Listening to the “Wives” of the “Female Husbands”

SUMMARY

This article treats two of the central queer texts of eighteenth-century Britain, the autobiographical narrative of Charlotte Charke, a well-known cross-dressing actress who spent a portion of her life as a husband to another woman, and Henry Fielding's pamphlet, The Female Husband. Focusing on these texts, this study moves away from the traditional subject of such work-the female husbands themselves- and instead centers on the wives and lovers of these figures. In this way, the author offers a model of what she calls a project of imaginary coalition-building across time between contemporary femmes and the differ-ently-but still queerly-desiring feminine women in Charke's and Fielding's texts. Tracing two models of queer but gender-normative feminine subjectivity in these texts, the “wife” in a same-sex companionate marriage, and the “duped woman,” this article challenges assumptions by mainstream as well as queer scholars about just who should be our subjects of study and why, ultimately calling into question definitions of both “heterosexuality” and “queer.”

Key Words:

• Femme
• femininity
• female husband
• cross-dressing
• eighteenth-century Britain
• Charlotte Charke
• Henry Fielding