LHMP #487 Wood 1993 With Ready Eye

Given the prominence of the word “lesbianism” in the title of this article, I found it less interesting than I hoped. Margaret Fuller was a prominent American writer and feminist in the first half of the 19th century. The theme of this article is how her writings and opinions around various romantic connections she had with women illustrate the tensions around the dividing line between acceptable and praiseworthy Romantic Friendship and the types of relationships between women that were felt to go beyond the bounds of the acceptable.

In general, this article leans more toward literary criticism than social history. There is a review of literature on Romantic Friendship and the history of sexuality in the 19th century, examining how relationships that were described with strongly romantic and sensual language could be seen as not transgressing social norms. (See, for example, Smith-Rosenberg 1975 and Lillian Faderman 1981.) Two strains of thought on this topic are: 1) that 19th century female friendships were never “lesbian” and that was why they were acceptable; or 2) that all such female friendships can be considered to be within a broad “lesbian continuum” regardless of whether they were erotic, thus reducing the meaningfulness of the term “lesbian.” Wood looks at a middle path where 19th century society was constantly, if silently, negotiating how far female friendships could go without crossing the line.

Wood identifies places in Margaret Fuller’s writings where she appears to be self-aware of reaching or crossing those lines, such as when she wrote to one intimate friend, “I build on our friendship now with trust, for I think it is redeemed from ‘the search after Eros’.” In passages like this, Fuller recognizes the potential for eros (thus negating framing #1) and deliberately steps back from it (thus negating framing #2).

Fuller was hardly the only writer who recognized that this boundary existed, well before intimate friendships were pathologized by medical sexologists. Advice literature aimed at women and girls cautions them to view their same-sex friendships as “not the real thing…but rather a foreshadowing of love” that must be put in second place after marriage. Close same-sex bonds were essential to the homosocial divisions of society, but there was a constant policing of those bonds to ensure they didn’t exclude men and marriage entirely.

In her feminist writings, Fuller finds an uneasy balance between attacking the notion of women’s inherent difference from men, and accepting the idea that certain types of opinions, interests, and literature were inherently gendered.

Overall, far less interesting than I hoped, and the examples from Fuller’s writing that are supposed to illustrate a “lesbian” sensibility are rather weak.