Surpassing the Love of Men: Female Romantic Friendship from the Renaissance to the Present (review)

278Reviews plan forces the discussion over well-worn ways, obliges the author to go over well-known plots, situations, actions, and characterizations, all to the critical purpose of measuring the degrees of their commitment to libertarian or deterministic principles. Thus despite its technical competency, orderliness, and clarity, the book seems to often to repeat mere commonplaces of literary history and criticism. University of GeorgiaJames B. Colvert Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Female Romantic Friendship from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: William Morrow, 1981. 512 pp. Cloth: $18.95. Surpassing the Love of Men is an ambitious undertaking. It studies the occurrence of romantic friendship between women in letters and in life from the Renaissance to the present ; it surveys the canon of lesbian literature written by both men and women; and it advances a theory of the genesis and transformation of female romantic friendship over historical time. Faderman sees three historical stages of such friendships: a long era in which they were socially condoned and predominantly asexual although deeply emotional ; a transition stage in the early twentieth century when female emancipation and the new "sciences" of sexology and psychology led to the discrediting of such friendships as deviant and diseased; and a contemporary stage when these friendships, now sexual in nature, have become the occasion for feminist activism. As the author writes in her preface, "I venture to guess that had the romantic friends of other eras lived today, many of them would have been lesbian-feminists, and had the lesbian-feminists of our day lived in other eras, most of them would have been romantic friends." The author's method calls for large generalizations supported by textual evidence drawn from a wide range of sources, including literary works, diaries, letters, biographies. Supplementary historical and sociological data is occasionally provided. Invariably, much more is left out than included, and what is included can receive hasty mention at best. The author necessarily has relied on secondary sources—sometimes acknowledged and sometimes not—for identifying pertinent primary materials. The book has the appearances of scholarship—massive quotation, extensive footnotes—but not the reality. I found many errors and much oversimplification in the area that I know best, and I assume that specialists in other fields will find the same. The author simply does not have the knowledge—few of us do—to carry out this work with intellectual distinction. The overriding intention is not scholarly but rhetorical, to persuade us of the importance, if not primacy, of female-female friendships in women's lives through the ages. Some of the book's assumptions seem naive. Faderman cannot ultimately decide whether female friendships are evidence of human wholeness or compensatory strategies in a patriarchal culture which devalues women. She cannot decide whether the sexualization of life in this century, with its accompanying sexualization of many (but by no means all) friendships among women, means a change in essence or only in expression. She concentrates on the monogamous female couple to the exclusion of all other relationships experienced by women at large, and even by her chosen women (earlier or later female friendships, spouses, children, parents, siblings, co-workers), hence her view of human emotional range is strikingly narrow. Lesbian diabolism, Don Juanism, guilt, or selfloathing she dismisses as the regrettable result of internalized male standards; there is no tragic view of life in her world scheme. Lesbian women who wrote books portraying les- Studies in American Fiction279 bianism in negative terms, or who engaged in relationships along lines of dominantsubordinate pairing, are pitied but not taken seriously. Some of the book's assumptions seem worse than naive to me. I cannot accept the repeated contention throughout the book that until the early twentieth century women were partial or fledgling human beings, only now beginning to realize their potential for full humanity. There is an extraordinary cultural chauvinism in this assertion, both in respect to the past and to other cultures than the American. I also find it regrettable that, when so many of her examples are literary women, Faderman has no interest in their artistic aspirations or achievements. She is interested only in role-models and life-styles. Nevertheless...