"The Future Arrives Late": Queering the Ladies of Llangollen
Creators: name: Brideoake, Fiona
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2007

description: Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby are central figures within the historiography of female same-sex desire. Butler and Ponsonby eloped together from Ireland in 1778 and retired to the North Welsh village of Llangollen. Transforming a small cottage into an elaborately-improved Gothic 'mansion,' they shared a home until Butler's death in 1829. My thesis examines the figuration of Butler and Ponsonby's cultural project from the eighteenth- to the twentieth-centuries, exploring both their own self-fashioning and how they were represented. Drawing on archival manuscripts, some of which have been unexamined by previous scholarship, literary texts, and material culture, the project traces the literary, material and sociable practices through which Butler and Ponsonby transformed themselves from sexually suspect Irish exiles to virtuous Welsh indigenes. It describes how their performative assertion of both a substantive public image and a zone of opacity rendered their relationship a cipher upon which a protean array of cultural meanings have been projected, allowing them to be figured as romantic friends, bluestocking scholars, prototypical lesbians, Romantic domestic archetypes, and feminist modernists. Rejecting attempts to locate them within a single, historically-legitimated subject position, the project characterizes their definitional resistance as central to their enduring fascination, their performative self-fashioning and figurative plasticity marking them as quintessentially queer. Butler and Ponsonby's foundational status within the historiography of female same-sex desire has been subject to limited critical reflection. Redressing this omission, my thesis contextualizes their figuration as emblems of the romantic friendship paradigm and traces their alternative depiction as a gender-differentiated masculine-feminine pair. The project interprets their transformation of their cottage as central to their efforts to dispel rumors of their sexual intimacy, allowing them to mask the anomalous nature of their retirement through the material assertion oflanded Welsh gentility. Drawing upon William Cowper's 1785 The Task, it locates Butler and Ponsonby within eighteenth­ century discourses of bluestocking feminism, illuminating the historical context of their earliest reception and the broader significance of sociably-integrated retirement to Bluestocking culture. The project describes the citation of their enduring same-sex domesticity as a relational ideal in Anna Seward's 1796 "Ll ngollen Vale," the poetry of William Wordsworth and the letters and life-writings of Lord Byron and Anne Lister. In so doing, it establishes Butler and Ponsonby's central place within Romantic cultural history and the sociable and performative nature of Romantic era self-fashioning. The project's final section demonstrates Butler and Ponsonby's centrality to twentieth-century queer representations with reference to Mary Louisa Gordon's 1936 novel Chase ofthe Wild Goose, in which Butler and Ponsonby are figured as the proleptic embodiments of queer modernity. Gordon's portrayal of Butler and Ponsonby as ghostly revenants whose lives engender their self-appointed "spiritual descendents" thus offers a fitting figure for the enduring significance of their cultural project, their performative self-fashioning enabling both their own queer narrative and those of a protean array of successors.