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SEL 43, 2 (Spring 2003): 375-394
ISSN 0039-3657
To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein1
During the last two decades, a growing body of historical, cultural, and literary criticism has begun to explore the ways in which female homoeroticism was depicted in early modern fictions.2 Most of this critical work, while acknowledging that a discrete "lesbian" identity did not yet exist in the period, has nevertheless worked to recover emergent and recognizable languages of female homoeroticism from early modern art, poetry, and drama.3 Most recently, pioneering efforts in the field of gay and lesbian studies by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Valerie Traub, and others have shifted critical interest toward an investigation of the historical and ideological developments that helped to constitute "homosexual" identity after the Enlightenment-developments that included changes in early modern languages, tropes, and discursive logics that gave particular shape to modern sexological categories.4
In examining how female eroticism begins to assume discursive shape and currency on the early modern stage, I argue here that Shakespeare's Twelfth Night offers an often overlooked opportunity to witness the dynamics by which a language of female-female desire emerges from the materials of conventional heteroerotic discourses already in circulation. Viola's performance of Orsino's poetic suit to Olivia creates a curious dramatic space in which female characters negotiate and revise the scripts and conventions of the elite, if increasingly cliched, Petrarchan poetry of Elizabethan courtiers. In the interview scene, the inadequacy of Orsino's ostensibly heteroerotic Petrarchan discourse, surprisingly enough, gives rise to a pastoral poetics of female desire in Viola's conversation with Olivia. A close examination of the interplay of discursive and erotic modes in this scene allows us to see both the ways that female desire finds imaginative space outside the restrictions of a thoroughly masculine Petrarchan poetics and how newly forged languages of female desire find their way into action. Viola's successful wooing of Olivia in the interview scene affords us a glimpse of a tentative "lesbian" poetics as one female character imagines and articulates the words that will seduce another.
I
Viola. I pray you tell me if this be the lady of the house, for I never saw her. I would be loath to cast away my speech; for...