"When it ceases to be silly it becomes actually wrong": The Cultural Contexts of Female Homoerotic Desire in Rose Terry Cooke's "My Visitation"

Abstract

In popular antebellum conduct book titled The Young Lady's Friend, Eliza W. R. Farrar advises young female readers of a among young ladies of holding each other's hands, and fondling them before company, had much better be dispensed with. She instructs, All kissing and of your female friends should be kept for your hours of privacy, and never be indulged in before gentlemen. There are some reasons for this, Farrar explains, which will readily suggest themselves, and others, can only be known those acquainted with the but are conclusive against the practice (269). The contains an interesting paradox: [K]issing and caressing between girls is simultaneously encouraged and condemned, innocent and dangerous--innocent for young girls not yet well acquainted with the world, but dangerous in the eyes of gentlemen and mature women like Farrar, who evidently knew better. Only tenuous line between knowledge and ignorance separates pure girlish friendship from its more threatening sexual possibilities (252). The passage is striking for the way it complicates more idealized contemporary images of female romantic friendship. The custom Farrar refers--kissing and caressing between girls--has been documented in countless letters, diaries, and literary works of the era, leading number of cultural historians, most notably Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman, conclude that female homoerotic behavior was condoned and even celebrated during period. While these historians are correct caution against ascribing twentieth- and twenty-first-century attitudes about sexuality the previous century, the dichotomy they create between pre and post-sexology culture overstates the degree female homoerotic behavior was casually accepted in nineteenth-century America. While some scholarship has briefly addressed the anxiety over female homoeroticism revealed in conduct books by Farrar and others, the topic warrants more discussion, especially with regard texts written before the beginning of the medical discourse on homosexuality produced by German sexologists around 1870. (1) One such work is Rose Cooke's 1858 story My Visitation, (2) overtly fictionalizes the tension between girlish friendship and female same-sex desire that appears in conduct books. The date and mainstream publication of story, as as Cooke's popularity, make particularly compelling case for an expansion of thinking about how women's romantic friendships were perceived by pre-sexology nineteenth-century culture and also for how modern lesbian identities have evolved. Susan Koppelman includes My Visitation in Two Friends and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers. She finds it surprising that the editors of Harper's New Monthly Magazine published the story because they had specifically called on writers to exercise moral self-censorship so that nothing in the magazine would 'violate the house policy of printing only material that could be read aloud in any family circle'; nevertheless, she concludes that perhaps they did so because, at the end, this woman who so passionately loves another woman, is learning love man. Indeed, the lesson of the story is far from subtle. Koppelman suggests the obviousness of female homoeroticism despite double remove ... provided by ghost story and an unreliable (Rose Terry 22); however, Cooke overtly depicts female homoeroticism as the very problem her narrator must overcome. I suggest that Cooke's story presents model of what Sarah Emily Newton calls conduct-fiction, hybrid fiction that combin[es the] behavioral advice of conduct literature with popular fiction. According Newton, fiction, emerged during the colonial period and continued until about 1900, develops mythic model test female virtue as as affirm women's entitlement through motherhood and self-control (140). …