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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 Francesca Canadé Sautman Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. By Martha Vicinus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. 344. $35.00 (cloth). Throughout several decades of work on gender, women's history, and female same-sex love, Martha Vicinus has never hesitated to confront the reigning wisdom of the day and offer alternative readings of well-known tropes. She has consistently put out new material and new interpretations and asked unsettling questions that move current understandings of lesbian history and same-sex affectivity to another level. In this respect, Intimate Friends does not disappoint. It is a substantial, rigorous, and fascinating engagement with the complex detours taken by same-sex love between women in the formative years of the modern West. Following an apparently strict chronological pattern, the book begins with the late-eighteenth-century Ladies of Llangollen and leads up to the inception of the "modern lesbian" of the Parisian 1920s and to Radclyffe Hall's transgendered persona. It offers, through eight tight chapters that are at once biographical and theoretical, a series of finely nuanced interpretations of how women who loved other women developed a consciousness of their sexual and affective selves, of the contradictory and backtracking ways they voiced that self, and of the means they devised to simply ignore or circumvent the interdictions of their day. In and of itself, the chronology appears to present a thesis, articulating a movement from early affective relations in which friendship was the most important cipher or, possibly, the most effective screen that women could mobilize so that their relationships might survive and thrive, all the way to stated and publicly declared lesbian lives. But this is not what this book really addresses, nor is it its most compelling hypothesis. Rather, one has to look at the path set out in the introduction and eloquently followed throughout the work. Vicinus effectuates a radical departure from the straightjacket of preoccupations with identity definitions and their inherent presupposition of a linear trajectory of the lesbian self—from the practice of inchoate, occasional [End Page 352] "acts" in the distant past,1 to the alleged birth of "the" lesbian after 1900, in the wake of a fully realized male homosexual and as his progeny—all notions that have tended to dominate the field. In the introduction to her edited collection, Lesbian Subjects, Martha Vicinus already challenged well-received post-Foucauldian dogmas that, arguably, misread Foucault. She rejected in particular a definition of gender conformity and sexual behavior that allowed the end of the late-nineteenth-century sexologists to compartmentalize, hem in, and catalog the homosexual self and speak in place of homosexual persons and denied their validity as creators of a codified lesbian identity.2 Critiquing the too eager endorsement by the scholarly community of these models as effective in shaping, defining, and containing the identities of same-sex loving persons, she has pointed out that their work relied on a corpus of earlier observations, based on common knowledge and identification of several types of transgressive behaviors among women that already had a considerable history. She takes up this position again in Intimate Friends more explicitly still (176). Further, because she bases herself thoroughly and consistently on a discourse of women about themselves—at times hesitantly budding and at times fully and militantly expressed, as it surfaces in letters and diaries—she returns their voice to these women of the past, letting it occupy center stage and push the numbing rhetoric of the sexologists into the corridors outside the dressing rooms. The book's primary sources indeed consist predominantly of diaries and letters, which are given very close and attentive readings and thus insert the subject's voice in a multifaceted response to normative sexual doctrine. Vicinus reveals the numerous potential contents of common notions such as "intimate" and "romantic" and weaves a carefully archived tapestry of interconnecting sensibilities, inclinations, and sexual identities—the latter often shifting and unstable over the course of a lifetime—between women whose paths often intersect across chapters and categories. The debates between essentialists and constructionists of the early 1980s have thus been mercifully left...