CHAPTER 4 “My sister, my friend, my ever beloved” QUEER FRIENDSHIP AND ASEXUALITY IN THE MEMOIRS OF MISS SIDNEY BIDULPH
Ziona Kocher
Intimate female friendships are a mainstay of the eighteenth-century novel, serving as a crucial entry point for queer readings of the period. From the epistolary relationship between Clarissa Harlowe and Anna Howe in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) to the femicentric utopian community of Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) to the bond between Belinda and Lady Delacour in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), female friendships are central to the genre. Examinations of such relationships through a queer lens often seek to unpack desires that are embedded in bonds between women, shining an important light on the eroticism expressed through their interactions.1 In seeking the possibility of queerness rooted in sexual desires, however, other forms of queer intimacy, such as asexuality or queer friendship, can be ignored. In Queer Friendship, George Haggerty notes that “we often want to assume that the love between friends is different from the love between lovers. As I hope to show, that is rarely an easy distinction.”2 My goal here is not to draw boundaries around these different types of love but rather to illustrate how reading these messy webs of affection with asexuality in mind can reinvigorate understandings of queerness in the eighteenth century.
Frances Sheridan’s epistolary novel, The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) illustrates these webs, as the novel represents Sidney’s struggles to navigate marriage when her suitor, Orlando Faulkland, is revealed to have fathered a child with an unmarried woman. These events are narrated in Sidney’s agonized letters to her friend and closest confidante, Cecilia. By reading Sheridan’s Sidney Bidulph through an asexual lens, the heroine’s passivity regarding marriage and her longing to return to a time when she and Cecilia were inseparable suggest that, while her romantic feelings for Faulkland persevere, she would be happier existing in a world free of the pressures of marriage. Though marriage serves as both an outlet for romantic feelings and a means of maintaining familial wealth and status, it is also a tool that reinforces compulsory sexuality and limits access to other forms of intimacy. Sidney Bidulph read through an asexual lens critiques compulsory sexuality to locate a queer, asexual potential that Sidney expresses in her writings to Cecilia.
Friendship, particularly between women, holds a tense position in queer scholarship of the eighteenth century. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick evolves Adrienne Rich’s construction of the lesbian continuum to suggest that “the adjective ‘homosocial’ as applied to women’s bonds … need not be pointedly dichotomized as against ‘homosexual’; it can intelligibly denominate the entire continuum.”3 While such a continuum is undeniably useful for understanding these relationships, it simultaneously holds the potential to flatten the various forms of desire and intimacy that exist between women. Documenting an astonishing array of representations of women’s relationships in literature, Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men attempts to untangle the distinctions between lesbianism and “romantic friendships,” a concept that has met criticism for its potential to distance these relationships from their eroticism. Susan Lanser, for example, describes the term as “obfuscating … with its odd blend of discrediting (eighteenth-century) and desexualizing (twentieth-century) baggage.”4 The relationship between Sidney and Cecilia could easily be read as a romantic friendship, as described by Faderman, or as sapphic, as Lanser argues in The Sexuality of History. By introducing asexuality as a means of understanding Sidney’s longing for Cecilia, I aim to sidestep “a tendency in the reception of queer scholarship to demand incontrovertible evidence of homoerotic desires or acts” while exploring the heroine’s queerness through and beyond her relationship with Cecilia.5 These women’s bond is undeniably queer, but Sidney’s asexual tendencies expand far beyond their longing for one another.
Rooted in feminist and queer theory, asexual approaches to reading are not simply invested in labeling characters as asexual.6 Rather, as Ela Przybylo and Danielle Cooper explain, “Through a queerly asexual reading strategy and an attention to the touches, instances, moments, and resonances, we begin to assemble an asexual archive that can accommodate the ephemeral and elusive fragments of asexuality.”7 By assembling such an archive, “asexuality encourages us to rethink the centrality of sex to feminist and queer politics, and to consider critically what has been at stake in the neglect of asexual articulations and perspectives.”8 This approach to queerness is not an attempt to erase sex or eroticism, or to hide it behind euphemism, but, instead, encourages the exploration of alternate forms of queer relationality. Though many assume that asexuality equates to a lack of feeling, asexuality studies remain closely tied to queer affect theory.9 Ann Cvetkovich describes the production of “ ‘an archive of feelings,’ an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception,” and Sidney Bidulph, both in form and content, acts as a fictionalized version of such a repository.10 Despite her many attempts to repress her emotions, Sidney’s narrative overflows with deep, queer feeling, and it is through those feelings—and her own reactions to them—that her asexual potential becomes legible.
Sheridan published the novel during the age of sensibility and the rise of companionate marriage, so there is little surprise that Sidney’s troubled and troubling feelings are so central to the text, as she struggles to negotiate her passions and discomfort when faced with marriage and the possibility of love. Paul Kelleher argues that “eighteenth-century literature and philosophy fundamentally rewrote the ethical relationship between self and other as heterosexual fiction, as the sentimental story in which the desire, pleasure, and love shared by man and woman become synonymous with the affective virtues of moral goodness.”11 Texts like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela highlight the positive potential of such dynamics, as Kelleher suggests that “in Richardson’s hands the travails of seduction become a particularly effective means of provoking forms of reflection that expand and expound upon virtues that, if narratively entangled with the question of female chastity, do not simply mirror its gendered, irreversible, either-or logic of ‘honest’ versus ‘ruined.’ ”12 Though Sidney, like Pamela, is deeply invested in propriety and virtue, hers does not match that heroine’s happy fate.
Instead, her narrative is far more similar to that of Richardson’s Clarissa, whose story illustrates “how the union of sexuality and moral feeling can be tragically betrayed.”13 Rather than trusting their intense feelings, both Sidney and Clarissa attempt to suppress them as a form of self-protection, but this suppression repeatedly backfires. In describing Clarissa, Wendy Anne Lee explains that, in the eyes of other characters, her “hard-heartedness offends not because it reflects an inability to love but because it betrays an absolute unwillingness to do so. The hard-hearted person is not just unfeeling, affectless, and inhuman … but she refuses to feel, to express affect, to be human.”14 Such a description mirrors the reactions Sidney faces to her denial of romantic feeling as well as the harmful assumptions that circulate around asexuality, which, rather than viewing it as a legitimate embodiment of queerness, instead frame it as a dehumanizing defect. Analyzing Sidney’s narrative with an asexual lens rejects this impulse in favor of highlighting how her tragedy critiques the period’s linkage of sensibility, morality, and (hetero)sexuality.
Sheridan’s novel illustrates the trauma caused by compulsory sexuality, primarily represented by the unceasing pain and hardship that accompany Sidney’s multiple attempts at marriage. Kristina Gupta explains that through the recognition of its existence within our social structures, the critique of compulsory sexuality “seeks to emphasize that [it] is a system that regulates the behavior of all people, not just those who identify as asexual.”15 The eighteenth-century novel often emphasizes the importance of marriage, reinforcing compulsory sexuality to maintain social hierarchies. The suggestion that marriage leads to positive outcomes is thus in tension with the misery it may cause. Sheridan’s critique of compulsory sexuality extends far beyond its connection to marriage and reproduction: while Sidney’s discomfort with marriage and love are central to an asexual reading of the text, it must be noted that an adherence to compulsory sexuality is what repeatedly destroys relationships. Both Orlando Faulkland and Mr. Arnold are shown incapable of controlling their sexual desires, and it is their actions that lead to conflict rather than Sidney’s rejection of sexual and romantic feelings. By embracing the assumptions produced by a society that promotes compulsory sexuality, these men induce problems that Sidney is then held accountable for, further complicating her understanding of herself and her own desires. While they meet tragic ends themselves, Sidney is the one left to pick up the pieces of her doomed attempts at adhering to a system that she would rather reject, and it is her deep-rooted relationship with Cecilia that provides her with comfort as she navigates these events.
Asexual tensions arise in both form and content. Reading with critiques of compulsory sexuality in mind can expose a “logic of asexuality” that organizes a text. As Elizabeth Hanna Hanson explains, “An asexually structured narrative frustrates both the teleological movement towards closure and the aimless desire that may also characterize those narratives that resist closure.”16 Looking for such tensions within Sidney Bidulph reveals the influence of asexual potential: viewing asexuality as both a tool that allows us to better understand the construction of oppressive social structures and a way to better understand desires and behaviors opens up new opportunities to examine modes of queerness that have otherwise been ignored. By reading Sidney Bidulph as an archive of asexuality, I reinterpret the possibilities that are embedded within Sheridan’s novel as they relate to the queer friendship between Sidney and Cecilia and its view of marriage as a tool of compulsory sexuality. If we focus on the ways Sheridan’s novel refuses to reproduce the assumed rewards of marriage, the novel points to an alternative understanding of desire that is often ignored in favor of an emphasis on romantic love or sex. Christina Lupton describes Sidney Bidulph as “a series of ‘what ifs.’ [It] is presented as a journal of a young woman who writes to a friend of a marriage that might have been but wasn’t, another that might have worked but didn’t, and another contracted on the basis of a death which might have occurred but didn’t.”17 The novel actively encourages readers to pursue those “what ifs” and learn from them: Sidney’s epistolary narrative emphasizes her continual reconsideration of the decisions she has made and their varied potential outcomes, feeding into the novel’s refusal of closure.
In seeking asexual possibilities, Sidney Bidulph’s “what ifs” expand even further, no longer limited by the constraints of compulsory sexuality, which, for Sidney at least, is primarily represented by her need to marry. Sidney regularly reflects on her life before marriage, with a particular focus on her youth with Cecilia, making it clear that she longs to return to that period of her life. While many of the “what ifs” in the novel focus on Sidney’s relationships with men, reading asexually allows us to ask what might have happened if she and Cecilia were able to remain in that premarital state, free from the pressures of a system that uses women as tools for maintaining and producing capital through the reproduction of family structures—questions that other essays in this collection, including those by M. A. Miller, Jeremy Chow, and Riley DeBaecke, take up explicitly. Examining Sidney Bidulph through an asexual lens makes it clear that Sidney’s passivity regarding marriage, her longing for Cecilia, and the narrative’s refusal of closure reflect an important critique of compulsory sexuality while encouraging readers to consider asexual alternatives that, within the world of the novel, can only exist in Sidney’s imagination. Though an emphasis on the rise of companionate marriage often attempts to mask the economic function of marriage in favor of an emphasis on romantic love and attachment, the continued belief that women must be pure and chaste to ensure the protection of the family line suggests that an asexual heroine would be an eighteenth-century ideal, even as an adherence to such an embodiment endangers the reproduction of these structures. While Sidney is unable to find permanent happiness through her asexual impulses and desires, her story reveals both the dangers of compulsory sexuality and the potential pleasures of asexual existence and queer friendship.
“IF YOU FIND NO DISINCLINATION, IT IS ENOUGH”: THE PERILS OF COMPULSORY SEXUALITY
Sidney Bidulph is commonly read as a commentary on the sentimental novel; in particular, scholars frame Sidney’s misery, rooted in her obedience to her mother, as a critique of female passivity and over-adherence to the norms presented in popular conduct books.18 Though readings of asexuality are scant if not absent, critiques of Sidney’s attempts at marriage illustrate a concern about the heroine’s position as a marriageable object and provide a groundwork for extending this critique to compulsory sexuality more broadly. Written as a series of journal entries addressed to Cecilia, Sidney Bidulph follows the trials the eponymous heroine faces as she attempts to find happiness in marriage and, following her failure to do so, attempts to provide a stable life for herself and her daughters. After her rejection of Orlando Faulkland, Sidney marries Mr. Arnold, a man for whom she feels little. Following the revelation of Mr. Arnold’s unfaithfulness, he falsely accuses Sidney of infidelity and abandons her, taking their children and leaving her destitute. Though the pair eventually reconciles, their happiness is short-lived as they face financial ruin and Mr. Arnold’s death. Sidney, estranged from her brother due to her refusal of Faulkland’s proposals, is left poor and virtually friendless until a forgotten cousin appears, providing her with a large fortune as a reward for her generosity. Sidney’s happiness is again temporary, as Faulkland returns once more and finally convinces her to marry him, this time under the threat of suicide after he kills his wife. Once the pair have finally married, it is revealed that Faulkland’s wife lives, and he takes his own life. The cycle of trauma perpetuated by the pressure for Sidney to marry combined with repeated sexual betrayal by the men she is meant to love reveals the perils of compulsory and coercive sexuality, while Sidney’s representation of the events of her life suggests a longing for an asexual existence free of such imperatives.
The tensions among virtue, desire, emotion, and trauma are constantly present in the novel, and the interpretation of Sidney’s suffering guides an asexual, affective reading of the text. Sidney’s first experience of trauma is the direct aftermath of her engagement to Faulkland: she and her mother learn that before he came to London, he had an affair that impregnated a woman. At the recommendation of her mother, Sidney immediately ends their engagement, much to her brother’s disappointment, and though Sidney reveals her feelings about Faulkland in a state of feverish delusion, she convinces herself that she must fully abandon them.19 Patricia Meyer Spacks frames this decision as Sidney making herself “invulnerable” to Faulkland through her “proclaimed lack of feeling, although her account makes it clear that the ‘lack’ signifies refusal rather than absence.”20 Sidney’s decision to reject feeling marks an important critique of compulsory sexuality: rather than being persuaded by her feelings of love and attraction, Sidney acknowledges that these emotions are not sufficient grounds for marriage, recognizing how they can easily lead to destructive outcomes. This choice highlights her desire for an asexual existence, wherein her attraction toward Faulkland (or any other man) cannot impact her behavior and she can instead rely on her reason rather than her emotions. Though Sidney repeatedly discusses her lack of feelings for Faulkland as something that she has chosen, it is crucial to recognize that her agency does not undermine the asexual impulse: the decision to simply stop feeling rather than acknowledge this loss more fully reinforces the discomfort with romantic emotions threaded through her narrative.
While the end of Sidney’s engagement to Faulkland serves as a flashpoint of asexual expression, this is far from the only moment—or even the first—when she embodies asexual potential. From the novel’s opening, Sidney’s journal reveals a discomfort with romantic feelings, even as she admits her interest in the man her brother intends her to marry. Writing about her concern that Faulkland may not like her, she explains, “I have a heart not very susceptible of what we young women call love; and in all likelihood I shall be as indifferent towards him, as he may be towards me—Indeed I think I ought to resolve on not liking him.”21 While there is a certain playfulness in Sidney’s declaration, her claim to be “not very susceptible” to love is proven by her own behavior after meeting her husband-to-be. Sidney spends far more time relating how others react to Faulkland than detailing her own opinions. This attention to other people’s feelings proves to be the driving force in Sidney’s relationships with men, even if her own feelings draw her in a specific direction. Carol Stewart points out that Sheridan’s novel acknowledges “that marriage is necessary primarily as a means of ensuring the legitimate inheritance of property. Women, and women’s sexuality, are linked to sums of money, or are equated with money.”22 By focusing on the opinions of her mother and brother, Sidney illustrates an understanding that her marriage is less about her feelings than it is about what will be best for the family and its economic situation, itself a useful critique of the intertwined nature of compulsory sexuality and compulsory marriage. This critique becomes even more obvious as the novel progresses and Sidney is encouraged to marry Mr. Arnold.
Sidney’s willingness to follow familial guidance is compounded by her obvious anxiety concerning vulnerability and love. Even in the moments where Sidney expresses her feelings, they are couched in the interpretation of others, and she is quick to guard her heart by sharing her fears. As Stewart observes, compared to the plot of Clarissa, “as Anna Howe … tells the heroine that she is attracted to Lovelace, so Sidney’s friend Cecilia tells her that she is in love with Faulkland.”23 This passage comes less than two months after their initial meeting, and Sidney’s journal is filled with italicized phrases emphasizing her surprise: “You are unkind, Cecilia, and do not do justice to my sincerity, when you say, you are sure I am in love with Mr. Faulkland. If I were, can you conceive it possible that I would want to deny it to you? Ah! My sister, must I suspect you of wanting candour by your making a charge of disingenuity against your friend? Indeed, Cecilia, if I am in love with him, I do not yet know it myself.”24 Though Sidney expresses her fondness for Faulkland, and that she would “certainly give him preference … over all the rest of his sex,” she writes that “I still endeavour to keep a sort of guard over my wishes, and will not give my heart leave to center all its happiness in him.”25 While Sidney occasionally shows her hand, revealing deeper feelings for Faulkland, her anxiety over doing so is undeniable, illustrating a desire for a path forward that is not determined by romantic feelings.
Sheridan continues to emphasize Sidney’s investment in fulfilling her duty as a daughter while distancing herself from her own emotions. Her refusal to show her feelings about Faulkland is reflected in the interactions she records, particularly those involving her brother. While Lady Bidulph approves of this control over her emotions, Sir George finds it frustrating: “Well, Sidney, you are either very affected, or the greatest stoic in the world; why, any other girl would be in raptures at such proof of the honest tenderness of that heart which she knows she possesses entirely, and on which the whole of her future happiness depends.”26 Sir George remains annoyed at his sister’s refusal to admit that they are destined to be married, illustrating his own investment (and return) in compulsory sexuality: he believes that, because Faulkland has expressed interest in Sidney, she must return those feelings in kind. Additionally, her marriage to his friend would secure their own homosocial relationship, serving as the third point of the triangulation Sedgwick describes in Between Men. When Faulkland eventually proposes, Sidney agrees, but is quick to place the bulk of the responsibility on her mother and brother, suggesting her understanding that the marriage is of greater concern for the members of her family who control money and property. Sheridan, by continually highlighting Sidney’s understanding of the purpose of marriage as she struggles to process her own feelings of love and attraction—many of which, based on what she writes in her journal, are confusing and potentially unwelcome—indexes the hypocritical nature of compulsory sexuality and the ways in which cultural structures utilize a faulty emphasis on love in marriage to reproduce patriarchal hierarchies.
Sidney’s story repeatedly illustrates that love is not enough to save a woman, and for this reason she relies on her “proclaimed lack of feeling” for protection.27 Having left her desire for Faulkland in the past (at least in theory), she soon deigns to marry Mr. Arnold. Sidney’s practiced pattern of indifference is heightened during their courtship when Cecilia once again lays claim to an understanding of her friend’s true feelings. Sidney responds to her accusations, “You say, you are sure Mr. Arnold is, or will be my lover; and insist on my being more particular in my description of him.”28 This description, however, is far from complimentary, ending with an insistence that “I have told you already, he plays divinely on several instruments; this is the only circumstance about him that pleases me.”29 This judgement proves to be immaterial: describing a conversation with her mother, Sidney writes, “I did not find in myself any great inclination towards Mr. Arnold. Oh, my dear, said she, if you find no disinclination, it is enough.”30 Sidney convinces herself to marry Mr. Arnold, and following their wedding, she determines that “it is not necessary to be passionately in love with the man we marry.”31 Sidney makes a distinct effort to train herself to love Mr. Arnold in order to align with the ideals she has been taught about how to be a proper wife, but her attempts prove insufficient when faced with assumptions about compulsory sexuality that threaten the stability of marriage.
Marriage serves as Sidney’s primary means of adhering to cultural expectations regarding love and sex despite her own distaste for these feelings, but Sheridan’s novel illustrates that compulsory sexuality can destroy matrimony as easily as it can produce it. Faulkland’s premarital affair with another woman ends their engagement, but his ongoing connection to Sidney and their assumed desire for one another proves to be the undoing of the marriage between the heroine and Mr. Arnold. Having caught her husband having an affair with the manipulative Mrs. Gerrarde, Sidney “resolved not to interrupt them; nor if possible, ever let Mr. Arnold know that I had made a discovery so fatal to my own peace, and so disadvantageous to him and his friend.”32 Such efforts are unsuccessful when her rival executes a plan for Mr. Arnold to find Sidney and Faulkland together. Assuming the worst—that an adherence to the norms of compulsory sexuality means that she too must have been unfaithful—Mr. Arnold abandons his wife, declaring, “You have broke your faith with me, in seeing the man whom I forbad you to see, and whom you so solemnly promised to avoid. As you have betrayed my confidence in this particular, I can no longer rely on your prudence or your fidelity.”33 Having embraced a form of compulsory sexuality that implies an inability to resist sexual desires, Mr. Arnold is incapable of trusting his wife, instead relying on the hypocrisy of marriage as a patriarchal system to turn Sidney out for the appearance of having behaved like him. While the truth eventually surfaces, their relationship ends in disaster: they are reunited and grasp at happiness but Mr. Arnold’s early death leaves Sidney destitute. Despite her best efforts to be a perfect wife, the system of compulsory sexuality irreparably disrupts her marriage, even though the two structures are expected to support and reproduce one another.
While it may be tempting to read Sidney as “hopelessly naïve in her understanding of the realities of female sexuality,” reading asexually, with attention to the structures of compulsory sexuality, suggests that Sidney’s decision to repress her feelings and adhere to the norms presented by her mother stems from an awareness of the trap that she is caught in by virtue of being a woman who possesses enough of a fortune to be considered worth marrying.34 The novel highlights how Sidney replaces her own feelings with those of the people around her to clarify that she is not simply following their instructions out of pure obedience; rather, she attempts to protect herself from the harsh realities of marriage by distancing herself from her own emotions. Combined with the discomfort Sidney expresses to Cecilia about her own romantic feelings, Sheridan presents her heroine in such a way that challenges notions about love, romance, and sexuality circulating in mid-eighteenth-century conduct books and novels. Reading asexually allows the reader to explore a new “what if” within the novel: rather than asking “what if Sidney had followed her brother’s advice and married Faulkland?,” we can ask, “what if Sidney was able to reject the burdens of compulsory sexuality, primarily represented in the pressure to marry, and embody the asexual potential she longs for in her journal?”
“YOU, MY DEAR CECILIA, MIX YOURSELF IN ALL MY THOUGHTS”: IMAGINING ASEXUAL ALTERNATIVES
Though Sidney’s various trials relating to marriage drive the plot, her queer friendship with Cecilia—physically embodied in the journals that make up its text—serves as the grounding force. Many scholars have attended to the impact of Sidney Bidulph’s epistolary form and its resistance to closure: these formal features have been read as a way of “subvert[ing] reader expectations,” a means of calling “attention to the issue of narrative privacy,” and a challenge to “fixed rules for behavior, and didactic fiction.”35 Reading the form of the novel asexually, however, introduces another understanding of its various resisting moves. Hanson explains that “the logic of asexuality dissolves the meaningful relationship between narrative middles and ends, dragging narrative’s forward movement not just off course but to a screeching halt, shutting down the possibility of meaning and closure.”36 In the eighteenth-century novel, narrative closure is often found through the promise or ascertainment of marriage, and Sidney’s failures in this realm resist such a horizon. Her relationship with Cecilia, however, presents a hopeful alternative for the novel’s heroine, even as she repeatedly acknowledges the impossibility of their future happiness together. Lupton suggests that “Sidney is resilient … in her consciousness of alternative realities,” and I argue that the most important of these alternative realities is the potential of Sidney and Cecilia building a life together.37 The novel’s resistant, asexual form successfully critiques marriage while pointing toward the power of queer friendship, as Sidney allows herself to imagine an alternate world where the pair can exist together, in a state that pre-dates the conjugal pressures of compulsory sexuality.
Sidney’s intimacy with Cecilia is most clearly articulated by the fact that the novel is written as a journal addressed to her, opening with the heroine mourning Cecilia’s recent departure: “My dear and ever-beloved Cecilia is now on her way to Harwich. How insipid will this task of recording all the little incidents of the day appear to me, when you, my sister, friend of my heart, are no longer near me? How many tedious months will it be before I again embrace you? How many days of impatience must I suffer before I can even hear from you, or communicate to you the actions, the words, the thoughts of your Sidney?”38 The longing expressed in this opening passage remains consistent through the novel, a sharp contrast to the way Sidney obscures her feelings for Faulkland and performs the love she claims to feel for Mr. Arnold. Doubt can be cast upon her feelings for men, but her love for Cecilia is never questioned, as the language she uses when addressing Cecilia is far more passionate than that used when talking to or about the men she marries. Lanser argues that the novel “is built upon blatant trade-offs in the object of desire: just as Cecilia leaves to go abroad, Sidney’s brother returns from abroad to introduce Faulkland.”39 This trade-off is best illustrated directly following Sidney’s marriage to Faulkland, when she writes, “I would it were possible for my Cecilia to arrive in England before my departure for Holland. Indeed, my dear, I shall not be sorry if I am detained from Mr. Faulkland, till I have the happiness of first embracing you.”40 By prioritizing Cecilia over her new husband, Sidney further emphasizes the importance of companionate friendship. Sidney’s longing to see Cecilia, paired with her repeated reminiscence of their time growing up together, positions their relationship as a powerful example of queer friendship, a relationship that does not compete with Sidney’s asexual potential but rather thrives because of it.
Though Sidney’s reflections on her relationship with Cecilia illustrate her longing to be reunited with her friend, they are often mournful in tone. Sidney Castle, where the pair grew up together, serves as a touchstone for their relationship, and Sidney alternately longs for and avoids the comfort her home may provide. Upon her broken engagement with Faulkland, Sidney writes, “Sidney Castle is too long a journey for me at present to think of undertaking, and [my mother] talks of going into Essex … I shall like this better than going down to Wiltshire, where the want of my Cecilia would make my old abode a melancholy place.”41 Cecilia’s absence from the neighborhood haunts Sidney, turning a space of comfort into one of melancholy. She repeatedly rejects the idea of returning to Sidney Castle, explaining that it “is a prospect which loses much of its charm, by the reflection that my dear Cecilia is not there.”42 Sidney’s desire for her home wanes in moments of happiness (either feigned or genuine) while increasing in moments of misery or tragedy. It thus appears that Sidney fears her sadness regarding the absence of her dearest friend will distort the positive feelings that she is trying desperately to perform—positive feelings that are meant to be implicit when a woman marries or reunites with her husband after a conflict but that Sidney must actively work to produce.
This theory, that Sidney’s sadness over Cecilia has the power to undermine any other happiness, is proven true when she returns to Sidney Castle with Mr. Arnold following their reconciliation. Though Sidney’s journal entry opens with a declaration of joy, her attention is quickly overwhelmed by thoughts of the past:
You, my dear Cecilia, mix yourself in all my thoughts; every spot almost brings you fresh into my memory … From what trifles do minds of such a turn derive both joy and grief! Our names, our virgin names, I find cut out on several of the old elm trees: this conjures up a thousand pleasing ideas, and brings back those days when we were inseparable. But you are no longer Rivers, nor I Bidulph. Then I think what I have suffered since I have lost that name, and at how remote a distance you are from me; and I weep like a child.43
A common symbol of love, the detail of their “virgin names” carved together on numerous trees signals the intense affection shared by these women.44 Sidney’s emphasis on the change of their names following marriage highlights their inability to return to this idyllic past, while also illustrating a desire for a time before sex and romantic love was forced on their identities. Though they may still harbor these deep feelings of love for one another, they cannot access their relationship as it once was; instead, Sidney must return to the role of faithful wife. She attempts to convince Cecilia—and herself—that her future with Mr. Arnold has the potential to bring her a greater form of joy, writing, “I am now happier, beyond comparison happier, I think, than I was before my afflictions overtook me.”45 The implication that her happiness now exceeds that of the earlier part of her marriage, however, illustrates an unspoken comparison to the past she has recently described with Cecilia. Sidney’s careful language emphasizes that nothing can compare to the happiness she once felt with her dearest friend, even as it appears that her marriage may be improving.
Cecilia is not only prioritized above the male love interests in Sidney’s story but is shown to be preferable to all other women too. Throughout Sidney Bidulph, the heroine longs for a companion who can fill the gap left by Cecilia’s departure. As such, she often dedicates more space on the page to her potential women friends than to possible suitors. Some of these women prove to be valued companions, such as Lady V—and Sidney’s maid, Patty, but others, like Mrs. Vere, are valued only when they are actively present, suggesting that their connection is a matter of convenience. Despite numerous attempts to replace Cecilia, the women Sidney finds are never sufficient. As she writes, “We can have but one friend to share our heart, to whom we have no reserve, and whose loss is irreparable; but I perceive the absence of a pleasing acquaintance … is a loss easily supplied; this I find by experience. There are Mrs. Veres every where; but alas! there is but one Cecilia!”46 That Sidney expresses such an unbreakable bond with a friend while illustrating, not only through her actions but in her own writing, that one’s relationship with a husband need not be grounded in undying love, proves that her relationship with Cecilia is, and always will be, the most important. This longing for queer friendship and asexual existence without the pressure to marry suggests that Sidney might thrive in a femicentric utopia like the one described in Millenium Hall, published a year after Sheridan’s novel. What is clear from Sidney’s tragedy, however, is that such a freedom cannot exist in a world that is so singularly dedicated to reproducing compulsory sexuality through marriage: she may imagine the possibility through her memories of Cecilia, but they will never attain an uninterrupted future together.
“I WAS NOT MISTRESS OF MYSELF AT THE SIGHT OF HER”: NARRATIVE AS QUEER UNION
Though Sidney and Cecilia are unable to return to the romanticized world of their youth, where they could be together beyond the bounds of compulsory sexuality, the narrative form of the novel binds them together eternally. Sheridan makes it clear that Cecilia is more than the passive recipient of these letters; rather, she is the one who compiles and copies the journals before providing them to the fictitious editor who arranges their publication. Throughout the novel, Cecilia provides brief editorial notes where she has removed passages to move the plot forward and she breaks in at the end to complete the story, following Sidney’s shock at the news that Faulkland’s wife is still alive. Lanser argues that Cecilia’s involvement in the production of Sidney’s story represents an “exchange of narration and story [in which] heterosexual marriage dies off to be replaced by a kind of female textual union.”47 This ending, wherein Cecilia takes over narration from Sidney to close the novel, simultaneously exposes and forecloses the potential for their queer, asexual future together: because she is married, Cecilia cannot remain with Sidney forever, but the published journal remains a testament to their love.
Cecilia’s position within the novel, as both the intended recipient of Sidney’s narrative and its first editor, provides her with complex power over her friend’s story. Kaley Kramer explains that “Sidney Bidulph … reveals the authorial impulse towards control and ownership of history. Told only through Sidney’s voice and letters, Memoirs condenses various interpretations and experiences into one individual’s history.”48 Sidney’s production of her own history, however, is influenced by what Cecilia has chosen to include or exclude from her friend’s journal. As the only character who “exists outside of Sidney’s memoirs,” Cecilia asserts her ownership over the story, not as an act of control but as an act of affection and admiration.49 By completing Sidney’s narrative, Cecilia attempts to interpret the events of her later life rather than simply describe them, before her narrative, too, ends abruptly. The repetition of these interrupted endings allows, as Spacks explains, “other interpretations, including the theological one suggested by Cecilia: God works in mysterious ways; human beings cannot fathom them. This deliberate ambiguity functions as a courtesy to the reader, a refusal to impose.”50 Cecilia’s understanding of the greater meaning of Sidney’s life can either be accepted or rejected by the reader. Such ambiguity, however, does not undermine Cecilia’s greater control over the final form of Sidney’s story.
Cecilia’s involvement in shaping Sidney’s narrative proves to encourage an asexual reading of the novel, as Sheridan uses her position as editor to “remove” lengthy passages to progress the plot and distance Sidney from the sexual realities of married life. Sidney gives birth to two daughters, yet descriptions of her pregnancy are absent from the narrative, marked with editorial notes that explain, “though the Journal was regularly continued, nothing material to her story occurred by the birth of a daughter; after which she proceeds.”51 Sue Chaplin suggests that “Sidney’s loss of textual authority at the moment that she becomes a mother may be seen to reflect the absence of legal authority that Sidney suffers as a mother.”52 This loss of agency, however, also serves to erase her experiences of both sex and birth. Ironically, Sheridan’s novel is not particularly shy about sex: the novel is punctuated with allusions to numerous sexual indiscretions. But Cecilia’s interference with the narrative obscures the reality that Sidney and her husband are sexually involved. Cecilia’s desire to create an illusion of Sidney as both maternal and virginal signals her own discomfort with her friend’s marriage. Similarly, the decision to name Sidney’s second daughter Cecilia hints at the women’s desire for one another: Cecilia cannot be a physical presence in Sidney’s life, so the daughter becomes a stand-in for the absent friend and an imagined result of their love. Mr. Arnold’s lack of interest in the young Cecilia bothers Sidney, further distancing her from him and emphasizing the unhappiness caused by compulsory sexuality.
As the novel reaches its final climax, Cecilia again inserts herself into the narrative, this time re-centering her importance in Sidney’s life. Cecilia removes thirteen months from the journal, explaining briefly that her friend continued using her fortune for charitable acts, before resuming on June 28, 1708, the day before Sidney receives the letter from Faulkland that leads to the tragic events that conclude the novel. By resuming the journal the day before this letter arrives, Cecilia preserves the passage wherein Sidney writes of the news that she will soon be reunited with her dearest friend: “And shall I really be so blessed, my ever beloved Cecilia, as to see you at the time you mention? Oh, my dear, after an absence of five long years, how my heart bounds with joy at your approach! … Let me but live to embrace my Cecilia, and then, providence, thy will be done!”53 Comfortably situated with a large fortune and waiting for the return of her dear friend, it appears that Sidney might have attained the happy ending she was repeatedly denied and that her queer friendship with Cecilia may be allowed to grow beyond the bounds of her journal. With Faulkland’s return, however, the cycle of compulsory sexuality resumes, driven by Sidney’s brother and cousin, who finally convince Sidney to acquiesce to Faulkland. Cecilia takes over the narrative to provide a brief description of the remainder of her friend’s life, and though Sidney finds comfort in her children, Cecilia’s married state prevents the pair from finding happiness together. Through the novel’s form, however, they are united permanently, as their joint production of the journal serves as a material representation.
Sidney Bidulph read through an asexual lens not only accounts for Sidney’s complex relationship with marriage and love but also illustrates how an asexual narrative form, which continually refuses closure, can disrupt the conventions of the eighteenth-century novel. Sheridan plays with audience expectations, providing the reader with numerous moments of potential closure yet refusing to follow any of them to a predictable end. The novel’s marriages repeatedly end in disaster, and even Sidney’s queer friendship with Cecilia cannot reach a fully satisfying conclusion because she too is bound by compulsory sexuality in the form of matrimony. Though genre conventions and the novel’s characters continually remind the audience and Sidney both that these systems are meant to bring about happiness, Sheridan’s repeated disruption of tropes forces the reader to reconsider understandings of marriage, sexuality, and desire. The novel discloses how compulsory sexuality has the potential to traumatize those who willingly embrace it and those who resist it simultaneously when it serves as an inflexible structure of control.
An asexual approach similarly informs the queer friendship between Sidney and Cecilia: the groundwork on which the novel is built and even as Sidney navigates her complicated feelings about love, sex, and marriage. Their commitment to one another extends far past marriage: as Sidney tells Cecilia on multiple occasions, one can learn to love a husband, but a true, close friend can never be replaced. Sidney Bidulph’s pessimistic outlook on compulsory sexuality, marriage, and obedience provides a flicker of hope in the form of the heroine’s queer friendship with her best friend.
NOTES
1. For more about women’s queer intimacy in the eighteenth-century novel, see Lisa L. Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); George Haggerty, Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Susan S. Lanser, The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Ula Lukszo Klein, Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021).
2. George Haggerty, Queer Friendship: Male Intimacy in the English Literary Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 2.
3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, 2015), 3.
4. Lanser, The Sexuality of History, 17.
5. Lanser, The Sexuality of History, 16.
6. Danielle Cooper, Kristina Gupta, Elizabeth Hanna Hanson, and Ela Przybylo (as cited below) point to the work of Judith Butler, Ann Cvetkovich, Jack Halberstam, Heather Love, José Esteban Muñoz, and Adrienne Rich, among others, to ground their understanding of asexual identity, desire, and eroticism and to build a critique of compulsory sexuality.
7. Ela Przybylo and Danielle Cooper, “Asexual Resonances: Tracing a Queerly Asexual Archive,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 3 (June 2014): 297–318 (298).
8. Przybylo and Cooper, “Asexual Resonances,” 298.
9. For more about assumptions made about asexuality and related queer identities, see Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2020).
10. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 7.
11. Paul Kelleher, Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015), 8.
12. Kelleher, Making Love, 132.
13. Kelleher, Making Love, 199.
14. Wendy Anne Lee, Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 59.
15. Kristina Gupta, “Compulsory Sexuality: Evaluating an Emerging Concept,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 1 (Autumn 2015): 131–154 (135).
16. Elizabeth Hanna Hanson, “Toward an Asexual Narrative Structure,” in Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, ed. KJ Cerankowski and Megan Milks (New York: Routledge, 2014), 344, 347.
17. Christina Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 110–111.
18. For more about Sidney Bidulph as a commentary on female passivity and adherence to conduct book norms, see Margaret Anne Doody, “Frances Sheridan: Morality and Annihilated Time,” in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 324–358; Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Oscillations of Sensibility,” New Literary History 25, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 505–520; John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700–1780 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1998); Candace Ward, “ ‘Cruel Disorder’: Female Bodies, Eighteenth-Century Fever Narratives, and the Sentimental Novel,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 32 (2003): 93–121; Sue Chaplin, Law, Sensibility, and the Sublime in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Fiction: Speaking of Dread, (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004); John C. Traver, “The Inconclusive Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph: Problems of Poetic Justice, Closure, and Gender,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 35–60; Carol Stewart, The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics (London: Taylor and Francis, 2010); Kaley Kramer, “The Limits of Genre: Women and ‘History’ in Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph and Elizabeth Griffith’s The History of Lady Barton,” ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830 2, no. 1 (March 2012): 1–15; and Karen Lipsedge, Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
19. For an explanation of how the Marriage Act of 1753 may have influenced the reception of Faulkland’s infidelity, see Eve Tavor Bannet, “The Marriage Act of 1753: ‘A Most Cruel Law for the Fair Sex,’ ” Eighteenth Century Studies 30, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 233–254.
20. Spacks, “Oscillations of Sensibility,” 509–510.
21. Frances Sheridan, The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, eds. Heidi Hutner and Nicole Garret (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2011), 54. All citations are to this edition.
22. Stewart, The Eighteenth-Century Novel, 127.
23. Stewart, The Eighteenth-Century Novel, 123.
24. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 64.
25. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 64.
26. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 67.
27. Spacks, “Oscillations of Sensibility,” 510.
28. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 111.
29. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 112.
30. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 114.
31. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 136.
32. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 162.
33. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 171.
34. Richetti, The English Novel, 207.
35. Traver, “The Inconclusive Memoirs,” 45; Patricia Meyer Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 105; and Stewart, The Eighteenth-Century Novel, 129.
36. Hanson, “Toward an Asexual Narrative Structure,” 353.
37. Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time, 113.
38. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 49.
39. Lanser, The Sexuality of History, 178–179.
40. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 457.
41. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 89.
42. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 125.
43. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 283.
44. For more about the importance of naming in Sidney Bidulph, see Kramer, “The Limits of Genre,” 1–15; and Kathleen M. Oliver, “Frances Sheridan’s Faulkland, the Silenced, Emasculated, Ideal Male,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 43, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 683–700.
45. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 283.
46. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 150.
47. Lanser, The Sexuality of History, 178–179.
48. Kramer, “The Limits of Genre,” 7.
49. Kramer, “The Limits of Genre,” 7.
50. Spacks, Privacy, 108.
51. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 145.
52. Chaplin, Law, Sensibility, and the Sublime, 97.
53. Sheridan, Sidney Bidulph, 425.