Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts

Abstract

Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts * Susan S. Lanser (bio) In 1778 the upperclass Anglo-Irish women Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby defied their families and ran off together to Wales. They shared bed, board, and belongings, named one of their dogs Sapho, signed their correspondence jointly, called each another "my Beloved" and "my Better half," and when they went visiting insisted on returning to their "State Bedchamber," however late the hour. Although their elopement caused some scandal in Ireland and sporadic suspicions thereafter, for most of their forty years of "delicious Retirement" these "Ladies of Llangollen" lived not simply with impunity but with celebrity, escaping public suggestion that they were sexually intimate. Their pastoral retreat with its renowned gardens became a site for pilgrimage; they received dozens of distinguished visitors, corresponded with men and women of rank and of letters, and were iconized in poems from a Wordsworth sonnet to Anna Seward's epic "Llangollen Vale." 1 Why were Butler and Ponsonby fetishized rather than ostracized in a country so invested in marriage and motherhood that it succeeded in halving its rate of celibacy and doubling its rate of birth in less than a century? 2 At a time when the English sculptor Anne Damer and the French actress Mademoiselle de Raucourt were being mocked as tribades, and Butler and Ponsonby's own neighbor Hester Thrale [End Page 179] was raging in her diary about sapphic "monsters" at Versailles and "unclean birds" at Bath, how did other women in exclusive, arguably homoerotic relationships—Englishwomen Sarah Scott and Lady Barbara Montagu, the Dutch writers Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken, the French novelist Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni and her partner Thérèse Biancolelli—similarly escape opprobrium? 3 Why did Scottish courts find incredible the charges of lovemaking leveled in 1810 against the Edinburgh schoolmistresses Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods? What cover story allowed Yorkshire gentrywoman Anne Lister to carry on sexual relations with both single and married friends under the covers of ostensibly ordinary friendship beds? To ask why Butler and Ponsonby were honored and not spurned is also to ask what interests—and whose interests—the performance of female attachment served. The possibilities I want to explore here have their roots in the unprecedented publicity for female friendship that surfaced in seventeenth-century Europe and became institutionalized in eighteenth-century painting, poetry, fiction, and letters by women and men. In asking how private intimacies became public relations, I will suggest that female friendship emerged through women's agency as a powerful resource in the struggle for autonomy and authority; that it also implicated women in the consolidation of gentry-class interests; that it operated through a discourse of passionate love and physical longing that carried at least the theoretical possibility of seeming "lesbian"; that social hierarchies worked to separate the monstrous sapphist from the tender friend; and that the very prominence of passionate female friendship enabled cover stories for less conventional behaviors and relationships. By the time of Butler and Ponsonby's elopement, the politics of female intimacy, deeply imbricated with those of class, were positioned to serve the sometimes conflicting and sometimes converging needs of gentry hegemony and feminist agency. Female intimacy also illustrates the complex interdependence of status politics and sexual ideology during a century when both were in flux. "If one sets out to survey the annals of friendship," writes Carolyn Heilbrun, "one ends by reading—in Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Plutarch, Erasmus, Montaigne, Johnson, Rousseau, Emerson, Thoreau, et al.—of male friendships." 4 Certainly discourses from Aristotle to Montaigne had defined friendship as a male affair and rendered friendships between women epistemically invisible. 5 Montaigne's influential "De l'amitié" (1580), echoing Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and the medieval romances that imagined male friendship as "sweeter than woman's love," 6 defines friendship as the noblest human relationship, uniting "one soul in two bodies." Montaigne explicitly rejects the possibility of male-female friendship on the grounds of woman's inferior character, and while he is as silent about friendship between women as his forebears, he affirms that as the highest practice of virtue, friendship is men's work and men's privilege. Such attitudes...