When I decided to blog a few books on Charlotte Cushman in support of doing a podcast on her, my online searches suggested two titles that fell in the “definitive” category: Merrill’s 2000 book that I blogged last week, and Leach’s 1970 one that I’m blogging today. I hadn’t quite realized that they’d be such an object lesson in ways to approach the sexuality of 19th century queer women. Merrill unabashedly tackles the evidence for Cushman’s romantic and erotic relationships with other women and the ways she self-conciously managed her public reputation around them, as well as how shifts in public reception for same-sex relationships contributed to a significant erasure of Cushman’s rightful place in stage history. Leach, writing 30 years earlier, takes a far more “traditional” approach to the lives of 19th century women in “romantic friendships”. At almost every turn, Cushman’s lovers are turned into “friends”, the emotional chaos of her personal life is converted to concerns about finances and professional jealousies, and when evidence of Cushman’s intense emotional relationships with women is impossible to ignore, Leach hurries past with no analysis or discussion. In contrast, Leach fastens onto every scrap of evidence for Cushman’s interactions with men, converting an unnamed man that she spurned early in her career to a life-long romantic wound who was solely responsible for her remaining unmarried and regularly referring to Cushman’s life as “loveless” and “lonely”. And yet both biographers had exactly the same set of documentation available to work from.
One explanation, of course, is the times they were writing in (keeping in mind that Leach’s 1970 publication reflects research and composition done well before that date). He wrote at an era before “gay liberation” when a laudatory biographer would consider it a duty to “protect the reputation” of his subject. But also when myths about the nature of 19th century women’s sexuality largely stood unchallenged. (Keep in mind that Lillian Faderman’s 1981 work also failed to challenge them substantially.) Merrill was writing in the midst of a renaissance of historic research into queer women’s history: when Helena Whitbread’s work with Anne Lister’s diaries had exploded the myth that pre-20th century women were incapable of a self-conscious lesbian identity and when there was no longer a pall of stigma attached to identifying your research topic as other than heterosexual.
When digging for historic evidence for queer sexuality, it can be important to keep this sort of contrast in mind. Historians are never objective. They have their own biases and filters and their own agenda regarding how they want to present their topic. And while that doesn’t mean that you can’t trust anyone, it certainly means that no books should ever be taken as the final word on a subject.
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