CHARITY’S MIND WAS far away when she stepped through the cottage door after arriving home from a prayer meeting one April evening in 1811. At the end of worship she had raised her voice in song with her spiritual brothers and sisters, and now two lines of the final hymn echoed repeatedly through her head. “Where will those wild affections roll / which let a Saviour go?” She had listened to the poetry of Isaac Watts all her life, learning much of her sense of rhyme and meter from his devotional lines. But tonight his words took on new meaning, and she felt impressed with the gravity of her own fallen state. For years, she acknowledged, she had let “wild affections” possess her, and she had “abus’d the mercy of God.” Deep in the contemplation of her own transgressions, Charity was taken by surprise to discover, when she came in the house, that Sylvia, who had stayed at home that evening, was in a terrible state of distress over her own fallen state. Charity hurried over to her beloved, and together the women raised their voices in prayer. The blood of their savior, Charity assured Sylvia, could wash away even the worst iniquities. Jesus had promised “whatever are thy crimes, my Goodness can exceed them.” United in faith, the women repented for their sins.1
Several days later, Charity approached the doors of Weybridge’s meetinghouse with a firm sense of purpose. For the first time, Charity felt awakened to the depth of her fallen state. She rejoiced that “whereas I was blind, I now see!” Possessed by this powerful religious conviction, Charity decided to offer herself as a candidate for full admission to the village’s Congregational church. Charity and Sylvia had joined the church together soon after they began their marriage, but the orthodox congregation, which kept true to the Puritan traditions of New England’s early settlers, administered communion only to members who testified to their spiritual rebirth.2 Ironically, Charity’s new sensitivity to her own depravity made her a suitable candidate for the privilege of communion. The orthodox creed preached the depravity of all humanity and regarded sin as mankind’s common inheritance; an individual’s true conviction of his own fallen state was the necessary first step in spiritual rebirth, rather than a rationale for exclusion.
Charity voiced her desire to unite with the church even though she did “not judge myself worthy of that honor, Nor do I think that of myself I can walk agreeably to the proffession.” Her rebirth had brought knowledge of her fallen state, but no sense of surety that she would not sin in the future. The title of the Isaac Watts hymn that had catalyzed Charity’s rebirth, “Backslidings and Returns,” spoke to the common lapses into sin that afflicted even the most faithful. Both Charity and her spiritual brethren acknowledged the powerful possibility that as a lowly sinner she might succumb to her wild affections in the future as she had in the past.3 Curled up at night in bed with her beloved, the temptation was sometimes too strong to resist.4
The Puritan author John Milton used the phrase “wild affections” to describe sexual expression outside of marriage.5 Charity adapted the term for her own unsanctioned physical relationship. St. Paul warned his church about the “vile affections” by which “women did change the natural use into that which is against nature” (Romans 1:26). This passage was the most common biblical verse used to condemn lesbianism in early America. The legal code of New Haven Colony quoted Romans 1:26 to justify imposing the death penalty on women discovered having sex with other women.6 The penalty was never enforced, and the last executions for male sodomy in North America took place during the mid-eighteenth century, but the Christian sentiment against such vile affections remained powerful in the early nineteenth century.7
Charity and Sylvia’s struggle to find grace and overcome their sinfulness provides some of the best textual evidence of their erotic relationship. The language that they used to describe their sins often suggested that they considered themselves to be guilty of committing specific sexual transgressions. Since women of their generation and social class rarely wrote explicitly about sex (especially illicit sex), Charity and Sylvia’s religious reflections open a critical window onto their erotic lives.8 But these textual fragments are not the only or even the best evidence that Charity and Sylvia were lovers.
The clearest evidence that the women were lovers is the fact that they regarded each other as spouses and shared a bed for their entire lives. If the women were a cross-sex couple, those facts alone would be enough to establish the pair as sexual partners. The presumption of heterosexuality stands in the place of written evidence. Certainly, the children who result from most traditional marriages offer their own evidence of a couple’s sexual relationship, but the sexuality of childless couples is rarely questioned, nor do historians often pose the question of paternity (that a couple’s children might not result from their own sexual relationship). There is a corollary presumption: that in the past there were women who had sexual relations, and historical subjects who lived in same-sex unions can be presumed to be lovers.9 Although the evidence will never permit total certainty, and it is possible to imagine that Charity and Sylvia shared a celibate intimacy throughout their lives, the women’s confessional writings corroborate the presumption of a sexual bond between them.
The circumstantial evidence of Charity and Sylvia’s sexual relationship not only bolsters the fragmentary confessional evidence, but also provides an important counterpoint to the bias inherent in the latter source. While the women’s religious writings capture their feelings of sexual guilt, their lifetime of bed-sharing suggests the positive attachment they felt toward physical intimacy. The history of same-sex sexuality has been overdetermined by the selective evidence available for its study. Reliant on religious doctrines, court records, and psychological theories, the history of same-sex sexuality is often framed around the poles of oppression and resistance. The missing evidence of pleasure must be supplied by the imagination. Enjoyment of each other was the daily glue that bound Charity and Sylvia despite their intermittent episodes of self-recrimination.
Charity’s guilty feeling about her sexual connections with women long predated her relationship with Sylvia. In 1798, after she first became a target of sexual gossip, her guilt inspired her to copy out passages from “The Suicide,” a dramatic dialogue about a youth driven to despair over his sexual sins.10 In 1806, following the exposure of her relationship with Mercy Ford, Charity “felt the weight of my transgressions to be more than I could bear,” according to her confession before the Weybridge church. She “felt ‘to abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.’ My iniquities appear’d so great that I thought the justice of God could not pardon them.”11 The wording of her confession is telling. Iniquity was associated with a catalog of sexual misdeeds in Leviticus 18:25, and in Ezekiel 18:49–50 the word was used to describe the misdeeds of the women of Sodom in particular. The word also connoted repetition or a pattern of wrong behavior. Charity’s confession of guilt suggested she had not committed one sexual misdeed, but many.
Charity’s spiritual crisis in 1806 did not lead to her spiritual rebirth, probably because it coincided with the renewal of her relationship with Lydia Richards. After her arrival in Cummington, she confessed, “I kept my feelings chiefly to myself till in the Vortex of Worldly cares they were mostly swallow’d up.” Over the next several years, as Charity traveled to Vermont, joined in a marriage with Sylvia, and built a home, she kept her feelings of guilt suppressed. She “abus’d the mercy of God” and returned to her old ways.12 She did not become irreligious at this time; the poems she wrote during her early years with Sylvia were suffused with pious sentiment.13 But she returned to those transgressions and iniquities that had haunted her twenties. The same early poems that invoked God’s blessings on Sylvia also depicted a relationship between the two women that was passionate and physical, involving mutual caresses.
Charity remained blind to her iniquities until 1810, when Mercy, who had experienced a spiritual rebirth, wrote to Charity encouraging her former lover to repent. Mercy’s letter instructed Charity that God’s love was more satisfying than any sensual pleasures to be taken from the earthly world. You cannot imagine, she wrote to Charity, the joys that redemption would bring: “You may form a faint idea by what you have felt in the enjoyment of the dearest friend you ever had in your happiest moment but you know I have also tasted that sweet and permit me upon experience to tell you that it has but a faint resemblance.”14 Mercy’s language contrasted their history of shared fleshly pleasures with the promise of future spiritual joys. To make her case, she quoted from a Watts hymn that renounced the sensual world for religion: “Where can such sweetness be / As I have tasted in thy love / As I have found in thee?”15 Mercy’s testimony that she had “tasted that sweet” clearly referred to Watts’s hymn. But her choice of words also echoed colonial America’s most popular midwifery manual, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, which used the words “sweetness of love” as a term for orgasm.16 When Mercy claimed that she had experienced the sweet of a friend’s enjoyment in the happiest moment, but now knew that God’s love was even better, she suggested that redemption surpassed the sensual pleasures that she and Charity had once enjoyed together. Charity could take it from someone who knew: God’s love was the best love of all.
The arrival of Mercy’s letter coincided with a spiritual revival taking place in Weybridge. Mercy even quoted the same Watts hymn that had so moved Charity on the evening she returned home to find Sylvia in distress. The combined influence of her old lover’s testimony and the charismatic preaching of her minister in Weybridge overcame Charity’s defenses and resurrected her long-suppressed guilt over the wild affections that possessed her soul. The sight of Sylvia’s sorrow sealed her conviction, persuading Charity that she was the “chiefest of sinners.” Repentance could wait no longer. At long last Charity accepted her savior’s love and renounced the sinful carnality that had plagued her throughout her adult life.17
Rejecting her sinful past could not preserve her from the danger of backsliding in the future, however. Sylvia’s presence beside her every evening in bed over the next forty years presented temptations that were too powerful to overcome. Like many sinners who had been reborn, Charity struggled with her besetting sins for the rest of her days. In the final decade of her life, Charity wrote Sylvia a poem that described this private challenge. A person, she wrote, must fight:
… the secret cherishd sin
The poison serpents tooth
The treacherous clam that lurks within
Destroying age + youth.18
Charity’s sexual proclivities haunted her throughout both “age + youth.” They were the “treacherous clam” (so obvious a sexual innuendo that Charity abandoned the language in a later draft of the poem) and the “secret cherishd sin.”
The secret sin, in the language of the time, was a common euphemism for masturbation. Martin Luther himself had once called masturbation the secret sin. In the early nineteenth century, this corrupt practice or secret vice became an obsession within the American medical establishment. Leading doctors argued that masturbation was the primary cause of disease among American youth, leading to consumption, blindness, insanity, and even death. Notably, a close reading of anti-masturbation texts reveals that what early nineteenth-century doctors called masturbation among girls, we might call lesbian sex today. The secret vice, according to the authorities, was a sin that girls taught to each other and frequently practiced together for maximum titillation.19
The fact that Charity was still writing poems about the dangers of the secret sin during the last decade of her life suggests she never escaped her sexual feelings for Sylvia. As their relationship matured, and the women grew older and suffered from increasing episodes of ill health, the sexual dynamic between them likely cooled, but there is no evidence that the erotic dimension in their relationship ever disappeared. Instead, Charity seems to have settled into a state of resignation. She acknowledged that her wild affections made her a sinner, and she prayed that God’s grace was sufficient to redeem even the chiefest sinner like herself.
Sylvia’s diary reveals the same evidence of an unresolved struggle to overcome her physical desires. Like Charity, she perceived herself to be a sinner of the very worst variety. A decade after the religious crisis that awakened them to the magnitude of their sins, Sylvia continued to be afflicted by backslidings into temptation. Pouring out her misery onto the pages of her diary, Sylvia berated herself: “Oh! had my life been less stain’d with sins of the first magnitude Sins which embitter all the sweets of life.”20 For Sylvia, the phrase “sins of the first magnitude” was not vague hyperbole. These were sins clearly enumerated within Congregationalist theology as those most heinous in the eyes of God. They included murder, sodomy, incest, adultery, and theft.21 There is only one sin in the list that Sylvia had the chance to repeat regularly, as her diary entry suggests. Murder can be crossed off the list. As a single woman, Sylvia could not commit adultery (if she had sex with a married man, the crime would have been regarded as fornication, not adultery). Living as she did in a subsistence economy, making rare visits to stores and in possession of few personal goods, it seems unlikely that Sylvia had much opportunity for theft. Incest cannot be excluded from possibility, but as she lived apart from her relatives it again seems unlikely to have been a regular habit. Atheism or blasphemy might also be considered as sins of the first magnitude, but Sylvia’s constant prayers and contributions to her church reveal the force of her faith. That leaves sodomy, defined at the time as extending to sexual relations between women, as the only sin of the first magnitude possible for Sylvia.22
At another place in her diary, Sylvia suggested that she considered herself a Sodomite. On April 1, 1821, two weeks after berating herself for committing sins of the first magnitude, Sylvia attended a sermon preached by her friend, the Reverend Eli Moody, an ultra-orthodox Congregationalist who rejected any leavening of the sacred truths.23 During the sermon, Moody berated his congregants for their religious torpor. The sermon, Sylvia wrote, “reminds me of Lot preaching to the sodomites.”24 It was an interesting choice of words. At one level, she probably meant to say that she and the other villagers of Weybridge, like the Sodomites, were turning a deaf ear to a godly man. But the Sodomites were not infamous for their deafness. They were known to early New Englanders for their willingness to countenance sex between men (or, more accurately, homosexual rape).25 Sylvia’s imagining herself as one of the Sodomites cannot be divorced from the imputation of same-sex sexuality.
Elsewhere in her diary, Sylvia described herself as guilty of “unclean” sins, another common descriptor for homosexual sex. Early Americans often used the language of uncleanness to describe sexual sins.26 They applied this language to sex between men or between women in particular since, in the book of Genesis, God destroyed the city of Sodom because its people were “unclean.”27 In keeping with her identification as a Sodomite, Sylvia repeatedly berated herself for being unclean and prayed for Christ to purify her. She confessed in the pages of her diary that she was “a person of unclean lips,” using a phrase often assigned to people who cursed or blasphemed, but which also had sexual overtones.28
If sex between women was considered an unclean sin, then sexual practices involving either the face or genitals or both could produce unclean lips. Aristotle’s Masterpiece described the labia majora as “lips,” and later editions also promised that the morphology of a person’s facial lips revealed a great deal about her true character.29 There are multiple places in the diary where Sylvia seems to connect her sinfulness directly to her lips, tongue, or mouth. She certainly saw herself as too liable to speak angrily. But she may also have seen her mouth as unclean because of how she used it in her physical relationship with Charity. In one particularly recriminating diary entry she attacked herself as “proud arrogant contentious deceitfull jealous envious unkind given to fleshly appetites covetous given to anger.”30 This long list of flaws mixed temperamental weaknesses such as irritability with physical besettings such as “fleshly appetites,” or sexual lusts, making no distinction between the two expressions of uncleanness. Elsewhere, she rebuked herself for possessing “an unnatural appetite,” a phrase that echoed common descriptions of homosexual sex as an “unnatural” connection or offense.31
In another particularly suggestive passage Sylvia rebuked herself with the words “the tongue is a little member + boasteth great things.”32 This phrase, taken from James 3:5, warned against false teachers. Sylvia, who taught Bible classes to village youth but doubted her own salvation, had reason to worry that she was a hypocrite as well as a bad role model. At the same time, Sylvia’s choice of language indicated another concern. The word member served as a common synonym for penis in early America. To call her tongue a little member acknowledged the phallic potential of the organ. The fact that Sylvia wrote this entry on a rare day when she and Charity had been at home alone suggests that opportunities for intimacy during the free afternoon, rather than time spent in religious instruction, gave Sylvia cause for later repentance about her unclean mouth.33
There is no question that Sylvia connected her relationship to Charity with feelings of great sinfulness. On the thirty-first anniversary of the commencement of her marriage, Sylvia noted the day in her diary with a mixture of love and regret:
31 years since I left my mother’s house and commenc’d serving in company with Dear Miss B. Sin mars all earthly bliss, and no common sinner have I been, but God has spared my life, given me every thing I would enjoy and now I have a space, if I improve it, to exercise true penitence.34
The notion that marriage brought an earthly bliss tainted by sin was familiar to Christian theology. It originated in the story of Adam and Eve. In the beginning, Adam and Eve lived in a state of pure earthly bliss in the Garden of Eden. But after Eve and Adam ate from the tree of knowledge, they gained awareness of their sexuality and were cast out of paradise. Ever since, men and women’s earthly bliss has been stained by sin. In the Augustinian tradition that Sylvia’s faith emerged from, sexuality was by nature defiling, which is why Augustine advocated celibacy for the priesthood. Protestants, who were persuaded that celibacy was impossible, recommended marriage as an alternative framework to contain humanity’s sinful carnality. But even within this pro-marital theology, sexuality retained its sinful stain. Sylvia’s diary entry on her thirty-first anniversary implied that she viewed her union with Charity as a site for earthly bliss, like other marriages, but she believed that the sin tainting her earthly bliss was worse than ordinary. Sylvia’s relationship to Charity made her “no common sinner.”
Three decades after meeting her beloved, Sylvia still struggled with the temptation to succumb to wild affections. With great relief, shortly after her thirty-first anniversary Sylvia noted that she had attended a sermon where the minister announced that people often took thirty or forty years to master their besettings or sins. Sylvia commented that she was “never more interested” by a sermon, and she seemed to take hope that the time had finally come for her to move beyond her own besettings and “exercise true penitence.”35 The day that Sylvia had come to live with Charity she embarked on a career of sin; at long last she hoped to find a more righteous path.
Despite her best hopes, another decade passed without Sylvia mastering her besettings. A poem that she wrote for Charity in 1848 showed Sylvia in the same mixed mind about her marriage as ever. She was grateful for spending her life with Charity and yet was persuaded that their relationship was stained by sin. “Life’s thread is quickly spun / All earthly bliss is marr’d,” Sylvia wrote in the poem’s opening lines. For forty-one years the women had “clung” to their love, but all that time their earthly bliss was tainted. Only in Heaven, Sylvia wrote, would she and Charity find the pure love denied to them in the sublunary world. There “Rivers of love in heaven, perpetual flow, / Yes, such as finite mortal cannot know. / And when thy throbbing pulse shall cease to beat / No disappointment be then thy bliss complete.” These closing lines are remarkable for their sexualized imagery of salvation and their insistence on Charity’s salvation regardless of the sin that marked her life. Sylvia painted Heaven as an ecstatic, even orgasmic, place, where rivers of love perpetual flow and where Charity’s bliss would not be marred by disappointment. If the women’s physical intimacy was a sin of the first magnitude, Sylvia prayed that Jesus would forgive them and reward them with a more holy intimacy in heaven.36