Sex variant women in literature

Introduction

That no variant material remains from the ten centuries following Alciphron is hardly surprising, since so little record of any sort has survived. An oral literature of heroic tales and folk humor must have flourished throughout the Middle Ages; narratives in the earliest vernacular manuscripts bear many marks of such ancestry. But if anything was written down before the eleventh century it doubtless shared the fate of Charlemagne’s collection of Frankish tales, which were destroyed by his son, Louis the Pious, because of their pagan character.

By the twelfth century written literature was increasing rapidly, and early in the thirteenth we find incorporated in a medieval romance the first known variant episode since Alciphron’s light-hearted and bawdy tale. Its appearance did not, however, herald any sustained use of variance as a literary theme, and to appreciate its significance and that of the few subsequent examples prior to the eighteenth century, one needs for background some over-all view of the status of woman in medieval society. To put it briefly, woman was regarded in two antithetical lights: as angel and as devil. We have already noted that from the outset Christian theology saw her as responsible for the fall of man and, therefore, as the root of all sexual evil. This derogatory opinion was reinforced after the third century by infiltrations from the dualistic religion of Persia. Manicheism divided the universe into God’s divine and incorporeal kingdom of light and the souls of men, and a realm of darkness comprising the material world and men’s bodies, the province of the Devil. Since woman’s reproductive function bound her closer to the flesh than man was bound, her burden of original sin was so much the greater. In the later Middle Ages serious philosophical debate arose as to whether she was a complete human being possessed of a soul, or merely a breeder for the superior race of men.

If today such views seem incredible, they gain reality when one remembers the outbreaks of witchcraft from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries and the dreadful measures taken to suppress witches as followers of Satan. Modern psychologists tend to diagnose those epidemics as hysteria on the part of the bewitched and of the culprits themselves, who frequently confessed to intimacy with the Devil. Certain historians of the occult, however, offer convincing evidence that organized witchcraft was a survival from ancient fertility cults widespread in Europe, of Druidic or even earlier origin; cults which had worshipped a god in the semblance of an animal—most often a goat—and whose rites, as in all known fertility cults, were sexual.[1]

Records of witches’ trials show that leaders of covens and more especially of the great orgiastic sabbaths appeared as “black men,” usually equipped with horns, tails and hooves, and that their followers credited them with supernatural powers and literally worshipped them as legates of a god or as the god himself. The animal disguise so exactly fitted the medieval concepts of Satan that Christian heretic-hunters quite naturally equated witchcraft with devil worship, recorded it as such, and reacted accordingly. No apologia for witchcraft is intended by this suggestion. If one grants “wise women” a knowledge of poisonous herbs and of rudimentary hypnosis, and also, as midwives, the opportunity to procure the bodies of stillborn infants for their horrid magic-working concoctions, the ugliest charges against them become plausible. Then, too, there is little doubt that sexual licence of all sorts was common at the quarterly sabbaths if not at all smaller gatherings. It is particularly noteworthy that the male leaders of these festivals had female partners, supposedly for the benefit of the few attending warlocks; but the record of at least one trial states that the celebrants “usually” consorted with leaders of the opposite sex,[2] an indication that at times they must have consorted with their own. And from secondary sources one learns that witches generally were credited with “masculine” sexual tastes and habits. Thus, homosexual practices, in themselves anathema, were associated also with witchcraft, the blackest of all possible heresies.

In sharp contrast to this negative view of woman there existed at the same time a cult of woman-worship first articulated by the Provençal troubadours and later immortalized by Dante. It celebrated the ennobling and exalting influence of love for a pure woman, who, since she had transcended both common human frailty and the special aptitude of her sex for evil, deserved a twofold reverence. In its religious aspect this worship centered about the Virgin Mary and found expression in the naïvely human legends which grew up about her.[3] As her invariable championship of the underdog, man or woman, innocent or guilty, appears to be merely an apotheosis of the maternal instinct, these legends do not concern us here.

On the secular side, adoration of woman flowered in the convention of courtly love, that concept of passionate devotion without overt reward which seems more often to have been celebrated in the breach than in the observance. From this idealistic code of sexual relations stemmed the copious literature of medieval romance, and indeed of subsequent romantic fiction, in all of which the parallel worship of purity and of overwhelming passion provides the basic conflict. And until the eighteenth century, romantic fiction was the almost exclusive vehicle—at least on the reputable level—for variant incident, which therefore remained technically beyond reproach.

Taken together, then, the two contradictory views of woman just outlined provide, as it were, a philosophical portrait of her as she appeared to the later Middle Ages. There is also a practical picture more difficult to delineate because less was written about it at the time. Its early background in particular is obscure, since so very little is known about women during the Dark Ages. Some anthropologists hold that among Germanic peoples women were highly regarded; monogamy was the universal practice even before the advent of Christianity; women fought beside men in emergency; and certainly the Teutonic Valkyrie are a match for the Amazons of ancient Greece. Other social historians point out that the earliest epics, sagas, and chansons de geste celebrate only the valor of men whose deeds insured the survival of their folk-groups, and in these tales women play negligible roles. It is known, too, that under feudalism in some parts of Europe women were treated as little more than adjuncts to the land holdings they inherited, and were promised in marriage by male relatives, sometimes when scarcely out of the cradle, with the sole end of cementing politically profitable jointures of territory.[4] Whatever the truth may be—and it is certain that no single truth can hold for so heterogeneous a geographic and temporal span as Europe in the Dark Ages—we come to relatively stable ground only with the crusades and the transition from feudalism to chivalry.

For perhaps a dozen generations from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries many men of all classes were drawn off on ever-widening military campaigns, civil or religious. Thus, the management of affairs at home devolved to some extent upon women. Of the effect on lower-class women we know little that is specific, though the hysteria of witchcraft suggests one result of numerical imbalance between the sexes on that level. On the upper social levels history tells us that many women managed their lords’ estates, dispensed justice, marshalled armed forces when necessary, and sometimes even led those forces against rival lords—a circumstance commoner in Italy and southern France than in regions farther north. Consequently, these women acquired considerable learning. Hitherto even literacy had not been too common among laymen aside from those destined for very high positions, but it is probable that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries women were better educated than men of the same class, the latter being engaged in more strenuous pursuits. It is known that women were in charge of hospitals during this period, and a few rose to the status of lecturers in Italian universities.[5]

The long period of men’s absences and women’s widening responsibility resulted, as always under such circumstances, in a certain feminization of social outlook, evident in the burgeoning of courtly love. Today statistical reading studies show that sex is a prime factor in determining reading interests and that romantic fiction is predominantly a feminine taste.[6] Historic evidence of these facts can be seen in the rapid spread of chivalric romance between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

The earliest romances written down in the twelfth century were comparatively simple and direct, showing close relation to the epics and chansons de geste which preceded them. Subsequently, partly because crusaders brought home oriental tales of intricacy and sophistication exceeding any style current in Europe, plots incorporated magical and fantastic elements and developed greater elaboration. Still later, after the revival of classical learning in the early renaissance, pastorals developed in rough imitation of Latin models, but with plot structure nearer that of their medieval narrative sources.

Medieval and Renaissance Fiction

The first romance mentioned by students of this genre as containing anything relevant to sex variance is Huon of Bordeaux, which appeared in French about 1220. (It has been consulted by the present writer only in the English translation of Lord Berners, first printed in 1543.) The tale was basically a derivative from the Charlemagne cycle or “Matter of France,” and the first part, though incorporating fantasy in the person of Oberon, King of the Fairies, runs fairly true to its source. But like many popular stories it acquired sequels, and when the action reaches the third generation we find Huon’s granddaughter, Ide, serving among the Holy Roman Emperor’s forces in the guise of a knight, a feministic touch alien to the original epic.

In recognition of her prowess Ide is given the Emperor’s daughter in marriage, and cannot refuse the honor without dangerous offense to her overlord. The princess Olive is in love with her fiancé. Ide’s own emotions are not described—one of the author’s subtle devices for exploiting a piquant situation without involving his heroine in moral obliquity. Another is his weaving of an inescapable net of circumstance in preliminary chapters to prevent Ide’s either fleeing as a lone knight errant or returning to her father’s domains in her feminine role—the one course meant disgraceful death, the other involvement in incest. So the reader is free to follow with good conscience Ide’s submission to the marriage ceremony, her pretence of illness as excuse for inadequacy on the bridal night, and the unelaborated account of her attempt to satisfy her bride with “clyppynge and kyssynge” throughout the eight days of the wedding feast. When this technique is pursued for another week, however, the bride’s bitter grief forces Ide to confess her sex, and the confession, carried to the Emperor by an eavesdropping page, results in his decreeing that Ide be burned, “for he sayd he wold not suffre suche boggery to be used.” The fire is actually kindled before Ide’s frantic prayers to God and the Virgin save her (as Ovid’s Iphis was saved at the altar) by miraculous transformation into a man. Beyond a doubt considerable physical intimacy is implied here, though none so specific as in Martial or Lucian. And it appears that death was not an excessive penalty for such intimacy if wilfully indulged in, though again the mores reflected must be taken as a hybrid between those of the tenth century, in which the story was laid, and the thirteenth, in which it was written down.

It is possible that this sequel to Huon owed something to a collection of oriental tales which doubtless entered Europe during the period of the crusades, though they were not published until the sixteenth century and are believed to have been rewritten at that time (as La Fleur Lascive Orientale).[7] One of these, “The Princess Amany,” recounts the adventure of a daughter of the “emperor” of Tartary. Converted to Islam by a highly educated nurse, Amany avoids marriage to a “pagan” by flight in male clothing. During her wanderings, she has a liaison with a “farmer’s” wife, and then rescues the Indian princess, Dorrat, from violation by slaying her abductor. For half a year she supports herself and the lady, who does not know her sex, by her prowess in hunting and marauding. Having arrived in India, the two marry at the emperor’s decree. Up to this point, only Dorrat has been emotionally involved, Amany being still half in love with the Tartar prince from whom she fled on religious grounds. But when Dorrat, disillusioned on her bridal night, attempts suicide, Amany becomes physically excited in the course of the struggle to save her, and the two live in complete marital intimacy for a month. Then the Tartar prince, now converted, appears and marries them both (happy Islam!), whereupon both ladies discover that they prefer the embraces of a man to each other’s. Even an elementary acquaintance with oriental literature will suggest that this tale is a hybrid well cross-fertilized with Christian chivalry, upon which it may have left its reciprocal traces.

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An Italian renaissance example of female sex variance appears in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1531). Ariosto’s predecessor, Boiardo, in treating the same Roland material, cast as heroine the completely feminine Angelica, but Ariosto gave the lead to Bradamante, a young Amazon in full armor whose exploits equalled and sometimes exceeded those of the male knights. Indeed, Ariosto’s version has been cited as feministic because of her prominence in the plot.[8] We need consider only Canto 25, which tells how Bradamante while suffering from a head wound is shorn of her hair, and thereafter is universally mistaken for her twin brother. Sleeping one day in the forest she is discovered by “young Flordespine of Spain,” whose instant infatuation is so violent that Bradamante is wakened by a passionate kiss. Since in the chivalric code “cravenhood it were, befitting man of straw” not to respond, she at once confesses her sex. The disclosure has no effect upon the young princess’ ardor. Taking Bradamante home, Flordespine showers her with rich woman’s apparel and gifts, and laments all day—in almost the very words of Ovid’s Iphis—that she should be cursed with a love the like of which she has never met “mid mankind or herd.” Bradamante feels no answering attraction, but nothing indicates that either girl considers this love to be sinful. It is merely “unnatural.”

In the morning Bradamante quickly departs, to relieve a misery she cannot assuage.

And now follows an interesting inversion of the theme. When Bradamante recounts her adventure at home, her twin brother, recognizing in Flordespine a beauty whom he has long admired but has had no chance to approach, makes off in secret in his sister’s knightly trappings and seeks the Spanish castle in her place. The princess welcomes him with rapture, again supplies woman’s dress, and only at night discovers his sex, which the boy, still posing as his sister, attributes to a timely bit of magic. The two live together for several weeks before the truth is learned by anyone else.

Comparison of this treatment with that in Huon of Bordeaux points up the literary and social changes which have intervened. Nothing could testify more clearly to the altered role of religion than the absence of moral judgment and the sex change through benevolent magic instead of divine intervention. This and the verbal echo of Ovid throughout Flordespine’s long lament (only partially quoted above) show to what extent the Revival of Learning had bred familiarity with classical word and temper. There is also here a greater psychological subtlety, natural to growing humanism. Though Flordespine’s passion is roused by her mistaking Bradamante for a man and satisfied only by sex-reversal, her initial emotion is unaltered by her enlightenment, and the brother whom she accepts is so feminine in both appearance and action that an entire household is deceived for weeks. Thus the Spanish princess exhibits definite psychological variance. It is interesting that the knightly Bradamante remains unmoved throughout and that Flordespine, the petite, impulsive, eminently feminine member of the pair, takes the initiative in the whole business.

Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral Arcadia, circulated among friends in 1580 though not published till a decade later, shows a similar relation to both medieval and classical sources. Here, as in the second part of Ariosto’s episode, the hero masquerades as an Amazon, in order to gain access to a princess whose family is living in pastoral seclusion for political reasons. The heroine’s father is completely taken in and himself conceives a passion for the handsome stranger. His wife, several decades his junior, is only briefly deceived but holds her peace because she is similarly smitten. Thanks to the separate jealous machinations of these two, all the hero’s efforts to reveal his secret to his love are balked, but within a few weeks his passion has communicated itself to the girl. And now we have the moral scruples which regularly distinguish English from continental literature. They are given vividly in Sidney’s own words:

There could scarcely be a more economical record of how girls were taught to regard homosexual passion in sixteenth century England; of the heroine’s ignorance that any satisfaction of the desire was possible; and of her blameless rectitude, for she has both her mother and her idol as examples, and the reader knows that she is under the spell of legitimate sex attraction. That Sidney’s own moral attitude was not necessarily his heroine’s is suggested only in his wording of an oracle’s prophecy to her father earlier: “Thy youngest shall with nature’s bliss embrace An uncouth love, which nature hateth most” [author’s italics.] Still, he was careful that Zelmane’s secret should become known to the princess before the pair had opportunity for so much as a kiss.

The Arcadia is cited in Iwan Bloch’s Sex Life in England as the first instance of lesbian love in English literature, but Bloch bases his claim on a night the princess and her sister spent together. He does not mention that they were sisters; however, it is not the kinship which invalidates his statement. It is true that the text reads: “... there cherishing one another with deere, though chaste embracements, with sweet, though cold kisses; it might seem that Love was come to play him there without darte; or that weerie of his owne fires, he was there to refresh himselfe betweene their sweete-breathing lippes.” But the reason for their embrace was that both were suffering from hopeless loves, and, too shy to share confidences even by candlelight, had agreed that “they might talke better as they lay together.” Bloch, however, makes his point from the statement that “they impoverished their cloathes to inriche their bed, which for that night might well scorne the shrine of Venus,” interpreting this to mean that they made elaborate preparation for a night of love, however cold and chaste Sidney claimed it to be.[11] The proper sense of the elaborate Elizabethan conceit is, of course, simply that they released their own loveliness from their garments and laid themselves on the bed which was thus more “inriched” than a shrine bearing an image of Venus herself.

A French pastoral making use of the same theme is d’Urfé’s Astrée, published serially between 1607 and 1620. This vast work, running to some 5500 pages, has not been examined, but Maurice Magendie’s L’Astrée d’Honoré D’Urfé gives an adequate notion of its significant points. Laid in Merovingian times, it is bound anachronistically by the strictest rules of courtly love, which made a lady’s lightest word law for her lover. Thus, once banished by his offended lady’s decree, the hero Céladon may not re-enter her presence without specific summons. After a volume of misadventure he contrives to return by impersonating Alexis, daughter of a Druid priest whose casuistry reconciles him to this evasion of Astrée’s orders. Since Astrée has long mourned him as dead she is unlikely to summon him, but until she does, “Alexis” cannot reveal his identity. Her new friend’s phenomenal resemblance to her lost lover provokes in Astrée an infatuation which, however well accounted for, is our first example since classical times of a woman’s passion without scruple for one believed from the outset to be of her own sex.

For a time the Druid manages to prevent too great an intimacy between his “daughter” and Astrée, but when the two are guests at the same castle and share a room, the hero cannot resist taking some advantage of his opportunity, his only concern being dread of his lady’s reaction to these liberties when she is finally enlightened. This eventuality is postponed by enemy attack and a long embroilment during which “Alexis” fights as a heroic Amazon, saves Astrée’s life, is wounded, and is finally spirited away by the Druid to recover without danger of disclosure. When the revelation finally occurs, Astrée is indeed outraged—but note the reason: people will believe she merely pretended to be duped in order to excuse her own complaisances, and ‘in Forez a woman does not trifle thus with her honor.’ She bids Céladon die in expiation for his crime. “‘De quelle mort vous plait-il que je perisse?’ gémit Céladon écrasé. ‘N’importe, pourvu que tu meures!’ Et il s’enfuit pour la satisfaire.”[12] The Druid intervenes by proposing a pilgrimage to a shrine of Diana whose lions and unicorns slay the guilty but spare the pure. These heraldic guardians are transmitted into statues as the pair approach, thus testifying to the young lovers’ technical chastity. As everything short of the ultimate intimacy has pretty clearly occurred, it would appear that in France of the early seventeenth century, as in sixteenth century Italy, such relations between women were not regarded too harshly. Nevertheless, both this pastoral and Sidney’s portray the “far away and long ago,” not the authors’ own period, and d’Urfé’s tale is obviously more than a little satiric. Evidence will appear later that with regard to contemporary phenomena judgment is generally less lenient.

The Borderline of Reality

The five examples described above are all from the field of romance, in which no further variant flora have been detected until the early nineteenth century. Indeed, the whole field of fiction was largely fallow during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the renaissance on, thanks to a growing classical influence and the weakening of churchly prejudice, drama of actable length gradually supplanted long formless narrative. But the drama, too, yields a thin harvest during these centuries. In romantic plays sex disguise was fairly common, but it produced no variant situations comparable to those cited from romance and pastoral. Action on the public stage, of course, cannot go as far as in the printed volume; furthermore, theatre audiences included lower class spectators more apt to be shocked by homosexual implication than educated readers with classical literary background.

Let us look, for example, at the two most significant masquerading women in Shakespeare’s plays. Viola in Twelfth Night is an unconvincing man, afraid of the sight of her own sword, and her scenes with Olivia never even skirt the anomalous, their interest centering on her verbal agility. In As You Like It Rosalind is much more boyish in appearance and temperament, and Celia’s devotion to her is marked. Following her cousin headlong into banishment, Celia reminds her harsh parent that:

Also LeBeau tells Orlando that Rosalind has been “detained by her usurping uncle To keep his daughter company; whose loves Are dearer than the natural bond of sisters.” These passages suggest an intensity in Celia’s attachment which the effeminate Frenchman is quick to notice, but no further word or action in the play reinforces them. Celia’s infatuation at sight for Oliver, though it does not, like Rosalind’s for Orlando, blossom before the spectator’s eyes, is no less whole-hearted, and if passion is implied at all between the girls it is that early adolescent sort readily supplanted by the first heterosexual attraction. The other women of Shakespeare frequently cited as unfeminine, Beatrice and Katherine, express antipathy to men, marriage, and male domination but exhibit no interest whatever in women.

Two realistic plays of the early seventeenth century which have as their heroines real persons, one a known lesbian and the other suspected, are of special interest because no hint of variance appears in either drama. Middleton and Dekker’s Roaring Girl (1611) was built around Mary Frith, a transvestist of the London underworld commonly called “Moll Cutpurse,” who was about twenty-five when the play was written. She is portrayed as hearty, fearless and clever, a walking lexicon of thieves’ cant and free tavern songs, but of blameless character—the sworn enemy of injustice, oppression and double-dealing in underworld and gentry alike. She befriends honest lovers of any class but makes short work of men who approach her; she would like to see all women “manned but never pandered,” and she burns to right women’s wrongs in general. Asked when she will marry, her impudent rhymed answer adds up to “Never!” In short, she is a kind of sexless and feministic Robin Hood.

In their epilogue the authors say that some will:

Their reference is undoubtedly to A Booke called the Madde Prancks of Merry Moll of the Bankside, with her Walks in Man’s Apparel and to what Purpose. Written by John Day, which was entered in the Stationers’ Register for August 1610. All copies of this document were so thoroughly eliminated by her friends that scholars have even questioned whether it was ever printed, and a Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith surviving from 1662, the year after her death, is somewhat less harsh. An editorial note to the 1885 edition of the play,[13] drawing on this biography and other sources, tells us that she was a shoemaker’s daughter who from childhood would run only with boys, “taking many a bang and blow,” and that she had a lifelong aversion to women’s occupations and to children. Against family opposition she educated herself far above her station, but in the end apparently found no outlet for her capacities except in the underworld, where even her bitterest detractors admit her masculine daring and success as “highwayman,” forger, and fence. Havelock Ellis, in his introduction to another edition of the play and in his Studies in the Psychology of Sex,[14] quotes the 1662 biography as saying that “No man can say or affirm that she ever had a sweetheart or any such fond thing to dally with her,” a mastiff being the only living thing she cared for. Ellis adds that though nothing is said of homosexual practices, “we see clearly here what may be termed the homosexual diathesis.”

The second play is La Monja Alférez (1626) by Juan Pérez de Montalban, a literary disciple of Lope de Vega, and is included in a volume by Fitz-Maurice Kelly entitled The Nun Ensign. It gives a partial picture of the known life of Catalina de Erauso, a Basque woman who was alive at the time of its publication, and like The Roaring Girl, it was probably written to whitewash the heroine’s reputation. Here also the heroine is a transvestist, but one who actually passes for a military man, the mainspring of the plot being her exposure by her brother, a fellow officer. One Doña Ana is represented as being infatuated to the point of presenting her beloved with her girdle, but the gesture is symbolic only. “Guzlan” evades the issue by pleading a vow of castidad, a term less exclusively feminine than its English equivalent, and the two are never alone together or involved in more than acceptable verbal exchange. The play can scarcely have been a dramatic success, consisting as it does largely of long retrospective speeches by other characters which review Catalina’s past adventures and constitute her apologia. It is not known to have been produced more than once, at a critical period in her fortunes when it must have been badly needed.

Erauso’s full history as given in Kelly’s volume is compiled from an autobiography included in toto, certain “Relaciones” fairly well established as originating with Erauso herself, and references in the De’ Viaggi ... of Pietro della Valle. Relegated by her family to the life of a nun, which she found intolerable, though three of her sisters took their vows, the girl escaped from her convent in 1607 at the age of about fifteen by contriving men’s garments from the stuff of her religious habit. Subsequently she shipped to South America, where for some time she lived by her wits and her sword. Later, to escape a prison sentence she joined the army, was promoted for bravery to the rank of ensign, and was entrusted with at least one special mission. For some ten to fifteen years she went unexposed and unrecognized even by her brother, under whom she served for a time in Peru. In 1622, however, he became suspicious, and assigned her to perilous duty, as a result of which wounds brought her so near death that she confessed her sex to a bishop, and her military career was naturally at an end. The alternative life as a nun was now more distasteful to her than ever, and within a year she sailed for Spain to obtain proof that she had never taken the final vows, and, if possible, to secure a pension from Philip III on the strength of her military service.

It was at this time that La Monja Alférez was written and presented, and perhaps partly through its sympathetic influence she had success in both her undertakings and was furthermore granted permission by Pope Urban VIII to continue wearing men’s clothes, though not to practice further deception about her true sex. Her European visit was thus somewhat in the nature of a triumph, though her family still refused to recognize her. Accordingly she returned to South America, became a wealthy owner of horses and mules, and was still thriving in the business of carrier when she died in her late fifties.

Of her love life not too much is given, but it is all significant. At one point she tells of taking refuge, when wounded, with a halfbreed Indian woman, a widow, who wished to keep her on as son-in-law. The daughter, however, “was very black and ugly as the devil, the very opposite of my taste, which has always been for pretty faces.”[15] From this situation she quite simply ran away, as from a number of similar ones; but where the ladies were agreeable to her she postponed flight till the ultimate moment. While serving under her brother she even sometimes accompanied him to his mistress’ house, but when she took to going there on her own he became so jealous—believing her a man, of course—that he had her transferred to a distant post.

Before joining the army she worked for a time as bookkeeper to a wealthy merchant in Lima, in whose house she also boarded, and she was dismissed in less than a year for “sporting and frolicking” with his wife’s two unmarried sisters, “one especially whom I preferred.” One day while she was “in the parlour, combing my hair, lolling my head in her lap and tickling her ankles,” the employer observed the play “through a grating” and sent her packing.[16] The inferred activities are fairly unmistakable, but since she was believed to be a man, we can deduce nothing from the incident about local attitudes towards homosexuality.

A well-documented passage in the “Relaciones” tells us that after her return from Europe she was entrusted, by a couple in Vera Cruz who knew her to be a woman, with the responsibility of escorting their daughter to Mexico where the girl was to be married. Thus it is clear that her earlier emotional adventures had been well concealed. But during the journey “she became jealously attached to her charge, resented her young friend’s subsequent marriage, and in a letter of incomparable arrogance challenged the girl’s husband to a duel” because he forbade her the house. Friends managed to prevent the meeting, and it was after this that she “sheathed her rapier and set about earning an unromantic living as a carrier.” She must have been in her late forties at the time of this episode.

Neo-Classical Aridity

Because so little variant material appears in reputable imaginative writing between 1650 and 1800 we must turn elsewhere for evidence that variance nevertheless flourished. For reasons mentioned earlier, biography and memoirs are not generally within our scope, but in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries the chief aim of such writing was narrative interest, and certainly Brantôme, Casanova and the rest are read and enjoyed now in somewhat the same way as is Proust’s autobiographical fiction of the present century. As has been said, even historians grant that a very fair general impression of the writers’ periods can be gained from these spontaneous records.

The wide and colorful canvas of Brantôme testifies that court morals under the later Valois were free in every respect. At several points in the Lives of Gallant Ladies (1665) he implies that lesbian attachments were taken for granted in his time, and in Section 15 of his first Discourse he raises the question whether husbands are cuckolded when their wives engage in “the love that is called donna con donna.”[17] He also doubts whether the point has ever been raised before, living as he did three centuries before divorce was commonplace and lesbian activity actionable as one form of alienation of affection. The cases he cites are almost all bisexual, for though he has heard of women who would have nothing to do with men, these do not seem to have been celebrated for variance either. He says it was useless to seek one young girl in marriage because her “friend” would never let her go; but the friend, who was providing bed and board, was a married woman. Indeed, he maintains that husbands regarded such affairs lightly, since these could not lead to embarrassing questions about the paternity of offspring. With characteristic wit he manages to include among his anecdotes every possible means of satisfaction between women, impermissible of translation today outside a medical treatise. He maintains throughout that women come in the end to acknowledge the inadequacy of all such means, “for after all nothing is the equal of a man.”

Anthony Hamilton in his Memoirs of the Comte de Grammont (1713) gives an amusing account of the rivalry between the Earl of Rochester and Miss Hobart, a maid of honor to the Duchess of York, for the affections of the rather stupid young court beauty, Miss Anne Temple. However, at the English court even under Charles II such affairs were not taken so lightly. When, after a long siege, the patient Hobart attempted to embrace her favorite, the girl screamed, other waiting women came running, and “this was sufficient to disgrace Miss Hobart at court and totally ruin her reputation in London.”[18]

These affairs occurred in high society, but Montaigne—or perhaps his secretary, who is said to have written the Voyage in Italy (1581)—writing in the same period as Brantôme, describes the case of a young weaver, one of a group of six or seven transvestists engaged in that trade, who courted several women in towns near her own and was finally hanged for effecting a marriage with one of them. The union endured happily for half a year, however, before the offender was recognized and exposed by someone from her own village. This is interesting evidence of contrast in sexual mores at different social levels, for the country in this case was Italy, and Brantôme and others claim that homosexuality was rife there, particularly in the courts of Naples and Sicily.

What may be called a middle-class allusion appears in the memoirs of the Comte de Tilly (1800) when he tells of being drawn in as second in a duel by two young men in an inn at Chartres who wished to settle a quarrel at once. The matter involves a girl whom both had known intimately and one had promised by signed agreement to marry within the year, come what might. The prospective bridegroom learned that “the treacherous Julie was acquainted with a lady of this town who was suspected of having habits once much in vogue in Lesbos and which to the shame of our time have made alarming progress even in the provinces,” and accused the other man of having known this when he foisted Julie off on him. Without denying the charge, the accused says to de Tilly: “I confess this sort of rivalry gives me no ill humor, on the contrary it amuses me, and I am so lacking in morals as to laugh at it.”[19] Several other examples of lesbian activity, some of them involving nuns, are to be found passim in Casanova’s memoirs.

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From the viewpoint of mere numerical count the richest field for the gleaner of variant incident would be that literature—not quite reputable from the English reader’s viewpoint—which is farthest removed from the romantic. In romance, sexual attraction is an experience so personal and subjective that true lovers can be satisfied only with one another, and separation or an extraneous attraction on the part of either constitutes tragedy. Woman’s role often transcends that of man because any lapse on her part entrains personal and social consequences of extreme gravity. That is, the romantic viewpoint is relatively feminine.

In the other type of narrative, sometimes erroneously classed with realism, the sexual act is all-important, enjoyable with any adequate partner since sensual pleasure eclipses all subjective factors. Here a woman may be an enthusiastic and carefree playmate, a coy jade to be taken by trickery, or an aggressive, even sadistic, snarer of the hapless male. Her one requisite is a sexual appetite to equal her partner’s, and she is apparently immune to physical, and indifferent to social, consequences. In short, the outlook here is masculine. If the percentage of women authors is low in all areas of literature, in this one it reaches the vanishing point. Not even Margaret of Navarre nor Aphra Behn, famed as they are for a free approach, go all the way with their brother writers.

The ultimate limit of male-oriented literature is pornography, with which this study will not be concerned beyond defining it as writing of which the primary intent is sexual arousal. The category is difficult of sharp delineation for an English-reading audience, since relatively unseasoned readers may attribute pornographic intent to works which the more “sophisticated” continental takes in his stride and admits to the realm of legitimate belles-lettres. This is particularly true of that early French and Italian material which was written with wit, style, and care to avoid coarse terminology, and which is more properly termed erotic or galant. To account adequately for such racial or national inconsistencies in sexual tolerance is impossible here. Undoubtedly an earlier familiarity with classical literature in Italy and southern France, as well as a readier exposure there to oriental influences, had something to do with continental lenience.

Historians of erotic literature trace the genre ultimately to two hypothetical sources. One is a group of Greek tales called Milesian which originated about the sixth or seventh century B.C., satirizing religion as well as sex. They were particularly scurrilous in their portrayal of women. The other source is oriental literature, since in both Hindu and Islamic philosophy the inferior status of woman tends to depersonalize sexual relations. Whatever its origin, erotic literature has flourished steadily in modern Europe from the earliest renaissance to the present day, and has been produced by authors of literary repute—Boccaccio, Poggio, Aretino in Italy; and, in France, LaSalle, Rabelais, Venette, not to mention a score of lesser names in both countries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it developed in France into the style called galant, somewhat less lusty and more verbally subtle than earlier works but nonetheless very free. In this class the names most familiar to English readers are probably Restif de la Bretonne and Casanova.

Naturally all erotic works concentrate mainly upon heterosexual activity, but intrasexual episodes, particularly among women, are not uncommon. The women involved are never wholly, or even primarily, homosexual. An innocent girl may be initiated by one more experienced into the mysteries of giving pleasure to men. Ladies of quality may experiment with one another to alleviate boredom, or prostitutes amuse themselves in idle intervals. Nuns may console each other for lack of opportunity with priests, though the latter are usually also available. All these contacts are the fruit of propinquity rather than personal devotion, and the sexual play often involves more than two participants. In short, even these lesbian anecdotes are presented from the male viewpoint.

Erotic works involving religious celibates have been much more a continental than an English product. Such works always had as their secondary and sometimes as their primary aim, the discrediting of the Roman church, and may have begun in the Middle Ages after Gregory VII (1015-1085) first stringently imposed celibacy on the clergy. (It will be recalled that Sappho’s works were burned by the Church in 1073.) With the growth of rationalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries anti-clerical erotic writing increased in volume, and once the French Revolution had broken the hold of Catholicism in France, tales about the cloistered orders degenerated there into almost unalloyed pornography. In England, where Roman church and monasticism had been crushed by Henry VIII, the anti-clerical category of erotica did not flourish; in the Puritan-influenced American colonies it seems never to have taken root at all. Perhaps as a corollary of this religious conservatism, homosexual works were equally rare. Of the continental writers named above only Boccaccio and Rabelais are generally acceptable to English readers, possibly because of the absence of homosexuality from their works.

Even after the Restoration in England the natural anti-Puritan outburst of risqué drama and picaresque novel went no farther than heterosexual freedom. The only variant literary traces of the court’s sojourn in France are Anthony Hamilton’s lesbian anecdote cited above, and a vicious poetic satire written anonymously in 1732. It was actually penned by Sir William King, principal of St. Mary’s Hall at Oxford, and was directed against a female relative who had done him out of a fortune. He describes the lady as one endowed with some of the attributes of a witch and addicted to indecencies with a titled woman friend who figured as her “familiar.” The occult details Sir William seems to have incorporated not only to render his picture more repulsive, but to supply etiology for his subject’s homosexual bent, which apparently he did not care to import gratuitously. England has little else to contribute to the early variant record save an incident or two included in stereotyped histories of prostitutes, and some rather juvenile whipping stories laid in boarding schools or in households dominated by sadistic step-mothers or governesses, and even in these lesbian activity is infrequent.

French literature, meanwhile, moved in quite the other direction, undoubtedly following tendencies at court. At the end of the sixteenth century Henry III was widely reputed to be homosexual. A generation later Louis XIII, ailing and neurotic, vacillated between a few feminine and several masculine favorites, and is said, by some French biographers, to have made little distinction among them. The house of Orléans was also generally credited with homosexual proclivities in both the male and the female lines. On the feminine side, too, we have Christina of Sweden’s lengthy visit in France during the emotionally disturbed period of her life (1670-1680) following her abdication. It has been suggested that she brought about Monaldeschi’s murder at Versailles because the “thick packet of letters” in his possession contained damning evidence of her now almost unquestioned lesbian habits. A century later Marie Antoinette’s relations with Lamballe, Polignac and others of her court ladies were the subject of numerous scurrilous pamphlets, and although the details must be largely discounted as political mudslinging, any wide reading of serious biographical studies shows the underlying charges to be quite plausible.

For whatever reason, as the Bourbon dynasty grew in power and extravagance and under Louis XV the great courtesans enjoyed high social standing, freedom among women even loosely connected with court circles became quite fashionable. By the middle of the eighteenth century several houses of pleasure were elite institutions. Private theatres were maintained by certain noblemen for the presentation of highly censorable drama, and the best-known actresses and courtesans—often synonymous—were credited with constant lesbian activity in memoirs of the gossip-column type. From better authenticated sources we know that numerous frivolous private societies sprang up, and at least one of them was composed of “Anandrynes” or lesbian women. The galant narratives, of which the eighteenth century produced a rich crop, included frequent lesbian episodes, and for the first time in many decades the variant interest sometimes predominated over the heterosexual.

As one example of such writing, let us glance at a comparatively inoffensive survival from the period just before the Revolution. It is taken from L’Espion Anglais (1777-1778), eleven rambling volumes probably from several pens. In imitation of the more reputable journalistic correspondence of the time, this work is cast in the form of letters from “Milord All’eye” in Paris to his friend “Milord All’ear” in London. Mayeur de Saint-Paul is credited with the authorship of three very long letters[20] recording the career of a young girl from the provinces who runs away to Paris, finds a place in the most elite maison of the day, and is there groomed for the service of a prominent lesbian actress. The latter’s luxurious maisonette, which is secluded in a wooded park, is described in detail, as are the stages of the girl’s initiation into the erotic services of her mistress and into a large lesbian cult whose temple is located within the grounds. Action and setting are portrayed with some art and the narrative seldom becomes indelicately specific. Unhappily for the lesbian, the girl’s personal maid, who lives outside the grounds, gives her male lover an eloquent account of her young mistress’s charms. By masquerading as a delivery girl from a modiste’s shop the boy insinuates himself into the actress’s paradise, converts the lavishly-kept prisoner to the superior delights of jouissance with him, and brings about her expulsion by her outraged lesbian lover. This rococo gem was said to be based upon actual persons and circumstances of the decade in which it was written.

As a kind of last gasp of the galant school’s attempt to conform to later standards of acceptability one may cite the work of Felicité de Choiseul-Meuse, an author of uncertain identity who produced a number of racy novels just after 1800. Her Julie, ou J’ai Sauvé ma Rose (1807) is a lushly romantic tale in which, as its title suggests, a professional flirt contrives to be all but seduced by every type of lover from timorous stripling to middle-aged man-about-town, and in every sort of setting from her own boudoir to a Gothic cavern where she is held by a kidnaper. Throughout the story she is attracted by lovely women, but she becomes involved with one only in the final chapter. A woman of boyish type seems to have captivated the man Julie really loves, and, by way of revenge on both, Julie seduces her rival, who proves to be an already active lesbian. She finds this dalliance pleasanter than anything thus far experienced with men, and as it does not constitute defloration, she ends by marrying happily the original lover who advised her in adolescence that women’s power over men consists in never sacrificing their technical virginity.

Erotic writing did not, of course, cease with the end of the eighteenth century. But what may be called the galant way of life suffered a sharp check with the French Revolution. Not only the divine right of kings but the allied privilege of court circles to be a law unto themselves was eclipsed for a number of decades. In all countries and at all times the possessors of enormous wealth have enjoyed considerable independence of public opinion, but literature celebrating such independence in the sexual sphere tended to bifurcate after 1800 into problem novels whose tone was condemnatory, and an underground stream of pornography unacceptable for open publication. However unavailable the latter material may have been to the growing number of middle-class readers, rumors of its existence doubtless filtered into the general consciousness. Bisexual pornography continued to be written throughout the nineteenth century, some of it fairly high in quality and attributed to authors of renown, and the recurrence of lesbian activity in this subterranean stream may well have contributed to the disrepute of variance of all sorts during that century and the first years of the present one.