The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 by Susan S. Lanser (review)

The past quarter century or so has brought to light a rich and varied archive of European early modern same-sex materials, primarily of printed texts and visual items, by a large international community of scholars working in different geographies, languages, and historical moments, with for the most part each scholar’s research limited to a narrow perspective. This archive now offers a panoptic view of early modern Europe—that is, the old Europe before its postmodern turn East—as it was inflected by its understanding of female affective relations or sapphic connections. To our great fortune, Susan Lanser has taken as her project to assemble, synthesize, and reconceptualize the long historical 265-year sweep into modernity from 1565 to 1830 and forward. Now that the history of sexuality has been mined (though hardly completed) for the experiential lives of sapphic persons, Lanser has turned to the freshly complex effort of unpacking the sexuality of history—a play, of course, on Foucault’s 1975 History of Sexuality—to examine the connections and confluences between sociopolitical culture and the sapphic, here understood as embracing affective bonds between women, but not necessarily including sexuality as such. Lanser’s concern moves from our current interest on lived life and our efforts to recover the history of sapphic lives to the history of sapphic texts and what they have to tell us about their larger connections to sociopolitical formations: insofar as the sapphic itself can be seen as a social formation, her work “tacitly suggests that lesbian history may have more to gain from looking at public representations than from hunting down evidence of public desires” (15).

In the first chapter, “How to do the Sexuality of History,” Lanser establishes the “configurations of sapphic discourse” that identify the three distinctive narrative forms that dominate the early modern period: the metamorphic, the ethnographic, and horizontal or leveling. Most significantly, modernity brings into play complex, sometimes ambiguous, same-sex representations embedded in equality, or “leveling,” “horizontal” relations. We see these as they move through chapters two and three, “Mapping Sapphic Modernity, 1565–1630” and “Fearful Symmetries: The Sapphic and the State, 1630–1749,” as textual recognitions of what Lanser calls a “sapphic episteme” occur in which diverse imaginative textual projections perform the cultural work of the sapphic or, as she puts it more simply: a literary “world view in which the logic of woman + woman is made available for good and ill” (29). The current scholarly consensus that a major shift in the representation of the sapphic occurred around 1600 has now opened up the possible examination of a much more finely detailed analysis of “the changed investments that attach to sapphic subjects across the next century” (25), which become entangled with family, state relations, travel, and empire. In chapter four, “The Political Economy of Same-Sex Desire, 1630–1765,” Lanser argues for a “sapphic apostrophe,” using mostly poetic examples of erotic friendship that advanced classically identified “protofeminist arguments” (26) for a sapphic subject, as in work by Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, and Anne Killigrew.

Chapter five, “Rereading the ‘Rise’ of the Novel: Sapphic Genealogies, 1680–1815,” the longest and arguably the most originally creative section of this study, posits that “the history of the (‘rising’ European) novel can be read as a sapphic plot” (147). Beginning with early narratives, Lanser identifies the sapphic picaresque, stories that shape narratives of adventure and social “resistance to patriarchal schemes” (161), or such as the allegedly true stories in Giovanni Bianchi’s Breve storia della vita di Catterina Vizzani Romana (1744) and F. L. Kersteman’s De Bredasche Heldinne (1751), or Sarah Scott’s tale of two cousins who run off to an “’irregular life’” (161) to save one from a forced marriage as the other disguises herself as a clergyman in Journey Through Every Stage of Life (1754). As the...