonstrates. Yet it is far more difficult to imagine oneself in the place of the woman receiving such intimate addresses from another woman; if the representation of such homoerotic desire seems problematic, then the representation of a nonmascuEne, nonlibertine readerly response is even more ill-defined. Yet there are poems written from one woman to another during this period that seem to require just such a leap of imagination on the part of the reader. To take only one example ofhow a \voman writer's appropriation of a male-centered position of desire might throw into question a conventional horizon of interpretative expectations, we need only examine a few stanzas of Anne de Rohan's poem "Sur Une Dame Nommee Aimee": Belle,j'aurais un tres grand tort Si pour votre grace estimee ]' avais reyu 1' amoureux sort; Pour autre que pour vous, rna chcre Aimee,

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Tous les olympiqucs flambeaux De leur carriere enluminee Ne sont point ornements plus beaux Que les yeux de ma belle Aimee. Amour, ravi de ses beaux yeux, La main droite et de fleche armee Darda dans mon coeur soucieux L'ardent desir d'aimer Aimee. 11 ' 1 [Beauty, it would be a great wrong, If, for your worthy graces, I had been dealt the lover's fate; For anyone but you, my dear Beloved, All the Olympic torches, Illuminated in their course Are not lovelier ornaments Than the eyes of my beautiful Beloved. Cupid, ravished by those eyes, His right hand armed with an arrow Shot into my troubled heart The ardent desire to love my Beloved. j Conventional in its use of Petrarchan imagery, the poem nonetheless subverts the assumptions of the Petrarchan love lyric not only through its implicit substitution of a female speaker into the position of the desiring lover /poet but also through its retention of the explicit gendering of a object of desire as female (" aimee"). We can begin to discern just how radical this restructuring of the poem's erotic relations might be by comparing Rohan's strategy to the two possibilities Margaret Homans discerns for women poets in their negotiation of the masculinist tradition of Western love lyric: Given a literary form constructed so clearly to the specifications of male desire, women writers ... [could] either repeat the traditional quest plot in linguistic drag, or ... take up the position of the silent object and attempt to speak from there. 104 With her assumption that the lyric form can only articulate heterosexual desire, Hon1ans limits the female poet's rhetorical strategies to that of masquer-

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ade or to an implicitly utopian project of "filling in" and giving voice to woman's conventional position as an "absent" presence, or "zero" placeholder. Although Rohan's refusal to mark the gender of the speaker may indicate that she is engaging in the kind of narrative transvestism Homans suggests, her insistence that the speaker desires a woman imbues the poem with a potentially homoerotic dynamic that cannot easily be "explained" away by any claim that the poet is simply creating a mirror image of the conventional passionate relation between a male lover and a female beloved. Instead, Rohan's emphasis on the appropriateness of this particular woman as an object of desire seems subtly to exclude any other reading of the poem than a homoerotic one, as if she already anticipated the heterosexualizing tendency to read such desire as a temporal aberration and is intent on making it clear that she can love no one else. Indeed, Rohan goes even further in her inversion of the dynamics of Petrarchan convention by emphasizing that the speaker's relation to the mediating figure of Cupid may operate both literally and symbolically as one of "feminine" passivity. At the same time, in another reversal of the lyric's conventional scopic economy, Cupid is compelled by the gaze of a woman to take the active, phallic role of shooting an arrow into the speaker's heart, not to ensure a "proper" heterosexual outcome, but ironically to facilitate the ardent desire of one woman for another. Despite the existence of such poems, which appear either structurally or thematically to demand a homoerotic reading, the critical discomfort with the idea of sexual or even homoerotic desire between women, without clear historical evidence of a "genital" relation, 105 has fostered efforts to rewrite expressions of love between women according to a nineteenth-century 1nodel

of "romantic friendship." 1" 6 Not only has this particular construction of female-female desire tended to bracket the question of female homosexuality as a historically indeterminable subject; it has also created a homogenizing effect in the description of all relations between women while paying insufficient attention to the historical, social, and cultural forces that shaped attitudes toward female homoeroticism over the course of two centuries and altered the ever shifting boundary that separated the erotic from the platonic and the impermissible from the culturally sanctioned in an amorphous spectrum of female-female bonds. Although she does not single out critical responses to lesbian sexuality, in her introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick has similarly observed that the very possibility of a homoerotic reading tends to provoke an automatic response of dismissiveness from critics which they cast under an implicit rubric of "Don't ask I You shouldn't

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know." So conditioned and ingrained is this response, with its underlying assumption of heterosexuality as an unchanging and universal norm, that Sedgwick's list of the grounds for such blanket dismissals warrants an extended citation: Passionate language of same-sex attraction was extremely common during the period under discussion-and therefore must have been completely meaningless. Or Attitudes about homosexuality were intolerant back then, unlike nowso people probably didn't do anything. Or Prohibitions against homosexuality didn't exist back then, unlike nowso if people did anything, it was completely meaningless. Or The word "homosexuality" [or indeed "lesbian"] wasn't coined until the [nineteenth century]-so everyone before then was heterosexual. Or The author under discussion is certified or rumored to have had an attachment to someone of the other sex-so their feelings about people of their own sex must have been completely meaningless. Or (under a perhaps somewhat different rule of admissible evidence) There is no actual proof of homosexuality, such as sperm taken from the body of another man or a nude photograph with another woman-so the author may be assumed to have been ardently and exclusively heterosexual. Or (as a last resort) The author or the author's important attachments may very well have been homosexual-but it would be provincial to let so insignificant a fact make any difference at all to our understanding of any serious project of life, writing, or thought. (52-53) However, while the cultural will-to-disbelieve always tends to mute such expressions of love between women into the more neutral register of the rhetoric of friendship, the same bias that defines platonic friendship as a masculine phenomenon also undercuts the legitimacy of an analogous relation between women, as if the expression of female intimacy must always strike a false note or strive for an ideal it cannot realize. Such a sentiment is embodied in Swift's remark: "I never knew a tolerable woman to be fond of her own sex," as if female friendship must always represent a diminishing of a woman's abilities, her attractiveness to men, and her judgment. 107 If women are seen as incapable of expressing erotic desire for one another, then so too are their effusions of affection, once coded as platonic, also subtlely denigrated as exceeding the requirements of their limited capacity for intimacy

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of any kind. Those expressions that might ennoble the feelings of a Montaigne for an Etienne de la Boetie threaten to border on bathos or hypocrisy when transposed to the correspondence of two women, and this cultural tendency to code the language of female intimacy as "extravagant" or merely "sentimental" has dominated the critical reception of such writing by \von1en. 108

Female Intimacy as 'Tendre Amitie': Passion Constrained by Modesty In addition to the cultural tendency to disbelieve in homoerotic desire between women and the critical. tendency to render such desire invisible by casting it as an" excessive" form of rhetoric, another seemingly intractable bar to a homoerotic reading of relations between early modern feminists or femmes d'esprit has stemmed from the fact that many of these women consistently and publicly rejected "love" in favor of an idealized relation of intellects or souls. This apparent denigration of physical passion has led many critics and historians to interpret their more idealistic rhetoric as evidence of prudery. Although in many cases, transcribed conversations and their own writing suggests that a number of women did indeed share a profound distrust of heterosexual passion, their refusal to engage in heterosexual relations seems to have stemmed less from an explicit distaste for physical intimacy and more from fear of its consequences. Women were well aware that male lovers could use the unequal relations of power between the sexes to their own advantage and even more cognizant of the physical debilitations of pregnancy and childbirth. Such fear of amour as a category of heterosexual relations could permeate even metaphoric uses of the term to describe relations between the sexes that were intellectual or emotional rather than erotic. For example, in her analysis of Anne de la Vigne's "Reponse ;1 J'ombre de Descartes," Erica Harth notes that la Vigne cedes both the pursuit of love and learning to men or to very exceptional vvomen and takes up the conceit of love only to reject the idea that any form of a heterosexual relation can sanction her own desire for knowledge: "For me not even the love of a dead man is permitted; I Pure as it is, I could be blamed; I There is always some shame in loving." 109 Despite the inversion of conventional hierarchical relations between the sexes, propounded in feminocentric novels and utopian romances like Scudery's Artamene and CIC/ie, a profound gap persisted between these literary representations of tcndre amour and the practice of heterosocial relations between men and women, even within the ostensibly feminocentric

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space of the salon. Whereas the romance lover was expected to submit absolutely to his beloved and be wming to maintain their relation on a platonic level for as long as she might desire, in actual heterosocial exchanges of conversation or letters, the relations of power were in fact reversed: Men could indulge in erotic repartee even with women of irreproachable conduct, while women were subject to a rigid code of public modesty that dictated that they not even appear to comprehend such sexual innuendoes. 110 In fact, many of the women who organized and frequented these salons were already highly conscious of the dangers that might attend them should they make an indiscreet remark. From their inception, salons were viewed as alternative social spheres to the centralization of power within the royal court, and many of their habitues were barred from court precisely because their own political or social status was suspect. Erica Harth notes that Mme. de Rambouillet was pressured by Richelieu to serve as a spy and that all subsequent salons, including that of Mlle. de Scudery, worried about the dangers ofboth gossip and unconstrained speech, making euphemisms and veiled innuendoes a linguistic norm. However, for the female inhabitants of the salon, the political necessity to use an evasive or coded language took on an added urgency because of social expectations about female "modesty." Ironically, even as women attempted to reform linguistic usage to create an atmosphere of greater respect and equality between the sexes, banishing or softening the cruder expressions that an earlier "masculine" ethos ofgalanterie had long permitted, 111 their etforts were mocked as evidence of false prudery even as they evoked masculine tears of a "female" code that would allow women to speak to one another without being understood by men. Satirical compilations appeared citing alleged precieuse euphemisms for body parts like breasts (coussinets d' amour) and buttocks (le ruse inferieur) with such caricatures reaching their apex in the plays of Moliere and Somaize's exhaustive Dictiomwire des precieuses. However, circumlocutions for terms like "pregnancy" (lc mal d'amour permis) or "labor pains" (scntir les contre-coups de !'amour permis) not only mocked female "prudery" but also conveyed the implicit assumption that precieuse women would evade their prescribed biological role as mothers if they could find a way to do it. 112 While men might use the circumlocutions and euphemisms of salon discourse to engage in erotic double entendre, women found it difficult to respond in kind without opening themselves up to accusations of licentiousness or a false prudery; moreover, the conventions of modesty required them to appear not to understand and to resort to silence as the sign of both their physical and linguistic "innocence."

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By contrast, relations between women, particularly as they emerge in private writings, outside of the semipublic, heterosocial space of the salon, express a sense of freedom from the often contradictory performative and selfcensoring imperatives of salon conversation. For example, in one of her letters to her long time friend, Angelique Paulet, Mlle. de Scudery writes: "Pardon this liberty to a person who treats you without constraint and who does not worry about being witty when she writes to you," expressing her relief at having the autonomy to write even about trivialities if she chooses. 113 Drawing on Scudery's romances as a kind of code book of the ideology of tendre amour and tendre ami tie, Nobuko Kurata suggests that only in the latter relation could women enjoy any sense of equality and reciprocity and describes this ideal of friendship as "a spiritual liaison ... that does not allow either domination or submission, and whose duties are absolutely mutual." Moreover, Kurata argues that Scudery's theory of friendship is innovative precisely because she gives serious consideration to "friendship between women whereas philosophers had excluded women from their treatment of friendship." 114 Although few extensive exchanges of letters and poems between women can be found from this period, those documents which have survived indicate that women writers tended to characterize their relations with other women as both precieuse and tendreY 5 Many complained of the social or familial obligations that prevented them from pursuing their friendships and found long absences emotionally and psychological draining, 116 indicating that the bonds of intimacy between women were neither dictated by fashion nor devoid of emotional complexity. In fact, a poem written by the Comtesse de la Suze to Madeleine de Scudery figures female intimacy as a safe repository where women may exchange secrets. without fear of censure or injury to their reputation: Ilustre et chere amie a qui dans mes malheurs J'ai toujours decouvert mes secretes douleurs Qui sais ce que 1' on doit ou desirer ou craindre Et qui ne blames pas ce qu'on ne doit que plaindre Ecoute-moi ....

[My dear renowned friend, to whom in the course of my misfortunes, I have always revealed my secret pains, who knows what should be either desired or feared, and who does not censure what can only be pitied, listen to me .... ]

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Idealized Models cif Female Intimacy

This sense of privacy and emotional freedom could not be obtained within the context ofwomen's correspondence or conversation with men. Such exchanges tended to be constrained on both sides by conventions of modesty that tied women's tongues and by the rhetoric ofgalanterie, which scripted all heterosexual relations as a game of erotic pursuit and seduction. Only in writing to one another could women feel themselves at liberty to express themselves freely without fearing that their words would be made public as potential trophies of erotic conquest or mocked for their attempts to display their learning or wit.

Rejecting Heterosexual Passion I Coding Homoerotic Attachments: The Correspondence cif Madeleine de Scudery and Catherine Descartes The effect of so many social and political constraints on how women could behave and what they could say, even within the semiprivate space of the salon, imbued the explications of tendre ami tie that women were writing in their correspondence, poetry, and other collaborative forms of salon writing, including novels with a highly allusive, ambiguous, and overdetermined quality. The very term "tendre" suggests the multiple and often contradictory impulses of this redefinition of the bonds of intimacy and emphasizes their connection both to the realm of the spiritual with its connotations of fragility and innocence, embodied in its associations with newly formed organic entities such as buds or flowers, and to the realm of the sensual through its association with carnal entities such as the flesh of a fruit or a woman's skin. Women writers felt themselves compelled to create their own forms of double entendre and to express themselves through an often enigmatic discourse that intimated their personal awareness of both the coercive and the constructive power of language. This tendency to retain a coded discourse even within more intimate forms of writing such as personal exchanges of poems and letters poses a number of interpretative questions for the critic who must attempt to discern if such coding simply represents a transposition of romance rhetoric onto the more intimate discourse of the private letter, or whether the adoption of such rhetoric instead represents an attempt by women writers to formulate a new language of intimacy to express a feminine form of tendre amitie that would not be subsumed by the masculine tradition of platonic friendship or by the male-centered ideology of heterosexual passion. Yet even as these women writers appeared to construct a kind of opposition between eros and amicitia,

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they also began to challenge the delineation of the boundary between love and friendship (amo11r and amitie), as categories separating heterosexual and samesex relations, suggesting that these two forms of attachment were not mutually exclusive but rather disturbingly proximate both in their form and intensity. An extended exchange ofletters and poems between Madeleine de Scudcry and Catherine Descartes illustrates this curious dynamic, in which a conventional poem of female abandonment, written by the latter as a kind ofliterary exercise, prompts the two women not only to contrast the pleasures of rational (and by implication homosocial) friendship with the dangers of heterosexual passion but also to explore the curious lack of difference in the depth of emotion generated by these two kinds of relations. 117 Thus Scudery responds to the younger woman's display of poetic bel esprit by claiming that her capacity for wit also attests to her ability to love, a love which she implies cannot be adequately reciprocated within the context of heterosexual relations. En m 'apprenant, Iris, que vous savez rimer, Vous m' apprenez aussi que vous savez aimcr: Mais, Iris, 1' oserois-je dire! ... Ah! qu'il est dangereux d'etre trop tendre amante, Puisqu'il n'est point d'amant heureux Qui soit longtemps fort amoureux. 11 ~ [Iris, in teaching me that you know how to rhyme, you have also taught me that you know how to love. But, Iris, dare I say itl ... Ahl It is dangerous to be too tender a lover since there is scarcely any fortunate lover who is very much in love f(x a long time.] What begins as an apparently simple exchange of verses and poetic advice between an established writer and a fledgling poet turns into a exchange of ideas about love and intimacy that Harth rightly characterizes as "alternately tender and flirtatious" (93). Descartes protests her fidelity to Scudery's rejection of passion, exclaiming: "Thank God, I have never made conquests;' and cites more of Scudery's own verses on the subject in a gesture that is both flattering and submissive, a response which not only seems to evoke the relation of a fledging writer to an established literary figure but also to reflect the conventional attitude of a romance hero toward an imperious mistress. Descartes goes on to draw a parallel between the self-deceptions passion may impose upon the desiring female subject and those she creates through her own self-imposed retreat from passion.

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One lives in a state of retreat and a solitude of the heart that can scarcely be imagined; and as for the truth, as beautiful as it is, perhaps it is ofless value than certain sweet and charming illusions that flatter agreeably. (397) In an unexpected turn, Descartes delineates these "sweet and charming illusions" not as a desire for a reciprocal relation with a male lover but instead as a coyly expressed desire to be loved by the woman she is addressing in her letter: For example, Mademoiselle, I wish with so much passion to be loved by you that I believe it is something about which you must never disillusion me. I beg you, leave me a fantasy that enchants me and that creates all the good fortune of your very humble servant etc. (397-98) Scudery responds ambivalently to this deferential plea by sending Descartes another poem, in which she adroitly avoids offering her young correspondent a direct answer to her implicit question. Instead, she uses the rhetoric of galanterie to reorient their discussion oflove within a conventional heterosexual context. First she proclaims her disbelief that Descartes could lack (male) lovers and even insists that Descartes' very capacity to love argues that she must inevitably acquire and yield to a such a lover, even if modesty makes her deny this possibility: "But one rarely finds that when someone is in love with the idea oflove she hates a lover" (398). Then in a sudden shift in tone away from this coercive rhetoric of coquetry, she exempts Descartes from this rule, recasting Descartes as a stoic figure of virginal chastity who, like Scudery herself, "has preserved her liberty" because she has found that no man can embody her ideals. Carefully constructing herself as one who treats all of her female friends with the same degree of detached benevolence, 119 Scudery offers her friend the gift of another poem, one that deliberately shifts their correspondence away from an deux intimacy toward a more public register and that also asserts Scudery's literary authority and her social status, since it is "a madrigal which has had the good fortune not to be displeasing to the King" (399). Scudery's equivocal response shifts the focus of their correspondence away from an examination of each writer's own feelings of desire toward the kind of formal, theoretical consideration of the relation between love and friendship that formed a staple of salon conversation. Whether this change to a more formal register stems from Scudery's sense that Descartes has committed a faux pas in expressing her affection for her so overtly, 120 or whether it argues a defensive posture against any potential insinuation that Scudery's own championing of tendre ami tie might be a cover either for her own failure

a

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to obtain a husband 121 or even for latent homoerotic tendencies, is difficult to determine. 122 Despite her advocacy of a woman's capacity to think and act of her own free will as an abstract principle, Scudery scrupulously avoids making any personal claims to such freedoms either in the realm of intellectual endeavor or in matters of the heart, and she assiduously eschewed both the role of the femme galante and the femme savante. Indeed, in her subsequent letter to Scudery, Descartes demonstrates that she has taken her correspondent's hint by reverting to a more philosophical discussion of "the beautiful ideal of love" that casts Scudery as her instructor and mentor and herself as a kind of student and protegee. Adopting a stance that almost smacks of sycophancy, she confesses that Scudery has understood her better than she understands herself, and shores up her arguments in favor of tendre amitie as "an innocent passion" with liberal allusions to Scudery's own poetry. In the final exchange of letters that Rathery and Boutron record in their compilation, Scudery opens her missive to Mlle. Descartes with a long poem in which she assumes both the self-congratulatory pose of the successful writer and moralist instructing an eager pupil and the imperious attitude of one her own heroines toward a suppliant lover: Quandje fis de !'amour une image parfaite, Des vulgaires amours j' esperai !a defaite ... Je ne me repens pas d'avoir fait !a peinture De cette passion et si noble et si pure, Qui sait unir les coeurs sans blesser la raison; Car !'amour herolque est un contre-poison ... Je vous demande done pour prix de mon ouvrage Ce coeur, ce meme coeur echappe du naufrage; Ne le refusez pas a mas tendre amitie, Qui vaut mieux que !'amour de plus de !a moitie.

[Once I had made oflove a perfect image, then did I hope for the defeat of more vulgar loves ... I do not regret the task of having portrayed this passion, so noble and so pure, which knows how to unite hearts without wounding reason. For heroic love is an antidote to the poison of vulgar love ... I ask you then, as the price of my handiwork, to give me this heart, this same heart saved from shipwreck. Do not refuse my tender friendship, which has a greater worth than the love of more than half the world.)

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Knowing that Descartes' idealism would preclude her from choosing to pursue a heterosexual galant relation with all of its accompanying constraints and dangers, Scudery instead offers her the substitute of her own tendre amitie on the implicit condition that Descartes acknowledge her superiority in the realm ofletters and oflove. 123 In fact Descartes does capitulate to this equivocal gift claiming: "One cannot refuse a heart I When the celebrated Sapho asks for it" (402). However, by adopting Scudery's own formal rhetoric, she is able to use the language of heroic love as a way of returning to the problematic distinction between love and friendship she had raised in her earlier letter. Once again she confronts Scudery with a provocative assertion that the boundary between heterosexual passion and tendre amitie is a disturbingly amorphous one and thereby reintroduces an erotic undercurrent into an exchange that Scudery herself had struggled to maintain on a desensualized and highly formal plane. Descartes compares Scudery to the very kind of galant lover both women claim to eschew and tells her: "If some Tirsis had asked for me as gallantly as you do, I would be lost" (402). She then goes on to draw an explicit parallel between the emotional perils of love and tendre ami tie: La moindre aventure amoureuse Trouble notre repos, blesse notre devoir; Mais la tendre amitie n'est guere plus heureuse, Quand on ne doit jamais se voir. Par vous des mers d'amour j'evaitai les orages, Mers fameuses par cent naufrages; Mais mon sort n' en est pas meilleur; Par vous, Sapho, mon malheur est extreme; Vous me faites aimer, et j 'aurai la douleur De ne voir jamais ce que j'aime.

[The least amorous adventure troubles our repose and wounds our sense of duty. But tender friendship is scarcely more fortunate even if one might never imagine it that way. Because of you, I have avoided the storms of the sea oflove, seas that are famous for a hundred shipwrecks. But my fate is no better than the rest. Because of you, Sapho, my misfortune is extreme. You make me love you; yet I would have the pain of never seeing what I love.]

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5

For Descartes the absence or physical inaccessibility of the beloved, a central dynamic of the courtly love relation and the raison d'ctre for most of its love lyrics, resonates with an equal emotional primacy in the relation between female friends, so much so that when she writes, "vous mefattcs aimer," the shading between the two senses of "aimer" as sentimental attachment and romantic passion seems scarcely discernible. Descartes closes her letter to Mlle. Scudery with a further series of verse in which she praises the poetic gifts of her mentor and identifies her as a worthy successor to "that Sappho whose fame all of Greece has sung" (40 3). Yet this commonplace identification of Scudery as the French Sappho takes on its own unconventionality through Descartes' poignant replication of the Greek poet's famous Fragment 3 I, which had become known in French by the title "A l'aimee": 12 ~ Quand au rare merite on est sensible et tendre, Et que par la faveur des cieux, On peut souvent vous voir et souvent vous entendre, C' est un plaisir plus grand que le plaisir des dieux. (403)

[When one is susceptible and tender toward a singular merit, and by the favor of the gods can often see and hear you, that is a delight greater than the pleasure of the gods.] Descartes' poetic paraphrasing ofSappho's lament, "Fortunate as the gods he seems to me, that man who sits opposite you, and listens nearby to your sweet voice," aligns Scudery with a feminocentric literary tradition in which a poetic link is forged not only between Sappho and Scudery but also between Sappho and Descartes herself. By assuming the voice of the Greek poet, Descartes reverses the implicit hierarchy in her relation with Scudery, casting her not in the role of a privileged mentor but rather as the beloved girl whose erotic power might rob her of speech but not the power to create poetry. Descartes' rewriting of Sappho's verse allows her to have literally the last word in an exchange that seems increasingly charged with an underlying debate over the nature of feminine desire as well as the nature of female poetic authority. 125 She takes this vision of a woman-centered poetic tradition one step further, not simply paraphrasing Sappho's lyric, but instead altering the sex of the one who hears the beloved speaking. Even before Descartes invokes Sappho's verse, she makes it clear that the fortunate man who listened

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to the voice ofSappho's beloved girl has already been replaced by the fortunate woman whom Scudery chooses to favor with both her writing and her speech: Heureuse a qui vous voulez bien ecrire, Plus heureuse cent fois qui vous entend parler.

[Fortunate is the one to whom you wish to write. A hundred times more fortunate is the one who hears you speak.] The homoeroticism inherent in the poem's intertextual relation to its original seems unmistakable when one considers that Descartes is invoking a poem of intense passion to describe an exchange between two women, a relation that she figures not only in poetic terms but also in a language that is at once courtly and flirtatious, deferential and provocative. Yet Descartes's positioning of Scudery as an absent object of desire alters the erotic intensity of Sappho's verse with its sense of immediate, physical attraction-"For when I look at you a moment, then I have no longer power to speak. But my tongue keeps silence, straight-away a subtle flame has stolen beneath my flesh ... " and increases the pathos ofits situation-a speaker who lacks the great happiness of seeing and speaking to her mistress and does not yet possess the poetic authority to which Scudery can lay claim. Despite Descartes' deferential attitude toward Scudery as the preeminent female poet of her generation, her own poetic meditations upon the ideals of amour and tendre amitie in fact suggest a willingness to reexamine Scudery's more abstract conception of the realm of tendre as a heterosocial model of intimacy.126 Descartes's poetic inquiry into the nature of the difference between the female subject's relation to un amant and to une amie, both of which Scudery couches in a language of courtly love, produces the startling revelation that tendre ami tie between two women does not necessarily constitute the platonic, intellectual relation that Scudery would elevate above heterosexual passion but can take on the same emotional intensity and sensual overtones as a love affair. Moreover, Descartes' revisioning of the dynamics of tendre amitie belies the presumed egalitarianism of such friendship, reintroducing an awareness of the social hierarchies and power struggles invested in relations between women as well as in those between women and men. 127 At the same time her mapping of this model of intimacy onto issues of female poetic authority and lineage further destabilizes Scudery's representation of female

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friendship as a means of attaining equilibrium, status, and that most pastoral of ideals, repose. Descartes' suggestion that female intimacy might constitute a relation as conflicted, passionate, and often malheureuse as love itself marks her as one of a younger generation of women writers who were far less optimistic about an earlier "feminist" vision of human relations that might be transformed by the regenerative efforts of a collective body of femmes fortes. 128 By the time Descartes and Scudery were exchanging their letters in the I 66os, the idea of a utopian female community, whether based on common intellectual interests or an idea of spiritual retreat from an aristocratic ethos of galanterie, had already come under attack for more than a decade from an antifeminist backlash that was not only directed at women's political participation in the Fronde but also at their perceived encroachment into the realm of letters. 129 In the wake of satirical attacks against the figure of the precieuse and its link to the idea of a female cabal that Michel de Pure invoked in his novel, La Pretieuse, female intimacy became increasingly suspect whether it was seen as a hypocritical and evasive maneuver in the social game of galanterie, as a usurpation of masculine privilege in the public realms of letters or politics, or as an illicit sexual bond, a view that was delineated with increasing frequency in the emerging genre of pornography. Catherine Descartes' correspondence with the seventeenth-century grande dame of French letters, at once tender and deferential as well as challenging and passionate, also represents a further step in the incremental undermining of idealized visions of female friendship, but one which took place within the realm of "polite," idealized discourse. As representations of sexualized relations between women began to take on the delineations of an "open secret," implicitly recognized though never openly acknowledged except through circumlocution and double entendre, it became increasingly difficult to insulate any idealization of female friendship as a relation devoid of sexual connotations.

The Limits of Idealized Intimacy: Manley$ New Cabal and the Excesses plaisir" and "bizarrerie" seem to register a kind of eruption of satiric distaste within an otherwise "pure" precieuse discourse, as if de Pure could not wait for Aurelie to finish her speech before criticizing the sentiments he permits her to express. Whether this distaste is simply directed at Aurelie's refusal to marry while she is still young enough to attract a suitor or whether it bespeaks a less explicit condemnation of her pursuit of a "youthful friendship;' presumably with other women in her small band, remains unclear. Yet it is precisely this element of vague disapprobation that hangs like a cloud over the novel's repeated descriptions of its female characters' mysterious meetings in the absence of men or their evident and exclusive bonds of female friendship that has led a critic like Carlo Franyois to argue that "the novel contains a small number of allusions to latent forms oflesbianism in the

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intimacy of certain feminine circles;' even though he ultimately dismisses the idea of the precieuse as implicitly lesbian, arguing that these insinuations are "too vague to be entered into here." 75 Despite Franc;ois's reluctance to give serious consideration to such allusions, what does emerge clearly from de Pure's construction of a speech like Aurelie's is that the libertine attitude of amused tolerance or elegiac idealization that had characterized representations of homoerotic bonds between young women earlier in the century in romances or lyric poetry had begun to wear thin in a context where these bonds of tendre amitie seemed to extend into adulthood, particularly when women appeared to espouse them as a deliberately chosen alternative to the bonds of marriage. Other satirists like Saint-Evremond wrote scathingly of precieuse claims that such a principle of tendre amitie could appeal to women more than an explicitly sexual conception oflove. These false delicates have removed from love what was most natural in it, thinking to give it something more valuable [precieux]. They have drawn away a passion that was completely felt by the heart toward the mind, and changed its movements into ideas. This great purification originated in an honest disgust for sensuality. 76 A far cruder response can be found in the poem "Aux Precieuses," attributed to the libertine poet Claude Le Petit, who savagely mocks the idea of women claiming any kind of refined spirituality or Cartesian privileging of mind over body: Courtisanes d'honneur, putains spirituelles, De qui tous les peches sont des peches d' esprit, Qui n'avez du plaisir qu'en couchant par escrit, Et qui n'aimez les lits qu'a cause des ruelles; Vous chez qui la nature a des fleurs eternelles, Precieuses du temps, mes cheres soeurs en Christ, Puisque 1' occasion si justement vous rit, Venez dans ce bordel vous divertir, mes belles. Si 1' esprit a son vit aussi bien que le corps, Vostre arne y sentira des traits et des transports A faire descharger la femme la plus froide; Et si le corps enfin est par I' amour flechi, Ce livre en long roule, bien egal et bien roide, Vaudra bien un godemichi. 77

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[Courtesans of honor, spiritual whores, I For whom all sins are sins of the mind I Who take no pleasure in bedding but prefer writing in bed I And who love beds only because they occupy ruelles; I You in whom Nature eternally flowers [but never comes to fruition], I Precieuses of time, my sweet sisters in Christ, I Since opportunity smiles on you, come amuse yourselves in a brothel, my beauties. I If the soul has its prick as well as the body, I Your soul will feel both shafts and raptures enough I To bring the most frigid woman to climax. I And if your body is at last pierced by love's arrow I This book rolled up along its length, well weighted and stiff I Will serve you as well as a dildo.] The poet's satiric juxtaposition of the precieuse terms ("spirituelle,"" esprit;' and "ruelle") with the coarsest kind of sexual language ("putain," "bordel," and 'godemichi ") not only suggests a kind of derisive suspicion of the precieuscs' claims to spirituality but a determination to break through such rhetorical defenses and force these women to confront the materiality of the body and its desires. Indeed, the poet's use of the term ·:r,zodcmichi," or dildo, a word that was too obscene for Montaigne or even Brantome to use openly in their writing about sexual relations between women, also implicitly links the precieuses with other sexually transgressive figures like the tribade or the female sodomite, since it was precisely this phallic instrument that constituted proof of sodomy in the trials cited by Henri Estienne or in Brantome's salacious tales of sexualliaisons between aristocratic women in his Recueil des damcs. 7 N Following a libertine understanding of sexual relations, Le Petit crudely suggests that if the sight of heterosexual activity in the brothel does not rouse the sexually frigid precieuse, or if she cannot bear the touch of a (masculine) body, then she should seek the comfort of an artificial phallus, an instrument that such a phallocentric ideology perceived as the only way for women to have sex with one another, since only those erotic practices that sought to simulate phallic penetration could hold any significance as a sexual act. Although he certainly does not go so far as to suggest a godemichi, or dildo, as a possible solution to the problems ascribed to the precieuscs in such satiric discourse, critic Philippe Sellier comes suprisingly close to Claude Le Petit's diagnosis of the precieuses' alleged sexual "dysfunction." Sellier perceives the precicuses to be suffering from either frigidity or a secret nymphomania, which he construes as a type of hysteria. "The hysteric personality 'forgets' a great deal. She will resort to these kinds of amnesia, when instead of a wild flight from sexuality, she plunges herself into a frantic practice of sexuality, that is nymphomania" (ro8). Where the fear of sexuality renders the precieuse frigid,

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it creates, in Sellier's view, the characteristic symptoms of "auto-idealization, a difficulty in taking up the complexities of a love relation" and, of course, "their distaste for marriage" (ro9). Yet Sellier also follows the lead of seventeenth-century writets like the Abbe Cotin and Saint-Evremond in perceiving a latent or unconscious lesbianism in the precieuse penchant for "these peculiar friendships." Arguing that the precieuses were by no means phantom stereotypes as maqy literary critics and historians have claimed, Sellier suggests that one can discern within the friendships of women like Madame de Lafayette and Madame de Sevigne or Ninon de Lenclos and Madame Scarron "an exclusive quality" (r13) that bespeaks an unconscious lesbian desire. Within such bonds of female intimacy, Sellier argues "their affects are inverted: heterosexual desire is transformed into disgust and frigidity, overlaying a foundation of unconscious homosexuality" (!09). While Sellier's diagnosis of the psychosexual dynamics of precicuse desire betrays its own symptoms of heterosexism in its implicit assumption that women who refuse to marry must suffer from some kind of "disorder," his largely Freudian reading of precieuse friendships offers a suggestive modern reduplication of how their own male contemporaries explained the precieuse rejection of male lovers by linking this rejection to their exclusive attachments to other women. Even though Sellier frames his analysis in terms of a now discredited taxonomy of lesbianism as a psychosexual disorder, his willingness to give serious attention to intense same-sex friendships between women does open up the possibility for reevaluating a body of writing that has remained largely invisible within critical discourse. 79 What is even more striking, however, is the frequency with which satirists writing about the precieuses in the seventeenth century diagnosed these women as suffering from a similar type oflatent or deliberately occluded lesbian desire. Even in a work like La Prhieuse, whose satiric intent is often ambiguous, there is a telling exchange that follows a debate over the evils of marriage. The precieuse Neossie asks one of the gentlemen present to recount for her the story of Iphis and Ianthe, a myth that was well established not only in Renaissance romance but also in more recent French libertine writing as a myth of female-female desire. 80 When the storyteller, Thanatime, reaches the point of relating Iphis's miraculous transformation from a woman into a man, Neossie interrupts exclaiming: "The gods were indeed compassionate to have deigned to aid an unfortunate member of our sex by so extraordinary a miracle!" (II.48). As soon as the words are out, however, Neossie is overcome by embarrassment. "And suddenly having said these

The Problem

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20 5

words, she was seized with embarrassment, shame overwhelmed her, and since she was rendered mute, her discomfiture made the company easily imagine the design she must have had all along in wanting to hear this story" (ll.48). As if it were not enough for her to demonstrate her explicit understanding of the nature of the transformation that constitutes Iphis's change of sex, Neossie also voices a longing for the phallic wherewithal to love another woman. Though another precieuse tries to excuse Neossie's outburst by claiming that she simply wished to taste "another's pleasures," an anticipation of Freud's own formulation of "penis envy," Neossie herself disavows all such insinuations, arguing instead that her desire to hear the story stems only from a wish that "our sex might share authority with yours" (II.49). Neossie's desire for a more egalitarian relation between the sexes thus implicitly confirms cultural anxieties surrounding tales of women turning into or merely passing as men, that were so often represented as a female desire to usurp the authority and privileges of men. In his reading of this scene, Ian Maclean argues that while the invocation of the myth is suggestive of a homoerotic undercurrent, "to make an assertion on the basis of the evidence of this myth that the secret of the ruelles is sapphism, is clearly excessive" (64). While it is true that it would be misleading to argue that the discovery of "sapphism" is the "real" secret of the ruelles, it would be equally misleading not to insist that such instances constitute sufficient evidence to include female-female desire as one facet of the multiple stereotypes of the precieusc that such satiric writing created. Indeed, de Pure's inclusion of the lphis/Ianthe myth is interesting not so much for its potential status as "evidence" for the existence oflesbian relations within ruclles as for what it reveals about contemporary fantasies of female-female desire. For Thantime's retelling of the story oflphis and Ianthe adheres closely to a libertine stereotype of female homosexuality as a pale imitation of a phallocentric model of heterosexual relations in which the possession of the penis or its phallic equivalent and the ability to play a masculine role in sexual relations constituted the woman-loving woman's ultimate goal and her deepest transgression of cultural taboos about female usurpation of male authority. This view of female homosexuality as a sexual practice dependent on phallic simulation and thus easily construed as a largely impotent form of desire is reflected in Saint-Evremond's extraordinary poem "La Prude et la precieuse," which creates a taxonomy of the various negative stereotypes of femininity with which the prccicuse was so often linked. Echoing the sentiments of Gelasire in de Pure's La Pretieuse, Saint-Evremond exhibits skepticism to-

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ward all female claims to chastity, particularly within marriage. He even argues that the married woman who remains faithful to her husband is a prude and that the married precieuse is either frigid or a hypocrite, "suffering" conjugal embraces in private that she appears to despise in public. Pour un plaisir trop rare en commerce d' amour Une Dame galante est souvent decriee Quand la femme de bien, la Prude mariee Epuise chastement son epoux nuit & jour Dans leur volupte domestique ... Mais passons ala Precieuse, Vestale a l' egard d'un amant; Et solide volupteuse Avec un mari peu charmant ... L'appetit conjugal !a presse, Et sa pudeur, d'un homme nu Souffre la robuste caresse. 81 [A lady of easy virtue is often disparaged as a pleasure too rare in the commerce oflove, while the woman of means, the married Prude, chastely wears out her spouse night and day in their domestic pleasures .... But let us pass on to the Precieuse, a vestal with regard to a lover, and a stolid voluptuary with a husband of little charm .... But conjugal appetites chafe at her, and her modesty suffers the robust caress of a naked man.J Thus Saint-Evremond castigates both the prude and the precieusc, holding their "modesty" responsible for the lugubrious pleasures of the marriage bed. Yet he views the precicuse with even more scorn for her apparent frigidity, a coldness that he insinuates is maintained primarily for public consumption and may conceal a secret enjoyment of the embraces she seems to reject. 82 While Saint-Evremond makes no direct reference to the precieuse's distaste for marriage, he does remark on the propensity of his precieuse to delight in "mutual friendships" with other women and mocks such intimacy with other women as "the simple sweetness of desire" (32), insinuating that despite her idealization of female friendship, she will obtain no physical pleasure from it: C' est votre sort, mes cheres soeurs, De jouir sans amour, d' aimer sans joui:ssance J' en veux excepter les plaisirs De votre amitie mutuelle, Qui tient souvent au dessous d'elle

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La simple douceur des desirs. Nous ne vous plaignons point, 6 cheres Precieuses, Qui dans les bras aimes de quelque tendre soeur, Savez go{iter le fruit des peines amoureuses Sans interesser v6tre honneur.

[It is your fate, my dear Sisters, to take your pleasures without love, and to love without pleasure. I would except only the pleasures of your mutual friendship, which often reveals beneath its surface the simple sweetness of desire. But we do not feel sorry for you at all, my dear Precieuses, who know how to taste the fruit of your amorous labors in the arms of some tender sister, without compromising your honor.) With the characteristic insouciance of a libertine observer of female-female desire, Saint-Evremond views this lesbian manifestation of precieuse desire with amusement and condescension, suggesting that the precieuse desire to transcend the body is merely empty rhetoric designed to cover over the essential inability of women to satisfy their own sexual appetites in the absence of men. Indeed, his suggestion that such erotic practices serve the interests of women in preserving a semblance of chastity-that by engaging in sex with one another they avoid the risk of pregnancy, which might endanger their reputation (and ruin their figures) 83-Saint-Evremond underscores the libertine view oflesbian sexuality as a part of a set of non procreative sexual practices that were cast as supplementing rather than supplanting heterosexual relations. Yet what is most striking about Saint-Evremond's poem is its deliberate (mis)reading of precieuse language as a kind of code for expressing femalefemale desire. In this sense, the poem provides one kind of key for those critics who have begun to perceive a homoerotic dimension within such rhetoric, particularly in the private exchange of poems or letters between women, which have too often been dismissed as mere rhetorical embellishments or inflated sentiment. Like Delarivier Manley's use of the term "tendre amitie" as a code word for a lesbian cabal in her novel The New Atalantis, SaintEvremond's deliberately eroticized use of terms like "ami tie mutuelle" and "tendre soeur," and his blurring of the boundary between amorous and amicable relations, suggests that those terms were increasingly interpreted as a form of double entendre and that their usage encompassed a potential erotic resonance. For example, Saint-Evremond's repeated categorization of the precieuses as "soeurs" seems to carry with it a suggestion of the satirical current

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that was beginning to eroticize the figure of the nun and the suspicions of female intimacy that had already centered on the convent, a link that would also serve to subvert the precieuse claims to spirituality and to reinforce their association with unorthodox religious sects such as the Jansenists. 84 In the closing lines of the poem, Saint-Evremond appears to blur his distinctions between the figure of the precieuse and the prude, suggesting that the two are essentially the same in their "perverse" rejection of men and in their attempts to conceal their secret indulgence of the very desires that they reject in public. Yet he also intimates that for the prude and the precieuse, their apparent rejection of men conveys less about their own sexual desires than about their determination to obtain the upper hand in an ongoing war between the sexes, a move that Saint-Evremond can recognize as rational, even as he mocks its futility. Si Dieu m'avoit fait naitre femme, Je serois Prude assurement. Je pourrois bien aussi d'une soeur Precieuse. Vivre aimee autant qu'amoureuse: Mais quand le premier des Medors Pour me toucher le coeur feroit taus ses efforts; 11 me trouveroit inhumaine Je rirois de ses vains soupirs Et ferois taus les jours sa peine. Sans faire jamais ses plaisirs.

(57-66) [If God had caused me to be born a woman, I would assuredly have become a Prude. I could happily have lived beloved by one of my Precieuse sisters and loved her in return. But when the first young gallant "Medor" had engaged all his efforts to touch my heart, he would have found me inhuman. I would have mocked his futile sighs and filled all his days with pain, without ever making him feel pleasure.] For Saint-Evremond, the precieuse-prude assumes the role of the rigorous, unfeeling mistress in a Renaissance love sonnet, resisting the attentions of her male lover because that resistance is the only source of her power. In this sense, Saint-Evremond's construction of the precieuse as in part a "lesbian" figure follows a libertine tendency to see female-female desire only as the result of a grotesque distortion of relations of power between men and women. If

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these women cannot dominate men, they will reject them, denying them sexual pleasure even if it means that they must deny themselves as well. Within this narrative, the prospect that women will turn to one another for the satisfaction of their erotic desires emerges as a potentiality that is ultimately dismissed as a barren exercise, productive of more frustration than pleasure. Yet there is also a way of reading the ending of Saint-Evremond's poem against the grain of this heterosexual teleology, for when he imagines himself as a precieuse-"to live beloved as much as loving"-he invokes an image of arelationship based on mutuality and equality rather than the agonistic hierarchy of male-female relations and thus provides a vision of sexual relations analogous to Donne's elegiac evocation of lesbian love as belonging to an elusive prelapsarian or utopian moment. From this perspective, the masculine pursuit of women becomes an intrusion that breaks this moment of utopian reverie and transforms the precieuse from a lover of women into the conventional object of male desire, which represents her as cruel and "inhuman" in her resistance to men even as it suppresses the question of her own desires altogether. Thus, in spite of its persistent mockery, Saint-Evremond's poem offers a portrait of the lesbian precieuse that remains strangely ambiguous. In his identification with this figure in the final lines of the poem, he seems to follow the curious rhetorical strategies of other male poets like Donne and Benserade, who seem to view lesbian eroticism on one level as a utopian vision of sexual plenitude, a fantasy that through their identification as a woman allows them to desire women without the constraints of gender hierarchy or competition from other men, but that ultimately must be revealed in prelapsarian or elegiac terms as nothing more than a fantasy. Thus the final lines of "La Prude et la precieuse" return the poet to the status quo of embattled relations between the sexes in which questions of dominance seems to take precedence over questions of desire that seem unanswerable in the fraught realities of power and gender in SaintEvremond's own world.

Images of Female Community and the Politics of Female Intimacy From the rediscovery of Sappho and the community of women that surrounded her to the redeployment of the myth of the Amazons in writings about the Fronde to satirical renderings of the precieuses as a female sect or cabal, images of female community as separatist, seditious, and potentially homosexual seemed to multiply over the course of the seventeenth century in

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England and particularly in France, where these images contributed to an emerging, complex, and often contradictory discourse of female homosexuality. I have used the phrase "the politics of female intimacy" broadly to suggest that within these images of female community was an increasing tendency to link the collective efforts of women to gain a voice within intellectual or literary debates, or to advocate reforms of institutions like marriage, or even to envision a female academy with a range of negative stereotypes including the amazon, the femme savante, and the precieuse. As women tried to portray themselves in terms that rejected their conventional placement within a social order that tended to define them in essentially sexual terms as maid, wife, or widow, there was a concurrent reaction, most evident in satirical writing, that viewed women's spiritual or intellectual aspirations with suspicion and castigated their efforts as exercises in hypocrisy or futility. In their representations of stereotypes like the precieuse, writers like de Pure and Saint-Evremond intimated that in rejecting masculine desire, women might turn to one another to satisfY their sexual needs, but they portrayed such relations in conventionally libertine terms not as an alternative to a dominant phallocentric model of sexuality but as a distortion of it, a vain attempt to simulate heterosexual relations but not to supplant them. Yet the very fierceness of the attack on the precieuses attests to the power of such ideas of female collectivity to strike a cultural nerve; as a representation of women's efforts to take themselves "out of circulation" from a socioeconomic traffic in women upon which the absolutist state depended for its stability and continuity, the precieuses offered a potent threat to the state's investment of its power in the male-dominated institutions of marriage and family. De Pure's depiction of precieuse demands for divorce, trial marriage, and limited pregnancies did not simply represent an attempt to satirize and discredit the precieuses but also gave voice to masculine anxieties about the kinds of demands any effort at female emancipation might entail. The debate over the precieuses came to an abrupt end by the early r66os, with the performance of Moliere's Les Precieuses ridicules offering a kind of postscript to a defeat of precieuse ideology that Sorel cast as a veritable rout so complete that no woman dared lay claim to the term. Yet the precieuse's political, intellectual, and erotic resonances continued to be felt in writings ranging from Madame de Lafayette's Princesse de Cleves with its heroine's infamous "rifus d'amour" to Charier's portrait of Tullia as a lesbian femme savante in his Academic des dames. Ironically, even as the satirists seemed to achieve victory in banishing the "phantom" figure of the precieuse to the shadows of

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literary and cultural history, they did not succeed in eradicating the subversive social, political, and erotic currents surrounding her. For if the precieuse had indeed become a mere specter by the end of the century, the figure of the "lesbian," with whom she was linked, had begun to take on a far more material form. Not only did actual women begin to appear in pseudonymous or allegorical terms as lesbian figures in satirical and political writings about aristocratic decadence and court intrigue, but by the eighteenth century, women writers themselves, ranging from Madame de Murat to Charlotte Charke, were beginning to represent their own homoerotic desires, albeit in coded terms, that gave an increasing historical and corporeal dimension to the stereotyped images of female intimacy that had become part of the political satirist's palette.

6.

Regulating the "Real" in Fictional Terms: The (Auto)biography of the Tribade in Erotic and Documentary Texts

On December 6, 1699, Rene d'Argenson, a lieutenant of the Paris police, wrote to his superiors to report on his surveillance of Henriette de Castlenau, Madame de Murat: 1 I have the honor of sending you the report that you asked for concerning Madame de Murat. It is not easy to explain in detail all disorders of her conduct without wounding propriety, and the public can scarcely bear to see a woman of her birth in a state of depravity that is so shameful and so openly avowed. 2 A few months later, the lieutenant sent another report that provided a more explicit explanation of the "disorders" of Murat's conduct that d'Argenson and others found so repugnant. But he was forced to acknowledge that it would be difficult to obtain any substantial evidence of Mme. de Murat's dissolute behavior, partly because he lacked reliable witnesses, and partly because the nature of her alleged crimes-especially the accusation that she engaged in sexual relations with other women-could not easily be categorized within available juridical categories. 3 February 24, 1700-Even were my zeal completely dampened, your obliging manner of awakening it would be capable of giving it new life. I still hope that the incremental relation of these facts will justify me before you .... The crimes that are imputed to Madame de Murat are not of the kind that are easily proven by the normal means of intelligence, since they consist of domestic impieties and a monstrous attachment to persons of her own sex. (ro-r r) Since d' Argenson was Murat's social inferior, he could not interrogate her directly, nor would the conventions of propriety permit him to discuss sex212

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ual matters openly. Indeed, d' Argenson could scarcely find the words to describe her sexual proclivities without fearing that he was engaging in a kind oflinguistic impropriety, and most of his respectable witnesses indicated that they were equally unwilling to engage in any public discourse about Murat, fearing that the very mention of such matters would injure their own reputations. Instead, d'Argenson found himself confined to the circumstantial and intangible realm of hearsay and gossip in his attempt to establish the "facts" of Murat's scandalous behavior and alleged sexual relations with other women, which remained impenetrable to his observing eye despite his constant surveillance ofher home. D'Argenson's frustration at his inability to obtain any firsthand testimony from Murat or to obtain reliable witnesses to testifY against her resonates in the wording of his report, since it was only through the mediation of this written document that he could have any hope of confronting Murat with the "evidence" he had managed to gather: I would really like to know how she would respond to the following facts: A portrait torn by the blows of a knife, as a result of the jealous rage of a woman she loved and abandoned several months ago in favor of Madame de Nantiat, 4 another woman of extreme debauchery, less notorious for her gaming than for her loose morals. This woman, who lodges with her, is the object of her continual devotion, even in the presence of servants and pawn brokers. Vile oaths offered while gaming and infamous conversations at table, to which the Count of Roussillon has been a witness, though he has now fallen out with Madame de Murat. Dissolute songs sung at all hours of the night. The insolence to piss out of the window after a long debauch. Her brazen conversation with the priest of Saint-Cosme, as far removed from modesty as from religion. A chamber maid, who was let go without pay, had promised me to testifY against her, but the fear of this has led friends of Madame de Murat to pay her off. Monsieur, the [Count] ofRoussillon, who is familiar with all these wicked mysteries does not dare to cast any light on them, whether out of a sense of false honor, or because he does not want to acknowledge his own guilt. Monsieur Boistel, a councilor to Parliament, and the nearest neighbor to the house where so much debauchery has occurred, does not believe it

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The Politics of Intimacy

compatible with the dignity of his position to give me a deposition, and he has not even permitted his footmen to offer me their testimony. Finally, the priest of Saint-Cosme, from whom I've learned the principal facts of the case, believes that his position as a cleric is not compatible with the role of a plaintiff or a witness. (n-rz) While d'Argenson could find no specific terminology to describe Mme. de Murat's crimes with Mme. de Nantiat, his account does offer a fascinating glimpse of how lesbian desire increasingly tended to be linked to a whole series of "masculine" behaviors, in this case, the libertine vices of gaming, drinking, swearing, and engaging in public urination. 5 But d'Argenson's reports are also unusual in their departure from the conventions of available narratives of female-female desire, which tended to portray a woman's love for her own sex as an insufficient or unsatisfactory desire, easily deflected toward its "proper" heterosexual object. That sense of masculine assurance or tolerant amusement that surfaces so frequently in the galant chronicles of a Brantome or the poetry of a Saint-Evremond remains absent in d' Argenson's reports. Instead, he constructs a strikingly different narrative in which Murat and her supporters are set up as neighborhood bullies ("I would add that Madame de Murat and her accomplices are so feared in the neighborhood that none dare expose themselves to their vengeance" [13]) who can only be restrained by the execution of the king's justice in confining Murat to a convent. In fact, while d' Argenson's final entry records that Murat has been imprisoned at the chateau du Laches, he continues to view her as a dangerous and sinister figure, arguing that she should be denied all visitors and kept under the most austere conditions. April 20, 1702-I have learned that Madame de Murat is writing from the chateau de Loches, not only to her family but also to those who were the most implicated in her disorders. It would be as just as it would be convenient if she were deprived of this general freedom .... It would be a good thing also while waiting for it to become possible to extract some means of support from the ruins of her fortune that the officer in charge should order that she be nourished with the utmost frugality. I would like to believe that she is not being allmved any visitors. But it would not be amiss if you were to write to him again so that he does not happen to misinterpret your silence on this matter in her favor and give in to the importunities of this woman, who is equally clever and capricious, and who will stop at nothing to get her way. (7-8)

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The discrepancy between the kind of fear and uneasiness that d' Argenson evinces in his account of Madame Murat and the ease vcvith which lesbian figures are thwarted or converted in fictional narratives of female-female desire indicate how fractured and even contradictory cultural attitudes toward female homosexuality could be, depending upon whether the women involved were perceived to be real or imaginary. Even those works that conveyed the trappings of authenticity by labeling themselves "memoirs" or "true histories" tended to mitigate the more threatening implications of female homosexuality by casting them within a conventional narrative of heterosexual conversion or by portraying their lesbian figures as nai:ve and easily duped. In one such narrative, T11c i\1emoirs if the Count de Gram mont, a maid of honor to the Duchess of York, Miss Hobart, tries to woo a fellow maid of honor, Anne Temple, away from Lord Rochester by rewriting some of his scurrilous stanzas to make it appear that his intent is to mock and humiliate Temple. 6 But Hobart proves no match for Rochester, who easily dupes both women. He informs Temple of Hobart's desire to seduce her, by hinting that Hobart may be a hermaphrodite, and thus frightens the girl away from Temple and into his own arms. From the beginning of his account, as Hamilton introduces the reader to Miss Hobart and begins his tale ofher machinations with Miss Temple and Lord Rochester, he suggests that the outcome is a foregone conclusion, adopting the tone of a Restoration comedy in which any obstruction to the desires of the hero proves insubstantial, and his ultimate sexual gratification is always assured. Miss Hobart's character was at that time as uncommon in England, as her person was singular ... she had a good shape, rather a bold air. and a great deal of wit, which was well cultivated, without having much discretion. She was likewise possessed of a great deal of vivacity with an irregular £1ncy ... and she had a tender heart, whose sensibility some pretended was alone in favour of the fair sex ... It was not long before the report, whether true or £1lse, of this singularity, spread through the whole court, where people, being yet so uncivilised as never to have heard of that kind of refinement in love of ancient Greece, imagined that the illustrious Hobart, who seemed so particularly attached to the fair sex, was in reality something more than she appeared to be. Satirical ballads soon began to compliment her upon these new attributes; and upon the insinuations that were therein made, her companions began to tear her. The governess, alarmed at these reports, consulted Lord Rochester upon the danger to which her niece was exposed. She could not have applied to a fitter person: he immediately advised her to take her niece

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out of the hands of Miss Hobart; and contrived matters so well that she fell into his own. 7 This comic summation leaves out the more unfortunate ramifications for Miss Hobart that the narrative eventually reveals. Primed by Lord Rochester's hints, Miss Temple reacts hysterically when Hobart enters her room to change clothes and begins to "shriek and cry in the most terrible manner" (vol. 2, r66) as if she were about to be raped. Through the intervention of the duchess, Miss Hobart manages to retain her position, but her reputation is effectively ruined. As the 1\1emoirs demonstrate, when placed within the generic conventions of a comic or satiric narrative, female-female desire appears to have posed no serious threat to male authority or to the presumption that women remain sexually accessible to men. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century, this sense of masculine assurance tended to reveal a greater degree of vulnerability to an emerging "qfet de ree/" 8 as the figure of the tribade or lesbian began to acquire a far more material, realistic, and contemporaneous shape. One can easily discern the formal narrative or theatrical conventions underlying Hamilton's account of Miss Hobart's ill-fated encounter with Miss Temple; one may even argue that the story is nothing more than a tale fabricated from court gossip. But beyond the historical authenticity of its central characters-Lord Rochester, the Duchess of York, and Miss Temple-the narrative also demonstrates the authenticity of contemporary knowledge of female homosexuality, whose circulation through channels of gossip, innuendo, and double entendre obviated the need for any overt acknowledgment of its existence. As Emma Donoghue suggests, Hamilton's narrative of Miss Hobart even offers evidence of how the myth of the lesbian as a female hermaphrodite was yielding precedence to the idea of the lesbian as tribade, a figure whose desires were not motivated by physical abnormality but by a more disturbing "unaccountable" predilection for her own sex: It is a measure of the persistence of the lesbian-as-hermaphrodite motif that such an author, considering himself too sophisticated to believe the myth himself, still chooses to allude to it to colour his satire. Hamilton's double-edged mockery undercuts the "uncivilised" bigots who have never heard of Greek homosexuality, while making sure that the taint of abnormality still clings to Mistress Hobart. Rather than being more than the woman she appears to be, he hints, she is less; the tribade has lost her power to threaten the "civilised" reader. (54)

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While it is true that the shift away from the figure of the hermaphrodite with its accompanying mythology of clitoral hypertrophy erases one sign of female homosexuality that could easily be exposed and regulated, it is not at all clear that the tribade's less visible sexuality did in fact substantially reduce anxiety about female homosexuality within a culture predicated on women's compulsory heterosexuality. Although Hamilton would have his sophisticated, largely male readership believe that a woman like Miss Hobart posed no threat to them in their pursuit of the opposite sex, her very specificity as an individual suggested the contrary by confirming that if the female hermaphrodite was a fiction, then her counterpart, the tribade, might be all too real and far more difficult to expose. Indeed, one has only to juxtapose Hamilton's memoirs with Rene d'Argenson's denunciation of the behavior of Mme. de Murat to see how a shift in context from the scandalous but only possibly true to the more juridical genre of a police report could dramatically alter the dimensions of the danger that female homosexuality posed to a culture that seemed determined to expose female-female desire as a fiction or a fraud, even as it inevitably constructed more and more evidence of the tribade's actual existence within its midst. By exploring these shifting boundaries between the imaginary and the real, within cultural discourses that simultaneously projected and debunked female homosexuality as a reason for concern about unregulated female intimacy, we can begin to dispel some of the aura of insouciance about lesbian desire that libertine and pornographic narratives of the period convey and that some scholars have uncritically accepted as a transparent representation of attitudes toward female homosexuality within a larger cultural context. In order to address these issues more closely, I will look at several libertine or pornographic narratives ranging from the late seventeenth to eighteenth centuries and examine their representations of female homosexuality not only in terms of the fictional conventions they employ but also in terms of their references to or incorporation of actual women who were either identified as lesbians or satirized for their potential lesbian tendencies. In choosing these texts, I have deliberately chosen a subset of works by male authors. Partly this choice reflects an awareness of how large a role pornographic and erotic discourse has played in constructing cultural stereotypes of female homosexuality and in constructing attacks on real women ranging from Queen Anne's ladies-in-waiting to the actress Mademoiselle Raucourt to Marie Antoinette, and it reflects an awareness that pornography of this period is largely a maledominated discourse. But I also want to address the peculiar phenomenon in

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The Politics