This was not the book about 18th century lesbians that I had meant to read. I have a second book on the same topic, also with the word Intimate in the title, on my shelf. But, I accidentally read this one instead, and so have swapped the two on my list. I think this one goes better with the other “Sapphic History” book on my list anyway, which covers a similar time frame but in American literature.
I was pleasantly surprised by how materialist this book is, especially for a book that focuses on analyzing literature. Moore’s argument is essentially that during the 1700s, with colonization, revolution, the slave trade, and increasing industrialization going on (shift from feudalism to capitalism in its later stages), the bourgeoise had a lot of contradictions and anxieties they wanted to shore up/ignore/resolve. Gender, sexuality, and race are three ideological axes with which bourgeoise hegemony sustains itself, so figuring out the role of the Ideal Bourgeoise Woman (and therefore defining Others against her) was important. Making Others works as a justification for division and oppression. The novel, being a bourgeoise genre that rose up during this time, was one way that these ideologies were created/distributed/circulated.
— Most of the following is me summarizing Moore’s arguments
The first chapter after the introduction looks at Millennium Hall. In this book, the women who are living separately from men are depicted as non-sexual, productive, and morally superior. By controlling the working class women around them, they make these women better. Yet even though they live independently from men, Moore argues that the sphere of influence of these women is still the domestic, private sphere. Engels, D’Emilio, and others have talked about how the shift to capitalism also meant a separating of the work/life spheres, since people had to go Out to work in other places, rather than working other people’s land (which they also lived on) or running cottage industries. There is also much talk of “slavery,” but always as a metaphor, comparing women’s subjugation to men to slavery, even though the actual slave trade was very much happening in a big way at the same time. This lets “slavery” be discussed while ignoring actual slavery.
The next chapter is about Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which is kind of the opposite— the women’s relationships to each other are automatically eroticized because of their line of work, and one character teaches Fanny (the main character) how to have sex (with her) to “prepare her” for sex with men. This book also claims homosexuality as native to England, instead of casting it as a foreign French/Italian practice. And the problem with it is framed as inconsistency/difficulty identifying who is homosexual (lack of defining physical characteristics) rather than something inherent to it. Moore also notes how while the plot is ostensibly promoting heterosexuality and women’s desire for men (it is, after all, written to arouse men), there’s times when Fanny seems to be desiring her fellow sex workers and they seem to be more concerned with her enjoyment than their clients’. In the end, she argues that the eroticism throughout the rest of the book is assembled at the end of the novel in service of national bourgeoise English identity. This series of ideological moves lets England incorporate women’s desire/sexual excess into itself while preserving what’s more important: power and money. It’s kind of rewriting the definitions of what it means to be English so that Englishness can continue being (viewing itself as) superior given shifting material conditions.
The next chapter is about Belinda, a novel from 1801. But Moore begins first by discussing a real life court case about Jane Cummings, a student who accused her teachers of having lesbian sex, and discussing Anne Lister, who dressed masculinely and did masculine things and was educated and loved women, but disdained those same traits in other women. Lister can get away with it because she’s nobility. She still wants other women (her love interests) to be appropriately feminine. In the court case, it became an issue of who was more likely to come up with the idea of lesbian sex: the student, or the teachers? Either the student had the idea and made it up, or the teachers had the idea and did it. The court ended up deciding in the teachers’ favor, but for a racist reason: because Jane was half-Indian, they decided that made it more likely that she would know about (and therefore lie about) deviant things. Similar moves to both of these real world examples can be found in the book. The only person who explicitly accuses one character of being inappropriately masculine is Juba, an African servant (slave? Wikipedia says servant) on the plantation. The book treats this as sensical because only someone who is also deviant (Black) would have the correct knowledge to know another deviant. At the same time, that character’s gender nonconformity reinforces the value of “appropriate” female relationships. (Like Lister is still feeding bourgeoise femininity even though she herself does not practice it.)
The last chapter (besides the conclusion) is about Emma, and Moore argues that this book does the same kinds of identity category maintenance but in a much subtler way, because it interiorizes and psychologizes what is external and material in the other books. Emma, then, is an example of how the process that was at work over the course of the decades of the other novels manifested as the 19th century got on its way.
So, how sapphism was treated in novels during this time (and it was treated/present!) was important, but not really for itself— it was important for how its ideological management enabled other capitalist and imperialist processes.