Cross dressing is an old and familiar plot trope in romance. We’ve talked about it here before, and there’s a pretty thorough list at AAR of all the cross dressing romances they’ve cataloged.
I joke (A LOT) about how oddly easy it is for heroines to easily pass as boys. So many romance heroines years past puberty have grabbed some boys clothing, possibly from a well-hipped stable lad, I presume, and shoved a cap on their heads and presto! Everyone thinks she’s a boy.
Yet there is an amazing history of “passing women,” women who “passed” as men, often marrying other women and living publicly as males, even practicing male professions such as medicine. Cross-dressing was a favorite plot device of many a writer, including Shakespeare.
NB: I may be incorrect in my terminology here. I *thought* “passing women” referred to women who lived outwardly as men, but I’m also finding references to individuals who “passed” as another race. I’m referring here to gender and if I’m using the wrong term, I apologize.
There are several accounts of “passing women” whose stories are jaw dropping. Murray Hall was a politician who voted long before women had the right to do so, and was not revealed to be a female until after Hall died of untreated breast cancer. Hall refused treatment because his gender would have been revealed. James Barry was a British military surgeon whose gender was also not discovered until after his death in 1865. And musician Billy Tipton was similarly revealed to be female upon his death in 1989.
I’ve been thinking about the history of women who passed as men – and how dangerous it was for them – as I’ve been writing up questions for the book club chat for Darlene Marshall’s Sea Change. The heroine, Charlotte, is passing as a male and practicing medicine on a ship as ‘Charley.’ She’s described frequently as not very curvy, with a square jaw and somewhat plain face, but she also takes very careful steps to hide her secondary sex characteristics: she binds her breasts, for example, and she tries not to be seen without a jacket on, even in the Caribbean (oy).
This is a bit of a different type of cross-dressing heroine. Charley is living full-time as a man through much of the story, without anyone on the ship knowing her gender. Charley is in danger if her charade is found out, especially since her reputation is pretty much obliterated due to all the naked manjunk she’s seen professionally. One of the things I find really interesting about Charley is that she’s aware of the many advantages she attains by passing as a male, but she’s also aware that for every social and economic advantage, there’s an equally increased danger of violent consequences if her disguise is discovered. Charley’s uniqueness as a heroine is giving me a lot to think about.
Cross dressing heroines are often masquerading as boys for a few chapters, or maybe a few scenes or one key scene in particular, such as when Frances in Midsummer Magic dresses as a male so that she will be permitted to watch a stallion mount a mare with her husband (yes, of course, you do know what happened next). (Bow chick-a whinny snort).
The reader fascination with bending gender in romance continues. On Twitter the other night I asked about a book someone had emailed me about – the reader had read the sample and wanted to go read the rest but couldn’t remember the title. In the sample, the heroine is investigating something while disguised as a male and working as a valet to a duke. There’s a scene where the heroine shaves the hero in the bath.
The reader, L, remembered the book after emailing me – she had read the sample online, and the book isn’t out yet: it was Joanna Chambers’ The Lady’s Secret, [AMZ | BN] scheduled for publication on 7 November 2011.
Yet the query via Twitter revealed a few other recent cross-dressing heroines, including
Sabrina Jeffries’
(sorry) Sophie Jordan’s Sins of a Wicked Duke [AMZ | K | BN | K | WORD] which features an orphaned heroine who works in household service disguised as a male so as to avoid the unwanted attention of unsavory nobility who like to force themselves on their household staff. But of course her current employer is puzzled by his own interest in the heroine he thinks is a boy, and she’s totally got it bad for him and is trying to keep that to herself.
I think that’s one of my favorite and yet most frustrating stock moments in cross-dressing romance: when the hero gets all confused because he’s having feelings he can’t identify or control about another DUDE. Commence angst and self-recrimination or anger or something like that. The confusion of the hero questions gender in a way that I find fascinating – though the conclusion is that feelings for what the hero thinks is another man can often be labeled as “homosexual,” when really, it’s bisexuality the hero might be confronting. As Candy wrote back in 2005 about hero archetypes,
I’ve noted before that I enjoy it when taboos involving gender lines are broken, or at least bent and bashed around a bit. It’s part of the reason why I like romances involving cross-dressing. When the characters are feeling what seems, at the surface, to be a homosexual attraction? Love it. Love watching the characters struggle with it. Some people are squicked by the idea that the characters, by evincing this attraction, are not 100% hetero. Most of the people I know who are squicked by this aspect almost always say the hero is showing signs of being gay and they’re worried that he might run off with the footman, when really, he’s showing signs of being bisexual, and tendencies towards monogamy are not, as far as I know, exclusively associated with sexual orientation.
Overall, however, the underlying message is a pretty attractive one to me, even if it’s not necessarily realistic: that it’s the essence of somebody that’s attractive, and not necessarily their packaging, even something as powerful like gender.
Yes. That. Cross-dressing is as much a part of romance as it ever was, and makes for many an adventurous plot, even as heteronormative standards are often impressed upon the narrative (to wit: You’re not gay, that’s a GIRL. Aren’t you RELIEVED that you’re NOT GAY?!) (Cue me gritting my teeth.) As Candy wrote, part of what romance explores is the idea that these two individuals are attracted for reasons that go deeper than the “packaging.” That includes, sometimes, gender. There is often some distinct and unexplained element of attraction, something that makes the hero notice something special about the heroine, and vice versa, even when one or both are not what they appear. I love and am fascinated by the idea that what attracts us toward one another is not exclusive to gender (or race, or class, etc. as romance has also explored a bit) and that individually we are unique and our uniqueness is identifiable by those who care about us, even when we hide parts of who we are.
Do you like romances in which there’s cross-dressing? What are your favorites? What’s the most startling exploration of gender you’ve read in a romance?
Not a book, but the BBC adaptation of Casanova with David Tennant and Peter O’Toole features Casanova falling for someone he believes to be a man. Though he has gleefully shagged anything in skirts up to this point and is surprised at what he thinks is his attraction to another man, his attitude is – well, I want you so let’s go for this.
He is therefore a little taken aback when his lover’s sausage turns out to be … a sausage.
I can’t suspend my disbelief in cross dressing romances. While women can pass as men IRL and vise-versa, in the novels the women are often too womanly in manners to pull it off. Many have very little experience with men. I could do it if my breasts weren’t so freakin’ big because I have three older brothers and enough masculine ways about me that people often mistake me for a lesbian. (Which is also annoying and is on reason why I HATE stereotypes so much. I’m STRAIGHT, people! Just because I can act a bit like a man doesn’t mean I want to sleep with women, damn it!) I always expect the hero to say two paragraphs in, “Lady, you make a terrible man.”
You know what I think would be a fun change of pace? A man who’s slightly effeminate, probably because he was raised in a primarily female environment, slender, who passes for a woman while trying to hide from someone trying to kill him, and hanging out with another woman whom he falls in love with and see how she feels when she thinks she’s a lesbian because she’s falling for her new BFF.
I’m currently reading an oldie (based on Super Wendy’s rec) called THE SEDUCTION OF SAMANTHA KINCADE by Maggie Osborne. The hero suspects early on that the heroine is a woman, and is confused why others are so willingly blind. But he’s not attracted to her. He’s intrigued and, like I said, confused, which made for a more realistic and nuanced approach to the trope. It’s only later when he spends a lot more time with her on the trail does he begin to admire her skills, understand why she chose to live as a man, and see the woman beneath. I’m enjoying it because the OMG AM I GEH?? thing hasn’t been a factor at all. She is snarly and hard-bitten, and he likes *that* about her. Refreshing and unpredictable—just what I like in a good romance.
(For those sticklers about POV, there is a bit of headhopping, but the book was first pubbed in 1995. I’m too entertained to care.)
@JamiSings—that’s the brother’s plotline in Heyer’s The Masqueraders. It’s a Georgian romance and the girl hanging out with him has no idea what a lesbian is, but the rest is exact.
That’s one thing I like about the Leviathan books. Deryn has to take “being a boy” lessons from her brother before she fully adopts her disguise.
I wrote my university thesis on cross-dressing. In the stories when a cross-dresser finds out usually one of three things happen, either they get stoned to death by angry townfolk and accused of trying to get it on with the sex they’re pretending to be by sneaking into their friendship groups, or they confess to their love interest who is upset because they lost a MALE friend (since y’know friends are better than lovers -_-) but eventually comes around and marrys the chick, or their love interest is appalled and so forces them into some horrid situation in which they lose their job/life.
Usually there seems to be more focus on the trauma of losing what one thought was a same-gendered friend, than any sort of homo-sexual activity. The disguise seems to be almost faultless. Mulan’s friends were utterly shocked when they went to her house and saw her dressed in female clothes. A big problem in imperial china, was that you didn’t sleep with your male friends because that person was your equal, rather you would have a catamite, who because they took on feminine roles (being the penetrated in sex) they were seen as lesser class.. Most men who cross-dressed where more likely to face stigma than females, as the only reason a men would dress as a “lower class citizen” would be either to get the woman in the sack by deception or because he was mentally deranged.
The only place where it was acceptable was in the theatre, because that was another “world” and it seemed normal that the cross-dressing behaviour would also infringe on the real world.
Joanna Maitland’s Harlequin Historical “His Calvary Lady” (2009) also has a cross-dressing trope. It wasn’t without its gay angst moments but offered some interesting variations with a theme of Tsarist Russia in the early 19th century.
When the hero is worried that he’s suddenly attracted to a small boy, I don’t read that as homophobia. If he’s worried about being attracted to another man, that would probably irk me, but the vast majority, if not all, of the cross-dressing romance heroines I can think of never try to pass themselves off as adults. Of course, people used to be considered sexually mature at a far earlier age, so maybe it’s not a valid argument, but it’s helped me. Also, I recommend skimming over annoying bits.
Not a romance, but Cavalry Maiden is the story of a woman who served in the Russian cavalry in the Napoleonic Wars and it’s pretty amazing. If I recall correctly, Pushkin originally published the memoirs. The Chevalier D’Eon is another fascinating historical person, but I’ve never come across a really good history of him/her. It’s hard to know what pronoun the Chevalier would prefer, as he/she lived most of his/her life as a woman as the result of a court order, which doesn’t exactly fall in the purview of modern terminology.
Masqueraders, I know everyone’s already said it, but it’s my favorite cross-dressing romance novel.
I’ve always wondered why there aren’t more romances set in (Russian empress) Elizabeth’s court – government mandated cross dressing masquerade balls! plus all the intrigue – I suppose because one would presumably have to know Russian to research it well enough to write a book?
Not a romance, but Anne Perry’s A Breach of Promise is a Victorian era mystery and “passing women” story with a suspenseful and thought-provoking reveal. This is one in a long series from the POV of a detective who struggles with his simultaneous attraction and dislike of the nurse heroine because she has an “un-feminine” personality. His feelings formed a subtle and affecting backdrop to the unfolding drama around acceptable (to the time) gender roles.
My scholarly specialty, back in Ph.D. days of yore, was actresses who played male roles in Shakespeare’s plays, usually Hamlet, in the 19 th century. For that, I did a LOT of research, and a lot of it confirms the “we see what we expect” theory. I recall reading one of the historical accounts of a woman passing as a man on a ship who was outed when the ship went to Jamaica (I think). The cultural signifiers of gender were so different that the Jamaicans saw right through her disguise.
That’s been my experience as a performer and director, too. The highest compliment ever paid my acting was when a critic, watching me in the role of John MacDonald, first prime minister of Canada, said to his companions, “I think that actor is gay.” When I directed a cross-gender-cast version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the actors playing women were much more convincing to the audience than the actresses playing men, because the external signifiers, particularly clothing, were so much more extreme. A girl in pants and short hair doesn’t say “boy” to today’s audience, but a full Edwardian gown, hat and wig still says “woman.” All the performers worked equally hard on changing their movement patterns, vocal register and so forth, but having a recognizable dress code really helped the guys.
I wish I still had the blog post Joanna mentioned up-thread; it was eaten, along with all the content of my old blog, when Vox went under. It was inspired by Carolyn Jewel’s Indiscreet, which along with Pam Rosenthal’s Almost a Gentleman, tops my list of thoughtful considerations of gender difference inspired by cross-dressing. I love the trope madly, but my favorite books go beyond the surface acknowledgement that dressing as a man gives a woman more freedom. They consider, even if only for a few pages, the social construction of gender.
Thanks for the discussion, the further recommendations, and the reminder of that fun post with Candy’s great insights.
@nadia Yes!! Thank you, I thought it might be Anne Stuart, but I wasn’t certain. It was so strangely funny.
@Sierra: The SEP novel is Just Imagine, although I think it may have been originally published under a different title because I distinctly remember my copy having a note from the author about revisiting the work. I don’t think the heroine was intentionally dressed as a boy in the beginning. She basically ran wild and acted like a heathen growing up, hunting and riding, always wearing pants, and keeping her hair chopped short. Oh and she never bathed in the beginning. I also remember her wondering why everyone thought she was a boy. In the beginning of the novel she’s still fairly young, and hasn’t really developed yet. This is completely believable to me since I didn’t really get curves, or anything that resembled boobs until my mid twenties.
She does go with the mistaken identity hoping to get the chance to kill the low down dirty rotten yellow-bellied Yankee who inherited the plantation that should rightly be hers. (I’m pretty sure she calls him that to his face).
But once she goes to finishing school and learns that she can use dressing like a girl to her advantage, kind of like a well honed weapon, she hardly ever is seen in pants, or *gasp* unwashed again.
George35: my name was almost Georgina but I’m not quite 35 yet.
@Ashley – Ah, so it has been done. But I must say I find Heyer incredibly hard to read. I barely made it through These Old Shades because I often couldn’t make sense out of what was being said. I swear Shakespeare is easier to understand!
I’d like to see it in a modern novel, actually, set in a contemporary setting! Sort of a new Some Like It Hot, only without a Marilyn Monroe type but more someone, well, honestly, like me. (Remember, I am that pathetic type that reads romance novels because she has no romance in her life. I fit that stereotype, I admit.) Some dude trying to escape some killer, maybe someone who’s actually in the FBI, so he can’t do witness protection, can get away with looking and acting like a woman, without being all Tootsie, and falls in love with some gal who thinks she’s found the perfect best friend and who’s just boyish enough that she thinks nothing of punching out the FBI agent/vicious killer.
I wish I was good at writing. I can come up with plots and characters, but my actual writing sucks. Too bad I don’t know any writers who are great at writing, but suck at plots and characters.
My favourite quote is from the French film “La Nuit de Varennes” where Casanova enounters a male admirer. He kisses the man gently and says “I never decline anything on principle”
Lovely 🙂
Angels face is the UK’s no1 supplier of beautiful designer tutus, Pettiskirts, Tutu dresses, baby tutus, Flower girl dresses and girls party dresses.
It’s not a trope I love, but I recall a few that I enjoyed:
Fool’s Masquerade by Joan Wolf (old Signet tradreg)
Shield of Three Lions by Pamela Kaufman
Hawkmistress by Marion Zimmer Bradley
The last one is most definitely fantasy, an early part of MZB’s Darkover series, though it does contain some very stilted romantic elements.
What I want to see is the heroine who needs to dress as a boy but can’t – too pretty, too plump, too curvy. Or too old. Your 40 y.o. heroine.
What seems more realistic to me is that the unknowing party, let us say the hero, would not actually be sexually attracted to the “boy” but rather disturbed by the “boy’s” (or knowing party’s) obvious attraction to him. And I think I did read such a book, once. HABO?
Also it seems to me that many people, even if they’re entirely open-minded about others’ sexual orientations, would be upset on experiencing an attraction foreign to them. Not homophobic (or hetero-) just human nature.
Et finalement, I find it off-putting when a character from centuries past mouths the pieties of today. Let him or her be true to his era. People are complex and times are complex, a mix of good and bad. The future is not likely to judge us as we judge ourselves now.
Elli dixit:
This. It’s what makes me unable to wholly enjoy books like Ken Follett’s World Without End and The Pillars of the Earth. You’ve got these medieval characters who are tolerant of homosexuality, skeptical of the Church’s teachings, OK with premarital sex, horrified by any kind of domestic violence, supportive of a woman’s desire for a career….values that weren’t current even fifty years ago, let alone 700. It just doesn’t ring true, and it makes me feel like I’m reading a giant cosplay script rather than a something that might actually have happened in the past.
Laura Kinsale’s “The Dream Hunter” the heroine is dressed a male Bedouin teen and the hero becomes attracted to him as they endure a grueling march in the dessert. At the reveal, it’s the loss of the male companion that causes his anger because he morns the loss of his male companion—who genuinely admires. He lamants that he saw the heroine’s male clothing and didn’t look further than that. Later in the story the heroine is wearing traditional english women’s clothing and is treated as an english woman though she doesn’t view herself as such.This is a fabulous read!
Best genderbending book ever and one of the best books I have ever read is “Playing the Jack” by Mary Brown. Even saying that much is a spoiler, but really.
All time favorite, really bummed it isn’t available as an ebook. (I’m not the only one who loves it – Amazon shows some crazy prices for it, although some reasonable ones too.)
There is a lot of fascinating Early Modern stuff out there dealing with the issue of what happens when you fall in love with a cross-dresser in the assumed gender, i.e. Twelfth Night—not the Duke and Viola but Olivia and Viola (dealt with, in a really unsatisfactory way by giving Olivia the Viola-twin).
The trope is taken much further in Sir Philip Sidney’s The Old Arcadia, in which two young men dress as women to gain access to the court to woo princesses (no men allowed). But the king falls in love with one of the ‘women’, and while the king is presented as a fool, I always found it a bit tragic.
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso have lots of cross-dressing female-knights (and Ariosto gives even The Maharaja’s Mistress a run for it’s wtf! plot).
I did ask my university tutor about how all this cross-dressing related to representing transgenderedness or homosexuality in early modern culture, but I never got a decent answer. Anyone here have any ideas? This has been bugging me for a decade!
Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote a fantasy novel called “Hawkmistress!” in which the heroine disguises herself as a boy and runs away to escape an abusive father and an unwanted marriage. It’s really funny, because she eventually encounters a group of people on the run and falls in love with one of the (male) leaders who turns out to be gay. Ooops.
Madeleine Brent’s “The Long Masquerade” features a heroine who dresses as a boy and adopts a gender-neutral name, although she doesn’t really go to any length to hide her gender, more her identity. What I loved about that book is that there wasn’t any silly attraction/weirdness between the heroine and her surrogate father, despite living in tight quarters for a few years.
Second the recommendations for Tamora Pierce’s “Alanna, the First Adventure,” and Gillian Bradshaw’s “The Beacon of Alexandria.” Excellent books, both, although I really didn’t like the way the Alanna books ended.
Really liked Mr. Pierce in Quick’s Arcane Society Novels, and would love to learn more about him/her.
This is seriously one of my favourite plotlines. Well it makes my top three. I think I fall into the same category as Candy because I enjoy when the hero decides that he doesn’t care about the “packaging” as much as he does the person.
My absolute favourite is Dutchess by Night by Eloisa James which I only found this year, but after reading these posts I’m thinking my TBR pile is going to get a whole lot bigger.
When I posted earlier, I somehow totally forgot one of my favorite books from my youth, The Florentine by Sandra Shulman. After her family is destroyed by Lorenzo de Medicis, the young heroine dresses like a boy and studies painting.
Elizabeth Lowell’s Reckless Love has an orphaned heroine who dresses like a boy and is initially mistaken for one by the (jerk) hero.
Thomas K. Carpenter’s Fires of Alexandria features a woman who assumes the identity of her dead brother in order to continue his work—something that would be punishable by death were she to be discovered.
I’m getting all kinds of good ideas from this post. How come reading this blog always ends up costing me $$ at Amazon? Sigh.
Eeek. One more. I don’t know if this was mentioned/on the list already, but Virginia Henley’s Seduced has the heroine masquerading as her lost/dead? twin brother to save the estate—you get the drill. She is so convincing that the new guardian, a fabulously wealthy but rough around the edges grower from Ceylon, wants to take her under his wing and make a real man out of her.
This is kind of an old-school bawdy romp. It has its high points—exotic locations and occasional broad humor—but also has some drawbacks for me. Toni (heroine) is very young, and not always likeable. Despite his magnetism, Adam (hero) is kind of, well, a pig—one indication of which is the fact that Toni’s mother is his mistress.
So. . .this may be one of those books that readers either love or hate.
Oh, and I also endorse the reccie of Pamela Kaufman’s Shield of Three Lions. (Just pretend the other 2 books in the trilogy don’t exist.)
I wish my memory was better and I could remember all these books at once, rather than have them percolate up to the active brain cells one at a time!
I *love* Twelfth Night. Viola is strong and independent minded!
The plot with Shakespeare’s Rosalind is silly. If the man who supposedly loves me doesn’t recognise me when I’m dressed as a man; well, I’d start having second thoughts!