Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of EnlightenmentStanford University Press, 1999 - 358 ページ This book explores the ambivalent and often contradictory ways in which English and French writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represented relations of intimacy between women. These representations included both a sexualized model of the lesbian tribade and an idealized model that portrayed female friendship as devoid of sexual expression. Although these two perceptions of female intimacy may seem mutually exclusive, the author argues that both operate as defining parameters, not only for literary representations of relations between women but also for cultural responses to those institutions in which women could gather salon, convent, theater, or brothel. Despite increasing evidence of female homosocial and homosexual bonds during this period, representations of female intimacy have remained largely invisible within critical discourse. They are overshadowed either by a dominant heterosexual understanding of such institutions as marriage or prostitution or by historical patterns of male homosexual behavior, to which they often do not correspond. By broadening the concept of intimacy to include relations between women that may evade or subvert the boundaries of compulsory heterosexuality, the author argues, one can locate a duality of polite and eroticized models of female intimacy in the cultural discourses of both France and England. Analyzing a variety of legal, medical, and historical materials, as well as literary texts by Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips, Madeleine de Scudéry, Catherine Descartes, Delarivier Manley, and John Cleland the author outlines a combination of cultural and historical circumstances that contributed to or were symptomatic of increasing consciousness and concern about female homosexuality in England and France. Relating this sexualized model of female intimacy to idealized images of female friendship in mainstream literary texts allows the author to recover an incipient discourse of female homosexuality. She also delineates cultural fantasies about the outcome of unregulated contact between women, as well as underlying fears that such intimacy could foster aberrant social and political behavior in addition to unauthorized sexual relations between women. |
目次
Introduction | 1 |
The Tribade the Hermaphrodite and Other Lesbian Figures | 17 |
Representations of the Tribade in Libertine Literature | 43 |
Outside the Bonds of Marriage | 75 |
The Autobiography | 212 |
Notes | 255 |
Works Cited | 329 |
| 351 | |
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anxiety Aphra Behn argues aristocratic attempt Barash Behn Brantôme Cabal carnal Chorier's claims clitoral hypertrophy clitoris companionate construction conventional critics cultural Descartes dialogues dildo discourse Donne's early modern eighteenth century English erotic eroticism female friends female friendship female homosexuality female intimacy female sexuality female-female desire feminine feminist femme fictional figure France French gender Harth hermaphrodite heterosexual heterosocial homoerotic homoeroticism homosocial husband ideal ideology innocence Iphis Katherine Philips kind Lady lesbian lesbian desire lesbian sexuality libertine literary lover Lucasia Mademoiselle male marriage married masculine masturbation narrative Octavia offers Orinda passion penis phallic phallocentric Phaon Philaenis Philips's poetry platonic pleasure poet political pornographic potential précieuse reader relations between women rhetoric role romance romantic friendship Rosania salon Sapho satiric Satyra Sotadica Scudéry Scudéry's seventeenth seventeenth-century sexual practices sexual relations social sodomy status suggests tendre amitié term texts tion translation tribade tribade sexuality Tullia utopian woman women writers writing