Schrodinger’s Queer: Learning Through Imagination

I saw a quote going around the internet recently that I think is extremely powerful and extremely apt in the current political climate:

[Image ID: Tweet by Jennifer Powell username Ace_Librarian7. I have made it my mission to unteach children that “fiction is fake”. Here are my new definitions I started teaching today: Nonfiction= learning through information. Fiction = Learning through Imagination.]

What Powell is trying to say here is that even if a story is fiction, even if the people, the situations, and the places are made up, all stories are at their core a tale about someone (be they human, animal, elf, alien, or brave little inanimate object) wanting something and going on some kind of journey to get it. Whether emotional, physical, romantic, or personal, this journey then teaches the character something about the world and/or about themselves along the way. And, as a result, teaches the reader as well. Readers learn about themselves and others through fiction.

For example, in the case of The Hunger Games series, the lesson is that Rampant Capitalism is bad, and Empathy and Compassion are good.  Or in Star Wars, the lesson is that treating all people, no matter how unalike you they may look and behave, as people, and fighting for their right to live a life of peace and plenty is how we resist fascist power-hungry dictators with too much money and power (and, ahem, tariff wars.) And what smut reader hasn’t had a happy little kink awakening and learned a new secret about their own desires while reading a love scene?

I distinctly remember being assigned The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver to read in high school, and realizing that the food culture of the Guatemalan characters in the book was wildly different from the one that I enjoyed at home, and even at friend’s houses in my small home town. I grew up in a largely white, largely Presbyterian, largely rural community, where having “diverse” food meant getting sweet-and-sour chicken balls from the Canadian-Chinese place downtown–super tasty, but not exactly an example of authentic cuisine. The novel opened my eyes to cuisine I’d never heard of before, and was eager to try cooking for myself. (Let us not dwell on the success of those dishes.) I didn’t just learn about food while reading the book, either. I learned about the American immigration system, about colonialism, and about the sorts of emotional truths and experiences that I hadn’t yet had the circumstance or opportunity to explore in my own life, like the fierceness of love and found family that goes beyond biology.

And when reading Historical Fiction, one learns about the fashion and lifestyles of those who came before us, but also their prejudices and values, what they thought about the general news and world events of the day, and the political or social sentiments of the economic classes being portrayed.

But it does create an issues that plagues us Historical genre writers especially: how can a writer be sure that what you’re teaching readers of your work is 100% authentic and correct?

Well, that’s the thing with History—you can’t.

Without extant garments to study and the ability to reproduce textile fabrication in the exact same manner using the exact same materials, no costumer can ever be 100% accurate.  Without detailed recipes, access to identical foodstuffs grown in an identical manner and environment, a mathematically precise set of measuring utensils, and the room to cook on an open flame in their back yard, no food historian can ever reproduce an identical dish to one served hundreds of years ago.

This is especially true of aspects of society that were intangible and ephemeral. If everyone is doing the thing, then no one needs to keep record of it.

And this is doubly true if the thing one is doing is illegal, taboo, or frowned on; if you’re not supposed to be doing the thing or thinking the thing, then it’s unlikely that you’ll be writing down the details of whatever it is that you’re up to.  Which means that those of us doing research hundreds of years later are left without evidence or primary resources to cite.

It would be terribly useful if treasonous conspirators left us letters explaining their plans in minute detail, or criminal masterminds kept lists of everything they’d ever stolen, or, in the case of times and places when being anything but openly cisgendered and heterosexual was frowned upon, kept lists of their lovers or explicitly called themselves lesbian or gay in their personal diaries.

And hey, some of them did—or at least, we can assume they did. The problem with trying to label historical figures with modern terminology is that the historical figures would never label themselves with modern terms. Never once did Anne Lister, the sapphic diarist who has been dubbed “The First Modern Lesbian”, write the word lesbian in her pivotal diary. While the word has been floating around since the 1550s, it didn’t enter common usage with the precise meaning we ascribe to it today until a medical text the 1890s, and even then it was to describe what was then considered a form of insanity. It wasn’t until 1925 or thereabouts that ‘Lesbian’ became the female equivalent of ‘Sodomite’, and again it was freighted with negative connotations.

If someone was to travel back in time to interview Anne Lister and ask her if she was a lesbian, she would say no. Not because she was not a woman who formed romantic and sexual relationships with other women, but because she didn’t know what a ‘lesbian’ was. (She was clever, I’m sure she could infer the meaning, but the point stands.)

We cannot know for sure, not until someone invents Time Travel and gives it to academics and investigative journalists, and sends them careening through history to create a Queer Census. And even if we do interview historical subjects about their sexuality and their experiences trying to hide or celebrate it in their current socio-economic climate (assuming they’d even discuss something so deeply private and personal with a complete stranger holding a strange contraption in their faces), then we risk the butterfly-effect knock on of having to explain what a term means and thus embedding it in history inorganically, which is really just confirmation bias at it’s worst. The words we use as gender and sexuality labels today didn’t even mean the same thing — “Queer” was for odd, “gay” was for happy, and a “faggot” was a small bundle of thin-split wood that was used to start a fire as kindling.

So those of us in the 21st Century can only make assumptions. We can guess. We can extrapolate. We can infer. We can deduce. But we cannot know.

So, when I toured Bath and the Jane Austen Museum, I knew the world-famous authoress was not queer.  But I also knew that it’s possible that she was not-not queer.

See, when Jane Austen died at age 41, her older sister Cassandra burned about 3,000 of her letters. The sisters were very close, and when they were away from one another, they wrote to each other constantly. The letters that Cassandra did safeguard paint them as witty, thoughtful, observant, and dedicated correspondents, where the famous authoress gave her opinions as decidedly and freely as her heroine Lizzie.

Before she succumbed to the mysterious illness that killed her, Jane Austen’s fame was already growing despite her dislike of the public and her desire for privacy, and her previously anonymous identity was becoming an open secret among the literary set.  It was inevitable that some one would want to publish her letters, and Cassandra had already seen the way the late author Fanney Burney’s personal letters had been skewered in the press and talked of in scathing language by the public. Many speculate that Cassandra burned the letters to prevent friends and relatives from having hurt feelings over Jane’s complaints, or to spare the Austens the embarrassment of fans reading Jane’s moaning diatribes about their never-ending money problems.

But my speculations turned in a decidedly more bent direction when I learned about Jane Austen’s other best friend, Martha Lloyd. Little is known about Martha, save that she was the neighbour and childhood friend of and the Austen family, she was ten years older than Jane, that she was unwed in Jane’s lifetime, and that she was privy to Jane’s secret identity as a writer. Not long after Jane’s father died in 1805, Martha’s mother also passed. With her younger sister married already, Martha was left alone to fend for herself, and so moved in with the Austen ladies, where they combined their households. They shared chores, finances, and management.

And then she never left.

Not even after Jane passed. Martha remained a beloved second sister to Cassandra, and cherished second daughter to Mrs. Austen. She even married Jane’s youngest brother when became a widower, and stayed in the family.

“Oh my god,” I thought to myself, “And they were roommates!”

What really clinched it for me was learning about Jane’s single marriage proposal. Harris Bigg-Wither, a family friend and son of local landed gentry, was six years younger than Jane and seemed to have rather cornered her with an unexpected marriage proposal while she and Cassandra were visiting his family for a few days. Jane said yes in the evening, went up to bed with Cassandra, and retracted her consent in the morning, causing the Austen girls to flee the house in a cloud of discomfort. Those are the facts we have. As for why Jane changed her mind, we historians cannot say.

Maybe, like her character Jane Bennet later does for Lizzie in Pride and Prejudice, Cassandra urged Jane to “do anything but marry without affection.” Maybe Cassandra pointed out that as the mistress of Manydown Park, Jane would be obliged to set aside her writing pen in favour of a hostess’ calling cards. Maybe Jane was horrified by the idea of children (she loved her nieces and nephews but seemed uninterested in having any herself, going so far as to call her sister-in-law as ‘poor animal’ on the birth of her 11th child). Maybe the surprise of the proposal made her give a knee-jerk ‘yes’, and when she had a second to think about it, she realized she really did not want to marry anyone.

Or maybe dudes gave her the ick. Maybe she already had a girlfriend. Maybe she knew she would not be able to live her own truth and love where her heart pulled her if she married this guy.

Now, all of this is speculation, of course. And very thin speculation at that. And while I’m not the first academic to propose this reading of Jane Austen’s life and work, all I’m really going on is vibes and wishful thinking.

But that afternoon, while enjoying a cream tea at the museum in 2009, the idea that Jane Austen may have been sapphic hooked into my heart and refused to let me go. And because we can never know for sure whether any of my wild imaginings are true, and it was clear that I hadn’t any right to write about them even if they were (Jane certainly wouldn’t want me to), I decided to write a story about a fictionalized sapphic regency-era authoress, and named her Margaret Goodenough.

My novel Time and Tide arose out of the liminal space where the knowing and the not-knowing intersect: Schrodinger’s queer.

And in that novel, I can provide emotional experiences to my readers, I can teach through imagination what it would have been like to have been a white, sapphic, cis-gendered woman of firmly rural professional middle class origins in pre-regency England. I can explore who that person would have been and what she would have faced, how she would have had to mitigate her desires nor what might happen if she followed them, and perhaps even what she would have feared.