Separating the Inseparables: Female Friendship and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

Separating the Inseparables: Female Friendship and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century France Christine Roulston (bio) In the second half of the French eighteenth century, from the writings of Rousseau to the advent of the Revolution, the concept of inseparability in female friendships helped to guide and inform the construction of gender in eighteenth-century discourse. The definition of inseparable friendships depended on both class and gender markers, as well as on the often fluid relationship between public and private. Within the aristocracy, a class whose social relations relied to an important extent on visibility and publicity, inseparable friendships inhabited a more public arena than friendships within the bourgeoisie, a class in search of a more private model of subjectivity. At the same time, the aristocracy used inseparable friendships to create a sense of private space, while the bourgeoisie sought to publicize certain forms of private friendship in opposition to the society friendships of the aristocracy. In addition, the nature of inseparable friendships shifted and changed depending on the gender of those involved. Inseparable male friends were more likely to be read under the aegis of a public homosocial bonding, whereas inseparable female friends tended to function within a more private and intimate sphere. An inseparable friendship between the sexes, in turn, always risked being read as a mask for heterosexual desire. [End Page 215] The eighteenth-century use of the term “inseparable” (as a noun and an adjective) implies a sense of indivisibility and unity (it is interesting that the grammatical term “inseparable” refers to any prefix found only in combination and incapable of being used as a separate word, e.g., mis- or un-). To be inseparable, then, is to be undivided, to become one, although this one is made up of two (or more). At the same time, the concept of the inseparable contains within it its own self-division since the word is made up of a positive term (separable) and negated by the prefix “in,” the idea of separation permanently inhabits that of inseparability. In terms of the construction of female friendship, the notion of separation becomes literally inseparable from that of inseparability, specifically with regard to the place of women within the public sphere. By 1793, after a brief period of liberation during which women’s political clubs and divorce were allowed, the project of the Revolution, with regard to the feminine, was one of separation. It was the female body that had to be separated from the body politic, a separation that was symbolically and literally performed by the guillotine. The paradox of the discourse of separation in which the dynamics of female friendship were cast in eighteenth-century France is that it demands the construction of a sphere in which women are a priori inseparable: this sphere is that of the public. To allow women a place in the public sphere has always been a source of debate. Reducing women to the either/or of public/private also risks privileging a binary opposition that fails to take into account the multiple categories of each term, as Lawrence E. Klein has convincingly argued. 1 In the eighteenth century, while both aristocratic and bourgeois women were excluded from what Klein calls “the magisterial public sphere—the State and its related agencies and the world of office-holding they circumscribed,” 2 they were active participants in “the civic public sphere,” 3 which included the realm of culture and society in its broadest sense; the salonnières were flourishing, women were writing and publishing more than at any other period in history up to that point, and they were leaders in fashion and social decorum, influencing even the codes of the language. 4 At the same time, discursive and ideological strategies were being deployed in order to return them to the private sphere. Already in the seventeenth century, resistance to the growing influence of women in the public sphere was being voiced, not only in the satirical comedies of Molière, but also, according to Joan Landes, by “disgruntled nobles who tied their resentments against the breakdown of traditional social stratification to complaints about women’s cultural power.” 5 From the establishment of the earliest salons, a...