Slav N. Gratchev - Female Friendship: Literary and Artistic Explorations

Literary and Artistic Explorations

Edited by Slav N. Gratchev, Ida Day, and Larry Sheret

Foreword by Ann Jefferson

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gratchev, Slav N., editor. | Day, Ida, 1975- editor. | Sheret, Larry, 1954- editor.

Title: Female friendship : literary and artistic explorations / edited by Slav N. Gratchev, Ida Day, and Larry Sheret.

Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022016453 (print) | LCCN 2022016454 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666907230 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666907254 (paperback) | ISBN 9781666907247 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Female friendship. | Interpersonal relations.

Classification: LCC HQ1206 .F4226 2022 (print) | LCC HQ1206 (ebook) | DDC 302.34082--dc23/eng/20220405

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016453

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016454

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

About the Artist

Ned Mueller , born in Wisconsin and raised in Montana, has been distinguished as a Master Artist by the American Impressionist Society and the Oil Painters of America. He started drawing and painting when he was four years old. He loves to travel and observe different people, cultures, and environments that he later depicts in his art. Neds passion for life and artistic sensibility are expressed in his exquisite works that have been exhibited in some of the finest galleries in the United States and won numerous awards. The artist shares his knowledge and experience by teaching classes, jurying art shows, writing articles, and offering workshops regionally, nationally, and internationally. Currently he resides in Renton, Washington, with his wife, Karen, who also is an artist. He continues to draw, paint, and teach. For more information, visit the website: www.nedmueller.com.

Ann Jefferson

The most violent sentiment known,

the friendship of a woman for a woman

Balzac, La Cousine Bette

There are many synonyms for friend , and each generation seems to create its own lexicon, those of the last half century perhaps with more urgency and more frequency than their predecessors. Chums and pals belong to another era, sounding a rather different note from words of more recent coinage. Bruv hails from the latter part of the twentieth century in the UK, bro defines the parties as African American, and both terms are reserved for men. The British bestie and bezzie, first attested in the early 1990s, imply the gender specificity that the American BFF makes explicit. Being an ungendered language, English resorts to non-grammatical means to indicate the sex of the friend, and all three termsbestie, bezzie, and BFFstake out a space for friendship between women that avoids confusion with the girlfriend romantically involved with a heterosexual or same-sex partner.

In addition to gender, several of these words also convey degrees or kinds of friendship, so that, for example, mate requires a qualifier like best or good to give it weight. In a more complex semantic idiom, bromancewhich Webster defines as a close, non-sexual relationship between menis just two decades old, while frenemy, first attested in the late nineteenth century, has acquired much wider currency since the late 1970s when Jessica Mitford recalled her sisters use of the word to characterize a heartily disliked childhood playmate.

As well as conveying subtleties of gender, degree, and kind, several of these wordsnotably bro and bruvalso function as a direct form of address. But over and above this usage, a friendship is declared in the very use of the word friend, and a position is taken as much in speaking of a person as a friend as in speaking to one. In quoting Aristotles apocryphal Oh my friends, there is no friend, Derrida makes much of the apostrophizing dimension of all talk about friendship, and announces at the start of The Politics of Friendship that his book will take the form of an address launched by Aristotles vocative, Oh my friends.... Blanchot makes the same point in more extreme terms when he writes that friendship passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to speak to them. These are calls for a particular attention to be paid to the ways in which friendship is talked about, the kinds of language used in discussing it, and an ear attuned to the pragmatic, performative element that will inevitably inform that language.

While the language of social psychology is increasingly widely internalized, it is also implicitly gendered to tell us that women form friendships more easily than men, that they have an average of 4.7 friends to mens 3.2, and, in sum, that, as the title of a recent journal article has it, Women Favour Dyadic Relationships, but Men Prefer Clubs. All this tends, perhaps contradictorily, to normalize a gender-neutral view of friendship as a universal condition for health and well-being, while simultaneously privileging women as models for its practice.

And yet, in the hierarchy of discourses, philosophy continues as the touchstone of wisdom on the issue, where, following Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics , the virtue on which friendship depends is defined as intrinsically male. Aristotle discounts womens friendshipbetween husband and wife, mother and childas inferior, and fails entirely to consider the possibility of friendship between women. This overt or implied denigration of female friendship continues (through Montaigne, Nietzsche, et al.) until in his Politics of Friendship Derrida questions both the automatic gendering of friendship as virile and the dominance of philosophy in the literature of friendship that has made synonyms of the two. In an assertion that he doesnt develop, he proposes a shift of discourse from philosophy to literature, with a glancing suggestion that poetry offers the obscure friendship of rhyme and narrative the chance for an abstract concept of Friendship to give way to friends and their singularity.

Friendship has of course long since featured in literature, where it has traditionally been restricted to men. Epic poetry from the ancient world to the Middle Ages offers representations of male friendships, many held up as exemplary. But there is every reason to explore the issue of specifically female friendship through its literary manifestations, supported by recourse to strategies of reading alive to dimensions of language that convey more than a narrowly content-focused approach will allow.