Homosocilaity

“After supper at the Trap, Elliot and I lay together on the long morocco sofa. He put his dear strong arms round me & his face against mine. Chat, not very well, sat near the fire ... WJ in the big red chair close to our sofa. We kept calling for Chat, & finally he was lifted on to us, nestling in between Elliot and me. My arms were round him, and Elliot’s were round him and me. Chat liked our both breathing in his ears. We kept on repeating this. All things must end. “

(Future Lord Eshton’s Diary 1868)

At first she [Ada] came very often to the door, and called to me, and even

reproached me with sobs and tears; but I wrote her a long letter, saying that

she made me anxious and unhappy, and imploring her, as she loved me, and

wished my mind to be at peace to come no nearer than the garden. After

that she came beneath the window, even oftener than she had come to the

door. (Bleak House 499)

“If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men.”

― Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

Prior to the nineteenth century, there was no such thing as a "homosexual identity." There were homosexual activities, which were viewed with varying amounts of stricture, but that was not the same as being a homosexual.

Cynthia Davis Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography

I miss you, and mourn for you, and walk the Streets alone – often at night,

besides I fall asleep in tears, for your dear face, yet not one word comes

back to me from that silent West. If it is finished, tell me, and I will raise

the lid to my box of Phantoms, and lay one more love in; but if it lives and

beats still, still lives and beats for me, then say so, and I will strike the

strings to one more strain of happiness before I die. (Emily Dickinson to Female Friend Jan 1855, 315)

Female affiliation and closeness could be read as an attack against patriarchy, changing how we view depictions of female spaces and relations, especially in 2oth and 21st century texts

This is very foreign to our way of thinking, in which a homosexual activity is an essential part of identity. One way of understanding this is that sodomy, the act, was a sin, but so were lots of other things. This actually opened up a large variety of ways in which men might relate to each other that today would be considered very sexual, but were seen as simply ways of being part of a masculine society then.

Homosociality

Women, then, often had a way to talk about their feelings for each other in very physical ways without being seen as acting on this. In fact, this was read as practice for heterosexuality. This changes how we might view what happens in female-female depictions in 19th cent literature

At its most basic, homosociality simply names same-sex relationships as opposed to opposite sex relationships. It does not necessarily denote any sort of sexual activity.

Throughout the 19th century a shift in understanding homosexual acts as identity took place.

“French and German specialists in the 1880s began to produce more sophisticated interpretations of sexual perversion, a key argument being that the aberrant act simply represented the particular stage of a deviant’s development. These doctors, in regarding the act as a mere symptom and in paying greater attention to the specific type of individual who carried it out, accordingly turned away from biological towards psychological explanations. Whereas it had been once said in a tautological way that a pervert was one who performed perverse acts, now researchers such as Valentine Magnan declared that the importance of such acts was that they were due to a diseased central nervous system and a symptomatic of a morbid category of person. Perverts suffered, claimed the doctors, from congenital rather than acquired illness; they were responsible yet could be cured. Some perverts – particular the humiliated fetishists – were presented by the doctors as often causing more pain to themselves than to the community. Most importantly, progressive doctors asserted that a variety of deviant practices, once regarded as ‘choices’ made by the sinful or immoral, were actually involuntary symptoms of the individual’s entire personality. Thus the sex experts created in the latter decades of the nineteenth century an entirely new nomenclature to describe the species they had discovered: the ‘exhibitionist’, the ‘transvestite,’ the ‘ voyeur’, the ‘homosexual’, the ‘sadist’ and the ‘masochist’. Countless psuedo-scientific treatises popularized the notion that whole subcultures were populated by potentially dangerous ‘others’.” (McLaren, Twentieth-century Sexuality A History, p. 92)

“once the secularization of terms [about homosexuality] began to make ‘the homosexual’ available as a descriptive category of lived experience, what had happened was not only that the terms of a newly effective minority oppression had been set, but that a new and immensely potent tool had become available for the manipulation of every form of power that was refracted through the gender system…homophobia per se was not necessary but some form of leverage over channels of bonding b/w male pairs was—and needed to have power through unpredictability and instability of how it ‘regulated’” (Sedgwick Between Men 87-88)

“This resulted in a kind of paranoid masculine culture, where the space “between men” might shift uncertainly between homosocial fraternal bonds and masked homosexual desire. In a series of brilliant readings of works by Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, barely conceivable desires took shape in narratives of “homosexual panic.” In Between Men, Sedgwick had argued that the Gothic romance repeatedly articulated this panic in stories where men were persecuted by their doubles—from James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).” (Roger Luckhurst http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/abstracts/a109.htm

The existence of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls "homosexual panic" arose: the need to police male spaces for homosexual desire. This changes our analysis by suggesting such fears were not about sexual acts per se, but about the power relations they concealed/revealed.

At the same time, Sedgwick 'defines male homosociality as a form of male bonding with a characteristic triangular structure. In this triangle, men have intense but nonsexual bonds with other men, and women serve as the conduits through which those bonds are expressed'.[21] Sedgwick's analysis of 'the love triangle in which two men appear to be competing for a woman's love...develops René Girard's claim that such a triangle may disguise as rivalry what is actually an attraction between men'.[22] Girard argued that 'the homosexual drift stems logically from the fact that the model/rival is a man', producing at times a 'noticeably increased preponderance of the mediator and a gradual obliteration of the [female] object'.[23]

(wikipedia)

The concept of the homosocial traingle may change our analysis of male rivalry for a woman in 19th and 20th cent literature by suggesting it should be read as a form of interaction between the two men more than about their desire fro the woman. This may allow us to analyze the role of desire or the types of power being deployed in different ways.