Second selves
In a famous moment in Virginia Woolf ’s 1929 feminist classic “A Room of One’s Own,” the narrator pauses to imagine the possibility of something previously not visible in her survey of literary history: a relationship between two women. Discussing an invented novel by a made-up female writer that tells the story of two women at work together in a laboratory, she highlights as significant the phrase “Chloe liked Olivia...” “Do not start. Do not blush,” she chides the reader. “Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”
The absence of relationships between women in literature, according to Woolf, becomes more poignant when we consider the essential nature of men’s friendships in great works. “Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers: how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!”
Gender studies scholars Marilyn Yalom and Theresa Donovan Brown journey back through the ages in “The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship” to discover evidence of women liking women. Like Woolf, they acknowledge that male friendships dominate the stage for centuries because so much of what was written in the earlier periods was by men, but unlike Woolf, they have the benefit of more than half a century’s worth of scholarship on women’s history that allows them to excavate sites that would have eluded a reader in the early 1900s.
Yalom, in the preface, pays tribute to her friend writer Diane Middlebrook, who died in 2007, and declares, “I could think of no better way to honor her memory than to craft a book about female friendship.” Alluding to her own 2012 book, “How the French Invented Love,” she notes that “the subject of friendship is less glamorous than love,” yet throughout the book, the authors remind us that love and friendship are bound up together and that the privileging of romantic over platonic love may be a misleading hierarchy.
Yalom and Brown celebrate what they call the “female friendship model” and offer the hope that the “power, and often the wisdom, of what women seek and find in friendship could lead future generations into lives of dignity, hope and peaceful coexistence.” If at times they seem anxious about whether this history will find friends in a wide readership, an anxiety that no doubt arises from the same context that once consigned women’s history to oblivion — i.e., that women’s concerns and relationships are frequently treated as less valuable than those of men — the authors are passionate believers in the centrality of female friendships in women’s lives.
Beginning with biblical history and following what they call “a zigzag path” to cover women’s friendships in Europe and America up to the present day, the book oscillates somewhat unevenly between big generalizations and specific tales. In the case of the Bible, the authors assert, “Often we can sense a feminine presence lurking within the narrative.”
They highlight as early archetypes the friendships between Ruth and Naomi, and between Mary, mother of Jesus, and Elisabeth, mother of John the Baptist, going on to speculate on the relationship that might have existed between Jesus’ mother, Mary, and Mary Magdalene. Just as Woolf did in her imaginary novel, they frequently create stories when none present themselves.
Not surprisingly, given the broad historical scope, when the authors linger over details about women’s lives and particular friendships, the book comes to life. For instance, in the story of Madame Rolande and Sophie Grandchamp, friends during the French Revolution, we learn that Rolande asked Grandchamp to station herself along the route when she was being taken to the guillotine.
“Your presence,” wrote Rolande, “will diminish the fear that this odious journey inspires. I shall at least be sure that a being worthy of me will render homage to the firmness which will not abandon me in such a dreadful ordeal.” Grandchamp undertook this grim charge, and later wrote, “Approaching the bridge, her eyes looked for me. I read the satisfaction that she experienced in seeing me at this last, unforgettable rendezvous.”
Information about the early friendships of French author George Sand (who was born Aurore Dupin and later adopted a masculine nom de plume and persona) stand out. Sand’s close friends in the convent school she attended in Paris were “all bound by a code that required them to draw up a list of their best friends in an immutable order based on chronology, despite changes of the heart.” In Sand’s words, “Once we had given a girl first place, we did not have the right to take it away in order to give it to someone else. The rule of seniority was law.”
That said, she personally gave first place to the girl who was No. 3 on her list, and in later years, she looked back tenderly on that youthful friendship with absolute certainty that her friend continued to love her and know herself to be loved.
From Aristotle, Yalom and Brown adopt two central definitions of friendship as recurring touchstones: the idea of friends as “one soul in two bodies” and the friend as “a second self.” As these quotations suggest, the line between platonic and romantic relationships can be blurry, and the authors see lesbian and non-sexual relationships as existing on a continuum of female friendship.
Similarly, Woolf ’s delight in Chloe liking Olivia, followed as it was by an immediate reference to blushing, tends to be viewed as a coded reference to same-sex desire. Love, as Yalom and Brown write, “will always hold a mystery, whether between two women, two men, a man and a woman, or between people who label themselves straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, or a combination thereof.”
Perhaps because the authors sought to provide a long history of female friendship, they decided to de-emphasize the recent past. Eleanor Roosevelt and her circle receive a full chapter, but the book speeds up when it gets to women’s friendships in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Their claim that female friendship has now reached “iconic prominence” may well be true, but if so, then Taylor Swift’s “girl squad” would probably receive less press attention than it has.
Still, for those who may view women as natural adversaries or believe that reality TV cat fights and mean-girl antagonists are the norm, this book provides a compelling counter-narrative. And the emotional appeal is undeniable “because,” as the authors put it, “we dwellers on this crowded, conflicted planet must ply every relationship available to us.” BFFs abide.
Audrey Bilger is a professor of literature and faculty director of the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College. She is co-editor of “Here Come the Brides! Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage.” E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com