Add "Inseparable" to Your Codewords for Sapphic

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.

The idea of “inseparable friends” held a significant place in France of the later 18th century, but both gender and class had an impact on how inseparability was experienced and performed. Among the aristocracy, inseparability was part of the public performance of identity while at the same time creating a refuge from the lack of privacy that aristocratic performance entailed. Among the bourgeoisie, inseparable friendships were more private by default, but might be publicized in strategic fashion. Cutting across these trends, female friendships among all classes tended to belong more to the private sphere, while male friendships were more likely to be part of a public identity. (Cross-gender friendships were more complicated and risked being read as an insincere cover for erotic relations.)

During this same era, except for some brief exceptions during the Revolution, women were systematically and officially “separated” from the political sphere, leaving them to wield cultural and intellectual influence, but losing the types of political power they had access to in earlier centuries. Philosophers pushed the position that women’s presence in the public sphere was inherently corrupting. [Note: This was one face of the anti-feminist program of Enlightenment theories of sex difference, which resolved itself into the “separate spheres” position that dominated the 19th century.] This was framed as a “return” of women to the private sphere as a remedy for social and political ills supposedly generated by her stepping out of “her place.”

Part of this program was to construct the “ideal woman” as focused on domestic concerns, a focus which also elevated bourgeois status over the aristocracy. Within this framing, inseparable female friendship occupied an ambiguous middle ground between domestic and public, creating a private emotional space but asserting the right to reach beyond the family to do so.

On the occasions when the powers that be decided to undermine female friendship, two major strategies were employed: framing female friendships as trivial and unserious, and raising the specter of sexuality.

Literary representations of “inseparable” female friendships often worked to contain their power even while validating their existence. Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse sets up Julie and Claire’s friendship as domestic and supportive, but also in conflict with the heterosexual relationships that work to separate them or to confine them together in the segregated “woman’s space” of shared motherhood. Readers did not necessarily absorb the “containment” lesson, but built their own alternate family structures that prioritized the female bond.

A minor incident within Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses elevates the bond between three female “inseparables” from competition with heterosexual relations to an active challenge that must be destroyed. Not only are they a challenge to the (male) seducer, who has been left outside their bond, but destruction of the friendship bond itself is the goal. (The destruction includes the implication of sapphism.)

The article analyzes these texts in detail and continues with a discussion of other criticisms of the time aimed at women in the public sphere: that acting outside the domestic realm makes them masculine, that urban women (necessarily engaging more in public) are the equivalent of actors on stage, that artificiality is inherently dishonest.

The ways in which various of these strands of thought intersected in critiques of Queen Marie-Antoinette is reviewed, including her creation of separate personal spaces defined by her circle of female friends as a buffer against the culture of the court. She is criticized for attempting the separate, domestic, private, feminine space that women are supposed to be restricted to, and then blamed for the alternate economy of access and favors that develops within that separate space.

In conclusion, the author lays out the no-win scenario that gender-related rhetoric built for women: separation from public life is both a virtue and a danger that must be punished; inseparable friendships are both praiseworthy and suspect; philosophers claim to seek “natural” women, but define women’s nature in constrained and artificial terms.