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‘Among Women:’ The Examination of Homoerotic Relationships
between Black Women in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries of
America Through Love Letters, Diaries, and Nella Larsen’s Passing
Desiree
Fields
Department
of Women's History,
Sarah
Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.
New York Mar. 30, 1862
[…] Think my Dearest […] I am
near the breathing the same air with your arm gently drawn around me my
head reclining on your noble breast in perfect confidence and love.[i]
Hartford
Nov. 16, 1865
What
a pleasure it would be to me to address you My Husband and if so
do you think for one moment you would be where you are without me? No,
never.[ii]
At
first glance one would perhaps assume three things about the written
pieces of affection above. She/he
would firstly presume that the notes were written between a man and a
woman during a courtship period of the nineteenth century. Secondly, one might assume that
both the man and woman corresponding with one another are White. Thirdly, one might presuppose that
each letter was written by two different people profession their love to
one another. However, all
three of the assumptions are wrong. The
quotes that I have extracted from two lengthy love letters were written by
a Black woman named Addie Brown to another Black woman named Rebecca
Primus.
The
female world of homoeroticism in the nineteenth-century, “… the
long-lived, intimate, loving friendship between two women, is an excellent
example of the type of historical phenomenon that most historians know
something about, few have thought much about, and virtually no one has
written about.[iii] The intimate and loving
Victorian female friendship/relationship is one crucial aspect of the
female experience that consciously or unconsciously is ignored in history. However, it is also during the
Victorian era that women were considered sexless creatures that oozed
innocence.
Yet,
in the beginning of the twentieth-century, the romantic friendships
between women during the Victorian period were defined as something
opposite of “innocent.” All women were suddenly labeled as sexual
beings. Therefore, a logical conclusion was drawn that women in
relationships with other women most certainly were engaged in sexual
behavior, something unimaginable in Victorian America. While women in the
twentieth-century were supposedly gaining sexual liberty, they were in
turn oppressed through the new and emerging sexual limits, terms, and
social taboos. With this
said, the conversion of the “innocent” homoerotic friendship into the
sexual lesbian relationship is one prevalent example of what the
twentieth-century constructed about women’s sexuality.
Armed with the intimate
correspondence between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, personal diary of
Alice Dunbar Nelson, poetry and love letters by Angelina Weld Grimke, and
Nella Larsen’s novel Passing, I explore what romantic friendships
between women in the Victorian era and twentieth-century meant. Did these women truly embody and
exemplify the age of romantic love? What did romantic love mean to them?
Does Alice Dunbar Nelson and Nella Larsen, both twentieth-century women
deal with homoerotism like the other women in the Victorian period? Does
her writing exemplify the same tone about intimacy as the women’s from
the nineteenth-century? How does race play a role in the romantic
relationships, if it does? How does race play a role in each woman’s
intimate writing? These are just a few of the questions that I will
answer.
[i] Farah
Griffin, Beloved Sisters & Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca
Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford,
Connecticut, 1854-1868 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 65.
[iii]
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. “Female
World of Love and Ritual” in Disorderly Conduct (Oxford:
Oxford University Press), 53.
Abstracts |
ORGANIZACIONES EN LA FAMILIA
ENKIDU
CUENTO DE LA SEMANA
Información en español:
