Women Without Men
The subject of Lillian Faderman’s SURPASSING THE LOVE OF MEN (Morrow, $18.95/$10.95), “romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present,” is clearly too large for a single volume. I can imagine a reader of good will and sensitivity flinching at the book’s hard words—“lesbian” and “lesbianism”— despite feminism’s determined effort to redefine them positively. And toward the end of the treatise the author begins slouching toward the suspicion that her real business throughout has been to report yet another triumph of enlightened modern logic over olden
superstition. But while these failings are far from trivial, they’re not disabling: this book as a whole is instructive and humane, and often extremely affecting as well.
Its argument, trimmed a little for comprehensibility, runs as follows: until some point in the not very distant past, deep, personal, intensely rewarding attachment between one woman and another was understood by both sexes to be socially desirable and benign. Things changed, though —abruptly and absurdly—whereupon close connection between women was poisoned by a single, sick question: Are the parties involved touching each other sexually? Is the expression of affection “genital”? Are these people lesbians? A key function of contemporary feminism is to create a climate that re-establishes the right of women to a caring solidarity with each other, free of prurient obsession with the sexual dimension, if any, of their friendship. And achieving that goal probably requires, for some women, the rejection of traditional relationships with men.
In a preface Dr. Faderman, professor of English at California State University in Fresno, explains that she was drawn to her theme in the course of studying the love poems and letters Emily Dickinson addressed to Sue Gilbert, who was to become her sister-inlaw. “Passionate and sexual,” unmarked by any sign that the poet “felt the need to be covert about her emotions,” these documents presented a vexing problem:
If I had really uncovered a lesbian relationship, why could I not find any evidence of guilt and anxiety, the need to keep secrets from family and friends, that I thought were inevitably associated with homosexuality before the days of gay liberation? . . . Why did Emily, who viewed the event with painful ambivalence, have a nervous breakdown after Sue’s marriage to Austin Dickinson?
The author’s implicit and naive assumption at the time was that twentieth-century perspectives are always pertinent to nineteenth-century behavior—but, as her tone indicates, she quickly dropped that assumption as she pursued research in English, American, and European literature centered on love relationships between women. (There’s no evidence, I have to note in passing, that Professor Faderman ever arrived at an adequate understanding of the configuration of feelings represented in the Gilbert-Dickinson friendship.) Her investigation revealed discontinuities and erratic veerings in the development of an institution first described as “romantic friendship,” later as “the love of kindred spirits” or “sentimental friends,” still later as “lesbian-feminism.” And it was as a chronicle of these discontinuities that she conceived her book—an essay in the history of sensibility that would describe the realities of the relevant changes as experienced by people caught up in them.
The book’s survey of life and literature is divided into three periods—the sixteenth through the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries—and sets under examination two kinds of woman-to-woman relationships: connections understood by contemporaries to be primarily sexual in nature, and connections understood by contemporaries to be either nonsexual or, at any rate, only incidentally sexual in nature. In the earliest period, sexual contact between women seems to have been viewed with more humor than horror. French libertine poets took it as “merely a prelude to heterosexual lovemaking”; respectable eighteenth-century society sealed it off as a mode of transvestite zaniness inevitable among the unreal inhabitants of the world of the theater or among female prostitutes. But by the mid-nineteenth century, owing partly to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mai, the joke was over: lesbian lovemaking was firmly connected with moral degeneracy, and, a half-dozen decades later, owing to Havelock Ellis and Freud, it was seen as proof of mental disorder.
Attitudes toward love relationships considered to be nonsexual proved less easy to categorize, because more is known about how women themselves conceived them. In the seventeenth century, the friendship of the poet Katherine Philips, the “Matchless Orinda,” and Anne Owen (the pair “delighted not in physicality but in the union of souls and in philosophizing and poetizing”) was perceived as ennobling. (Among men, that notion of romantic friendship persisted almost to the eve of the present century.) But soon, among women, other perceptions came to prevail. Romantic friendship was a sanctuary from offensive importunacy—male sexual appetite. Sometimes it was an arrangement through which a woman writer, artist, scholar, or other professional—Louisa Alcott, for one— evaded the loneliness imposed by ambition without incurring career-crippling burdens. Recently such friendship, often having a sexual component but seldom exclusively sexual in character, has won the esteem of lesbian-feminists as the best alternative to the falsehood and exploitation of maledominated societies.
At any given historical moment attitudes toward love relationships between two women were, of course, more complicated than schematic overviews can convey. Professor Faderman opens her discussion of nineteenth-cen-
tury romantic friendship with a chapter on a suit for libel filed in 1811 by two mistresses of a Scottish girls’ boarding school who lost their students when one student’s grandmother publicly charged them with “improper and criminal conduct” with each other. And the record of the proceedings—the final decision awarded a judgment to the mistresses—offers insight into patterns of assumption at that time. It reveals, not surprisingly, that the concept of woman-to-woman friendship as elevating flowed from the conviction that “women above the lower class were [not] sexual creatures, that they would [not] willingly indulge in sexual activity for the gratification of their own appetites,” and that for persons of their class, sexual congress was “for the sole purpose of procreation.” In finding for the complainants, the House of Lords declared
the behavior of these two women free from suspicion, and affirmed their right—even their obligation—to intimacy. A woman who is not capable of the tenderest feelings and deepest intimacy toward her friend is lacking [so held the court] in an essential human component.
The psychological interest of the author’s story to this point, while considerable, doesn’t begin to match that of the period when the structure of assumptions underlying the concepts of “spirituality” and “ennoblement” broke down, and women friends were put under pressure to explain themselves. Between 1890 and 1910, years in which the tradition of romantic friendship among the genteel and educated became suspect because of the findings of the new sexology, those who had previously been protected were suddenly required to prove their decency. In showing forth the human costs of that enterprise then and in the two decades immediately thereafter, Professor Faderman focuses on both the obscure and the famous (Djuna Barnes and Edna Millay among the latter). Her most touching story is that of Jeannette Marks and Mary Woolley, a student and a professor of biblical history, who met at Wellesley College in 1895.
Their relationship “lasted through Mary’s presidency at Mt. Holyoke . . . and to her death in 1947,” but as early as 1908 Jeannette Marks was writing in a vein testifying to “how painful the new view of love between women [i.e., as an ugly disease] must have been to romantic friends, and what self-loathing women must have developed as they tried, whether only publicly or in fact, to alienate themselves from their strongest emotions.” Time and again, Jeannette Marks sought a language in which to serve oblique notice that she, too, shared the world’s repugnance, and to establish that her friendship was untainted. She produced essays on “Unwise College Friendships,” warned students against “temptations,” laid plans for a book on homosexuality in literature emphasizing that “insanity and suicide [were] associated with same-sex love”—everywhere committed herself to an encoded moral battle that, in Professor Faderman’s re-creation, seems at once pitiable, moving, and heroic.
Surpassing the Love of Men verges at intervals on becoming a miscellany of emblematic episodes such as the Marks-Woolley tale, some previously examined at book length elsewhere, many too briefly discussed here to inspire more than a gossip response. (An example of overcompression is the treatment accorded the passionate romantic attachment between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok.) And further problems emerge. Professor Faderman has a poor ear for the harmony of plain prose, a weakness for jargon—"self-actualization,” etc.—and too little patience with the tasks of coiling her sentences neatly and paring excess. And, as I say, I found myself troubled by her increasing confidence, as she advances into the politics of contemporary lesbian-feminism, that a period of true awakening is at last at hand.
This objection can be overstated, to be sure. Consciousness that enlightenment has both defects and virtues, entails both losses and gains, surfaces often in the book:
Our century has a passion for categorizing love, as previous centuries did not, which stems from the supposedly liberalized twentieth-century view of sex that, ironically, has created its own rigidity. The sex drive has been identified, perhaps for the first time in history, as being the foremost instinct—in women as well as men —inescapable and all but uncontrollable, and invariably permanently intertwined with real love. As a result, romantic friendships of other eras, which are assumed to have been asexual since women were not given the freedom of their sex drive, are manifestations of sentimentality and the superficial manners of the age. Throughout most of the twentieth century, on the other hand, the enriching romantic friendship that was common in earlier eras is thought to be impossible, since love necessarily means sex and sex between women means lesbian and lesbian means sick.
This strikes me as a sensible, if windy, accounting, founded on a flexible imagining of historical process. But the author’s analysis of the “rise of lesbianfeminism” is less flexible; its foundation is extravagant faith in the deity Reason, worshipped by those women who have decided “not to relate to men” sexually and emotionally. And, rather more important, it’s marked by a thoroughly ahistorical blindness to recent attitudinal changes in men that are at least as sweeping as those deemed pivotal in this book’s discussion of events at the turn of the century. Quoting a young English activist who declares, “It’s almost impossible to have any kind of whole relationship with a man,” and who sees wholeness as unattainable for any “strong woman” not a lesbian, Dr. Faderman pronounces the logic of the position “compelling.” And her final sentences reiterate that the choice made by lesbian-feminists continues to be “the only logical one possible for a
person who desires to be her own adult person.”
The absolutism of this, the odd celebration of logic, the hint that it’s progress alone that has brought us out here—and, once again, the unresponsiveness to broad new currents of feeling alive within men—strike me as worse than silly. (I hear echoes from yesteryear of infallible males explaining to each other, for the ages, the nature of women.) Having heightened one’s awareness of male willfulness, reductiveness, and abstraction, having demonstrated how, in the succession of epochs, one mode of oversimplification or fantasy has replaced another in judgments of a central human relationship, the author, enclosed in an ahistorical vacuum, concludes by greeting as wisdom a new, fiercer, utterly unforgiving abstraction.
I resist.
But, to repeat, Surpassing the Love of Men remains, despite these failings, a work of genuine interest and value. Its pages are filled with vivid portraits of heroes and heroines struggling to lead their contemporaries out of delusion on sex and gender matters, and with astonishingly fresh disclosures about details of sexist feeling from age to age. We’re shown the links between early versions of “revolting spinsters,” “butches/femmes,” and the like, and the rhetoric adopted by Time and others when abusing Kate Millett for bisexuality. There’s a shrewdly placed review of Alfred Adler’s attempt to convince his contemporaries that “lesbianism has nothing to do with the traumas that Freud described, and that it is not primarily a sexual phenomenon [but] for some women a means of protest over being accorded an inferior position in society.” Dr. Faderman’s readings of several works of imaginative literature—most notably Henry James’s The Bostonians— are tuned closer to the spirit of the originals than the readings currently in vogue in most graduate schools. If she’s overentranced with logic and the myths of modern enlightenment, she has a clear sense of ideal relations between men and women—knows, that is, that the only promesse du bonheur that’s finally worthy is a world without dominance, prurience, or pointless repression.
And while she oversimplifies the present, she does care about the sufferings of the past. Doubtless a strong case for right relationships between the sexes can be rooted elsewhere than in pity for
the pain endured by vanished generations. But in Surpassing the Love of Men pity becomes a powerful summons to conscience: yesterday’s anguish is felt as today’s mandate for change, and the authority of the writer’s voice strengthens as her sense of the poignance of forgotten lives deepens.
Felicitas Taylor, heroine of THE COMPANY OF WOMEN (Random House, $12.95), a second novel by Mary Gordon, whose first book, Final Payments, was widely praised, marches with modern enlightenment throughout much of her young life, and is planning a monograph to be called Friendship in Jane Austen. Reared as a Catholic (her guardians include not only her widowed mother but her mother’s three dearest friends and the priest who is their close counselor), she enjoys teasing the provincialism of the Church. (She’s hilariously irreverent, for instance, about church vestibule pamphlets addressed to youth —“So You Think It’s All Right To Go Steady?” “TV for Teens,” “St. Peggy of the Tennis Court,” and so on.) Her heroine is Elizabeth Bennet, whom she admires for being “full of the right answers, never looking foolish.” And at Columbia, where Felicitas is a student during the countercultural revels, she rejects Father Cyprian’s advice to stick to Greek and concentrates instead on Karl Marx.
Keen, enthusiastic, self-centered, condescending to her elders (her mother’s friends and the priest ceaselessly cosset her), Felicitas Taylor has to be brought down, and at length she is. A not entirely believable, self-hating professor of Marx cynically deflowers her, and Felicitas finds herself pregnant.
It’s the kind of experience that often leads one’s “own adult person” to say an everlasting Nay, but, happily, matters come out differently in The Company of Women. At the moment of narrative crisis, when Felicitas returns home with the bad news of her pregnancy and her gullibility, she instantly receives from her elders the gift of loving pardon. We don’t watch the onset of a seed time of embitterment; neither do we watch Felicitas trading off sophisticated skepticism or comprehension of dominance as the price of being loved and pitied in her misfortune. We see, instead, that in welcoming her home with whole heart, Felicitas’s guardians have not observed strict logic. (Strict logic dictates that when those condescended to as inferior see a chance to humiliate their oppressors, they do so unhesitatingly.) And the balance of the narrative proves, as it carries closer to the present the story of the heroine’s relationships with other men and women, that Felicitas has learned an enriching lesson her elders’ swift generosity is meant to teach: forbearance is among the world’s great things.
No single character in The Company of Women seems to me as energetically drawn as the half-dozen major parties in Final Payments. (The four adult women are nearly interchangeable: each time the narration turned to one of them, I found myself obliged to leaf backward to check her identity.) And the atmosphere lacks tautness and edge. But there’s a sweet and old-fashioned tolerance at the book’s core that’s highly likable. Miss Gordon chooses for her epigraph Auden’s beautiful poem “The Common Life,” the tricky closing lines of which claim:
though truth and love
can never really differ, when they seem to,
the subaltern should be truth.
The charm of The Company of Women lies in the warmth of its acceptance of the simple dailiness of forgiveness, and in the directness of its reminder— we can’t have too many such reminders, it seems—that, even now, truth and logic luckily often don’t compel.