From “Romantic Friendship” by Marylynne Diggs (GLBTQ Encyclopedia)
Elizabeth Mavor uses the eighteenth-century phrase Romantic Friendship in her study of the "Ladies of Llangollen," it did not achieve wide usage in historical and literary scholarship until the publication of Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (1981).
Faderman applies the term to a wide range of women's emotional, passionate, and occasionally erotic relationships with each other before World War I in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries in Western Europe, most notably France. But more important than the history of the phrase is the history of the idea--an idea defined by historians and literary scholars--and its implications for gay and lesbian studies in general.
William R. Taylor and Christopher Lasch offer an early discussion of the phenomena of what they called "sororial relations" in nineteenth-century American culture. They were among the first historians to acknowledge the presence of such relationships, to recognize the element of social acceptance surrounding them, and to contend that calling them "lesbian" was historically inaccurate.
Historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg applauds Taylor and Lasch's attention to a phenomenon which, she says, "consciously or unconsciously we have chosen to ignore." But rather than seeing this "female world of love and ritual" as an effect of the disintegration of familial bonds, as Taylor and Lasch did, Smith-Rosenberg sees it as emerging during a period of intense concern about the dangers of heterosexual relations in which separate homosocial spheres of interaction became safe places in which intimate relations between women were "socially acceptable and fully compatible with heterosexual marriage."
The Acceptability of Romantic Friendship
Lillian Faderman's study of Romantic Friendship, mentioned earlier, is the most exhaustive and influential to date. She suggests that Romantic Friendship was celebrated, even fashionable, until the twentieth century. Although cross-dressing and other signs of usurping male power and privilege were often met with punitive measures, intimacy and erotic expressions between women rarely were.
She contends that women were often innocent of the sexual implications of their exclusive and passionate bonds with one another, having internalized the view that women were sexually passionless. Only in a post-Freudian era, she claims, were women generally aware of their sexual potential.
Faderman locates the great transformation in public perception of same-sex intimacy at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, when sexologists began to define such relations as both "lesbian" and "perverse." Until then, they were innocently, and ambiguously, defined as Romantic Friendships and held a socially acceptable position in Anglo-European culture.
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Henry James and Mary Wilkins Freeman have come to be read as transitional figures whose writing represents a shift from the social acceptance of Romantic Friendship in nineteenth-century American culture to the redefinition of same-sex intimacies as pathological or perverse in the twentieth century.
In The Bostonians James depicts the "Boston marriage" between Olive and Verena as a wholly conventional aspect of New England life. But he also represents Olive's role in the relationship as manipulative and vampiric.
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Lisa Moore has argued that the ideology of romantic friendship coexisted with a "wariness" of women's sexual relations with each other. She reads English writer Maria Edgeworth's novel Belinda (1801) and the Pirie and Woods trial of two Scottish teachers accused of having sex with a pupil as illustrating the fear of lesbian sexuality and the attempt to dissociate it from white, middle-class women by blaming it on foreign and servant-class women.
Mary E. Wood also departs from the Romantic Friendship hypothesis and the focus on sexological discourse, seeing the ideology of separate homosocial spheres as providing a model that nineteenth-century American women like Margaret Fuller appropriated and manipulated for the creation of a subversive form of lesbian identification.
Conclusion
The idea of Romantic Friendship thus remains a contested category in the history of same-sex relations, a category that ultimately represents the tricky relationship between history and the historian's own contemporary moment.
Despite the quibbles over the meaning of intimate and erotic relationships between women prior to the emergence of modern lesbian identity, the Romantic Friendship concept has deepened our understanding of women's relationships in distant and not so distant history. As a part of the idiom of our gay and lesbian literary heritage, Romantic Friendship continues to raise issues about the place of sexuality in lesbian identity and in lesbian literary and social history.