Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 Judith Halberstam (bio) Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928, by Martha Vicinus; pp. xxxii + 314. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004, $35.00, £22.50. Intimate Friends, by Martha Vicinus, traces the intricate involvements—romantic, erotic, familial, and friendly—of various groups of mostly elite women from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The book is a great read, full of intrigue and outrage, sexual liaisons and anguished but chaste involvements, and, above all, drama. In fact, we might say after reading this book that while lesbianism cannot be called a transhistorical phenomenon, dyke drama apparently stretches through the ages, with or without concrete identity formations. The women who left records of their entanglements in letters or journals or lawsuits tell of intense involvements with relatives, with famous authors or artists, with actresses, and with religious companions; we hear of female Romeos, Lotharios, and beloved objects of desire, revered from afar or worshipped up close. In story after story, Vicinus presents her readers with a tangled web of desire, identity, and friendship. The book covers many familiar figures—Radclyffe Hall, the Ladies of Llangollen, Ann Lister, Natalie Barney's Parisian circle—but it also embeds the well-circulated narratives about these individuals within the very specific context of the extensive communities of pre-twentieth-century European female friendships. Intimate Friends represents an impressive research project and contributes to ever more complicated histories of female desire. As she comments in her introduction, Vicinus cannot provide as varied a survey of female friendship as she might like and the book must limit itself to depicting "the lives of those most likely to leave documents for future historians" (xvi). This means, obviously, that we do not hear about working-class women, or about females who passed as men and made a living as men; we do not know about any similar intimate communities of women who were not independently wealthy, and we have no idea how representative the communities we do know about might have been. Vicinus relies a lot, perhaps too much, on the notion that the communities she tracks are representative: she speaks of "representative examples" of women who sexually "self-fashioned." The notion of self-fashioning, which depends to a certain extent on Laura Doan's book, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (2001), refers for Vicinus to the ways in which "educated women who loved women" created and molded "recognizable sexual identities" (xxii). While Vicinus quotes Judith Butler and other poststructuralist feminists in an attempt to avoid the ascription of willed identity formation to these pre-twentieth-century women, nonetheless, Vicinus repeatedly implies that women somehow generated the identity categories through which we now read them. Identity, identification, desire, and role-playing produce, of course, immensely complicated historical questions, and Vicinus tries her best to avoid producing what she calls "identity history"; and yet, with phrases like "recognizable identities" and "self-fashioning," Vicinus repeatedly presumes the sexual formations she is supposedly exploring before they emerged as such. Intimate Friends really does not make its contribution at the level of theories of the history of homosexuality; rather, it provides readers with a rich and detailed account of a specific set of erotic communities. Vicinus structures her book both chronologically and thematically, and she methodically moves through the narratives of overlapping communities while organizing their involvements in terms of metaphorical structures like marriage, family or kinship, spirituality, triangulation, and gender cross-identification. [End Page 373] Having put the vexing question of pre-twentieth-century identity formations aside, Vicinus tries to use these metaphorical rubrics to explain how women would have understood themselves and each other. We know from Lister's diaries, for example, that she did compare herself to a man or a husband, but she also did not think of herself as in any way "like" another masculine woman in her circle. The metaphorical structures that Vicinus explores make the intimacies between women meaningful to contemporary readers and prevent the possibility that they will be historically discounted or overlooked. The chapter on "The Rome Community" of "emancipated females" surrounding Charlotte...