So why was desire between women the most common result of these storylines? Because in Western literature there is a long tradition of considering such a form of illicit attraction as ultimately harmless—therefore funny, or poignant, or aesthetically pleasing. What Joseph Harris concludes from his study of seventeenth-century cross-dressing romances is just as true of theater:
Women in seventeenth-century literature6 are often allowed a degree of lenience in desiring both real men disguised as women, and other women disguised as men. The fact that this is very rarely the case for men suggests that there was a great deal of anxiety about the possibility that male desire could be inadvertently misdirected.
Passionate attraction7 between women was often described in terms of amor impossibilis, impossible love: this did not mean a love that could never happen emotionally, but one that could not be satisfied sexually—whether because there could be no penis-ejaculating-in-vagina, or just no orgasm, is far less clear, but the second event was generally held to depend on the first. In both drama and prose,8 Western writers repeatedly used images of “fruitless” (meaning nonprocreative, and therefore pointless) desire between women.
The “lenience” Harris mentions has its limits; the understanding is that the woman’s erotic interest in someone she either believes to be female or who secretly is female is a mistake, which will be magically corrected by the eventual dropping of the disguise. Often the middle of these stories is more interesting than the ending; as Harris suggests, “Something in cross-dressing9 frequently seems to resist the general narrative flow,” producing episodes of sexual confusion which are secondary or entirely irrelevant to the main plot and undermine its tidy conclusions. The safety net enables the riskiest tricks.
THE FEMALE BRIDEGROOM
In Aelfric’s Lives of Saints10 (a sermon-cycle of the 990s), the cross-dressed Saint Eugenia heals a woman who, when the saint rejects her advances, ungratefully accuses “him” of rape. For the last thousand years,11 then, it seems a heroine cannot disguise herself without attracting at least one girl, and often bevies of them. The motif shows up frequently in romances (from the 1200s) and plays (from the 1500s) in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. The anonymous Sienese comedy Gl’Ingannati (1537) adds a delicious twist which would have a lasting influence: a girl disguised as a page is in love with her master, but he sends her to court his beloved for him, and she accidentally wins the lady’s love herself. The female bridegroom entered English romance by the 1580s, and by the 1590s was a stock character on the English stage (in the quick-change costume of hat and long black cloak) who would not leave it for another two centuries.
Walter H. Deverell, “Viola and Olivia,” in Art and Poetry (formerly The Germ), No. 4 (May 1850).
In the final issue of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s magazine, this etching by English painter Walter Deverell (who died at the age of twenty-seven) was published alongside a poem of the same name by John Lucas Tupper, an anatomical draftsman. Tupper mulls over the “natural” attraction between the two Shakespeare heroines, calling them “lovers” and “married souls…/ having an inward faith that love, called so / In verity, is of the spirit clear / Of earth and dress and sex.” Deverell used his sister as a model for Olivia, but for Viola he “discovered” a part-time milliner named Elizabeth Siddal; she would go on to pose for, study with, and finally marry his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti two years before her own early death.
The earliest and most important source for the motif is the myth of Iphis and Ianthe, told in many classical texts but most memorably by the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses (composed around 8 C.E.). Raised as a boy (to save her from infanticide), Iphis at thirteen is engaged to marry her friend Ianthe. As Ovid tells it, with an audible relish for the contradiction, “Iphis loved a girl12 whom she despaired of ever being able to enjoy, and this very frustration increased her ardor.” He gives her a long soliloquy, the original lesbian lament, which we will hear echoed in many later texts: “What is to be the end of this for me, caught as I am in the snare of a strange and unnatural kind of love, which none has known before?” She must be a monster, Iphis argues, because “cows do not burn with love for cows,” mares for mares, ewes for ewes, and so forth. (Without the benefit of modern biology,13 she has no idea that same-sex goings-on can be observed right across the animal kingdom.) What Iphis sees as distinguishing lesbian desire from other sick whims—such as bestiality—is that it has no hope of consummation, since sex is what happens between males and females. She lectures herself sternly: Ianthe “cannot be yours, nor can you be happy, whatever happens…Pull yourself together, Iphis, be firm, and shake off this foolish, useless emotion.” But the plot rolls on: she makes no attempt to excuse herself or run away, even though she expects that to play Ianthe’s bridegroom will feel like “thirst in the middle of the waters.” On the day before the wedding, her despairing mother takes Iphis to plead at the altar of the goddess Io, who was the one who said she should be raised as a boy in the first place. The temple shakes; on the way out, Iphis “walked with a longer stride than usual…she who had lately been a woman had become a man.” Notice Iphis is still “she,” her girl-self lingering like a ghost. Only when recounting the wedding itself does Ovid shift to a male pronoun, to tell us that “the boy Iphis gained his own Ianthe.” You could say that the sex change is a daring way of making the girls’ illicit passion acceptable—or a cheap trick to reestablish the status quo. I see it as both at the same time: a handy device to wind up the story, which has the side effect of rewarding same-sex love.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses enjoyed a great vogue in European literature from the Middle Ages on. The Iphis story was radically reworked14 in Yde et Olive, an anonymous epic poem written in Old French before 1311 as one of the many sequels to Huon de Bordeaux. (When Lord Berners translated the whole Huon cycle into English around 1534 it became extremely popular, before falling into obscurity in the seventeenth century.) Ide and Olive15 (as the poem is known in English) is about a princess who runs away in disguise to escape her father’s incestuous advances. The emperor of Rome employs the promising young “squire” Ide as servant to his daughter, the Lady Olive, who has refused countless suitors but is immediately won over by Ide’s gentle manner. (This is typical of female bridegroom plots: it is almost always the cross-dresser’s feminine charms that attract other women, rather than any machismo she may display.) Interestingly, three other medieval romances16 inspired by the Iphis story—Heldris de Cornuälle’s Roman de Silence (1200s) and the anonymous Roman de Cassidorus (c. 1270) and Tristan de Nanteuil (c. 1375)—refer to their cross-dressed heroines by masculine (or a mixture of masculine and feminine) names and pronouns. But this anonymous author gives his the gender-neutral name of Ide, and uses feminine pronouns throughout, which keeps reminding us that she is a woman.
The Damsell [Olive] often times gladly regarded her, and began in her heart sore to love her, and she (who perceived her [Olive]) prayed our Lord God, that he would so deale, that she be not accused neither of man nor woman.
Notice that Ide’s first reaction is fear of being “accused” of wooing the emperor’s daughter—as an upstart who is breaking the rules of class as much as gender. But the emperor is a meritocrat: grateful for Ide’s military services, diplomacy, and wit, he offers his daughter’s hand. “Great dammage it should be to so noble a Damsell,” Ide protests, “to be assigned to such a poore man as I am.” Poor, that is, in manhood as well as in money. But nobody is going to “assign” Olive anywhere; in fact she begs her father to hurry up the wedding, with such obvious desire that the courtiers burst out laughing. (Joseph Harris shows17 that in female bridegroom stories, it is almost always the woman-in-skirts who is obliged to take the erotic initiative, stepping into the male position—so the cross-dresser’s act of sartorial gender bending sparks off a more deeply scandalous masculinization in the other woman.)
In an intriguing soliloquy, Ide makes up her mind that she would be a “Foole” to reject
fate’s terrifying gifts of a princess and an empire: “I will wed her,18 and doe as God will give me grace to do.” Unlike Ovid, this author does not bring on a miraculous sex change before the ceremony, and this allows the story to unroll with appalling suspense. On the wedding night, Ide locks the doors for fear of eavesdroppers and lies down with Olive. She makes the traditional claim19 of impotence, but her tone is yearning and sorrowful: “My right sweete Love, God give you good night, for as for me, I can give you no good, because I feele such a disease, the which greeveth me sore, and therewith she kissed her.” Olive is not convinced that her “sweete Lover” lacks the relevant thing that will do Olive “good,” since Ide is “the thinge in the world that I most desire, for the bountie and sweetness that I knowe in you.” (Notice that instead of calling each other husband and wife, they use the gender-neutral vocabulary of “sweete Love” and “sweete Lover.”) In case her bridegroom might think her desperate for consummation, she offers to postpone it for fifteen days. “It sufficeth me to kiss you, & as for the privie love, I am content for this time (since it is your pleasure) to forbeare it.” (This suggests that she has guessed that Ide is not sick, but stalling.) So the couple relax, and pass the whole night “clipping [embracing] and kissing.” The next morning, when the emperor asks how she is, Olive gives a defiantly upbeat answer: “Sir, (quoth she) even as I desire, for I love Ide my Husband better than I love you.” What everyone wants to know is how her “desire” (in a technical sense) has been satisfied; Olive turns the question and tells them about her “love” for her bridegroom instead.
But after a fortnight of kissing, it comes to the crunch: “Then she [Olive] drew neere to her and touched her, and she [Ide] (who knew well what her [Olive’s] desire was) turned toward her, and wold hide himselfe no longer from her, but all weeping cryed her mercie.” The effect of all these pronouns (eight feminine, one masculine) is a melting of the two women’s different feelings into one pool of melancholy eroticism. And Ide’s confession that she is female does not split them apart again. Olive reacts with an extraordinary speech:
My right sweete Lover, discomfort not your selfe, for you shall not be accused by me neither to no man nor woman living, we are wedded together, and I will be good and true to you, since you have kept your selfe so truly, with you I will use my time and passe my destiny since it is thus, for I see that it is the pleasure of our Lord God.
Just as Ide embarked on this adventure in a spirit of knightly obedience to “God” and “destiny,” so Olive proves herself a fit mate by showing the same spirit. When she credits Ide with having “kept your selfe so truly,” this could refer to the fact that Ide has been honest with Olive at last—or that, all along, Ide has maintained some kind of personal integrity by means of the disguise, a truth within the lie. Or perhaps “truly” here means faithfully, and what Olive is praising Ide for is for being a virginal, chaste bridegroom. In any case, it is clear that Olive still considers herself truly “wedded together” with Ide’s “selfe” (another gender-neutral word), whatever biological sex that self may happen to be. Their marriage is presented here not as a sham but as a very private mystery.
But this is not a modern novel; such a subtle and open ending would hardly do for the medieval listeners. Exposed by an eavesdropper, the newlyweds are sentenced to burning alive by the weeping emperor. By making their punishment identical, he is acknowledging that his daughter is no victim but a true partner in the marriage. Intriguingly, their crime20 is called buggery in Bourchier’s original translation (c. 1534)—“he wold not suffer such boggery to be used”—but by the third edition in 1601 the word has been euphemized to “falsehood.” In any event, as the fire rises, God intervenes to announce that Ide is now transformed into a man, and that the emperor has only eight days to live. (Clearly a punishment for having tried to execute the misunderstood couple.) Olive’s father rushes off to make out his will in their favor, and she and Ide-the-man go to bed and conceive an heir who will be a great leader.
Ide and Olive may have more or less the same ending as the myth, but it deviates sharply from Ovid by allowing the bride to discover the truth. It suggests that a same-sex marriage can include everything—attraction, complementary roles, loyalty, lovemaking—except the intercourse necessary for reproduction, and that there is nothing evil about it. Ide and Olive may have been shocking21 to some of its audience, because when it was rewritten later in the fourteenth century in dramatic form as Miracle de la fille d’un roy (in English, Miracle of a King’s Daughter), the ending was changed to marry the cross-dresser and her bride to each other’s aged fathers.
So why would this anonymous French author, working in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, have fastened on this theme? Not with a view to social commentary, I would argue; his listeners and readers are most unlikely to have interpreted the story as a proof that women did (or should be allowed to) desire each other. Instead, he seems to me to have chosen it, much as Ovid did, to make a point about love in general: its wild unpredictability and power. The tone had changed over the more than millennium that separated the two, of course: on top of the Roman author’s concept of Eros, the French medieval author added layers of Christian purity, humility, and faith, as well as melancholic, self-abnegating amour courtois (on both sides, interestingly—the bride’s as well as the bridegroom’s). But his basic impulse22 seems to have been the same as Ovid’s: perhaps it took a romance as unprecedented as Olive and Ide’s to prove that classical motto so popular in medieval times, amor vincit omnia, or love (even “impossible love”) conquers all.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses remained popular in the Renaissance; an English translation went through five editions in the late sixteenth century. When French playwright Isaac de Benserade dramatized it as Iphis et Iante in 1634 (published in 1637), he made the same key choice as the Ide and Olive author—to postpone the sex change until after the wedding, so the bride is forced to realize her predicament as a woman with a female husband. As a further turn of the screw, he added a male character, Ergaste, who both knows Iphis’s secret and is hopelessly in love with her. Ergaste can be read as a sort of mouthpiece for the male libertines who were Benserade’s target audience. In several speeches, with a mixture of amused condescension, excitement, and jealousy, Ergaste broods over the paradoxical nature of his beloved’s passion for one of her own sex; the way both women are “too innocent23 to know how to commit a crime,” but that they are planning to do exactly that by fraudulently formalizing what he calls their “clownish love” in the sacrament (and legal bond) of matrimony.
Some have seen this tragicomedy as mere titillation for a male audience, but Benserade’s approach stresses fascinating epistemological questions. His Iphis—not thirteen, as in Ovid, but twenty years old—is a strong character who resists her mother’s urging to stifle her forbidden passion for Iante. She swings between suicidal impulses and hope that the gods will somehow solve her problem. In many speeches, Iphis simultaneously emphasizes her despair and her desire, her inability to tell Iante what the matter is, and her inability to “do the impossible for her”24 by consummating the marriage. Kissing her beloved’s breast, she groans that this is like “dying of thirst beside a fountain.” The frustration seems as much a matter of knowledge as sex: she needs to figure out a way to break through Iante’s innocence as well as her maidenhead.
In a startlingly frank speech toward the end of the play, Iphis tells her mother how the wedding night went. “Possessing her25 thrilled me,” she admits:
I satisfied my love fever with a kiss,
And my soul was on my lips.
In the sweet feeling of these excessive delights,
I was forgetting the thing I aspired to most.
I embraced her beautiful body, whose pure whiteness
Excited me to make a place for it in myself.
I was touching, I was kissing, my heart was content
Here Iphis wavers between what we might call a phallic sexuality (the claimin
g of kisses and embraces, the thrill of possession) and a much more uncertain, diffusely ecstatic, receptive kind of desire that leads to “forgetting” the “thing” itself, the consummation: where we might expect this bridegroom to focus on the task of deflowering her bride, she confounds our expectations by longing to (symbolically or literally?) “make a place for” Iante’s body in herself. Only when her appalled mother asks how Iante reacted does the story turn more conventional. Iphis reports that as soon as she revealed the secret by stripping naked, Iante rejected her embraces and went off weeping, “ashamed to see herself the wife of a girl.”
But one oddity of the play’s fifth act is that we have already heard from Iante, who does not seem ashamed at all. In a soliloquy, two scenes earlier, she hints that the wedding night brought her pleasure as well as disturbing knowledge. “This marriage is sweet,26 it has charm enough for me, and if only people didn’t laugh at it, I wouldn’t complain…” What embarrasses her is the thought of what others might say about her story (or, specifically, how they might present it onstage; here the play becomes a sort of commentary on itself). She only belatedly considers the moral aspects, adding that if two girls could marry “without offending heaven and natural law,” her heart would make no objection.
Her wishful thinking here suggests that Iante means to hold on to the shreds of her naïveté as long as she can, because she does not want to lose Iphis. If audiences or readers might have been outraged by the brazenness of a woman who consciously defies heaven and nature by having sex with another woman, they may have found it much easier to be indulgent to a wide-eyed heroine who made them feel amused and worldly.
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