The Construction of Gender and Sexuality through Various Discourses on Female Homosexuality in Modern Britain

This research project aimed to examine the ways in which gender was constructed in modern Britain, in relation to the idea of sexuality of the time, female homosexuality in particular. More specifically, this research investigates through various discourses about the Ancient Greek woman poet Sappho and the Ovidian Sappho, discourses on female homesexuality, and the poetic discourses of British women poets called "Sappho." It has been hitherto argued that the concepts of sexuality and homosexuality had not appeared until late nineteenth century in Europe. The current research, however, ascertained that the terms ‘Sapphism' and ‘Sapphist' had been used in late eighteenth-century Britain similar to their use in modern times, and the lesbian tradition from Sappho to the present had been sarcastically noted. On the other hand, the attachments between two women, however intense, were often rather celebrated as asexual "romantic friendship." Chapter one of the research results analyzes the conflicting discourses of female homesexuality (‘romantic friendship' and ‘Sapphism') concerning the Ladies of Llangollen, who lived together for over fifty years, bringing to light the particular relation of the rise of new gender to the changed view of female sexuality in the Romantic period. Chapter two verifies that Anna Seward, posthumously called "the British Sappho," was a poet in the tradition of Sappho of Lesbos, as her love poetry was, like Sappho's poetry, created by a fervent longing and yearning for the absent female beloved, as well as lost time and lost pleasure. Chapter three highlights Seward's Louisa and examines the ways in which it seemingly presents itself as a heterosexual love story, while setting the heroine's romantic female friendship above her heterosexual romantic love and marriage. This poetic novel also illustrates an aspect of late eighteenth-century lesbianism which was compatible with heterosexual society.