The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England

Abstract

Marshall reviews The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England by Valerie Traub.

The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England

By Valerie Traub

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002

Critics and historians have traditionally thought of early modern lesbianism as largely invisible, a shadowy essence failing to register in a prevailingly patriarchal culture. Valerie Traub has worked for a decade to challenge that idea, and in The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, she tackles the problem in two ways: by increasing the magnification on a wide range of cultural documents to reveal a tracery of female-female eroticism, and by challenging established definitions and hermeneutic methods. Through both approaches, but especially the second, the book inquires into the foundations of the erotic and sexual taxonomies that result in modern definitions of heterosexual, homosexual, gay, and lesbian identities. For Traub, there is nothing pre-given about erotic arrangements (361). Accordingly, eroticism functions here as a "heuristic tool" and "category of analysis" (21), with the definition of the "sexual" submitted to careful scrutiny. Traub illuminates how fully patriarchal concepts of sexuality have dominated traditional critical as well as literary discourses. Her significant achievement is to suggest what a nonphallocentric sexuality looks like and to enable a vision of how it flourished in early modern England.

Throughout the book "lesbian" and "lesbianism" are italicized to register their use as "strategic anachronism[s]" (16), a tactic less intrusive than one initially fears. While Traub presents compelling evidence for the presence of female-female eroticism in the earlier period, she steadfastly resists the idea of a transhistorical lesbian identity. She differs from gay historians who look to the past for a mirror and indeed presents a sophisticated analysis of such a desire as a species of melancholia. Traub believes her genealogical project, showing the historical development of the concept of lesbianism, can "pry apart the terms" and "disarticulatfe the] links" of modern homophobic discourses (228). The Renaissance of Lesbianism amply demonstrates the mutability of epistemological categories and supports Traub's contention that the cultural signification of various erotic arrangements is not inevitable. She successfully remaps the terrain of the history of sexuality.

A chapter on Elizabeth I, for instance, challenges the critical consensus that the virgin queen's power depended on her repudiation of eroticism. Chastity does not preclude eroticism, a point one might miss if sexuality is assumed to equal phallic penetration. Stepping free of the phallic frame of reference, Traub finds evidence in the Armada portrait of Elizabeth's "erotic command" (132): the drop pearl as a "metonymy of female pleasure" (129), the "profusion of pleasure points" announced by the rich display of "visual and tactile surfaces" (131), the seductive display of the small statue of a mermaid. Other images of Elizabeth likewise announce erotic potential while performing feminine modesty. Documentary accounts of the queen exposing her breasts, evidently a fashion of the day, suggest her regal delight in her body, providing further evidence of a nonphallic politics of pleasure. In Traub's view, "rather than assume Elizabeth's heterosexuality and, more importantly, the coherence and stability of heterosexuality itself, we need to examine the ways that such a category was produced retroactively as the sole mode of possibility for a self-identified Virgin Queen" (153-54).

Discovering the terms through which "the past articulated its own queerness" (40) involves scrutiny of an astonishingly wide range of cultural texts, including canonical and noncanonical poetry and drama. Letters, diaries, pornography, medical texts, funeral monuments, and paintings of mythological scenes provide images of intimate friendship or erotic connection between women. Traub notes a "routine . . . eroticization of female friendship" (181) in sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century texts. In literary pastoral, in particular, female homoeroticism features in an overt but nonthreatening way, rendered insignificant by its temporal and spatial distance in a golden age. Crucial to this picture of toleration is the cultural distinction between the tribade and what Traub calls the femme. The tribade-a woman who penetrated her partner with a dildo or with an unnaturally large clitoris-was condemned as a sodomite. Femmes-women who expressed love for other women while maintaining traditionally gendered appearance and behavior-did not appear threatening, transgressive, or even alternative in their desires. In historical retrespective, the "palpable 'femininity' of these characters blinds us"-somewhat paradoxically-"to the eroticism evident in their language of desire" (182). Traub counts As You Like It's Celia, A Midsummer Night's Dream's Helena, and Two Noble Kinsmen's Emilia among this company, along with many other dramatic characters. Only when femmes were perceived "as a threat to the reproductive designs of marital alliance or to the exclusive masculine prerogative over phallic power" (182) were women's relations with one another considered transgressive. When that began to happen-by Traub's account in the late seventeenth century-the tribade and the femme merged in the cultural imagination, heterosexuality became a more clearly defined norm, and the "renaissance" of lesbianism drew to a close.

Central to the book's argument are the ramifications of Realdo Colombo's "rediscovery" of the clitoris in 1559, and Traub's consideration of these issues illustrates her formidable skill in using theoretical inquiry to pressure historical investigation, and vice versa. Anatomists' attention to the clitoris challenged the traditional Galenic view of the sexes, which was built on a structural homology between penis and uterus, and which posited the female genitalia as an inverted, and inferior, version of the male. Because women's erotic pleasure was understood to be necessary for conception-and as Traub points out, medical writers considered female satisfaction important only for that reason-the clitoris, not the uterus, came to be seen as the counterpart of the male "yard." The tidy gender parallelism of Galenic theory was imperiled by the introduction of a third term connoting female pleasure, and male anxiety about the excessiveness and potential autonomousness of women's eroticism blossomed. Symptomatic of this anxiety was the cultural fantasy of the tribade, with her hypertrophic clitoris and aggressive sexuality. Traub presents the evolution of lesbianism as the "transgressive twin" of female heterosexuality (218), limning a more complex picture of the development of modern erotic identities than did earlier accounts dependent on Thomas Laqueur's narrative of the shift from a one-sex (Galenic) model of human anatomy to a two-sex model.

Contributing to the developing stereotypes were travel narratives reporting the exoticized same-sex practices of non-European women. Tales of cucumbers in Turkish harems had particular resiliency in the colonial imagination. Surveying the range of documents, Traub finds a form of "anatomical essentialism" at work, an effort "to organize and make intelligible the plurality of corporeal structures and behaviors within the conceptual confines of Renaissance cosmological and earthly hierarchies" (208). The tribade was a powerful fantasy-hermaphrodites were likely included under this label, but otherwise the differences in size were mostly imaginary-because "clitoral hypertrophy metonymizes women's supposedly inordinate capacity for pleasure" (209).

In a powerful turn, Traub observes that a similar logic of metonymy is reiterated in the work of feminist theorist Luce Irigaray. In a bodily poetics celebrated by many feminists, Irigaray challenges the singular and specular economy of the phallus, invoking labial imagery of plurality, fluidity, tactility, and movement. Traub worries, though, that the association of body part with erotic identity reproduces a colonialist logic and ultimately secures a phallic "meta-narrative of legitimation" (226). In her view, such overdetermined regulatory schemes can best be dismantled by understanding their historical contingency.

Recognizing that matters of sex, gender, and erotic identity are conceptually difficult and emotionally charged, Traub writes in a straightforward and occasionally playful style, drawing on her sharp analytical skill, conceptual rigor, and a wealth of historical and literary knowledge. Moreover, while she challenges existing paradigms of feminist theory and gay historiography, a hallmark throughout is Traub's collaborative methodology; she is patient and tactful in articulating her argument, gracious in citing the work of other scholars and in acknowledging debts. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England is a work of sustained brilliance that opens pathways for further work-on the history of the family and of sexuality, on early modern understandings of the body, on the linguistic expression of erotic pleasure, on phenomenologies of difference and attraction-and sets a high standard for further work in these fields.