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"SOMETHING MORE TENDER STILL THAN FRIENDSHIP": ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIP IN EARLY-NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
The genealogy of contemporary lesbian identities and practices is sharply attenuated: we know much more about the emergence in the early twentieth century of the term "lesbian" in sexology and popular accounts, and the women, communities, and texts through which its current meaning has been constructed, than we do about the historical lineages that made that emergence possible. Indeed, we have been cautioned by feminist historians not to look for "lesbians" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; curiously, however, this caution against anachronism has most often taken the form of an ahistorical prohibition against reading sex between women in history. In insisting upon such a reading -- upon reading lesbian sex -- this essay does not attempt to find "lesbians" in the early-nineteenth-century texts it examines; rather, these texts demonstrate how powerful a part the category of female homosexuality played in the cultural imaginary of the period. Such images, although not representations of "lesbians" as we now understand the term, are nevertheless part of the history of those representations and as such warrant our careful scrutiny. The conflicts these texts express and contain have their legacies in the construction both of current lesbian identities, practices, and communities and in the history of the specific forms of homophobia we struggle with today. As a conceptual category in the early nineteenth century, the possibility of sex between women played a constitutive role in the three texts examined below: in a domestic novel, in the diary of an early-nineteenth-century British woman who recorded her sexual intimacies with other women, and in a Scottish legal case in which two women teachers were accused of "indecent behavior." By reading the tension between "romantic friendship" and female homosexuality across both fiction and nonfiction, this essay seeks to establish the status of that tension as a basic, if sometimes unstated, cultural assumption -- a linchpin in the rise to power of both the bourgeois "private" and the bourgeois "public" spheres. As such, it formed an important part of the construction of specifically modern versions of sexuality, gender, the body, and the family, and of class and colonial relations, public order, and the rule of law. By implication, then, if bourgeois culture...