Heather Rose Jones's Blog, page 78
July 23, 2019
Teaser Tuesday: Living Under Threat of Disaster
Floodtide
Between the time between when I established floodtide as a facet of life in Rotenek and now with the book with that title is moving towards publication, the effects of weather fluctuations have become a lot sharper in people's awareness. The massive persistent flooding in the American midwest this year is shocking, but less in the general news than more focused floods due to hurricanes and the like. Technological attempts at long-term flood control in places like the Mississippi basin have not always produced the benefits they promised...or have simply moved the damage from one location to another.
The river's behavior in Floodtide is not entirely natural, but the city treats it as simply part of the natural variation in behavior: unpredictable and to be endured. The engineering controls focus on human behavior. Those in the potential path of a flood--whether because they can't afford a house in the safer parts of town, or because they're willing to trade hazard for the prestige of the Vezenaf--shift their belongings to minimize damage. Those who can afford to do so leave town.
When the river shows signs of rising, you act. You can't wait to see how high it comes. Hence, the public service provided by the floodtide bell. And those who know the river best don't need to wait for that warning. Most years, the precautions are wasted effort, but you can't expect the Rotein to show mercy to the complacent.
The details associated with the floodtide declaration are all my own invention: measuring the rise of the river by the water-steps (which have been nicknamed after the apostles), declaring a flood when the water reaches the feet of the statue of Saint Nikule, and the symbolic declaration of the floodtide holiday when the river doesn't rise that far by wetting the statue's feet. They all feel like the sort of hybrid folk-civic-religious rituals that arise over the centuries.
It's facile to say that if a place has regular disastrous flooding, maybe you shouldn't put human habitations there, but habitability has always been hopelessly entwined with bodies of water. The placement of New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi river wasn't an unfortunate oversight--the river was what made the city exist. Much closer to me, personally, the Sacramento river has seasonal flooding due to Sierra snowmelt that is mitigated by the use of reserved floodplains (no building allowed) and an extensive levee system in the agricultural areas of the delta. I used that familiarity for some of the "emotional truth" of my stories, but throughout Europe, major cities have always risen up on significant rivers, whether large enough for navigation or simply for water supply. And that has always made them vulnerable to periodic flooding. I have a research folder of images of floods in older European cities to use for reference and inspiration when visualizing the effects in Rotenek.
* * *
[Liv] pushed off and prayed to Mama Rota as she kissed the river. Then she made a face and tasted the water again. Instead of keeping close to the edge, Liv pulled out into the middle of the river like she meant to cross or to catch the current to go all the way down to Urmai. Liv pulled one oar in and let us drift briefly as she dipped her hand in the water and brought it up to taste again.
“It’s coming,” she said. “Don’t know how high or how long, but it’s coming.”
“Floodtide?” I asked.
She nodded as she put the second oar back in the water and angled back toward the north bank again.
People were muttering about it in the Nikuleplaiz over the next few days. The rivermen had seen the signs in a streak of color toward the middle of the current. Mefro Dominique took Liv’s word and rather than sewing, we spent two days carrying all the stock upstairs from the workroom.
“It isn’t often the water rises high enough to fill the streets,” Mefro Dominique said. “It’s only happened three times while I’ve lived here. But if it does, we won’t have time to move things.”
So the fine fabrics were tied into bundles and carried up to the bedroom. The baskets of ribbons followed them, and the printed magazines with their fashion plates and anything else the water might spoil, until the upstairs rooms were stuffed like a warehouse and the downstairs was bare except for the worktable and the dresses we were sewing.
The muddy streak in the middle of the river grew wider and the river crept up one step toward the statue of Saint Nikule then part of another. Three days went by without the water rising farther. Whoever it was that decided to declare floodtide must have figured it was all we’d get, so Father Mazzu went down to the edge of the steps and dipped a bronze bucket on a little chain into the water, then took and poured it over the saint’s feet.
Major category: TeasersPublications: FloodtideTags: teaserswritingFloodtide
Teaser Tuesday: The Shrine of Saint Rota
Floodtide
Since last week's teaser, the editorial revisions on Floodtide have been completed--the quickest and most painfree editing process I've ever experienced! It'll be nice not to have that hanging over me during my upcoming travel to Worldcon.
I'm not going to lie: I love to embed intellectual "Easter eggs" in my stories that may pass under the radar of 90% of my readers and only be fully appreciated by maybe 1%. I never want anyone to feel excluded by those hidden treats, but I do want to reward close attention and familiarity.
I think I mentioned in a previous teaser that at one point in the plot noodling for Daughter of Mystery I had a vision of my characters winding through underground passages that had fallen out of the awareness of most citizens of Rotenek. The episode ended up not fitting into that book, but it was part of my background vision of the city and at some point I realized it had a role to play in the eventual concluding book. But that meant laying down the groundwork well before that point.
When I needed some sort of "hidden resource" as a MacGuffin in Floodtide, given that I was already thinking in terms of water symbolism, the thought of a long-lost spring somewhere under the city felt promising. An ancient fountain that had been covered over by the changing needs of city planning--not a deliberate secret, just forgotten and unused.
It made complete sense for that hidden spring to provide the reader with backstory for the legend of Saint Rota and a key to her origins. As I mentioned in the teaser about river deities, Rota was originally the local water goddess or the Rotein river. (People may have guessed that the Rotein is a sort of parallel development of the Rhone. Not the Alpennian name of the real-world Rhone, but a fictional duplicate of the river with a different course.) She might have managed to linger in popular imagination purely by oral tradition, but what if there had once been concrete evidence of her existence available for reinterpretation and adaptation as a Christian saint?
* * *
At the top of the steps a fountain stood against the wall. The fountain didn’t look like much: just a half-round base about six foot across. Behind it, on the wall, was a carving with a picture of a woman and writing scattered around her. Below the woman, water tumbled out of a hole into the basin. There was another spout at the front where it spilled down a channel cut into the middle of the stone steps and into the chanulez. I would have thought the water would be green and slimy without anyone to clean the fountain, but it was clear enough to drink.
...
“Who is she?” Celeste asked, looking up from the water in the basin to the carved stone behind it.
In some ways, the lantern made it harder to see, because of all the shadows it threw off. You could tell the stone was supposed to be a lady with a long flowing dress. It wasn’t a very good statue, though. I don’t think they’d have paid a sculptor like that to do saints in the cathedral. Maybe it had been better at first but the stone had worn away. You could tell she was holding a branch of something in her hand. And there was something round near her feet—maybe some sort of beast—but I couldn’t tell what it was any more.
You could still read the letters, though. Maisetra Iulien leaned closely with the lantern and started reading them out one at a time. “R…O…D…A…D…E…D…”
“No,” said Mesner Aukustin and took the lantern from her again to go around the other side of the fountain. “It’s an old Roman stone. I’ve seen some like it in Akolbin. You read it all the way across. RODANAE DED…and then MA— The rest is too faint to see. Chautovil would know how to read it. He thinks I should study the ancient Romans more. But Rodanae is a name—Rodana—and Ma-something, that would be the man who set up the stone.”
“Rodana?” Celeste said wonderingly. She whispered, “Mama Rota?” And then more loudly. “It’s Saint Rota. It must be. When people talk about water from Saint Rota’s well they usually just mean the river. But it’s a real well. A real well that flows into the river.” Her eyes followed the flow of water from the rim of the basin down to where it led into the chanulez.
“Are you sure?” Maisetra Iulien asked.
Celeste made a quiet noise. I could tell she thought it was a silly question but didn’t dare say so to a maisetra.
“It’s a holy well. My eyes can tell me that.”
* * *
And of course I spent entirely too much time researching exactly what the Roman dedicatory inscription to a river goddess would look like. The inscriptions were frustratingly compact for standard formulas. I've given the readers more of a hint with the partial "DED..." (for "dedit" or "dedicavit") where a real inscription would probably just have "D". And while the partial name of the person who set up the inscription (MA...) could be many things, I've allowed for the (erroneous) guess that it might be Mauritius, the region's patron saint.
I envision the plaque layout something like this, with X's where the image is, and unreadable or omitted letters in brackets:
[DEAE] XXXXX RODA
NAE XXXXXX DED[IT]
MA[??] XXXXXX [????]
This isn't the first time I've played around with ambiguous inscriptions, of course. Tanfrit's gravestone was rather fun to design as well, and it still has some secrets to tell that will keep until I tell her story.
Major category: TeasersPublications: FloodtideTags: teasersFloodtidewriting
Teaser Tuesday: Making Necessity Natural
Floodtide
Several of my teasers have harped on the theme of how to take a plot-essential situation and set it up so that the readers view it as a natural consequence of the setting. In one sense, it can be manipulative, but in another sense, as an author you have a vision of how things have always been. Your task is to communicate that vision in a way that feels effortless.
Setting up those expectations needn't be focused only on the immediate plot requirements. Because everything you write needs to be consistent in some way with the underlying truths of your fictional world as a whole.
One truth of the Alpennia I've constructed is that Margerit Sovitre has established a school with the goal of educating any girl who has the ambition to learn. And especially to encourage any girl with mystical talents to develop them.
One truth of the plot of Floodtide is that there needs to be a solid and believable reason why Celeste is not a student at that school, especially given her personal contacts through Serafina.
How do I resolve these in a way that doesn't seem artificial? The answer is that I lean on other, unspoken truths.
One of those truths is that Margerit can be a bit dense about how other people's life situations differ from her own. About how to give people opportunities they're able to take advantage of. And about how throwing money around doesn't solve all the problems. Akezze regularly serves as the voice of her conscience in pointing out when Margerit has structured a benefit in ways that make it difficult for some people to use. Akezze is uniquely situated for this role but some lessons Margerit has to learn on her own. And Margerit will learn some of those lessons. (All of my charaters have their tragic flaws. I may have blogged about that at some point. Barbara's primary flaw is massive control issues and having invested her self-identity in physical competence. Jeanne had to work through some of her tragic flaws in The Mystic Marriage. Roz's tragic flaw is a tendency to run her mouth off before her brain is solidly engaged. Margerit...I guess a useful way of putting it in contemporary political jargon is that Margerit's tragic flaw is that her feminism is middle-class-white-feminism. She'll get through it but it's going to be a hard road.)
Sometimes I lean on truths that can be spoken, but only to certain people, and only when they are willing to listen.
Roz makes some guesses as to why Celeste hasn't taken up the implied invitation from the Tanfrit Academy, and Celeste is quite happy to tell her the rest of it, if only she'd ask.
* * *
“Maisetra Iulien says that they want all kinds of girls at the school. Not just the rich girls, but poor ones too, if they have the talent to learn mysteries. She says they have students from the Poor Scholars there.” The Poor Scholars hadn’t done me any good back when Father Mazzu took me there, but if they were studying at Maisetra Sovitre’s school, then it was true that anyone could. “Iulien says you should ask Maisetra Talarico about it.”
I hesitated because Celeste’s eyes flashed when I’d said “poor girls.”
“You think we’re poor? When we have a good house here? And hot food every day? And I have three dresses, not even counting my church clothes?”
“I didn’t mean poor like that,” I protested. “She just said you needn’t worry about the school fees.”
But Celeste kept on. “Do you know how we have all that? Because we work hard, Maman and me. And what would Maman do if I were off all day at Maisetra Sovitre’s school? Who would get all this sewing done? You? All by yourself? In half-days? Who would mind the shop when she takes her samples and measuring tapes off to a grand lady who’s too busy to come here? You think we could ask the baker’s girl to stand behind the counter? What would Maman do if she had to hire an assistant for the sewing I do? For wages! That’s not piece-work she can send out like we did before you came. Maman is counting on me to take over the trade and help put money away so she won’t have to keep sewing when she gets old and her fingers get knotted and her eyes get dim. School!” she scoffed. “It doesn’t matter if the lessons are free or if they cost the price of Princess Anna’s gowns. Your Maisetra Sovitre isn’t going to pay for someone to take my place here in the shop.”
Major category: TeasersPublications: FloodtideTags: teaserswritingFloodtide
July 21, 2019
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 36d - Swinging Singles and Lesbian Opportunities
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 36d - Swinging Singles and Lesbian Opportunities - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/07/27 - listen here)
Why Study Singlewomen?
When imagining the lives of lesbian characters in pre-modern western history, one false idea that regularly comes up is that women had no viable alternatives to marriage--not without becoming complete social outcasts. Both authors and readers of historical fiction often have a misunderstanding that women living autonomous lives outside of marriage are unhistorical or anomalous. That not being married to a man was view as inherently suspect unless one had a special exemption such as a religious vocation.
This misconception has obvious consequences for imagining the historic spaces in which lesbian characters might exist. It means they are imagined as being socially transgressive in refusing or avoiding marriage to a man. That their lives and domestic arrangements will be scrutinized. That they will be considered an anomaly within their societies. If imagining one woman living a life independent of men is made difficult by this error, imagining two--who also find their lives entwined--is thought to strain credulity.
And--to be sure--many women in history who engaged in same-sex relationships did so within the context of a heterosexual marriage. And there's a place in historical fiction to tell those stories as well. But the truth is that singlewomen--women who had not married, or declined to marry, or had been married but now lived single lives as widows--were extremely common in pre-modern Europe.
While the proportions varied depending on time and place, on class, occupation, and family situation, demographic studies of specific communities in medieval Europe show that anywhere between a fifth to a half of the adult women in a community might be unmarried at any given time. In the 17th and 18th centuries, studies show that anywhere between 10 to 20% of women in their 40s and 50s had never married. (And at that age, were unlikely ever to do so.)
Of course, not all those single or never-married women were in that position because they weren't sexually interested in men. Likely women with same-sex interests made up only a small percentage of singlewomen. But any situation that applies to one woman in five can't be considered unusual or remarkable. It might be treated as falling outside the ideal model of womanhood, but it couldn't be viewed as inherently suspicious in the context of sexuality.
And that's why the study of singlewomen is highly relevant to the writing of lesbian historical fiction. Because if you want to write female characters who are not married to men and yet are ordinary and unremarkable members of society, you have a vast scope of models to choose from. That's what we're going to talk about today.
The show notes are going to include several excellent books that address this topic, but a great introduction and one-stop-shop is the collection edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide titled Singlewomen in the European Past: 1250-1800. Check out the blog entries for its articles in the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. Today's episode will primarily look at western European cultures of the middle ages through the 19th century, but the questions that are raised can be applied to other cultures.
The influence of culture
The first thing to keep in mind is that different cultures have different patterns of family life and marriage. Pre-modern Europe wasn't a monolith. One of the large-scale patterns that affects the expectations for a woman's life is divided very roughly into a southern European pattern and a northern European pattern.
Characteristics of the southern pattern--not absolute rules, but trends--include older men marrying younger women, often women in their mid to late teens. Women were expected to be sexually inexperienced at marriage. Women generally did not live or work outside the family household before marriage. Marriages were typically arranged by the parents and seen as a contract between families rather than between individuals. And there was a very low rate of never-married women, in part due to a high rate of unmarried women joining religious orders.
But the northern pattern is a polar opposite in many ways. Marriages tended to be between spouses of the same age and were usually delayed until both had a chance to earn money towards setting up a household. For women, this often included working outside the home, whether in domestic service, in apprenticeships, or in agricultural labor. The average age at first marriage tended to be in the mid to later 20s. Spouses typically had more input into their choice of marriage partner and more ability to refuse marriage. And it was typical for spouses to have engaged in sexual activity before marriage, even though it was officially disapproved. Rates of never-married women (among those women of marriageable age) could be anywhere between 10 to 30%, and even higher in some specific communities. And after the Reformation, the largely-Protestant cultures of northern Europe no longer had convents as a way of absorbing "surplus" singlewomen.
These cultural patterns mean that if you want your fictional characters to be unmarried, their general geographic location is going to affect how typical or atypical that state is, and whether personal choice is likely to be a factor, as opposed to sheer luck. It's going to affect what their options are for life circumstances and how their family and community will view their unmarried state.
The influence of class
Within a given culture, social class also affected life expectations. As a general rule of thumb, the daughters of the aristocracy or the land-owning elite tended to marry younger if they did marry, and with less choice of partner. But they were also, overall, more likely to remain single. The reasons were varied, including lack of approved partners, the expectation for a large dowry without the ability to contribute to their own economic resources, but also to some extent a greater acceptance of unmarried women as valuable within the family economy. At the other end of the social scale, different factors were more important for marriage rates and ages
The influence of location
One major influence was whether you lived in a rural agricultural community or an urban community. With the rise of urban centers, men and women had different migration patterns that affected marriage options. Women who migrated from the countryside to work in towns, either as domestic workers or in crafts, typically married later than their rural sisters. But they also married later than the women who were born in those towns. One can imagine several contributing reasons. If your goal in moving to a town is to build up a nest egg toward establishing a household, you aren't going to plunge into a marriage that would cut that path short. And women who were already established members of the community, with family connections, probably had a leg up on marriage opportunities. But urban centers often had a relative shortage of men due to being tapped for military service and foreign opportunities. Conversely, in rural areas, age at marriage tended to be a bit younger.
The influence of demographics
Migration is one factor that can affect marriage rates, due to changing the distribution of the sexes across the landscape. But there are other more drastic events that can reduce women's rate of marriage. War almost always has a higher mortality for men than for women. As the scope and intensity of warfare increased in the early modern period, the results could affect sex ratios for an entire generation. The English Civil War in the 17th century, the Napoleonic wars around the turn of the 19th century, the American Civil War in the later 19th century -- all of them left in their wake a period of severe gender imbalance in which many women never had the opportunity to marry. And in among them, no doubt, were a fair sprinkling of women who were relieved about that.
With the beginning of the colonial era, larger numbers of men than women emigrated from Europe, contributing to a relative surplus of women back home. In North America, the western expansion always began with more men than women setting out for parts unknown.
Even disease affected marriage rates. Studies of plague mortality in early modern England indicate that men were more likely to fall ill and even still more likely to die from the plague than women. It's hard to estimate the gender ratios affected by the Black Death in the 14th century, but in its wake, with the overall labor force reduced, women found themselves with more opportunities to work outside the domestic sphere, and their greater economic independence resulted in lower marriage rates and more women choosing not to marry at all.
Specific strategies
So what are some specific strategies for creating plausible female characters in history who opt out of the heterosexual marriage economy with no fuss, no muss, and no need to live extraordinary lives?
For one, give her money. Let her inherit income-producing property, or be given a an inheritance by a relative. Probably her family would expect her to use it as a dowry, but maybe the "right man" just never happens to come along. No reason for her to pine away in the mean time. The details will depend on the local land-owning laws, but in many many contexts, certain women were perfectly able to inherit real estate. And as long as she didn't marry, she retained full control over that property and its profits.
Give her a craft, a profession. Apprentice her in a trade. There were professions that were dominated by women. Different professions at different times and places. In medieval England, have her be a brewer or baker. In medieval France, a silk-worker. In most pre-industrial societies, have her spin for a living. There's a reason why "spinster" came to mean an unmarried woman. It was a profession thoroughly dominated by women and that could be engaged in with little overhead, often in informal cooperatives.
As discussed in one of the articles I'll be blogging about shortly, once legal restrictions on moneylending were lifted, it became a popular side business for single women. With the same nest egg that could get you a good marriage, you could bring in interest equivalent to what you'd make in wages. There are plenty of options to have your single heroine earn her living. Oh, and it really helps to have her live in a town, not out in the country.
This next one is more restrictive: set your story in a culture that followed the "northern European marriage pattern"--the pattern where women were expected to leave the parental home and perform wage labor to accumulate a nest egg for marriage. Where they generally married in their mid to late 20s. Where they expected to have veto power over a choice of spouse. And then...just have them fail to marry. For any of many possible reasons.
Alternately, have your heroines meet in a convent. It happened often enough that the convents felt the need to warn against it. Or in the times and places where it was appropriate, have them join a lay religious order like the Beguines who required women to be unmarried.
Place one of your heroines in service in a household outside the family. Maybe she fails to marry because she becomes so devoted to her mistress that she couldn't think of leaving. Maybe she makes a special friend among one of the other young women in service there. For that matter, in some eras, people complained of how domestic servants chose to have separate homes of their own and only come in to work on a daily basis. If people were complaining about it, someone was doing it.
Or from the other side, have your heroine be the daughter of an aristocratic family. They had a lower marriage rate for their daughters than almost any other class. Such women wouldn't have the option of leaving home to take up a profession, but they might spend an extended period living in another household as a companion, housekeeper, or simply from family ties, giving them an opportunity to form other relationships.
How do you identify spaces for singlewomen?
The essential thing to keep in mind is that regardless of what the "nomative" life pattern was for women in a given time and place, the actual lives of women varied across a continuum. And unless your heroines are standing on a streetcorner proclaiming their sexuality, no one is going to be able to tell the difference between a heterosexual singlewoman and a singlewoman whose friendships with women cross the line into romance. So in any context where you can find straight women living happy, productive, and unremarked lives without the benefit of marriage, it's just as plausible to insert a lesbian character living that same life without the need to create a hateful and oppressive social environment.
Look for the women who failed to marry, who chose not to marry, or who simply somehow forgot to marry, and you'll find the spaces in which your fictional lesbians can thrive.
Links
Useful books on singlewomen studies
Bennett, Judith M. & Amy M. Froide eds. 1999. Singlewomen in the European Past 1250-1800. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. ISBN 0-8122-1668-7
Beattie, Cordelia. 2007. Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classification in Late Medieval England. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-928341-5
Froide, Amy. 2005. Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Amtower, Laurel and Dorothea Kehler (eds). 2003. The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Staples, Kate Kelsey. 2011. Daughters of London: Inheriting Opportunity in the Late Middle Ages. Brill, Leiden. ISBN 978-9004203112
This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here: Singlewomen
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 37c - Bosom Sex (reprise)
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 37c - Bosom Sex (reprise) - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/08/17 - listen here)
[This podcast was originally broadcast as episode 4 on 2016/11/26]
For scheduling reasons, I wanted to fill this week's show with a reprise of one of my early podcasts. And when I thought about it, the perfect choice was this show about two Civil War era black women that I mentioned during the interview with Penny Mickelbury last week.
If you've never listened to it before, I hope you enjoy it. And if you've been a follower of the podcast since those very first episodes, I hope you like it as much this time as you did the first time.
* * *
[Note: Spelling follows the original in all direct quotations from the correspondence.]
It’s rare to have access to the internal emotional lives of women in history. Personal correspondence can give us a glimpse of the complex and often contradictory thoughts of women whose lives diverged from expected paths. But it’s not uncommon for such correspondence to be lost after their deaths. Letters may simply be discarded as trash. Or family members may destroy them in order to protect the reputations of the dead. In American history, there is a similar difficulty in finding the self-told stories of the African-American community in its early years. So the correspondence of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus is doubly valuable for the story it tells.
Addie and Rebecca were black women, both born in the mid 19th century as free women in Connecticut. Their correspondence comes from a time shortly after the end of the Civil War when Rebecca often spent time away. It was Rebecca’s family who preserved the letters, so the collection includes Addie’s letters to her and Rebecca’s letters to her family, but the content of what Rebecca wrote back to Addie needs to be interpolated.
Rebecca's family was solidly middle class and had lived in Connecticut for several generations. She trained as a schoolteacher. And because of that and her missionary enthusiasm, she traveled to the South after the Civil War was over to help establish a school for ex-slaves. She experienced (and wrote home about) serious racial hostility, both because of her vocation and in response to her personal behavior because she saw no reason to automatically defer to white people if they didn’t respect her back.
Addie was an orphan without Rebecca's extensive network of family ties and support. Her correspondence is less literate but full of enthusiasm, passion, and sensuality. She was an avid reader, had a forceful personality, and tended to be judgmental of others. She, too, lived in Connecticut, which was probably where the two met. She made a living in a number of different jobs: as a seamstress, as a domestic worker, in various factory jobs. Shortly before her early death at age 29, she worked as a teamster driving wagons. She was intolerant of racism and segregation and was unafraid to speak her mind to her white employers. This might possibly have something to do with the number of times she changed jobs during the course of the correspondence.
The romantic relationship between Addie and Rebecca appears in their letters in a number of ways. There were regular protestations of love and devotion, but they also spoke of passionate kisses and caressing each other’s breasts. The letters also give clear indications that their relationship was felt to be in competition with potential heterosexual relationships.
The mid 19th century is typically thought of as a time of “romantic friendships” and Boston Marriages. And much of the language that Addie and Rebecca use is similar in flavor. In fact, they discuss the white literary depiction of romantic friendship in their letters, comparing their devotion to that described in Grace Aguilar’s novel Women’s Friendships. Some historians such as Lillian Faderman take the position that these relationships were romantic but not physically erotic. Women might kiss, they might embrace, they might even share a bed without it being considered sexually improper or incompatible with heterosexuality.
Addie and Rebecca give us a closer look--one that may have been a more silent part of other romantic friendships. After all, if we didn’t have these letters, we wouldn’t know it was a part of theirs. In one letter, when Addie mentions that she shares a bed with another woman, she reassures Rebecca, “If you think that is my bosom that captivated the girl that made her want to sleep with me, she got sadly disapointed injoying it, for I had my back towards all night and my night dress was butten up so she could not get to my bosom." And she continues with a protestation that her bosom is reserved for Rebecca.
Rebecca must have regularly expressed jealousy of women that Addie shared living space with. Addie writes that she has no desire to be kissed by anyone else, saying, "No kisses is like youres." She also says, "I imprint several kisses upon your lips and give you a fond imbrace." And later: "I wish that I was going to sleep in your fond arms to night."
Interestingly, Rebecca’s family and their community appear to have recognized and supported the special nature of their relationship, although sometimes with ambivalence. On one occasion, when Addie visited Rebecca’s family while Rebecca was away in the south, she reports that Rebecca’s mother told another visitor that “if either one of us was a gent, we would marry.” Addie was quite happy to hear that. Addie felt comfortable talking about her physical longing for Rebecca to friends and family and that she wished for her embrace and her return.
Both women were also courted by men, and that provides a chance to see how they thought of the parallels with their own relationship. Addie writes, "O Rebecca, it seems I can see you now, casting those loving eyes at me. If you was a man, what would things come to? They would after come to something very quick." and later "What a pleasure it would be to me to address you My Husband." When Addie mentions a male suitor, she notes that although she loves him, it’s not passionately. On other occasions, when she mentions attractions to men, she always compares her feelings to those she has for Rebecca. At times, these mentions seem intended to provoke jealousy. Addie seems to have had fewer occasions to experience jealousy of Rebecca’s other connections, though she once writes, that she dreamed of seeing Rebecca caress another woman, and spoke of how bad it made her feel not to be the object of those caresses.
When Addie wrote more seriously about contemplating marriage to a man, it was in the context of economic security. On one occasion when asking Rebecca how she would feel about marriage for that reasons, she says, "Rebecca, if I could live with you or even be with you some parts of the day, I would never marry." But this was at a time when Rebecca was living elsewhere and the two were unlikely to be able to set up a household together.
Over the course of their correspondence, the language gradually shifted to calling themselves sisters, but even this is ambiguous. Addie sometimes signed her name using Rebecca’s surname. Addie did marry a man eventually, after flip-flopping several times, but died of tuberculoses two years later at the age of 29. At some point after that, Rebecca married. She married one of her co-workers at the school where she was teaching in Maryland. She survived to the age of 95.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
When is a Wife Still a Singlewoman?
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
With its emphasis on the details and proofs of heterosexual intercourse within marriage (or the lack thereof) this article doesn’t bring much to the LHMP. Still interesting in terms of the concerns of women’s lives, but not much to say here.
And with that, we conclude this collection of papers on singlewomen in medieval and early modern England. Next week I hope to start my series on "the foundational texts of the history of gender and sexuality that everyone else is in conversation with"--possibly leavened with some other shorter items because this is a lot of weighty stuff.
In the mean time, the empty spots in the blog schedule are going to be filled with "Heather gets caught up on doing book reviews" for the next few weeks.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #269 Amster 2003 Frances Howard and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling
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Full citation:
Amster, Mara. 2003. “’Frances Howard and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling: Trials, Tests, and the Legibility of the Virgin Body” in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Publication summary:
A collection of articles on the general topic of how single women are represented in history and literature in medieval and early modern England. Not all of the articles are clearly relevant to the LHMP but I have included all the contents.
This article looks at the legal case brought in 1613 by Frances Harding for annulment of her marriage, based on the claim that her husband was unable to have sexual intercourse with her. Her argument was that, as she desired to become a mother, she needed the marriage annulled so that she could marry a more capable husband. The testimony and questioning in the case largely centered around physical “proof” of her virginity, as her husband was known to be sexually active with other women. While the relevance of the article to the collection’s theme is along the lines of “how can a married woman also be single?” it doesn’t have much relevance to the Project.
Time period: 17th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: singlewomencourt case
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An Old Theme that’s New Again
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
In this study of the legal and social context of infanticide concerns, I found a lot of interesting connections with modern discourse around abortion. It becomes clear that the law and the patriarchal establishment wasn’t really so much concerned with the lives of the women and fetuses involved, but with controlling and punishing women’s bodies for stepping outside the prescribed paradigms. Unmarried women whose newborn died (or was stillborn) were automatically presumed to have committed infanticide and needed to provide positive evidence that they had anticipated and prepared for a live birth. (E.g., by hiring a midwife, by preparing clothing and supplies for the child, etc.) In contrast, married women whose newborn died or was stillborn were automatically presumed to have desired the child, and in order to make an accusation of infanticide, one needed to present positive evidence for the act. Although this article isn’t relevant to the LHMP, it’s quite fascinating and informative.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #268 Staub 2003 News from the Dead
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Full citation:
Staub, Susan C. 2003. “’News from the Dead’: The Strange Story of a Woman Who Gave Birth, Was Executed, and Was Resurrected as a Virgin” in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Publication summary:
A collection of articles on the general topic of how single women are represented in history and literature in medieval and early modern England. Not all of the articles are clearly relevant to the LHMP but I have included all the contents.
This article examines the social and legal background of a sensationalized “marvel tale” about an unmarried woman hanged for murdering her newborh child and then discovered to be still alive. The article largely centers on attitudes towards infanticide, especially of children born outside marriage. There isn’t much that’s relevant to the Project.
Time period: 16th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: singlewomen
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Lit Crit is Not My Thing
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
OK, I confess that once I hit the “this is going to be lit crit” part of this article, and I already knew it wasn’t going to be strongly relevant to the Project, I didn’t really even skim the rest of the article. But if lit crit is your thing, hey, that’s ok!
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #267 Sedinger 2003 Working Girls
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Full citation:
Sedinger, Tracey. 2003. “Working Girls: Status, Sexual Difference, and Disguise in Ariosto, Spenser, and Shakespeare” in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Publication summary:
A collection of articles on the general topic of how single women are represented in history and literature in medieval and early modern England. Not all of the articles are clearly relevant to the LHMP but I have included all the contents.
Despite their statistical commonness, singlewomen were treated as an anomaly without a recognized role in society, especially after the Reformation removed the option of convents as a marriage-alternative in Protestant countries. The feminist historians’ goal of recovering women’s identities has leaned on two assumptions: that “single” women were rarely actually alone, and that unmarried women’s identities can be revealed in their relations to other women. [Note: this is not necessarily implying romantic relationships.] Recent [as of this publication] critiques of these approaches can be found in two collections: Singlewomen in the European Past: 1250-1800 and Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England. [Note: this is on my shopping list of books to track down.] But this latter approach overlooks the importance of barriers of class between women and seeks to identify a unitary “woman’s experience.”
This article takes a literary criticism approach to three versions of the story of Ariodante and Ginevra (an episode that appears in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso) that addresses the problem of that “false coherence” of women’s lives. As a whole, the article has little relevance to the Project.
Time period: 16th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: singlewomenEvent / person: Orlando Furioso (Ludovico Ariosto)
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He Just Can’t Stand the Thought of Being Forgotten
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
Once again, this article takes women’s lives and makes them all about the men. It feels like there are entirely too many articles in this collection that fall in that category. The genre of “widow portraits” in early modern England are a testament to men’s anxiety that maybe--just-maybe--their wives aren’t quite as in love with them as they seem.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #266 Levy 2003 Good Grief
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Full citation:
Levy, Allison. 2003. “Good Grief: Widow Portraiture and Masculine Anxiety in Early Modern England” in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Publication summary:
A collection of articles on the general topic of how single women are represented in history and literature in medieval and early modern England. Not all of the articles are clearly relevant to the LHMP but I have included all the contents.
This article concerns the visual genre of “widow portraits” created as a symbolic representation of the widow’s status and a depiction of her mourning. These were not typically painted at the widow’s direction after her husband’s death, but rather were commissioned by the living husband to ensure that he was properly mourned...at least symbolically. Ironically, in some cases, they represent women who predeceased their husbands. Thus, they are not representations of the woman herself as an individual, but as defined in relation to her marriage and her husband. The paintings represent men’s anxieties that their wives would not mourn them, but would see widowhood as freedom and a desired state--a sentiment reprseented in popular literature of the time. The article is fascinating, but has very little relevance to the Project.
Time period: 17th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: singlewomenwidows
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Bath Time Again
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
One can pretty much guarantee that any general discussion of women in medieval England is going to talk about Chaucer’s Wife of Bath eventually. This collection gets double-duty from her. It isn't that there aren't other women (and actual, rather than fictitious, women) that appear in texts of the same era. But academia has always been fond of anointing specific figures and stories as central, iconic representations and then building analytic industries around them. In cases (such as women) where the relative volume of documentary material is smaller due to historic marginalization, this contributes to the "tyranny of the single story". The Wife of Bath is an interesting literary character, but she isn't the be-all and end-all of medieval women or even medieval widowhood.
This blog is going to be packed with material for a while because in addition to zipping through the remaining articles in the current singlewomen collection, I've set myself a project to get caught up with my book reviews. And just when all that is sorting itself out, it'll be time to really ramp up in preparation for the release of Floodtide in November. So buckle your seatbelts!
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #265 Moore 2003 (Re)creations of a Single Woman
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Full citation:
Moore, Jeanie Grant. 2003. “(Re)creations of a Single Woman: DIscursive Realms of the Wife of Bath” in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Publication summary:
A collection of articles on the general topic of how single women are represented in history and literature in medieval and early modern England. Not all of the articles are clearly relevant to the LHMP but I have included all the contents.
The Wife of Bath gets a lot of exercise as the archetype of the “lusty widow” in Middle English literature. She is the only pilgrim in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales who is identified by marital status rather than by occupation. (Though ”wife” could also simply mean “woman” at this time.) But she operates, not as a wife, but as an independent singlewoman. Being a widow gives her the freedom to travel that a never-married woman might not have had. She represents an independent woman with agency and power, despite the references in her story to her various husbands. Through speech, she is able to claim the power to define her own history and identity, rather than have it defined for her, as her last husband attempted to do by teaching her woman’s “traditional” place. From one angle, she can be seen as mangling the meaning of the sacred texts she uses to justify her story, but from another angle she can be seen as deliberately re-making them for her own ends. The remainder of the article is a detailed analysis of how the Wife of Bath represents herself within her tale to lay claim to an androgynous and authoritative identity.
Time period: 14th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: singlewomenwidowsEvent / person: Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
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