Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 (review)

First published in Great Britain in 1993 by Scarlet Press, Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women seeks to “discuss the full range of representations of lesbian culture in British print between 1668 and 1801, in a variety of discourses, from the poetic to the medical, the libertine to the religious” (1). In this endeavor, Donoghue joins a number of literary critics and historians who, in recent years, have worked to expand our ability to recognize lesbian identities in literary and historical writings. To some extent Donoghue takes the work of Lillian Faderman (Surpassing the Love of Men) as a model for her historical survey. But she also notes, as have others, the serious shortcoming of Faderman’s vision, most significantly the tendency for the model of romantic friendship to erase the potentially sexual nature of relationships between women. Donoghue calls for reexamination of what she terms the “rigid divisions between friendship and sex, social acceptability and deviance, innocence and experience” (1). Her study is devoted to demonstrating just how widespread and diverse representations—fictional and historical—were of lesbian bodies, lesbian practices, and lesbian cultures in eighteenth-century England. In short, she seeks to correct the misconception that lesbians were and are sexless women who settle for chaste but intense emotional bonds, and to argue instead that sexual interaction, even interpenetration, was at least one among many possible forms of expression in women’s attachments to one another.

Donoghue’s study is a descriptive record of material from the eighteenth century in which women can be found sharing passionate moments. Those familiar with this territory, as well as with the field of women’s writing in general, will find much of Donoghue’s material unsurprising. The recovery and resuscitation of women’s writing over the past twenty-five years and the emergence of lesbian and gay studies brought many of these stories, anecdotes, and historical documents to light. What Donoghue offers here that has not been represented elsewhere, however, is an insistence on viewing these materials from a “lesbian” perspective, to hear the anecdotes with a “lesbian” ear. While some critics may find her usage of the term “lesbian” and her definition of a “lesbian” approach theoretically problematic, Donoghue makes it clear in a polemical introduction that what is at stake is a practical knowledge of the cultural availability of “the extraordinary variety of early writings about love between women,” not some “eternal truth about lesbian existence, but rather theories, stories, possibilities” (11, 17). Donoghue pushes the envelope in the field further, moreover, when she insists that we differentiate lesbian culture and treat it as neither a footnote to nor a mirror image of the history of gay men. As she perceptively puts it, “a study like this one, which looks at lesbians without comparison with gay men, can let us establish our own priorities and ask our own questions” (9).

Donoghue divides her study into four primary subjects: gender blurring, under which she includes chapters on the female hermaphrodite (25–58), female husbands (59–86), and the breeches part (87–108); friendship (109–81); sex (182–219); and community (220–68). Many of the works she describes in this study appear under more than one of these headings, and not surprisingly, either to Donoghue or to us, the categories cannot always be easily maintained. In any event, Donoghue concentrates on providing a descriptive summary of the printed material in question; she keeps critical commentary to a minimum. When she does offer critical observations, they range from the banal to the tantalizing. Of the latter, two examples will have to suffice as hints to what kinds of new critical possibilities are opened up for further exploration through Donoghue’s approach to the materials. In the context of discussion of legal treatments of female husbands, she note in passing that the “legal language steers us away from sexuality towards theft” (65). Later, in a discussion of Mary Pixie’s Queen Catherine (1968), she suggests how the...