But the inseparables are unaware that their drunk-on-love conversations and embraces are being spied on by the “secret witness” of the novel’s subtitle, Constantia’s rakish suitor Ormond. Sophia does not like the sound of this mercenary soldier, a “competitor17 in her [Constantia’s] affections.” She moves quickly to secure Constantia’s promise to settle in England with her and her meek husband. Eavesdropping on this betrayal, Ormond is filled with rage. He confronts Constantia, ranting about having spied on the women’s “rapturous effusions” and “romantic passion”; he is well aware “that thy affections and person were due to another.” “Person” here means “body”; he is hinting that she has committed herself physically as well as emotionally. In this strange scene, the rake sounds like nothing so much as a cuckolded husband. It is as if the oddity of such an embodied passion between women has canceled out, in his mind, the irregularity of his claim to Constantia’s fidelity. Appalled to hear of this accusation, Sophia examines her conscience: “On reviewing what had passed between Constantia and me, I recollected nothing incompatible with purity and rectitude.” But the technical chastity of such a bond is no comfort to Ormond, or defense against his outrage; like Brockden Brown’s modern readers, the rake glimpses the sexual in what is not strictly sex. (As early as 1949, Harry R. Warfel was complaining of Constantia that “emotions of normal love18 are alien to her nature, and there seems to be a homosexual tendency in her conduct.”) In the novel’s gripping climax, Ormond corners Constantia in a locked room. Here the plot contrasts with that of Clarissa so clearly that Brockden Brown almost seems to be rebuking Richardson for letting his heroine get raped: rather than surrender, Constantia stabs Ormond to death with a penknife. Sophia turns up to shepherd her through a quick trial that finds her innocent of murder, then nurses her through the consequent breakdown before carrying her off to England. Interestingly, in the bellicose triangle of Sophia, Constantia, and Ormond, Sophia has to “win” Constantia away from her “competitor,” whereas in the more harmonious triangle of Constantia, Sophia, and Courtland—in which the husband accepts a secondary place—it need never come to blows.
Suffrage Parade, New York City, May 4, 1912.
This anonymous press photo of one of a number of mass rallies demanding the vote for women (finally won in 1920) emphasizes the suffragists as mothers and captures a moment of intense eye contact.
FEMINISTS VS. HUSBANDS
But husbands are not always so meekly compliant, nor are the friends always willing to share space with a marriage. Although most novels, throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, would continue to present marriage as completely compatible with female friendship, sometimes we can hear the rumblings of women’s discontent with such an arrangment.
Perhaps the earliest example is Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millenium Hall (1762), not so much a utopia as a novel about the formation of a small utopian community by various escapees from orthodox womanhood. One of them is Miss Melvyn: forced to marry the horrible, aged Mr. Morgan, she knows that marriage will somewhat constrain her inseparable bond with her childhood friend Miss Mancel, but she has no idea that her husband is harboring a strange jealousy. (I say strange because apart from nasty-minded rakes, men in eighteenth-century fiction tend to view love between women with approval, or, at worst, indifference.) The day after the wedding Mr. Morgan refuses to let Miss Mancel visit, telling his wife, “Madam, my wife19 must have no other companion or friend but her husband; I shall never be averse to your seeing company, but intimates I forbid.” Mrs. Morgan is as “stunned” by this as if hit by lightning, and bursts into tears.
“I did not want this proof,” resumed Mr Morgan, “that I have but a small share of your affections; and were I inclined to grant your request, you could not have found a better means of preventing it; for I will have no person in my house more beloved than myself. When you have no other friend,” added he with a malicious smile, “I may hope for the honour of that title.”
He is a villain, but almost a tragic one: his resentful logic may make more sense to modern readers than to those of the 1760s, since he has seen what we see, that the friend is indeed “more beloved,” leaving him only a “small share” in his wife’s affections. He does not phrase it in terms of a same-sex preference—he shows no signs of caring what it means about his wife that her beloved is a woman—but he knows there is a battle going on. The irony is that by fighting so dirty, by keeping his miserable wife away from her friend for years and years, Mr. Morgan is never going to win, since love—unlike marriage—cannot be compelled. Sarah Scott finally punishes him with a mysterious paralysis; speechless, he must submit to being nursed to death by his saintly rival, Miss Mancel, who has returned to claim her beloved.
It is by his hostility to women’s intimacy—so peculiar for a husband of his time—that Mr. Morgan proves himself to be as much a tyrant as any wife beater. (It is hard to avoid reading this storyline as autobiographical, although Sarah Scott did not meekly wait for a merciful Providence to release her from her own awful marriage: she walked out after just a few months and spent the rest of her life with a woman.) But it is also political: Millenium Hall is a sort of manifesto of the “bluestocking circle”—bookish women, of proto-feminist tendencies.
The women’s community in Millenium Hall is only founded after the Morgan marriage is over, but in nineteenth-century novels, feminism—the Cause, as those first-wave British activists of the 1850s often called it—sometimes takes hold of the heroine before she gets safely hitched. The best example is The Rebel of the Family (1880) by Eliza Lynn Linton, a journalist and novelist (and, again, separated wife) notorious for her attack on the “New Woman” of the day. The young post office worker Perdita, struggling to break free of the expected feminine role, has a name that suggests she is in danger of being “lost.” She meets Bell Blount, a garishly dressed separated wife and feminist, whose name suggests her handsomeness and her blunt manners. Bell tells Perdita seductively, “I can give you all you want20—work, love, freedom and an object. I want nothing in return but your love and that you will let me guide you.” Perdita’s mother tries to make her give up this unsuitable friend, but the girl resists, as enthralled as someone “about to be admitted into a secret sect” and “initiated into those hidden mysteries.” (This is Linton’s nod toward the more lurid French tradition of writing about lesbian monstrosity that I will explore in chapter 4.) Bell claims the girl, with a pseudomotherly “kiss of adoption,” as “one of us!—the friend of woman and the enemy of man.”
Bell may hate men but the joke is that she models herself on them too, in both blunt manners and lifestyle. What complicates her overtures to Perdita nicely is that she has done this before: she left her own husband and children for a woman called Connie. Far from representing a radical alternative to the stifling codes of marriage, she calls Connie “my little wife”21 and expects her to act as (as the narrator puts it nastily) “lady’s maid, milliner, housekeeper, amanuensis, panegyrist in public, flatterer and slave in private.” And like many a Victorian husband, Bell has a roving eye: she invites Perdita to “come and chum with us” as a housemate, masking her sexual intentions by presenting herself and Connie as mentors:
“And if you want love,” said Bell, putting her arm tenderly round Connie Tracy; “You have it here—the best and truest that the world can give—the love between women without the degrading and disturbing influence of men.”
“Yes, I know,” said Perdita, a little blankly.
The women’s home is bare and messy, bottles of beer and cigarettes everywhere. Despite Perdita’s “fascination” with Bell, we are told that the older woman’s physical overtures “chilled and repelled” her from the start, because Bell is “one of those sphinxes which are beast and human in one.” (As for Connie, she suffers tortures of jealousy. Linton points out snidely that she is as subservient as a man’s wife but as insecure as his mistress, since she is bound to “her woman-‘husband’” with no
legal security.)
Once a male rival presents himself—a gentle pharmacist with the oddly sapphic name of Leslie—it is obvious which way Perdita will go. The crisis of The Rebel of the Family comes when Bell tries to force Perdita to join her on the platform at a suffrage meeting, and Leslie turns up in time to dissuade her. But Bell does not give up without a fight. Connie, walking in on Bell and Perdita in an embrace sometime later, takes delight in dropping the bombshell about the male suitor: “She will never be one of us.”22 The outraged Bell punishes her fallen idol by telling Perdita’s mother about Leslie, unsuitable husband material because he happens (like Mr. Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre) to have a mad wife in the attic. But hundreds of pages later he is finally freed, by widowhood, to marry Perdita and save her from the feminists. Compared with the creepy, oppressive simulacrum that is marriage between women, ordinary marriage is offered as a safer bet.
Biographers have pointed out the difficulty in classifying such writers as Eliza Lynn Linton as antifeminist, because although they attacked “the Cause,” they seemed to endorse female independence in both private and public life. The Rebel of the Family is a crude but intriguing commentary on the condition of women and the changing image of their pair-bonds. The novel is marked by23 an ambivalence not only about feminism but about desire between women: patently hostile to Bell and all she so “bluntly” promotes, it still offers her as a memorable, oddly seductive figure. Interestingly, although Bell is not described as being like a man in features or clothes, her manner is the epitome of what we would now call butch. “The masculine lady24 who inveigles Perdita into her friendship, is a character too odious, and the scenes in which she appears too repulsive, even for comment,” shuddered the Academy, but the Saturday Review decided Bell was worth commenting on:
[Linton’s] portrait of Mrs Blount, or Bell Blount, as she preferred to be called, is as forcible as it is unsparing. In executing it with complete fidelity, the author has once or twice had to deal with somewhat risky matters, and has dealt with them with marked skill. The scenes in which Bell Blount figures cannot possibly be pleasant, in the sense in which a pretty landscape is pleasant, and some of their features are markedly unpleasing; but Mrs Linton knows where to insist and where to touch lightly, and the whole result is what no doubt she aimed at—to exhibit in a strong light some of the absurdities, and worse than absurdities, connected with a movement which she seems to dislike. The character is, as we have said, drawn with considerable strength, and in many of its touches there is a strong, if grim, sense of humour.
I have quoted this review at such length because its language exhibits a strange overspill of masculinity from Bell to her author: it is Eliza Lynn Linton’s writing that is described as “forcible,” “unsparing,” tackling “risky matters” with “marked skill” and “considerable strength” like some death-defying adventurer. She even “knows where to insist and where to touch lightly,” which makes her sound like some bodice-ripping Lothario. The reviewer may find Bell’s scenes “unpleasing,” but he seems fascinated both by her and by her equally masterful creator. It is hardly surprising25 that he focuses on this issue, because Linton’s characterization of a butch (though not cross-dressing) lesbian was almost unprecedented.
One of Linton’s correspondents, on and off for a decade, was the novelist Henry James, an American who spent most of his life in his adopted country, England. Published six years after The Rebel of the Family, his novel The Bostonians (1886) has a very similar structure—a girl must decide between a feminist activist and a male suitor—and ends with an almost identical showdown over a speaking engagement. But in James’s arrangement, the feminist is much more appealing than Bell Blount and has no other “little wife” to hand, so the stakes are much higher. James conceived of the novel on a visit to his family in Boston in 1883, and later explained his untypical choice of such an overtly political topic:
I wished to write26 a very American tale, a tale very characteristic of our social conditions, and I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point in our social life. The answer was: the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf.
He insists that this is not a narrow or minor story, then, but one that says a lot about men, women, America, and the times. Badly reviewed on first publication, The Bostonians—with its perceptive characterization, intense drama, and wry narrative style—is now recognized as a masterpiece.
The rich, nervous spinster Olive Chancellor (her name probably echoing Olivia from Twelfth Night) and her poor southern lawyer cousin Basil Ransom are both young and single-minded in their pursuit of the innocent and even younger Verena Tarrant, an inspirational speaker from a vulgar family. They each use the weapons of their own sex. The night they both meet Verena, for instance, it is Olive, as a lady with a home and an established name in Boston, who can seize the initiative and befriend her; Basil, the male stranger in town, is kept at bay by protocol. Over the weeks that follow, Olive courts Verena rather frantically, because of “her sense that she found27 here what she had been looking for so long—a friend of her own sex with whom she might have a union of soul.” She is aware that her passion is not yet reciprocated and offers to wait—but a page later she is suggesting that Verena should move in so her “protectress” can shape the girl’s talent for oratory. “Olive had taken her up, in the literal sense of the phrase, like a bird of the air, had spread an extraordinary pair of wings, and carried her through the dizzying void of space.” The image suggests an eagle stealing a lamb.
For his part, Basil is a misogynist with a chip on his shoulder who seizes every opportunity to undermine Olive. But love between women has a peculiar status in the world of The Bostonians. The pairing of educated, New England female couples in what was commonly known as “Boston marriage,” and the jealous wish to hold on to one’s “friend” for life—this is taken for granted (and not called unhealthy or perverse) by most of the characters. (What James does not mention when describing his choice of theme for The Bostonians is that his invalid sister Alice had recently settled into a partnership with a beloved woman, Katherine Loring. It is far from clear whether Alice, as the brilliant hysteric, or Loring—the possessive intruder, as several of the Jameses saw her—is the main model for Olive Chancellor.) By offering the rivals a fairly level playing field, James never makes it clear who will win, which gives the suspense another turn of the screw. He also balances his sympathies cleverly, switching point of view between the two and satirizing everyone.
After Verena moves in with Olive, the two study, go to concerts, and occasionally embrace or kiss, and Olive keeps Verena secluded even from their colleagues. (In one of her seedier moments, she secretly pays the girl’s crass parents to stay away.) Verena is more and more enthralled:
The fine web of authority,28 of dependence, that her strenuous companion had woven about her, was now as dense as a suit of golden mail…Her share in the union of the two young women was no longer passive, purely appreciative; it was passionate, too.
However, Olive keeps looking over her shoulder for potential dangers, longing to “extract some definite pledge” that “would bind them together for life.” Her feminist scruples prevent her from letting Verena promise not to marry any man. Instead of admitting that she wants to possess Verena for herself, Olive puts the onus on the girl to work her way through “a certain phase” (meaning interest in men) before choosing a life of dedication and “sacrifice” to the cause, a sort of “priesthood.”
Just as with Richardson’s Anna, this high-mindedness is Olive’s weakness. It becomes clear that “Boston marriage” between women, for all its respectability, is not seen by most people as any bar to the “real” marriage that awaits a charming girl. “Don’t attempt the impossible,”29 Mrs. Burrage advises Olive, trying to bribe her into persuading Verena to marry Mrs. Burrage’s rich, pleasant son; this harks back to the Renaissance notion of love between women as an exquisite amor impo
ssibilis. The real threat, however, is from Basil, who takes up his interest in Verena again partly out of animosity toward his cousin Olive. He sees Verena heading toward “ruin” (a highly sexual word) as she trains to be a feminist orator, and he toys with the idea of “rescue”: “She was meant for something divinely different—for privacy, for him, for love.” In Basil’s slow and covert courtship of Verena, he is more strategic than the other suitors, and cleverer than Olive; more playful, less direct. He pumps the women’s friends for information about Verena and her whereabouts; he pretends to fully respect both their “tremendous partnership” and Verena’s speaking talents, while privately determining that “if he should become her husband he should know a way to strike her dumb.”
Verena is no pushover: she is impatient with Basil, and keeps insisting to Olive that she is “more wedded30 to all our old dreams than ever.” But her use of the word wedded may remind the reader that female union is no legal marriage. Basil charms her into a secret correspondence, casting “a spell upon her,” much as Olive did first; James shows the two cousins as oddly similar in their wooing. As the plot moves toward a showdown, Verena panics, embraces Olive, and cries, “Take me away, take me away!” But Olive lacks Basil’s masculine confidence; although she does bring Verena to a rural retreat—a houseful of women on Cape Cod—she does not lock the door the way a husband would. When Basil comes “to take possession,” the “double flame” that was Verena’s love for Olive and her commitment to feminism is snuffed out into “colourless dust” by his “magical” power. As he sees it, the women’s friendship is only a “flimsy” pretext for Verena to refuse him; “he wanted to know since when it was more becoming to take up with a morbid old maid than with an honourable young man.” Without ever naming31 Verena’s relationship with Olive as sexual, he portrays it as profoundly unimportant, and “morbid”—which is one of those words (like sentimental, intense, languid, and dangerous) often used as code for lesbian in the late nineteenth century.
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