Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century

by Katharine Kittredge (Editor)

Overview

Accounts of women's transgressive behavior in eighteenth-century literature and social documents have much to teach us about constructions of femininity during the period often identified as having formed our society's gender norms. Lewd and Notorious explores the eighteenth century's shadows, inhabited by marginal women of many kinds and degrees of contrariness. The reader meets Laetitia Pilkington, whose sexual indiscretions caused her to fall from social and literary grace to become an articulate memoirist of personal scandal, and Elizabeth Brownrigg, who tortured and starved her young servants, propelling herself to an infamy comparable to Susan Smith's or Myra Hindley's. More awful women wait between these covers to teach us about society's reception (and construction) of their debauchery and dangerousness.
The authors draw upon a rich range of contemporary texts to illuminate the lives of these women. Astute analysis of literary, legal, evangelical, epistolary, and political documents provides an understanding of 1700s womanhood. From lusty old maids to murderous mistresses, the characters who exemplify this period's vision of women on the edge are essential acquaintances for anyone wishing to understand the development and ramifications of conceptions of femininity.
Katharine Kittredge is Associate Professor of English, Ithaca College.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472024414
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	12/21/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Katharine Kittredge is Associate Professor of English, Ithaca College.

Read an Excerpt

Lewd & Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century

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By Katharine Kittredge

University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2003 Katharine Kittredge
All right reserved.
ISBN: 047211090X

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"Queer to Queer"

The Sapphic Body As Transgressive Text

Susan S. Lanser

Not even the Oxford English Dictionary, that sturdy guide to roots and meanings, knows the etymology of queer: as each entry reiterates, the word is "of doubtful origin." From at least the sixteenth century, queer, in its various incarnations as noun, verb, and adjective, has described the strange and the suspect: that which is not what it seems to be or does not seem to be what it is. The word's doubtful status thus lingers in its signifying possibilities: unknown in its history, vague in its meaning, shifting in its syntax, queer is itself a slippery word that refuses to be pinned down.

This lack of fixity seems especially apt in the present moment, when queer has come to signify not simply "strange" and "suspect" same-sex desires, either derogated or celebrated, but an aggressive challenge to sexual and social binaries. As Donald Morton notes, "The return of the 'queer' cannot be explained commonsensically simply as the oppressed minority's revalencing as positive what was once a negative word, or as the outcome of a search for an umbrella term" for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, or as a "younger and hipper" generation's rejection of "the older generation's 'square' style" (11). Queer signals a resistance to all categories, especially but not only those of male/female and gay/lesbian; an attack on rational epistemologies and classificatory systems in favor of the disorder, or the different logic, of desire. Queer theory, then, becomes "the result, in the domain of sexuality, of the (post)modern encounter with--and rejection of--Enlightenment views concerning the role of the conceptual, the rational, the systematic, the structural, the normative, the progressive, the liberatory, the revolutionary, and so on, in social change" (Morton 12).

But the Enlightenment project to systematize gender and sexuality is arguably already dependent on the willful production of anomaly: the act of categorization introduces, or at least acknowledges, the very queerness the categories hope to keep in check. In this context, it is striking to note the particular use of queer practiced by Anne Lister (1791-1840), who remains the first known English woman who disclosed in writing her homoerotic acts. For reasons that no etymological analysis has yet unearthed, Lister's diaries for 1824 sometimes use queer as a noun to designate the female pudendum:

I then leaned on her bosom &, pretending to sleep, kept pottering about & rubbing the surface of her queer. (Priest 47)

She begins to stand closer to me. I might easily press queer to queer. (Priest 48)

Felt her breasts & queer a little. (Priest 50)

Although it is not certain how Lister came to "queer" her genitalia in this way, the term seems apt, for in Lister's England what I will call a "sapphic body," a construction that emerges to stand hegemonically for women whose erotic desires are oriented primarily to women, is produced and insistently reproduced during the eighteenth century under various and shifting nomenclatures, as strange, suspect, odd--and, like the word queer itself, of doubtful origin. This construction of a sapphic body, which I believe culminates in the cultural production of a sapphic person, suggests that the Enlightenment project of fixing sexual categories was from the start an unstable and self-contradicting enterprise.

Within a Foucauldian logic, the very proliferation of sapphic representation, recently confirmed by an impressive body of scholarship, is itself compelling evidence that female homoeroticism became in the eighteenth century a new kind of problem demanding new recuperative strategies. This anxious overproduction of discourses ranging from medical and moral treatises to novels and poems, most intense in England at midcentury, marks an ideological crisis in the larger project that Tim Hitchcock rightly describes as the "naturalisation of heterosexuality" (5). On the one hand, scientific "advances" were undermining the long-standing anatomical explanations that attributed homoeroticism in women to a hermaphroditic body or a penislike clitoris. On the other hand, if women who desired women looked and acted like other women, on what grounds could femininity and patriarchy be conjoined? One important strategy, I argue, was a queering of those (real and fictional) women suspected of primary or exclusive homoerotic desire, a queering that rendered such figures at once visibly female and metonymically masculine.

In the larger project from which this essay is drawn, I explore the ways in which the social, sexual, and intellectual formations of eighteenth-century Europe make sapphism not simply a product of but an agent in the (re)construction of patriarchy on a foundation of heterosexual desire and ultimately of heterosexual identity. Here I am examining an important strand in that more complex field of representation: the confused textual effort to reify a sapphic Other and thereby establish a particular kind of body as a ground for "normal" heterofemininity. As the figuration of the woman who desires woman undergoes a (never completed) shift from the anatomically to the socially transgressive--a shift that I attempt to signal in a terminological move from tribade to sapphist--eighteenth-century discourse finds new ways to queer homoerotic desire, creating the sapphic person as a bulwark against the threat that homoerotic preference might be compatible with physical "normality." In this way, the sapphic body speaks as text across the eighteenth century, and discourses attempting to account for it often end up transgressing their own premises or making queer textual maneuvers in order to distinguish a sapphic body from a heterofeminine one. I will also propose that it is this discursive project, more than any change in the sexual consciousness or sexual practices of women themselves (which Randolph Trumbach and Tim Hitchcock imply), that creates the conditions for an emergent sapphic identity in the late eighteenth century. While epistemic shifts in the significations of sapphism are also occurring elsewhere in Europe, and operate differentially across the century, I will emphasize here the particularly intense dynamics of refiguration that characterize English discourse in the middle of the eighteenth century.

The queering of the homoerotic female body is not, of course, born from scratch in this period. Confusions about the role of the body in female homoerotic desire are already evident not only in Renaissance writings but, as Bernadette Brooten's important research makes clear, in the classical sources from which early modern discourses take their cue. There is no apparent consensus among Greek and Roman writers about whether female-female desire results from anatomy, from temperament, from willful choice, or from some form of psychic masculinity. Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century discourses, while repeating this uncertainty, give new prominence to the hermaphrodite as the site of same-sex desire. From at least the publication in 1573 of Ambroise Pare's On Monsters and Prodigies, translated into English by 1634, an intensified interest in hermaphrodites also entailed a new focus on female homoerotic practices. As both Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, have noted with different emphases, early modern treatises on hermaphrodites fluctuate between two ancient models: the Hippocratic version, in which the hermaphrodite is an intermediate third sex neither male nor female; and an Aristotelian model, in which the hermaphroditic body is genitally both male and female. While Daston and Park focus on the dominance of the Aristotelian framework and Jones and Stallybrass emphasize the Hippocratic challenges, both pairs recognize that by the seventeenth century hermaphroditism "came to stand for sexual ambiguity of all kinds, including the associated transgressions of [male and female] sodomy and cross-dressing" (Daston and Park 428).

The hermaphrodite was not simply a "natural" phenomenon to be permitted the liberties of double identity; queerness was to be contained by determining and enforcing the hermaphrodite's "true" sex, even though the notion that a hermaphrodite could have a singular sex already undermines the category itself. Some early modern discourses of hermaphroditism tended to see bodies as fluid rather than fixed at birth; women in particular could close the gap of sexual difference by "degenerat[ing] into men," and hence into female sodomites, through the effects, for example, of excess bodily heat (Jones and Stallybrass 84). This fear that women could "transform themselves into men" seems to have fostered both the extension of the term hermaphrodite to casual usage-- for example, in Lord Denny's charge against Lady Mary Wroth for satirizing his family in her Urania (1621)--and an increased criminalization of female sodomy on the European continent. The result, as Valerie Traub has shown in studying discourses of the seventeenth century that anatomize female-female eroticism as the practice of genitally masculine women, is that "the 'tribade' only enters England when endowed with an enlarged clitoris" ("Psychomorphology" 98). Moreover, anatomical judgments were sometimes rendered retroactively: a young woman discovered in flagrante with another woman might be claimed to have "turned into a man." Conversely, a woman accused of tribadism might be let off if her genitals proved unspectacular: Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson report a case in which a lawsuit against a cross-dressing woman who had "bigamously" married another woman was dismissed after seven midwives found the defendant to have normal genitals.

Yet the very naming of homoerotic women as "tribades" and "fricatrices" suggests the long-standing instability of anatomy to anchor female-female desire: etymologically, fricatrice and (probably) tribade denote not the penetration associated with sodomy but simply contact or rubbing, movements that do not require the penetrative clitoris. This tension dates to ancient times, as Bernadette Brooten's evidence suggests: even as the anatomy of the sapphic body gets defined in terms of a penis equivalent, the naming of that body undermines the need for the phallic anatomy. Indeed, in at least one instance in late eighteenth-century France, the word fricatrice ends up signifying not the tribade but a woman skilled in the manual stimulation of the penis, for which she is alleged to need long fingers and a nimble wrist (Almanach 7).

Already self-contradictory and unstable, then, the argument from genital anomaly was further compromised in the eighteenth century as empirical skepticism, bolstered by anatomical research, made it increasingly difficult to anchor same-sex desire to the hermaphroditic body or to accept notions that women could "turn into" men. At the same time, however, a more generalized notion of female masculinity--i.e., of masculine qualities in persons visibly female--attached itself to women suspected of homoerotic desires in ways that mark a shift from early modern usages. For even though sex between women had long been connected to notions of a mannish anatomy, most references to women as "masculine" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had nothing to do with homoeroticism. Indeed, the contrary worry--that women might engage in unlicensed sex with men--was often at stake when women were accused of being "masculine" in behavior, dress, achievement, or personality. Nor was homoeroticism yet connected with the other (intellectual, moral, political) usurpations of male prerogative that charges of female masculinity signified in early modernity.

The famous 1620 pamphlet Hic Mulier; or, The man-woman, accusing women of transgressive dress and behavior, is a useful case in point: it charges women in mannish clothes with behaving "loosely, indiscreetly, wantonly and most vnchastely"--toward men. Homoeroticism is not implicated in this text, nor does it figure in James I's campaign of the same year against short-haired women in "brode brim'd hats" who turn up in churches carrying "stilettaes or poniards" (Chamberlain, Letters). Even the cross-dressing Queen Christina of Sweden, who left evidence of inclinations for women, was accused in her own day of lewd converse with men. Similarly, nearly all the amazons who populate seventeenth-century literature end up with men when they end up with anyone, as do most of the female pirates and soldiers of both history and balladry, even when women fall in love with them. In Renaissance writings, female masculinity and the lewdest heteroeroticism are more than compatible: hic mulier's mannish French doublet is "all vnbutton'd to entice."

What does get firmly established in these early modern scenarios, however, is that metonyms of masculinity--male clothing, behavioral traits, weapons, achievements, or bodily attributes--signify women's usurpation of some male prerogative, most frequently of a political, military, or intellectual sort. For masculine women were usually transgressing boundaries of gender rather than sexuality--or, to put it differently, the modern link between sexuality and gender had not yet been forged. Thus, as Valerie Traub has persuasively argued, the erotically charged cross-dressers who people the early modern stage almost always resume their proper garments and slide into a marital economy, even when the cross-dressers are both women (as in Lyly's Galathea, where marriage is effected when one--indeed either one--of the women is magically changed into a man). Sexuality is not yet, here, predicated on polar differences: women who are accused of being like men are also perceived as desiring men, and arguably the dominant fantasy in early modern representations of the masculine woman is her subjugation not simply by a man but by her own desire for that man. If this version of female masculinity seems queer to us today, that is because female masculinity and homosexuality have become so intertwined. "Femme" lesbians are often marked by the lack of it--as in "she doesn't look like a lesbian," and Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinity has reminded us that heterosexual rural women often fit the modern image of the lesbian butch (57). We may be surprised by hic mulier's heterosexuality, in short, because we live on this side of the eighteenth century.

The shifting relationship between homoeroticism and a more generalized notion of female masculinity makes a vivid early appearance in Tractatus de Hermaphroditus; or, a Treatise of Hermaphrodites, attributed to Giles Jacob and published in 1718 by Edward Curll, along with a treatise on flagellation. A work less scientific than sensational, the Treatise sets out to categorize hermaphrodites, to explain their origins, and especially to recount the "Intrigues of Hermaphrodites and Masculine Females." After distinguishing five types of hermaphrodites it immediately discounts three of these as merely late-blooming or slightly anomalous yet nonetheless "true" men--that is, men capable of performing generative intercourse. The Treatise identifies another category consisting of persons with "confus'd" anatomies and tempers, who are "rather a kind of eunuchs than Hermaphrodites, their Penis being good for nothing, and the Terms never flowing," and claims that it will focus on women who "have the Clitoris bigger and longer than others" but who, because they menstruate, are "real Women" though they are "taken for Men."

As it turns out, however, the three pairs of women whom the text presents as homoerotically active have quite different anatomies, and none seem ever to be "taken for Men." The first pair, the Italian Marguereta and the French Barbarissa, are just such "real Women" with some of the secondary sex characteristics of men: in stature they are "very near equal to the largest siz'd Male"; they have "full and rough Faces, large Shoulders, Hands, and Feet, and but slender Hips, and small Breasts: In short, they resembled Men in all their respects, but their Dresses, their Gates and Voices" (19). Their sexual behavior seems likewise to resemble an encounter between two men: the servant-voyeurs report that Barbarissa's clitoris descends and becomes erect; penetration occurs; and then, with the help of "obscene Portraitures" and some flogging with a birchen rod, Marguereta's parts also eventually descend and the pair comes together for another sexual encounter. The second couple, Theodora and Amaryllis, who manifest the physical "Perfections" of femininity and are formed with "full and round" breasts, must satisfy one another through "Art" rather than "Nature." Because both were "cross'd in their amorous Inclinations" with men, they have resolved "never . . . to fix their Affections upon any Man living" but to live together and "to use their utmost Artifices for the Relief of each other": they fasten "artificial Penis's" to themselves in turn so as to perform orgasmic intercourse (40-41). Diana and Isabella, the third pair, while passing outwardly as women, are "more vigorous than common in their Parts" and "frolick" with "both Sexes in general." Only when Diana makes advances to a woman with whom she happens to have been bedded for convenience is she declared to be "a Man or a Monster" bearing "the Members of both Sexes" (50-51); only when Isabella ends up in bed with a count who attempts to seduce her is it discovered that she too is a "Monster" with male genitals. Castrated by the count, Isabella ends up living with Diana "as Man and Wife (being now better qualified for it)" until they quarrel, after which Diana too ends up getting castrated, and both live "to be harmless old Women."

In the Treatise, then, three sets of women engage in satisfying same-sex acts, yet their bodies run the spectrum from "true Hermaphrodites" with double genitalia, to "masculine Females" with enlarged clitorises, to "feminine" paragons with entirely conventional body parts. Contradicting its announced intentions, the Treatise undermines any fixed causal relationship between anatomy and desire. If sexual pleasure is defined as penetration (whether by penis, dildo, or long clitoris), the enlarged clitoris is rendered bisexual: so long as it does not get in the way of the penis, says the author, its larger size affords greater pleasure in intercourse. At the same time, "robust and lustful Females" who are "well furnish'd" may "divert themselves with their Companions, to whom for the most part they can give as much Pleasure as Men do" (16). Female desire here is itself queer, and the very notion of homoeroticism as the province of "masculine Females," let alone of "true" hermaphrodites, is undercut even as the categories are being posited.

Without yet erasing the hermaphroditic model, then, the Treatise also begins the move into a representational field more complicated than the seventeenth-century "anatomical essentialism" by which, as Valerie Traub notes, the "tribade" is fixed as "the abject other against which a normative female body is defined" ("Psychomorphology" 99, 96). By introducing the "normal" Theodora and Amaryllis, the Treatise of Hermaphrodites suggests a social rather than biological cause for homoerotic acts: these particular women are fed up with ill treatment from men. That Theodora's and Amaryllis's preferences for one another will ultimately be reversed, however--an outcome that I will discuss more fully later-- both recuperates this feminine couple and illuminates a distinction between acts and persons that, I will suggest, gains importance in the eighteenth century.



Continues...

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Excerpted from Lewd & Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century by Katharine Kittredge Copyright © 2003 by Katharine Kittredge. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction - Contexts for the Consideration of the Transgressive Antitype Part I - Transgressive Words 1 - “Queer to Queer”: The Sapphic Body as Transgressive Text 2 - Claiming the “Sacred Mantle”: The Memoirs of Lætitia Pilkington 3 - Elizabeth Carter’s Self-Pun-ishment: Puns, Pedantry, and Polite Learning Part II - Transgressive Images 4 - A Carnival of Mirrors: The Grotesque Body of the Eighteenth-Century British Masquerade 5 - Lustful Widows and Old Maids in Late Eighteenth-Century English Caricatures 6 - Sensibility and Speculation: Emma Hamilton Part III - Transgressive Acts 7 - “Every Like Is Not the Same,” or Is It?: Gender, Criminal Biographies, and the Politics of Indifference 8 - Elizabeth Canning and Mary Squires: Representations of Guilt and Innocence in Legal and Literary Texts, 1753-1989 9 - A Mistress, a Mother, and a Murderess Too: Elizabeth Brownrigg and the Social Construction of an Eighteenth-Century Mistress Part IV - Transgressive Fictions 10 - Eliza Haywood, Sapphic Desire, and the Practice of Reading 11 - “A-Killing Their Children with Safety”: Maternal Identity and Transgression in Swift and Defoe 12 - Ruined Women and Illegitimate Daughters: Revolution and Female Sexuality About the Editor and Contributors Index