This article discusses ideas of “inseparability” and “separation” in social relations from a number of different angles. The author does a fair amount of overlaying interpersonal and political experiences of in/separation in ways that don’t always feel pertinent. That is, that within the sphere of friendship, ‘inseparable” had a particular meaning regarding the merging of identities and the creation of an intimate private space inhabited by the friends, whereas within the political sphere, Roulston focuses on the pressure to separate women as a class from meaningful participation.
Dangerous Liaisons (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos)
18th century French novel that includes an older woman expressing desire for the young woman she is setting up for (heterosexual) seduction.
LHMP entry
Elizabeth Mavor, in her study of the Ladies of Llangollen, offers as a motivation for the rise of Romantic Friendship, that women could not achieve with men the ideal of equal Platonic friendship, and so turned to other women. But Faderman notes that 17th century writers (some female) considered such heterosexual equality possible. Even so, the general sense on both sides was that men and women existed in such different spheres (both by practice and because of beliefs about their inherent natures) that reaching across the divide was difficult.
While the Inseparable motif sometimes employs a male character to bridge the practical logistics of forming a female couple, it is more natural for a triangle of this sort to frame the man and woman as rivals for their shared object of desire. Sappho’s fragment 31 encapsulates the envy of a woman for the man who has the attention of the woman she loves. And in contrast to the common motif of-two men competing for a woman's love, when one of the rivals is a woman there is always an awareness that the playing field is badly uneven.
Here Donoghue considers the literature that addresses sexual activity between women. In contrast to some claims, there are a number of home-grown English texts in this period that address non-penetrative sexual activities between women, and during the 18th century there seems to have been a regular dialog between French and English writing in this vein, with works in one language rapidly appearing in translation in the other.
