SOURCE: Shaffer, Julie. “Cross-Dressing and the Nature of Gender in Mary Robinson's Walsingham.” In Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture, edited by Chris Mounsey, pp. 136-67. London: Associated University Presses, 2001.

[In the following essay, Shaffer considers gender panic, or cultural anxiety over gender boundaries and sexualized bodies, at the end of the eighteenth century, and reads Mary Robinson's novel Walsingham for its depiction of female cross-dressing and gender identity.]

By most accounts, the tradition of women dressing as men or presenting themselves as masculine, which had remained strong at least through the mid-eighteenth century in England, waned by the end of the century both in the arts and in reality.¹ While women might earlier be praised for choosing to cross-dress, by the end of the eighteenth century, female cross-dressing became more problematic and it was suggested that women dressing as men had been forced by others or circumstance into doing so. Women warriors lauded in ballads and fiction over the course of the century who successfully passed as men to follow lovers and fight for their country likewise diminished at this point into weak characters unconvincing as males and incapable of carrying out duties as soldiers and sailors.² Women in male military uniform ceased to appear in polite theater, instead being presented in burlesque and at the less highbrow pleasure gardens. Depictions of women in such garb fell from favor in portraiture as well, and stage roles for women in breeches parts likewise lapsed in popularity.³ Men and women argued earlier in the century that women might have masculine minds and display martial courage; few, however, were willing to entertain such notions by the last two decades of the eighteenth century.⁴ Even Wollstonecraft's call for women to adopt formerly masculine strengths gets downplayed by Godwin's insistence on her feminine complementarity to his masculine reason.

Dror Wahrman claims this shift arose out of what he calls the “gender panic” of the last two decades of the eighteenth century, a widely held cultural anxiety about gendered identity that caused a movement away from the “relative playfulness of former perceptions of gender” to an intolerance of the view that “gender boundaries could ultimately prove porous and inadequate; and therefore that individuals or actions were not necessarily always defined or fixed by those boundaries.” By the 1780s, Wahrman asserts, “gendered behaviour was … made inescapably and naturally to conform to sexual bodies.”⁵ Thomas Laqueur argues that some time from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth century, there was a change in beliefs about the biological make-up and relation of the sexes; as a result, by the end of the eighteenth century, the sexes were considered different and incommensurable. As long as this was the case with the biology of the sexes, it would be the case for gendered behavior.⁶

As Carolyn Williams notes in “Women Behaving Well,” women presenting themselves as masculine in strength of character, body, or intellect could be cast as monstrous rather than heroic earlier as well, but, as Wahrman demonstrates, such a linkage became nearly universal in the last two decades of the eighteenth century.⁷ In all but the most daring works, the woman who wears male clothing and appropriates masculine behaviors and attitudes at the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth fares as ill as do warrior women. Most are mocked or punished, as is the case with Miss Sparkes in Hannah More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808) and Harriot Freke in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801/1810).⁸ Such characters' diminishment and punishment offer lessons on the unacceptability, even criminality, of severing gender roles and rights from clearly sexed bodies.

Given this situation, one need not be surprised by Chris Cullens's suggestion that Mary Robinson's Walsingham; or, the Pupil of Nature is perhaps unique in portraying “a male protagonist who, at the end of four volumes, is revealed to narrator and readers to be a female transvestite.”⁹ Cullens states that she knows of “no other eighteenth-century novel” that does so;¹⁰ according to Dianne Dugaw and Wahrman's arguments, while such a novel might occur earlier, it should be virtually unthinkable in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. It is in fact not the only novel of the period that includes female characters who cross-dress or otherwise transgress gender roles, as Edgeworth and More's novels demonstrate. Such characters continue appearing even long after the supposed demise of the cross-dressed female, for instance with Princess Evadne in Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826). It is perhaps alone, however, in sustaining its heroine's cross-dressing as long as it does.¹¹

Robinson's novel, published as it was at the end of the eighteenth century, might be expected at least to contain its cross-dressing female protagonist, Sidney Aubrey, leaving her unconvincing as a male or punishing her for her transgressions, as is the case not only for the masculine Miss Sparkes and Harriot Freke, but also for the later Princess Evadne, who dies in battle as a (fe)male warrior. Sidney, however, remains convincing until her mother makes her secret public; nothing in Sidney's own deportment gives it away. Furthermore, Sidney is not particularly harshly punished by novel's end. She suffers illness and must ultimately resume her female-gendered social role, but this punishment is slight when compared to her triumph at cross-dressing and her rewards, a sizable fortune and marriage to the man she has long loved. Robinson's light treatment of this gender transgressor shows that she tolerates what Dugaw and Wahrman demonstrate was widely culturally intolerable by this point: the notion that gendered attributes, behavior, and rights need not be tied to sex.

Through Robinson's depiction of a female character who passes easily and for an extended time as a man, Walsingham addresses the nature of gender recognition and gendered identity in the late eighteenth century. Sidney's story, like others in which female characters seize male prerogative, demands that readers question late eighteenth-century economic and social limitations on women. But this novel is as much about masculinity as it is about femininity and women's rights, raising questions about the adoptability and changing definitions of masculinity, itself as constructed and shifting in this period as was femininity. Through Sidney's relationships and attractiveness to men and women who may or may not know her biological sex, the novel likewise addresses issues of intimacy and sexuality, querying limits of same-sex intimacy and the reliably natural basis of heterosexuality.

At times, Walsingham foresees late twentieth-century debates on sexuality and gendered identity, but the significance of Sidney's cross-dressing can best be understood by placing it in the context of late-eighteenth-century debates on sex and gender out of which it arose. At times, for instance, in questioning the constructedness of gender, the novel enters into debates on which sex may claim which (gender) attributes and privileges, a debate that at times, as Claudia Johnson argues, still insists on a binary in which one sex adopts or is defined by having qualities that complement the other's lacks.¹² In what follows, then, I will ground discussion of Walsingham's gender- and sex-querying elements in debates from the period about the fixity or fluidity of gender, the linkage of gender to biological sex; and the implication of these issues for defining the limits to which interpersonal relationships between the sexes and between members of the same sex might be taken. Walsingham does not simply represent these debates but rather enters into them actively. Its contribution to these debates requires that we go beyond the insightful discussions provided by critics such as Wahrman and Johnson to look at the way daring writers in the era refused to be mentally cowed by mainstream responses to the era's gender panic, insisting on a fluidity and a collapse of a binary that others clearly found threatening.¹³

CROSS-DRESSING WOMEN

As Rudolf Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol explain, many women passed as men in the eighteenth century, sometimes for extended periods of time, the trend ceasing only at that century's end. Some women cross-dressed to move about without the molestation that might come to them as women. This would be the case, for example, for laboring class women who needed to travel to find work. After reaching a place where work was available, they may have returned to wearing female clothes, or they may have continued to dress as men. Those continuing to cross-dress, along with other lower-class women who dressed as men, may have done so either to get jobs that paid men better than they paid women or to pursue activities that would not otherwise have been open to them, such as military careers.

Maria van Antwerpen, for instance, defends herself along these lines in her trial in the Netherlands in 1769 for passing as a man. She started doing so when she lost her job as a servant away from family and, she argued, “at that point in her life, what other ways were open for a destitute girl? She did not want to be a prostitute, so becoming a man was the only way to stay a pure and chaste virgin. … The second time she became a soldier, she did so to escape poverty.”¹⁴ Cross-dressing would likewise grant women more security from molestation in pursuing activities “on the margins of society, [such as] begging, stealing and cheating,” as was the case in the early seventeenth century for Mary Frith, a.k.a. Moll Cutpurse; cross-dressing likewise allowed Mary Read to flourish as a pirate.¹⁵

Other women cross-dressed to become so-called female husbands, to pursue relationships with other women, as was the case with Mary Hamilton, Catherine Vizzani, Queen Christina of Sweden, and, to some extent, Charlotte Charke. Some cross-dressing women combined these reasons for their transvestism. Maria van Antwerpen, for instance, took her second stint as a cross-dressed soldier because the woman she married was pregnant and van Antwerpen “had to earn money to maintain her family.”¹⁶ Hannah Snell likewise cross-dressed to fight in wartime, and later, remaining in male garb, married a woman.¹⁷

Women in England and in northern continental Europe might pass as men due to a tendency in this period not to question the link between surface presentation and identity. They could do so in part because males were taken into the military at the age of thirteen¹⁸ and otherwise entered the world of work as young as fourteen. Women could pass convincingly as such young men and could perform work on ship as well as these youths could.¹⁹ Sailors' loose dress through the eighteenth century aided in women's ability to pass as males. Other elements might counteract this aid: the inability to produce male genitals when undressed or to join in “public love-making” as men, for instance. Close ranks on board ship or in military quarters led to the early discovery of some female cross-dressers for precisely these reasons, but others were discovered to be female only after death, on battlefields. Many, in military and other careers, passed for astonishingly long periods—most for up to six months and some for decades.²⁰

Their ability to do so demonstrates that the English, along with the continental Europeans Dekker and van de Pol research, accepted self-representation in this period in which “people believed that one's garments unquestionably told one's sex.”²¹ That eighteenth-century European cultures might have held this belief more than others is demonstrated by a story involving a Frenchwoman who worked as a sailor and passed for male even in the close quarters of the explorer Bougainville until the crew arrived in Tahiti, where “she was immediately indicated as a woman by the natives [who] made no automatic assumptions related to trousers and other outward accoutrements of a European male person.”²² In Europe, not only clothes but behavior might likewise tell one's sex, and as long as a woman acted socially like a man, performing men's work well, she might be taken as a man.

Attitudes toward cross-dressing women were mixed. Emma Donoghue notes that cross-dressing in itself was not criminal in England,²³ and women caught dressing as males might or might not be punished for crimes related to their cross-dressing. Some female cross-dressers were simply required to reassume female dress and identity. On the other hand, women's passing as men was more severely punished where the women in question were suspected of having sexual relations with other women. This was most typically the case when two unrelated women lived together, with one dressing and representing herself as a man.²⁴ Legally, the situation was complicated because in England, unlike in America and on the continent, there were “no laws against sex between women” per se.²⁵ There were, however, laws against sodomy. This included penetration of a woman by another woman, which could occur if one woman had an enlarged clitoris that mimicked a penis or if the couple used a dildo.²⁶ Women were rarely tried for this capital offense, however. They may have escaped trials for sodomy, Donoghue surmises, because judges did not want to acknowledge that a woman could be sexually satisfied without the penis,²⁷ or, as Dekker and van de Pol propose, because they did not want to sentence women to death.²⁸ Instead, then, female cross-dressers suspected of engaging in sexual relations with other women were generally tried instead for “lewdness and fraud,” the latter being the case especially when it was assumed that the female husband married a woman to get her fortune.²⁹

The case of Mary Hamilton, brought to court in 1746, proves an interesting example of the difficulty the English courts had in identifying precisely what crimes might be claimed to have been committed by female cross-dressers suspected of having sexual relations with other women. Hamilton, the subject of Henry Fielding's play of that same year, The Female Husband, cross-dressed and married her landlady's niece (her third wife), who exposed Hamilton after two or three months of marriage.³⁰ Hamilton was “brought to court for a sexual offence” but was not tried for anything relating to “her gender or sexuality,” suggesting that the courts found it “hard to find any legal offence that she had committed” in terms of the transgression of which she was accused.³¹ She was tried and convicted, then, only for vagrancy. Despite this seemingly innocuous crime, however, she was whipped in several towns and then imprisoned, and in 1777, another such woman was exposed in the pillory and imprisoned.³² These cases show that where cross-dressing was linked to the sexual transgression of lesbianism, it might raise “extreme societal anger,”³³ even if this anger did not lead to the death which American or continental lesbians or British male homosexuals suffered if discovered.³⁴

Legal decisions do not completely reveal lay responses to possibilities that women's cross-dressing engendered. The popularity of ballads on cross-dressing women who became sailors suggests positive reception. As Dugaw makes clear throughout Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, females lauded in these ballads are praised for their bravery and faithfulness in love. Their positive reception did not depend on the subjects of these ballads being fictional and so nonthreatening to a system relying on male rather than female prowess; some of these songs were about real women, or were believed by contemporaries to be so. The sheer numbers of such ballads and the brave, cross-dressed women they celebrate suggest that many of their consumers did not need to see such women as exceptions to the rule, although some may have found such women worth celebrating because they saw them as comfortingly unique, as Williams suggests in “Women Behaving Well.”

Tolerance is likewise demonstrated in some cases involving female-female marriages, some of which were allowed to go forward despite suspicions that the groom was a cross-dressed female. In 1737, a clergyman married John Smith to Elizabeth Huthall but his notes demonstrate his belief that both were women: “By ye opinion after matrimony my Clark judg'd they were both women, if ye person by name John Smith be a man, he's a little short fair thin man not above 5 foot. After marriage I almost co[ul]d prove [the]m both women, the one was dress'd as a man thin pale face & wrinkled chin.” Despite these doubts, “the officials went ahead with the ceremony and seem to have made no attempt to have the couple punished.” In another case, the groom was discovered after the ceremony to be a woman, but there is no record that efforts were made to annul the match. Newspaper items about other married female couples are “appreciative, almost approving,” as in the case of a couple in which one woman was reported as having cross-dressed and wed a woman “with whom she has lived agreeably ever since,”³⁵ stressing the harmonious quality of the marriage rather than the illegal nature of their union. In these cases, perhaps the women were not suspected of engaging in sexual relations. Otherwise, they suggest an occasional tolerance even of suspected lesbian sex, demonstrating further the complex and inconsistent reception of sex and gender transgressing women.

Other cross-dressers were likewise tolerated. Women who cross-dressed and joined the military to fight for their country might be seen as attempting to transcend female weakness and were especially lauded for doing so in periods in which the sexes were not yet seen as incommensurable but as similar and on a hierarchical continuum, with men above women.³⁶ In this earlier paradigm—one widely held through the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth—women were understood to be simply undeveloped men, their genitals inverted from the male norm; women were thought to lack adequate heat for their genitals to descend so that they might become fully developed (mature) men. A woman presenting herself as a man because she wanted to be a man—even becoming a man, as was believed to have occurred in some instances³⁷—was allowable because “a woman who became a man strove to become something better, higher, than she had been, and that was considered an understandable and commendable effort in itself.”³⁸

Even in periods in which women might be seen as trying to improve themselves by becoming male in appearance and attitude, however—well into the eighteenth century—their passing as male could equally be interpreted as damnable self-assertion instead of as a praiseworthy attempt at self-betterment. It could be read as cosmological and social insubordination and as women's refusal to contain their unruly bodies and the sexual desires considered to be innate them until late in the eighteenth century.³⁹ Such women did not comprise category crisis, since, existing biologically on a continuum with men, women did not cross categories in attempting to be (like) men. Such a woman, her motivations and effects nonetheless became metaphoric for category crisis, signalling and used to argue that allowing women to behave so was sign of and might lead to the overthrow of civilized people—male Britons—by ostensibly savage races and nations.⁴⁰

While the cross-dressing woman who successfully passed as a man for any length of time might not actually constitute category crisis, her misrepresentation of self and the possibility that one might misrecognize others suggested the fragility and constructedness of identity and gender. This was especially the case when sex was held to be changeable, as it was, according to Laqueur, through most of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth: not only could a woman become a man, but one could be born a hermaphrodite and settle into one sex or the other.⁴¹ In such a system, that gender—femininity, at least—could be constructed was in any event clear to the extent that before 1660, when women were allowed to become actresses in England, men were considered capable of representing women accurately and recognizably on stage via a finite number of traits and gestures that show the easy assumability of culturally recognized versions of “woman.”⁴²

But convincing disguise is most threatening to systems based in stable identities and in which gender—attributes, roles, and social status—is tied to stable, unchangeable biological sex. In such systems, the successfully passing cross-dressed woman becomes most threatening because she foregrounds the idea that the patriarchal version of femininity—indeed any version of female identity—is a mask from which a woman might absent herself and from which that self might not in fact be identical, just as men assuming the role of women on the stage were not identical with those roles. That identity might not be delimited by sex and that gender could be constructed must prove highly troubling to any culture in which gender is tied to biologically differently sexed bodies. As Lesley Ferris notes, it “generated immense social, philosophical and existential concern in late Elizabethan and Jacobean society,”⁴³ when the sexes were still seen as based on one model but hierarchically ordered.

Those concerns are demonstrated by James I's 1620 edict reiterating the ban on women's dressing as men given in Deuteronomy 22:5, the first legal dictum against cross-dressing in a land in which sumptuary laws against crossing class lines had long been in place.⁴⁴ The concerns are further born out by the Hic-Mulier, Haec-Vir pamphlet war of 1620.⁴⁵ In the first, a woman is attacked for cross-dressing; in the second, a cross-dressed man and cross-dressed woman ultimately decide that the world would be best off if they returned to gender appropriate clothes and behavior. Given the reconception of the sexes that obtained by the end of the eighteenth century, cross-dressing would have been the more threatening then than during the Renaissance, when, as Ferris makes clear, it was clearly threatening enough.

If versions of female behavior and identity are masks that women themselves can assume or put off at will, a woman's masquerade of any sort must be particularly horrific, continually representing her terrible lack, not only of the phallus, the focus of Freudian-based theory, but of identity itself. Her role-play suggests that woman's identity may always be a fraud. Such a view of women underlines a belief that women are by their very lack of identity untrustworthy, which can be used to justify continued social control of them. Such views may have formed some of the basis of discourse against women's acting on stage and on their attending masquerades, although the usual reasons given against these are the sexually suspect nature of the theater and the masquerade.⁴⁶ Even when actresses played women and women attended masquerades dressed as females, their impersonation suggested that female roles could be assumed, as Joan Rivière notes much later in her well-known 1929 case study, on which Luce Irigaray also draws.⁴⁷ The assumability of all female roles could be used by women to their own advantage, as is demonstrated by Eliza Haywood's Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1724); here, a woman keeps her male lover's interest by playing different women.⁴⁸ For those concerned with stability of identity or wanting to see women as passive, subordinate, and tractable in all ways—keystones of femininity at the end of the eighteenth century—such a notion would have been hateful. However, within the temporary nature of the masquerade and the play, at least the foregrounding of women's own potentially assumed and discardable identity as females was contained. The woman who cross-dressed in real life was more threatening because she refused to contain the threat she represented.

Given that the last two decades of the eighteenth century witnessed a hardened intolerance of gender-play and fluidity, as Dugaw and Wahrman so convincingly argue it is little wonder that the masculine woman becomes by and large unthinkable and that heroism for women becomes increasingly feminized, so that any woman capable of being celebrated cannot be masculine, cannot pass for a male: the woman warrior worth lauding then can be no warrior at all, as Dugaw and Wahrman make clear. In this period in which females ceased being assumed to be sexually appetitive, the woman passing as a man or claiming male strengths and rights was frequently seen not only as improperly claiming male social, economic, and legal prerogative but as claiming male sexual prerogative as well. In so doing, she sinned against the entire gender system, which was increasingly based in sexed, heterosexual, and differently sexually appetitive bodies.⁴⁹ As such, it is the more startling to find not only that Sidney Aubrey passes successfully as a male but that this character is not horrifically punished for such an ostensibly unimaginable and impossible act. Through showing that the unimaginable was still imaginable in fiction at least, Walsingham challenges wide-reaching late-eighteenth-century intolerance of play with the nature of gender, bodies, intimacy, and sexuality.

WALSINGHAM: SIDNEY AS USURPING AND SEDUCTIVE MALE

The novel Walsingham concerns the relationship between Walsingham Ainsforth and his cross-dressing cousin, Sidney Aubrey. It is not well known, and as such, discussion of the implications of its use of a cross-dressing female protagonist will follow summary of Sidney's grounds for transgression and its effects. To be consistent with Sidney's social persona, I use the pronoun “he” to refer to Sidney for as long as this character passes as a man, switching to “she” when Sidney becomes known as female.

Walsingham Ainsforth is born at Glenowen, the estate owned by Sir Edward Aubrey, where Walsingham's father is curate. Walsingham's maternal aunt marries Sir Edward and the couple goes to London, returning after Walsingham's mother dies. Reverend Ainsforth leaves shortly thereafter and Sir Edward and Lady Aubrey act as loving parents to Walsingham. He therefore comes to see their estate as his, although if Sir Edward dies without a son, the estate must pass to his brother, Colonel Aubrey. Sir Edward dies while his wife is pregnant; she leaves and bears a daughter whom she passes off as a son to ensure that the estate remains within her family. She then takes her child to Nice to escape detection in the fraud. Heir as “son” to Sir Edward's estate and title, this child becomes known as Sir Sidney.

While Lady Aubrey is pregnant, everyone treats Walsingham as soon to be displaced and he therefore learns to hate his cousin as a usurper of the love and estate he had come to consider his. The two cousins meet briefly when Walsingham is seven and taken to Nice by his guardian and tutor, Mr. Hanbury. They next meet when Walsingham is about twenty-one and Sidney seventeen, at which time Lady Aubrey returns to Glenowen and Walsingham is called home from university to meet the cousin whom everyone adores as a paragon. Walsingham's predisposition to hate his cousin is exacerbated by Sidney's apparently forming intimate relationships with all the women Walsingham desires—first Isabella Hanbury, his tutor's sister, and then Lady Emily Delvin and Lady Arabella. Walsingham sees Sidney as robbing him not only of parental love and material wealth but of marital love as well. At the end, Walsingham learns that Sidney is female, loves Walsingham, and has interfered in Walsingham's relationships with other women to keep Walsingham free for her.

The novel proceeds in part through Walsingham's ambivalent reactions to his cousin. He is jealous of Sidney but nonetheless appreciates Sidney's kindness. When Walsingham is in Nice, his predisposition to hate his cousin is intensified by the rudeness shown to him by Lady Aubrey and her servants. Sir Sidney, however, is kind, leading Walsingham to feel grateful sympathy. Later, at Glenowen, he grows jealous when Isabella exclaims that Sidney is “a celestial being” who was “born to embellish society.”⁵⁰ When Colonel Aubrey visits the estate asking to borrow money, the greedy Lady Aubrey refuses but Sidney swears that he will give Colonel Aubrey the funds he requests or serve in the military with him. Again, Walsingham admires Sidney's sympathy and generosity. Walsingham regards Sidney as his enemy when Sidney elopes with Isabella but grows ambivalent when he encounters the two later and they both help him. By this point, Walsingham has set off from Glenowen and fallen into a series of mishaps, culminating in his being accused of cheating at gambling and challenged to a duel. Walsingham finds Sidney's “easy familiarity … blended with good-nature” toward him a welcome change, again keeping him from hating his cousin.⁵¹

Furthermore, Walsingham recognizes and admires Sidney's looks and talents. Isabella describes Sidney as physically attractive and as having “manners [which] are so fascinating, so polished, so animated! He sings divinely, and plays on many instruments with skill the most enchanting!” He knows and can quote from “the Italian poets, and from Ossian; for he ha[d] been [for the previous] four years under the tuition of one of the most learned and enlightened men in Switzerland.” Walsingham, despite his jealousy, admits that Sidney is “handsome, polite, accomplished, engaging, and unaffected.” He acknowledges that Sidney is masterful at all the arts for which Isabella praised him and adds that “he [also] fenced like a professor of the science; painted with the correctness of an artist; was expert at all manly exercises; … and [was] a fascinating companion.”⁵²

But jealousy and anger by and large triumph when Sidney elopes with Isabella. Walsingham concludes that “Sir Sidney was the seducer of Isabella: the libertine who had robbed her of her honour.” He consistently refuses to believe Sidney's claim that “by the sacred powers of truth—by all that is dear to honour! she is not, she never shall be my mistress:—I love Isabella too well to see her degraded, even were it possible that she could consider me as a lover.”⁵³

Walsingham cannot accept Sidney's protestations in part because no other reason for her behavior but pursuit of a sexual relation seems plausible. Sidney suggests that he retains Isabella merely because she is “a pleasant girl, who wishes to travel; I am a social being, and want a companion.”⁵⁴ Isabella corroborates this when she suggests that Walsingham alone thinks her fallen. But she shows that she recognizes the implausibility of such a view by passing as Sidney's wife. She need not do so if she could travel with Sidney without doubts being cast on her purity.⁵⁵ She is also wrong that Walsingham is “the only being upon earth that suspects [her] of dishonour.” Lord Kencarth, to whom Walsingham becomes tutor, sees her with Walsingham, recognizes her as “Sir Sidney's mistress,” and assumes that if she is out of Sidney's protection, she is literally up for grabs, “[catching] her in his arms” and nearly “forc[ing] a kiss from her.” Walsingham claims that “this lady is my property,” but when Isabella denies this, Lord Kencarth assumes she can become anyone's “property.” Refusing to give her up to either Lady Aubrey or Walsingham, he proclaims she must become his: “Return to Lady Aubrey she shan't—stay with you she won't—and therefore go with me she must.” Walsingham and Lord Kencarth's shared assumption that the two can settle “ownership” of another man's cast-off mistress constitutes a shared male view that a woman who has traveled alone with a man is free goods because already (as good as) fallen.⁵⁶

Furthermore, other women in the novel recognize that if they travel or fraternize alone with men, their reputations will be compromised. So thinks Lady Arabella, for instance, who travels alone with Lord Kencarth to Walsingham at Glenowen, noting that if Walsingham does not marry her, she is ruined because her traveling alone with one man to go to another “expose[s] her to the censure of the world” and so compromises her that she “cannot return to [her] home.” Walsingham has no other model for interpreting a woman's close relationship with a man, following the cultural model that virtually all other characters also accept to be the rule. But because he does not know that Sidney is female, he has no means of recognizing that Sidney's relationship to Isabella is a bond between two women, one formed because one of them—Isabella—admires the other and gives up whatever maritally directed love she may have had for Walsingham so as not to impede her friend's chance to win him.

Unmasking would seem the most likely way to forward Sidney's desires for Walsingham. Once Walsingham discovers that Sidney is female, after all, he falls instantly in love with her, exclaiming, “How unworthily, how barbarously have I repaid this heroic attachment!” and recognizing that “all the trifling crowds of women appear as shadows of the sex, when compared with this transcendent, this unequalled Sidney.”⁵⁷ But she could not unmask earlier. She had promised her mother that she would never unmask, as unmasking would expose her mother's greed and fraud, and Lady Aubrey is kept from releasing Sidney from this promise by her evil maid, Mrs. Judith Blagden, who originally suggested that Sidney be passed off as a son and depends on the secret for her own gain.

Lady Aubrey only allows the truth to be known after she has been almost fatally poisoned by Mrs. Blagden's son, whom she has recently married. Not realizing she has been given poison and so not able to retaliate against her husband and maid, Lady Aubrey nonetheless casts their influence aside. She gives up her greed and, feeling Mrs. Blagden can hardly bring her closer to death than she already is, she loses her fear of telling her secret. Walsingham appears at this juncture and Mrs. Blagden, fearing discovery, jumps from a window when Walsingham is about to burst into the room where she is scheming with her son. With Mrs. Blagden's death, Lady Aubrey's fears of retribution for telling the secret disappear entirely. Sidney, after recovering from a long illness due in part to the strains of hiding her feelings and sex, becomes publicly a woman.

AN EDUCATION IN (HUMAN) NATURE

Each character's grounds for beginning and perpetuating fraud are different, ranging from Mrs. Blagden's and Lady Aubrey's greed to Sidney's filial duty and love. But the original motivation for the fraud is the conventional proviso in Sir Edward's will that passes his estate to a son but not to a daughter. As such, the protracted masquerade works as an indictment of a patrilineal passage of property and an exposure of the cost to women of accepting their cultural role. As Cullens argues, not just Sidney's but other characters' identities as well are mistaken as characters double for one another; through these mirrorings, doublings, and mistaken identities, the novel questions the linkage between signifiers, such as “heir” or even “man/woman,” and bodies, playing with a carnivalesque crisis in the readability of signs, in which bodies are included. By the end, however, when Sidney reverts to being a woman, Cullens sees Robinson as capitulating to a cultural imperative to accept one “natural” identity for each individual, which for women—certainly for the women in this novel—entails “a string of accepted losses (of title, fortune, and, nearly, life).” According to Cullens, Robinson treats this “situation as a necessary precondition for the restabilization of an epistemological order based, in the first instance, on binary sexual difference.”⁵⁸ Even while accepting this binary, Walsingham “makes clear that the biology of incommensurability … remains intimately tied up with material inequality, and testifies to the high price exacted, in the form of psychic trauma and residual melancholy [Sidney's illness], by the cultural mandate to produce sexed bodies.”⁵⁹

But the novel, even its resolution, works in more complex ways, and Robinson does not simply capitulate. The complexity derives in part through the novel's destabilizing the term “nature,” a word that first appears in its subtitle and that locates Walsingham as the novel's “pupil of nature.” And that he is: he must learn that Sidney is “naturally” (biologically) female. He is also given the opportunity to learn that Sidney's female nature in no way reduces her. Whether he learns from Sidney's masquerade that female nature cannot be easily identified or defined is unclear, but that lesson is certainly offered for readers.

That there is something Walsingham must learn is first hinted when he goes to Nice to meet Sidney. Lady Aubrey's servant tells Walsingham and Hanbury that they may learn “a secret of the most important nature” by eavesdropping on Lady Aubrey; he tells them tantalizingly that “Sir Sidney is not—,” at which Lady Aubrey enters the room and the conversation is interrupted. That Lady Aubrey is hiding something of note is further suggested in a discussion she has with Hanbury in which Hanbury argues that “sincerity cannot be incomprehensible. … It is only deception that is mysterious.” Lady Aubrey disagrees, saying that “one likes sometimes to be agreeably deceived.”⁶⁰

If Walsingham followed the model taken by other late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century depictions of cross-dressed women, the real sex of the male-masquerading Sidney would be apparent to Walsingham and, indeed, to everyone else. As Dugaw asserts, warrior women in ballads from this point on are depicted as weak, passive, and delicate, more the “suffering helpmate” than self-reliant.⁶¹ Wahrman likewise asserts out that when late eighteenth-century fictional women pass as men, they do so as particularly effeminate, sexless men, and Williams notes that depictions from this period of real cross-dressing women who lived earlier in the century cease highlighting the strength for which these women were earlier celebrating, stressing instead their femininity, their “properly maternal and domestic” attitudes.⁶² By conforming to late eighteenth-century rules on feminine behavior, the laudable cross-dressing female protagonist gives herself away by her overriding femininity.

Sidney, however, does not function thus: his admirable qualities include, after all, expertise in manly exercises, making him not effeminate but androgynous—having both male and female strengths. When Walsingham is told that Sidney is female, he exclaims, “what a blind, thoughtless fool have I been!”⁶³ but his blindness, at least regarding Sidney's sex, is not unique: the only ones who know that Sidney is biologically female are her mother, Mrs. Blagden, and a few others who have been told the secret or learned it by eavesdropping. Anyone might take Sidney for male, given Sidney's failure to follow late eighteenth-century representations of real-life and fictional cross-dressing women as overwhelmingly feminine.

The novel's subtitle, along with Walsingham's assertions and some of his actions, suggest, however, that Walsingham is a good enough pupil of nature to discover Sidney's secret. He claims to be a pupil of nature from having received a Rousseauian education at Hanbury's hands and from having been raised in nature, at Glenowen, rather than in the artifice of cosmopolitan and court life. In Rousseauian (and Romantic) terms, this education should lead its recipient to draw on natural benevolence and to respond to the benevolence of others. When seven years old, Walsingham demonstrates his sensibility by rescuing a horse and a dog slated for immediate death; to signal the sentimental weight of Walsingham's first rescue, Robinson even has the horse shed a reciprocally sentimental tear. More importantly, Walsingham shows his sensibility whenever he responds positively to Sidney. When Sidney is kind to Walsingham in Nice, for instance, Walsingham exclaims, “Oh! how vivifying! how grateful to the heart are the sympathies of benevolent minds!” His benevolence toward others manifests itself when he frees a man he perceives to be unfairly arrested for debt, even though it leads to his being arrested for his interference; as he here explains in the conventional language of sensibility, “the fibres of my heart quivered with that emotion which never failed to wring them when I beheld a weaker object in the power of a stronger.”⁶⁴ He shows beneficent sensibility as well when he liberates the jailed Julie de Beaumont, a young woman who has been seduced and abandoned, left to make her livelihood from prostitution.⁶⁵

Were Walsingham presented as truly rooted in sensibility, Robinson might be seen as suggesting, along with Wollstonecraft, for instance, that as long as men are thus ruled by sensibility and are emasculated by it, women must become men. If Robinson were participating in this discussion, one traced by Claudia Johnson, she might seem to be accepting the complementarity of the sexes, continuing to express a binary, oppositional sex-gender system.⁶⁶ But Walsingham, despite occasional responsive sympathetic feeling and the benevolence rooted in it, is neither truly a man of sensibility nor emasculated. His status as a man of sensibility is compromised in part because he frequently cannot act on his beneficent wishes. After he liberates Julie, for instance, he finds a note that suggests she has committed suicide; because he is immediately arrested as responsible for the death she is assumed to have met, however, he can neither discover that she remains alive nor help her. While a failed ability to act on one's feelings need not prove one lacks true sensibility, Walsingham's inadequacies as a man of sensibility are highlighted throughout by his contrast to the one truly benevolent character in the novel, Mr. Optic, who saves Julie and others whom Walsingham is unable to succor.

Worse, however, Walsingham actively wrongs others and refuses to take responsibility for doing so. He claims to love Isabella, for instance, yet his behavior to her seems driven not by love but by desire for vengeance. He pretends to have an attachment to Lady Emily because getting Isabella jealous thereby “would gratify my self-love, and humble my exulting rival.”⁶⁷ His most serious sin against her fails, but only because he mistakes another woman for her when he sees a woman at a masquerade who is wearing the same costume Isabella had at a previous masquerade. He whisks the woman into his carriage, takes her home, and rapes her. This woman, Amelia Woodford, resembles Isabella even when not in costume, and Walsingham's raping her is both a symbolic rape of Isabella and an actual rape of Amelia. He palliates his guilt by blaming “intoxication” and Amelia's curiosity, calling her “the victim of her own susceptibility”⁶⁸ and himself “an involuntary criminal.”⁶⁹ According to his logic, if she had not chosen to dress as Isabella had at a previous masquerade, the mistake never would have occurred; her choice of a costume thus leaves her at fault. When Optic then insists that Walsingham marry the girl, Walsingham employs a double standard to refuse to do so, saying that “The frailty which had rendered her my victim, made me suspect that she would scarcely fulfil [sic], with honour, the duties of a wife … it is the reasoning of nature.”⁷⁰ His logic is specious and his refusal to wed her shows hard-hearted selfishness.

Walsingham's sensibility is at times like that modeled by Goethe's Werther, but as such, it is self-centered and self-indulgent rather than based on feeling or concern for others.⁷¹ He blames his lack of remorse on discovering the identity of his victim on the fact that he was then “too wretched to know pity, too distracted to feel the throb of commiseration.” But through such responses, through their negation or “Wertherization” of Walsingham's sensibility, with sensibility ostensibly developing best in those with a “natural” education, the novel redefines both human nature and the external nature that forms it. Human nature is revealed as not benevolent, not rational, not based in emotions that connect humans to one another, but based instead in self-centered pity and in querulous and harmful passions.

Walsingham's education close to nature clearly has not led him to the better human nature adherents of sensibility think it should. He asserts at one point that “Nature is a liberal parent; and were not her children the slaves of prejudice, or the dupes of their own passions, the circle of enlightened humanity would enlarge, till vice and folly would be extinguished in its lustre.” He seems to refer to himself when asserting that “the child of nature” acts on sensibility,⁷² making the same link when he asserts that “Sir Sidney … would have been the delight of my bosom, had nature been permitted to take the place of compulsion” when he is called on to love his cousin.⁷³ Hanbury makes the same connection in instructing Walsingham early on that “it is in our power to assume such greatness of mind as becomes wise and virtuous men … [if we] conform ourselves to the order of Nature”; he clearly does not have selfish passions in mind as part of the order of Nature. To him, nature must lead us to truth about ourselves and others, as he suggests when he tells Walsingham that as “the student of nature,” he cannot be mistaken about others and their feelings.⁷⁴

Walsingham later asserts, however, that “the natural passions implanted in the breast of man were too often terribly triumphant over the sober dictates of reason and reflection” and that he, at least, “had not strength of mind to vanquish the strong hand of Nature”—here, apparently, “Nature” means the passions, rather than the soberer qualities of reason, reflection, sensibility, those qualities to which Hanbury clearly refers in advocating “conform[ing] ourselves to the order of Nature.” When Walsingham says that he is “the pupil of resistless nature,” he means that he is “the dupe of [his] own passions, an alien from reason, the slave of early impressions” rather than one who can find truth. Nature becomes highly individual, rather than universal or trustworthy; Walsingham learns that his is “perverse.”⁷⁵ By the time he asserts that he has “outraged the very laws of Nature” and become “[Nature's] victim,” it is impossible to know what nature means.⁷⁶

That nature is not trustworthy and that individual nature can mislead from the truth is demonstrated by Walsingham's consistent mistakes about others and himself. These are, of course, exacerbated by the disguises in which others dress—not just Sidney, but Miss Woodford as well, at the masquerade ball at which he mistakes her for Isabella. That scene is perhaps predictable in the way it draws on discourse in the period that sexualizes masquerade, seeing it as allowing both men and women to indulge sexual license with impunity because the individuals behind the masks might not be easily identified. In such discourse, Walsingham is right to assume that the woman he pursues is as interested in sex as is he. In these terms, she is at fault not only for dressing as the woman he loves dressed at a previous masquerade, but for appearing at a masquerade at all.

However predictable in its sexualization of masquerade, the scene is remarkable for its revealing ugly truths about Walsingham's faults in perception about women and the nature of his emotions toward them. It acts thereby both to prove Walsingham no real man of sensibility and to problematize the view of women as lacking both individuality and moral lives. This occurs first by Walsingham's belief that Amelia “resembled, fatally, strikingly resembled, Isabella.” This resemblance is intensified in her dress for the first masquerade they attend together; knowing that he is Welsh, she dresses as “a Welsh peasant girl,” and when he sees her in this garb, he claims “she was the exact counterpart of Isabella” and his “whole soul was absorbed in contemplating the perfect resemblance of that divinity whose fascinations were not yet unbroken.” By the time she appears at the second masquerade in the same outfit that Isabella had worn at the previous masquerade, Walsingham is ready to see them as identical. In fact, however, his great desire at this point to find Isabella makes him susceptible to seeing any woman as identical with Isabella; at this second masquerade, he explains, “I fancied that I saw and heard, at least, a dozen Isabellas. Every pretty figure, every soft voice, seemed to mark the object of my search.” If not seeing every woman around him as Isabella, he sees them as all equally able to satisfy his desire by serving as “the object of [his] search.”⁷⁷

His conflation of all women is furthered by his description of his feelings toward Isabella and Amelia. Late in the novel, when he still wants to marry Isabella—before he discovers that Sidney is female—he claims that “I love [Isabella] as I should love a sister.”⁷⁸ He uses similar vocabulary to characterize his feelings toward Amelia. After he has effected Amelia's ruin, since she feels she cannot return home, he places her in lodgings as sister and “visit[s] Miss Woodford as [his] sister.” When she begs him to retain her, he tells her to “consider me henceforth as a dear brother.”⁷⁹ By describing his relationship to both women in terms of sibling love, he shows sexual and sibling love slide overly easily into one another for him, or that he is unable to recognize his emotions and desires for what they are.⁸⁰

The identical nature of his (mis)representation of his feelings for these two women, along with his mistaking one for the other, suggests not only Walsingham's lack of real honor but his refusal to see women as at all differentiated, as though they are all at base identical ciphers with “no Characters at all.”⁸¹ Using the scene of the masquerade in this book about disguises to highlight Walsingham's conflation of Amelia and Isabella points us to beliefs that women's social personae are always masks, with nothing but a lack behind those masks. By showing the extent to which Walsingham draws on such views and the harmfulness of his doing so, Walsingham asks us to reject this formulation of female (non)identity. Because Walsingham's views and treatment of women are here especially shown to be both misguided and deleterious, and because these errors are linked to Walsingham's misperception of Sidney, the novel insists that while masks misguide, women must be individuated, and their individuation should not be based solely—primarily—on gender.

But any ability to recognize how individuals should be individuated—how their actual identities should be perceived—is made difficult. Walsingham makes this point by showing that while Walsingham misperceives Sidney's identity, motivations, and love, it is perhaps understandable that he should be thus mistaken. His confusion about Sidney, after all, is exacerbated in part because Isabella and everyone else intimately connected with Sidney do little to help Walsingham recognize the truth behind Sidney's appearance. Without the trustworthy guidance of those who know Sidney's secrets or of what Hanbury might mean by a natural understanding—which Walsingham clearly lacks—it is hard to discern either Sidney's sex or the nature of Sidney's desire.

It is easy to disbelieve Sir Sidney, for instance, when he claims that it is impossible that “[Isabella] could consider me as a lover” because Sidney does not explain what prevents Isabella from considering Sidney thus. Such equivocation reinforces the jealousy to which Walsingham is prone by his personal nature. But Walsingham's mistakes about Sidney are justified by their being so widely shared, which demonstrates how difficult it is to identify one's true “nature.” No one recognizes Sidney as female, after all, until s/he shares her secret. But Sidney does not simply appear to be male; she has been constructed as male by her education. As such, Walsingham cannot sense that the person before him is a woman; Sidney is not simply female except biologically. Nature again proves untrustworthy, or less important than other factors. The biological nature of Sidney's sex is displaced, socially, by education. Sidney must be reeducated or shed her male-gendered education to be reconnected with her biological nature.

Such seems to be the argument when Lady Aubrey announces that Sidney is female and Walsingham wants to rush to her and declare his love; Hanbury explains that “the amiable Sidney has been educated in masculine habits; but every affection of her heart is beautifully feminine; heroic though tender; and constant, though almost hopeless. She will, nevertheless, demand some time to fashion her manners to the graces of her sex.” Once the change has taken place and Walsingham is reunited with her, he asserts that “the transcendent Sidney” has “heroic virtues,” continuing, “so completely is she changed, so purely gentle, so feminine in manners; while her mind still retains the energy of that richly-treasured dignity of feeling which are the effects of a masculine education, that I do not lament past sorrows, while my heart triumphs, nobly triumphs in the felicity of present moments.”⁸²

It is hard to know, however, in what Sidney's transformation inheres—what constitutes Sidney's new femininity, her “manners” and “graces” rooted in her biology, however much newly fashioned—in part because we never see her again. We read only Walsingham's assertion that she has changed, and that assertion contains no specifics. Furthermore, most of the qualities that made Sidney marvelous as a man make a woman of this era particularly admirable too: singing, dancing, playing instruments, knowledge of and ability to emulate poets, and painting. Isabella's initial description of Sidney, before she knows Sidney is female, seems to fit a woman more than it would a man, calling Sidney “an angel … born to embellish society” with “a form moulded by the Graces, and fashioned by a studious desire to please.” Sidney's “studious desire to please,” after all, matches the ostensibly “feminine … manners” that she gains after her transformation. Virtually all that is masculine in Sidney is that Sidney “fenced like a professor of the science … [and] was expert at all manly exercises,” along, perhaps, with his “easy familiarity.”⁸³ Sidney as a woman no doubt gives up easy familiarity and fencing, although when this novel was written, the Chevalier d'Eon, whose female sex at this point had been established, fenced in exhibitions. The combination of Sidney's androgynous appeal and his fencing might in fact be a gesture to d'Eon, who was himself never hyperfeminine, even when cross-dressed and passing as a woman.⁸⁴

Even if we accept that Sidney had to learn greater modesty (perhaps learning to wait for Walsingham's courting rather than pursuing others, as Sidney appears to do in running off with every woman threatening to come between Sidney and Walsingham), Walsingham admits that Sidney is the more lovable precisely because she leaves all other women behind as “shadows.” Does Sidney's “transcend[ing]” other women stem from some hyperfeminine quality she has possessed all along? After all, Walsingham exclaims that Sidney is transcendent when he learns that Sidney is female but before Sidney undergoes gender transformation. Or are the “heroic virtues” she retains after her gender change due to her having been formed by education as male? Sidney's attachment to Walsingham, proven by his pursuit of the women whom Walsingham might have married, is treated by Walsingham as a “heroic attachment,” which, when echoed by the “heroic virtue” she exhibits after her gender change, becomes admirable, even in a female. The reiteration of the term “heroic” suggests that Sidney's active courtship may not have harmed what was admirable in her as a woman. Taken together with the increased ambiguity of what “nature” means in this novel, that which constitutes Sidney's admirable femininity likewise becomes ambiguous, and as it is linked to Sidney's initial (mis)education and then to Sidney's reeducation, that femininity, along with Sidney's admirable masculinity, are suggested to be constructs. Traits rooted in nature become increasingly hard to identify, and, as a result, gender itself becomes detached from nature, connected more thoroughly with education. Far from capitulating to a system of “natural” identities that reiterate a binary sex-gender system, then, Robinson leaves the issue muddied and indeterminable.

In so doing, Robinson also raises the question of whether desire is naturally, unproblematically heterosexual. When Walsingham first meets and grows jealous of Sidney, after all, he sees Sidney as “too generous, too exquisitely worthy, not to impress the female heart with admiration bordering on idolatry” and likely to fill women with “sentiments with which the liberal Sir Sidney inspired every bosom”—sentiments that would make women love Sir Sidney rather than Walsingham. Isabella responds precisely so: her encomiums on Sidney before she knows that Sidney is female and her claim that “Every spot which Sir Sidney inhabits must be a terrestrial paradise!” suggest that she can imagine few men more lovable than Sidney.⁸⁵

That Sidney is a woman, however, and that we can never be certain which of Sidney's attributes are due to education, which due to “natural” feminine ideality, suggests that women might prefer women to men. As Cullens points out, those readers who guess Sidney's true sex have “[a] field of potentially transgressive speculation opened up, namely, the nature of the attachment between her and her ‘companion,’ Isabella, and whether Isabella herself is a dupe, accomplice or lover.”⁸⁶ Given that two women living together with one of them cross-dressing were taken by eighteenth-century Britons to be lesbians, once we realize that Sidney is female, we are invited to see their relationship as sexual. In her vow to “mock the world's surmises, and, by the zeal and fidelity of my attachment, [to] deprecate its scorn,”⁸⁷ Isabella may be referring to scorn that she would receive not as a man's mistress but as the feminine partner in a lesbian relationship.⁸⁸

To complicate the issue further, Robinson presents Isabella as trying to convince Walsingham to stay at Glenowen when he returns from university to meet his cousin by telling him that “with such a companion, you cannot fail to be happy.”⁸⁹ Walsingham is more concerned with winning Isabella as a lover, and given her refusal to acknowledge this desire along with her offering Sidney (in her place?) as a companion who ensures “felicity,” she seems to offer a same-sex relationship, sexual or otherwise, in place of the heterosexual relationship that would be formed by her union with Walsingham. Sidney's behavior toward Walsingham and Walsingham's reactions to Sidney suggest that the two are drawn to such a union as well. As Cullens suggests, as long as we consider Sidney as male, we might “ponder the motivations for the mixed signals sent by ‘his’ alternately kind and cruel, but clearly obsessive behavior toward his cousin; the two ‘men's’ tormented pattern of flight from/pursuit of each other lends an implicitly eroticized impetus to their relationship, suggesting the classic uncanny configuration of homosocially bonded doubles.”⁹⁰

Given that it is difficult to decide which qualities make Sidney admirable and desirable derive from the education that prepared Sidney to be male and which qualities are “natural” and based in Sidney's female sex, it is unclear whether Isabella suggests that a male is more likely to make Walsingham happy than a female could—than Isabella could, for instance. The issue is made more complex by Walsingham's instant adoration of Sidney when discovering that Sidney is (biologically) female. Is an admirable man who happens to have female genitals a man's best mate? What sort of eroticism is offered here? The answer is the harder to establish because of the difficulty in establishing exactly what kind of creature Sidney is. As Debra Bronstein provocatively explains, we need not see Sidney as a (cross-dressed) heterosexual woman who longs for a heterosexual relationship with Walsingham. The story equally invites us to see Sidney as wishing to become a man either to pursue a heterosexual relationship with Isabella or to pursue a homosexual relationship with Walsingham. She may thus be either a heterosexual or homosexual man in a woman's body. She can equally be seen as a cross-dressed lesbian wishing for a homosexual relationship with Isabella, however much Sidney believes it is impossible for Isabella to return her desire.⁹¹

The confusion about Sidney's sex, sexual identity, and habits on the one hand and the confusion about the nature of Sidney's relationship with Walsingham and Isabella on the other blurs lines among heterosexual, homosocial, and homoerotic/sexual relationships in ways that may be seen as treating as positive forms of intimacy elsewhere treated as unnatural.⁹² That Sidney's qualities make Sidney equally admirable as a man or a woman suggests that as far as internal, intangible qualities go, it may be appropriate to fall in love with someone of one's own sex. If this is true, any system that insists on heterosexuality must place all its weight on biological sex because Sidney's case suggests that it is misguided to gender the sexes as absolutely different, albeit complementary, by any other means.

The ambiguity about Sidney's sex, sexual desires, and sexual appeal should be the more threatening, culturally, because it makes the homosexual man, by most accounts the period's worst sexual criminal, harder to identify, punish, and eradicate, unsettling in a period in which the male homosexual was easier to convict than rapists, more vilified than prostitutes, and more liable to capital punishment than lesbians.⁹³ According to Randolph Trumbach, such ambiguity should not be possible by the end of the eighteenth century, given that the male homosexual becomes defined at the beginning of the century, according to Trumbach, by his effeminacy and exclusive homosexuality, along with his aristocratic class status.⁹⁴ It was precisely the male homosexual's effeminacy, Trumbach argues, that made him most problematic; he departed from a masculinity that increasingly foregrounded dominance. That effeminacy likewise worked to the male homosexual's detriment because it made him an easy mark of hatred and punishment. Trumbach then argues that the fop, effeminate both in the sense of liking women's company and of modeling (negative) female behaviors, such as narcissism and too great an interest in clothing, becomes identified and used as the male homosexual type.

The identification of the fop or otherwise effeminate male as homosexual and of the male homosexual as the biggest deviant from the sanctioned version of masculinity in this period is highly problematic. As Laurence Senelick points out, “most of the sodomites arrested and tried were indistinguishable from the rest of the population: solid fathers of families, hitherto respectable tradesmen, schoolmasters, and clerics, generally mature in age” although given the strong popular view of the male homosexual as effeminate, “it became hard to conceive that a ‘manly’-looking man should share his same tastes.”⁹⁵ As Philip Carter explains, the (certainly heterosocial) fop was problematic for his antisocial behaviors of all sorts, such as his disruptive exhibitionism, for sinning against emergent versions of masculinity that required complaisance and “genuine fellow-feeling and a desire to please.”⁹⁶ All the same, the fop might be used to stand in not only for social deviance but for sexual deviance as well—on stage, as Laurence Senelick argues—in a way that reassured audiences intolerant of homosexuality that its practitioners were easy to identify.⁹⁷ The effeminate male, fop or not, was certainly a social deviant; he might also be taken for or represent a sexual deviant; in either case, he sinned against acceptable masculinities as they evolved over the course of the eighteenth century.⁹⁸

But Sidney is neither an effeminate nor a socially deviant male in the way that those writing on fops and homosexuals suggest. He appears desirable as a male, however, for precisely those reasons that also apparently make him desirable as a woman. To the extent that these qualities are not effeminate, the novel suggests that femininity too in this period is in some ways defined along the same lines as is masculinity, including complaisance—“studiously desiring to please.” In this way, the novel suggests that lines between acceptable gendered behaviors are not particularly divergent. Sidney may therefore have attributes equally admirable in a man or a woman without being effeminate. But Sidney's lack of effeminacy problematizes views of the male homosexual as easily spotted because effeminate; as long as Sidney is thought to be a man, he may be read as providing Walsingham with a male—that is, homosexual—love object. Sidney's lack of effeminacy and the fascination he provides to the equally non-effeminate Walsingham argue, along with the trials noted by Senelick, that the male homosexual may not be so easy to spot after all. Sidney's attractiveness to Walsingham suggests, further, that a man's lack of effeminacy is no protection against feeling attraction to another man.

Given the accepted criminality of the male homosexual along with the possibility that Sidney might be a male homosexual who becomes the object of homosexual desire in a noneffeminate man, it is the more interesting that Sidney's punishment is mild. Hanbury suggests that Sidney need not be particularly punished because even if “the fastidious will say [that] she violated the laws of strict propriety, … her virtues, her sensibility, were her own; her crime, if the concealment of her sex can be considered criminal, was Lady Aubrey's.”⁹⁹ It is hard to understand how concealing her sex might not be considered criminal, given that it involves usurping what is not hers, apparently sexually attracting others of the same sex, and challenging views that behaviors, attributes, roles, and rights were absolutely gendered, specific to each sex.

Sidney is symbolically punished through her long illness, through losing “title, fortune, and, nearly, life,” and through her transformation; the “transvestite Sidney must ‘die’ as a male, or at least be confined to the passivity of unconscious immobility, in order to be reborn female.”¹⁰⁰ Yet that symbolic death occurs offstage, effectively downplaying it as punishment. Furthermore, neither the title nor the entire fortune Sidney held were hers, since she was not a son. Had Lady Aubrey born Sir Edward a son, he would have inherited sixty thousand pounds and his father's estates, and Walsingham would have received eight thousand pounds, plus funds for his education. As a daughter, however, Sidney is entitled to thirty thousand pounds plus funds for her support while a minor, and Walsingham is entitled to twenty thousand pounds.¹⁰¹ He inherits an additional ten thousand pounds from Isabella's early guardian, Randolph. Together they have sixty thousand pounds rather than sixty-eight thousand pounds plus an estate: meaning they end up with nearly as much of a fortune as she would have if the masquerade had been successful. What underlines the mildness of Sidney's punishment is the much worse end that comes to Mrs. Blagden. Once she jumps out a window to escape discovery by Walsingham, “she … expired in agonies which mocked the powers of description; every feature was distorted, every limb lacerated and broken,” “her skull fractured, and her flesh bruised,” and she is left a “blackening corpse.”¹⁰² That Mrs. Blagden gets all the highly visible, tangible punishment that Walsingham doles out suggests that she is the most guilty character in the novel.¹⁰³

Through leaving Sidney so much more lightly punished despite her transgression of sartorial and behavioral gender codes, Robinson disavows Sidney's guilt, confirming that Walsingham is right finally to accept Isabella's assertion about Sidney that “never did nature form so wonderful a creature!”¹⁰⁴ But Sidney is an indeterminate “creature,” neither clearly masculine nor feminine. As such, she challenges clear differential gendering, natural or triumphant heterosexuality, and easily identified homosexual types and desires. Others' responses to Sidney, along with the plot movement and its dispensation and withholding of punishment, suggest that this indeterminacy is not monstrous, however, and that the challenge Sidney presents to the late-eighteenth-century sex-gender system need not be seen as negative.

Robinson reinscribes her characters as heterosexual and bases the gender behavior and attitudes with which they end in biological sex, but she nonetheless leaves us with a vision in which both gender and sexuality are greatly destabilized, unraveling the certainties that continue to be reasserted with every insistence that the sexes are different not only in biology, but in behavior, rights, and roles. She also unravels the idea that we are all innately, unproblematically heterosexual and that the sexual deviant is easy to identify, leaving us uncertain about the nature of sex, desire, and gender and suggesting that unnatural affections are not so unnatural after all.

Notes

1. See Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin's, 1989); Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1989); and Dror Wahrman, “Percy's Prologue: Gender Panic and Cultural Change in Late-Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 159 (1998): 113-60. Dekker and van de Pol situate the start of this tradition at the end of the sixteenth century (2); they concentrate on the tradition in the Netherlands but note numerous cases in England and argue that the tradition there paralleled what occurred in the Netherlands (1).

2. Dugaw discusses this movement throughout Warrior Women and Popular Balladry. Wahrman, in “Percy's Prologue,” notes their diminishment in balladry and fiction at the end of the eighteenth century (127-29, 157-59).

3. See Dugaw, Warrior Women, 179-89; Wahrman, “Percy's Prologue,” 132. See also Randolph Trumbach, “London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture,” Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, eds. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 134; Pat Rogers, “The Breeches Part,” Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes, 1982), 244-58; and Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 127-50.

4. On portrayals of women as brave in the seventeenth century and through much of the eighteenth, see also Carolyn Williams, “Women Behaving Well,” [in Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture, edited by Chris Mounsey. London: Associated University Presses, 2001]. Late-eighteenth-century writers stressing qualities in women not ordinarily thought to be theirs—courage, for instance—usually based those qualities in more acceptable versions of femininity. Late-eighteenth-century examples that Williams uses base courage in maternal love, merging it with discourses naturalizing women's selfless maternal drives.

5. Wahrman, “Percy's Prologue,” 115, 135, 177, 126.

6. Thomas Laqueur makes this argument throughout Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

7. The mixed response to masculine women that Williams finds, rather than their outright rejection, may derive from the fact that the texts she cites predate the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the gender panic that then takes over.

8. On Miss Sparkes, see Wahrman, “Percy's Prologue,” 146; on Freke, see Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668-1801 (New York: Scarlet, 1993), 100-103.

9. Chris Cullens, “Mrs. Robinson and the Masquerade of Womanliness,” Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mücke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 267-68. Cullens mistakenly cites the original publication date of Walsingham as 1796. The edition I use is Mary Robinson, Walsingham; or, the Pupil of Nature, 4 vols. (London: Longman, 1797).

10. Cullens, “Mrs. Robinson and the Masquerade,” 267.

11. The other examples I provide here, along with Walsingham, suggest that what had elsewhere become unimaginable remained alive in female-penned fiction. Although the sex/gender-transgressive female characters in Belinda, The Last Man, and Coelebs in Search of a Wife are ultimately contained, they too, I would argue, challenge a sex-gender system based on an oppositional or hierarchical, mutually exclusive binary of male/female. So too do those in yet other female-penned British novels at the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. Portrayals and treatments of female characters who transgress sex-gender norms in novels of this period are too varied and address issues too numerous to examine in adequate depth in this essay, however. My focus on Walsingham, with its extensive treatment of a female cross-dresser, suggests some of the ways other women writers of the period too challenged the sex/gender system through their treatment of female characters with masculine characteristics.

12. Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

13. Debra Bronstein argues, however, that Robinson may also buy into this binary, as in insisting that women have “masculine” strength of mind, especially in her treatises on women's rights. Bronstein makes this point in her “Whose Gender? Which Gender?” presented at the Seventh Annual Conference on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers; Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 27 March 1998.

14. Dekker and van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism, 10-11, 126.

15. Ibid., 10, 38, 40; see also 9-10, 30-33; Dugaw, Warrior Women, 121-42; and Lynne Friedli, “‘Passing Women’—A Study of Gender Boundaries in the Eighteenth Century,” Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, eds. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 242-43.

16. Dekker and van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism, 26.

17. On Hamilton, see Donoghue, Passion Between Women, 73-80; Friedli, “‘Passing Women,’” 239-40; Sheridan Baker, “Henry Fielding's The Female Husband: Fact and Fiction,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] 74 (1959): 213-24; Terry Castle, “‘Matters Not Fit to be Mentioned’: Fielding's The Female Husband,” ELH 49 (1982): 602-22; and Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981), 52. On Vizzani, see Donoghue, Passion Between Women, 80-86 and Friedli, “‘Passing Women,’” 249. On Queen Christina, see Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 55. Erin Mackie notes the complexity of Charke's cross-dressing from childhood on in “Desperate Measures: The Narratives of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke,” ELH 58 (1991): 841-65. On Charke, see also Castle, “‘Matters Not Fit,’” 607, 617; Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 57-58; Friedli, “‘Passing Women,’” 240-42; Donoghue, Passions Between Women, 97-100, 164-67; Straub, Sexual Suspects, 127-50; and Felicity Nussbaum, “Heteroclites: The Gender of Character in the Scandalous Memoirs,” The New Eighteenth Century, eds. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987): 163-66. On van Antwerpen, see Dekker and van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism, 1, 63-69. Snell's story appears in The Female Soldier; or, the Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell, 1750 (Los Angeles: UCLA-Augustan Reprint Society, 1989). For discussions of that story, see Donoghue, Passions Between Women, 91-94; Friedli, “‘Passing Women,’” 242; Wahrman, “Percy's Prologue,” 130-31; and Dugaw, Warrior Women, 184. Other early modern women, Susanna Centlivre for example, cross-dressed for ease in carrying on sexual affairs with men (Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 57).

18. Dugaw, Warrior Women, 131.

19. Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, 15, 18; Dugaw, Warrior Women, 131.

20. Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, 15, 22, 19.

21. Ibid., 23. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, argues that this was also true for the Renaissance (48).

22. Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, 23.

23. Donoghue, Passions Between Women, 61.

24. As Faderman notes throughout Surpassing the Love of Men, if neither woman dressed as a man or took a culturally masculine role, they may not have been suspected of having sexual relations, being instead possibly simply romantic friends. Donoghue, Passions Between Women, too notes that where women's friendship was concerned, a number of different details had to coalesce, including one friend's taking a masculine role and the other a feminine role, before that friendship became suspected as sexual (11). See also Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, 74-75.

25. Donoghue, Passions Between Women, 60.

26. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 47-61; Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, 77-80.

27. Donoghue, Passions Between Women, 18.

28. Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, 80.

29. Donoghue, Passions Between Women, 18.

30. Donoghue, ibid., gives the time elapsed as two months (73, 79); Castle, “‘Matters Not Fit,’” identifies it as three months (604).

31. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe,” in Epstein and Straub, Body Guards, 89.

32. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, says that Hamilton was whipped in three towns and then imprisoned (52), while Donoghue, Passions Between Women, identifies the number of towns in which Hamilton was whipped as four (79). Faderman discusses the other case mentioned here (52-53).

33. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 52.

34. Donoghue, Passions Between Women, points out that the term lesbian did exist in the eighteenth century (2). On the harsher reception of cross-dressing women judged to be in lesbian relationships on the continent or in America, see Jones and Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender,” (88) and Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, (50-52). On the more extreme punishment of male homosexuals, see Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, 78; Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, (51); and Randolph Trumbach, “Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2.2 (1991): 186-87; 190.

35. Donoghue, Passions Between Women, 66, 67.

36. They might equally be lauded later, despite a shift in the understanding of the physical relation between the sexes. Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, note that British female soldiers were granted favors and incomes from nobles and royalty at both ends of the eighteenth century (96). According to Dugaw, Warrior Women, women who served on board ships as gunpowder carriers during the 1798 Battle of the Nile afterwards received honors. She points out too that Victoria proclaimed in 1847 that medals should be awarded “without reservation to sex” for those who served in battle. These were ultimately not awarded because it was feared that “multitudes” of women might claim them (128-29). Dugaw does not specify whether these women fought dressed as men or as women. Dekker and van de Pol explain this late lauding of female warriors by suggesting that in periods of national military crisis, normal rules constraining women's behavior are suspended, an intriguing but questionable formulation, given the greater constraints placed on most women in both Great Britain and France at the turbulent end of the eighteenth century.

37. Laqueur, Making Sex, 127.

38. Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, 74. Women's adoption of male-gendered strengths was considered laudable at least through the late seventeenth century. Such was the case in late antiquity, as Mary Castelli notes in “‘I Will Make Mary Male’: Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity” in Epstein and Straub, Body Guards, 29-49; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Dugaw, Warrior Women, explains (172-74); and in the late seventeenth century, as Janet Todd points out in Gender, Art and Death (New York: Continuum, 1993).

39. Castelli, “‘I Will Make Mary Male,’” 46. See also Jean Howard, “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (winter 1988): 421-25. For a discussion of debate on when women became seen as passionless rather than sexually voracious, see my “Not Subordinate: Empowering Women in the Marriage-Plot—the Novels of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen,” Criticism 34, 1 (winter 1992): 51-73. See also Nancy Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850,” Signs 4, 2 (1979): 219-36.

40. Howard, “Crossdressing,” 425.

41. For varied views on when this change occurred and the new paradigm on the sexes' nature and relation was accepted, see Dekker and van de Pol, Tradition of Female Transvestism, 49-53; Donoghue, Passion Between Women, 25-58; Friedli, “‘Passing Women,’” 235, 246-49; Laqueur, Making Sex, (135-42); Trumbach, “London's Sapphists,” 115-21; and Jones and Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender,” (80-111). Although such a change occurs gradually and at different rates in different places and classes, most agree that by the end of the eighteenth century, the change had occurred and the new paradigm was virtually universally accepted.

42. Ferris, Lesley Acting Women: Images of Women in Theatre (New York: New York University Press, 1989) 60-64.

43. Ibid., 4.

44. Jones and Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender,” 89. Given Donoghue's assertion, in Passions Between Women, that cross-dressing was not illegal in eighteenth-century England (61), James's dictum must have lapsed into disuse with other sumptuary laws in the 1690s. Deuteronomy 22:5 likewise forbids male cross-dressing, but James did not deploy this element of biblical law in his own anti-cross-dressing edict.

45. For discussion of these pamphlets, see Jones and Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender,” 104; Dugaw, Warrior Women, 163-89; and Howard, “Crossdressing,” 424-28.

46. On these views of masquerades, see Terry Castle's “The Culture of Travesty: Sexuality and Masquerade in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Rousseau and Porter, Sexual Underworlds, 156-80, and her Masquerade and Civilization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). On these views of the theater, see Straub, Sexual Suspects. On the variety of objections to the theater, see Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

47. Joan Rivière, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” Formations of Fantasy, eds. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), 35-44; and Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 76.

48. Catherine Craft-Fairchild discusses Haywood's use of masquerade in Fantomina in Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity in eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 51-72. See also Mary Anne Schofield, Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind: Disguising Romances in Feminine Fiction, 1713-1799 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990).

49. On increased calls for men to be exclusively heterosexual, see Randolph Trumbach, “Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture,” and “The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660-1750,” Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: Penguin-New American, 1989), 129-40.

50. Walsingham, I: 267-28.

51. Ibid., II: 126.

52. Ibid., I: 267, 269.

53. Ibid., II: 38, 40; III: 86.

54. Ibid., III: 86, 83.

55. Ibid., III: 137. She in fact does so “for private reasons,” which may have as much to do with convincing Walsingham that she is unavailable as with concern for her reputation.

56. Ibid., IV: 136, 76.

57. Ibid., 297, 387, 390.

58. Cullens, “Mrs. Robinson,” 268.

59. Ibid., 269.

60. Walsingham, I: 173-74, 149.

61. Dugaw, Warrior Women, 67.

62. Wahrman, “Percy's Prologue,” 131.

63. Walsingham, IV: 387.

64. Ibid., II: 167-69.

65. Ibid., II: 178-79. That he is perceived by others to have sensibility is demonstrated by Sidney's assertion that Walsingham should believe that Sidney does not mean to persecute Walsingham in eloping with Isabella, saying, “you have sense, discernment, feeling!—you have faculties of mind that should place it above prejudice” (III: 81). Isabella too, despite all Walsingham's cruelty, refers to him obliquely as the object of Sidney's love, and, as such, as “the most deserving, the most enlightened of men” (IV: 132). Given his callous, self-centered behavior, such assertions reveal their bad judgment rather than his true nature.

    My treatment of Walsingham's sensibility here diverges from Eleanor Ty's argument in Empowering the Feminine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 51. Ty does not address the possibility that Robinson presents Walsingham's sensibility as negative or incomplete. She stresses that Walsingham helps others without including discussion of his not doing so in key instances, and in harming those he ostensibly loves through his self-centered sensibility.

66. In Equivocal Beings, Johnson argues that this was the case with Wollstonecraft, for instance, who continued claiming in this time of gender panic that women needed to model what was elsewhere defined as masculine strength.

67. Walsingham, II: 134.

68. Ibid., III: 99, 97.

69. Ibid., IV: 195.

70. Ibid., III: 125-26.

71. Peter Garside argues that Walsingham follows models of the sentimental novel provided by Goethe and Rousseau and that his sensibility at times draws on nature but at other times is more “morbid” in his Introduction to his edition of Walsingham (London: Routledge-Thoemmes, 1992), ix-x. The assertion that the morbid side of Walsingham's sensibility is Wertherian is mine.

72. Walsingham, I: 84-85, 201.

73. Ibid., II: 211.

74. Ibid., I: 163, 319.

75. Ibid., III: 271, 338.

76. Ibid., IV: 192. The novel plays throughout with varied views on nature and on the genius, benevolence, or ignorance that belongs to one raised in nature, for instance identifying Shakespeare as an example of a natural genius that might as easily be found in laborers as is in the well-born (II: 270-71). Elsewhere, the notion of the natural man is used in a manner challenging Hanbury's and Walsingham's use of it as guarantee of truth and benevolence to suggest that the person raised in nature will be an ignorant boor, not skilled in fashionable behaviors (III: 228-30). At times, Walsingham seems to differentiate between external nature, capitalizing “Nature” when referring to it, and human nature. This typographical differentiation is inconsistent, however, allowing for the conflation between the two.

    Ty, Empowering the Feminine, likewise focuses on nature and the construction of gender (45-46, 52). She does not treat the novel as dislocating or relativizing nature to the extent that I outline here, however. She nevertheless quite usefully examines the permeability of gender lines in ways that augment my discussion of the issue.

77. Walsingham, III: 2, 29, 30, 74.

78. Ibid., IV: 162.

79. Ibid., III: 96, 112, 117.

80. Walsingham could also simply be lying, or otherwise reconstructing his version of the past from his aim to exculpate his behavior without recognizing his inconsistencies—or, to put the case more accurately, his telling consistencies. His blurred boundary between sexual and sibling love is otherwise in keeping with the relation between these two sorts of love elsewhere in the period. For a discussion of ways in which sibling love both properly and improperly merges with sexual love elsewhere, see my “Familial Love, Incest, and Female Desire in late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century British Women's Novels,” in Criticism 41 (1999): 67-99.

81. Alexander Pope, “Epistle II. To a Lady. Of the Characters of Women.” 1743.

82. Walsingham, IV: 388, 398.

83. Ibid., I: 267-69; II: 126.

84. Bronstein likewise links Sidney and d'Eon in “Whose Gender? Which Gender?” See also Peter Ackroyd, Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979): 81.

85. Walsingham, I: 304, 305, 318.

86. Cullens, “Mrs. Robinson,” 339 n.15.

87. Walsingham, II: 38.

88. I do not mean to suggest that one partner's taking a masculine role and the other's taking a feminine role was not the only model for lesbian relationships in the eighteenth century. Donoghue's Passions Between Women explores different kinds of lesbian desires, relationships, and models that women who loved other women might follow.

89. Walsingham, I: 317.

90. Cullens, “Mrs. Robinson,” 339 n.15.

91. Bronstein makes these points in “Whose Gender? Which Gender?”

92. For another discussion of the valorization of forms of relationships normally considered deviant and unnatural, see George Haggerty, Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the later 18th Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

93. See [previous] for comparison to punishment meted out to lesbians. Randolph Trumbach, throughout “Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture,” points out that prostitutes could be more gently dealt with because they, unlike male homosexuals, were seen as socially redeemable and because they were held as necessary to keep men from turning to sodomy. On chances of convicting rapists, see Antony Simpson's “Vulnerability and the Age of Consent,” in Rousseau and Porter, Sexual Underworlds, 181-205.

94. Trumbach makes this argument in “The Birth of the Queen,” “London's Sapphists,” and “Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture.”

95. See Laurence Senelick, “Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the Eighteenth-Century London Stage,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990): 51.

96. Philip Carter, “Men about Town: Representations of Foppery and Masculinity in Early Eighteenth-Century Urban Society,” Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, eds. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (New York: Longmans, 1997), 49. Susan Staves also argues that the fop is heterosexual in her “A Few Kind Words for the Fop,” SEL [Studies in English Literature,1500-1900] 22 (1982): 413-28. Carter foregrounds the fop's social rather than sexual deviance by pointing out that given that male homosexuality was a capital offense, the male homosexual or molly is necessarily “clandestine in practice [while] the fop is social, flamboyant, vigorously heterosocial, and, above all, conspicuous” (39). Were a molly to be so flamboyant and conspicuous, he would be arrested, pilloried, and possibly stoned to death (Trumbach, “Sex, Gender,” 190). Carter notes too that given the scandalous nature of the molly, works on him—specifically on his dangerous sexuality—might have been received as pornographic and so would have been less prevalent and public than those on the fop, who was “regularly featured in the more ‘respectable’ format of essay periodicals, serious or satirical social commentaries, courtesy books and conduct guides.” (40).

97. Senelick, “Mollies or Men of Mode?,” argues that the fop was used thus to stand in for the male homosexual without his sexuality's being specifically addressed (43).

98. Pertinent discussions of such shifts include Anna Clark's “The Chevalier d'Eon and Wilkes: Masculinity and Politics in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, 1 (1998): 19-48, and Gary Kates's “D'Eon Returns to France: Gender and Power in 1777,” in Epstein and Straub, Body Guards, 167-94.

99. Walsingham, IV: 388.

100. Cullens, “Mrs. Robinson,” 272.

101. Walsingham, IV: 383-84.

102. Ibid., IV: 366, 359-60.

103. Bronstein presents Mrs. Blagden's punishments in similar terms, in part because she, like Cullens, “Mrs. Robinson,” sees Sidney as returning to proper femininity. The detailed delineation of Mrs. Blagden's and literary precedents for it deserve exploration, but providing it lies beyond the purview of this essay.

104. Walsingham, I: 266.