Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (review)

Sharon Marcus’s Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England extensively revises critical interpretations of female relationships during the Victorian era. Scholars in the fields of queer studies and feminist theory will quickly recognise the title’s nod to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), a landmark study that inaugurated the field of queer theory. Indeed, Marcus acknowledges her allusion to Sedgwick’s title and notes her employment of ‘Sedgwick’s wise insight that homo- and hetero- are inherently interrelated’ (10). Marcus defines her audience broadly, stating her argument’s applicability will extend to scholars of queer theory, women’s studies, the novel, and Victorian studies. Thus, her multidisciplinary approach focuses on all varieties of relationships among women. To further clarify her argument, Marcus suggests that rigid boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality defined feminist theorists’ approach to Victorian literature. Such boundaries, however, cannot explain the complexities of women and their relationships with each other. Marcus proposes instead that the ‘elasticity, mobility, and plasticity’ of women’s relationships defied ‘even the most cherished and foundational oppositions’ between men and women and between homosexuality and heterosexuality (22). Ultimately, Marcus’s skillful, detailed analysis redefines how we have come to understand gender norms and their influence on women’s behavior and relationships during the Victorian era.

The three sections of her study, then, are as follows: Part One concerns female friendship, Part Two discusses feminine objectification, and Part Three examines female marriage.

Before Marcus delineates the three distinct sections of her argument, she informs us that she has restricted the scope of her study to the years 1830 to 1880, instead of offering a comprehensive survey that covers the entire Victorian era. However, Marcus argues these five decades were notable for the gradual shift in views concerning gender and marriage. According to Marcus, they are “the touchstone for thinking about gender and sexuality” and have acquired “canonical status in the history of sexuality” (5).

The first part of Marcus’s study consists of two chapters that discuss female friendship as it appears in women’s lifewriting and in the marriage plots of Victorian novels, respectively. In these chapters, Marcus repeatedly points out that women were often instrumental in securing viable marriage partners for their female friends. Thus, female friendship was situated ‘at the heart of the hallowed middle-class institutions of marriage and family’ (72). Marcus’s idea about the complementary nature of women’s friendships and marriage is initially surprising, given traditional feminist interpretations that either portray those friendships as ‘external to family life’ (29) or define a variety of women’s relationships as lesbian relationships that challenged the heterosexual marriage institution. However, she convincingly advances her argument by reading numerous primary sources of women’s writing such as published diaries and correspondence between friends. In addition, Marcus carefully distinguishes between sexual and nonsexual relationships between women, warning the reader that ‘declarations of love are as insufficient to prove a sexual relationship between Victorian women as lack of evidence of sex is to disprove it’ (54). Marcus argues an important point here, and one that should cause gender studies scholars to look at Victorian texts in a new way.

Feminist scholars of the Victorian era will be especially interested in the second chapter of Marcus’s study, in which she conducts close readings of several canonical Victorian novels to prove her thesis that ‘female friendship is a central element in the novel of courtship and marriage’ (80). Before launching into her interpretative analyses, Marcus explains the meaning of the title’s chapter, ‘Just Reading’, by stating ‘I do not claim to plumb hidden depths but to account more fully for what texts present on their surface but critics have failed to notice’ (75). Marcus ends the chapter on a high note by analyzing Brontë’s Villette (1853). Like many other readers of Brontë’s novel, I...