Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

John B. Beynon and Caroline Gonda, eds. Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. 214 pp. $99.95.The publication of Valerie Traub's The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (2002) arguably marked a new era in studies. Certainly the last decade of the twentieth saw the publication of important work on the subject by a host of eighteenth-century scholars. Book-length studies such as Emma Donoghue's Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (1993), Lisa Moore's Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (1997), George Haggerty's Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later Eighteenth Century (1998), and Elizabeth Wahl's Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (1999) as well as crucial essays by scholars such as Susan Lanser, Martha Vicinus, and Terry Castle (among others), worked shape-indeed create-the field. These scholars (three of whom have essays in the collection under review) produced work that illustrated the rich opportunities queer theory offered women's studies, eighteenth-century studies, and historiography. Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century, the first collection to focus on desire between women in the long eighteenth century (1), suggests how far the field has matured in the past decade. Like Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700-1800 (2007), a volume Caroline Gonda edited with Chris Mounsey, Lesbian Dames offers a sense of what has been done in the past ten years and what can be done in the decades come. It provides an example of the diversity of attitudes and theoretical frameworks that shape the field and signals, in the editors' words, how lesbian historiography and literary criticism and queer theory have grown up (2).Lesbian Dames offers a primer of sorts of the kinds of questions, methodologies, and critical practices employed by scholars working queer the eighteenth century. That approach makes the collection an excellent introduction for readers seeking a starting point for their own research or teaching; the best essays offer powerful models for compelling and revisionary scholarship that remind us how queer theory compels us reassess our underlying assumptions and familiar reading practices. The collection's strongest essays unite impeccable research, lucid prose, theoretical sophistication, and thorough scholarly documentation. Additionally, the volume usefully covers a range of genres and media, from pornography and ephemera, fiction and poetry, journals and letters. While the less successful essays fall prey some of the failings associated with scholars in emergent fields-sloppy (or non-existent) documentation, jargon-laden prose, and a limited familiarity with traditional scholarship related the text(s) discussed-overall, the volume's assets outweigh its liabilities, making this mature collection a welcome addition that marks the importance of queer theory multiple fields.Traub's book, which editors Caroline Gonda and John C. Beynon describe as monumental (1), provides the scholarly anchor for Lesbian Dames. (Indeed, it is cited in virtually every essay.) Traub's essay, the volume's first, 'Friendship so Curst': Amor Impossibilis, the Homoerotic Lament and the Nature of Lesbian Desire, is essentially a sophisticated precis of her book. She describes a gender system in crisis, a moment in cultural history during the regime of domestic heterosexuality that witnessed increasing anxiety about gender and marked a profound shiftin the cultural discourse of female homoeroticism. Focusing primarily on the poetry of Katherine Philips (1632-64), the essay explores Philips's usurping of the idiom of amicitia-idealized between men-both capture the tradition's symbolic capital (16) and make manifest the homoerotic potential lodged within other representations of chaste female friendship (16). …