Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub
from sexuality are nowhere theorized in Bray’s work, we might approach the question of their relation as a productive fault line upon which his corpus is built—the “blindness” that enabled his considerable insight. If, as I have argued, Bray negotiated this fault line by deploying a strategic ambiguity—by seeming at one point to concede or advance an erotic interpretation while at other points explicitly denying that possibility—it may be because of some criteria of evidence known only to him. The fact remains that nowhere does he submit to systematic comparison any evidence of erotic affect in order to better delineate the homosocial from the homoerotic. Rather than preclude further investigation, the identification of this problem—and the hijacking of Bray’s work to privilege asexual friendship over sexuality—should spur us on. Indeed, just how far the rhetoric and practice of masculine friendship comprehended the expression of erotic desire and the performance of erotic acts and whether it is possible to construct a legitimate definition of such criteria remain two questions unanswered by Bray’s corpus—questions, in other words, for the rest of us.68
Additional questions embedded in Bray’s work likewise deserve consideration. In the afterword to the 1995 edition of Homosexuality in Renaissance England, for instance, Bray boldly asserts that “attitudes to homosexuality unquestionably have been symptomatic of fundamental changes in European society and in substantial part constitutive of them.”69 Sexual representation is not merely mimetic; it has an efficacy, an agency, of its own. Such an assertion urges a greater appreciation of sexuality’s ideological utility—not only its pliability and susceptibility to pressure but its ability to exert pressure on practices, discourses, and institutions external to it. But from where, one might ask, does this agency derive? Of one thing we can be sure: it is not a function of desire. Strikingly absent from Bray’s work is any concept of desire as an internal, generative mechanism or drive. Such a concept is, to his mind, alien to the psychic, emotional, and ideological landscape of early modern culture. In his discussion of the sexual dreams and fantasies expressed in the diary of Michael Wigglesworth, for instance, Bray argues that the sexual impulses over which Wigglesworth agonized (the “filthy lust … flowing from my fond affection to my pupils”) were experienced by this colonial subject as unbidden, separate from his will, not a matter of his own desire at all.70 As Bray notes in The Friend, the “desire for the gift of the friend’s body … does not correspond easily to anything in our culture several centuries on.”71 Even as Bray may contribute to what David Halperin has called “the possibility of a new queer history of affect,”72 his contribution is not to explain what intimacy tells us about the desires of an individual subject (or, for that matter, to historicize emotion), but to describe the instrumentality of intimacy in creating (or threatening) social cohesion. Sworn brotherhood, for example, is a response to the ethical uncertainty of friendship, and its meaning exists primarily in the wider social responsibility assumed by friends when they formalize their vows. So too, the “desire for the gift of the friend’s body” functions, much like the homosocial desire anatomized by Sedgwick, as the glue that holds early modern society together.
Yet, the question remains: What does it mean to assert for representations of sexuality an agency that does not depend on a subject of desire? The answer to this question is everywhere implied by the dense historical interconnections Bray excavates among religion, ethics, the family, and friendship, but the most trenchant indication of it is recorded in a memorial headnote to an essay he published in an anthology that appeared after his death. According to Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke, when Bray asked himself, “How would [his current work] change the exploratory maps constructed twenty years ago? he said this: it would be a shift from studies of sexuality into ethics and from the politics of identity into the politics of friendship.”73 There is much for historians of sexuality to ponder in that proposed shift, including the presence or absence of the body and erotic desire in ethics and friendship and the risks involved in leaving their material histories behind. Addressing that risk is a motivating force behind Chapter 6, which, in an explicit departure from Bray’s own strategy, contemplates early modern sex acts in order to advance the epistemological direction inaugurated by his historical work.
A further consideration is the relation of Bray’s work to the category of gender. On the face of it, Bray’s corpus seems to offer little to the history of female friendship or female sexuality. Although I tend to think otherwise, certain problems with his approach to gender deserve acknowledgment. Bray duly noted the restricted scope of Homosexuality in Renaissance England: “Female homosexuality was rarely linked in popular thought with male homosexuality, if indeed it was recognized at all. Its history is, I believe, best to be understood as part of the developing recognition of a specifically female sexuality.”74 This may have been true when this book was written; whether it remains true is a question to which I will return. To his credit, Bray recognized then that the dissonance between friendship and sodomy was in part a function of gender: “So long as homosexual activity did not disturb the peace or the social order, and in particular so long as it was consistent with patriarchal mores, it was largely in practice ignored.”75 Yet, because of the asymmetrical application of the legal and theological category of sodomy to early modern English men and women, Bray’s first book does not provide ready analytical purchase to scholars working on women. Perhaps predictably, major studies of female homoeroticism have limited their engagement with his thesis primarily to the perception of parallels between a growing stigma regarding female intimacies and the increasing legibility of sodomy.76
Bray’s published essays on friendship likewise retain a focus on men, in part because the formal displays of intimacy that characterized male patronage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, he argues, less relevant to women, who on the whole were denied access to the public sphere. As Bray remarks in “The Body of the Friend,” it was precisely because of the male body’s privileged ability to confer cultural capital that the gift of the friend’s body was definitively male. In addition, much of Bray’s analysis of the symbolic gift exchanges among men hinges on the fact that “the daily cycle of working, eating and drinking, the bodily functions, and sleeping was carried on outside the marital home.” “Service in the great houses was men’s work,” Bray contends, and although women served as washerwomen, herdswomen, and traders, they did so from outside the great house walls.77 Where, one might ask, did these women live? Given the importance of the patriarchal household, it seems unlikely that they resided in all-female collectives. Does the mere fact that they were not mentioned in household records provide sufficient support for Bray’s claim?78
A portion of The Friend’s long final chapter concerns female relations, mainly by means of the figure of Anne Lister. Prior to this chapter the book treats female friendship as “the silence between the lines” of male friendship, referring briefly and sporadically to a few female burial monuments.79 Lister’s voluble diary breaks this silence, both because of its erotic explicitness and because Lister was intent on enacting with two of her lovers the kind of formal, public, and binding union that sworn brothers had vowed for centuries. She thus provides Bray with a “vantage point” for reconsidering the congruity between a relationship that was “unquestionably sexual” and “the confirmation of a sworn friendship in the Eucharist,” as well as a frame for thinking about the extent to which “that traditional world of kinship and friendship at the heart of religion’s role” survived in the byways of the nineteenth century.80 Nonetheless, the criteria Bray uses to admit women’s entrance into the historical picture imply that there is little evidence with which to track the path of female friendship prior to Lister’s relatively late incarnation. Bray admits that the friendship between Ann Chitting and Mary Barber “had a sufficiently formal and objective character for them to be buried together” in the early seventeenth century, but this does not impact his general view that women’s role in the history of friendship is the “silence between the lines.”81 One is left to wonder whether Lady Anne Clifford’s apology, in a letter to her mother, for her inability to travel “to Oxford, according to your Ladyship’s desire with my Lady Arbella [Stuart], and to have slept in her chamber, which she much desired, for I am the more bound to her than can be,” demonstrates something of