Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England
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"Between Women literally shifts our understanding of how the history of sexuality and gender norms ought to be written. Sharon Marcus's groundbreaking text finally offers us a framework for thinking about the social and sexual bonds among women and their centrality to the history of gender, sexuality, marriage, and the family. Working with a wide array of texts, Marcus brilliantly shows how literary studies can enter into both social history and contemporary politics. Her final reflections on gay and lesbian marriage make clear the high stakes and pressing conceptual implications for our time of this kind of critical and capacious work."--Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley"This magnificent and impressive book offers us what Foucault would have called a 'history of the present': not only does it completely transform our perception of the past, but, in so doing, it also newly illuminates the debates and struggles that are ours, today."--Didier Eribon, author of Michel Foucault and Insult and the Making of the Gay Self"Between Women significantly revises conventional wisdom about Victorian female friendships, desire, and marriage. To tell this story, Marcus has studied women's life writings, canonical fiction, fashion magazines, doll stories, and anthropological texts of the period. The result is intellectually stunning and wonderfully entertaining."--Judith R. Walkowitz, Johns Hopkins University"Between Women is not only a first-rate Victorianist study, it is also the most original work on gender and sexuality to appear in years--one that promises to shake up feminist theory and queer theory in all the right ways. A densely researched book, as academically sound as it is intellectually thrilling."--Diana Fuss, Princeton University"This is a superb work of scholarship, beautifully conceived and written, that will change our views of Victorian women, men, society, and culture. Sharon Marcus's argument that the Victorians viewed intense and passionate female relationships as a vital precursor and stimulus for heterosexual marriage is persuasive. What she has accomplished is the most difficult of intellectual projects: seeing what is in plain sight and yet has not been noticed because of our cultural preconceptions, and then using her findings to recast an entire field."--Bonnie S. Anderson, City University of New YorkPublishers WeeklyQueen Victoria would not be amused. In this persuasively argued, provocative book, Marcus makes the case that women in late 19th-century England engaged in intimate friendships-which "the Victorians... believed cultivated the feminine virtues of sympathy and altruism"-that often had a sexual component of visual objectification and even sexual intimacy. Marcus, associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, probes a wide range of the period's culture-novels of Dickens, Trollope and George Eliot; women's fashion magazines; female children's literature; doll stories-to understand a Victorian culture that is not interpreted by "our present-day belief that heterosexual norms dominate all lives." Going against the current academic grain, Marcus maintains that images of women in fashion magazines did not turn women into passive objects but represented women's own "erotic appetite for femininity." Much of Marcus's material will be new to the common reader, and she presents it in plain, engaging prose. Many of her examples are marvelously intriguing: her critique of the conservative opposition to same-sex marriage is bolstered by her documentation of prevalent female-female marriage in the 19th century involving such noted women as Charlotte Cushman, Anne Lister and Rosa Bonheur. This is an important addition to the current literature on sexuality and gender. (Feb.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Illustrations viiAcknowledgments ixIntroduction: The Female Relations of Victorian England 1Overview 2Historical and Disciplinary Borders 5How This Book Engages Scholarly Debates 9How I Came to Write This Book 14Conclusion 21Elastic Ideals: Female Friendship 23Friendship and the Play of the System 25Female Friendship in Feminist Studies 29Victorian Women's Lifewriting and Relationships between Women 32Female Friendship as Gender Norm 38Friends and "Friends" 43The Repertory of Friendship 54"Purified and Made One in Jesus" 62Friendship, Kinship, Marriage 66Just Reading: Female Friendship and the Marriage Plot 73The Form of the Plot 82Female Amity and the Companionate Marriage Plot 85Female Amity and the Feminist Marriage Plot 91The Double Marriage Plot: Friendship as Cause and Effect 96Unamiable Villette: Lucy Snowe's Passion 102Mobile Objects: Female Desire 109Dressing Up and Dressing Down the FemininePlaything 111Fashion and Fantasies of Women 116Discipline and Punishment in the Fashion Magazine 135Live Dolls 149The Female Accessory in Great Expectations 167The Female Dyad and the Origins of Desire 173Masculinity as Castoff 177Pip as Doll and Fashion Plate 180The Sentimental Education of the Female Dyad 184Plastic Institutions: Female Marriage 191The Genealogy of Marriage 193Female Marriage in the Nineteenth Century 196Female Marriage and Victorian Marriage Reform 204The Debate over Contractual Marriage 212Victorian Anthropology and the History of Marriage 217Same-Sex Unions and the History of Civilization 222Contracting Female Marriage in Can You forgive Her? 227Trollope, Feminism, and Female Marriage 228Female Marriage and Contractual Marriage in Can You Forgive Her? 232Marriage as Forgiveness: Primitive Contract and Modern Punishment 239The Persistence of Female Relations 251Conclusion: Woolf, Wilde, and Girl Dates 257Notes 263Bibliography 317Illustration Credits 347Index 349
