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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 27c - Sappho: The Translations (reprised)

Saturday, October 20, 2018 - 11:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 27c - Sappho: The Translations (reprised) - transcript

(Originally aired 2018/10/20 - listen here)

Scheduling gets tricky sometimes, and I found myself putting together the October podcasts without an author guest. Rather than scramble and try to pull someone in at the last minute, I decided instead to reprise the two episodes I did on Sappho back in the first year of the podcast. They’ve been among my most popular shows. It also gives me an excuse to finally get the transcripts for these two episodes posted. Last week, you heard what we know about the historic Sappho and her times, as well as how her story was changed and mythologized across the ages. This week, you’ll hear a tour through translations of Sappho’s most complete works in different eras, as well as poems inspired by the style and sensibility of her poetry. I hope you’ll enjoy these shows, either as a new listener or returning to some favorite episodes.

* * *

One of the bright spots in the history of lesbian desire in history and literature is the ancient Greek poet Sappho. When you think about the erasure of women from history and the even greater erasure of queer sexuality, it’s so amazing that we have an icon like Sappho whose presence and genius were so powerful that they could only be dimmed and distorted and not entirely erased.

I like to try to do some sort of special feature in the Lesbian Historic Motif Project to celebrate Pride Month. This time I’ve been covering several books about Sappho from my to-do list, and have bracketed the month with two special podcasts.

The first one was about the historic Sappho and the beginnings of the myths that ancient Greek and Roman writers created about her.

This time we’ll look at the legacy of Sappho from the Middle Ages up through the 19th century. The various images people had of her. How people used her as a symbol. And the way those images affected how her poetry was translated into everyday languages, and how poets used her themes and imagery in their own work.

Sappho lived in the 7th century BC and it’s a testament to her reputation among other classical writers that we know anything about her at all. Early references to her works indicate that her poetry was collected into 8 volumes, representing perhaps 10 thousand lines of verse, of which 650 lines survive. That’s a small fraction, even considering that new fragments of her poetry are still being discovered today. One of the largest modern discoveries was on scraps of papyrus excavated from a rubbish dump in Oxyrhynchus Egypt at the end of the 19th century.

But for much of history before that, the only way that Sappho’s poems survived was when they were quoted by other authors--sometimes only a few words or a line, used to illustrate some point of poetics or grammar, or simply to gain the cachet of quoting the renowned poet. When literature was disseminated only by laboriously writing each copy out by hand, to cease to be re-copied was to be forgotten. And some time around the 6th or 7th century AD, the full collections of Sappho’s work stopped being of interest to copyists, and thus never made the transition from papyrus scrolls to parchment books, except second-hand when quoted by others.

Only one complete poem survives: her Ode to the goddess Aphrodite, where she begs Aphrodite to help her win the love of a woman who spurns her. But another nearly-complete song, known as “Fragment 31”, is the one that most caught the imagination of translators and imitators. The following translations are from Jane McIntosh Snyder’s book Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho and are literal renderings of the original meaning, rather than being works of poetry in themselves. They will serve as a foundation for the other versions I’ll be presenting. In fragment #1, known as the Ode to Aphrodite, Sappho names herself as the speaker and begs the goddess Aphrodite for aid in her romantic disappointment.

#1 Ode to Aphrodite

O immortal Aphrodite of the many-colored throne,

child of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I beseech you,

do not overwhelm me in my heart

with anguish and pain, O Mistress

But come hither, if ever at another time

hearing my cries from afar

you heeded them, and leaving the home of your father

came, yoking your golden

Chariot: beautiful, swift sparrows

drew you above the black earth

whirling their wings thick and fast,

from heaven’s ether through mid-air.

Suddenly they had arrived; but you, O Blessed Lady,

with a smile on your immortal face,

asked what I had suffered again and

why I was calling again

And what I was most wanting to happen for me

in my frenzied heart: “Whom again shall I persuade

to come back into friendship with you? Who,

O Sappho, does you injustice?

“For if indeed she flees, soon will she pursue,

and though she receives not your gifts, she will give them,

and if she loves not now, soon she will love,

even against her will.”

Come to me now also, release me from

harsh cares; accomplish as many things as my heart desires

to accomplish; and you yourself

be my fellow soldier.

The second poem, fragment 31, is incomplete at the end, but enough survives that it has been a favorite for translation and imitation, expressing the physical experience of desire and jealousy.

#31 He seems as a god to me

He seems to me to be like the gods

--whatever man sits opposite you

and close by hears you

talking sweetly

And laughing charmingly; which

makes the heart within my breast take flight;

for the instant I look upon you, I cannot anymore

speak one word,

But in silence my tongue is broken, a fine

fire at once runs under my skin,

with my eyes I see not one thing, my ears

buzz,

Cold sweat covers me, trembling

seizes my whole body, I am more moist than grass;

I seem to be little short

of dying...

But all must be ventured...

To understand the context of how Sappho’s poetry was understood and translated, we need to have a sense of how Sappho herself was viewed in later ages.

Classical writers like Ovid and some medieval writers held Sappho up as a model of education and erudition. Giovanni Bocaccio (who is most famous for his Decameron) wrote a celebration of famous (and some infamous) women that included her. And Christine de Pisan includes Sappho among the intellectual women praised in her work The City of Ladies.

In parallel with her reputation as a poet, Sappho was also associated with sex between women, whether as an example of a woman with lesbian desires, or to refute that accusation.

The Italian writer Bartolommeo della Rocca, writing around 1500, uses Sappho as an example of “morally offensive lust” between women.

In the mid 16th century, Italian writer Agnolo Firenzuola, when writing of the love that women could have for each other said, “Some love each other’s beauty in purity and holiness, as the elegant Laudomia Forteguerra loves the most illustrious Margaret of Austria, some lasciviously, as in ancient times Sappho from Lesbos, and in our own times in Rome the great prostitute Cecilia Venetiana. This type of woman by nature spurns marriage and flees from intimate conversation with men.”

Around the same date, the Swiss encyclopedist Theodor Zwinger included a list of Sappho’s female lovers in his entry for “tribades”.

The French aristocratic gossip-monger Brantôme, writing around 1600, was more interested in Sappho as an early proponent of what he called “donna con donna” -- woman with woman--than as a poet. Citing Roman authors he notes, “It is said that Sappho of Lesbos was a very good mistress in this art. Indeed, they say she invented it, and that the ladies of Lesbos have imitated her in this since and continued down to today. As Lucian says, such women are women of Lesbos, who will not tolerate men, but approach other women as men themselves do.”

During the 16th and 17th centuries, an increasing desire to distinguish acceptable forms of romantic attraction between women, versus unacceptably physical forms, led to a divergence between the images of Sappho as romantic poet and Sappho as unnatural deviant. This conflict plays out repeatedly over the following centuries with Sappho’s admirers feeling they needed to de-sexualize her work and life, and her detractors using the example of her fabled sexuality to attack learned women of their own time as inherently deviant.

Both sides used the classical poem “Sappho to Phaon” --now associated with Ovid, but at the time considered to have been written by Sappho herself--as evidence either of her repudiating the love of women, or of the tragic fate of one who had previously dared to embrace it. Translations of this poem appeared somewhat earlier than those of Sappho’s own poetry, as in Thomas Heywood’s 1624 edition.

Some responded to the conflict between the poetic and sexual Sapphos by inventing a second Sappho, to whom the objectionable material could be attributed. Others dealt with the dilemma by interpreting her poems as being written from a fictional masculine point of view. Male poets sometimes used Sappho as an alter ego, expressing their own heterosexual desire for women through her voice.

It is in this context that the renewed interest in Sappho’s poetry (as opposed to her personal life) led to publication, translation, and imitation of her works. Sappho’s poetry itself had previously only accessible to those who could read the original Greek--as well as having access to the older manuscripts that included it. In the mid 16th century, her work began being collected up and published either in the original Greek or with Latin translations.  Perhaps the earliest of these is the 1556 publication by Henri Estienne, which includes poems 1 and 31. Following soon after, were translations into everyday language.  But even before vernacular translations appeared, poets were referencing Sappho’s works and loves in their own poetry.

English poet John Donne, in 1600, wrote an original poem in Sappho’s voice entitled “Sappho to Philaenis” which acknowledges her homoeroticism and treats it positively.

French poet Anne de Rohan was clearly familiar with Sappho’s homoerotic reputation, and in her 1617 poem “On a lady named beloved” makes direct allusion to fragment 31 in a work that is clearly a love poem from one woman to another. She would have had access to Sappho’s works via publications such as those mentioned. You can see the echoes of Sappho’s themes in this English translation of de Rohan’s poem, though it is not a direct counterpart to a specific poem:

Beauty, it would be a great wrong,

If, for your worthy graces,

I had been dealt the lover’s fate;

For anyone but you, my dear Beloved,

All the Olympic torches,

Illuminated in their course,

Are not lovelier ornaments

Than the eyes of my beautiful Beloved.

Cupid, delighted with those eyes,

His right hand armed with an arrow

Shot into my troubled heart

The ardent desire to love my Beloved.

I know not whether they be heavens or gods

Whose power from me is hidden

And compels me, both near and far,

To die so as to love my Beloved.

To see them, they seem like the heavens,

Of azure color are they,

But by their effects they’re like gods,

Forcing me yet to love that Beloved.

For me, then, they’re both heavens and gods,

Because of their hidden power

And luminous appearance,

For I hold nothing dearer than my Beloved.

Anne Dacier’s French edition of Sappho’s work published in 1681 was important for the spread of familiarity with Sappho’s work thoughout Europe. However Dacier considered the homoerotic interpretation of Sappho to be slander, in her edition, Sappho’s fragments are reinterpreted to create a virtual male figure around whom Sappho’s life revolves.

Slightly earlier than Dacier, in 1652, the English translator John Hall included a version of fragment 31 in his edition of the classical Greek poetic manual that it is quoted in. Perhaps it is this context that inspired his choice of poetic meter. Unlike many translations, he retains the final surviving line that shows the incomplete nature of what we have.

Fragment 31 (John Hall)

He that sits next to thee now and hears

Thy charming voice, to me appears

Beauteous as any deity

That rules the sky

How did his pleasing glances dart

Sweet langors to my ravish’d heart

At the first sight though so prevailed

That my voice fail’d

I’m speechles, fev’rish, fires assail

My fainting flesh, my sight doth fail

Whilst to my restless mind my ears

Still hum new fears.

Cold sweats and tremblings so invade

That like a wither’d flower I fade

So that my life being almost lost,

I seem a ghost

Yet since I’m wretched must I dare...

17th century English poet Katherine Phillips was compared to Sappho by her friends. Although the intention may have been simply to praise Phillips’ poetry, the two bodies of work share the characteristic of using the structures and tropes of heterosexual love poetry in contexts where both the lover and beloved are unmistakably female.

Alexander Pope, perhaps best known for his mock-heroic poem “The Rape of the Lock”, turned his translating talents in 1712, not to Sappho’s work itself, but to Ovid’s poem “Sappho to Phaon”. Unlike some other translations of this work, Pope’s  version includes the acknowledgement that Sappho did originally love women--a topic that others had simply glossed over in translating the poem, turning Sappho entirely heterosexual.

The early 18th century English writer and politician Joseph Addison wrote a number of works inspired by classical authors. He wasn’t as proficient in Greek as Anne Dacier had been with her French edition. In 1735, Addison translated a number of Sappho’s works into rather forgettable rhymed couplets, including Fragment 31 “Happy as a god is he”. The first-person voice of the poem, combined with an absence of any specific reference to the person addressed (and the lack of grammatical gender markers in English) mean that little trace of homoerotic sentiment remains.

Fragment 31 (Joseph Addison)

Happy as a God is he,

That fond Youth, who plac’d by thee

Hears and sees thee sweetly gay,

Talk and smile his Soul away.

That it was alarm’d my breast,

And depriv’ed my heart of rest

For in speechless Raptures toss’d

While I gaz’d my voice was lost.

The soft Fire with flowing rein,

Glided swift through ev’ry vein

Darkness o’er my eyelids hung

In my ears faint murmurs rung

Chilling damps my limbs bedew’d

Gentle tremors thrill’d my blood

Life from my pale cheeks retir’d

Breathless, I almost expir’d

Some somewhat more poetic--if less faithful--versions were published by Ambrose Philips in 1748 including the Hymn to Aphrodite (Fragment 1), and Fragment 31. In The first, Philips had changed to gender of Sappho’s beloved to male.

Fragment 1 (Ambrose Philips)

O Venus, beauty of the skies,

To whom a thousand temples rise,

Gayly false in gentle smiles,

Full of love-perplexing wiles, ⁠

O goddess! from my heart remove

The wasting cares and pains of love.

If ever thou hast kindly hear'd

A song in soft distress prefer'd, ⁠

Propitious to my tuneful vow,

O gentle goddess! hear me now.

Descend thou bright, immortal, guest,

In all thy radiant charms confess'd. ⁠

Thou once didst leave almighty Jove,

And all the golden roofs above:

The car thy wanton sparrows drew;

Hov'ring in air they lightly flew; ⁠

As to my bower they wing'd their way,

I saw their quiv'ring pinions play.

The birds dismiss'd (while you remain)

Bore back their empty car again: ⁠

Then you, with looks divinely mild,

In ev'ry heav'nly feature smil'd,

And ask'd, what new complaints I made,

And why I call'd you to my aid? ⁠

What frenzy in my bosom rag'd,

And by what care to be asswag'd?

What gentle youth I would allure,

Whom in my artful toils secure? ⁠

Who does thy tender heart subdue,

Tell me, my Sappho, tell me who?

Tho now he shuns thy longing arms,

He soon shall court thy slighted charms; ⁠

Tho now thy offerings he despise,

He soon to thee shall sacrifice;

Tho now he freez, he soon shall burn,

And be thy victim in his turn. ⁠

Celestial visitant, once more

Thy needful presence I implore!

In pity come and ease my grief,

Bring my distemper'd soul relief: ⁠

Favour thy suppliant's hidden fires, 

And give me all my heart desires.

In Philips’ translation of fragment 31, there is no need to make pronoun changes, but a subtle shift in the emphasis of the poem can make it appear that the speaker’s love-sickness is caused by the man referenced in the first line. Alternately, the absence of an identification for the poem’s speaker leaves one free to imagine it in the male translator’s voice.

Fragment 31 (Ambrose Philips)

Bless’d as the immortal gods is he,

The youth who fondly sits by thee,

And hears and sees thee all the while

Softly speak and sweetly smile. ⁠

'Twas this depriv'd my soul of rest,

And rais'd such tumults in my breast;

For while I gaz'd, in transport toss'd,

My breath was gone, my voice was lost. ⁠

My bosom glow'd; the subtle flame

Ran quick through all my vital frame;

O'er my dim eyes a darkness hung,

My ears with hollow murmurs rung. ⁠

In dewy damps my limbs were chill'd,

My blood with gentle horrors thrill'd;

My feeble pulse forgot to play,

I fainted, sunk, and dy'd away. ⁠

Despite the best efforts of these gender-swapped translations, knowledge about Sappho’s work and reputation provided a “conceptual community” for women who loved women in the 18th century. The terms “lesbian” and “sapphic” were coming into common use in a sexual sense, and even superficially innocent references to the poet could be used as a sort of secret password to refer to lesbian desire.

For intellectual and literary women of the time, there was a complication. In addition to her sexual reputation, Sappho stood in for the idea of intellectual and literary women in general. So it sometimes happened that female scholars, even more than male ones, found themselves straining to discount the “taint” of lesbianism for the most famous Lesbian.

Sappho’s mere existence entered into the tension between several framings of same-sex passions. One position othered lesbianism by placing it elsewhere in space or time: in ancient Greece, or in foreign countries. Another view saw lesbianism as a brand new decadent phenomenon. A sort of “kids these days” approach. The classical Sappho could be used to imply lesbianism was something of the past, no longer practiced, and perhaps conceptually divorced from affections between 18th century women. But those educated enough to have access to literature of the previous century, such as John Donne’s “Sapho to Philaenis” (1633) or Brantôme’s Lives of Gallant Ladies would find it harder to dismiss lesbianism as a longstanding tradition.

It was during this era that accusations of lesbianism became a regular part of social and political attacks on prominent women. Sappho was a useful symbol to use in such attacks that would carry a weight of symbolism with an economy of reference. An anonymous poet in 1735 wrote a long mock-heroic poem entitled “The Sappho-an” satirically attributing to Sappho the origin of lesbianism in general and certain sexual practices in particular.

In the 19th century, the academic approach to Sappho’s poetry might be summed up by the opinion of Henry Thornton Wharton, whose 1887 edition of Sappho’s work attempted to produce a comprehensive bibliography of published editions starting in the mid-16th century, as well as materials relating to her life. Wharton discusses the passion and skill of Sappho’s poetry, but almost entirely sidesteps the issue of her sexuality, even when citing works that address it. He concludes, “whether the pure think her emotion pure or impure, whether the impure appreciate it rightly, or misinterpret it, whether, finally, it was platonic or not, seems to me to matter nothing.”

The translations he collects reflect this insistent side-stepping. Although Wharton’s literal rendering of the Ode to Aphrodite is faithful to the gender of the original without comment: “Who wrongs thee, Sappho? For even if she flies she shall soon follow...and if she loves not shall soon love, however loth.”

Most of the metrical renderings he collects all turn the diffident beloved to “he”. Wharton’s version of fragment 31 is less problematic, given that the original lacks the same overt reference to Sappho as the speaker and clear reference to the gender of the beloved. Thus the metrical versions by male poets that he collects can be received as the jealousy of one man (the poet) for another over the woman they both desire. Rather than a direct translation, here’s a borrowing of the imagery for another context by Lord Tennyson in 1832:

I watch thy grace; and in its place

My heart a charmed slumber keeps,

While I muse upon thy face;

And a languid fire creeps

Through my veins to all my frame,

Dissolvingly and slowly: soon

From thy rose-red lips my name

Floweth; and then, as in a swoon,

With dinning sound my ears are rife,

My tremullous tongue faltereth,

I lose my color, I love my breath,

I drink the cup of a costly death

Brimmed with delicious draughts of warmest life.

I die with my delight, before

I hear what I would hear from thee.

In versions such as this, the male literary establishment claimed Sappho’s poetic legacy for their own and for heterosexual love, by appropriating Sappho’s words and removing them from the context of her own desires.

But while one 19th century movement straight-washed Sappho in order to claim her for Romanticism, Sappho’s transgressive sexuality was enthusiastically embraced by the decadent movement that sprang up in France, who saw in her in icon of everything they considered most outrageous to bourgeois sensibilities: an aggressive and predatory female sexuality that led inevitably to madness and death.

This movement evoked their version if the legendary Sappho in works like Charles Baudelaire’s “Lesbos” (in 1857), and Pierre Louÿs’s The Songs of Bilitis (in 1894)--a cycle of poems in the voice of a fictional member of Sappho’s community.

Rather than end on that note, I’d like to close with two works by the American poet, Mary Hewitt. Her translation of Sappho’s fragment 31 published in 1845 fails somewhat in terms of poetic merit but seems to carry an intensity of emotion that many other translations lack.

Fragment 31 (Mary Hewitt)

Blest as the immortal gods is he

On whom each day thy glances shine

Who hears thy voice of melody

And meets thy smile so all divine

Oh when I list thine accents low

How thrills my breast with tender pain

Fire seems through every vein to glow

And strange confusion whelms my brain

My sight grows dim beneath the glance

Whose ardent rays I may not meet

While swift and wild my pulses dance

Then cease all suddenly to beat

And o’er my cheek with rapid gush

I feel the burning life-tide dart

Then backward like a torrent rush

All icy cold upon my heart

And I am motionless and pale

And silent as an unstrung lyre

And feel, while thus each sense doth fail

Doomed in thy presence to expire

Hewitt was also inspired to write original poetry in the style of Sappho. The following work echoes many of the themes of fragment 31, but rewoven into a new work. If anything, this poem carries a stronger sense of homoeroticism than the original, for instead of simply recording the speaker’s physical reactions, it explicitly attributes those reactions to love. When I looked for further information on Hewitt, I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover her among the literary lifelong spinsters who formed the backbone of the Romantic Friendship phenomenon. Alas, Hewitt was twice married to men--so my fantasies were shattered--but then so were many of the women of this time who wrote of their strong emotional bonds to other women. This poem suggests that at the very least she would have understood such desires.

If to repeat thy name when none may hear me,

To find thy thought with all my thoughts inwove

To languish where thou’rt not -- to sigh when near thee

Oh! If this be to love thee, I do love!

If when thou utterest low words of greeting

To feel through every vein the torrent pour

Then back again the hot tide swift retreating

Leave me all powerless, silent as before

If to list breathless to thine accents failing

Almost to pain, upon my eager ear

And fondly when alone to be recalling

The words that I would die again to hear

If at thy glance my heart all strength forsaking

Pant in my breast as pants the frighted doves

If to think on thee ever, sleeping--waking--

Oh! If this be to love thee, I do love!

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 27b - Sappho of Lesbos: The Woman and the Legend (reprised)

Saturday, October 13, 2018 - 07:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 27b - Sappho of Lesbos: The Woman and the Legend (reprised) - transcript

(Originally aired 2018/10/13 - listen here)

Scheduling gets tricky sometimes, and I found myself putting together the October podcasts without an author guest. Rather than scramble and try to pull someone in at the last minute, I decided instead to reprise the two episodes I did on Sappho back in the first year of the podcast. They’ve been among my most popular shows. It also gives me an excuse to finally get the transcripts for these two episodes posted. This week, you’ll hear what we know about the historic Sappho and her times, as well as how her story was changed and mythologized across the ages. Next week, you’ll get to hear a tour through translations of Sappho’s most complete works in different eras, as well as poems inspired by the style and sensibility of her poetry. I hope you’ll enjoy these shows, either as a new listener or returning to some favorite episodes.

* * *

Looking back at the long history of neglect, erasure, and condemnation of women who desire women, one of the few bright spots is the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Think how marvelous it is that we--as women who love women--have an icon like Sappho who has not only given us a vocabulary to identify and talk about our experiences, but entirely apart from that, who was so talented that even the long centuries could not dim our knowledge of her genius.

I like to try to do some sort of special feature in the Lesbian Historic Motif Project to celebrate Pride Month. It was June 2014 when I first started the blogging project and here we are, three years and 140 publications later! This time I thought I’d cover a handful of the books about Sappho that are on my to-do list, and do two special podcasts to book-end the month.

The first one will be about what we know of the historic woman named Sappho and the society she lived in. Then I’ll look at what Greek and Roman writers said about her, and how some of the myths about her life sprang up.

The second episode will look at the legacy of Sappho from the Middle Ages up through the 19th century. I’ll look at how she was used as an example of such different things as decadent sexuality and female literary genius. And I’ll trace the history of how her poetry was translated into everyday languages, and how poets used her themes and imagery in their own work.

* * *

For this first episode, I give a great deal of credit to André Lardinois, whose 1989 article “Lesbian Sappho and Sappho of Lesbos” provides a detailed and even-handed look at the historic and literary context of Sappho’s life. Other sources are listed in the show notes.

The association of the name Sappho and the word Lesbian with female homoeroticism is so well entrenched that we rarely question what evidence we have that Sappho actually was a lesbian (in the orientation sense, rather than the geographic one)? How would such an orientation have been understood in her time and culture? There isn’t a large amount of data, but there’s enough to draw a few conclusions.

Sappho lived around 600 BC on the island of Lesbos in the eastern Aegean sea, very close to the coast of modern Turkey. Other than her own poetry, every record we have of her was written centuries later.

The earliest source materials for Sappho’s life are the remnants of her poetry (mostly in the form of fragments quoted by later writers); an assortment of fiction that included her as a character, salacious gossip and a few more reliable facts about Sappho and her poetry that are found in the works of Classical authors; and general circumstantial evidence regarding the social and historic context in which she lived.

Sappho’s body of work includes songs celebrating the beauty of young girls, ceremonial songs (including cultic hymns addressed to deities and wedding songs), satires, and songs about members of her immediate family. There is also a fragment of an epic poem.

It is the songs in praise of girls that form the primary evidence for Sappho’s erotic interests, but the ceremonial songs provide important evidence regarding the social context. Sappho’s authorship of cultic hymns demonstrates that she was an established and respected member of her community. This is the functional equivalent of writing hymns for church. Therefore if her songs in praise of girls are evidence of sexual interest, then that interest must have been acceptable to her community. Similarly, her satirical works that focus on rivalries and jealousies between women indicate that whatever relationships were involved, they were known and accepted by the community.

There are other clues in Sappho’s poems regarding social and political relationships on the island of Lesbos in her time, and the respectable position held by both Sappho herself and the girls she addressed. And yet there is a pattern of references to the girls named in the songs leaving Sappho, either with her consent or to her regret. The personal and individual nature of these references suggests the songs were works written for specific occasions. In contrast, her poems of praise tend to be generic, and don’t mention specific names, either for the narrator of the verse or its subject. (Though it should be noted that most of what survives is fragmentary and we can’t know what was in the parts that weren’t preserved.)

If you take the content of these poems at face value, they suggest a context of female pederasty in the technical, classical Greek sense. That is, a social pattern where an adult is a mentor and lover of an adolescent of the same gender, and where this relationship is expected to change in nature when the younger person “graduates” to adulthood. Sappho’s poems indicate that whatever form this pattern of relationships took, it was compatible with her respected social standing. Over the centuries, these bare facts have often been interpreted in many different ways, according to the prejudices of the interpreter.

Sappho’s poetry never touches explicitly on sexual activity with the possible exception of one fragmentary reference to a dildo--a reference that is insufficient to determine the context. But it does use the forms and tropes of erotic love poetry. There are references to activities associated with courtship, such as the making of flower wreaths, as well as ones that are suggestive of physical expressions of affection, such as the line ”on soft beds...you would satisfy your longing”. For context, these themes should be compared to poems written in the context of male pederasty, which similarly avoid mention of sexual acts (but where no one doubts their existence).

Songs praising the beauty and attractiveness of girls--even those where Sappho notes her own response to that beauty--must also be understood in the context of the songs’ performance, often as part of marriage ceremonies. Themes of praise in this circumstance may be conventional rather than personal. But turning the argument around again, later male poets such as Catullus had no qualms about quoting Sappho’s work to express their own erotic response to a woman. So there was a clear context where her work was understood to represent erotic desire.

Among the later supposedly biographic stories regarding Sappho’s life, the one used most prominently to argue against her homoeroticism (or at least to argue for her eventual and inevitable “conversion” to heterosexuality) concerns Phaon, the man for whom she is said to have made a suicidal jump from the Leucadian rock. The earliest surviving source for this is from Ovid, who wrote in the 1st century BC, and takes the form of a letter purportedly in Sappho’s voice. There is some question whether Ovid was the actual author, but no question at all that Sappho was not.

Sappho’s work also refers to a daughter, and, given that, it is unlikely that she could have held the social position she did without being married--to a man, that is. Can all these elements be compatible with homoerotic desire? References to her desire for women (albeit, often disapproving references) are common in later classical commentaries. Athenian comedies sometimes satirized her, but never for homoeroticism, rather for heterosexual promiscuity. It can reasonably be supposed, however, that the authors of the comic plays were as unfamiliar with the historic context of 6th century BC Lesbos as modern authors are. The only difference is that they most likely had a much larger corpus of Sappho’s work available to them.

So, for example, when classical authors assert that Sappho had a daughter named Cleis, a certain amount of confidence can be placed on this (the name appears in fragments of her work, and she wrote about other family members) even though the existence of a daughter by that name could not be confirmed from what survives of her work today.

What, then, are we to make of the story of Phaon and the Leucadian rock?

One strong possibility is that this is a mythic reference and a poetic trope. Phaon was the name of one of the legendary men beloved by Aphrodite (who figures prominently in Sappho’s songs). It is possible that the story arose from a poem that was intended to be understood in the voice of the goddess.

For another possibility, a near-contemporary poet of Sappho, Anacreon, mentions a “leap from the Leucadian rock” as a proverbial remedy against the pain of love. As love-pangs feature regularly in Sappho’s work, it is not unlikely that she, too, may have made use of it as a rhetorical device. From such references, a later legend of Sappho’s leap of despair for the love of Phaon could have been constructed by someone not familiar with the literary motifs that were being used.

Could Sappho’s reputation for loving women also have originated in a mis-reading of poetic tropes? For this, such tropes would need to exist. And if they existed, then they would reflect prevalent and accepted practices. Did such practices exist? (And if they did, would they not be support for a position that homoeroticism was compatible with Sappho’s professional reputation?)

Sappho’s sexual reputation in pop culture changed radically over time. Sappho flourished around the early 6th century BC. In Athenian comedies of the 4th century BC, she was satirized as excessively heterosexual. Snide references by Roman writers to her “disgraceful friendships” with women began appearing around the 1st century AD.

Slang uses of the term “lesbian” in classical literature underwent similar shifts. The word always had a primary sense of “a female inhabitant of Lesbos”, but it picked up a variety of erotic connotations. Aristophanes (in the 5th c BC) used a related verb to mean “to practice fellatio” and this sense continued through late antiquity. The first known explicit association of the word “lesbian” with female homosexuality comes from Lucian (in the 2nd century AD) who writes, “They say there are women in Lesbos with faces like men, and unwilling to consort with men, but only with women as though they themselves were men.” There are early medieval Byzantine references to the word “lesbia” explicitly meaning a female homosexual.

Were the shifts in Sappho’s sexual reputation a result, or a cause, of shifts in the senses associated with the word “lesbian”? Or is it entirely the wrong question to ask whether Sappho was homosexual, given that a categorical distinction and division between homosexual and heterosexual eroticism arose long after her era?

We can get some sense of what the answers might be by looking at the social and historic context of Ancient Greece. The first consideration is the social institutions that brought young girls together in groups for the sort of education in song, dance, and other activities referenced in Sappho’s works. The second consideration is the evidence in other parts of Greece of that era for institutions of female pederasty, in parallel with the more familiar male institutions.

There is copious evidence for organized institutions of young women who learned music, singing, dance, and other activities to “serve the Muses.” In addition to serving as education for the girls, these institutions would participate in religious and social rituals as a group. This organization and these activities are perfectly compatible with the many references in Sappho’s poetry, including references to beautiful clothing and other adornments. Therefore the context of Sappho’s interactions with the subjects of her poetry could easily be in one of these institutions.

Although later Roman authors generally treated the subject of female homoeroticism with distaste and disapproval, they provide occasional references suggesting that earlier Greek attitudes were different. Plutarch describes a Spartan custom whereby “distinguished ladies” had sexual relationships with younger women or girls, in direct parallel to the pederastic relationships between adult men and adolescent boys.

This claim is corroborated by other authors as early as the 4th century BC. The Greek poet Alcman wrote songs for Spartan “maiden choirs” in the 7th century BC (that is, slightly earlier than Sappho). He used the word “aïtis” for a girl in a sexual relationship, as a direct parallel to male “aïtas”, which was the official term for a boy in a pederastic relationship. Alcman’s songs for the maiden choirs include language that suggests erotic interactions (or at least erotic desires) between the girls themselves.

For visual evidence, a vase from the Greek island of Thera from the time of Sappho’s life shows two women in a stylized interaction similar to depictions of male erotic couples.

From all this, we can envision a scenario where a married female poet of high social status and impeccable reputation could enjoy and openly celebrate erotic relationships with the young women under her guidance. Such relationships could even have been an important part of the extensive social and political networks on the island of Lesbos. Only with the loss of that institution were later writers left with the need to try to make sense of Sappho’s erotic expressions in the context of her life and times.

And the next episode of this podcast will take one of Sappho’s most complete poems and use it to trace how later western cultures understood Sappho, both as a poet and as a woman.

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 26e - Peaceweaver by Jennifer Nestojko

Saturday, September 29, 2018 - 11:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 26e - Peaceweaver by Jennifer Nestojko - transcript

(Originally aired 2018/09/29 - listen here)

Welcome to the third story in the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast original fiction series!

Each of the stories we’re presenting this year has a different mood and flavor. We started with daring adventure, then shared the stumbling adventures of young love. This time, our characters are mature women, looking back at a lifetime of devoting their lives to others and wondering if there is still space to find personal joys. The story comes to us from Jennifer Nestojko, a writer and poet who lives in central California. She is a part time medievalist as well as a high school and college teacher. Jennifer likes to translate Anglo-Saxon English and write alliterative poetry, sometimes in Anglo-Saxon. She takes one of her classes through Beowulf every year, and in addition to wanting to write an epic poem about the women who have to clean up the great hall of Heorot after every one of the monster’s attacks, she has always been intrigued by the side story of Hildeburh. That interest led to this story, “Peaceweaver.”

Tiana Hanson returns to narrate this episode, having previously contributed to our debut fiction episode. Tiana was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, and came to the San Francisco Bay Area to chase her lifelong dream of being a professional actress. She has narrated fifteen audiobooks (available on Audible), mostly lesbian romances, and is delighted to find a new creative outlet that allows her queer light to shine.

This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.

* * *

Peaceweaver

by

Jennifer Nestojko

 

Peaceweaver: that had been her task. She had held to it, a young bride married off to a foreign folk, but her husband had been kind and she had been given her place as queen by his side. She brought the welcoming cup to visiting guests, she was a goldfriend to guests and nobles and the jarls; she was queen and her word carried weight. There was peace between her people, both the people of her birth and the people of her womanhood. Her son grew strong and tall, learning the ways of a warrior and a leader.

Threads break over time; sunlight frays the working of warp and weft. All things end, and peace itself never lasts long. Hildeburh had hoped, though, that the peace she had brokered with her youth and her body would have outlasted her age. Her son was seventeen when he fell in the same battle that also left her brother for the ravens to pick over and feed upon.

Hildeburh looked at the rising coastline of the land of the Danes. She had never seen it from this vantage point, and it felt strange to be seeing it now as a form of coming home.  She closed her eyes to the soft light of spring, breathing the air deeply. She would not show her grief now, not in front of her kinfolk, the ones who had betrayed her husband and were carrying her home as part of the spoils of war. Finn had shown them honor in the hall, given them treasure from his own hand, and they had waited until the bonds of frost and ice had been loosened for this, their return to this coastline, this homeland. It had been a bitter winter, but spring brought no ease to her heart.

When she opened her eyes, she could make out the fort cresting the hill by the beach where they would land. She remembered rides down to the coast from her father’s hall when she was a girl; the sky here had opened up and the smell of salt and sea spoke of possibilities. She used to dream of sailing off to new lands in one of the proud ships with its sail bright against the sky and returning with new treasure. She stood up straight in the bow of the ship she now rode upon; the warriors within had to maintain its pride, as it was worn by winter winds and still carried marks from the previous fall’s battle. She was returning from another land; who knew the fulfillment of such a girlish dream would gall so? There was treasure in the hold, certainly, some given in faith, more wrested from the hands of the slain.

Son and brother both burned on a pyre, and her husband was left behind to be mourned and buried, though she was taken before the funerary rites were even begun. What was she? Was she treasure returned, or wrested from the hands of the dead? No longer was she a peaceweaver; she was the tattered remnants of the hangings above her now cold hearth.

It was in this mood that Hildeburh set foot once more upon the shores of the Spear Danes. She was silent when Ingi, who had been a small boy of three when she had been wed, helped her down the plank onto the sand. He was a warrior now, having slain Ronne, her husband’s counselor. He lifted her carefully up to the waiting horse; she stared at him impassively. Ronne had helped her when she was a new queen to the Frisians. She had learned much under his tutelage.  Ingi nodded to her briefly, also offering no words, leading her horse to the road. She knew the way from here, but it was clear that she would have the courtesy of an escort within the larger group. Whether it was courtesy or caution, she cared not.

Her silence was broken only when she was escorted to her chamber within her nephew’s hall. There was no point in being rude to the handmaid who came to offer her water and a change of clothing. When she had washed and dressed and had the tangles combed from hair that was then braided with woven bands, the girl left her to sit in her room and look out the window. It was the same view that had been hers as a child; it seemed to have become smaller. She no longer recognized the figures crossing the courtyard.

There was a brief knock on the door; she turned to see it open, allowing a woman of middle age to come in. “Dota,” she cried, standing up suddenly.  “I thought you had married Kaj and left for his lands long ago.” Dota smiled, the calm, secret smile that had been hers all through their growing up together.

“You,” she replied, “were the one who left for farther lands. I crossed no sea.”

“Now you have returned?” asked Hildeburh. “Shouldn’t you still be tending those closer lands?”

Dota snorted. “Do I look like a farmer to you?”

“Kaj was no farmer,” Hildeburh retorted, a bit sharply. “He oversaw farmers.”

Dota shrugged. “He oversees them no more. He died in a feud with a neighbor. The neighbor’s son now sits by my hearth and I am here.” Her shrug was dismissive, and there was a look in her eye that let Hildeburh know, from almost forgotten experience, that she would get no more out of Dota for now.

 “Have you come, then, to welcome me back, now that I myself have returned,” Hildeburh asked, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice. Women tend the hearths, but they are easily ousted from them.

“I have come to get something from my room,” Dota replied, calmly. “It seems that we are to share once again. Just as when we were girls.” Dota opened one of the boxes on the lower shelf on the wall, pulling out a skein of wool. “I will see you in the hall at eventide.” It was not a question.

That a feast was held in honor of the returning warriors that evening was inevitable. The hall was bright with candles and the shining gear of the jarls. Cups of gold and silver at the high table reflected back the light, and Hildeburh recognized a brooch on Hoc’s shoulder as one belonging to her husband. Hoc, named after his father, was king now. He had been much younger when she had left home; she had scolded him for stealing sweets from the kitchens.

Hoc stood, silencing the hall in that motion, bringing all eyes to him. “We welcome you back,” he began. “You have kept faith with your people, bringing glory to the spear Danes and erasing the shame of the winter’s long exile.”

There was much clattering of shields and cheering from the men. Dota, who was sitting at a lower table, quirked an ironic eyebrow at Hildeburh. Hildeburh smiled to herself. She was used to sitting at high tables, her face schooled to the proper expression, but she found herself close to tears.

Hoc had been going on, praising his warriors, and he was giving out treasure, golden rings, and torques, and blades scrubbed clean of blood so that they too reflected the light. Ingi, Hildeburh saw, was given praise and a fine sword. Hoc came to the end of his gift giving and then turned to her.

“This night also gives us cause for joy,” he intoned, “for our royal princess, Hildeburh, has also been returned to us. She too is a great treasure of our house. Welcome back, dear aunt.”

Hildeburh stood. “I thank you for your welcome, and I accept the hospitality and protection of your hall.” It was a short, and to her ears, stilted speech, but the warriors applauded and Hoc looked gratified. She sat back down, toying with her cup of mead, looking into its golden depths as the skald began his rhyming.

Her returned childhood seemed to be not such a bad turn of fate later that night, when she once again shared a bed with Dota. In the darkness came the familiar touch once again, and Hildeburh turned to her old friend, embracing her as she so often had when they were younger. Then there was no harm in two friends sharing affection; now that they were both widowed, there was again no harm.

The next morning Dota was gone before Hildeburh awoke, and she spoke little to her throughout the day. They sat in the solar, weaving in silence, while the younger girls chattered about them. In the hall at supper they sat at different tables, though Hildeburh was not given a place at the high table again. She did not miss the high table, but she wanted Dota’s company. Hildeburh was sure that Dota regretted their previous night’s caresses, but that night she was woken once more in the darkness to Dota’s touch and sweet kisses.

This became the pattern of Hildeburh’s day; working in the stillroom, weaving in the solar, and wondering if the night would bring a closeness that was shunned during the daylight hours.  Dota did not reach for her every night, and Hildeburh wondered what would happen if she reached out for her. She tried one night, but Dota rolled away. Hildeburh lay still in the darkness, wondering what she had done wrong.

The only time their tasks crossed was in the solar, and there was little privacy amongst the young girls weaving or plying their needles. Dota did not always come to the solar, however; she found tasks elsewhere. One afternoon, with the pale sunshine making its way across the floor, one of the young girls sat next to her. Her golden hair hung in long braids, and her clothing was modest, but of good weave. She smiled shyly, naming herself Edela. “I know you are a friend of Dota’s,” she said, after having glanced about the room. “She used to speak much of you.”

Hildeburh smiled back encouragingly. “We were childhood friends,” she said.  The girl was no more than sixteen, she judged. 

Edela looked down at her embroidery. “I was the daughter of one of her landholders,” she said. “I served in her household from a young age.” She hesitated. “She cared for me. “

There was more to what the girl was saying. “Is that why you followed her here?” she asked.

The girl blushed. “I could not go home. Farthin, he that took Kaj’s place, had plans to marry me to one of his men.”

Hildeburh shook her head. “Was he not a good prospect?” she asked.

Edela shrugged, a gesture very similar to Dota’s. “He had land, he was well respected. He was like Kaj, though. All temper. Dota claimed me as hers and took me away. I saw,” she faltered a bit, and lowered her voice, “I saw what Kaj did to her. I came willingly. My father died in the feuding. No one else would speak for me.”

Dota had spoken for Edela, and Hildeburh knew what courage that must have taken, so she was out of sorts at being avoided. Dota had taken to staying up late enough that there was no question of conversation or anything else in the reaches of the night. Tired of being avoided, she woke one morning before the dawn. Dota was snoring lightly beside her; for once she had not stolen away early.  Her face in the new light was more wrinkled, and her body was softer now with age, but Hildeburh knew that she herself had the same marks. Dota was still beautiful to her, and Hildeburh recalled watching her in the same way so many years before. When Dota showed signs of stirring, Hildeburh turned her face away, not wanting to be caught looking.

Dota opened her eyes and frowned.  “Awake so early?” she asked grumpily. She had never been fond of rising early and Hildeburh had been waiting for the morning her natural patterns to reassert themselves. The fact that Dota had been coming to bed so late had worked in her favor.

“I wanted to speak with you,” Hildeburh replied. “The day seems to bring too many tasks, so I thought to make time when all is quiet.”

“What is there to speak of?” Dota sat up and grabbed for her under tunic. She put it on and began to unbraid her hair.

“I have missed you,” Hildeburh began. Dota brushed her hair silently, her face turned away. “It is good to be sharing a room with you again.” Still Dota remained silent. She began to plait her hair, which had a few strands of grey in it now. The grey had not shown beneath her veil.

“Dota,” said Hildeburh, “why won’t you talk to me?”

Dota deftly pinned her wimple and veil into place. “What do you want me to say?” she asked.

“Anything! Here we are, once again, and I know so little about the years between. I know you, Dota, or I knew you once before. Who are you now?”

“There’s a riddle no skald can answer,” said Dota, almost angrily. “I am a widow, and that is good enough for most. My husband died dishonored, and thus I carry that mark myself.”

“My husband is now deemed an enemy; but I am not one,” Hildeburh said sharply.

 “Oh,” Dota replied,  “I refuse to feel stained, as a good woman should. His choices were all his own. Still, what is there for me now? Shamed widowhood and the sufferance of the king.” She shrugged, “You are a princess and therefore something to be retrieved after battle.”

“Like a gold coin lost beneath a chair, but once found thrown into the pouch,” Hildeburh agreed.

Dota looked at her finally, hearing the echo of her own bitterness in Hildeburh’s voice.

“So we have both returned,” she said, standing up. “You, however, are the only one who is the gold coin.” She moved to leave. Hildeburh grabbed her by the hand, but Dota shook her off, walking firmly out the door.

Later that afternoon the solar was quiet; it seemed that the young girls and the other women were helping with the spring cleaning of the hall. Only Dota and Hildeburh were present, each at her own loom. Dota made no move to speak.  Her silence was woven between them, each thread laid down by time and distance, until Hildeburh felt wrapped in it, stifled. She wanted to rend it into pieces, but did not know what words to choose.

“Dota,” she began, “why are you angry with me?”

Dota said nothing, but continued with her weaving. Hildeburh stood up and went to her side, putting her hand on Dota’s arm. “Do not ignore me!” she cried.

“You are not my queen, to order me so,” said Dota. “You are queen only to the dead and broken, and they do not speak.” She shrugged off Hildeburh’s hand, continuing with her work, her eyes on the emerging pattern.

Hildeburh sat down, looking at her empty hands. After a long moment she said, “The broken can speak, Dota. I am queen no longer, but I learned that much.”

“The broken can scream, for all I care,” replied Dota. “They still are not heeded.”

“Who broke you?” asked Hildeburh.

“Who says I am broken?” replied Dota, looking up from her loom, her eyes fierce. Despite their fierceness, they held remembered pain. Hildeburh had seen such a look from one of her attending ladies, one who served at court as an escape from a drunkard of a husband.

“Kaj?” she whispered.

Dota held her eyes for a moment and then looked back to her loom. She once again began to weave, but her silence had changed. Instead of wrapping Hildeburh, it seemed to wrap around Dota, as if it were a shawl protecting her from the cold.

“I did not know,” Hildeburh said. “You were so far away and we heard so little news from you. Then I too was gone, across the sea. I did not know.”

Dota snorted. “We heard about you – reports reached even our holdings of your wisdom and kindness.”

“If you revile me so much,” said Hildeburh heatedly, “then why hold me at night? Or are you like a husband who ignores his wife during the day only to seek out favors in darkness?”

Dota flinched, the arrow having made its way to the right target. She studied her weaving, as if looking for flaws or dropped threads. “You responded when I touched you,” she said.

“I welcomed you,” Hildeburh agreed. “You are more of a homecoming to me than anything else could be.” She found a gap in her own pattern and carefully began to pick it out, dismayed at her lack of attention.

The light was beginning to wane. Dota carefully tidied her space and then stood up. She paused by Hildeburh’s side before leaving the room. “A poor homecoming, then,” she said.

“No,” said Hildeburh, “a rich welcome. I know your value, and always have. You are treasure beyond compare.”

Dota stared at her a moment; there were tears in her eyes.  “Of course I have missed you. I have always missed you. What choices did we have?”

The tears Hildeburh would not shed in her husband’s hall, the ones she would not shed on the ship or at the high table, began to stream down her face.  Dota reached out and caressed her cheek.

“I do not know,” she said, “what choices I have now.”

That night Dota came to their room quite late. Hildeburh was awake, listening for her arrival. Dota undressed, crawled beneath the blankets, and then lay on the edge of the bed, her back to Hildeburh. Hildeburh turned to face the wall, the one with the window in it, though now it was covered. She stared into the shadows all night, until dawn came creeping in. Then she rose silently, getting dressed, and leaving the room. She knew Dota was awake; there was no sound of gentle snoring, only silence.

Hildeburh made her way to the keep’s herb garden, which at this point was only a promise and hope of things to come. She sat down on a bench; the stone was not yet warmed by the sun, and its cold seeped into her. She felt a twinge in her hip; this winter’s cold had brought her ached in her joints, reminding her that her body was aging. It had been a hard winter in many ways, and spring had brought no relief. Was there any point in trying to warm Dota’s winter? Perhaps it would be best to live with frozen silences. Spring had brought death, once the thaw came. Dota’s anger brought its own pain. Hildeburh scuffed at a bit of frost on the ground by the bench. She had spent many hours in this garden as a young girl, learning herblore and tending to the plants. She loved the smells that rose when the sun warmed the plants. Those days seemed so far away, and in the cold sunshine, Hildeburh found she could not imagine the coming of summer.

There was a step behind her, and before she could look, Dota sat down on the cold bench. There were circles under her eyes, but she looked more at peace. She put her arm around Hildeburh, lightly at first. When she was not rebuffed, she moved in closer.

“Remember old Una?” she began.  “We thought she was so ancient, puttering about the stillroom, telling us that happiness came later in life.”

Hildeburh smiled at the memory. “We thought she was crazy.”

“She always had a treat for us, though. And a smile. I now realize that she was not all that old,” Dota said.

“She would tell us, when I got restless, that we were going to do battle against the encroaching weeds, and that the treasures we would return with were more valuable than gold, since they cured illness.” Hildeburh rested her head against Dota’s shoulder.

Dota took a deep breath and held it for a moment, then exhaled with a sigh. “I think,” she began slowly, “I think that I am still waging war, but with no spoils worth bringing home.”

“I am one of the spoils of war,” Hildeburh said, with her own sigh. “I would be worth more if I could heal rather than harm.”

There was a long silence, while the sun warmed the garden and their bodies warmed the bench and each other.

“You brought no harm,” Dota said, finally.  “I left first, those many years ago, and I would not have told you about my marriage had you been able to ask. I missed you fiercely, but we had each followed the road fate set for us. “

“Now we are back, where we started,” said Hildeburh.

“Yes,” said Dota.

“I do remember Una,” said Hildeburh. “She and Gunild shared quarters.”

Dota leaned into Hildeburh. “And much more. Right now, I have no more answer for you than that.” She stood up, once again stiff and aloof, and walked back into the keep. Hildeburh stayed for a while, trying to see the garden as it had been on summer days, as she would see it soon in the coming months.

Later that afternoon the solar was filled with chatter once more. The young girls were excited; one was now betrothed to a jarl in Geatland, strengthening bonds between the Danes and the Geats. Dota pursed her lips and looked up at Hildeburh, her eyes ironic.

Despite the gossip, the girls were attentive to their weaving, working as they were taught to mind the weft, to gauge the tension, to take thread and make it into something whole and beautiful. Hildeburh attended to her own work, warmed by Dota’s presence. She smiled to herself as she thought of the coming night, when tasks could be laid aside. She was certain that, despite last night’s cold and sleepless vigil, this night would be warmer.

She had not failed; she had woven peace between two nations as best as she could, but there could be no lasting peace when grudges were held more closely than gold. She glanced over at Dota, who was frowning in concentration and then she looked to her own pattern. There were many forms of battle, she thought, and Dota had survived a long and grievous war. They both deserved a better spring.  Peaceweaver: all her life she had been taught that this was her task. Perhaps there was more than one way she could weave peace.

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast2018 Fiction Series

Mary Diana Dods - A Reference Timeline

Tuesday, October 2, 2018 - 11:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

Complicated historic stories tend to send me either to drawing up genealogies or timelines. When I finished doing my LHMP summary of Bennett's book on Mary Diana Dods, I needed to sort it all out in my head by coming up with a chronology of her identities and movements. One startling aspect is how short the time was between the first inklings of creating Walter Sholto Douglas as a husband for Isabella Robinson, and Douglas's probably fatal end in a French debtor's prison. Bennett never seems to interrogate the various references to Dods' physical ailments and Mary Shelley's rather abrupt turn from assisting in the creation of Mr. Douglas to treating him as some sort of villain with a "diseased mind". I'm not going to add my own speculations to the question of what Dods thought about the Douglas marriage project, or how she felt personally about Isabella Robinson. As story fodder, those details don't matter and as history they may be unknowable.

In the following timeline, keep in mind that Dods, Lyndsay, and Douglas are all the same person. "MS" is Mary Shelley because she appears so often I got tired of typing the whole thing.

* * *

Pre-1790 (maybe)

Georgiana Dods born

1790 (maybe)

Mary Diana Dods born?

1807

Evidence that Mary and Georgiana Dods are living with their father, Lord Morton in London.

Ca. 1808-1810

Georgiana Dods marries John Carter and goes to India with him.

Ca. 1814 (maybe)

Mary Diana Dods leaves her father’s household when he marries (a woman younger than herself!).

1815-1819

Mary Diana Dods is living in Swansea and racking up debts. This appears, in part, to be a result of her father having no idea what sort of allowance is necessary for the minimal support of the bastard daughter of an earl, and the irregularity of the payment of that allowance which puts Mary into a debt spiral where she's constantly borrowing from friends to pay off creditors and then begging for money to pay the friends.

Ca. 1818

Georgiana Carter (Mrs. Carter) is back in London with 2 children, her husband dies in India. She joins Dods in Swansea sometime in 1819.

1820 (roughly)

Dods and Carter move to London, one step ahead of their creditors (who eventually track them down). They are borrowing money from Miss Figg to pay debts and beg their father for money to settle them.

1821

February - References to Dods having “scholars” in London as a reason for remaining there. She appears to be giving music lessons among other things. Mrs. Carter is looking for a post as a paid companion. The sisters appear to be living separately for a time.
March - There are references to Miss Charlotte Figg in Dods’ accounts. (Miss Figg appears to be a close friend who has slightly better access to funds than Dods has, though see later notes on that.)
August 27 - David Lyndsay’s first letter to publisher William Blackwood. The return address is care of Mrs. Carter in London. (In the midst of all of the anxious letters from the sisters to their father about money, it's clear that Dods is taking clear positive action to try to bring in more income, both from writing and from the teaching venture with Miss Figg and others. Dods' choice to pubish under a male pen name need not be seen as anything to do with gender identity--simply a means of being taken seriously. It may also be that her father woudn't take kindly to her publishing under her own real name. She reassures him on that point in one letter.)
August - Publication of Lyndsay’s Plague of Darkness in Blackwood's Magazine
October - Publication of Lyndsay(?)’s The First Murder in Blackwood's Magazine
November - Dods writes to her father telling of the success of the academy she runs with her associates Miss Figg and Miss Aleworth who teach piano and singing. Mentions that she is writing for newspapers and magazines including the Edinburgh Review. Mrs. Carter is boarding with them. (Mrs. Carter's concerns largely have to do with making sure her sons are placed in good boarding schools and that she's able to locate herself nearby to visit them. I'm feeling a lot of personal echoes of my Luzie Valorin from Mother of Souls in reading about their struggles.)
December - Publication of Lyndsay’s Mount of Olives in Blackwood's Magazine
December - Lyndsay’s collection of dramas published by Blackwood. (The collection of dramas, alas, did not sell well. Blackwood lost money on the venture and this seems to be the point when he cools significantly towards Lyndsay's work. Lyndsay/Dods, on the other hand, quite naturally feels like things are looking up.)

1822

January - Publication of Lyndsay’s The Ring and the Stream in Blackwood's Magazine
January - Lyndsay mentions to Blackwood that he is about to leave town for his health.
February - (for several months?) Dods (and David Lyndsay) and Mrs. Carter possibly leave London. Lyndsay’s mail drop is Mr. Weale.
February - Lyndsay/Dods inscribes a poem of loss on the flyleaf of a copy of his collection of dramas. The book later finds itself in the hands of MS. (This is the context where I'm intensely curious about who the poem might have been mourning if it referred to a genuine real-life personal loss. The friend most commonly mentioned by Dods in this era is Charlotte Figg, but she is clearly still alive and thriving after this date, so it can't be her. But might the period away from London be connected with grief? All pure speculation on my part.)
April 1 - Lyndsay tells Blackwood he has been at Cheltenham for the waters due to a complaint of the liver.
April - MS writes that she admires Lyndsay’s Cain. (This is the first hint that Dods had become part of the Shelleys' circle. Lyndsay's claims to Blackwood of having been their intimate also support a serious friendship around this date.)
May - Publication of Lyndsay’s Horae Gallicae in Blackwood's Magazine
May - Lyndsay continues writing to Blackwood but his material is no longer being accepted for publication.
June - Dods is in London. She writes her father of her disappointment that he won’t help her unmarried friend Miss Figg to get a pension in honor of her father's military service. Describes Figg as “her friend and partner” who earns what she can by teaching music (but may receive an inheritance when her mother dies). (One shouldn't read anything into the word "partner" as they had been business partners in the musical academy. It's easy to lose track that "partner as euphemism for same-sex lover" only really cropped up in the later 20th century.)
June - Lyndsay writes to Blackwood with an air of desperation, noting the very moderate nature of his allowance from his father. Blackwood rejects his proposed projects.
July - Percy Shelley dies, as well as Edward Williams (common-law husband of Jane Williams)
August - Lyndsay tells Blackwood he is about to go to France with a friend and collect materials for his writing. (Unclear if Dods did travel to France with Figg at this time.)
August - Publication of Lyndsay’s The Death of Isaiah in Blackwood’s Magazine.
September - Dods writes her father about the poor state of the education industry. She and her friend Miss Figg are looking into setting up the academy in Paris instead, which her friend’s mother is looking into. (Miss Figg appears to have traveled to Paris to assist with this exploration, but it isn't clear that Dods accompanied her.)
November - Lyndsay writes Blackwood with a new proposal after a long gap.

1823

February - Lyndsay complains to Blackwood of not hearing from him. He proposes a set of German translations, perhaps a connection with those MS mentioned to Colburn.
March, April, June, July - Lyndsay continues to offer works to Blackwood but no indication of any interest.
August, September, October, December - Lyndsay and Blackwood have a spat and reconciliation, Lyndsay continues to express disappointment that Blackwood is not taking his works. (After the successes of 1821 and the slow decline of her situation in 1822, there's a sense that Dods must have been coming to wit's end with regard to finances during this period.)

1824

February - Lyndsay requests Blackwood to return material via Weale if not usable.
February - Mrs. Carter, writing their father on Dods’ behalf, tells of her desperate finances which involve entangled loans with Miss Figg and her mother.
March, May - Lyndsay still receives no response from Blackwood.

1825

Some time this year - MS, Isabella and Mary Diana Dods all attend Dr. Kitchener’s salons. Dods and Shelley almost certainly were friends for several years before this, but Isabella may be a new acquaintance.
January - Lyndsay’s first contact with Blackwood since the previous May. Notes his goblin tales will be published by Hurst and Company and asks if he may dedicate them to Blackwood. (The answer was no.) He mentions in passing that he is “well acquainted with Mrs. Shelley.”
May - Lyndsay writes to Blackwood mentioning that his Tales of the Wild and the Wonderful is being published by Hurst and Robinson and asking Blackwood to include  a book announcement for his new books.
Oct/Nov - Lyndsay writes Blackwood on several subjects and includes anecdotes about his friendship with MS, calling her a “fine creature” too good for the party she belongs to and providing gossip for which MS was certainly the source.

1826

June - Blackwood writes to Mrs. Sholto Douglas accepting two works for publication. (Presumably there was previous correspondence from her offering them.) This is around the time when Isabel’s daughter Adeline is born. (It's a reasonable presumption that Isabella is doing the actual writing here, rather than just allowing her name to be used. What isn't clear is whether there was already a plan at this point for Isabella to be Mrs. Douglas permanently for her own benefit, as opposed to filling the role for the sake of Dods' writing career.
July - Mrs. Sholto Douglas (Isabel Douglas) responds to Blackwood, disclaiming authorship in favor of her husband, to whom she says she’s been married 6 months.
August - Blackwood’s Magazine publishes a story credited to “Mrs. Sholto Douglas”.
October - MS writes to publisher Alaric A. Watts, acting as go-between for David Lyndsay  while he was abroad (no direct evidence of Dods going abroad), and sending a packet of his writing, but it is too late to be included in his publication
October - MS writes to publisher Henry Colburn promoting David Lyndsay’s new collection of dramas to him

1827

June 27 - MS first mentions the Douglases in her letters. (But since she is most likely the context of the Douglases meeting, one assumes that she has been aware of the fictitious marriage from the very start.)
July - MS’s friend Jane Williams becomes common-law wife of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, MS feels Jane has betrayed her by gossiping about her past, especially her relationship with Shelley.
July 23 - George Douglas, Lord Morton dies.
July 30 - Funeral of George Douglas, Lord Morton.
July - MS letter to Jane Williams Hogg mentions Walter Sholto Douglas, he is attending the funeral of Lord M, he and Isabel are newlyweds. MS others are in the south of England with Isabella Robinson Douglas, who is anxious about “D” who is off at the funeral of Lord M whose will is relevant to the Douglases’ fate. MS is there until October 1827. (It's important to note that the financial consequences of Lord Morton's will are not the possibility of receiving some substantial inheritance, but rather the possibility that Dods and Carter will lose their allowances entirely -- a possibility mentioned by Lord Morton in his previous correspondence with them. The confirmation that the annuity will continue is a relief, but not any sort of solution to their financial difficulties.)
August 11 - Date of the codicil of Lord Morton’s will that confirms an annuity to his “reputed” daughters, Mary Diana Dods and Georgiana Carter.
August 20 - MS writes a friend that Mr. Douglas is coming in “a few weeks” after which the Douglases will leave for Paris.
August 26 - MS and Isabella Douglas are evicted from rooms in Sompting and move to Arundel.
August 28 - MS  refers that Douglas “seriously thinks of les culottes.” (That is, Dods has decided to live publicly as Mr. Douglas. It isn't clear whether this was intended as a permanent life-long project or a temporary experiment.)
September 23 - Dods has joined MS, Isabella, and Mrs. Carter. Dods is now living publicly as Mr. Douglas.
September 23 - MS commissions John Howard Payne to impersonate Douglas to pick up passports for the Douglases’ trip to Paris.
September 25 - MS writes publisher Alaric A. Watts about a delay in sending him some work of hers. She includes a packet “from Mrs. Douglas.” (This doesn’t appear to be material for publication?)
October 1 - The passports are received.
October - The Douglases and Mrs. Clark travel to Paris. (The removal to Paris served two functions. It enabled the Douglases to establish their new married identities away from anyone who might call foul. And English people were finding that living abroad was less expensive that staying at home. It isn't clear what the Douglases' finances are at this point. Dods would appear to be receiving very little in the way of writing income, but had her annuity. There's the annuity. Isabella has reconciled with her father and might possibly be receiving an allowance from him but I haven't seen any mentions of this. And whatever their income is, it's certain that their expenses outstrip them.)
November 12 - Mr. Godwin dined at MS’s joined by Mr. Robinson. (There are a large number of entries from Mr. Godwin's (MS's father's) journals that mention social events involving Mary Shelley and various other people in the Douglases' circles such as Isabella's father and sister, or Dods' friend Miss Figg. These are very much side issues, but show that the larger social circle continues on interacting with each other, even as the Douglas marriage runs onto the rocks and fails. I've included only a few of them.)
December 5 - MS records in her journal that she has lost one friend (Jane Hogg) and is divided from another (Isabella Douglas) but "divided from" might only refer to the geographic separation.

1828

February 12 - MS’s journal records a visit from the Robinsons.
March 2 - Mr. Godwin joined Miss Figg and Miss Robinson at MS’s house.
April 11 - MS leaves for Paris to stay with the Douglases, with Mr. Robinson and Julia Robinson (Isabella’s sister) who is her new companion. She comes down with smallpox on arrival.
May - MS returns to England
June 5 - MS writes Jane Hogg about Isabella and refers to Isabella’s “sufferings [that] transcend all that imagination can portray” and speaks of trying to “extricate her.”
June 13 - MS receives a letter from Viscount Dillon with compliments to Miss Dods and a request for her to send stories for inclusion in his publication. MS sends some of her own work and that of “a friend writing as David Lyndsay,” though it is too late for inclusion.
June 22 - MS writes to an unnamed editor promoting Lyndsay’s work. (It's very interesting that even as Mary Shelley is commiserating with the "sufferings" brought on Isabella by her marriage, she continues to promote Dods' literary endeavors under various names.)
June 28 - MS writes to Jane Hogg about Isabella and blames herself for some problem possibly having to do with the marriage. She blames Sholto, referring to his “diseased body” and “diseased mind”. Last mention of the Douglases in her letters
July 5 - A Paris friend writes MS that Isabella Douglas is bored.
October 5 - A Paris friend writes MS that Isabella Douglas is involved with Claude Fauriel and criticizes her for it.

1829

February 4 - A Paris friend refers to the Douglases’ marriage as an argument against the institution.
May 13 - MS’s journal says she might have been happy with Isabella but “that dream is over”. (Is this because she now sees through Isabella as shallow and self-centered? Or because the Douglas marriage is a bar to MS and Isabella having some sort of romantic friendship relationship? Unclear.)
May 15 - Mr. Godwin dines at MS’s with Julia Robinson
July - After this, the Douglases are no longer mentioned by their previous friends in Paris. There is no evidence that they go to Hannover as planned.
September - Lyndsay’s last letter to Blackwood proposing a long Scottish historical poem. He spells his name “Lindsay” and the handwriting is not his usual. (Although Bennett doesn't comment on any matches to the handwriting, one might guess that this is Mary Shelley continuing to act as a go-between for Dods' literary hopes.)
November - A Paris correspondent notes that Mr. Douglas is in prison for debt. (The law at the time considered the husband to be the only "legal entity" in the marriage. So Isabella wouldn't be under threat of imprisonment, though one must assume that she would lose any lodgings and might be importuned by creditors. Was she staying with friends? Had she skipped off back to England? No clue.)

1830

May 10 - Mr. Godwin dines at the Robinsons with MS and others.
June 7 - Mr. Godwin has tea at MS’s with Thomas Moore and the Robinsons. (I've included these notes to point out that whatever Isabella was doing, she wasn't socializing with her family back in London.)
November - Isabella Douglas and Adeline are back in London.
December 1 - MS’s journal records her disillusionment with Isabella Douglas. “She has lost her fascinations.” The two are clearly estranged. There is no mention of Sholto

1832 Mary Clarke continues to complain about the behavior of Isabella in Paris.

1840 (maybe) Isabella marries Mr. Falconer.

1842 Mrs. Carter dies and is buried in Paris.

1851 Mary Shelley dies.

1853 Adeline Douglas is married. The license lists Walter Sholto Douglas as her father.

1869 Isabella Robinson Douglas Falconer dies in Italy.

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP

Sexual Identities in The Roaring Girl

Monday, September 24, 2018 - 09:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

This article makes a nice palate-clenser to last week's piece by Ungerer. It primarily focuses on the dramatic character of Moll Cutpurse within The Roaring Girl, but also notes how Mary Frith (by way of her post-show performance) acted to underming the play's attempt to rehabilitate her character, and to re-claim her identity as a disruption to existing gender identities.

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LHMP #214 Kranz 1995 The Sexual Identities of Moll Cutpurse in Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl and in London





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Full citation: 

Kranz, Susan E. 1995. The Sexual Identities of Moll Cutpurse in Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl and in London in Renaissance and Reformation 19: 5-20.

Krantz primarily focuses on the character of Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl, with a secondary consideration of how that image relates to the historic Mary Frith. [Note: to keep the two clear with the least effort, in this summary I’ll use “Moll” for the dramatic character and “Frith” for the historic person.] She examines Moll’s ambiguous identity through three framings: prostitute, hermaphrodite, and bisexual ideal.

Moll Cutpurse stands out in the context of cross-dressed female characters in Renaissance theater in using the trope not for complete gender disguise, as with the girl-disguised-as-a-boy leads in romantic comedy, but in depicting a hybrid “hermaphroditic” character who has both male and female characteristics at the same time. The character of Moll is also complicated by the historic Mary Frith, who also challenged gender boundaries, but within a different context. The portrait of Moll in the frontispiece of the printed edition of The Roaring Girl show her key masculine signifiers: short hair, a pipe, a drawn sword, and wearing loose “slops” breeches. But neither for the historic Frith nor for the character Moll are these used for gender passing or disguise. And both in the play and in real life, her default outfit combined a feminine skirt with masculine upper garments.

Women wearing masculine garments were subject to various interpretations in 17th century England. The one that came foremost to mind, especially from official sources, was an assumption of immorality and uncontrolled sexuality, i.e., either prostitution or at least sexual impropriety. When Frith was arrested for going about wearing garments of mixed genders, but clearly not trying to pass as a man, the central suspicion and charge was that she was involved in prostitution, a charge she vehemently denied.

The character of Moll is explicitly described in a similarly hybrid outfit: Enter Moll in a frieze jerkin and a black safeguard [i.e., a protective outer skirt]. With the addition of the props of a sword and tobacco pipe, the audience is given a contradictory set of signifiers to read. Moll doesn’t fit easily (or at all) into Jacobean social and sexual hierarchies and thereby points out the deficiencies and flaws in those hierarchies. She disrupts the gender binary, but does so by claiming male privilege and opting out of the marriage economy, rather than by sweeping away the existing social order.

One can’t read The Roaring Girl as a straightforward transvestite plot, with characters moving within the gender binary while reaffirming it. Standard female transvestite characters temporarily claim the independence and privileges of a man, but participate in a heterosexual marriage resolution that inevitably re-establishes the gender binary and gender hierarchy. But Moll doesn’t return to a normative feminine role at the conclusion. She neither marries nor undergoes personal transformation. Her interaction in marriage sub-plots works to establish her comic unsuitability for marriage, thereby supporting the positive outcome for the designated romantic leads.

Moll’s simple existence creates a category crisis: she exists as a gender enigma, neither adopting nor shedding her hybrid costume. The other characters recognize this crisis by engaging with her via three different sexual identities, as well as with the character’s refusal to identify herself as a sexual being. She is approached via both standard poles of female sexuality, the virgin and the whore, but also as standing outside binary gender as a “monster” or hermaphrodite, either an ungendered being who is neither male nor female, or a bisexual being who is both simultaneously.

Moll is given the attributes of a dramatic hero: physical prowess, a noble spirit, and moral certitude--but she succeeds in claiming them only by removing herself from the question of sexual identity. In the end, she is allowed to transcend gender by reference to a philosophical bisexual ideal that makes her self-sufficient and unconnected to sexuality.

Another continuing theme in the play is for other characters to misread Moll’s transgression as sexual promiscuity. Women assume she is a rival for their husbands’ sexual attention. Men assume she is available for their sexual conquest. Moll’s resistance to these assumptions is not as a virtuous and chaste woman, but as a martial champion of all women’s virtue. She confronts the male sexual aggressors, defeats them by force of arms, and chastises them for thinking that women are their natural prey. But in doing so, Moll removes herself from the category she defends. She is not susceptible to male flattery and she cannot be subjected by force.

This feeds into the reading of Moll as a “third sex” outside the gender binary. The character of Sir Alexander labels her a monstrous gender hybrid in response to Moll’s deliberate emphasizing of her masculine dress (deliberately done to deceive him). Other characters speculate on her possible physical hermaphroditism, or at least on her bisexual potential: “she might first cuckold the husband and then make him do as much for the wife.”

Renaissance culture was obsessed with the concept of the hermaphrodite. In terms of ordinary bodies, this manifested as a need to force ambiguous individuals into one binary category or the other. But on an abstract philosophical level, it allowed for the envisioning of a sexually self-suffient ideal being who combined the best attributes of male and female, thereby transcending the need to unify with a gender opposite to achieve perfection.

Moll rejects the reading of her as physiologically indeterminate, as monstrous. The play then invokes this hermaphroditic ideal, turning her transgressive masculine signifiers into an outward sign of her male-coded virtues. One of Moll’s speeches invokes this sexual self-sufficiency when she rejects a suitor’s overtures saying she, “likes to lie a-both sides of the bed herself”. Being both male and female, there is no place in her bed for any other.

The mythologic origins of Hermaphroditus may be alluded to in various astrological discussions of Moll (and of Frith) which invoke the sign of Mercury (Hermes) in the context of her criminal activities and her service to Venus (in Frith’s case, in running a bawdy house later in life; in Moll’s case, in helping the young lovers to their happy conclusion). But in doing so, the question of Moll’s own sexuality is removed from the question, and her performative status as a “third gender” is instead idealized as a metaphorical ideal.

The confusing contradiction of Moll’s various identities in the play is disrupted further by the appearance of Frith on stage after at least one of the performances of the place, wearing her hybrid-gender outfit, singing, and giving “immodest and lascivious speeches” including an offer to prove her female gender to anyone who would return to her lodgings with her. Frith rejects the metaphoric idealized hermaphrodite posited by the play, and invokes a physiological-essentialist position that prioritizes her genitalia over her gender performance. [Note: This framing by Krantz should be noted as speculative. Frith could just as reasonably be read as identifying as female and offering her body as contradiction to the accusation of hermaphroditism and comfortable in embracing her hybrid gender expression.] While the playwrights used Moll to advocate for social liberality and the incorporation of transgressive gender identities into society, Frith herself raises the question of whether she wanted to be so incorporated and normalized, or whether she preferred to continue as a disruptive force.

Time period: 17th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: cross-dressingcross-gender roles/behaviorhermaphroditismEvent / person: Mary Frith aka Moll Cutpurse







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Erasing Queer Identity: Moll Cutpurse

Monday, September 17, 2018 - 07:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

Sometimes this blog is a dispassionate and intellectual summary of academic research. Sometimes it's a total squee-fest about a great source or a fascinating piece of historical evidence. And sometimes it's the equivalent of rage-tweeting. This one has turned into the last. Ungerer's article is a valuable single source for most of the documentary evidence of Mary Frith's life. And it's a maddening morass of unsupported and contradictory prejudice, directed at the goal of erasing any trace of queer identity from that life (plus some snide and snarky comments directed at other researchers on the topic). Historians are human beings like the rest of us, and sometimes you just want to smack them upside the head. This is one of those times.

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LHMP #213 Ungerer 2000 Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature






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Full citation: 

Ungerer, Gustav. 2000. “Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature” in Shakespeare Studies, 28:42-84

It was hard to escape two underlying themes in this article, neither of them speaking directly to the scholarship: the author appears to have something of a personal grudge against Elizabeth Spearing’s edition of Frith’s biography, and he seems determined to conclude that there was nothing particularly queer or transgressive about Frith’s life—she just thought dressing in men’s clothing was a useful career move. Now, it’s not as if I don’t have personal interests in the interpretation of Mary Frith’s life, but I’m startled at the amount of evidence Ungerer feels compelled (and willing) to brush away to come to this conclusion. So this will be one of those summaries that involves a number of editorial asides, clearly identified in square brackets.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of this article is the catalog of documentary references to Mary Frith, under her various names.

Ungerer notes that one of the difficulties in sorting out Mary Frith’s sexual and gender identities is the fragmentary nature of the evidence and that it is filtered through male-oriented and prejudiced records. He early stakes out a position that the memoir attributed to Frith is a complete fiction representing the “criminal biography” genre. With regard to gender and sexuality, she is contradictorily presented as “a transvestite usurping male power, as a hermaphrodite transcending the borders of human sexuality, as a virago, as a tomboy, as a prostitute, as a bawd, and even as a chaste woman who remained a spinster.” [Note: these are not as distinct and contradictory identities as he implies, regardless of their accuracy.] Ungerer goes further to suggest that the question of whether Frith might have been an entirely fictional figure is not adequately addressed, although the question isn’t treated as seriously in doubt within the rest of the article.

Ungerer’s first serious dig at Spearing comes in suggesting that she had made a mistake in doing her analysis of the full version of Frith’s memoirs and not considering the chapbook version “extracted from the original” published by G. Horton in the same year, which sensationalizes the material further. I haven’t had a chance to compare the two editions, but neither does Ungerer discuss specific points of difference. Mostly he delves into Horton’s treatment of other criminal biographies, such as that of highwayman James Hind, that include a suspicious amount of royalist propaganda. Frith, too is given a highway robbery incident in Horton’s work, which clearly seems unlikely to be truthful. But I can't seem to find that reference in the full biography. Additional mythologizing can be found in later works, such as Alexander Smith’s A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Shoplifts, and Cheats of Both Sexes (1719), who seems to be the inventor of the story that Frith robbed the Parliamentarian General Fairfax on Hounslow Heath. Ungerer points out that obvious fictions such as this can’t be used to answer questions about Frith’s actual life and character.

The author then lays out the program of his arguments: that the 1662 “diary” of Mary Frith was structured to add a few historical facts to a standard template for the criminal biography genre. And that therefore the 1662 document presents a mythic construct that tells us little about Frith’s life. And that the fact that Frith is recorded as having married a man contradicts more transgressive theories about her gender and sexuality. [Because, of course, no person ever entered into heterosexual marriage who had anything other than a cis identity and heterosexual orientation.] And lastly, that Frith’s cross-dressing was entirely a deliberate professional theatrical performance and not an expression of personal identity. [Note: Ungerer argues so strongly, in the face of the evidence, against viewing Frith as a queer figure—though the word “queer” doesn’t figure in the terminology here—that it makes me curious to know what it would have taken to convince him.]

Ungerer argues (somewhat in contradiction) that the hypothetical author of Frith’s biography (rejecting the possibility that it was, indeed, based on Frith’s own dictation) didn’t have access to the archival data that modern scholars have identified (though presumably they had living memories to work from) but that on the other hand, whatever data they had was reshuffled to fit the genre, so it didn’t matter. The following points are presented as arguing against the biography’s accuracy: that it includes a standard “sinner turned penitent” speech, that it frames Frith as a royalist, that it presents her as the mastermind behind two other highwaymen, that it presents her as a popular defender of the poor, and that in contradiction to all that, it presents her as a “sexual monster”.

[Note: The suggestion that these features undermine the truthfulness of the work as a whole runs up against similar themes in documents not derived from the biography. For example, Frith’s will uses similar “penitent sinner” language. Middleton and Dekker’s fictionalized Moll Cutpurse, penned four decades earlier, present her as a defender of the downtrodden and an enemy of hypocrites. And I would argue that the degree to which Frith is presented as “monstrous” in any of these texts is simply a product of the limits of how her contemporaries could envision gender roles, not a personal indictment.]

Ungerer agrees with Spearing that the full text of Frith’s biography constitutes three separate authors, corresponding to the three separate sections of the work. (I.e., the address to the reader, the third-person introduction to Frith’s life, and then the first-person section presented as her own story which is referred to here as the "diary" section.) He notes that the structure is “three incoherent, uncoordinated, and at times contradictory parts”.  [Note: It’s unclear to me how the addition of what is self-identified as a different person’s introduction to the diary is proof of the fictional nature of the diary itself.] The address to the reader acknowledges the discontinuous nature of the text, saying, “excuse the abruptness and discontinuance of the matter, and the several independencies thereof…it was impossible to make one piece of so various a subject, as she was both to herself and others, being forced to take her as we found her, though at disadvantage.” [Note: it would seem to me that this would argue for the validity of the “diary” part of the text, as otherwise why not simply write it to be more continuous and coherent?]

The second section of Frith's biography presents an analysis and commentary on Frith’s life and person with an insight that suggests personal familiarity with her. However there are clear errors and omissions. Some dates don’t align. [Note: the second writer also fails to include several facts—like Frith’s marriage—that are also absent from the diary section.] The third section is framed as a first-person narrative, forming an autobiographical confession. It begins by running through a number of pranks and anecdotes, then there is a break and the setting shifts more towards the later part of Frith’s life and includes more contemporary political events and diatribes against Cromwell and the Puritans.

The numbers for birth and death dates and for Frith’s age, as given in the various sections of the work, do not entirely align. She died in 1659 and the diary has her claim (when ill, shortly before her death) that she was 72 years of age, placing her birth in 1585. But the second writer in the work assigns her a birthdate in 1589.

Frith left a will, written in June 1659 a month before her death. But in the diary Frith asserts, “I did make no will at all,” and then relates various disbursements of her fortune that she had made while living. [Note: these wouldn’t be contradictory if the dictation of her diary occurred before the drawing up of her recorded will. But the person named in the diary to receive the remainder of her estate is not mentioned at all among the various people listed in her recorded will.]

One of the most curious omissions from the diary in any of its sections is reference to Mary Frith’s marriage in 1614 to Lewknor Markham, esquire. For all that it seems to have been a marriage in name only, quite possibly for legal advantages, Frith made reference to her status as a widow and used “Mary Markham” as an alternate name in records throughout her life (including in her will). There are several references in the diary and the 2nd writer’s discussions that refer to Frith as not only unmarried but deliberately so. This would seem to be the strongest argument undermining the diary’s authorship. [Note: Though it’s possible that Frith-as-hypothetical-narrator simply didn’t consider it interesting or relevant to mention when relating the more adventurous events in her life.]

Ungerer suggests that the strongest argument for the fictional nature of the diary section is how it follows the pattern of the fictionalized biography of highwayman James Hind, as shaped by author George Fidge in 1651-2. And that the encoding of Mary Frith as another “royalist criminal” is evidence of the deliberate fictionalization of her life as given in the diary. An “origin story” given in the diary for her nickname as “Mary Thrift” that connects it with a political event in 1639 is contradicted by evidence of the nickname being in use perhaps two decades earlier. Frith asserts various politically pointed activities and inveighs against various various parliamentarians in the diary section covering events in the 1640s. The insertion of the anecdote about Frith masterminding the robberies of James Hind and Richard Hannam is suspect, if only because Frith’s sphere of expertise was London and not the region where they operated. These highwayman exploits were expanded in Alexander Smith’s (aforementioned) 1719 treatise on highwaymen, in which Frith is credited with robbing General Fairfax. [Note: however the implausibility of this anecdote doesn’t reflect on the diary, as it is a later work.]

Another feature of the fictionalized criminal biography was the “penitent sinner” motif. This element in the opening of the diary section is offered as evidence against its fictionalization. [Note: But similar language appears in Frith’s will, and the use of penitential language is pervasive in texts of this era. So it seems a weak thread to hang an accusation of untruth on.] Similarly, the presentation of Frith as a protector of the poor against injustice is a standard feature of criminal biographies. [Note: But see similar themes in The Roaring Girl, suggesting that this motif had been a part of Frith’s legend all her life.]

In considering theories about Frith’s gender identity and sexual orientation, Ungerer entirely discards the diary and its accompanying material as evidence and turns instead to the record of her marriage in 1614 to Lewknor Markham, possibly a son of author Gervase Markham. He says that marriage, “imparted an air of cultural normalcy” to her status and erases the framing of her as unmarriageable, as monstrous, or as a hermaphrodite who refused to marry. Ungerer’s position (which he spends some effort to support) is that “She turned out to be a self-fashioning individual who had taken to transvestism as an alternative strategy for economic survival. … she was a scheming and calculating woman with an ingrained instinct for upward social mobility and determined to exploit to the full the ambiguous legal position of women under common law.”

[Note: I’m going to come back to this. Hold that thought.]

Marriage provided several changes to Frith’s legal status. A married woman could either be a feme covert, a woman whose legal identity was “covered” by her husband and who could take no independent legal or financial actions. Or, even though married, the marriage contract could specify that she would remain feme sole, in effect, a legally single woman, able to run her own business and take actions in her own name. Frith acted regularly as  feme sole, especially with regard to her business as a fence. But on other occasions, she claimed to be feme covert, when it was convenient to dodge legal consequences by claiming to have no ability to act independently under law. So, for example, in 1624 when a hatmaker sued her for money owed, he was warned not to sue her as feme sole because she would only respond by claiming to be feme covert and that therefore he must apply to her (long-absent) husband for redress.

In point of fact, the testimony in that case provide strong evidence that the marriage was a polite fiction. Frith claimed that she couldn’t even remember how long she’d been married to Markham, and the attorney for the other side asserted that she had not lived with her husband “these ten years or thereabouts” (i.e., the entire period of the marriage).

Ungerer notes that engaging in marriage is in direct contradiction to the character portrayed in Middleton and Dekker’s play who rejected the very concept of marriage. [Note: As the play was published in 1611 and Frith’s marriage was in 1614, this needn’t be considered a contradiction. At the time The Roaring Girl portrayed Moll Cutpurse as disdaining marriage, the character’s namesake was, in fact, unmarried and perhaps had every intention of remaining so at the time.]

Documentation concerning Frith’s career as a licensed broker of stolen goods (a fence) makes her status as a legally independent woman clear. The article returns to her criminal and crime-adjacent career, starting with her arrests in 1600 and 1602 for theft (the literal cutting of purses for which she was nicknamed), along with the absence of any reference to cross-dressing at that time. Ungerer then asserts that Frith’s cross-dressing correlates specifically with the beginnings of her involvement with the Bankside entertainment industry and he speculates, “that her transvestism was a commercially and professionally motivated ploy to increase her income.” He continues, “It would definitely be dangerous to diagnose the case of Mary Frith as that of a lower-class woman in quest of her sexuality; hers is far more likely to be the case of a pickpocket turned transvestite for gain.” The reasoning was that Frith’s appearance on the streets in male clothing would draw and distract a crowd who would then be victims of pickpockets who would presumably share the proceeds with Frith.

[Note: the flaw I see in this reasoning is that Frith’s cross-dressing would make her highly memorable and identifiable, which surely would be the opposite of the desired effect.]

Ungerer concludes that the conjunction of her cross-dressing and her association with criminal elements means that the cross-dressing was a professional strategy, and further that this “confirms that there was a relationship between transvestism and crime.” He claims that Dekker and van de Pol’s study of female cross-dressing in the Low Countries demonstrates a “paradigm of the criminal female transvestite”.

[Note: I have no idea how one could draw this conclusion from Dekker and van de Pol’s work. They discuss a wide range of contexts and motivations for female cross-dressing, and although a few examples involve criminality, the majority do not. To focus on this one specific context and then claim that there was an inherent relationship in 17th century northern Europe between female cross-dressing and criminality is  the strongest tell that Ungerer has a preconceived conclusion here that he is working hard to “prove.” Whether that preconceived conclusion stems from his own prejudice against gender transgression in women, or whether he feels a need to erase gender/sexuality as a factor in Frith’s life, I don’t know. But this was the point when I decided to discount his conclusions entirely and to flag this article as “useful only when quoting primary source material.” So from this point on, I’ll add my back-talk without bothering to flag it in brackets.]

Ungerer supports his conclusion that Frith’s appearances in male clothing were a deliberate performance with such things as her confession in the Bishop’s court that she “had long frequented all or most of the disorderly and licentious places in this city as namely she hath usually in the habit of a man resorted to alehouses, taverns, tobacco shops, and also play houses there to see plays and prizes.” Of course, many other people frequented this same list of locations and activities without doing so for the purpose of performing as an entertainer, or of participating in criminal activity. Frith certainly engaged in “pranks” like the wager that led her to ride horseback in a fully male outfit through the streets of London, as well as the sort of rude practical jokes that make up much of her biography. But Ungerer spins an invented scenario where he depicts Frith singing bawdy songs in a tavern and distracting patrons with the startling sight of a woman smoking a pipe, solely to enable her confederates to pick their pockets more easily, and then he uses this invented scenario as proof of his interpretation regardin her motivations.

The direct evidence for Frith as a professional entertainer is limited: an announcement at the end of the script for The Roaring Girl that Frith herself would appear on stage “some few days hence” to perform, and a corresponding confession in court records that she appeared “at a play...at the Fortune in man’s apparel and in her boots and with a sword by her side...and also sat there upon the stage in the public view of all the people there present in man’s apparel” during which she sang to the lute and made speeches. Ungerer plumps this up with speculative elaborations and then concludes that, “She seized the opportunity to bring home to the audience that her self-fashioned cultural identity as a public persona, that is, as a female entertainer in male disguise, was not identical with her private self. Thus, she let it be known in unmistakable words that she was not a transvestite, nor a hermaphrodite, nor a sexually ambiguous character of any kind.” The sole evidence he gives for this conclusion is Frith’s declaration that she knew many in the audience thought she was a man, but she’d be happy to disabuse them of that idea if they came with her to her lodging. As if identifying as a woman were incompatible with having a “sexually ambiguous character.”

To push further on the erasure of Frith as a gender outlaw, he argues that Frith’s message was that crossing gender boundaries was not transgressive or disruptive, not immoral or reprehensible. But the authorities clearly disagreed (just as they considered the wearing of cross-gendered clothing by non-criminal women to be morally suspect--a factor that Ungerer doesn’t seem to consider).

The crackdown on Frith after her stage appearance in connection with The Roaring Girl was not aimed at her alone or even at cross-dressing women in general. In October 1612, there was a legal ban on theaters staging the performance of “jigs, rhymes, and dances after their plays” because of the disruption to the peace they often caused. (Though Ungerer implies that it was Frith’s performance in particular that drove this action.) Ungerer discusses Frith’s shift to working as a fence, accompanied by a lot of speculative “whether X was a factor is unknown” and “it would also seem logical” and “she conceivably had opportunity”.

Ungerer sums up the preceding with his predetermined conclusion: “[Mary Frith] had made a name for herself as a street and tavern performer, as a light-fingered instrumentalist and dancer of jigs, who apparently sensed that the time was ripe to confide to her audiences that her cross-dressing had nothing to do with her sexual identity and should be taken for what it was: a simple trick of the trade consisting in a costume change. In her promotion of this view, her male dress or playing apparel had become, as it were, her signature as a popular entertainer.”

The next section of the article discusses gendered aspects of the tobacco trade and the act of smoking. Frith’s pipe-smoking was part of her masculine performance, and her social presence in tobacco shops was another example of entering male-coded spaces. But despite a claim in her biography, she was hardly the first English woman to engage in smoking.

The last section of the article is the most useful, as it provides transcripts and source annotations for pretty much all the documentary references to Mary Frith’s life. If one sifts out Ungerer’s commentary and unwarranted assumptions about the various documents, this is the only part of the article that I can whole-heartedly recommend as useful to the researcher.

Time period: 17th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: cross-dressingcross-gender roles/behaviorEvent / person: Mary Frith aka Moll Cutpurse







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Moll Cutpurse: 17th Century English Gender Outlaw

Monday, September 10, 2018 - 07:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

In conjunction with this month's podcast essay, I'm covering a couple of publications, both scholarly articles and primary sources, about Mary Frith, aka Moll Cutpurse. Moll is a great example of what I'm talking about regarding the details of actual history being far more fascinating than the tropes they often evolve into in popular culture. Moll wasn't simply "a woman who habitually wore male clothing," she was a woman (and proclaimed herself a woman, without any denial or concealment) who used maculine-coded garments to negotiate her relationship to society and to the misogynistic culture of 17th century England while still absorbing and reflecting that culture's attitudes and beliefs about women's nature and place. She knew exactly where the several boundaries were regarding what would be tolerated and flirted with their edges out of a spirit of daring and rebellion. But she was also socially and politically conservative, a staunch royalist during the English Civil War, expressing disgust for men who she perceived as taking on feminine attributes, and disdainful of all parties involved in sex work, even when she herself was willing to profit from them. In popular culture of her day, she was depicted both as a figure of mockery and as a champion of feminist principles. One gets the impression that Moll would have been an entertaining companion to go drinking with, but not necessarily the most restful person to have as a friend.

Stay tuned for this month's podcast essay which will include excerpts from a number of those contemporary records, including the memoir discussed here.

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP







LHMP #212 Todd & Spearing 1994 Counterfeit Ladies






About LHMP

Full citation: 

Todd, Janet & Elizabeeth Spearing ed. 1994. Counterfeit Ladies: The Life and Death of Mary Frith Case of Mary Carleton. William Pickering, London. ISBN 1-85196-087-2

This book is a study and edition of two 17th century “real life memoirs” of women who attracted mythologizing stories due to their unusual lives and criminal contexts. The label “counterfeit” women would seem to apply more obviously in the case of Mary Carleton, who passed herself off as a foreign noblewoman and used that image to acquire financial support and attract advantageous suitors. As there are no overt queer elements to her story, I won’t be discussing that part of the book in detail. Mary Frith (Moll Cutpurse), on the other hand, would seem to fit the category if one views her as a counterfeit of a woman, due to her habitual gender bending, both in dress and in profession. [Note: “Moll” was a common nickname for “Mary” at the time, part of a range of nicknames derived by a set of regular sound changes used to create variants from many base names. In this case, it’s part of the group: Mary > Molly > Moll.]

Their two biographies were published a year apart in the 1660s, shortly after the restoration of King Charles II to the throne. Both women were openly royalist and associated with images of cavalier “glamour”. Autobiography was not an established genre at the time. Both texts are framed as “novels” or “Romance”. Mary Frith refers to the picaresque tradition in literature, into which her life definitely fits! The two texts also suggest the genre of “criminal biography” that became popular in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Criminal biographies often straddled fact and fiction, echoing anecdotes and tropes from previous works in the field that are quite likely borrowed rather than true.

Moll Cutpurse appears as a character across a number of publications, but this is the only text that attempts to portray a real woman, rather than a mythic figure. It was published within three years of her death and survives in a single copy. The events in the text can be traced and corroborated with known events and places with great precision, supporting the accuracy of the contents.

The work contains three sections: an address to the reader, an introduction, and the first-person “diary.” The introduction frames the genre as moral instruction and gives a commentary on Frith’s life. Despite the work’s evident general accuracy, it’s uncertain what level of direct participation Frith had in its composition. The “diary” does appear to have a consistent and distinctive voice, similar to that found in Frith’s will. It is a distinctly oral style, suggesting that the text may have been taken down from her dictation.

Mary Frith was already notorious by the time she was in her 20s and is mentioned in a variety of contemporary texts. In popular culture, Moll Cutpurse is most familiar from Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s play The Roaring Girl (1611), named after a term used for young women of transgressive and assertive behavior. The play’s protagonist wears masculine clothing, uses a sword, hangs out in taverns with thieves, but is also a supporter of the women in the play. The play’s epilogue suggests that Moll herself appeared on the stage while it was playing (although perhaps not in the eponymous role).

The Stationers’ Register (a record of texts authorized for publication) has an entry in 1610 for a work titled A Booke called the Madde Prancks of Merry Mall of the Bankside, with her Walks in Mans Apparel and to what Purpose. Written by John Day. No copy of the work survives and it isn’t certain that it was actually published.

Legal records from occasions when Moll was brought into court include her “confession” that she went about in “the habit of a man,” with boots and sword, to attend plays and taverns. This was not for the purpose of gender disguise. Moll not only openly proclaimed her female sex but offered to prove it to people. “[S]he told the company there present that she thought many of them were of opinion that she was a man, but if any of them would come to her lodging they should finde that she is a woman.” She admitted to swearing and drinking in this recorded confession and promised to reform, but she denied that she was a “bawd” (a term referring to any woman exercising uncontrolled sexuality, not necessarily a prostitute) or that she had “drawn other women to lewdness.”

But the superficial penitence she shows in the court record (and the moralizing tone of Moll’s diary) is undermined somewhat by a contemporary record of 1612 noting “...and this last Sonday Mall Cut-purse a notorious bagage (that used to go in mans apparell and challenged the feild of divers gallants) was brought to the same place, where she wept bitterly and seemed very penitent, but yt is since doubted she was maudelin druncke, beeing discovered to have tipled of three quarts of sacke before she came to her penaunce.” [Note: "doubt" here means "thought, believed" rather than negating the idea.]

Moll also briefly appears as a character in Nathan Field’s 1618 play Amends for Ladies (subtitled With the merry prankes of Moll Cut-Purse: Or, the humour of roaring) and in this case it’s quite possible that Moll played the role on stage herself. The role is very brief and mostly consists of some pointed banter on her gender presentation that is otherwise unrelated to the content of the play.

There is no doubt that Moll made her living by largely criminal means, though not necessarily as directly as her nickname of “cutpurse” suggests. Crime in early 17th century London more often involved goods than coin. And as mass production had not yet made goods interchangeable, the items being stolen were easily identifiable by unique characteristics. This meant that the most profitable outcome of stealing an item was to receive a “finder’s fee” for returning it to its original owner. Thieves were understandably wary of claiming this fee themselves. Enter the profession of fence. Unlike the modern image of the fence who re-sells stolen goods to an independent party, the 17th century fence was something of a “professional finder,” a person who had plausible deniability as simply being really good at tracking down “lost” goods. The following description appears in a court record from 1621 when Moll was defending herself against a different charge.

“...became to this Defendant [i.e., Moll] and desired her to doe her endeauour to try if she could by any meanes fynd out the pickpockett or helpe him to his monie, he being before of this defendant’s acquaintance and hauinge heard how by this defendant’s meanes many that had had theire pursses Cut or goods stollen had beene helped to theire goods againe and diuers of the offenders taken or discouered...”

In contrast to the officially sanctioned feminine virtues of silence and modesty, Moll was brash, outspoken, and assertive. One feature of her diary is her rejection of the usual domestic skills expected of a woman, such as sewing. (In fact, she expresses a clear disdain for women’s lives, someone in contrast to the proto-feminist stance she is given in The Roaring Girl.) Having early rejected marriage and the usual alternatives for a single woman (food service trades, domestic service, prostitution, thieving) Moll created her own role on the edges of the criminal world.

Her life played out in a time of enormous political and religious upheaval, but also social and sexual upheaval. The structures relating the genders were being challenged and Frith’s life could be considered a representation of that. Frith’s adoption of male clothing is recognized by her contemporaries as a claim to male social power. Many of the activities she was condemned for, were not illegal per se for a woman but traditionally restricted to men. Even “walking abroad alone while female” could be cause for being brought into court on suspicion. On one occasion, Frith was charged with “unseasonable and suspicious walking” for being out alone at night, compounded by a charge of a “strange manner of...life.”

In 17th century English, full cross-dressing was illegal, but only on a few occasions did Frith wear an entirely male outfit. Her diary notes that typically she wore male-style upper garments with a skirt, a style that was not technically illegal. This was the sort of mixed signifiers in clothing that had become common enough to have inspired polemic pamphlets calling the fashion out, such as Hic Mulier. King James is recorded as having issued instructions for sermons to be given against this sort of gender mixing in clothing: “the insolencie of our women, and theyre wearing of brode brimd hats, pointed dublets, theyre haire cut short or shorne, and some of them stillettaes or poinards, and such other trinkets of like moment.”

While Frith’s presentation resulted in descriptions of her as being “masculine” or “hermaphroditic” (a term that at the time didn’t necessarily imply intersex anatomy, only the use of a mixture of gender signifiers), she was far from unique (though perhaps extreme) in her style of dress.

There is little evidence for Frith’s sexual interests, if any. The tone of her relationships with men in her diary is one of non-sexual camaraderie. There is an episode related of a prostitute teasing Frith by accosting her and kissing her as she was wont to do with men, to which Frith reacted violently. On another occasion, Frith tells a story of seducing a woman of ill repute with kisses and caresses in order to provide her to a third party. [Note: this is a motif that occurs in plays of the era and is one of the contexts on stage for the appearance of female homoeroticism without implying the reality.] But in both cases, Frith expresses hostility and disgust for the other women, so it would be difficult to see either incident as evidence of homoerotic interests. Although the Moll Cutpurse of The Roaring Girl is sympathetic to the social plight of women, the voice of the diary is generally hostile to conventional femininity and carries a strong “not like other girls” tone, verging on outright misogyny.

Below are some excerpts from Mary Frith’s diary that particularly speak to questions of gender performance and sexuality. These excerpts do not provide a full and balanced picture of her biography but are most relevant to forming an understanding of her relationship to gender and sexuality.

* * *

From the address to the reader:

A very Tomrig or Rumpscuttle she was, and delighted and sported only in Boys play and pastime, not minding or companying with the Girls: many a bang and blow this Hoyting procured her, but she was not so to be tamed or taken off from her rude inclinations; she could not endure that sedentary life of sewing or stitching, a Sampler was as grievous as a Winding-sheet, her Needle, Bodkin and Thimble, she could not think on quietly, wishing them changed into Sword and Dagger for a bout at Cudgels. For any such Exercise, who but she! where she would not fail, tide what would, if she heard of any such thing, to be a busy Spectator: so that she was very well known, by most of the rougher sort of people thereabouts, when she was yet very young and little.

Her Head-gear and Handkerchief (or what the fashion of those times were for Girls to be dressed in) was alike tedious to her, wearing them as handsomely as a Dog would a Doublet, and so cleanly, that the driven Pot-hooks would have blushed at the comparison, and always standing the Bear-garden way, or some other Rabble-rout Assemblies.

She would fight with boys, and courageously beat them, run, jump, leap or hop with any of them, or any other play whatsoever: in this she delighted, this was all she cared for, and had she not very young, being of a pregnant docible wit, been taught to read perfectly, she might well through her over addiction to this loose and licentious sporting have forgot and blotted out any easy impression. But this Learning stood her much in stead afterwards.

She was too great a Libertine, and lived too much in common to be enclosed in the limits of a private Domestic Life. A Quarter staff was fitter to her hand than a Distaff, stave and tail instead of spinning and reeling ... She could not endure the Bake-house, nor that Magpie Chat of the Wenches; she was not for mincing obscenity, but would talk freely what ever came uppermost ... Washing, wringing, and starching were as welcome as fasting days unto her; or in short, any Household work; but above all she had a natural abhorrence to the tending of Children, to whom she ever had an averseness in her mind, equal to the sterility and barrenness in her womb, never being made a Mother to our best information.

At this Age we spoke of before, she was not much taxed with any Looseness or Debauchery in that kind; whether the virility and manliness of her face and aspect took of any mans desires that way (which may be very rational and probable) or that besides her uncompliable and rougher temper of body and mind also, which in the female Sex is usually persuasive and winning, not daring or peremptory (though her Disposition can hardly find a suitable term for an indifferent expression of the manage of her life) she her self also from the more importunate and prevailing sway of her inclinations, which were masculine and robust, could not intend those venereal impurities, and pleasures: as stronger meats are more palatable and nutritive to strong bodies than Quelquechoses and things of variety, which may perchance move an appetite, provoke a longing; but are easily refrained from by any considerate good fellow, that knows what is the lastingest Friend to good Drink and good Company; her Motto.

She could not but know moreover (for I suppose her of a very competent discretion and sagacity of mind as well as maturity and suitable growth at those years) that such Prostitutions were the most unsatisfactory, that like an accidental scuffle or broil might end in danger, but never in Love, to which she was no way so happily formed; nor was so much a woman as vainly to expect it.

[This is followed by a discourse on the topic of cross-dressing in general among the sexes, which the author of the introduction generally finds offensive and disgusting.]

No doubt Moll’s converse with her self ... informed her of her defects; and that she was not made for the pleasure or delight of Man...she resolved to usurp and invade the Doublet, and vie and brave manhood, which she could not tempt nor allure.

I have the rather insisted on this, because it was the chief remark of her life, as beginning and ending it; for from the first entrance into a competency of age she would wear it, and to her dying day she would not leave it off, till the infirmity and weakness of nature had brought her a bed to her last travail, changed it for a waistcoat and her Petticoats for a Winding Sheet.

These were no amiable or obliging vests, they wanted of a mutual correspondence and agreement with themselves, so unlikely were they to beget it abroad and from others: they served properly as a fit Covering, not any disguise of her, (according to the Primitive invention of apparel) wherein every man might see the true dimensions and proportions of body, only hers showed the mind too.

So that by this odd dress it came, that no man can say or affirm that ever she had a Sweet-heart, or any such fond thing to dally with her. A good Mastiffe was the only thing she then affected and joyed in, in whose fawnings and familiarity, she took as much delight as the proudest she ever gloried in the Courtship, admiration, attraction and flatteries of her adored beauty. She was not wooed nor solicited by any man, and therefore she was Honest, though still in a reserved obedience and future service either personally or by Proxy to Venus.

Her Nuptials and Wedding grew to be such a Proverb, as the Kisses of Jack Adams, any one he could light upon, that is to say, as much design of love, in one as in the other: all the Matches she ever intended was a Bear-baiting, whose pastimes afforded not leisure or admittance to the weak recreations and impertinencies of Lust.

[Note: although not mentioned at all in this publication, there is documentary evidence that Moll did marry at one point, although it seems to have been in name only.]

She never had the Green sickness, that Epidemical Disease of Maidens after they have once past their puberty; she never eat Lime, Oatmeal, Coals or such like Trash, nor never changed Complexion; a great Felicity for her Vocation afterwards that was not to be afraid nor ashamed of anything, neither to wax pale or to blush.

[Note: "Green sickness" was a supposed malady of women resulting from lack of regular sexual satisfaction.]

[Mention of a close friendship with a shoemaker who took financial advantage of her, resulting in her breaking off the friendship.]

...she resolved to set up in a neutral or Hermaphrodite way of Profession, and stand upon her own legs, fixed on the basis of both Concerns and Relations; like the Colossus of Female subtlety in the wily Arts and ruses of that Sex and of manly resolution in the bold and regardless Rudenesses of the other, so blended and mixed together, that it was hard to say whether she were more cunning, or more impudent.

From the diary

[regarding her attitude toward gender-bending men]

There was also a fellow a contemporary of mine, as remarkable as myself, called Anniseed-water Robin, who was clothed very near my antic mode, being an hermaphrodite, a person of both sexes. Him I could by no means endure, being the very derision of natures impotency, whose redundancy in making him man and woman had in effect made him neither, having not the strength nor reason of the male, nor the fineness nor subtlety of the female, being but one step removed from a natural changeling, a kind of mockery (as I was upbraided) of me, who was then counted for an artificial one. And indeed I think nature owed me a spight in sending that thng into the world to mate and match me, that nothing might be without a peer, and the vacuum of society be replenished, which is done by the likeness and similitude of manners: but contrariwise it begot in me a natural abhorrence of him with so strange an antipathy, that what by threats and my private instigating of the boys to fall upon, and throw dirt at him, I made hi quit my walk and habitation, that I might have no further scandal among my neighbors, who used to say, here comes Moll’s Husband.

I shall never forget my fellow humorist, Banks the Vintner in Cheapside, who taught his horse to dance, and shooed him with silver. Among other fantastic discourse, one day he would needs engage me in a frolic upon a wager of 20 pounds which was that I should ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch a straddle on horseback in breeches and doublet, boots and spurs, all like a man cap a pie. I was all for such sudden whims .... Just so it took me, I accepted the condition and prepared me with all the before named particulars against the day, and to do something more than my bargain, I got a trumpet and banner and threw it behind my back as trupeters used to wear it.

The day appointed being come I set forward, none suspecting me, yet every body gazing on me, because a trumpeter in those days was as rare as a swallow in winter, every body wondering what it meant, and taking it for a prodigy. I proceeded in this manner undiscovered till I came as far as Bishopsgate, where passing under the gate, a plaguey orange wench knew me and no sooner let me pass her but she cried out, Moll Cutpurse on horseback! which set the people that were passing by, and the folks in their shops a hooting and hollowing as if they had been mad; winding their cries to this deep note, Come down thou shame of women or we will pull thee down. I knew not well what to do, but remembering a friend I had, that kept a victualling house a little further, I spurred my horse on and recovered the place, but was hastily followed by the rabble, who never ceased cursing of me, the more soberer of them laughing and merrily chatting of the adventure. In my own thoughts I was quite another thing: that I was Squiresse to Dulcinea of Tobosso the most incomparably beloved Lady of Don Quixote and was sent of a message to him from my mistress in the formalities of knight errantry, that I might not offend against any punctilio thereof which he so strictly required; and also to be the more acceptable to my lovely Sancho Pancha, that was trained up by this time in chivalry, whom I would surprise in this disguise. These quirks and quillets and that instant possessed my fancy, but presently I had other representations. ... [the crowd is distracted by the passing of a fancy wedding party] I paced the same way back again to the winning of my wager, and my great content, to see myself thus out of danger, which I would never tempt again in that nature.

[her encounter with a flirtatious prostitute]

There was a shameless Jade, as noted in this town as my self at this time, but for far more enormous actions; she was called Abigail, her way of living (she being a kind of Natural [i.e., intellectually disabled]) was by ringing the bells with her coats for a farthing, and coming behind any gentleman for the same hire, and clapping him on the back as he turned his head, to kiss him, to the enraging of some gentlemen so far as to cause them to draw their swords and threaten to kill her. This stinking slut, who was never known to have done so to any woman; by some body’s setting her on to affront me, served me in the same manner. I got hold of her and being near at home, dragged her to the conduit, where I washed her polluted lips for her, and wrenched her lewd petticoats to some purpose, tumbling her under a cock, and letting the water run, till she had not a dry thread about her, and had her soundly kicked to boot.

[During a period when the events of the English Civil War were making the fencing trade less profitable, Moll turned her hand to keeping a bawdy house.]

...there being always, which I considered both in war and peace, good vent of such commodities. The voluptuous bed is never the less frequented for those hard and painful lodgings in the camp. I saw also, that the former traffickers this way were very straitlaced and too narrow in their practice, as confining their industry in this negotiation to one sex, like women tailors, that if they were to be hanged cannot make a doublet for themselves. In this I was a little prosperous, though to make good the simile, I could never fit my self.

[Moll digresses for a bit on the question of her own sexuality.]

One time...as I was going down Fleetbridge I espied one of my neighbors Mr. Drake, a tailor God bless him, and to my purpose, he was altogether for the women, quoth I in droll, Mr Drake when shall you and I make ducklings? He quacked again, and told me, that I looked as if some toad had ridden me and poisoned me into that shape, that he was altogether for a dainty duck, that I was not like that feather, and that my eggs were addled. I contented myself with the repulse and walked quietly homeward.

[Moll returns to the story of managing sexual services of diverse types. But although one might jump to the conclusion that she’s talking about providing male prostitutes to men, she makes it clear that she’s providing them for women.]

I chose the sprucest fellows the town afforded, for the did me reputation at home and service abroad; my neighbors admiring what this retinue and attendance meant, nor would I now discover it but to unburden my conscience, and shame the private practices of some great women, who to this very purpose keep emissaries and agents to procure stallions to satiate their desires, as confidently as they entertain grooms and laundries. I will stir this puddle no longer, nor dive into the depth of it any further, lest I pollute and inquinate the reader with the filth hereof.

[Despite this claim, she continues to describe how, even when not providing organized sexual services, she lent herself as a private go-between to do sexual match-making. The following encounter was to the benefit of a “noble friend” who later would put in a good word for Moll when she was in legal trouble, as thanks for her services here.]

There was a noted lass a married wife of this time, whose story shall serve to conclude all the amorous tricks and pranks that were wrought by me, for indeed it sums up all that belongs or attends to such doings, and the account I promised; want and shame never failing to bring up the rear of lust and wantonness. She was in her youth a very curious piece indeed, but wanting a fortune competent and proportionable to it, arrived no higher at her marriage than an ordinary citizen, yet of good fame and reputation. For a while in the beginning of this state she lived continently at home, but the flies buzzing about her as they resort always to sweets soon corrupted and tainted her; this was not unknown to me, and thereupon I resolved that she was as free for my turn as for any bodies, and forthwith I accosted her, using such caresses, promises and invitations as I knew the market would bear, so that I made her entirely mine, and gratified a friend with her first acquaintance, who in short, was that noble friend that preserved me out of the hands of the people at Westminster who had resolved on my mind. He had not long after occasion to leave London, and then I bestowed her on another, and so to a third, fourth, and fifth, etc. according to my best advantage, till such time she had contracted those distempers which not long after brought her to her grave.

Time period: 17th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: cross-dressingcross-gender roles/behaviorEvent / person: Mary Frith aka Moll Cutpurse







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Book Review: A Study in Honor by Claire O'Dell

Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - 07:00

It’s funny what reputation can do: if you’d handed me A Study in Honor knowing nothing except what’s in the blurb, I’d probably have told you that I’m not really into near-future dystopian political thrillers, even one that’s  re-visioning of Holmes and Watson featuring two queer black women. But tell me that [author I love] is coming out with a new series under a new nom de plume and I’ll give anything she writes a try. I would have missed out on a great book if I’d gone just by my usual genre and setting preferences.

O’Dell has created two strong personalities with just enough of their literary antecedents that you know what your getting in terms of interpersonal dynamic. One has clawed her way up from a working class background, one was born of privilege. One is damaged to the edge of breaking by her experiences in the war, one is smooth and polished and always so very much in control. But you believe that these two can be thrown together, can survive the initial distrust and conflict, and can begin to forge what we recognize as the enduring Holmes/Watson partnership that has made its way into legend. As with the original canon, we see the events through Watson’s eyes, leaving the internal workings of Holmes’s mind (and her backstory) enough of a mystery to be intriguing.

I’m not going to lie about the setting: the line that can be drawn between where were are today and the terrifying vision the book offers of political turmoil and civil war is too believable to be enjoyable. The tech is just the far side of futuristic but the sociology is entirely too familiar. But the story is about human beings and how they make it through, first and foremost by caring about truth, honor, and each other. And that makes all the difference in envisioning how we might recover from such a future.

The icing on the cake is that both protagonists are casually and unapologetically queer without needing to insert a romance plot into the dynamic. I long for the day when I can pick up any random book and consider that a possibility. Until then, I’ll always be seeking out books like this that combine representation with rock-solid writing.

Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books

The clever title generator is on vacation

Monday, September 3, 2018 - 11:53

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

No thoughtful introduction. Posting on my phone from the middle of a big key ride. Needless to say the main entry was set up in advance!

ETA: You can tell I was posting from my phone because "big key ride" was supposed to be "bike ride".

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP







LHMP #211 Lemay 1996 Human Sexuality in Twelfth- through Fifteenth-Century Scientific Writings






About LHMP

Full citation: 

Lemay, Helen Rodnite. 1982. “Human Sexuality in Twelfth- through Fifteenth-Century Scientific Writings” in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage eds. Prometheus Books, Buffalo. ISBN 0-87975-141-X

Lemay, Human Sexuality in Twelfth- through Fifteenth-Century Scientific Writings

This is an overview of treatments of human sexuality as indicated in the title. Only a very small amount of material pertains to same-sex sexuality, so this summary will be brief. The subject matter is medical, astrological, and philosophical treatises of the 12-15th centuries, either written in or translated into Latin.

In general, medical texts treated sexuality with a matter-of-fact approach and did not reflect moral judgments on their topics even when they noted social attitudes towrads them. Astrological texts also avoided moral judgments although in this case the attitude may be attributed to the deterministic approach of the field itself. If the heavens determined one’s sexuality, what was there to condemn?

Astrological evidence regarding a woman’s virginity might seem a strange place to find discussion of sexual practices, but the discussion notes that the loss of virginity is a complicated question. A woman might technically lose her virginity without having intercourse with a man by means of stimulation by her own hands or someone else’s which brought her to orgasm. (Although the text does not specifically mention same-sex activity, it touches on sexual techniquest that don’t involve a penis.)

Astrological texts recognized a large array of sexual orientations, in the sense of the types of sexual partners and preferences in sexual activites that a person prefers. The postion that a person’s sexual response will be determined at birth is in contrast to the competing medieval theory that “sodomy” was a moral failing and was something any person might fall into.

Astrological texts are unusually forthcoming in recognizing the potential for female same-sex desire, although it is typically framed in heteronormative terms. A particular stellar configuration “increases the virility of their souls and makes them lustful for unnatural congresses, when they act as if their female friends were their wives. ... they may perform these acts either secretly or openly.” Another text elaborates that “act as if their female friends were their wives’ means “they rub one another as if they were men.” One Italian tract suggests that planetary conjunctions can also cause a change of physiological sex later in life.

In medical literature, William of Saliceto was one of the first writers to advance the “enlarged clitoris” theory of female same-sex desire, though his version involves what appears to be a prolapsed uterus rather than the clitoris.

Time period: Medieval (general)12th c13th c14th c15th cPlace: EuropeMisc tags: medical treatisesastrological textsEvent / person: William of Saliceto







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Book Review: Awake Unto Me by Kathleen Knowles

Thursday, September 13, 2018 - 22:00

Two young women in turn-of-the-century San Francisco come of age, struggle to find their feet, and find each other. Kerry had a rough beginning, often on the far side of the law, and more comfortable taken for a boy in trousers than playing the girl. Only a chance alliance between her father and an up-and-coming doctor gave her a chance at a way out of the rough Barbary Coast neighborhood. Beth’s strict middle-class upbringing gave her a surer future, but one where she struggled to make her own choices even as a brilliant nursing student. Both are drawn to each other, but only Kerry knows the truth of the desire they both feel.

Although Awake Unto Me is marketed as a romance, it feels much more like a bildungsroman in structure--a coming of age story that only happens to include romantic and erotic encounters as part of the two women’s exploration of the world. It may sound odd to say so, I but I would have found the story equally satisfying if those encounters had not been structured as the culmination of the plot, but had simply been an integral part of Kerry and Beth’s growing understanding of their identities and desires.

The writing style is spare and straightforward. The historic background was solidly researched if occasionally explained in more detail than necessary. I did wince a few times at historically-accurate but unchallenged bigotry expressed by secondary characters with regard to ethnicity and religion and the secondary characters tended to function primarily as setting.

Awake Until me does a good job at providing a window into a variety of women’s lives in historic San Francisco, for those interested in exploring history through women-centered lives.

Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books