Normalizing female friendship.(Sharon Marcus's Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England)

Sharon Marcus's book is a refreshing reconsideration of same-sex relations between women. Between Women questions a paradigm that has become a cliche in sexuality studies: the notion that women's friendships became "morbidified"--to use pioneering lesbian historian Lillian Faderman's word (76)--during the nineteenth century. In fact, Marcus insists, the earlier generation of feminist scholars had it all wrong: the nineteenth century exalted women's friendships, not simply as a preamble to heterosexual marriage, but as a valuable experience of intimacy that should be integral to every middle-class woman's life. She concludes that if a fictional heroine lacks an intimate woman friend, it is a sure sign of her moral immaturity. Marcus disparages previous criticism for its hindsight history, in which twentieth-century attitudes are projected backwards onto a very different world; at one juncture she suggests that previous critics have suffered from a "vision clouded by anachronism" (107). Even recent work that questions Faderman's conclusions and demonstrates the centrality of the family is dismissed. Such polemics clear the ground for Marcus's central argument that critics have neglected the complexity of female friendships, dividing them too easily between two categories in what she calls a "parallel universe": women who divested themselves of women friends as soon as they married, and women whom these critics treat as proto-lesbians (19).

Marcus instead argues for the rich variety of nineteenth-century female friendships, amply evident in neglected aspects of feminine culture. She draws upon life-writing (memoirs, journals, and autobiographies) to delineate the normality of loving friendships among middle--class women. Marcus perhaps too readily accepts the conduct manual writer Sarah Stickney Ellis as a guide to Victorian attitudes toward women's friendships, for Nancy Armstrong and Mary Poovey have demonstrated the discrepancy between advice and actual behavior. Ellis, in advising the socially insecure, believed that women's friendships were essential, but she also warned against forming friendships outside one's own social class, and advised girls never to reveal family secrets to a friend. Friendship, while important, was …