hudebnik

[Note: Keep in mind that Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Man was published in 1981. This article is part of the ongoing research she was doing that eventually contributed to that work. For that reason, I’m going to skim a bit, since I’ve covered that publication extensively.]

Faderman considers the portrayal of women’s same-sex love in three mid-to-late 19th century novels by well-known (male) American novelists: Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849), Holmes’s A Mortal Antipathy (1885), and James’s The Bostonians (1885). The main thesis of this analysis is the inappropriateness of applying post-Freudian sexual theories to the characters in these works, and rather considering them in the context of normalized women’s same-sex intimate relationships in the 19th century, as explored for example by Smith-Rosenberg (1975) (https://alpennia.com/lhmp/lhmp-292-smith-rosenberg-1975-female-world-lov...).

She sets out four reasons for 19th century American tolerance for these relationships.

• Women’s lack of economic independence which meant that their same-sex relationships would not interfere with marriage. [Note: While this may be an accurate high-level generalization, increasing economic opportunities for middle-class American women in the later 19th century created the context for phenomena like “Boston Marriages” which clearly overlapped the era when such relationships were considered acceptable.]
• People did not seriously consider the possibility of f/f sex, and assumed women “merely tolerated sex” and only for procreation. [Note: This dodges two inconvenient considerations: that the myth of the sexless woman has many heterosexual exceptions, and that f/f erotic activity was not always considered to be “sex.”]
• Medical professionals did not recognize female homosexuality until the end of the 19th century. [Note: I think this only holds if you restrict it to “homosexuality by that name” because there are certainly earlier cases that were considered to be medical conditions.]
• In the 19th century it was assumed (once recognized at all) that female homosexuality was limited to those with a masculine physical attributes.  [Note: I would quibble again, but I’m getting repetitive.]

The underlying consideration regarding women’s relationships was “does this threaten society” and the answer to that question changed around the turn of the century and became very different in the period after WWI.

There’s a brief historical review of laws and attitudes toward f/f sexuality, including colonial era laws against sodomy, only one of which included women. In contrast, you have individuals like Deborah Gannett who fought in the Revolutionary War as a man, had romantic relations with at least three women during that time, was honorably discharged on discovery, and even was granted a Congressional pension for her heirs after her death. Similarly two women both serving in male dress in the Civil War had an “intimacy” but this aspect was not disparaged when their gender was discovered.

The article also cites an 1863 publication referencing four cross-dressing women serving in the Civil War including one who was married to another woman for 34 years, however the description of the case is that of James How, who lived in 18th century England, not 19th century US, so I’m skeptical of the accuracy of this particular citation. (And a bit disappointed that Faderman didn’t spot the error.)

Lucy Ann Lobdell is cited as the first case of such a woman being classified as “sexual perversion” (in the 1880s), supporting the position that earlier cases were not so classified. Faderman quotes a 1896 article from the American Journal of Insanity that states that until recently (i.e., the 1890s) insinuating that there was anything improper about women’s intimate relations would have been considered an outrage. The article goes on to note that the author was aware of a case somewhat earlier but had not recognized it as a type of perversion.

Faderman cites Smith-Rosenberg’s argument that whether or not 19th century women had genital relations is asking the wrong question, because that was not a dividing line between categories of relationships at the time. But Faderman continues with the assumption that grated on me when reading her book , that “it would probably be safe to assume that most of these relationships seldom involved genital contact—simply because the middle-class Victorian woman seldom engaged in genital contact outside of marriage.” I have always thought that Faderman bought in too deeply to the myth of the sexless Victorian woman.

But she notes that the concept of “being in love” was focused on intense emotional responses, rather than sexual desire. So there was no stigma attached to being “in love” with someone of the same sex and, indeed, given homosocial forces, the type of emotional intimacy associated with being “in love” was far more available with someone of the same sex than the opposite one.

[Note: we then get the old error of taking the OED at face value in asserting that the word “lesbian” in the sexual sense didn’t exist until the 20th century. Take my rant on this as given.]

Anyway, now we move on to analysis of the novels themselves, which illustrate the principles discussed above. Each of them depict a female couple who are clearly in love with each other, and where that relationship was socially acceptable or even praiseworthy. The apparent exception in The Bostonians, where the male character clearly views his target’s same-sex relationship as problematic becomes less clear when—as Faderman points out—the male character is rather clearly depicted as a controlling anti-hero whose victor over his rival will result in his future wife’s misery, not a happily ever after.

Literary critics of the 20th century, she asserts, who find Freudian character flaws in these three novels are bringing in anachronistic interpretations and assumptions that distort the stories that are actually on the page. (I have condensed down a great deal of detailed analysis here into only the conclusions.)