These substitute-brother endings are about winding up the story, rather than psychological realism. This causes a jarring gear change in such works as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (performed 1601), in which Olivia falls deeply in love with “Cesario” (Viola) over the course of several long, intimate têtes-à-têtes—but, discovering she has been tricked into marriage to Viola’s identical twin, Sebastian, raises not the slightest objection. The comic convention strains to accommodate Shakespeare’s subtle characterization, like the proverbial new wine in old skins. “A sister!”46 Olivia cries, which might seem like an unconvincing expression of banal friendship. But Denise Walen argues47 that Olivia’s immediate declaration that she will host Viola’s wedding to Orsino can be read as her way of holding on to the girl she still loves, by means of a sort of permanent, four-person union.
The motif of the female bridegroom48 remained popular on the stage until the late 1700s. What really changed was not the storyline but the tone; we can register an overall shift from the freshness of Elizabethan cross-dressing comedies to a more glum or hostile tone by the Jacobean and Caroline periods, and a formulaic use of the motif in the eighteenth century.
But as far back as As You Like It (staged in 1600), we can detect in the cocky speeches of a character such as Rosalind a certain relish for the piquant situation in which she finds herself; without having intended to make women fall in love with them, these cross-dressers often seem flattered, titillated, and downright triumphant. In Jean de Rotrou’s Célimène (1633), Florante marvels at how easy women are to seduce. More unsettlingly, the heroine of Rotrou’s Cléagénor et Doristée (1634), despite having put on breeches to escape the men who keep trying to rape her, laughs about how one of the women fawning over her “would love to be forced49 a little.”
A novelty in Jacobean treatments50 of the female bridegroom is that the secret of her sex is often kept from the audience until quite late in the play; this allows the audience (or readers) to take the desire seriously before realizing it is a same-sex one. Less often noticed is a more important Jacobean innovation: the cross-dresser who deliberately woos another woman. Her hidden motive is usually a nasty one, but that does nothing to reduce the sexiness of the scenario.
Rivalry over a man is the most common reason: in the tight triangle of two women and the man they both want, cross-dressing often turns the link between the two rivals into something highly charged. In Margaret Cavendish’s Matrimonial Trouble51 (an understated title for a sort of Restoration Fatal Attraction), the sinister Mistress Forsaken crashes her ex-lover’s wedding in breeches, to dance with and win the heart of his new wife. Similarly, in Antoine Jacob Montfleury’s52 box-office smash La Femme, juge, et partie (performed 1669—in English, The Wife, Judge, and Accuser), a cast-off wife returns in male disguise to seduce her husband’s new fiancée; the scene in which she kisses and gropes her caused such a scandal that Montfleury wrote a play-about-the-play to defend it.
Equally, it can be the woman-in-skirts who takes the initiative and seduces her rival. In James Shirley’s The Doubtful Heir (performed c. 1638, published 1652), for instance, the beautiful, domineering Queen Olivia (her name clearly borrowed from Twelfth Night) decides to make her husband, Ferdinand, jealous by seducing his page “Tiberio,” really his mistress, Rosania. Ferdinand encourages Rosania to go through with the late-night bedroom assignation, to keep the sexually frustrated queen at least temporarily happy, but Rosania is understandably nervous:
But shall I not expose53
Myself to danger if her love pursue
Immodest ends, since you advise I should
Apply myself to her desires?
Sure enough, the ensuing scene hovers on the brink of rape. As Olivia plays with the hair of “Tiberio” and caresses “his” cheek, the stage direction is wonderfully vague: “The Queen is pleasant with Ros.” Although Olivia does not know the page’s secret, Shirley maximizes the titillation for the audience by having her play outrageously with gender.
OLIVIA I suppose you a Lady all this while,
And I the man, our lips must meet again,
Will this instruct thee nothing?
ROSANIA Gracious Madam.
OLIVIA And yet this recreation comes short, Dear Lady, of what love might well allow us.
The next minute, it is a class boundary she is breaching: “Admit you are a Queen…I am become your servant.” Then she demands they swap clothes, for extra excitement:
Come, we’l in
And change our Sexes; Thou shalt wear my clothes,
And I will put on these, help on with thine,
And I will dress thee handsomely, and then
We’ll act again.
“Not for the world dear Madam,” gasps the panic-stricken Rosania.
This pattern of rivalry-turned-to-seduction could be treated romantically rather than lecherously, as in Sir John Suckling’s Brennoralt (1646). Francelia and the cross-dressed Iphigene enter after spending the night together, in a scene reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet: “Look, the day breakes,”54 says Iphigene. She asks for a picture to keep, but Francelia goes one better by giving her beloved “this virgin-bracelet of my haire” instead. Enter the jealous Almerin, who stabs them both. Iphigene confesses that she is a woman who courted Francelia to keep her away from the man she loves, Almerin. But instead of reacting with the expected rage and shame, Francelia insists she adores Iphigene as much as ever. (As for her original love object, Almerin, she rather snappishly sends him off to fetch a surgeon.) Iphigene marvels:
Have you
So perfectly forgiv’n already, as to
Consider me a losse? I doubt which Sexe
I shall be happier in. Climates of Friendship
Are not lesse pleasant, ’cause they are lesse scortching,
Then those of Love; and under them wee’l live;
Such pretious links of that wee’l tye our souls
Together with, that the chaines of the other
Shall be grosse fetters to it.
The vocabulary of friendship as cooler and loftier than love is conventional; the situation, in which two women pledge themselves to each other forever as they lie bleeding in each other’s arms, is anything but. It is the woman in skirts, not the one in breeches, who insists on the passionate nature of their bond; Francelia, aware she is not going to survive, refuses to tone down her language. “Oh would you / Had never un-deceiv’d me, for I had dy’d with / Pleasure, beleeving I had been your Martyr.” In Suckling’s remarkable tragedy, the death of both women does not function as a punishment, but a pedestal: they are lifted above any possible disapproval or disgust their passion for each other might arouse in the audience.
The heyday of the female bridegroom motif, in fiction, was the eighteenth century, when she did not need to have any motive loftier than liberty. The storyline spread55 contagiously across prose genres; we find women in breeches making conquests of other women in biographies or pseudo-memoirs of female rogues as well as in novels. My favorite female bridegroom story56 is the anonymous Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu (1744), a brilliant if haphazard rake’s progress which was completely forgotten until Professor Carolyn Woodward rediscovered it in the early 1990s. Its heroine, Alithea de Richelieu, describes herself as an unwomanly eccentric who roams around Europe, mostly in male disguise as the “Chevalier Radpont.” The majority of her conquests of women are narrated in the predictable style, with gleeful arrogance and a last-minute withdrawal, but she strays into new territory when she finds herself becoming deeply attached to a young widow called Arabella de Montferan.
Feeling guilty about deceiving her, Alithea literally bares all—and at the sight of her breasts, far from recoiling, Arabella cries out in relief.
How happy do you make me57 by this Discovery, which I hope will unite us in Bands of Friendship more solid and more noble than that of Love; and if your sentiments correspond with mine, nothing but Death shall separate us.
The context
of cross-dressing and nakedness gives the “Bands of Friendship” a heightened tone which makes this speech sound very like a proposal. But how are these two women to share their lives, given that Alithea is not ready to go back into skirts, and a wedding ceremony, they agree, would put them at risk of prosecution for fraud? Arabella comes up with an imaginative solution: “If I cannot persuade you, continued she smiling, to give over your travelling project, I will take Breeches too, and we will set out together upon our Adventures.” Alithea lets her readers know that she was just as ready to make the concession:
I never in my Life felt so much Joy at her consenting to go along with me, and I expressed my Satisfaction in terms more proper for a Lover than a Friend; for to speak the truth, I found my Heart so rapt up in this lovely Woman, that had she stood out [held out], I certainly should have come into petticoats again.
Rather like the two heroines of Lyly’s Gallathea, these women care only about being together, whichever role each ends up playing. Their vocabulary is diverse and relaxed: each refers to the other as her “Partner,” and when they are briefly parted, Arabella writes to Alithea, “every Minute is an Age till I have the Pleasure of embracing my dear Alithea, who is Husband, Lover and Friend to Arabella.” On the road, the two women in breeches break the hearts of many deceived girls; each is titillated by the other’s successes, and only occasionally jealous of the other’s closeness to other women. After being kidnapped by a female lecher, they escape and—tired at last, but still flexible in their “Friendship and Freedom”—decide to spend every winter on Arabella’s estate in the south, and every summer on Alithea’s estate in Paris. Though they make no promises of lifelong commitment, after several years Alithea observes that they are “without the least Thoughts of altering our Scheme ’till Death parts us” (her language echoing the Anglican wedding ceremony). Perhaps the most surprising text in the whole female bridegroom tradition, The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu takes advantage of a narrative convention so well-worn (by the mid-eighteenth century) that it raised no eyebrows. Starting out with the most formulaic cross-dressing plot, it ends up with a female marriage that—in its equality and flexibility on everything from houses to monogamy to roles—looks entirely modern.
THE MALE AMAZON
Stories of disguised women are not the only ones that have lesbian repercussions. When a man puts on skirts, his motive is very often to court or seduce a woman under cover of female bonding, and just as much interesting havoc ensues. This literary tradition derives from various legends about men and gods (Achilles, Hercules, Theseus, Vertumnus) donning skirts. But by far the most interesting source, found in Hesiod, Apollodorus, Hyginus, Euripides, and Pausanias, is the tale of Diana and Callisto.
Goddess of hunting and the moon, Diana (a Roman version of the Greek goddess Artemis) is beautiful, wild, terrifying, and the original man-hater: in one legend, she punishes a man who spies on her by making his own dogs hunt him down and tear him apart. Her band of warrior nymphs—variously portrayed as her friends, servants, or worshippers—form a permanent community, passionately loyal to the goddess and their way of life. The Callisto story is told most fully and eloquently by Ovid in his Metamorphoses (circa 8 C.E.). “None of the nymphs58…was dearer than she to the goddess of the Crossways: but a favourite is never a favourite for long,” Ovid warns. When Jove, father of the gods, tries to seduce Callisto, the nymph resists his overtures so fiercely that he has to resort to a magic trick, changing his appearance so that he looks like Diana. Thinking she sees her beloved, Callisto lets her guard down.
“Greetings, divine mistress,” she cried, “greater in my sight than Jove himself—I care not if he hears me!” Jove laughed to hear her words. Delighted to be preferred to himself, he kissed her—not with the restraint becoming to a maiden’s kisses. And as she began to tell of her hunting exploits in the forest, he prevented her by his embrace, and betrayed his real self by a shameful action.
Notice that Callisto is not put off by unrestrained kisses and embraces from the faux Diana. Only when these erotic overtures reach the “shameful action” of rape does she recognize that this must be a man. Fallen and (inevitably) pregnant, the warrior girl lurks on the margins of her old world: “She scarcely raised her eyes from the ground, and did not stay close by the goddess as she usually did, nor did she take her place in the forefront of them all.” But when Diana invites all her nymphs to bathe with her, and Callisto has to bare her swollen body, the merciless goddess neither asks nor cares whether it was rape or seduction: either way, the punishment for losing virginity is banishment. Poor Callisto finally ends up getting turned into a bear by Jove’s furious wife.
Pieter van der Borcht, “Jupiter Seizes Callisto,” in P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoses (1591)
The rape of Callisto—or rather, the moment just before the rape, when the nymph believes she is being embraced by the goddess Diana—inspired many paintings as well as a great number of illustrations in editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, such as this one by a painter of the Flemish school at Antwerp.
The lesbian implications of the story were not lost on the many painters (including Titian and Boucher) who took it as their subject. What Jove does, disguised as Diana, has the paradoxical effect of gesturing toward a prior erotic connection among Diana and her nymphs: among any women who live secluded from men, in fact. A good example is The Golden Age (1611), in which Jacobean playwright Thomas Heywood specifies that Diana’s nymphs sleep two by two, “coupled / And twinn’d59 in love,” and take the following vow:
You never shall with hated man atone,
But lie with woman, or else lodge alone…
With ladies only you shall sport and play,
And in their fellowship spend night and day…
Consort with them at board and bed,
And swear no man shall have your maidenhead
Jupiter, disguised as a new applicant, promises jokily, “If e’er I lose’t, a woman shall have mine!”—an answer Diana seems to like. When she orders the nymphs to “hand each other and acquaint yourselves,” this literally means “go hand in hand and get to know each other,” but Heywood’s audience would have heard a suggestion of mutual handling, and a pun (“quaint,” meaning “cunt”) that dates back to Chaucer. The brief Callisto episode in William Warner’s epic poem Albion’s England (1586) is even more explicit:
He feeleth oft60 her Ivorie breasts, nor maketh coy to kisse;
Yet all was well, a Maiden to a Maiden might doe this.
Then ticks he up her tucked Frocke, nor did Calisto blush,
Or thinke abuse; he tickles too, no blab she thinks the Bush.
The last two lines can be roughly modernized as “then he touched her under her nightgown, and she did not blush or take offense; he tickled her too, and she did not take Diana’s bush (i.e., vulva) for a bubble or swelling (i.e., penis).” All of which suggests that the serpent was already in this garden of all-girl intimacy. The man-in-skirts motif61 is not just about men’s desperate desire for women, then, but also about the less definable eroticism among women that such a trick can bring to light.
Clearly influenced by the Callisto myth, the male amazon shows up in literature as early as the twelfth century, in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and English, becoming quite common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The disguised man62 was a familiar visual image: Giovanni Battista Guarini’s 1590 play Il Pastor Fido (in English, The Faithful Shepherd), for instance, was not only translated into many languages but illustrated in scores of different paintings, prints, tapestries, and wall hangings across Europe. What may surprise readers familiar with the uneasy tittering caused by cross-dressed men in the movies today is that the skirt-wearing hero of these romances and plays is presented as young, gorgeous, virile, and clever—playful, without being laughable.
In many texts,63 his disguise causes no erotic confusion, because as soon as he gets a moment
alone with his beloved, he declares himself as a man. But in some interesting romances and plays, he keeps up the act and courts her undercover. The earliest example64 of this may be Guillaume de Blois’s extremely popular Alda, written in Latin around 1170. Pyrrhus disguises himself as his twin sister to reach and seduce his secluded beloved; “she” convinces Alda that “her” penis is an instrument “she” bought in the marketplace, and Alda suggests “she” should have bought a bigger one! After a week in bed, this prototypical gullible heroine is left pregnant, without any idea that her lover was not a woman.
When Robert de Blois took up the Alda plot for his thirteenth-century romance Floris et Lyriopé, he changed it to emphasize psychological interest over bawdry. Disguised as his twin sister, Florie (companion to the duke’s daughter Lyriopé), Floris lies kissing Lyriopé in an orchard, reads her the story of Piramus et Tisbé, and sighs that if “she” were a man, “she” would love Lyriopé as much as Piramus did his Tisbé. Significantly, this desire is presented as a matter of cross-gender identification and borrowed roles; it is by reading and fantasizing that the faux Florie learns to express desire for “her” own sex. As for Lyriopé,
“I don’t know,”65 she said, “what could I say.
Loving too much seems madness to me.
Sure we have to love each other,
but love makes me sigh,
it sends me to my bed, it makes me yawn and suffer.
I do not wish to experience such things.
I do not know if it is love
that has made me sigh so frequently.
I am falling apart, I sob,
I love you much more than I should,
And I know I should not, anyway, let myself go in such a way.
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