COPE, v. A reader recently asked me about the use of “cope”and “full of matter” in these lines of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, at the end of Act II, scene 1:
DUKE SENIOR
And did you leave him in this contemplation?
SECOND LORD
We did, my lord, weeping and commenting
Upon the sobbing deer.
DUKE SENIOR Show me the place.
I love to cope him in these sullen fits,
For then he’s full of matter. (Source.)
In “For then he’s full of matter,” according to the OED—which, conveniently for me, cites this exact passage as an example—the word “matter” means “Material for expression; fact or thought as material for a book, speech, etc. Now rare or merged in sense 9a,” and sense 9a is “the substance of a book.” So the character being discussed, Jaques—last seen weeping and commenting upon the sobbing deer—always has a lot to say when he’s in a sullen fit. (He’s the “all the world’s a stage” guy.)
The line with “cope” is also cited in the OED, so we’re in luck there, too. (The OED loves Shakespeare. Will’s been in this newsletter once or twice before, too—there’s a line from As You Like It in this one.) Even more exciting for me, “cope” turns out to have tons of definitions that don’t line up with contemporary US English usage (cope v. 2, II, 4 in the OED, “to manage, to deal (competently) with, a situation or problem”). The “cope” in As You Like It above is cope v. 2, III, 7—these numbers should give you an idea of how much the OED has to say about this verb—meaning “To meet, meet with, come into contact (hostile or friendly) with. Obsolete.” So above, the Duke is saying he wants to come into contact with Jaques while he’s in a sullen fit and has a lot to say.
That parenthetical about “hostile or friendly” is because a lot of the “cope” definitions are about violence. The very first one, now obsolete, is “to strike; to come to blows, encounter, join battle, engage, meet in the shock of battle or tournament.” I guess the semantic connection between that and our contemporary usage is something like… when you cope with a situation, you defeat it in battle. Take that, baby-induced sleep deprivation! I am coping.
Etymologically, “cope” as “strike” comes from French “coup,” a strike or a blow, which I wrote about previously. Something this OED entry taught me about French is that the verb “couper,” which means “to cut” in modern French, used to mean “to strike.” I had never put together that “coup,” which means like fifty different things in French, was related to “couper,” even though now that I see it, I can’t unsee it.
This question was timely for me, since I had been thinking about As You Like It after stumbling across a tumblr post describing a good portion of Shakespeare’s work as “William Shakespeare, visibly vibrating: Imagine a hot boy who is also a hot girl.”
Rosalind in As You Like It—who would have been played by a young man costumed as a woman—dresses up as a man while in exile, names herself Ganymede (Zeus’s beautiful young cupbearer and lover, thus: a twink), re-introduces herself to her crush Orlando without his knowledge, then pretends to be Rosalind with him so he can practice flirting. That’s a lot of layers. Rosalind’s many presentations—and everyone else’s inability to recognize Rosalind underneath it all—add this weird ambiance of “wait, what” every time any character is lecturing at length on What Women Are Like or What Men Are Like.
In the end, Rosalind-dressed-as-Rosalind marries Orlando. One of my professors in grad school opined that most comedies with crossdressing use laughter in a punitive, corrective way, and that the happy ending consists of everyone returning to the norm. But… does it? Rosalind spends her entire love story Doing Gender Stuff. Wearing a dress while she marries Orlando doesn’t undo that. Sure, don’t worry, we’re all straight and cis here now.
In Capital-R Romance, I haven’t read much in French lately, but as a reference for my own fiction writing, I did read some French history written in English—Anne E. Linton’s Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France, which is about intersex people, their lives, and how they were treated by medicine, the law, and literature.
“Intersex” is an umbrella term that covers a lot of bodily differences, not all of which are visible. The vocabulary we use to talk about intersex, as well as sex, gender, and medicine in general, has evolved in the past couple of centuries. Intersex people can be any gender or sexuality, though those terms weren’t used in the nineteenth century. There’s some overlap between intersex and trans issues, like “not being discriminated against” and “having doctors respect your personhood.” It’s possible to be both intersex and trans, but not all trans people are intersex and not all intersex people are trans. The opposite of “intersex” is “endosex,” which is a new word for me, and it means having the anatomy and chromosomes that conform to the medical/social norm.
Linton was methodical about her terms in this book, using 19th-c vocabulary only when quoting or discussing quoted text, and otherwise using “intersex” to be respectful. Wherever possible, she uses the name and pronouns that people chose for themselves; sometimes the historical record is unclear. Sometimes, as in the case of Herculine “Alexina/Abel” Barbin, whose memoirs are a rare, precious first-person account of life as an intersex person in 19th-c France, people went by different names and pronouns at different points in life.
Linton didn’t include any medical photography because it has so often been traumatic for the people photographed. She did include some relevant 18th- and 19th-c illustrations. While I was already well aware of the strange overlap of philosophy and pornography in 18th-c France, I had no idea that there existed another overlap of “medical illustrations ostensibly for teaching” and “sexy images of naked people.” Before we look at a medical illustration, for context, here is a 1753 François Boucher painting of a nude woman who is most likely Marie-Louise O’Murphy, mistress to Louis XV.
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I think we can safely say that the expected reaction to this Boucher painting is “wow, what a beautiful woman” with a big dollop of “isn’t it exciting to catch her naked in bed.”
Here is Jean Michel Moreau’s 1773 engraving of Marie Augé, an intersex woman born in 1755, subtitled Girl Hermaphrodite Seen and Drawn from Life for the Usefulness of the Studious. The setting and the pose look way more like the Boucher painting than they do like a medical illustration—wow, what a beautiful woman, isn’t it exciting to catch her naked in bed—but the allegedly educational nature of the image justifies a more explicit, front-facing angle. It’s got labels and a legend and everything.
(I read the surrounding text to see if there was other information about Marie Augé’s life. Once “discovered” in Paris, she was put on display (“seen by a great number of curious people and draughtsmen”), which sounds… not great for her. She disappeared and “it is said that she is presently in London.” Good.)
Obviously, these images are not an impartial, ethical way to learn about or practice medicine. There’s a lot of horrifying stuff in the history of medicine in Linton’s book. I think she does a good job bringing to the fore the real people who existed beyond the judgments and speculations of their doctors, especially since the doctors in question often disregarded their patients’ wishes. She also finds evidence of doctors who did respect their patients’ wishes. Sometimes doctors would inadvertently discover that a happily married person was living a life that contradicted the M or F on their birth certificate, and instead of making a fuss about how marriage was legally between one man and one woman, they would just let their patient go on about their business. Yes, “not purposefully wrecking other people’s happiness” is the bare minimum when it comes to human decency, but there are other doctors in this history who argued that the law should change to include a third category of sex (male, female, “doubtful”). Don’t mistake that explicit acknowledgement of the nonbinary nature of sex for progressivism—the goal was to deny intersex people the right to marry.
There is not much record of gender-affirming surgery, partly because surgery was a dangerous undertaking. It’s also notable that “castration” (removing gonads) was illegal in France, so any doctors who performed it would be unlikely to write about it. Linton does find a case where an intersex woman, Louise-Julia-Anna, requested this surgery and seems to have found a sympathetic doctor, and there the historical record ends. I know I am not supposed to read history like fiction and imagine happy endings, but I truly can’t help myself. I hope she got what she wanted.
Linton does read actual fiction and talk about its relationship with history, but happy endings are scarce there, too. There are intersex characters, androgynous characters, and characters who trans genders all over 19th-c French fiction. As she says, you can hardly turn a page in Balzac without running into an androgynous character. (Honoré de Balzac, visibly vibrating: Imagine a hot boy who is also a hot girl. Though unfortunately he often added “now imagine them suffering a bleak, punitive fate.”)
In the works Linton studies, the intersex and/or nonbinary protagonists tend to absent themselves by the end of the story, sometimes by death and sometimes just by leaving. The only one who gets a happy ending is the titular character of the little-known 1820 novel Clémentine, orpheline et androgyne by P. Cuisin. In a genuine romance-novel-style Happily Ever After, Clémentine, who is an intersex woman, marries a marquis who’s besotted with her.
One of the novels that Linton discusses is Théophile Gautier’s 1835 novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, where the titular character—very, very loosely based on 17th-century queer opera star and duelist Julie d’Aubigny AKA La Maupin—is not intersex, but trans. Maupin is both Madeleine de Maupin (hot girl) and Théodore de Sérannes (hot boy), simultaneously captivating a man named D’Albert and his lover Rosette. This delightfully queer premise is made further into my personal catnip by being written in a partially epistolary style. I am so mad that the only part of this novel that ever got mentioned during all the millennia that I was in graduate school is the preface.
Granted, the preface is famous. This newsletter is already way too long so I’m gonna get back to Gautier in a future issue, once I’ve finished reading the novel.
I’m so sorry I don’t have any small-r romance novels to talk about this time. In books that are neither Romance nor romance, but certainly romance-adjacent, and certainly certainly about a hot boy who is also a hot girl, I just read and loved A. R. Capetta’s YA fantasy The Brilliant Death. It’s set in an Italy-inspired fantasy land controlled by mafia families where strega are hunted and exploited for their powers. Both main characters are nonbinary—and yes, they fall in love. A murder-y, magical good time.
Re: nonbinary characters getting happy endings in fictional 19th-c France, sometimes you gotta make your own fun. So I wrote a novel. It’s called The Scandalous Letters of V and J. It comes out May 16 as a regular book, and Wednesday (February 15) in free, serialized email form. You can sign up if that sounds good, and if not, I’ll still be writing Word Suitcase every few weeks while it’s going on.