LHMP #567 Clark 2023 Anne Lister’s Search for the Anatomy of Sex

This article explores Lister’s sources of anatomical knowledge and how they affected her embodied understanding of erotic response. The question begins with an odd fact: although Lister first recorded the word “clytoris” in 1814, at age 22, it wasn’t until 17 years later that she describes clearly identifying her own clitoris. What can make sense of this for a woman who was deeply and clinically interested in her own sexuality?

The primary answer (to jump ahead to the conclusion) is that the ambiguity and vagueness of the materials she had available led to her confusing the cervix for the clitoris, and then not understanding how it was supposed to be at the seat of female pleasure.

The article lays out of the groundwork of prevalent theories about the analogy of male and female anatomy. Three elements contributed to her confusion. First, theories that described the vagina/uterus as analogous to an inverted penis, combined with descriptions of the clitoris as like a miniature penis, led her to expect it to be located inside the vagina. Second, although medical texts of the 16th and 17th century were the first to give technical descriptions of genital anatomy, including the so-called “rediscovery of the clitoris,” by the 18th to 19th century, focus had shifted to reproductive anatomy, in which the clitoris was not considered to participate. (In part, this was due to no longer considering female orgasm to be essential for conception.) Third, as medical texts became oriented towards a general readership that included women, descriptions related to sex and reproduction were made more vague and euphemistic. Lister also had to deal with texts that, when they did mention women’s non-heterosexual activities, did so disparagingly. Though Lister seems to have been adept at reading counter to such texts.

Due to Lister’s habit of recording her reading in detail, we can know exactly which textual materials she drew sexual knowledge from. We also know that she found references to female homosexuality in classical texts, and made lists of sexual vocabulary found there.

Although the classical material was disparaging of lesbianism, this doesn’t seem to have colored Lister’s views. It took her a little more effort to shake off the attitudes toward masturbation found in texts such as Onania. In early journals, Lister described her masturbation (carefully recorded with a cross in journal entries) as “shameful” and “a vile habit,” but these negative references disappear after 1825.

It was Lister’s practice, when touching on sexual matters in conversation, to feign ignorance until she had elicited the other person’s degree of sexual knowledge, and only then, if she judged it wise, to admit her own knowledge. We see this in her conversations with Mrs. Barlow, where she elicits Barlow’s opinion that there was “little harm” in sex between women, before engaging in a discussion of how they understood biblical references considered to touch on the subject. (They concluded that biblical “onanism” referred to coitus interruptus, and that the reference to women participating in “that which is against nature” referred to anal sex. Thus, they eliminated possible biblical condemnations of lesbianism.)

Lister developed a detailed vocabulary related to sexual experience. [Note: Some seems to have been an idiosyncratic use of ordinary vocabulary, but some may be drawn from existing usage that hasn’t been otherwise recorded.] In the Eliza Raine era, she uses “felix” (happy) to document sexual encounters as well as masturbation. Later, she uses “kiss” to document orgasm during sexual encounters, with various degrees of satisfaction described. “Kiss” could also be literal, and the dual meaning may have been adopted from the dual senses of French “baiser.” [Note: As Orr 2023 suggests, Lister’s “kiss” also appears to involve face-to-face genital contact, with the expectation of mutual pleasure.]

It isn’t clear to what extent Lister’s specific vocabulary was shared by her lovers as opposed to being private. In one case she records a lover referring to “using the fingers” in a context that Lister might have described as “grubbling.” This article provides the first source for “grubbling” (manual stimulation of a clothed partner) that I’ve encountered, noting that it’s included in Johnson’s dictionary as “to feel in the dark” with a citation from Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s The Art of Love as “to grubble, or at least to kiss.” There are earlier references to the word meaning “to grope,” so there’s a solid basis for believing that Lister picked it up from existing usage. (See also Turton 2023 following.)

Another Lister term that could be idiosyncratic or possibly picked up from dialectal usage is “queer” to refer generally to the female genitals, possibly connected to “quim” with the same sense. (See Lanser 2003)

The specific spelling “clytoris” in Lister’s first record of the word suggests she encountered it in the popular sex manual Aristotle’s Masterpiece, in which the spelling is found and which Lister records having read at various times between 1817 and 1821. This work was half sex manual, half erotica, but lacked illustrations. It describes the clitoris as the “seat of venereal pleasure” in women, as being similar to a penis and capable of erection, and as being located near the “neck” or “door” of the womb. (The book doesn’t describe the cervix.) Given the ambiguity of this description (“womb” might refer to the uterus or to the combination of uterus plus vagina) and to the suggestion of a far more prominent “erect clitoris” than most women were likely to experience, it’s understandable that Lister could have overlooked the actual organ in her search for something interior and more prominent. Various journal entries make it clear that she thought the cervix was what was being described, but her own examination failed to produce any pleasure from it, for herself or her lovers.

In contrast, Lister clearly understood the pleasure of stimulating “the top of the queer” and that orgasm was “produced on the surface.”

Being familiar with texts that attributed female same-sex desire to an enlarged clitoris, Lister considered whether this could be a cause for her own desires, but found no physical formation that could account for it. She did, however, speculate on the possibility that she could enlarge her clitoris – perhaps buy an operation – sufficiently to use it for penetrative sex. (This was during the era when she still thought the references were to the cervix.) She also speculated on whether it was possible for female ejaculation to cause pregnancy. [Note: This is before general understanding of the actual biology of fertilization.]

The article has an extensive discussion of Lister’s interest in, and pursuit of, scientific knowledge, which was a significant goal of her visits to Paris. It wasn’t until she studied the illustrated plates of the medical texts by the Cloquet brothers in 1831 that she finally was able to connect descriptions of the clitoris with its anatomical location – a discovery that she celebrated by “incurring a cross.

The French medical texts she studied tended to follow descriptions of the clitoris with theories about its enlargement and the association with lesbianism. While these discussions were negative in tone, Lister was quite practiced in reading against such texts, and doesn’t seem to have been infected with their attitudes.