LHMP #564c Orr 2006 A Sojourn in Paris - Theorizing Anne’s Sexual and Social Identity

Each of the major editions of Lister material focused on selected aspects of her social or sexual identity at specific life stages. This disjunction mirrors similar disjunctions within lesbian and feminist history. Operating in the context of queer and feminist academics of the 1970s and 1980s, Whitbread and Faderman tended to view Lister’s sexuality through a modern lens, applying sexological theories, or viewing her as transmasculine.

Faderman’s claim that Lister “would have recognized herself” in the sexologists’ category of “congenital invert” (a theoretical framework that was not created until decades after Lister’s death) as she considers Lister’s self-description as incompatible with the prevailing framework of (nonsexual) romantic friendship. But all of these frameworks – invert, romantic friendship, and whatever Lister experienced – are social constructs specific to a particular historic context. Orr notes that further analysis suggests that the “mannish lesbian” stereotype that flourished around the turn of the 20th century was not a product of sexological theory, but rather was an existing identity that emerged out of its specific historic context, and not some sort of universal constant that could be applied retroactively.

Others who have studied Lister’s life have tried to fit her into a butch-femme framework, seeing her as the only “true” lesbian within her various relationships and looking to apply the same dichotomy to other homoerotic couples she encountered. But this view privileges the visibility of Lister’s appearance and behavior, contributing to “femme erasure” and artificially reinforcing a binary view of lesbian identity rather than exploring potential continuity.

By looking for historic reflections of the cultural and behavioral features of modern lesbian identity, the illusion of absence is created, leading to projecting modern identities into that void. Lister’s unambiguous and explicit statements of her erotic orientation and practices were then considered evidence that “modern lesbianism” could now be pushed a century earlier than the sexology era. But this framing separates her from her own historic context–making her a precursor of modern identity rather than an ordinary exemplar of her own era.

If one steps away from the imperative to find a reflection of modern lesbianism, Lister begins to appear to belong solidly to her own time. Sedgwick argues that Lister could be “an almost archetypal Jane Austen heroine.” Many aspects of her life and loves fit solidly within the social and literary discourse of the long 18th century. But even those historians who connect her with 18th century themes fall prey to pigeonholing. Mavor associates her with the late 18th century “cult of sapphism,” ignoring the evidence that Lister was well aware of “sapphic practices” and disavowed that as an identity. [Note: We could use a closer look at exactly what Lister considered “sapphic practices.” Perhaps that will be covered later in this work. The specific aspect she notes is the use of a dildo, which seems an awfully specific thing to define an identity around.] Regardless of how she felt about the idea and label, she was clearly aware of it and the idea it was available to her in her own negotiation of identity. When Lister contrasts her own “natural” style of lovemaking to the “artifice” of the dildo-wielding sapphists, this distracts from how otherwise similar the two appear.

In her focus on education and self-improvement, Lister also has strong echoes of the bluestockings, but once again we have direct evidence that she was aware of that culture and considered herself separate from it. She has comments that seem to reflect an internalized misogyny–valuing her own learning but disapproving of women’s education for others and not valuing education in her own potential lovers. Here we see the conflict between Listers class identity (conservative, upper-class) and modern expectations of female or queer solidarity.

Lister had a variety of examples of other female romantic couples to compare herself to. She visited the Ladies of Llangollen while traveling in Wales and speculated on the nature of their relationship. More locally, she socialized with a female couple Miss Pickford and Miss Threlfall and recognized their couplehood as similar to what she inspired to. Yet she deliberately misled Pickford about her own sexual desires and experience, even as she elicited confessions from Pickford.

But each of these intersections demonstrate that Lister not only was not temporally isolated in absolute terms, but was not isolated even in her own direct experience. Even if her experience and practices differed in detail from those of other women she encountered, she clearly existed within a continuum of homoerotic practice within her own historic context. This evidence of a “lesbian continuum” (to use Adrienne Rich’s term) around the turn of the 19th century contradicts the theories of historians like Smith Rosenberg and Faderman who saw a sharp dichotomy between nonsexual (though often sensual) romantic friendship and lesbian relations defined by genital sexuality. The problem is that–as we actively see in Lister’s own writing and negotiations–active management of sexual knowledge and representation mean that we could rarely know where the dividing line was between sexual and non-sexual relationships.

Among the other models of lesbianism that we know Lister had access to were classical texts like Juvenal’s satires and novels such as Belinda. She may even have been aware of the Pirie and Woods court case. Lister commented on medical texts discussing lesbianism that she found unhelpful in understanding herself. [Note: From context, it appears the central point was the myth of the macro-clitoral lesbian. Lister examined her own genitals and found no evidence of such a thing.]

Lester also used reading and texts as a way of engaging with other women, either using texts such as Byron to sound them out on their romantic receptiveness, or arranging for parallel reading as a practice reinforcing couplehood.

Although Lister sometimes described her own behavior in masculine terms, such as “gentlemanly” she does not–contrary to some historians’ claims–appear to have considered herself “a man in a woman’s body,” even though on one or more occaseven though on one or more occasions she records having fantasized about having a penis or about passing in order to marry. On one occasion she describes herself as “not all masculine but rather softly gentleman-like.” But the forms and nomenclature of heteronormativity were inescapable. She referred to her established partnerships as “like husband and wife.” [Note: This was hardly unique to Lister. Romantic correspondence between women regularly used husband-wife language from as early as the 17th century through the 20th.] The sartorial presentation that felt natural to her was a hybrid of specific masculine-coded garments and an avoidance of “femininity” via the use of sober colors and plain stylings. Some researchers have analyzed how Lister deployed shifting strategies of presentation to address the varied concerns of gender and class. Class was an extremely significant aspect of her identity that she was constantly constructing, negotiating, and defending.

Class becomes relevant in exploring how Lister built relationships with women that she was not romantically involved with. Further, her interactions were not always clearly distinguished between romantic and not. Many women shifted easily between the categories of acquaintance, friend, flirtation, affair, and romance.

Orr sets out that her purpose is not to “correct” previous conclusions about Lister’s sexuality, but to identify some that have become accepted knowledge and overwrite them with a more nuanced view that draws on her specific historic context, rather than evaluating her life in terms of anachronistic models.