But it is a rather different plot I am interested in here, the story of friends threatened with separation—a story which sometimes includes marriage, but sometimes keeps it at bay. Despite the friends typically being described in terms of likeness, the narrative pattern was an asymmetrical one from the start: in As You Like It, it is Celia who sacrifices her family and fortune for Rosalind, who is not sacrificing anything in return. By the eighteenth century, in novels such as La Nouvelle Héloïse, a clear distinction has developed between the vulnerable heroine and her gallant friend. It seems there is nothing these protectors will not do for the sake of the beloved: risk their own reputation,26 even marry men they cannot stand.27
Interestingly, nineteenth-century novels28 often feature a bond between a virginal woman and a fallen one—whether a deflowered innocent or a longtime prostitute. The friendship is redemptive and uplifts both of them in different ways. Sometimes these novels are strongly feminist, highlighting solidarity between women across the social chasm. Often a Christian context allows for the description of the relationship in erotically overwrought terms, for instance in Joanna Traill, Spinster (1894)—the novel that made the name of Annie E. Holdsworth, a missionary’s daughter from Jamaica—in which Joanna takes in a penitent whore called Christine. It is no accident29 that many of these characters are named after Christ or Mary—Marion in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856), for instance, or the title character in Rosa Mulholland’s The Tragedy of Chris (1903). Mulholland’s novel begins as an idyll, with two Irish flower sellers managing to rent a room together and foster a baby while the mother is in jail. It segues into the “tragedy” of the title when Chris is kidnapped. The tireless Sheelia tracks her for three years through the urban wilderness of London—only to find her “darling” trapped in white slavery (the Victorian euphemism for prostitution). “I’m goin’ to save you now,”30 Sheelia insists valiantly. “We’ll go away somewhere, home to our own country, some place where nobody will ever know what happened.” But you can’t go home again, as the saying has it, because while Ireland is only a boat ride away, the country of innocence, of prelapsarian girlhood romance, is beyond reach. The reunion is only temporary; Chris must die in that unspecified depressed/poxed/consumptive way that white slaves do, freeing Sheelia to start a new life with a good man. By English literary convention, extramarital sex is fatal for women.
Work, an 1873 novel by Louisa May Alcott—more famous for the Little Women series—is one of the few exceptions to the rule that death must ultimately separate the fallen woman and her virginal protector. The seamstress Christie—yet another of those Christlike names—and the fallen Rachel, having endured painful tests of loyalty and years apart, are finally rewarded with a shared life in a women’s household. But then, Alcott intones fatalistically:
Only one summer31 allowed for the blossoming of the friendship that budded so slowly in the spring; then the frost came and killed the flowers, but the root lived long enough underneath the snows of suffering, doubt and absence.
This botanical parable makes love between women seem natural—but it also naturalizes its persecution. It is no enemy in particular that attacks the plucky little plant, simply “the frost.” Even an author32 as feminist as Alcott, writing a story with a happy ending, cannot see female inseparability outside the traditional framework of endurance.
Sometimes, instead of producing dramatic events, love between women merely survives them: the inseparables, despite their name, consent to separation. For instance, in Euphemia (1790), by Charlotte Lennox, the heroine is married off to a lout who insists on taking her into the wilds of America, so she and her beloved Maria have to maintain their love by thoughts and letters for more than a decade before being rewarded by reunion. Here inseparability is sublimated into pure suffering. (Lennox, incidentally, walked out on her own bad marriage.) We are left wondering whether, over the gap of two centuries, Shakespeare’s Celia would recognize this pious, passive way of being “coupled and inseparable.”
JEALOUSIES
“It is not absence33 which severs friends, but changes in heart, and mind, and position,” warns Woman’s Friendship (1851) by Anglo-Spanish/Jewish novelist Grace Aguilar. Often what threatens inseparables is not literal parting but alienation from each other. What would it take, many writers wondered, to break such a bond? How would it fare in a tug-of-war with other virtues such as honor, patriotism, or filial feeling? Or—perhaps most interestingly—the attraction between the sexes?
C. Carleton [attributed], “Love felt her soft lips on her cheek,” in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Love of Parson Lord and Other Stories (1900).
In this story the motherless heroine Love is greeted by her patron and “first love,” the squire’s lady, whose grandson waits impatiently to be introduced. The book’s illustrations were credited to “C. Carleton and Another.”
As Janet Todd puts it succinctly in Women’s Friendship in Literature, “female friendship34 is rarely allowed to exist in a pair.” Though, as we have seen, it can coexist harmoniously with the relationship one of them has with a man, in other texts the two bonds are set against each other in a tense triangle, when a man is introduced as a wedge between the inseparables. This motif of women friends35 turned rivals—a variation on the ancient triangle in which men friends fight over a woman—is played out in many dramas and fictions from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. A typical example is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s novel Kavanagh (1849), which presents the love between Cecilia and Alice as a mere trial run, “a rehearsal in girlhood36 of the great drama of woman’s life.” When they both fall for a man, the metaphors become downright ejaculatory:
The old fountain of friendship, that hitherto had kept the lowland landscape of [Alice’s] life so green, but now being flooded by more affection, was not to cease, but only to disappear in the greater tide, and flow unseen beneath it.
That is, Alice’s feeling for Cecilia must “disappear,” and Cecilia must conveniently drop dead.
Oddly enough, only one of the women needs to actually want the man for the ritual of sexual competition to be set in motion. For instance, the problem in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (staged around 1595, published 1600) is that Helena loves Demetrius, who has abandoned her to court her friend Hermia. Despite the fact that Hermia rejects him in favor of Lysander, Helena becomes insanely jealous. Puck’s reversal of the situation with a magical flower only makes it worse, because both men now pursue Helena, who is convinced she is being mocked and makes a famous lament for lost intimacy.
We, Hermia,37 like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles created both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key;
As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds,
Had been incorporate. So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem;
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart;
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.
And will you rent our ancient love asunder,
To join with men in scorning your poor friend?
Notice that Shakespeare ascribes to love between girls a pseudodivine power, a spiritually fertile quality. Like “gods” the two “create” a flower with their needles, and the “double cherry” is a literally fruitful image (as well as a symbol of virginity). The fact that their “union” is compared to a symmetrical “crest” suggests that their love is like the marital bond recorded in heraldry.
Whereas Celia in As You Like It asked, “shall we be sunder’d” by harsh circumstances, Helena’s is a more psychological question—“And will you rent our ancient love asunder?”—which clearly echoes the Anglican marriage ceremony, with its “Those whom God hath joined to
gether, let no man put asunder.” She is not accusing Hermia here of taking her man, but of something rather more subtle: letting men into the secret garden of girls’ love. The irony is that it is Helena herself who, by falling so hard for Demetrius and becoming possessed by the demons of jealousy, could be said to have “rent our ancient love asunder.” At the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream both women do “join with men” (each marrying the one she wants), and though they are all officially friends again, it is significant that Shakespeare does not show Hermia and Helena speaking another line to each other.
A much darker version of this rivalry powers Nicholas Rowe’s The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714), one of the most frequently produced plays in eighteenth-century England. When Jane’s affair with King Edward leads to disaster, she runs to her childhood friend Alice in search of an emotional haven, volunteering to “give up Mankind”38 and be her loving “Partner.” Here friendship joins forces with a fervent proto-feminism—a subject that Rowe helped to introduce to the early-eighteenth-century stage. Alice seems to welcome Jane as her “other self,” and makes a vow in the tradition of the book of Ruth.
Be witness of this Truth, the holy Friendship,
Which here to this my other self I vow.
If I not hold her nearer to my Soul,
Than ev’ry other Joy the World can give,
Let Poverty, Deformity and Shame,
Distraction and Despair seize me on Earth.
But in fact the garden has already been desecrated: Alice, jealous of her male lover’s interest in the unwitting Jane, means to destroy her. When Jane finally comes to Alice’s door as a starving beggar, Alice rejects her in language that reveals a desire turned inside out:
See where she comes! Once my Heart’s dearest Blessing,
Now my chang’d Eyes are blasted with her Beauty;
Loath that known Face, and sicken to behold her.
It is interesting that in both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tragedy of Jane Shore, a storyline of bitter alienation evokes (whether nostalgically or perversely) a lost world of female eroticism.
Often, however, at least one of the friends will rise above jealousy, saving the inseparables from being alienated. Catharine Trotter—a prodigy who published her first novel at fourteen—centered her eloquent tragedy Agnes de Castro (1696) on a passionate friendship between two women. The remarkable Princess Constantia insists that her husband and her lifelong friend Agnes
share my divided Heart39
So equally, I cannot tell myself
To which I have given most…
For you are both so equal dear to me,
So closely wove by Fate to my fond breast,
That neither can be sever’d from my love,
Without unravelling this Web of Life.
Constantia describes her divided loyalties in surprisingly positive terms as a “Web of Life.” By contrast, the equally strong Agnes is a one-woman woman, who adores Constantia and feels only friendship for the Prince. He, a more helpless character, is beginning to fall in love with her. Shaken to learn it, Princess Constantia nonetheless resists the predictability of a resentful response.
My Reason must approve the Prince’s choice,
For I my self, prefer her to my self,
And love her too, as tenderly as he.
She insists that the triangle formed by the Prince’s and Agnes’s love of Constantia is only reinforced by the new triangle superimposed on it: the Prince’s and Constantia’s love of Agnes. Since sexual competition is not enough to break up the threesome, Trotter has to bring in an outside factor to begin the tragic “unravelling” of the “Web”: a conspiracy of enemies who are jealous of the women’s intimacy. And the plotters’ victory is a Pyrrhic one, because when both our heroines have been fatally stabbed, Agnes has a vision of the other side, where no hearts need be divided:
I shall meet my Princess where I go,
And our unspotted Souls, in Bliss above,
Will know each other, and again will love.
Over the eighteenth40 and nineteenth centuries, it became a cliché for one or both heroines to make a noble withdrawal from the battlefield, sacrificing a man’s love for the sake of the adored woman. Sharon Marcus finds throughout Victorian fiction “an altruistic exchange41 economy in which women do not compete for men but instead give them to each other.” Often the bewildered fellow is not even consulted, but thrown around like a hot potato.
One of the only authors to allow her characters self-consciousness about the jealousy plot is Charlotte Brontë in Shirley (1849)—her most political, peculiar, and unpopular novel, an indictment of the different oppressions of women and workers in mid-nineteenth-century England. Shirley, a whistling Yorkshire landowner who boasts of having “a touch of manhood,”42 forms an intense, flirtatious friendship with the thoughtful, impoverished Caroline; she lays a bouquet in her friend’s lap, for instance, with “the aspect of a grave but gallant little cavalier.” (Shirley is an exception to the rule that says inseparables must be feminine. It has recently been suggested43 that her characterization may owe something to a contemporary Yorkshirewoman whom Emily Brontë lived very near in 1838–39, the mannish landowner Anne Lister, whose diaries—not decoded and published till 1988—chart her affairs with a variety of more ladylike partners.)
When Shirley goes for a walk with Caroline’s beloved cousin Robert, Caroline (clearly well versed in English fiction) leaps to the conclusion that she will have to sacrifice Robert to her infinitely superior friend, then flee. But Shirley rejects that hackneyed storyline. Not that she denies that things have been changed by Robert’s arrival: she describes her bond with Caroline as a shining thing like the sun or moon, “but that six feet of puppyhood makes a perpetually recurring eclipse of our friendship. Again and again he crosses and obscures the disk I want always to see clear.” Shirley’s candor about what she calls “the black eclipse” shocks the reserved Caroline into making her own declaration of
affection that no passion can ultimately outrival, with which even love itself cannot do more than compete in force and truth. Love hurts us so, Shirley: it is so tormenting, so racking, and it burns away our strength with its flame; in affection is no pain and no fire, only sustenance and balm. I am supported and soothed when you—that is, you only—are near, Shirley.
In this interesting passage, Caroline begins by identifying “affection” for a woman and “love” for a man as two different, equal forces that “compete” with each other. But in her next sentence she backs off, trying to recast them as complementary—love burning, affection pouring on the balm. (The vocabulary is highly traditional: in Sir John Suckling’s Brennoralt [1646] we heard women’s love for each other described as “less scortching” than men’s.) This ambiguity is fundamental to Brontë’s novel: will their friendship “soothe” and “support” Caroline and Shirley as they struggle toward marriage, or will the love of men “outrival” the friendship in the end? For all the originality of the “black eclipse” scene, Brontë ends up resorting to the substitute brother trick, as in As You Like It; a brother of Robert’s turns up for Shirley to marry, so Caroline can have Robert, the two women can set up a school, and they can all live happily ever after together. The eleventh-hour appearance44 of a brother—so handy, as we saw, for winding up female bridegroom stories—is just as convenient for bringing two inseparables together again, either by marrying one to the other’s brother, or both to a pair of brothers.
Sometimes the narrative sequence is reversed: rather than beloved friends becoming rivals, rivals are transmuted into beloved friends. Here the man begins as a wedge between them, but becomes more like a bridge. The earliest example45 may be Marie de France’s lai Eliduc (written sometime before 1189), in which Guildeluec, gazing at her husband’s mistress, who is in a coma, is so ravished by her beauty that she heals her with a magic flower, then volunteers to become a nun to allow the other two to marry.
From the seventeenth century46 to the n
ineteenth, then, there are few plots in English literature more popular than that of female friendship under fire. Generally women fight to preserve their bond at all costs. That bond may be pre-, post-, or extramarital, or neatly interlocked with marriage in the form of a three- or four-person family.
Only occasionally do writers drop hints that, as Brontë’s Caroline says (before correcting herself), the bond may “compete” directly with women’s love for men. A buried resentment often comes closest to the surface at the point where one woman tells her friend she is getting married. In Hedged In, a novel of 1870 by American spiritualist/feminist activist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, the mutually devoted factory girls Christina (another of those Christlike names) and Eunice finally manage to form a female household with Christina’s mother and Eunice’s long-lost child—but then Christina gets engaged. Once over the shock, Eunice praises the bridegroom, and makes the bridal clothes.
It was noticed,47 through the day, that Eunice was somewhat more than commonly pale, and that, though she was busy, in and out, here and there, up and down, smiling much, that it was she who tied the flowers, who trimmed the rooms, who dressed and veiled and gloved and kissed Christina, and stopped her (so Christina says) on her way down stairs, to lead her into the gray room, and close the door, and fold her into her arms, and move her lips a little as if she would have spoken; yet, speaking not a word, unwound her arms, unlatched the door, and led her, by the hand all the way, down stairs,—that through all the day she was very silent.
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