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Article Excerpt
When Lady Mary Pierrepont (1689-1762), the future Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, went on the marriage market, she found herself in a troubled relationship with her own femininity. As she lamented to Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, "There is hardly a character in the World more Despicable or more liable to universal ridicule than that of a Learned Woman. Them words imply, according to the receiv'd sense, a tatling, impertinent, vain, and Conceited Creature. I believe no body will deny that Learning may have this Effect, but it must be a very superficial degree of it." (1) With much apology and professed humility, she asked whether she had a correct understanding of the passage of Epictetus that she had translated and sent to the bishop for correction. She excused her enquiry by criticizing the sort of "weakening and Effeminateing" books reserved for her sex and quoting Erasmus's refutation of the common belief that studying Latin impaired female modesty. (2) Preserving femininity while rejecting effeminacy would prove to be a perennial challenge for Lady Mary. Yet, the clandestine courtship she was conducting with Edward Wortley suggests that she had found a potential husband who accepted her masculine qualities. In a letter of April 1710 he assured her,
I ever believ'd the compleatest Plan of Felicity that we are acquainted with, was to enjoy one woman friend, one Man, and to think it of little moment whether those that were made use of to fill up some idle hours were Princes or Peasants, wise or foolish, but rather to seek the Lower as less likely to work any change in a mind thoroughly satisfi'd that knew no want nor so much as a wish. Had I you, I should have at one view before me all the Charms of either sex met together. I should enjoy a perpetual succession of new Pleasures, a constant Variety in One. This is far beyond what I thought sufficient to make life Happy. (3)
It soon became apparent that this hermaphroditic ideal was easier imagined than lived. The protracted prenuptial negotiations became a battle of wills, and Lady Mary and Wortley's eventual union increasingly resembled a business partnership with the pair spending progressively longer stretches of time living apart. Her intimate friendship with the courtier John, Lord Hervey and rivalry with him over the affections of the philosophe Francesco Algarotti, who, like Hervey, appeared to prefer men sexually, prompted the author of the first scholarly analysis of Lord Hervey's sexuality to opine, "In many ways, Lady Mary was what we now unceremoniously call a 'fag hag.'" (4) At the same time, her relationships with women have raised speculations of sapphism. (5) Lady Mary's biographer, Isobel Grundy, in reference to contemporary innuendo, cautions, "Today it would be risky in a different way either to chastise or admire Lady Mary as a lesbian: her orientation towards men seems well established." (6)
The late-twentieth-century pronouncement of "not a lesbian" might be judicious, but Lady Mary's close emotional ties to other unconventional women and to Hervey and her subsequent infatuation with Algarotti indicate that her tent was not firmly staked in the heterosexual camp either. How do we categorize this "gender outlaw" who took a sensuous delight in the appearance of other women; had a devoted friendship with one man publicly pilloried as "such a delicate Hermaphrodite," "such a pretty, little Master-Miss," "Lord Fanny," an "Amphibious thing," and "one vile antithesis"; and who developed a mad passion for another man who was not only half her age but also more romantically inclined toward other men? (7) The labyrinthine terrain of Lord Hervey and Lady Mary's interpersonal relations provides a rich ground for exploring the complicated nature of intimacy and the inadequacy of modern sexual taxonomies for helping to understand it. Lord Hervey and Lady Mary developed emotional ties of incredible range and fluidity. Each of them rebelled against the rigid gender roles that eighteenth-century society prescribed for them as they pursued their desires. The nature of their intimacies varied over the course of their lives, with the only consistent element being their craving for intellectual stimulation. Sexual, potentially sexual, and nonsexual relationships alike often seemed to generate similar emotional intensity, pleasure, and longing. As one might expect, a comparison of the two friends shows Lady Mary fettered by conventions of gender and sexuality. It was she who in 1722 made the celebrated quip that the world consisted of "men, women, and Herveys." (8) One wonders whether some envy was mixed in with her levity. In many ways, Lady Mary herself became a Hervey. The similarity in how the two took on differently gendered personas in their intimate relationships also raises questions about the precise relation between sexual desire and gender identity.
The dialogues generated by the shifting alliances between queer theory and transgender studies over the past fifteen years or so, particularly issuing from writings on intersexuality and transsexuality, provide a fresh perspective on the question of how affective relations shaped individual identities before the notion of sexual orientation existed. (9) The term "transgendered" originally emerged to distinguish a person crossing gender lines in a more committed way than a crossdresser (transvestite), but who did not undergo a sex change (transsexual). In the interests of alliance building, the word acquired its more general connotation covering all traversals over sex and gender boundaries. (10) For the purposes of this study--as gender reassignment surgery was not an option for eighteenth-century subjects--I use the term in the latter sense, while remaining mindful of the diverse and sometimes discordant ideas and practices that it encompasses. The issues raised by transgender studies have informed my analysis of intimate relations in the eighteenth century in three principal ways: the role of transitional processes in identity formation, the interplay between gender identity and sexual object choice, and the force of normative models of sex, gender, and sexuality.
First, the "trans" aspect of transgender is especially helpful to understanding premodern identities for the significance it accords to the physical and emotional changes that the individual might experience over a lifetime. In Lessons from the Intersexed, Suzanne J. Kessler observes that "Physicians teach parents of intersexed infants that the fetus is bipotential, but they talk about gender as being 'finished'...
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