Sally O'Driscoll Article

Access Provided by Emory University Libraries at 09/05/12 5:28PM GMT
The Eighteenth Century, vol. 53, no. 3 Copyright 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
The Pirates Breasts: Criminal Women
and the Meanings of the Body
Sally ODriscoll
Faireld University
The links between women, motherhood, the family, and natural morality may
help to explain the emphasis on the breast in much medical literature. . . . While
the uterus and ovaries interested nineteenth- century gynaecologists, the breast
caught the attention of eighteenth- century medical practitioners who were con-
cerned with moral philosophy and ethics. The breast symbolized womens role in
the family through its association with the suckling of babies. It appeared to dene
the occupational status of females in private work in the family, not in public life.
The breast was visible it was the sign of femininity that men recognized. It could
thus be said to be a social law that sexual attraction was founded on the breast, and
a natural law that women should breast feed their own children. . . . The breasts
of women not only symbolized the most fundamental social bond, that between
mother and child, but they were also the means by which families were made since
their beauty elicited the desires of the male for the female.
Ludmilla Jordanova
1
The locus both symbolic and real of this new appropriation of womens bodies
for motherhood and for the state was the maternal breast. . . . It was as if this organ
became the site of the struggle over the maternal denition of women, staged in
opposition to the sexual denition of women.
Ruth Perry
2
The rst edition of Captain Charles Johnsons A General History of the Robberies
and Murders Of the Most Notorious Pyrates appeared in 1724.
3
It included the
stories of two female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, attached as an ap-
pendix to the story of Captain Calico Jack Rackam, whose crew they had
been part of. This edition includes illustrations of Bonny and Read, dressed in
mens clothes with cutlasses and hatchets: it is a representation that emphasizes
their ferocity and their masculine aspect (see Fig. 1). They stand with legs apart,
21370.TX_ECTI_TheoryInterp_53_3.indd 357 7/24/12 9:46 AM
358 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
F
i
g
.

1
:

A
n
n
e

B
o
n
n
y

a
n
d

M
a
r
y

R
e
a
d

(
A

G
e
n
e
r
a
l

H
i
s
t
o
r
y

o
f

t
h
e

P
y
r
a
t
e
s
,

1
7
2
4
)

T
h
e

B
r
i
t
i
s
h

L
i
b
r
a
r
y

B
o
a
r
d
.

C
.
1
2
1
.
b
.
2
4
.
ODRISCOLLTHE PIRATES BREASTS 359
rmly planted, brandishing their weapons, dressed in jackets and wide- legged
pants, and ready to ght. Their hair is loose and ows around their shoulders,
but this is an ambiguous sign of gender. Behind them lie three ships at anchor,
near a promontory with palm trees, contextualizing them in the West Indies.
The pictures caption identies them by name and notes that they were con-
victed of Piracy Nov
r
28
th
1720, in Jamaica, thus immediately situating them
not only as anomalous female sailors but as convicted criminals. The caption at-
tempts to x the ambiguity of the image the free ferocity of the women as they
are displayed has, according to this textual addendum, already been tamed and
dealt with: they are now safely under the control of the law.
The History of the Pyrates quickly became popular, and spawned multiple
editions and translations; only a year later, a 1725 Dutch edition of the book
made a crucial change to the illustration, showing Bonny and Read with jackets
open, revealing their breasts (see Figs. 2 and 3).
4
The military accouterments
and background of ships are similar, but their jackets and shirts are artfully un-
buttoned not only to reveal but to deliberately frame and present their breasts
as the rst thing a viewer notices about the gures. In the 1724 British illus-
tration, Bonny and Read occupy an indeterminate space: their clothes pres-
ent their gender as masculine, while the caption names them as female. Their
martial aspect dominates the image; the womens more feminine attributes
rounded gures, oating hair do not register until after that, thus creating a
teasing ambiguity that the viewer can continue to enjoy once the caption has
claried the truth. That frisson of ambiguity remains as a pleasurable tension
for the viewer; it creates a desire to know more and thus a desire to read the
accompanying text. In the 1725 Dutch images, that frisson of ambiguity is no
longer possible; Bonny and Read are immediately read as female, and their
masculine attire seems to the modern eye more like an erotic party costume
than real clothes. The 1724 image hints at a narrative that is in fact delivered a
story of piracy and potentially unnatural women whose interesting histories
and characteristics are gradually revealed (and eventually conrmed by the
sight of their breasts). The 1725 images present a static erotic spectacle for the
readers enjoyment; they foreclose the narrative of revelation by anticipating
it, so that Bonny and Read are left as women whose truth (their femaleness)
is already known, and the mystery of their cross-dressing is paradoxically no
longer of great interest.
5
I begin with these images because they are widely distributed, continuing to
draw readers to a tale that still resonates with modern audiences; yet although
both the clothed and bare- breasted images appear as if interchangeable, little
has been said about the meaning of the differences between them.
6
The swift
visual repackaging of Bonny and Read can be read as a process of sexualization,
part of the cultural work that made Bonny and Read into glamorous, notorious,
and malleable gures used to reframe and normalize excessive or problematic
female behavior. But it can also be read as the sign of an emerging fascination
with the female body qua body a fascination that is accompanied by a detailed
rhetoric of investigation. The eighteenth centurys concern with the female
body is made manifest through a willingness to interrogate the material real-
ity of the female body, its uses and functions, its social meaning. The pirates
breasts are not simply a sign of their femaleness: they are a clue to the nature
of womanhood itself (a concept that changed drastically during the course of
the eighteenth century), an ambiguous signier of what women are or should
be and a reminder of how far these particular women have strayed from the
ideal. And in yet another layer of meaning, the pirates breasts offer pleasure:
the narrative frames them in such a way that the audience can enjoy them we
are given permission to commodify and consume the images of female bodies
displayed for our amusement.
Bonny and Read are an enigma: they use the exterior costuming of gender
to pass successfully as men; they leave home to ght in wars and become pi-
rates; yet they also seek and nd romantic heterosexual love. Their ability to
pass could be interpreted as an acknowledgment that gender is malleable and
performative, rather than essential and naturalized yet that is a dangerous
cultural position, so the narrative seeks to use the womens breasts to foreclose
their unruly behavior. The revelation of their breasts puts an immediate stop
to any notion that the boundaries of binary sex can be as porous as those of
gender. The theatrical, repeated unveiling of the breast reminds women who
have used gender to acquire agency and power in the world that they can go no
further: the female body is now asserted as an absolute fact, a truth that cannot
be sidestepped. Femaleness is insisted upon as a reality whose meaning (and
accompanying social consequences) is so clear that it needs no explanation; it
is the new and complete denition of the self. The insistence on the breast is an
attempt to conate sex with gender. Although the women themselves use their
breasts in playful ways to assert agency and sexuality, in the narrative the pi-
rates breasts are the nal point of a process of revelation, an attempt to reduce
these women to a social place that has already been dened for them.
The pirates milk- white breasts, ashing from their clothes, are the heart of
their enigma. The mens jackets they wear cannot completely contain them, and
neither can the narrative the conundrum of the female gure who exceeds all
social bounds is hard to contain in a formally messy narrative that is a cross-
roads for several literary conventions. The romance of the female outlaw draws
the audience in, and is too powerful an image to be utterly reduced to a moral
tale. And the breast becomes the compelling metonymic focus of a swirling
debate about appropriate femininity.
It is not an accident that the breast is used as the prototypical marker of the
bodys female truth. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the breast came
to signify what kind of woman one was, through ones relationship to the con-
cept of appropriate domesticity and maternity; the new ideal of womanhood was
the middling or upper- class woman, breastfeeding her own infant, surrounded
by other healthy children (in the bosom of her family, so to speak) a woman
who has exchanged the erotic pleasure of the dry, rm breast for the satisfaction
of the dripping, lactating breast of patriotic motherhood. I suggest that this later
domestic vision of the maternal breast actually emerges from a concern with the
bodys meanings that can be seen earlier than the emergence of domesticity itself.
The breast cannot take on its later meanings without a rst stage of re- envisioning:
that is, the breast has to become a focal point of the bodys meanings, so that it
can later take on the meaning of maternal domesticity. This is what we see in the
narrative of the female pirates: the breast functions to reduce Bonny and Read to
the status of their body. Their breasts tie them to a body that the narrative then
uses to attempt to contain them within a plot of heterosexual romance.
The pirate womens narratives were rst published at a cultural intersection,
a historical moment when multiple ideas about the signicance of being female
were available, and it was not yet clear which would be adopted. Thomas La-
queur suggests that this was the period when the very conceptualization of
what it meant to be a woman or a man changed radically; and Michael McKeon
argues that the modern patriarchal sex/gender system came into being in the
eighteenth century, thus making concerns about sex and gender both crucial
and politically legible.
7
Representations of womens bodies marked them as
appropriate or aberrant, codifying a new way of being sexed. This is the context
within which the pirates breasts take on their signicance: the images accrue
signicance retroactively, pointing us back to a moment when it was not yet
clear that their bodies would tie them so ineluctably, and in this particular way,
to the maternal domesticity of the later part of the century.
THE STORY OF BONNY AND READ
In the conventional style of criminal biographies, Johnsons rst edition of A
General History of the Pyrates tells us about the early years of Bonny and Read,
whose childhoods were similar in that their parents raised both of them dressed
as boys. The reasons for this are convoluted, and much narrative energy is ex-
pended on the point; it is signicant as an attempt to suggest that there was
nothing abnormally masculine about either of the two, physically speaking
their later masculinity, in other words, is a result of nurture rather than na-
ture, and not evidence of tribadism. Both were courageous and strong. Mary
Read served rst on a man- of- war, next as a foot soldier, and then in a cavalry
regiment in all cases, we are told, she acquitted herself with bravery. Anne
Bonny had a erce and couragious Temper (171): It was certain that she was
so robust, that once, when a young Fellow would have lain with her, against
her Will, she beat him so, that he lay ill of it a considerable Time (17172) an
effective defense against rape, the description of which at the beginning of the
narrative allows readers to assume that Bonnys later sexual activity is consen-
sual rather than coerced.
Fig. 2: Mary Read, Dutch edition (Historie der Engelsche zee-roovers, 1725) The
British Library Board. 9555.aaa.1.
Fig. 3: Anne Bonny, Dutch edition (Historie der Engelsche zee-roovers, 1725) The
British Library Board. 9555.aaa.1.
The narrative offers a romance motivation to recuperate the potentially
transgressive plot. Both women changed their lives for love of men: this con-
vention shapes the narrative and attempts not entirely successfully to tame
it. For Read, heterosexual love reveals the qualities she is lauded for in the nar-
rative: her modesty and her nobility of mind. She falls in love with a fellow sol-
dier, and then volunteers for any patrol her beloved is part of, so that she could
ing herself in front of him if there were any sign of danger. Finally, she delib-
erately reveals her sex to him (the text merely says she found a Way of letting
him discover her Sex, without appearing that it was done with Design [159]).
At rst he envisions turning her into his private camp follower, yet she insists
on marriage, and they retire from the army. But domestic life does not last long
for Read: her husband dies, and she rejoins the army, then ships out for the
West Indies, and ends up with the pirates. Reads extreme sexual modesty is
underlined with a second love story: while a pirate, she once again falls in love,
and once again successfully conceals her birth sex from her pirate comrades,
choosing to reveal it only to her new beloved (an artist captured by the pirates).
This time, When she found he had a Friendship for her, as a Man, she suffered
the Discovery to be made, by carelessly shewing her Breasts, which were very
White (163). Here, Reads breasts function as the marker of her true identity:
the merest glimpse belies her previous successful appropriation of masculinity,
and immediately changes friendship into erotic desire the revelation of her
female body is claimed to lead inexorably to a heterosexual sexual relationship
that exactly mirrors her rst marriage.
8
The narrative suggests that her modesty
and repeated insistence on marriage thus are revealed by her breasts to be her
essential domestic nature; ironically, a cross- dressed female pirate can long for
domesticity. The cross- dressing is presented as the aberration, and her breast
is the breast of a woman who concedes happily to marriage, with a man who
is not a pirate (and who thus offers a potential alternate ending, a life away
from piracy). Yet the narrative cannot convince the reader of this interpretation
because it undercuts itself; Reads pirate comrades claim that she loved being
a pirate, and quote her saying she would never give it up. Read dies at the
end from gaol fever rather than execution and so does not have the chance
to choose an ending that would foreclose the ambiguity of her tale.
If heterosexual love is depicted as bringing out Reads modesty, it does the
opposite for Bonny it reveals her lust. Unlike Read, she is not represented as
sexually virtuous: she meets the pirate Captain Rackam and leaves her hus-
band for him, dressing as a man and joining his crew, having a child with him
and then re- joining the pirate ship. Then she and Read end up together on
Rackams ship, and her attraction to Read allows the narrative to indulge a
playful innuendo:
[Reads] Sex was not so much as suspected by any Person on Board, till Anne
Bonny, who was not altogether so reserved in point of Chastity, took a particular
liking to her; in short, Anne Bonny took her for a handsome young Fellow, and
for some Reasons best known to herself, rst discovered her Sex to Mary Read;
Mary Read knowing what she would be at, and being very sensible of her own
Incapacity that Way, was forced to come to a right Understanding with her, and
to the great Disappointment of Anne Bonny, she let her know she was a Woman
also. (162)
This classic rhetorical strategy enables the audience to envision a titillating les-
bian relationship without requiring readers to face the consequences of same-
sex attraction. This episode, on the surface, focuses not on potential pleasure but
on what it describes as Reads Incapacity and Bonnys Disappointment: the
female body is presented as marked by lack, subtly indicating the impossibility
of same- sex female love between two bodies that lack what is required to fulll.
Just as a glimpse of Reads breasts led inevitably to sexual desire between man
and woman, the revelation of femaleness here (the text does not specify how
Read let Bonny know) is claimed to lead to disappointment: the text presents
an overdetermined insistence on the necessity that there be two different sexes
for any chance of sexual satisfaction to occur.
Yet, as always when a scenario is presented as a mistake, the trace of its
potential reality still lingers: the possibility of a same- sex affair remains avail-
able to the reader, couched in the conventions of cross- dressing theatricality
thus presented as playful misrepresentation. The original edition neatly labels
this playful possibility as impossible, yet later editions indicate that readers
and publishers found it appealing. The women are always presented as a pair:
when they are all captured, Bonny is in a relationship with Rackam, yet it is
Bonny and Read who ght together, with Rackam nowhere in sight after the
trial Bonny excoriates him for being a coward. Iconographically, they are pre-
sented together, both in the initial illustration of them as erce pirates, and in
the second, overtly sexualized version, where they stand together, joined more
rmly by their relationship than they are with the men they supposedly love.
The togetherness of the two women, their constant presentation as a couple,
signals a homoeroticism that some later editions pick up on more strongly: the
1765 edition, for example, adds a slight variation to the story, in which Read
refers to Bonny as her lover:
She pretended, when, after rst being taken, she was upon her trial, as indeed
most of them do) [sic] that what she did was upon compulsion, and to save her
life: notwithstanding the evidence against her, who were forced men, positively
swore that in the time of action nobody on board was more bold and resolute
than Mary Read and Anne Bonny to attack any ship; and particularly at the time
they were taken, when they came to close quarters: which was the sum of what
was sworn against her. But she denied it with a great deal of art and skill, saying,
it was impossible for a woman to be guilty of what they swore against her, and
that she entered into the service of the privateer purely upon the account of Anne
Bonny, who was her lover; being sensible if she had not put herself into disguise
she should not have been admitted on board the ship. This had some weight with
the jury as well as the judge, for it plainly appeared, by all the witnesses, that she
had always behaved herself very modestly among the men.
9
This version does not expand on what it means by the term lover, or take
the potential plot twists any further; but it makes the possibility of a lesbian
plot more available to readers by suggesting that such a relationship might not
only be the result of mistaken gender identity but actually of choice. Many of
the changes and adaptations made in later versions and translations suggest
the possibility of audience response to the original not only textually but also
visually: the 1725 Dutch version of the illustrations of Bonny and Read is not
only more overtly sexual but also more playful and vivacious. Readers of all
types could nd it pleasurable, and so it undercuts the moral tone and plot
foreclosure of Johnsons text.
Johnsons narrative consistently characterizes the two women as tting into
one of two main roles: the scene of cross- dressing misrepresentation presents
Bonny as lustful rather than modest, a converse to Reads potential for appro-
priate domesticity. Bonny and Rackam have had a child together, an infant that
she apparently left behind in Cuba:
After she had been at Sea some Time, she proved with Child, and beginning to
grow big, Rackam landed on the Island of Cuba; and recommending her there to
some Friends of his, they took Care of her, till she was brought to Bed: When she
was up and well again, he sent for her to bear him Company. (172)
Just as the potential lesbian relationship reappears in later versions, Bonnys
characteristic lust is embroidered upon in later editions. For example in the
1726 edition, a special appendix gives new details about Bonnys behavior: it
claims that her rst husband was a pirate, that she had affairs with other men
while they were in Jamaica, and that when she met Rackam there he was so
taken that he spent all his recent plunder money on her, and offered to give her
husband money to allow her to live with him. When the islands governor put
a stop to that transaction, she and Rackam stole a ship and went back to piracy
in order to be together.
10
Just as the 1765 edition expands queers, even the
presentation of sexuality, this appendix picks up elements of the original and
expands them to t audience reactions. The depiction of the lustful Bonny rep-
resents an alternate, non- maternal, undomestic, and potentially queer repre-
sentation of a woman: one who leaves her own husband and has a child with
another man, and who leaves her infant in the care of others. She, however,
survives at the end: but what has become of her since, we cannot tell; only this
we know, that she was not executed (173).
Bonny and Reads femaleness does not affect their piratical behavior: many
of their pirate comrades swear that the two women are the boldest and bravest
in any encounter, the most willing to ght. In fact, when the pirate ship was
taken, the two women, with only one other man, fought on deck till the last,
and called to the other pirates to come up from below deck and ght like Men
(161). After their ship was captured, and the pirates were tried and sentenced
to execution, Bonny is said to have told Rackam that she was sorry to see him
there, but if he had fought like a Man, he need not have been hangd like a
Dog (173). Bonny and Read both claimed pregnancy; by pleading their bellies
they had their cases postponed and avoided execution. Their pregnancy under-
scores the narratives representation of sex as reied and natural the women
have breasts, and are pregnant; in contrast, gender (their masculine ferocity) is
presented as radically disconnected from the sexed body, although the narra-
tive repeatedly attempts to join them.
This narrative is marked by a set of destabilizing ambiguities. Sex does not
fully succeed in matching gender. The narrative fails to classify Bonny and Read
as either of two powerful feminine stereotypes, modest woman and sexually in-
satiable woman, even when those opposites are translated into pirate terms: as
Hans Turley points out, the audiences continued interest in Bonny, Read, and
other passing women was precisely piqued by the impossibility of nally xing
them into either whore or faithful mate category.
11
But the sexed body
represented by the female pirates white breasts is presented throughout as
if it were a stable, xed point of truth. The ambiguities that remain unresolved
in this narrative are precisely those that the ideal of the domestic woman will
resolve later in the century: for the domestic woman seamlessly conates sex
with gender, and with sexuality, naturalizing them as if all those born female
were essentially both appropriately feminine and appropriately heterosexual.
Yet ambiguity is part of the pleasure and energy of this text, which invites the
reader to interpret the possibilities of femininity. For modern readers, the plea-
sure of this multilayered, inconclusive characterization is markedly different
from the pleasure of the later tightly woven domestic novel.
That the female pirates breasts were seen as particularly signicant by
their contemporaries is suggested by the pamphlet on which Johnsons His-
tory must have been based: The Tryals of Captain John Rackam (1721).
12
This
pamphlet is supposedly a description of the actual trial, and gives some detail
about what witnesses said including a woman who had been captured by
the pirates, Dorothy Thomas, who testied that she knew they were women,
despite their mens clothes: the Reason of her knowing and believing them
to be Women was, by the Largeness of their Breasts, although it is not clear
whether she saw these breasts clothed or revealed.
13
Other witnesses noted
that Bonny and Read sometimes wore womens clothes on board ship, when
there was no danger of a piratical confrontation: That when they saw any
Vessel, gave Chase, or Attacked, they wore Mens Cloaths; and, at other
Times, they wore Womens Cloaths.
14
This tiny glimpse of a historical voice,
however mediated, belies the claim made by Johnsons narrative that pass-
ing could be a choice for the women that they could completely control the
presentation of their identity. This makes Johnsons narrative on which I
focus because of its enduring popularity even more interesting: this ctional
account makes the womens agency central to the plot, and allows them to
use the revelation of true identity for their own purposes. As Turley says,
we cannot . . . recover the real pirate; we cannot know what contempo-
raries thought about the actual women, and so the story that the trial records
engendered Johnsons is the one we can work with.
15
Yet Johnsons nar-
rative both allows the women agency and then uses the breast to undercut
that agency through a claim of essentialist bodily identity: the reader seesaws
through potential interpretations (a fact that helps to explain the narratives
popularity with a wide audience).
Johnsons narrative proceeds as a series of complex misrepresentations and
revelations of identity: apart from the piratical cross- dressing, Reads mother
passes her off as Marys dead older brother (to hide Marys illegitimacy from
her late husbands family), while Bonnys father passed her off as a boy so that
his wife would not realize she was the child he had fathered with the household
maid. In both cases, cross- dressing the protagonists in their childhood was a
ploy to maintain the socioeconomic status of the household, which depended
on maintaining the appearance of a legitimate marriage. The revelation of these
misrepresentations of identity causes plot events but not disaster; similarly,
Reads revelation of her sex to Bonny when they are on the pirate ship is a
means to avoid a plot problem a misplaced lesbian affair. The pattern of re-
peated misrepresentation of the gendered self (by choice or imposed by others)
is the core of the narrative: such misrepresentation is shown to be certainly
possible and often successful, and linked to social position and opportunity it
is often a way for women to attain agency beyond the domestic sphere.
16
Yet
such misrepresentation must also be shown to be nite, or the tale of the female
pirates could too easily offer a critique of domesticity. The bared breast serves
as the iconic symbol of a physical reality that cannot be denied, a body that
betrays the passing woman and restores order to society.
BODIES
The tale of the female pirates displays unease about the possible implications of
the misappropriation of gender by bodies sexed as female. It is in this context
that the breast takes on a vital role: it becomes the signier of femaleness that
betrays passing women and thus attempts to prove that passing is impossible.
The revealed breast upholds the social order by reassuring the reader that the
truth of femaleness will always be made evident, and that fraud will eventu-
ally be detected.
Historically, the breast has held various cultural meanings; yet its crucial
place in our understanding of nature (and human nature) was xed in the eigh-
teenth century by Linnaeus, who chose to use the breast as the icon of his new
classication system, in which he linked humans and animals to form a new
category whose very title derives from the fact of having breasts: mammals.
17

Charting the meaning of the breast in various eras, Marilyn Yalom argues that
in Europe the breast was seen as primarily sacred and maternal in the four-
teenth century, then increasingly was represented as erotic in the fteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, until a new turn toward breastfeeding
changed its signicance again in the middle of the eighteenth century.
18
Until
that point, most English women with any means had sent their infants to wet
nurses, and often only retrieved them (if they survived) when they were two
or three years old.
19
The breast takes on new meaning in the later eighteenth
century as a metonymic symbol of domestic motherhood: the woman suckling
a baby is an appropriate woman who has put care of children above her own
sexual desire or self- presentation as erotic. Thus the breast becomes shorthand
for what a woman should be, as well as a marker of what her body limits her to.
Ruth Perry argues that medical science was not much concerned with womens
bodies until the mid-eighteenth century, when colonial ambitions sparked a
political interest in motherhood, and so also with breastfeeding producing
new citizens and nurturing them.
20
Thus began a public campaign to persuade
women of the middling and upper classes to forgo wet nurses and instead to
see breastfeeding as a patriotic duty. Breast feeding a return to natures law
also rmly relegated woman to the domestic sphere:
Linnaeuss term Mammalia helped legitimize the sexual division of labor in Euro-
pean society by emphasizing how natural it was for females both human and
nonhuman to suckle and rear their own offspring. Linnaean systematics had
sought to render nature universally comprehensible, yet the categories he devised
infused nature with middle- class European notions of gender. Linnaeus saw the
females of all species as tender mothers, a vision he (wittingly or unwittingly)
projected onto Europeans understandings of nature.
21
A concern with motherhood as the new vision of womens primary role, as
Perry suggests, is also a concern about what kind of woman one is dealing
with, and thus a new scrutiny of the female body developed: all of the pro-
cesses and functions of a womans body came to be seen as signiers of her
character, of her truth. The way a woman presented her breasts could thus be
seen as an indication of her essential character.
The idea that the female body could reveal a womans character began to
emerge earlier in the century. Johnsons female pirate narrative is published
well before the breast becomes the icon of patriotic motherhood, yet it marks
the beginning of a turn, an important cultural crossroads when attention shifts
toward this part of the body. Interestingly, this creates a paradox: the public con-
cern with aberrant womens bodies increased at the same time that a physical
explanation for their abnormality tribadism was falling out of currency. The
theory of tribadism as the cause of transgression could once have provided a
useful explanation based in the body for why some women were transgres-
sive: yet that theory had lost its explanatory power. In the seventeenth century,
the enlarged clitoris signied an unnatural woman a tribade, a woman with
hermaphroditic tendencies who took on a masculine role.
22
The tribade could
be seen as an anomaly, a monster, not a problem that affected most women
(although there was debate over whether a woman was born with one or made
hers grow through masturbation and other practices). In the eighteenth cen-
tury, however, the tribade was becoming conceptually unavailable as an ex-
planatory tool of aberrant behavior. The breast replaced the clitoris as the new
indicator of womans proper nature. Interestingly, the breast arouses desire in
the men who glimpse it, not in the woman herself, whereas the clitoris is linked
to the womans own desire and pleasure: the shift from clitoris to breast as a
focus for the societys gaze makes sense as the ascendant culture of domesticity
required the denial of the very existence of female desire.
CONTEXTUALIZING THE FEMALE PIRATES IN NARRATIVE
TRADITION
In the 1720s, the female pirates occupy what in hindsight appears to be a mid-
point position in the emerging popular culture debate about the signicance of
womens bodies. Their story can be contextualized in relation to two overlap-
ping narrative traditions from which it borrows tropes and conventions: the
balladry tradition of what Dianne Dugaw calls warrior women, and the biog-
raphies of female criminals that spanned genres from broadsides to chapbooks
and novels throughout the period. Such borrowing should offer a template for
contemporary readers to interpret Bonny and Read, through already familiar
conventions. In this case, however, the template creates a clash of interpreta-
tion, because the two models of female representation contradict each other.
The balladry tradition offers celebrated and heroic warrior women, while the
criminal biography turns women into abject spectacles that are increasingly
eroticized and objectied. The essential ambiguity of the female pirate nar-
rative is a result of its uneasy placement between the two traditions, which
represent transgressive women either as celebrated (in a limited context) or as
abject. To complicate matters further for later readers, hindsight shows that the
pirate narrative plays a pivotal role in the development of an emerging narra-
tive genre: the longer prose narratives of passing women that became popular
in the mid- eighteenth century.
The ballad tradition presents warrior women female soldiers and sail-
ors who pass as men from the sixteenth century into the eighteenth. These
women ght bravely in wars yet (despite their apparent gender transgression)
are celebrated and rewarded with adventures, praise, and usually marriage.
Dugaw describes a prototypical celebrated female warrior, Mary Ambree,
who enjoys combat and is praised for her prowess, yet is willing to use the
revelation of her femaleness to avoid punishment when she is captured just
as Bonny and Read do by pleading their bellies.
23

Genre is a crucial determiner in this depiction of the female warrior: the bal-
lads are written in a style that appealed to the lower part of its readership to
the semi- literate laboring classes who were still heavily shaped by an oral cul-
ture (although this particular form of cheap print was in fact enjoyed by all
classes at least until the beginning of the eighteenth century). Generic conven-
tions produce a certain conservatism: though social mores and traditions may
be upended for the sake of a story, such ballads tend to conclude with the world
put back to rights that is, warrior women tend to cross- dress in order to fol-
low their sweethearts to battle, and often return to marry them. These women
may display a taste for battle that would seem to confound rigid twenty- rst
century concepts of appropriate gender presentation, yet these ballads do not
represent this as extraordinary.
24
Dugaws female warriors negotiat[e] gender
as a bipolar system of costuming: that is, they choose how and when to pass,
and match their behavior appropriately.
25
The cross- dressing warrior women
in the ballad tradition are celebrated and admired because they are seen not as
abnormal, but as heroic.
For Dugaw, the female warrior destabilizes gender by showing that its se-
miotic codes can be taken on by women: by encoding herself in the language
of gender deceptively, she becomes ungrammatical, subversive, a lying sign. In
so doing, she destabilizes the gender systems capacity to signify reliably and
to restrict the power it creates.
26
Yet even for these warrior women the body
sometimes intrudes, and the femaleness of the body interrupts the control of
gender markers for example, in instances where sex, not gender, causes the
female warrior to be outed where a milk- white breast pops out, or where
she becomes pregnant.
27
The warrior women are not presented as potential trib-
ades or as sexually transgressive; they do not fall in love with other women,
and their gender masquerade is not seen as signifying or as linked to anything
abnormal in their essential nature in fact, gender seems to oat untethered
in these ballads as a costume. Since heroism has been dened as masculine, a
heroic woman simply steps into the masculine costume required for that char-
acteristic; yet neither the characteristic itself nor the temporary gender presen-
tation indicates a problem with the woman herself.
The balladry tradition of warrior women offers one way for contemporary
readers to interpret the tale of Bonny and Read: as brave women whose martial
heroism required masculine garb, and whose love for men normalized their
choices. Yet the story of the female pirates ts uneasily into those conventions
for Bonny and Read seem to match more closely a different tradition, the crimi-
nal biography. Some publishers made the link between pirates and criminals
explicitly a 1755 collection pairs Bonny and Read with other notorious female
criminals old and new such as Mary Carleton and the highwayman Joan Phil-
ips, rather than with male pirates.
28

Criminal biographies follow their own conventions.
29
The biographies of fe-
male criminals, however, differ from those of their male counterparts by mark-
ing female criminality as a form of gender transgression, so that the tales of
female criminals sometimes exceed the formal boundaries of the genre. Popu-
lar cheap print ballads, broadsides, and pamphlets made material about
criminals widely available in a variety of formats: gallows literature, which
features the supposed last words of criminals on the scaffold, or accounts of
their last confessions; pamphlets about trials; pamphlet biographies of famous
female criminals; and accounts of lewd women and prostitutes (such as Har-
riss Covent Garden List [175795]). The popular texts treat women differently
from men, focusing on their bodies, on how unusual it was for them to speak
in public even when that speech is a scaffold confession and on their de-
viation from the gendered norm.
30
The presentation of criminal women in the
late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries draws attention to the ways in which
their acts out gender conventions, and thus turns them into the site of cultural
speculation about women as sexed beings. Their breaking of the boundaries of
conventional womanhood makes these women available for public view. The
narrative tradition of female criminal biography, beginning in the seventeenth
century, prepares readers to interpret the female pirates as abject women who
are available for public scrutiny. There is also a concurrent movement in the
theater that strengthens this tendency toward making actresses, who had al-
ways been seen as public women, into erotic, sexualized objects. This started
with the Restoration: Jean Marsden argues that set pieces in plays of the 1680s
were particularly effective in showing raped heroines as erotic objects; through
these scenes, says Marsden, playwrights encourage the audience to envision
the heroine and the actress who embodied her as an ongoing sexual spec-
tacle.
31
Various cultural threads combine to present the female body in popular
culture as available for public scrutiny and interpretation at the turn of the cen-
tury, in a way quite different from the cultural uses made of mens bodies. The
presentation of the pirates breasts is a notable step on the way to signaling the
cultural normalization of scopophilia: the notion that all womens bodies are
available for erotic representation and general consumption.
In this outpouring of popular cheap print about criminal women, by the
eighteenth century, the womans voice becomes less important in these rep-
resentations than her body, often presented for viewing in the accompanying
illustrations. These illustrations invite the viewer to eroticize the female subject;
the illustrations do not simply present the woman in a historical setting, but
rather invite the spectators pleasurable participation. In this popular litera-
ture, criminal women embody the sexuality that is contemporaneously being
drained from the novels representations of the domestic woman. In the eigh-
teenth century, female characters in the novel are increasingly desexualized as
the new ideology of middle- class female domesticity takes hold. At the same
time, there is an upsurge in popular literatures increasingly explicit presen-
tation of highly eroticized women, who are marked off from the respectable
classes by their criminality. Domesticity is a system that ensures bodily integ-
rity only to a certain class of women; any women who becomes public loses
that privilege, and her body becomes a spectacle that can be exhibited pictori-
ally as an erotically charged amusement, or interrogated at trial for the ways in
which it might offend the norm. Being criminal or being an actress, or a pub-
lic speaker makes these women public; being public makes them sexualized,
more or less explicitly. They are presented now for the audiences scopophilic
pleasure.
Contemporary readers of Bonny and Reads tale could recognize their
prototypes within the balladry tradition, or from among the mass of popular
literature about female criminals.
32
Retrospectively, readers of the pirate narra-
tives could also connect them to a new tradition of longer narratives focused on
cross- dressing women, which began to appear in the early seventeenth century
with Moll Cutpurse (Mary Frith) and Long Meg of Westminster, whose stories
enjoyed an extraordinarily long publishing history.
33
However, such narratives
become far more common in the mid- eighteenth century, as a quick listing of the
most important ones shows Bonny and Read (1724), Christian Davies (1740),
Mary Hamilton (1746), Jenny Cameron (1746), Hannah Snell (1750), Catherine
Vizzani (1751), and Charlotte Charke (1755).
34
The female pirates story can be
seen as a turning point in this tradition, one that marks the diminishing of the
cultural legibility of the celebrated warrior woman trope found in ballads, and
the beginning of a new and more ambiguous narrative style that explores and
questions the cross- dressing heroines motivations and sexuality.
35
The pirates
are a turning point because they present a different conceptualization of gender
than is seen in the balladry tradition; yet they do not yet problematize or sex-
ualize the appropriation of masculinity, as the cross- dressing narratives from
Davies to Charke do. Although the pirates briey raise the question of sexu-
ality, they do not make a rm link between cross- dressing and transgressive
(same- sex) sexuality, something that is a question in all those later stories. Thus
they occupy a unique position in the narrative tradition halfway between the
ballad tradition (in which gender can be radically disconnected from sex by
heterosexual women who cross- dress for romantic reasons) and the narrative
tradition of female masculinity (in which gender is tied to sex, and a protago-
nist such as Hamilton, the female husband, is vilied for appropriating male
privilege through her cross- dressing and unnatural use of a dildo).
36

The different narrative traditions that represent versions of gender trans-
gressive women indicate an increasing concern with the actual bodies of such
women that is, with sex rather than gender. Those ideas were expressed in
genres that also competed and sometimes lost popularity. For example, the bal-
lad traditions warrior women separate sex from gender in a fairly radical way:
gender is a costume that can be convincingly assumed, and the womans usur-
pation of masculine gender prerogatives in those tales does not implicate her
sexed female body, which remains respectable and even admired. But the cul-
tural ideas expressed in ballads were becoming outmoded, as the genre itself
fell out of favor.
37
The playful vision of gender expressed in the ballads began
to disappear. The female criminal biographies, on the other hand, maintained
their popularity; their representation of criminal behavior in women as gender
transgressive took stronger hold. Such biographies, by turning the womans
body into an object of speculation, implied that the body was a potential source
of explanation for the transgression.
The key element in the female pirates narrative is the problem of how one
should read their bodies. What is the truth of their selves? Johnsons text answers
this question through an implicit insistence on the body, an attempt to get at
the truth of their behavior through their bodies. The female pirates, as convicted
criminals, have bodies that are available to be publicly interrogated and eroti-
cized; readers cannot fail to be concerned with their bodies and what they might
signify. The narrative pushes the reader to see Bonny and Read as ballad- style
warrior women who would do anything for love of a man it is a trope that
normalizes aberrant behavior and makes it safe. But the tale of Bonny and Read
exceeds the by then outmoded conventions of the balladry tradition, and raises
questions about the female pirates bodies that remain unanswered these are
questions related to the bodily mechanics of passing on a tiny pirate ship. Where
would one urinate, on a ship without toilet facilities when the side of the ship
served as urinal? Where would one dispose of bloody menstrual rags? Where
would one hide the fact that one does not shave? Can one hide a body that is
sexed as female, or is the appearance of physical sex in fact something that can be
as easily appropriated as gender? These questions about the functioning of the
female body destabilize the primary plot. Johnsons version of the story has noth-
ing to say about such questions, which strike a modern reader as essential: the
text simply elides the question of passing with blanket declaratives such as, Her
Sex was not so much as suspected by any Person on Board (162). In the episodes
where the concealed sex of one of the women causes puzzling behavior, the plot
demands that onlookers be puzzled that they only know the womens true sex
if the women choose to reveal it. So, when Read falls in love with a fellow soldier,
she throws herself into danger to protect him:
when her Comrade was ordered out upon a Party, she used to go without being
commanded, and frequently run herself into Danger, where she had no Business,
only to be near him; the rest of the Troopers little suspecting the secret Cause
which moved her to this Behaviour, fancied her to be mad, and her Comrade
himself could not account for this strange Alteration in her. (159)
The narrative offers the reader a plot conceit on which the entire story hangs.
That is, Bonny and Read have freedom of choice: they choose to reveal them-
selves as women only to the men they love, and these men, although they are
soldiers or pirates who function in the world of plunder and camp followers,
do not behave as one might expect: they do not rape the women and then reveal
them to their comrades instead, they marry them. This claim is the heart of
the cultural work the narratives do: the insistence on the womens free choice
shores up the importance of romantic love and womens investment in it. Fur-
ther, this narrative conceit short- circuits any worries about the womens mo-
tivations, since romantic love claims to gives closure to the plot. A readers
refusal to accept this plot would move Bonny and Read into illegible territory
yet that is precisely what happens: the narrative conceit of the pirates perfect
passing is not completely convincing, and questions about bodies arise. How-
ever hard the narrative tries to make Bonny and Read legible, it does not quite
succeed: there is a fundamental ambiguity in the story, an inability to explain
the womens motivations. The pirates breasts in the tale of Bonny and Read
signify a concern with the truth that the female body could tell about the real
nature of aberrant women that is, the answer to gender lies in sex. Yet narra-
tive confusion and ambiguity enhance rather than diminish the pleasure avail-
able to the reader, who can respond to and decide between multiple scenarios
and interpretations.
CONCLUSION
The revelation of the female pirates breasts in the 1725 illustration of their
tale can now be read in a more complex way; on one level it is a publishers
response to what readers found interesting about the original edition an
expansion of a core element of the appeal of Johnsons story. Certainly it is a
sensationalized and sexualized way to sell books, but it also indicates a larger
concern with the female body. Opening the womens jackets turns them into
an erotic spectacle, but also insists on their female physicality. The breasts of
the female pirates are presented as a marker of an absolute fact: incontrovert-
ible femaleness. Femaleness is presented as the truth of the pirates bodies, and
implies that a womans body utterly denes her; that is, anatomy is claimed
to be destiny, and sex is conated with gender.
38
That claim is a central part of
what, by mid- century, will become domestic ideology: but domesticity does not
emerge from nowhere, and the tale of the female pirates is simply one earlier
example of popular culture in which we can see its beginnings. Already, for
the female pirates, the breast is beginning to be a focal point of signicance for
what it can demonstrate about a womans self. When a breast is revealed, the
narrative would like to convince us that the argument about a womans nature
is over: the woman in question must give up the agency she acquired through
her creative use of gender signiers (masculine clothes). The context in which
her breasts are exposed on a pirate ship, inadequately clad in mens clothes
marks her as aberrant, as a woman who is outside the sphere of appropriate
domesticity, which is represented later in the century by a woman suckling an
infant. Because of her behavior, she has given up her claim to control the repre-
sentation of her body, and her image can now be eroticized and interrogated in
public. The narrative uses the pirates breasts to make a claim about what kind
of women they are and how they can be treated; their breasts also remind the
viewer of the supposed limitation that such femaleness is assumed to create.
One could say, in fact, that their breasts betray the pirates, who thought they
could control their own bodies and nd they cannot. Marked as criminals
interesting and outrageous ones the pirates nd themselves and their bodies
offered up for the pleasure of the reader.
NOTES
An early version of this paper was presented at the American Society for Eighteenth- Century
Studies conference in March 2010, on a panel honoring the intellectual legacy of the late
Hans Turley, whose work had a profound effect on many of us who work on eighteenth-
century sexuality. I would like to thank Kathryn King for organizing the panel, which cre-
ated the opportunity for us to consider and celebrate Hanss friendship, his collegiality,
his efforts to make queer eighteenth- century studies ourish, and his scholarship. A later
version was presented at Queer People V, Cambridge, July 2010. I thank Caroline Gonda,
Kevin Murphy, and Valerie Traub for helpful comments on these versions.
1. Ludmilla Jordanova, Natural Facts: A Historical Perspective on Science and Sexu-
ality, Nature, Culture, and Gender, ed. Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (Cam-
bridge, 1980), 4269, 4950.
2. Ruth Perry, Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth- Century
England, Eighteenth- Century Life 16, no. 1 (1992): 185213, 194.
3. Capt. Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most
Notorious Pyrates, and also their Policies, Discipline and Government (London, 1724); this edi-
tion will hereafter be cited in the text. This work is often attributed to Daniel Defoe.
Apart from the eighteenth- century editions, the story of Anne Bonny and Mary Read has
endured in modern versions, described in detail in Lizabeth Paravisini- Gebert, Cross-
Dressing on the Margins of Empire: Women Pirates and the Narrative of the Caribbean,
Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse, ed. Ivette Romero-
Cesareo and Paravisini- Gebert (Houndmills, 2001), 5997.
4. Johnson, Historie der Engelsche Zee- roovers (Amsterdam, 1725), the Dutch version of
Johnsons Pyrates. The importance of Dutch renditions of pirate stories begins with the
very rst pirate narrative of the period, Alexandre Exquemelins 1678 De Americaensche
Zee- Rovers; this was quickly translated into English as Bucaniers of America. Carolyn East-
man notes the translations into multiple languages and the different versions indicating
its popularity in Shivering Timbers: Sexing Up the Pirates in Early Modern Print Cul-
ture, Common- Place 10, no. 1 (October 2009), http://www.common- place.org/vol- 10/
no- 01/eastman/. Thus it is not surprising to nd a reciprocal Dutch interest in Johnsons
English pirate narrative, which borrowed conventions and materials from Exquemelins
original and achieved a similarly long- lasting popularity.
5. In this essay, I consider the representations of Bonny and Read as artifacts of popu-
lar culture; clearly, the image of a martial woman with breasts bared also has an important
function in high art that is beyond my current scope. Others address this: for example,
Marcus Rediker discusses the compositional similarities between the Dutch frontispiece
of Historie der Engelsche Zee- roovers (showing a bare- breasted woman on a pirate ship) and
Eugene Delacroixs Le 26 juillet: la Libert guidant le peuple(see Liberty Beneath the
Jolly Roger: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Pirates, Iron Men, Wooden Women:
Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 17001920, ed. M. S. Creighton and Lisa Norling
[Baltimore, 1996], 133).
6. For example, the 1725 image appears on the book cover of Dianne Dugaws Warrior
Women and Popular Balladry, 16501850 (Cambridge, 1989), and Creighton and Norlings
collection, Iron Men, Wooden Women. Eastman is one of the few to address the signicance
of the differences between the two illustrations.
7. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge,
Mass., 1990); Michael McKeon, Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Dif-
ference in England, 16601760, Eighteenth- Century Studies 28, no. 3 (1995): 295322.
8. As she had done before with her husband, Read protected her beloved by ghting a
duel in his stead the most noble of Actions (Johnson, General History, 163). Again, she
insisted on a plighting of troth rather than an illicit liaison, which she lookd upon to be as
good a Marriage, in Conscience, as if it had been done by a Minister in Church (Johnson,
General History, 164).
9. Johnson, The History and Lives of all the Most Notorious Pirates, and Their Crews (Lon-
don, 1765), 67.
10. Johnson, The History of the Pyrates, vol II. To the Whole is added, an Appendix, which
compleats the Lives of the rst Volume, corrects some Mistakes; and contains the Tryal and Execu-
tion of the Pyrates at Providence, under Governor Rogers; with some other necessary Insertions,
which did not come to Hand till after the Publication of the rst Volume, and which makes up what
was defective . . . (London, 1726), 27389.
11. Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity
(New York, 1999), 97. Turley also suggests that the presence of these two women allevi-
ates anxiety caused by the audiences perception of the clearly homoerotic world of the
pirate ship: tales of pirates raping their captives function in the same way they titillate,
yet also reassure. He argues that Bonny and Read in fact act as a sedative to audience
anxiety, which is why they are included in the rst place: the anxiety created by an
absent heterocentric foundation in stories of the pirate world requires gendered tranquil-
izing, and the female pirates are the sedatives (101).
12. The Tryals of Captain John Rackam (1721), British Piracy in the Golden Age: His-
tory and Interpretation, 16601730, vol. 3, ed. Joel H. Baer (London, 2007), 766.
13. Tryals, 27.
14. Tryals, 28.
15. Turley, 1.
16. For further discussion of the centrality of the revelation trope, see Paravisini-
Gebert, 61.
17. Londa Schiebinger, Why Mammals Are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in
Eighteenth- Century Natural History, American Historical Review 98 (1993): 382411.
18. Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York, 1997), 5.
19. Perry, esp. 19495.
20. Perry, 191.
21. Schiebinger, 409.
22. For a particularly succinct review of the relationship of tribadism to femininity, see
Susan S. Lanser, Sapphic Picaresque, Sexual Difference, and the Challenges of Homo-
Adventuring, Textual Practice 15, no. 2 (2001): 25168. See also Valerie Traub, The Re-
naissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002); Katharine Park, The
Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 15701620, The Body in
Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio
(New York, 1997), 17193; Theresa Braunschneider, The Macroclitoride, the Tribade, and
the Woman: Conguring Gender and Sexuality in English Anatomical Discourse, Tex-
tual Practice 13, no. 3 (1999): 51336; Sally ODriscoll, The Lesbian and the Passionless
Woman: Femininity and Sexuality in Eighteenth- Century England, The Eighteenth Cen-
tury: Theory and Interpretation 44, nos. 23 (2003): 10331.
23. Dugaw, 941. Dugaws work on the balladry tradition remains denitive in its
breadth.
24. Dugaw insists in chapter 5 that the ability of women to pass was a result of the
realities of laboring class womens lives: such women, she suggests, would not have sur-
vived in the harsh conditions of the period without bravery.
25. Dugaw, 41.
26. Dugaw, 16566.
27. Dugaw, 15556.
28. The Lives and Adventures of the German Princess (Mary Carleton), Mary Read, Anne
Bonny, Joan Philips, Madam Churchill, Betty Ireland, and Ann Hereford (London, 1755).
29. See, for example, Lincoln Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of
Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth- Century England (Cambridge,
1987); and J. A. Sharpe, Last Dying Speeches: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in
Seventeenth- Century England, Past and Present 107 (1985): 14467.
30. Garthine Walker and Frances Dolan have examined gallows literature from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and argue that women are represented differently
from men in these pamphlets because the spectacle of the woman speaking in public car-
ries a special weight in the earlier period. See Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations
of Domestic Crime in England 15501700 (Ithaca, 1994); and Walker, Crime, Gender and So-
cial Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003). See also Kirsten Saxton, Narratives
of Women and Murder in England, 16801760: Deadly Plots (Farnham, 2009); and Sandra
Clark, Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (Houndmills, 2003).
31. Jean Marsden, Spectacle, Horror, and Pathos, The Cambridge Companion to Eng-
lish Restoration Theatre, ed. Deborah Payne Fisk (Cambridge, 2000), 17490, 187.
32. Bonny and Read t somewhat uneasily into this narrative tradition of criminal
women the text of their story actually misses some opportunities to connect it more
rmly. The distinction between privateers (who worked for the British Crown) and pi-
rates (who worked only for themselves) was historically a somewhat slippery one; and in
fact Rackhams pirate ship was originally a privateer, until he (with the apparent support
of Bonny and Read) returned to piracy:
Hearing that Captain Woods Rogers, Governor of the Island of Providence, was
tting out some Privateers to cruise against the Spaniards, she [Read] with several
others embarkd for that Island, in order to go upon the privateering Account, being
resolved to make her Fortune one way or other.
These Privateers were no sooner saild out, but the Crews of some of them, who
had been pardoned, rose against their Commanders, and turned themselves to their
old Trade: In this Number was Mary Read. (Johnson, General History, 161)
The distinction between pirates and criminals seems hard to draw, particularly for
women. For although the biographies of the male pirates detail their actual crimes
taking ships, murdering, plundering, etc. and thus t them squarely into the criminal
biography tradition, the tales of Bonny and Read miss the opportunity to cast the women
as criminals and instead say as little as possible about such deeds once their personal fe-
rocity has been established. Indeed, the story cannot help but suggest that their real crime
is their self- misrepresentation.
33. For a brief history of Mary Frith/Moll Cutpurses life history and publishing his-
tory, see the introduction to Counterfeit Ladies: The Life and Death of Mal Cutpurse and The
Case of Mary Carleton, ed. Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing (New York, 1995), viiliii.
34. For an excellent introduction to these narratives see Braunschneider, Acting the
Lover: Gender and Desire in Narratives of Passing Women, The Eighteenth Century: The-
ory and Interpretation 45, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 21129.
35. Critics have noted the strong link between the criminal biography and the emerg-
ing novel tradition. See, for example, Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the
English Novel (New York, 1983); and J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: Cultural Contexts of
Eighteenth- Century English Fiction (New York, 1990).
36. For a discussion of the signicance of the dildo in popular narratives, see
ODriscoll, A Crisis of Femininity: Re- Making Gender in Popular Discourse, Lesbian
Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. John Beynon and Caroline Gonda
(Farnham, 2010), 4560. Recent work on passing woman includes: Scarlet Bowen, The
Real Soul of a Man in Her Breast: Popular Opposition and British Nationalism in Mem-
oirs of Female Soldiers, 17401750, Eighteenth- Century Life 28, no. 3 (2004): 2045; Braun-
schneider, Acting the Lover; Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, The Tradition of Female
Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (London, 1989); Emma Donoghue, Passions Between
Women: British Lesbian Culture 16681801 (London, 1993); Lynne Friedli, Passing Women:
A Study of Gender Boundaries in the Eighteenth Century, Sexual Underworlds of the En-
lightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Chapel Hill, 1988), 23460; Lisa Moore,
She Was Too Fond of Her Mistaken Bargain: The Scandalous Relations of Gender and
Sexuality in Feminist Theory, Diacritics 21 (1991): 89101; ODriscoll, The Lesbian and
the Passionless Woman; Kristina Straub, The Guilty Pleasures of Female Theatrical
Cross- Dressing and the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke, Body Guards: The Cultural
Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York, 1991), 107
33; and Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids (London, 1989).
37. Ballads continued to be produced in the eighteenth century, but they were increas-
ingly self- consciously modeled on an older style, until by the 1760s they became the focus
of antiquarian collectors and thus, one can argue, are no longer an expression of current
popular taste. See, for example, the discussion of literary antiquarianism in Nick Groom,
The Making of Percys Reliques (Oxford, 1999).
38. The assumption that the physical body completely denes a person continues
through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and not only in relation to sex: in
nineteenth- century novels the truth of ones race can be revealed through the skin color
of characters who pass as white; some eighteenth- century novels also claim class as an in-
herent bodily trait, as when a child in a poor farmhouse has unusually soft, white hands
and is later revealed to be the lost daughter of an aristocrat.

Sally O'Driscoll Article

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Sally O'Driscoll Article

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Access Provided by Emory University Libraries at 09/05/12 5:28PM GMT

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi