18세기 영국의 여성교육공동체와 ‘여자친구’

Eighteenth-century British Female Boarding Schools and the Homoerotic Female Friendship

This paper investigates cultural and political implications of early modern British boarding school culture focusing on distinctively moralistic and polite depictions of female friendship that were also surprisingly homoerotic. The first section of the paper looks at the rising popularity and cultural visibility all-female boarding schools had garnered during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which necessitated heated debates on the need and dangers of female education in boarding schools. The following section discusses the well-known cases of controversial female friendship of Anne Lister and the ladies of Llangollen, where the couple attempts to normalize their relationship by explicitly exhibiting and performing the polite manners of the gentry class. Highlighting the female boarding school experience, this paper seeks to show how early modern female education allowed women to appropriate upper-middle class models of perfect friendship and to adapt them to maintain homoerotic utopian space of their own.