Susan S. Lanser

Of Closed Doors and Open Hatches: Heteronormative Plots in Eighteenth-Century (Women's) Studies

As Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant have argued, it was in the eighteenth century that “hierarchies of property and propriety” were consolidated as heteronormative principles. This normativity has also shaped modern epistemologies, often rendering eighteenth-century scholarship, including scholarship on women and gender, more heteronormative than the period itself, to the potential distortion of the field. Hans Turley’s pathbreaking work on pirate societies shows how single-sex social formations managed to set standards of normative masculinity while also playing out homoerotic desires. As a way to uncover the more domestic anti-heteronormativities in women’s history, this essay turns to Amanda Vickery’s important studies, The Gentleman’s Daughter (1998) and Behind Closed Doors (2009) to uncover investments in a heteronormative epistemology that Vickery’s own source materials do not necessarily support. Formulating five axiomatic practices that can be applied widely, this exploration identifies queer pockets in seemingly straight archives as a method for historicized critique. This project aims not only to delineate a queerer eighteenth century, but to show that the boundaries of heteronormativity itself cannot be understood apart from the resistant and divergent practices that lie within and outside it. Such scholarly strategies make it clear that the eighteenth century is much more, and much less, than a heteronormative plot.

Mapping Sapphic Modernity

In 1566, the Geneva publishing scion Henri II Estienne printed a scathing attack on modern morals known as the Apologie pour Herodote. To crown his chapter “On the Sin of Sodomy, and the Sin Against Nature in Our Time,” Estienne offers this “amazingly strange” tale: A girl from Fontaines, which is between Blois and Romorantin, having disguised herself as a man, served as a stable groom for about seven years at an inn on the outskirts of Foye, then married a girl from there, with whom she lived for about two years while working as a wine-grower. At this point, the wickedness she used in order to simulate a husband’s role was discovered, she was seized and, after confessing, was burned alive. This is how our century can boast that beyond all the wickednesses of the preceding ones, it has some that are specific and peculiar to itself. For this act has nothing in common with those of the sordid ones who were called “tribades” in ancient times. (110; my translation)

Au sein de vos pareilles: sapphic separatism in late eighteenth-century France.

Donna con donna, femme à femme: so Pierre Brantôme designates the “art” of “lesbian ladies” at the close of the sixteenth century. “Woman with woman” certainly seems to suggest the desire of like for like, but Brantôme places man as the shadowy similitude beneath this same-sex coupling: Tribades “give themselves to other women in the very way that men do.”2 What Marie-Jo Bonnet identifies as the first entry for “tribade” in a French dictionary echoes Brantôme’s suggestion that “woman with woman” is somehow also “woman with man.” In Richelet’s dictionary of 1680, the tribade is one “who mates with another person of her sex and imitates a man.”3 This understanding of the tribade as man-like carries us into, but does not carry us out of, the eighteenth century. In the larger project of which this essay forms a part, I argue that during the “Age of Enlightenment” new concerns that women might align themselves with other women become crucial in creating the ideology not simply of sexual but of heterosexual difference on which modern patriarchy grounds itself. Representations of female homoeroticism, which intensify dramatically during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, perform complicated cultural work of both incitement and containment as European societies struggle with new challenges to male dominance. In ways

Israeli–Palestinian narratives and the politics of form: reading Side by Side

Abstract As the first foray into a larger study of conflicting Israeli and Palestinian narratives through a narratological lens, this essay focuses on a single volume, Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine (2012). With recourse to classical concepts in narrative theory, the authors compare the formal practices deployed in each history, giving particular attention to questions of narrative voice, temporality – i.e. order, duration and frequency – and addressing questions of narrative agency and character formation in a collective history. They also ask how these accounts imagine possible worlds, giving rise to bifurcations between what happened and what could have happened. Their aim is to show not only how narratology can be used in a politically charged context, but also how that context can unveil gaps and limitations in narratology. They also demonstrate that the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, read through the lens of their form, diverge and converge in ways that are less predictable than the oppositions of content might suggest.

A Prince for All Seasons, With Notes Toward the Delineation of a New Yorker Narratee

Gerald Prince does not know this, but he is often in my company. When I was daunted by preparing for an MLA panel on the short story, I was rescued by Prince’s “The Long and the Short of It,” which in just five pages lays out key issues for considering short fiction in narratological terms. When I taught Salman Rushdie in a narrative theory course, Prince’s pioneering “On a Postcolonial Narratology” became my guide. And when I was working out my concept of “negative plotting,” his notion of the “disnarrated” became a crucial point of contrast. Prince dropped by more recently when I first read “Zusya on the Roof,” a short story by Nicole Krauss that led to the metonymic misprision in my title (for as Prince would rightly remind me, the New Yorker, being no narrative, cannot in itself have a narratee). Before I address that misprision, though, I want to explain why Prince is my narratological man of all seasons—no misprision—and to highlight the approach to context through text that seems to me a hallmark of his method as it has developed in the wake of the “postclassical” turn.