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dwellordream · 3 years

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“Members of respectable Victorian society were also able to perceive women as married to one another, and they rarely confounded female marriages between white, middle-class women with the polygamous or incestuous arrangements they attributed to the peoples they sought to subjugate, using Christian ideals of marriage to justify the imperial mission. The life of Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876), documented in letters and memoirs, shows that even a woman who did have an illicit affair with her daughter-in-law differentiated between that illicit, quasi-incestuous affair and a more marital relationship, conducted in full view of her friends and the public, with a woman she called her wife. Charlotte Cushman was one of the most acclaimed and financially successful American actresses of the nineteenth century, best known for playing Romeo in the 1840s.

Born in the United States, she lived outside it for most of her life, first in England and then in Italy, but returned often to play sold-out national tours. As Lisa Merrill has shown in a brilliant biography, Cushman used the language of marriage to conceptualize many of her sexual relationships with women, which after her rise to stardom usually consisted of a primary relationship with a peer and a secondary, clandestine relationship with a much younger woman, often a fan. Cushman described her primary relationships as marriages that created a spousal bond and kinship network. In 1844, she noted in her diary, “Slept with Rose,” and the following day wrote “‘R.’ Saturday, July 6th ‘married.’”. As in heterosexual marriage, sex made marriage and marriage created kinship: Cushman called Rose’s father “Father,” as though he were her father-in-law, or as though in marrying Rose she had become her sister.

Cushman was involved in two long-term relationships with women: one with Matilda Hays, an author, translator, and feminist activist, and another with the sculptor Emma Stebbins, whom she met in 1857. Steb- bins is best known today for her sculpture Angel of the Waters, which stands in Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace and features prominently in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Until her death in 1876, Cushman cultivated a public persona as a respectable artist and lived openly with Emma Stebbins in an elegant apartment brimming with friends and pets. After Cushman’s death, Emma Stebbins wrote a biography of her former spouse that, with the reticence and impersonality typical of the lifewriting discussed in chapter 1, made only one direct statement about their relationship: “It was in the winter of 1856–57 that the compiler of these memoirs first made Miss Cushman’s acquaintance, and from that time the current of their two lives ran, with rare exceptions, side by side.” But Stebbins attested to her marital connection with Cushman through the very act of writing the biography as a memoir, in her pointed exclusion of Cushman’s other lovers from her account, in her detailed description of their shared apartment in Rome, and in a ten-page inventory of their pets, including dogs named Teddy and Bushie.

…Cushman herself described her relationship to Stebbins as a marriage when she warned her young lover Emma Crow that she was not a free woman; as she put it, “Do you not know that I am already married and wear the badge upon the third finger of my left hand?” (211). Cushman began a clandestine relationship with the much younger Crow in 1858, soon after she exchanged rings with Emma Stebbins and began living with her. Cushman met Crow while touring the United States; their affair lasted years, spanned continents, and is documented in Cushman’s many letters to Crow, which Crow preserved and bequeathed to the Library of Con- gress, despite her lover’s many anxious requests that she burn them. In that correspondence, Cushman frequently tried to naturalize her adulterous betrayal of Emma Stebbins by calling the younger Emma Crow her daughter, niece, and baby, as if to suggest that Crow was not Stebbins’s rival but simply an addition to the family. “Never did a mother love her child so dearly. Never did Auntie think so sweetly so yearningly of her Niece. Never did Ladie love her lover so intensely,” Cushman wrote.

Cushman took the incestuous fantasy of sex as kinship to its literal limits when she encouraged Crow to marry Cushman’s nephew and adopted son, Ned Cushman. Cushman’s plan was to have Crow live near her as her daughter-in-law, a situation to which Cushman’s wife, Emma Stebbins, could not object. Crow was so in love with Cushman that she agreed to the arrangement, and she and Cushman continued their affair well after Crow’s marriage to Ned made Charlotte Cushman young Emma’s mother-in-law and aunt to the children Emma had with Ned. After Crow married Ned Cushman, Charlotte continued to address Emma as her lover, but also as a “dear new daughter” who had, in taking the Cushman name, also become in some sense Cushman’s wife. Cushman called Emma’s marriage with Ned her own “ultimate entire union” with Emma, and her letters to a pregnant Emma convey a sense, as biographer Lisa Merrill puts it, “that she and her ‘little lover’ were having this baby together.” With a grandiosity that came easily to a rich and famous actress, Cushman arrogated to herself the roles of husband, wife, father, mother, aunt, and lover, saluting Emma as “Dearest and Sweetest daughter[,] niece, friend and lover” and referring to herself in other letters as “Big Mamma.”

Cushman’s matrilineal, incestuous, adulterous, polygamous, homosexual household seems to realize the conservative fantasy of the primitive family in which no distinctions are made, no restrictions imposed, and patriarchal monogamy does not contain the promiscuity that results when women reign unfettered. For that very reason, Cushman provides an excellent point of departure for interrogating the equation of homosexuality with primitive sexual anarchy. Her affair with Emma Crow does not in fact show that those who disregard the taboo on homosexuality will also flout the prohibitions on incest and polygamy. Instead it demonstrates that, like most Victorians, Cushman’s desires were shaped by taboos that incited the very desires they prohibited. Vows of monogamy, even when not legally binding, made adultery all the more alluring, and as Foucault shows in the first volume of the The History of Sexuality, nothing in the Victorian family was more normative than its obsession with incest.

In societies that make “the family . . . the most active site of sexuality . . . incest occupies a central place; it is constantly being solicited and refused; it is an object of obsession and attraction, a dreadful secret and an indispensable pivot. It is manifested as a thing that is strictly forbidden . . . but it is also a thing that is continuously demanded in order for the family to be a hotbed of constant sexual incitement.” The mother-daughter axis was as subject to eroticization as any other aspect of family life, and incest fantasies, veiled and overt, were a prominent feature of Victorian culture (see chapters 3 and 4). Cushman’s letters to Emma Crow blurred the lines between lover and family member in the same way as Dinah Mulock Craik’s 1850 novel Olive did when describing a wife’s love for her hus- band: “She loved him at once with the love of mother, sister, friend, and wife.” Pornographic novels obsessively depicted incest of every variety and in every possible gender configuration (see chapter 3), and Henry James easily translated his acquaintance with Charlotte Cushman’s history into the heterosexual plot of The Golden Bowl, in which a father marries his daughter’s husband’s lover, also named Charlotte.

The normative cast of even Cushman’s most hidden desires helps to explain why she was not branded as deviant in her lifetime and why the relationships with women that she did make public were accepted by those surrounding her. Cushman was a recognized and often admired type: a nineteenth-century woman whose financial independence made it relatively easy for her to form a couple with another woman. Cushman enjoyed playing male roles on stage, and like many middle-class and aristocratic women in female marriages, she adopted masculine dress and nicknames. But she lived openly with other women as a woman, and identified with both feminine and masculine roles. Cushman called Emma Stebbins her better half and described herself as married to her first lover, Rose, but she did not consistently or exclusively see herself as a husband.

The language of marriage described the quality of her commitment to a sexual partner rather than a gendered division of roles. In this respect female marriage appears, on the basis of current historical evidence, to have been a primarily middle- and upper-class phenomenon. Working- class women who earned their own money also formed couples with other women, but it was more common for one member of the couple to live as a man. Such alliances were therefore not perceived as female marriages. Although in some technical sense they could be called marriages between women, in the eyes of the law, the couple’s community, and even the couple themselves, they were marriages between a woman and a man. If caught or exposed as women, some female husbands were legally cen- sured and mocked in ballads and broadsides for seizing male privileges, but others were not. An 1869 article on “Modern Amazons,” for example, wrote approvingly of two women who assumed the roles of “man and wife” and “lived together in good repute with their neighbours for eighteen years.”

…The idea of female marriage was not simply a private metaphor used by women in same-sex relationships; it was also a term used by the legally married to describe relationships that were conducted openly and discussed neutrally in respectable society. Even among middle-class Victori- ans, marriages were not defined by law alone, and for couples with no legal status, social acceptance provided legitimation and established rules for beginning and ending relationships. Charlotte Cushman assumed that many in her circle were aware of sexual romance between women, since she warned Emma Crow in an 1860 letter that “there are people in this world who could understand our love for each other, therefore it is necessary that we should keep our expression of it to ourselves.”

The historical context leaves it surprisingly unclear whether Cushman demanded secrecy because Crow was a woman, or because Cushman was afraid of being exposed as adulterous. There are no similar records of Cushman attempting to conceal her relationships with Eliza Cook, Matilda Hays, or Emma Stebbins, which far from being open secrets were explicitly acknowledged by her social circle and in newspapers. Cushman and her lovers displayed their intimacy for all to see. In the 1840s Cook published a fervent poem, “To Charlotte Cushman,” which described the two women as “captive in Affection’s thrall,” and when Hays published her translation of George Sand’s La Petite Fadette in 1851, she dedicated it to Charlotte Cushman. On a tour of United States theaters in 1849, Cushman traveled with Hays, and a newspaper article praising Cushman as a “woman . . . worthy of homage and esteem” added, “Miss Cushman will be accompanied by her friend, novelist and translator, Matilda M. Hays.”

…To understand the social position of women in female marriages, it is helpful to distinguish between a subculture and a network. Charlotte Cushman did not belong to a subculture, a type of social group that tends to be organized around a limited number of shared traits and that coheres through its separation from the mainstream. She did, however, belong to a network, a form of social alliance whose strength derives from its relative openness and internal variety and from its links to other networks. Overlapping sets of acquaintances as well as shared identities define networks; the stronger the network, the greater the number and type of groups to which it is linked. Cushman’s network thus included women in or interested in relationships with other women and had many links to people who were not in same-sex couples.

Her circle overlapped considerably, for example, with the Browning circle, which consisted of highly respected artists who lived in Italy to get distance from their immediate families, access to a warmer climate, and exposure to Italy’s historic culture. Charlotte Cushman’s integration into multiple networks shows how easily same-sex relationships between women were assimilated to the model of marriage. Indeed, as Merrill notes, Cushman’s relationships with Matilda Hays and Emma Stebbins helped incorporate the actress into many networks by giving her an aura of propriety and respectability. Women in female marriages or interested in sexual liaisons with women banded together but also entered social circles organized around legally married couples. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning spent time not only with Cushman and Hays but with several other women whose charged same-sex relationships included giddy flirtations, tempestuous infatuations, short-term love affairs, and long-term partnerships.

…In the 1860s and 1870s, a period when few knew of the sexological idea of inversion and many still associated sodomy with sexual acts absolutely opposed to nature and virtue, the female couple was accepted as a variation on legal marriage, not treated as a separate species. This suggests that Lillian Faderman and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg were absolutely right that Victorians considered love between women to be perfectly normal, whether that love involved intense, sensual friendships that existed alongside marriage to men (Smith-Rosenberg) or lifelong partnerships that replaced marriage to men (Faderman). It also shows how they were wrong. Smith-Rosenberg erred in defining intimacy between women as a supplement to male-female marriage, for women in female marriages did not supplement marriage, they appropriated it.

Faderman was wrong to argue that acceptance of female couples depended on the perceived asexuality of their relationships; the use of marriage as a term to describe female couples suggests that people believed sex was involved, for marriage, unlike friendship, was never an asexual term. For Victorians, marriage meant the union of sexual and spiritual impulses, the reconciliation of sexuality with propriety. Marriage was a socially acceptable exhibition of sexual intimacy because it was predicated on fidelity and thus advertised not only the sexuality of spouses but also their acceptance of restraints and limits. For this reason, female marriage was not associated with a savage state of sexual license but instead was readily integrated into even the most restrictive ideas of social order. As we will see, however, female marriage also differed from legal marriage between men and women in significant ways, and those differences made it a model for reformers seeking to modernize legal marriage.”

- Sharon Marcus, “The Genealogy of Marriage.” in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

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