Galatea, Lesbianism, and the Fair Face
The early modern body as it exists both on and off-stage does not relate to gender and sexuality as it does in modern studies. In the Renaissance period, gender was constructed through clothing and movement, as well as through the differences designated between premature and mature adult bodies. Where the one-sex model claims the female body as inverted and inferior to the male body, performances of the female gender on-stage were never supported by physical female bodies (actresses). Men and male youths played female roles, thus maintaining the gender in the text. Female characters are then female-bodied, even if played by physical males.
Therefore, in John Lyly’s Galatea, I argue that while the lovers Galatea and Phyllida are played by boy actors and fall in love disguised as boys, this invisible element - the characters’ female bodies - is what creates and maintains the play’s lesbianism. Galatea plays with the romantic and sexual desire between two young women, Galatea and Phyllida, as well as Diana’s female nymphs, such as Eurota, Telusa, and Ramia. While Galatea and Phyllida play with language as if unsure whether the other is a boy, the text confirms that what they find attractive about each other is each other’s “fairness,” a beauty usually reserved for a feminine or youthful face. The play involves itself in women and the love between women, as well as explorations of gender roles and what it means to act and love as a boy or as a girl, love a boy as a boy, and love a girl as a girl. Lyly’s play has an inherently queer plot, but I want to explore this representation of love and lust between female-bodied characters, and claim that the text is more lesbian than it is bisexual, heterosexual, or queer.
Simone Chess explores the queerness of the play in “Cross-Dressing, Sex, and Gender Labor,” claiming that the play is bisexual, heterosexual, lesbian, and queer due to the unfixed relationships between gender performances and sexuality of female characters. Chess describes what it means to do “gender labor” in a queer relationship by piggybacking off Jane Ward’s study of cis women with FTM partners (139). Like the cis women in those partnerships, Galatea and Phyllida do the work of gender labor through the labor of alliance, labor of forgetting, and labor of playing the girl (140). Galatea plays with what today might be called transgender or genderqueer identities by having Galatea and Phyllida fall in love as girls dressed as boys, playing off each other’s gender confusion. However, at the play’s conclusion, the lovers are discovered, and Neptune sees through their boy disguises and focuses on their female bodies, asking them, “Do you both, being maidens, love one another?” ( 5.3.126).
In this essay, I’ll analyze Galatea, Phyllia, and Diana’s nymphs as maidens experiencing female-to-female lust through the language of the text. Upon first meeting, Galatea and Phyllida bemoan how they must learn to act like boys in order to escape Neptune’s sacrifice, and are immediately taken with each other as they observe how the other acts. Galatea notices that Phyllida is uncomfortable in boys’ clothing and assumes that “boys are in great disliking of themselves as maids,” thus developing a connection to Phyllida based on shared experiences of discomfort (2.1.18-19). In return, Phyllida notices Galatea is “a pretty boy and a fair,” a boy so fair “he might as well have been a woman,” but because Galatea is not, Phyllida is “glad” she is a woman (2.1.21-23). Phyllida is taken with Galatea’s physical appearance, that which is feminine, and feels relieved that she’s allowed to be attracted to this fair-faced person because he is a boy and she is a girl. However, Phyllida finds Galatea attractive because she looks like a woman, and throughout the remainder of the play, the lovers continue to call each other fair and tease each other as if knowing, beneath their garments, that they’re both female-bodied. When the lovers meet again, they continue this playful flirtation.
Phyllida: It is a pity nature framed you not a woman, having a face so fair, so lovely a countenance, so modest a behavior. (3.2.1-3)
Galatea: I would not wish to be a woman, unless it were because thou art a man. (3.2.8-9).
Phyllida: Nay, I do not wish to be a woman, for then I should not love thee. For I have sworn never to love a woman. (3.2.10-11).
The lovers continue in this fashion, confirming that they could not love each other as two women, and would rather one of them be a man so that they may be allowed to love as women. Female-to-female love and sex acts were not recognized as valid in the early modern period, which is why Venus proposes a solution to turn one of them into a man so that they may marry and consummate a heterosexual marriage. However, while Galatea and Phyllida are aware of these conventions, they flirt with each other in hypotheticals, supposing what would happen if one or both of them was actually a maid. Phyllida proposes a hypothetical:
Phyllida: Suppose I were a virgin (I blush in supposing myself one), and that under the habit of a boy were the person of a maid.” (3.2.19-21)
Galatea: “Admit that I were as you would have me suppose that you are...” (3.2.25)
Both women “tush” over the words “admit” and “suppose” as if recognizing the not-actually hypothetical. At the end of the scene, both women are sure the other the other is their same sex, but this discovery does not scare them off. Instead, Phyllida grows possessive over Galatea and “the beauty of [her] own face” and reminds Galatea that she “promised [Phyllida] in the woods that [Galatea] would love [her] before all Diana’s nymphs” (3.2.54-56). Galatea promises she will love Phyllida the most, then invites her “into the grove” to explore each other’s bodies and “make much of one another” (3.2.62). In this scene, the lovers have already created a committed love relationship, are titillated at the discovery of each other’s female bodies, and seek to consummate their love with invisible, off-stage lesbian sex acts.
Lyly makes commentary on female-to-female desire by having Cupid play a trick on Diana’s nymphs, causing them to fall in love with each other and Galatea and Phyllida. Throughout the play, Diana herself refers to the two main lovers as “pretty” and “fair,” and along with Diana’s nymphs, all maidens fall for a feminine, fair face. Cupid enacts this trick on Diana’s nymphs to prove his power, and plays “such pranks with these nymphs that, while they aim to hit others with their arrows, they shall be wounded themselves with their own eyes” (1.2.34-37). Cupid considers this an impish trick to play because Diana’s nymphs were created without distractions of love and desire. Diana considers romantic and sexual desire a wanton, unhelpful attraction, which is why her nymph’s attraction to Galatea and Phyllida is played as comedy. Where Eurota is taken by the ears and falls for Galatea’s sweet words, Telusa falls for Phyllida’s beautiful face, and bemoans her love as it consumes her. Telusa is possessive over Galatea when she finds Ramia is also in love with her, and Ramia confesses she is “thrall to that boy, that fair boy, that beautiful boy” (3.1.96). Telusa repeats the use of “fair boy,” and the nymphs continue to express their love over the fairness, softness, and youthfulness of the lovers.
Lyly’s Galatea is rampant with lesbianism. It presents true love and desire between female characters but frames these desires as if lesbianism is a love reserved for the invisible. Women loving women, desiring women, and having sex with women was seen as invalid because conventional relationships were those that ended in marriage and heterosexual reproduction. Lyly uses Cupid to make female characters lust for each other, presenting female desire and the invisible love between women, and puts his female lovers in boys’ clothing to subvert female-bodied same-sex attraction. He contains this subversion as the lovers and nymphs think they’re infatuated with boys, and while Venus concludes the play with a suggestion of heterosexual marriage, Galatea, Phyllida, and the nymphs still engage in lesbian attraction. What they find attractive about the lovers is their fair, feminine faces, and while the nymphs’ desire is cause of Cupid’s spell, Galatea and Phyllida genuinely love and commit to each other. Galatea and Phyllida’s gender disguise is a way to maintain a hetero- or bi-sexuality on the surface, but as the language of the text reveals, the lovers are well aware the other is female-bodied, and confirm their physical love by having sex in the grove.
Galatea and Phyllida are relieved that both of them, while female-bodied and fair in the face, present as boys, thus allowing them to maintain a conventional, heterosexual relationship. They swear to themselves that they’ll never love women, but continue a flirtation over the course of a year, teasing each other with hypothetical language as if they know the truth. Independently, Galatea and Phyllida discover the truth, but it seems they had already known. It’s possible within the world of the play for a girl to be disguised as a boy, as both lovers are, so the lovers are aware that a feminine, fair face could be an indicator of a female body. After the lovers consummate their love in the grove, they reveal themselves as maids in love before Diana, Neptune, Venus, and their fathers. At the conclusion of the play, Galatea and Phyllida are fully committed to marrying each other, and Phyllida feels safe in calling Galatea “mistress” as a term of affection, “seeing as [they] are both boys” (4.4.16). The lovers masquerade their love as that which is acceptable, either two boys desiring each other, or one girl and one boy, because women desiring each other was not valid. They switch off in doing the gender labor of being the girl, so when Venus proposes a heterosexual solution, neither of them have a preference in becoming male. Their love is based in female-to-female attraction, and they are at peace knowing each other’s bodies. The two are not married onstage, but Galatea is excited to wed, so that she may “enjoy Phyllida” in heterosexual consummation (5.3.158).
Works Cited
Chess, Simone. Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations, “Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender Labor.” New York London, Routledge, 2016, pp. 139-40.
Lyly, John. Galatea / Midas. 1st ed., Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 38-105.