“Passionate friendship”—a friendship that’s both emotionally intimate and physically affectionate—is sort of impossible today. Anyone looking at that sort of relationship now would call it lesbianism, but that hasn’t always been the case.
ED: Yeah, we’re pretty crude today… Actually, there’s a really interesting novel by Lisa Alther, called Bedrock, about two women who are lifelong friends, and they do ultimately become lovers, but that’s not really what the novel is about. The main point is their wondering, “What is this thing we have between us? What form of love is it? What do we call it?”
Lesbian historical fiction—which, ten years ago, you would have said was the most obscure of genres—is doing so much better. People like Sarah Waters have had such success, and I think it’s because people are actually impatient with labels. I think people are very interested in writing that explores sexuality before the labels, writing that gets back to subtleties and, well, oddities…
I mean, I find it fascinating that Horace Walpole [the author of The Castle of Otranto, who appears as a character in Life Mask] was clearly such a big fag, and yet, at the end of his life, he is besotted by Mary Berry… How do we name the romantic yearning of a 70-year-old gay man—as we would call him now—for a young woman? We might ask, “What’s going on there?” But we need to respect that desire as much as any of his other interests.
Of course, we all know and live these ambiguities in our own lives. I know plenty of people who are officially one thing but have a passion or two on the other side. It’s very liberating to write about an era before the labels were introduced. I mean, the labels are useful—there’s a reason for them—but many people find them confining. Read more…
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