Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal, 1600-1800

331 Pages·2013·4.734 MB·English

by  Chris Mounsey

Developments in the
Histories of Sexualities
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T R A N S I T S :
LITERATURE, THOUGHT & CULTURE
Series Editor
Greg Clingham
Bucknell University
Transits is the next horizon. Th e series of books, essays, and monographs aims to extend
recent achievements in eighteenth-century studies and to publish work on any aspects of the
literature, thought, and culture of the years 1650–1850. Without ideological or method-
ological restrictions, Transits seeks to provide transformative readings of the literary, cultural,
and historical interconnections between Britain, Europe, the Far East, Oceania, and the
Americas in the long eighteenth century, and as they extend down to present time. In addi-
tion to literature and history, such “global” perspectives might entail considerations of time,
space, nature, economics, politics, environment, and material culture, and might necessitate
the development of new modes of critical imagination, which we welcome. But the series
does not thereby repudiate the local and the national for original new work on particular
writers and readers in particular places in time continues to be the bedrock of the discipline.
Titles in the Series
Th e Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women’s Novels of the 1790s: Public
Aff ection and Private Affl iction
Jennifer Golightly
Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment
Yaël Schlick
John Galt: Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society
Regina Hewitt
Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals
Manushag N. Powell
Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660–1760
Kathleen Lubey
Th e French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790–1814: Th e Struggle for History’s
Authority
Morgan Rooney
Rococo Fiction in France, 1600–1715: Seditious Frivolity
Allison Stedman
Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets
Deborah Kennedy
Richard Brinsley Sheridan: Th e Impresario in Political and Cultural Context
Jack E. DeRochi and Daniel J. Ennis
Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print
Kevin Murphy and Sally O’Driscoll
Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal, 1600–1800
Chris Mounsey
For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit
http://www.bucknell.edu/universitypress
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T R A N S I T S
Developments in the
Histories of Sexualities
I N S E A R C H O F T H E
N O R M A L , 1 6 0 0 – 1 8 0 0
E D I T E D B Y C H R I S M O U N S E Y
L E W I S B U R G
B U C K N E L L U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
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Published by Bucknell University Press
Co-published with Th e Rowman & Littlefi eld Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
10 Th ornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2013 by Rowman & Littlefi eld Publishing Group
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who
may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Developments in the histories of sexualities : in search of the normal, 1600-1800 /
edited by Chris Mounsey.
pages cm. — (Transits: Literature, Th ought & Culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61148-500-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61148-501-1
(electronic)
1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. English
literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and criticism. 3. Homosexuality
and literature—Great Britain. 4. Gender identity in literature—Great Britain.
5. Homosexuality—Great Britain—History—18th century. 6. Homosexuality—
Great Britain—History—17th century. I. Mounsey, Chris, 1959- editor of
compilation.

PR448.H65D48 2013
820.9'353—dc22
2012049964
™
Th e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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CONTENTS
Introduction: Sexuality, Post(con)structuralism and After vii
Chris Mounsey
1 Th e History of Homosexuality Reconsidered 1
George Haggerty
2 Queer Renaissance Dramaturgy, Shakespeare’s Shrew, and the
Deconstruction of Marriage 17
David Orvis
3 ‘Unusual Fires’: Ann Batten Cristall’s Queer Temporality 51
Christopher Nagle
4 De-sexing the Lesbian: Isaac de Benserade’s Narrative Quest 71
Marianne Legault
5 Unqueering Sappho and Eff eminizing the Author in Early
Modern Italy 91
Clorinda Donato
6 ‘A Th ing Perhaps Impossible’: Th e 1811 Woods/Pirie Trial
and Its Legacies 125
Chris Roulston
7 Th e Molly and the Fop: Untangling Eff eminacy in the
Eighteenth Century 145
Sally O’Driscoll
[ v ]
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CONTENTS
8 Proto-Butch or Temporally-Challenged Trans? Considering
Female Masculinities in Eighteenth Century Britain 173
Katharine Kittredge
9 Th e Sound of Men in Love 209
Th omas Alan King
10 “An Extraordinary Subject for Dissection”: Th e Strange Cases
of James Allen and Lavinia Edwards 249
Caroline Gonda
Bibliography 271
Index 293
About the Editor 299
About the Contributors 301
[ vi ]
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INTRODUCTION
Sexuality, Post(con)structuralism and After
Chris Mounsey
C
AROLINE GONDA AND I met in August 2000 at the
annual conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, held at
Aberdeen University. Our fi rst conversation was marked by our sadness at what
we felt was the exclusion of the lives of people like us—or at least of our same-sex
loving foremothers and forefathers—from the history of sexuality that was then at
its height in the dominant theoretical approach, Queer Th eory. Th e Foucauldian
constructionist analysis which then dominated (and is still in the ascendant), for
both of us, failed to pin down anything like the sexuality that we experienced in
our own lives, in the search for its history. Sexuality, we believed, was the desire
for and physical expression of sex acts by people for other people, and was only
partially modifi ed by the social and political world of those who desire in their
historical context. Th e urgency of desire, we considered, exploded forth towards
the object of desire, and, if recognized, reciprocated and acted upon, might lead
to mutual physical enjoyment, and possibly love over the long term, whether
between woman and man, woman and woman, or man and man. Following this
belief in the working of sexuality, our personal experiences suggested to us that
people in history must have felt the same way, that all of us, historical and modern
people must have felt something of the same on our journeys to becoming homo-
sexual subjects. Th e outcome of the journey for an historical person may have been
set against a diff erent context, and led to a somewhat diff erent sense of being a
sexual subject, but fundamental to the journey was the body and its desires, which,
we believed, could be recuperated. Our conviction was so strong that we decided
to hold a conference on eighteenth-century homosexuality to see whether we were
wrong, and Foucault was right after all.
[ vii ]
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INTRODUCTION
As we saw it, the problem with the Foucauldian analysis was that it ignored
the glaringly obvious in its fear of essentialism. Based in poststructuralist methodol-
ogy, Michel Foucault’s Th e History of Sexuality: An Introduction employed the dictum
“sodomy that utterly confused category”1 to tread lightly around the problem of
reference to the body since reference to things in the world has always been the heart
of the philosophical conundrum that led to poststructuralism.2 How does the mind
know that the body is in contact with the world through its mental perceptions? Th e
Foucauldian answer was to ignore reference to the body and to study only mental
concepts, such as the social and political, and to ignore the body. Foucault’s move
was consonant with the methodology of the language-based poststructuralist project
in which he was engaged. Originally a product of the French academy, poststruc-
turalism derives its caution about the existence of the body and of other bodies in
particular from Descartes’ dualism, which infl uenced Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian
Meditations, 3 which were so hugely infl uential in many forms of poststructuralist
analysis. David Jalal Hyder makes clear the particular link between Husserl and
Foucault in “Foucault, Cavailles, and Husserl on the Historical Epistemology of the
Sciences,” where he writes about Foucault’s key term “archaeology:”
the notion of “archaeology” itself, a form of historical investigation of
knowledge that is distinguished from the mere history of ideas in part
by its unearthing what Foucault calls “historical a prioris”. . . [is] derived
from Husserlian phenomenology.4
But rather than working in the linguistic to theorize sexuality, Caroline and I
believed that sexuality itself might bridge the gap between the mind and body by
placing emphasis on sexual perceptions, desires and capabilities which might work
in a diff erent way from language.
Even though the subjects in a sexual relationship may be classifi ed by their
political and social condition, that set of values does not mask the basic desires,
or the response of the body to those desires. If a king commands his footman to
sodomize him, the footman might be personally inclined to do so or he might not,
but he will try to do what the king commands because of his subordinate role.
However, the king cannot command the footman to desire him, or to maintain an
erection out of desire for him. At the heart of this example is the irrefutable logic
of the body and its mind’s desires. Th e king may crave the footman’s physical at-
tention, but all his political power cannot answer the blank stare of unreciprocated
desire. Even if the footman is able to use his own fantasy to bring himself to the
point where he can fulfi l the king’s wishes, the act so consummated is not the same
as a consensual and mutually desired act.
[ viii ]
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INTRODUCTION
But this is not to equate and confuse the consensual and mutually desired
act with modern homosexuality. Th e morganatic relationship between king and
footman (Edward II and Piers Gaveston?) may have been as fulfi lling as that
between two modern men who have been politically and economically joined
in a civil partnership. Likewise, the apparently equal civil partnership between a
modern millionaire and a penniless partner may be fraught by the power dynamic
of money and ownership. But while the physical is one level of a relationship and
the social and political another, fundamental to it being a relationship at all has to
be the physical response to the desire which links the mind and body.
Th is is not to say that the modern civil partnership is necessarily a perfect
physical and mental union. Th e power dynamic of money and ownership might
enslave the penniless partner in return for fi nancial stability. It might mean that
the penniless partner only entered into the civil partnership for money. But these
possible analyses—and there are many more—all exist as real versions of the ideal
physical and mental union, and the compromises of the real relationship are the
stuff of life and literature. Th ey ensure that understanding of the queerness of peo-
ple is local and particular, for as Tolstoy says every family is unhappy in its own way.
Th e “logic of the body” suggests that Caroline and I might be arguing an
underlying similarity that draws together the couple, which might be conceived
of in terms of essentialism, the typical binary opposite used to argue against con-
structionism. As Diana Fuss has argued in Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature
& Diff erence, essentialism and construction are in play with each other in everyday
language,5 so much so that at times it is hard to understand why essentialism has
been cast as the enemy. I have always been fascinated by Luce Irigaray’s poetic,
complex and beautiful analyses, particularly after I translated Amante Marine: De
Friedrich Nietzsche as part of my Master of Arts in Continental Philosophy. What
is so wonderful about Irigaray’s work is that it does not reduce essentialism to the
bland idea that we are all alike, and that if we have an essence it will express itself
willy-nilly. If we can classify Irigaray as an essentialist the category applies because
she off ered in her earliest work, ‘Th is sex which is not one’ as a counter metaphor
to Lacan’s phallus in order to close the distance between language and meaning
inherent in patriarchal discourse. An oft quoted passage from Th is Sex gives an ac-
count of écriture feminine derived from the sexual anatomy of women:
Th us, for example, woman’s autoeroticism is very diff erent from man’s.
In order to touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a
woman’s body, language . . . And this self-caressing requires at least a
minimum of activity.
[ ix ]
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