The novel Ormond by Charles Brockden Brown (1799) maybe the earliest American literary depiction of a passionate romantic relationship between women. Criticism of the work has tended to reflect the attitudes toward women’s same-sex relationships prevalent in the critic’s own era, rather than considering it within its own context.

This literary analysis situates it within the cultural debates and anxieties prevalent in the Anglophone world around 1800, including the “sex panic” in the wake of the French revolution that led to something of a backlash in England (and to a lesser extent in America) around women’s sexuality in general, but in turn led to some interesting explorations in fiction of the nature and limits of women’s intimate relations with each other.

Ormond focuses around several prominent female characters, in particular the intimate friendship between Constantia and Sophia, but also including the “male-identified” Martinette (who is held up as something of a bad example, due to a somewhat bloodthirsty enthusiasm for revolution) and others. The generally positive and supportive relationships between the female characters are contrasted with more destructive dynamics between the male characters.

American reactions to the French revolution differed in certain aspects from English reactions, with Americans initially celebrating the French cause and American women leveraging debates over women’s rights. However with the turn of the century, enthusiasm for the excesses of the revolution waned, and some of the momentum for women’s rights with it.

Despite American and English differences, the two strands of literature both saw women’s virtue as reflecting the strength and morality of the state, manifesting as a debate around controlling women’s bodies. This is the context in which Ormond depicts the specter of the most extreme version of female autonomy: women so closely bonded to each other that male interests are excluded entirely.

The 18th century had seen something of an explosion of literature (English and French) depicting lesbian interactions, generally with a sense of titillation but in some cases for satiric purposes. But the absence of similar literature in America cannot be taken as an absence of interest, either literary or real. The article quotes French travel writer Moreau de St. Méry discussing in the 1790s how Philadelphian women might be averse to hearing sexual language, but “are not at all strangers to being willing to seek unnatural pleasures with persons of their own sex.”

The romantic relationship between Constantia and Sophia in Ormond is described and acted out in line with the ideals of romantic friendship, but it includes a physicality that is less common. And the central conflict of the novel is the competition between Sophia and Ormond for Constantia’s affection. Ormond’s reaction is hostile and jealous, establishing for the reader that there is a potential reason for jealousy in the strength of the women’s bond. The novel’s author uses various motifs to contradict the sapphic potential, again, recognizing that potential.

The potential for female same-sex erotics was certainly in the public awareness in the 18th century. The lesbian rumors/slanders about Marie Antoinette were rife. Military cross-dressing narratives and female husband stories felt the need to deny any sexual element when a female-bodied person living as a man flirted with women or married, as when a news account of Continental Army soldier Deborah Sampson’s romantic interactions with women commented that they were inspired by “sentiment, taste, [and] purity” and that “animal love, on [Sampson’s] part was out of the question.” Clearly it wasn’t entirely out of the question if there was a need to deny it.

Thus, readers of Ormond would have been well aware of the potential for such an intense and intimate love between two women to take an erotic turn. If such a possibility had been unthinkable, there would have been no need for the author to deny it.

The character of Martinette in Ormond helps to situate non-normative sexuality as a “foreign” element—a common theme in the early modern period—both by her birth and by her association with France. This was another way of acknowledging sapphic possibilities while insulating the “virtuous” characters from any taint.

Despite repeated attempts to heterosexualize the female characters in Ormond, the male characters play a very marginal role and a repeatedly shown to be inessential to the women’s emotional and economic lives, highlighting the potential for full female self-sufficiency within a truly “companionate” relationship of the type beginning to be idealized for (but rarely achieved in) heterosexual marriage. The titular character fails to win Constantia by wooing her and resorts to attempting violence, viewing her as a prize or possession, not a love object.

The author concludes that literary representations of romantic friendship must be understood not simply in the context of the idealized image of that type of relationship, but also in the context of the anxieties and power struggles around female autonomy and lesbian possibility. Literature was one of the tools for recognizing and trying to contain these potentials as a means of social control.