Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 294 – Follow the Monkey by Jamie McGhee - transcript
(Originally aired 2024/08/31 - listen here)
This quarter, I am proud to be able to present to you the story “Follow the Monkey” by Jamie McGhee, narrated by Cláudia Cruz Machado. This is a difficult story, set in colonial Brazil of the 1670s, with an unflinching look at the experiences of enslaved people on a sugarcane plantation. But it’s also a story of love, of loyalty, of hope, and of hard choices.
The author, Jamie McGhee is a novelist who aspires to build interactive spaces of resistance and experimentation, through language. Her books include You Mean It or You Don’t: James Baldwin’s Radical Challenge (co-authored with Dr. Adam Hollowell of Duke University) and What I Must Tell the World: The Story of Lorraine Hansberry. She is based in Berlin, where she instructs Ph.D. students at Humboldt University. You can find a link to her website with more information about her work in the show notes.
When I bought this story, I knew that it would challenge me to find a narrator with the right skills and background, but through professional connections I was able to find Cláudia Cruz Machado, who usually goes by the nickname Claw. As a multipotentialite, Claw is always involved in at least one creative project, and this is her first work as a narrator. Once chronically online, now a bit absent from the webs, she’s trying to find a way to navigate the current social network landscape in a way that feels authentic. She teaches English as a foreign language. Her Instagram and email links are in the show notes, and she also welcomes contacts for future game development projects through her itch.io account.
This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.
FOLLOW THE MONKEY
By Jamie McGhee
She runs in circles without the faintest idea that today is her last day on earth.
A final feast pours down from heaven: her weight in corn.
Right as she stretches her downy feather neck to snap up a kernel—shink! The blade slices.
She leaps away in a bawking flutter of feathers—and, finding herself alive, swivels back and forth between the hatchet and the corn, between death and dinner, before finally clucking curiously over to the hatchet. Her reflection shimmers long and distorted in the polished iron.
“Not afraid of being sacrificed, hm?” I run a gentle palm along the chicken’s back until she coos. Petting her reminds me of tending eiyele funfun in my home across the ocean, of grooming their cream-colored feathers and watching younglings sprout into full pigeons. “Does it bring your life meaning knowing it will be traded for something better?” Instead of answering, she purrs against my fingers.
Crack!
I dive behind a mountain of ox feed.
In the distance, a whip pops again: Crack! “Oi! Why are you animals lazing about?”
A wavering voice. “Sinto muito, Mãe da Silva.”
“Certo, you’d better be sorry.”
I peer through slats in the barn wall. Escravos—that’s what they call us—are unloading stalks of sugarcane from an oxcart. One escravo, however, rocks on all fours, moaning; the overseer’s whip has opened his back into a puckering wound. Even from far away I taste metal and blood in the air.
The head overseer muscles another escravo into a shoulder-lock. The plantation mistress, Mãe da Silva, wrinkles her nose. “Have you seen the macaquinha?”
“N-no, Mãe da Silva.”
“Where is that little monkey?” She all but stamps her foot. “If I have to delay the exhibition—! Ai, ever since those rebel brutes in Palmares learned to hold a musket, escravos believe they own the world.”
The overseer tosses the man aside like animal fodder. “I’ll put my men on alert.”
They vanish: Within seconds, the whip cracks! again. I shiver, massaging the knotted stripe that travels from my shoulder to hip, where Mãe da Silva marinated the wound with salt to ensure a fleshy scar. It throbs with the memory of pain.
The hen, meanwhile, pecks a kernel from my palm. “The trouble with sacrifice,” I mutter, “is that you rarely get what you want. Tomorrow, we’ll pray for those ‘rebel brutes’ to be victorious, but if they aren’t, was it worth your life? Is sacrifice worthwhile even if it fails?”
I peer the chicken in the eye, and she peers back. “Or in other words, should I actually risk telling her how I feel?”
“Do it.”
I spin. “Dandara!”
Dandara stretches into a lunge, her dress rumpling over the breeches underneath. “I don’t know what you’re asking the chicken this time, but whatever it is, I have faith in you.”
“Meu Deus!” I wrench her wrist into the light. “What happened?”
She yanks down her sleeve. “Nothing. I was practicing, and you know I earn more money when I incorporate flips, so—never mind that. I want to show you something.“
“Later.” I point. “Dê.”
She kneels and surrenders her arm, where a wound winds into a scarlet river from elbow to thumb. I snap an aloe leaf. “I despise Mãe da Silva for making you do this.”
“I know, but—ah!” Dandara jerks as I smear the cold liquid over her inflamed skin.
“Stop talking. I’m concentrating.” I uncoil a cloth strip. She’s so small she hardly grazes my shoulder, but years of performing have thickened her muscles into tree trunks. She could wrap them around my waist the same way I’m bandaging her forearm.
Tell her.
“Dandara, I—”
“Macaquinha!” A shrill cry. The ting-ting of a bell. “Little monkey!”
“Ah!” Dandara springs up. “Where’s my tail? And about that thing I wanted to show you—meet me after.”
I skid in front of the barn doors. “No!”
“I promise I’ll be more careful.”
“That’s not it. I need to tell you—”
“Macaquinha!”
Mãe da Silva’s footsteps grow louder. She’s coming.
I seize Dandara’s hand and take off at a sprint.
“Agostinha! Are you crazy?”
Her heartbeat drums in my palm. I tighten my sweaty grip. “Today I am.”
We dart through the corners and crevices of the engenho, the plantation, bolting beneath rusted machines in the casa de máquinas, dodging dripping sugar jars in the casa de purgar. Around us, iron gears clank, wooden wheels rattle, aging furnaces sigh.
We dash past the moenda, teeming with overseers. The escravos who work the mill shudder with exhaustion, sweat salting their burned faces as they churn rattling metal grinders. If we’d been assigned here instead of the casa grande, the manor, then we’d be toiling beside them—but even escravas domésticas like us will be whipped if caught ignoring Mãe da Silva.
We roll behind an oxcart. “Where are you taking me?”
I crouch to peer around the corner. I admit: “No idea.”
Something chatters overhead. Atop the oxcart, a marmoset plucks at a sugarcane stalk until it splinters. It grinds the hard fibers in its jaws and bounces away.
Dandara lights up. “When in doubt, follow the monkeys.”
The creature bounds towards the river. We scamper after it, ducking into the shadows of the jatobá trees. The drought has sharpened the riverbank into a steep cliff, a sudden drop into a dying trickle of water. Dandara clambers down and reaches up. “I’ve got you!”
I creep to the ledge. “Are you sure?”
I edge my way down slowly, slowly, slowly.
“You’re doing fine,” she calls.
That is, until I notice the warm, sun-brushed glow of her cheeks from this angle—and my foot slips.
The world topples, and I’m falling, then she’s falling, and we crash and tumble and bounce and bump and scrape over weeds and rocks, the sky becoming the ground becoming dirt in my mouth. When we skid to a stop, Dandara lies on my stomach.
An overseer’s growl: “Did you hear something?”
I press a finger to Dandara’s lips as she presses a finger to mine: “Shh.” Our eyes meet.
The footsteps of a second overseer. “Someone spotted the macaquinha near the barn. All I hear is, ‘Extra cachaça to whoever nabs her first.’”
Both men retreat, but Dandara keeps her voice low. “And I can hear the blood rushing in your veins.” She presses an ear to my chest. “Is this how the ocean sounds?”
Of course not, I want to say. But there’s so much I want to say. Such as, I’ll take you to the ocean. One day. When we’re free.
When she raises her head, she’s so close that her breath tickles my lips. My mouth moves closer. I swallow.
The trouble with sacrifice…
What if I tell her, and she never looks at me again? Is the risk worth killing what we have now? In my home across the ocean, love took no solid shape, yet here, to kiss her would be called sin. And Dandara was raised here.
I roll her off of me. “Your sapatinho!”
“Pardon?” She smacks soil off her dress.
Coins dot the riverbank like dew on grass. Silver vintéms peek out from between red hibiscos, copper quartãos hide among lilac bromélias. We scramble to collect them before the glinting metal draws overseer eyes. I dust off her sapatinho, the makeshift purse she created from a baby bootie, so that she can funnel the coins inside. “Então, Dandara, what did you want to show me?”
“This is what I wanted to show you.” She cradles the sapatinho. A shy red tint rises to her ears. “I think… I think I’m nearly there.”
“Wait—”
“Yes.”
“Yes!” I snatch her waist, and I swing her around, and I fling her in the air. “Graças a Deus!”
Her feet kick. “Put me down!”
The coins clink as we twirl. “Dandara, that’s incredible! You’re incredible! I love—how incredible you are!”
“Shh!” But she’s laughing.
“Shh? Forget the overseers.” I cup her cheeks. “We can finally start imagining what freedom looks like.”
“We know what freedom looks like.” She weaves her fingers into mine. “It looks like a casa pequena. Having our own little house in the rainforest, as far away from this engenho as the moon is from the sun.”
“Exac—”
She wouldn’t.
She wouldn’t want to build a house with you if she knew how you felt.
She wouldn’t, wouldn’t, wouldn’t.
Dandara frowns. “Your face changed.”
“Mine? Ah.” I trace her bandages. “I just—I’m remembering how many years I lost worrying about your exhibitions. Every time you go up, I fear how you’ll come down. You’ve sacrificed so much.”
“We each play our part.” She drops my hand. “Speaking of which… Sargento Pereira is attending.”
Acid bubbles in my mouth. “Oh.”
“I hate to ask, but—“
“I’ll occupy him.” I cross my legs, flutter my lashes. “And he’ll leave with empty pockets.”
A shrill and distant cry: “Macaquinha!”
I smooth Dandara’s hair. “Rest your arm for a few more minutes. I’ll tell Mãe da Silva you’re in the casa grande, then while she’s checking the house you sneak in through the courtyard.”
I turn to leave, but she whirls me around. “There’s one more thing.”
“Anything.”
“I’ve heard rumors.“
About me? My tongue goes dry. “Say it.”
“Fortunato.”
I exhale. “The deluded revolucionário.”
“He’s been—well, he’s sharpening rocks again, and the last thing we need when we’re so close to freedom is for him to attack someone. Mãe da Silva’s friends won’t donate if they feel threatened.”
“I’ll take care of everything.”
“You always do.” She seals her words with a kiss to the inside of my wrist. I melt into sunlight.
Why did I ever want more? It’s better this way. It’s better if I never tell her, better if we keep our friendship just as it is.
Sacrifices aren’t worth the risk.
Pleasure the sergeant, calm the rebel. I join the escravas trooping into the sala do jantar, balancing a tray of brigadeiros as I scan the dining hall. Easy.
Of all the guests—slaveowners who breed and slaughter us like chickens; priests who swear that Deus wants them to; generals who massacre resistance—military men are the easiest to manipulate. Soldiers see escravas as spoils of war and they expect their spoils to spoil them in return. I despise it, but it’s child’s play.
Ting-ting! Mae da Silva strikes a bell. “Feliz Entrudo! I, mother of the faithful, welcome you to rejoice on this sacred holiday.”
Sparse applause.
Doors slam open.
“Hooh-hooh, ah-ah-ah!” Primeiro Sargento Pereira swaggers inside, beating his chest; an escravo trails him with a bowed head and a covered tray. “I learned that little tribal call in the jungles of Nordeste. African women are truly wild, rather like you in your younger days, Ana.”
Mãe da Silva flushes. Guests titter.
Sargento Pereira whisks the cloth off the tray. “And in memory of those days, a gift.”
A crystal decanter twinkles sunset pink, composed of glass so delicate a high note could leave cracks. Guests lower their masquerade masks for a closer look.
Sargento Pereira installs himself at the head of the table. “Sede.”
The other escravas pace backwards; they know where his hands wander. I swoop in to accept the decanter. “As you command, o Primeiro Sargento.”
Mãe da Silva prefers us to dilute the cachaça, so in the dispensa, the storeroom, I fill it to the brim instead. The tang of pure alcohol pricks my eyes.
“Oh! Joana-Vitória!” I tug an escrava’s sleeve as she passes. “Have you seen Fortunato?”
She glares.
She keeps walking.
I toss my braids over one shoulder. Well, then.
A gaggle of soldiers swarms Sargento Pereira by the time I return. “I pried that decanter from the twitching fingers of a guerreiro beast!” he bellows. “The African was ten years old but possessed the strength of a demon.”
I drop my voice to a low purr that only he can hear. “Minha nossa! Primeiro Sargento Pereira, is your generosity any match for your immense bravery?”
This cachaça is meant to be sipped, so he swigs. “Exceedingly so.”
I refill his glass. “Then I look forward to the macaquinha’s exhibition.”
A smirk distends his lips. “Ah, macaquinha, macaquinha! She’s especially lithe tonight, isn’t she, boys? As if she sprung out of the Amazônia this very morning. It reminds me of when I led my men into that jungle’s black folds…”
I shudder.
“Speaking of tonight’s entertainment”—Mãe da Silva stands—“excuse me.”
I monitor the courtyard through the window. Outside, Dandara balances on a high rope. She twirls once, extends a leg, twirls again. Beams.
But everything changes once Mãe da Silva tugs her down. As they speak, Dandara shifts her back towards me, but I mark the sudden straightness of her spine. When she returns to the rope, she’s rubbing red eyes. What the devil did Mãe da Silva say?
“Be a dear.” Sargento Pereira elbows me. “And cut my pig.”
Instinct tells me to run to Dandara’s side, but experience tells me to stay put.
“I’d be honored.” I bend over his plate of leitão à bairrada and carve a knife into the suckling pig’s neck. Its pleading eyes are glassy with death, its mouth frozen into a toothy screa—“Oof!” The fork and knife clatter to the ground.
“I’m so sorry!” Joana-Vitória scrambles to pick them up. “I bumped you. I’m deeply sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“Really?” Her lip quivers as she wipes the fork on her dress. “Have I mentioned, Agostinha, that you are a creature of grace?”
“I, ah—well, do continue.”
She dashes off. I rub my chin. Has she fallen for me? Well, it’s to be expected. No wonder she was so cold earlier; she was nervous. Ha. I’ve turned the sergeant’s head, I’ve turned Joana-Vitória’s head, so why can’t I turn Dandara’s—wait, where’s the knife?
I duck under the table. I frisk my own pockets. Gone.
“Something amiss, escrava?”
“Of course not, Segundo Sargento Pereira. Let me attend to your glass.”
Diacho! Knives are a nightmare to replace. Ever since escravos started building armed communes, Mãe da Silva stores them under lock and key. This evening is becoming a headache.
In the meantime, I keep the sergeant talking. “Então, Primeiro Sargento Pereira, is it true you’ve never lost a man?”
“I have now!” He slams the table. The glasses jump. “Damn Palmares!”
“Now you’ve done it,” a priest mutters.
“Those savages ambushed me!”
“They sound barbaric,” I say quickly. I stroke small circles along his neck where the other soldiers can’t see. The motion makes him unclench. For now.
“Were you were ambushed?” The priest saws the leg from his suckling pig. “Or were you caught fleeing while you abandoned your men to die?”
Out of the corner of my eye—a dark flash. I snap around.
“Monkeys play dirty.” Sargento Pereira starts to stand until I touch his back.
Near the door, another glint. This time, silver.
I curtsy. “Excuse me, Sargento.”
In the corridor, I catch the shadow flitting past the dispensa. “Fortunato!”
I pin him to the wall. Fortunato’s arm snaps up—the knife glints—he could whip the blade across my throat.
“Oh! It’s you.” He laughs.
“I’ll murder Joana-Vitória.” I confiscate the knife. “If you hurt anyone, Mãe da Silva will hang all of us. Do you understand?”
“Entendí.” He delivers a mock solute. “But may I ask a question?”
I nod.
“Do you care about Dandara?”
“I—what? I—lower your voice!” I shout. “Of course I do.”
Yelling bursts from inside the sala do jantar.
“Are you a coward, Pereira?”
“By all means, drop your crucifix and find out!”
Fortunato pinches my chin and swivels my attention back to him. “Then why do you let her perform when it could kill her?”
“We’ll purchase our way off the engenho soon.”
Fortunato snorts. “Do you honestly imagine da Silva will relinquish her prized macaquinha? Her sacrificial little monkey?”
In the sala, wood scrapes, clatters—someone’s overturned a chair. A woman shrieks, “Keep them apart!” Glass shatters.
I wheel around. “I have to go.”
“Agostinha.” His breath chills my neck. “We both know that Dandara is headed for an unmarked grave.”
I’d like to prove that’s not true. But what did she tell Dandara that made her cry?
“I can save her life, Agostinha.”
“I…” I shiver. “Let’s talk about this later?”
He strolls off. “Later, I’ll be gone.”
When I return to the sala, the sergeant and the priest have knotted themselves together, flinging fists. Mãe da Silva shouts, “Senhores, calm down!”
“No, no, no!” I rush forward. I was supposed to keep the sergeant happy. It’s okay, I can salvage this. Perhaps. A furtive touch, several rounds of cachaça, and I can goad him into donating at least a quartão.
So Dandara can break her neck for a few copper coins?
I stop short.
Bawk!
“Oi, come back!” Joana-Vitória darts past, chasing a speckled rooster. She scoops it up by the legs as it flaps wildly for its life. “Let’s get you into your pot.”
Am I being too naive?
“Fortunato!”
He’s pocketing food scraps when I charge into the dispensa. I clamp his shoulder. “Speak fast.”
“Ah!” He jerks. Where I touched him, his shirt darkens with blood.
I startle. “Did I—”
“My plan,” he says, waving it off with a grimace, “begins tonight.”
“Your plan for Dandara?”
“For everyone.” Fortunato crouches between two barrels as escravas rifle through nearby shelves. “Because I’m escaping to join Palmares! You heard the soldiers. Escravos are waging war, and they’re winning. With a few more fighters, Palmares could end slavery within a month, two at the most. Come with me. Become guerreiras. Warriors.”
I gape.
“Say something,” he says.
“I will kill you.”
“Around so many witnesses?”
“That’s your plan?” I knot my fingers through my hair. “You won’t make it off the engenho. Dogs will hunt you down if overseers don’t shoot you first. If you do reach the river, you’ll drown. If you reach the forest, you’ll be eaten by jaguars. If you reach the caatinga, you’ll choke in a desert sandstorm. And if—if!—by some miracle you reach Palmares, Portuguese soldiers like Pereira will skin you from scalp to sole.”
“Now you see why I needed that knife.” He cocks his head. “Wait, I thought you supported Palmares.”
“I do! But I’m sacrificing a chicken, I’m not going there.”
“Look, Agostinha, for years I tried to earn my freedom through good behavior. Do you know where it got me?” He unbuttons his shirt: Raw scarlet stripes stretch from shoulder to spine. “Liberation only comes when you seize it yourself. ”
“I won’t risk Dandara’s life for a platitude.”
He shrugs his shirt back on. “Then what about your life?” He flicks my medicine pouch. “You could heal a lot of guerreiros.”
“You’re mad.” I shift the pouch to my other hip. “Besides, if Palmares will win within two months, they don’t need me.”
“If everyone thinks that way, Palmares will lose.”
“If Palmares loses, me dying in battle won’t help Dandara.”
“Pelo contrário, your death would help more than your life,” he says. “With you gone, suddenly freedom becomes half as expensive.”
It’s an awful truth. But it’s the truth.
“After all these years, you still can’t tell her how you feel.” He scratches dried blood off his hand. “Perhaps this is how you show it.”
I attempt to swallow, but my throat closes up.
In the distance: “Step aside!”
I stagger back to the sala do jantar just as Sargento Pereira storms out, clutching his nose. What happened? No!
I jog at his heels. “Primeiro Sargento, please stay for Mãe da Silva’s sake. It’s a sacred holiday.”
He shoves past. “Move, escrava.”
I almost shout, “Wait!” but he might shoot me for insubordination. All I can do once I reach the courtyard is hang my head. A cold breeze ripples the grass.
My skin prickles: Behind me, Dandara crouches underneath the hulking mogno tree with her legs pulled to her chest. Her face folds in disappointment.
One thing. She asked one thing, and I failed. She turns away.
Fool, fool, fool. I ladle guarapa and squeeze limes as if it’s the only task in the world, anything to avoid Dandara’s gaze. Near the tree, guests deposit coins into pouches connected by a string. The pouches look light. If the sergeant were here, he’d fatten them with gold dobrãos.
Mãe da Silva claps. “Despite the…excitement of earlier, we must celebrate. Deus has trusted me to civilize the savages of these dark lands, yet like many of you, I often wake up doubting my impact. In those moments, my macaquinha reminds me that without my guidance, she—like all escravos—would revert to barbarism.”
Dandara adjusts her cloth monkey ears, balancing on the rope connecting the tree to the casa grande. The priest spins the pouches above his head like a boleadeira until they soar into the tree, where they wrap around the topmost branches. Oh no. Although Dandara’s small, those branches are twigs. Please don’t break.
Ting-ting!
Dandara sprints along the rope so fast her feet flicker. She leaps off, somersaults midair and catches a low branch in a single smooth motion. In the same breath, she hooks her legs around the branch and flips upside down, beating her chest.
Beside me, a guest halts her cup halfway to her mouth. “Minha nossa, the macaquinha is something after all.”
“Perhaps da Silva knows her way around discipline,” says the man beside her. Mãe da Silva beams. This is what she lives for.
And Dandara, she lives for the trees. She springs to another branch and arcs her legs into a handstand. Maybe she could be a guerreira.
Where did that thought come from?
Guests crane their necks as Dandara monkey-swings higher and higher, from branch to branch to branch, on the back of the wind. The pouches dangle just above her head. She extends an arm.
Click-bang!
Metal splits the air.
We all hit the ground. I slap my hands over my ears. Someone shrieks. Gunpowder billows.
“Dandara!” I bolt upright. She’s wrapped herself around a branch, eyes squeezed shut like a trembling baby animal.
Primeiro Sargento Pereira struts forward, reloading his musket. “Am I still a coward?” Plaster covers his nose.
Mãe da Silva edges towards him. “No one believed that.”
The sergeant rams a musket ball down the muzzle. “I’d like to dispel all doubts.”
He aims straight at Dandara.
“No!” I cry.
The second blast tears the branch like a black powder bomb.
Splinters explode.
She screams.
Smoke whips my eyes.
I smell burnt paper.
Taste sulfur.
Hear wood snap.
Through the haze, I see Dandara scrambling to grasp another branch.
Missing.
Her hand swiping empty air.
Her eyes flying open. Her body contorting into a tumble.
“Dandara!”
She crashes down.
Down.
Down.
Her head slams into one branch.
Another lashes her neck.
Her arms go limp.
“Dandara!”
Ground.
When I was a child, I loved tending the eiyele funfun but I couldn’t watch the sacrifice. My mother promised their lives were an offering for something greater, yet after we ate the cooked pigeon meat I swore I tasted feathers.
I trace Dandara’s weeping wound. It opens like a fleshy smile across her neck, and only my bandages seem to keep her head attached. I tuck the sapatinho into her fist.
Through the curtain separating this makeshift infirmary from the kitchens, I hear dishes clink and escravos chug leftover cachaça, smell cinnamon soap and sun-rotting pork. However, as Mãe da Silva repeated, Dandara is blessed, because she’d have flung any other escrava into an unmarked grave.
Clammy fingers brush my wrist.
“You’re awake!” I mop her forehead.
She blinks blearily. “I…”
“Shh.”
“I’m sorry…”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.” I dip the rag in fresh water and run it over her cheeks. “We’ll be rid of this engenho soon.”
“Yes.” Light comes to her eyes. It’s dim, but it’s light. “Only a few more years.”
My toes curl. “What?”
Dandara’s smile flickers. She fidgets with the sapatinho. “I showed Mãe da Silva, and she said a few more years.”
The room plunges into darkness.
Sacrificial little monkey.
Her eyes are foggy, her pupils darting. She won’t survive three years.
“I…” I wring the rag and dunk it and wring it again. “I can’t let you do this anymore.”
“Pardon?”
“What if…” I say slowly. “What if perhaps, perhaps, we joined Palmares?”
She manages to sit up. “Y-you’ve lost your mind. At least my exhibitions only kill one of us.”
“So you admit they’re killing you.”
“You won’t even make it off the engenho. The second you run, overseers will—”
“Shoot me.”
“Then you’ll—”
“Drown.”
“And—”
“Jaguars, sandstorms, soldiers.” I pass her a cup of camomila. “For the pain.”
She glowers into the tea. “The risk isn’t worth it.”
I lower myself onto the mat beside her. “Dandara, you don’t know the agony of watching the person you love kill themselves.”
“Of course I do. I see the engenho eat you alive, but that doesn’t change the fact that—”
“Do you know the love I mean?”
Dandara blinks. After a long time, she lifts the camomila to her lips and winces as she sips.
“If you do care for me,” she says finally, “then don’t mention Palmares again. No running, no armies. Just you and I in our casa pequena. Claro?”
When I don’t respond, her nails trail clumsy lightning bolts up my thigh. She gives me a look, a look that unsettles, biting her bruised lip and lowering her lashes. This isn’t her, and yet it feels familiar. Why?
It’s the same one I give Primeiro Sargento Pereira.
I pull away. “You almost died today.”
She darkens. “I’m fine, Agostinha.”
To prove it, she stumbles into the kitchen with halting, crooked steps. The other escravos fall silent. She cleans as if they don’t exist, scraping unfinished pig carcasses into a feeding trough. But by the time she lifts a second stack of dishes, the bandages around her neck are thick with blood. She sways on her feet.
“Dandara,” I say, “please lie down.”
“I can do it.” Her knees knock.
I open my arms.
For a moment, she bear-hugs the plates as if she’ll never let them go. But the next, her eyes roll into her head. She staggers sideways, grabs a table, and the entire wooden structure collapses.
Crash!
My stomach drops.
“Dandara, that was…”
“I know.”
No, no, no. We scramble to salvage the crystal shards. My mind goes blank. The glass bites my palm.
Only Mãe da Silva’s cold shadow forces us to raise our heads. Her blue eyes reflect black.
I manage a curtsy. “Perdão, Mãe da Silva. Your decanter fell when I bumped the table.”
Dandara steps forward, but I tread on her foot to keep her quiet.
Mãe da Silva towers over me. “Destroying property?”
Behind her, the head overseer fingers his whip. “Didn’t we hear that one escrava was overly familiar with Pereira? Twenty lashes is a good start.”
I swallow. “Yes, Mãe—”
“Don’t!”
“Dandara!” I hiss.
Dandara wedges herself between us. “D-don’t whip Agostinha. I broke it.”
Mãe da Silva halts. “You?”
“Accidentally.”
“I see.” The woman examines a shard, tosses it back. “Nevertheless.” She extends her hand.
Dandara frowns.
Mãe da Silva raises her eyebrows.
Slow horror creeps across Dandara’s face. “You don’t mean…”
It hits me next. “Mãe da Silva, that’s unreasonable!”
Mãe da Silva plucks the sapatinho straight from Dandara’s pocket. “This might pay for a new decanter.” I could swear she’s biting a smile as she vanishes up the stairs.
Dandara’s eyes flash. Her fists tighten. The macaquinha is ready to bury a blade in Mãe da Silva’s neck, and I will not stop her. But all moments pass, and eventually her shoulders droop. She stares into some unseen distance with sunken, sallow eyes. Then she strains a smile. “I’ll start over.”
“And what happens when Mãe da Silva confiscates it again? What if she never lets you leave? ”
“I don’t know!” Dandara snaps. “Não sei, all right? But we can’t run to Palmares, because I can’t lose you. So can we please, please stop talking about the future?”
I kneel, and she follows. “You’re right, Dandara. Let’s stay in today.”
She slumps against me. I bury my nose in her hair. And I slip a shard of the decanter into my medicine pouch.
Maybe this is how you show it.
Shadows creep along the ceiling. I count her sleeping breaths and wish I could stretch this moment into forever. “Is there really no other way?”
The chicken opens a single groggy eye, fluffing her feathers.
I brush my fingers along Dandara’s jaw, tracing the map of her skin. She burrows herself into my hand, resting her cheek on my palm.
Tell her.
“Dandara.”
The next time I see you, I’ll swing you on my shoulders and whisk you off this engenho. The next time I see you, we will both be free. And if I don’t return, build the house we imagined.
I withdraw slowly, so as not to wake her.
“Hmm?” Dandara murmurs, shifting.
I freeze. What am I doing? Can I really leave? What if I’m making a mistake?
Clouds shift. Moonlight soaks into her scarlet bandages.
This is why I have to go.
I start to stand when Dandara’s arms sleepily ring my neck. She cups my cheek and tugs me in and kisses the corner of my mouth. Camomila tea wafts faintly on her breath, for the pain. I pull away.
Her arms fall as she drops back to sleep.
I scoop up the chicken and climb onto the windowsill. Just outside, perched in the mogno tree, a marmoset chatters as it gnaws on sugarcane. It cocks its head. I cock mine. It leaps to the ground and scampers across the engenho.
When in doubt…
I take one final look at Dandara.
Then I follow.
This quarter’s fiction episode presents “Follow the Monkey” by Jamie McGhee, narrated by Cláudia Cruz Machado.
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
Links to Heather Online
Links to Jamie McGhee Online
Links to Cláudia Cruz Machado Online
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 293 – Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 14a: Actresses and the Stage - transcript
(Originally aired 2024/08/17 - listen here)
This episode is part of the series “our f/favorite tropes,” examining how popular historic romance tropes work differently for female couples than for mixed-gender couples. As used in discussing romance novels, a trope is a recurring literary device or motif—a conventional story element that is used regularly enough that it carries a whole context of meaning, and connects the story to other works that employ the same trope. The trope could be a character type, like the knight in shining armor; it could be a situation, like the moment when the detective reveals the murderer; it could be a mini-script, like “experienced mentor trains novice to be an expert.”
One subset of tropes particularly popular in contemporary romance are those focused on specific careers or jobs. In historic romance, you’re more likely to find tropes based on social roles than professions, but occupational tropes are still a feature.
When I started thinking about doing a show based on actresses, I realized that the situation was more complicated than simply talking about the dynamics of a romantic relationship involving a particular profession. Dramatic performance—especially the aspect of playing out roles with other people—adds in a whole other angle to romantic relationships, especially when those relationships aren’t well represented in ordinary society. It can overlap the “fake relationship” tropes, except that the fakeness of the relationship is overt. But it also overlaps hidden identity or masquerade tropes, except—again—the masquerade aspect is overt.
So this trope episode is split into two parts representing those different aspects. This first episode will look at various ways in which dramatic performance can create space for same-sex female relationships. The second episode will look at the history of women in theater and the points at which the profession of actress intersected with the experience of sapphic relationships, whether in the popular imagination or in the lives of specific people.
Dramatic performance can create spaces for same-sex desire in several different ways. The most obvious one is by depicting women loving women in the script. But even if sapphic desire isn’t written in to the story, the use of cross-gender casting can bring it on stage, as the distinctions between the performer and the role become blurred and overlaid on each other. This may happen in contexts where all the performers are women, but the roles involve heterosexual romantic relationships. But some of the most exciting contexts come with the rise of what came to be called “breeches roles”—that is, when women in mixed-gender acting companies deliberately took on male roles on stage, deliberately taking on a character who romanced women, and becoming an object of desire for male and female spectators alike. And apart from these contexts that create the image of desire between women on stage, there is the opportunity for self-discovery, when an actress who takes on a cross-gender role finds that the situation resonates more strongly than she expected. We’ll take a look at each of these in turn.
Same-Sex Romance in the Script
One of the most obvious ways that theater can enable same-sex romance is to tell women that such a thing exists and can be imagined. There are depictions of same-sex desire in prose and poetry, but those are often limited in terms of who has access to them. Theater is usually aimed at a general audience. Sometimes the stage is more private, and sometimes it’s open to all viewers—or at least anyone who has the admission price.
That isn’t to say that all portrayals of same-sex desire on the stage are positive, much less that they have what we’d consider a happily-ever-after ending. But if you want to give your protagonists the idea that love between women is imaginable, then these plays can be their first step.
The most common motif that enables same-sex possibilities on stage is some sort of gender bending. The structural framework of the relationship appears to be heterosexual, but the supposed man is a woman in disguise. A strong runner-up is situations where we are shown what appear to be two women in love…but one of them is actually a man in disguise, thus offering propriety a way out. Far more rarely does a play show us two women in love as women.
Several philosophical principles lie behind the ways same-sex love was presented. One was a belief that beauty—and so attraction—is not necessarily gendered. This might be thought of as the principle that everyone is potentially pansexual. A beautiful person will be loved and desired by everyone, and if someone is attracted to beauty in the same gender it can be understood and forgiven, especially if they have the plausible deniability that they thought they were falling in love with the opposite sex. Related to this is the idea that women are prone to fall in love with someone, and if men are not present, then they will fall in love with each other.
A second principle is that like tends to attract like. That it’s natural and understandable for someone to desire a person who is similar to them in some way, potentially including similar in gender. But acting in concert with these philosophical principles is the safety valve of situating same-sex desire somewhere other than the here and now. It might take place in the distant past, or in a far-off land, or in a fantasy world. There are exceptions, but for the most part, sapphic desire on stage is deliberately distanced from the world the audience inhabits.
At the other end of the scale, same-sex desire may be played for laughs or derision. The idea of women loving—or simply making love to—each other may be treated as a joke, or be used to shock, or to satirize some group of people by associating them with lesbianism. The tone of the dramatic work will affect which of these options are used. Is it a high-minded drama? A fun-loving pastorale? A low-brow farce? Each has its motifs and stock characters.
To explore the range of material, let’s take something of a geographic tour. The material I’m discussing is largely from the Renaissance and early modern eras, which isn’t to say that we don’t find sapphic themes in more recent centuries. As I’m drawing from materials covered in the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog, there is also some skewing toward English material. But many of the themes—indeed often the plays themselves—were shared across Europe. In some cases, this is due to adaptations of plays from one language to another, but theatrical plots based on female cross-dressing seem to have become generally popular across western Europe in the early modern period, even when no direct connection can be traced.
Classical Greek & Roman
The available material is also constrained by whether the scripts of plays—or at least descriptions of the plot—were recorded for posterity. For the most part, this means we’re looking at a small amount of medieval material, then primarily the 16th century and later. But there are two records of classical-era plays that have suggestive content.
One of the sources for the early roots of the myth of Callisto and Artemis is a 4th century Greek comedy by Amphis that makes explicit the fact that Callisto believes she had sex with the goddess. The matter is played for laughs as the character protests naively that she has become pregnant by a woman.
Somewhat more obscurely, in a classical Roman play, Truculentus, a character puns on two similar-sounding words to suggest that a female character “fuck your mistress”, though the bit is a passing joke rather than a significant plot element. But the joke would not have landed without the audience considering the possibility of the action.
Italy
Several Italian plays of the 16th century have a central element where a woman cross-dressing as a man attracts the romantic interest of another female character. In La Calandria by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, published in 1513, and based on a play by the Roman author Plautus, the romantic comedy centers around male and female twins, separated in their youth. Santilla has been living disguised as a boy since she was 6 years old and has taken on her lost brother’s identity. Her brother, meanwhile, has fallen in love with a married woman and takes on Santilla’s identity to seduce his love without her husband’s knowledge. The real Santilla (in male disguise) is tapped to marry the daughter of the man who has become her patron. Both of these contexts create either the illusion or the reality of a woman expressing desire for another woman.
Slightly more familiar is the Commedia dell’Arte play Gl’Ingannati (published in 1531) which is considered the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. As in Twelfth Night, a female twin takes on her brother’s identity and finds herself being the go-between for the man she loves with the woman he loves, who then falls in love with her (in disguise). I’m going to talk about both the Italian and Shakespeare plays together, because the contrasts are interesting.
The Italian play is far more overt about the possibility of the disguised heroine standing in for her brother sexually as well as socially. Where Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroines often emphasize their conventional feminine natures and desires, the Italian heroines focus more on the social constraints and expectations of gender roles, and the potential legal consequences of carrying the role into another woman’s bed. The homoerotic tension in this genre of play is resolved via the “convenient twin brother” motif, but also by creating a familial bond between the two women, typically mediated by marriage of one to the other’s relative. Homoerotic desire is not repudiated, but is diverted to an acceptable form.
When Gl’Ingannati was first performed in Italy, it would have been by an all-male company, but commedia troupes were incorporating women across the later 16th century and by the time Shakespeare’s play was written, an Italian equivalent would have had actresses playing the female parts. The original performance of Gl’Ingannati was produced and dedicated to a primarily female audience. From this, we must assume that depictions of female homoeroticism must have been expected to entertain and please women. And some scenes in the play imply that sex between women might be accepted and excused.
Frequently, in plays with this motif, the women initially cross-dress for the safety and mobility it affords them, or even in support of heterosexual desire, which gives them a realistic and excusable motivation. The plays embrace both tragic and comedic potential in the motivations and consequences. The desiring women of the Italian plays express more physicality, whereas Shakespeare’s heroines feel a more diffuse, romanticized yearning. In Gl’Ingannati, Isabella, in her desire for the disguised Lelia, is described as being “in heat” and masturbating when thinking of her beloved.
While female homoeroticism is treated more openly in Italian theater than on the English stage, it was more closely policed in Italian culture and law, which provided a clear vocabulary for such acts. English society and law expressed anxieties about cross-dressing and gender roles, but shied away from overtly acknowledging female homosexuality, and had no laws addressing it.
Another difference is that Shakespeare’s Olivia has far more social power and freedom than her Italian counterpart. Olivia has power over her potential suitors, while Isabella (in Gl’Ingannati) is under others’ control and seeks her goals through deceit. In the Italian play, the cross-class nature of the forbidden relationships is more highlighted than the cross-dressing. Thus Italian cross-dressing comedies are “translated” for an English audience in a variety of ways, while still retaining the central motif and ambiguous sapphic desire.
Another Italian play that was exported multiple times to other cultures was Il Pastor Fido by Giovanni Battista Guarini (published 1590) and translated into English by Richard Fanshawe in 1647 as The Faithfull Shepherd. One minor incident involves the shepherd Mirtillo, who has disguised himself as a woman in order to gain access to Amaryllis, the woman he desires who is hiding out with an all-female group of nymphs. The nymphs decide to hold a competition to see who is the best kisser, which Mirtillo wins. Thus we have a set-up for women engaging in passionate kisses with the escape valve that the best kisser is actually a man.
France
Ovid’s myth of Iphis and Ianthe, in which gender disguise leads to two girls falling in love, thus requiring a divinely-mediated sex change to enable their marriage, shows up in medieval literature in a number of forms, including the medieval French chivalric romance of Yde and Olive. But the latter was also adapted in the 14th century as a miracle play. The main character (here named Ysabel) takes on male disguise to escape from her father's incestuous advances and becomes distinguished as a knight in the court of the emperor of Constantinople. The emperor requires Ysabel to accept his daughter's hand in marriage. Ysabel reveals her secret to her bride on the wedding night, who promises to keep the secret and to honor and cherish Ysabel as she would a husband. All is well until an eavesdropper betrays them to the emperor who demands that the pair take a bath before him in the garden to confirm or deny the accusation. The miracles involve Ysabel’s several narrow escapes from detection, but not—contrary to the earlier versions of the story—a magical sex change. Instead there’s a rather awkward resolution in which both women marry each other’s father.
Iphis and Iante, in its original form, was adapted as a play in the 17th century by Isaac de Benserade. Benserade was writing for a libertine audience (both male and female) and dares to depict happy lesbian relations. The two are allowed a happy wedding night as women—and Iphis’s secret is known and discussed by many characters before the wedding—but a sex-change is still required to validate the marriage. In contrast with Ovid’s original, which considered love and marriage between women to be impossible, Benserade’s play is clearer that it is social rules, not rules of nature, that stand in the way.
Spain
In 17th century Spain, desire between women was depicted on stage using several different framings. The real-life story of Catalina de Erauso, who ran away from a convent, took on a male identity, and went adventuring in South America, was fictionalized in Juan Pérez de Montalbán’s 1626 play La Monja Alférez (The Lieutenant Nun). Somewhat in contradiction to the events documented in Erauso’s own memoirs, Monalbán centers his plot on a romance between Erauso and a woman named Ana. Erauso’s desire is depicted as hopeless, and Ana ends up with a man, but the love is depicted as genuine and self-sacrificing.
Alvaro Cubillo de Aragón’s play Añasco el de Talavera (written around 1637) depicts lesbian desire without the mechanism of male disguise, though through a lens of female masculinity. The butch Dionisia’s desire for her female friend Leonor is an open topic of discussion within the play. Dionisia complains about the restrictiveness of female gender roles and has a serious case of “not like other girls”. She specifically expresses the desire to be touched sexually by Leonor and says she loves her. Leonor is uncertain about the concept, but Dionisia presents her argument in terms of platonic love, and argues for the supremacy of same-sex platonic love over heterosexual desire. The dialogue acknowledges that women may “sin” together, making it clear that that Dionisia is proposing a sexual relationship. Leonor, alas, is irredeemably heterosexual.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca wrote a 1664 play, Afectos de Odo y Amor, based on the life of the Swedish Queen Christina. He gave a wink and nod to Christina’s sexual reputation by naming her lady in waiting in the play “Lesbia.” The character in the play is defending her right to rule as a woman, in conflict with the antagonist Casimiro. The play sets up a bait-and-switch marriage plot in which Queen Christina agrees to marry Casimiro’s sister (that is, within the play this is overtly a same-sex marriage plan). But after the marriage is contracted, the sister substitutes her brother Casimiro and Christina rather inexplicably capitulates.
England
Late 16th and early 17th century English drama is rather rich in depictions of female homoerotic desire—a noteworthy feature even though the plays overwhelmingly have heteronormative resolutions. In general, the plays presented desire between women as suspect and threatening, but simultaneously as tolerable and pleasurable, particularly if viewed through the lens of friendship and homosociality rather than implying sexual activity. In general, expressions of explicit sexual desire are presented negatively while depictions of romantic love are most accepted.
I already discussed Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night when talking about its Italian roots. Here is a brief summary of other plays with notable female same-sex desire, listed roughly chronologically.
John Lyly’s 1585 Gallathea is yet another spin-off From Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe, but with the spin that both women are cross-dressing, both initially believe they have fallen in love with a man, and both hold to that love as they come to realize that they love a woman. The conclusion of the play confirms their love and, although a magical sex-change will be required for their marriage, it falls outside the action of the play.
Two plays interpret the Greek myth of Callisto and Diana, in which Jupiter disguises himself as Diana in order to seduce Callisto, but Callisto believes herself to be loved by the goddess. William Warner’s 1586 Albion’s England and Thomas Heywood’s 1611 The Golden Age both portray Diana’s band of nymphs as engaging in same-sex erotics, setting up the context for Jupiter’s trick. Thus, within Diana’s band, the “chaste” opposite of heterosexuality is not an absence of sexual activity, but an embracing of lesbian sexuality.
In The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (published 1610), fictions of the stage intersect with real-life personalities in the character of Moll Cutpurse, a gender-bending character who alludes to the possibility that she engages in sex with both women and men. The character’s namesake was probably in the audience and regularly wore a combination of male and female clothing, though it’s unclear whether she had any sapphic leanings.
Both pretended and sincere desire between women is depicted in The Female Rebellion by H.B., published 1659. Using a mythological setting with warring Amazon groups, the play associates genuine lesbian desire with the villains while the heroines only pretend to a sexual relationship as a strategic trick.
In Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, written 1668, a group of aristocratic women go on a women-only retreat—no boys allowed. Gendered role-playing and romantic play are evidently part of their activities and a newcomer enthusiastically begins to court the central figure, Lady Happy. Their courtship progresses to kisses and embraces and pledges of love…at which point it is revealed that the newcomer is a man who disguised himself to infiltrate the retreat. Unlike many similar disguise plots, the audience is not clued in to the gender-disguise motif until this reveal, thus they would have been shown a genuine and convincing love story between women, only given a heteronormative resolution at the very end.
Even plays that don’t make apparent same-sex desire a central motif either introduce or reinforce the knowledge that women can engage in sex together. In Aphra Behn’s 1681 The False Count, a character acknowledges this potential, saying, "I have known as much danger hid under a petticoat as a pair of breeches. I have heard of two women that married each other.” The 1684 libertine play Sodom or the Quintessence of Debauchery (attributed to John Wilmot) has sexually frustrated women using dildoes on each other.
Theatrical opportunities for female homoeroticism also included a fashion for assertive female characters who—as part of the script—seized on excuses to cross-dress for extended periods and to flirt with other female characters in this guise. Less formal theatricals, such as masques, were another context where cross-dressing might lead to same-sex flirtation and more, and several early 18th century pamphlets warned against the practice for exactly this reason.
Cross-Gender Roles in Single-Sex Contexts
Homoerotic content in the scripts of the plays themselves is the most obvious way for audiences of plays to “get ideas” about sapphic possibilities, but just as gender-disguise plots were a mechanism for introducing those possibilities to the characters, performers in cross-gender roles could create similar possibilities—for both players and audience—even when the script itself was utterly heterosexual.
As we’ll discuss in the second part of this episode next month, women emerged as professional actresses at different times in different countries, largely during the 16th and 17th centuries. But women acted in non-professional contexts across a much wider span of time, whether it was local religious pageants, private entertainments, or formal masques at court and in the houses of the aristocracy.
When plays were staged by all-female groups, it would naturally fall out that male roles would also be played by women. There is plentiful evidence for plays being staged in convents. The 12th century abbess Hildegard of Bingen was a prolific writer and composer and wrote at least one play. Spanish convents of the early modern period staged plays not only for their own entertainment, but for invited guests and visitors, with the nuns performing the roles. In pre-Reformation England, the evidence for plays staged in convents includes the occasional condemnation of them.
Convent theatricals tended to lean towards morality plays, rather than the sort of romances that might include suggestive interactions. A more fertile ground might be court masques and private theatricals. Masques were a stylized type of performance, usually to commemorate a special event, but that often served a secondary purpose of propaganda or political persuasion. The “story” would be told via narrative poetry and song, while the cast acted it out with dance and gesture. They might involve elaborate costumes and sets, and a constant motif was that the players wore thematic masks that were understood to conceal their identity—usually members of the court and even the presiding royalty.
In the 17th century, English masques became more narrative in style and both Queen Anne of Denmark (queen to James VI and I) and Queen Henrietta Maria (queen to Charles I) were frequent sponsors and directors of court masques, performing in them with their ladies in waiting. As the style shifted to something more like a play than a tableau, classical stories and chivalric adventures were favorite sources to draw on. These provided ample opportunity for romantic encounters between the characters, all of which were typically played by women.
Somewhat different in tone were private theatricals staged as seasonal entertainment, or to entertain an important guest. There are records of plays performed for royal progresses, where the aristocratic host family contributed part of the cast. Or of girls’ schools staging a play for an important patron.
All these contexts provide opportunities for a romantic storyline to be staged with women playing both members of the romantic couple. Both the cast and the audience could be aware of the potential double-meanings at seeing one woman wooing another on stage, even with the excuse that all the roles were played by women. It’s particularly worth noting that masques and private theatricals are a context where women of the upper classes are participants, making theatrical-based romance tropes available beyond the professional performer class.
Breeches Roles on the Mixed-Gender Stage
But with the introduction of actresses into professional, mixed-gender companies, a new phenomenon arose of great interest to our examination of same-sex romance tropes. More or less as soon as women began participating in mixed-gender acting troupes, we find the phenomenon of the “breeches role,” that is, when a male character is portrayed by a female performer even though male performers are present and available. Here the character on stage is meant to be understood as male, but the audience is fully aware that a woman is playing the part, dressed in male clothing and interacting with the other characters as a man. Breeches roles were especially popular for characters meant to be young romantic heroes, as a woman was considered to be better able to portray the androgynous beauty of youth.
Somewhat ironically, even as women playing male roles on stage increased in popularity, the previous fashion for boys playing female roles on stage all but disappeared, except for characters meant to be parody.
Due to the theatrical context, it wasn’t necessary for an actress to be able to pull off the masquerade perfectly—in fact, a certain amount of the appeal lay in the audience’s awareness of her gender, while relating alternately to the masculinity of the role or to the femininity of the performer. Theater historians often suggest that a driving motivation behind this phenomenon was the ability to put female bodies on display without resorting to undress. And the idea that women wearing masculine garments and styles signaled moral looseness—or at least a disdain for propriety—had already been circulating. But actresses in breeches roles were not simply passive objects of the male gaze, and they became romantic icons for female spectators as well as male ones.
Breeches roles attracted criticism from moralists for the same reasons that women wearing masculine-coded styles off-stage attracted criticism. It blurred gender boundaries and signaled that women might want to claim other male privileges as well.
Theatrical female cross-dressers were often described by contemporaries in ways that indicated that a large part of the appeal was the chance (for men) to appreciate women in form-fitting lower garments, or the frisson of an androgynous sexual appeal. But while male fans of female beauty might be offered a visual spectacle, the possibilities offered to a female audience were even more daring. Breeches parts frequently included romantic male heroes, creating a scenario where women were openly courting (and winning) women on stage and audiences (of both men and women) were expected to enjoy seeing them do so. Some have argued that the increasing anxiety about female homoeroticism in the later 18th century was part of why breeches parts fell out of fashion, but if so, it was a brief lull because there were plenty of women playing male parts on stage throughout the 19th century and later.
We can look at what writers were saying at the time about the phenomenon. In Delarivier Manley’s early 18th century satire The New Atalantis (something of a roman a clef featuring identifiable women in English and French society) she describes how one aristocratic woman “fell in Love with one of the Comedians, when she was acting the Part of a young Lover and a Libertine.” The woman courts the actress with presents and tries unsuccessfully to seduce her, just as a male theater patron might. A theater-goer’s memoir written in 1766 notes, with regard to a cross-dressing actress, “It was a most nice point to decide between the gentlemen and the ladies [of the audience], whether [the actress] was the finest woman or the prettiest fellow.”
Reactions to women in breeches roles were not always overtly sexual. One reviewer, after seeing 19th century actress Charlotte Cushman playing Shakespearean romantic leads, suggested that Romeo should only be played by a woman, because two women together could best portray passionate love “without suggesting vice.” (Cushman’s personal life indicates that “suggesting vice” was definitely a bonus for her with respect to her adoring female fans. But I’ll get into that more in the second episode on this topic.)
The dramatic fiction that cross-dressing actresses were “men” in their roles gave license for women to find them desirable, as well as for others to deny the same-sex aspect of that desire. In some cases, the actresses’ male performance was also available as a way to solicit or signal (or engender) same-sex desires in other women, whether indirectly in the audience or via general public awareness.
Self-Realization on Stage
The use of actresses to play male romantic roles on stage not only has the potential to “give women ideas” about erotic possibilities, as well as creating a context for an erotically-tinged, but socially acceptable, admiration of female stage icons, but for women performing in cross-gender roles, the experience of performing a romantic or erotic relationship opposite another woman—with the social sanction of it being “just a play”—could be the context for recognizing one’s romantic interest in women offstage as well.
Theatrical performances at all-female schools and colleges in the 19th and early 20th century played a part in many a school crush developing into an off-stage romance. As a mechanism in a historic romance for a character to take the first experimental steps toward expressing her love—always with plausible deniability in case it doesn’t work out—the play rehearsal offers rich possibilities. In a recent episode on 19th century poetry about love between women, I included the poem “Private Theatricals” by American author Louise Guiney, written in 1884, where she depicts the experience of playing the romantic lead opposite the woman she loves and contemplating how much of their actions and reactions were only “in the play” or might be true.
Conclusions
In conclusion, The ways in which theatrical performances played with gender—whether in the script, in the staging, in the casting, or in the relationship between cast and audience—provide multiple opportunities for women to learn about same-sex desire, to experience it vicariously, to recognize their own desires, and to act them out in a safe framework. While the specific forms and opportunities varied by time and place, western culture has reliably offered some version of this trope since the middles ages, and at times even celebrated it.
In this episode we talk about:
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
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(Originally aired 2024/08/03 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for August 2024.
Thank goodness for pre-scheduled podcasts, because when this show is going live—assuming nothing untoward happens in the mean time—I am in Iceland, having a brief stopover on my way to Scotland, where I’ll be attending the World Science Fiction Convention and then doing a couple weeks of sightseeing. I hope to have all sorts of fun tidbits to report in next month’s On the Shelf. I’ll be doing at least one interview for the podcast at the convention. And my sightseeing will include doing some deep-background location research for a couple different fiction projects, plus I’m hoping to make a sort of pilgrimage to Halifax to visit Shibden Hall. The last time I traveled for an entire month like this was back in 1999, so we’ll see what my stamina is like a quarter century later.
Barring unexpected complications (and I keep mentioning that, because my life has had a few too many unexpected complications lately) I’ll also have pre-scheduled this month’s essay—the first half of an “our f/favorite tropes” episode on theater and actresses in historic romance. Then when I get home at the end of the month, assuming everything happens on schedule, I’ll have a sound file from one of my narrators waiting for me and we’ll have another fiction episode to round out August. As you may have noticed, the episode with Elizabeth Birdsall’s “The Font of Liberty” should have been scheduled in June, but things worked out to move it a month later and I took the opportunity to have a brief break from writing new episodes and put it in the essay slot. But now we should be back on the default schedule of posting fiction on 5th Saturdays.
I’ve been having my regular mid-year panic attack about whether I’m doing the fiction series again next year. When I was freaking out a little about finding narrators, I was really dithering. And since next year is my retirement year, I’m going to need to take a hard look at the finances of the fiction series. But at the moment I’m still defaulting to doing it another year.
Publications on the Blog
The blog has seen a lot of new material this past month, all focused on research for the tropes double-feature about actresses and theater. I blogged a collection entitled Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, which contained 14 articles. The contents were of variable relevance to my purposes, but several were quite valuable on the subject of what women were doing on stage at various times and locations, especially when one expands the question beyond professional paid acting companies.
Next was a dissertation rather than a published work: The Salon and the Stage: Women and Theatre in Seventeenth-century France by Elizabeth Grist. Only a few bits focused on women participating in theater, but those bits were quite interesting.
Michael Shapiro’s Gender in Play on the Shakesperaean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages was predictably more about the gender dynamics of having male actors play female roles—including female characters then disguising themselves as men—than about women in theatrical professions. But the book opens with a chapter on the social context of women cross-dressing in actual life, which is more generally relevant to the Project.
Finally, I have a somewhat scanty summary of Sophie Tomlinson’s Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, which is a socio-political history of the female presence in dramatic works, though not always about women performers. And that wraps up my deep-focus series on theater history. I probably won’t blog any new publications read in August because I’ll be traveling for the whole month, but I hope my momentum picks up again when I get back. It feels good to be blogging this much again.
Book Shopping!
To balance that out, I didn’t pick up any new research books this month, but I suspect maybe next month will make up for that.
Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
New fiction also seems a bit sparse this month. I have one correction to last month’s listings. I had Tasha Suri’s The Lotus Empire as a July book, which was the schedule when I first put it in my spreadsheet. But evidently publication was pushed back to November, so I’ll try to remember to mention it again then. There’s also one August book that I’m saving for next month, in part because the publisher doesn’t have a link up yet, and in part because I’m planning to interview the author for the September show. That leaves us with a half dozen items for this month, less than our usual haul.
First up is a two-fer, because the release of the second book in a series brought the first one to my attention as well. Rachel Ford’s Meredith and Alec Thatch Mystery series is a bit easy to overlook as sapphic fiction because it involves a closeted couple with a “female husband” marriage in 1920s England. The first volume, Murder by Multiples came out last year and is available for free if you sign up for the author’s newsletter.
Quiet Fenwood-On-Sea is the perfect place for an heiress with secrets to hide. Or a killer.
Beautiful heiress Meredith Thatch married for love, and scandalized her community in the process. But her neighbors don't know the half of it. These days, she and spouse Alec keep a low profile, managing her hospital for recovering soldiers and invalids - and growing the finest roses in the county.
But when the most despised landowner in the area winds up dead shortly after feuding with the hospital, the finger of suspicion turns on the couple. And that's only the first murder.
With a Scotland Yard inspector asking uncomfortable questions and a killer on the loose, they need to solve the crime sooner rather than later. But how can they find a killer when there are suspects everywhere they turn, and motives all over the place?
The second book in the series, Murder by Rote, is the new release that caught my attention.
Aunt Anne’s house parties are to die for. Sometimes, literally.
When heiress Meredith Thatch accepted an invitation to a house party on her aunt’s country estate, she expected an exciting weekend for herself and partner Alec.
The worst storm in decades wasn’t in the cards, though. Neither was murder. Then a guest winds up dead in suspicious circumstances – and the only road in the area washes out.
Trapped in the manor, with every guest a possible suspect – and everyone harboring secrets – Meredith and Alec race to find the murderer.
Before their own secret comes out – or the killer strikes again.
Next up we have what looks like a short story, or maybe a novelette, Shadow of the Moon by T. Lona.
Eleanor Wren, a young woman of privilege in Victorian England, finds herself constrained by societal expectations and her father's ambitions. While her father arranges her marriage to Edward Lancaster, Eleanor secretly harbors feelings for her friend Lydia Blackwood. As Eleanor navigates the complex social landscape, she uncovers a hidden family secret that challenges everything she knows about her heritage. With Lydia's support, Eleanor must decide between following her heart and conforming to society's expectations.
The Palace of Eros by Caro De Robertis from Atria Books is set in a mythological Greece, with direct participation of the gods. I waver a bit on whether stories like this can be shoehorned into the historic fantasy category, as opposed to pure fantasy, but since almost all sapphic romances set in ancient Greece have mythic elements I’d be eliminating the category entirely if I had strict limits.
Young, headstrong Psyche has captured the eyes of every suitor in town and far beyond with her tempestuous beauty, which has made her irresistible as a woman yet undesirable as a wife. Secretly, she longs for a life away from the expectations and demands of men. When her father realizes that the future of his family and town will be forever cursed unless he appeases an enraged Aphrodite, he follows the orders of the Oracle, tying Psyche to a rock to be ravaged by a monstrous husband. And yet a monster never arrives.
When Eros, nonbinary deity of desire, sees Psyche, she cannot fulfill her promise to her mother Aphrodite to destroy the mortal young woman. Instead, Eros devises a plan to sweep Psyche away to an idyllic palace, hidden from the prying eyes of Aphrodite, Zeus, and the outside world. There, against the dire dictates of Olympus, Eros and Psyche fall in love. Each night, Eros visits Psyche under the cover of impenetrable darkness, where they both experience untold passion and love. But each morning, Eros flies away before light comes to break the spell of the palace that keeps them safe.
Before long, Psyche’s nights spent in pleasure turn to days filled with doubts, as she grapples with the cost of secrecy and the complexities of freedom and desire. Restless and spurred by her sisters to reveal Eros’s true nature, she breaks her trust and forces a reckoning that tests them both—and transforms the very heavens.
I thought rather hard about including the next title—also set in classical Greece—for entirely different reasons. And this is going to sound a little harsh. I don’t normally filter books for inclusion in the podcast based on writing quality. Because such a large proportion of sapphic historicals are published independently, and because my goal is the support and encouragement of the field regardless of the author’s background, I consider my job to be the simple presentation of information. But sometimes I do want to put a caveat on a listing, either because I’m concerned about how it handles a sensitive topic, or for some other reason. In the case of Teleios: Flaw, is Perfect by Asvoria K., when I looked at advance reviews to confirm that the book has sapphic content, the reviews were in agreement that the writing has some serious quality issues. The author’s website notes that English is not her first language, which may go some way to explaining this. So if the cover copy strikes your interest, you may well enjoy the story, but be aware of what you’re getting.
In the dusk of Hellas, the shadow of Rome began to stretch its dominance. Arete of Syracuse had lost her father and her beloved city. Following his last wish, Arete embarked on her odyssey to stop the strange malevolent forces behind which controlled the Roman Emperor Nero.
Guided by a determination in her heart, Arete traveled to the fabled city of Oraiapolis to find a mysterious Teleios, the perfect woman who was rumoured to be the living Aphrodite.
Along her journey traveling through different villages and cities, she fought against ferocious creatures and forged unbreakable bonds with a diverse cadre of companions, each carrying the weight of their own life in their hearts.
What will transpire throughout their perilous journey that will shape their destinies? And what evil forces would seek to capture the Teleios for their own sinister ends?
The Roaring Twenties continue to be a popular setting for historic romance. Check out: Craze by Margaret Vandenburg from Jaded Ibis Press.
Fresh off the boat from Roaring Twenties Paris, Henrietta "Henri" Adams lands in New York in the midst of the Queer Craze that is taking the city by storm. An art critic by day and lady lover by night, she ventures into the clandestine worlds of speakeasies and drag balls, which free her from the tyranny of the gender binary. Fun-loving slummers crash the party, flocking to see queer performers at the Astor Hotel and the Cotton Club. Broadway stars rub elbows with Harlem Renaissance luminaries at the Hamilton Lodge Masquerade Ball. But the revelry can't last forever. Faced with Depression-era crackdowns, Henri calculates the risk of fighting back, prompting a decision with far-reaching consequences.
For those looking for a book aimed at somewhat younger readers—or maybe you like YA books yourself--Not for the Faint of Heart by Lex Croucher from Bloomsbury Children's Books takes on the Robin Hood legend, with a twist.
‘You aren’t merry,’ said Clem to her captor. ‘And you aren’t all men. So there’s been some marketing confusion somewhere along the line.’
Mariel, a newly blooded and perpetually grumpy captain of the Merry Men, is desperate to live up to the legacy of her grandfather, the legendary Robin Hood. Clem, a too-perky backwoods healer known for her new-fangled cures, just wants to help people.
When Mariel's ramshackle band of bandits kidnap Clem as retribution for her guardian helping the Sheriff of Nottingham, all seems to be going (sort of) to plan … until Jack Hartley, Mariel’s father and Commander of the Merry Men, is captured in a deadly ambush. Determined to prove herself, Mariel sets out to get him back – with her annoyingly cheerful kidnappee in tow.
But the wood is at war. Many believe the Merry Men are no longer on the right side of history. Watching Clem tend the party’s wounds and crack relentlessly terrible jokes, Mariel begins to doubt the noble cause to which she has devoted her life. As the two of them grow closer, forced by circumstances to share a single horse and bed, one thing is clear. They must prepare to fight for their lives and for those of everyone they’ve sworn to protect.
Other Books of Interest
I’ve put one title in the “other books of interest” category because, despite being tagged as sapphic on the website where I spotted it, I can’t figure out the details from the cover copy. This is: Accidental Darlings by Crystal Jeans from The Borough Press.
In the night, I slept with my head under a shawl, listening to the ceaseless low groans of the house, telling myself that my mother would never have sent me to live with a murderer or a witch or a Miss Havisham…
1924.
When Anastasia’s beloved mother dies, she has no choice but to go to rural Skimpole and move in with ‘the Aunt’ – too fearsome for a first name, an outcast from the village who lives in a dilapidated mansion with two servants and an unruly pack of dogs.
The many mysteries of Skimpole are irresistible: how did Anastasia’s father really die? Who wrote the extremely raunchy love letters she has found in the Aunt’s bedroom, signed ‘Big Willy’? And why does everyone in the village hate the Aunt so much?
When some of the Aunt’s friends from her youth arrive at the house, wreathed in cigarette smoke and an air of debauchery, Anastasia may be closer to finding answers – but the truth she was so desperate to uncover will turn her entire world upside down…
What Am I Reading?
And what have I been reading in the last month? It’s been all audiobooks, as is often the case, in part because I’ve been doing so much print reading for the blog.
I rather enjoyed A Bluestocking's Guide to Decadence in Jess Everlee’s “Lucky Lovers of London” series. It’s a Victorian-era sapphic romance that’s part of a loosely-braided series where the other titles feature gay male romances. I hope it’s ok to say that I liked this more than I expected to—in part because I’m coming out of a run of historic romances that rather fell down on the historic side. But Everlee sets up a solidly believable context for her ill-matched lovers, including a glimpse of what parts of society might find same-sex couples well within the non-conformity they’re happy to accommodate. The miscommunications and anxieties that put stumbling blocks in the path to happiness are all plausible
There was a new release in the “Mr. Darcy and Miss Tilney” historic mystery series, featuring the neurodivergent son of Darcy and Lizzie and the adventure-seeking daughter of the protagonists of Northanger Abbey. In Claudia Gray’s The Perils of Lady Catherine De Bourgh, the two young sleuths are summoned to Rosings Park to figure out who seems to be trying to kill Lady Catherine. The mystery plot was slightly flawed in that I quickly figured out whodunnit based on which character the protagonists were obviously overlooking in their considerations—although the theme of being overlooked and ignored aligned with the motive. But we get further slow progress of the budding romance between Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney at a believable and satisfactory pace that ensures the series is likely to continue for further developments.
And finally I went on a deliberate hunt to fill in the gaps in my K.J. Charles collection and listened to Unfit to Print, a second-chance romance overlaying a mystery involving the Victorian pornography industry, with a delightfully diverse cast. The only minor disappointment was how abruptly the mystery plot was resolved at the end, with almost no input from the protagonists. A happy ending, but not an entirely satisfying one in terms of pacing.
For next month, we’ll see what effects travel has on my reading. Sometimes I find myself ripping through things quickly on planes and trains, and sometimes I’m so busy having fun I forget to read.
Author Guest
To finish up, we have an author guest this month! I’m talking to Melissa Addey, a prolific author of historical fiction.
(An interview transcript will be added when available.)
Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.
In this episode we talk about:
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
Links to Heather Online
Links to Melissa Addey Online
This is the last of the books and articles I read as background for the Actresses/Stage tropes podcasts. (I had a bunch of posts lined up -- finished doing the reading a couple weeks ago and recorded the first of the two podcasts last weekend.) Just in time, since I'm flying out tomorrow evening for my Worldcon-related travels.
And speaking of which, I'll be on a panel at Worldcon titled "Sword Lesbians: Discuss". My co-panelists are Christina Orlando (moderator), Ellen Kushner, Em X. Liu, and Samantha Shannon. Here's the panel description:
Sword lesbians are a recognised and popular trope in fantasy and science fiction. How do we think about heroic positions and expansive gender expression in sff? How do queer people position ourselves in relationship to traditional masculinity and its phallus/sword continuum? Do we reclaim roles like knight/cavalier/Jedi, or do we find different ways for women/femmes to fight? Are sword lesbians also an expression of athleticism, when athleticism is often coded as masculine despite not really being tied to the masc/femme axis at all?
As you might guess, my contributions will likely include the deep history of the instersections between masculine-coded activites/accessories and female homoeroticism. Plus, also, talking about Alpennia.
Tomlinson, Sophie. 2009. Women on Stage in Stuart Drama. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-0-521-81111-8
This book wouldn’t ordinarily be sufficiently in line with the goals of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project to be blogged as part of it. In fact, I considered simply posting my summary on my blog without being part of the LHMP apparatus. But since it ties in closely with my current podcast project, looking at actresses and the stage as sapphic historic romance tropes, that seems to be sufficient connection to handle it in the usual way.
Like many books that start out as a PhD dissertation, the book has a lot of fine-grained analysis of specific aspects of the topic. In this case, the “meat” of the book is deep dives into the structure, symbolism, and social context of a number of specific dramatic works or performances. There is less focus on the subject of “women on stage” and more focus on “femaleness on stage” than the title might imply. That isn’t a knock on the book, just a context for how well it spoke to my reasons for reading it.
Introduction: Shifting Sisters
The aim of this book is to broaden the questions asked about women and drama, about the idea of the actress in drama and her presence on stage between 1603 and 1670. This is not a story of appearance and disappearance, but of continuity and change. The standard story is that women first came on stage in the restoration due to Charles II’s familiarity with women performing in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. Other shifts have also been identified as causal: the relationship between court theater and public theater, a shift from moral condemnation to celebration. But Tomlinson argues that actresses participated in a longer 17th century shift in the representation and self-representation of women. These changes can be seen across the century leading up to the Restoration, and draw on ideas introduced by Queens Anna and Henrietta Maria. Stuart queens formed around themselves a “second court,” to some extent independent from the Kings Court, which provided scope for a female-centered culture. This culture – despite the grumbling of prominent men – spread into the general population.
The book considers how masques, pastoral entertainment, and “closet plays” developed a woman-led and woman-inclusive theatrical tradition. Public theater was simply the final venue it spread to. In this context, Puritan attacks on actresses as “notorious whores” in the 1630s can be seen, not as prevailing opinion, but as the last gasp of a failed rear-guard. And the late retention of all male professional theater in England was due to isolated provincialism (from the rest of Europe) not a uniquely English characteristic.
The book’s chapters will touch on the following:
Chapter 1: ‘Magic in majesty’: the poetics of female performance in the Jacobean masque
Queen Anna was known and commented on (for good and ill) for organizing masques in which she participated with the ladies of her court. These were only a part of the playful intellectual culture the queen promoted, but were the most theatrical. The symbolic and mythic themes of the masques had an overt purpose to legitimize the power of the king, but carried additional meanings that centered the queen and female agency, as well as promoting specific political goals.
Masques presented a spectacle that was distinctly different from ordinary court life, displaying the “unusual and exotic” either by using classical settings or depicting a vision of foreign cultures. The content of a masque was chiefly elaborate costumes and expressive dancing, interspersed with songs that articulated the storyline of the performance. As a rule (with few exceptions) the female performers did not speak or sing themselves. While court poets were commissioned to write the lyrics for masques, the topic or theme was often directed by the queen (or other principle female performer).
This chapter dives deeply into the structure and symbolism of specific masques, including the curious “Masque of Blackness” in which the performers in blackface, tell a mythic story of Ethiopian water nymphs coming into an understanding of their own luminous beauty.
[Note: there are a lot of complexities in the fascination early modern culture had for blackness, both as exemplified by black performers, and by the use of blackface. I can’t go into that subject deeply here, but let’s just say “it’s complicated.”]
As an example of how masques were carefully crafted to send a specific message, for the "Masque of Queens," which presented the ladies as martial women of history, Queen Anna requested a contrasting prelude with actors dressed as hags depicting anti-virtues, such as Ignorance. To enhance the contrast, these negative female roles were played by male actors.
[Note: It is very hard to summarize this publication at a reasonable level of detail and length, so my summary will be inconsistent. In general, this publication was not of as much practical use for the history of women on stage as I hoped it would be, though it’s fascinating in its look at the details of a wide variety of performances and texts.]
Chapter 2: ‘Naked hearts’: feminizing the Stuart pastoral stage
This chapter examines how the sexual dynamics of pastoral dramas under queens Anna and Henrietta Maria foreshadow the sexual permissiveness of the restoration stage. Even before the presence of actresses on stage, pastoral dramas were centered around female interests and concerns, such as romance, desire, and the conflicting demands of chastity and love. Female characters drive the action of pastorales by their choices, refusals, and actions with respect to their male suitors.
The chapter explores the gradual insertion of a female performative presence on stage, via female vocalists as narrators of the story, then masque performers who also sing. In a reverse of the professional stage, where men acted both male and female roles, in romantic pastorales such as The Shepherd’s Paradise, women of the court acted both the male and female characters.
[Note: the combination of an all-female cast, and a script in which modesty and chastity are obstacles to expressing love, creates a potential second layer of hesitancy in a woman (role) confessing love for a woman (actress). And, of course, in works such as Il Pastor Fido, this cross-gender dynamic is further entangled with a male character disguising himself as a woman in order to be close to, court, and kiss a female character. This latter creates a different type of homoerotic implication where, within the action of the play a woman (female character, not in disguise) accepts and even welcomes the erotic attentions of a woman (male character, in disguise).]
Chapter 3: ‘Significant liberty’: the actress in Caroline comedy
This chapter looks at three plays that extend the representation of women’s liberty and agency in drama. Once again, this is a deep dive into the structural details of the plays that is difficult to summarize. Of particular interest is The Lady-Errant (published 1651) which predicts a shift to gender-aligned casting in its prologue, which argues “that each sex keeps to its part.” The plot also involves significant gender subversion, with a female warrior rescuing men in distress, and an attempted coup by rebellious women. (Despite all which, it was published in the era when women were not yet acting on the public stage.)
Chapter 4: Sirens of doom and defiance in Caroline tragedy
This chapter examines the intense focus on women’s sexuality in tragic drama under Charles I. Combined with that theme is "women as a cause of men’s seduction or downfall." A counterpoint to this is criticism of theater for the same themes. Expressions of female sexuality and madness expand the scope of women’s representation. (Women are dangerous!)
Interchapter: ‘Enter Ianthe veiled’
[Note: The character “Ianthe” referenced in the chapter title is not the one from Greek myth, so no homoeroticism here.]
Between 1642 and 1660, by order of Parliament, plays in commercial public theaters were banned. As women had not been performing in this context, the ban had little impact on traditions of female performance and, in fact, opportunities increased. Plays were read and performed in private houses and academic settings. Women had always been performing in private household entertainments and continued to do so. Royalists were particularly fond of pastoral dramas, and there are regular records of aristocratic women participating in masques and plays of this type. New plays were written in this tradition, and such works were sometimes noted as being woman-centered.
Even before the ban was lifted, plays and masques began to re-infiltrate official culture, with the support of key officials, emphasizing the moral character of the content. Work-arounds were created, such as reframing the masque genre as a “dramatic narrative in the form of musical theater” and there was even a play discussing the moral pros and cons of dramatic performance (using speeches, music, and song).
But masques were beginning to evolve into a new form, with a more coherent plot, and new preoccupations, such as a fascination with the Ottoman Empire. (Masques were in the process of becoming opera, and even used that label.) Valorous women were popular as central characters.
Chapter 5: The fancy-stage of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
The next two chapters explore of the works of two prominent female playwrights of the restoration, starting with Margaret Cavendish. Cavendish was exposed to continental theater, both high and low, during her exile on the continent during the interregnum. She commented on being impressed by actresses playing male roles on stage. In this context, she began writing the plays she would later publish, often using them to explore women’s potential and possibilities.
Rather than staging her plays with publication as an afterthought, Cavendish published first and expressed a disinterest in ever seeing them on stage, possibly hesitant about their reception. She saw parallels between the condemnation of women acting and the condemnation of all female public speech. Though she featured women speaking up in her plays, she may have been aware of her own vulnerability in doing so as a published author.
Of particular interest is Cavendish’s play The Convent of Pleasure, in which a group of women set up a woman-only community on feminist principles, only to have it infiltrated by men disguised as women, with romantic aspirations. This creates scenes of apparent same-sex desire via gender disguise.
Chapter 6: Styles of female greatness: Katherine Philips’s translations of Corneille
With respect to the stage, Katherine Philips is primarily known as a translator and adapter of Pierre Corneile’s neoclassical tragedies. Although, like Cavendish, she was working from the female centered culture of préciosité, associated with the court of Henrietta Maria, the stage performance of these plays was likely in the older tradition of all-male companies. The bulk of this chapter is an analysis of the social context of Philips’s work, and the themes of female heroism contained in the plays.
Coda
The final chapter sums up the overall conclusion of this study. The era contains several parallel movements with regard to women and drama. There is the elite, woman-centered culture of court masques and private theatricals, revolving around classical, pastoral, and usually royalist themes. There is the rise of professional actresses who were met with both public acclaim and moral condemnation. As a representation of women having a “public voice,” actresses had an ambivalent reception. But both elite and professional dramatic traditions were changing in ways that increased women’s prominence in drama, as creators, as characters, and as performers.
Although appended to a book discussing theatrical cross-dressing, this catalog presents a contrast in how actual women (of the lower classes) were treated when found or accused of cross-dressing.
Benbow, R. Mark and Alasdair D. K. Hawkyard. 1994. “Legal Records of Cross-dressing” in Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages, ed. Michael Shapiro, Ann Arbor. pp.225-34.
Since this book is primarily focused on how roles were played in Shakespearean theater, it concerns all-male acting companies and male actors playing female roles. As such, it largely falls outside the scope of my interests, but as context for the main discussion, there is a chapter on real-life cross-dressing by women, as well as an appendix of legal records of such. As the appendix has different authors than the main book, I’ll be covering the two as separate publications.
Appendix: Legal Records of Cross-dressing
As a supplement to the discussion of records of women cross-dressing, the book has an appendix with quotations from the court records. It notes that these are not an exhaustive record—indeed the number of records is relatively small. It’s likely that the attention given to cross-dressing as an offence varied depending on what other concerns might draw attention, for example a rise in the concern over vagrancy in the 1590s.
What I found interesting was the relatively small number of cases where overt evidence of sexual offences was mentioned. Of the 14 women mentioned in the cases, by my analysis 4 were accompanied by a solid accusation of a sexual offense, 3 were “probables” but the question was more complicated, and for the remaining 7 the only offense mentioned was wearing men’s clothing.
For the “yes” group: A woman was “enticed…to whoredom” which for some reason involved cutting her hair short and wearing men’s hose and doublet, cape and cloak. Another woman habitually went abroad “in man’s attire” and also was said to have engaged in sex with various persons. A third case involves the testimony of a servant of the multiple women he was asked to procure for his master for sexual purposes, one of whom “came in a man’s gown and a hat.” One woman had been persuaded by a man to put on man’s apparel, but though she denied having sex with him, she was notorious as a prostitute.
The case of Magdalyn Gawyn is complicated. There’s a long recitation of her movements through various households, after the summary charge that “contrary to all honesty of woman hood” she wore men’s clothing abroad in the streets. Throughout her narrative, she regularly interacts with one Thomas Ashewell and eventually he persuades her to run away with him, at which she insists on going in disguise in men’s clothing. He, alas, doesn’t show and she arouses suspicion and is apprehended. In a different long narrative, Margaret Bolton gets caught up in delivering clandestine messages to one Mrs. Luddington, and in the ensuing brangle Mr. Luddington says that Margaret and her daughter “went abroad in man’s apparel.” Neither Margaret nor the daughter is accused of any sexual offense, though they do seem to have been abetting the potential offense of Mrs. Luddington. The third “maybe” is a woman who confessed both to having a bastard child and having gone in man’s apparel.
The “no” group includes a woman who arranged with her husband to be “disguised and appareled in all things like a soldier” and accompanied him as his lackey. Whatever her purpose might have been, any sexual aspect would have been between husband and wife and so no crime. In several cases, the record describes the cross-dressing itself as being inherently “lewd,” “like a rogue,” “more manlike than womanlike.” One quite non-judgmental record notes a woman “brought in boy’s apparel” and punished for it, with no other context given.
Cross-gender play and disguise is rampant on Shakespearean comedies (and, as we have seen in recent material, in early modern drama generally across Europe). There are two ironies to scenarios of female homoeroticism on Shakespeare's stage. One is that among the professional acting companies staging them, all parts--even women romancing women--were played by male actors. But the other irony is that the scenarios of playful, protective, or adventurous gender disguise that audiences clearly loved to see on stage could be viewed very differently when carried out by ordinary women. This study of gender-disguise themes in drama primarily focuses on implications for the men involved in staging the works, but the book opens with a chapter looking at records of real-life women in gender disguise and how they were viewed and treated.
Shapiro, Michael. 1994. Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. Ann Arbor. (Chapter 1: A Brief Social History of Female Cross-Dressing)
Since this book is primarily focused on how roles were played in Shakespearean theater, it concerns all-male acting companies and male actors playing female roles. As such, it largely falls outside the scope of my interests, but as context for the main discussion, there is a chapter on real-life cross-dressing by women, as well as an appendix of legal records of such. As the appendix has different authors than the main book, I’ll be covering the two as separate publications.
Chapter 1: A Brief Social History of Female Cross-Dressing
Although the book isn’t particularly relevant to my current focus on actresses and the stage, it falls in one of the general categories of interest for the Project.
In contrast with the backstories of cross-dressing women in Shakespearean drama, legal records of women wearing male clothing (either individual garments or complete outfits) were viewed harshly by civic authorities. The chapter opens with an exception: the case of Arabella Stuart cross-dressing to try to evade confinement and escape to the continent in 1611. (As a potential claimant to the throne, James I was interested in keeping her under his thumb.) She dressed for her unsuccessful venture wearing “a pair of great French-fashioned hose over her petticotes, putting on a man’s doublet, a man-lyke perruque with long locks over her hair, a black hat, black cloake, russet bootes with red tops, and a rapier by her side.”
But most women discovered to be cross-dressing were assumed to have much less elevated motives, and as this chapter discusses, the law automatically assumed that a cross-dressed woman had loose morals and was probably involved in sex work. The women who appear in legal records for this are generally of low status. [Note: the causality may be questioned here; women of higher status probably were able to avoid legal charges more easily. See below.]
The reasons for this may be two-fold. Women engaged in illicit sexual relations—whether freelance prostitution or adulterous assignations—may have used gender disguise, as a woman going about at night alone might have been more suspicious. But in turn, gender transgression was viewed as a sexual crime, and little distinction was made between all manner of sex crimes: prostitution, fornication, adultery, or simply being an “unruly” woman.
Sexual behavior came under greater official scrutiny and control beginning around the mid-16th century. Prostitution, rather than simply being regulated as previously, was forbidden within the bounds of London, moving the established brothels outside those bounds. The persecution (and prosecution) of sex work was relatively continuous (with varying intensity) from then on.
It isn’t at all clear that prostitutes, as a group, habitually cross-dressed, but it does appear that cross-dressed women were automatically suspected of being prostitutes, or at least of being engaged in illicit sex. But while several of the arrest and trial records included here do support the conclusion that the women were cross-dressing in order to engage in illicit sex of various types, in many other cases there seems to be no direct evidence of such and the connection was simply assumed by the authorities. Note also that the “illicit sex” could range anywhere between having been forced into prostitution, to street-walking, to making a secret assignation with a fiancé, to a wife joining her husband in military attire presumably to accompany him on campaign.
Unlike the records studied by Dekker and van de Pol for the Low Coutries, the London examples don’t seem to include any cases attributed to economic motives (better pay for men—in fact, in some cases the women claimed to have cross-dressed specifically to avoid the need to engage in sex work) or cases of gender-crossing to enable a romantic relationship with a woman. The Dutch records do not assume any particular connection between cross-dressing and prostitution, and when legal charges were brought, it was for concerns like fraud, theft, or unruly behavior.
Nor do the English court cases reference cross-dressing as part of carnival. [Note: Some of the polemical literature of the time does refer to this, so it may be that those cases were not treated as criminal, as opposed to being treated as moral offenses.] Nor has the author identified English cross-dressing records outside of London, though whether they were ignored, not detected, or did not occur is not determined.
As noted above, the cross-dressing women accused of sexual crimes were primarily of low social class. Middle and upper class women who wore selected male-coded garments, such as doublets or feathered hats, might be criticized as part of the early 17th century “gender panic” but were not trying to pass as men and were not systematically prosecuted for it. Instead they were the target of polemical literature such as the pamphlet Hic Mulier that railed against gender ambiguity in dress. While this literature also associated the wearing of masculine garments with sexual looseness (accusing such women of flaunting their sexuality and usurping male privileges) it was not in a prosecutable form.
The cross-dressing women warriors popular in literature, such as Bradamante, were not to be taken as role models for real women, nor were the romantic heroines of Shakespeare’s stage. It’s unlikely that the women who inspired Hic Mulier were being inspired by literature in any case, but were a manifestation of a greater participation by women in the public economy and greater social freedoms, which were connected via fashion to male-coded garments. This, in turn, was viewed as an intentional challenge to traditional gender roles and the criticism of the fashions reflected a growing anxiety about women’s place in society.
Theatrical cross-dressed characters reflected neither the assumption of illicit sex nor the accusation of gender rebellion. They were depicted as cross-dressing for pragmatic purposes to prevent recognition or as a strategy in support of conventional marriage. Within the plays, the cross-dressing is neither criticized nor punished and is typically taken for granted as something a woman might do in extreme circumstances. Only in a couple of rare instances does a play include a cross-dressed woman depicted as a sex worker. Nor is it common for cross-dressed characters to be directly critiquing gender roles, with The Roaring Girl being a rare exception. While the fictionalized character of Moll Cutpurse in that play is depicted in a positive light, other examples as in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, are satirized for their gender transgression.
Note: The book includes an appendix with a chronological list of 16th and early 17th century plays with cross-dressed heroines.
The recent announcement from the Glasgow Worldcon committee about some unexpected patterns in Hugo voting ballots, the conclusions made about those patterns, and the actions taken in response, have naturally raised interest in the nomination process for this year. As readers may remember, both the nomination process and voting process in 2023 had clear anomalies that cast severe doubt on the validity of the outcome and generated a great deal of concern among the SFF community.
The Glasgow committee’s commitment to openness and transparency with regard to data and communications has been highly appreciated. Because of that, I have every confidence that if they had observed anomalous patterns in the nomination data (as they clearly did in the final voting data) they would have taken appropriate action. But can we back that confidence up with any hard data, in advance of having access to the full nomination and voting statistics?
In response to some questions thrown out into the ether by ErsatzCulture, I opened up the historic trend analysis spreadsheet I created at the beginning of this year and plugged in the data we have available at this point. For each category, that data consists of:
[1] Keep in mind that the calculation process for determining finalists is not “first past the post” but involves multiple rounds of data processing, with the result that an item that makes the finalist list may have fewer direct mentions than an item that fails to make the list. This process is too complex for me to explain here.
[2] Some potential finalists declined the nomination. It would make sense that these are included in the stats—possibly including the max/min stats. Some nominated items were determined to be technically ineligible and are therefore (presumably) not included in the max/min stats, but probably are included in the overall ballot/nominee numbers. (The difference wouldn’t be significant for distinct nominees.) When the full stats are available, I’ll update with the complete numbers, but for now this will be an approximation.
I selected the following years to analyze:
[3] If this reference means nothing to you, count yourself lucky. But in that case, you probably aren't that interested in deep dives into Hugo Award data.
[4] Because I'm looking only at "how many nominating ballots included this item" the difference in how those nominations are processed pre- and post-EPH should not be significant, except to the possible extent that it affects how people nominate.
Note that Best Fancast and Best Series were added at various times during the scope covered by this study and so are not present in all the graphs. Best Game is new this year and is not included as there is no comparative data.
Because the available data for 2024 is limited at this time, I’ll be looking only at the following questions:
Yes, yes, the figures are very hard to see at this scale. But to some extent that’s a feature, not a bug. Because we’re looking at overall patterns, not specific numbers. It makes it easier to see an overall pattern and the items that break that pattern.
Overall, in the fiction categories, plus Related Work and Drama-Long, there is generally a steady increase in numbers of ballots across the study, with starkly higher numbers in 2015 (puppies), 2017 (E Pluribus Hugo) and 2023 (Chengdu). The other categories are either running fairly steady or have no clear trending pattern, again with the exception of the specified years.
What breaks this overall assessment? Best Related Work is out-of-trend in 2024, with total ballots almost as high as 2023. Fancast is also out-of-trend with the highest number of ballots in my data set (and this was not a category with unexpectedly higher numbers in 2023). Other than these two categories, nothing jumps out as unexpected when viewed in the historic context.
The next pattern to examine is the percentage of ballots (out of those with any nominees in the category) that listed the finalist that appeared most often. (I’m trying very hard to find concise language that doesn’t imply value judgments.) Again, I’m going to start with a high-level graph that is more for the shape of the patterns than the specific numbers, but this time I’m then going to break it up into groups for better visibility.
The analysis here is that there’s normally a relatively narrow range for the percentage of the top finalist—mostly between 10-30%. For a number of categories, 2023 significantly breaks this pattern with much higher values. But 2024 not only returns to “normal” but in most cases has a lower top percentage than in previous years.
The category that breaks this pattern is Best Related Work, where 2024 had the relatively most popular “top performer” of the data set. It’s not only higher than the anomalous 2023 value, but also higher than the previous peak in 2017. (Looking back, this points out that sometimes there’s simply a run-away favorite, especially in a category with a relatively limited set of known candidates. That runaway favorite in 2017 also won the final ballot on the first round of counting.)
In the fan categories, it’s interesting (but perhaps not meaningful) that Best Fan Writer currently appears to be increasing focus on the top performer, but not in the same stand-out sort of way. And given the previous observation that Best Fancast had an unusual spike in numbers of total nominating ballots, this doesn’t appear to be due to a runaway favorite, as the most popular nominee appears on only 15% of the ballots—almost the lowest in my data set.
The next question has some sharper, but less interesting, patterns. What percentage of ballots list the finalist who has the lowest number of listings? This is a much tighter range—eyeballing suggests mostly around 7-12%. Again, I’ll start with the high level overview where the overall pattern is clearest. What’s clear, is that all the most significant out-of-trend items are from 2023. The pattern is much starker that the higher percentages for the top finalist.
In fact, let’s flip the data to cluster by year rather than by category. (Due to the nature of my spreadsheet, the years are numbered in order rather than labeled by year—see the key above.) Here it’s easy to see that 2023 had overall higher percentages for the low finalist. But we can also see that 2024 is running lower than typical for the low finalist. (There are various possible hypothses that would explain this, but I’m not going to speculate until I have the full data.)
I’m not going to zoom in on this one because, frankly, it’s not that interesting.
When I put together the data showing the difference in percentages between the high and low finalists, I thought it would be easy to interpret, but it’s actually rather complex and requires a number of individualized explanations to make sense of. I’ll put up the high-overview graphs grouped by category and by year, simply because I have them. But I’m not seeing anything meaningful to say. 2024 seems to be running to larger spans in everything but the fiction categories, but I don’t know what that means.
With regard to the two categories that seem most interesting, Best Related Work has a large span, indicating either a very sharp tail-off or a runaway favorite. Fancast has an utterly typical span.
To sum up, there are two categories that stand out as having at least one unusual feature. Both Best Related Work and Best Fancast have a larger number of nominating ballots cast than history would predict. However while the top finalist in Best Related Work appears on an unexpectedly high % of the ballots and has a larger-than-typical difference from the bottom finalist, the % ballots for the top Best Fancast finalist is not merely typical, but lower than usual, and the span between top and bottom finalists is utterly typical.
Best Related Work is a category that has historically been rather variable in performance, and there have been previous instances of clear favorites as early as the nominating process. Given that we can assume the total nominating ballots include withdrawals, and presuming that the max/min stats also reflect pre-withdrawal data, it is plausible that the bump in the Best Related Work category reflects the peculiar virality of one nominee who declined nomination.
But another explanation might come from one nominee that appeared in both Best Related Work and Best Fancast, but was ruled ineligible for the latter. (I know in some circumstances a work nominated in two categories can have nominations moved to the more numerous category, but I don’t know if that would happen with eligibility issues. So I don’t know how/if that would affect the numbers.) A second item nominated in Best Fancast was also ruled ineligible (in both cases, on the basis of being professional productions). If the nominations were counted under “total ballots” but were excluded from the max/min data, that could explain why the nominating numbers were unusually high without it being reflected in the popularity of the top finalist.
Anyway, that’s as much as I can make of it at the moment. Any potential relationship of the above analysis to the question of which finalist was the beneficiary of attempted ballot-stuffing is left entirely to the reader’s speculation. It may be related, it may be entirely unrelated. There are a number of high-level theories about what the purpose of the attempted ballot-stuffing was, and each theory would have an entirely different potential relationship to nomination patterns.
I'm sitting here, writing an introduction to a study of women claiming their voice and their place in salons and on stage in a historic setting and the sort of crap they got for being trailblazers. It seems oddly apropos on a day when we (unexpectedly) can envision a woman claiming her voice and her place in the White House and making new history.[1] And we all know the crap she's going to get for taking that trail. But frankly I'm tired of doom-sayers and Debbie Downers. It's even harder to win if you don't act like it's possible. We aren't just working for the political career of one specific woman; we continue to work for the future of the USA as a democratic institution that truly believes in liberty and justice for all. And that is far more important than the specific name in the office. We all need to take the stage, shape the intellectual conversation, and wade through the crap we'll get for doing so. Because there is no other way to get where we want to be. And me? I'm dusting off that "Kamala" t-shirt I bought four years ago.
[1] In case you're reading this instead of the US national news, Biden handed off the campaign to Harris earlier today.
Grist, Elizabeth Rosalind. 2001. The Salon and the Stage: Women and Theatre in Seventeenth-century France. Dissertation.
Reviewed as part of the research for the stage/actresses trope series on the podcast. No specifically sapphic content.
This dissertation didn’t have quite as much information about actresses as I thought it might. The majority of the focus is on playwrights—which is wonderful and informative! But I ended up skimming a lot to pull out the bits on actresses.
This analysis considers the parallels in the emergence of women as central the public stage and the private salon, both of which opened up new roles, and both of which became a focus of morality-based criticism, taking the view that women “putting themselves forward” was inherently dangerous to feminine morals.
With respect to the theater, this criticism targeted not only the actresses themselves, but the roles they played, as well as the enthusiastic presence of women in the audience (rather than keeping to the domestic sphere).
The leadership of women in salon culture, and the encouragement it gave them to engage in literary endeavors, broadened women’s opportunities for education and increased the centrality of women as subjects within those literary ventures. The salon was also central to women’s patronage of the theater, with many plays being initially presented within the salon, or even acted out privately by amateur companies that might include the aristocratic women who hosted them. Women acted as patrons for female playwrights, as seen in dedications.
French theater is its modern sense was established in Paris in the early 17th century, with earlier precursors being guilds that produced religious mystery plays. Two permanent professional companies were established in 1629 and 1635, with the building of the first dedicated theater building in 1641. The theaters were supported (and regulated) by the crown and records show regular attendance by royal figures. Marie de Medici was an enthusiastic supporter of both French companies and visiting Italian troupes.
Early in the century, records refer to popular farces, but with the establishment of the professional companies we see more prestigious works, often dedicated to powerful female patrons. Those upper class women were not the only female audience, as visual records show women among the middle-class audience in the cheaper seats. Female audiences, in turn, influenced the nature of the material being featured, with an increasing focus on tragedy and more serious drama across the first half of the century.
Moral criticism of theater-going included its function as a place of social and economic display.
There are no surviving records of actresses in Paris before the early 17th century, in contrast to the records of stage actresses in Italy and Spain in the late 16th century (and also in contrast to England where all-male companies were the rule until the 1660s). It is likely that women were acting on provincial stages earlier, though the profession may have been looked askance. A reference in 1592 to an actress in Bordeaux notes that she was received in respectable houses, implying that this might have been surprising. There are suggestions that the Parisian mystery plays of the latter 16th century used all-male companies, and that this was typical for bawdy farces as well. But the presence of celebrity actresses in visiting Italian troupes may have helped shift the tide. England lagged behind, and when French mixed-gender companies visited England in the 1630s, English commenters were harshly critical, considering actresses “unwomanly.”
The first named French actress we know of was Marie Venier, who like most of the early actresses had a husband in the same profession. Women entering the French theatrical companies were treated as equals to their male co-workers and could expect to receive a general education as apprentices, as well as theatrical training. The apprenticeship included room and board. By mid-century, companies had roughly equivalent numbers of men and women on stage, and a number of female performers were achieving star status. Later in their careers, well-known actresses might supplement their income by providing elocution lessons to women of the upper classes.
Despite all this, actresses were the target of moral criticism, with complex and ambiguous rationales. Because of the roles they played on stage, they were seen as potential seductresses. When the characters they played strayed from idealized women, they were considered to be setting a bad example for their female audiences. Their revealing stages costumes were accused of inciting more general fashions.
[Note: This work doesn’t have any mention of lesbian accusations against French actresses, in contrast to the discourse in the 18th century. There is a note that one particular play—Le Railleur by Antoine Mareschal—was suppressed in 1635 likely due to lesbian allusions directed at Madame d’Aiguillon, a niece of Cardinal Richelieu. (She was a target of various rumors due to her refusal to remarry after being widowed at age 18, but it isn’t clear that there was any substance to the lesbian accusations.)]
(Originally aired 2023/07/20 - listen here)
Here we are, scheduled only a little bit later than originally planned, the second fiction episode of 2024. “The Font of Liberty” by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall is set in Paris in 1830, among the printers and booksellers who dodge around the capricious demands of the censors. As a bit of pop culture historic grounding, this story takes place two years before the revolt that is the climax of Les Miserables. I love this story for the varied community of women it depicts…and for the word-play in the title.
The author, Elizabeth Porter Birdsall, lives in Boston with her wife, a lot of books, and a lot of tea. In her day job, she's a French to English translator, and she worked as a translator and editor on the video game Harmony: The Fall of Reverie by Don’t Nod. Her short fiction has been published in places such as "Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories," the "Women Destroy Science Fiction!" special issue of Lightspeed Magazine, and Etherea Magazine. In her free time, she likes hanging out in nature and flitting between entirely too many hobbies, especially handicrafts. She can be found online on Bluesky and Mastodon. See the links in the show notes.
When looking for narrators who can do right by the various settings of our stories, I belatedly realized I had a great international resource in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. I was attending the annual SFWA conference a few months ago and mentioned that I was looking for narrators with some specific competencies and rather hit the jackpot. Our narrator for this episode is C. J. Lavigne, a Canadian SFF author. Her urban fantasy novel In Veritas, from NeWest Press, was a finalist for the 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in Speculative Fiction and the 2021 Crawford Award, and was the Alberta Book Publishers Association 2021 Speculative Fiction Book of the Year. Her short fiction has appeared in On Spec, Fusion Fragment, Augur Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, PodCastle, and other publications, and her novella The Drowned Man's Daughter is forthcoming from NeWest Press in 2025. She is generally busy drinking coffee, petting the cat, and being a full-time media studies academic.
Without further ado, let’s get to our story.
This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.
THE FONT OF LIBERTY
by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall
Sandrine dropped into the chair beside me and stretched her back dramatically. I took the opportunity to admire the view, as I was sure she intended. “Ugh!” She wiggled her fingers high overhead. “Never be a compositor, Mylène my beauty. You’ll have to typeset a scholar’s list of sources in eight point, half of them in Greek.”
“I don’t speak a word of Greek,” I pointed out, though it didn’t need saying. When would a girl from a little Normandy village have learned such a thing as Greek? Sandrine was the one who had grown up in this printshop two streets from the Quartier Latin, not me. I had the impression that she didn’t read it terribly well herself, come to that; the king’s censors had been striking out texts so eagerly recently that the shop had been taking on jobs we might ordinarily have farmed out.
“Then you’ll have to learn to read Greek by typesetting such things,” Sandrine retorted, “off that same scholar’s badly scribbled fair copy, which is the least fair copy I ever saw, by the way. Then your pretty dark eyes will cross forever. Mine certainly have; I don’t think I’ll see straight for a week.”
“Charge the scholar extra for the trouble to your pretty grey eyes,” I suggested, and she laughed.
“Oh, we are! You’re right, though, I’ll put his coins on my eyelids to soothe them.”
It always felt daring to flirt with the boss’s daughter at work, for all that she’d been flirting with me since I’d arrived six months back, and we’d kissed up in her room more than once. More than kissed, too, out in the fields outside the city where her mother wouldn’t overhear us, and some marvelous romps those had been. Sandrine was a warm and playful soul who didn’t seem the least vindictive. If we broke matters off tomorrow, it would be awkward, but I didn’t think she’d get her mother to send me off, especially when they’d just trained me up to make the ink and be quick at stitching bindings.
Still, all of that was part of the reason I kept on sleeping on Isabelle and Lucie’s spare mattress, instead of taking a room over the printshop.
Lucie worked at the cabaret around the corner, where we all loyally went for wine and mediocre food at breaks. Here, meanwhile, Isabelle operated the press, set type when Sandrine was busy, and generally acted as the foreman this shop didn’t officially have. That left Sandrine and Mme Barthélemy free to meet with clients and keep the budgets and all the other business of an owner and her only daughter, with Sandrine’s cousin Antoine doing apprentice work. But if Mme Barthélemy had had a living husband and a dozen daughters, I think Isabelle would still have ended up in charge of the shop floor. She’s that kind of person.
Just as I thought that, Isabelle herself thumped down a whole stack of freshly printed and folded pages next to me. I yelped. “Hey! Isa, you fiend, you print too fast! Here I thought I’d get the chance to take a break.”
Isabelle grinned her craggy slice of a grin, and mimed a thump on my shoulder. “You need faster fingers than that to get ahead of me, young chicken!”
I pretended to sulk about the blow that hadn’t landed, dramatically shaking out my fingers even though they weren’t actually sore, and she laughed. “Don’t fret, lunchtime’s not so far off. If you get through that whole stack, I’ll buy you a drink, how’s that?”
“Deal!” I wasn’t at all sure that I’d manage the stack, but I was willing to make a go of it. And for all that she looked like a belligerent wine cask in a dress and printer’s apron, Isabelle was a soft touch at heart; odds were good she’d buy me the drink even if I fell a little short, as long as I made the effort.
“Ugh!” said Sandrine. “I was going to offer to help you, but now I’d be costing you wine for it. Well, there’s no help for it, I’ll have to go start printing that play of Borel’s.”
I glanced over in some surprise, unspooling the first length of waxed thread. “Haven’t you already?”
She grimaced. “Well... I’ve been putting it off. Just in case, you know.”
Halfway across the room, Isabelle snorted. “That one! Wild as they come and then some. He’s part of that Romantic set our Sandrine loves so much, you know, the young ones. The Petit Cénacle or the Young France or whatever they’re calling themselves this week. Can’t help but push every boundary there is.”
“The censors are hemming and hawing about whether to approve his script,” Sandrine clarified. “Just because it has some soul in it! But they can’t stand real art, you know.”
“And meanwhile the actors are already cast!” Isabelle hoisted up the press bar. “But if the censors won’t get off their asses—” Wham, went the paper frame, down onto a fresh sheet of paper. “—then for all we know, we’re throwing away money every minute we spend working on the damn thing. Soul won’t pay the bills.” As she spoke, she hoisted the press up again—the job of a strong man in most shops, but as Lucie often said with a sly grin and a rather different meaning, who needed a man when you had Isabelle?
“Still, we’re throwing away money if I don’t get off my ass, too.” Sandrine shook out her arms, adjusted some infinitesimal shifting of her sleeve covers, and stood. “I finished that monograph and Isa’s already well launched on Favart’s pamphlet, so there’s nothing else in shape for me to work on but Borel’s eccentricity. On I go.”
On she did go, and on I went too, till my hands were starting to get sore for real. Sewing paper bindings is different than sewing shirts. More pleasant, in my experience, and easier on the eyes, but harder on the fingers. And all of our work accompanied by the steady slam of the press. Every so often Isabelle paused to let Antoine shift the racks around, with clatters and thumps, and then up the slams would start again.
I’d had to learn to tune it out. It hadn’t taken me too long, though. After the house burned down, after the fever took Dad away from me, I’d spent a few months living with my aunt and her shouting husband. She gave as good as she got—he’s an awful husband, as far as I could tell, but she isn’t much of a wife either, and the two of them just make each other miserable all day long at the top of their lungs—so it was a great relief when dear sweet Mlle Sophie Boudreau down the street offered me a letter of introduction to her old friend Isabelle, and the excuse to go earn my bread in Paris. Ten printing presses running top speed night and day would have been better than that house.
I do earn my bread, too, and enough besides to send a few sous home to my aunt now and again. She did take me in, after all, and gave me a made-over dress to bring with me to Paris, and it’s much easier to feel sorry for her at a distance.
Especially since I’d landed so very much on my feet, thanks to Mlle Sophie. A place to stay, steady work, a girl to have some fun with, and a web of likeminded women who welcomed me in as another bead in the netting. (At this point, in fact, I suspected dear Mlle Sophie of having been a good deal closer to Isabelle than I’d originally realized, back when she’d moved to Paris in the heady years of the Revolution. I wondered how much of her kindness had been simple generosity to a neighbor, and how much recognition of a certain kinship between us. She’d sent me to Isabelle and Lucie, after all, and a single day in their home had made it clear to me how close the two of them were.)
To take my mind off my sore fingers, and stop myself watching the clock tick with glacial slowness towards our eleven o’clock break, I started to speculate about what Lucie’s cabaret might have on the menu today. It wouldn’t be anything fancy, being just a corner cabaret, but the owner didn’t like to bore himself by cooking the same thing every day.
At ten fifty, Mme Barthélemy came in like a stormcloud.
I hunched dutifully over my work, sewing away like a busy little ant. It’s not that I was afraid of Mme Barthélemy, for I got over that my first week, but I was the junior girl in the shop and she was the boss. Why would I put myself forward with her scowling away like that, hanging up her fichu and slapping down her things as if she wanted to be throwing them across the room, and both Isabelle and her own daughter in the shop to take on the matter instead of me?
Like any self-respecting busy little ant, of course, I pricked my ears as sharp as they’d go to listen.
“Maman! You look like Hernani himself.” Sandrine’s clever fingers didn’t pause in their work, but her brows drew together. “What on earth has happened?”
“If that’s Favart’s pamphlet you’re working on, drop it.” Mme Barthélemy untied her bonnet with a sharp jerk and flung it onto a shelf. “Our good idiots at the censorship bureau have forbidden it.”
I fumbled the pages I was holding, nearly sending the whole half-sewn pamphlet fluttering onto the shop floor. Memories of a Family of the Theater, with some Accompanying Witticisms stared up at me from the front page, by Antoine-Pierre-Charles Favart, with allusion to his Grandfather’s Memoirs. All those hours this morning, all those needlepricks, and the whole stack useless?
Sandrine let out a terrible oath. “We can’t print them?”
“Language, my dear. We can’t sell. We can print all we like, if we want to throw away money, but it amounts to the same thing.”
“That fluff?” I’d heard Sandrine irritated, and coquettishly mock-angry, but this was a deeper frustration than I’d heard for anything but political rants. “What about Borel’s play?”
“Oh, Borel! Never a word on him, yea or nay. Not that it matters much. Sorry, my darling, I know that you love him—”
“His work, mother, I love his work—”
“—but it’s a small print run and a short play, that one. You know it’s even odds the play won’t go ahead, especially with his name attached. But Favart! All his fans, all his father’s and grandfather’s fans, all that theater gossip, all those people who hated one Favart or another and would have bought the pamphlet to argue with! I was going to tell you to save the plates, I was sure we’d have a second printing at the least. And now, these idiots, they have their heads so empty of everything but kissing the king’s royal... fingers, they’ve decided that he’s a subversive radical. He mentions young ladies running wild, does he perhaps mean those demoiselles causing a ruckus down south in the Ariège? Perhaps he supports them! He writes of the Opera upholding its contract with the audience, ah! No doubt he’s making a sly reference to the Charter! Half a dozen more like that.”
“But those are so minor, surely he can just…” Sandrine faltered, no doubt remembering that we were well past the point of making any changes to the text. Silently, I lifted a stack of newly bound signatures and let them thump back down.
“Indeed,” said Mme Barthélemy, with an awful dry finality. “No doubt he will, but in the meantime, we’ll have to pulp the run. Put them away in the corner, Mylène, child. We’ll give it a few days. I doubt he can talk them round, but I suppose he’ll want to try.”
I did as I was bid. Sandrine rounded on her mother and they started in again, both of them furious at the same distant, entirely uncaring men, and sniping each other for lack of a closer target. Isabelle and Antoine, equally silent, folded up the printed pages, stacked them up, and started in on the arcane and precise work of moving the trays of type and etched plates out of the press. I shuffled back and forth with armfuls of paper. I’d never be able to carry the same amount Isabelle could—my arms were strong, but my left leg had never grown quite straight, and it limited me—and each load felt twice as heavy as it should have, just from my mood. All that work! I don’t mind working hard, but when it’s for nothing at all, that gets to you.
I was just straightening the fifth and last armful when the clock tolled eleven. I stared glumly at the stacks of paper. I’d nearly finished; I would have, if not for Mme Barthélemy’s news. Isabelle would have owed me that drink.
Isabelle’s voice interrupted my dark thoughts. “All right, my chickens, the eleven o’clock break is sacred no matter what the censors are up to. Mylène, you’ve earned your wine, and our dear Jesus knows I want some of my own. Come along.”
And off we all stumped. The wine did help a bit, or at least drinking it in company did.
We rallied for the afternoon, of course. We had to; sitting around moping wouldn’t earn us our bread, nor Mme Barthélemy the coin to pay us with. Two or three months ago, we’d have had a backlog of lower-priority printing to go through, but things had slowed down, between censors’ cancelations and skittish authors. Still, any shop always has make-work tasks, so we had enough to scrabble together. When there were no signatures for me to bind, I scrubbed at ink smears and practiced my memorization of the font organizational system. Mme Barthélemy was out more than she was in, bustling about on errands I wasn’t sure I had the right to ask about. So was Sandrine, either accompanying her mother or sent off with some cryptic direction like “Sandrine, my dear, go talk to Josée down the way, and see how things are with her father.” Isabelle stayed to keep charge, trading looks and low incomprehensible comments with both Barthélemies whenever they were in. I scrubbed harder to keep from minding being left out.
At three o’clock, when I was running through the title case for a fifth time and making the same mistakes I’d made the last four, Mme Barthélemy stumped in and dropped her basket. “All right, everyone. Let’s save something for Monday. Off you go. I’ll pay you full wages for the day, but there’s nothing worth doing just now. Goodnight.” She undid her bonnet with a tired air of finality. I traded a look with Isabelle and Antoine, Sandrine being off on one of those mysterious errands still, and got to my feet.
“You run along,” Isabelle told me, still sitting. “I have an errand myself before I head home.”
All the way home, I stewed about it. (And I went the long way; there had been rioting over by Rue Saint-Denis this morning, and I wanted no part of that tangle or the mop-up.) It was strange to be walking home so early. That strangeness muddled up with the day it had been and made me feel a sort of formless prickliness.
This wasn’t a normal lull in business. I wouldn’t have known that back home, as the king’s edicts came slow to Normandy and all I knew of what was in the newspapers and pamphlets was what I read there. But in Paris, the king speaks and the streets know it on the instant. From Sandrine and Isabelle, and from keeping my ears open, and from a hundred little comments by a hundred different people, I had learned my way about in all sorts of new ways.
The general election hadn’t gone well for the king and his ministers, and Charles X wasn’t a king who liked to be balked, if any king does. The government was a thunderstorm. The censors were feeling a rush of power, or were urged to it by the king, and were kicking out like yearling bulls, reckless and eager to bruise all and sundry. And their kicks fell mainly on us, and the customers who came to us to send out their words for purchase.
It seemed so unfair. We were just little rabbits in the field. The customers who came to us weren’t all little rabbits—why, we had Favart, after all, and he’d been in the Paris Salon!—but they weren’t high and mighty, either. So why the bulls should have kicked at us so much I didn’t know.
Except I did. We weren’t rabbits, not really. Nobody in Paris was. Maybe we were goats, or dogs. Something that could band together and scare a cow—send even a bull running, or kill it, like old headless Louis, the king’s older brother—and they wanted to keep us bruised. Cattle dogs, Sandrine would have said, with that merrily ferocious grin of hers: cattle dogs that ought to be the ones doing the herding, if we’d only work together for it. Her talk frightened me.
But it was exciting, too. And maybe not all of it right, but… maybe a little bit right.
I took my thoughts home, to the apartment where Isabelle and her Lucie had first loaned and then rented me their spare mattress in the corner of their sitting room. I buried them in the busyness of feeding their little caged canary and tidying up—I always tried to make myself useful, because I wanted Isabelle to keep liking me well enough to keep sharing a small shop floor with me, and because I knew Isabelle and Lucie were giving me a very good deal on the rent, and because anyway I liked to be busy. Dad had taught me that.
I buried my thoughts, but I didn’t stop thinking them.
Later that evening, I sat by the window with Isabelle in her squashy chair drawing—she’s a terrible artist, if I’m being scrupulously honest, but she knows it and she likes to draw anyway, so where’s the harm?—and Lucie at the table putting her hair in rollers.
Sandrine had stopped by earlier on her way to a salon at M. Victor Hugo’s place, but only briefly. She’d tried to entice me along—but Mylène, anyone who’s anyone will be there! Talking of real things, important things! It’s good to know such people, my dear, especially with everything going on Paris now. You really ought to—but I’d refused. She’d taken me to one some time ago and it had made me feel like a sluggish provincial with mud for brains to be surrounded by all those witty uproarious theatrical radicals, all outrageous fashion and political opinions.
Besides that, my leg was hurting, and I was peeved on top of that. I’d been hoping she’d stay in for a bit of a cuddle, especially as she’d been running errands for her mother after work all week. So we’d half-quarreled—or maybe more than half—and she’d left in a huff a little while ago.
I was trying to read. But it was hard to focus on much this evening, somehow. It had been even before the sunset started to steal away the sunlight. I put the book down and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes.
“Is the light fading, Milou? Come over here, I’ll get a lamp.” Lucie is the sort to nickname everyone upon a day’s acquaintance, and warm enough to make the habit endearing instead of annoying.
“The light’s fine,” I told my sleeves. “It’s my brain that’s fading. Ugh.”
“You shouldn’t take little Sandrine’s enthusiasms to heart. She thinks everyone ought to enjoy everything she does, that’s all, but she’ll listen when you say you don’t.”
“It’s not that,” I said, though it was, a bit. I didn’t like feeling like a mud-for-brains, especially around her, and I didn’t like coming second best to a stupid salon. “She says it’s real things, all that stuff they talk—and the plays and the poems and all—and she’s probably right, she knows so much—and their politics, too, it’s not that I disagree, mostly, but twelve citations and three puns for every opinion, even the wrong ones—ugh! If that’s real things I’ve never had a real thought in my life.” I lifted my head and sent them an apologetic grimace.
“I went to see Hernani, you know,” Isabelle volunteered. Hernani was the most uproarious of the theatrical uproars, shattering every rule of theater in sight, the darling of Sandrine’s artistic circles. Everyone at that salon I’d been to had quoted it constantly. “In March or so. Couldn’t see what the fuss was about, to be honest.” She shrugged.
“It doesn’t make a great deal of sense, really,” I agreed, with a quiet thrill of transgression. Sandrine loved it so much that it seemed a sin to admit that I found the language beautiful but the way it discarded classical strictures almost too daring and the plot absolutely idiotic. Even aside from the fact that it was nearly impossible to hear the actors over the audience. All the Romantics yelled out lines and jokes and callbacks, and all the classicists yelled out insults, and sometimes they actually fought each other in the aisles about it, and the actors yelled grimly over the whole thing. You got double the show for your money, at least, I’ll say that.
Isabelle made a face. “All that stomping and swooning and dying in each other’s arms for no good reason. And I’m old, call me a relic if you like, but I rather like the classical unities. You go to a play and you know what will and won’t be in it. Real life gives us all the chaos I need. But these young artists, they think if you just make your art wild and free enough, put every emotion you’ve got into it, you can build a better world out of that.”
“And you think they’re fools.” I tried not to sound glum, but I was feeling it, even though I’d been resenting those same young artists a moment before. Why does everyone of a certain age feel the need to tell the young that they’re starry-eyed fools?
“No,” she said.
I goggled. She shrugged again, more expressively this time. “Well, maybe they are, but maybe I am for thinking it. It doesn’t matter. If they do manage that better world, I’ll be the first to thank them with all my heart! And plenty of them are doing a good deal more than art, you know, for the cause. You can write a play that makes no damn sense and help a wanted man out of the city and stand ready for a barricade, all three. The play’s not the point. The point is, none of us know how to get to a better world, or we’d have done it already. Even the Revolution—it overthrew so much that was old and awful, the people took great strides forward in ‘89, but it had its bad sides too. The ones who rail about it aren’t all wrong. We’re all blindfolded in a dark room, trying to fumble our way to the exit, trying to tear off the blindfold so that if we stumble across some light we can see it.”
I thought about that, and about Sandrine’s fierce certainties. She was so much surer about all her convictions than I’d ever been in my life. “How do you know when you’re going right, then?”
Isabelle made an eloquent who knows? face. It was Lucie who spoke up.
“You look at the people you’re with,” she said, and smiled. “If they’re people you trust to steer to a good end, then you’re probably doing all right.”
On Sunday I went to mass, as always, and made confession. I didn’t tell the priest anything that wasn’t his business—my prickly unsettled feelings about the haze of rumor and riot in the air, the exact dimensions of my friendship with Sandrine—but it always does me good. You feel your sins washed away, and you sit and hear the holy Latin rolling over you, and that washes you clean too. Sandrine calls me a provincial for it, and I suppose all her artistic radicals would too, but I don’t see why there’s anything provincial about trusting in God.
On Monday morning there was a stormcloud charge to the air. It felt as if all my prickling had spread outside my head to the whole of Paris, or at least the whole of our neighborhood. Usually on the walk to work I just feel tired and grumbly (and stiff too, until I’ve walked a few blocks and gotten everything in my bad leg moving again), but that day I was wide awake and jittery. Everyone around me seemed to be casting quick glances and passing whispers, but I couldn’t quite catch why.
I’d only just settled into my chair and started to lay out my tools when there came a quick commotion of running feet, followed a youthful yell. “Madame!” the kid cried, skidding to a halt between the two typesetting stands. “Madame Barthélemy!”
Jacques, it was, old M. Daigneau’s grandson from three blocks over. Every printer in Paris had a few children running notes around town, be they relatives or neighborhood urchins or both, and in these unsettled days every printer was keeping ears to the ground. Daigneau’s is a bigger shop that can handle more bulk work, and Barthélemy’s does better fine work, so there are notes and runners going back and forth all the time. We see a lot of Jacques.
“Now then, Jacquot, what’s the fuss?” Mme Barthélemy strolled over. She gets worked up herself, but when someone else is worked up instead she turns into a lump of imperturbable stone, and that was in full force now. “Word from your granddad?”
“It’s the king!” Jacques cried, nearly vibrating with his excitement. The atmosphere galvanized, just at the word, and I fumbled a needle. Anything the king did was news, and unlikely to be good. “He’s altered the Charter by decree, him and that rat Polignac. Sent out ordinances. Just this morning—Grandpa got it from the folks at Le National. He’s suspended freedom of the press, that’s one of the ordinances.”
“Suspended it?” That was Isabelle, sharper than I’d ever heard her, and on her heels Sandrine demanded, “Temporarily? Or permanently?”
Mme Barthélemy lifted her hand to shush them, and they shushed. “Well, child?”
Jacques fumbled in his vest and pulled out a newspaper: Le Moniteur universel, and without seeing the date I knew it had to be this morning’s first printing. He shoved it at her. “Suspended, that’s all it says! See for yourself, Madame. Grandpa says to tell you it’s time.”
Mme Barthélemy gazed down at the paper in her hands. “Well then,” she said. “Well then.”
The hair was up on the back of my neck. I felt as if I was still in a dream, and simultaneously so full of nervous energy I might explode out of my skin at any moment. I flicked my eyes at Sandrine surreptitiously, and saw her whole face shining. Isabelle looked like a mountain all by herself: stolid, huge, all looming power.
It dawned on me that perhaps not all of those errands they’d been running had been to customers; I felt as if I’d been standing on a hillside for months, and only just realized it was a volcano.
She folded the paper and tucked it away in her basket with small, unhurried motions. She patted the kerchief she kept over it back into place. “Well then,” she said one more time, as if to herself, and then raised her voice. “All right, my girls. Shop’s closed today. There’s no point in the press without its liberty, now is there? Mylène, Antoine, home you go. There’ll be fighting in the streets before long, if I make my guess. I hope I’m wrong but I’m sure I’m not. Sandrine, Isa, here we go, my dears.”
I found my voice. “I’m coming too.” It came out thick and halting—I hadn’t known I was going to say it until I did, but I meant it—so I cleared my throat and said it again, clearer. I couldn’t be shooed home from this. We provincials have voices too, loud as anybody else.
“Oh, Mylène, I knew you would!” cried Sandrine, but Isabelle made a sharp hushing gesture.
“Mylène,” she said. “Are you sure? It’ll get messy today. Bullets and barricades and blood in the gutters, kind of messy. No shame to want out of that.”
Sandrine’s shining pretty eyes or not, I made myself return Isabelle’s steady gaze. I swallowed. “I’m sure. I’ll leave if ever I’m not. But it’s not right—it’s not right, that the king should think he can overturn elections and the press and all just to suit him. I’m not trotting off home. And you all know what you’re about, don’t you?”
Isabelle nodded at me, solid and steady. I trusted her, I realized; I trusted her to lead the way to a barricade across the Rue Saint-Denis, if it came to that. Mme Barthélemy sighed, but she was smiling faintly down at her basket too, and Sandrine beamed right at me, bright as the July sunlight stretching over the roofs of Paris.
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
Links to Heather Online
Links to Elizabeth Porter Birdsall Online
Links to C.J. Lavigne Online
What it says on the tin.
Rackin, Phyllis. 2005. “Afterword” in Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-0953-7
Although this collection does have one paper addressing female homoeroticism on stage, I have covered it primarily as background reading for exploring role-playing and stage theatrics as a context for romance tropes involving female couples.
Afterword
The afterword sums up the conclusion of the collection that the “all male stage” is a myth and an aberration, being true only of certain specific times, contexts, and locations. Women are absent from the stage only when “the stage” is very narrowly and carefully defined. The concept holds true in England only for a narrow range of time between the rise of private professional companies (displacing the earlier tradition of guild-sponsored plays) and the entrance of women into those companies at the Restoration. It never applied to amateur theatricals, court masques, or local seasonal theatricals. And while other countries had specific theater genres that specified an all-male cast, the prominence of those contexts was more limited than in England and gave way to a mixed-gender profession earlier.