Lecture Notes:3

Dos sexuality have a history?

- Tend to think of SEXUALITY as AHISTORICAL
- Ex. as being outside of history, as never changing
- However, sexuality, as with all human activity is embedded in the historical
- Erotic practices, identities and sexual acts, have signified differently at different times
- In the Classical era, sexual relations between male Athenian citizen and a male youth
were fully legitimate
- Sexual relations with subordinates ( young males, slaves, women)
- We tend to think of the history of sexuality as a PROGRESS NARRATIVE, from
oppression to liberation, from ignorance to knowledge, and from non identity to identity
- However, we need to question this narrative, and to show how the past can sometimes
surprise us, and help us question our assumptions about the present

Gender and sexuality in the Early 19th Century:

- Marriage: Dominant relationship between men and women
- Separate Social Spheres: Men and women who lived in separate social lives
- Era of Empire building and Industrial Revolution
- Men fully engaged in Public Sphere
- Women defined by domesticity

Jane Austen and Regency Society:

- 1811-1837 Regency period (also called Georgian period)
- Regency period best represented by novels of Jane Austen (1775-1817)
- Austen’s novels capture society steeped in rules of social decorum, marriage and
heterosexuality
- Jane Austen creates strong, independent women
- Ex. Elizabeth of Pride and Prejudice
- The women in her novel are always ultimately in search of a husband and confirm the
social order

Social Norms of the Early Nineteenth Century:

- As Austen’s novels show, marriage was exclusive goal for middle-class women
- Middle- class women were women of leisure, and represented civility and decorum
- Women were seen as facilitators of the social world
- Men were providers engaged in the public sphere

Romantic Friendships
- Bonds between women were known as “romantic friendships”
- Even married women had these bonds with other women
- Not unusual for a bride to bring her female companion on her honeymoon
- Representations of female couples were very common in the visual culture of the period,
either representing ‘intimate’ friends of sister pairings
Homosociality vs. Homosexuality
- Regency society (early 1800’s) promoted homosocial relations within a heterosexual
world
- Homosociality: friendships between people of the same sex
- Was dependent on rejection of homosexuality
- Lesbian desire was thought of as ‘impossible’
- Male homosexuality was criminalized and punishable by death penalty
- Female and male homosexual practices were perceived very differently
- 1811 Woods/Pirie trial
- Female student accused two school teachers of “lewd acts” together
- Judges argued that “ no such crime was ever known in Scotland, or in Britain
- In contrast, in 1806, “there were more executions for sodomy than for murder”
- Male homosexual practices available through public records: court trials and police
transcripts
- Female homosexual practices appear only in private documents: letters, diaries, poems
etc.
- Female sexuality constructed as passive, and as activated by male desire
- Therefore, homosexual acts between women were thought to be ‘impossible’
- Lynda Hart argued that
- That which a culture negates is necessarily included within it (1994)
- That which a culture forbids also brings the forbidden into being
- Scholars are discovering that the line between ‘romantic friendships’ and homoerotic or
sexual relations between women could become extremely blurred
- Women’s sexual “invisibility” gave them a certain freedom men did not possess

The Ladies of Llangollen:

- Eleanor Butler ( 1739-1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1832) ran away together from
Ireland in 1778, and set up a new home in Llangollen, Wales
- They lived as a married couple and became known as the Ladies of Llangollen
- It would have been very hard for two men to live together in the same public way
- Therefore, in spite of the official “unthinkability” of lesbian desire during this period, we
can find examples to show that it was nevertheless circulating in unexpected ways

The Case of Anne Lister (1791-1840)

- During the same period as Jane Austen’s novels, an aristocratic landowner called Anne
Lister was having a series of passionate affairs with other women over the course of her
life

Who was Anne Lister?:

- In 1826, at age 35, Anne Lister inherited her uncle’s estate of Shibden Hall, in Yorkshire
- This made her economically independent, and allowed her to avoid marriage
 - Anne was a scholar, she read Greek and Latin, and followed a rigorous program of
learning
- Anne came into her inheritance of the height of the industrial revolution in Britain; she
competed with other industrialists and ran a very successful, if small, coal-mining
business
- Anne was a conservative (Tory) landowner, who kept her tenants subservient, and who
exploited her land through mining
- Anne travelled around England, spent time in Paris, and eventually died in the Russian
Caucasus while doing a grand tour of Europe
- “Fortunately, her money allowed her the eccentricity of spinsterhood and the
opportunity to educate herself in the classics and to travel abroad”
- From 1806, age 15, Anne wrote a diary until her death in 1840.
- This diary ranges from descriptions of her farming and mining practices, to her
sexual exploits
- Anne’s personal and erotic affairs were written in code, making up about 10% of the
diary
- “This diary, based on Greek, originated in the context of her first love affair as a
young girl. She and Eliza Raine, and later she and Mariana Belcombe, used the
code to write love letters to each other, which Anne often copied down to her
journals. The code, of course, was used for sexual matters.”
- The diaries are made up of 26 volumes
- About 4 million words
- Twice as long as the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the most famous diarist from the
17th century

Anne Lister’s diaries:

- The fact that details of Anne’s erotic life were written in code is the only reason the diary
survived
- In the 1890’s, John Lister, a descendant of Anne’s successfully decoded the diary with
his friend, Arthur Burrell. They cracked the code through the word “hope”
- After deciphering the code, Burrell strongly advised his friend, John Lister, as follows
- “The part written in cipher-- turned out after examination to be entirely
unpunishable. Mr.Lister was distressed but refused to take my advice which was
that he should burn all 26 volumes….”
- It has since been discovered that John Lister himself was very likely to be a homosexual
- In the 18890’s, homosexual acts in Britain were illegal and offenders could be subject to
imprisonment; Oscar Wilde was sentenced to 2 years’ hard labour in 1895 under the
‘sodomy’ laws
- Although John Lister could not publish the diaries, his refusal to burn them suggests a
certain identification with his ancestor, Anne
- John Lister made the survival of the diaries possible
- Although the diaries continued to be too controversial to publish from another century
- Finally, in1988, a local historian, Helena Whitbread, published a selection with Virago
Press
Anne Lister’s Relationships:
- Anne had 2 important female lovers in 1810s and 1820s
- Isabella Norcliffe and Mariana Belcomb
- Isabella was a casual sex partner
- Mariana became the love of Anne’s life
- Anne also contracted a “marriage” with Anne Walker in 1832, a neighbouring heiress
- Anne actually had a priest perform some kind of ceremony for her and Anne Walker, and
records it as a marriage, the first “lesbian marriage” on record
- Anne saw herself as unique, and as an anomaly
- On one hand, Anne Lister’s diaries defy all the expectations of female decorum and
behaviour in the early 19 century
- On the other hand, Anne’s class privilege and independent wealth ( although this
happened after her first affairs) enabled a sexual behaviour that would have been
inaccessible to others
- Anne Lister’s diaries show that whatever a given culture of historical period decided to
sanction, this sanction will always be subject to contestation and subversion
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