ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes John Cleland's 1755 translation, The True History and Adventures of Catherine Vizzani with the 1744 Italian original by Italian anatomist Giovanni Bianchi, Breve storia della vita di Catterina Vizzani to highlight a thoroughly divergent representation of gender in the translated versus original version of the novella. In a 1994 essay, Susan Lanser noticed that "there were significant national and cultural differences in the construction of sapphism in the long eighteenth century, and England was arguably in the vanguard in the project to render Sapphic bodies queer". While same-sex female desire had been taken up by the medical profession in England as it had been in Italy, it was deemed to be so deviant that a clitordectomy was recommended so as to prevent women from developing too strong a desire for other women. Within this context, the deviant woman is presented within the heterosexual paradigm that Katherine Crawford has identified in her work on European sexualities.
