Anne Lister's construction of lesbian identity

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 23-49

  Clark, Anna ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHARLOTTE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; FEMALE; HISTORY; HUMAN; LESBIAN; PUBLICATION; UNITED KINGDOM;

FEMALE; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HOMOSEXUALITY, FEMALE; HUMANS; MANUSCRIPTS;

EID: 0030183133     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (188)

1. Helena Whitbread, ed., I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791-1840 (London, 1988), p. 145.
2. For a pioneering exploration of this theme, see Leila Rupp, "Imagine My Surprise: Women's Relationships in Historical Perspective," Frontiers 5 (1980): 61-70.
3. Lilian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York, 1981),
4. Scotch Verdict (New York, 1983), p. 281.
5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978).
6. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), p. 265.
7. Jennifer Terry, "Theorizing Deviant Historiography," differences 5 (1991): 55-74.
8. As in Joan Scott, "Experience," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York, 1992), p. 34. To be sure, Scott acknowledges agency, but concentrates on the discursive construction of the subject.
9. See also Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York, 1993), pp. 6-8.
10. For instance, see Randolph Trumbach, "London's Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the 18th Century," Journal of Social History 11 (1977): 1-33,
11. "Sodomotical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography," Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (1985): 109-21,
12. "Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London," Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1991): 186-203;
13. George Chauncey, Gay New York (New York, 1995);
14. Theo van der Meer, "Sodomy and the Pursuit of a Third Sex in the Early Modern Period," in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York, 1994), pp. 137-88;
15. Gert Hekma, "'Female Soul in a Male Body': Sexual Inversion as Gender Inversion in Nineteenth-Century Sexology," in Herdt, ed., pp. 189-240.
16. Martha Vicinus, "'They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong': The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity," Feminist Studies 18 (1992): 481;
17. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian (New York, 1993), p. 93;
18. Randolph Trumbach, "The Origins and Development of the Modern Lesbian Role in the Western Gender System: Northwestern Europe and the United States, 1750-1990," Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 20 (1994): 289;
19. Lisa Moore, "'Something More Still Tender Still Than Friendship': Romantic Friendship in Early Nineteenth-Century England," Feminist Studies 18 (1992): 511.
20. Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668-1801 (London, 1993);
21. see also Randolph Trumbach, "London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture," in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York, 1991), pp. 112-41 - a revised version can be found in Herdt, ed., pp. 111-36, 518-28.
22. For an earlier example, see Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson, "Sexual Identities in Early Modern England: The Marriage of Two Women in 1680," Gender and History 7 (1995): 362-77.
23. For a recent discussion, see Edward O. Laumann and John H. Gagnon, "A Sociological Perspective on Sexual Action," in Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in a Postmodern World, ed. Richard G. Parker and John H. Gagnon (New York, 1995), pp. 183-214.
24. Ervin Goffman, Stigma (New York, 1986);
25. Ken Plummer, Sexual Stigma (London, 1973).
26. Van der Meer, "Sodomy and the Pursuit of a Third Sex in The Early Modern Period," p. 200.
27. Emma Donoghue and Randolph Trumbach suggest that we simply have not found such evidence because we have not been looking in the right way. That is possible, but in the course of extensive research on other projects into popular literature, prostitution, cross-dressing, police court records, newspapers, and trials in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in London, Glasgow, Yorkshire, and Manchester I actively looked for such evidence and found none. It is possible that lesbian networks or subcultures did not exist in England in the way they existed in France and Amsterdam. I hope further research proves me wrong! Such subcultures existed in Paris among dancers, actresses, and prostitutes, as Michael Ryan, a doctor, noted in his Prostitution in London (London, 1839), pp. 56, 179.
28. Ryan said he had seen no evidence of such women in London. For Paris, see D. A. Coward, "Attitudes to Homosexuality in 18th Century France," Journal of European Studies 10 (1980): 246-47;
29. Marie-Jo Bonnet, Un choix sans equivoque: Recherches historiques sur les relations amoureuses entre les femmes, XVIe-XXe siecle (Paris, 1981), p. 65.
30. For Amsterdam, see Theo van der Meer, "Tribades on Trial: Female Same-Sex Offenders in Late Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam," in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout (Chicago, 1992), pp. 189-210.
31. For a discussion of the "incoherence" of binary oppositions in terms of the development of the identity "homosexual," but also how gay people have developed a sense of identity, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990), p. 9.
32. Butler, Bodies That Matter (n. 7 above), p. 228.
33. Jeffrey Weeks, "History, Desire, and Identities," in Parker and Gagnon, eds., p. 38.
34. For further discussions of the self, see Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, eds., Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (New York, 1995), pp. 5-35;
35. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 289. Foucault himself became more interested in the process of self-construction in the last years of his life.
36. See Luther H. Martin et al., eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, MA, 1988);
37. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, vol. 3 of The History of Sexitality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1986).
38. For a similar discussion of a materialist approach to working-class autobiographies, see Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920 (Oxford, 1991), p. 7.
39. For a study of diaries in general, see Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London, 1974), p. 30.
40. Jill Liddington, "Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Halifax (1791-1840): Her Diaries and the Historians," History Workshop 35 (1995): 61.
41. Jill Liddington, History Workshop Ibid., p. 52.
42. Anne Lister Manuscript Diaries, July 21, 1820, SH/7/ML/E/4, Calderdale Archives, Halifax. Henceforth referred to as Manuscript Diaries.
43. Helena Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love: The Journals of Anne Lister, 1824-1828 (Otley, England, 1992), pp. 4-5, 204-6.
44. Manuscript Diaries, September 5, 1820.
45. Whitbread, ed., I Know My Own Heart (n. 1 above), p. 212.
46. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class (London, 1987), p. 208.
47. John O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century (Carbondale, IL, 1978), p. 8.
48. Irving Howe, "The Self in Literature," in Constructions of the Self, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992), p. 249.
49. Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject (Baltimore, 1989), p. 25.
50. For My Secret Life,
51. see Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (New York, 1966), pp. 91-92;
52. for Munby, Leonore Davidoff, "Class and Gender in Victorian Britain: Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick," Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 87-133.
53. Nussbaum, p. 36.
54. Ibid.; Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self (Cambridge, MA, 1976), p. 191.
55. Donoghue (n. 10 above), pp. 124, 150; Elizabeth Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen (Harmondsworth, 1973).
56. Similarly, Anne's contemporaries and fellow Yorkshire residents Charlotte Brönte and Ellen Nussey wrote passionate letters to each other and yearned to live out their lives together, unmarried, in a little cottage. See Elaine Miller, "Through All Changes and Through All Chances: The Relationship of Ellen Nussey and Charlotte Bronte," in Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History, ed. Lesbian History Group (London, 1989), p. 36.
57. See Marylynne Diggs, "Romantic Friends or 'A Different Race of Creatures': The Representation of Lesbian Pathology in Nineteenth-Century America," Feminist Studies 21 (1995): 317-40.
58. Whitbread, ed., I Know My Own Heart (n. 1 above), p. 210.
59. Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Lore: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington, IN, 1994), p. 308.
60. For a theory of lesbian reading, see Jean Kennard, "Ourselves Behind Ourself: A Theory for Lesbian Readers," in Gender and Reading, ed. Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart (Baltimore, MD, 1986), p. 63-77,
61. quoted in Judith Roof, A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (New York, 1991), p. 162.
62. Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 89-98;
63. Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 (Chicago, 1989), p. 210;
64. Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY, 1994).
65. Extracts from Readings, vol. 6, fol. 41 (1819), SH 7/ML/EX 1, Calderdale Archives, Halifax. Henceforth referred to as Extracts from Readings.
66. The Poetical Works of Byron (Boston, 1975), p. 88, lines 1-2.
67. Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington, IN, 1989), pp. 13-14.
68. Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA, 1980), pp. 63-64, 169, 280-81.
69. Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love (n. 23 above), p. 20.
70. Eva Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (Berkeley, 1993);
71. Amy Richlin, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (New York, 1992).
72. Judith P. Hallett, "Female Homoeroticism and the Denial of Roman Reality in Latin Literature," Yale Journal of Criticism 3 (1989): 209-27.
73. Extracts from Readings, vol. 6, fol. 33.
74. DeJean, pp. 116-98.
75. Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, 2d ed., edited, revised, and corrected by Mr. Des Maizeaux (London, 1738), 5:44.
76. Manuscript Diaries (n. 22 above), March 16, 1820.
77. Reverend D. H. Urquhart, Commentaries on Classical Learning (London, 1803), p. 332.
78. For instance, Donoghue (n. 10 above) notes that Mrs. Thrale was not able to detect the lesbian allusions in Juvenal, although she was looking for them (p. 267).
79. Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires (London, 1975), satire 6, lines 306 ff.
80. Extracts from Readings, vol. 6, fol. 33.
81. Martial, Epigrammes, translated into French prose by Michel de Marolles (Paris, 1655), bk. 1, no. 91.
82. Martial, bk. 7, no. 67, in J. P. Sullivan and Peter Whigham, Epigrams of Martial Englished by Divers Hands (Berkeley, 1977); the translator for no. 67 is George Augustus Sala.
83. Roof (n. 38 above), pp. 162, 172.
84. For instance, feminist classicists have argued that other Roman authors, such as Propertius, might be read as providing more varied and vigorous images of women than usually available, even if their intent was sexist. As Barbara K. Gold notes, the feminist reader can try to hear "voices speaking against the text" ("But Ariadne Was Never There in the First Place: Finding the Female in Roman Poetry," in Feminist Theory and the Classics, ed. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin [New York, 1993], p. 89).
85. See also Judith P. Hallett, "Feminist Theory, Historical Periods, Literary Canons, and the Study of Graeco-Roman Antiquity," in Rabinowitz and Richlin, eds., p. 63.
86. Manuscript Diaries (n. 22 above), July 21, 1820.
87. Fragment in Extracts from Readings, October 3, 1814, in code.
88. Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in Martin et al., eds. (n. 17 above), pp. 27-48.
89. Lyons (n. 27 above), p. 88.
90. Manuscript Diaries, July 21, 1820.
91. Extracts from Readings (n. 40 above), vol. 4, fol. 103, 104, 138 and vol. 6, fol. 25 (1819). Also Manuscript Diaries, February 3, 1831. She read an article called "Phallic Worship" in Modern Antiquities vol. 5, p. 31, and seems to have read Richard Payne Knight's work on phallicism, the cross, and the Trinity.
92. For Richard Payne Knight, see Randolph Trumbach, "Erotic Fantasy and Male Libertinism in Enlightenment England," in The Invention of Pornography, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York, 1993), pp. 279-80;
93. G. S. Rousseau, "The Sorrows of Priapus: Anticlericalism, Homosocial Desire, and Richard Payne Knight," in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), pp. 101-55.
94. Whitbread, ed., I Know My Own Heart (n. 1 above), p. 281.
95. Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love (n. 23 above), p. 168.
96. Whitbread, No Priest but Love Ibid., p. 156.
97. Whitbread, No Priest but Love Ibid., p. 143.
98. Trumbach, "The Origins and Development of the Modern Lesbian Role in The Western Gender System" (n. 9 above), p. 292;
99. Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love, p. 281.
100. Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love, p. 49.
101. Of course, many other people of her class and time enjoyed Byron while trying to be very respectable (see Davidoff and Hall [n. 26 above], p. 259).
102. L. Moore (n. 9 above), p. 512.
103. Lyons (n. 27 above), p. 199; Fothergill (n. 19 above), pp. 30, 151.
104. Muriel Green, ed., Miss Lister of Shibden Hall: Selected Letters (1800-1840) (Sussex, 1992), p. 77.
105. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York, 1947), p. 3.
106. Similar to Barbara Taylor's discussion of how Rousseau inspired and angered Mary Wollstonecraft ("Mary Wollstonecraft and the Wild Wish of Early Feminism," History Workshop Journal 33 [1992]: 209).
107. C. Taylor (n. 17 above), p. 357.
108. Castle (n. 9 above), p. 104.
109. Manuscript Diaries (n. 22 above), July 25, 1820, also Whitbread, ed., I Know My Own Heart, p. 344.
110. Byron, "To Thyrza," quoted in Crompton (n. 39 above), p. 178.
111. Susan J. Wolfson, "'Their She Condition': Cross-dressing and the Politics of Gender in Don Juan," English Literary History 54 (1987): 606.
112. Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh, 8th ed. (London, 1818), p. 65.
113. Whitbread, ed. I Know My Own Heart (n. 1 above), p. 78.
114. Crompton, pp. 98-102. Interestingly enough, Byron had tried to suppress this poem when Edlestone, his beloved, was arrested for homosexual acts. Anne therefore may have had a very rare copy.
115. De Lauretis (n. 37 above), p. 308.
116. For contemporary concealment, see David Bell and Gill Valentine, "The Sexed Self: Strategies of Performance, Sites of Resistance," in Pile and Thrift, eds. (n. 17 above), p. 148.
117. Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love (n. 23 above), pp. 42, 53, 124, 165.
118. Liddington (n. 20 above), p. 61.
119. Whitbread, ed., I Know My Own Heart, p. 237.
120. Whitbread, I Know My Own Heart, Ibid., p. 273.
121. Whitbread, I Know My Own Heart, Ibid., p. 281.
122. Whitbread, I Know My Own Heart, Ibid., p. 297.
123. Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love, pp. 26, 29.
124. Whitbread, No Priest but Love, Ibid., p. 49.
125. Whitbread, No Priest but Love, Ibid., p. 49.
126. For such theories, which were common medically until the eighteenth century and persisted after that in popular culture, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge, MA, 1990).
127. Extracts from Readings (n. 40 above), vol. 2, fol. 133.
128. Interestingly enough, "Michael Field" (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, poets who lived, loved, and wrote together) also cited the tale of Tiresias in their oeuvre applying classical precedents to same-sex love (Chris White, "Poets and Lovers Evermore: The Poetry and Journals of Michael Field," in Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Joseph Bristow [New York, 1992], p. 30).
129. Whitbread, ed., I Know My Own Heart (n. 1 above), pp. 235-36.
130. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford, 1986), pp. 60-61.
131. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Ibid., p. 222.
132. Castle (n. 9 above) also notes that Anne may be referring to this Callisto but does not develop the interpretation (p. 104).
133. Ovid, pp. 36-40.
134. Green, ed. (n. 73 above), p. 87.
135. Manuscript Diaries (n. 22 above), July 21, 1820, and January 3, 1831.
136. Liddington (n. 20 above), p. 62; Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love (n. 23 above), p. 127.
137. Whitbread, ed., I Know My Own Heart, pp. 1, 14, 167, 223.
138. Whitbread, I Know My Own Heart, Ibid., p. 116.
139. Whitbread, I Know My Own Heart, Ibid., p. 277.
140. Whitbread, I Know My Own Heart, Ibid., p. 136.
141. Whitbread, I Know My Own Heart, Ibid., p. 342.
142. Whitbread, ed. No Priest but Love, pp. 37, 198.
143. Whitbread, No Priest but Love, Ibid., p. 152.
144. Whitbread, No Priest but Love, Ibid., p. 153.
145. Whitbread, ed., I Know My Own Heart (n. 1 above), p. 267.
146. Whitbread, I Know My Own Heart Ibid., p. 151.
147. De Lauretis (n. 37 above), p. 228.
148. Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love (n. 23 above), p. 49.
149. Whitbread, ed. I Know My Own Heart, p. 291,
150. No Priest but Love, p. 32.
151. Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love, p. 85.
152. Whitbread, No Priest but Love, Ibid., p. 173.
153. Whitbread, No Priest but Love, Ibid., p. 81.
154. Betty T. Bennett, Mary Dinna Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar (New York, 1991); for another intellectual woman who passed as a man, see the case of Theodora de Verdion, the daughter of a Berlin architect who passed in England as a man. She was often rumored to be a woman, but her eccentricity, swearing, and heavy drinking kept such rumors at bay.
155. She died in 1802. See Kirby's Wonderful and Eccentric Museum (London, 1820), 7:48;
156. J. T. Smith, Antitnt [sic] Topography of London (London, 1817), p. 20.
157. Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love, p. 290.
158. Whitbread, No Priest but Love, Ibid., p. 36.
159. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990), p. 136.
160. For discussion of gender images in the early nineteenth century, see my "Womanhood and Manhood in the Transition from Plebeian to Working Class Culture" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1987), pp. 165-222.
161. For examples, see Tegg's Caricatures (London, 1819), 5:312, 323, 331-32.
162. For example, the story of Helen Oliver, a journeymen plasterer who seems to have gotten the idea for cross-dressing from a ploughman, actually a woman in disguise, who was thought to be her male lover. See "Helen Oliver," in Miscellaneous Collection of Broadsides, 1875, b. 30 (4), British Library;
163. London Times (April 20,1822).
164. For flirtation, see "The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Mary Lacy, the female sailor," in C. D. Donald, Collection of Broadsides (Glasgow, 1890), Mitchell Library, Glasgow.
165. For female husband, see Michael Ryan, Medical Jurisprudence (London, 1836), p. 227.
166. For a general discussion and more examples, see Clark, pp. 196-213; Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids (London, 1989), p. 59;
167. Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1989).
168. Memoirs of the Life, Public and Private Adventures of Madame Vestris (London, 1839), p. 54;
169. see also C. E. Pearce, Life of Madame Vestris (London, 1923), p. 56.
170. M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum (London, 1978), no. 12843.
171. Butler, Bodies That Matter (n. 7 above), p. 89.
172. Whitbread, ed., I Know My Own Heart, p. 49.
173. Whitbread, I Know My Own Heart, Ibid., p. 113.
174. Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love (n. 23 above), p. 127.
175. Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London, 1811; reprint, London, 1981).
176. Robert Holloway, The Phoenix of Sodom, or the Vere Street Coterie (London, 1813), pp. 10, 30.
177. For example, Weekly Dispatch (April 11, 1841), (May 18, 1845);
178. Daily News (July 12, 1846).
179. Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love, p. 171.
180. Whitbread, ed., I Know My Own Heart (n. 1 above), p. 65.
181. In 1811, a woman severely beat a male neighbor for supposing she was a "hermaphrodite" (Morning Herald [January 10, 1811]); a violent, large, masculine woman with a low voice was supposed to be a "hermaphrodite"
182. (Weekly Dispatch [March 27, 1831]); in a no-doubt apocryphal anecdote about Madame Vestris, which may nonetheless indicate popular attitudes, Madame Vestris and her sister Miss Bartolozzi "sallied out after dusk in man's apparel, and made love to the ladies," when a prostitute suspected their true sex and declared, "I'll find out whether you are Moffiydites or men"
183. (New Rambler's Magazine, vol. 2 [n.d. (ca. 1830)], p. 112). See Donoghue (n. 10 above), pp. 25-57, for hermaphrodites.
184. Davidoff and Hall (n. 26 above), p. 110.
185. Manuscript Diaries (n. 22 above), March 5, 1831; Liddington (n. 20 above), pp. 68-69.
186. Manuscript Diaries, February 27, 1831.
187. Ibid., November 12, 1832.
188. Whitbread, ed., No Priest but Love (n. 23 above), p. 206; Manuscript Diaries, November 5, 1832, for her equivocal courtship.