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Title: Sex variant women in literature
A historical and quantitative survey
Author: Jeannette Howard Foster
Release date: November 20, 2025 [eBook #77276]
Language: English
Original publication: Washington: Vantage Press, 1956
Credits: Tim Lindell, Jens Sadowski, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEX VARIANT WOMEN IN LITERATURE ***
Sex Variant Women in Literature
A Historical and Quantitative Survey
by
JEANNETTE H. FOSTER, PH.D.
VANTAGE PRESS · NEW YORK
WASHINGTON · HOLLYWOOD · TORONTO
FIRST EDITION
_All rights reserved, including the right of
reproduction in whole or in part in any form._
Copyright, 1956, by Jeannette Howard Foster.
Published by Vantage Press, Inc. 120 West 31st
Street, New York 1, N.Y. Manufactured in the
United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 56-9038
FOREWORD
The germ from which this book has grown was implanted nearly forty years
ago when a student council voted one spring afternoon to dismiss two
girls from a college dormitory unless they altered their habits. To one
junior council member several features of the council session made it
memorable. It was an unscheduled meeting and was convened quietly so as
to render it secret. The absence of freshman and sophomore members
indicated a “morals case,” for in those days the younger students were
thus sheltered from evil intelligence. Most striking of all was the
utter incomprehensibility of the issue at stake.
The bewildered junior was herself younger than her peers, and outside
the realm of books was ignorant to a degree incredible today. She had
understood the earlier expulsion of a girl who stayed out all night, for
after all one had simply accepted from childhood that such conduct was
disreputable. But why should locking themselves into their room together
lay two students open to rigorous discipline? To her private
humiliation, everyone else appeared to know. The business was dispatched
with embarrassed speed and by blind allusion rather than open statement.
Her relief was great when opinion favored probation for the brief
remainder of the year. For she could not have cast her vote for
expulsion without understanding the cause.
She left the meeting with her mortifying ignorance undisclosed; but it
rankled. She had never before been the most stupid in any group. And her
curiosity was aroused. The two culprits were to her among the least
attractive girls in college both physically and temperamentally. How
could they be so obsessed with one another as to lock themselves in
their room together at every opportunity? She was determined to learn.
She went to the college library where day after day she had passed the
row of worn tan volumes labeled _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_
without once having the impulse to look inside. Now she explored tables
of contents with the same slight nausea that had accompanied initial
zoology laboratory dissection. Thus she met Havelock Ellis.[1]
Within her subsequent twenty-one years in women’s dormitories as student
or faculty member she had reason many times to be glad of all the study
she was moved to undertake then and later, for it enabled her to help in
averting more than one minor tragedy and to conduct her own life with
some measure of wisdom. At first her study was confined to scientific
and factual works; but as these sometimes cited pertinent belles lettres
its scope gradually widened to include the latter. And, finally, because
science and fact were so well listed in the bibliographic tools for
specialists, and literature so sporadically or not at all, her
investigation came to focus in the area of imaginative writing. The
once-perplexed junior is the present writer, and what follows is a
product of her extended search.
J. H. F.
PREFACE
For more than a century there has been a tendency to worship science as
a key to knowledge and understanding. This preoccupation has served to
determine the limits of potential knowledge. Science has created new
problems almost as rapidly as it has solved old ones.
History records the phenomena of human life. It depends upon
biographical data which are notoriously biased. Virtue or viciousness of
character varies with the prejudice of the biographer. Most of what is
told us in the realm of sexual behavior has been colored by, or has been
a reaction to, social, moral, and religious convention.
Science proceeds by dissecting reality into its component parts. It has
become so preoccupied with the study of these parts that it has failed
to grasp the whole. Moreover, it is dependent upon knowledge which can
be verified only through the use of the senses, with the result that its
adherents have grown sceptical of philosophical and literary
evaluations. Its study of elements and forces has led to abstractions,
to a greater knowledge of unrealities.
In the realm of the sex variant, popular prejudice has reached and
maintained its maximum height. The sex variant has always been with us
and probably always will be. He has been thus classified, partly because
of the arbitrary designations _male_ and _female_. As I have shown in
_All the Sexes_, there are any number of possible gradations of human
behavior—from that of a theoretical masculine to that of a theoretical
feminine being.
A particular person is always a complex of masculinity and femininity.
Sex variants commonly are conspicuous through the exhibition of
characteristics usually associated with the opposite sex. But science
continues to recognize the fiction of male and female and has thrown
little light on the problem.
The present work, SEX VARIANT WOMEN IN LITERATURE, is a unique
undertaking. The author was troubled in her student days by her lack of
knowledge regarding female homosexuality. The need for understanding has
resulted in a long search for evidence in literature, a field with which
she was familiar. She has come to believe that imaginative as well as
scientific writing is a mirror of human sexual behavior which should be
given serious attention.
Some readers may question the propriety or the motives in associating
the personal lives of authors with their writings. Poetry loses some of
its charm through the suggestion that it might be an expression of the
writer’s sexual maladjustment. But as a matter of fact it is beginning
to seem that all imaginative writings are attempts to find libidinous
satisfaction in fantasy. Science may never be able to support this
impression by its laborious methods of securing evidence, but the
author’s review of the literature of twenty centuries leaves little
doubt of its validity.
In SEX VARIANT WOMEN IN LITERATURE the author has called attention to
lesbian tendencies wherever she has found them. She has made no attempt
to estimate what proportion of imaginative writing may be the work of
lesbians. She has not confined herself to literary classics but has
accepted the fact that human beings reveal themselves in whatever they
read and write. Sexual variance shows itself in so many different ways
that all types of imaginative writings have to be studied if we are to
understand human motivations and behavior.
GEORGE W. HENRY, M.D.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For help in pursuing this study the author owes many debts of gratitude,
first to friends who added chance-read titles to the bibliography;
especially to those who had no basic interest in the subject. An even
heavier debt is due all the librarians who made available rare or
restricted material, negotiated interlibrary loans, or merely rendered
much ordinary service. Staffs of the following institutions deserve
special thanks: the Union Catalogs of the Library of Congress and the
Philadelphia Bibliographic Center; the libraries of Bryn Mawr College,
the University of Chicago, Emory University, Indiana University, the
University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Swarthmore College,
and Yale University; the medical libraries of Emory University Hospital,
the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Philadelphia College of
Physicians; the public libraries of Chicago, New York City, and
Philadelphia; and the Library of Congress.
Particular mention is due the special library of the Institute for Sex
Research at Indiana University, of which the author was librarian for
four years (1948-1952). It should be made clear that the present study
is unrelated to that of the Institute, does not reflect its views, and
has not been approved by members of its staff. The librarian’s function
was cataloguing, not sex research, and almost all of the material
considered here was seen elsewhere. Nevertheless, acquaintance with what
may be the largest extant library related to sex served to reassure the
author that she had overlooked no important area of the field she wished
to study. Gratitude is thus due also to the Institute and its Director,
the late Dr. A. C. Kinsey.
CONTENTS
Foreword iii
Preface v
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 11
I. The Ancient Record
Sappho and Ruth 17
Mythology in Classical Authors 24
Later Classical Literature 27
II. From the Dark Ages to the Age of Reason
Introduction 30
Medieval and Renaissance Fiction 33
The Borderline of Reality 39
Neo-Classical Aridity 43
III. From the Romantics to the Moderns
Introduction 51
Precursors of Modern Fiction 54
The Novel Before 1870 60
Evidence from Poets 72
IV. Later Nineteenth Century
Fertility in France 81
Shadow of Feminism 91
Fin de Siècle 99
Summary 114
V. Conjectural Retrospect 116
Louise Labé 117
Charlotte Charke 120
“The Ladies of Llangollen” 122
Karoline von Günderode 124
George Sand 127
Emily Brontë 129
George Eliot 135
Margaret Fuller 136
Adah Isaacs Menken 138
“Michael Field” 141
Emily Dickinson 145
VI. Twentieth Century
Introduction 149
Poetry—French 154
—German 174
—English 177
VII. Fiction in France
Before 1914 193
Post-War Trends 204
VIII. Fiction in Germany
Before 1914 218
Post-War Gleanings 229
IX. Fiction in English
Introduction 240
The Age of Innocence 243
Sophistication and Dispute 255
Post-War Crescendo 269
First Peak: 1928 279
X. Fiction in English (continued)
Sequel to Censorship 288
The Worm’s Turning 307
Above Reproach 314
Another War’s Shadow 324
Second Crescendo 328
Conclusion 342
Notes 355
Bibliographies 362
Index 396
INTRODUCTION
This study is concerned with certain types of emotional reaction among
women as these appear in literature. Its primary aim is neither
psychiatric nor critical; that is, it does not pretend to solve the
problems described nor to pass conventional judgment on the literature
examined, though rudiments of aesthetic and psychological evaluation
will inevitably be included. Its purpose is to trace historically the
quantity and temper of imaginative writing on its chosen subject from
earliest times to the present day, on the assumption that what has been
written and read for pleasure is a fair index of popular interest and
social attitude from one century to another.
Since new viewpoints and methods of study are constantly altering our
sex vocabulary, some preliminary definitions seem advisable. First, what
is meant by _sex variant_? The term was selected because it is not as
yet rigidly defined nor charged with controversial overtones.
Intrinsically, _variant_ means no more than differing from a chosen
standard, and in the field of sex experience the standard generally
accepted is adequate heterosexual adjustment. But even this phrase lacks
precision. Lawyer, clergyman, physician, psychoanalyst, biologist,
sociologist, each will interpret it from his particular viewpoint. The
meaning a layman meets oftenest in the literature of our western
Christian culture is happy marriage and parenthood, but this is nearer
to the churchman’s and sociologist’s ideal than to the working
compromise by which average citizens worry along. Perhaps the highest
practical common denominator is a heterosexual union agreeable to both
its parties and not detrimental to them, to the society in which they
live, or to the continuance of the race.
Possible deviations from this standard are many, but the present study
will stay within the limits set by a work of 1941 entitled _Sex
Variants_,[1] which was devoted to persons having emotional experience
with others of their own sex. Under this head the author included
homosexuals, a term which he confined to those having only such
experience; bisexuals, capable of enjoying relations with both sexes;
and narcissists, attracted to both but able to achieve satisfaction with
neither. The author of this work, Dr. G. W. Henry, was, as his
terminology indicates, a psychiatrist. His case histories provided very
complete personal data, his volumes dealt with both men and women, and
he included only those who had engaged in overt sexual activity. By
contrast, the present study is not strictly oriented to any professional
school of thought. It is limited to relations between women, and
“relations” is substituted for “experience” by intent. Because of the
comparative sex reticence prevailing in our culture, few details of
sexual action are reported in nonscientific writing, and in the
peculiarly discredited field of sex variance authors often avoid even
implying action. For this reason scientists tend to disparage studies
based on literature, but where women are concerned a lack of specific
detail is not too serious. Current scientific work, notably that of Dr.
A. C. Kinsey,[2] has established the fact that women as a whole engage
in much less sex activity than men. But in spite of, or perhaps because
of, this relative infrequency of “outlet,” passionate emotion more often
plays a dominant role in their lives.
Not all women recognize a sexual factor in their subjective emotional
relations, particularly in the intrasexual field so heavily shadowed by
social disapproval. Still they often exhibit indirect responses which
have all the intensity of physical passion and which quite as basically
affect the pattern of their lives. Hence this study includes not only
women who are conscious of passion for their own sex, with or without
overt expression, but also those who are merely obsessively attached to
other women over a longer period or at a more mature age than is
commonly expected. If “commonly expected” is another nebulous phrase, a
species of pooled judgment is available to clarify it. During the past
few decades—that is, since Freudian concepts have become a part of the
common background—most works on sex guidance have taken some account of
homosexuality. These agree in general that passionate attachments during
puberty and early adolescence may lie within the norm, but if occurring
later they constitute variance. Without here debating the absolute
validity of this opinion, one may borrow it as a working criterion.
As to women who habitually wear men’s clothing or even for a part of
their lives pass for men, such transvestism is not in itself variant. To
be sure, many psychoanalysts consider it indicative of latent
homosexuality, but to bring a woman properly within the scope of this
study her transvestism must be accompanied by some evidence of fondness
for her own sex. And, of course, mere sex disguise arising from pressure
of circumstance, a favorite device for plot-complication from ballads to
modern films, has no significance here.
With the meaning of _variance_ clarified, the more familiar terms
_homosexual_ and _lesbian_ need attention. In popular usage the latter
implies overt sexual expression and so it will be used only where such
implication is intended. _Homosexual_ is more ambiguous. Still in good
scientific standing, it ordinarily has not Dr. Henry’s restricted
meaning, but is more nearly synonymous with his _variant_. For this
reason and also because as a noun it is most often applied to men, it
will be employed here only when needed to relieve verbal monotony.
To conclude the business of definition, the word _literature_ has, of
course, two common meanings: belles-lettres, and factual material
relative to a given subject. Here it is used in the former, or, more
accurately, not in the latter sense; that is, the impressive bulk of
scientific writing on sex variance will receive only cursory attention,
to provide background for the matter of primary interest. This latter
comprises mainly fiction, drama and poetry, and might best be termed
simply _imaginative writing_, since many works to be discussed can boast
but little belletristic worth. Even such inferior items, however, are
important in reflecting attitudes and providing quantitative evidence of
interest.
Only a few excursions into the field of biography and memoirs will be
undertaken. Though such works are frequently classed as belles-lettres,
they suffer from too many limitations to provide a profitable hunting
ground. Those claiming factual accuracy are seldom frank enough about
sexual matters to be useful, a condition which applies to virtually all
reputable efforts since the development of scholarly historical method
in the early nineteenth century. As to items written largely for
sensational appeal, months of research would be required in each
separate case to winnow the sparse truth from chaff which might prove
explosive if offered as seriously related to fact. Biographies will be
examined, then, only if their subjects produced ambiguous or enigmatic
literary works possible of clarification by reference to their lives; or
if they were the subject of fictional works which represented them as
variants; or even (very rarely) if persistent rumor or circumstantial
evidence strongly suggests variance. Most of these will be treated in a
separate section specifically labeled conjectural.
For each variant woman considered, as many as possible of the following
points will be noted: physical appearance and temperament, with
particular regard to “masculine” attributes; emotional history,
including any suggestion of etiology for variance; social reactions to
the variant expressed or implied within her milieu; and the author’s
personal attitude. Only occasionally are all these data found together
in any single work, but from the aggregate written within a given period
enough can be gleaned to reflect trends in sentiment from one generation
to another.
* * * * *
The ideal scope of any study pretending to offer a quantitative picture
would be complete coverage of its chosen field, but realistic
considerations limit such an undertaking. Oriental literature, for
example, though cited by a number of scientific writers on variance, is
too unavailable in translation to receive more than passing mention. The
same is true of certain areas in western European belles-lettres, for
only such as have appeared in English, French and German, or have been
adequately reviewed in these languages, are of avail to the present
writer. Even within such limits, of course, completeness is a goal as
elusive as the rainbow’s end. First there is the difficulty of learning
about pertinent items. Scientific material on sex variance has been
recorded adequately in bibliographies, indexes and abstracts in the
fields of psychology and medicine. Imaginative writing has not been
similarly covered. Almost the only systematic listing was that attempted
early in this century in a journal of varying title and
frequency published in Berlin and edited by Magnus Hirschfeld:
_Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen_ (etc.), sponsored by the
Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, 1899-1921. There, under the
heading “Bibliographie der homosexuellen Belletristik,” European titles
were assembled for the years 1899-1917, with a scattering of
retrospective items; however, even for current German material the list
was not exhaustive.
As to the nonscientific bibliographies and indexes, the material listed
under such sexual headings as appear in them is largely factual or
controversial, not imaginative writing. Book reviews sometimes offer
helpful leads, but variant works are all too often ignored altogether,
or are treated with such squeamishness or caution as to obscure their
sexual significance. And, though extensive discussions or notes of
pertinent material occasionally appear in factual works, beginning
roughly with Krafft-Ebing’s _Psychopathia Sexualis_ (1886) and coming
down to Donald Corey’s _The Homosexual in America_ (1952), such
windfalls are sporadic and disconnected. In short, however thoroughly a
student may comb bibliographic sources, he will still happen by pure
chance upon enough items not mentioned there to end with the certainty
of others still undiscovered. He can only hope, then, that better
informed readers will hasten to attack his shortcomings and fill his
lacunae.
Another difficulty is gaining access to titles of which record has been
found. No class of printed matter except outright pornography has
suffered more critical neglect, exclusion from libraries, or omission
from collected works than variant belles-lettres. Even items by
recognized masters, such as Henry James’s _The Bostonians_ and
Maupassant’s “Paul’s Mistress,” have been omitted from inclusive
editions issued by reputable publishers. When owned by libraries such
titles are often catalogued obscurely, or impounded in special
collections almost inaccessible to the public, or they have been
“lost”—most probably stolen—and not replaced. Of Catulle Mendès’s
_Méphistophéla_, for example, which ran to half a dozen printings in
French and as many in English between 1890 and 1910, only four copies
are recorded in the United States among the nearly fifteen million
entries in the Library of Congress Union Catalog.
Despite such handicaps, however, persistent search eventually reaches a
point where the majority of new references prove duplicates of older
discoveries, and the jealous pursuit of new volumes produces diminishing
returns in that the items when located prove of only trifling
significance. Thus, while the degree of completeness attained is not
that of the statistician, it is believed sufficient to provide a
reliable historical overview.
Along with completeness another ideal in work of this sort is to include
nothing which has not been seen at first hand, but because of the
difficulties just outlined some inaccessible works have been admitted
when reviews or other records clearly indicate their importance and
offer an adequate account of their content. For works well known and
easily available in English, such as the poetry of Sappho or Gautier’s
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, a minimum of résumé will ordinarily be given,
but in the case of scarce items, even when inferior, a fuller account
will be necessary to render any discussion of them intelligible.
A final note on punctuation should be included here. Direct quotation
from original texts in any language, or from published translations of
foreign works, will be indicated by the customary signs. The present
writer’s own translations of foreign material will be enclosed in
_single_ quotation marks.
CHAPTER I.
THE ANCIENT RECORD
Sappho and Ruth
It is natural to begin a study of sex variant women with Sappho, Greek
lyric poet of the early sixth century B.C., whose name and that of her
native island, Lesbos, have supplied our popular vocabulary with its
terms for female homosexuality. Plato, who lived only two centuries
later and probably knew her work almost completely, pronounced her the
Tenth Muse, and, happily, the high quality of her verse led classical
writers to quote it freely. For what with the hazards of time and later
prejudice, the twelve thousand lines she is believed to have written are
now lost save for these quoted excerpts and some fragments on papyri
salvaged during modern excavations in Egypt. The few hundred surviving
lines consist largely of lyrics addressed to girls, among them the
famous “Ode” which has been pronounced the most economical description
of passion to be found in literature. These verses will be considered
presently.
An amazing quantity has been written about Sappho, translating and
re-translating her poetry, eulogizing her poetic genius, and arguing
hotly about her emotional life. An exhaustive bibliography would fill
yet another volume. The ultimate source upon which all the rest is based
may be consulted in the Loeb Classical Library’s _Lyra Graeca_,[1] where
J. M. Edmonds gives (with translations) the text of all that is known of
her poems, taking into account the latest archaeological findings, as
well as every significant allusion to Sappho in classical literature
from Plato to Suidas—some seventy references by more than forty authors.
A more popular volume is that from the Peter Pauper Press (1948)[2] in
which an anonymous compiler has assembled for each of Sappho’s poems and
fragments the two or three soundest prose translations along with
metrical versions by well-known English poets.
As is universally the case with persons so far removed in time, few
details of the poet’s life are established beyond question. The most
comprehensive biographical effort to date is Arthur Weigall’s _Sappho of
Lesbos, Her Life and Times_ (1932),[3] to which its author brings a wide
knowledge of classical languages, history and geography. Although
perhaps too conjectural in parts to satisfy the rigid scholar, this can
be recommended for its careful documentation and its impartiality with
regard to Sappho’s emotional temperament.
The best-authenticated facts seem to be that the poet was a small dark
woman sometimes referred to as “ill-favored,” but endowed with
sufficient grace and personal charm to inspire in several fellow
countrymen and poets a passion which she did not reciprocate. She was of
distinguished family and lived in a time of acute political strife. She
suffered exile twice during her early years: once from Mitylene to the
interior of the island of Lesbos, the second time to Sicily. Weigall
believes she was already well-known as a poet before her Sicilian
sojourn, and suggests that she may have spent her several years on the
island in Sybaris, where she acquired something of that city’s brilliant
sophistication. He places in this period also her marriage, probably of
short duration, and the birth of her daughter Kleis to whom she was
devoted throughout her life. After her return to Mitylene in her middle
twenties she seems to have had constantly about her an ever-changing
circle of younger women to whom she taught the verse-writing, music, and
dancing which constituted a well-born girl’s preparation for marriage.
Some of these pupils or protégées may have lived in her house; it is
known they came from neighboring islands and mainland to be taught by
her.
The incident most often connected with her name is her leap to death
from the cliffs of Leucadia for unrequited love of a young ferryman,
Phaon. Certain references in her work and that of others, however,
indicate that she died peacefully at home at a relatively advanced age.
In fact, modern scholars are inclined to pronounce the whole Phaon
anecdote legendary; but since it persisted for a couple of millennia,
Weigall attempts to demonstrate at least its possible truth. The
tenacity with which the story has survived is undoubtedly due to Ovid’s
incorporating it in his _Heroides_ or Epistles of Heroines (15: “Sappho
to Phaon”),[4] since, thanks to his romantic qualities, he was the most
popular of all classical authors for several centuries after the Revival
of Learning. Ovid’s epistle, though sympathetically written, represents
Sappho as an aging and heartbroken woman deserted by her handsome young
lover and still consumed by passion for him “as by a grass fire.”
Ridiculed by friends, reproached by her brother for such despondency
while she still has a living daughter, desperate over her waning charms,
she can think only of suicide; and all this plaint she pours out in a
letter to the man who has left her without even a farewell. The lament
shows less restraint than any of Sappho’s known verse, for fervent
though that often is, it never lacks dignity. There is always the
chance, of course, that Ovid had access to poems now wholly lost and
never mentioned elsewhere; it is certain that during the centuries
immediately following her death Sappho was the subject of some dramatic
works (possibly satiric) of which we now know only the author’s names,
but which Ovid may have known.
Wherever responsibility lies, there was certainly a legend subsequent to
Ovid’s day that two Sapphos had flourished in Lesbos, one the great poet
and the other a courtesan of undisciplined habits. Weigall believes this
tale was motivated by rumors of heterosexual irregularities, and was
invented by her well-wishers to clear her name of their shadow. But one
must consider also that during the period of this myth’s crystallization
homosexuality in either sex was no longer tolerated as it had been
(within limits) in the earlier Greek period. In Rome its practice among
women was associated only with courtesans; thus it may equally well have
been rumors of lesbian irregularity which gave rise to the conviction
that she must have been a courtesan.
When one turns from personal conjecture about Sappho to the text of her
work, one is left with no possible doubt about her variant tastes.
Consider, for instance, the “Ode” mentioned above:
It is to be a god, methinks, to sit before you and listen close by to
the sweet accents and winning laughter which have made the heart in
my breast beat fast, I warrant you. When I look on you, Brocheo, my
speech comes short or fails me quite, I am tongue-tied; in a moment a
delicate fire has overrun my flesh, my eyes grow dim and my ears
ring, the sweat runs down me and a trembling takes me altogether,
till I am as green and pale as grass, and death itself seems not very
far away ...[5]
Few of her other poems equal this in intensity, and the textual
evidences that its object was a woman (the gender of the name Brocheo
being for a time in doubt) are meager enough so that during the years
when homosexuality was a heinous offense scholars could translate it as
addressed to a man without too great a strain on intellectual integrity.
Discovery of the Oxyrinchus papyri, however, (so called from the
Egyptian town where they were disinterred), added so much variant
material to that already preserved in quotations that it rendered honest
doubt of her variance impossible. In the many poems and fragments
addressed to girls her ardor is evoked oftenest by maidenhood, its
moving aspect not virginity so much as physical grace and delicacy and a
certain light freedom of spirit. In one fragment, indeed, she describes
herself as “eternally maiden” at heart.
There is no comparable evidence with regard to her feeling for men.
Once, to be sure, in attempting to hearten a girl on the eve of her
wedding, she says: “That night was sweet enough to me, neither have you,
dear maid, anything to fear ...”[6] Again she writes to a man: “But if
you love me, choose yourself a younger wife; for I cannot submit to live
with one that is younger than I.”[7] And finally: “If my paps could
still give suck and my womb were able to bear children, then would I
come to another marriage bed with unfaltering feet; but nay, age now
maketh a thousand wrinkles to go upon my flesh, and Love is in no haste
to fly to me with his gift of pain ...”[8] (The complaint: “Sweet
mother, I truly cannot weave my web; for I am overwhelmed through
Aphrodite with love of a slender youth,” cannot be counted as
significant, for it was rendered by one translator even before the
Oxyrinchus discoveries as ending: “a slender maiden.”)[9] These are the
total count of verses referring to heterosexual love, and there is
nothing in them to match the “delicate fire” of the “Hymn to Aphrodite”
imploring the goddess to soften the heart of a girl; or of the “Ode”
quoted above; of the verses to Anactoria and Gongyla and the five poems
to Atthis; or of the numerous fragments that glow with vivid delight in
the beauty and love of girls. Significant too is the poem addressed to
these girls in her old age. She laments her fading charms more bitterly
even than in Ovid’s fictitious epistle, and ends:
But I, be it known, love soft living, and for me brightness and
beauty belong to the desire of the sunlight [are as necessary to me
as light] and therefore I shall not crawl away to my lair till needs
must be, but shall continue loved and loving with you. And now it is
enough that I have your love, nor would I pray for more.[10]
Thus on internal evidence it appears that despite marriage and
motherhood, opportunities for a second match, and much writing of
conventional hymeneal verses, her lifelong preference was for women. Nor
does the meager quantity of surviving verse disqualify such an
assumption. A great part of it consists of quotations chosen by forty
classical authorities on poetic style, who can scarcely be suspected of
mass preference for variant subject matter. The remainder (barring one
seventh century manuscript) comes from papyri which had been used to
reinforce mummy-casings.[11] Altogether, no sounder random sampling
could well be devised.
We have seen that during the later classical period Sappho was suspected
of having been a courtesan, which in those times may also have implied
lesbian activity. Just when lesbianism became the main charge against
her has not been determined. To be sure, a heavy weight of disrepute
fell upon her with the establishment of the Christian church, and led to
the burning of her work more than once. This was ordered first about 380
A.D. by Gregory Nazianzen as the result of an earlier church father
having pronounced her a _gynaion pornikon erotomanes_—lewd
nymphomaniac—but the phrase does not necessarily imply lesbian excess.
Subsequently Scaliger states that her books were burned in 1073 at both
Rome and Constantinople, without specifying the reason.[12] As this date
falls shortly after that on which the church had reimposed strict
celibacy upon its clergy, it may be that society had been made sensitive
to homosexual activity among celibates and turned its suspicion upon her
also. But this last surmise defies proof.
The lesbian controversy became bitter only in the nineteenth century
when homosexuality was a heated issue both in the English-speaking
countries and on the continent, and Sappho’s champions felt impelled to
prove her innocence. The sole outcome of the voluminous quarrel is
certainty that the issue can never be finally resolved without the
unearthing of fresh evidence. There is no specific mention of active
lesbianism in her verse. By way of implication there are two or three
references to her girls as her own or each other’s _hetaerae_, which,
since it was the common term for _courtesan_, might be taken to connote
physical intimacy. She also mentions more than once the “pure and
beautiful things” they all did together, an emphasis which Weigall feels
may imply that in her day rumor ran otherwise. But her defenders judge
these and a few more tenuous allusions insufficient to support the
charge against her. More definite is Maximus of Tyre’s statement, made
without animus, that three girls (whom he names) were to Sappho what
Alcibiades and others were to Socrates;[13] then there is the epithet
_mascula Sappho_ used by Horace,[14] and last, a reference in Ovid’s
“Epistle” to “a hundred others [feminine] whom I have loved not without
evil imputation.” Certain translators of Ovid, however, omit the _not_,
thus completely reversing the sense of the phrase; thus neither reading
carries any real weight.[15]
It was not until 1909 that so considerable an author as Rainer Maria
Rilke ventured to exalt Sappho’s loves (without discussing their nature)
as nearer the ‘divine intention’ than heterosexual passion, which he
pronounced a ‘temporal interruption’ in the evolution of ideal human
relations. Taking Ovid’s “Epistle” as a virtual translation from some
vanished poem of Sappho’s, Rilke suggests that the original was a lament
not for some actual lover, but for the nonexistent man who could satisfy
her after her less sensual experience with girls.[16]
With this century’s increasing tolerance of all sorts of sexual freedom,
prejudice has softened to a relatively untroubled acceptance of Sappho’s
probable lesbianism, and to an effort to understand, rather than defend,
such behavior. Weigall suggests that one description of her “tiny little
body” implies underdevelopment and unfitness for easy childbearing,
circumstances which psychiatrists consider likely to induce avoidance of
heterosexual relations and motherhood. And Freudians might stress her
devotion to her eldest brother, Charaxus. In two surviving poems she
attacks him so harshly for marrying a beautiful Alexandrian courtesan,
whose freedom he had purchased at great cost, that her vitriolic lines
to him and the epithet “black she-dog” for his wife suggest acute
jealousy as well as contempt.[17]
All this conjecture, like last century’s battles, proves little save the
impossibility of objective judgment until new evidence appears. In
accordance with the temper of our own time, we may leave it that Sappho
was certainly variant, and, quite probably, what modern authorities term
bisexual. She experienced marriage and motherhood, and may even have
enjoyed other heterosexual relationships, but passion for her own sex
inspired most of her poems, to judge from the surviving fragments.
Furthermore these poems have been called by some critics the greatest
love lyrics ever penned.
* * * * *
Though the work of Sappho provides a natural introduction, chronological
precedence must be granted to the biblical Book of Ruth, written perhaps
a few centuries earlier and describing events that antedated King David
by three generations. This great short story, long acclaimed as a
masterpiece of narrative art, is the first of a thin line of delicate
portrayals, by authors seemingly blind to their full significance, of an
attachment which, however innocent, is nevertheless still basically
variant.
Certainly as an “anonymous but exact description of love” there are few
passages in literature to rival Ruth’s appeal to Naomi beginning
“Entreat me not to leave thee ...” To quote it is surely unnecessary,
but let anyone who learned it in childhood, who has never subsequently
considered it in the light of primitive tribal custom, reread it for the
force of Ruth’s willingness to abandon not only her native soil and her
own family but even her God and her hope of burial with her ancestors.
The emotional significance of this passage is reinforced by three others
in the story. Ruth and Orpah had been married “about ten years” at the
time of their widowhood and of Naomi’s decision to return to Israel, so
that Ruth was then at least in her twenties, and her devotion cannot be
counted the clinging of a bereaved adolescent to her bridegroom’s
mother. Orpah, moreover, remained in Moab without more than formal
protest, and with apparently every prospect of finding a second husband
there.
Then when Boaz welcomed Ruth among his gleaners because “it hath fully
been shewed me, all that thou hast done unto thy mother-in-law,” the
girl replied, “Let me find grace in thy sight, my lord, for that thou
... hast spoken to the heart of thy handmaiden.”[18] And, finally, when
by carrying out implicitly Naomi’s clever scheme Ruth was taken as a
wife and bore Boaz a son, “The women said to Naomi ... he shall be unto
thee a restorer of life and a nourisher of thine old age; for thy
daughter-in-law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven
sons, hath borne him.”[19]
Viewed without prejudice, this is a masterly portrait of a somewhat
passive young woman, twice playing the heterosexual role with success,
but dominated by another love at least as compelling as that for the men
she successively married. H. M. and Nora K. Chadwick in their _Growth of
Literature_ point out that “it gives the impression of being written
primarily for feminine circles,”[20] and by comparison with many
treatments of the variant theme it might well also have been written
_by_ a woman.
* * * * *
After Sappho’s poetry and this one Hebrew prose masterpiece, little that
is pertinent to our subject remains from the half dozen centuries
preceding the Christian era. That male homosexuality was, within limits,
an approved pattern in Greek life, and that it occurred in Rome whether
approved or not, especially under the later emperors, are now accepted
facts. About its prevalence among women less is known. From Plato and
Euripides to Ovid, women as individual personalities did not often
figure in well-known classical writing, and of women writers, though
Mary Beard enumerates references to an impressive number,[21] most
traces have vanished. A few fragments, however, and a few allusions to
works never recovered, indicate that female variance existed.
Plutarch, for instance, tells us that Spartan girls under Lycurgan law
received the same athletic training as boys and were encouraged in the
same emotional expression.[22] Havelock Ellis (without citing his
source) mentions Miletus along with Lesbos as favorable to female
homosexuality.[23] The _Greek Anthology_ includes some variant epigrams
of Nossis from the lower Italian town of Locris, an imitator of Sappho,
“one dear to the muses and equal to her.” From the same source we have
Asclepiades’ epigram on the beautiful Dorcion who wore boy’s garments
and “with the chlamys clearly revealing her naked thigh would flash the
fire of love from her eyes,”[24] but this may have been merely a device
to attract male attention since the costume described here was that of
the _ephebi_—male homosexuals. Elsewhere both Ovid and Appolodorus
recount that Caenis of Thessaly, having given herself to Poseidon,
begged that in return she be changed into a man.[25] These last two,
indicating nothing more specific than transvestism and dissatisfaction
with a female role, are not too significant. Equally outside our scope
because in the category of erotica, but written and illustrated by
women, are lost manuals on erotic techniques of all sorts written
respectively by Elephantis and Philaenis. The illustrations from the
latter’s work are said to have been widely copied in the bedroom art of
contemporary sophisticates.[26]
Weigall suggests that two of Sappho’s protégées, like her, celebrated
love for women in their verses.[27] One is the Gyrinno to whom she was
particularly attached, who died at nineteen. Weigall identifies her
fairly plausibly with Erinna, a known poet from the island of Telos near
Rhodes, whose work was highly regarded in her day, although only one
poem of hers is known by name and all but a few lines are lost. These
lines, however, lament the death of a loved girl, Baucis. The other
poet, more certainly identified, is Damophyla of Pamphilia, who is known
to have stayed with Sappho and to have written love poems and hymns to
Artemis in imitation of her great model’s verse.
Mythology in Classical Authors
Secondary evidence that interest in female variance continued through
the period is found in the myths as recounted by Greek and Latin writers
at the beginning of the Christian era, though details of these stories
are probably more characteristic of the writers’ own times than of
earlier centuries. One finds as much variety in different authors’
treatment as is found between Malory’s and Tennyson’s versions of the
Arthurian legends. From any great compilation such as the _Mythology of
All Nations_ or Fraser’s _Golden Bough_ one learns that in all the
interrelated Mediterranean mythologies there was at least one goddess
among whose attributes were one or more of the following: virginity,
aversion to male sexual approach, some masculinity in dress or interests
(such as warfare or the hunt), intense fondness for maiden devotees, and
a strict requirement of maidenhood in the latter. One finds also
persistent legends of Amazons, exclusively female groups who suffered
men only for procreative ends and made active war against the other
sex[28] (cf. a random news note, April 1951, of a precisely similar
legend from an island off the coast of Japan).[29] It is impossible to
date the origin of these myths or to secure historical substantiation of
the mores they reflect. But anthropologists assure us that female
homosexuality is known in most primitive societies (e.g., there is a
North American Indian legend of physical intimacy between two women
which resulted in an amorphous birth),[30] and it seems likely that
variant detail was current in early oral tradition but was omitted by
writers to whom such phenomena was antipathetic, or eliminated by later
censorship.
A comparison of the later classical writers supports this view. In Book
XI of Vergil’s _Aeneid_ one of the vivid personalities is Camilla,
leader of a cavalry troop which figures brilliantly in the military
action and of whose members many, if not at all, were women. Of her
favorite comrade-in-arms, Camilla says only that she was like a sister
to her. The goddess Diana is described as loving Camilla long and
intensely, and, when the latter is slain by a sly and unheroic man,
Diana lends her own bow and arrows to another protégé, Opis, so that
this demigoddess may avenge the favorite’s death. But there is no
mention of intimacy between the goddess and either Opis or Camilla.
Similarly the conscientious chronicler Apollodorus reports between
Artemis and her nymph, Callisto, a great fondness terminated by the
girl’s lapse from virginity;[31] and Iphigenia, whom Artemis rescued
from the altar upon which her father was about to sacrifice her, was
equally cherished.[32] Of Athene and her boon companion, Pallas, he
tells us that in their girlhood they were so equally matched in the
practice of arms that Zeus felt obliged one day to interpose his aegis
between them lest his daughter be slain. As a result, Athene’s thrust
killed Pallas, whereupon, overcome by grief, Athene herself fashioned a
wooden statue of her friend, wrapped it in the aegis, set it up beside
that of Zeus, and honored it as she did his image. Hence her later
epithet, Pallas-Athene.[33] Apollodorus later illustrates Athene’s
antipathy to the male by the Hephaestus story.[34] But with all these
suggestive incidents he never mentions active variance in the goddess.
Ovid, on the other hand, offers two reports of variance. That it was not
a personal obsession with him is proved by his treatment of those
devotees of Diana, Atalanta and Daphne. Though the latter was so averse
to the male that she prayed to be free of the beauty which made gods and
men pursue her and was transmuted into a laurel tree,[35] no woman
enters her story. The same is true of Atalanta,[36] “maidenly for a boy,
boyish for a maiden,” her plainly dressed hair “caught up in one knot,”
and a bow and quiver part of her usual costume. The story is well-known
of her evading marriage by challenging all suitors to a footrace in
which defeat meant death, but in the end she finally succumbed to the
youth who secured Venus’s aid against her.
Concerning Callisto, however, of whom Apollodorus’s account is so bare,
Ovid is much more specific.[37] Jove, smitten with the charms of the
young huntress, knows that the sure means of approaching her is to
assume his daughter Diana’s form. Thus disguised he says, “Dear maid,
best loved of all my followers, where hast thou been hunting today?” and
then “he kissed her lips, not modestly nor as a maiden kisses.” With
neither protest nor surprise Callisto begins to recount her doings, and
not until “he broke in upon her story with an embrace and by this
outrage betrayed himself” does she recognize that her lover is not the
goddess. When the results of Jove’s attentions become evident—amusingly
enough Diana, the virgin, is the last to recognize the signs—the girl,
though blameless, is expelled forever from the goddess’s train.
Then there is Ovid’s idyl of Iphis and Ianthe.[38] Iphis’s mother, while
carrying her child, is warned by the father that if she bears a girl it
will be subjected to death by exposure. Consequently she manages to
conceal the child’s sex and raise it as a boy, giving it the name Iphis
“which was of common gender.” From infancy, Iphis is the inseparable
companion of a neighbor’s child, Ianthe, and by the time the two reach
marriageable age, a little over thirteen, they are passionately in love.
The two fathers have long since arranged a marriage. Iphis and her
mother exhaust every pretext for delaying the ceremony, to the sorrow
and anger of everyone else, for even Ianthe does not know her beloved’s
true sex. Iphis spends long days lamenting the cruelty of Nature, which
“surely never before has cursed a living creature with a love so
monstrous.” Conscience bids her “do only what is lawful” and confine her
love strictly “within a woman’s right.” She and her mother pray
frantically to Isis for aid, to the end that when the wedding day can
finally no longer be postponed Iphis is transformed at the altar into a
boy, her voice deepening, her color darkening, and her body growing in
muscular firmness. (As treated later by Antonius Liberalis[39] the
heroine of this same plot is the mother, and the suspense centers wholly
about her escaping her husband’s wrath, the daughter being of only
incidental interest.)
In yet another of the _Metamorphoses_ Ovid describes the birth of
Hermaphroditus,[40] thus indicating that he was much interested in all
variant phenomena, but from the quoted passage concerning Iphis’s pangs
of conscience about expressing her love, it would seem that his approval
of overt lesbianism was not unqualified.
Later Classical Literature
All the remaining variant tales in Latin literature deal with
courtesans. Probably the best known is Juvenal’s scathing sixth
_Satire_,[41] generally thought to have been directed against the
empress Messalina, who figures in the text as Saufeia. It describes
orgiastic rites in honor of the Bona Dea during which women of the
highest social rank vie with prostitutes in erotic skill and endurance,
with Saufeia bearing off the palm. The performance ends with a frantic
search for men, since lesbianism alone cannot satisfy the participants.
With a much lighter touch Martial in the course of his _Epigrams_
describes unflatteringly two women who on his evidence would modernly be
classed as hermaphrodites. One, Bassa,[42] has gained an irreproachable
reputation by admitting no men to her house as either lovers or
servants, but the initiated know that with her feminine domestic staff
she practices every license. The other, Philaenis, the erotic writer
mentioned earlier, exceeds men in her prowess with women, and also takes
the active part in sodomy with boys.[43] Although Dioscorides has denied
in his epitaph in the _Greek Anthology_[44] that she wrote the “obscene
book” attributed to her, Martial’s repeated references throughout the
_Epigrams_ suggest that enough smoke hung over her in his day to justify
the suspicion of fire. The specific sexual exercise implied by both
Juvenal and Martial is tribadism, and there is mention in Juvenal as
elsewhere of the _olisbos_ employed by women less well equipped for a
male role than Bassa and Philaenis. Both authors purported to describe
actual persons and conditions immediately preceding the Christian era.
A couple of centuries later we find fictional contributions from the
minor Greek authors, Lucian and Alciphron, both of whom claimed to be
writing about a period nearer that of Plato. Though doubtless they had
at hand more literature from the century in question than has been
available since, a glance at historical fiction from medieval romance to
modern novel will remind us that the life pictured is probably much
nearer to that of their own time.
Lucian, in his _Dialogues of Hetaerae_,[45] presents a tale told to her
lover by a flute-girl hired as entertainer by two wealthy lesbians, one
a Corinthian. After the banquet the hostesses persuade Leana to stay and
share their bed, sleeping between them. The Corinthian removes a
feminine wig to display close-cropped hair, and vaunts her ability to
give amatory satisfaction. Physically she is entirely feminine, but she
protests that “in my feelings and passions I am altogether a man.” Leana
admits to have received proof of this, but when pressed for detail by
her lover she says, “Now you want to know too much. It was rather nasty
business. No, by the Goddess! I won’t tell you any more.” She has
already gone far enough, however, to imply tribadism and to hint at
cunnilingus.
In a later _Dialogue_, a lover accuses his mistress of having slept the
previous night with another man. He says that stealing to her chamber to
surprise her, he hoped the companion he found there was only her maid,
but his exploring hand discovered a cropped head. She replies that it
was her girl friend whose hair has been cut because of illness and who
hides her disfigurement by day with a wig. The gentleman apparently
takes no exception to this explanation, though whether the lover was
maid or girl friend, the implication is obvious. Lucian’s own attitude
may or may not be that of the male lover of women in his _Amores_.[46]
In the course of a long debate with a pederast on the relative merits of
the two modes of sexual experience, the champion of heterosexual love
says: “If it is becoming for men to have intercourse with men, then for
the future let women have it with women ... girding themselves with
their infamous instruments of lust ... in a word, let our wanton
tribades reign unchecked.”
As to Alciphron, in his _Letters from Town and Country_ (2:12)[47] he
describes a day-long picnic to which a courtesan has invited her friends
at her lover’s villa. After a meal of oysters and lettuce, “the sort
Aphrodite is said to love,” the guests pair off, a few with their male
lovers, the rest with women partners “of random choice,” and drift away
into surrounding thickets. Whether the feminine coupling is from
preference or _faute de mieux_ is not made exactly clear. The author
neither expresses nor implies any judgment on the activity portrayed.
That gleanings should be so comparatively meager from a full millennium
is scarcely surprising in the light of later history. After the collapse
of Roman power, repeated waves of barbarian invasion, famine, and plague
reduced both social organization and literature to only what could be
salvaged in the growing Christian monasteries. As the spoken language
drifted into dialects of unlettered vernacular, churchmen clung to Latin
as the medium of communication, but they withheld classical
belles-lettres from laymen for many centuries and undoubtedly winnowed
and expurgated it. Deeply ingrained in Christian morality were several
factors making for obliteration of anything sympathetic to female
variance. One was general asceticism, a natural reaction from Roman
excesses during the later Empire. Another was the animus against all
homosexuality which Christianity inherited from Hebrew mores. A third
was the intolerance toward women in any sexual role, largely chargeable
to the strong anti-feminine bias of St. Paul.
From the surviving classical records of variance the policy of later
censors is easy to deduce. Ovid’s tales stop short of objectionable
detail and in any event include only mythical characters. Juvenal and
Martial are vitriolic or contemptuous, Lucian and Alciphron are talking
of courtesans. Sappho survives only in such fragments as were embedded
in otherwise valued treatises. Any sympathetic treatments of lesbian
love have been eradicated.
Even in the few scattering survivals, however, we find a great variety
of persons: goddess, empress, great literary artist, wealthy
sophisticate, courtesan, and bucolic adolescent. Their experience ranges
from depraved exhibitionism through proud assumption of masculinity or
unashamed feminine passion, to naïve and troubled innocence (or in the
case of Ruth to devotion unconscious of its own deeper significance.)
All of these types of personality and experience recur often in later
literature, in such guises that it is sometimes difficult to be sure
whether they are grounded in observation of universal human behavior, or
in admiring imitation of ancient models.
CHAPTER II.
FROM THE DARK AGES TO THE AGE OF REASON
Introduction
That no variant material remains from the ten centuries following
Alciphron is hardly surprising, since so little record of any sort has
survived. An oral literature of heroic tales and folk humor must have
flourished throughout the Middle Ages; narratives in the earliest
vernacular manuscripts bear many marks of such ancestry. But if anything
was written down before the eleventh century it doubtless shared the
fate of Charlemagne’s collection of Frankish tales, which were destroyed
by his son, Louis the Pious, because of their pagan character.
By the twelfth century written literature was increasing rapidly, and
early in the thirteenth we find incorporated in a medieval romance the
first known variant episode since Alciphron’s light-hearted and bawdy
tale. Its appearance did not, however, herald any sustained use of
variance as a literary theme, and to appreciate its significance and
that of the few subsequent examples prior to the eighteenth century, one
needs for background some over-all view of the status of woman in
medieval society. To put it briefly, woman was regarded in two
antithetical lights: as angel and as devil. We have already noted that
from the outset Christian theology saw her as responsible for the fall
of man and, therefore, as the root of all sexual evil. This derogatory
opinion was reinforced after the third century by infiltrations from the
dualistic religion of Persia. Manicheism divided the universe into God’s
divine and incorporeal kingdom of light and the souls of men, and a
realm of darkness comprising the material world and men’s bodies, the
province of the Devil. Since woman’s reproductive function bound her
closer to the flesh than man was bound, her burden of original sin was
so much the greater. In the later Middle Ages serious philosophical
debate arose as to whether she was a complete human being possessed of a
soul, or merely a breeder for the superior race of men.
If today such views seem incredible, they gain reality when one
remembers the outbreaks of witchcraft from the fourteenth to seventeenth
centuries and the dreadful measures taken to suppress witches as
followers of Satan. Modern psychologists tend to diagnose those
epidemics as hysteria on the part of the bewitched and of the culprits
themselves, who frequently confessed to intimacy with the Devil. Certain
historians of the occult, however, offer convincing evidence that
organized witchcraft was a survival from ancient fertility cults
widespread in Europe, of Druidic or even earlier origin; cults which had
worshipped a god in the semblance of an animal—most often a goat—and
whose rites, as in all known fertility cults, were sexual.[1]
Records of witches’ trials show that leaders of covens and more
especially of the great orgiastic sabbaths appeared as “black men,”
usually equipped with horns, tails and hooves, and that their followers
credited them with supernatural powers and literally worshipped them as
legates of a god or as the god himself. The animal disguise so exactly
fitted the medieval concepts of Satan that Christian heretic-hunters
quite naturally equated witchcraft with devil worship, recorded it as
such, and reacted accordingly. No apologia for witchcraft is intended by
this suggestion. If one grants “wise women” a knowledge of poisonous
herbs and of rudimentary hypnosis, and also, as midwives, the
opportunity to procure the bodies of stillborn infants for their horrid
magic-working concoctions, the ugliest charges against them become
plausible. Then, too, there is little doubt that sexual licence of all
sorts was common at the quarterly sabbaths if not at all smaller
gatherings. It is particularly noteworthy that the male leaders of these
festivals had female partners, supposedly for the benefit of the few
attending warlocks; but the record of at least one trial states that the
celebrants “usually” consorted with leaders of the opposite sex,[2] an
indication that at times they must have consorted with their own. And
from secondary sources one learns that witches generally were credited
with “masculine” sexual tastes and habits. Thus, homosexual practices,
in themselves anathema, were associated also with witchcraft, the
blackest of all possible heresies.
In sharp contrast to this negative view of woman there existed at the
same time a cult of woman-worship first articulated by the Provençal
troubadours and later immortalized by Dante. It celebrated the ennobling
and exalting influence of love for a pure woman, who, since she had
transcended both common human frailty and the special aptitude of her
sex for evil, deserved a twofold reverence. In its religious aspect this
worship centered about the Virgin Mary and found expression in the
naïvely human legends which grew up about her.[3] As her invariable
championship of the underdog, man or woman, innocent or guilty, appears
to be merely an apotheosis of the maternal instinct, these legends do
not concern us here.
On the secular side, adoration of woman flowered in the convention of
courtly love, that concept of passionate devotion without overt reward
which seems more often to have been celebrated in the breach than in the
observance. From this idealistic code of sexual relations stemmed the
copious literature of medieval romance, and indeed of subsequent
romantic fiction, in all of which the parallel worship of purity and of
overwhelming passion provides the basic conflict. And until the
eighteenth century, romantic fiction was the almost exclusive vehicle—at
least on the reputable level—for variant incident, which therefore
remained technically beyond reproach.
Taken together, then, the two contradictory views of woman just outlined
provide, as it were, a philosophical portrait of her as she appeared to
the later Middle Ages. There is also a practical picture more difficult
to delineate because less was written about it at the time. Its early
background in particular is obscure, since so very little is known about
women during the Dark Ages. Some anthropologists hold that among
Germanic peoples women were highly regarded; monogamy was the universal
practice even before the advent of Christianity; women fought beside men
in emergency; and certainly the Teutonic Valkyrie are a match for the
Amazons of ancient Greece. Other social historians point out that the
earliest epics, sagas, and _chansons de geste_ celebrate only the valor
of men whose deeds insured the survival of their folk-groups, and in
these tales women play negligible roles. It is known, too, that under
feudalism in some parts of Europe women were treated as little more than
adjuncts to the land holdings they inherited, and were promised in
marriage by male relatives, sometimes when scarcely out of the cradle,
with the sole end of cementing politically profitable jointures of
territory.[4] Whatever the truth may be—and it is certain that no single
truth can hold for so heterogeneous a geographic and temporal span as
Europe in the Dark Ages—we come to relatively stable ground only with
the crusades and the transition from feudalism to chivalry.
For perhaps a dozen generations from the eleventh through the thirteenth
centuries many men of all classes were drawn off on ever-widening
military campaigns, civil or religious. Thus, the management of affairs
at home devolved to some extent upon women. Of the effect on lower-class
women we know little that is specific, though the hysteria of witchcraft
suggests one result of numerical imbalance between the sexes on that
level. On the upper social levels history tells us that many women
managed their lords’ estates, dispensed justice, marshalled armed forces
when necessary, and sometimes even led those forces against rival
lords—a circumstance commoner in Italy and southern France than in
regions farther north. Consequently, these women acquired considerable
learning. Hitherto even literacy had not been too common among laymen
aside from those destined for very high positions, but it is probable
that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries women were better
educated than men of the same class, the latter being engaged in more
strenuous pursuits. It is known that women were in charge of hospitals
during this period, and a few rose to the status of lecturers in Italian
universities.[5]
The long period of men’s absences and women’s widening responsibility
resulted, as always under such circumstances, in a certain feminization
of social outlook, evident in the burgeoning of courtly love. Today
statistical reading studies show that sex is a prime factor in
determining reading interests and that romantic fiction is predominantly
a feminine taste.[6] Historic evidence of these facts can be seen in the
rapid spread of chivalric romance between the twelfth and fourteenth
centuries.
The earliest romances written down in the twelfth century were
comparatively simple and direct, showing close relation to the epics and
_chansons de geste_ which preceded them. Subsequently, partly because
crusaders brought home oriental tales of intricacy and sophistication
exceeding any style current in Europe, plots incorporated magical and
fantastic elements and developed greater elaboration. Still later, after
the revival of classical learning in the early renaissance, pastorals
developed in rough imitation of Latin models, but with plot structure
nearer that of their medieval narrative sources.
Medieval and Renaissance Fiction
The first romance mentioned by students of this genre as containing
anything relevant to sex variance is _Huon of Bordeaux_, which appeared
in French about 1220. (It has been consulted by the present writer only
in the English translation of Lord Berners, first printed in 1543.) The
tale was basically a derivative from the Charlemagne cycle or “Matter of
France,” and the first part, though incorporating fantasy in the person
of Oberon, King of the Fairies, runs fairly true to its source. But like
many popular stories it acquired sequels, and when the action reaches
the third generation we find Huon’s granddaughter, Ide, serving among
the Holy Roman Emperor’s forces in the guise of a knight, a feministic
touch alien to the original epic.
In recognition of her prowess Ide is given the Emperor’s daughter in
marriage, and cannot refuse the honor without dangerous offense to her
overlord. The princess Olive is in love with her fiancé. Ide’s own
emotions are not described—one of the author’s subtle devices for
exploiting a piquant situation without involving his heroine in moral
obliquity. Another is his weaving of an inescapable net of circumstance
in preliminary chapters to prevent Ide’s either fleeing as a lone knight
errant or returning to her father’s domains in her feminine role—the one
course meant disgraceful death, the other involvement in incest. So the
reader is free to follow with good conscience Ide’s submission to the
marriage ceremony, her pretence of illness as excuse for inadequacy on
the bridal night, and the unelaborated account of her attempt to satisfy
her bride with “clyppynge and kyssynge” throughout the eight days of the
wedding feast. When this technique is pursued for another week, however,
the bride’s bitter grief forces Ide to confess her sex, and the
confession, carried to the Emperor by an eavesdropping page, results in
his decreeing that Ide be burned, “for he sayd he wold not suffre suche
boggery to be used.” The fire is actually kindled before Ide’s frantic
prayers to God and the Virgin save her (as Ovid’s Iphis was saved at the
altar) by miraculous transformation into a man. Beyond a doubt
considerable physical intimacy is implied here, though none so specific
as in Martial or Lucian. And it appears that death was not an excessive
penalty for such intimacy if wilfully indulged in, though again the
mores reflected must be taken as a hybrid between those of the tenth
century, in which the story was laid, and the thirteenth, in which it
was written down.
It is possible that this sequel to _Huon_ owed something to a collection
of oriental tales which doubtless entered Europe during the period of
the crusades, though they were not published until the sixteenth century
and are believed to have been rewritten at that time (as _La Fleur
Lascive Orientale_).[7] One of these, “The Princess Amany,” recounts the
adventure of a daughter of the “emperor” of Tartary. Converted to Islam
by a highly educated nurse, Amany avoids marriage to a “pagan” by flight
in male clothing. During her wanderings, she has a liaison with a
“farmer’s” wife, and then rescues the Indian princess, Dorrat, from
violation by slaying her abductor. For half a year she supports herself
and the lady, who does not know her sex, by her prowess in hunting and
marauding. Having arrived in India, the two marry at the emperor’s
decree. Up to this point, only Dorrat has been emotionally involved,
Amany being still half in love with the Tartar prince from whom she fled
on religious grounds. But when Dorrat, disillusioned on her bridal
night, attempts suicide, Amany becomes physically excited in the course
of the struggle to save her, and the two live in complete marital
intimacy for a month. Then the Tartar prince, now converted, appears and
marries them both (happy Islam!), whereupon both ladies discover that
they prefer the embraces of a man to each other’s. Even an elementary
acquaintance with oriental literature will suggest that this tale is a
hybrid well cross-fertilized with Christian chivalry, upon which it may
have left its reciprocal traces.
* * * * *
An Italian renaissance example of female sex variance appears in
Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_ (1531). Ariosto’s predecessor, Boiardo, in
treating the same Roland material, cast as heroine the completely
feminine Angelica, but Ariosto gave the lead to Bradamante, a young
Amazon in full armor whose exploits equalled and sometimes exceeded
those of the male knights. Indeed, Ariosto’s version has been cited as
feministic because of her prominence in the plot.[8] We need consider
only Canto 25, which tells how Bradamante while suffering from a head
wound is shorn of her hair, and thereafter is universally mistaken for
her twin brother. Sleeping one day in the forest she is discovered by
“young Flordespine of Spain,” whose instant infatuation is so violent
that Bradamante is wakened by a passionate kiss. Since in the chivalric
code “cravenhood it were, befitting man of straw” not to respond, she at
once confesses her sex. The disclosure has no effect upon the young
princess’ ardor. Taking Bradamante home, Flordespine showers her with
rich woman’s apparel and gifts, and laments all day—in almost the very
words of Ovid’s Iphis—that she should be cursed with a love the like of
which she has never met “mid mankind or herd.” Bradamante feels no
answering attraction, but nothing indicates that either girl considers
this love to be sinful. It is merely “unnatural.”
The ladies had one common bed that night,
Their bed the same but different their repose.
One sleeps, one moans and weeps in piteous plight
Because her wild desire more fiercely glows.
And on her wearied lids should slumber light,
All is deceitful that brief dreaming shows:
To her it seems as if relenting heaven
A better sex to Bradamante has given.[9]
In the morning Bradamante quickly departs, to relieve a misery she
cannot assuage.
And now follows an interesting inversion of the theme. When Bradamante
recounts her adventure at home, her twin brother, recognizing in
Flordespine a beauty whom he has long admired but has had no chance to
approach, makes off in secret in his sister’s knightly trappings and
seeks the Spanish castle in her place. The princess welcomes him with
rapture, again supplies woman’s dress, and only at night discovers his
sex, which the boy, still posing as his sister, attributes to a timely
bit of magic. The two live together for several weeks before the truth
is learned by anyone else.
Comparison of this treatment with that in _Huon of Bordeaux_ points up
the literary and social changes which have intervened. Nothing could
testify more clearly to the altered role of religion than the absence of
moral judgment and the sex change through benevolent magic instead of
divine intervention. This and the verbal echo of Ovid throughout
Flordespine’s long lament (only partially quoted above) show to what
extent the Revival of Learning had bred familiarity with classical word
and temper. There is also here a greater psychological subtlety, natural
to growing humanism. Though Flordespine’s passion is roused by her
mistaking Bradamante for a man and satisfied only by sex-reversal, her
initial emotion is unaltered by her enlightenment, and the brother whom
she accepts is so feminine in both appearance and action that an entire
household is deceived for weeks. Thus the Spanish princess exhibits
definite psychological variance. It is interesting that the knightly
Bradamante remains unmoved throughout and that Flordespine, the petite,
impulsive, eminently feminine member of the pair, takes the initiative
in the whole business.
Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral _Arcadia_, circulated among friends in 1580
though not published till a decade later, shows a similar relation to
both medieval and classical sources. Here, as in the second part of
Ariosto’s episode, the hero masquerades as an Amazon, in order to gain
access to a princess whose family is living in pastoral seclusion for
political reasons. The heroine’s father is completely taken in and
himself conceives a passion for the handsome stranger. His wife, several
decades his junior, is only briefly deceived but holds her peace because
she is similarly smitten. Thanks to the separate jealous machinations of
these two, all the hero’s efforts to reveal his secret to his love are
balked, but within a few weeks his passion has communicated itself to
the girl. And now we have the moral scruples which regularly distinguish
English from continental literature. They are given vividly in Sidney’s
own words:
O me, unfortunate wretch (sayd she) what poysonous heates be these,
which thus torment me?... O you Stars judge rightly of me, & if I
have with wicked intent made myself a pray to fancie, or if by any
idle lustes I framed my harte fit for such an impression, then let
this plague dayly increase in me, till my name bee odious to
womankind ... No, no, you cannot help me: Sinne must be the mother,
and shame the daughter of my affection. And yet these be but childish
objections ... it is the impossibilitie that dooth torment me: for,
unlawfull desires are punished after the effect of enjoying, but
impossible desires are punished by the desire itself ... And yet ...
what do I, sillie wench, knowe what Love hath prepared for me? Doo I
not see my mother, as well, at least as furiouslie as my selfe, love
Zelmane? And should I be wiser than my mother? Either she sees a
possibilitie in that which I think impossible, or else impossible
loves neede not misbecome me. And doo I not see Zelmane (who dothe
not thinke a thought which is not first wayed by wisdom and virtue)
doth not she vouchsafe to love me with like ardor? I see it, her eyes
depose it to be true; what then? And if she can love poore me, shall
I thinke scorne to love such a woman as Zelmane? Away then all vaine
examinations of why and how. Thou lovest me, excellent Zelmane, and I
love thee: And with that, embrasing the very grounde whereon she lay,
she said to her selfe (for even to her selfe she was ashamed to
speake it out in words) O my Zelmane, governe and direct me: for I am
wholy given over to thee.[10]
There could scarcely be a more economical record of how girls were
taught to regard homosexual passion in sixteenth century England; of the
heroine’s ignorance that any satisfaction of the desire was possible;
and of her blameless rectitude, for she has both her mother and her idol
as examples, and the reader knows that she is under the spell of
legitimate sex attraction. That Sidney’s own moral attitude was not
necessarily his heroine’s is suggested only in his wording of an
oracle’s prophecy to her father earlier: “Thy youngest shall with
nature’s bliss embrace An _uncouth_ love, which _nature_ hateth most”
[author’s italics.] Still, he was careful that Zelmane’s secret should
become known to the princess before the pair had opportunity for so much
as a kiss.
The _Arcadia_ is cited in Iwan Bloch’s _Sex Life in England_ as the
first instance of lesbian love in English literature, but Bloch bases
his claim on a night the princess and her sister spent together. He does
not mention that they were sisters; however, it is not the kinship which
invalidates his statement. It is true that the text reads: “... there
cherishing one another with deere, though chaste embracements, with
sweet, though cold kisses; it might seem that Love was come to play him
there without darte; or that weerie of his owne fires, he was there to
refresh himselfe betweene their sweete-breathing lippes.” But the reason
for their embrace was that both were suffering from hopeless loves, and,
too shy to share confidences even by candlelight, had agreed that “they
might talke better as they lay together.” Bloch, however, makes his
point from the statement that “they impoverished their cloathes to
inriche their bed, which for that night might well scorne the shrine of
Venus,” interpreting this to mean that they made elaborate preparation
for a night of love, however cold and chaste Sidney claimed it to
be.[11] The proper sense of the elaborate Elizabethan conceit is, of
course, simply that they released their own loveliness from their
garments and laid themselves on the bed which was thus more “inriched”
than a shrine bearing an image of Venus herself.
A French pastoral making use of the same theme is d’Urfé’s _Astrée_,
published serially between 1607 and 1620. This vast work, running to
some 5500 pages, has not been examined, but Maurice Magendie’s _L’Astrée
d’Honoré D’Urfé_ gives an adequate notion of its significant points.
Laid in Merovingian times, it is bound anachronistically by the
strictest rules of courtly love, which made a lady’s lightest word law
for her lover. Thus, once banished by his offended lady’s decree, the
hero Céladon may not re-enter her presence without specific summons.
After a volume of misadventure he contrives to return by impersonating
Alexis, daughter of a Druid priest whose casuistry reconciles him to
this evasion of Astrée’s orders. Since Astrée has long mourned him as
dead she is unlikely to summon him, but until she does, “Alexis” cannot
reveal his identity. Her new friend’s phenomenal resemblance to her lost
lover provokes in Astrée an infatuation which, however well accounted
for, is our first example since classical times of a woman’s passion
without scruple for one believed from the outset to be of her own sex.
For a time the Druid manages to prevent too great an intimacy between
his “daughter” and Astrée, but when the two are guests at the same
castle and share a room, the hero cannot resist taking some advantage of
his opportunity, his only concern being dread of his lady’s reaction to
these liberties when she is finally enlightened. This eventuality is
postponed by enemy attack and a long embroilment during which “Alexis”
fights as a heroic Amazon, saves Astrée’s life, is wounded, and is
finally spirited away by the Druid to recover without danger of
disclosure. When the revelation finally occurs, Astrée is indeed
outraged—but note the reason: people will believe she merely pretended
to be duped in order to excuse her own complaisances, and ‘in Forez a
woman does not trifle thus with her honor.’ She bids Céladon die in
expiation for his crime. “‘De quelle mort vous plait-il que je perisse?’
gémit Céladon écrasé. ‘N’importe, pourvu que tu meures!’ Et il s’enfuit
pour la satisfaire.”[12] The Druid intervenes by proposing a pilgrimage
to a shrine of Diana whose lions and unicorns slay the guilty but spare
the pure. These heraldic guardians are transmitted into statues as the
pair approach, thus testifying to the young lovers’ technical chastity.
As everything short of the ultimate intimacy has pretty clearly
occurred, it would appear that in France of the early seventeenth
century, as in sixteenth century Italy, such relations between women
were not regarded too harshly. Nevertheless, both this pastoral and
Sidney’s portray the “far away and long ago,” not the authors’ own
period, and d’Urfé’s tale is obviously more than a little satiric.
Evidence will appear later that with regard to contemporary phenomena
judgment is generally less lenient.
The Borderline of Reality
The five examples described above are all from the field of romance, in
which no further variant flora have been detected until the early
nineteenth century. Indeed, the whole field of fiction was largely
fallow during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the
renaissance on, thanks to a growing classical influence and the
weakening of churchly prejudice, drama of actable length gradually
supplanted long formless narrative. But the drama, too, yields a thin
harvest during these centuries. In romantic plays sex disguise was
fairly common, but it produced no variant situations comparable to those
cited from romance and pastoral. Action on the public stage, of course,
cannot go as far as in the printed volume; furthermore, theatre
audiences included lower class spectators more apt to be shocked by
homosexual implication than educated readers with classical literary
background.
Let us look, for example, at the two most significant masquerading women
in Shakespeare’s plays. Viola in _Twelfth Night_ is an unconvincing man,
afraid of the sight of her own sword, and her scenes with Olivia never
even skirt the anomalous, their interest centering on her verbal
agility. In _As You Like It_ Rosalind is much more boyish in appearance
and temperament, and Celia’s devotion to her is marked. Following her
cousin headlong into banishment, Celia reminds her harsh parent that:
... we still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, sat together,
And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable.
Also LeBeau tells Orlando that Rosalind has been “detained by her
usurping uncle To keep his daughter company; whose loves Are dearer than
the natural bond of sisters.” These passages suggest an intensity in
Celia’s attachment which the effeminate Frenchman is quick to notice,
but no further word or action in the play reinforces them. Celia’s
infatuation at sight for Oliver, though it does not, like Rosalind’s for
Orlando, blossom before the spectator’s eyes, is no less whole-hearted,
and if passion is implied at all between the girls it is that early
adolescent sort readily supplanted by the first heterosexual attraction.
The other women of Shakespeare frequently cited as unfeminine, Beatrice
and Katherine, express antipathy to men, marriage, and male domination
but exhibit no interest whatever in women.
Two realistic plays of the early seventeenth century which have as their
heroines real persons, one a known lesbian and the other suspected, are
of special interest because no hint of variance appears in either drama.
Middleton and Dekker’s _Roaring Girl_ (1611) was built around Mary
Frith, a transvestist of the London underworld commonly called “Moll
Cutpurse,” who was about twenty-five when the play was written. She is
portrayed as hearty, fearless and clever, a walking lexicon of thieves’
cant and free tavern songs, but of blameless character—the sworn enemy
of injustice, oppression and double-dealing in underworld and gentry
alike. She befriends honest lovers of any class but makes short work of
men who approach her; she would like to see all women “manned but never
pandered,” and she burns to right women’s wrongs in general. Asked when
she will marry, her impudent rhymed answer adds up to “Never!” In short,
she is a kind of sexless and feministic Robin Hood.
In their epilogue the authors say that some will:
Wonder that a creature of her being
Should be the subject of a poet, seeing
In the world’s eye none weighs so light: others look
For all those base tricks published in a book
Foul as the brains they flowed from, of cutpurses,
Of nips and foists, nasty obscene discourses
As full of lies as empty of worth and wit,
For any honest ear and eye unfit.
Their reference is undoubtedly to _A Booke called the Madde Prancks of
Merry Moll of the Bankside, with her Walks in Man’s Apparel and to what
Purpose. Written by John Day_, which was entered in the Stationers’
Register for August 1610. All copies of this document were so thoroughly
eliminated by her friends that scholars have even questioned whether it
was ever printed, and a _Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith_ surviving
from 1662, the year after her death, is somewhat less harsh. An
editorial note to the 1885 edition of the play,[13] drawing on this
biography and other sources, tells us that she was a shoemaker’s
daughter who from childhood would run only with boys, “taking many a
bang and blow,” and that she had a lifelong aversion to women’s
occupations and to children. Against family opposition she educated
herself far above her station, but in the end apparently found no outlet
for her capacities except in the underworld, where even her bitterest
detractors admit her masculine daring and success as “highwayman,”
forger, and fence. Havelock Ellis, in his introduction to another
edition of the play and in his Studies in the _Psychology of Sex_,[14]
quotes the 1662 biography as saying that “No man can say or affirm that
she ever had a sweetheart or any such fond thing to dally with her,” a
mastiff being the only living thing she cared for. Ellis adds that
though nothing is said of homosexual practices, “we see clearly here
what may be termed the homosexual diathesis.”
The second play is _La Monja Alférez_ (1626) by Juan Pérez de Montalban,
a literary disciple of Lope de Vega, and is included in a volume by
Fitz-Maurice Kelly entitled _The Nun Ensign_. It gives a partial picture
of the known life of Catalina de Erauso, a Basque woman who was alive at
the time of its publication, and like _The Roaring Girl_, it was
probably written to whitewash the heroine’s reputation. Here also the
heroine is a transvestist, but one who actually passes for a military
man, the mainspring of the plot being her exposure by her brother, a
fellow officer. One Doña Ana is represented as being infatuated to the
point of presenting her beloved with her girdle, but the gesture is
symbolic only. “Guzlan” evades the issue by pleading a vow of
_castidad_, a term less exclusively feminine than its English
equivalent, and the two are never alone together or involved in more
than acceptable verbal exchange. The play can scarcely have been a
dramatic success, consisting as it does largely of long retrospective
speeches by other characters which review Catalina’s past adventures and
constitute her apologia. It is not known to have been produced more than
once, at a critical period in her fortunes when it must have been badly
needed.
Erauso’s full history as given in Kelly’s volume is compiled from an
autobiography included _in toto_, certain “Relaciones” fairly well
established as originating with Erauso herself, and references in the
_De’ Viaggi ..._ of Pietro della Valle. Relegated by her family to the
life of a nun, which she found intolerable, though three of her sisters
took their vows, the girl escaped from her convent in 1607 at the age of
about fifteen by contriving men’s garments from the stuff of her
religious habit. Subsequently she shipped to South America, where for
some time she lived by her wits and her sword. Later, to escape a prison
sentence she joined the army, was promoted for bravery to the rank of
ensign, and was entrusted with at least one special mission. For some
ten to fifteen years she went unexposed and unrecognized even by her
brother, under whom she served for a time in Peru. In 1622, however, he
became suspicious, and assigned her to perilous duty, as a result of
which wounds brought her so near death that she confessed her sex to a
bishop, and her military career was naturally at an end. The alternative
life as a nun was now more distasteful to her than ever, and within a
year she sailed for Spain to obtain proof that she had never taken the
final vows, and, if possible, to secure a pension from Philip III on the
strength of her military service.
It was at this time that _La Monja Alférez_ was written and presented,
and perhaps partly through its sympathetic influence she had success in
both her undertakings and was furthermore granted permission by Pope
Urban VIII to continue wearing men’s clothes, though not to practice
further deception about her true sex. Her European visit was thus
somewhat in the nature of a triumph, though her family still refused to
recognize her. Accordingly she returned to South America, became a
wealthy owner of horses and mules, and was still thriving in the
business of carrier when she died in her late fifties.
Of her love life not too much is given, but it is all significant. At
one point she tells of taking refuge, when wounded, with a halfbreed
Indian woman, a widow, who wished to keep her on as son-in-law. The
daughter, however, “was very black and ugly as the devil, the very
opposite of my taste, which has always been for pretty faces.”[15] From
this situation she quite simply ran away, as from a number of similar
ones; but where the ladies were agreeable to her she postponed flight
till the ultimate moment. While serving under her brother she even
sometimes accompanied him to his mistress’ house, but when she took to
going there on her own he became so jealous—believing her a man, of
course—that he had her transferred to a distant post.
Before joining the army she worked for a time as bookkeeper to a wealthy
merchant in Lima, in whose house she also boarded, and she was dismissed
in less than a year for “sporting and frolicking” with his wife’s two
unmarried sisters, “one especially whom I preferred.” One day while she
was “in the parlour, combing my hair, lolling my head in her lap and
tickling her ankles,” the employer observed the play “through a grating”
and sent her packing.[16] The inferred activities are fairly
unmistakable, but since she was believed to be a man, we can deduce
nothing from the incident about local attitudes towards homosexuality.
A well-documented passage in the “Relaciones” tells us that after her
return from Europe she was entrusted, by a couple in Vera Cruz who knew
her to be a woman, with the responsibility of escorting their daughter
to Mexico where the girl was to be married. Thus it is clear that her
earlier emotional adventures had been well concealed. But during the
journey “she became jealously attached to her charge, resented her young
friend’s subsequent marriage, and in a letter of incomparable arrogance
challenged the girl’s husband to a duel” because he forbade her the
house. Friends managed to prevent the meeting, and it was after this
that she “sheathed her rapier and set about earning an unromantic living
as a carrier.” She must have been in her late forties at the time of
this episode.
Neo-Classical Aridity
Because so little variant material appears in reputable imaginative
writing between 1650 and 1800 we must turn elsewhere for evidence that
variance nevertheless flourished. For reasons mentioned earlier,
biography and memoirs are not generally within our scope, but in the
sixteenth to eighteenth centuries the chief aim of such writing was
narrative interest, and certainly Brantôme, Casanova and the rest are
read and enjoyed now in somewhat the same way as is Proust’s
autobiographical fiction of the present century. As has been said, even
historians grant that a very fair general impression of the writers’
periods can be gained from these spontaneous records.
The wide and colorful canvas of Brantôme testifies that court morals
under the later Valois were free in every respect. At several points in
the _Lives of Gallant Ladies_ (1665) he implies that lesbian attachments
were taken for granted in his time, and in Section 15 of his first
Discourse he raises the question whether husbands are cuckolded when
their wives engage in “the love that is called _donna con donna._”[17]
He also doubts whether the point has ever been raised before, living as
he did three centuries before divorce was commonplace and lesbian
activity actionable as one form of alienation of affection. The cases he
cites are almost all bisexual, for though he has heard of women who
would have nothing to do with men, these do not seem to have been
celebrated for variance either. He says it was useless to seek one young
girl in marriage because her “friend” would never let her go; but the
friend, who was providing bed and board, was a married woman. Indeed, he
maintains that husbands regarded such affairs lightly, since these could
not lead to embarrassing questions about the paternity of offspring.
With characteristic wit he manages to include among his anecdotes every
possible means of satisfaction between women, impermissible of
translation today outside a medical treatise. He maintains throughout
that women come in the end to acknowledge the inadequacy of all such
means, “for after all nothing is the equal of a man.”
Anthony Hamilton in his _Memoirs of the Comte de Grammont_ (1713) gives
an amusing account of the rivalry between the Earl of Rochester and Miss
Hobart, a maid of honor to the Duchess of York, for the affections of
the rather stupid young court beauty, Miss Anne Temple. However, at the
English court even under Charles II such affairs were not taken so
lightly. When, after a long siege, the patient Hobart attempted to
embrace her favorite, the girl screamed, other waiting women came
running, and “this was sufficient to disgrace Miss Hobart at court and
totally ruin her reputation in London.”[18]
These affairs occurred in high society, but Montaigne—or perhaps his
secretary, who is said to have written the _Voyage in Italy_
(1581)—writing in the same period as Brantôme, describes the case of a
young weaver, one of a group of six or seven transvestists engaged in
that trade, who courted several women in towns near her own and was
finally hanged for effecting a marriage with one of them. The union
endured happily for half a year, however, before the offender was
recognized and exposed by someone from her own village. This is
interesting evidence of contrast in sexual mores at different social
levels, for the country in this case was Italy, and Brantôme and others
claim that homosexuality was rife there, particularly in the courts of
Naples and Sicily.
What may be called a middle-class allusion appears in the memoirs of the
Comte de Tilly (1800) when he tells of being drawn in as second in a
duel by two young men in an inn at Chartres who wished to settle a
quarrel at once. The matter involves a girl whom both had known
intimately and one had promised by signed agreement to marry within the
year, come what might. The prospective bridegroom learned that “the
treacherous Julie was acquainted with a lady of this town who was
suspected of having habits once much in vogue in Lesbos and which to the
shame of our time have made alarming progress even in the provinces,”
and accused the other man of having known this when he foisted Julie off
on him. Without denying the charge, the accused says to de Tilly: “I
confess this sort of rivalry gives me no ill humor, on the contrary it
amuses me, and I am so lacking in morals as to laugh at it.”[19] Several
other examples of lesbian activity, some of them involving nuns, are to
be found _passim_ in Casanova’s memoirs.
* * * * *
From the viewpoint of mere numerical count the richest field for the
gleaner of variant incident would be that literature—not quite reputable
from the English reader’s viewpoint—which is farthest removed from the
romantic. In romance, sexual attraction is an experience so personal and
subjective that true lovers can be satisfied only with one another, and
separation or an extraneous attraction on the part of either constitutes
tragedy. Woman’s role often transcends that of man because any lapse on
her part entrains personal and social consequences of extreme gravity.
That is, the romantic viewpoint is relatively feminine.
In the other type of narrative, sometimes erroneously classed with
realism, the sexual act is all-important, enjoyable with any adequate
partner since sensual pleasure eclipses all subjective factors. Here a
woman may be an enthusiastic and carefree playmate, a coy jade to be
taken by trickery, or an aggressive, even sadistic, snarer of the
hapless male. Her one requisite is a sexual appetite to equal her
partner’s, and she is apparently immune to physical, and indifferent to
social, consequences. In short, the outlook here is masculine. If the
percentage of women authors is low in all areas of literature, in this
one it reaches the vanishing point. Not even Margaret of Navarre nor
Aphra Behn, famed as they are for a free approach, go all the way with
their brother writers.
The ultimate limit of male-oriented literature is pornography, with
which this study will not be concerned beyond defining it as writing of
which the primary intent is sexual arousal. The category is difficult of
sharp delineation for an English-reading audience, since relatively
unseasoned readers may attribute pornographic intent to works which the
more “sophisticated” continental takes in his stride and admits to the
realm of legitimate belles-lettres. This is particularly true of that
early French and Italian material which was written with wit, style, and
care to avoid coarse terminology, and which is more properly termed
erotic or _galant_. To account adequately for such racial or national
inconsistencies in sexual tolerance is impossible here. Undoubtedly an
earlier familiarity with classical literature in Italy and southern
France, as well as a readier exposure there to oriental influences, had
something to do with continental lenience.
Historians of erotic literature trace the genre ultimately to two
hypothetical sources. One is a group of Greek tales called Milesian
which originated about the sixth or seventh century B.C., satirizing
religion as well as sex. They were particularly scurrilous in their
portrayal of women. The other source is oriental literature, since in
both Hindu and Islamic philosophy the inferior status of woman tends to
depersonalize sexual relations. Whatever its origin, erotic literature
has flourished steadily in modern Europe from the earliest renaissance
to the present day, and has been produced by authors of literary
repute—Boccaccio, Poggio, Aretino in Italy; and, in France, LaSalle,
Rabelais, Venette, not to mention a score of lesser names in both
countries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it developed in
France into the style called _galant_, somewhat less lusty and more
verbally subtle than earlier works but nonetheless very free. In this
class the names most familiar to English readers are probably Restif de
la Bretonne and Casanova.
Naturally all erotic works concentrate mainly upon heterosexual
activity, but intrasexual episodes, particularly among women, are not
uncommon. The women involved are never wholly, or even primarily,
homosexual. An innocent girl may be initiated by one more experienced
into the mysteries of giving pleasure to men. Ladies of quality may
experiment with one another to alleviate boredom, or prostitutes amuse
themselves in idle intervals. Nuns may console each other for lack of
opportunity with priests, though the latter are usually also available.
All these contacts are the fruit of propinquity rather than personal
devotion, and the sexual play often involves more than two participants.
In short, even these lesbian anecdotes are presented from the male
viewpoint.
Erotic works involving religious celibates have been much more a
continental than an English product. Such works always had as their
secondary and sometimes as their primary aim, the discrediting of the
Roman church, and may have begun in the Middle Ages after Gregory VII
(1015-1085) first stringently imposed celibacy on the clergy. (It will
be recalled that Sappho’s works were burned by the Church in 1073.) With
the growth of rationalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
anti-clerical erotic writing increased in volume, and once the French
Revolution had broken the hold of Catholicism in France, tales about the
cloistered orders degenerated there into almost unalloyed pornography.
In England, where Roman church and monasticism had been crushed by Henry
VIII, the anti-clerical category of erotica did not flourish; in the
Puritan-influenced American colonies it seems never to have taken root
at all. Perhaps as a corollary of this religious conservatism,
homosexual works were equally rare. Of the continental writers named
above only Boccaccio and Rabelais are generally acceptable to English
readers, possibly because of the absence of homosexuality from their
works.
Even after the Restoration in England the natural anti-Puritan outburst
of risqué drama and picaresque novel went no farther than heterosexual
freedom. The only variant literary traces of the court’s sojourn in
France are Anthony Hamilton’s lesbian anecdote cited above, and a
vicious poetic satire written anonymously in 1732. It was actually
penned by Sir William King, principal of St. Mary’s Hall at Oxford, and
was directed against a female relative who had done him out of a
fortune. He describes the lady as one endowed with some of the
attributes of a witch and addicted to indecencies with a titled woman
friend who figured as her “familiar.” The occult details Sir William
seems to have incorporated not only to render his picture more
repulsive, but to supply etiology for his subject’s homosexual bent,
which apparently he did not care to import gratuitously. England has
little else to contribute to the early variant record save an incident
or two included in stereotyped histories of prostitutes, and some rather
juvenile whipping stories laid in boarding schools or in households
dominated by sadistic step-mothers or governesses, and even in these
lesbian activity is infrequent.
French literature, meanwhile, moved in quite the other direction,
undoubtedly following tendencies at court. At the end of the sixteenth
century Henry III was widely reputed to be homosexual. A generation
later Louis XIII, ailing and neurotic, vacillated between a few feminine
and several masculine favorites, and is said, by some French
biographers, to have made little distinction among them. The house of
Orléans was also generally credited with homosexual proclivities in both
the male and the female lines. On the feminine side, too, we have
Christina of Sweden’s lengthy visit in France during the emotionally
disturbed period of her life (1670-1680) following her abdication. It
has been suggested that she brought about Monaldeschi’s murder at
Versailles because the “thick packet of letters” in his possession
contained damning evidence of her now almost unquestioned lesbian
habits. A century later Marie Antoinette’s relations with Lamballe,
Polignac and others of her court ladies were the subject of numerous
scurrilous pamphlets, and although the details must be largely
discounted as political mudslinging, any wide reading of serious
biographical studies shows the underlying charges to be quite plausible.
For whatever reason, as the Bourbon dynasty grew in power and
extravagance and under Louis XV the great courtesans enjoyed high social
standing, freedom among women even loosely connected with court circles
became quite fashionable. By the middle of the eighteenth century
several houses of pleasure were elite institutions. Private theatres
were maintained by certain noblemen for the presentation of highly
censorable drama, and the best-known actresses and courtesans—often
synonymous—were credited with constant lesbian activity in memoirs of
the gossip-column type. From better authenticated sources we know that
numerous frivolous private societies sprang up, and at least one of them
was composed of “Anandrynes” or lesbian women. The _galant_ narratives,
of which the eighteenth century produced a rich crop, included frequent
lesbian episodes, and for the first time in many decades the variant
interest sometimes predominated over the heterosexual.
As one example of such writing, let us glance at a comparatively
inoffensive survival from the period just before the Revolution. It is
taken from _L’Espion Anglais_ (1777-1778), eleven rambling volumes
probably from several pens. In imitation of the more reputable
journalistic correspondence of the time, this work is cast in the form
of letters from “Milord All’eye” in Paris to his friend “Milord All’ear”
in London. Mayeur de Saint-Paul is credited with the authorship of three
very long letters[20] recording the career of a young girl from the
provinces who runs away to Paris, finds a place in the most elite
_maison_ of the day, and is there groomed for the service of a prominent
lesbian actress. The latter’s luxurious maisonette, which is secluded in
a wooded park, is described in detail, as are the stages of the girl’s
initiation into the erotic services of her mistress and into a large
lesbian cult whose temple is located within the grounds. Action and
setting are portrayed with some art and the narrative seldom becomes
indelicately specific. Unhappily for the lesbian, the girl’s personal
maid, who lives outside the grounds, gives her male lover an eloquent
account of her young mistress’s charms. By masquerading as a delivery
girl from a modiste’s shop the boy insinuates himself into the actress’s
paradise, converts the lavishly-kept prisoner to the superior delights
of _jouissance_ with him, and brings about her expulsion by her outraged
lesbian lover. This rococo gem was said to be based upon actual persons
and circumstances of the decade in which it was written.
As a kind of last gasp of the _galant_ school’s attempt to conform to
later standards of acceptability one may cite the work of Felicité de
Choiseul-Meuse, an author of uncertain identity who produced a number of
racy novels just after 1800. Her _Julie, ou J’ai Sauvé ma Rose_ (1807)
is a lushly romantic tale in which, as its title suggests, a
professional flirt contrives to be all but seduced by every type of
lover from timorous stripling to middle-aged man-about-town, and in
every sort of setting from her own boudoir to a Gothic cavern where she
is held by a kidnaper. Throughout the story she is attracted by lovely
women, but she becomes involved with one only in the final chapter. A
woman of boyish type seems to have captivated the man Julie really
loves, and, by way of revenge on both, Julie seduces her rival, who
proves to be an already active lesbian. She finds this dalliance
pleasanter than anything thus far experienced with men, and as it does
not constitute defloration, she ends by marrying happily the original
lover who advised her in adolescence that women’s power over men
consists in never sacrificing their technical virginity.
Erotic writing did not, of course, cease with the end of the eighteenth
century. But what may be called the _galant_ way of life suffered a
sharp check with the French Revolution. Not only the divine right of
kings but the allied privilege of court circles to be a law unto
themselves was eclipsed for a number of decades. In all countries and at
all times the possessors of enormous wealth have enjoyed considerable
independence of public opinion, but literature celebrating such
independence in the sexual sphere tended to bifurcate after 1800 into
problem novels whose tone was condemnatory, and an underground stream of
pornography unacceptable for open publication. However unavailable the
latter material may have been to the growing number of middle-class
readers, rumors of its existence doubtless filtered into the general
consciousness. Bisexual pornography continued to be written throughout
the nineteenth century, some of it fairly high in quality and attributed
to authors of renown, and the recurrence of lesbian activity in this
subterranean stream may well have contributed to the disrepute of
variance of all sorts during that century and the first years of the
present one.
CHAPTER III.
FROM THE ROMANTICS TO THE MODERNS
Introduction
Imaginative works featuring variant women have thus far been few, widely
separated in time, and for the most part written with literary intent
only. Thus, it has sufficed to present them with slight orientation in
literary history. During the nineteenth century such items averaged
better than three per decade and the majority were novels, a form
particularly apt to reflect drifts of contemporary thought and even to
be written for ulterior ends. If even tenuous patterns are to be traced
in this mass of material it will be necessary to sketch as background
the general trends of interest from which the novels grew.
Probably the most significant feature of the decades just following the
French Revolution was the rapid spread of democratic efforts toward
political, economic and educational betterment of the common man. This
was reflected slowly in variant literature, and then only indirectly as
it multiplied readers, writers, and subjects of relatively modest social
status. Outside the field of social reform the same revolutionary
sentiment appeared under such different guises as the Romantic Movement
in literature and a scientific rather than a philosophic attack upon the
problems of human personality.
Most closely allied to practical politics was the Woman’s Movement. The
eighteenth-century French rationalists who championed the rights of man
included women in their thesis; however, for various historical and
psychological reasons their own countrywomen never as a whole embraced
the feminist cause. In England and America, on the other hand, where the
property rights of women or their inability to vote on such humanitarian
issues as abolition of slavery were sore points, feminists embarked upon
a battle for legal equality which ran on into the present century.
The Romantic Movement in literature represented a swing away from
eighteenth century rationalism toward the glorifying of emotional
experience. Whereas the sexual licence in pre-Revolutionary France had
reflected a _galant_ indifference to moral standards, the new and more
general claim to emotional freedom was a matter of philosophic
principle. However unsatisfactory from a pragmatic viewpoint the lives
of such men as Rousseau and Shelley may have been, these “mad idealists”
were acting upon conviction. The keynote of romanticism was, as always,
the exaltation of Love and of every individual’s right to follow its
dictates, a theme which figured prominently in nineteenth century
literature and which still persists in popular fiction and films. While
this philosophic tolerance did not extend to homosexual love, it enabled
the subject to be treated seriously in other than underground erotic
literature.
Yet another aspect of the rebellion against hitherto revered authority
was the extension of scientific method to the study of human
consciousness. Ever since the renaissance, science had been advancing
steadily in physical fields. Its practical applications had produced the
Industrial Revolution, and its unfettered intellectual attitude had
helped, via the French Encyclopedists, to sow the seeds of political
revolution. During the late eighteenth century students of geology,
biology, and human anatomy were accumulating the evolutionary data so
dramatically systematized in 1859 by Darwin. At the same time scientific
travelers, observing primitive societies, assembled the raw materials of
what later became anthropology. Finally at the beginning of the
nineteenth century a few pioneers, defying heavy odds of religious and
popular prejudice, began to explore the relation of mind to body. In
Germany laboratory experiment was concentrated on the neurological bases
of sensory experience. In France medical aspects of the problem took
precedence, focussing on mental aberration, and by the 1860s Charcot,
best known for his therapeutic use of hypnotism, had founded the first
great neurological clinic.
As to the objective study of homosexuality, nothing which could be
called scientific by modern standards was attempted until the last third
of the century, but the phenomenon was noted extensively in the
pre-anthropological records mentioned above, and a considerable group of
studies on human hermaphrodites antedated 1850.[1] A single descriptive
article on homosexuality appeared as early as 1791, when a German
periodical, _Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde_, published the
biographies of two men who “manifested an enthusiastic love for persons
of their own sex,” and one of whom attributed his predilection to
childhood experiences at home and at school. For the next fifty years
the only pertinent contributions seem to have been some articles on “the
Scythian madness” (male homosexuality) in the ancient Greeks. Then, in
1852, a Dr. Casper published in his _Vierteljahrsschrift_ a number of
comments on contemporaneous pederasty,[2] and a few years later he
brought out a volume of male case histories under the title _Klinische
Novellen_. During the following two decades Karl Ulrichs (writing under
the pseudonym Numa Numantius) produced upward of a dozen pamphlets,
controversial rather than scientific, which defended male homosexuality
as hereditary and therefore not justly subject to legal penalty. All
these studies, it should be noted, dealt exclusively with men.
What is considered the first essentially scientific publication,
however, was a clinical report in 1870 on a female homosexual patient by
a German physician, Westphal, after which similar descriptive case
studies multiplied rapidly. In 1886 Krafft-Ebing brought out his lengthy
_Psychopathia Sexualis_, a large section of which was devoted to
“contrary sexual feeling,” and before the end of the century Albert
Moll, Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld produced even more extensive
treatises.[3] Although all these later studies included female cases,
women still did not receive much emphasis. A Spaniard, Casán, was
apparently the only writer to treat women exclusively. (His volume,
listed in the U.S. Surgeon General’s Catalog as _El Amor Lesbio_, 1896,
has not been available for examination.)
The mounting stress upon an objective approach to psychological
phenomena had its effect on alert literary minds. (It was not
restricted, of course, to sex or variance). Balzac was the first to
embark deliberately upon a “naturalistic” study of human experience, and
although literary critics observe that his plots are often based on more
or less abstract concepts, none deny that his individual characters show
the fruit of minute observation. By 1857 Flaubert also was maintaining
that “it is time to give it (literary art) the precision of the sciences
by means of a pitiless method,”[4] and later in the century Zola pointed
out that his own practice, as well as his theories set forth in _Le
Roman Experimental_, were “based upon the application of experimental
science to physiology as developed in the writings of Dr. Claude
Bernard.”[5] Each of these three major novelists contributed to the
understanding of female variance, and the same spirit can be detected in
the fiction of several lesser writers who attacked the subject.
Even in the many cases where direct connection cannot be demonstrated
between scientific thought and the imaginative writing under
consideration, there is a perceptible correlation from decade to decade
between quantitative developments in both fields.
Precursors of Modern Fiction
The transition from _galant_ writing of the eighteenth century to modern
fiction with its psychological preoccupation and its elevation of
women’s roles to a position of romantic importance could hardly be
better exemplified than by Diderot’s _La Religieuse_. Superficially,
this novel appears to be a typical pre-revolutionary anti-clerical
effort. As it was undertaken in 1760, only a year after the second
suppression of its author’s major project, _L’Encyclopédie_, it is
tempting to imagine that the Jesuits’ share in that act of censorship
may have been the immediate spur to its inception. Actually _La
Religieuse_ broke new ground, for Diderot’s preoccupation was not so
much the religious shortcomings of the convents depicted, as the morbid
physical and psychological effects of celibacy upon women, especially
when this way of life was not freely elected but enforced by church and
family.
The tale was first conceived as a practical joke on an impressionable
philanthropist, the Marquis de Croismare, who in 1757 had exercised his
influence in behalf of a nun seeking release from her vows. Not even
personally acquainted with the young woman, he engaged legal aid for her
but had no success, and she was forced to remain in her convent. A few
years later, when she was unobtrusively transferred to another religious
house, Diderot, Grimm, and other friends of de Croismare’s conceived the
idea of pretending that she had escaped, and Diderot forged a series of
letters in which she appealed to her former benefactor for some means of
support in a place where her religious “persecutors” could not find her.
The victim of the hoax was so moved by it that he offered her (by mail)
a position as companion to his daughter, and the perpetrators were
forced to fabricate an account of her sudden death. It was not till
eight years later that the marquis learned the truth, and “was able to
laugh at the incident over which he had earlier wept.”[6]
In the meantime Diderot had invented a complete autobiography supposedly
written by the girl during her last illness, and though this was not
completed in time to become a part of the deception, it so engaged its
author’s interest that he continued to work on the whole story
intermittently for a couple of decades. It was pretty certainly finished
by 1780, but was not published until 1796, when it appeared in its
present form, along with the account of its composition. Written as her
own artless journal, it gives the story of an illegitimate girl forced
into convent life by a guilt-ridden mother and her suspicious husband.
The victim resists her fate with extraordinary intelligence and
ingenuity, but her struggles are futile, and she is merely transferred
from one religious house to another, each exemplifying some pathological
aspect of conventual sex-repression. Under the best abbess she meets
nothing worse than a rather hysterical exaggeration of piety with slight
variant overtones; in the second institution she encounters outright
sadism, and in the third rampant homosexuality.
The Superior in this last house is an overt lesbian, and her efforts to
seduce the girl occupy nearly a third of Diderot’s whole volume. The
young nun, steadfast in her desire for freedom—and marriage, though she
has not yet known love—remains almost wholly blind to the meaning of the
other’s blandishments and of her own partial response to them. The
Superior is described as vain, frivolous, flighty, and wholly without
religious feeling. The scenes in her quarters where her favorites
gossip, fawn on her, and compete for her favors are more in the spirit
of _galant_ eighteenth century canvases than that of a religious house.
Ellis says that for the Superior “Diderot found a model in the Abbess of
Chelles, a daughter of the Regent (Philippe of Orleans, brother of Louis
XIV) and thus a member of a family which for several generations showed
a marked tendency to inversion.”[7] Wherever Diderot gathered his
material, his picture of fevered intrigue, jealousy, skilled seduction,
and finally of the frustrated Superior’s decline into acute neurosis, is
unparalleled in fiction before the present century. Indeed, for clinical
accuracy of detail it had no equal until Westphal’s scientific case
study of a homosexual woman was published in 1870. Thus it stands as a
landmark in the literature of female sex variance.
Equally a landmark, though of a very different sort, is Mary
Wollstonecraft’s _Mary, a Fiction_, which since it appeared in 1788,
actually antedated Diderot’s from the viewpoint of open publication. It
is the first novel on female variance to be written by a woman, and its
significance is augmented by its being an English work, written before
its author’s lengthy sojourn in France at the beginning of the
Revolution. The writer of this now forgotten volume (only a handful of
copies are extant here or abroad) is more generally remembered for her
_Vindication of the Rights of Women_ (1798), for her liaison in Paris
during the Revolution with Gilbert Imlay, an American soldier of
fortune, and for her later and comparatively unromantic marriage to
William Godwin. In their recent _Modern Woman, the Lost Sex_.[8]
Lundberg and Farnham devote much space to establishing the _Vindication_
as the germ of all subsequent rebellion of women against their normal
social and biological roles. But though Wollstonecraft strongly defended
the right of women to the individual liberty which was being generally
claimed for all men, an impartial review of feminism hardly appears to
justify so complete an assignment of responsibility to this single work.
The authors of _Modern Woman_ have done an excellent job of analyzing
the unhappy home environment and early experiences that made
Wollstonecraft a champion of her sex and a mordant critic of male
dominance. They pass over, as not germane to their theme, one major
factor in her life, her consuming attachment to Fanny Blood, a young
woman slightly Mary’s senior, which began when the latter was about
fifteen and continued until Fanny’s death twelve years later. Of this
attachment William Godwin in his _Memoirs_ says that it was “so fervent
as ... to have constituted the ruling passion in her mind.”[9]
This friendship is the theme of _Mary_, though the fictional version is
less moving and significant than the known facts on which it was based.
As biographers and critics are agreed that Wollstonecraft had little
creative imagination and drew for all her fiction with almost
embarrassing literalness upon her own experience, a parallel analysis of
the tale and its source incidents will be enlightening. The fictional
“Mary” is the child of wealth, with a single brother and an ailing
mother sentimentally addicted to novel reading. In reality, Mary was the
second of six children of a violent drunken father and a masochistically
submissive mother. The family was so impoverished that from childhood
Mary was acquainted with the bitterest contriving, and in late
adolescence faced earning her own living, a problem not easily solved in
her time for a woman above the servant class.
The father in the novel, dangerous when in his cups and given freely to
wenching, is the only accurate family portrait aside from the heroine
herself. That “tenderness and compassion” for the ill-treated mother
became “the governing propensity in her heart through life” was as true
of the real as of the fictional Mary. As a mere child Wollstonecraft had
often slept on the landing outside her mother’s door so that her father
should not misuse his wife when drunk. Ann, the beloved friend in the
novel, lives, as did Fanny Blood, in wretched poverty and suffers from
unrequited love for a man who has trifled with her affections. Thus
“Mary’s” passionate devotion to Ann is not returned in kind, and she is
“often hurt by involuntary indifference.” Rushing to Ann with glowing
delight and seeing no answering emotion in her friend’s face, “Mary
would check her warm greeting and seem of chilling insensibility.” Then,
perceiving her friend’s hurt surprise, she forces a contrite and
disciplined warmth.
Upon the death of both mother and brother, “Mary” submits to her
mother’s dying wish and to pressure from her father, and marries a boy
who is joint heir to the family property. Her only thought is of
providing a stable home for Ann. Without the marriage’s being
consummated—the mere approach of the husband sickens “Mary”—the weak and
egocentric boy embarks on the conventional Grand Tour of the continent
to complete his education, and Ann moves in as “Mary’s” companion.
“Before she enjoyed Ann’s constant society she imagined it would have
made her completely happy; she was disappointed, and yet knew not what
to complain of.”[10] At her father’s death her husband proposes to
return, but the thought of him still makes her ill. “There was no
previous attachment to give rise to her revulsion. Her friendship with
Ann had occupied her whole heart and resembled a passion.”[11]
This husband, so pallid a figment, was extraneous to the real Mary’s
experience. Actually she and a sister had launched a school for young
girls, for which she had had superficial preparation as a governess, in
order to provide a home for Fanny. The latter had once expressed a wish
to live with Mary, but after much procrastination and one brief trial of
life with the two struggling sisters, she returned to her own wretched
home. Presently she married her vacillating suitor, whom in fact Mary
had brought to terms with a few privately delivered home truths—quite
simply that Fanny’s incipient tuberculosis was due to his long
indecision. After achieving this selfless end Mary fell ill, for the
second time in her life, the first having followed her mother’s death
five years earlier.
In the novel Ann, unmarried and ailing, is taken to Lisbon by “Mary,”
and dies there despite the beneficial change of climate. In reality it
was her husband’s business which took Fanny there, and pregnancy which
aggravated her pulmonary weakness. Gravely ill, she sent a desperate
appeal to Mary, who threw over her teaching, borrowed ruinously to
finance the journey, and even so, arrived in Lisbon only a few hours
before Fanny’s confinement and a few days before her death.
The _Fiction_ was written subsequent not only to that loss but to Mary’s
first efforts at journalism and her resulting encounter with the artist
Henry Fuseli. Almost at once she loved Fuseli passionately. He, however,
was married, and his wife quite naturally vetoed Mary’s incredibly naïve
proposal to become one of the household. The girl, now twenty-six,
believed her own passion to be purely “platonic.” One biographer of
Fuseli reports her as saying to him, “If I thought my passion criminal I
would conquer it or die in the attempt, for immodesty in my eyes is
ugliness.”[12] In the _Fiction_ “Henry” figures as an ailing violinist
met in Lisbon during Ann’s last illness and loved later in maternal
fashion, but made inaccessible by Mary’s own married state.
He told her that the tenderest father could not more anxiously
interest himself in the fate of a darling child than he did in hers
... He had called her “My child!” ... His child, what an association
of ideas. If I had had such a father! She could not dwell on the
thoughts, the wishes which obtruded themselves. Her mind was
unhinged, and passion unperceived filled her whole soul.[13]
Another speech of “Henry’s” is significant in the Ann-“Mary”
relationship: “I would give the world for a picture with the expression
I have seen in your face when you have been supporting your friend [in
your arms].”[14] As to the final relation of “Mary” to her husband,
after her return to England she faints at the sight of him, and finally,
demanding her freedom, retires to the country where she devotes herself
to good works and waits for death, in which she will be reunited with
Ann, and “where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.”[15]
This whole cathartic outpouring raises interesting questions as to the
author’s own understanding of its emotional significance. It was
published anonymously, but her own name and that of Henry appear
unchanged, their relations in the tale, as in life, being beyond
question blameless. So were “Mary’s” with Ann on the surface, though the
author states openly that “Mary always slept with Ann, who was subject
to terrifying dreams.” Yet she substituted “Ann” for Fanny, even though
the latter had passed beyond the possible reach of slander. Was she
perhaps aware of criticism directed against their relationship? Mary
had, at twenty, been governess to the children of Lady Kingsborough in
Ireland, and was dismissed because the children grew too fond of
her.[16] The fourteen-year-old daughter in particular was so attached as
to become ill during a brief separation from Mary. In a letter preserved
in Godwin’s _Memoirs_, Mary refers to the pleasure she derived from the
girl’s “innocent caresses,” an odd adjective had Mary not been aware of
possible caresses between women that were otherwise.
The answer seems to lie in two passages, one from the _Rights of Women_
in which she refers to physical love as “perhaps the most evanescent of
all passions,” and the other in a letter to Imlay written after it was
all too plain that his infatuation had burned out:
Ah, my friend! You do not know the ineffable delight, the exquisite
pleasure, which arises from the unison of affection and desire, when
the whole soul and senses are abandoned to a lively imagination that
renders every emotion delicate and rapturous. Yes; these are emotions
over which satiety has no power and the recollection of which even
disappointment cannot disenchant, but they do not exist without
self-denial. These emotions, more or less strong, appear to me to be
the distinctive characteristics of genius, the foundation of taste,
and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of which the
common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begetters certainly have
no idea. You will smile at an observation that has just occurred to
me: I consider those minds as the most strong and original whose
imagination acts as the stimulus to their senses.[17]
Here is a summing up of the wisdom gained from three love affairs, two
physically unfulfilled, the third disillusioning. The passage also
foreshadows her relations with Godwin, whose own description of their
courtship runs as follows:
The partiality which we conceive for each other ... grew with equal
advances in the mind of each.... One sex did not take the priority
which long established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep
that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that
either party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the
toil spreader or the prey, in the affair.... It was friendship
melting into love.[18]
In Mary’s eyes, Fuseli, Fanny, and she herself evidently bore some of
the stigmata of genius. Imlay, business man, extrovert, casual
adventurer, impetuous lover, was of “the common herd of
child-begetters.” Hers is definitely the feminine romantic ideal of the
subjective aspects of Love outweighing the physical to a point where the
sex of the partner is less important than his personality.
Thus, we have in the last dozen years of the eighteenth century two
novels which sounded the keynotes of much that has followed. Diderot
analyzed an overtly homosexual woman and pronounced her wholly
pathological and destructive, even though he assigned much of the
responsibility for her divagations to the environment in which her
entire life was spent. Wollstonecraft’s novel idealized an innocent
variant relationship as the highest form of emotional experience.
Numerous variations on both these themes appear in the succeeding
century and a half.
The Novel Before 1870
For the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century variant fiction
was so nearly an exclusive product of France that traces appearing
elsewhere may be left for separate consideration. The first pertinent
French item was a typical Romantic Period novel of indifferent literary
quality, Philip Cuisin’s _Clémentine, Orpheline et Androgyne_ (1819). As
its title indicates, intersexual anatomy is responsible for the
heroine’s variant personality, which is used merely as mainspring for a
plot of the wildest extravagance. _Clémentine_ is a beautiful child of
unknown antecedents cast ashore near Carcassone as sole survivor of a
shipwreck. With the approach of puberty her ambiguous sex makes her the
object of so much superstitious hostility among the peasants of the
neighborhood that she is sent by her wealthy protector to a physician in
Cadiz who is glad of the chance to observe such an anomaly.
A child’s unawareness of her own peculiarity had betrayed her to the
peasants of Carcassone. Shocked into neurotic prudery she manages in
Cadiz to avoid suspicion though not curiosity on the part of the
physician’s daughter, who becomes strongly attached to her and is hurt
by her refusal of the easy intimacy common among growing girls.
Clémentine canalizes her waxing male eroticism into strenuous physical
exercise and becomes a proficient fencer. This unfeminine skill and her
habit of going about occasionally in men’s clothing produce violent
infatuation in a bold young woman of the neighborhood who believes her
to be a man, and who plays thereafter the role of villain in the piece.
Because of this woman’s advances, Clémentine is forced to leave her
second home in Cadiz and is subsequently involved in a series of stormy
adventures. She is too feminine to live out her life disguised as a man,
too relentlessly pursued by her evil adorer to settle down as an
independent woman and win a man she has come to love. An interim in a
convent, where she takes refuge from the law after killing a man in a
duel, naturally only produces fresh complications. Here she, herself, is
passionately drawn to the urbane Superior who cherishes her, and a
novice is similarly attracted to her; but she resists all temptations
(and they are many) to give way to her feelings. At last obstacles are
overcome according to the best romantic pattern—she marries her male
beloved, who understands and accepts her anomaly, encourages her to
fence and hunt with him, and enjoys her love, which has “la force réuni
des deux sexes.” The author must have read the contemporary literature
on hermaphroditism, but was evidently shy of attributing his heroine’s
passionate intensity to her anomaly after once he had her settled as a
married woman, and so lays it in part to prenatal influence. Her mother,
we are told, had during pregnancy been very friendly with a Persian
ambassador to the French court, and had been “saturated” with his
oriental tales. Thus, the daughter was predestined to love “avec
l’exaltation d’une Persane.”
The second and slightly more artistic French narrative is a two-volume
novel by Henri de Latouche entitled _Fragoletta_ (1829), which is
concerned primarily with the Napoleonic wars and anti-British
propaganda. Emotional interest centers about the hero’s love for the
title figure, whom he first meets as a boyish girl of fourteen, daring,
brilliant, and free of coquetry. Her Sicilian guardian, knowing himself
pursued by political assassins, implores d’Hauteville to marry and care
for Fragoletta, but d’Hauteville feels that his love for her has roused
no response save lively friendship and so waits for her emotions to
mature. On the guardian’s death he becomes her protector until the
misfortunes of war separate them. Later he hears she has returned to her
native Austria from which she was removed as an infant.
She writes him of discovering there a twin brother, Adriani, who
eventually visits d’Hauteville in his Paris home and falls in love with
his sister, an untouched innocent a year Adriani’s senior. Sent as a spy
to Naples, d’Hauteville sees Fragoletta there at a court ball given by
Queen Caroline, at which Lady Hamilton is a guest. He hears that Adriani
is a spy on the English-Neapolitan side, but because of the need for
concealing his own identity he can neither reveal himself to Fragoletta
nor penetrate the mystery of her presence among the English and her
brother’s treasonous activity.
He then learns from a frantic letter from his sister that Adriani has
seduced her and that she no longer wishes to live. Her mother also has
fallen gravely ill of the shock. D’Hauteville pursues the boy to Paris
only to find him gone again and his sister on her deathbed.
Subsequently, he tracks the traitor-seducer back to Naples and
challenges him to a duel. Fragoletta, still in Naples, begs him not to
expose himself to certain capture by the enemy merely in order to avenge
“un tort exagéré ou peut-être imaginaire,” implying that only his
sister’s naïvete led her to believe herself ravished. D’Hauteville
persists in duelling, however, and overcomes his opponent without
effort. Adriani retreats almost without resistance over the edge of a
cliff and falls to death in the sea below with a feminine cry which
reveals to d’Hauteville that Fragoletta and her twin are one. The reader
is left in doubt whether Fragoletta was, like Clémentine, a
hermaphrodite, or (as seems more probable) was simply an exclusively
lesbian woman. (Similarly the Chevalier d’Eon moved in international
diplomatic circles alternately as man and woman, his true sex being
known only upon his death in 1810.) In the course of the story the
author incorporates a scene between Queen Caroline and Emma Hamilton
which takes place in the former’s sunken marble bath. The queen first
plays the part of lady’s maid in disrobing her beautiful friend, and
later indulges in erotic play until the two drowse off in one another’s
arms in the warm pool. Latouche may have intended this lax court
background to account for Fragoletta’s transformation from a rather
engaging tomboy into an active lesbian.
Far superior from a literary viewpoint to either of these novels was
Balzac’s first venture in the intersexual field, _Seraphitus-Seraphita_
(1834). The heroine of this tale has been mentioned by Natalie Clifford
Barney, a twentieth century writer of lesbian verse, as one of those
androgynes who lend rarity to the Human Comedy.[19] But Seraphita was
not, like Clémentine, a physical anomaly. The novel of which she is the
title figure is a lengthy excursion into Swedenborgian philosophy, and
the girl is raised in an undiluted atmosphere of that particular
mysticism. The result is a sexless and wholly ascetic personality. To
the man who loves her she seems the perfect woman. To a younger girl
whom she leads in fearless ascents of rocky heights above the fjords and
who loves her equally, she seems the perfect man, although there is
never any mystery about her true sex. With neither man nor girl does she
exchange even the most innocent of physical caresses. After her early
death the girl and the man marry one another, their common half-mystical
worship of her constituting a stronger bond than exists between ordinary
lovers.
In the following year Balzac published his much better-known novel, _The
Girl with the Golden Eyes_, a romantic tale involving an overt lesbian,
though the latter enters the story only at the end, the main theme being
her effect upon her passive victim. The story describes the conquest, by
the very flower of Byronic heroes, of a mysterious beauty sequestered in
a Paris mansion with all the vigilance surrounding a caliph’s harem.
Once reached by the hero, the golden-eyed girl proves a paradox of
virginity and voluptuous sophistication until a _lapsus linguae_ betrays
that it is a lesbian of enormous wealth who has initiated her sexually
and kept her hidden from the world of men. This woman, returning from an
absence which made the adventure possible, at once detects the girl’s
infidelity and, in a jealous and sadistic frenzy, kills her. She then
discovers that her rival is her own half-brother and almost physical
twin (they were both illegitimate, their father but one step removed
from royalty), and, consequently, it was his resemblance to her that
made his fatal conquest of the girl so easy.
In the extravagance of the plot and the description of the hero, which
occupies a good quarter of the tale, one might suspect satire upon the
Byronism which was sweeping Europe, except for the romantic seriousness
of the whole. Another long interpolated essay is an arraignment, mordant
in brilliance, of the cruelty, stupidity, and license of Parisian life,
in which one detects echoes from Rousseau: in such an “unnatural” milieu
excesses of evil are only to be expected. Such romantic social
philosophy concerned Balzac here more than the psychology of either
woman. That the golden-eyed girl, sold by her mother at the age of
twelve and a passive partner throughout, should first learn complete
love from the hero, is barely credible. That after a decade in which she
has suffered neither physical nor nervous ill-health she should be so
instantly changed as to prefer death to her former life might be
questioned by the modern psychologist. The lesbian Marquise is hardly
better accounted for. Her cool purchase and long imprisonment of the
girl, whose physical beauty is the only tie suggested between them, make
poor preparation for her heartbreak and sudden desire for convent life
because she has lost “that which seemed the infinite.” Possibly her
half-Spanish, half-royal blood are intended to account for both her
lesbianism and her vagaries of temperament, for gossip credited the
Spanish ruling dynasty as well as the house of Orléans with tendencies
toward homosexuality.
In _Cousin Bette_ (1846), Balzac, with a realism in sharp contrast to
both his earlier tales and in keeping with literary trends of the
intervening dozen years, presents rather casually the half-realized
infatuation of the thwarted spinster, Bette, for Madame Marneffe, the
human instrument she employs to satisfy her much stronger passion for
revenge upon the family who have humiliated her. Valérie Marneffe, who
“spent her days upon a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit
on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments and intrigues ... had
discovered the true nature of this ardent creature burning with wasted
passion, and meant to attach her to herself.”[20] Both women have had
lovers, Bette having striven in vain to hold a Polish artist several
years her junior. But “in this new affection she had found food ... far
more satisfying than her insane passion for Wenceslas, who had always
been cold to her.”[21] Little of physical intimacy is implied between
the two women beyond frequent kisses, and since Balzac is not
particularly reticent about such details, it is not safe to assume any
such relation as existed in _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_. But later
in the book he speaks of such attachments as “the strongest emotion
known, that of a woman for a woman.”[22]
Thus, the faithful observer of the Human Comedy presented three
contrasting types of emotional variance and offered three distinct
explanations of it. In the first, intellectual conditioning was the
causal factor; in the second, a possible inheritance of temperament plus
the certain freedom for self-indulgence provided by limitless wealth;
and in the third, poverty of both circumstance and emotional
opportunity. The resulting experiences also show the writer’s
imaginative range. The first seraphic heroine is as innocent and
passionless as the biblical Ruth. The Spanish Marquise is violent to the
point of melodrama. The warped spinster is confused and groping in
expression as well as feeling.
In the same year that _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_ appeared, Gautier
published _Mlle de Maupin_. The former enjoyed a few months’ priority,
but Gautier’s volume had been promised to the publisher a year before
its appearance, and as the two men’s long friendship began only with
Balzac’s reading of the younger man’s story,[23] there is no question of
influence in either direction.
From the standpoint of modern psychology Gautier’s is the more careful
and complete study. Indeed, having humor, vitality, and a tolerant
bisexual attitude, it is probably the most generally popular of all
variant “classics.” In it an orphaned heiress dons men’s clothes and
sets out to discover how men live when uninhibited by the presence of
ladies. In the course of her adventures Maupin is loved by a young man
of poetic temperament who has had mistresses but found them physically
satisfying only, and by a young woman of good social standing who has
been one of those mistresses. Maupin also has with her for a time a
young girl disguised as a page whom she has rescued from exploitation by
an old rake and on whom she lavishes a devotion both erotic and
maternal. The young man suffers from believing his passion abnormal
until he learns Maupin’s true sex, but then recognizes that for the
first time he has found complete love because he has so many more tastes
in common with this girl than with his previous feminine paramours.
As to the young woman, her passion survives the revelation of Maupin’s
sex, her persistent caresses prove as exciting as the man’s, and Maupin
finishes by spending half the final night depicted with each of them and
by riding off in the morning with markedly unfeminine detachment.
Physically, we have for the first time in modern fiction the explicit
description of a type which has since become associated with homosexual
tendencies in women—the tall, wide shouldered, slim hipped figure
endowed with perfect grace and with great skill in riding and fencing.
Temperamentally we have Maupin’s own description of herself as “of a
third sex, one that has as yet no name above or below.” As a girl she
was “six months older but six years less romantic” than her bosom
friend, for whom her friendship had “all the characteristics of a
passion,” but for years she “burned in her little skin like a chestnut
on the stove” to satisfy what is described as an intellectual curiosity
about the lives of men away from women and their real attitude toward
women.[24] It is this unemotional detachment which Gautier emphasizes as
peculiarly masculine.
Scattered through the story is a quantity of very canny analysis of
intersexual characteristics, and though the tale is supposedly based
upon the life of a seventeenth-century actress, it departs so far from
the known facts about her that it must stand as a monument to the
author’s psychological acumen alone. Since he wrote it at the age of
twenty-four, one cannot escape the suspicion that it was drawn from
personal or at least close secondhand acquaintance with George Sand, so
newly come to Paris in her male costume and so prominent in literary
circles at that moment. It certainly marks a long step forward in the
serious study of a variant personality. (The actual history of Madeleine
Maupin d’Aubigny,[25] late seventeenth-century singer and actress, is
perhaps worth attention because of its contrast to Gautier’s artistic
modification. As a young woman Maupin came to Paris from the provinces
determined upon a stage career, and married her vocal teacher,
d’Aubigny, who was connected with the Opera and who got her the position
upon which she was set. The marriage was apparently a mere strategic
move on her part and was short-lived. A tall woman, and a fencer of
extraordinary ability, Mme. d’Aubigny frequently played young men’s
parts, and soon took to wearing men’s costume off as well as on the
stage. One of her diversions was roaming the streets at night and
provoking men to cross swords with her for the pleasure of worsting
them. She inspired passion in many young women, one of whom, a girl of
good family, ran away with her when her repeated embroilments forced her
to leave Paris. The girl’s parents overtook the eloping couple and put
their daughter into a convent at Avignon.
Being apparently infatuated herself, Maupin resumed woman’s dress and
gained entry to the convent as a novice for the purpose of manoeuvering
her friend’s escape. The means which presented themselves were macabre
enough. A nun died and was buried within the convent enclosure; Maupin
exhumed the body, put it in her friend’s bed, and set fire to the cell;
during the resulting confusion the two young women escaped. But their
subsequent precarious vagabondage apparently cured the girl of her taste
for bohemian freedom and for Maupin; she returned to her parents.
Maupin’s later career was comparatively seamy and unromantic.)
* * * * *
In 1851 Lamartine included in _Nouvelles Confidences_[26] an innocent
infatuation between two adolescent girls which is reminiscent of
Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Balzac’s _Seraphita_. (Though a reference in
Havelock Ellis seems to place Regina among Lamartine’s poetic works, it
is actually prose. His statement that here the theme is treated with
“more or less boldness”[27] also appears unjustified.) Although the
initial attachment between the heroine, Regina, and her school friend,
Clothilde, might be considered “normal,” since it occurs between the
ages of fourteen and seventeen, its later effects compel attention. The
two girls, thrown together in a declining Roman convent school where
supervision is lax, contrive regularly to spend their nights together.
Lamartine describes their hours of long talk and tenderness with such
skill and delicacy that one can doubt neither the basic innocence of
both girls nor the ultimate passion in their embraces.
During their years together Clothilde talks so much of a twin brother
Saluse that Regina falls half in love with him vicariously, but at
seventeen she is married unwillingly to a titled dotard. In the same
year Clothilde’s mother dies, and Clothilde does not long survive this
double loss of her only parent and beloved friend. At Clothilde’s grave
Regina and Saluse meet and fall in love at sight. Their passion runs a
stormy but blameless course, which leads eventually to Regina’s seeking
formal release from her marriage. While she is away from Rome her
petition is granted by the church, but only on condition of Saluse’s
permanent exile from the city. Saluse decides in her absence on exile
for her sake rather than on elopement and public scandal. On learning of
his decision the girl cries out that he who would sacrifice love to
conscience cannot be the brother of Clothilde. ‘At Clothilde’s tomb it
was not she I found again, it was a phantom.... He had her features but
not her heart.’[28]
Lamartine’s effort to explain the girls’ passionate friendship is
interesting if seemingly somewhat confused. Primarily, like Diderot, he
lays responsibility upon the convent environment, where not only are
women segregated but every aspect of their life—music, incense,
pageantry, solitude and idleness—inflames the ‘imagination,’ while the
feeble pretense at education includes nothing to stimulate or discipline
the intellect. Such life produces ‘veritable orientals, fit only for the
harem.’ The specific occasion of their emotional involvement, however,
he says, is Regina’s identification of Clothilde with the unknown
brother of whom the latter talks so eloquently. ‘I should never have
believed in this phenomenon, which reflects and thus redoubles the
beloved object, I should have taken it for the imaginative creation of
poets, had I not seen it with my own eyes in the spirit of Regina.’[29]
This seems a rather feeble attempt to gloss over any homosexual
implication, for Clothilde, though more intellectual and less passionate
than Regina, is in no way masculine. And, in the end, it was precisely
the masculine element in Saluse’s sacrifice of their love which repelled
Regina. It was a man’s decision and not a woman’s, ‘of the head and not
the heart.’ Lamartine’s treatment here of the variant theme gains added
interest from the fact that earlier, in _Jocelyn_, he had sailed
perilously close to the implication of male variance. In this story,
popular enough to supply the libretto for Godard’s opera, a hermit
priest becomes so attached to the “boy” left in his charge that he
suffers agonies of conscience before discovering that his ward is a
disguised girl. Evidently the whole matter of possible intrasexual
attraction held a kind of fascination for Lamartine, though he treated
it with a reserve more Victorian than French.
Toward the end of this decade (1858) a novel appeared, _La Sapho_, cited
by Lewandowski in _Das Sexualproblem ..._[30] as definitely lesbian, and
of added interest in that it was written by a woman, Céleste Venard
comtesse de Chabrillan; but unhappily this has not been available for
examination.
At the beginning of the following decade (1862) Flaubert published
_Salammbo_, of which Krafft-Ebing says that the author made his heroine
homosexual.[31] If this is true at all by modern standards the condition
is latent and of short duration, but because of the expressed judgment
of so prominent an early authority on sex variance the story will be
examined in some detail. It will also be interesting to see with what
“pitiless method” Flaubert dissects the emotional economy of an
inhibited girl. To be sure Salammbo’s adolescent devotion to the virgin
moon-goddess Tanit (comparable to the Greek Astarte and the Roman Diana,
and allied also to the Roman Bona Dea) verges upon passion, but it is so
described as to suggest the sexual overtones in any ecstatic religious
experience rather than to imply a variant element.
Daughter of Hamilcar of Carthage, Salammbo grows up in a time of such
peril that she is raised in solitary seclusion; her only companions are
an aged nurse and the eunuch who is chief priest in the temple of Tanit.
She would like to become a “devotee,” but Hamilcar designs a politically
profitable marriage for her, and forbids her initiation into the inner
mysteries of the cult (which would involve ritual defloration, though
Flaubert does not mention this fact).
She had grown up in abstinence, in fastings and purifications, always
surrounded by exquisite and solemn things, her body saturated with
perfumes and her soul with prayers.... Of obscene symbols she knew
nothing ... (she) worshipped the Goddess in her sidereal aspect.
She says to the priest:
It is a spirit that drives me to this love of mine.... [The other
gods] are all too far away, too high, too insensible; while She—I
feel her as a part of my life, she fills my soul.... I am devoured
with eagerness to see her body.
This may seem suggestive, but she denies physical interest when under
the fires of spring and the full moon, she cries out to her nurse:
Sometimes gusts of heat seem to rise from the depths of my being....
Voices call me ... fire rises in my breast; it stifles me, I feel
that I am dying ... it is a caress folding about me and I feel
crushed.... Oh! that I might lose myself in the night mists ... that
I could _leave my body_ [author’s italics] and be but a breath, a
ray, then float up to thee, O Mother [Tanit].[32]
Her nurse, wise in the signs of physical ripening, does not take this
for religious ecstasy.
“‘You must choose a husband from the sons of the Elders, since it was
[your father’s] wish,’ she says. ‘Your sorrow will vanish in the arms
of a man.’ ‘Why?’ asked the young girl. All the men she had seen had
horrified her with their wild bestial laughter and their coarse
limbs.”[33]
These men are her father’s barbarian mercenaries, and Flaubert’s picture
of their drunken orgy after victory would revolt a stronger spirit than
that of a sheltered girl. Her first direct encounter is with Matho the
Libyan, “his great mouth agape, his necklet of silver moons tangled in
the hairs on his chest.” Crazed with passion for her, he steals the
Zaimph [sacred veil of Tanit] from the temple as a love charm, breaks
into Salammbo’s chambers at midnight, and attempts to ravish and abduct
her. Naturally terrified, she summons aid in time to save herself, but
she does not understand what it is he wants of her. Later she tells him:
“Your words I did not understand, but I knew you wished to drag me
toward something horrible, to the bottom of some abyss....”[34]
The story then centers around her personal conflict between her desire
to retrieve the Zaimph and her horror of the barbarian who has fled the
city without returning it. Finally, under religious compulsion to save
Carthage by regaining its sacred talisman, she makes her way to the
Libyan’s tent. She has been instructed by the high priest to resist
Matho in no way, and consequently she submits to his embrace.
Salammbo, who was accustomed to eunuchs, yielded to amazement at the
strength of this man.... A feeling of lassitude overpowered her ...
all the time she felt that she was in the grip of some doom, that she
had reached a supreme and irrevocable moment.... Some power from
within and at the same time above her, a command from the gods,
forced her to yield to it; she was borne up as on clouds, and fell
back swooning.[35]
But on being questioned subsequently by her father as to what occurred,
she is evasive.
Salammbo told no more, perhaps through shame, or else because in her
extreme ingenuousness she attached but little importance to the
soldier’s embraces.... Then she examined the Zaimph and when she had
well considered it, she was surprised to find that she did not
experience that ecstasy which she had once pictured to herself. Her
dream was accomplished; yet she was melancholy.[36]
Although she does not see Matho again and feels only hatred for him “...
the anguish from which she formerly suffered had left her, and a strange
calm possessed her. Her eyes were not so restless, and shone with limpid
fire.... She did not keep such long or such rigid fasts now.... In spite
of her hatred of him, she would have liked to see Matho again.”[37]
This is a master’s account of the effect of physical release on an
unawakened girl.
Considerably later Salammbo is married, according to her father’s plan,
to the effete prince, Narr’ Havas.
He wore a flower-painted robe fringed with gold at the hem; his
braided hair was caught up at his ears by two arrows of silver.... As
she watched him, she was wrapped about with a host of vague thoughts.
This young man with his gentle voice and woman’s figure charmed her
by the grace of his person and seemed like an elder sister sent by
the Baalim to protect her. She did not understand how this young man
could ever become her master. The thought of Matho came to her and
she could not resist the desire to learn what had become of him....
Although she prayed every day to Tanit for Matho’s death, her horror
of the Libyan was growing less. She was confusedly aware that there
was something almost like religion in the hatred [sic] with which he
had persecuted her, and she wished to see in Narr’ Havas a
reflection, as it were, of a violence which still bemused her.[38]
These two passages indicate quite the opposite of homosexual emotion.
When, after months of carnage, Matho is taken captive and literally torn
to pieces by the people of Carthage, Salammbo is witness to his terrible
death. Instead of sharing in the shrieking triumph of the populace, she
“could once more see him in his tent, clasping his arms about her waist,
stammering gentle words. She thirsted to feel and hear those things
again and was at the point of screaming aloud.” And when Matho “fell
back and moved no more,” Salammbo also collapsed into unconsciousness
from which she never recovered. The concluding words of the book are:
“So died Hamilcar’s daughter, because she had touched the mantle of
Tanit.” Flaubert’s novel carries symbolic overtones not apparent in
brief summary, and since Tanit was allied to the Roman Bona Dea, goddess
of sexual fulfillment and fertility, her Zaimph doubtless represents
heterosexual passion. Salammbo, conditioned to asceticism throughout her
early life, dies of the unresolved conflict between these two dominating
drives.
* * * * *
A minor novel which Krafft-Ebing mentions as also “mainly lesbian in
theme”[39] may shed some light on what he intended by the term. It is
Ernest Feydeau’s _La Comtesse de Chalis_ (1867), in which a dashing
Parisian beauty neglects her children and tubercular husband for a
spectacular career in _le haut monde_. An idealistic and infatuated
professor of the new _Ecole Normale_, who is keenly aware of belonging
to a lower social class, ruins himself financially in his attempt to
maintain a place in the countess’s world. The story, told by him, is
chiefly concerned with his efforts to save her from the frivolous and
corrupt life of her circle. Her evil genius is a fabulously wealthy
Prince Titiane, diseased and depraved at twenty-one, whom she repeatedly
promises to dismiss from her life but to whose influence she
continuously succumbs. She goes gradually from bad to worse, and ends by
consorting _à trois_ with him and one of the city’s celebrated
courtesans, his long-time mistress; however, this situation develops
only in the last pages of a lengthy volume. The Prince is described
throughout as so effeminate in appearance, dress, and appurtenances that
it would be easy to imagine him a woman in disguise, but there is no
textual support for such an inference. Late in the story it develops
that it is solely his use of the whip which binds the countess to him,
and that this flagellation is without sexual sequel, since Titiane is
impotent.
Aside from being unusually tall and arrogant, the countess has no
masculine attributes whatever, either physical or psychological, and it
is never she who wields the lash. Her dominant motive is an egotistic
compulsion to be the most dazzling figure in Paris. Since the fantastic
young Croesus, Titiane, is the arbiter of social destinies in her
particular world, she is slavishly submissive to him. Her interest in
the courtesan, though it is charged with emotion throughout, appears to
be the obsession of an ambitious woman with the techniques of a serious
rival, and the emotion is predominantly jealousy. Her final indulgence
in sexual promiscuity results from her determination to be outdone by
that rival in no field whatsoever. Analyzed by a modern psychiatrist,
the countess would be diagnosed as a complete narcissist, unable to care
the slightest for anyone but herself.
Consideration of these two novels suggests that to Krafft-Ebing any
failure of feminine heterosexual adjustment was included in that
“contrary sexual feeling” which was equated throughout his later study
with active homosexuality. As we have seen, modern psychoanalysts
consider narcissism and homosexuality as closely related in etiology;
yet it is confusing to have the more specific term applied to
experiences which, like Salammbo’s and the countess’s, include relations
with men and none with their own sex. “Mainly lesbian in theme” _La
Comtesse de Chalis_ certainly is not.
The fact that in a contemporary novel considered later, Feydeau’s _La
Comtesse_ was bracketed with Gautier’s _Mlle Maupin_ and Balzac’s _Girl
with the Golden Eyes_ may also have contributed to Krafft-Ebing’s
thinking it more “lesbian” than it is. Indeed, the modern investigator
sometimes suspects that scientific writers had not read all of the
belletristic titles they referred to but were satisfied to rely on the
word of others with respect to them. Another detail which might have
strengthened an impression of similarity to Balzac is Feydeau’s
denunciation of _le haut monde_ in imitation of Balzac’s earlier
indictment of metropolitan life in general. The new element in Feydeau
is acute class consciousness in his condemnation of the “idle rich.”
However second-rate from an artistic standpoint _La Comtesse de Chalis_
may be, it is a remarkably exact contemporary record of “the mixture of
splendor and misery ... the sense of uneasy satiety, of restless torpor,
of indefinable dread” described by the modern Albert Guérard as
prevailing in the late Second Empire.[40]
Evidence from Poets
Although fiction made up so preponderant a part of variant writing in
the nineteenth century, poetry also made a sizable contribution. In
1816, Coleridge, who with Wordsworth is generally thought of as
initiating the Romantic Period in England, published two parts of a
narrative poem, _Christabel_, which was never finished. All college
students of literature know that eerie fragment of medieval romance with
its occult overtones.
Christabel, the innocent heroine whose betrothed is “far away” on a
knightly quest, steals out from her father’s castle at midnight to pray
for her lover beneath a giant oak hung with mistletoe—a test of maidenly
courage in the face of both natural and occult darkness, for oak and
mistletoe still retain pre-Christian connotations. In the moonlit wood
she finds a distressed lady, Geraldine, who tells a story of kidnaping
and violence designed to win her sympathy. As she helps the fainting
lady into the castle certain signs forebode evil to a reader acquainted
with demonic lore: Geraldine’s eyes gleam in the dark like an animal’s,
she is so faint that she requires Christabel’s aid in crossing the sill,
and once she is inside a mastiff moans in its sleep and embers on the
hearth shoot out tongues of flame.
In Christabel’s maiden chamber while the two are disrobing Geraldine
(and she alone) sees the “spectre” of Christabel’s dead mother come to
guard her child, and bids the hovering spirit be off. Though she has
shown fear at sight of a carven angel in the room and has made poor work
of feigning prayer, Geraldine still has power to prevent Christabel’s
seeing the vision or being warned, and presently the two lie down
together “in appropriate medieval nudity.”[41] With fascinated loathing
Christabel notes that Geraldine’s “breast and side” are those of a
withered hag; still she is powerless to resist the other’s spell, and in
Geraldine’s arms she falls into a trance.
With open eyes (ah woe is me!)
Asleep and dreaming fearfully,
Fearfully dreaming, yet, I wis,
Dreaming that alone, which is—
O sorrow and shame! Can this be she
The lady [Christabel] who knelt at the old oak tree?
Afterward “Her limbs relax, her countenance Grows sad and soft,” and in
her sleep she both smiles and weeps, while Geraldine “Seems to slumber
still and mild As a mother with her child.”
In the morning Christabel wakes to find her guest already clothed, but
“fairer yet and yet more fair!” for now her shriveled bosom has the
fullness of a young woman’s, a subtle allusion to the widespread folk
superstition that sexual contact with innocent youth heals sickness and
restores old age. Christabel is troubled by “such perplexity of mind As
dreams too lively leave behind,” and delivers her morning greeting in
“low faltering tones.” “Sure I have sinned!” she feels, but is uncertain
precisely how, and prays merely that “He who on the cross did groan
Might wash away her sins unknown.”[42]
Roy Basler, in his _Sex, Symbolism and Psychology in Literature_,
devotes a long chapter[41] to the poem which is recommended to the
reader for its minute analysis of Coleridge’s skill in handling the
whole episode. As he points out, it is “too realistic psychologically
... for one to avoid an erotic implication.” The remainder of the poem
contains nothing further of variant significance. The spell of
Geraldine’s touch has made it impossible for Christabel to give her
father anything beyond the simplest objective account of how the woman
came there, and the action merely prepares for later events never
written.
Of the content of these three projected “books” we have only a brief
account by Dr. James Gilman, with whom Coleridge lived later while
undergoing treatment for his addiction to opium. The relevant points
follow: Complications force Geraldine to abandon her feminine form and
to assume that of Christabel’s absent lover. In this guise she woos the
girl and gains the father’s consent to a marriage, even though
Christabel is filled with inexplicable loathing for her at the altar.
Had Coleridge carried through this outlined narrative, he could
scarcely, as Basler says, “have avoided even more harrowing suggestions
of a sexual nature” in Geraldine’s disguised courtship. Significant of
her sexual duality are repeated references to her height and her
arrogant bearing.
Basler points out that after 1801, Coleridge’s moral reputation was
precarious because of his opium habit, and that “no man ever feared
calumny more keenly.” Although the poet began _Christabel_ and had the
entire plot worked out at that time, he published none of it for fifteen
years. When it finally appeared, the _Edinburgh Review_ attacked it with
“charges of obscenity” and “implications of personal turpitude,” while
“parodies and vulgar continuations of the poem made the most of leering
improbabilities.” The dread of further personal attack discouraged
Coleridge from completing the work, and no other English poet seems to
have approached the subject of variance for nearly a half century.
The next poem that appeared in England, however—Christina Rossetti’s
_Goblin Market_, written in 1859—is so akin to _Christabel_ in its
overtones of folk magic and so alien to the temporally intervening
French poetry on variant themes that it is best to examine it here. It
is generally regarded as variant or even lesbian, but the vivid
narrative is too symbolic for precise sexual interpretation. On the
surface it recounts that two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, as they stroll
at dusk are daily tempted by “goblin men” to buy the most luscious of
ripe fruits. Though knowing the fruits to be forbidden, Laura succumbs,
pays with a curl of her golden hair (having no money), and partakes
alone, Lizzie having fled. “She sucked their fruit globes fair or red
... sucked and sucked and sucked ... until her tongue was sore....”
After this indulgence she can no longer see or hear the goblins, and
wastes away with pining for their delicacies.
When she seems “knocking at Death’s door,” Lizzie, aware that another
girl in like case has recently died, goes to purchase fruit for her
sister with honest coin. The goblins refuse her money and use every
means to force their wares between her own lips, but she resists and
returns so dripping with crushed fruit that she is hopeful of bringing
some satisfaction to her sister. Laura kisses her hungrily, but more in
gratitude for the dreadful risk she has run than in greed for what
lingers “in dimples of her chin.” Indeed, the fruit now scorches Laura’s
lips and is wormwood on her tongue, so that from loathing she is seized
with violent convulsion and falls unconscious. In the morning she awakes
cured, and Lizzie suffers no ill effects at all.
As a translation of voluptuous experience into decorous terms the poem
cannot be equaled, but any attempt at literal reconstruction of the
experience bogs down in the symbolic details. Certain points however are
implicit in the text: Laura’s experience is a complete sexual release
which it needs no acquaintance with Freud to recognize as oral-erotic.
All the goblins are male, but they are grotesque, repulsive, more animal
than human save for their ability to hawk their wares, and these
irresistible wares take the shapes of ripe cherries, peaches, plums,
melons, “figs that fill the mouth”—in short, the whole catalog of
age-old symbols for female charms. Although the sisters are described as
“Sleeping in their curtained bed Cheek to cheek and breast to breast,”
there is no more incestuous lesbian implication here than in Sidney’s
_Arcadia_. These embraces are plainly symbols of the innocence from
which Laura lapses and to which she returns by virtue of Lizzie’s
steadfast purity. Perhaps the only safe inference is that Laura’s “fall”
is solitary, even subjectively induced (psychiatric records prove
fantasy to be an adequate agent). Her subsequent neurotic inhibition is
the product of guilt, and ends in a releasing hysteric convulsion
somehow brought about by Lizzie’s ministrations.
This mundane analysis of an exquisite work of art does reveal its
author’s emotional pattern. It is known that Miss Rossetti had a
somewhat cloistered life, largely spent in the company of a mother to
whom she was intensely devoted and a sister who later became an Anglican
nun, all three women being almost fanatically devout. She was twice
passionately in love with men, but refused them both on the grounds of
religious incompatibility. The first of these episodes occurred when she
was barely seventeen. The man, a recent convert to Catholicism, returned
to the Church of England when he discovered that Christina would not
marry a papist, but later reverted to Rome, and the whole affair seems
to have constituted a two-year span of acute emotional disturbance in
the girl’s life. (She subsequently fainted upon meeting him unexpectedly
in the street.) It may well have been that any man’s ability to switch
religious camps so readily under the stress of passion produced a
reaction to the whole business of sex such as we find in _Goblin
Market_, which was written when its author was nearing thirty.
Tragically enough, her lifelong ascetic repression broke during her last
illness in a protracted delirium which revealed at what cost it had been
maintained.
* * * * *
France was as always more tolerant of sexual latitude in literature than
England, but even there the open-mindedness which made _Mlle de Maupin_
acceptable in 1835 was not constant. Since it is impossible to give in
short compass any account of the alternating waves of liberalism and
conservative reaction that swayed public opinion there during the middle
decades of the century, it must suffice to note that Charles Baudelaire
published his _Fleurs du Mal_ during an interim of clerical dominance,
and in consequence the volume was condemned by the _Tribunal
Correctionnel_ in August 1857. As early as 1846 the publisher Levy had
announced on advertising pages of other works a forthcoming title by
Baudelaire, _Les Lesbiennes_,[43] which never appeared as such, probably
because the title was too daring. Only three poems in the _Fleurs_ touch
upon lesbianism, but the longest of these was one of the six which were
ordered removed from the volume and which were not publicly printed
again until 1911.
This poem, “Femmes Damnées, I,” some twenty-six quatrains in length,
describes rather explicitly the conquest of a feminine and passive young
girl, half reluctant because still dreaming of heterosexual love, by a
more aggressive feminine partner who decries the physical brutality and
spiritual incompatibility of any male lover. In “Femmes Damnées, II” the
poet watches a band of lesbians at a shore resort behaving much as any
uninhibited heterosexual group might do, and accords them more than even
his customary despairing compassion. Such love as theirs is doomed to go
unsated, and they themselves, he says, will pass progressively to drink
and drugs and “loveless loves that know no pity.” And yet in “Lesbos” he
holds Sappho guilty of a “crime of the spirit” when, faithless to her
own earlier teaching and practice, she “flung the dark roses of her love
sublime To a vain churl (Phaon.)”[44] (Note: “Lesbos” had appeared in
1850 in an anthology, _Les Poètes de l’Amour_, published by Lemerre. It
was omitted from the 1858 edition of that volume, but reappeared in the
edition of 1865.)[45] The Catholic Baudelaire was essentially a mystic,
not a romantic with that faith in Love which had been the gospel of the
preceding decades. Obsessed as he was by the failure of all passion to
satisfy the human craving for perfection, it is natural that homosexual
passion, inevitably “unassuageable, sterile and outcast,” should seem to
him the essence of pitiable futility. This negative judgment, however,
is not given in terms of conventional morality.
Within a decade the wave of conservatism had so far receded that Paul
Verlaine’s _Les Amies, Scènes d’Amour Sapphique_ (1867), though
published in Brussels for safety, apparently encountered in France no
harsher judgment than a comment in the _Bulletin Trimestriel_ that they
were by a poet of the school of M. Leconte de Lisle, and were “fort
singuliers.”[46] The slim sheaf of sixteen pages contained six poems,
subsequently included in his volume _Parallèlement_, which described
lesbian love and its overt expression more explicitly than Baudelaire’s
condemned verses, or indeed than any other non-erotic work up to that
time. The “Pensionnaires” are sisters in the middle teens, the younger
of whom still ‘smiles with innocence’ despite the elder’s far from
innocent ministrations. The pair in “Sur le Balcon,” dreaming only of
the love between women, are ‘a strange couple, pitied by other
heterosexual couples.’ “Printemps” and “Eté” reproduce the situation in
Baudelaire’s “Femmes Damnées, I” except that here the younger and more
innocent girl is neither reluctant nor apprehensive. In “Per Amica
Silentia” the poet applies for the first time the adjective
“esseulées”—solitary, left alone—to those who ‘in these unhappy times’
are set apart by “le glorieux stigmate,” thus foreshadowing the social
isolation lamented sixty years later in the _Well of Loneliness_, but
indicating by the adjective “glorieux” that his sentiment, unlike
Baudelaire’s, is one of championship. In the final “Sappho” he describes
the poet, hollow-eyed, pacing a cold shore, restless as a she-wolf,
weeping and tearing her hair over Phaon’s indifference until finally she
plunges into the sea in despair at the contrast between her present
state and the ‘young glory of her early loves.’[47] It is more than
likely that it was from this poem that Rilke derived his interpretation
of Sappho’s “Lament” heretofore mentioned.
During the preceding year (1866) there had appeared in England
Swinburne’s _Poems and Ballads: First Series_, which raised an outcry on
several counts—its general “paganism,” its evidence of French influence
(particularly that of Baudelaire), and its scattering of poems with a
homosexual tinge. Swinburne had, in his youth, been intimate with the
much older Sir Richard Burton, famous translator of the _Arabian Nights_
and author of an appendix on that “sotadic zone” in the Mediterranean
region which in his opinion favored the development of homosexual
tendencies. Later Swinburne fell under the influence of Richard
Monckton-Milnes, famous for a library of variant erotica. As both of
these friendships were matters of common knowledge, when _Poems and
Ballads_ appeared, attention focussed naturally on such poems as
“Erotion,” “Hermaphroditus,” “Fragoletta,” “Hesperia,” and the fairly
numerous group with a lesbian coloring, though none of these were
explicit or described a realistic contemporary situation in the manner
of Verlaine.
“Anactoria” is a ten-page plaint from Sappho to a girl who no longer
reciprocates her love, but it differs little from Swinburne’s many
laments celebrating all love as pain. The “Sapphics” describe life on
Mitylene, “place whence all gods fled ... full of fruitless women and
music only.” A half dozen stanzas scattered through other poems—notably
“Dolores,” “Faustine,” and “Masque of Queen Bersabe”—echo the same note.
Swinburne’s attitude is unsympathetic, colder even than Baudelaire’s and
more scornful, with emphasis always upon the barrenness of lesbian love,
as might be expected from a poet who occasionally made almost a fetish
of baby-worship.
All of the longer biographies of Swinburne give some account of a
projected narrative in mixed prose and verse upon which he worked
intermittently between 1864 and 1867 but never finished. What remains of
manuscript and galley proof is now in the British Museum, after a
half-century in the possession of the notorious rare-book dealer and
literary forger, Thomas Wise. It was finally edited and given private
publication in 1952 by Langdon Hughes, an idolatrous admirer of
Swinburne, for whom it held the promise of becoming, if completed, one
of the greater English novels. Unhappily, neither the scant surviving
text nor Mr. Hughes’s overwhelming volume of annotation and championship
convey to the reader much of that promise or of the author’s projected
intent. As Swinburne himself gave it no title it is generally known by
the suggestive name of its central figure: _Lesbia Brandon_. Georges
Lafourcade, in his scholarly two-volume study of Swinburne, suggests
that this character was drawn from Jane Faulkner,[48] daughter of one of
the poet’s friends, who also inspired “The Triumph of Time” (fifteen
pages of bitter reproach for failure to love him and save him from other
fateful loves). For this dark, spirited young girl he seems to have
nursed briefly his only “normal” passion; she responded to his
half-hysterical romantic proposal with a helpless burst of laughter, and
it needed but the one touch of ridicule to snuff out the hardly lighted
spark.[49] Lafourcade believes that Jane herself “avait quelque chose
d’anormal,” and certainly the description of Lesbia is suggestive: dark,
heavy-lidded, taciturn, Byronically proud, with a pathological hatred of
men. When, on her deathbed, she is tenderly embraced by the man who
adores her she shows only “mad repugnance, blind absolute horror.” In
her youth she had loved a governess and threatened suicide when the
woman talked of marrying. Later she was an enthusiastic student of
Sappho and wrote many love poems from the masculine viewpoint.
The emotional life of the hero, Hubert, up to the time of his meeting
with Lesbia is said to be a quite frank parallel of Swinburne’s own. The
critical first encounter occurs while Hubert is dressed as a girl, and
this disguise is responsible for Lesbia’s immediate interest. Their
subsequent relations are not developed in the portions of the story that
Swinburne committed to paper, nor is much of Lesbia’s experience save
her eventual slow suicide by opium, in an atmosphere heavily fragrant
with flowers and eau de cologne. Among the disconnected residual
fragments are two: “Turris Iburnea” and “La Bohème Dédorée,” in which
the poet presents Leonora Harley, a beautiful but vulgar and stupid
demi-mondaine. This character was said to be drawn directly from Adah
Isaacs Menken, who was also the original of his “Dolores”—a fifteen page
description of an insatiable nymphomaniac. There is reason, as will
appear later, to believe that Menken’s temperament included a variant
strain. That Swinburne intended to make use of this in his plot is
strongly suggested by the following:
Over their evening Leonora Harley guided with the due graces of her
professional art [that of courtesan]. It was not her fault if she
could not help asking her young friend [Hubert] when he had last met
a dark beauty: she had seen him once with Lesbia.[50]
Further evidence that he planned to incorporate a lesbian element in the
story is found in his correspondence of 1866, where he boasted that
having won an undeservedly scandalous reputation because of that element
in _Poems and Ballads_, he meant to live up to it in his current effort,
which would give his countrymen real cause for Philistine horror.[51]
It is known that Swinburne was still at work on the manuscript in 1867
when his meeting with Mazzini deflected his interests into new channels.
After the years of political discipleship which produced _Songs Before
Sunrise_, he returned to the interrupted narrative. Following that, its
history becomes confused. Certain passages in the hands of his
publishers reached the stage of galley proof but became mixed with
proofs of other incomplete work. Sections of manuscript entrusted to his
good friend, Watts-Dunton, were “mislaid,” and the poet’s repeated pleas
and complaints never stimulated him to find them. Though Langdon Hughes
finds Watts-Dunton guilty of criminal rascality,[52] one cannot
help wondering whether all this apparent carelessness may not have been
well-meant discretion.
The text as it now stands is almost wholly in prose, and the few songs
it contains have, like “The Triumph of Time” and “Dolores,” been
published among Swinburne’s other poems. Nothing in it is at all daring;
there is nothing to account for Lesbia’s variance, nor any indication of
how far the relations between her and Leonora would have gone. But it is
clear that Swinburne, like his hero, worshipped the repressed, intense
and melancholy Lesbia, and despised Leonora, the bisexual wanton. A
reasonable conjecture is that Lesbia’s early passions had been innocent;
that even though despising Leonora she was unable to resist the other’s
seduction; and that self-contempt motivated her suicide—a plot allowing
plenty of latitude for the author’s intent to shock the British reading
public.
CHAPTER IV.
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY
Fertility in France
The sultry uneasiness in French society recorded by Feydeau in 1867 soon
broke in the storm of the Franco-Prussian war, which ended monarchy in
France. As is usual in time of war, all fiction concerned with emotional
subtleties dwindled, and the years from 1870 to 1880 produced
comparatively few variant items. One, however, was significant in being
the first novel to attack lesbianism as a moral and medical problem. It
was Adolphe Belot’s _Mlle Giraud, Ma Femme_, and it began in 1870 as a
serial in the newspaper _Le Figaro_. Westphal’s clinical report on a
lesbian woman had appeared in Germany early in the year, and it seems
probable that Belot capitalized at once on the interest it aroused in
medical circles, turning out instalments with journalistic facility, for
he produced popular novels by the dozen. Westphal had concluded that his
patient’s compulsive homosexuality was not an isolated pathological
streak in an otherwise sound nature, but a general state related to
manic-depressive insanity (“_sogenannte folie circulaire_”), and Belot
mentions early in his novel the sad difference between the French
casualness with regard to lesbianism and the serious concern prevalent
in Germany, although he does not enlarge upon the latter.
The serial was stopped “in the interests of morality,” but it soon
appeared in book form and ran to several editions (printings) before
1880.[1] All Belot’s novels exploited sex, the boldest requiring
anonymous private printing, so that he was experienced in skirting the
limits of acceptability. When the serial version was censored he had
only to delete or alter condemned passages, amplify the virtuous tone of
the unpublished portion (there is a moral harangue interpolated baldly
in the middle of the book) and profit by the publicity which censorship
always provides.
_Mlle Giraud_ follows the course of a man’s marriage to a girl who
stubbornly refuses to consummate the union. Adrien has been warned
against marrying Paule by a young matron of his acquaintance, but since
Mme. Blangy will give him no reason for her warning, he ignores it.
After several months he suspects this woman, still his wife’s
inseparable companion, of being a blind for some illicit affair of
Paule’s. He tracks the two to an apartment which he examines in their
absence and finds to be a lush love-nest, with some details reminiscent
of the boudoir of the _Girl with the Golden Eyes_. Among other things,
he finds there that volume, along with Diderot’s _La Religieuse_,
Gautier’s _Maupin_, and “Feydeau’s latest, _La Comtesse de Chalis_.”
Adrien’s life as a civil engineer has kept him out of Paris for some
years and left him so unaware of homosexuality among respectable women
that none of these suggestive details arouses his suspicion. It is only
upon his meeting M. Blangy, separated for several years from his wife,
that Adrien learns of the lesbian relationship between the two women.
The two husbands institute a joint campaign to separate their wives, but
it is too late. For the few months Adrien has spent in travel to escape
insupportable domestic tension, Paule has been free for the first time
in her life to indulge her tastes as freely as she likes, and her health
has been gravely affected. During the collapse which follows upon
Adrien’s taking her to North Africa, Paule cries out one day against the
wickedness of segregation in boarding schools where loneliness drives
girls to emotional dependence upon their own sex. ‘I believe it is not
so often men who ruin women,’ she says. ‘It is women who ruin each
other.’[2]
At this her husband begins to regard her as morally ill rather than
depraved, and his new sympathy brings her to the verge of normal passion
for him. But at this crucial moment, Paule’s recapture by Mme. Blangy
destroys all possibility of subsequent adjustment. The conflict ends
with Paule’s complete subjection by her lesbian friend and her death
from meningitis, supposedly the direct result of sexual excess. Adrien,
learning later that Mme. Blangy has begun the conquest of another girl,
manages under the guise of accident to drown the seductress. M. Blangy,
who guesses the truth, tells him he has done the world a service in
removing “cette reptile,” and the author leaves little doubt that he
himself agrees.
Neither girl shows any sign of masculinity except that Paule’s voice is
unusually low and penetrating. Mme. Blangy, the aggressor, is the
essence of flighty femininity. But Paule shows a ripeness of figure
unusual in an unmarried girl, which Adrien naïvely takes for promise of
unawakened _volupté_, and both exhibit a cool and intelligent competence
in dealing with practical details of their secret liaison which is
overmature for their years. The cause of both girls’ abnormality is the
time-worn segregation in boarding school, Mme. Blangy’s having begun
earlier in her life than Paule’s.
Heterosexual frigidity as a direct result, however, makes its pioneer
literary appearance in this novel. To the majority of variant women thus
far encountered, heterosexual experience was also attributed, and of the
handful to which it was not, only five—Mary Frith, Wollstonecraft’s
Mary, Lesbia Brandon, and one each in the poems of Baudelaire and
Verlaine—have expressed antipathy to the male. Even in these cases
revulsion was presented as a part of what Ellis calls the “homosexual
diathesis,” not as the result of previous lesbian activity. Although the
present writer has not encountered earlier scientific authority for
Belot’s claim, his was not a mind likely to originate such an idea. His
attributing meningitis to sexual excess was derived from contemporary
medical theory, and it is probable that his holding homosexuality
responsible for heterosexual failure was similarly grounded. Certainly
the thesis was too popular with moralists and educators of the next half
century to have stemmed from the passing comment of a minor novelist.
During the decade in which _Mlle Giraud_ was the outstanding variant
title, Barbey d’Aurevilly, nearing the end of a long career, published
_Les Diaboliques_, and in one of these short stories, “The Crimson
Curtain” there is a rather boyish girl, the pink of propriety when under
the eye of her guardians, but unfemininely bold and aggressive with a
male boarder in their house. Since none of her hidden sophistication is
attributed to homosexual experience, and as the macabre end of the tale
is her death from heart failure during a night of unrestrained
heterosexual activity, the only implication seems to be that women with
masculine traits are also “masculine” in the intensity of their sexual
endowment, an idea previously hinted in Cuisin’s _Clémentine_. The
notion has reappeared more modernly in ordinary as well as variant
fiction, but in the 1870’s it would have run counter to growing
scientific opinion that male secondary characteristics in women implied
homosexuality.
In the course of the same years Zola’s literary torrent was beginning to
flow, and it is known that many of his novels, notably those treating of
metropolitan life in Rome, London and Paris, include incidental sketches
of variant women. No pretense can be made here to having read or even
skimmed his entire output, but _La Curée_ (1874) may be cited as a
sample appearing during the decade in question. The significant figures
are a pair of wealthy young married women who appear intermittently
among the numerous background figures who are regularly referred to as
“the inseparables” by their friends, and by the author, and who are
strongly reminiscent in both appearance and behavior of Mlle Giraud and
Mme. Blangy. As with the latter pair, their friendship is said to have
begun in boarding school and to have continued uninterrupted by their
respective marriages, but it has no dramatic outcome nor any important
significance to the plot.
As was said in introducing the nineteenth century, the last two decades
saw a sharp increase in all sorts of writing on variance. In the
scientific field the great names were Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Ellis, and
Hirschfeld, the last three being crusaders for official leniency and
general tolerance on the grounds that homosexuality is inborn and
therefore should not be penalized. There was much talk of an
“intermediate sex,” whose condition was referred to as “inversion”
(Ellis’s term). The term _perversion_ was confined to those who were
able to find heterosexual satisfaction and whose homosexual activities
were therefore judged to be willful and unjustified. This hereditary
view did not gain popular currency until late in the century, but as it
spread, the controversy it engendered began to be reflected in fiction.
* * * * *
With 1880 the steady stream of variant fiction began to flow, starting
with Zola’s _Nana_. In this well-known life history of a courtesan the
reader will recall the gradual progress of the robustly heterosexual
heroine from revulsion against an affair between her friend, Satin, and
Mme. Robert and against the lesbian society of the fat Laure’s cafe,
through indifferent tolerance of such activity, to her own final active
relations with Satin which end only at the latter’s death. (This
premature death carries a faint implication that Satin’s long sustained
lesbianism was less healthy than Nana’s predominantly heterosexual
life). All the stages of Nana’s habituation to homosexuality are
presented with the same naturalism which marks Zola’s portrayal of her
other affairs, and there can be little doubt that his material was drawn
from direct observation of the Paris underworld.
The physical types described at Laure’s cafe are noteworthy. The
majority are women in their forties or over, obese and repulsive, whose
outcropping of masculine tendencies might thus seem to be a biological
result of menopause. A few hoydenish younger women appear, but only one
of them is a transvestist. None of their relationships is distinguished
by love or constancy. Even Mme. Robert’s superficially generous attempts
to hold Satin by supporting her seem motivated largely by jealousy.
While Zola’s attitude is not one of approval, the lesbian episodes are
presented with less harshness than several of the heterosexual affairs
in Nana’s career, and they entrain no tragic consequences to compare
with the suicides and utter demoralization resulting from the latter. In
the particular segment of Paris society portrayed, that of the high
grade prostitute or courtesan, lesbianism is not only tolerated—Nana’s
titled lovers are well aware of her relations with Satin—but taken for
granted. Evidently those cafés already flourished which were to be
celebrated later on the canvases of Toulouse-Lautrec and in occasional
cynical verses by Donnay.
In _Pot-bouille_ (1883) Zola included two minor lesbian episodes at a
respectable middle-class level. One involves the adolescent daughter of
a mother so “particular” that the child is tutored at home for fear of
evil influences at school. No account is taken, however, of the family
servant, from whom the girl undertakes to learn ‘what happens when you
are married.’[3] The lessons are given in the daughter’s room after the
family has retired, and are apparently adequate. The second episode
occurs between two young wives, each of whom has been drawn into a
liaison with the same irresistible bachelor living in their apartment
building. One of them, on the point of being caught by her husband
before regaining her own apartment, takes refuge with the woman who has
been her predecessor in the young rake’s affections. Strangers till now,
though curious about one another, the two women become much excited by
their mutual exchange of unhappy confidences. It is three in the
morning, and neither is fully clothed. They conclude by giving one
another what comfort they can.[4]
In 1881 “Paul’s Mistress” was published in de Maupassant’s volume
entitled _La Maison Tellier_ and has appeared subsequently in only three
editions in either French or English. (The English translations are very
poor.) One of his lengthier short stories, it presents the tragedy of a
boy of very good family, intelligent and sensitive, lost in infatuation
for “a small thin brunette with a stride like a grasshopper’s.” At a
riverside amusement park the couple encounters four women (two in men’s
clothes) who are hailed by the holiday crowd with enthusiastic shouts of
“Lesbos! Lesbos!” That Paul is revolted infuriates his companion, and in
the course of the ensuing quarrel the boy faces the hitherto
unacknowledged fact that he and Madeleine have nothing in common but
their passion. Over his protests they return in the evening to dance in
the pavilion, and his partner soon slips off with one of the
transvestists. After an hour of fevered search the boy comes upon the
two in a thicket, and in a frenzy of revulsion escapes unnoticed and
throws himself into the river. When some hours later his body is
recovered Madeleine weeps copiously, but then goes home with the
lesbian, “her head on Pauline’s shoulder, as though it had found refuge
there in a closer and more intimate affection.”
Here, as in _Nana_, homosexuality is pictured at the prostitute’s level,
but an additional causal factor is suggested in Madeleine’s boyish build
and gait. (One of the women in trousers, however, is described with
corrosive accuracy as fat-hipped.) De Maupassant’s judgment is quite
clear. The exquisite beauty of the countryside, evoked with all his
genius for description, is presented as the symbol of Paul’s spirit, the
strident vulgarity of the dance hall as that of Madeleine’s. Every
phrase of this sustained contrast points up the tragedy of fineness
destroyed by depravity. Socially significant again is the comparative
tolerance of lesbianism and transvestism among the respectable resort
population. The two lesbian couples, living in a riverside cottage and
entertaining so noisily that their neighbors protest to the police, are
“investigated” with stupid solemnity. However, there is no more serious
result than “a voluminous report of their innocence.” This caricature of
official action produces only hearty laughter among the other cottagers.
(Bernard Talmey, however, quotes a less complaisant report by Fiaux to
the Municipal Council of Paris in 1887 on lesbian prostitution.)[5]
Another short story in which lesbian action plays some part is Dubut de
Laforest’s “Mlle Tantale” (1884),[6] one of a group of psychological
novelettes comparable to Casper’s _Klinische Novellen_ of thirty years
earlier in that the author gleaned his material from his friend
Charcot’s clinic. Mary Folkestone, the “Mlle Tantale” of the title, and
the illegitimate daughter of a dancer, has, throughout childhood, been
the witness of too many intimate scenes between her mother and the
latter’s lovers to feel anything but loathing for sex. As an adolescent
she is revolted even when her friend Camilla opens her blouse on a hot
day; at the same time she is so aroused by the sight of the other girl’s
breasts that she falls ill. The story outlines her lifelong struggle to
overcome her inhibitions. Following a first experiment with her maid’s
lover, which disgusts her, she tries a second with an artist who is her
social equal. Although this is less repellent, she finds no complete
satisfaction. She then enters upon a liaison with Camilla who, after
experience with men as disillusioning as her own, has become a lesbian.
This effort, too, is a failure. Finally, neurotic from lack of emotional
outlet she resorts to aphrodisiacs and dies of their excessive use; not,
however, until the first scorned lover has found her in time to receive
a contrite dying kiss. This ending indicates a belief in heterosexual
passion, however unromantic, as the remedy for sex-engendered neurosis,
and reminds one that Freud began as a pupil of Charcot.
Paul Bourget’s _Crime d’Amour_ (1886) will be touched on in passing only
because Havelock Ellis mentions it as “dealing with the (lesbian)
theme,” but actually it offers only half a dozen lines on the subject.
The night before becoming the lover of a good friend’s wife, the hero
reviews his very full amatory past. This reminiscence occurs early in
the book and the cynicism about women which it reflects is an important
factor in the story. The following quotation, however, gives the entire
lesbian passage:
On the mantlepiece between the likenesses of two dead friends he kept
an enigmatic portrait representing two women, the head of one resting
on the shoulder of the other. It was the constant living reminder of
a terrible story—the bitterest faithlessness he had ever endured. He
had been cynical or artificial enough to laugh over it earlier with
the two heroines, but he had laughed with death in his heart.[7]
No further reference is made to the women, nor is there the slightest
implication that this affair is more responsible for his disillusionment
than his many others, some of which are recounted at length.
* * * * *
In contrast to the comparative realism of the last five authors stand
such imaginative flights as those which follow. The first was the
_Monsieur Vénus_ of Rachilde (Marguérite Eymery Vallette), published in
Brussels in 1884. According to André David,[8] the book was condemned,
all available copies confiscated and the author heavily fined. Living in
Paris, however, she was happily outside Belgian jurisdiction—the chief
reason why so many daring French titles of the late century bore
Brussels imprints. A year later the novel was brought out in Paris with
some deletions and a preface by Maurice Barrès, and only this second
version has been accessible for study.
It is the story of a wealthy orphaned girl, ward of an ascetic aunt who
but for the necessity of raising her niece would have taken the veil. At
the age of twenty-five Raoule encounters an effeminate man of the
working class a year her junior to whom she is hopelessly attracted. Her
pride is stung by her weakness, and to avoid accepting Jacques as an
equal she virtually buys him and subsequently maintains him in luxury.
By degrees she forces him to wear feminine clothing and play the woman’s
part, to which he proves readily adaptable after an initial rebellion.
She herself assumes the masculine costume and role. Jacques’ avaricious
older sister is at first agreeable to his being kept, but when she
discovers the real nature of the relationship she uses the threat of
exposure to force a marriage which appears to her even more
advantageous. This plebeian match estranges the aunt and most of
Raoule’s own world, leaving a handsome military man, a former suitor of
the girl’s, as the couple’s only frequent visitor. But so completely has
the husband become effeminized that presently he makes advances to the
officer. A duel ensues which the jealous Raoule urges the latter to
carry through to the death. After the loss of her faithless love she has
a wax figure of him enshrined in the room that had been their “temple of
delight,” and she continues to visit it in secret.
In a significant early conversation with her military suitor, Raoule
tells him that she is at last in love. “Sapho!” he cries. “Continue,
Monsieur Vénérande, mon cher ami!” But she hotly denies the charge. Her
intelligence and pride preclude that amusement of boarding-school girls
and prostitutes. In Sappho such love may have had dignity because it was
her invention, a new thing, but mere imitation is shameful weakness. She
herself will also splendidly create a new vice. She then tells of
meeting Jacques, with whom she fell in love as with Beauty. “She said
‘Beauty’ because she was unable to say ‘_Woman_.’”[9]
Jacques is described elsewhere as a dazzling Titian blonde, well-fleshed
in breast and hips, only his voice, hands, and coarse hair betraying his
sex. Raoule herself is taller than he, a handsome brunette with level
brows and a boyish figure. On the occasions when she ventures out in
men’s clothes her own sex is never suspected. That the method of
satisfaction employed between the two is the kiss, and that only in its
usual manifestation, is made unequivocally clear. Late in the story
Jacques discovers that impotence has resulted.
Rachilde accounts with care for her heroine’s behavior pattern.
Throughout Raoule’s childhood the aunt had harped upon the vileness of
physical passion. At the same time the girl’s emotional endowment was
such that the mere reading of an erotic book threw her into a violent
fever. Hence, both the compulsive experimenting with many lovers and the
frigidity which prevented satisfaction. Raoule herself lays the blame
for the latter squarely upon her lovers, whom she has taken as she has
read books, in order to learn what passion is. But men, she says,
offer a woman either brutality or weakness, never the one
aphrodisiac—Love—which might teach her real passion. And to become the
slave of mere sensation is unthinkable. If one is merely to indulge
one’s senses, then to preserve self-respect one must remain, like a man,
indifferent to the experience and master of oneself.
Barrès, in his preface, says that Rachilde was only twenty when she
wrote the tale, a well-bred and innocent girl with nothing but wishful
dreaming from which to spin her fantastic plot. He singles out pride as
the chief handicap of both heroine and author, pride which cannot endure
domination of any sort by a man.
To what mysterious cult are they pledged, these men and women whom
love of self draws one to another [of their own sex]?... One sees
with alarm men losing their taste for women, as Monsieur Vénus
displays hatred of male traits.... It is _la maladie du siècle_ ...
it smells of death.[10]
What he naturally dared not say more plainly is that the tale gives
clear evidence of severely repressed homosexual inclinations on the
author’s part.
Additional, though less marked, evidence of her bias appears in
Rachilde’s second novel, _Madame Adonis_, which came out in Paris in
1886 without serious moralistic repercussions. From a literary viewpoint
it shows some advance in maturity, being fairly free of florid
description, vague philosophy, and erotic purple patches. There is even
a touch of satire in the delineation of a miserly provincial woman
lumber-dealer and her despotic persecution of her son and his Parisian
wife, as well as in the Dickensian portrait of the girl’s alcoholic
father. But although comparative realism makes it more convincing, the
plot is hardly less bizarre than that of _Monsieur Vénus_. It details
the havoc wrought upon the young couple by a picturesque individual who
first in the guise of a romantic artist woos the wife, and later as a
_galante_ and domineering woman captivates the man. Continuing to pose
alternately as twin brother or sister, this person convinces each of the
young people that the other is unfaithful, and so manages to consummate
affairs with both. Only when, goaded too far, the jealous husband
surprises and kills his wife’s lover, do they learn that only one person
is involved—a woman. She has deceived the wife as to her sex by
artificial means. No etiology is suggested for the woman’s sexual
dualism beyond her rebellion, like that of Raoule de Vénérande, against
a feminine role. Light is shed upon the author by the tingling vitality
of her descriptions of the central figure in the male role as compared
with her parallel pictures of the same character as a woman, and also by
the love scenes between the woman and the young wife. These are more
convincing than the conquest of the man which is motivated largely by
vindictive arrogance.
Seasoned readers of biography will not be surprised to learn that beyond
her marriage in 1899 to Alfred Vallette, then editor of the _Mercure de
France_, few facts about Rachilde’s own emotional life are available.
André David compares her personality to that of the Chevalier d’Eon,
famous diplomat and transvestist of the eighteenth century, whose sex
was an enigma to all Europe not finally solved until his death; Ernest
Boyd refers to her assumption of men’s clothing in her teens when she
came to Paris and was befriended by Sarah Bernhardt;[11] but neither
alludes to homosexuality. David does mention, however, her long and
close friendship with Verlaine, whose homosexual connection with Arthur
Rimbaud was a scandal in the late nineteenth century.
Rachilde continued for several decades to produce novels, in some of
which lesbian women made brief appearances too slight to consider here.
Her one later sustained treatment of homosexuality, (which ran serially
in the _Mercure de France_ as _Les Factices_ and was published in book
form as _Les Hors Natures_) dealt with men. In the reviews of fiction
which she contributed to her husband’s periodical from 1896 to the
1930s, she maintained the same attitude of superiority to female
variance expressed by her own Raoule de Vénérande, but she regularly
included lesbian novels in her review list and seldom failed to indicate
their theme. Thus she provided an index of sorts to such fiction over a
period of nearly forty years. When, during the 1890s, criticism was
leveled at the _Mercure_ for its consistent noting of fictional
“decadence,” Vallette replied in a sharp editorial that theirs was the
only periodical whose reviews gave anything resembling an honest picture
of contemporary writing.[12]
The Shadow of Feminism
In Rachilde’s two novels just considered, women’s deliberate adoption of
male attire and outlook figures for the first time in half a century;
that is, since the appearance of _Fragoletta_ and _Mademoiselle de
Maupin_. No significant rebellion against the feminine role is evident
in Zola’s or even Maupassant’s references to transvestism among
prostitutes nor in other variant French fiction before 1890. In other
countries, however, what is now termed the masculine protest was
receiving considerable attention. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James
in America, Olive Schreiner in South Africa, and August Strindberg in
Sweden all contributed observations, even though the phenomenon appears
in their work under widely differing guises and sometimes is only
tenuously related to variance.
Dr. Holmes, versatile contributor to both medicine and letters, would
today undoubtedly have been a psychiatrist. Throughout his life he was
preoccupied with intersexual personality in women, and he explored it at
least tentatively in each of his three novels: _Elsie Venner_ (1859),
_The Guardian Angel_ (1867), and _A Mortal Antipathy_ (1885). Of these a
modern psychiatrist, Dr. Clarence Oberndorf, has observed:
The theory of bisexuality and the importance of bisexual components
in influencing the character of individuals is more than implied in
each one of his abnormal personalities. The masculine traits in
childhood of both Elsie Venner and Myrtle Hazard [in _The Guardian
Angel_], something of a tomboy, are unmistakable. The bisexual theme
becomes even clearer in _A Mortal Antipathy_, where Holmes repeatedly
contrasts the femininity of Euthemia Tower with the masculinity of
Lurida Vincent, and it is apparent that he has but little sympathy
with the latter.[13]
Strictly speaking, Elsie Venner alone deserves the adjective “abnormal.”
Her eccentricity is due to her mother’s having suffered a rattlesnake
bite during late pregnancy of which she died shortly after giving birth
to her child. The girl grows up unafraid of rattlers if not immune to
their poison (there is no account of her being bitten), and possessing
something of the reptile’s power to hypnotize a sensitive individual
with her steady ophidian gaze. As a result she is shunned by her mates,
and develops a solitary and arrogant personality. She is a fearless
mountain climber and not infrequently spends the night on dangerous and
snake-infested rocky slopes above her home. During adolescence she
exhibits for a teacher in the select female academy she attends “a
special fancy” so intense it frightens the woman. On the girl’s side the
obsession seems more a desire to test her power than love. The reaction
of the overworked and half-hysterical teacher is one of terrified
revulsion until Elsie in her last illness calls upon her to act as nurse
and companion. Elsie’s only feeling of normal warmth is directed toward
a young male instructor to whom she virtually offers herself, but he,
too, is unable to respond as she desires, and she dies as an apparent
result of subduing the innate drive to overpower those she loves.
Myrtle Hazard in _The Guardian Angel_ was born in the tropics and lived
her early years amid a luxury not only of natural beauty but of parental
love and adulation from native servants. The strength and self-assurance
thus bred enable her when orphaned to survive the efforts of a couple of
puritanic aunts to break her spirit. At fifteen, precociously mature in
both mind and body, she crops her hair, dons boy’s clothes, and runs off
to return to India where she spent the few remembered years of happy
childhood. The accident which foils her plan wins her new friends, among
them a young man whom she eventually marries. Although in appearance and
behavior she is the most masculine of Holmes’s heroines, variance plays
the least part in her history. Her “best friend,” the only person for
whom she leaves any word upon running away, is merely the bosom
companion natural to an adolescent, and there is no hint of passion in
Myrtle’s feeling for the girl.
As for Lurida Vincent in _A Mortal Antipathy_, despite Dr. Oberndorf’s
emphasis on her masculinity, she is physically fragile, underdeveloped,
and anything but boyish. We see her only in boarding school and learn
nothing of her antecedents or early history. The factors conditioning
her against a feminine role are that she is plain and unappealing to men
and abnormally brilliant. Her only masculinity consists in a resolute
ambition to best her male acquaintances in intellectual achievement.
Envious of her schoolmates’ charm and athletic prowess, she reacts by
becoming the school prodigy and an ardent feminist. Jealously, and with
unconscious passion, she adores Euthemia Tower, who returns her fondness
with marked moderation and common sense. Euthemia is obviously more
Holmes’s ideal of womanhood than a convincing individual. She is
beautiful with the wholesome beauty of youth, modest, warm-hearted, and
admirably well-balanced. She is also the school’s champion athlete,
strong enough to carry an unconscious young man, whom she later marries,
from a burning house without assistance.
From these novels one gathers that the good doctor was partial to women
who were physically not much inferior to men, but he firmly believed
that such equality did not breed masculine emotions. His scientific
acumen had made him aware of passionate attachments between women[14] (a
secondary character in _The Guardian Angel_ is so devoted to her mother
that the latter says, “I should think you were in love with me, my
darling, if you were not my daughter”), but such attachments appear to
concern him so little that one wonders if he was even aware of their
ultimate potentialities.
The same question arises in reading Thomas Hardy’s earliest novel,
_Desperate Remedies_ (1871), even though some early chapters give more
details of a variant episode than anything in Holmes. Circumstances
force the well-born Cytherea at eighteen into service as a lady’s maid,
and Miss Aldclyffe, a spinster of forty-six, employs her despite her
frank admission of inexperience wholly from infatuation with her beauty
and physical grace. Since both women are headstrong and mercurial,
Cytherea’s term as servant lasts a matter of mere hours, but its stormy
ending promotes her to the status of companion and (ultimately) partial
heiress of her mistress’s fortune. This transition occurs during their
single night together, in the course of which the older woman learns
that the girl is already in love with a man and does her best to turn
her adored against him and all of his sex. Miss Aldclyffe is a “tall ...
finely built woman of spare though not angular proportions,”[14a] but
her aversion to men is the result of early seduction and desertion and
not innate, and her passion for Cytherea, half-maternal, stems from
years of emotional starvation. The girl, though also strong-willed and
independent, is wholly feminine and quite unable to satisfy her
mistress’s pleas for some warmth of response to her caresses.
Although _Desperate Remedies_ shows some immaturity in its Victorian
elaboration of plot, its grasp of character foreshadows the mastery
Hardy was later to attain, and an already developed ironic detachment
saves the night incident from being either mawkish or offensive to
British readers. Nothing in it betrays the least awareness of lesbian
possibilities on the part of either Miss Aldclyffe or her author, nor is
there any conscious feminism in her disparagement of men. Actually, she
at once sets about contriving to marry Cytherea to a man of her own
choice—her unacknowledged illegitimate son. The variant episode is thus
brief and incidental, but it is significant in having no known
antecedent in British fiction save Wollstonecraft’s _Mary_ published
nearly a century earlier.[15]
The feminist theme so uncongenial to Holmes’s taste had been presented
with passionate sympathy two years earlier in Olive Schreiner’s _Story
of an African Farm_. This novel is reminiscent of _Mary, a Fiction_,
both in its championship of women and its naïvely autobiographical
pattern. The similarity is due, however, only to the authors’ comparable
life circumstances and not to any possible influence, for by 1880 when
Schreiner was writing, Wollstonecraft’s volume was rare even in England,
and Schreiner had not then left the Transvaal. She brought her
manuscript to London in 1882 and it was published in 1883. _The Story of
an African Farm_ is a sensitive girl’s outcry against the masculine
violence and brutality of a frontier society, and its heroine is
obviously a self-portrait of the author. Lyndall (Schreiner _mère’s_
maiden name) has been turned against men by the villainy or contemptible
weakness of the only specimens of the sex in her lonely milieu, and
equally turned against passion in women by her coarse and callous aunt’s
susceptibility to it. Snared later by her own emotions, she revolts
against her lover’s domination, refuses marriage, bears his child
secretly and alone, and falls fatally ill in consequence. An effeminate
boy, long in love with her, traces her to her hiding place, disguises
himself as a woman, and without revealing his identity nurses her until
her death.
All her life, at least on the conscious level, Lyndall has sought
“something nobler, stronger than I, before which I can kneel down.”
Religion, the obvious answer to her need, has been spoiled for her by
the pitiable weakness of the one man she has known who professed it. Her
lover is stronger than she but signally lacking in the nobility she
craves. Her only help, and subconsciously her only real love, is her own
fearless strength. At one point she is reduced to crying: “Why am I so
alone, so hard, so cold? Will nothing free me from myself?” But on two
other occasions, notably the deathbed scene where she communes with her
own image in a mirror,[16] her naïve and passionate narcissism reveals
itself so clearly and is so lovingly transcribed as to betray it as the
author’s own. (One cannot help wondering whether Barrès had read the
_African Farm_ before writing his preface to _Monsieur Vénus_ in 1885.)
Schreiner’s heroine is drawn to no individual woman save herself, but
she is an impassioned champion of the whole female sex as well as a
hater-of-men. The novel is filled with revolt against the subjugation of
women and their limited opportunities for individual development.
Henry James’s early novel, _The Bostonians_, published in 1885, stands
in sharp contrast. This story ran as a serial in _Century Magazine_.
Before it was finished Richard Watson Gilder, the editor, wrote James
that “he had never published anything so unpopular.” The novel came out
as a book a year later but met with no warmer reception, and was not
subsequently reissued until 1945, being omitted even from the
twenty-nine volume Scribner edition of James’ _Novels and Tales_ in
1923. Philip Rahv in the preface of the 1945 edition of _The Bostonians_
indicates several reasons for its unpopularity, but says that
undoubtedly the “most disquieting” was its keen analysis of “the
emotional economy of the Lesbian woman.”[17]
Because of James’s subtlety his work suffers more than most from
condensation, but as the text of the novel is now readily available, its
nearly four hundred pages can be reduced here to the barest skeleton. In
essence, the plot is the eternal triangle. At its apex is Verena
Tarrant, ultra-feminine, passive and suggestible, whose antecedents bear
witness to James’s interest in recently published theories of heredity.
The rivals for possession of her are Olive Chancellor, Boston
intellectual and feminist spinster a decade her senior, and the latter’s
cousin from Mississippi, a young man who has come out of the Civil War
on the losing side with something of the present day’s critical
pessimism toward modern society. Olive sees in the girl, who has
inherited a spell-binding oratorical gift, a powerful potential ally for
the Woman’s Movement to which she herself is devoted. Subconsciously,
however, her motivation is a love-at-first-sight quite as passionate as
that of her male cousin. Olive manages virtually to adopt Verena and by
degrees to estrange her from her family and her previous suitors.
Olive’s cousin, Basil Ransom, is not so easily disposed of, so she must
finally resort to exacting a promise from the girl that she will not
marry. For several years the two women are wholly absorbed in their
feminist efforts, traveling in Europe where they meet the prominent
leaders of the movement, and studying intensively. Olive’s emphasis is
always upon the wrongs women have suffered at the hands of men.
Olive is increasingly obsessed by her love for Verena. Of Verena, James
says: “Her share in the union, ... was no longer passive, purely
appreciative; it was passionate too, and it put forth a beautiful
energy.”[18] At last Verena is ready for public appearance, and invites
Basil to her first lecture, since he has been forbidden his cousin’s
house in Boston. He takes the opportunity to talk long and seriously to
her about herself, Olive’s influence, and his own love for her. He tells
her that what the times need is not more feminization but less, that
“it’s a ... hysterical, chattering ... age of false delicacy and
exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities.... The masculine
character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear
reality ... is what I want to preserve.”[19] He tells her, too, that she
has allowed Olive to imprison her in “a false thin shell” of devotion to
feminism, when actually she has a genius for giving herself, not to a
cause, but to normal life with a man. The girl is so moved that she
dares not see him again and cannot hide her disturbance from Olive. The
story then records a rapidly accelerating struggle between the man and
the older woman for possession of the girl. The climax comes on the
night of Verena’s great Boston debut, when, just before speaking before
an audience of thousands, she falls ill in the dressing room from inner
emotional conflict. Basil attempts to reach her; Olive, beside herself,
tries to keep him out; but Verena is aware of his presence and of her
own accord chooses him in preference to public triumph and a potentially
brilliant career.
As to the precise nature of the relationship between the two women, no
more is specified than a good deal of quiet kissing and holding of
hands, more symbolic than passionate except for a general
“tremulousness.” At one point the following appears: “It was a very
peculiar thing, their friendship: it had elements which made it probably
as complete as any (between women) that had ever existed.”[20] This is
included as part of a mental soliloquy of Verena’s, and so Rahv, who
comments on the “prescience with which [James] analyzed ... the lesbian
woman,” may possibly be justified in adding that “one cannot be sure
that James understood her precisely as such.”[21] Had Verena’s
rumination above been presented as James’s own, there could be no doubt
of its significance, for he had spent a year in Paris during the 1870’s,
had known Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola, and could not have escaped
awareness of all emotional potentialities between women. It is
interesting that he was careful not to speak in the role of author, nor
to venture recording any comparable fragment of the strongly variant
Olive’s stream of consciousness.
The last novel dealing with feminism, violent in its condemnation of the
Movement and also of female variance, is Strindberg’s _Confession of a
Fool_. This story is now known to be a thinly veiled report of the
author’s relations with his first wife, Siri von Essen, Baroness
Wrangel, whom he married in 1877. It was written in 1887-1888 as an
_apologia pro vita sua_ intended for publication after his projected
suicide. When he decided instead to live and divorce his wife, he kept
the manuscript sealed for five years, until public sentiment aroused by
the circumstances of the divorce led him to publish it “in self
defense.” In view of the fact that his second marriage in 1893 was
followed a year later by his second divorce and a third matrimonial
venture in 1901 came to a similar end in 1904, the _Confession_ provides
a valuable document on the psychology of the unhappy misogynist, but
scarcely an unbiased portrait of the wife.
The hero of the story, Axel, is a bookish introvert with what today
would be termed an obvious mother fixation. He falls in love with the
wife of an officer, his friend, partly from pity because her husband is
involved in a flirtation with her sophisticated young cousin; the
Baroness Marie, however, is rather less concerned about the affair than
Axel. “I’m in love with the little cat myself,” she says early in their
acquaintance. Like Belot’s Adrien, Axel is not warned. In the idealism
of first love he searches the art books in his library for a likeness of
his beloved. She is a goddess—not Venus, definitely not Juno, not even
Minerva, but Diana, “more boy than girl,” who never forgave Actaeon for
seeing her nude. Axel is naïvely enraptured by this seeming evidence of
his love’s purity.
Presently Marie leaves her husband for a stage career, living with Axel
rather incidentally and marrying him only upon discovery that she is
pregnant. It appears later, however, that the child is the Baron’s,
conceived after their formal divorce. After a masquerade for which she
has dressed as a man, Marie is caught fondling a servant girl. To Axel’s
reproaches she retorts that his suspicions are groundless and vile, as
are police reports and medical treatises which term “vicious” all
caresses of any warmth. The birth of a second child—Axel’s, this
time—briefly relaxes domestic tension; however, Marie soon farms the
child out to a nurse, installs an actress friend in a neighboring
apartment, and creates a scandal by caressing her new love in public,
though still protesting innocence.
The lengthy plot continues to oscillate between brief periods of marital
peace during Marie’s pregnancies, and tempests over her increasingly
scandalous connections with women. Most of these are with Marie’s
countrywomen, artists, and other bohemians who dress and act as much
like men as possible, make love openly to one another, and “wallow in
the lowest depths.” Many are militant suffragists, and all are devoted
to the cause. Once Axel reaches the point of wanting to drown his wife,
but he spares her for the sake of their children. Most of the action
thus far has occurred in Paris or in Swiss resorts. There follows an
interlude in Germany, “land of militarism where the patriarchate is
still in full force.” There no one will listen to talk of women’s
rights, and, for the first time, Marie is out of public life;
consequently, Axel flourishes. Even his voice, “which had grown thin
from everlastingly speaking in soothing tones to a woman, regained its
former volume.”[22] When his wife rages against his new dominance he
reflects that he has always known it was the weakling in him, “the page,
the lap-dog, her child” that she loved. He now makes an effort to leave
her, but is helplessly bound by his masochistic passion. This sign of
dependence softens her for a few months. Then Marie is caught caressing
the adolescent daughters of guests, and the rupture is final.
Axel, intellectually concerned as to the cause of her aberration, tries
to discover whether Marie had been a prostitute before her first
marriage, but all evidence is negative. He does learn, however, that her
lesbian habits and those of the Paris circle with whom she had most
conspicuously misbehaved were common knowledge to everyone else. He
finally decides to leave her and “to write the story of this woman, the
true representative of this age of the unsexed.” The novel was published
in Berlin in 1893, two years after his divorce from Siri von Essen, but
“in a corrupt and mutilated text, so crude in its language that it was
suppressed.”[23] The first authorized edition appeared in Sweden in 1912
after the author’s death.
Before leaving Strindberg it will be interesting to return
parenthetically for a moment to _Mlle Tantale_, since the modern analyst
Dr. Clarence Offenbacher has suggested that it may have given Strindberg
the plot of a much better known work, his drama _Miss Julie_.[24] To be
sure the two have in common the unrewarding liaison of a girl with a man
who is her social inferior, in Julie’s case a groom. But in personality
and in conditioning circumstances Julie differs sharply from Mary
Folkestone. Julie is the daughter of a domineering feminist who, in her
effort to equalize the sexes, assigns the labor on her estate to men or
women with complete disregard of its customary division between them.
Quite unlike Mary’s parent, the sensual courtesan, Julie’s mother scorns
passion. She gives her senses rein as rarely as possible and then merely
for the purpose of nervous catharsis. Julie also is wilfully
self-contained, taking the groom in a callous spirit like her mother’s.
Offenbacher points out that Strindberg was in Paris in the 1880s and
probably knew of both Dubut de Laforest and Charcot. It is even more
likely that he was aware of women like Rachilde and the more notorious
Mme. Jeanne Dieulafoy, lifelong transvestist and author who was made a
member of the Legion of Honor about 1890. At the beginning of the
Franco-Prussian war, Dieulafoy was a girl of nineteen, convent bred, who
had just married and who fought beside her husband during the siege of
Paris wearing men’s clothes, “to which she was long accustomed.”[25]
Subsequently, she accompanied him on archeological expeditions to Egypt,
Morocco and Persia. To her grief she was unable to have children, but
she devoted herself to those of her friends, and she and her husband for
a time conducted a private school in which they educated the girls to be
independent and fearless, the boys to show gentleness and consideration.
This training they believed, doubtless from their own experience, would
lead to better adjustment in marriage.
Since at the time of writing _Miss Julie_ Strindberg was deep in the
stormiest phase of his quarrel with Siri von Essen, he would have been
more sensitive to masculine women than to clinical literature. No model
for Julie’s mother could have been readier to hand than this virile
ex-soldier, archeologist, and “progressive” educator. _Miss Julie_ may
well be Strindberg’s dark prediction as to the results of child-training
by such a woman. The fact that there is no trace of variance in _Miss
Julie_ seems another reason for questioning whether it derived from
_Mlle Tantale_. Strindberg was so exercised over that issue at the
moment that he would not have missed a chance to attack it openly unless
his models were actual persons and might conceivably be recognized.
The central figures of the more or less feministic novels considered
above are not marked by unanimous sexual antipathy to the male. A number
of them had husbands or lovers and bore children. Their common feature
is rebellion against the domestic role imposed upon them in
nineteenth-century society, and often their variance is merely one
aspect of that rebellion. In contrast, the novels that follow have
variance per se as their predominant theme, and the authors’ attitudes
toward variance are equally disapproving.
Fin de Siècle
Dubut de Laforest’s second approach to the subject appeared in _La Femme
d’Affaires_ (1890), a vertical section of Paris life as sensational as
was _Mlle Tantale_ in the field of individual psychology. The title
figure is a grasping Jewess, and her contrast to her Catholic
daughter-in-law (almost the only irreproachable character in the book)
would reward a student of religious and racial prejudice; however,
neither of these women is directly concerned in the variant action. The
latter involves a self-centered musical comedy star, bisexually
promiscuous, and a lesbian amazon, Faustine, who supports her when
necessary. Faustine, we learn, was expelled from a school at fifteen for
corrupting its dormitory, and her subsequent excesses with a governess
contributed to the latter’s early death from tuberculosis (cf. _Mlle
Giraud_). She then tried a couple of husbands, and at the time of this
tale’s action she still experiments with men—which is inexplicable since
she never ceases to loathe heterosexual experience. She is violently
jealous of her actress friend, especially of the latter’s connection
with a fantastic titled Englishman who has turned circus clown. During
an ether ‘drunk,’ Faustine surprises the two together and cuts out the
woman’s tongue, thus destroying “the instrument of love.” No etiology is
suggested for her variance except her amazonian build. The unsavory trio
are apparently incorporated in the novel to illustrate the types to whom
the Business Woman will rent apartments at sufficient profit, but the
author devotes more space to them than such reason requires. It was more
probably his own literary profits due to sensationalism that he had an
eye on. His is the most specific reference thus far to the techniques of
lesbian activity, a detail doubtless reflecting his clinical
connections, and one seldom repeated in openly published literature.
More concentrated upon variance is Catulle Mendès’ _Méphistophéla_
(1890), mentioned earlier for its long popularity and its present
rarity. It is also notable for the immense detail of the lesbian life
history presented in its more than five hundred pages. It must have
escaped the censor in its day because of its heavily moralistic tone and
its literary style. Mendès, like Flaubert and Maupassant—though
artistically far from their equal—was more subtle than naturalistic, and
veiled his lurid facts in generalities that might glitter or smoulder
but were unlikely to put specific notions in a reader’s head.
Its prologue gives a sinister sketch of a drug addict in the act of a
self-injection of morphine—a reassuring indication that no matter how
she may appear to flourish in the course of the tale, she will come to
no good end. Wealthy and proud as the heroine of _Monsieur Vénus_,
modish as the Comtesse de Chalis, she has the debauched remnants of
beauty; however, her lack of natural brows and lashes implies syphilis.
She takes morphine to blot out some abysmal horror which has left its
scar upon her. The author then unfolds the heredity and the erotic
career which have brought her to her present pass.
Sophie is the child of a bisexually promiscuous dancer by a Russian
nobleman who laments his mistress’s pregnancy because his ‘rotten and
accursed line’ should never be perpetuated. He dies almost immediately
and the dancer, now fabulously wealthy, takes a house in Fontainebleau
and raises Sophie in strict respectability. But even in childhood Sophie
becomes so attached to a neighbor’s daughter, Emmaline, that a temporary
separation brings on hysterical convulsions, dangerous fever and
somnambulism. The two children have ‘played at marriage,’ a game of
innocent embraces which brought vague shame to the other child, but
seemed natural and acceptable to Sophie. With the approach of puberty
the game is discontinued. During adolescence Sophie’s powerful but still
unconscious sex drive leads her into emotional excesses, first in
connection with confirmation, and later in the study of music and
poetry. Through all these storms she sweeps the passive Emmaline along
with hypnotic intensity, and the two girls are sometimes brought to the
verge of fainting through unrelieved excitement. Recognizing the danger
signals, Sophie’s mother arranges her daughter’s early marriage to
Emmaline’s brother. Sophie, still physically ignorant, is so delighted
at not losing her friend that she accepts the arrangement without
question.
The disillusionment of her wedding night drives her to an attempt to
leap out the window, which her husband prevents. However, as soon as he
is asleep she flees to Emmaline. Awakened by marital initiation to the
significance of her feelings for her friend, she kisses the sleeping
girl’s breast. The husband who has been searching for her, surprises her
in the act, reviles her, and beats her senseless.
Her brother’s brutality moves Emmaline to run away with Sophie, but in a
cottage where they spend an idyllic week she is unwilling to accept the
caresses the other girl now consciously burns to bestow. When
circumstances finally overcome Emmaline’s reluctance, she does not share
Sophie’s transports. Somewhat repelled, and afraid for her reputation,
she slips away and returns home. Sophie is left broken-hearted by her
desertion. She realizes that she has failed Emmaline exactly as her own
husband has failed with her, and she determines to find out how one
woman can satisfy another.
Hiding in Paris from her husband, she allows herself to be initiated by
a lesbian show girl, Magalo, with whom she lives for some time,
physically captivated but hating herself for inconstancy to Emmaline.
The discovery that she is pregnant as a result of her wedding night
brings her to the verge of suicide. She loathes the very thought of
maternity; when her child is born, she consigns it to an orphanage
without a qualm. Her partner, Magalo, is shocked and hurt, being
genuinely in love with her and having envisioned a life _en famille_ for
them and the child. Sophie turns against Magalo in distaste because of
the girl’s interest in motherhood. Upon her mother’s death, Sophie, left
enormously wealthy, makes plans to recapture Emmaline. She is confident
that she can now both support her and adequately fill the role of
husband. In Fontainebleau, however, she learns that Emmaline has
married, her family has dispersed, and her whereabouts are unknown. Once
again, heartbroken, she returns to Paris.
Now she establishes a smart ménage and acquires an enormous lesbian
following. Under her spell, actresses, artists and women of title
neglect careers, male lovers, and husbands. She is known as ‘a giver of
incomparable joys, violent and sophisticated, deliciously and
frightfully inventive.’[26] Into this spectacular brilliance breaks
Magalo, destitute, broken, and ill. In a scene of deathbed repentance
the girl, claiming guidance from Heaven, implores Sophie to give up her
empty and miserable life and return to her husband and child. There can
be no other happiness on earth. ‘We both have had a demon in us,’ she
says, ‘but for you it is not too late.’
Sophie’s response is to go directly from Magalo’s funeral to an
orgiastic lesbian banquet where she glories in her role of presiding
goddess (or demon). With this defiance, a third stage in her
disintegration begins. Her liaisons, always loveless, now fail to give
even sensual satisfaction, and she knows only boredom, relieved less and
less frequently by flashes of desire. Haunted by memories of her only
real love, she ferrets out Emmaline’s whereabouts in the hope that even
a brief encounter may rekindle her own jaded emotions.
In seeking to discover how she can reach Emmaline alone, she finds
herself one evening spying through an open window upon a family scene
centering about Emmaline’s four children. The two men, father and uncle
(the latter her own husband) are fatuously devoted to them. Emmaline has
become wholly maternal, plump and placid. The climax occurs when
Emmaline offers the youngest, an infant of six months, her breast.
Revolted to nausea, Sophie plunges away through the darkness with
demonic laughter.
‘Now Emmaline was no longer worthy of her passion. Was her own life
wrong? Must one be like such clods to be happy? Should she have had
four children? ... No! She repudiated such spineless notions. She was
what she was. She thrust from her her old dream of Emmaline’s breast,
she jeered at Emmaline’s bovine happiness.’[27]
This further repudiation of maternity heralds the final stage of her
degeneration, a round of infamous adventures stimulated by drink and
drugs. ‘Unwilling to believe there could be so little pleasure in vice,
she chose to think she simply had not learned enough,’ and she frequents
the most debauched Paris haunts, no longer bothering to select her
partners, but seizing indifferently on servants and waitresses, to whom
she becomes an object of terror. At last, suffering from hallucinations,
largely of sexual odors, she consults a physician. His first advice is
marriage; however, when he learns that she has already tried that and
even borne a child, he advocates as a last therapeutic experiment the
actual practice of motherhood.
Accordingly she fetches her sixteen-year-old daughter from the convent
orphanage. The girl is graceless and unappealing and on sight awakens no
sentiment but boredom. But while watching her asleep and half-clothed,
Sophie is stirred by violent desire. And now in real horror of herself
she leads the girl to the gate of Emmaline’s house where she can find
her father and a true home, and entreats her to enter it and stay there.
The book closes with an epilogue almost the literal duplicate of the
prologue, for now the reader knows from what nightmare the doomed woman
was seeking to escape when she plied her hypodermic needle.
Marred though it is by excess in length, incident and style, this novel
holds interest because of its effort to present a complete life history
and to account for its lesbian element. The chief trouble is excess in
this respect also. While the “morne demon” possessing “Méphistophéla”
seems at the outset an hereditary syphilitic taint, the author says at
one point:
‘Why, if a scientist today diagnoses hysteria from the same symptoms
that for Bodin [Attorney to Henri III and author of _Démonomanie des
Sorciers_, 1580] proved demonic possession, should not current
neuroses be, under other names, simply the old spells used by
sorcerers? If divine grace is present in the bread and wine [of the
sacrament], why not diabolic malice in opium, hashish, morphine? He
who takes alcohol imbibes Satan. An emetic is an exorcist.’[28]
This could be sailing close to a biochemical explanation of
psychopathology, or, employed by Mendès who was at least a nominal
Catholic, it could indicate a half-serious suspicion of supernatural
influence.
At another point he distinguishes between relatively harmless and
“serious” homosexual activity.
‘Rejected lovers, deceived wives, may console one another and forget
to mention it to their confessors. Brilliant young belles dizzy with
champagne and dancing may fall into each others’ arms as they undress
at dawn. Prostitutes may seek the tender love they have never known,
or consolation for men’s brutality. Only the conscious, cool,
deliberate players of man’s role are courting damnation.’[29]
There is no indication of heredity bearing the burden here. Indeed,
Mendès seems to absolve his heroine from responsibility for her actions
up to the time of her desertion by Emmaline and her escape to Paris;
that is, so long as she is physically innocent and motivated by love.
But from that point on, each step in her downward course results from a
deliberate refusal of motherhood, the final one involving repudiation of
even her early love for Emmaline. Interesting to a modern analyst would
be her obsession with Emmaline’s breast, which had a parallel in Mlle
Tantale’s reaction to her friend Camilla.
Josephin Peladan, author of _La Gynandre_ (1891) states differently the
same thesis: there is no such thing as lesbian Love, it is simply one of
the sexual vices. This novel is one in a long series designed to expose
all these vices under the heading _La Décadence Latine_, which unless
checked, he says, forebodes the end of French civilization. (He also
proclaims the volume to be in part a satire on current lesbian fiction.)
The hero of the tale, a young intellectual known merely as Tammuz, is,
like his author, both Catholic and Rosicrucian, his mission the
conversion of Lesbos to a constructive worship of Eros. The only other
male protagonist is a novelist, Nergal. These names are derived from
Assyrian-Babylonian mythology and represent sun gods and the generative
principle, in opposition to all the female lunar divinities.
A prologue incorporates the two men’s rapid survey of previous
literature on female variance, from classical references through
Catholic confessors’ manuals to Balzac, Gautier, and Baudelaire.
Sappho’s influence, Tammuz decides, operated in so segregated a
community of girls as to engender the cathartic intrasexual play common
in such environments. In short, ‘Lesbos is the story of a pagan
convent.’ The Catholic literature, of course, supports the thesis that
lesbianism is merely ‘female sodomy.’ So also do belletristic works from
Brantôme to Diderot. _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_ is pronounced
Balzac’s weakest effort because it represents lesbian passion as a
motivating force for murder. Gautier gives them momentary pause, because
_Mlle de Maupin_ records lesbian activity between two women of high
social status; however, it is the Catholic Baudelaire who offers them
the most convincing evidence that the lesbian experience may approach
real passion. Tammuz claims that such error merely foreshadowed
Baudelaire’s mental collapse. After this formidable spearhead of
symbolism and avowed moral purpose, the novel presents, with only faint
satire, a cross-section of contemporary female variance. Interestingly
enough, it claims that the vice had become general in Parisian society
only within the previous decade, but it does not attempt to account for
that sudden burgeoning.
Tammuz, an impoverished nobleman enabled by a windfall to spend a year
studying life and love in Paris, is first introduced to the Orchids.
This group is no more than a salon, its hostess a woman architect
nearing forty. Her circle comprises a dozen idle young women, some
married, ranging from a wide-eyed orphan of seventeen who has been
“taken” in her lonely innocence by the first man who showed her any
attention, to a beauty who worships her own dazzling skin far too much
to risk its damage by male caresses. The presiding spirit, Aril, is
sufficiently the diplomat to make each of her protégées feel valued and
to avoid tension by playing no favorites. Tammuz is unable to discern
much real passion among the group for either Aril or one another, and no
lesbian activity save as outsiders stimulate it. A seductive
actress-courtesan may strike a momentary spark, or curious provincial
women in Paris for a brief fling may provoke some of the girls to
exhibitionistic petting, but all soon lapse again into emotional
indolence. Their common need is mainly companionship and freedom from
the male aggression from which all have suffered in one fashion or
another. Aril’s need is scope for her powers of domination.
That the whole business is rather a pose is apparent in the women’s
adoption of picturesque nicknames—not masculine—and is further attested
to by the confession of a senior member. While protesting her own and
the group’s willingness to die for Aril, she makes clear to the young
man that all of them are more thrilled by his masculine interest than by
anything happening among themselves.
Tammuz’s next field for study is the Royal Maupins, a fencing club
housed and headed by a deserter from the Orchids too masculine to submit
to Aril’s dominance. Whereas the Orchids were all passive-feminine, even
though one or two were tall, small-breasted and narrow-hipped, the
Maupins consciously affect masculinity, in their nicknames, and in
wearing fencing hose and men’s silk shirts exclusively in the privacy of
their quarters. Here the prime favorite is not the hostess and nominal
leader but “the Chevalier,” a woman who has avoided overt expression of
all emotion, variant or normal, and whose “purity” Orchids and Maupins
alike hold in such reverence that they forbear trying to win her from
it. She shows an immediate predilection for the young man whose
self-mastery in the pursuit of an ideal equals her own, and this
semi-defection from the lesbian cause wakes violent jealousy among the
pettier Maupins. A trio of them provokes Tammuz to a match with their
most skilled fencer, fitting his opponent with a plastron beneath her
tunic and substituting untipped blades for regulation foils. Their
apparent plot is to kill him in the guise of accident. But the young man
divines the trick, makes the sign of the cross with his blade, and
contrives to break off the tip of it in his opponent’s concealed guard,
escaping with a superficial wound. The exposure of the trick results in
the expulsion of the offending trio and in the Chevalier’s betrayal of
an overmastering love for him. Although he feels an equal attraction, he
goes his way. He diagnoses the Maupins as poseurs whose prototype is the
swashbuckling male adolescent, still encumbered by feminine weaknesses
while lacking the male virtues of intelligence and impersonality.
His further “studies” in Paris lead him to a bathing club where the
sexual play of “socialites” is indistinguishable from that of
courtesans, and to the dressing rooms and studios of actresses and
artists where similar behavior is even more brazenly manifested. Along
the way he accumulates male gossip in the best clubs and sensational
stories from the yellow journals, all of which he holds heavily
responsible for nurturing the legend and cult of Lesbos.
There remains a famous lesbian group secluded in a chateau on the coast
of Normandy to which he makes an unannounced visit. Here the leader is a
Russian princess, whose name has become a byword for lesbian
excess—possibly a satiric imitation of Méphistophéla. Tammuz finds the
Princess Simzerla a proud but pathetic stripling of thirty whose
excursions into vice have been, like Méphistophéla’s, a sterile quest
for some satisfying love. Knowing all the gossip about her before
leaving Paris, he offers his sympathetic and seemingly clairvoyant
analysis of it to the princess while she is disguised as her own brother
and unaware that he knows her identity. This kindly understanding, the
first she has ever met, leads her—with time out for a quick change into
feminine costume—straight into his arms. Tammuz, as always, has
sufficient control to treat her as a sister, for he has decided that the
way to ‘save Lesbos’ is not by converting any single individual to
heterosexual passion, not even the notorious archetype, Simzerla, but by
completely foregoing that physical victory against which most of them
have rebelled. If he gives himself to one, his imaginative hold on all
the rest is lost.
He finds Simzerla’s group more mature and diversified than those
previously encountered, most of them near thirty and fugitives from
Parisian notoriety. He spends some weeks studying them individually and
collectively, leading them into such literary and philosophical
discussion as they are capable of, and spying for passionate
attachments. He is unable to discover that more than one couple indulges
in any physical expression, and that is rather anemic. Furthermore, in
the course of their group effort to write a lesbian drama he obtains
final evidence to support what he has felt throughout his study (and,
one might add, before he began): women have no powers of impersonal or
abstract thought nor any creative intellectual capacity. It is he who
contributes as much of the drama as is written.
His final observation is made aboard the yacht of a Swedish-American
transvestist known as the Phantom Princess, though she has acquired the
actual name of Limerick from a British [sic!] peer, her deserted
husband. Rumor has credited her with maintaining a floating ‘Lesbos’ to
equal Simzerla’s, but Tammuz finds it no more than a luxury craft of
masculine simplicity manned by a hard-bitten male crew. “La Fantôme” has
experimented with both men and women more lustily than Simzerla, and is
completely disillusioned about the existence of Love. Weary of sensual
indulgence, she now permits herself no more than occasional voyeurism,
having her crew bring aboard waterfront women for orgies which she
observes from the captain’s bridge.
Because she is the most masculine of all the women he has encountered,
Tammuz enjoys more intellectual companionship with her than with the
others. He finds her capable of understanding his concept of woman’s
proper role in the scheme of things—that of Frea, goddess of fertility.
She is quite in accord with his refusal to deify Love aside from its
procreative aspect, and shares his unreadiness to sacrifice an
impersonal quest or even personal liberty on the altar of Romance.
Informed early by one of the Maupins that many women’s inability to
respond to men is due to the ugliness of modern male garb, Tammuz has
assumed on occasion a more graceful costume—modified Directoire—and with
the Princesse Fantôme he dresses in gray silk fencer’s hose and a jacket
of violet velvet. She reciprocates by appearing at dinner in an evening
gown of ivory moiré, above which her white shoulders, deeply tanned face
and cropped hair create a ludicrous effect. Tammuz, however, is touched
by this effort at refeminization, and before long the two are enjoying a
passionate interlude against that grandest of all settings, the open
sea.
The inevitable sequel is La Fantôme’s holding him captive aboard the
yacht in obedience to a newborn feminine hunger for permanence, and only
a providential near-shipwreck frees him. Her desire is that they die in
each other’s arms; his, that he be spared to pursue his mission against
Lesbos, and their escape from death can be attributed only to
supernatural intervention in his behalf.
He now returns to Paris, and in completing his study of Lesbos he
accumulates as it were the dregs of naturalistic data—lesbian sadism,
gross exhibitionism, the gift to his mistress by an infatuated nobleman
of his fifteen-year-old daughter, an excursion into lesbian prostitution
on the part of a countess in order to earn a fortune for her beloved who
is a “regular” prostitute. As his money and his time run out, Tammuz, as
was foreseen, is convinced that his findings prove his initial thesis:
lesbianism is not a distinct psychological entity but merely one of the
sins of the flesh. Its causes are numerous—comparative frigidity,
feministic rebellion, defiance of undeserved social opprobrium, cynicism
about all love. And productive of, or augmenting, all these is the
brutality or carelessness of men, their indifference to individual
personality in their approach to women. Tammuz knows that by virtue of
his sexless sympathy he could have had any one of the scores of lesbians
he has studied. Believing, then, that he has achieved a far-reaching
psychological victory, he risks clinching it by a ruse which, as he
himself observes, ‘would make the angels of orthodoxy hide their eyes
with their snowy wings.’ In short, he stages a celebration of the rites
of Eros, on the grounds that the proper cure for emotional aberration is
not orthodox denial of the flesh but pragmatic trial of the normal.
With the aid of Nergal, who knows his Paris, Tammuz invites an
attractive (and eligible!) male partner for each of his lesbian
semi-converts, and amid a classical decor complete with Roman dining
couches and phallic decorations, he treats the company to a banquet
accompanied by aphrodisiac wines and incense. Then extinguishing the
lights he leaves nature to take its course. Peladan fails to record the
percentage of error in this quantitative experiment. (But at least one
sadistic lesbian survives to figure in _La Vertu Suprême_.)
Easy as it is to ridicule Peladan’s second-rate symbolism and although
his _reportage_ may not be dependable, there is much psychological
soundness in his analysis of lesbian types, however melodramatic the
personal histories he fabricates to account for them (and perhaps also
to forestall attempts to identify their originals). The composite
personality of Tammuz and Nergal is sound—the idealistic, somewhat
effeminate man such as variant women are often drawn to. And in
_L’Androgyne_,[30] the complementary study, in his “épopée,” of
homosexual tendencies during male adolescence, he shows sympathy with
the very type he scorned the Maupins for imitating, so long as it is a
passing stage in male development. Just as evolutionary ideas were in
the air long before Darwin systematized them, so the theory of emotional
maturing now attributed to Freud was antedated in literature.
Even after discounting Peladan’s and Mendès’ Catholic bias and their
romantic extravagance, their canvases give evidence to widespread
lesbianism in _fin de siècle_ Paris, and echoes of it and of the crop of
fiction it bred must have been far reaching. Amusing proof of this fact
is at hand in a light-hearted farce written in 1892 by two Americans,
Archibald Gunter and Fergus Redmond, entitled _A Florida Enchantment_. A
transvestist tale, it involves no real intrasexual experience (in this
respect harking back to medieval and renaissance romances), but its
intent must have been unmistakable burlesque of such novels as
Rachilde’s and Peladan’s. In Part I, “The Metamorphosis of Miss Lillian
Travers,” the heroine discovers that her fiancé is dallying with a ripe
widow, and at about the same time she acquires four seeds from an
African “tree of sexual change.” Since the casket containing these is a
relic from a slave-trading grandfather long dead, there is no chance of
replenishing the supply. Embittered by her lover’s faithlessness,
Lillian decides to move from the category of deceived woman into the
obviously happier one of philandering man. To gain an ally in the
venture she persuades her negro maid to join her in swallowing a seed,
and both become sexually male, though to all ordinary appearances they
are still women.
Part II, “The Boyhood of Lilly Travers,” recounts the hilarious and
salacious adventures of the two ‘trans-sexists,’ to coin the only
appropriate term. Lilly’s young cousin Bessie falls in love with her, as
does also the widow hitherto involved with her fiancé. Lilly
wholeheartedly reciprocates Bessie’s love, but the cousins’ bedroom
scenes are kept at the level of farce and never go the implied lengths
of Ariosto’s or d’Urfé’s in similar circumstances. At one point Lilly
attends a ball where she dances exclusively with women, apparently
without incurring social criticism—a detail which, if as realistically
accurate as the rest of the winter resort setting, gives evidence of
American naïveté in the 1890s. The negro maid’s adventures are naturally
somewhat more rabelaisian than those of her mistress but stop short of
being censorable.
Part III, “The Wonderful Adventures of Mr. Lawrence Talbot,” presents
Lilly’s life after she has managed to assume male garb and name. The
former fiancé suspects Lawrence of having murdered his cousin Lilly for
her fortune, and challenges him to a duel intended to be fatal. To
protect himself Lawrence forces the man to swallow the third magic seed,
whereupon he becomes a grotesquely masculine woman, just as Lawrence is
a beautiful and beardless youth. Now Lawrence and Bessie marry and set
out for Europe, but the unhappy ex-fiancé pursues them, threatens
Lawrence with exposure, and points out that Bessie, on learning the
truth, will certainly swallow the fourth seed in order to learn the
delights of being a man, and will thus be lost forever as a wife. The
only solution is to present the villain with the means of regaining his
manhood, so that he can get the widow, who is still infatuated with
Lawrence, out of his way by marrying her. There is no evidence that this
jolly bit of satire (discovered quite accidentally by the present
writer) was reviewed or otherwise noted either at home or abroad, nor
did it deserve to be from a literary viewpoint. It is worthy of mention
here, however, as showing that America was aware of variant fiction
other than that of Henry James.
To return once more to France, during 1896 the _Mercure de France_
carried serially Remy de Gourmont’s _Le Songe d’une Femme_, a work of
higher quality than any since James’s _The Bostonians_. In the form of
correspondence among some dozen persons it presents an exhaustive
analysis of what constitutes a satisfactory sexual relationship. The
central figures are a sensitive intellectual, Paul; a simple, sensuous,
and radiantly happy Annette; and a fascinating but physically inhibited
Claude whose emotional pattern closely resembles that of Mlle Tantale
without being similarly accounted for. Claude is married and has also
experimented sexually with an artist for whom she posed in the nude, but
she has never achieved satisfaction. She exerts an irresistible charm
over women but has found relations with them equally unrewarding. For a
time she falls under the spell of Annette’s open-hearted warmth, but
Annette scorns lesbianism as childish. Claude dreams of a perfect love
which will be more than fleshly, and for a time she is hopeful of
realizing her ideal with Paul. During what might be called a
probationary period she holds him captive by giving him “all her
thoughts,” and permitting generous caresses without complete surrender.
Paul has cherished a similar dream and has found Annette too exclusively
sensual. In the end, however, he abandons Claude for the simple and more
“natural” woman. Claude, he finds, can bring happiness to no one, not
even herself. The implication is that for anyone who seeks romantic
perfection all love must end in failure—a direct echo from Baudelaire.
De Gourmont’s title pronounces such an ideal typically feminine: a
woman’s dream.
The last important negative item before 1900 was Henry James’s “The Turn
of the Screw” (1898). If his delineation in 1885 of the Bostonian Olive
Chancellor was moderate enough to leave critics dubious whether he
intended her as a lesbian, there is nothing ambiguous in his later
story. In one of his letters, James himself says that his intention was
to give “the impression of ... the most infernal imaginable evil and
danger.”[31] In this novelette, an innocent young governess goes to a
remote English country estate to take charge of two orphans, a boy of
ten and a girl of eight. The children’s precocious beauty and charm
strike her at once as more than normal, and apprehension dawns with her
learning that the boy has been expelled from his school for reasons
carefully evaded in the letter of dismissal.
Soon she has glimpses about the grounds of a repellently attractive man
and an equally sinister woman, who prove to be apparitions visible only
to herself. From a reluctant housekeeper she extracts that the man, a
former groom now dead, had “had his way” with any woman in the household
or neighborhood that he chose, and that the female spectre, in life her
predecessor as governess, had departed pregnant by him and died in
London of an abortion. These indelicate facts James characteristically
conveys by indirection, never by the bald word. Both these personalities
had been evilly intimate with the children.
Discovering that her awareness and antagonism can hold the spectres at
bay, the governess devotes herself to protecting the children from them.
She soon learns to her horror, however, that the little girl not only
sees the dark woman but exerts self-control and histrionic talents
beyond the capacity of most adults in order to conceal the fact. The boy
becomes genuinely devoted to the governess and tries to cooperate in
resisting the male ghost, but, always fragile, he succumbs to the
emotional conflict and dies of a heart attack. The little girl, more
completely dominated—might an affectionate man have weakened the spell
for her as a woman did for the boy?—realizes now that only she and the
governess can see the apparitions. With precocious acumen she accuses
the governess of insanity, sensing that a child’s word will stand
against that of a potentially hysterical spinster, and achieves her
enemy’s removal.
This is the first literary appearance of lesbian corruption of a child
by an adult, and is probably attributable to the increasing publication
of clinical case studies, for the theme has recurred at least twice in
the subsequent half-century. James’s aversion can be explained on a
number of counts. Where in _The Bostonians_ he studied well-bred women,
his antagonists here are debauched members of a lower class. Then, too,
it is known that he had abandoned an original plan of taking up
permanent residence in Paris because he found the atmosphere there
morally uncongenial, and he had settled in England, which had been
rocked only three years earlier by the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde
for homosexuality. It is conceivable that a desire to deny unequivocally
any sympathy with that phenomenon helped to motivate _The Turn of the
Screw_.
The final French writer of importance to treat of lesbianism before the
turn of the century was Pierre Louÿs, who wrote more in the spirit
(though not the style) of Gautier, Verlaine or Zola than in that of his
contemporary anti-lesbian crusaders. His _Chansons de Bilitis_ (1894)
and _Aphrodite_ (1896) purported to be the fruit, respectively, of
translation and intensive classical research, and to give accurate
pictures of life in early Greece and Alexandria. Classicists promptly
exploded his claim and accused him of sensational exaggeration;
nevertheless the two works enjoyed enormous popularity at the time and
have since been reissued every few years in English as well as French.
The _Songs of Bilitis_, in free verse reminiscent of the Greek
Anthology, pictures the life of a girl from her bucolic childhood in
Pamphilia, through young womanhood on the isle of Lesbos, to her end as
a prosperous courtesan in Cyprus. In her teens she bears a child but
leaves it behind without a qualm when adventure leads her on. The
emotional highlight of her roving existence is the period in Mitylene,
during which she loves and marries another girl with whom she lives
happily and faithfully for a decade. However spurious their Hellenism,
the poetic quality of the _Chansons_ is high, and they have been
repeatedly imitated and translated in English, German, Swedish, and
Czech. One German translation of twenty-four of the songs was made by
Richard Dehmel, a poet in his own right.
In _Aphrodite_ lesbianism is only incidental, but still it recurs
throughout, including the daily ministrations of a slave girl to a
courtesan mistress who accepts them as she does her bath or food; the
courtesan’s intermittent play with a pair of younger flute-girls; and
the flute-girls’ marriage, like that of Bilitis, in which they find
solace for the depravities they must see and endure as paid
entertainers. That Louÿs was aware of every possible sort of lesbian
activity is evident, but confining his attention as he does to
courtesans, he adds little to an understanding of variant relationships
among other classes of women. It is the taller and stronger of his pairs
who always plays the male role, and the only other suggestion of
etiology is the excessive worship of female beauty, dominant in the
cults of Isis or Aphrodite. It was in this respect particularly that he
was accused of distorting historic fact. As Louÿs pictures this worship,
it is closely related to feminine narcissism.
Louÿs’s _Adventures of King Pausole_ published at the turn of the
century is a rollicking tale, supposedly contemporary, but wholly
fanciful in setting. One of its characters preaches the saving grace of
healthy promiscuity as opposed to the prudish constraints of romantic
love. Wholesome citizens, he says, come from the slums where children
run loose. Strictness in raising the young, breeds maladjustment and
neurasthenia. Voluntary exclusive devotion to one individual leads to
the madness of an Orestes, the tragic end of a Marguerite, or the
suicides of Romeo and Juliet.
The lesbian pattern in his fantastic design is woven about Mirabelle, a
danseuse reminiscent in physique and temperament of Maupin. She easily
captivates the kings’ daughter, Aline, for, although the royal Pausole
himself has a harem of 365 women, he has kept his child as secluded as
Salammbo. Brought to his senses by Aline’s “elopement” with Mirabelle,
and by several adventures he has while searching for the pair, the king
embraces the doctrine of freedom for the young to the extent of smiling
on Aline’s marriage (at fifteen) to a page who speedily converts her to
the joys of heterosexual love. The dancer happily encounters a young
noblewoman who, like herself, has known men but has dreamed of a woman
partner, and their union apparently becomes permanent. Thus, Louÿs
compromises between the promiscuity advocated by his spokesman in the
book and the current romantic ideal.
In the factual literature on homosexuality one finds ambiguous allusions
to more variance in French fiction between 1880 and 1895 than it has
been feasible to pursue, but considering the returns on those verified
it is unlikely that any important lesbian works even of low quality have
gone undetected. In 1896 Rachilde’s signed reviews began in the _Mercure
de France_ and a little later the first bibliography of belles-lettres
in Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_ listed a few retrospective titles along with
current notes. These two systematic sources show that perhaps a dozen
minor French novels appearing during the last half dozen years of the
century (none were available for examination), dealt with variance to
some extent. Such titles as _Mlle Wladimir_, _Mon Mari_ and _Satana_
indicate close imitation of such earlier successes as _Mlle Giraud_ and
_Méphistophéla_. The majority seem to have made at least a pretense of
condemning lesbianism, but Rachilde remarked acidly in reviewing one of
them (Jane de La Vaudère’s _Les Demi-Sexes_, the theme of which was
ovariotomy undergone by women sufficiently eager for masculinity) that
she wished novelists would stop peddling sensationalism under the guise
of medical instruction or moral preachment.[32] The cheery insouciance
of _King Pausole_ was clearly an innovation and marked the beginning of
a new period. As for the few novels published in Germany before 1900,
since they were the first of their kind they will be left for
consideration with twentieth-century material from which they are
indistinguishable.
Summary
Before leaving the nineteenth century a brief summary of its variant
writing will be illuminating. That a preponderance of the material was
in French will not surprise English readers, who have long recognized
the comparative frankness of France in matters of sex, at least until
our own last decade or so. In view of the quantity and variety of
attention devoted to the subject, however, the proportion of sympathetic
treatment is low. Of the more than a dozen authors who took overt
lesbianism as a major theme, seven—Coleridge, Baudelaire, Belot, Mendès,
Peladan, Strindberg, and Gourmont—condemned it explicitly, though with
differing degrees of severity. Seven others—Latouche, Balzac in _The
Girl with the Golden Eyes_, Rossetti, Swinburne in _Lesbia Brandon_,
Maupassant, Rachilde in _Mme. Adonis_, and James in _The Turn of the
Screw_—made lesbian affairs responsible for murder, suicide and ruin,
and so implied equally strong condemnation. Only three were tolerant,
and of these Louÿs, for all his championing of sexual freedom generally,
hurried Aline in _King Pausole_ into a heterosexual match at fifteen,
and depicted Bilitis as promiscuous from puberty to death save for her
lesbian interlude. Gautier was sympathetic to a single lesbian
experience but predicted an unhappy future for Maupin. Verlaine alone,
himself homosexual, let his portraits stand without comment. The several
authors who included minor lesbian episodes pictured them as involving
gravely maladjusted women or as the pastime of prostitutes and other
questionable characters.
Of the four novelists who used variance as a major theme but avoided or
denied lesbian implications, James in _The Bostonians_ considered it a
menace to society, Lamartine showed it as contributing to failure in
heterosexual adjustment, Balzac in _Seraphitus-Seraphita_ made it a
mystic apprenticeship for marriage, and only Wollstonecraft exalted it
above experience with men.
Quite as notable as this limited sympathy for variance is the frequency
of heterosexual action. Some eighty primary and as many or more
secondary characters are involved in the total of variant scenes, and of
these only half a dozen indubitably never knew men. (For a number of the
minor figures definite evidence is lacking, but indications are that
they belonged in the bisexual group.) To be sure, several women had
involuntary and/or distasteful experience with men, but the majority
eventually found such experience preferable to variant relations.
When it is noted in conclusion that the proportion of male to female
authors is even larger than that of French to English, one cannot avoid
inferring some causal relation between the fact and the statistics
above. This impression is confirmed by noting that the four feminine
writers, Wollstonecraft, Schreiner, Rossetti and Rachilde, pictured no
successful heterosexual relations. “Mary” refuses to consummate her
marriage; Lyndall commits slow suicide to escape hers; Raoule achieves a
fantastic evasion, and Mme. Adonis takes the man of the couple she
captivates in a spirit of vindictive sadism. The hypothesis of a very
natural sex bias with regard to feminine variance will be amply
supported in studying twentieth-century authors.
CHAPTER V.
CONJECTURAL RETROSPECT
Four women among thirty-odd nineteenth-century authors dealing with
variance may seem a meager fraction until one recalls that Mary
Wollstonecraft was the first of her sex to appear in this record since
Sappho. What accounts for this dearth of feminine authorship? Since the
renaissance, many women have been published; factual literature attests
that female variance has always existed to a greater or less extent; and
surely it is a subject in which, if any, one would expect women to show
more interest than men. But thus far, only one literary attitude toward
variance has enjoyed freedom from censure: disapproval, whether it was
conveyed by satire, exhortation, or tragic example.
To such derogatory expression it is natural enough that few women should
contribute. Equally obvious are the factors inhibiting feminine
expressions of sympathy. For one thing, women have suffered too many
critical handicaps on the score of their sex alone to embark lightly
upon a venture which lays men of established repute open to attack. More
important, a man writing tolerantly of female variance can be accused of
nothing worse than tolerance, but a woman is at once suspected of being
variant herself, which to the man-in-the-street is tantamount to being
lesbian in the most damning sense of the term. This is not mere armchair
theorizing. Havelock Ellis in his volume on sexual inversion observes
that women poets of his day who had contributed variant histories to his
record regularly changed the gender of pronouns in love lyrics destined
for publication, in order to conceal the homosexual inspiration of their
verses. And the present writer has amusingly enough been viewed askance
by certain librarians after demanding from their “restricted” cases
novels no more questionable than those of Radclyffe Hall. If this was
the state of affairs well into the twentieth century, a time presently
to be shown more tolerant of variance perhaps than any since the
classical period, how much more stringent must have been the need for
caution when to be suspect incurred moral opprobrium and complete social
ostracism?
It seems certain, then, that there have been women of variant
inclination through the centuries who also possessed literary gifts, and
it is probable that exhaustive research would reveal traces of variance
in a surprising number of feminine authors from the renaissance on. The
purpose of the following chapter is to consider those few whose lives
most readily yield suggestive hints, and to correlate such hints with
corresponding traces, however carefully masked, in their writing.
*Louise Labé.* The first promising subject is Louise Labé, lyric poet of
the early sixteenth century and one of a group of brilliant young women
who brought considerable distinction upon their native city of Lyons.
Until the middle of the last century the best biographical encyclopedias
stated as fact that in 1542 she took active part in the Dauphin’s siege
of Perpignan and acquitted herself so well that she was thereafter
nicknamed “le capitaine Loys.”[1] With advances in historical method,
the authenticity of this episode has been questioned (though never
flatly disproved), the alternate probability being that she took the
part of a knight in a tournament celebrating the same victory. In either
event, her horsemanship and conduct of arms are described as masterly.
Scholars have expended much effort in attempting to identify the persons
to whom her passionate lyrics were addressed. Internal evidence favors
the assumption that she had a number of lovers; yet, even the critics
who find this idea acceptable have not managed to identify more than
one, her fellow poet Olivier de Magny. Several other leading questions
also remain unanswered. Why, in view of Labé’s marked poetic gift, does
so slim a volume of her verse remain, in comparison to her surviving
prose, which is excellent but of lower vitality? And what was the cause
of her quarrel with Clémence de Bourges, a younger woman poet to whom
she dedicated a volume published in 1555, and, in that dedication,
proclaimed as being more gifted and showing brighter promise than
herself?
Her biography, like those of many nonpolitical figures so far removed in
time, is not rich in documented detail. It is known that she was born
about 1520, the daughter of a wealthy cordage merchant. Despite her
middle-class status, as a girl she studied music, Greek, Latin and
Spanish, and seems also to have known Italian well, especially the work
of Ariosto. In 1542—that is, in her twenties, late for those days—she
married Ennemond Perrin, another cordage merchant and a friend of her
father’s. Her husband was twenty years her senior and the marriage was
childless; however, it endured for more than a quarter of a century, and
on his death Perrin left her all his property. Both father and husband
being men of wealth, Labé had a large house with pleasant gardens which
became a rendezvous for poets and artists. Her liaison with de Magny
apparently stirred no scandal, but ‘so brilliant a position naturally
excited envy,’ and she was rather spitefully nicknamed “La Belle
Cordelière.” After her husband’s death in 1565, the noblewoman of Lyons
set upon “la petite bourgeoise” for having eclipsed them intellectually
and socially, and during the brief year before her own death Labé was
accused of being “livrée à toutes sortes de désordres.”[2]
Until the time of her marriage Labé was certainly skilled and active in
all the arts of an _homme de guerre_. Even later (about 1547) when Diane
de Poitiers accompanied Henry II on a visit to Lyons, Louise seems to
have been one of the moving spirits, if not the organizer, of a fête
honoring the favorite, in which young women of the town assumed the
costume of Diana the Huntress and exhibited their skill with bow and
dart. (It is interesting to find Brantôme alluding to this event in
passing, though he mentions no names and no precise date.)[3]
In her thirties Labé rebelled against the limitations of feminine
education, proclaiming that women should study all the “sciences”
pursued by men, and in the letter of dedication to her friend which
prefaced her volume in 1555 she begs them to ‘lift their spirits a
little above their bobbins and distaffs.’[4] Shortly after the
publication of this work she was estranged from Clémence de Bourges by
the aforementioned “éclatante” quarrel of uncertain origin, though until
then ‘their union was cited as one rare between two women.’[5]
Apparently no one has suggested that she may have been homosexual. But
in her “Elégie I,” we find the following:
Encor Phébus, ami des Lauriers vers ...
Chanter me fait ...
Il m’a donné la lyre, qui les vers
Souloit chanter de l’amour Lesbienne ...[6]
If in sixteenth century France the final adjective carried its present
meaning, and there seems no evidence to the contrary, this passage is
certainly suggestive. In “Elégie III,” a kind of apologia for a life of
emotional _Sturm und Drang_, she says she was only sixteen when she
first suffered a devastatingly tragic love, but that she had already
loved deeply twice before. She implores her townswomen as they read of
her ‘amorous pains, regrets and tears’ not to condemn that “erreur de ma
folle jeunesse—Si c’est erreur....”[7] This confession has disturbed
some critics profoundly because it seems to imply that she must have
been a courtesan.
Only a few of her lyrics reveal the sex of the person to whom they were
addressed, an evasion more difficult in an inflected language than in
English, and among those which do not betray it is the group that is
acclaimed by critics as most distinguished by sincerity, frankness, and
‘an amazing freshness compared to her contemporaries.’[8] The
descriptive touches in some of these sonnets, moreover, picture a loved
one of more delicate beauty and a passion of less harsh and painful
violence than the others. The assumption that she was a lesbian would
explain her precocious passions and the number, variety, and anonymity
of these later flames better than the hotly disputed courtesan theory,
although she was undoubtedly bisexual and very ardent—“tous ses gouts
furent des passions,” says one biographer. It would also explain the
many, although comparatively unimpassioned, tributes written to her by
male poets, for artists incline to be more tolerant of sex variance than
the public at large, and they may possibly have gone on record in her
favor because she suffered from social persecution.
And finally, lesbianism would account for her estrangement from her
younger friend, “of noble family and spotless reputation,” as well as
any of the other theories advanced to that end. Until late in the
nineteenth century a legend persisted that in the same year that Labé’s
volume was published Clémence submitted verses of her own to her friend
for criticism, but the latter instead of giving it “enleva a Clémence
son amant,”[9] and it was suggested that Clémence’s death within the
year was chargeable to this blow. This tale was fairly well discredited
in 1877 by the Dutch scholar Boy;[10] however, nothing plausible has
replaced it.
Let us consider the case if that rare union _was_ a passionate one. With
the older woman married and famous, the younger formally engaged (as
Clémence was), their friendship would excite little comment. If the
married woman had also had as lover the most distinguished poet of the
period, and if, as there is reason to believe, Clémence had married at
twenty, and lost a husband, they would be even safer from suspicion.
Then Labé publishes the volume of poems described above. She dedicates
it to Clémence in a letter lauding the girl’s poetic promise to the
skies and deploring a married woman’s humdrum life. If, as commonly
happens, identities were inferred at the time for the subjects of Labé’s
verses, Clémence’s “noble family,” and her fiancé as well, may have
frowned on further intimacy between the girl and the devoted friend who
seemed so little in favor of her marrying.
Clémence might still, however, submit her own work for a more practiced
writer’s criticism. What happened? Despite the fact that scholars have
unhappily been unable to trace de Bourges’ volume, several conjectures
are legitimate. Did it contain impassioned verses to the fiancé which
stirred Labé to reckless jealousy? Were there cryptic love poems to Labé
herself which convinced her that marriage would be unhappy for her
beloved protégée? In either case she might have enlightened the young
man as to the nature of her relation to Clémence. Unhandsome behavior,
but no more so than the legendary stealing of the lover for herself
(which Boy believes did not occur). There is a kindlier alternative: she
merely warned Clémence that certain poems would be identified as written
to her; the less experienced girl, suspecting her of literary jealousy,
published them anyway; Labé’s apprehensions proved correct, and the
result separated the lovers. But such involved psychology belongs more
to the twentieth century than to the sixteenth. All this is conjecture,
to be sure, but no more implausible than the several conflicting
theories already advanced by Labé scholars. Furthermore, it has the
advantage, conclusive with experimental scientists, of providing answers
to more questions than any other single hypothesis.
*Charlotte Charke.* A sadly different life story is recorded in the
autobiography written nearly two centuries later by Charlotte Charke,
daughter of the erratic actor and playwright, Colley Cibber. (An account
of that irresponsible egomaniac’s family life would shed light on his
youngest child’s temperament and fate, but cannot be included here.)
Though Havelock Ellis expresses uncertainty that Charlotte was actually
homosexual,[1] there are elements in her adventures which more than
compare with significant passages in the lives of Mary Frith and
Catalina Erauso. Like these two women, Charke was a transvestist, and at
several points in her story she mentions connections with women which
promise definite significance had they been expanded. But at the time of
writing she was forty-five, unable to get work, and more than
half-starving in a bare single room near a refuse dump in London.
Survival depended on her standing well with her readers—her tale
appeared in weekly installments—and on her hope of reconciliation with
her father, who had long refused aid. Hence her narrative is so full of
discreet elision as to be sometimes incoherent or even contradictory.
This is particularly evident in regard to her “wearing breeches,” one of
the sorest points between her and her family, and also to all her
personal relations except her early and unhappy marriage.
Her history is a veritable psychiatric case study. Born when her mother
(the actress Jane Shore) was forty-five, she was the youngest of a dozen
children and the object of violent jealousy among her elder siblings
because of the mother’s favoritism. Charlotte, on her part, was
intensely devoted to her mother as long as the latter lived.
Precociously brilliant, she was sent to boarding school at eight and
within two or three years was crammed with three languages, music,
dancing, and geography, all of which she later pronounced useless in
aiding a woman to earn her keep. From the age of five she was given to
donning boy’s clothes and engaging in the most daring and original
exploits, sometimes to the point of grave danger. These make enthralling
reading but are not pertinent here. At sixteen she married a worthless
bandleader in her father’s theatre—the Drury Lane—and had a daughter
within the year; but even before the child’s birth her husband was
“running with a plurality of common wretches [women] that were to be had
for half a crown,”[2] and at the end of the year the two separated. Her
trenchant comment on her marital relations is that both she and her
husband “ought rather have been sent to school than to church, in regard
to any qualification on either side towards rendering the marriage state
comfortable to one another.”[3]
She made her debut as an actress shortly before her marriage and
continued on the London stage for perhaps two years after her
separation, taking men’s parts at least half the time. Then apparently
she went on the boards in her father’s favorite role and one he had made
famous, Lord Foppington in _The Careless Husband_. Perhaps this fact led
Cibber to cut off financial support and to spoil her chances with all
London producers. More likely it was her travesty of his acting that
enraged him, for his vanity was morbid and she inherited his wicked and
heartless wit. As long as her mother lived she was sure of some funds,
but death soon closed that channel and she was driven to a variety of
shifts that would have been tragic had she been capable of taking
anything very tragically. These experiences, too, are diverting, but
only the most significant can be touched on here. For a time she ran a
grocer shop in London, living meanwhile with a young widow who lent her
money for her business. Later, when arrested for debt, she was saved by
contributions from women, once from a Mrs. Elizabeth Careless whose name
suggests her profession, and again from “all the ladies who kept coffee
houses in and about Covent Garden ... for the relief of poor Sir
Charles, as they were pleased to stile me.”[4] Twice women lost their
hearts to her and she was forced to reveal her sex, but her mere word
was not sufficient. In the first case we are not told how she managed to
be convincing. In the second, she was working as a waiter, and her
inamorata came to Charlotte’s room to give her the lie, saying she
“could never have made advances to one of her own sect [sic].” When
Charlotte asked if she was sure she “understood what she meant,” it led
to a physical brawl so violent as to cost Charlotte her position.
Intermittently she acted in the provinces with strolling companies of
low calibre and continually bankrupt, and for a long time she and
another actress stayed together through thick and thin, the friend
caring for her during three years of “nervous fever and lowness of
spirits.” At one point she lets slip that this woman passed in a tight
place as “Mrs. Brown,” and since “Mr. Brown” was the name Charlotte took
whenever she needed an alias, it may be that they lived outside the
theatre as man and wife. Finally, they abandoned acting for a time at
Chepstow in Wales because Charlotte “met with many friends,”
particularly another widow who lent her considerable sums of money, and
a younger woman who gave her the use of “a very handsome house with a
large garden, near three quarters acre of ground” which had just been
inherited. The latter also wrote her “very friendly letters” when she
went on short trips. At that time, she attempted to run a bake-shop,
still with her faithful friend the actress, who she says now stayed on
“only out of sincere friendship and an uncommon easiness of temper,” a
suggestion that might well imply a more cogent previous reason. As was
said, none of these passages mentions variance, but taken all together
and in conjunction with the dark mystery she makes of her first
experience in men’s clothes,[5] as well as her family’s relentless
disowning of her, they make a picture which seems to justify her
inclusion in a conjectural record.
*“The Ladies of Llangollen.”* Charke’s history brings us to the late
eighteenth century, a period when the Age of Reason had passed its peak
and the deifying of emotion which characterized the Romantic Period was
beginning to appear. Blanche Hardy, in a biography of the Princess de
Lamballe, says:
It was the age of great friendships: girls and even grown women
carried the miniature of another woman about with them in a locket,
bracelet or other ornament, would draw it out occasionally when in
company, gaze fondly upon it, and press it to their lips; wrote long
and loverlike letters to the beloved object, awaited her coming
ardently, and wept storms of tears at her departure.[1]
One such passionate friendship was born in Ireland, though the parties
to it are universally known as “the Ladies of Llangollen,” the
picturesque valley in Wales where they spent the greater part of their
lives. The journal kept for forty years by the elder of the two is now
all that survives of their writing, though references to them in the
work of friends suggest that both wrote some nature essays and verses.
The younger was something of an artist as well. Both Lady Eleanor Butler
and Sarah Ponsonby came of titled families. They met first at a school
in Kilkenny, probably when Eleanor was nearing twenty and Sarah entering
her teens, for there seems to have been about seven or eight years’
difference in their ages. Their friendship apparently flourished for
nearly a decade before Eleanor’s harsh and prudish mother tried to force
the boyish young woman into either a distasteful marriage or a convent.
Sarah’s mother, a second wife, had died in the girl’s infancy. After a
third wife increased the already large family, Sarah lived with a cousin
whose husband made advances which were disgusting and gravely disturbing
to the adolescent girl. Her older and more independent friend, given to
wearing men’s clothes, proposed an “elopement,” but the two were without
resources, and after spending several nights in a barn they were
apprehended and brought back in disgrace. Sarah at once fell gravely
ill. Eleanor was forbidden to see her, and Sarah’s cousin accused
Eleanor of having
a debauched mind, with no ingredients for friendship which ought to
be founded on virtue, whereas hers every day more and more ... was
acting in direct opposition to it, as well as to the interest,
happiness and reputation of one she professed to love.[2]
This cousin also attempted to keep Sarah from receiving Eleanor’s long
letters, which she said only aggravated the girl’s illness.
The romantic pair had an ally, however, in a servant, Mary Caryll, known
as “Molly the Bruiser” because of her marked masculinity. With this
girl’s help, Eleanor was hidden in Sarah’s bedroom closet for several
days, whereupon the latter promptly recovered, and as soon as she was
well enough the pair staged a rebellion—they simply refused to live any
longer at home or apart from one another. Both families being by now
worn down, the girls were given a small allowance and invited to remove
themselves permanently from the neighborhood. They managed to get as far
as Wales, and, once established, they sent back for Molly, who remained
their servant until her death many years later.
Though “poor as church mice,” the two women were radiantly happy, and
“of a personality so powerful” that they were known as the Platonists.
“Their retreat became a kind of court at which all the great ones of
their time presented themselves. Wordsworth, DeQuincey, Scott, the Duke
of Wellington and Mme. de Genlis were among their guests,”[3] and they
had a half century of idyllic happiness before they died, Eleanor in
1829 and Sarah in 1831. The journal which Eleanor Butler kept from 1788
until her death records the placid course of their mutual existence,
detailing financial stress lightly borne, small village tensions faced
with equanimity, and again and again “a day of sweetly enjoyed
retirement.”
On the precise nature of the relation between them the journal is
naturally reticent. The modern French analyst of all feminine emotions,
Colette, devotes better than twenty pages to it in _Ces Plaisirs_, and
epitomizes neatly the distinguishing feature of all such attachments.
‘It is not sensuality that ensures the fidelity of two women but a
kind of blood kinship.... I have written kinship where I should have
said identity. Their close resemblance guarantees similarity in
_volupté_. The lover takes courage in her certainty of caressing a
body whose secrets she knows, whose preferences her own body has
taught her.’[4]
If English readers of Eleanor’s journal want to see in a single mention
of “our bed” an impure significance, says Colette, then let them.
‘What is purity? Why is it “pure” to stroke a cheek but not a breast?
Yes, yes, the breast responds. But what of it, if above it the lover
merely dreams? “It is the victim who is almost always responsible in
emotional crimes,” says an old magistrate. How one would like to have
the journal of Sarah Ponsonby, the younger girl! Eleanor Butler was
the practical one, the possessor, the male. Sarah Ponsonby was the
_woman_.’[5]
*Karoline von Günderode.* During the same years that saw these willing
exiles living out their rapturous idyll, a very different life was swept
along on the tide of romantic _Sturm und Drang_ in Germany. Karoline von
Günderode was still unborn when the Ladies of Llangollen settled in
their Welsh elysium, and suicide ended her quarter-century of life two
decades before their death. Outside her native land this distinguished
young romantic poet is most likely to be remembered through her brief
connection with Bettina Brentano von Arnim, sister of the poet Clemens
Brentano and the “child” of _Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kind_. The
mercurial and precocious Bettina was undoubtedly a very remarkable young
person, but scholarly research has proved her published correspondence
with Goethe to be largely spurious, and even the superficial reader can
detect signs of _post facto_ interpolation in her letter to Goethe’s
mother describing Günderode’s death and the two girls’ previous
relationship.[1]
Equally copious expansion is evident in the correspondence with
Günderode,[2] a really remarkable volume of philosophy, poetry, and
romantic “sensibility” made human, however, by the small ordinary
preoccupations of the two very busy young women. Nine-tenths of the
volume is occupied by Bettina’s own letters, supposedly written during a
number of brief absences when she was a guest at various country
estates. Had these voluminous outpourings actually been penned under
such circumstances the girl would have had no time for meals or sleep,
let alone the normal social exigencies of house-party life.
Karoline von Günderode was one of several daughters of a moderately
affluent widow, who spent the latter part of her short life in a
“Kloster” (not a religious house but a dignified retreat for well-born
spinsters such as has been charmingly pictured by “Isak Dinesen” in
_Seven Gothic Tales_). She was, by all accounts, an interesting mixture
of emotional mysticism and sceptical “masculine” intellect, and both are
reflected in her poems.[3] At least one of these, “Wandel und Treue,”
suggests that there is no certainty save that all is uncertain, no
ultimate Truth because life and universe alike are in constant flux and
inexpressible in terms of any constant pattern. It might almost have
been written today rather than a century and a half ago.
The context in which the poem is quoted shows that it grew out of
long-sustained discussions between her and Bettina on the nature of
love. It is cast in the form of a dialogue between Violetta, who
embodies Bettina’s championship of romantic constancy, and Narziss, who
represents Günderode’s own viewpoint. The latter holds that love, like
all else, is subject to change; therefore, one should not attempt to fix
it upon a single person or thing, but should love only Love and follow
its dictates wherever it leads. The amount of stress laid upon this
composition by Bettina, who compiled and inflated the correspondence for
publication, suggests an effort to throw upon the other woman all
responsibility for any inconstancy which ensued.
The sixty-page biography of Günderode in Ersch and Gruber’s _Allgemeine
Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste_[4] records several variant
attachments in her life. Previous to her acquaintance with Bettina she
enjoyed a very close friendship with Frau Karoline von Barkhaus, to whom
she wrote oftener than weekly in the warmest terms, and in one of the
quoted letters she mentions that ‘a room is ready where we will sleep
together when you come.’ Another woman, Frau Susanna Maria von Heyden,
mentioned as her most intimate friend, fell heir to Günderode’s portrait
and two paintings of the scene of the unhappy girl’s death. She ‘never
recovered from her grief over her unlucky friend, and lived secluded
from the world in joyless solitude.’
As to the relationship with Bettina, their correspondence shows it to
have been warmly emotional as well as intellectual. Bettina wrote at
length to Madame Goethe of Günderode’s extreme sensitiveness and
intensity, describing the latter’s pallor the first time that Bettina
kissed her on the mouth, and generally betraying awareness of unpleasant
gossip and eagerness to deflect it from herself.[5] The facts of the
case seem to be that, like Labé and Clémence de Bourges, the two girls
had a serious quarrel, and Günderode’s suicide followed closely enough
upon it to create some unpleasantness for the survivor. Here, too, the
cause of the quarrel was a man, and editors of Günderode’s poems and
letters claim that it was the tragic end of this romance with him which
led the poet to take her own life. The man involved had, while fairly
young, married a widow thirteen years his senior, who had several
children. When he and Günderode found themselves deeply in love, the
wife, with “sterbender Güte,” agreed to release him, but under emotional
stress the already tubercular young man suffered a serious hemorrhage,
and since he was not yet free it was the wife who nursed him back to
health. In penitent gratitude he swore that if he lived he would never
leave her, and he kept his vow. This version of Günderode’s tragedy is
offered by the conventional biographies.[6]
In Bettina’s letters and elsewhere, however, the story survives of the
man’s being a fellow guest of hers at one of the house parties which
spacious living and difficult travel fostered in the eighteenth century.
Full of his love for Günderode, he paid much attention to a child in the
house who reminded him of his beloved, and in Bettina’s presence he
called the little girl “his Karoline” (her name was Sophie) and caressed
and kissed her. The fiery Bettina, furious that he ‘used expressions in
speaking of Günderode as if he had a right to her love,’ told him off
roundly, and this contretemps apparently led to some difficulty between
him and Günderode—the only reasonable explanation being that Bettina
must also have talked as if _she_ “had a right to her love.”
The quarrel between the two young women followed, and one summer evening
a few weeks later Günderode strolled unobtrusively to the bank of her
favorite stream and there shot herself. It is not suggested that any
overt scandal occurred, or that the quarrel with Bettina was the
immediate cause of this act. Günderode’s poetry is minor-keyed and full
of a romantic preoccupation with early death. But certainly something in
the relation between the two girls was a contributing factor. And that
variant inferences are not far-fetched is evidenced by a German lesbian
novel of 1919,[7] in which the memory of Günderode is worshipped with
passion by a brilliantly educated lesbian, while Bettina is the object
of jealous hatred. The author of this tale (of which more later) is
known to have had access to much German material not available to the
present writer, which apparently supported the lesbian inference.
* * * * *
Only a few years after Günderode’s death a tragedy in Edinburgh was
directly attributed to homosexual scandal. Two mistresses of a private
school, Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie, were accused of tribadism by Dame
Helen Cumming Gordon on the evidence of a young relative (or ward) who
was a pupil in the school. The young women brought suit for slander and
after a long and bitter battle apparently won their case, but their
reputations were damaged to the extent of ruining their educational
enterprise. It is upon the court record of their trial that Lillian
Hellman based her Broadway success of 1934, _The Children’s Hour_, and
their story will receive further attention when that drama is considered
under twentieth-century literature.
*George Sand.* In France the spectacular figure of George Sand invites
attention, both because of her adoption of male costume in the 1830s,
and because critics are agreed as to the pronounced masculinity of her
always semi-autobiographical heroines. She wrote nothing to be classed
as variant, but special note is due her _Gabriel-Gabrielle_,[1] the
title an obvious echo of Balzac’s _Seraphitus-Seraphita_, which
antedated it by only five years. Sand’s title-character is definitely an
intersexual, but the author avoids variant emotion and concentrates upon
psychological ambiguity. Gabriel, an orphan, is not only raised as a
boy, but by a somewhat strained device is made to believe that she
actually is one until she attains her majority. Learning at this point
that the deception has been contrived by her grandfather, to secure for
his branch of the family a fortune which can be inherited only through
the male line, she sets out to find her defrauded male cousin and make
restitution. The two fall in love, marry secretly, and live abroad in
the hope of avoiding family interference. Their effort is futile, and
after much tragic misunderstanding and dangerous intrigue, Gabrielle is
finally set upon and killed by her grandfather’s hirelings during one of
the periods when she is again, as during her youth, posing as a man.
The most pertinent passage describes a masked ball which Gabrielle
attends dressed for the first time as a woman. The cousin, who still
believes her a man, speaks recklessly of how easily he could love “her.”
Her reply is:
“This sort of entertainment should be morally frowned upon. It all
goes to excite impure ideas, the whole purpose is to shake our
composure. The joke has gone too far. I am going to take off this
costume and never put it on again.”[2]
Later she implores him not to duel with a fellow-reveller who has
insulted her, as when it is known that she is “really a man it would be
ridiculous. And who knows? Wicked minds could even find in it matter for
odious interpretation.” Her cousin replies: “That’s true. May my honor
and reputation for courage perish, rather than that flower of innocence
which graces your name. I will turn it all off as a jest.”
As it is common knowledge that, though never a compulsive transvestist,
George Sand wore men’s clothes as frequently as women’s from her
girlhood in Nohant until she approached middle age, her treatment of
this incident is rather surprising. But this, and her careful avoidance
of so much as the mention of female homosexuality, carry a suggestion of
the caution observed by all potentially suspected variants. The
circumstances of Aurore Dudevant’s childhood and puberty were enough, in
all conscience, to produce any or all of the aberrations in a
psychoanalyst’s manual. Her heterosexual affairs were so numerous, open,
and dramatic that few students have looked for other emotional incidents
in her life. By her own statement, however, she never achieved complete
satisfaction with any of the men she loved,[3] and there are a number of
suggestive incidents which crop up in one after another of her
biographies.
During her last year in a convent school in Paris—at about seventeen,
that is—she suffered what in modern parlance would be called a violent
“crush” on an Irish schoolmate. In the 1830s she was “for a long time
... fascinated by the great romantic actress of the day, Dorval....
Dumas and Vigny loved her (Dorval), and she had been Musset’s last
mistress. George had seen much of her in those years, so much that Vigny
had become jealous of their intimacy.”[4] (André Maurois quotes a letter
in which Vigny refers to Sand viciously as “that Lesbian.”)[5] Many
years later, after Dorval’s death, Sand took over the responsibility for
her children. During Sand’s sojourn in Switzerland in the middle 1830s
she met Mme. d’Agoult—known to literature as Daniel Stern—and was so
strongly attracted that she entertained her new friend at Nohant for
several months after their return to France. Subsequently the two lived
but a few doors apart in Paris and for some time held a joint salon.
Still later she experienced a friendship of similar intensity with
Pauline Garcia, Malibran’s sister and a noted singer. Even after Garcia
had married Viardot, Sand continued to see so much of her that Mme.
Viardot was generally referred to as “Mme. Sand’s friend” first, “the
great singer” second.
Given Sand’s passionate temperament and her lack of restraint, it seems
reasonable to assume that she had several variant experiences, which
were overshadowed in the public eye by her more dramatic heterosexual
ones, and about which she preserved discreet silence in her writing. It
may be argued that such silence is out of character with her fictional
volubility about her other affairs. But the noted men of her day with
whom she became involved had little to fear from her advertising their
relations with her. For her own reputation she was apparently not much
concerned, being a true and courageous child of the period; however, she
may well have felt consideration for women whom she loved and who had
more to lose. Possibly her variant attachments were _not_ physical
liaisons; nevertheless, if she had presented them fictionally in their
true intensity, because of her other notorious experiences it is
unlikely that they would be credited with innocence.
*Emily Brontë.* In England an even more complete discretion was guarded
by the enigmatic Emily Brontë. All four of the Brontës wrote with talent
which in Charlotte and Emily approached genius; yet their lives as
children of a poor clergyman in a remote country village were almost
empty of outward event. Emily’s was barren even of a love affair, a
paradox to critics in view of the emotional power in her writing. In the
century since their deaths, some hundred critical and biographical
studies have attempted to solve the Brontës’ riddle. In Charlotte’s case
the task is relatively simple, since her letters reveal without much
reticence two passionate attachments, one to Ellen Nussey, an early
school friend, and the second to Constantin Héger, master of the school
in Brussels where she twice stayed briefly, as student and as teacher.
The first love was of such intensity that E. F. Benson, in his biography
of Charlotte, frankly pronounces it homosexual, though he is quick to
add that considering the frequency of such experience among adolescents
of both sexes, it should be regarded as more normal than otherwise.
It is true that this friendship began in the years between fourteen and
sixteen when Charlotte and Ellen were together in boarding school, but
it seemed to grow rather than diminish over the subsequent decade, until
Charlotte was writing to Ellen in her twenties of “trembling all over
with excitement after reading your note.” In 1836, when she was
twenty-one, Charlotte wrote:
Ellen, I wish I could live with you always, I begin to cling to you
more fondly than I ever did. If we had a cottage and a competency of
our own I do think we might love until Death without being dependent
on any third person for happiness.
And again in the next year:
Why are we so divided? Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of
loving each other too well—because of losing sight of the Creator in
idolatry of the creature.[1]
From the very openness of these transports it must be obvious that the
relationship was an innocent one, and indeed that she herself was
ignorant of any other possibility. Moreover, all the fire went out of it
as soon as she had met and fallen in love with M. Héger.
Emily’s case is more complex; consequently, all manner of solutions have
been advanced for the puzzle she presents, from a most secretly hidden
liaison of the ordinary sort to an incestuous relation with her brother
Branwell. The most illuminating suggestions from the viewpoint of the
present study are found in Romer Wilson’s _All Alone_ and in Virginia
Moore’s _The Life and Eager Death of Emily Brontë_. Miss Wilson analyzes
in Emily what she terms the “Dark Hero ideal,” a male alter ego which
she very plausibly claims to be the most significant feature of Emily’s
personality, and of which she shows Heathcliff in _Wuthering Heights_ to
be a projection. Employing a different approach, Miss Moore assembles
objective testimony that from earliest childhood Emily was boyish in
appearance, temperament and behavior, and suggests that many of her
lyrics were inspired by a person of her own sex.[2] In Emily’s own day,
of course, _Wuthering Heights_ was the one novel published by the
pseudonymous “Bells” whose feminine authorship critics longest refused
to credit, and Moore’s chapter advancing the theory of Emily’s variance
is very convincing. Adverse critics have attacked Moore’s soundness on
the score of her misreading the title of a poem in the British Museum
Brontë manuscript; however, all the Brontë handwriting is virtually
illegible, and Moore was the first to study the document. In her zeal to
consider all conceivable evidence for a man in Emily’s life, she read as
“Louis Parensell” a title shown later to be inserted in Charlotte’s hand
and deciphered as “Love’s Farewell,” but at least her exhaustive search
for records of Mr. Parensell has reduced the likelihood of any
subsequent scholar’s unearthing evidence of a lover.
Surprisingly enough, Moore failed to capitalize on one important episode
in Emily’s life—the girl’s reaction at fifteen to her first meeting with
Charlotte’s bosom friend, Ellen Nussey. At the time of Ellen’s first
house-visit to the Brontë’s she was, on the evidence of a surviving
portrait, a bewitchingly pretty and very feminine young woman. Thus the
adolescent Emily, who had had opportunity of meeting virtually no one
outside her family, was thrown into contact with an older girl of great
physical appeal and one patently capable of variant emotion. The house
was small, and sleeping arrangements involved Emily’s sharing a bedroom
with Charlotte and her guest.
But Emily had sensibilities too delicate to intrude on bosom friends.
While Charlotte and Ellen whispered far into the night, she bundled
up and went and slept in the little cubby over the peat room with
Tabby the servant.[3]
One day Charlotte was ill and unable to entertain her guest.
But to their surprise, Emily, whose dislike of strangers had always
been violent, volunteered for that office. On their return from the
moors Charlotte was nervous. “How did Emily behave?” she asked
eagerly as soon as she could get Ellen aside. “Why, Emily had been
very, very nice,” said Ellen in surprise.[3]
Later in her life Ellen described Emily as maddeningly unsociable, but
as having “a brilliant and very appealing sudden gaze when she allowed
her eyes to be seen.”
Immediately upon Ellen’s departure, Emily suffered an attack
of erysipelas so severe that her arm had to be lanced,
“accompanied—unromantically—by liver complaint.” The indication that her
general health was not good Moore considers puzzling.
Though living next to the pollution of an ancient graveyard and
exposed to the unhealthy environment of Cowan’s Bridge [the original
of the dreadful boarding school in Charlotte’s _Jane Eyre_] she had
remained hale and strong from the age of five to the age of
fifteen.[4]
In view of modern psychosomatic theory, this illness is highly
revealing, for skin and gall bladder complaints are recognized symptoms
of emotional tension or disturbance. It seems fairly evident that Emily
was strongly (even if perhaps unconsciously) drawn to Ellen Nussey.
Under the circumstances the latter’s visit would have been a period of
intense stimulation and strain. At the withdrawal of the exciting
presence the nervous reaction was equally intense, and her body
registered a deprivation which her proud and independent spirit would
not willingly have admitted to consciousness.
There is also internal evidence of variance to be gleaned from Emily’s
poetry, despite the angry insistence of one critic that “Emily Brontë’s
own voice turns to nonsense the hundreds of pages of biography based on
[such] subjective interpretation.”[5] The critic is Fannie Ratchford,
whose separate volume, _The Brontës’ Web of Childhood_, skillfully
reconstructs the two sequences of remarkable legend composed during
adolescence by Charlotte and Branwell, and Emily and Anne respectively.
But in her impatience with subjectivity Mrs. Ratchford goes to the other
extreme of regarding these creations as spontaneously generated and
quite unrelated to the lives of their creators. Thus, her discovery that
cryptic initials heading Emily’s most “masculine” poems stand for male
characters in the Gondal epic leads her to the outburst quoted above.
Yet she herself points out that the poems in question were composed over
a period of twelve years, and that “lack of agreement between chronology
of composition and story sequence shows that they were not written as
progressive plot incidents but were merely the poetic expression of
scenes ... and emotions familiar to her inner vision....” Ratchford also
admits that “only a small percent of the poems carry headings, and
[these] ... raise as many problems as they solve. Varying sets of
initials appear for the same character ... G. S. in one poem is a boy,
in another a woman.”[6]
Thus it seems probable that Emily’s lyrics sprang from her own
experience, and that the confused initials represent an effort to
incorporate them into some whole which would not betray their intimacy.
(In the end she achieved her catharsis in prose through _Wuthering
Heights_.) For lyric poetry is the most personal of all modes of
expression, and Emily was morbidly reticent. All Brontë scholars know
the story of Charlotte’s “accidental” reading in 1845 of her sister’s
jealously guarded manuscript, and of the violent quarrel which followed.
In Charlotte’s own moderate words:
My sister Emily was not a person ... on the recesses of whose mind
and feelings even those nearest and dearest to her could with
impunity intrude. It took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I
had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited
publication.[7]
It is certain that many poems, along with many letters, were sacrificed
to Emily’s passion for privacy.
The most enigmatic chapter in Emily’s history covers the years from 1835
through 1838. All critics agree on the evidence of her poetry that
during this time she underwent the major emotional experience of her
life, one which gave rise to poems of nightmare, guilt, tragic
separation and desire for death, and one which also contained the seeds
of the mutually destructive love of Catherine and Heathcliff in
_Wuthering Heights_, written nearly a decade later. Emily’s
correspondence from this period has been lost or destroyed, Charlotte’s
few surviving letters have undergone cutting on her part which leaves
them barren, and one must infer pointed expurgation. The precise dating
of Emily’s poems written before 1839 might help solve the mystery, but
for such precision scholars have striven in vain. The latest and best
established chronology, that of Hatfield, will be accepted here.
It is known that for three months in late 1835 Emily was a pupil at Roe
Head, a boarding school where Charlotte was engaged as teacher. Her
speedy withdrawal was laid to Charlotte’s concern for her health; and as
her poems before that date indicate that she could not be happy away
from the moors and could not endure any sort of constraint, she may well
have been literally sick for the freedom of home. Upon her return there,
Anne went to Roe Head in her place, and Emily was left in Haworth with
Branwell, who must have been sad enough company. He had just failed
neurotically in his intention to study at the Royal Academy and was
spending his time as a drunken idler at the village tavern. It is
because so few poems and so few letters to or from her absent sisters
remain from this interim that the hypothesis of a questionable
relationship between brother and sister has grown up, and of course,
Emily’s rapid decline and death within a year of Branwell’s in 1847
lends some support to the theory. But her poetry bearing the date of
1836 is emotionally thin and immature, and critics are agreed that the
major change in it dates from the following year.
The single external event in her life at that time was a teaching
engagement at Law Hill, of which all that is known certainly is that it
continued for at least six months during 1837. Some scholars hold that
it began in the fall of 1836, others that it continued well into 1838.
There are traces of evidence to support both contentions, but whether it
lasted six months or sixteen, it was, beyond question, Emily’s longest
absence from Haworth till then. Following Hatfield’s dating of her
poems, one can trace first the impact of new scenes (February 1837),
nostalgia for the moors, and a wish to “be healthful still and turn away
from passion’s call.” Then in sequence (how rapid one cannot say) come
abysmal self-distrust; nightmare; melancholy; the agony of separation
(November, 1837); more desperate melancholy (through 1838); and finally
in late October and early November, 1838, two poems of passionate and
bitter reproach to a faithless feminine love: “I knew not ’twas so dire
a crime To say the word adieu,” and “Light up thy halls—and think not of
me!” Whatever experience produced these intense, immediate and certainly
autobiographical outcries must have occurred during a period when, as a
letter to Charlotte testifies, her boarding-school responsibilities
absorbed her from six in the morning until sometimes eleven at night,
and where supervision would have made association with a man impossible.
In view of her earlier quick withdrawal from Roe Head, the fact that she
endured such conditions for even six months is remarkable.
It is reasonable to imagine that at Law Hill she met and fell ardently
in love with another woman—whether teaching colleague or senior
student—and that the emotion was sufficiently mutual for Emily to
envision some such lasting companionship as Charlotte dreamed of with
Ellen Nussey. (Indeed, Moore’s emphasis upon the beauty, intellectual
and social capacities, and personal charm of Miss Elizabeth Patchett,
the school’s forty-four-year-old headmistress, suggests the possibility
of Emily’s superior having lit the flame reflected in her verse.) The
pattern of such dormitory dramas, whoever the actors, is fairly
constant. One young woman is aglow with excitement and an often illusory
sense of complete rapport; the other is flattered and genuinely
responsive until the emotional voltage runs too high. Then withdrawal
follows on the one side, hurt and misunderstanding on the other. Whether
Emily encountered Victorian admonition from a colleague, or the news
from some charming young creature (as she toyed with her new ring) that
_she_ was about to enter love’s _real_ province, it is certain that
Emily felt herself “betrayed.” Actually, this proud woman of twenty or
twenty-one, in the grip of authentic passion, must have been brought to
see her feeling through other eyes as something between a juvenile
_Schwarm_ and that horror the very name of which Saint Paul forbade to
be uttered. It is probable that she became at once either physically or
nervously ill and perhaps left the school (inexplicable in the middle of
a term), hiding jealously the reason for her going, and blotting it from
all records. (Interestingly enough Moore tells us that Miss Patchett
married a local vicar “shortly after Emily’s departure from Law Hill.”
Was it her halls that were lit, and for her wedding, in November
1838?)[8]
A blow like this—the realization that the only love of which she seemed
capable was regarded by the world as either frivolous or sinful—would
explain her subsequent melancholy and her stubborn refusal to enter
again into any personal relationship. It also colored her memories of
Law Hill so that a decade later she used details of the buildings and
environs to describe Wuthering Heights farm, the setting in which, as
the dark-spirited Heathcliff, she finally wrought vicarious revenge upon
a vain and inconstant Cathy.
*George Eliot.* The eye in search of variance inevitably turns next to
the George in England who had not yet assumed her masculine
cognomen—Mary Ann Evans. This novelist was undoubtedly masculine in many
ways, both physically and psychologically; which of these traits were
inborn and which bred of the childhood adoration of father and brother
so vividly reflected in _Mill on the Floss_, it is impossible to say.
But George Eliot’s masculinity does not seem to have affected her
emotional life. There are, to be sure, a handful of very close women
friends cited in the Hansons’ recent biography:[1] Sara Hennell, near
her own age and, like her, rather masculine; Mary Sibree, the first
young girl she tutored; and later Bessie Parkes and Barbara Leigh
Taylor, young feminists a half dozen years or more her junior. All of
these are mentioned as parties to friendships which were briefly more or
less emotional on one side or both. But even so, two considerations
exclude their subject from a list of variant women until more evidence
is at hand. The concern felt by two of the girls’ families about Mary
Ann Evans’s influence was caused not at all by her emotional temperament
but by her religious unorthodoxy. Furthermore, nothing in George Eliot’s
work reflects any interest in emotional connections between women or
even an awareness of them. Her life, as soon as she was freed from
enslavement to her invalid father, was a succession of excitements
involving men, men who captivated her emotions regardless of whether
they were married or (like Herbert Spencer) incapable of passion. She
was that case so disheartening to the hereditary theorist—an extremely
mannish woman not obsessed with women but with men.
*Margaret Fuller.* The life of an American contemporary of George Sand
and Emily Brontë offers similar suggestions of variance, while her
surviving work is almost equally empty of it. Margaret Fuller, New
England transcendentalist, feminist, and journalist, is remembered for
her _Woman in the Nineteenth Century_, which played a part in this
country comparable to Wollstonecraft’s _Vindication_ in England; for her
editing of the short-lived _Dial_, and for her work at home and abroad
on the staff of Horace Greeley’s _New York Tribune_. She is also
remembered for her friendships with Emerson and Carlyle and her efforts
to familiarize her countrymen with Italian and German literature,
especially the work of Goethe. She is thought to have been the model for
Holmes’ Lurida Vincent and for the Zenobia of Hawthorne’s _Blythedale
Romance_. Catherine Anthony, in one of the first “psychoanalytic”
biographies of this century,[1] reveals the rigorous asceticism and
intellectual forcing imposed upon her during childhood by that puritan
idealist, Timothy Fuller, and argues for a father fixation as the key to
her later emotional life.
It was not until the age of thirty-four that she experienced her first
romantic love for a man, the German Jew James Nathan, whom she met
during her first year in New York. When he expressed passion for her,
she was deeply disturbed, even shocked, and he soon returned to Europe,
partly, it is thought, to escape from her stubbornly “platonic” hold
upon him. Four years later in Italy she lived for a season with the
Marchesa d’Ossoli, whom she married secretly after discovering that she
was pregnant, as Wollstonecraft had done in the case of Godwin. Versions
of both these heterosexual experiences were permitted to survive by
Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, who edited
her _Memoirs_, but, says Mason Wade in a later biography, “These friends
of Margaret, in their regard for her memory, inked out, scissored or
pasted over a third of the never-to-be-duplicated mass of material they
had before them.”[2]
The first thirty-four of her fifty years were not, however, emotionally
empty. At the age of thirteen she fell deeply in love with an
Englishwoman visiting in Cambridge, the first member of a more
cosmopolitan society than she had before encountered. When after a few
months her adored departed she fell into melancholy, was unable to eat,
and declined so much in health that her father packed her off to a
boarding school to find companionship of her own age. She was far too
precocious and self-absorbed to be popular with the girls, and her chief
interest was in a sympathetic teacher with whom, as with her English
idol, she afterwards corresponded for years. Family cares and financial
stress after her father’s death apparently filled her late teens and
early twenties to the exclusion of personal contacts, and no emotional
record survives from the year when she taught in Bronson Alcott’s
school. At the end of a succeeding period as headmistress of a school in
Providence, however, she parted from the boys without emotion, but the
girls, whose adoration had been precious to her, all wept at losing her
and she wept with them. (Most of these incidents were not expurgated
from her _Memoirs_.)
Her next five years, between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-four,
were devoted to her famous “Conversations,” hybrids between a French
salon and a modern seminar. For a course of these two-hour sessions held
in the homes of the participants her fee was twenty dollars, in a day
when tickets to as many lyceum lectures cost only two; still her group
never numbered less than thirty. Her intellectual brilliance and the
magnetism she exerted upon her exclusively feminine audiences have
become legendary, and it is quite evident from the various accounts of
them that a strong emotional rapport with women contributed to her
success. It is notable that the evening course given one winter to a
mixed group which included many distinguished intellectual men was a
comparative failure.
Considering her emotional inhibitions as shown in her affair with
Nathan, and, more particularly, in view of the rigorous prudery of
Boston at the time, it is unlikely that any of her numerous feminine
attachments reached the point of overt expression. But the student of
variance must forever regret the loss of those confessional passages
obliterated by the three moral vigilantes who edited them.
The only other episode of possible variant significance in her life
(aside from her translating a part of the work of Günderode) was the
effort she made to meet George Sand when she reached Europe in 1846. The
famous woman was for a month or so away from Paris, and after her return
she failed to answer Margaret’s note begging an interview. After a week
of silence Margaret “took her courage into her hands” and risked a call.
A servant’s error in reporting her name might even then have sent her
away disappointed, but she persisted, and finally reached Sand in
person. Writing to a friend about the encounter, she says:
Our eyes met. I shall never forget her look at that moment.... Her
face is very little like the portraits, but much finer; the upper
part of the forehead and eyes are beautiful, the lower strong and
masculine, expressive of a hardy temperament and strong passions, but
not in the least coarse.... What fixed my attention was the
expression of _goodness_, nobleness, and power that pervaded the
whole.... As our eyes met she said, “C’est vous,” and held out her
hand. I took it and went into her little study.... I loved, shall
always love her.[3]
Though pressed for time, Sand kept her for the greater part of the day
and talked freely to her. Afterwards Margaret decided that despite her
hostess’s constant smoking, and the fact that she had undoubtedly had
“something of the bacchante in her life,” she had never liked any woman
better than she liked George Sand.
*Adah Isaacs Menken.* The difference in emotional climate between
puritan Boston and exotic New Orleans could not be better illustrated
than by setting against Margaret Fuller’s life that of the actress,
dancer, poet and adventuress who attained fame as Adah Isaacs Menken.
Encyclopedias are monotonously insistent that she was born Dolores Adios
Fuertes, daughter of a Spanish Jew. Various other sources, among them
the preface to an 1890 edition of her poems,[1] claim that she was
Adelaide McCord, daughter of a storekeeper in a small Louisiana town.
The truth is perhaps obscured forever by what another authority
describes as “her own habit of romancing about herself and her
origin.”[2] Thus some of the following picturesque details offered by
Clement Wood should doubtless be liberally salted, but many are
demonstrably true.
Although, like Margaret Fuller, Menken was precocious enough to be
translating the _Iliad_ at twelve, she was also dancing in the New
Orleans Opera House, and by the age of fourteen “she was a woman, whose
sensitive beauty was the pride of the town.” By the time she was twenty
she had the following adventures to her credit: marriage at sixteen to
“a nobody whose very name has vanished,” who abused and abandoned her; a
season of dancing which made her the darling of the Tacón Theatre in
Havana; a tour with an amateur theatrical company in Texas, followed by
her founding a newspaper in the town of Liberty; being captured by
Indians, and rescued by white rangers. A year after the first
publication of Walt Whitman’s _Leaves of Grass_ she brought out a
volume, _Memoirs_ (or _Memories_ [?] now lost) which is said to have
“received the placid fervor it deserved.”[3]
A few months before she was twenty-one she married a musician in
Galveston, Alexander Isaacs Menken, adopted his faith and his name, and
retained both to the end of her short but crowded career, though this
included several later marriages. She subsequently returned to the stage
and toured the south, part of the time in Edwin Booth’s company. In
Cincinnati she paused long enough to study sculpture, and became the
leading contributor to the _Cincinnati Israelite_. Her article on Baron
Rothschild’s admission to parliament won her his epithet of “inspired
Deborah of her adopted race.” Moving north to Dayton, she took up
military drill and was elected captain in the Life Guards. Here she met
a pugilist, John Heenan, known as the Benicia Boy, whom she married a
year later in New York, but, like her first unlucky choice, he was
brutal, and she subsequently tried matrimony with the humorist known as
Orpheus C. Kerr, and again with “one John Barclay.” Menken died, Kerr
she divorced, but in what manner she freed herself of her other mates is
uncertain.
Her success as an actress seems to have been moderate until in New York
in 1861 she accepted the part of Mazeppa in a dramatization of Byron’s
melodramatic poem. This male part involved being bound to the back of a
fiery Arab steed, feet in his mane, head hanging from his crupper, and
“she glittered in this role from Albany to London, Paris and Vienna.” In
Europe she enjoyed social and literary, as well as dramatic, success.
“Nobility and royalty paid court to her; the aristocracy of art thronged
to her salon.” She was the intimate friend of Gautier, Dumas, Charles
Reade, Swinburne, and Dickens, and in 1868 dedicated to the last of
these her second volume of poems, _Infelicia_.[4] Within a few months of
its publication she fell ill and died at the age of thirty-three.
Menken’s place in the present study is due to James Gibbons Huneker’s
comment in _Steeplejack_:
The grave of Ida [sic] Isaacs Menken, poet, actress ... greatest of
Mazeppas, is there [Père La Chaise cemetery in Paris].... Her letters
to Hattie Tyng Griswold, published after the death of the notorious
and unhappy woman, revealed another side of her temperament. Extracts
were printed in the newspapers. She was a Mazeppa doubled by a
Sappho. Her slender volume of verse entitled “Infelice” was credited
to Swinburne, but that is nonsense. The poet of Anactoria, while he
sympathized with Lesbian ladies, never wrote bad poetry.... A
strikingly handsome woman according to the report of her day, her
figure being the “envy of sculptors.” ... A tormented, morbid soul, a
virile soul in a feminine body....[5]
Upon examination, the volume _Infelicia_ reveals no more obvious
lesbianism than do the poems of Brontë or Labé. Its impersonal poems,
pleas for the Jews or for industrially exploited women, explain the
interest of Dickens and Reade, champions of social reform. The tragic
desperation in most of the love lyrics suggests, along with her twice
marrying sadistic men and her success as the victimized Mazeppa, a
strain of masochism which may account for her appeal for Swinburne (who
was not, craving Huneker’s pardon, too sympathetic to lesbian ladies,
but who was obsessed by pain). Three poems, however, are obviously
addressed to women. “Dying” and “Answer Me” allude to soft and tender
hands, warm bosoms. “A Memory; To a Dead Woman” says:
Too late we met. The burning brain,
The aching heart alone can tell
How filled our souls with death and pain
When came the last sad word, Farewell![6]
In “The Release,” a subjective autobiographical fragment, she says:
Wherefore was that poor soul of all the host so wounded?
It struggled bravely ...
Can it be this captive soul was a changeling, and battled ... in a body
not its own?[7]
These poems to, or about, women come nearest to serenity and peace of
any in the volume. The rest reproach men for their cruelty to the women
who bear their children, or, like “Resurgam,” they represent the author
as dead though still beautiful, crowned with flowers, and fêted—her
spirit murdered by the man she loved.[8]
As to the Hattie Tyng Griswold mentioned by Huneker, she is listed in
Frances Willard’s _Woman of the Century_[9] as a successful Wisconsin
journalist and a friend of Violet Paget, the British art critic and
philosopher, who wrote under the name Vernon Lee. No record seems to
exist of her connection with Menken outside the newspaper articles
mentioned by Huneker, which have not been consulted here. As in the case
of Sand and Wollstonecraft, interest in Menken’s spectacular career has
diverted attention from possible variant experience, but it appears to
be precisely such stormy and passionate spirits who turn to women for
the happiness they are unable to find with any number of men. It is
interesting that Clement Wood should say, in contradiction to Huneker,
that she deserved as much poetic acclaim as Whitman, but “was a woman,
with a softer voice.”[10] The volume alluded to, _Memoirs_, has not been
seen by the present writer, but honest critical judgment compels some
qualification of Wood’s praise in view of the known _Infelicia_, though
there are many pages in the latter which are not “bad” poetry.
*“Michael Field.”* Another “poet” in the present group is Michael Field,
pseudonym of two late-Victorian Englishwomen, Katherine Bradley and
Edith Cooper. They were aunt and niece, but actually they were much
closer than this relationship indicates, for when Edith’s mother was
left an invalid after the birth of a second child, Katherine and her
mother moved in to care for the family, and Katherine assumed complete
responsibility for the three-year-old Edith. Katherine was then
seventeen and had studied at Newnham and in Paris, where she had been in
love with the older brother of a French friend. This man died, and the
loss is reflected faintly in her first published poetry a decade later.
There is no indication of any other heterosexual interest on either
woman’s part throughout their lives.
By the time Edith had reached late adolescence and Katherine was
approaching thirty, their relation had become one of adult equality, and
they were active together in university life in Bristol, though
apparently more in debating, woman’s suffrage, and anti-vivesection
societies than in formal university courses. In 1881, when one was
thirty-three and the other nineteen, they published jointly a first book
of verse, “by Arrand and Isla Leigh,” which received little critical
comment. It was two years later that they hit upon the pseudonym of
Michael Field, and when _Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund_ appeared in 1883
it was hailed as the work of a new and promising talent. They published,
in all, eleven volumes of verse and nineteen or twenty poetic dramas,
mostly on classical or historical themes; but, as Sturge Moore says in
the introduction to their joint memoirs, _Works and Days_:
“After the first flush of acclamation their work was treated with
ever-increasing coldness by the literary world, and there is no doubt
that the discovery that Michael Field was no avatar ... but two
women, was partly responsible.”[1]
The handful of volumes which have been available for inspection seem far
from works of genius; nevertheless, the poems have as much freshness and
lyric charm as those of many other minor writers who are repeatedly
included in anthologies. The plays, though they exhibit careful
historical scholarship, are weighted with moral or feministic message
and seem artificial and heavy. The one that reached the stage in their
own day was an immediate failure.
There is evidence in the luxurious format of their privately printed
volumes, and in the description of the house in Richmond where they
lived after Mr. Cooper’s death, that they were blessed with ample means,
and beyond doubt their thirty-five years of adult life together were
happier than the lives of most Victorian spinsters. They cultivated the
acquaintance of all the surviving nineteenth-century poets, and derived
much excitement from moderate friendships with the aging Browning and
Meredith. But the Victorian era as a whole was disinclined to honor two
“Platonists” as the previous century had done, and their closest friends
were a pair of Royal Academy artists, Charles Ricketts and Charles
Shannon, who lived together near them in a relationship evidently
comparable to their own. That they did not escape disapprobation is
indicated indirectly in several of the entries in _Works and Days_. When
they first recognized Ricketts and Shannon at an art exhibition they
hesitated long before speaking, uncertain how such a gesture might be
received, even though Ricketts had designed the cover for one of their
recent volumes. After attending another “private view” one Sunday
afternoon in 1889, Katherine made much in their journal of being greeted
by Fairfax Murray. “We recognized that he was proud to manifest to the
world that we were his friends.”[2] And in connection with one of their
volumes of verse, _Long Ago_ (1889), based on fragments from Sappho,
Katherine told Browning that “we meant to do no more harm than George
Herbert, when he took a text from Holy Writ and wrote a hymn thereon.”
The harm they were accused of having done is not mentioned.
The relation between the two women is more difficult to analyze than any
so far encountered. Some time before the publication of their first
volume of poems they were moved to a step best described in a later poem
of Katherine’s:
It was deep April, and the morn
Shakespeare was born.
My love and I took hands and swore
Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers evermore.
To laugh and dream on Lethe’s shore,
To sing to Charon in his boat,
Heartening the timid souls afloat;
Of judgment never to take heed,
But to those fast-locked souls to speed
Who never from Apollo fled,
Who spent no hours with the dead;
Continually
With them to dwell,
Indifferent to heaven and hell.[3]
This, along with certain other poems (notably the “Third Book of Songs”
in _Underneath the Bough_), leaves no possible doubt about the intensity
or the variance of their mutual emotion. Not even Colette, however,
could assign a masculine or a feminine role to one or the other. Sir
William Rothenstein, in his preface to _Works and Days_, describes
“Michael” (Katherine) as “stout, emphatic, splendid and adventurous in
talk;” “Field” (Edith) as “wan and wistful, gentler in manner, but
equally eminent in the quick give and take of ideas.”[4] A good
photograph of the two women shows Edith’s features to be of a decidedly
boyish cast and her hair short. In the memoirs the two use a wealth of
nicknames, masculine, feminine or neuter, and either may refer to the
other by the male pronoun. It seems as though they tried to think of
themselves as a single bisexual personality, and in one place Katherine
says of the Brownings: “These two poets, man and wife, wrote alone; each
wrote, but did not bless and quicken one another at their work; _we are
closer married_ [italics hers].”[5]
They exhibit consciousness of the physical possibilities between women
more frankly than any other writers except for the portrayal of
fictional characters. This is particularly striking in Edith’s account
of an attack of scarlet fever she suffered while they were travelling in
Germany. Katherine fought an entire hospital staff in order to occupy a
room with her, and Edith writes later: “I have my love close to me....
Looking across at Sim’s little bed I realize she is a goddess, hidden in
her hair—Venus. Yet I cannot reach her.... I grow wilder for pleasure
and madder against the ugly Mädchen”[6] (the nurse who kept her in bed).
Yet when another nurse, middle-aged, becomes infatuated and annoys her
with constant caresses, she says:
My experiences with Nurse are painful—she is under the possession of
terrible fleshly love she does not conceive as such, and as such I
will not receive it. Oh, why will Anteros make one cynical by always
peering over the beauty of every love—why must his fatality haunt
us?[7]
Much later in their lives, Edith, whose health was never robust, failed
steadily, learned she had cancer, and turned to the Church of Rome.
Katherine followed her into that church more slowly and, one infers,
partly to reassure the younger convert that they would never be
separated here or hereafter, just as she concealed the fact that she
also was suffering from the same dread ailment as long as Edith lived,
in order to spare her added vicarious pain. This religious move resulted
from the influence of a brilliant Jesuit, who had made their
acquaintance through enthusiasm for the mystic exaltation of their
verse. There is no hint of struggle, change of habit or attitude, or
anything resembling “repentance” in either woman, and this fact, along
with the “Anteros” allusion above, suggests that the two had achieved
some sort of limitation upon expressing their love which satisfied their
stringent Victorian consciences.
Probably the complete manuscript of _Works and Days_ included other
psychological and philosophical discussion of such relationships, and
perhaps also more details of the poets themselves, for Sturge Moore
mentions having reduced the text considerably in the interests of good
taste, and of omitting matter likely to be of little interest to later
students of literature. Unfortunately, biographers and literary
historians often prune material of foremost interest to students of
emotional psychology.
*Emily Dickinson.* If Emily Brontë was for a century a British enigma,
Emily Dickinson has for almost as long been New England’s “little
sphinx.” Many who do not know her poems will have heard of her
self-cloistration at thirty in the family house in Amherst, her wearing
only white thereafter, and her habit of communicating even with old
friends through the open door of a room in which she remained stubbornly
invisible. Favoring the growth of such legends are a life as empty of
outward event as the earlier Emily’s, poems with a higher emotional
charge and no fictional disguises, and a history of publication
mysteriously complicated by family feud. Some critics have observed that
in nineteenth century New England recluses and eccentrics were not
uncommon, particularly among old maids and old bachelors who sometimes
worked at becoming “characters.” Some have elucidated in detail the
family quarrel between surviving sister and sister-in-law which blocked
publication. But none have dared to pretend that Emily’s life was
absolutely normal.
A tragic love affair has been the natural hypothesis, and search for
clues has produced an embarrassment of possible candidates. All Emily’s
letters resemble her poems enough in economy and intensity so that
despite her own elision and the subsequent editing many still approach
love letters in effect. On their internal and some external evidence,
she seems to have felt real warmth for a number of men with whom she
enjoyed intellectual communion, from her near-contemporary George Gould
in the late 1840s to Judge Otis Lord, her father’s friend, eighteen
years her senior, in her later life. To each of a half-dozen potential
candidates, one biographer or another has assigned responsibility for
the heartbreak in her poetry and her willful seclusion. But in every
case, objective support is meager, and the necessary assumptions have
reflected the theorist’s predilections quite as much as his subject’s.
As the quantity of poetry and correspondence in print has increased,
however, the different editors’ versions of some duplicate material have
invited comparison, and from this and much peripheral research Rebecca
Patterson has suggested in _The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_ (1951) a
pattern of departure from the norm which brings its subject within the
range of the present study. Mrs. Patterson presents the integrated
results of three separate investigations. First, she has studied Emily’s
life story exhaustively: the puritan background in Amherst; emotional
tensions in the family circle (Emily’s father, whom she both loved and
inwardly defied, forbade at least one marriage and tried to prevent her
writing); Emily’s feelings, convincingly diagnosed as ambivalent, toward
the men who captured her interest; and her sometimes more absorbing
attachments to certain women. Second, Mrs. Patterson has compiled the
objective and emotional biography of Kate Scott Anthon of Cooperstown,
New York. This tall, striking, and passionate woman she shows to have
been the product of a relatively cosmopolitan milieu, to have been
emotionally attracted to women from adolescence in boarding school to
ripe old age on the continent (despite a couple of satisfying if
short-lived marriages), and to have met and violently loved Emily
Dickinson when both young women were about twenty-nine. Third, she has
collated all available versions of Emily’s poems and letters (in some of
which the sex and number of pronouns were altered or lines omitted by
the poet herself or censoring editors), and has re-established
chronology which was either deliberately falsified or wishfully confused
by the editors to support the legend of a male lover. However unpopular
Mrs. Patterson’s hypothesis of a variant passion for Kate Anthon may be,
it partly explains the erratic behavior of both the poet herself and her
surviving relatives as motivated by fear of scandal. (Sue Gilbert
Dickinson in particular, whom Emily’s sister Lavinia branded a
procrastinator and obstructionist in the matter of publication, had her
reasons.)
From minutely assembled external evidence as well as careful
interpretation of poems and letters, Mrs. Patterson reconstructs the
following emotional history. During late adolescence Emily was
passionately attached to Sue Gilbert, afterward her sister-in-law, a
girl who had similarly attracted Kate Scott during their boarding school
days. But Sue herself was cold in both relationships, and left Emily
wholly unaware of the true nature of her emotion. A decade later, Kate
Scott Anthon appeared, the widow of a loved first husband who had died
after only two years of married life. Kate was beautiful, socially and
emotionally mature, hungry for love, and much taken with Emily at sight.
The two women’s association was not protracted, probably amounting in
all to less than two months; however, it was highly concentrated during
Kate’s semi-annual visits over a period of two years to Sue Gilbert
Dickinson who lived next door to Emily.
The contact begun in March 1859 flowered then and during August of that
year into an intense mutual absorption. Emily even showed Kate the
poetry of which her own family still knew nothing. This flowering
included some demonstrativeness, apparently Emily’s first congenial
experience of caresses, and therefore an electrifying revelation. In
March 1860, during Kate’s third visit to Sue, Emily’s sister Lavinia was
absent from home, and the two young women spent a night together. This
experience enlightened Emily as to at least the nature of passion (a
lesson of which many Victorian spinsters died ignorant), but to Kate’s
desire for complete intimacy, Emily reacted with shock and withdrawal.
Kate knew herself well enough to be aware that she could not continue a
close association on Emily’s puritanic terms, and she avoided visiting
Sue again for more than a year, though for a time she continued to
correspond with Emily. The latter was too inexperienced to understand
quite what had happened, and for six months she continued to be—as she
had been since first meeting Kate—happier and more out-going in her
personal relationships and correspondence than ever before or after.
Then, at the beginning of 1861, Kate ceased to reply to Emily’s letters,
of which only three have been published and probably few more survived.
Kate was not silent from indifference; Mrs. Patterson assembles sound
evidence that she too suffered bitterly. But she was apparently
convinced that their relation had reached an impasse, and by April 1861
Emily’s pain and veiled reproach so troubled her that she wrote
terminating their connection. This month marked the beginning of Emily’s
withdrawal from social contacts. She refused particularly to see anyone
who might mention Kate’s name, for fear of her own reaction if she heard
it spoken. Meanwhile, Kate had turned for comfort to her friend,
Gertrude Vanderbilt, wife of a New York judge and some six years her
senior, on whom she evidently could depend for complete understanding.
Mrs. Vanderbilt seems to have offered sane advice—which may even have
preceded Kate’s final letter to Emily—and some religious consolation.
When in the fall of 1861 Kate felt constrained to visit Sue Dickinson,
knowing that to sever the connection without reason would arouse awkward
conjecture, she played safe by bringing Mrs. Vanderbilt with her. To the
still uncomprehending Emily, this effective preclusion of private
interviews was a bitter final blow.
All this, it must be admitted, is a fairly detailed reconstruction of
events for which proof positive can never be produced. But it did not
deserve the wholesale damnation which critics accorded Mrs. Patterson’s
volume when it appeared. Other biographers had noted the meticulous
omission of any descriptive detail in Emily’s love poems which could
give a clue to the beloved’s identity or personality. The present
writer, still little acquainted with Dickinson (to her shame be it said)
when _Bolts of Melody_ appeared in 1945, was assured by several lovers
of Emily’s poetry, on the internal evidence in that volume, that the
poet belonged in this study. Let us grant, then, that Emily may in her
early life have felt “idealistically amorous” (as one critic phrases it)
toward certain young men, notably Gould and Newton, with whom her
associations came to nothing. (Both died quite young, which might
partially account for Emily’s concern with death.) She also probably
fell in love with the Reverend Charles Wadsworth whom she met in
Philadelphia in 1854. (This has the vote of Mark Van Doren, specialist
in historical research.) But she saw Wadsworth no more than three times
again, probably only twice, and then only for a few hours. In her late
twenties—a dangerous age for emotional spinsters—she met the first woman
whose mind matched her own. She was off guard precisely because her new
friend was a woman; but Kate Anthon had virtually a man’s emotional
approach. An explosive result was almost inevitable. Mrs. Patterson’s
demonstration of how closely a new out-going happiness in poems and
letters paralleled Emily’s meeting with Kate Anthon, how exactly the
beginning of her period of “agony” coincided with Kate’s withdrawal, is
too apt to be dismissed as absurdly biased special pleading.
CHAPTER VI.
TWENTIETH CENTURY
Introduction
The early twentieth century has already been cited as relatively
tolerant of homosexuality. To the extent that it prevailed, this
tolerance was due to popular acceptance of hereditary theory. We have
noted Karl Ulrichs’ defense of male homosexuals in the 1860’s on the
ground that their proclivities were innate. Within the next three or
four decades, scores of case studies, current and historical, were
accumulated to support or to oppose this claim. On the one hand there
were exclusively homosexual histories of persons whose physical traits
approached those of the other sex. On the other were records of
homosexuals cured by hypnosis in the clinics of Charcot and Magnan. The
majority of cases fell between these two extremes. Many were bisexual.
Many persons reporting obsessive homosexuality were somatically normal.
Following the lead of the biological sciences, students of the problem
attempted to classify homosexuals. The subjects were variously divided
into “true” or born and “pseudo-” or elective; “masculine” and
“feminine” in general appearance; active and passive in the sexual role;
homosexual and bisexual. But the determining data were less objective
than is desirable for close classification. And although each dichotomy
was independently more or less sound, there was little correlation among
the logically related groups from the several divisions.
The resulting confusion seems now to argue against, rather than for, the
claim of somatic causation of variance. But at the time the recent or
current publications of Darwin, Mendel and Galton provided rich soil for
the cultivation of any hereditary theory; so the men best remembered
today for their work on homosexuality are Krafft-Ebing, Moll and
Hirschfeld in Germany, and in England Symonds, Ellis and Carpenter, all
of them strongly inclined toward a hereditary explanation of the
phenomenon. By 1900 most of these men’s contributions to the subject
were in print and widely disseminated, so that in scientific and
intellectual circles there was much talk of an intermediate sex whose
condition was referred to as _inversion_—Ellis’s term, as noted earlier.
The effect on homosexuals was naturally pronounced. From being generally
regarded as moral lepers they felt themselves restored to human dignity,
as biological sports, perhaps, and in a distinct minority, but no more
reprehensible than albinos or color-blind people. Many were encouraged
to write, many other authors took a more liberal view of them, and the
public began to accept the new outlook in literature. Tolerance was by
no means general, however, even in the great metropolitan centers where
for years a certain degree of it had obtained. In the medical profession
negative opinion was strong, and, of course, conservatives in all fields
battled against the new “demoralizing” influence as long and bitterly as
their predecessors had against Darwinian evolution.
Geographic infiltration of tolerance was markedly uneven. France, where
interest if not sympathy was already widespread, was comparatively
hospitable to the new attitude. Germany, despite its being the
birthplace of the hereditary viewpoint, was somewhat less so. Sentiment
there might have developed more favorably if, in 1906, military
interests had not used the charge of homosexuality as a weapon against
Philip von Eulenberg, whose pacific influence on the Kaiser they wished
to eliminate.[1] Even so, the effects of the Eulenberg affair were not
so sweeping as those of the Oscar Wilde case in England a decade
earlier.
A retrospective glance at England shows that during the 1880’s the
publisher, Vizetelly, had managed to get into circulation a million
copies of current French fiction before legal battles with the censor
impoverished him, and, also, that a number of major critics had
supported his efforts.[2] All were fighting for greater general
liberality in matters of sex, but after the Wilde scandal in 1895, the
public reacted strongly against homosexual activity. Havelock Ellis had
to publish his volume on sexual inversion (1896) in Germany, and even
there its appearance was not welcomed; consequently, his other _Studies
in the Psychology of Sex_ came out in America a decade before England
would permit their publication.
America was the scene of no dramatic inhibiting episodes; however, our
intellectual isolation retarded awareness of relaxing European attitudes
towards inversion until Freud’s influence had also been felt. While the
wave of tolerance was spreading slowly from its continental origins, a
counterforce was growing there. Sigmund Freud had begun his work with
Breuer and Charcot before 1890 and was a practicing psychoanalyst by the
turn of the century. The year 1905 saw the publication of his first
important treatise; and in 1909 G. Stanley Hall, psychiatrist, and
president of Clark University, invited Freud to lecture at a conference
in celebration of that institution’s twentieth anniversary.
Almost immediately the foundations of the hereditary theory were
threatened. For Freud’s thesis, as no one needs reminding in this
generation, was that the human personality passes through several phases
of sexual development, beginning in earliest infancy, and reaching
maturity only with complete heterosexual experience. All individuals, he
said, are potentially bisexual. In some, the homosexual component
becomes conscious and active, and unless this phase gives way with the
passing of adolescence to the heterosexual, the personality remains
arrested and immature. Such an arrest constitutes neurosis, whether or
not it becomes troublesome enough to demand psychiatric attention.
As is obvious, this view contradicts the hereditary theory at several
important points. It holds that the homosexual is not born, but made by
conditioning factors in his early life, chiefly family relations before
he is five years of age. He can usually overcome his neurosis if he
earnestly wishes, at least with the aid of psychiatry; therefore, he may
be considered more or less responsible for his state if he persists in
it. Furthermore, the bisexual is nearer to maturity than the homosexual.
This conclusion is particularly opposed to the tenets of the
Ellis-Hirschfeld school, which classed frigidity to the opposite sex as
a mark of “true,” that is, innate and blameless, homosexuals. The battle
between the hereditary and the Freudian theories can be detected in a
good deal of twentieth-century variant fiction.
The pendulum swung again toward physical causation with the development
of endocrinology, which at first held the individual’s glandular
endowment responsible for his sexual inclinations. This science began as
a branch of general physiology, and acquired major sexual importance
only with Steinach’s and Voronoff’s famous experiments in rejuvenation
through graft of sex glands or other reinforcement of sex hormones. In
the variant field, endocrinologists were first concerned with glandular
influence on secondary sex characteristics—breast development, hair
distribution, vocal register, et cetera. Thus, during the 1920s and
1930s a number of physicians were attempting to cure homosexuals by
dosing them with hormones which reinforced their biological sex and
tended to decrease variant traits. These experiments enjoyed some
publicity in medical literature but had only limited success. In the
meantime, disciples of Freud were bringing in evidence that
psychological disturbances alter endocrine balance. The final compromise
is the current school of psychosomatic medicine.
To bring scientific opinion on homosexuality up to date, attention must
be given to four further attacks upon the problem. Most closely in line
with early search for physical causation are accumulations of exact
somatic measurements by such different agents as the so-called Harvard
group in their _Explorations in Personality—a clinical ... study of
fifty men of college age_ (only a partial publication of their
findings), and G. W. Henry in his _Sex Variants_. Neither of these
studies has, so far as published material indicates, established
significant correlations between homosexuality and any somatic factor or
group of factors measured.
A statistical study limited to genetics was made in Germany during World
War II by Theodor Lang.[3] On the ground that the offspring of a large
group of parents should by the law of probability be equally divided
between the two sexes, he made a statistical count of the siblings of
several thousand homosexual men. He found a greater proportion of males
among these than among siblings of a control group of heterosexuals.
From this he argued that the homosexuals, though somatically male,
possessed more than the average number of female genes, their brothers
having in the aggregate more of the male determinants. Like all such
studies this has been attacked on the grounds of its statistical
soundness, but it has not been discredited. More conclusive in the same
field is J. F. Kallman’s study of twins, _Heredity in Health and Mental
Disorder_ (1953). Dr. Kallman compared, among other things, the
incidence of homosexuality in identical and non-identical twins.
Identical twins showed an enormously larger percent of similar sexual
behavior than the latter, and his evidence is conclusive that “a
genetically oriented ‘imbalance’ theory ... can no longer be regarded as
an implausible explanation for certain groups of ... homosexuals.”[4]
In the psychoanalytic field such dissenters from the so-called
pan-sexualism of Freud as Jung, Adler, Horney and others have assembled
evidence that sex is not always the prime cause of neurosis. Freud found
it to be so, they say, because in his day social taboo made it the most
common cause of insupportable tension. Now that sexual standards are
less rigid (thanks in part to Freud’s work), other factors such as the
thwarting of the ego or long-continued insecurity appear of almost equal
importance. To account for the homosexual, these later psychoanalysts
suggest such causal factors as early social humiliation resulting in
withdrawal from heterosexual competition, acute anxiety with regard to
childbearing, or reluctance to assume responsibility for a family. Still
regarding homosexuality as a neurosis, that is, an abnormal way of
escaping an untenable situation, they leave unanswered the question as
to what predisposes an individual to the choice of this particular
solution of his difficulties.[5]
Most publicized of this century’s contributions are undoubtedly the
monumental statistical studies of sex behavior by the biologist A. C.
Kinsey, which have shown homosexual experience to be more prevalent than
hitherto claimed even by Ellis or Hirschfeld. Insofar as Kinsey attacks
causes, he is with the Freudians in holding that all individuals are
potentially bisexual, but there the agreement ceases. Kinsey’s
contention is that the human sex drive will find outlet according to its
strength in a given individual, and that its satisfaction via the same
sex is due to the sensitivity of erogenous zones to any adequate
stimuli. This explains satisfactorily the behavior of bisexuals and of
homosexuals whose opportunities are largely confined to their own sex,
but to account for those who are frigid to the other sex Kinsey is
obliged to admit the importance of subjective factors.
This brief survey indicates how much the social attitude toward variance
has relaxed since the days of Belot and Peladan. Today the sternest
counsellors of youth—outside perhaps a few religious groups—no longer
talk of homosexuality in terms of depravity and corruption. And the
psychiatrist’s charge of arrested development weighs comparatively
lightly upon such variants as are fairly well adjusted to their
condition.
* * * * *
Factors other than the scientific have also affected this century’s
output of literature dealing with variant women. Until the beginning of
World War I, the Woman’s Movement figured sporadically in fiction, but
not in variant novels after 1900. As a force in practical politics,
however,—sometimes, as in England, a very noisy one—it had by the end of
the war won the suffrage battle throughout much of the western world.
Even where this end was not achieved, the movement widened women’s
educational and occupational opportunities, and thus tended to multiply
the total number of feminine authors. Next, the war opened a number of
men’s jobs to women, increased their financial and personal
independence, and encouraged tendencies toward masculine simplicity in
dress. It also brought about that relaxation of sexual standards in
general for which the 1920s have become notorious. Taken together, these
alterations in women’s status are held by some social historians to have
increased female variance. Certainly what may be called a first peak in
variant literature was reached between 1925 and 1935.
Thus, it is not surprising to discover that during the first third of
the present century, literary titles dealing with variant women averaged
more than one per year, that at least half were written by women, and
that a majority were more favorable to variance than otherwise.
Poetry—French
Since the discussion of conjecturally variant women closed with a
consideration of lyric poetry, the same literary thread will be traced
first in the twentieth-century pattern. More than a dozen poets have
celebrated love between women, three-quarters of them feminine and all
but two sympathetic. The earliest were two expatriates who adopted Paris
as their residence and wrote almost exclusively in French.
The lesser, from a literary viewpoint, was Natalie Clifford Barney, an
American with New York and Bar Harbor background who was able to live
independently in Paris and to maintain her own yacht. Born in 1877, she
had by the late nineties made contact with Pierre Louÿs, and she
introduced to him her British-American friend, Pauline Tarn. Both young
women were enthusiastic about Louÿs’s _Songs of Bilitis_, and seeing in
him ‘the champion of the young girls of the future,’ they submitted
manuscripts for his judgment. They found him more inclined to admire
“_jeux latins et voluptés grecques_” than the “exaggerated
preoccupations” of _femmes damnées_ whose sense of sin he suspected of
giving an edge to their passions. He pronounced Barney’s novel, _Lettres
à Une Connue_, unsuited for publication because of its outmoded poetic
diction, but concerning Tarn’s verses, which he praised, he afterward
wrote to Barney: ‘You must write your story and hers. It is the
indispensable first chapter to your complete romance.’[6] The
implication of some previous emotional connection between the two is
supported by evidence in the poetry of both.
Barney was a Maupin type, with ‘a fencer’s grace noticeable in an
all-too-feminine Paris; moonlight-blonde hair, blue eyes with a glint of
steel, made to observe and not (like most women’s) to be gazed into;
white gowns and a cape of ermine’—a composite description from later
articles by her fellow authors “Aurel” and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, quoted
by Barney herself in her _Aventures de l’Esprit_.[7] In the garden of
her luxurious Paris residence she built a Temple of Friendship and
welcomed there many of the literary personalities of the day, evidently
in conscious imitation of certain esoteric groups of the eighteenth
century. Though many men were admitted, it was recognized that this was
an Amazonian cult dedicated primarily to women. In her Chart of the
Realm of Friendship she placed Remy de Gourmont first and Renée Vivien
(Pauline Tarn) second.
Barney’s literary output was comparatively meager, perhaps because she
did not care to publish too tangible evidence of her emotional bent. The
complete record of publication is as follows: _Quelques Sonnets et
Portraits de Femmes_ (1900), described by critics as sensuous poems of
restrained passion; _The Woman who Lives with Me_—possibly a version in
English of the novel Louÿs criticized—listed without date as a “roman
abrégé, hors commerce”; _Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs_, printed in the
periodical _La Plume_, 1901; _The City of the Flowers_, “poème avec
enlumières, à un seul exemplaire”; _Actes et Entr’actes_, 1910;
_Poèmes—Autres Alliances_, 1920; _Pensées d’une Amazone_, and _Aventures
de l’Esprit_, 1929, both in prose.
She is probably best remembered in French letters for having inspired
two volumes by Remy de Gourmont, _Lettres à l’Amazone_, essays which
first ran serially in the _Mercure de France_ and were translated into
English by Richard Aldington (1931), and _Lettres Intimes à l’Amazone_,
1927.[8] The first volume, comparatively impersonal, includes
considerable analysis of Barney’s temperament, which has ‘the
superiority of a profoundly pagan spirit, determined to obey Nature only
in so far as it gives its consent.’ This, Gourmont says, is ‘so
different from ... Christian morality that ... some courage is needed to
express it so openly and so strongly.’ He defines as “chaste” any action
prompted by Love rather than by what Verlaine calls ‘the obscene
mechanism,’ and observes that women, who feel passion only when they
love, are spared men’s bondage to ‘that tyrant, sexual need.’ He says
that l’Amazone sets out to conquer without coquetry or any other passive
or impulsive feminine motivation, and he judges her self-willed and
egotistic.[9] Both he and the feminine commentators mentioned above,
picture Barney as merciless in her intellectual judgments, wanting in
tenderness, impatient of men, and scornful of all who abandon themselves
to their emotions.
Despite Gourmont’s analytic clarity, in the _Lettres Intimes_ we find
the spontaneous record of what he terms “une amitié violente,” springing
from Barney’s being not only “une amie mais un ami.” His volume includes
a good bit of his own verse, “des poésies sapphiques” about two women of
ancient Greece written earlier but not previously published, and several
poems to Barney herself, whom he describes as “un page et une femme ...
Natalie qui aimes tes soeurs et tes pareilles, Plus que toi même, et
plus que tout, l’Amour ... Natalie préférant bure et cuire à la soie,
Natalie souriante au bord de la géhenne.”[10]
His friendship with Barney began in 1910 and drifted along less and less
satisfactorily for three years. By 1913 Gourmont betrays continual
distress because she is so often absent, traveling with “une amie” and
leaving no address, since most of the time, she and the friend are on
the yacht he had helped her to procure. He owns to a resentment which
surprises him, and implies that had he been able to divine her
temperament at the outset he would not have permitted himself to become
so involved. Yet we have here a close copy of the situation he himself
had analyzed so clearly a dozen years before in _Un Songe de Femme_.
There could be no stronger testimonial to the truth of Proust’s later
contention that each individual follows repeatedly a compulsive
emotional pattern, and does not profit by experience. Nor could there be
a better picture of the difficulty the two sexes experience in mutual
comprehension, even when both parties are psychologically so close to
the intersexual borderline and have so many interests in common.
Barney’s _Aventures de l’Esprit_ record primarily her association with
the more or less notable literary figures of her day, and the judgments
expressed are clear-headed and relatively merciless. _Actes et
Entr’actes_, the only other volume available for examination, consists
of four poetic dramas ranging from twenty-five to seventy pages each,
and a dozen or so lyrics. One of the dramas, “Equivoque,” was presented
in her garden in 1906 with the film star, Marguérite Moréno, in the
leading role of Sappho. It represents Sappho’s death as resulting not
from love of Phaon but from the loss of a beloved girl, Timas, who
marries Phaon but subsequently, disgusted by her wedding night and
overwhelmed by nostalgia for her great earlier love, follows Sappho to
death in the sea.
Two of the lyrics, “Virelai Nouveau” and “Filles,” represent the poet as
following young _filles de joie_ on their twilight strolls and taking a
man’s sensual pleasure in their consciously seductive beauty, but the
enjoyment is detached, that of the _voyeur_ only. “Couple,” however,
explicitly champions variance in its description of a loving pair:
Se tenant par la taille—ainsi que deux bouleaux
Reliés par leurs branches—
Elles vont, ondulant leurs têtes et leurs hanches ...
Elles tachent de fuir l’été, son corps doré
Versant, comme une essence ...
Sa mâle adolescence.
(Compare Peladan’s Tammuz the sun god.)
Il leur fait peur ...
Et la brune qui parle á sa blonde compagne ...
Est-elle la dryade au long corps maigrelet
Qu’emprisonnant l’écorce
Et qui garde d’instinct la crainte de la force,
De la brutale force?
Elles sont dans la nuit ainsi qu’au seuil d’un temple,
D’un mystérieux temple ...
Si quelque homme, épiant ce couple insidieux,
De son mépris le couvre ...
Qu’il sache que tout don de beauté plaît aux dieux;
Que les lois ordinaires
Ne peuvent s’appliquer á ces noces lunaires ...
Elles ont, d’un élan plus divin qu’animal
Dans les vastes silences
Joint avec des baisers leurs ressemblances,
Toutes leur ressemblances.
Et par delà la terre, et le bien, et le mal,
Elles vont, diaphanes
Et troublantes, et ceux qui les jugent profanes
Sont eux-mêmes profanes.[11]
In three short “Paroles de Maîtresses” she depicts well the misery of a
woman awaiting passively the pleasure of a male lover. In a dozen
“Paroles d’Amants,” she pictures and rejoices in a man’s more active
pursuit, even though painful, of the dream and illusion of love,
“sublime, immense et limité.”
Je ne regrette rien, ni son bien ni son mal.
Sa douleur m’est utile et son mal nécessaire ...
... Je n’ai peur
Que de ne plus souffrir ...[12]
“Te Deum” expresses the same satisfaction:
Tes yeus cernés de noir
Et ta face plus pâle
Que n’est pâle le soir,
Et ma bouche—pétale
Entr’ouvert, frais piment
Trop rouge—un peu brutale,
Disent étrangement
A la bonne Déesse
Des féminins amants
Et des males maîtresses
Une long remerciement.[13]
A “Quatrain” sums up the debit side of her resolute assumption of
masculinity:
Je ressemble à ces rois qui vivent séparés
De la vie, et malgré leurs plaisirs, misérables
Et seuls, tendant en vain leurs bras lourds et parés
Vers quelque pauvre joie humaine et désirable.[14]
There remain a group of poems addressed to Renée Vivien, published after
the latter’s death, which will be mentioned later.
* * * * *
Of greater literary importance is Renée Vivien, whose poetry has been
pronounced most perfect in form of any French verse written in the first
quarter of the century, and this quality is the more remarkable in that
her native language was not French but English. As she died at
thirty-two, its quantity also deserves mention, for her collected poems
run to five hundred pages; besides she produced two volumes of
“prose-poems” which a decade later would have been called free verse, a
prose satire, and an autobiographical novel. In addition she and a
friend collaborated on a number of similar volumes of verse and personal
narrative under the pseudonym of Paule Riversdale. As originally
published her work appeared in this order: _Études et Préludes_, 1901;
_Cendres et Poussières_, 1902; _Evocations_, _Sappho_, and _La Vénus des
Aveugles_, 1903; _Kitharèdes_, 1904; _A l’Heure des Mains Joints_, 1906;
_Sillages_ and _Flambeaux Éteints_, 1908; and posthumously in 1910,
_Dans un Coin de Violettes_, _Le Vent des Vaisseaux_, and _Haillons_.
Prose-poems: _Brumes de Fjords_, 1902, and _Du Vert au Violet_, 1903;
_La Dame à la Louve_ (a collection of short stories), _Le Christ_,
_Aphrodite et M. Pépin_ (satire), and _Une Femme M’Apparut_, (novel),
1904.
Vivien was more openly lesbian than any woman so far encountered, but
the few selections and biographical notes found in anthologies are
careful to conceal this fact, and since further text and comment are not
readily available in this country, she will be discussed here at some
length. Almost the only sustained account of her personal life is
included in a critical volume by her good friend André Germain; however,
as it was published in 1917 when most of the persons concerned were
still living, it omitted all personal names and many details of the
poet’s troubled history. Her publisher and friend, Edward Sansot, has
attested that all her work was autobiographical in its inspiration, and
so from internal evidence and scattered fact it is possible to
supplement Germain’s picture.
She was born (1877) Pauline Tarn, daughter of a Michigan heiress and an
English gentleman of a Kentish family distinguished in law and the
church. The girl was born in Hawaii and spent her first dozen years in
travel, in French and German schools, and in Paris. From the fragmentary
accounts one infers a background to equal any of Henry James’s pictures
of international marriage and difficult childhood. Between twelve and
sixteen she was happy for a time with another English girl housed in the
same Paris _hôtel_, whom she met through the intimacy of their
respective governesses. Violet Shilleto was already a precocious mystic
whose concern with “the meaning of life” made a lasting impression on
her young companion. No shadow seems to have fallen on their passionate
friendship before Pauline was removed to England at sixteen.
There for several years Pauline underwent conventional preparations for
debut and marriage, including presentation in the Queen’s drawing room.
On this occasion she is described as a tall slim girl with delicate
features, a luminous halo of fair hair, and eyes of “brun doré,” which
court gown lent her the air of a “princesse de légende.”[15] But the
demure exterior concealed rebellion. She was still nostalgic for Paris
and Violet. The stuffy formality of social life in Chislehurst smothered
her. Above all she was revolted by “coquetry” and the prospect of
marriage. All this she poured out in letters to Violet, and the
interception of certain of these produced an uproar of which Germain
says that her later poem, “Sous la Rafale,” is not an exaggerated
picture:
De la nuit chaotique un cri d’horreur s’exhale.
Venez, nous errerons tous trois sous la rafale ...
L’éclair nous épouvante et la nuit nous désole ...
O vieux Lear, comme toi je suis errant et folle,
Et ceux de ma famille et ceux de mes amis
M’ont repoussée avec les outrages vomis.
Comme toi, Dante, épris d’une douleur hautaine,
Je suis une exilée au coeur gonflé de haine ...[16]
According to Germain’s implications and evidence in her poetry, her
relations with Violet, like those of Lamartine’s Regina with Clothilde,
were essentially innocent. But if her letters matched her subsequent
verses to Violet in loving eloquence, they would scarcely have sounded
innocent to conventional Britons in whose ears the Wilde scandal still
reverberated. It is certainly from this same experience that “Le Pilori”
grew, for the two poems are unique among her collected verse:
Pendant longtemps, je fus clouée au pilori,
Et les femmes, voyant que je souffrais, ont ri.
Puis, des hommes ont pris dans leurs mains une boue
Qui vint éclabousser mes tempes et ma joue ...
J’ai senti la colère et l’horreur m’envahir.
Silencieusement, j’appris à les haïr.
Les insultes cinglaient comme fouets d’ortie,
Lorsqu’ils m’ont détachée enfin, je suis partie.
Je suis partie au gré des vents. Et depuis lors
Mon visage est pareil à la face des morts.[17]
Whatever actually happened, peace seems to have ensued only with her
attaining her majority and returning to Paris, where she lived alone
save for a formal companion. She was obviously wealthy in her own right,
for within a few years she acquired residences in Paris, Nice, and
Mitylene, the first of which became legendary for its treasures of
antique and oriental art, and to the end of her days she was an
inveterate traveler.
At the outset of Pauline’s Parisian life, drunk with her new freedom and
the means to enjoy it, she found her old friend Violet too serious for
her mood, and some sort of “puerile” misunderstanding occurred. Through
Violet, however, she had met a ‘fellow-exile and nascent poet’ who was
undoubtedly Natalie Clifford Barney. Her new friend introduced her to
Sappho, as yet unknown to her. Until now, says Germain, she had been a
_jeune fille_, ‘doubly unawakened either as poet or as woman.’ The new
contact proved a double revelation, as well it might. Here was a
beautiful sophisticate whose poetic gifts and interests, worldly
resources, and emotional tastes matched her own; here, too, at last, was
the great classical poet who glorified those tastes. In order to know
Sappho better she set herself to learn Greek, and in her ‘passionate
fervor’ mastered it “avec une facilité qui stupéfiait ses professeurs.”
She and Barney lived together, and it must have been during these years
between 1898 and 1900 that she acquired the villa above Mitylene where
intermittently “for months at a time she attempted to recapture the
golden age of Sappho.”[18] We know from Gourmont’s account that both
young women were writing poetry, and as soon as she considered
publication (possibly even earlier) Pauline adopted the new name under
which thereafter she lived as well as wrote—Renée Vivien, suggesting a
radiant rebirth.
Two poems published in the same volume with those already quoted convey
her exaltation at this time better than any account of them can do. One
was “Ainsi Je Parlerai:”
Si le Seigneur penchait son front sur mon trépas
Je lui dirais: O Christ, je ne te connais pas.
Seigneur, ta stricte loi ne fut jamais la mienne,
Et je vécus ainsi qu’un simple païenne ...
Le monde était autour de moi, tel un jardin.
Je buvais l’aube claire et le soir cristallin.
Le soleil me ceignait de ses plus vives flammes,
Et l’amour m’incline vers la beauté des femmes ...
Pardonne-moi, qui fus une simple païenne!
Laisse-moi retourner vers la splendeur ancienne
Et, puisque enfin l’instant éternel est venu,
Rejoindre celles-là qui t’ont point connu.[19]
Far from being the mere defiant sacrilege this seemed to some readers,
it was the confession of a new faith to replace the one in whose name
England had damned her. In its entirety, much too long to quote, the
poem is also an apologia for her first love so slandered by her
“persecutors.” She elaborated her creed in “Psappha Revit,” among whose
fourteen quatrains appear such lines as these:
Celles que nous aimons ont méprisé les hommes ...
Et nous pouvons ...
Être tout à la fois des amants et des soeurs.
Le désir est en nous moins fort que la tendresse ...
Et nos maîtresses ne sauraient nous décevoir,
Puisque c’est l’infini que nous aimons en elles ...
Nos jours sans impudeur, sans crainte ni remords
Se déroulent, ainsi que de larges accords,
Et nous aimons, comme on aimait à Mitylène.[20]
Of this faith from then on she was the dedicated priestess.
Inevitably her attainment of the Golden Age was imperfect. Her poems are
full of evidence that from the start her second love was not too happy,
as exemplified by the following:
Nocturne
J’adore la langueur de ta lèvre charnelle
Où persiste le pli des baisers d’autrefois.
Ta démarche ensorcelle,
Et la perversité calme de ta prunelle
A pris au ciel du nord ses bleus traîtres et froids ...
Sous ta robe, qui glisse en un frôlement d’aile
Je devine ton corps—les lys ardents des seins,
L’or blême de l’aisselle,
Les flancs doux et fleuris, les jambes d’Immortelle,
Le velouté du ventre et la rondeur des reins ...[21]
Sonnet
... Tes lèvres ont pleuré leurs rythmiques douleurs
Dans un refrain mêlé de sanglots et de pauses.
Et la langueur des lits, la paix des portes closes,
Entourent nos désirs et nos âpres pâleurs ...
Tes yeux bleus aigus d’acier et de cristal
S’entr’ouvrent froidement, ternis comme un métal ...[22]
La Fleur du Sorbier
... Le couchant qui blêmit et rougit tour à tour,
La campagne morbide et l’heure de tristesse
Semblant nous reprocher d’avoir, o ma Maîtresse,
Accompli sans désir les gestes de l’amour ...
Ton regard sans lueurs paraît agoniser ...
Une phalène, errant dans le jardin, se pose
Sur la fleur du sorbier, d’un or pâlement rose
Comme la fleur secrète où j’ai mis mon baiser ...[23]
These carry no record of “désir moins fort que la tendresse,” nor indeed
of tenderness at all in the poet’s cold blonde partner. But it is not
difficult to understand the two girls’ basic incompatibility. Barney’s
refusal of self-surrender, her contempt for abandon in others, were
aspects of a resolute masculinity. Vivien, by nature feminine and
romantic, needed to give herself wholly and to be cherished in return.
An apparently love-starved childhood and an antipathy to everything male
sharpened her hunger for a feminine response. Nothing less than the
initial experience of passion, induced by beauty and blessed by Sappho,
could have bound her to Barney at all.
In 1900 the spell that held her was broken by tragedy. Early in that
year Violet Shilleto fell into acute depression, “finding her
intellectual mysticism empty” and doubtless also wounded by the loss of
the intimate friendship, and in the autumn she secretly joined the
Catholic church. Whether spiritual conflict undermined her health or
whether incipient tuberculosis precipitated the religious crisis, she
fell ill and was ordered to winter in Cannes. Vivien promised to visit
her there, but was too deeply entangled in her own affairs to sense the
gravity of the other girl’s condition. She seems instead to have made a
trip to America. When at last she responded to an urgent summons, it was
too late—her friend was dead before Vivien reached her.
Vivien’s grief and remorse were shattering. The fact that Violet was
given a “cold” Anglican funeral and interred beneath a church in the
Avenue de l’Alma instead of under clean earth and sky increased the
poet’s agony, and “for a long time she spent hours each day at dusk” in
the subterranean gloom beside Violet’s grave. This state of affairs
quite naturally moved Barney, who was nothing if not proud, to accuse
her of being more in love with Love than with reality, and to depart for
a protracted stay in the States. Thus Vivien was left doubly deserted,
and from this period stem many poems in her early volumes. In _Cendres
et Poussières_ (1902) we find “Devant la Mort d’une Amie Véritablement
Aimée”:
Ils me disent, tandis que je sanglote encore:
“Dans l’ombre du sépulcre où sa grace pâlit
Elle goûte la paix passagère du lit,
Les ténèbres au front, et dans les yeux l’aurore ...
Dans une aube d’avril qui vient avec lenteur
Elle refleurira, violette mystique.”
Moi, j’écoute parmi les temples de la mort ...
J’écoute, mais le vent des espaces emporte
L’audacieux espoir des infinis sereins.
Je sais qu’elle n’est plus dans l’heure que j’étreins,
L’heure unique et certaine, et moi, je la crois morte.
And in _Études et Préludes_ (1901):
J’attends, o Bien-Aimée! o vierge dont le front
Illumine le soir de pompe et d’allégresse ...
Notre lit sera plein de fleurs qui frémiront ...
Et la paix des autels se remplira de flammes;
Les larmes, les parfums et les épithalames,
Les prières et l’encens monteront jusqu’à nous.
Malgré le jour levé, nous dormirons encore
Du sommeil léthargique où gisent les époux,
Et notre longue nuit ne craindra plus l’aurore.
In _Evocations_ (1903) she is proclaiming a “Victoire Funèbre:”
Dans le mystique soir d’avril j’ai triomphé.
J’ai crié d’une voix de victoire: Elle est morte ...
—Quel sourire de paix sur tes lèvres muettes,
O soeur des violettes!
J’ai brûlé de baisers des pieds blancs de la Mort
Car elle t’épargna la souillure et l’empreinte,
L’angoisse de désir, les affres de l’étreinte,
Les ardeurs de vouloir, l’âpreté de l’effort.
—L’amour s’est éloigné de tes lèvres muettes,
O soeur des violettes![24]
The contrast between these devoted elegies and the poems to her second
love is striking, and one is aware of a revolt against passion _per se_.
For the first time the poet voices a longing for death which recurred
with increasing frequency in her later work.
Completely sobered by her double loss, Vivien seems to have spent some
part of 1901 in Scotland with her family. On her return to Paris she
leased the large residence which had housed her and Violet during their
early association, and made it her permanent home. Here she must have
worked on the three volumes which appeared in 1902 and on the
translation of Sappho which was among those of 1903. This last and
_Kitharèdes_ (renderings into French of all fragments from the Greek
Anthology written by or about women) were lauded by critics both as
translations and as poetry, the only adverse comment being that they
were so much wordier than the originals. What she apparently attempted,
however, was to expand fragments into plausible wholes, as many other
translators have done before and since (cf. especially Marion Mills
Miller).
The year 1902, says Germain, was probably the calmest of her life. She
was suffering from disillusion as to her own powers of emotional
constancy, and believed that the serious loves of her life lay behind
her. If in mid-twentieth century this sounds adolescent in a young woman
of twenty-five, one must remember that in the English-speaking countries
the emotional ideal popularly given lip service at the turn of the
century was still “One Great Love in a Life.” For a year she strove for
emotional quiescence, but there are signs even in _Evocations_ (1902) of
encounter with a new personality:
Sonnet
Ta royale jeunesse a la mélancolie
Du Nord où le brouillard efface les couleurs.
Tu mêles la discorde et le désir aux pleurs,
Grave comme Hamlet, pâle comme Ophélie ...
Mon coeur déconcerté se trouble quand je vois
Ton front pensif de prince et tes yeux bleus de vierge,
Tantôt l’Un tantôt l’Autre, et les Deux à la fois.[25]
Twilight
Les clartés de la nuit, les ténèbres du jour
Out la complexité de mon étrange amour ...
L’ambigu de ton corps s’alambique et s’affine
Dans son ardeur stérile et sa grace androgyne ...
In _La Vénus des Aveugles_ (1903) “La Perverse Ophélie” and “Sonnet à
une Enfant” are addressed to the same person, and they show Vivien
struggling to spare both the other girl and herself the fevers of such
an alliance as her second had been. This volume also reflects a more
bitter struggle which would have remained an enigma except for Germain’s
discreet sketch of what occurred during 1903. He describes the new
beloved as endowed with a cameo profile, a keen if ‘exclusively
practical’ intelligence, and a temperament in every respect different
from Vivien’s. It is clear that he did not like the girl, and he
attributes to her much of the suffering and catastrophe in Vivien’s
later life, although he grants that the poet produced the greater part
of her published work under the stimulus of the new association. She
was, in fact, the Hélène de Zuylen de Nievelt who collaborated in the
“Paule Riversdale” volumes, and to her (in part) Vivien dedicated
several original volumes and her collected poems of 1909. No
biographical data are discoverable, but the Hamlet and Ophelia
references above, and the fact that _Brumes de Fjords_ (1902), the first
volume dedicated to her, was announced as translated from the Norwegian,
suggest that she was from Northern Europe. (Her name, of course, sounds
Dutch.) A difference in the dedicatory initials between 1902 and 1909
suggests that the girl may have married in the interval.
In 1903, Vivien was apparently just entering with delicacy and caution
upon this new emotional adventure when Barney reappeared on the scene.
Like all women who know themselves weak, says Germain, ‘Renée armed
herself with a strong resolution’ not to see her old love. But Barney
was not one to be “congédiée” at another’s pleasure. When Vivien, at the
end of her endurance, left Paris and took refuge in her villa at
Mitylene, wanting only peace, she was run to earth even there. (This
may, of course, be a euphemistic version of the episode. It is not
impossible that Vivien went to Greece by secret pre-arrangement with
Barney.) In any case some weeks of renewed intimacy ensued of which _La
Vénus des Aveugles_ reflects the bitter and poisoned entrancement. To
her tormentor Vivien writes, among much in the same key:
Sonnet
Tes cheveux irréels, aux reflets clairs et froids
Out de pâles lueurs des matités blondes;
Tes regards ont l’azur des éthers et des ondes.
Pourtant je ne sais plus, au sein des nuits profondes
Te contempler avec l’extase d’autrefois ...
Je vis—comme l’on voit une fleur qui se fane—
Sur ta bouche, pareille aux aurores d’été,
Un sourire flétri de vieille courtisane.[24]
Cri
... Vers l’heure où follement dansent les lucioles,
L’heure où brilla à nos yeux le désir du moment,
Tu me redis en vain les flatteuses paroles—
Je te hais et je t’aime, abominablement.[25]
Full reaction came with return to Paris and to Violet’s grave:
La Nuit Latente
La luxure unique et multiple
Se mire à mon miroir ...
Ma visage de clown me navre.
Je cherche ton lit de cadavre
Ainsi que le calme d’un havre,
O mon beau Désespoir! ...
Mon âme, que l’angoisse exalte,
Vient, en pleurant, faire une halte
Devant des parois de basalte
Aux bleus de viaduc ...
Et, lasse de la beauté fourbe,
De la joie où l’esprit s’embourbe,
Je me détourne et je me courbe
Sur ton vitreux néant.[26]
Other poems in the same volume make it evident that at this time she
longed for the courage to kill herself, and in reverie dwelt upon the
death of both her current loves.
By 1904 she had apparently freed herself of the old entanglement and
yielded to the inevitable ripening of the new. _A L’Heure des Mains
Jointes_, published in 1906 but reflecting this emotional period, opens
with the idealistic title poem:
J’ai puérilisé mon coeur dans l’innocence
De notre amour, éveil de calice enchantée ...
Ma douce! je t’adore avec simplicité ...
Tes cheveux et ta voix et tes bras m’ont guérie.
J’ai dépouillé la crainte et le furtif soupçon
Et l’artificiel et la bizarrerie.
J’ai abrité ainsi mon coeur de malade guérie
Sous le toit amical de la bonne maison ...
This poem and many others in the volume have, indeed, a new simplicity,
occasionally sacrificing to it something of her earlier verbal magic.
They evoke the image of a soft-spoken, light-footed pale girl with tawny
hair who turns to her for comfort and peace as well as reciprocating
them. One sees, too, a garden above Nice, surrounded by pines and full
of pale iris, for Vivien carried symbolism into daily life—violets for
the first love, lotus and tiger lilies for the second, iris for the
third. The love celebrated here seems complete and happy, combining
passion with companionship, and it was during 1904 that Vivien tried to
link her friend’s life to hers even in authorship with the “Paule
Riversdale” experiment. From this year come three volumes under Vivien’s
name and three or four of joint authorship, justifying Germain’s
statement that this alliance was fruitful.
But the collaborative prose-poems, narratives, and verses were not well
received. Of “Riversdale’s” _Echos et Reflets_ the reviewer of poetry
for the _Mercure de France_ said merely, ‘Renée Vivien is no longer
alone in evoking the glorious and tragic shade of Sappho.’ On _L’Etre
Double_, one pseudonymous narrative, Rachilde’s total comment was:
Que de vers! Et que d’histoires japonaises. Le roman, peu chose du
reste, un amour de femmes, est complètement noyé par ce déluge de
citations. Trop de vers! trop de fleurs! trop de lucioles, trop de
poissons bleus![27]
Vivien’s own autobiographical tale, _Une Femme M’Apparut_, fared thus:
... Le texte est du même ordre avec ... le vieux style dit décadent,
mort hier, déjà horriblement pourri, et la pluie des androgynes, y
compris la Saint-Jean-de Vinci. Tout cela sent l’héroïne de _La
Passade_ de Willy, qui se tenterait de se faire prendre au
sérieux.[28]
The last comment is particularly interesting inasmuch as Willy (the
novelist Henri Gauthier-Villars, of whom more later) had called the
heroine of _La Passade_ “Mona Dupont de Nyewelt,” a name too like
Hélène’s to be a matter of chance, considering his notorious penchant
for including real persons in his fiction. He described her as a
_gamine_ given to roaming the streets of Montmartre at night and tossing
pebbles through fanlights for sheer deviltry—altogether, far from
innocent.
It may have been the critical cold douche of 1904 that kept Vivien
silent during 1905 and restricted her output during 1906 and 1907 to a
single volume per year, but it was more probably unhappiness. The drift
of her personal life is not difficult to discover from poems in
_Sillages_ and _Flambeaux Éteints_ of 1908. “Malédiction sur un Jardin”
bids the flowers fade, since her love no longer cares to walk among
them. “Vêtue” begs the beloved not to discard a gown, but
Garde-moi, parfumée ainsi qu’une momie
Ta robe des beaux jours passées, o mon amie!
“Amata” voices that ultimate plea of the desperate woman which tougher
spirits always take for hypocrisy:
Dis, que veux-tu de moi qui t’aime, o mon souci!
Et comment retenir ton caprice de femme?
... Ton vouloir est mon voeu, ton désir est ma loi,
Et si quelque étrangère apparaît plus aimable
A tes regards changeants, prends-la, réjouis-toi!
Moi même dresserai le lit doux et la table ...
Je mets entre tes doigts insouciants mon sort,
O toi, douceur finale, o toi, douleur suprême.
That this time the defection was not hers, that she had at last attained
to her own ideal of self-effacing constancy, seems to have saved Vivien
from bitterness. Only one later poem is tinged with it, “Terreur du
Mensonge,” in which her resentment is not for the defection itself but
for the lie which sought to conceal it.
Was this lie perhaps responsible for the gender of “prends-_la_” above?
For as was suggested earlier, the “ambiguë” Hélène may have married
before the end of 1908. It is certain that, in that year, Vivien
prepared the edition of her collected poems which she dedicated to her
friend under the new initials. It is also known that she made an
unprecedented visit to her family in England, and soon afterward
attempted suicide with laudanum. One biographical note[29] mentions that
during her last year she was suffering from “Basedow’s disease”
(exophthalmic goitre), and such an affliction might seriously depress a
hellenic worshipper of physical beauty. But it seems hardly adequate to
have made her seek death, without the added burden of emotional despair.
Her later poems record increasing misery and loneliness, restless
travel, “loveless loves” and premonition of death. From the three
posthumous volumes come such titles as “Solitude Nocturne,”
“Résurrection Mauvaise,” “Déroute,” “Vieillesse Commence,” “Détrônée,”
and “Cyprès de Purgatoire.” Short quotations will suffice to convey
their tone:
L’amour dont je subis l’abominable loi
M’attire vers ce que je crains le plus, vers toi![30]
or:
Les êtres de la nuit et les êtres du jour
Ont longtemps partagé mon âme, tour à tour ...
Les êtres de la nuit sont faibles et charmantes ...
On ne boit qu’un baiser décevant sur leur bouche...
Et leur amour n’est qu’un mensonge de la nuit ...[31]
or:
Le monde inhospitable est pareil à l’auberge
Où l’on vit mal, tout est mal, on dort mal.
Et pendant que le cri des femmes se prolonge,
Je cherche le Palais Impossible du Songe.[32]
The Dream here was not, of course, such as comes with sleep, but that
illusion of Love which she had pursued all her life. The final volume,
_Haillons_, is filled with cries of pain and horror, of foreseeing the
end and wanting it to come swiftly.
The known facts of her last year are gleaned from Colette’s _Ces
Plaisirs_ and from news notes following her death. She was living alone
in her Paris residence, an “Arabian Nights dream” of luxury crowded with
the trophies of her travels. Colette conveys vividly the macabre effect
of rooms hung with gloomy colors and inadequately lighted by brown
tapers; the exotic flowers and food and drink; and the unpredictable
eccentricity of the hostess, dressed always in diaphanous black or
violet, who might walk out in the middle of a dinner in response to
mysterious summons from a nameless “Friend.” This figure was so
anonymous and so capriciously tyrannous that Colette surmises she may
have been the figment of an imagination already clouded by intemperate
habits. It is known that the unhappy poet was drinking to excess, an
indulgence particularly dangerous in view of her thyroid imbalance.
A few weeks before her death she was to appear in a tableau as Lady Jane
Grey on the executioner’s scaffold, and wishing to enhance her
effectiveness as the tragic heroine, Vivien put herself through a
punishing regime of violent exercise, little food, and much alcohol. She
made a brilliant appearance, but fainted on the stage and was carried
home to bed. Soon afterwards, as the result of further drinking to
escape black depression, she strangled while attempting to eat and was
quickly stricken with pneumonia.[33]
It was at this point that, with the utmost secrecy, she joined the
Church of Rome, as Violet Shilleto had done before her. Colette’s
matter-of-fact surmise is that a dour and disapproving elderly maid was
responsible for summoning a priest while her mistress was delirious, and
Natalie Clifford Barney in the longest of her memorial poems to the dead
girl agrees with Colette in implying external pressure:
Et pourtant ils ont pris ton âme splénétique
Aux décevants espoirs du dogme catholique,
Voulant ouvrir tes yeux avides de repos
A leur éternité—mais tes yeux se clos ...
Tes esprits affaiblis, ils purent te changer,
Mais l’oeuvre de ta vie est là pour te venger ...[34]
But the consensus of popular opinion was that this was a deathbed
repentance inspired by sheer panic.
It is possible, however, to trace in life and work hints which acquit
the poet of mere faint-hearted apostasy from her devout paganism. The
first is her friend Violet’s similar step, marked upon her ineradicably
by her own remorse. Then there are the many “violette” poems celebrating
the beauty and innocence of that first love, which were written
steadily, except during the brief happy period of her third affair.
There is also the parallel theme of guilt when her ideal of love was
violated, as during her second liaison and her last reckless
extravagances. There are even one or two tenuous religious allusions in
late poems—“Chapelle,” “Chapelle de Marine,” “Dura Lex Sed Lex,” and
there is _Le Christ, Aphrodite et M. Pépin_, a bitter prose satire on an
age of scientific materialism which was giving only lip service to its
deity. But more significant is Germain’s report of what was to him the
most amazing aspect of her conversion—it was the concept of Mary the
Virgin which drew her to the Roman Church. How little after all even her
close friends comprehended the basic motivation of her life: a
compulsive seeking for maternal tenderness.
To understand the odd finale to her story one must return to a phase of
her life so far neglected—her many contacts with artistic and literary
men of her day. The critics Charles, Droin, and Germain were her
personal friends, Sansot, LeDantec and Brun her staunch allies. Her
collector’s interests had gained her the friendship of Ledrain, curator
of oriental antiquities in the Louvre, and her passion for music—she was
an accomplished interpreter of Chopin—had won that of Gauthier-Villars,
music critic as well as novelist, and of Saloman Reinach. One must also
return to the second portion of Barney’s already partially quoted
memorial poem:
Ils ont caché ton corps sous une pierre
Chrétienne, ton squelette émiette sa poussière
Très respectablement dans un tombeau banal,
Anonyme, et couvert du bloc familiale.
Et craignant pour leur nom ce scandale: la Gloire,
Ils offrent leur dernière insulte à ta mémoire ...
“Ils” were her relatives, and it is true that she was buried at Passy
beneath a slab bearing for identification only her father’s name, John
Tarn. Immediately upon her death the quick-witted and practical Reinach,
foreseeing attempts on the part of church, family and even some friends
to suppress evidence of her emotional history, took possession of
letters and unpublished manuscripts and deposited them in the
Bibliothèque Nationale, with the stipulation that they should not be
made public until after the year 2000 A.D.[35] It will, therefore, rest
with another generation to compile the definitive record of her work and
her essentially tragic life.
Some years later in _Notes and Queries_ Reinach wrote the following
informal tribute in response to an inquiry:
I could quote from those volumes at least two hundred verses which
rank among the finest specimens of French poetry. ... I am aware that
there are some objectionable elements in her books, and wish that
they should not be dwelt upon; but her genius—for genius she had—is
the more extraordinary as she wrote in a language not her own. I feel
sure she will be famous some day, and think it desirable that we
should try to know more about her before it gets too late.[36]
All the critics who grant her this superlative poetic quality agree that
she has received nothing approaching her due recognition because of the
lesbian element in her work. In view of the small number of persons in
any generation who are tolerant of such love, it may be that she will
never receive it.
* * * * *
There remains little to mention in the way of variant French poetry,
though occasionally some isolated chance-encountered fragment—like a
sonnet to Hermaphroditus by Marguérite Yourcenar—stimulates a fruitless
search for more of an author’s verse. The _Mercure de France_ reported
in 1902 Henry Rigal’s _Sur le Mode Sapphique_, of which Pierre
Quillard’s review says that it was prefaced by a quotation from Pierre
Louÿs: ‘When a loving pair is composed of two women, then it is
perfect.’[37] The slim volume was made up of a dozen brief episodes laid
in a dimly distant Ionic island setting, and recounted in antiphonal
stanzas the love between Chrysea and Mnais. It was apparently a close
imitation of Louÿs’s _Songs of Bilitis_, with Mnais in the more
masculine role. It ends with a shepherd lad catching Chrysea’s eye one
evening and piquing her imagination by dreams of “a stronger and better
love.” Were it not for the title, says Quillard, one could well believe
the amorous dialogue one between a girl and an _éphèbe_—an effeminate
man.
The only other woman poet sufficiently variant to attract critical
comment was Paule Reuss, noted by Clarissa Cooper in her _Women Poets of
the Twentieth Century in France_. Reuss’s volume _Le Génie de L’Amour_
(1935) was dedicated to her fellow poet Anna de Noailles, and is said
“to breathe a pure idealistic love like that of Dante for Beatrice.”
Cooper’s only quotation is:
Vous demandez d’aller vous voir!
Mais serait-ce quitter ce soir
Vos mains jointes dans la mienne?
Sera-ce vous quitter au matin?
J’ôterai ma robe blanche;
Au clair de lune de la lampe,
Sera-ce toi vers moi qui te penches?
Je passerai dans les sentiers
Déjà connus ou oubliés
Et je dirai: Madame! alors
Que j’avais dit mon trésor![38]
This suggests a proud and ironic restraint to equal Natalie Clifford
Barney’s.
Poetry—German
The first contemporary variant poetry in German was probably an item
cited in Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_ simply as: Plehn. _Lesbiacorum Liber_.
1896. As it is not listed in the German publishers’ catalog during the
1890s, it must have appeared in a periodical or as a part of some longer
volume. The only possible author is a Marianne Plehn who produced a long
monograph on geology during the same decade. Her interest in a field
cultivated chiefly by men supports the assumption that her literary
outlook was also masculine, and her rather labored Latin adjective would
imply that her “Book of Lesbians” celebrated women of similar
temperament.
In 1898 considerable notoriety attended the publication of _Auf Kypros_
by Marie Madeleine (Baroness von Puttkamer), an author included by a
later literary historian among “exponents ... of the right to
unrestrained sexual freedom even if perverse,” and described as “so
brazenly pornographic [an adjective which the critic employed freely]
that the less said the better.”[39] The volume was later privately
reissued in a de luxe edition with color plates by nine or ten
established contemporary artists.[40] Though most of the poems in _Auf
Kypros_ are heterosexual, six or seven match Renée Vivien’s in lesbian
frankness, e.g. “Vergib” and “Greisenworte.” “Sappho” too much resembles
other imitations of that poet’s most passionate ode or Louÿs’ _Songs of
Bilitis_ to need special attention. Another, almost flippant in tone, is
from a group entitled “Aus dem Tagebuch einer Demi-Vierge,” and sketches
with great economy what is evidently a tranvestist episode. The speaker
has given her “Kätzerl” sweets, liqueurs, cigarettes (“natürlich Kyriazi
Frères!”)—and kisses—and has kept up her “strenges incognito” so
successfully that her Puss really believes her a Man-About-Town. Only
the American “Götze” on the end-table (surely Billikin) grins wickedly
to hear the impostor repeatedly promise the frustrated girl
‘Everything!!—next time!’
The remaining three lesbian poems express tragic regret for initiating a
younger girl. “Vagabunden” is a prophetic warning:
Verlassen wirst du Haus und Herd
um meiner Augen dunklen Schein.
Du wirst verachtet und entehrt
und wie ein Bettler wirst du sein ...
Und um uns her ist Hass und Hohn,
und alle werden uns verdammen,
und alle Pfaffen werden droh’n
mit Strafen und mit Höllenflammen.
Wir sind verflucht für alle Zeit!
und wirst doch Haus und Herd verlassen
um meiner Augen Müdigkeit.
“Crucifixa” pictures the innocence of a young girl before her initiation
and her plight afterward:
Ich sah an einem hohen Marterpfahle
an einem dunklen Kreuz dich festgebunden.
Es glänzten meiner Küsse Sündenmale
auf deinem weissen Leib wie Purpurwunden ...
Ich gab dir von dem Gift das in mir ist;
ich gab dir meiner Leidenschaften Stärke,
und nun, da du so ganz entlodert bist,
graut meiner Seele vor dem eignen Werke.
Ich möchte knie’n vor einem der Altäre
die ich zerschlug in frevelhaftem Wagen—
Madonna mit dem Augen der Hetäre,
ich selber habe dich ans Kreuz geschlagen!
And a later untitled poem goes even farther, in wishing the beloved dead
rather than as she has become:
Ich wollte, es läge kühl und blass
dein geschändeter Leib unterm Kirchhofsgras,
erlöst von Schmerzen und Sünd’,
und fleckenlos wärst du auf’s Neue—
ein Lilie im Morgenwind.
One cannot help wondering whether Vivien, who knew German well and
doubtless read these poems at about the time she was writing her own
impassioned elegies to Violet, may not have felt their influence.
During the 1890s the picturesque vagabond, Peter Hille, was roaming the
country with his scribbled manuscripts in the pockets of his shabby
jacket. He was so indifferent to publication that nothing was printed
until after his death in 1904, when his friends assembled his _Collected
Works_. Of these, the first volume is made up of poems, among them a
long rhapsodic biography of Sappho,[41] representing her as devoted
wholly to Beauty. She worships nature, women, and particularly youth as
embodiments of beauty, and wants to remain young and free herself,
leaving only her poems as offspring. But Hille hears premonitory echoes
of “the thunder of Jove”—passion—which will presently overcome her.
Therefore, his picture is that of an emotional adolescent; it evades her
variant loves and stops short of her marriage, her childbearing, and of
her hypothetical passion for Phaon. Among the prose “Aphorisms” in his
second volume Hille includes a severe indictment of current
lesbianism,[42] which he considers as depraved as any other illicit
passion. He says that only women so dedicated to spiritual beauty as to
forego all physical expression are entitled to call themselves disciples
of Sappho. Thus he is a precursor of Rilke, who similarly idealized her
emotional experience as nearer the “divine intent” even than happy
heterosexual love. In short, both men are basically ascetic.
In the same year that Hille’s work appeared in print a lesser lyrist,
Ernst Stadler, then only twenty, published in _Das Magazin für
Literatur_ a poetic drama, “Freundinnen.”[43] It presents the
culmination of an ardent friendship between Sylvia and Bianca, one
fifteen, the other eighteen, in their mutual awareness of passion under
the spell of a full summer moon, but it does not have specific lesbian
implications.
A second woman poet, more restrained than Madeleine, is Toni Schwabe,
whose _Komm kühle Nacht_ appeared in 1909. Its first group of “Lieder”
celebrates the loss of a male lover remembered with bitterness, for his
ruthless passion threatened the girl’s life and destroyed her love. The
poet sees ahead no feminine happiness, no home or children—a brief
cradle song speaks of a child abandoned to others’ care while the singer
roams the world, a slave to desire—but only ‘a mad riot of roses and
dancing’ and the brief ecstasy that comes with night and dies at dawn.
(Dowson’s _Cynara_, written in the nineties, “I have ... gone with the
wind, Flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng Dancing ...” comes
inevitably to mind.)
A later group of sonnets are like Louise Labé’s in concealing the sex of
the beloved, but are aggressive and masculine in mood. A “Lied der
Bilitis an Mnasidika” borrows the most fervent of Louÿs’s lesbian
episodes, and some pages of “Translations from the Danish,” said to be
of Schwabe’s own composition, begin with two “Songs to Lenore.” The
first poem in “Die Stadt mit lichten Türmen” is a dream in which a young
count bears the singer into a beech wood and tries futilely to possess
her, never divining that only her ‘smiling pity’ prevents her from
dealing him a death blow. Probably the most typical mood of the whole
volume is represented in “Nie traf ich einen,” in which she says that
‘no one has ever curbed me with the bridle of love. Where I was
weaker I refused myself altogether.... I have caressed only those who
craved my love and wanted my violence, and them I have contrived to
satisfy and to make dependent upon me. Me—me alone no one can succor,
for though I have known every kind of love, no one has ever truly
possessed me, made me surrender.’[44]
This is exactly the mood of Rachilde’s and Schreiner’s heroines and of
Barney’s poems.
Only one variant poet has been traced in Germany subsequent to World War
I, a woman who wrote under the pseudonym of Iris Ira. Her volume,
_Lesbos_ (1930), consists of free renderings of Sappho’s and Anacreon’s
surviving fragments, and a similar rendering of the _Songs of Bilitis_,
complete with introductory narrative. (Richard Dehmel had translated in
the 1890s only two dozen of its prose-poems.) A translator’s preface to
the volume pleads the necessity of maintaining mood rather than literal
accuracy, but while the verse displays skill and grace, its tone
throughout is more charming than passionate. And passion, of course, was
the very essence of Louÿs’s own work.
Poetry—English
Poets in English offer nothing as explicitly lesbian as the work of
Vivien or Madeleine, and they seldom equal Barney or Schwabe in
frankness of implication. Indeed, last century’s “thick veil of ellipse
and metaphor”[45] still shrouds most of our feminine variant lyrists,
and even where it has thinned, critics in general have either failed or
refused to penetrate it. Consequently some readers may incline to
skepticism concerning already familiar material cited below, but in that
case they are urged to re-examine it with open mind, not in anthologies
but in the authors’ original context, and not for overt lesbianism but
for clearly variant significance.
In America, Amy Lowell was the first poet to venture at all openly upon
variant ground. She was born three years earlier than Vivien and Barney,
the granddaughter of James Russell Lowell and sister of a president of
Harvard. In spite of this formidably respectable heritage, she did not
escape to Paris but lived out her life in the family mansion in
Brookline, though she did create within it her own particular haven. As
surely as Renée Vivien felt herself born in the wrong era, Miss Lowell
was born in the wrong flesh for a worshipper of female beauty. Even in
her adolescent journals she bemoans the excessive weight which robbed
her of appeal. Living too early for endocrinology to aid her, she tried
rigid dieting, but succeeded only in doing permanent damage to her
health. Something of a tomboy in her younger days, as she matured she
adopted also the male psychological role. Clement Wood has documented
for her as thoroughly as did Moore and Wilson for Emily Brontë this
consistent assumption of masculinity, and the reader must be referred to
the final chapter of his biography for detailed evidence. He lists there
all Lowell’s poems written from a male viewpoint, but for the present
purpose only such require mention as are love lyrics addressed to women
and spoken as if by the poet in her own person, not through the lips of
a fictitious man.
Miss Lowell published nothing until 1912, when she was nearly thirty,
but then in _A Dome of Many-Colored Glass_ she included a number of
variant verses. “Hora Stellatrix,” for instance, contains the following
lines:
’Tis night and spring, Sweetheart, and spring!
Starfire lights your heart’s blossoming.
In the intimate dark there’s never an ear ...
So give; ripe fruit must shrivel and fall.
As you are mine, Sweetheart, give all!
The poem entitled “Dipsa” is virtually an epithalamium fifty lines in
length, among them:
I wonder can it really be that you
And I are here alone, and that the night
Is full of hours, and all the world asleep,
And none to call to you to come away;
For you have given all yourself to me,
Making me gentle by your willingness.
There is also a sequence of nine sonnets in slightly less specific
vein,[46] as plainly written to a woman, and as plainly spoken by the
poet herself.
In _Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds_ (1914) five of the last poems—“Blue
Scarf,” “White Green,” “Aubade,” “A Lady,” and “In a Garden”—are written
to women and are full of passionate imagery. In _Pictures of the
Floating World_ (1919) there is a sixty-page sequence, “Planes of
Personality: Two Speak Together,” more extensive and unmistakably
variant than anything found elsewhere in Lowell. In the first poem,
“Vernal Equinox,” one finds: “Why are you not here to overpower me with
your tense and urgent love?” The second is the often quoted “The
Letter,” empty of variant suggestion when lifted from its context, but
ending:
I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little ink drops
And posting it.
And I scald alone here under the fire
Of the great moon.
In her final volume, _What’s O’Clock_, there are thirty pages beginning
with “Twenty-four Hokku on a Modern Theme” and ending with “Onlooker,”
which are comparable with, though less passionate than, the sequence
above.
Charlotte Mew, a woman who by date of birth (1870) should precede Miss
Lowell, took her own life in 1928. Virginia Moore describes her as
definitely variant.[47] Unhappily for literature she destroyed all
traces of that fact even more carefully than did Emily Brontë or Emily
Dickinson—so completely that we have of her work only two thin volumes,
scarcely fifty poems in all. This meager remainder is of high enough
quality to gain her inclusion in the _Dictionary of National Biography_
and in virtually every anthology of twentieth-century poetry. It does
not, however, include a single poem of which one can say “this is more
variant than otherwise,” though two or three (especially “The Farmer’s
Wife”) are poignantly successful in expressing a man’s emotional
viewpoint. Several (e.g., “Madeleine in Church”) show a deep religious
conviction of sin, and doubtless this, as well as a passion for privacy,
led her to the wholesale winnowing which critics, being unaware of her
emotional bent, laid to rigorous self-criticism of an aesthetic sort.
Certainly if what she destroyed was at all comparable to what remains,
there has been no more tragic literary, as well as personal, suicide
since Chatterton.
* * * * *
Writing undoubtedly at the same time as Amy Lowell, for she was born in
the same year, was Rose O’Neill. This woman is likely to be recalled
today as the creator of the Kewpies, those coy cherubs which became a
national fad early in the century, rather than as a serious artist and
writer. Nevertheless, she was poet, novelist, and illustrator, the
income from her juvenile and humorous works enabling her to pursue her
deeper interests. Her claim to inclusion here rests on her single volume
of serious verse, which was not published until 1922. Of it, Clement
Wood says in his _Poets of America_:
Her poetry will lose a certain Puritan following because of her
cryptic frankness on the theme of love. She does not write this
across the sky; neither does she, as is the convention, make this
creep into a hole and draw the hole in after it. It is here, in a few
poems; those who are not offended by this note in the masters since
the Greeks, will not be offended by it here.[48]
Its title, taken from Shakespeare’s most debated sonnet, is _The Master
Mistress_, and the title poem hymns “a lovely monster ... seeming two in
one, With dreadful beauty doomed,” but the subsequent references to
variance are comparatively few and almost equally vague. Only a dozen
poems among some two hundred are unmistakably variant—ten written “To
Kallista” (that notation appearing as subtitle); “Lee: A Portrait,” and
“A Dream of Sappho.” None but the last alludes vividly to any physical
expression of love, but all are passionate, and many are specific in
their praise of feminine beauty. The third poem in the volume reads:
The sonnet begs me like a bridegroom,
“Come within.”
“This palace! Not for me, the desert-born!”
I turn me, as from some too lordly sin,
And like a singing Hagar, pause and pass—
To lift for night’s sweet thieves my restless horn
In broken rhythms of the windy grass.
I will not be the measure-pacing bride,
But where the flutes come faintly,
Sing outside.
Like drifting sand my love doth drift and change—
I strangely sing because my love is strange.
From the lot of these variant poems the reader retains half-realized
images of two different loves, one a delicate and feminine personality,
“ceaselessly weeping,” the other:
Mimic, dancer, cavalier,
Silky hand the proud horse loves to fear;
Sailor and adventurer ...
She who lingers, loves, and goes alone.[49]
Though verses spoken through the lips of a fictitious man are much less
frequent than in Amy Lowell’s work, two such poems occur. And there are
many to which a Celtic titanism—fancies of removing mountains or seizing
the moon and stars for toys—lends a definitely masculine tone. Such
phrases as “in your princely fashion” and “fitting for you who feast
upon fierce things” indicate, moreover, that the poet glories in the
masculinity of one of her woman-loves.
Since this volume, whose quality Wood compares to that of the
Elizabethan Thomas Campion, is far superior to even the best of
O’Neill’s prose, the same question arises as in the case of Louise Labé:
how is it that from so articulate a writer, one who rhymed as she
breathed, we have no greater quantity of surviving verse? The answer may
well be the same, in view of her history.
She was born in Pennsylvania, but lived in no state long enough to call
it her own. Her father was a bookseller of more literary than practical
gifts, and there is little doubt that the swarming, hilarious and
penniless family in her first novel[50] is based on her own background.
From infancy the gifted child was destined for a stage career, but it
was discovered early that she was too high-strung to endure public
appearances. She then chose illustrating as her métier, and although
self-taught, was already selling drawings in her early teens. From
Omaha, where she attended a convent day school, she went alone at
fifteen to New York to seek a better market for her work, and lived
there in another convent until her marriage three years later. When her
husband died, she was twenty-three and already an established
illustrator and the financial mainstay of her family.
The humorous magazine _Puck_ soon became her chief outlet. She joined
its staff, and in 1902 married its editor, Harry Leon Wilson, later
famous as author of _Ruggles of Red Gap_ and _Merton of the Movies_. In
1904 O’Neill published _The Loves of Edwy_, which like two of her three
subsequent novels, is written in the first person and from a man’s
viewpoint. It is significant that the narrator of this story spends his
life in fruitless love of the bewitching heroine, a term in jail for an
altruistic forgery being the somewhat strained device which deters him
from marrying. The girl, who has returned his love since adolescence,
finally accepts another man, but a total psychological block prevents
her consummating the marriage.
In 1905 Wilson met Booth Tarkington and the two at once became intimate,
going to winter on Capri at Elihu Vedder’s “beautiful, unbelievable
villa,” and there collaborating on _The Man From Home_. O’Neill studied
art in Rome and Paris from 1905 to 1907, and twice exhibited in the
Paris Salon. She and her husband apparently did not return to America
until 1912, living in the interim in their own Villa Narcissus on Capri,
which is mentioned as one of her several residences later. Upon her
return to the States she was separated from Wilson, and thereafter lived
in the Ozarks, in Connecticut, and in New York on Washington Square,
where she became a close friend (as was Millay) of Elinor Wylie. In 1929
and 1930 she produced her last novels, _The Goblin Woman_ and _Garda_,
in the latter of which the heroine and a twin brother, Narcissus, are
“the two parts of a single whole,” she, the pagan and undisciplined
body; he, the sensitive poetic soul. In her first two novels (the second
was a whimsical mystery) the central feminine figure embodied soul and
conscience, the man being the pagan spirit.
One gains in the end the picture of a dual personality, whose loves may
well have changed like the drifting sand, and who made her most profound
effort toward sincerity in _The Master Mistress_. It is known that Capri
early in the century was the home of an international homosexual colony,
and O’Neill could scarcely have lived there for several years without
being drawn into the circle, at least superficially. But her early
religious training would have made it difficult for her to freely
embrace or champion its way of life. Embodied in her novels are many
charming light love lyrics, written by male characters to their loves,
and in all probability her private notebooks contained a good bit of
more personal variant poetry which will never be made public.
* * * * *
In 1906, at the age of thirteen, “E. Vincent Millay,” as she then signed
herself, saw her first verses printed in the young writers’ section of
_St. Nicholas Magazine_, and four years later her farewell
poem—seventeen was the age limit for the “League”—won the year’s cash
prize. Entitled “Friends,”[51] this poem presents in two neatly balanced
stanzas the incompatible temperaments of an adolescent boy and girl. The
girl’s rejection of the senseless brutality of football was the poet’s
own, as the hatred of all cruelty in her later work attests. The girl’s
occupation—embroidery—was unlikely to have been that of young “Vincent,”
who enjoyed a boy’s outdoor activities as well as a boy’s name.
From her debut in _St. Nicholas_ to the end of her life, virtually all
of Millay’s work appeared first in periodicals, so that for tracing its
chronology Yost’s bibliography of 1937 is invaluable. From this we know
that “Interim,” her first poem of variant significance, was written in
1912 along with the better known “Renascence.” “Interim” is a threnody
which at least two critics[52] have meticulously insisted is the product
of pure imagination, since no one intimately known to the poet had died
when she wrote it. It is possible, however, to suffer tragic loss
through separation, especially when young, and every homely and poignant
detail of “Interim” speaks of immediate experience. One passage near the
middle needs particular attention:
... That day you picked the first sweet pea—
I know, you held it up for me to see
And flushed because I looked not at the flower
But at your face; and when behind my look
You saw such unmistakable intent
You laughed and brushed your flower against my lips
(You were the fairest thing God ever made
I think). And then your hands above my heart
Drew down its stem into a fastening
And while your head was bent I kissed your hair.
I wonder if you knew ...
... If only God
Had let us love—and show the world the way!
Strange cancellings must ink th’eternal books
When love-crossed-out will bring the answer right![53]
The experience described here obviously involved another woman, and
remained unconsummated. Like Hille and Rilke, the poet feels such love
to be potentially the most perfect in the world; but, unlike them, she
sees perfection only in completion, not in abstinence. Furthermore, the
last two quoted lines have a kind of classroom echo, as of discipline by
some harsher agent than the deity of “God’s World.”
When Millay submitted this poem along with “Renascence” for inclusion in
_The Lyric Year_ she herself so much preferred “Interim” that she
ventured to plead by mail for its inclusion.[54] As it is inferior to
“Renascence” in both profundity and restraint, her preference argues
that it had been written too recently for her to gain perspective upon
it. She was twenty at the time, three years out of high school, and
living in a small Maine town of rather limited intellectual and personal
opportunities, according to her sister Kathleen’s later picture of it in
_Against the Wall_. It is also clear from all her poetry and her
correspondence that hers was a highly emotional temperament. All this
suggests that for a considerable time in her late teens Millay was
completely absorbed in a passionate variant attachment, which then
suffered some abrupt termination. Out of her grief grew “Interim” and a
number of other laments which trickled into print throughout the next
two or three years. Examination of her first published volume
(_Renascence_, 1917) shows that save for “God’s World” and “Afternoon on
a Hill,” the whole collection sounds a note of personal loss and
melancholy.
During her years at Vassar (1913-1917, her twenty-first to twenty-fifth)
she admitted an attachment to another fair delicate girl, at least to
the extent of her own “Memorial to D.C. (Vassar College, 1918),” which
appeared in the volume _Second April_. Death actually terminated this
friendship, but the group of “little elegies” assembled under the title
above are merely slight and graceful by comparison with “Interim” and
its aftermaths. It is probable that certain later laments, such as “Song
of a Second April” and “To One Who Might Have Borne a Message,” were
truer expressions of this later loss. A third woman is pictured in a
sonnet in _The Harp Weaver_:
Love is not blind. I see with single eye
Your ugliness and other women’s grace.
I know the imperfections of your face—
The eyes too wide apart, the brow too high
For beauty. Learned from earliest youth am I
In loveliness, and cannot so erase
Its letters from my mind, that I may trace
You faultless, I must love until I die....[55]
This is less passionate than many of her love lyrics, and it alone among
them speaks of lifelong constancy. It might have been written to the
poet’s mother, to whom, as her letters testify, she was ardently
devoted.
That variant emotion was at least an intermittent preoccupation with
Millay until she was thirty is evident from examination of her total
work before 1923, the year of her marriage. There are a number of
sonnets and other verses in which the sex of the subject is uncertain,
if not deliberately concealed, but which do not have the tone of those
specifically written to men. Then there is her poetic drama, _The Lamp
and The Bell_, written during a sojourn in Paris soon after graduation
from Vassar, and presented at the college in 1921. Its theme is an
undying devotion between two young women, and Elizabeth Atkins’s
description of it is so delightful that it must be borrowed:
The kingdom of Fiori is Poughkeepsie-on-the-Hudson, and college
students and faculty keep looking straight through their Italian
veils, very much as Elizabethan Londoners keep lifting their masks in
Shakespeare’s Illyria and Verona and Messina.
The theme is that one of burning concern in any girls’ school—the
theme of friendship; and the play takes up their endless arguments as
to whether it will last. Octavia, the very mildly wicked stepmother
in the play, supposedly a queen but essentially a dean of women,
avers that the friendship of the princess and her own daughter is not
healthy and will not last. Of course the girls prove her wrong. The
princess, without a murmur, gives up her lover to her friend; and
long afterwards she consents to violation by her most loathed enemy,
in order to be permitted to reach her friend as she lies dying.
The theme is surely Elizabethan. From Lyly to Beaumont and Fletcher,
Elizabethan literature is filled with asseverations that friendship
is a stronger thing than sexual love.... The only novelty is that
this twentieth century play deals with the friendship of women
instead of men....[56]
Friendship, however, is much too cool a description for the love between
the princesses. The relation is passionate, though as always in her
variant verse Millay avoids any implication of physical intimacy.
By the time that this drama was written, however, Millay also had
published a number of lyrics of heterosexual inspiration. Indeed, among
the conventionally minded she had gained a quite shocking reputation on
the strength of them, for they antedated the now notorious Twenties.
Many of them are flippant or bitter in comparison to those inspired by
women, and they flaunt inconstancy and promiscuity. See for instance the
sonnets “Oh think not I am faithful to a vow,” “I shall forget you
presently, my dear,”[57] “What lips my lips have kissed ... I have
forgotten,” and “I being born a woman....”[58] In short, these betray
conscious striving toward a masculine sexual standard to match that of
her partners. They remind one that “Vincent” had concealed her sex at
the date of her first publication. A critic, citing in an adult review
the “phenomenal” quality of a _St. Nicholas_ entry Millay wrote at
fourteen, confessed uncertainty whether the poem was written by a boy or
a girl.[59] Fellow poets reading “Renascence” thought it a man’s work,
and a Barnard professor during her brief months there (repairing
entrance requirement deficiencies for Vassar) pronounced “Interim” to be
written in the character of a man.[60] The same viewpoint marks her
libretto for Deems Taylor’s opera, _The King’s Henchman_.
After her marriage in 1923 all of Millay’s published verse was marked by
greater emotional reticence, and if she wrote privately anything
comparable to her earlier variant lyrics the chances are against its
ever being made public. (There has been no providential Reinach to
salvage her reliques for posterity, and it is rumored that censorship is
being exercised. Letters have been admitted to the published volume of
her correspondence which imply some early heterosexual indiscretion,
while all variant traces have been eradicated save a proper name or
two[61] in connection with which the published implications are
unrevealing. To the student of variance, however, they are significant.)
The one notable exception to this general reticence is _Fatal Interview_
(1930), of which Atkins said in 1936 that she, herself,
must be the first post-Victorian critic on record to state in cold
print ... that a still breathing married woman, name and dates given,
has written a poem of extra-marital passion, not as a literary
exercise in purple penmanship, but as an honest record of immediate
experience.[62]
The experience did not occur very close to the date of the volume’s
publication, however, for many readers will remember individual sonnets
coming out in this or that magazine over a considerable number of years,
and not in the order in which they finally stand. The majority might, as
far as verbal evidence goes, have been written to a person of either
sex, and they differ so sharply among themselves that even allowing for
the poet’s mercurial temperament and the gamut of emotion she wished to
record, one sometimes feels they cannot all have been inspired by the
same individual. It may be brash to suggest that they could have grown
out of more than one experience, and that the fifty-two were merely
assembled into one matchless tracing of the birth, growth and decline of
human passion. But one of them, numbered XXI, demands special attention:
Gone in good sooth you are: not even in dream
You come. As if the strictures of the light,
Laid on our glances to their disesteem,
Extended even to shadows and the night;
Extended even beyond that drowsy sill
Along whose galleries, open to the skies
All maskers move unchallenged and at will,
Visor in hand and hooded to the eyes.
To that pavilion the green sea in flood
Curves in, and the slow dancers dance in foam;
I find again the pink camellia-bud
On the wide step, beside a silver comb—
But it is scentless; up the marble stair
I mount with pain, knowing you are not there.
This verse was originally written either to a woman and fitted later
into the artistic pattern of the whole, or the man who inspired it could
appear (without incongruity in the dreamer’s mind) to have lost a
masquer’s accessories—pink camellia-bud and silver comb—which are
scarcely masculine. Was he one whom a woman’s costume would have become?
Did the dreamer at times secretly wish him a woman? Or was this sonnet
(and just possibly others in the sequence also) written specifically to
a woman?
It has been the critical fashion for some time to discount Millay’s
literary importance because of the sharp decline in the quality of her
work after _The Buck in the Snow_. Her “Epitaph for the Race of Man” in
that volume may be seen almost as her own poetic abdication. An artist
whose gods were Life and Beauty and whose devil was Cruelty may well
have found herself paralyzed by the horror of global and total war. If
one predicates also the burden of a dual emotional nature, one half of
which was in later years censored by the other—for no mature modern of
her intelligence would lightly court the charge of arrested adolescence,
no daughter of New England would willingly display what her generation
considered emotional deformity—one has supplementary explanation of her
creative paralysis.
* * * * *
Not all of this country’s variant poetry has been written by women; at
least two men have contributed narrative verse. Edgar Lee Masters’s
_Domesday Book_ (1929) follows Browning’s _Ring and the Book_ in that it
begins with a girl’s death and traces the history which led up to it,
through the memories of far more than Browning’s dozen persons. In the
end Elenor Murray is seen as a woman too passionate and open-hearted to
live peacefully or to end her days in happiness. Within a decade she
gave herself lavishly to several men but was self-defeating in her very
generosity, and finally ended her life because her efforts to meet her
lovers’ need only brought suffering to others as well as herself.
One of the earlier reminiscences in the book comes from Alma Bell, a
high-school teacher who knew Elenor at seventeen and loved her deeply.
Recognizing the dangers ahead for one so susceptible to passion, she
attempted to help the girl “to ripen to a rich maturity” unscathed. She
had success in warding off certain unsavory male advances, but not in
avoiding emotional involvement herself, since, as she observes, few
persons are wholly either masculine or feminine in spirit.
... the flesh’s explanation
Is not important, nor to tell whence comes
A love in the heart—the thing is love at last ...
My love for Elenor Murray never had
Other expression than the look of eyes,
The spiritual thrill of listening to her voice,
A hand to clasp, kiss upon the lips at best,
Better to find her soul, as Plato says.[63]
Despite this conscientious restraint the town became aware of the
intimacy, and Alma Bell was forced to resign her position and leave
... under a cloud
Because of love for Elenor Murray, yet
Not lawless love, I write now to make clear.[64]
The exceptional small town coroner, tolerant and philosophical, who
elicits the stories which compose the pattern, is an evident mouthpiece
for the poet himself. His final estimate of the girl’s character is one
of human dignity and largeness of spirit surpassing that of her
calumniators and even her lovers and friends. But the early suspicion of
lesbianism cast one of the shadows which reached beyond the limits of
her little Midwestern community and augmented the difficulties of her
later life.
The single protesting voice in American poetry is that of George
Stirling, whose _Strange Waters_ is a brief narrative related to the
work of Robinson Jeffers in both its Pacific coast setting and in
grimness of theme. To a childless, but quite happy, poet and his Irish
wife are sent the latter’s eighteen-year-old twin nieces. They are the
children of her much older brother, to whom she has alluded only once
during her married life proclaiming him a monster. His deathbed letter
implies some ironic justice in their being left to her. They are
fiery-haired beauties, abnormally reticent except with one another, and
their mutual devotion is marked. The more boyish twin exhibits a
brilliant intellect which fascinates the poet, but he intuitively senses
something amiss, and listens at the door of the bedroom where they sleep
together. To his horror he hears evidence of active lesbianism, and in
the morning he accuses them openly. Refusing to answer him, the two set
out for their usual day-long roaming on cliffs and shore. However, they
do not return. When their bodies are washed in from the Pacific, one
proves to be a boy. The subtle implication is that they are the
incestuous offspring of the poet’s wife and her brother. Their relation,
then, is not variant, but it gives Stirling opportunity to pass upon
lesbianism a judgment quite as black as upon incest, for which in this
case a hereditary etiology is implied.
* * * * *
From England the variant contribution is even thinner and more evasive
than from America. Richard Aldington’s _Loves of Myrrhine and Konallis_
(1926) is yet another derivative from Louÿs’s _Songs of Bilitis_. Its
pair are the young goat-girl, Konallis, and the prosperous courtesan,
Myrrhine, who bids her maid close her doors to male lovers, “for this is
a sharper love.”[65] The tenuous drama progresses through white nights,
bacchic revels, momentary unfaithfulness, and philosophic communing, and
ends with Myrrhine’s death and Konallis’s subsequent marriage. Though
graced with felicitous phrasing and vivid evocation of passionate mood,
it is the weakest of the echoes from Louÿs’s original because the least
direct in presentation of its theme.
Victoria Sackville-West’s _King’s Daughter_ (1930) is very different but
even more cryptic. Its echoes are wholly English and recall the
Elizabethan lyrists from one of whom the poet is descended. The scant
two-dozen pages, full of country images sharp and delicate as frost,
conjure up the spirit—seldom the physical presence—of an elusive
coquette and of the proud speaker, who
Although the blackness of her heart torment
Me and her whiteness make me turbulent,[66]
will commit neither pleas nor actions to paper. One early line disclaims
intimacy: “How shall I haunt her separate sleep?” The only others nearly
as explicit are:
Estranged from all, and rapt, I only ask
To be alone when I am not with you.[67]
It is not until reaching the final poem, “Envoi,” that the poet
indicates that anything has actually occurred outside of her haunted
imagination.
The catkin from the hazel swung
When you and I and March were young ...
The harvest moon rose round and red
When habit came and wonder fled ...
Snow lay on hedgerows of December
Then, when we could no more remember.
But the green flush was on the larch
When other loves we found in March.[68]
Here, for a moment, is the flavor of Millay, but not the intensity, and
to give evidence that the whole volume breathes subjective passion one
would need to quote it entirely, which is scarcely practicable. The most
vivid of the poems is also one of the best known:
Cygnet and barnacle goose
Follow her when she passes
Barefoot through daisied grasses.
Briars blown straying and loose
Catch at her as she goes
Down the path between woodbine and rose.
Seeking to follow and hold her,
The silly birds and the thorn.
But her laughter is merry with scorn.
What would she say if I told her
That the goose, and the swan,
And the thorn, and my spirit, were one?[69]
A negative note, barely audible, is sounded in the _Scrapbook_ of
Katherine Mansfield, published by her husband, Middleton Murry, in 1940,
a dozen years after her death. The poem is dated 1919, and entitled
“Friendship.”
When we were charming Backfisch
With curls and velvet bows
We shared a charming kitten
With tiny velvet toes.
It was so gay and playful;
It flew like a woolly ball
From my lap to your shoulder—
And oh, it was so small,
So warm and so obedient,
If we cried: “That’s enough!”
It lay and slept between us,
A purring ball of fluff.
But now that I am thirty
And she is thirty-one,
I shudder to discover
How wild our cat has run.
It’s bigger than a tiger,
Its eyes are jets of flame,
Its claws are gleaming daggers;
Could it have once been tame?
Take it away; I’m frightened!
But she, with placid brow,
Cries: “This is our Kitty-witty!
Why don’t you love her now?”[70]
Obviously Mansfield, unlike Millay, did not see perfection in the
fulfillment of variant love. Or at least not in this particular
fulfillment. Passages scattered through the _Scrapbook_ and the more
reticent _Journal_ (1928) reveal a compulsive and abject devotion in the
lifelong friend alluded to in the poem above. (See, for example,
“Toothache Sunday” in the _Scrapbook_.) The intensity of her friend’s
emotion troubled Mansfield, who sometimes felt herself “a callous brute”
to be unable to return it in kind or to make its possessor happy. “I
don’t know why I always shrink ever so faintly from her touch. I could
not kiss her lips.”[71] But, however innocent of expression, the
relationship was a problem she could never discuss with her husband, and
she felt that it cast a permanent, if faint, shadow between her and “J.”
(Murry).
(From the recent sympathetic biography of Mansfield by her fellow New
Zealander, Antony Alpers, several supplementary impressions emerge: 1)
Ida Baker (“L.M.”) was never abject, but rather a dedicated priestess
most happy to be elected and given a direction in life. 2) It was not
her shadow which fell between Mansfield and Murry so much as the
former’s compulsion to write. Katherine repeatedly blamed Murry’s
self-absorption for the difficulties in their relations (Nelia Gardner
White takes the same view in her novelized biography _Daughter of Time_,
1941) but surely her own was quite as marked. 3) While she was in
Queen’s College, London, between fourteen and seventeen, there seems to
have been some talk of her “unwholesome” friendships. Alpers uses the
plural, but discusses only her domination of Ida Baker, unless her
wooing of her feminine cousin Sidney Payne for a couple of years was
also suspect. According to Alpers this courtship proceeded largely by
letter, one of which he quotes to refute the charge. 4) From the picture
of her two unhappy marriages (the first almost farcical) and her
obviously ambivalent feeling for Ida Baker, it seems that she was a
person unable to give herself completely to either man or woman. Was
this because of her obsession with writing, or was that relentless
creative urge the result rather than the cause of some deeper emotional
block?)
The most notable feature of all these twentieth century lyrics is the
women’s relatively articulate confession of variant interests. Before
1900 only “Michael Field” and Matilda Betham-Edwards (to be mentioned
later) admitted inclination toward their own sex. Now the Catholic
O’Neill, the New England Lowell and Millay, the British Sackville-West
reveal it without apology. Schwabe and Madeleine offer their testimony
still more openly, and Barney and Vivien, with the independence of
expatriates and women of fortune able to create their own milieu,
proclaim it not only in writing but in their lives. Indeed Vivien at
least promises in any long view of western literature to figure as a
minor Sappho, the greater part of her work dedicated to this limited but
seemingly imperishable theme.
CHAPTER VII.
FICTION IN FRANCE
Before 1914
If variant poetry burgeoned suddenly with the turn of the present
century, new developments in fiction were equally apparent. Between 1900
and 1950, novels with female variance as either a central or a major
theme averaged more than two per year. A rather larger additional group
used variance as a minor motif or in a telling incident or two. Of this
generous crop a good half was the work of English and American authors;
an equal proportion was written by women; and although active
championship of lesbianism or variance was comparatively rare, better
than half the fictional presentations were either sympathetic or
neutral. These counts are based upon a hundred-odd volumes available for
examination, plus an additional score or so of unequivocal reviews.
The new century’s characteristic changes were least evident in France,
where for a couple of decades variant fiction had appeared in quantity,
and where at least two or three women (Rachilde, Jane de LaVaudère,
Camille Pert) had contributed. We have seen that Pierre Louÿs between
1896 and 1901 even struck a new note of cheerful insouciance, but his
_Aphrodite_ and _Bilitis_ pictured courtesans of the classical era, and
the adventures of his three girls in _King Pausole_ were set in a zany
fantasy well removed from reality.
From reviews and publishers’ records we know that during the century’s
first decade fully as many inferior lesbian novels appeared as in the
one preceding, a few of which will be mentioned later. The outstanding
work, however, was that done by the couple signing themselves
Colette-Willy, who opened a new era by portraying their own times with
both frankness and sympathy. Willy was the established music critic and
light novelist Henry Gauthier-Villars. Sidonie Gabrielle Colette has
since been recognized as the foremost French woman writer of her time,
but in 1900 she was merely a piquant personality who, a decade earlier,
at seventeen, had come to Paris from the provinces and married
Gauthier-Villars. Consequently, when _Claudine à L’Ecole_ appeared
(1900), it was taken to be mainly a work of Willy based upon his wife’s
girlhood experiences. Critics have since established that it and its
three successors, _Claudine à Paris_ (1901), _Claudine en Ménage_ (1902)
and _Claudine s’en Va_ (1903) were less his than Colette’s own, and the
fifth volume, _La Retraite Sentimentale_ (1907) was recognized at the
time of its appearance as hers, since by then she had separated from her
husband. The first four of the series have been translated as _Claudine
at School_, _Young Lady of Paris_, _The Indulgent Husband_, and
_Innocent Wife_, and are fairly well-known.
This series presents the emotional history of the delightful Claudine
between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and incidentally incorporates
the authors’ opinions upon many sorts of sexual relation. Claudine
appears first as a day pupil in a provincial public school somewhere in
the mountainous _départements_ of southern France. Motherless, she is
brought up after a fashion by a father so absorbed in his studies as to
approach a caricature of the absent-minded professor, and by a
free-tongued servant comparable to Proust’s Françoise. She grows up a
tomboy, free to climb trees, to roam alone over the wooded hills about
her small town, and to read at will in her father’s uncensored library.
Her emotional development begins with an attraction appropriate to her
years (fifteen) but uncommonly intense, to a pretty assistant mistress,
Mademoiselle Aimée. With Claudine’s wily arrangement to be tutored in
English at home, this affair promises to develop richly, but it is
interrupted when the headmistress, a domineering redhead, also contracts
a passion for her assistant. Knowing on which side her bread is
buttered, Aimée abandons Claudine, to become the pampered darling of her
superior. Two or three of the “big girls” understand perfectly what is
going on, and Claudine even eavesdrops one day upon an intimate moment
enjoyed by the two women in their dormitory quarters while their classes
run wild in the schoolrooms below. Later, the headmistress implies to
Claudine that had she not from the outset shown antagonism, her
affection might have been bestowed on her rather than on the somewhat
insipid junior mistress.
In the course of the year, Claudine discovers that she is becoming
attractive to men, notably the school’s visiting physician, a “wolf” at
whom she laughs although he has an irritating power to move her. He uses
his political influence to the end of enjoying Aimée’s favors, an affair
to which the older mistress appears indifferent, her jealousy being
reserved for feminine rivals. A second diversion develops when Aimée’s
young sister, Luce, enters at mid-term as a charity pupil and is badly
neglected by the two mistresses. A year Claudine’s junior, this thin
green-eyed youngster becomes her adoring slave, constantly manoeuvering
for caresses, but receiving only blows, which she appears to find almost
as satisfying. To herself, Claudine admits that, were the girl anyone
but a sister to the fickle Aimée, the affair might go farther.
At the graduation dance—a neat bit of satire on provincial
entertainment—Claudine is much sought after by local and visiting
swains, and analyzes afterward why she found their attentions so
unsatisfactory. She contemplates what she wants of love:
I terribly needed Someone, and was humiliated by this lack, and
because I could not give anything to anyone I did not love and know
through and through—a dream which will never come true, eh?[1]
This précis of the feminine ideal marks the beginning of Colette’s
since-famous dissection of women’s emotional psychology.
The second volume carries Claudine through the year—her
seventeenth—which her father decides must be spent in Paris, ostensibly
in the interests of his scientific work, but actually with an eye to
widening her circle of acquaintance. Sick with nostalgia for her native
Montigny and loathing every aspect of her urban imprisonment, Claudine
succumbs to a long illness which has two important results. Her hair
must be cropped, and her contacts are confined to her father’s older
sister and the latter’s grandson, a pretty creature of her own age as
effeminate as she is boyish. Very nearly disliking Marcel, Claudine
still feels a physical attraction much like that which drew her to Luce.
But Marcel’s emotions are absorbed in an affair with a male
schoolmate—an affair which has made trouble for both boys at their Lycée
and evoked the wrath and contempt of Marcel’s father. Evasive about his
own experiences, Marcel is avidly curious about Claudine’s relations
with Luce (pride prevents her mentioning Aimée). It is Marcel who sees
the modish possibilities in Claudine’s cropped head, and takes her to an
English tailor to be outfitted _en garçonne_, a style eminently suited
to her both physically and psychologically.
During her illness Claudine has heard from Luce that her situation at
the school has become intolerable and she is ready for desperate
measures. Presently she meets Luce on a Paris street dressed more
smartly than she is herself, and learns that the girl, who had sought
help from an uncle (a gross sixty-year-old widower), is now being
lavishly kept by him. Nevertheless, Luce manages to have a boy-friend
from the Beaux-Arts on the side, and is also eager to resume relations
with Claudine. The latter, too, feels the earlier attraction, but
realizes she cannot tolerate intimacy with a little _grue_ who is living
with her own uncle. With humorous honesty she admits to herself that
despite having “read everything—and understood it” before she was
sixteen, when it comes to “real life” she is nothing but “an ordinary
good girl.”
In the course of her acquaintance with the pretty Marcel she meets
Renaud, the latter’s widowed father, and is drawn to him despite his
intolerance of his son’s homosexual affair. She thinks he is just the
man she would have chosen for a father—urbane and witty, but with sombre
emotional depths. Soon she is in love with him. The man, twenty years
her senior, struggles against a reciprocal attraction, but Claudine’s
headlong infatuation wins, and the book ends with their engagement.
The first section of _Claudine en Ménage_ analyzes with skill her as yet
incomplete marital adjustment. She resents the memory of her elaborate
wedding and her husband’s continuing mixture of fatherly indulgence and
experienced sensuality which shames her adoring naïveté. The couple have
spent a year in continental travel uncongenial to the Montigny tomboy,
and as she settles in Renaud’s Paris apartment she is homesick for her
native province and rebellious against the routine of sophisticated
entertaining her husband wishes to resume.
Accepting life on his terms with what grace she can, she presently meets
Rezi, a seductive Austrian, wife of a retired English officer, and soon
they are mutually infatuated. Their emotion can find no outlet because
the colonel’s jealous surveillance and the unremitting social activity
in her own household afford them no privacy. After a period of
increasingly painful frustration Claudine appeals to her husband for
aid. Renaud has all along shown the same excited interest in this affair
that his son exhibited in her relations with Luce, and he readily agrees
to find the pair a private haven. He insists, however, on retaining the
key to their “nest” himself and on escorting them to it whenever they
wish to go there. This complaisance bordering on voyeurism offends
Claudine, who is at heart wounded by his lack of jealousy. Gradually she
realizes that what she feels for Rezi is mere infatuation. She suspects
that her partner has been intimate with other women about whom she is
evasive, and she even finds reason to wonder whether before her marriage
Renaud and Rezi might not have had an affair. Her brooding discontent
increases during three weeks of illness when she can keep watch on
neither husband nor friend, and comes to a head on the day when she pays
a surprise visit to the “nest” and finds the two there together. In a
fury of jealousy and disillusionment she goes home to Montigny.
There, healed by springtime in the country, she owns that she is still
as much in love with Renaud as his letters show him to be with her. She
finally writes him that he has been too indulgent, too like a doting
father. ‘I wanted Rezi and you gave her to me like a bonbon. You should
have explained that there are sweets one cannot eat without becoming
ill.’[2] She tells him that if they are to be happy she must be more his
equal as he must be more her master. Life seems to her so much more sane
and wholesome in the country that she is determined to stay there, and
she hopes he will consent to make his permanent home there as well. When
business or even pleasure call him to Paris, she will let him go,
knowing that when he returns it will be from genuine inclination. The
volume closes with this ultimatum without disclosing Renaud’s response.
In _Claudine s’en Va_ the viewpoint shifts to that of a very different
young married woman, but Claudine, moving in and out of the picture, is
still a dominant influence in the story. Its central figure, Annie, is a
submissive creature who has been married four years to Alain, an
autocratic cousin whom she has adored slavishly since childhood. While
he is absent on a protracted business trip Annie discovers herself—her
uninfluenced personality is very different from her husband’s, and her
married life has been a one-sided affair never affording her real
satisfaction. The latter revelation is the fruit of long talks with
Claudine, whose own marriage, now radiantly successful, becomes for
Annie the embodiment of what mutual love should be. Her husband has
forbidden her to associate with Renaud and Claudine, whom he considers
too “fast” to be a good influence, but Annie learns that the sister to
whose care he has entrusted her is involved in a sordid affair with an
alcoholic journalist and that Alain himself has, since their marriage,
carried on a long liaison with a woman who has always disgusted her.
This painful enlightenment comes during a hectic season at an
international spa. She turns more and more to the bohemian but wholesome
Claudine, who convinces her that a middle course is possible between the
looseness into which she has been so quickly plunged and the rigid
conventionality of her former life. As their intimacy grows it becomes
apparent that Claudine is strongly drawn to her but is as strongly
self-disciplined. At one point when they have been exchanging
confidences and Annie rests her head on Claudine’s shoulder, hungry for
tenderness, Claudine springs up crying “Not too far! In another instant
I would—and I’ve promised Renaud——”[3]
Annie finally feels that further life with her husband is impossible,
and she prepares to leave on a secret quest for emotional orientation
before his return. In bidding her goodbye and godspeed, Claudine
confesses that she could easily have become emotionally involved, but
dared not risk a second experience like the one with Rezi. She must
abide by her promise to her husband, even though because of the
different circumstances, she, herself, can see no harm in giving what
comfort she might to the suffering Annie. Her final words are almost
mystical—a confession of faith in Love as something precious enough to
seek at all costs, and when found, to preserve at any price.
_La Retraite Sentimentale_, appearing in 1907 after Colette’s divorce
from Willy, carries Claudine’s story to its conclusion. At the outset
Renaud is in a Swiss sanitorium, exhausted by the hectic pace at which
he has lived, and Claudine is with the now-divorced Annie on the
latter’s Burgundian estate, in order to spare Renaud the jealous concern
her life alone in Paris might occasion. The potential attraction between
Annie and herself is dormant, and Claudine, wretchedly lonely without
her husband, amuses herself by drawing from her companion a full account
of her _Wanderjahr_. She learns that Annie has run the gamut of sexual
experiment with men in search of her romantic ideal, but has gained
nothing beyond momentary appeasement. More unwilling than ever to risk a
further barren experience with Annie, Claudine yields to a fantastic
impulse. Her woman-shy stepson, Marcel, arrives for a visit just as
Annie feels impelled to set out on another sexual quest, and Claudine
throws the two together in the hope that each may solve the other’s
problem. The tragi-farcical outcome suggests that this episode may have
been plotted during Colette’s collaboration with Willy, for it echoes
the most cynical note of the earlier volumes.
The concluding portion of _La Retraite Sentimentale_ shows Claudine, now
thirty and widowed, once more entrenched in her beloved country house in
Montigny. Her father and the old servant have died, and she is alone
with her cherished dogs and cats, still faithful in spirit to Renaud,
and filled with tolerant pity for the restless Parisians (Annie among
them) who often motor down to see her. This final volume has no place in
a study of female variance save for its picture of Claudine’s resolute
refusal in maturity to become involved with Annie.
As has been said, all of the volumes are now recognized as chiefly the
work of Colette, and also as more autobiographical than could be
admitted at the time of their composition. They may, therefore, be
trusted as giving a fairly accurate picture of a certain group of
Parisian literati at the turn of the century. There is something of
Willy in the idealized Renaud and also in the caricatured Maugis,
alcoholic music critic and paramour of Annie’s sister-in-law. Judging
Willy’s attitude from that found in his independent fiction, the
complaisance of Renaud toward his wife’s lesbian liaison was less
improbable than certain contemporary critics—Rachilde among them—felt it
to be. From passing references in Colette’s much later volume of
personal reminiscences, _Ces Plaisirs_,[4] it would appear that the
group in which she moved during her early married years—that is, the
middle and late Nineties—were tolerant of male as well as female
homosexuality, and Marcel’s affairs were probably drawn from life.
Colette’s divorce after twelve years of marriage, however, is said to
have been due to heterosexual irregularities on her husband’s part. A
second marriage in 1914 to Henri de Jouvenel, by whom she had a
daughter, seems to have brought her a more settled happiness. But it
should be noted that Stella Browne, in a psychological study of some
women authors with homosexual tendencies,[5] mentions Colette as having
been involved herself before 1914 in two powerful variant attachments,
one with the film star, Marguérite Moréno, whom she met while she was
earning her living on the stage between her two marriages, and the other
with an unnamed foreign noblewoman. Character sketches of both these
women, naturally drawn with great discretion, appear in _Ces Plaisirs_.
From them one gathers that Colette’s relations with Moréno were
intimate, but “the Chevalier” (the nickname perhaps an echo from
Peladan’s chaste lady) is presented as a romantic idealist unwilling or
unable to cross the boundaries of physical intimacy with anyone.
To return to Claudine, she has some masculine secondary
characteristics—she is proud of her boyish height and acrobatic
abilities—and a personality in which unfeminine traits were emphasized
by her freedom and independence while young. But she never rebels
against the feminine role. She is also proud of her beautiful hair and
eyes, and she never abandons skirts even on her strenuous cross-country
rambles. She enjoys her power to attract men, though she scorns
flirtation and breaks an umbrella on a boulevardier who risks the
traditional continental pinch. Her reaction to the women who attract her
is definitely male—primarily physical, roused by beauty and passivity,
and manifesting itself in a desire to conquer and dominate. It contrasts
sharply with the clinging adoration of Luce, Aimée, and Annie. It is
most often stirred, after the initial “crush” on Aimée, by girls younger
than herself, those who recall her own youth or the masochistic devotion
of young Luce. This is particularly stressed in the early pages of
_Claudine en Ménage_, when, taking Renaud on a visit to her old school,
she finds there a handful of delicious adolescents spending their
holidays in the dormitory, and plays recklessly with them. It appears
again in _Claudine s’en Va_, when she encounters at the spa an impudent
comedienne so much like herself a few years earlier as to provoke
universal comment on the resemblance. This young woman, Polaire, was a
real not a fictional character who had acted in a dramatic version of
_Claudine à Paris_ in 1903, and who appears in the story under her own
name, as do various other contemporary personalities in the course of
the five volumes. (A particularly malicious sketch of Mme. Dieulafoy,
whose opera _Sémiramis_ had just been presented, figures in _Claudine
s’en Va_ in a letter from the music critic Maugis.)[6]
Taken together, the five _Claudine_ novels present a complete sexual
philosophy. It is Claudine’s progressive maturing under the influence of
Renaud which weans her away from her variant leanings, but the influence
is not one-sided. As their marital relationship deepens and mellows,
Renaud is led to “love Love,” to be, as Claudine puts it, more “chaste,”
less fond of sensual virtuosity “_qui s’aide d’une combinaison de
miroirs ... et de mots fait pour le chuchotement et qu’on se force à
crier à haute voix, tout crus_.”[7] In short, he has acquired a more
feminine outlook. Here, in brief, is the distilled wisdom of the woman
pronounced a genius in portraying the nuances of feminine psychology.
Lesbian attractions are legitimate but they belong to youth. Mature love
is neither uninhibited sophistication nor romantic idealism, but a
mutual devotion in whose interest each sex must sacrifice something and
must attempt to acquire some part of the other’s outlook. It has taken
four decades of Freud and his successors to produce the almost identical
wisdom which appears in all the better marriage manuals one reads today.
One might say that although France did not contribute so much as Germany
and England to the scientific study of sex, her long years of frank
attention to it from the personal and literary angles bore fruit before
the scientists’ harvest.
The _Claudine_ series spanned seven years, but they were not the only
works of their genre to appear in France. In the matter of public
acclaim, perhaps the most important item was an opera, _Astarte_,
presented by the Académie Nationale de Musique on February 15, 1901,
with a score by Xavier Leroux, which critics characterized as Wagnerian,
and a five-act libretto by Louis de Gramont. (It is cited in Martens’s
_Book of Operas_ as _Omphale_, and was apparently composed in 1891,
though there is no record of a dramatic performance before 1901.) The
libretto has not been available, and the following account is drawn from
the review by Breville in the _Mercure de France_ for April 1901, and
the summary in Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_[8] of an article in _Le Temps_
for February 20, by Pierre Lalo. The drama combines two episodes from
the mythological cycle of Hercules: his bewitched assumption of woman’s
dress and his death caused by the shirt of Nessus. Hercules is
represented as going to Lydia to stamp out the infamous lesbian cult of
Astarte by slaying Omphale, its high priestess. Instead, he is reduced
by her seduction to abject slavery, forgetting all his previous triumphs
and the purpose of his quest. Shedding his warlike accoutrements and
‘using the skin of the Nemean lion for a bedside carpet,’ he watches
with fascination a lesbian ceremony which Breville pronounces one of the
most beautiful ballets ever presented on the stage, ‘consecrated not so
much to those _amours animales_ of which Verlaine speaks as to the
harmonious disposition of groups and colors,’ its erotic climax being
veiled in ‘suddenly imposed shadows.’
At the ballet’s end Hercules is willing to abjure Vesta, adopt the
religion of Astarte, and enter into the marriage with Omphale urged by
the high priest. But Omphale, at last enamoured of a man, demurs because
she knows that the sequel to the nuptials must be the sacrifice of
Hercules on Astarte’s altar. At this point, the maiden Iole appears
bringing the miraculous tunic of Nessus from Hercules’s wife, Dejanira.
This tunic supposedly will save him from the power of Astarte and
rekindle the flame of legitimate love. The charms of Iole so transcend
those of Hercules in the eyes of Omphale that she offers to release him
and his warriors if she may keep the girl. Hercules, “toujours naïf,”
accepts the bargain, dons the tunic, and bursts into flame, igniting
temple and palace as well. Omphale, undisturbed either by his dying
cries or the general conflagration, embarks for Lesbos with the
enraptured Iole amid the ritual chants and dancing of all the women.
Breville, who finds Leroux’s score worthy of serious attention, is
fairly scornful of Gramont’s book. Here, he says, Hercules is not a
mythical hero but a robust swashbuckler who stalks about like the
professional wrestler paid to let an amateur win the bout. Amorous
psychology, he feels, has given way to mere physiology; Omphale’s sudden
preference for Iole is unconvincing, and moralists have no real case
against a work which ends in barren triumph for the purely sensual.
Despite this negative judgment the opera must have survived at least
from February till April, which suggests that Breville’s opinion was
prejudiced.
In the same year a popular star of music hall and demi-monde, Liane de
Pougy, published a novel, _Idylle Saphique_. Rachilde in the _Mercure_
pronounced it well-written but omitted comment on its theme, evidently
thinking the title sufficiently obvious. She confined herself to
lamenting that the author seemed on her way to becoming a respectable
woman (_honnête_), ‘and what is worse, a bluestocking.’[9] The
_Jahrbuch_, which repeatedly deplored the French tendency to regard
homosexuality as an experience possible for anyone, rather than the
innate tendency which that journal’s sponsors championed, considered the
_Idylle_ psychologically sound, and gave an extensive résumé of the
plot,[10] which seems representative enough of the sensational variant
novels of the time to merit review here. Annhine de Lys, famous Parisian
_courtisane_, differs from most of her class in dreaming of a great
love. Her profitable life with a millionaire or two has sickened her of
both luxury and sex, so that when a twenty-year-old American falls in
love with her she is moved by the girl’s intense worship. She herself
has hitherto avoided ‘lesbian degeneracy,’ and continues to resist it in
its completeness, having been warned by a colleague that it wrecks the
nerves.
Florence, the American, is engaged to a fellow countryman, who, like
Claudine’s husband, has not objected to several variant experiments on
her part, but of her passion for Annhine he is jealous for the first
time. He purchases Annhine’s favors at a fabulous price, thinking thus
to disgust his fiancée with her adored, but instead she turns against
him. When a previous love of Florence’s, realizing that she too has lost
the girl, stabs herself in the presence of the current pair, Annhine
falls ill from shock and leaves Paris. But some months in Italy and
Spain and a romantic interlude with a young man do not serve to
eradicate her memories of Florence, and the two are finally reunited.
Annhine sells her Paris mansion because it has been the scene of
professional liaisons which now seem shameful to her, and she and
Florence plan a “marriage” and a future of constancy and happiness. But
the other courtesan’s prediction proves correct: Annhine suffers a
breakdown, and Florence plans to marry the ever-devoted American suitor
in order to support her love. Annhine, knowing herself doomed, begs the
girl to enter the marriage seriously and give up lesbian practices, but
after her death Florence merely cancels her engagement a second time and
goes her way alone. Interestingly enough, the reviewer in the _Jahrbuch_
finds the suitor a wholly incredible character, and believes only an
American could be so casually tolerant. Yet the review of _Claudine en
Ménage_ follows immediately in the same number of the journal, with no
editorial comment on the parallel situations in the two.
In the following year (1902) a novel of less artistry voiced strong
disapproval of lesbianism. Charles Montfont’s _Journal d’une Saphiste_
is an autobiography which follows Aline from her first boarding school
initiation at the age of ten into her middle twenties. Her second love,
beginning in adolescence, is for the delicate and feminine Mirette, an
orphan who spends vacations in her home. Since Aline is motherless and
her father without suspicion, the two girls enjoy a protracted affair
until the father arranges a marriage for Aline. Her husband, alerted by
her docile frigidity and by watching her with her friend, tells her she
must choose between them. She chooses Mirette. Her father dies
financially ruined, and as her ex-husband will understandably enough
contribute nothing to her support, she is obliged to keep herself and
her love by selling herself secretly to one of her husband’s friends.
Mirette senses the truth, and, already weakened by passionate excesses,
dies in raving delirium. Aline ends her diary with an exhortation:
‘Women, seek only the love that all mankind honors, the healthy and
honorable, because fertile, love of men,’ and leaves the document to a
friend as a warning to all girls and schoolmistresses against ‘the
extravagant madness of lesbian love.’ The implication is that she then
commits suicide. The entire book, while using moral tags at beginning
and end to placate the censor, is written with detail bordering on
pornography, and Mirette’s death is as much medical nonsense as was
Annhine’s mentioned above, or Mlle Giraud’s from meningitis.
* * * * *
As was said earlier, the dozen years before World War I produced as many
variant novels of diverse quality as appeared in the 1890s. These ranged
from Morel’s _Sapho de Lesbos_ and Fauré’s _La Derniere Journée de
Sapho_, both of which whitewashed their classical heroine; through
Willy’s _La Môme Picrate_, in which the lesbian motif is incidental, and
de Régnier’s _L’Amour et le Plaisir_, a clever imitation of eighteenth
century farce; to LePage’s _Les Fausse Vierges_ and Hoche’s _Le Vice
Mortel_, melodramas holding lesbianism responsible for murder and
suicide in improbable circumstances.[11] The only novel to rate serious
consideration in both the _Mercure_ and the _Jahrbuch_ was Daniel
Borys’s _Carlotta Noll, Amoureuse et Femme de Lettres_ (1905).[12] In
this book, the heroine’s passion for a famous male literary colleague is
supplanted by infatuation for the homosexual Myrtil, who lures her into
active lesbianism and introduces her to the fatal habit of inhaling
ether as well. (Annie in _Claudine s’en Va_ had a similar fondness for
chloroform. _Sic transeunt_ modes in drugs!) When Carlotta is finally
abandoned by Myrtil she suffers general paralysis and ends in an
institution. The book’s chief claim to critical attention seems to have
been its prose style, which notably resembled that of Louÿs.
Post-War Trends
War, as always, checked the flow of fiction on any exotic themes. But
Marcel Proust in his invalid’s ivory tower was steadily working on _À La
Recherche du Temps Perdu_, which emerged intermittently from 1918 to
1926. (_Swann’s Way_ had appeared in 1913, but it and _The Guermantes
Way_ are least pertinent to the present study, variance in the latter
being confined to the male liaisons of the Baron Charlus.) One of the
major factors in Proust’s long narrative is the lesbianism of its
narrator’s mistress, Albertine. This is strongly foreshadowed in _Within
a Budding Grove_; its development provides much of the narrative
suspense in _The Captive_, and it reaches a climax in _The Sweet Cheat
Gone_. Proust weaves the lesbian strand skillfully through his complex
but controlled pattern. A sadistic episode between Mlle Vintueil and a
friend figures briefly in the Combray-childhood section of Marcel’s
history (which in the completed cycle precedes _Swann’s Way_), but this
ties into the later pattern when Marcel learns that Albertine had,
during adolescence, been associated with this pair of women.[13] Then
comes Marcel’s obsession with the group of bold and athletic girls at
the seaside resort of Balbec and his final fixation upon Albertine who
was one of them;[14] his temporary separation from her while he is
absorbed with the Duchesse de Guermantes and his military cousin,
Robert; his later living with Albertine alone in the family town house
and attempting to cut her off from all her previous feminine associates
save the trusted Andrée,[15] whom he later ironically discovers to have
been her lover;[16] and his final awareness that even his first love,
Gilberte Swann, was associated with a nameless girl transvestist whom he
had imagined to be a boy; and that Gilberte had also known Albertine’s
circle.[17]
Critics are now agreed that the tapestry of female variance which Proust
wove with such art was in part a transposition of the male homosexuality
he did not dare to treat so openly. Perceptive readers detected this at
once. Colette in _Ces Plaisirs_ pronounced his lesbians unconvincing
little monsters, and Natalie Clifford Barney in _Aventures de L’Esprit_
writes of warning him when his early volumes appeared of the difficulty
of translating the experience of one sex into terms of the other.[18]
Even quite naïve readers of his work in English have been sceptical of
Albertine’s freedom to visit Marcel in his hotel room late at night
whenever he sent the servant Françoise to fetch her, and one could cite
many similar inconsistencies with any known code of etiquette for
“respectable” and marriageable girls in France or elsewhere. Thus
Proust’s whole lesbian canvas is in part invalidated as a social
document. But still the types he portrays, their various
interconnections, and most of their psychology, ring perfectly true for
any group of young female sophisticates. He was certainly well
acquainted with many variants of both sexes, and one need discount his
feminine data very little.
* * * * *
In 1922 Romain Rolland, already famous for his greatest novel, _Jean
Christophe_, published _Annette and Sylvie_, the first volume of his
second series, _A Soul Enchanted_. As _Jean Christophe_ was the life
story of a man, so the later novel presents the emotional history of a
passionate woman, with her ultimate fulfillment in motherhood and
devotion to a son. The first episode is an attachment between the
heroine, Annette, and her illegitimate half-sister, Sylvie. The former
is the daughter of a puritanic and intellectual wife, the latter of a
less cultivated but more charming mistress. The progress of the girls’
intimacy after both are orphaned in their twenties is unfolded with keen
insight into their contrasting natures, one serious and violent, the
other self-contained and gracefully wise.
Sylvie’s affection was perfectly unrestrained, laughing, gamin-like,
impudent, but at bottom extremely sensible.... In Annette there dwelt
a strange demon of love ... she suppressed it ... for she was afraid
of it; her instinct told her that others would not understand
it....[19]
The two are drawn to one another with an intensity which Annette does
not suspect as unusual. Just before its climax their love is endangered
by the passing infatuation of both girls for a summer-resort Adonis, for
Sylvie a mere flirtation, stimulated largely by rivalry, but for Annette
a dangerous flare of passion alight for the first time in her
twenty-five years. Up to this point the girls’ devotion has expressed
itself only in constant companionship, endless confidences, and free but
innocent caresses. In Annette’s town house they have occupied adjoining
rooms. Occasionally Sylvie, a light sleeper,
... would get up and go over to the bed where Annette lay prostrate,
with the sheets thrust up in a mountain by her crossed knees; and ...
would fascinatedly watch the dull, heavy but strangely passionate
face of the sleeper who was drowning in the ocean of her dreams....
She wanted to waken her abruptly and put her arms about her neck.
“Wolf, are you there?” But she was too sure the wolf was there to try
the experiment. Less pure and more normal than her elder sister, she
played with fire, but she was not burned by it.[20]
After Annette’s stormy introduction to heterosexual passion,
however—(“That is love?... I don’t want any more. I’m not made for
it!”)—they spend some weeks together, and now
they were ruminating on their fever, their transports ... all that
they had acquired and learned from each other during the preceding
days. For this time they had given themselves completely, eager to
take all and give all.[21]
Their passion fights its way successfully through the phase of their
desiring to dominate and possess one another:
Their intimacy became so necessary to them that they wondered how
they had ever done without it ... but the two little Rivières felt
another, stronger need, that went deeper, to the very sources of
their being: the need of independence.[22]
The episode ends with Sylvie set up as a modiste, and Annette returning
to social life in the intellectual circles her father had frequented,
the two seeing one another less and less often.
The second portion of the book records Annette’s experience with a
highly eligible and attractive man whom she loves deeply. He and his
family, however, hold the conventional view that a wife should be
completely absorbed into her husband’s life and milieu, and as this
threatens her independence she breaks the engagement, though she is so
moved by her lover’s desolation that she gives herself to him before
parting. Unable to yield completely either to man or woman, she would
today be branded as a narcissist by psychoanalysts, but in the 1920s a
major artist could still present with sympathy such a quest for
individual integrity.
Written in the same year and treating the same theme more obliquely was
Victor Margueritte’s _La Garçonne_ (issued in a considerably expurgated
English translation in 1923 as _The Bachelor Girl_).[23] Monique
Lerbier, a true child of her decade, gives herself to her fiancé a
fortnight before her wedding, not only in token of loving trust but in
an effort to be more his equal in experience and courage. Then almost on
the eve of the ceremony she learns that she is merely a pawn in a
business deal between her father and Lucien, and also that her fiancé
has not given up a mistress of long standing nor does he intend to do
so. Outraged, she breaks with both him and her family, launches herself
as a decorator, and after some years of struggle achieves conspicuous
success. Along with her business career she leads a complicated personal
life with three or four lovers, one of them a woman, and only after much
travail attains emotional stability and a happy marriage. Among the
omissions from the English translation are the most explicit
heterosexual scenes and all homosexual passages.
In the original French version the latter are of considerable
importance. The first involves Monique and her chum Elizabeth, both
sixteen. “Zabeth” has adored Monique for three years without daring to
reveal her desires, which Monique for her part has never suspected. Then
on a sweltering afternoon the girls slip off their blouses—one is
reminded of Mlle Tantale—and fall to comparing breasts. Now Monique
senses her friend’s excitement and responds, and only a chance
interruption prevents her immediate initiation into the life of the
senses. Nearly a decade later, when Monique has plunged feverishly into
the bohemian life of Paris in the effort to forget Lucien, she and
Zabeth (now married) participate in a fashionable opium party and at
last consummate their long-deferred caresses.[24] Monique’s important
lesbian affair, however, involves a music-hall star who is still
bewitching at fifty, with whom she enjoys some months’ intimacy. It is
this woman’s tactful and knowing advances which release her emotions
from the ice in which the wreck of her engagement has frozen them. The
two often dance together in public, are recognized at once as intimate
by the male and female homosexuals who throng the dancing clubs, and
suffer neither personally nor professionally from the association. It
fades to a predictable end when Monique discovers that men no longer
repel her. Both women then return to heterosexual associations.[25]
* * * * *
As in pre-war years, during this third decade variant novels of all
qualities swarmed from the presses: Proust’s _Sodome et Gomorrhe_
(1921-22), _La Prisonnière_ (1924), and _Albertine Disparue_ (1925); in
1925 also, Jacques Lacretelle’s _La Bonifas_ and Edward Bourdet’s _La
Prisonnière_; and scattered over the same and later years, a shower from
the pen of one Charles-Etienne (an inferior disciple of Willy), and a
blast from Max DesVignons as hypocritical as Montfort’s and La Vaudère’s
prototypes of twenty years earlier.
Lacretelle’s novel, translated into English as _Marie Bonifas_ in 1927,
is worth special note. Its central figure is a motherless child of four
or five, stocky and ugly, when her father settles in the decaying Picard
hamlet of Vermont. Once thriving, the town has declined into a dreary
aggregate of men like the retired Major Bonifas, unmarriageable girls,
and acid gossips who spy upon each other behind half-closed shutters.
This country backwater, so different from the urban setting of most
variant fiction, is Marie’s lifelong home. The story covers the half
century preceding World War I.
Brought up roughly by her hard drinking parent and an ill-tempered
servant, Marie’s life is uneventful until a gentle country girl replaces
the old shrew and becomes at once mother, playmate, and tutor. Marie
blossoms as her adoring satellite, experiencing (as early as her tenth
year) a sensation she thinks of as “melting” when Reine caresses her.
She develops an antipathy to her father’s drunken coarseness, and
resents both his attentions to Reine and the bold admiration of soldiers
and country louts whom the girl attracts. This childhood idyll has a
shocking end when Reine, pregnant by the Major, throws herself from a
window and dies within a few hours. The curses of her peasant mother
convey the essence of the tragedy, though no understanding of its
details, to the terrified and prostrated child. A stronger conditioning
against men could hardly be devised.
In the boarding school to which her father consigns her for the next
half dozen years Marie develops her second passion for the older girl
appointed as her “shepherdess.” She remains at school during vacations
in order to wander the halls and garden paths she has walked with
Geneviève; she violently hates the latter’s fiancé; and for another of
Geneviève’s young charges she conceives such jealousy that she attacks
and beats her rival and is consequently expelled. The following years
from sixteen to nineteen she spends in a progressive school near the
Swiss frontier. Its principal, a Parisian, has studied at Lausanne and
taught abroad, and her advanced practice is to allow her girls complete
freedom outside the classroom. Marie’s delight is carpentry in a shop
where she spends all the hours not given to outdoor sports with her
English, American and Scandinavian mates. Conscious now of her masculine
build and lack of charm, she cultivates cynical indifference to romance,
but her instinct rejects the feminism preached by the headmistress and
her friends. Marie’s brief visits to her father are boresome, and it is
only at his death that she realizes the loss of her one tie on earth.
Nostalgia recalls her to Vermont, where she establishes herself as
mistress of the house, refuses the attentions of the physician who
attended her father, and attempts to become a part of the town’s life.
But although the soft femininity of a local aesthete makes a certain
appeal, she is impatient of the woman’s affectations, and she has too
many traits in common with a dowager philanthropist to make that old
aristocrat congenial. Because of her financial contributions to a
charity school, however, Marie is at least tolerated, and she puts her
carpentry to good use in renovating the school’s quarters unassisted.
Claire, the sewing mistress of the new school, a penniless, timorous and
fragile young woman of twenty, appeals instantly to Marie’s emotions.
Within a matter of weeks they are inseparable. Marie frightens off a
tentative suitor of Claire’s in a fashion which sows the seeds of town
gossip. When Claire succumbs to pneumonia Marie nurses her through the
illness and later takes the girl into her house as companion. As Marie
herself has by now refused a second proposal, slander runs rife. The
isolation in which the two live is delightful to Marie, but it palls
upon Claire so much that when a previous swain returns from his regiment
she welcomes him. Marie is seized with a jealousy she cannot conceal.
The man taunts her with her reputation, but since she is innocent, even
ignorant of its implications, her reaction is merely one of defiance.
When Claire contracts tuberculosis, Marie takes her to the Mediterranean
coast and acts as housekeeper and nurse to her socially-inferior
beloved. Far from being grateful, the girl puts her benefactrice through
some bitter hours, although she does soften before dying. Returning
alone to Vermont, Marie discovers that her eccentric benevolence has
only fed the ugly legends about her until the girl’s death is credited
to their intimacy, and she is completely ostracized. She responds with
contempt, buying strong tobacco at the village shop, riding astride as
no other Vermont woman has ever done, and laughing in the faces of those
who cut her. This blatant defiance ultimately provokes retaliation from
the town’s riff-raff, friends of Claire’s soldier-suitor, so that her
property and person are no longer safe and she is forced into complete
seclusion with only books for company.
Now, for the first time, she learns the nature of her own difference.
She recognizes that from earliest childhood she has found men ridiculous
and revolting; that women have provided the only interest in her life;
moreover, that
there was a certain resemblance between all the faces that had
attracted her; it was the same shade of melancholy, the same emotion
of a disappointed soul.... Whenever she saw on a woman’s face ... a
certain regret, a yearning look ... she felt a tug at her heart; she
wanted to rise up and offer herself as if she had been created to be
the guardian of a plant too fragile....[26]
Made conscious also of possible physical intimacy between women, and
knowing herself already branded in the town’s eyes as guilty of it, she
goes through a period of acute temptation, and is restrained from making
advances to a shopgirl only by the latter’s murmuring at a critical
moment a phrase that Claire had often used.
It is only when World War I breaks out and Vermont is invaded by German
troops that La Bonifas comes into her own. Then the disorganized
community, abandoned by its craven officials, turns to the emerging
recluse whose administrative ability, dauntless courage, and
considerable cunning save it from complete ruin. Thereafter, Marie
enjoys a position of honor. Her older enemies have died or fled, her
younger persecutors have been drawn off into the army. Indeed, old
enough by then to be the mother of the younger troops, and having won
their respect, she feels only warm admiration for their strength. “Marie
Bonifas had made her peace with men.” She is not, however, essentially
altered even by this change in one of her basic attitudes. Her interest
still centers about young girls and women. A daughter of her one-time
“shepherdess” is now her own goddaughter, and Marie frequently visits
her old school at the edge of town. The final scene in her drama occurs
at a prize-giving fête at that institution when Marie, occupying a seat
of honor, watches a dance-pageant presented by the students. At the
sight of all this young beauty costumed with the freedom of the
Twenties, and at the sound of a girl soloist rendering with fervor the
lament from Gluck’s _Orpheus_, the famous woman dissolves in a passion
of tears. It is the final irony of her life that one sympathetic
observer should whisper to another that she must be thinking of a dead
lover.
Exclusively variant women are rare in French fiction, and this long and
careful study of one is easily the best of its sort the country has
produced. Lacretelle has neither romanticized his heroine nor taken
sides in the heredity-environment dispute. Both innate masculine traits
and early conditioning start Marie on her variant way, and her later
social persecution is due equally to her own temperament and to the
town’s spiteful prejudice. This same temperament saves her from
succumbing intellectually to feminism or to the specious medical lore on
variance which she reads. She finds outlet for its strength only as the
war provides her with a man’s job to do. As far as simple realism and
dispassionate tolerance are concerned, _La Bonifas_ has scarcely been
bettered in any language.
Nothing could offer a sharper contrast than Bourdet’s drama, _La
Prisonnière_ (1925), which borrowed its title straight from Proust’s
novel of the preceding year. Within eight months of its presentation at
the Théâtre Fémina in Paris it was playing also in Berlin, Vienna,
Budapest, and New York. The germ of the play is said to have been its
author’s encounter during the war with a fellow officer who was
deliberately seeking death as escape from domestic tragedy,[27] and the
key character is this man’s wife, a lesbian who never appears on the
stage. The heroine is a girl of twenty whom the older woman has
captivated. As the play opens young Irene is struggling to remain in
Paris against her father’s efforts to take her with him to Rome, where
he is assigned to a diplomatic post. A widower, he has been accompanied
on other missions by his mistress, as both his daughters know, but
discretion dictates a more conventional ménage in Rome. When in
desperation Irene pleads an impending betrothal as reason for her
wishing not to leave Paris, her dictatorial parent takes matters in hand
and in short order has made the pretended excuse a reality. So Irene
must cope also with Jacques, the hitherto unsuccessful suitor (at that
time happy with a mistress who hoped one day to be his wife). Jacques
suspects that an old school friend, d’Aiguines, is Irene’s lover and the
real reason for her staying in Paris, but when he approaches the latter,
now married, he learns that it is Mme. d’Aiguines who is the object of
Irene’s absorbing passion. His first reaction is one of relief, but the
unhappy husband assures him that the case is much more serious than if
it were a matter of another man.
Understand this: they are not for us.... Under cover of friendship a
woman can enter any household ... she can poison and pillage
everything before the man whose home she destroys is even aware of
what’s happening to him. When he finally realizes ... it’s too
late—he is alone! Alone in the face of a secret alliance of two
beings who understand one another because they’re alike ... because
they’re of a different planet than he, the stranger, the enemy!...
_Get out_ while you still have strength to do it![28]
At this point Irene begs Jacques to marry her or even to take her as
mistress. She has been invited on a long cruise with Mme. d’Aiguines and
knows that to go will mean her complete ruin. Whether her adored is
cruel, or whether Irene fears social ostracism, is never clear—she
merely implores her fiancé to “save” her. “It’s like a prison to which I
must return captive, despite myself.” As a result Jacques makes her his
wife, in spite of his friend’s warning and his own recognition of the
other man’s wretchedness and premature aging. The couple spend a year
away from Paris, but with their return the struggle begins anew. Irene
has been a devoted wife and has severed all connections with her former
love, but she has been able to feel no passion for her husband, and when
an appeal comes from Mme. d’Aiguines, who is ill, Irene returns
helplessly to the old bondage. As for Jacques, he is fortunate enough to
discover his former mistress still unattached, and as she responds to
his kisses he says merely, “How beautiful!! A _woman_!”
Despite the hints above that Irene’s captivity is purely physical and
that she would like to escape it, all her symptoms throughout the play
are those of romantic and imaginative love. Every moment apart from her
friend is misery, and the violets she constantly receives become a
romantic fetish. Bourdet has been skillful in portraying the effect on a
number of persons of the conflict engendered in Irene by a love she
feels to be guilty. But her own actual feeling for and relation with
Mme. d’Aiguines are never made clear. It is, of course, easy to see why
this play, even with such evasion of a major psychological issue, swept
the western world while the superior efforts of Rolland and Lacretelle
raised only slight critical ripples. Chiefly, it condemned lesbianism.
But also Bourdet exhibited sheer inspiration in avoiding the direct
presentation of a lesbian on the stage. For it is difficult to find an
artistic middle ground between the unconvincing monster of hack writers
and a character perhaps too sympathetic to please the strait-laced.
Later his results will be compared with other plays appearing on the
American stage.
* * * * *
A very few words will do justice to the inferior novels referred to
above. Charles-Etienne’s _Les Désexuées_ is concerned chiefly with male
homosexuality, but a subsidiary plot is woven about Josette, childhood
companion of one of the men, who, through acting in a lesbian drama, is
drawn into an affair with the much younger ingenue. This ‘pitiful child’
adores her brilliant colleague until Josette gives way to passion,
whereupon the girl feels she is being merely used as emotional outlet,
and leaves the cast. Subsequent volumes, _Notre Dame de Lesbos_ and
_Léon dit Léonie_,[29] include liaisons between Josette and women
attracted to her by her success in the dramatic role of Sappho, as well
as a variety of other lesbians’ affairs. _La Bouche Fardée_ centers
about Gisèle, who enjoys a brief affair with her uncle and is pursued by
both his son and his daughter, but her secret love is the nephew Claude,
like herself an orphan, whom her uncle has brought home from Jamaica and
to whom he is closely bound. In the end it appears that Claude is
actually a girl, and she and Gisèle have one ecstatic night together,
(though both are under suspicion of having murdered the uncle), before
Claude is forced to flee back to the West Indies alone. Gisèle drifts
through subsequent volumes picturesquely inconsolable. The situation
here constitutes a triumph for lesbianism—a girl with satisfactory
heterosexual experience still prefers to all other men the one who
proves a woman in disguise. Of _Inassouvie_ the main figure is a
dominating woman ruthlessly bent upon an operatic career. Idol of the
day school where she teaches singing, she holds “orgies” in her
luxurious apartment with favorite pupils. The one girl who genuinely
loves her is a fifteen-year-old with a tragic family background. The
violence of this child’s affair with Adriane wrecks her fragile health,
whereupon her brother and a friend use stolen snapshots of an orgy to
break up Adriane’s engagement and injure her musical career. In the end,
however, Adriane triumphs by trapping the two boys in a situation which
compromises them as homosexuals, and she also takes violent revenge upon
the elderly fiancé and his son who have repudiated her. In temperament
she is related to Rachilde’s masculine heroines, and even more closely
to the central figure of James Gibbons Huneker’s _Painted Veils_, first
privately printed in English seven years earlier. The variety of
Charles-Etienne’s lesbians and their experiences are reminiscent of
Peladan, but he pretends to no high purpose, and indeed, the echoes in
his work from known predecessors (Rachilde, Willy etc.) are sufficient
to make one suspect synthetic inspiration from still others less
familiar.
The nadir of quality was touched in Des Vignon’s _Plaisirs Troublants_,
which like _Le Journal d’une Saphiste_ pretended to attack lesbianism
while including more scandalous detail than novels which tolerated it.
This tale pictures the encounter in their middle-twenties of two friends
who have known each other in public school, without dormitory
intimacies. The more masculine is happily married, save that her husband
is too absorbed in business to satisfy her. The other is a typist and
the mistress of one of her employers whom she hopes to marry. The chance
meeting ignites an infatuation which circumstances allow to flame for a
week unchecked, and the consequences are disastrous. Erotic reveries
leave Marceline unable to work and estrange her from her lover. Germaine
is roused to make such excessive sexual demands on her husband and her
maid that both fall ill. Marceline dies of tuberculosis; Germaine is
saved by a cliterectomy and then childbearing. The ostensible theme of
the book is the criminal waste in any sexual exercise save for the
purpose of procreation, but the author’s real interest, quite as
obviously as Montfort’s, is in sales, not reform.
This wave of homosexual fiction during the Twenties was heavy enough
that a new periodical, _Marges_, circulated a questionnaire on the
subject in 1926, soliciting ‘a certain number’ of current authors’
opinions on the social significance and moral effects of the abundant
crop. If such established writers as Proust, Rolland and Colette were
approached, they failed to reply. The thirty-odd answers varied from a
Catholic’s terse quotation of St. Paul: “Let not the word be spoken
among you,” to essays of several pages defending homosexuality as a
recognized segment of human experience and a legitimate subject for
literature. Everything from war, Freud, and athletics to decadence,
avarice, and original sin, was blamed for the fictional epidemic.
Suggested methods of combating it ranged from ignoring variant fiction
in all review sheets to imprisoning and whipping its authors or
committing them to asylums. The summarizing editor, throwing up his
hands, suggested that some other magazine might like to attack the
prevalence of heterosexual activity in current literature and devise
some means of combating that![30]
While chance and not the _Marges’_ effort was probably responsible,
review sheets actually did soon feature less variant fiction than
before. For reasons quite unrelated to the dispute, Rachilde retired
from the staff of the _Mercure de France_ and Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_
died, both before the end of the decade, and no equally serviceable
records of variant titles replaced them. Therefore, most of the dozen
French novels of the 1930s cited here or there as significant must pass
without comment, since neither the volumes themselves nor adequate notes
upon them have been accessible. Since the end of World War I much French
fiction has appeared in English translation almost simultaneously with
its home publication, and such titles will be left for consideration
along with our own contemporary products. Two titles, however, must be
mentioned here, for one, Suzanne Roland-Manuel’s _Le Trille du Diable_,
has not been translated, and the other, André Gide’s _Geneviève_, though
published in France in 1936, did not come out in English until 1950.
In 1929 Gide’s _School for Wives_ showed the effect upon a submissive
but intelligent girl of a love match with a man incapable of the least
selflessness or intellectual honesty. A first sequel, _Robert_ (1930),
presented the husband’s view of the marriage and of his own undeserved
suffering. The second, _Geneviève_, gave the daughter’s autobiography
through adolescence. Geneviève begins her story at about fifteen with
her infatuation for a schoolmate. Sara is the daughter of an artist and
aspires to a stage career for which she appears well fitted. Geneviève’s
father sharply opposes the friendship because of Sara’s bohemian
background. Her mother, as always, stands between her daughter and her
husband’s dictatorial harshness, although her own approval of Sara’s
influence is not unqualified. Sara herself is emotionally unmoved,
enjoying chiefly her domination of Geneviève and another girl whom she
includes in a “secret society,” bound by distinctly feministic vows. The
affair reaches its climax when Sara’s father exhibits a nude study, the
face concealed by a hand mirror, for which the journals announce that
his daughter was the model. Geneviève’s already half-wakened senses
catch fire from this revelation of her beloved’s beauty, and she becomes
ill with excitement and fury when her younger brother steals from her a
magazine reproduction of the canvas.
Both mother and father are for once agreed that the association with
Sara must be terminated, and Geneviève is withdrawn from her school and
tutored by friends of the family. In the woman tutor she takes an
intellectual interest only, for she is too closely bound to her mother
to feel emotion for another woman of the same age. Her reaction to the
man, a married physician, is more complex. She is not conscious of
sexual attraction, is in fact repelled by the idea of sex and marriage,
largely from observing her parents’ experience. She has also absorbed
from Sara (an illegitimate child) a contempt for the conventions. As a
feministic declaration of independence—on the conscious level—she asks
her mentor to give her a child by him which will then be wholly hers to
bring up. The good doctor, recognizing the immaturity and relative
impersonality of her feeling for him, contrives to remain detached,
fatherly, and helpful. Geneviève’s mother confesses to her later that
she herself at a particularly trying stage of her unhappy marriage, was
for a time in love with the doctor, and one infers the profundity of the
daughter’s identification with her from the fact that the girl
subconsciously turned to the same man.
Roland-Manuel’s _Le Trille du Diable_ (1946) is reminiscent of
Lacretelle’s _La Bonifas_ in that its setting is a declining village and
its heroine’s history is traced from about 1870 until after the first
World War. But Florence Benoit, unlike Marie Bonifas, is a ruthless
egotist who never serves anyone’s interest but her own. Spoiled daughter
of a pretentious speculator, she anticipates wealth and a brilliant
marriage as her due, and when M. Benoit dies impoverished she makes life
a veritable hell for her mother and younger brother. She then steals a
mediocre but kindly man from his fiancée and leads him much the same
sort of life, later attempting also to dominate and possess her only
child, a son sufficiently like her to defy her in the end.
Her earliest conquest is Augustine Virot, daughter of her father’s
bookkeeper, a tall not too attractive girl with whom her association is
innocent until after their hearing a charity concert in the neighboring
city of Santerre. On this occasion Florence, then about fourteen,
conceives a romantic infatuation for the violinist Soline, largely under
the spell of his spectacularly brilliant encore, _Le Trille du Diable_.
Although Florence does not see Soline again until she is past middle
age, she nurses an undying passion for him which leads her into all
manner of absurdities and against which all subsequent emotion seems
pallid. As the title of the novel indicates, the author intends the
meretricious musical number and its aftermath to epitomize an
unwholesome flight from reality.
For several years after this fateful concert the two girls divert
themselves by enacting love scenes between Florence and Soline, the
latter impersonated by Augustine. Their caresses, progressively more
intimate, finally become so necessary to both that, when Augustine
enters normal school in Santerre, Florence fabricates excuses for
visiting her there every week. To achieve privacy for their clandestine
meetings she also invents elaborate lies which enable them to engage a
succession of cheap hotel rooms for the afternoon, and so to play out
their erotic ‘Soline’ improvisations without hindrance. The game loses
interest for Florence as soon as she begins her conscienceless gamble
for a husband, but she cannot let Augustine escape her, and she spoils
the unhappy girl’s first engagement to a rather passive man by writing
him slanderous anonymous letters, the same device as she has already
employed to capture her own husband.
As for Augustine, the early playing of a male role plus the humiliation
of her engagement’s unexplained ending turn her from any thought of
marriage until middle age, when after a dreary stretch of elementary
teaching, she finally accepts, _faute de mieux_, one of the town’s
eccentrics at whom she had laughed as a girl.
As has been stated, the three or four subsequent variant French titles,
all of which appeared in English within a year after their original
publication, will be discussed with fiction in English.
CHAPTER VIII.
FICTION IN GERMANY
Before 1914
Insofar as secondhand information is to be trusted, it appears that
female variance figured but twice in German fiction before the late
1890s. Lewandowski’s _Das Sexualproblem in der modernen Literatur und
Kunst ... seit 1800_ lists Johannes Flach’s _Sappho: Griechische
Novelle_ (1886) under the heading of homosexual literature without
further comment. The _Jahrbuch_ during 1907 cited a passage from a
romantic novel of the 1820’s, Ernst Wagner’s _Isidora_, which describes
the same sort of innocent play between a princess and her
maid-in-waiting as Lamartine pictured in “Regina,” with the difference
that the bond between Wagner’s two girls appears wholly physical.[1] As
Lewandowski’s criterion for inclusion seems to have been overt sexual
action, he may have omitted subtler studies of variance; and
Hirschfeld’s frankly biased journal was not too much concerned with
discreditable bisexual records. Therefore it is possible that
nineteenth-century German novels comparable to Balzac’s
_Seraphitus-Seraphita_ or _Cousine Bette_ were passed over as
negligible. But when one recalls the emptiness of the record in English
during the same period, and remembers that in the matter of feminine
mores Germany resembled Victorian England rather than France, any
exhaustive reading of German fiction promises rewards incommensurate
with the labor involved.
Interest in female variance was, however, already alive when
Hirschfeld’s efforts in 1896 began to encourage its literary expression,
as evidenced by the sudden outburst of fiction as well as poetry during
the following decade. In 1897, Gabriele Reuter, a writer of ability,
published a novel of autobiographical pattern, _Aus guter Familie_,[2]
which included among its heroine’s early experiences a variant, possibly
lesbian, attachment—the _Jahrbuch’s_ note does not specify. In 1900
Elisabeth Dauthendey produced _Vom neuen Weib und seiner
Sittlichkeit_,[3] semi-narrative sketches like Colette’s in _Ces
Plaisirs_. The “New Woman’s” ideal is a life of quiet intimacy with
other women, free of the “brutal” relations with men which dull
appreciation of more delicate emotional nuances. An interlude with a
tribade, a ‘confident, wise, almost manly’ individual, at first promises
fulfillment of all the writer’s hopes. But a few amorous nights force
her to recognize that, like a man, this woman cannot distinguish between
crude sex and love. In the same year von Seydlitz used a case history
from the 1840s—possibly from the same source as Kaspar’s _Klinische
Novellen_—as the basis for _Pierre’s Ehe: Psychologische Probleme_.[4]
Its hero is unfortunate enough to love an odd, hard, masculine girl who
finally succumbs to his persistence, but is unable to cooperate
sexually, and presently the partners find themselves in love with the
same woman. In the course of a jealous brawl Pierre believes he has
killed his wife; he makes a successful escape into the merchant marine
and dies in Saigon without learning that he is innocent of manslaughter.
The wife, now a confirmed transvestist, lives out her life as a valet
without further emotional complication.
In 1900 also, Alfred Meebold included a tragic variant novelette, “Dr.
Erna Redens Thorheit und Erkenntnis,”[5] in the volume _Allerhand Volk_.
The larger portion of the tale presents Dr. Erna’s unhappy heterosexual
affair with a fellow medical student. To recover from her consequent
depression she travels in Italy with an artist, Lucie, who has been her
particularly warm and eager confidante. The latter is a homosexual, but
she manages to conceal the nature of her feelings until the two meet
another woman, an artist long acquainted with Lucie. In the course of a
quarrel this woman reveals Lucie’s secret. Although Dr. Erna has now
recovered from her heterosexual disappointment and exhibits a
sympathetic understanding of Lucie’s emotion, she is unable to return it
in kind, and in despondency Lucie kills herself. Dr. Erna then returns
to Germany full of crusading zeal against those who persecute
homosexuals. This bears slight but sufficient resemblance to Borys’s
later _Carlotta Noll_ in French to suggest that both may have been based
on a single known episode, or that the one influenced the other. The
German version, be it noted, is by far the more sympathetic.
In 1901 a Danish novel by O. W. Møller was translated under the German
title _Wer kann dafür?_[6] This traces the efforts of a German officer’s
daughter to overcome a lesbian attraction and marry a young astronomer
in the Heidelberg Observatory. She becomes deeply attached to her suitor
but cannot respond physically; and so they part, although because of her
masculine temperament and interests they are much closer in spirit than
most married couples. Involving little dramatic action, this
psychological study seems to have been of as high quality as Reuter’s
_Aus guter Familie_. In contrast, August Niemann’s _Zwei Frauen_[7]
involves an infatuation between a married woman and the brilliant music
student whom her husband, head of a conservatory, has accepted as a
pupil despite her apprehensive protests. The danger she foresaw
materializes, and from there on the story becomes what the reviewer
calls ‘an imitation of Belot’s _Mlle Giraud_ which is hardly a credit to
German letters.’
Much more interesting, in view of its author’s subsequent reputation,
was Jacob Wassermann’s _Geschichte der jungen Renate Fuchs_ (1900), and
it is a matter of regret that this volume, though it ran to several
editions, has proved inaccessible. The _Jahrbuch’s_ review mentions a
lesbian affair between two minor characters, a university student of
political economy and the daughter of ‘one of Europe’s most famous
courtesans.’[8] A puritanic critic later describes the heroine herself
as “wading through all manner of filth,”[9] but makes no reference to
homosexual experience either on her part or anyone’s else.
The year 1903 saw the publication of three lesbian titles. In Maria
Eichhorn’s _Fräulein Don Juan_[10] the heroine’s strong and domineering
sensual nature is roused in adolescence by homosexual affairs, but she
later knows many men and never returns to her lesbian practices. Maria
Janitschek’s “Neue Erziehung und alte Moral”[11] in _Die neue Eva_ is
the story of an orphan girl raised among seven foster brothers as one of
them and without much supervision, so that she is enlightened early
about matters of sex. At puberty she is abruptly cautioned by her foster
mother against looseness with men and given a fearful picture of the
fate of the unmarried mother. The resulting emotional conflict is
severe, but at sixteen, when she shares her room and bed with a charming
feminine guest, ‘at last in Agathe’s arms Seffi found a lovely peace.’
Upon being harshly berated for this innocent-seeming play, she defies
authority. ‘It is your own upbringing that has driven me into the arms
of my friend—now leave me there!’
An inferior _Sind es Frauen?_[12] by Aimée Duc pictures a large group of
openly lesbian women in a German university town. Most of them are past
the teens and slightly reminiscent of Peladan’s group centered about the
Russian Simzerla, especially in that they spend much time discussing all
aspects of sexual psychology. Most of them are foreigners—there seems to
be a tendency in second-rate homosexual fiction to saddle some other
country than the author’s own with the origin of lesbian characters. The
leader of this group is Minotschka Fernandoff, a Russian ‘just released
from three years of marriage,’ after having discovered that in sexual
relations she needs to play the man. There is also Annie who has
“escaped” marriage after only six months, Bertha Cohn whose beloved
“Fritz” has moved in the other direction, getting engaged and finding
she prefers a male lover, and Dr. Tatjana, mature and wise in the new
medical psychology. And last, living with Minotschka, is a Polish music
student, Countess Marta Kinzey, on whose account the Russian girl has
come to Germany. The plot proceeds through a separation between Marta
and Minotschka, during which the latter resists the advances of an
actress and the former enters into a marriage of diplomatic necessity
with a man who ‘knows all about her’ and is her husband in name only. In
the end after much painful misunderstanding the two are reunited, to
find that each has been faithful to the other. This is one of the
volumes about which the _Jahrbuch’s_ reviewer was most enthusiastic from
a psychological viewpoint.
In 1901 _Weiberbeute_[13] was published in Budapest over the ambiguous
pseudonym, Luz Frauman, and later it was considered worthy of a
4,000-word summary in Magnus Hirschfeld’s _Die Transvestiten_. Here
transvestism plays a significant role for the first time since
Rachilde’s novels, to the first of which this bears considerable
resemblance. As in _Monsieur Vénus_, double inversion of sexual roles
somewhat blurs the homosexual aspect; however, the period during which
both significant characters are living as women justifies its inclusion
here. Nana, an athletic but seductive girl reminiscent of Maupin,
marries from cool expedience the wealthiest and most enslaved of her
admirers. Thereby she incurs the implacable hatred of his son, a
delicate boy ‘with the face of a Japanese girl,’ who lays an idolized
mother’s death to his father’s dalliance with Nana. The father would
ship his son to Australia, but Nana offers an alternative. She is
skilled in hypnotism; she will throw the boy into a trance, and by
suggestion will eradicate all memory, not only of his hatred but of his
sex, leaving him convinced that he is a girl. ‘Conviction is the very
essence of a human being,’ she says, ‘and so shapes growth that after
this the boy’s male development will be arrested and he will be
virtually a woman.’
This fantastic plan is carried through, and for three years the
changeling, dressed as a girl, is Nana’s passionate adorer. In the
meantime Nana has borne her husband a son who will be his heir unless
the older boy is restored to his proper status. This dilemma naturally
troubles the father and when in addition his wife’s charming ‘companion’
is demanded in marriage, he decides the mummery has gone far enough. But
he reckons without Nana. Exerting her hypnotic powers now upon him, she
moves him to shoot himself, inherits his fortune, consigns her own son
to a boarding school, and sets out upon a world tour with her ‘girl
companion.’ In love with the latter from the outset, she now considers
releasing him from the hypnotic spell so that they can marry, but she
fears a return of his former antagonism, and, in view of her own
seniority, she decides to assume the man’s role herself. Always with the
aid of hypnotism she achieves this end, marries her stepson, and sets up
a household. Presently the desire for a child seizes the couple. Nana is
for adoption but the ‘wife’ objects. And now, as Hirschfeld says, ‘comes
a climax of fantasy so grotesque that the imagination conceiving it must
really have been warped.’ Through her convenient powers Nana induces
illusory pregnancy in the “wife,” bears the child herself, and contrives
to get it into the “mother’s” arms at the correct psychological and
physical moment.
But now an unforeseen complication develops. The “wife” hails the son as
a girl. The necessity for concealing the child’s sex from everyone
throughout its childhood puts a grave strain on Nana, but her ingenuity
is equal to the task, and the family enjoys an uncommonly happy life for
a matter of twenty years. When illness overtakes Nana she refuses a
physician, and only on her deathbed pours out the truth to her “wife.”
Though the hypnotic spell is now broken, the latter’s mental “set” is so
completely established that he takes the story for mere delirious
babbling. The author, Hirschfeld assures us, solves the two survivors’
problem as ingeniously as he contrived it, though it is difficult to
imagine how. Aside from the stepson’s years of subjective lesbianism
before marriage, the novel’s most noteworthy point is its presentation
of hypnotism as able to effect complete endocrine change, an exaggerated
foreshadowing of modern psychosomatic theory, and quite opposed to the
then-popular hereditary hypothesis.
The remaining handful of minor novels before 1910 are of the sort which
invariably appear upon a theme already proved profitable.
_Urningsliebe_, by “O. Liebetreu”[14] is a masochistic tale of a girl
who gives herself, her strength, and her money to a succession of five
or six loves, and ends in prison serving a three year sentence for an
offense committed by the last of them, in order to save her friend’s
good name. Erich Mühsam’s _Psychologie der Erbtante_[15] is a
half-satiric tragedy of a masculine woman of middle age, rather like
Bonifas, who commits suicide because of a mysterious ‘unlucky love’
(supposedly heterosexual), in order to leave all her property to the
girl with whom she had no luck. ‘Theodor’ (probably Anna) Rüling’s
“Rätselhaft,”[16] one of three novelettes in her _Welcher unter Euch
ohne Sünde ist_, also ends with a suicide. It is the story of a girl
whose family has discovered her lesbian relations with a beloved friend
and has separated the pair. _Dreiunddreissig Scheusale_,[17] published
first in Leningrad (then, of course, St. Petersburg), was the work of a
Russian actress, Annibal Sinowjewa. In it, a lesbian woman has lived for
some time with a younger girl in a relation so perfect that she never
doubts its permanence, and from sheer pride in her beloved’s beauty she
encourages the girl to model for a life class of thirty-three men. The
girl, as thoroughly schooled in erotic virtuosity as was the _Girl with
the Golden Eyes_, becomes the common mistress of the artist group and
never returns to her feminine lover. (This was not the sole, or even the
first, Russian notice of feminine variance. Tolstoi had skirted it
earlier in _Anna Karenina_ with the brief emotional flame lit in Kitty
by Varenka, and Dostoievsky came a step closer in _A Friend of the
Family_, with the mutual attraction between Nyelochka and her friend.
Both of these incidents occurred in late adolescence.)
During this same decade two major artists produced a series of works all
of which are still freely available in German, and one, at least, in
English. The symbolists in France did not touch upon female variance,
unless one thinks of _Monsieur Vénus_, _Méphistophéla_, or _La Gynandre_
as distantly related to symbolism, but these two men included the theme
in spreading canvases of definitely symbolic style.
The first is the work of Heinrich Mann, older brother of the more famous
Thomas. His _Die Göttinnen_ (1902-03) is a trilogy within whose epic
sweep he attempts to include every experience open to a woman of his
time. Its subtitle is “Die drei Romane der Herzogin von Assy: Diana;
Minerva; Venus.” But it is not under the aegis of Diana, as one might
imagine, that the countess meets lesbian experience. The first volume
(the only one available in English) is concerned with her devotion to
the cause of Freedom, not for women, but political freedom for all
oppressed people. Under the spell of Minerva in the second book her
interest is turned to the arts, including letters. Though these two
works are far from empty of dramatic emotional episodes, it is Venus who
leads the countess at last to seek every possible form of love. After
experience with several widely different male lovers, the most
satisfying of whom is a younger man who ‘thinks like her,’ she returns
to her mansion in Naples and takes ‘the one lover not yet tried—the
crowd.’
She fills her house with beautiful young people in lieu of canvases and
statues.
‘An unbroken stream of bodies which promised pleasure passed through
her bedroom—slim delicate bodies and athletic, well-trained ones; the
yielding firmness of girls and the delicate bones and melting flesh
of children. The fisherman from Santa Lucia followed the clubman. The
warm golden peasant girl with coarse heavy brows above her quiet eyes
left the impress of her robust figure on the cushions where [a titled
beauty] had lain; and she with her cold perfection interrupted the
convulsive ecstasy of [another girl’s] first passion of surrender and
abandon.’[18]
When this comparatively tame promiscuity palls, the countess turns to
sadism. Though never indulging actively herself, she provokes frenzied
jealousy among her own and others’ lovers, and the resulting violence
would equal, were it not merely suggested rather than amplified, any
recorded by “the divine marquis.” After all this, by way of final
experiment, the countess has staged for herself alone, and at enormous
cost, a lesbian bout between two expert performers, girls already so
spent with depravity that their flesh is ‘like a no longer fresh glove
over a masterfully sculptured hand,’ At the end of their act they
collapse, deeply unconscious, but the countess merely gazes down at them
with weary disillusion.
‘“Is this all? Or have these sweet cheats, ripest of the lot,
withheld some final sweetness? Alas, this fruit is like all the
others. I myself shall never pluck it, and I would its taste were
already gone from my lips.”’[19]
The chief significance of this episode is its serving as climax to all
that has gone before, evidently representing for the author the ultimate
depths of sexual depravity.
The second major German author is Frank Wedekind, who, like Balzac,
presents three sharply contrasting pictures of female variance.
Comparable in innocence to _Seraphitus-Seraphita_ is the devotion in
_Mine-ha-ha_ (1909) of a child dancer to her ballet mistress, a woman in
the late twenties, oriental in coloring, boyish of build, and military
in the ruthlessness of her discipline. For sheer magic in imparting the
illusion of reality to fantastic circumstances this novelette has few
equals, but attention must be confined here to its variant aspects. For
a half-dozen years, between seven and fourteen, Hidalla lives only for
her fortnightly ballet lessons, and the intervening days pass in a maze
of gruelling practice and bemused reverie. The latter, however, is not
sexual. When Hidalla reaches the age—about eleven—for nightly appearance
with the ballet troupe, objective self-expression partially relieves the
intensity of her introverted emotion. As soon as she leaves the
conventual rigors of the school for life as an élite demi-mondaine her
outlook is completely altered. Although she feels no love for her
wealthy male protector, she watches—at the age of perhaps sixteen—from
his loge in the great municipal opera house while her former idol dances
starring roles, and feels only a reminiscent warmth, as much for her own
remembered obsession as for its one-time object.
She skirts the edge of two other experiences which serve to define the
stringent ban upon lesbian intimacies in the training school. In
pre-adolescence she feels a transient tenderness for a companion, but
the latter is terrified at a half-proferred kiss during a twilight
stroll. Does Hidalla not know the penalty for “going with” another girl?
The sour and hideous servants who do the dormitory housework are there
because in their training days they “went with” girls, thereby ruining
forever their chances in that mysterious but alluring world beyond the
gates into which the school’s finished products are released—though
neither of the children has any idea what their place in it is to be.
Hidalla’s second attraction is to one of the younger children whom she
sees enter the school at seven as she did, shy and bewildered, and (like
Claudine) she feels for this reflection of her earlier self a maternal
as well as passionate love. She is barely adolescent at the time, but
the love-starved life of these orphans whose existence is bounded by the
Spartan walls of the school makes some such overflow of the heart
inevitable. The small hours of a night that she spends crouched at the
foot of the little girl’s bed, struggling with the hunger to go closer,
restrained only by the knowledge that to do so may mean the child’s
ruin, make a scene of delicate intensity equalling any in literature.
Wedekind’s second variant woman is the tailored and monocled English
countess slavishly bound to Lulu, central figure of his symbolic dramas,
_Earth Spirit_ and _Pandora’s Box_. Lulu represents amoral, or, one
might say, purely biological Woman. She is irresistible to the male, and
knowledge of her brings brief ecstasy and lasting devastation. But she
is as much victim of the force within her as are the men she enslaves.
She is driven to murder in self-defense; then, fleeing the law in more
and more desperate circumstances, she herself is murdered by an
underworld wretch modeled upon Jack the Ripper. The English woman alone
of all her lovers goes unrewarded throughout years of abject devotion,
for Lulu is too completely Woman to feel any response save to Man. The
countess not only exhausts her fortune in the service of her beloved,
but at one point voluntarily contracts cholera so that she can enter the
hospital where Lulu is hiding from justice; thus permitting Lulu to
escape by assuming her clothing and identity. (It could be that the plot
of the later _Urningsliebe_ had its germ in this devotion.) In the end,
realizing that Lulu has always wilfully used her, the countess attempts
suicide, but Lulu feels neither pity nor compunction. She tells Jack—the
man who finally kills them both—that the countess is her sister and
insane, but his sophisticated intuition suggests the truth. He strokes
the Englishwoman’s head and mutters ‘Poor creature,’ quite the only
sympathy she has ever received. It does not, however, prevent Jack’s
knifing her when she attempts to defend Lulu against him. Just before
this happens, in a solitary monologue, the countess says:
‘I am not a man, my body has nothing in common with those of men. Is
it that I have a man’s soul? But tormented men have small and narrow
souls, and I know that is not my case, when I have given up
everything, made every sacrifice.’[20]
She resolves to leave Lulu, who, she realizes, has from the beginning
felt an uncontrollable antipathy to her. She will study law and devote
the rest of her life to fighting for the rights of women—the implication
being, of women like herself rather than the _Ewigweibliche_. It is at
this point that the apache’s knife ends her unhappy existence.
In 1911 Wedekind published the satiric and still more symbolic drama,
_Franziska: A Modern Mystery_, in which the primary theme is a woman’s
struggle for individual independence. The protagonist Franziska, a girl
just under twenty when the play opens, has been irrevocably prejudiced
against the traditional feminine lot by childhood circumstances. She has
also refused marriage with two men, one a physician who assumed that her
surrender to him meant abject adoration, the other an elderly nobleman
from whom she accepted an insurance policy securing the future of any
child her free life might produce. She is bent upon living with all the
independence of a man. Opportunity offers when she meets Veit Kunz, a
theatrical manager whose sudden bursting into her drawing room out of a
thunderstorm marks him as Mephistopheles to her Faust. He sees in her
boyish bravura the possibility of exploiting her in the world of
entertainment. Until lately, he says, audiences wanted women with lovely
breasts, shoulders and arms. But his hunch is that taste is changing,
and his business is to keep one jump ahead of the mode. Interestingly
enough, it is as a singer he means to feature her, indicating a taste
for feminine tenors a good decade earlier in Europe than in the United
States, where they were not fashionable until the Twenties.
While studying voice and posing as a man, ‘Franz’ has a tavern affair
with a young prostitute which is cut off at its zenith when the girl is
shot by a jealous lover. Her next adventure is as the husband of a
middle-class heiress, who wants, not a romantic hero, but a respectable
husband and _pater familias_. When children fail to appear, the woman
blames her husband’s fondness for a young dancer, and threatens to kill
the girl unless she lets “Franz” alone. From a scene between Franziska
and Veit Kunz, however, it appears that he and she have been intimate
for a year, and a child is on the way. Franziska is resentful. Marriage
has proved irksome because of her wife’s desire for a family, and has
limited her freedom with both sexes. A child will be the final handicap.
Kunz tells her that her wife is a much worthier soul than she, and that
motherhood will bring more maturity than multiple adventures or his own
dramatic training. However, he says that if she persists on her chosen
path, vanity, selfishness and ambition such as hers are the drives that
produce successful artists. An enemy informs her wife that Franziska is
a woman, and the shock of the revelation causes the wife to commit
suicide, setting Franziska free.
The third act of the drama moves to the estate of a wealthy nobleman,
amateur playwright and owner of a private theatre, who has applied to
Kunz for the services of his intriguing “male” star. Most pertinent to
the present study is an interlude in which Franziska, in
eighteenth-century man’s costume, appears to the count in a species of
symbolic vision as the wish-fulfillment of his most secret dreams. She
tells him she is neither boy nor woman, but the ideal of all those
incapable of real passion; for love of another cannot go beyond love of
self in these “Wunschlosen.” This technical description of narcissism
(along with the drastic effect upon Franziska of early hatred of her
father) shows Wedekind’s familiarity with the then very new doctrines of
psychoanalysis.
The remaining acts show Franziska first sufficiently feminized by early
pregnancy to play the part of Delilah on the stage, and to become
infatuated and run off with the actor cast as Samson, who treats her
with rough and contemptuous masculine superiority. Veit Kunz is
prostrated. At fifty he sees his lifelong conviction controverted that
happy sexual and professional association on a footing of equality must
guarantee a permanent union. His brilliant intellectual acumen is
outplayed by female biology—Woman beats the devil!—and he is barely
saved from suicide. Finally Franziska, persuaded to abandon her career
for the sake of her son’s health, is shown living in rural poverty with
him. She refuses support from either Kunz or “Samson,” each of whom is
sure her child is his, and accepts the protection of an ascetic artist
who paints her as the madonna. Here Wedekind hits the narcissist complex
dead center. It is proof against both homosexual and heterosexual
experience and only partially resolved by maternity, since she can
tolerate only a man weaker than herself and one romantically deluded
about her.
Because of the Eulenberg scandal in 1907 literary reference to
homosexuality was checked for a time in Germany, and no doubt only
Wedekind’s established reputation and his disparaging treatment of the
theme made the theatrical production of _Franziska_ possible in 1911. By
1914 Dr. Kurt Heller was asking in the _Jahrbuch_: “Wo bleibt der
homoerotische Roman?”[21] He was referring to male homosexuality, and he
deprecated the moralistic tone of Thomas Mann’s _Death in Venice_,
considering it disappointing from the author of _Buddenbrooks_. His
answer to his own rhetorical question was that no sympathetic work could
clear the hurdle of state censorship, for even a wholly “spiritual”
treatment must be defined by some contrast with the sensual. Only true
literary freedom could provide incentive for creative writing of first
quality.
Until the post-war change in government no such freedom prevailed. In
1917 Sophie Hoechstetter’s _Selbstanzeige: Die letzte Flamme_[22] had to
be printed privately. When it was attacked by a reviewer in _Der Tag_,
the author defended the criticized “urnische Beanlagt” as an essential
stage in the self-comprehension which was the theme of the whole novel.
She also offered to supply the volume gratis to any interested reader,
an indication that it had been excluded from public sale. With 1918,
however, the ban was relaxed, and during the 1920s Germany shared with
the rest of the western world a period of sexual freedom which ended
only with the growing influence of Hitler in the 1930s. Even so,
post-war sentiment in the English-speaking countries made German
material unwelcome there, and the homosexual novels and magazines which
abounded in Germany for a decade gained little circulation abroad.
With Hitler’s ascendancy these titles were so soon obliterated that it
is difficult now to find more than the mere record in German trade
bibliographies of their original publication. This is especially
true because in 1921 Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_ (by then a
_Vierteljahrsschrift_) ceased publication. All efforts of the
Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee for repeal of the anti-homosexual
Paragraph 175 of the Prussian criminal code had failed, and the
organization was disheartened by the failure. Moreover, the fields of
history and biography had been well covered in factual articles during
the twenty-two years of the journal’s existence. And as for its function
of reporting current homosexual belles-lettres, that was abandoned even
before its own death because such literature was regularly reviewed in
‘other journals,’ (e.g., _Die Freundin_, _Die Freundschaft_,
_Freundschaft und Freiheit_—later _Eros_—_Junggesellen: mit den
Beiblättern “Frauenliebe,”_ and _Transvestit_.) These are now almost
completely lost, so that even descriptive notes on the literature in
question are not accessible today.
Post-War Gleanings
Of the few lesbian novels to reach the United States one of the best was
Anna Elisabet Weirauch’s three-volume _Scorpion_, which appeared in
Germany between 1919 and 1921. It was translated a dozen years later in
an abridged edition as two separate titles, _The Scorpion_ (1932) and
_The Outcast_ (1933). Though slightly inferior in literary quality to
_Marie Bonifas_, it shows equal mastery in accounting for and tracing
the full history of an exclusively variant woman. The scene of Metta
Rudloff’s childhood is a dreary city household consisting of her
ineffectual father and a spiteful puritanic spinster aunt. Her care is
entrusted to a nursery governess hired for no sounder reason than that
the child takes an instant fancy to her. The young woman exhibits a
facile affection which quickly enslaves her little charge, but her
emotions are wholly bound to a cashiered military officer, who controls
her completely and who alternately neglects her and lives on her bounty.
To supply him with funds, she more than once pawns the Rudloff’s
seldom-used family silver, employing Metta to secure it from its
cupboard and taking her along on visits to the pawnbroker. When the
misdemeanor is detected, the child is seriously involved, and the
uncomprehended scandal, plus the loss of her beloved Fräulein, leaves a
lasting scar.
During puberty and adolescence Metta attends a public school, but her
father’s snobbery discourages friendships with her mates, and she grows
up a bored and lonely introvert. Nearing twenty, she meets, at the home
of relatives, a handsome and enigmatic woman a decade her senior and
falls violently in love with her. Soon she is spending most of her time
in her new friend’s rooms in a pension, and she is spurred for the first
time to real intellectual effort in order to keep up with Olga’s wide
interests. (Among these is the life and work of Karoline von Günderode,
for whom Olga has come to feel an almost mystic affinity which stirs
Metta to jealous fury.) At the pension Metta also meets a Dr. Petermann,
musical aesthete and cripple, who frequently plays his violin for the
two young women.
Discovering that Olga is financially embarrassed, Metta contrives to
take foreign language lessons from her, but the two spend most of the
funds so earned on concerts, opera, and long country excursions. On one
of the latter, Metta notices that they are followed by a man. Her friend
becomes distraught at the discovery and betrays that she has suffered
the same experience before. The mystified younger girl on arriving at
home is forbidden by her father to see Olga again or to leave the house,
and presently she is visited by a psychiatrist. Under his questioning,
she suddenly recalls that she has pawned the silver, following her
childhood pattern, in order to redeem a gold cigarette case Olga was
forced to sacrifice to momentary need. This object, a gift from an
earlier beloved friend of Olga’s, is decorated with a jeweled scorpion,
the zodiacal symbol of passion and death under which Olga was born. The
psychiatrist delivers a subtle lecture on the destructive effects of
emotional friendships between women. The mysterious man, he explains,
was a detective employed by Metta’s father, who for some time has had
the two girls under surveillance, and to gain legal power over Olga, has
bought up her not-inconsiderable debts. Metta is to be sent to an
uncle’s in the country so that separation may cure her of her unhealthy
infatuation. Eventually, she is assured, she will thank her family and
the doctor for having saved her from ruin. She is forced to leave Berlin
without either explaining her departure or saying goodbye to Olga.
At her uncle’s she sets herself one goal: to escape and return to Olga.
Before long she has so ingratiated herself with the household that it is
not too difficult to obtain money secretly from her uncle’s desk and to
reach the railroad station. In Berlin, Olga meets her, but instead of
the warm welcome Metta anticipated, she merely remonstrates against the
madness of Metta’s flight and refuses to harbor her, knowing the girl
will at once be tracked to her rooms. After a very bad quarter-hour,
however, Metta succeeds in persuading Olga to accompany her in an
impulsive flight. The two take the next train scheduled for departure
and get off at a station elected by chance. In the modest hamlet so
discovered they spend a few ecstatic days of veritable honeymoon.
Hitherto they have exchanged no caresses—indeed, Metta has often been
deeply hurt by Olga’s show of brusque coldness. Now at last she learns
the true significance of her own feelings and of the older girl’s
previous restraint. Though Olga felt a reciprocal passion, she has had
previous difficulties because of an affair with a woman, and she dreaded
risking another such ordeal. She declares that never again can she
endure “to be stripped naked in public.” Once enlightened, Metta
determines that they shall never be separated. Within six months she
will attain her majority and be mistress of a large maternal
inheritance. She writes her father of her whereabouts and her
intentions, asking for temporary funds, but assuring Olga that if they
are refused she will raise money on her expectations.
Her answer is a telegram from the aunt telling her that her father has
had a stroke occasioned by the shock of her “robbing” her uncle, and
that he is dying. Metta suspects a trap, but returns to find the news
true, and lives through several hideous days before her father’s death
ends the nightmare. During the subsequent night, half-delirious from
exhaustion and her aunt’s vicious reproaches, she slips away to Olga’s
rooms for solace. Here she is found at dawn by the aunt, the wronged
uncle, and detectives. She declares her intention of never leaving her
friend, but Olga, in the face of public denunciation, fails to come to
her support, merely insisting that she is without responsibility in the
whole matter.
Confined at home and half-ill, Metta finds herself suddenly surrounded
by medical books and pamphlets on homosexuality, all condemnatory or
scandalmongering. Despite the bitter blow dealt her love and pride by
her friend’s defection, she writes Olga repeatedly, but receives no
answer. After a time, sickened by her reading and wounded by Olga’s
silence to the point of apathy, she allows herself, under pressure from
her aunt, to become engaged. The socially noteworthy match is featured
in the news, and on the eve of her marriage she has word from Petermann
of Olga’s suicide. Olga had, of course, none of her letters, but had
received many scurrilous anonymous threats in which Metta recognizes the
hand of her hated aunt, and Olga had, moreover, been prosecuted by the
Rudloff estate which held her debts. Shocked into sudden hard maturity,
Metta sells the family house, settles an allowance on her aunt, and
leaves Berlin, her only mementos Olga’s “scorpion” cigaret case and the
revolver with which she shot herself.
The first German volume ends here, and the second opens in an
unspecified large city, which in all probability actually represented
another aspect of Berlin. There Metta, completely on her own, attempts
to adjust to independent life. She plunges resolutely into solitary
study, but without the incentive of discussion with Olga she finds the
effort empty. Consequently she determines to “learn by living,” and
allows herself to be drawn into a bohemian group, several members of
which room in her own pension. Among these artists, journalists, and
entertainers she finds a sexual freedom which profoundly shocks her, but
laying the shock to her hitherto sheltered life, she refuses to
withdraw, and shrugs off the half-maternal admonitions of a
“respectable” coterie in the house. She is presently involved with a
night club singer, Gisela, to whom she is drawn by learning that the
girl’s obvious physical wasting and reputed drug addiction are the
results of hopeless love for a woman. Their affair is essentially a
matter of mutual physical assuagement, each girl being still in love
with someone else. It is developed slightly more in the German volume
than in the English _Scorpion_ of which it forms the second part, but is
not seriously expurgated in the latter.
A much more vital attachment begins between Metta and a handsome
sculptress, Sophie, but is broken off by the latter because she has
lived for years with an invalid who is completely dependent on her. This
woman was Sophie’s salvation in a desperate period of her youth, and
would give up the struggle to live if she felt herself no longer needed
by her partner. Left essentially friendless by Sophie’s withdrawal,
Metta drifts into a restless quest for diversion among the group of
professional entertainers and homosexuals of whom Gisela is one. In the
course of making a round of night clubs Metta becomes wretchedly ill
from experimenting with cocaine, and recognizing amused contempt in the
eyes of attractive strangers of the social class in which she was
raised, she goes home filled with self-loathing to employ Olga’s
cherished revolver and rejoin her lost love. She is checked by the
ministrations of one of the “respectable” older women in the house, who
confesses to a deep (though entirely innocent) affection for her, tells
her she is too young to be knocking about alone, and sends her to stay
with a sister in Hamburg whose husband is an alderman and whose daughter
is a sheltered adolescent.
In this new milieu Metta is at first terrified lest she be followed by
Gisela, but her fears prove groundless, and she is soon acting the model
young lady, though she has need to guard her allusions to places
recently frequented and uncensored books she read with Olga. She soon
discovers that the daughter of the house is, beneath a seraphic
exterior, as sophisticated as any of her late associates. The girl is
carrying on an affair with a man twice her age whose charm briefly
touches even Metta. She also constantly presses Metta to confess to
lesbian tastes and experience, declaring that she “can always recognize
the type,” and doing her best to seduce Metta by skillful caresses. This
Hamburg interlude ends with a weekend trip on which Metta is supposedly
Gwen’s chaperone. The fascinating man joins the expedition secretly, and
proves a connoisseur of liquors and an adept at clandestine contrivance.
In the girls’ room, Gwen, spurred by alcohol and the spring night, makes
an unusually insistent play for Metta, but just as the latter is about
to yield, the connecting door opens to admit the man, and she recognizes
the whole trip as “a put up job” to seduce her into a party _à trois_.
Utterly revolted, she makes a clean break with this life also, and
searches further for some emotional stability and peace.
The third German volume (of which _The Outcast_, in English, is a
literal and complete translation) shows Metta in a mountain town where
she has made no personal contacts and has told no one anything of
herself or her past. Falling in love with the beauty of the region, she
buys land and decides to build; consequently, she must go to Berlin for
legal and architectural advice. There, renewing connections with the
crippled Petermann, she meets in his pension a woman who reminds her
strongly of Olga and who produces almost as instantaneous an emotional
impact. Metta soon learns that this is the friend who originally gave
Olga the scorpion cigaret case, and that it was Corona who terminated
the association because she believes it is always better to end love
while it is still beautiful than to let it die. Corona has not even
known of Olga’s death until she sees the scorpion in Metta’s hands.
Instead of returning to the mountains to watch her hitherto thrilling
new house take form, Metta lingers in Berlin in Corona’s toils. She
finds this woman less intellectual and harder than Olga, and dislikes
intensely the exhibitionistic group of lesbians, some tailored, some
merely histrionic, with whom her new flame associates. When she finally
discovers that Corona is still half-involved in an old affair with a
married woman, and is also encouraging the advances of a Russian girl in
the pension, Metta flees to her mountains and lives quite alone in her
new house, save for visits from Petermann and another man of tragic
history met at Sophie’s before the end of that association. A
passionately-anticipated visit from Corona, which Metta hopes may result
in the latter’s taking up residence with her away from urban
distractions, proves a bitter disappointment. Corona finally confesses
that she is incurably restless and empty, a huntress who is free of an
actual pain of physical need only while she is in process of snaring a
new victim. She asks the privilege of using Metta’s mountaintop as an
occasional sanctuary. Thereafter Metta settles in, not happy but at
least relatively serene, to live alone and provide temporary peace for
such of her friends as care to seek her out.
Comparison of this novel with _La Bonifas_ is interesting because,
despite their similarity in basic theme and the influence of initial
traumatic incident, they are so widely different. Even the first
incidents illustrate the difference: in _La Bonifas_, the physical
violence of suicide enacted before the child’s very eyes; in _The
Scorpion_, a psycho-social teapot-tempest involving the child only
through her cross-questioning by a children’s psychiatrist, which she
meets with passive resistance. In the one novel a female creature is
endowed with all the extroverted tastes, interests, and abilities
usually considered male. In the other the female creature is wholly
feminine save for her sexual inclinations. Accordingly, Weirauch
stresses the influence of environment. None of her lesbians are really
masculine in appearance, and only one male homosexual looks born to the
role. On the other hand, biographical vignettes are adroitly introduced
to account for almost every variant in the story, and these are even
more effective because they are not notably Freudian in pattern. Indeed,
this novel’s quality lies in its verisimilitude, an effect naturally
easier for a woman writer in this field than for a man. The inevitable
conclusion drawn from these two novels together is that sexual variance
is not so much an inborn factor in a life pattern as it is a concomitant
result of other aspects of personality and experience.
A second German lesbian item, _Die Schwester_, is a drama of 1924 which
in style shows the influence of Wedekind. The author, Hans Kaltneker,
takes care to present in a foreword his convictions about homosexuality:
it represents the height of egotism, the antithesis of the Christian
spirit, for to love one’s own sex is to withdraw from the common life of
humanity and imprison oneself in a futile sterility. He doubtless felt
it necessary to voice this reassurance because in the first act of the
play his attitude to the heroine appears wholly sympathetic. The
homosexual Ruth loves her young stepsister, Lo, but controls her
feelings until chance throws them together for a night. She is
subsequently cast out by her stepfather, and his daughter is hastily
married to the first available man. Ruth then lives with a lesbian
artist, whose ‘eyes and mouth were shadowed by black melancholy,’ and
who tells her that lasting love is impossible for their sort—they can
gain satisfaction only through debauchery. The two visit a homosexual
tavern—presented symbolically after the fashion of Wedekind—and Ruth
chooses among the commercial dancing partners a girl who resembles her
lost stepsister. As she is very drunk, she imagines this is her sister’s
spirit, and she “receives a message” that Lo really loves her, but
advises her to abandon her vicious way of life and devote herself to
helping other lost women. She later learns that Lo had died but a few
moments before she received this mystic communication, and takes it for
a supernatural revelation. Accordingly she becomes a nurse in a women’s
hospital for veneral disease, but her unconcealable preference for the
gentler, slim, young patients breeds antagonism, and when she herself
becomes infected she is discharged. Too ill to work, she is violated by
men and robbed even of her clothing. She ends in a woman’s prison where
her dying act is to give her one remaining garment to an ungrateful
drunken prostitute. Thus, she is redeemed through having sacrificed
herself for others.
In 1927 Frank Theiss, in _Interlude_, employed a lesbian episode to
explain the failure of his hero’s first marriage. The wife had, at
eighteen, been “entrapped” by an older woman highly esteemed in the
community. “The enticements and snares must have been cunningly laid,
for it was always unthinkable to Kurt ... that Sabina could have been in
love with her.”[23] When, after six months or so, the affair came to
light, “the furious father would certainly have called on the police
authorities if any power of police or judiciaries could have helped,” a
subtle thrust at the injustice of legal penalty for homosexual men as
compared to none for women.
The parents then married their daughter off to the first available man,
but the affair had left a scar. This was not the frigidity one might
expect. On the contrary, it was “an alert and conscious, a more than
mature ... an erotic atmosphere”[24] which made the girl unusually
“beguiling” to men. Still, she was not happy in her marriage, and the
explanation given is that she had been physically awakened without
knowing love. Thus, she was drawn to her husband also without love, and
their marriage was the “exchange of a conventional form of excitement.”
Once she had obtained a divorce and married someone whose appeal for her
was complete, not merely physical, she “became another person. This
voluptuous glitter was all gone, she was just sweet and charming.”[25]
While the handling of the episode is somewhat hasty and superficial, the
argument it presents against pre-marital lesbian experience is more
subtle and rather more convincing than many one meets in anti-variant
fiction.
A sterner condemnation of lesbianism came from Herbert Eulenberg in “Der
Maler Rayski,” a novelette in the volume _Casanova’s Letzte Abenteuer_
(1929), in which he presents a domineering lesbian woman of almost
sadistic ruthlessness. This titled landowner has long kept a younger
cousin-companion in lesbian bondage. She loathes men, but must have an
heir to inherit her properties, and hits upon the device of inducing her
beloved to bear a child whom she can then adopt. Since the sire must be
of good stock, she selects a contemporary artist whose qualifications
please her, summons him to paint portraits of her and her companion, and
contrives to get the latter married to him by stressing the excellence
of the girl’s financial prospects. The couple fall genuinely in love,
and, under the influence of normal love, the girl blooms from strained
pallor into perfect health and loveliness. As soon as a child is
expected, however, the older woman secures a series of such advantageous
commissions for the artist that he must be absent until after his
child’s birth. She then denies him access to the infant—what right has
any man to the child in whose begetting he has played but a momentary
part, while the woman has carried it for nine months and must nurse it
for as many more? To clinch the matter she tells him of the long years
of intimacy between herself and his wife. Now he feels that his bride’s
innocence was all pretence, and that anyone who could have deceived him
about so black a past can never be trusted. He makes off, proudly
refusing any monetary settlement then or later, and deteriorates into a
worthless drifter because of this devastating blow to his self-respect.
The two women remain together, apparently happy, since motherhood
provides the girl with some normal interest.
Since the film _Mädchen in Uniform_ had fairly wide circulation in this
country, Christa Winsloe’s corresponding novel _The Child Manuela_ will
need but a brief résumé. The motion picture was released in 1932 and
reached this country in the latter part of the same year, but the novel
did not appear even in Germany until 1933, and so must have been one of
the last variant publications launched before Nazi ascendancy wiped out
homosexual literature. Those fortunate enough to have seen this
remarkably sympathetic picture or any of several good amateur
productions of the play on the legitimate stage here are unlikely to
have forgotten it. The motherless Manuela, at fourteen, enters a
boarding school for the daughters of officers where the headmistress,
herself descended from a military line, imposes barracks discipline upon
her young charges. One mistress alone contrives to preserve some human
warmth despite the severity she is obliged to maintain, and the girls
worship her.
Manuela, accustomed to maternal tenderness throughout childhood, is made
almost ill by the harsh regime until her emotions fix themselves upon
the general favorite, Fräulein von Bernberg. It is soon evident that her
feelings are more profound and violent than the average. The mistress,
moved by the pathetic and neglected girl, befriends her and becomes
warmly attached to her, even confessing that she prefers her to the
other students, but she warns Manuela that such emotions are not
countenanced among soldiers’ daughters and admonishes her to learn
self-control. The knowledge that she is loved raises Manuela to a dizzy
ecstasy which she manages to conceal for a time. But the excitement of
playing male lead in an amateur theatrical, plus a party afterward with
heavily “spiked” punch and abandoned dancing, prove too much for her
high-strung temperament, and, slightly hysterical as well as literally
drunk, she proclaims her secret to the entire school. The relation
between pupil and teacher, though passionate, has been wholly innocent,
and Manuela is unaware of its further potentialities. The adamant
headmistress puts the worst construction on her hysterical outburst,
sentences her to solitary confinement for the remainder of the
term—diplomacy prevents her expulsion—and forbids her to see Fräulein
von Bernberg again. Now genuinely ill from shock and emotional
frustration, the girl contrives to reach her idol’s room, but the older
woman, aware of the danger to them both and afraid of her own emotions,
maintains a frigid composure. Beside herself, Manuela climbs to the top
floor of the tall school building and leaps to her death at the foot of
an open stairwell.
This school interlude comprises only the last third of the novel, the
previous sections portraying Manuela’s development from her earliest
memories to the time of her entering the institution. The family has
moved from one army post to another, the necessity for maintaining her
father’s military prestige taking precedence over all other family
needs. The girl was first passionately devoted to her mother. During
pre-adolescence she falls in love with a public schoolmate, Eva, who is
also the choice of her older brother. Manuela spins fantasies of being a
male acrobat or dramatically winning the notice of her adored in other
ways, but it is only as Berti’s sister that she is of interest to Eva.
After her mother’s death, at thirteen, she has a brief and stimulating
friendship with a boy violinist, but it is his mother who appeals to her
emotionally and to whom she sends flowers. When the woman embraces her,
she experiences the first stirrings of unrecognized passion. Aware of
her obvious blossoming, her father’s prim housekeeper assumes it is
young Fritz who has roused her emotions, and the woman persuades her
father and aunt that she must be separated from him. Hence the boarding
school.
Here one has an uncommonly high-strung child with a strong
mother-fixation, without friends of her own age up to the time of her
mother’s death. She often mentally assumes a boy’s role because only men
and boys seem to count in the life about her. At puberty she is deprived
of both mother and mother-substitute and shut into a virtual military
prison, the opposite of her hitherto relatively free existence. Both the
inevitable emotional explosion at school and the careful preparation for
it owe a debt to Freudian theory.
In a second novel, translated in 1936 as _Girl Alone_, Winsloe includes
variance only in passing. The heroine is Eva-Maria, whose name
skillfully forecasts the mixture of sensuality and romantic mysticism in
her later experience. As a struggling art student, she first loves a
handsome boy whom she does not succeed in winning. She is next seduced
by one of her instructors, an established sculptor and Don Juan for whom
she poses nude, and as an aftermath of this bitter affair she gives
herself recklessly to a stranger on a night when otherwise she might
have leaped into the river. The variant element is introduced in the
person of Fax, a tailored and gauche fellow student with whom she shares
an apartment. This girl loves Eva passionately, but receiving no
response, she is satisfied to look after her with almost maternal
solicitude. The two enjoy sundry revels with a bohemian group including
one inseparable lesbian couple and a number of unattached homosexual
women. When Fax, though still in love with Eva, engages in a flirtation
with one of these, an alluring actress, jealousy spurs Eva toward giving
Fax what she craves. Eva waits in her roommate’s bed for her return from
a studio party, but Fax does not come home until daybreak—she has
succumbed to the actress’s blandishments—and Eva never confesses what
she had intended. Eva herself remains unmoved by genuine passion
throughout the crisis.
This is apparently the final variant episode in German fiction before
the Nazi purge began, and three years later authors who had dealt with
the subject, however mildly, were eager only for general oblivion of
that fact. Thus far, there has been no evidence of a subsequent variant
renascence.
One feature of these foreign twentieth-century novels which must strike
even a casual observer is the high incidence of suicide among variant
women. Physical or mental illness is also often attributed to lesbian
practices. Both reflect the extent to which variant fiction was based on
clinical reading. Both, too, are facile means of producing dramatic
effect, and tend to placate the strait-laced by suggesting that, though
man may tolerate aberration, nature will not. Such devices are avoided
by writers of first rank—Colette, Rolland, Proust, Lacretelle and
Mann—while in Wedekind the melodramatic is seasoned by satire. A second
conspicuous motif is the struggle for personal independence which leads
women to eschew marriage and motherhood or to achieve self-realization
at the expense of family responsibilities. This reflects the progress of
the women’s movement and the influence of Ibsen, Ellen Key and others.
Discernible also is a slight decrease in the proportion of bisexual
experience, due undoubtedly to the prevalence of hereditary theory. And
last, there appears in more than a few novels a background of shifting
homosexual groups, far above the underworld level, such as Peladan alone
pictured earlier and then only as small private closed circles. It will
be interesting to see how many of these continental features appear in
English and American fiction.
CHAPTER IX.
FICTION IN ENGLISH
Introduction
The variant novels still to be surveyed in English number well over a
hundred. In part this surprising count reflects the general growth of
interest in sexual psychology and the increase in the number of feminine
authors, both of which trends developed slightly later in the
English-speaking countries than elsewhere. But beyond doubt it is also
due in some measure simply to the greater accessibility of material in
our own language. Book reviews in English and the indexes locating them
have multiplied enormously since 1900, and, non-committal though reviews
may be with regard to variance, a practiced reader grows sensitive to
significant evasion. Even more fruitful, of course, is the wide, if
superficial, skimming of each year’s output, a habit which nets not only
unreviewed trivia but minor variant incidents in better novels as well.
Had titles in French and German been equally ready to hand, the score
here would certainly be more equitable.
In rapid survey of this century’s English fiction certain rough
divisions emerge. The first fifteen years might be called the age of
innocence, in that no published work referred to overt lesbianism,
variance was not a subject of dispute, and no particular school of
psychological thought had come to the fore. After 1915 more
sophistication was apparent and variance became a controversial issue,
particularly in England where the struggle for suffrage exacerbated any
reference to women’s departure from the feminine and domestic role.
Thereafter, for a decade or so partisan shots echoed intermittently back
and forth as they had in France a quarter-century earlier, with the
difference, however, that now the attack frequently employed the
batteries of Freud. During the first of these decades World War I
exerted a perceptible influence, quickening cross-fertilization between
continental and Anglo-American attitudes in general, and, in particular,
leading to the translation after 1920 of enough French fiction so that
occasionally specific influences could be detected in our own novels.
Another aftermath of war was that relaxing of all sexual strictures
which characterized the Twenties, and, in line with the growing freedom,
literary treatments of variance multiplied rapidly, reaching a first
peak in 1928.
In that year Radclyffe Hall’s _Well of Loneliness_ incurred legal
prosecution for its explicit defense of a lesbian woman.[1] The
restrictive effect of this action was no more than local and temporary,
and as usual in cases of censorship the long range result was wide
publicity for the banned title and for others on related themes.
Consequently, the number of novels giving attention to variance swelled
to a second peak in the middle Thirties, but the general tone was
altered. Authors were now more self-conscious. The best, if at all
sympathetic, dealt more gingerly with the delicate subject than before
the attack. The majority, of intermediate popular quality, were careful
to sound a disparaging note. And there sprang up also for the first time
in English the wave of mediocre work which always follows profitable
publication of better material in any field. Some of these inferior
tales were censorious, some defensive, but all were so unrestrained that
in this country, at least, certain pressure groups, notably the Catholic
League for Decency, were roused to crusade for wholesale suppression.
A less obvious influence was also at work. The “flaming youth” of the
Twenties, product of war and of general rebellion against Victorian
inhibitions, had reached a point of disillusionment with sexual freedom,
and now, as the “lost generation”, were groping toward emotional
stability. This quest for adjustment called forth a quantity of popular
psychology and sociology, stemming largely from Freud, which deprecated
irregular attachments, especially the homosexual, and exalted marriage
and family life. Thus, some decline in variant fiction was evident
before the end of the Thirties. Then, in 1939 the second World War
exerted initial pressure in the same direction, for, as always, the
younger generation’s urge to perpetuate itself before too late threw
added emphasis upon heterosexual relations and parenthood. And finally,
in the publishing business, to usual wartime handicaps was added the new
military requisition of cellulose for explosives, which resulted in an
unprecedented shortage of paper and stringent selectivity in published
fiction. Altogether it was inevitable that during the early Forties the
variant literary stream should run low.
It did not, however, cease entirely, and since the end of World War II,
trends in fiction suggest that variance is on its way to becoming a
recognized if not accepted segment of human experience. The probable
underlying reasons for this change are varied. One is the usual
aftermath of war. Besides regularly producing a bumper crop of infants,
war has, since the days of Sappho, swelled the number of variants by
segregating the young to some extent during just those years when sexual
interest is at its height. More conscious effort was made to combat this
tendency during World War II than ever before, both in the armed forces
and on the home front. Preventive measures this time were as much
educational as disciplinary, so that the war generation emerged with
some grounding in “psychiatry at the fox-hole level.” One result is that
among women there was no such deliberate post-war affectation of
masculinity as occurred in the Twenties. Another is that many incipient
authors were prepared to write of variance with some balance and
perspective.
A further possible reason for the relaxing of at least the American
attitude toward variance is the publication of the Kinsey reports on
sexual behavior.[2] The appearance of the male volume in 1948 encouraged
the production of several serious novels featuring male homosexuality, a
subject hitherto stringently banned from English fiction. It is not safe
to say that this lifting of taboo significantly affected the feminine
picture, since female variance was never so rigorously outlawed, and the
count of pertinent titles was as large in 1943 and 1944, for instance,
as in 1949 and 1950. For this same reason Kinsey’s second volume on the
female (1953) seems unlikely to produce an effect comparable to his
first. But one fact is certain—the inclusion of incidental variant and
even lesbian episodes and characters is on the increase in popular
current fiction.
This statement leads to consideration of a third and purely practical
reason for the increase—post-war innovations in the publishing business.
Before 1941 experiments in producing books of high readability and low
cost had not achieved financial success, but four years of government
subsidy to the end of providing the armed forces with reading matter put
the venture on a paying basis. At present, fiction available at magazine
cost and from all magazine outlets has become a commonplace of daily
life. While these paper-covered novels were at first reprints of titles
notably successful in other editions, since 1950 a number of companies
have issued originals in the same format. Quite naturally one sure-fire
selling feature on the newsstands is frankness with regard to sex, and
the multiplication of both reprints and originals dealing with female
variance provides objective evidence of interest in that subject.
Another requisite for fast sales is a not-too-exalted literary level,
and the combination of sex latitude and popular quality has alerted
would-be censors. For some years these self-appointed groups have sought
to control the paper-backed market and have here and there succeeded.
Variant titles have been conspicuous in all lists under fire from moral
vigilantes, and the current question is whether censoring agencies will
succeed in once again checking quantity circulation of such material.
The Age of Innocence
The last mentioned variant narrative in English was Henry James’s
novelette _The Turn of the Screw_ (1898). Treating as it did the
seduction of a girl of eight by a depraved governess, it was considered
along with French titles of its decade which it resembled more closely
than did any of the novels soon to appear in English. Of these last,
none offered more contrast to French sophistication or could more
fittingly have ushered in twentieth-century fiction in our own tongue
than the innocuous tale published in 1900 by a now-forgotten British
novelist, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.
Within the first quarter of _The Farringdons_ Mrs. Fowler includes a
series of three passionate attachments experienced by the motherless
heroine. These occur before Elisabeth is twenty, but they are noteworthy
because of the author’s peculiar stress upon them.
There are two things which are absolutely necessary to the well-being
of the normal feminine mind—namely, one romantic attachment and one
comfortable friendship. Elisabeth was perfectly normal and extremely
feminine, and consequently she provided herself early with these two
aids to happiness.[3]
Despite this insistence on normal femininity, the object of the girl’s
comfortable friendship is a boy neighbor; that of her passionate
attachment a tall, handsome and witty Cousin Anne, a decade older than
she is.
All the romance of Elisabeth’s nature—and there was a great deal of
it—was lavished upon Anne Farringdon.... The mere sound of Anne’s
voice vibrated through the child’s whole being, and every little
trifle connected with her cousin became a sacred relic.[4]
Deep in the reading of mythology, Elisabeth sees her cousin as Diana,
builds a shrine to her in the garden, and practices a ritual of burnt
offerings before it. She also takes great interest in the Book of Ruth,
sensing “a parallelism to herself and Cousin Anne (in feeling at
least).”
People sometimes smile at the adoration of a young girl for a woman,
and there is no doubt but that the feeling savours slightly of school
days and bread and butter. But there is also no doubt that a girl who
has once felt it has learned what real love is, and that is no small
lesson in the book of life.[5]
This devotion occupies Elisabeth from twelve to sixteen, when the
cousin’s death plunges her into melancholy which threatens her health.
She is accordingly hurried off to boarding school, where during the next
four years she experiences a case of passionate hero-worship for the
headmistress, and a “devoted friendship” with a schoolmate who became
for a time “the very mainspring of Elisabeth’s life. She was a beautiful
girl ... and Elisabeth adored her with the adoration ... freely given to
the girl who has beauty by the girl who has not.” Upon this girl
Elisabeth lavishes
that passionate and thrilling friendship ... so satisfying to the
immature female soul, but which is never again experienced by the
woman who has once been taught by a man the nature of real love.[6]
The latter experience she meets at twenty. All these careful statements
indicate the author’s full awareness of the nature of variance and her
taking a deliberate stand with regard to it. Equally definite is the
implication that none of these early adorations involved physical
intimacy.
Two years later (1902) a Canadian-American girl of twenty-one published
_The Story of Mary MacLane_, written as a journal covering three months
during her nineteenth year and purporting to be literal autobiography.
Like the comparable “Story of Opal,” printed as authentic by the
_Atlantic Monthly_ in 1920, but partially “debunked” by discerning
critics, it was probably laced with more than a dash of fiction. In its
day it created sufficient sensation to be burlesqued in Weber and
Field’s revue of that year, and sold well enough to allow its author a
half-dozen years in Boston and New York.
Conspicuous in its self-revelation is undying hatred of the father whom
Mary lost at the age of eight.
Apart from feeding and clothing me ... and sending me to school—which
was no more than was due me—I cannot see that he ever gave me a
single thought. Certainly he did not love me, for he was quite
incapable of loving anyone but himself....[7]
Of her mother she says later,
How can one bring a child into the world and not wrap it round with a
certain wondrous tenderness that will stay with it always!... My
mother has some fondness for me—for my body because it came out of
hers. That is nothing—nothing. A hen loves its egg.[8]
Mary feels herself unloved also by the rest of her family—older sister,
older and younger brothers, and stepfather—all of whom are “strictly
practical and material, seeing close human relations as the stuff of
literature, not real life....” She is herself a genius, infinitely apart
from the crude barrenness of Butte, Montana, though she owns to keen
sympathy for women there who are “outside the moral pale.” All this, of
course, is once again the “dark hero complex,” that sense of being
outcast but superior, which has since been so well analyzed by Romer
Wilson in Emily Brontë and others. For 1902, three decades _before_ the
era when parents could do no right, it was fairly strong meat.
As for men, MacLane is certain none can ever rouse or possess her except
the Devil. “He will be incarnate, but he will not be a man.” He will
hurt her, and passion for him will free her from herself, but it will
last only three days, and “there must be no falling in love about it.”
My shy and sensitive soul would be irretrievably poisoned and
polluted. The defilement of so sacred and beautiful a thing as
marriage is surely the darkest evil that can come to a life. And so
everything in me that had turned toward that too bright light would
then drink deep of the lees of death.[9]
It was this devil fantasy upon which Weber and Fields seized, and on the
stage the Dark Gentleman, played by William Collier, fled in terror
before the _enfant terrible_.
The pertinent point to which all the foregoing leads is an attachment to
a high school teacher of literature first encountered when Mary was
eighteen, “the first person on earth who ever looked at me tenderly,” to
whom she refers with adolescent sentimentality as the “Anemone Lady.”
About this woman she spins passionate reveries, wishing they might live
together high on a mountainside away from the world. With the beginning
of this friendship “I felt a snapping of tense-drawn cords, a breaking
away of flood gates—and a strange new pain ... a convulsion and a
melting within.”[10] Nevertheless, caresses went no farther than “your
hand in mine,” and the association seems to have lasted but a year.
Still Mary says:
Sometimes I am seized with nearer, vivider sensations for my friend
the Anemone Lady ... I feel a strange attraction of sex. There is in
me a masculine element that when I am thinking of her arises and
overshadows all the others.... So then it is not the woman-love but
the man-love set in the mysterious sensibilities of my woman-nature.
It brings me pain and pleasure mixed.... Do you think a man is the
only creature with whom one may fall in love?[11]
This pseudo-naïveté wakes a suspicion of literary influence which is
strengthened by her second volume, _My Friend Annabel Lee_ (1903). Here
she proclaims her few early literary loves to have been Poe, the
juvenile books for boys of J. T. Trowbridge, and “‘Three Grains of
Corn,’ by a woman named Edwards,” and she voices acute loathing for
Archibald Clavering Gunter without citing reasons. Mathilda
Betham-Edwards was an Englishwoman who lived in France during the late
nineteenth century, and the _Oxford Book of Victorian Verse_ includes a
sonnet of hers, “A Valentine: The Pansy and the Prayer Book,” ending
with the following sestet:
The while I knelt, I let a pansy glide
Between her grave sweet face and open book
And whispered as she turned with chiding look—
“Heaven has not willed, dear heart, that aught divide
Love pure as ours, nor blames if thought of me
Come like this flower between thy God and thee.”[12]
This MacLane would have loved, as she would have hated the farcical
treatment of variance in _A Florida Enchantment_, and to assume her
acquaintance with both would explain her otherwise unaccountable
singling out of these two authors alone for special mention. Both of
MacLane’s volumes betray a disingenuous effort to present herself as a
child genius springing as it were by parthenogenesis from the
intellectual wasteland of Montana. It is probable that her reading had
been more extensive and had influenced her more than she admitted.
As to the volume of 1903, it is not only less startling than the first
but seems more youthful. The “friend” of the title is a Japanese
statuette in which her fantasy sees “a woman of fourteen” who has known
love for a week, after which “the strong stranger went away,” leaving
life drab. Here is the Devil again, and “Annabel” is obviously no more
than Mary’s own _persona_, hard, experienced and self-contained even
before adolescence. One wonders whether MacLane may have suffered some
early traumatic experience with a man which produced this recurrent
fantasy and prompted her sympathy for the déclassées of Butte. As for
women, “Annabel” is her only admitted friend. The volume records nothing
beyond Mary’s roaming alone in Boston, falling in love momentarily with
Minnie Maddern Fiske as the Magdalen, and adoring the Puvis de Chavannes
murals in the Public Library—those delicate wraiths so remote from
reality. Of human contacts there is no mention; she is solitary and
bitterly nostalgic for the Anemone Lady, or, rather, for their
mountainside eyrie of her own imagining. Passages in her third volume,
_I, Mary MacLane_ (1917) shed some light on her actual experiences at
this time, but must await discussion in proper order because the later
volume reflects the comparative emotional sophistication which had
permeated this country in the intervening years.
The next variant item was an historical novel by John Breckenridge Ellis
(1902), but precedence will be given to the recently published _Things
As They Are_ (1951), written in 1903 by Gertrude Stein, because of its
closer similarity to MacLane’s autobiographical volumes. This earliest
effort of Miss Stein’s, written when she was twenty-nine, is recognized
as very near to her own experience by Edmund Wilson, a long-time student
of her total work.[13] It records the emotional entanglements among
three young American women over a period of two years, and opens on a
transatlantic liner carrying them to Europe. Adele, the central figure
from whose viewpoint the whole story is written, is oppressed by
exhaustion and “the disillusion of recent failures” in Baltimore, and as
Mr. Wilson points out, Miss Stein herself went abroad in the summer of
1902 after having abandoned hope of a degree from Johns Hopkins where
she had pursued the medical course for five years.
The three girls are characterized at length. Helen is
the American version of the English handsome girl. In her ideal
completeness she would have been unaggressively determined, a trifle
brutal and entirely impersonal; a woman of passions but not of
emotions, ... incapable of regrets,[14]
that is, definitely a masculine personality; but actually she is no more
than “a brave bluff.” Sophie is a New Englander with “the angular body
of a spinster but ... a face that would have belonged to the decadent
days of Italian greatness,” and with “the unobtrusive good manners of a
gentleman.” Events prove her, however, to be both feminine and feline.
Adele has “the freedom of movement and the simple instinct for comfort
that suggests a land of laziness and sunshine.” Very early in the
narrative she exclaims, “I always did thank God I wasn’t born a
woman,”[15]—this surprising statement is neither then nor later
elaborated in any way—but everything about her save her intellect is
passive to the point of inertia, and she struggles against being drawn
into the “turgid and complex world” of passionate intimacy.
She finds it impossible, however, to remain indifferent to Helen’s
subtle courtship, which includes “fluttering” caresses as the three lie
on the deck under the stars. Her familiarity with attraction between
women is evident from some early self-searching:
As for me is it another little indulgence of my superficial emotions
or is there any possibility of my really learning to realize stronger
feelings. If it’s the first I will call a halt promptly.[16]
At one point Helen charges her with “middle-class morality,” to which
Adele retorts:
I simply contend that the middle class ideal which demands that
people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they
avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to
me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life.[17]
But that (says Helen) means cutting passion quite out of your scheme of
things. Adele replies:
Not simple moral passions, they are distinctly of it but really my
chief point is a protest against this tendency ... to go in for
things simply for the sake of experience.... [That] is to me both
trivial and immoral. As for passion, it has no reality for me except
as two varieties, affectionate comradeship ... and physical passion
in greater or less complexity ... and against the cultivation of the
latter I have an almost puritanic horror and that includes an
objection to it in any of its many disguised forms.[18]
In accordance with these principles Adele spends her summer in Spain,
happy in the mere “family” comradeship of a cousin. But during the
subsequent winter she plays a divided game. She cannot resist going
repeatedly from Baltimore to New York to see Helen, though once there
she is not only passive but resistant to the other girl’s wooing. She
even says explicitly that they have few interests in common, but still
it is she who does all the traveling to make their growing intimacy
possible, for Helen’s resources are sharply curtailed by unsympathetic
parents.
Thus far, the third girl, Sophie, has remained surprisingly passive in
view of her long-established intimacy with Helen, but in the course of
this winter she enlightens Adele as to the precise nature of that
intimacy. Adele is so shocked that it is implied clearly that the
relation is physical and, up until then, wholly outside her own
acquaintance. Not even this revelation, however, can detach her from
Helen, although she deliberately elects a second summer abroad alone and
suffers when Helen’s letters are stopped by a visit from Sophie. During
the subsequent winter her own relations with Helen reach the stage of
physical expression, but the change is not a happy one.
Their pulses were differently timed. She could not go so fast and
Helen’s exhausted nerves could no longer wait. Adele found herself
constantly forced on by Helen’s pain. It was a false position ... her
attitude was misunderstood and Helen interpreted her slowness as
deficiency ... and the greater her affection for Helen became the
more irritable became her discontent.[19]
This is trite enough to readers of modern sexual psychology as set forth
in marriage manuals. It was not trite coming from an unmarried American
girl in 1903.
At this juncture Sophie invites Helen to accompany her on another
European trip. (As Mr. Wilson drily remarks, for the more prosperous
American college graduate, Europe was then an imperative.) Helen
accepts, and although Adele is certain that Sophie is financing the trip
she dares not put the question directly. Or perhaps she does not want
to, for Helen has urged her to spend the summer abroad also, not with
them, but within easy reach.
And so the lover of serenity travels for her third summer as a kind of
semi-detached appendage to the other pair, and the remainder of the
action is almost as tedious and confusing to the reader as to Adele
herself. Because of the physical incompatibility so well described
above, Helen has now cooled considerably in that respect, but her
emotional dependence upon Adele increases with Sophie’s balking of
private communication between them—one more testimonial to the soundness
of “Proust’s law”: the inverse proportion between “love” and
accessibility. Because Adele, on the other hand, is now rather more than
less physically attracted, her health and peace of mind suffer
noticeably during her frustrating periods with the other two. But she is
bound not only by her genuine love for Helen but by her confidence that
the other girl really loves her. When she reads Helen’s final desperate
letter promising that she will never again allow such a situation to
develop, Adele exclaims with impatience:
Hasn’t she learned yet that things do happen and she isn’t big enough
to stave them off? Can’t she see things as they are and not as she
would make them if she were strong enough...? I am afraid it comes
very near to being a dead-lock.[20]
This sentence concludes the book, to which Miss Stein originally gave
the title _Quod Erat Demonstrandum_, the implied proposition being that
such an emotional game could never be worth the candle. The current
title, chosen by the editor, throws the emphasis upon Helen’s inability
to be honest with herself or others, in contrast to Adele’s ruthless
clarity. If Adele acted against her own middle-class convictions, it was
at least without self-deception at any stage of the game. Mr. Wilson
suggests that continued preoccupation with women, and her unwillingness
to abandon herself again or to write openly about it, was responsible
for the increasing obscurity of Miss Stein’s work and the lofty
emotional detachment of her viewpoint.[20]
* * * * *
John Breckenridge Ellis’s _The Holland Wolves_, published late in 1902,
was largely in the cape-and-sword tradition of the time, but he inserted
a variant touch by making its central figure a transvestist and treating
the emotional consequences seriously. Rosamunda, daughter of a Spanish
leader in the war with the Netherlands, has been bred in a convent where
flagellation was a common practice. When, at nineteen, she must choose
between becoming a nun there or accompanying her father to the Low
Countries, she elects the latter course. Disguised as her father’s
squire, she engages in espionage and from expediency pays court to Anna,
a Dutch girl in her teens. The latter falls deeply in love with her and
abandons family and reputation to follow her. But Rosamunda’s fancy has
been caught by an officer in the Dutch forces, to whom she confesses
that she is a woman. When he pronounces Anna no better than a camp
follower, Rosamunda challenges him to a duel, worsts him, and
consequently is cured of her passion for him. Thereafter she becomes one
of the most cruel of the inquisitionary soldiers.
Since she has never been in love with Anna, and the latter throughout
much of the story believes her to be a man, the variant issue is as
confused as always in a romance of sex disguise. Like Gunter’s farce,
however, the tale bears witness to interest in intersexual types even
among superficial American readers, for Rosamunda has no feminine
characteristics. It also indicates the author’s belief that such types
result from environment rather than heredity. Rosamunda, despite her
Spanish coloring, is revealed at the end as Anna’s sister (stolen from
Holland in infancy), and not related at all to the Spaniards upon whom
she has modeled herself. The blood kinship between the two girls,
moreover, is evidently meant to account for Anna’s spontaneous
attraction, which after the revelation of Rosamunda’s sex becomes a
profound sisterly devotion. Readers were thus provided with a spicy
morsel but spared the slightest moral indigestion. (If this account
makes the tale seem one of mere sex disguise, comparison with Compton
Mackenzie’s _Sylvia Scarlett_ of a few decades later will make the
difference apparent.)
The first of the century’s openly published titles by a major writer was
John Masefield’s _Multitude and Solitude_ (1909), its author’s
least-esteemed novel to judge from the neglect accorded it by literary
historians, libraries, and secondhand catalogs. It is true that from the
standpoint of artistry it falls into two almost unrelated halves; but it
is, nevertheless, a convincing study of a young dramatist in search of
his soul—that is, of the “high and austere” character he feels essential
to a great artist. He does achieve his end via some gruelling years with
a medical unit in South Africa, but he is driven to this heroic measure
by a series of major and minor frustrations reminiscent of the tricks of
Fate in Thomas Hardy’s work. Among the major tragedies is the death of
the woman he has long loved, and this calamity is the end of a chain of
trivial mischances in which the detonating factor is jealousy on the
part of his beloved’s woman friend. There is an artistic preliminary
sounding of the variant note early in the book when, depressed at
failing to find Ottalie in her London apartment, he stops at a café
where he sees
a red-haired fierce little poet who sat close by reading and eating
cake. The yellow back of _Les Fleurs du Mal_ was propped against his
teapot. Something of the fierceness and passion of the Femmes Damnées
... was wreaked upon the cake.[21]
After Ottalie is drowned while crossing to Ireland, her friend Agatha
tells the lover what he had already guessed: Ottalie’s visit to her
Irish relatives was partially the result of his not having definitely
proposed marriage. And his failure to do so was (again in part) due to
Agatha’s jealously interrupting a tête-à-tête between the lovers, and
later delaying a letter from Ottalie to him. Agatha confesses all this
during her prostration after her friend’s death.
“I was jealous. I was wicked. I think the devil was in me.” ... He
would have asked to look upon Ottalie; but he refrained in the
presence of that passion. Agatha had enough to bear. He would not
flick her jealousies.[22]
There is no suggestion that Ottalie reciprocated Agatha’s love, nor any
implication of lesbian intimacy. Ottalie’s brother, however, tells the
hero that although she loved him she thought him “too ready to surrender
to immediate and perhaps wayward emotion”—an obvious hint at the
heroine’s physical coldness or Victorian repression in the heterosexual
field.
Two years later and half a world away the Australian woman known to
letters as Henry Handel Richardson recorded the emotional development of
an adolescent girl in _The Getting of Wisdom_ (1910). At fourteen Laura
is already too hard and independent to feel close to her emotional
widowed mother, and at boarding school she is subjected to refined
cruelty by her mates because she is so “different”—partly in her
precocious literary interests but most of all in her dislike of boys. To
gain face among them she invents a romance with a curate; the exposure
of this fiction brings more ridicule which hardens her further. Her
inner withdrawal becomes complete after the expulsion of an adoring
younger girl who stole in order to buy her a keepsake.
In the midst of her bitter isolation she is chosen as roommate by a
popular girl a few years her senior, and at once succumbs emotionally to
the first kindness and championship she has ever known. It is clear,
however, that no physical intimacy ensues—Laura kisses Evelyn only once,
and then impulsively when the latter, in a fit of pique, remarks that
all men are fools. The friendship is slowly blighted by Laura’s
passionate jealousy if the older girl goes out with men or shows
attention to other girls, a “tyranny” to which the senior will not
submit. The school gossips about this conspicuous attachment, but
without censure or apparent awareness of questionable possibilities even
on the part of the mistresses. After a brief and abortive religious
“conversion” Laura sets herself to cultivate her literary talent by way
of emotional outlet, for there are hints that she will never feel
attracted to men. The wisdom gained during this difficult adolescence is
summarized at the end by the author, who says that though the girl
returned home feeling that she “fitted no hole,” she could not yet know
that
just those mortals who feel cramped and unsure in the conduct of
everyday life will find themselves ... in that freer world where no
practical considerations hamper, and where the creatures that inhabit
dance to their tune.[23]
That is, in the somewhat narcissistic world which they, as writers,
create. This is a penetrating recognition of authorship as sublimation,
written as it was several decades before psychiatrists began to take the
writing fraternity apart.
Another novel with rather stronger variant overtones appeared in England
in 1914, Ethel Sidgwick’s _A Lady of Leisure_. This pleasant social
romance had for its main theme a muted echo from the Women’s Movement:
the wealthy and idle girl’s need of a routine occupation. Violet Ashwin,
daughter of a frivolous social belle and a Harley Street physician, is
driven by a sense of utter futility to fly in the face of convention—and
her mother’s prejudices—and apprentice herself to a modiste. Her
co-worker, Alice Eccles, is an enterprising cockney who supports a
neurotic mother, preferring this burden to marriage with a suitor whom
she suspects of engaging in illegal enterprises. Alice is tall,
handsome, high-spirited, and infinitely more self-reliant than the
sheltered upper-class girl, whom at first she assists and patronizes
with a kind of affectionate raillery. Soon, however, the two are close
personal friends, to the horror of Violet’s snobbish mother. Between
Violet and her father, though, a close alliance has always existed, and
he applauds both her job and her new friendship, seeing at once the
solid quality beneath Alice’s unpolished surface.
When Violet works herself into a collapse and is sent to the country for
the summer,
Alice longed to have news of her—but she was not going to ask for
it.... Her adoration for Violet, violently repressed, since its
torrential force made her almost ashamed, was a thing unique, unheard
of, as Miss Eccles believed, in the world before. The revelation of
woman to woman is often just as remarkable, for all the truisms on
the subject, as the revelation of woman to man.[24]
Somewhat later, Mrs. Eccles’ mental condition having become a danger to
her daughter, Dr. Ashwin copes with the mother and engages Alice as
lady’s maid to his wife, hoping that her companionship may restore his
still convalescent daughter’s interest in living. When he tells Violet
that Alice is in the house she colors visibly and runs upstairs, “her
face still pink and her heart thumping.”
Alice dropped her hands and coloured gloriously, far more gloriously
than Violet at her best could have accomplished. Her work slipped
from her knees and she spread her splendid arms.... [Violet] went
straight to her and fell upon her breast.[25]
The only further detail mentioned is Alice’s kissing the other girl’s
hands. The friendship survives Alice’s marriage and the birth of her
first child, and she is the only person save Violet’s parents to attend
the latter’s subsequent wedding. Here, then, is an unmistakably
passionate relationship between adults—both girls are in their middle
twenties—presented with complete sympathy and approval, and encouraged
by an established physician. It is, of course, quite innocent of lesbian
implications.
Since Miss Stein’s novelette remained unpublished for half a century,
MacLane and Ellis would be America’s only representatives in this early
period but for short stories which appeared sporadically. One of
Josephine Dodge Dascom’s _Smith College Stories_ (1900), “A Case of
Interference,” just skirted the variant field. A junior, prominent
because of her literary ability, enters the despised arena of campus
politics to save an unpopular gifted freshman who worships her from
leaving college. A little later the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ published a
slighter college story, “The Cat and the King,” by Jennette Lee, in
which a freshman shams illness in order to join her senior idol in the
infirmary, and is extricated from ensuing complications by a wholly
sympathetic woman physician. These were both written on an adult level.
The only known variant juvenile, _The Lass of the Silver Sword_ by Mary
Constance Du Bois, ran in _St. Nicolas Magazine_ during 1909 and was
published in book form later.[26] Centered about the adoration of a
fourteen-year-old girl for a senior of nineteen in her boarding school,
it was sympathetic but so circumspect as to lack full vitality.
Catherine Wells’s “The Beautiful House” (_Harper’s Magazine_, 1912)
pictures an idyllic relation between two adult artists, for the older
and less feminine of whom the connection ends tragically with the
marriage of the younger woman. Helen R. Hull’s “The Fire” (1918) will be
discussed later with its author’s longer narratives.
It is noteworthy that none of this early fiction records disapproval of
variant experience on the part of either the authors or society. It is
seen as educative and beneficial during the teens, or even in the
following decade for the single woman, and it provides the only
happiness during adolescence for several girls more gifted than their
peers. If in Masefield’s novel its sequel is tragic, jealousy rather
than variance per se is responsible, and Miss Stein condemns the
experience she describes, not as lesbian, but as generally spineless and
unintelligent. In the cases (Miss Stein’s and Miss Richardson’s) where
antipathy or indifference to men is noted, women’s attraction to their
own sex is not responsible, but is rather a concomitant product of
unspecified factors.
Sophistication and Dispute
In 1915 D. H. Lawrence, with _The Rainbow_, hit the first ringing blow
upon the anvil of controversy. As the messiah of robust heterosexual
passion, Lawrence needs no introduction, and in this early novel he
attacked right and left all factors which militate against it in modern
society—unhealthy urban and industrial life, sterile intellectuality
(especially among women), and lesbianism. It is in the final portion of
his three-generation panorama that the current representative of the
Brangwyn clan, sixteen-year-old Ursula, contracts a passion for a
schoolmistress. She has just had a brief but complete heterosexual
experience, and Lawrence implies that the tide of emotion which
overflows toward Winifred Inger is little more than an aftermath of that
physical awakening. A ten-page chapter significantly entitled “Shame”
gives the history of their affair, which reaches its first climax at
Winifred’s river cottage when the two bathe nude at night. Immediately
after this episode the girl’s one desire is to get away. Over a period
of months, however, “the two women became intimate. Their lives seemed
suddenly to fuse into one.” During the long vacation, Ursula, as always
when away from the older woman, is desolate and afire for her, but with
their reunion
a heavy clogged sense of deadness began to gather upon her, from the
other woman’s contact. Her female hips seemed big and earthy, her
ankles and her arms too thick.[27] [The last touch is a highly
original bit of anthropometry.]
Winifred, deeply in love with the younger girl, wishes to leave the
school and live with Ursula in London where they can mingle in literary
circles and participate in the Women’s Movement. Ursula repudiates the
suggestion and goes on to other heterosexual adventures, but—possibly as
a result of her lesbian experience?—she is always too much concerned
with her own emotions to become a satisfactory partner for men. Her
leaving a lover and going out to steep herself in the light of a full
moon is offered as symbolic of her narcissistic self-absorption.
This novel was published by the solid firm of Methuen, but was withdrawn
after a police court verdict of indecency which was based on attacks by
three or four reviewers. The charge was general, only one (Robert Lynd)
making an oblique allusion to its lesbian aspect. Lawrence was not
notified directly of the court order, and since he had neither funds nor
influence to launch a legal protest,[28] this act of censorship raised
few echoes in comparison with some cases to be noted later. It did,
however, postpone general circulation of the novel, and undoubtedly
focussed some attention on lesbianism.
A year later the American Henry Kitchell Webster touched briefly but
scathingly on the subject of variance in _The Great Adventure_ (1916).
In this history of a marriage the girl who has looked forward to
motherhood is frustrated by the birth of twins, the implication being
that she desired merely an object upon which to project her own
personality, and the self-abnegation demanded by two young entities, boy
and girl, is beyond her. Accordingly while the children can still be
cared for by nurses, Rose leaves her home and seeks self-realization on
the stage. In the course of her first year she takes an artist’s
interest in a beautiful but inferior colleague in the chorus of a revue,
whom she coaches in diction and for whom, among others, she designs
flattering costumes. But when her Galatea becomes infatuated with her
she is disgusted.
Rose understood this better than Olga did, having had to evade one or
two “crushes” while at the University. It was a sort of thing that
went utterly against her instincts.[29]
Olga’s efforts to persuade and caress her into intimacy are worse than
futile, and in retaliation for Rose’s contempt Olga spreads gossip of an
affair with the director which does Rose grave professional injury.
After some further experiment, Rose returns to her family a more mature
and humble woman. Olga is presented as a strongly antipathetic
personality, and Rose’s quest for self-expression proves sterile and
unrewarding for all concerned. Learning unselfish adjustment in marriage
is “The Great Adventure.”
In January 1917 the first British novel appeared which was devoted
wholly to variance, and the first in English since James’s _The
Bostonians_ of 1855—Clemence Dane’s _Regiment of Women_. Its attitude is
as bitter as Lawrence’s in _The Rainbow_, but any question of influence
is excluded by the author’s indication that it was written before the
latter was published. Title and initial quotation announce the theme as
“the monstrous empire of a cruel woman,” and its four-hundred-page plot
revolves about a subtle sadist, outstanding mistress in a girls’ day
school. Clare Hartill (the surname is surely symbolic), brilliant,
sardonic, and never attractive to men, has colleagues and pupils alike
well under her domination. The other mistresses stand in awe of her
superior intellect, her uncanny success as a teacher, and her mordant
tongue. The girls—she is really interested only in the higher secondary
classes—are emotionally subjugated by her alternation of warm praise and
stinging raillery, the praise intensified by “sudden brilliant smiles”
and the discreet laying on of hands.
Clare is a woman of feverish friendships and sudden ruptures,
“unmaternal” to the core
and pitiless after victory: not till then did she examine the nature
thus enslaved, seldom did she find it worth the trouble of the
skirmish.... To the few that pleased her fastidious taste she gave of
her best, lavishly ... to them she was inspiration incarnate.[30]
But her interest even in these favorites “required their physical
nearness” and died with their departure from school. Just as Clare has
reached the “dangerous age” of thirty-five a new teacher of nineteen
enters upon the scene:
... vehement Alwynne—no schoolgirl—yet more youthful and ingenuous
than any mistress had right to be, loving with all the discrimination
of a fine mind and all the ardour of an affectionate child. Here was
no ... fleeting devotion that must end as the schooldays ended. Here
was love for Clare at last, a widow’s cruse to last her for all time.
Clare ... relaxing all effort, settled herself to enjoy to the full
the cushioning sense of security.
But even so, Alwynne was “too obviously subject through her own free
impulse to entirely satisfy. Clare’s love of power had its morbid
moments, when a struggling victim pleased her.”[31]
So great is the older woman’s magnetism that Alwynne, wholesome and
spirited enough to hold her own at first, does not detect the other’s
egotistical cruelty until it is exercised upon a student. This
hypersensitive child of thirteen, Louise, whose precocity approaches
genius, Clare has forced intellectually beyond her strength and reduced
emotionally to half-hysterical subservience. Alwynne’s strong maternal
instinct moves her to intervene on Louise’s behalf, and a dangerous
triangle develops. When, ill from tension, Louise fails in an important
interscholastic competition, Clare turns suddenly hostile and excoriates
her, not only for the failure, but for her interpretation of a dramatic
role rehearsed in addition to her school-room load. Playing the tragic
child Prince Arthur in _King John_ has already driven Louise past the
limits of stability, and after this double humiliation at the hands of
her idolized persecutor, she leaps to death from an attic window. (This
antedated by fifteen years Winsloe’s _Mädchen in Uniform_, of which the
denouement and certain other details are so similar that some influence
seems beyond question.)
The tragedy and its aftermath—Clare, crowding her own guilt below the
threshold of consciousness, persuades herself and Alwynne that the
latter is in part to blame—brings Alwynne to the verge of breakdown, and
so she goes on leave to relatives in the country. A sympathetic cousin
who is something of an amateur psychiatrist gradually probes to the root
of her trouble and offers an impersonal estimate of Clare, whom he has
never met and has reconstructed solely from the girl’s still loyal
accounts. His opinion gives her pause, and subsequent encounters with
Clare, so shaken by the suicide and by Alwynne’s long absence that she
lacks her usual finesse, complete the girl’s disillusionment. She
finally marries the cousin.
This overlong narrative carries psychological conviction but suffers
from blurred focus. Clare’s heartlessness once her victims are
enthralled supports the initial claim that sadism is its thesis, but the
spell she casts is variant passion no less intense for being
subjectively induced and never allowed expression (the one real caress
in four-hundred pages figures early in her conquest of Alwynne). This
passionate element assumes primary importance during her final struggle
against a male rival. Close to the end a woman who has known Clare all
her life tells her:
When you allow [a girl] to attach herself passionately to you, you
are feeding and at the same time deflecting from its natural channel
the strongest impulse of her life.... Alwynne needs a good concrete
husband to love, not a fantastic ideal that she calls friendship and
clothes in your face and figure. You are doing her a deep injury....
I tell you, it’s vampirism. And when she is squeezed dry and flung
aside, who will the next victim be? One day you’ll grow old. What
will you do when your glamour’s gone? I tell you, Clare Hartill,
you’ll die of hunger in the end.[32]
Egotism is implied here, but the main issue is variant seduction, and
Clare’s retort is a long boast as to her prowess in that line amply
justified by earlier incidents. She concludes defiantly that she and
Alwynne “suffice each other. Thank God there are some women who can do
without marriage.” The reply is: “Poor Clare! Are the grapes very sour?”
Surprisingly, this “final triumphant insult” touches the quick.
The insult could cut through her defenses and strike at her very
self, because it was true. Her pride agonized. She had thought
herself shrouded, invulnerable.... She sat and shuddered at the wound
dealt; ... at the arrow-tip rankling in it still.[33]
Clare’s reaction is not prepared for in advance. Moreover, this episode
is so placed and treated as to make it the supreme climax of the plot,
and the implication is clear: it is the sex starvation of spinsterhood
which produces variance, a barren substitute for married love. If the
spinster is brilliant and proud, a sadistic egotism constantly requiring
fresh victims will be a concomitant. Clare’s spinsterhood is
involuntary; she is, then, a potentially tragic figure, and the novel
would have gained in power had she been so presented throughout. But she
is shown only as momentarily pathetic, and after such moments her
recoveries are too ready and her retaliations too mean to permit of
sustained sympathy. One is left with a sense that the author had known a
Clare Hartill all too well, had emerged hating her, and had not yet
achieved the detachment necessary for producing artistic unity.
Later in 1917 _I, Mary MacLane_ provided an autobiographical sequel to
the author’s volumes of fifteen years earlier. Like her first book, it
is an impressionistic journal of the preceding year which includes
considerable retrospective information. Once more Mary is in Butte,
convalescing from a grave illness induced by a half-dozen hectic years
in Boston and New York. She still hates men, who have never stirred any
emotion in her, and with whom in their “crude sex-rapacity” she has been
careless as no “regular woman” would dare to be. One gathers, then, that
the heartbreak from which she has suffered for a year is not the work of
a man.
It is one thing I do not dwell upon in this book of Me. Much of Me
had nothing to do with my heart when it broke: though I loved with
all of Me ... one who lives in New York—and I lost and lost, all the
way. There was mere human ordinariness, about which I built up a
strangely sincere temple of grace which I looked to see shed light on
my life like the eternal beauty of a Daybreak. I gave the best I knew
to it, from a distance, and I lost.... All was broken without so much
as a clasp of hands.[34]
That Mary is now well aware of all potentialities between women is clear
from other comments; for example, that she “wasted” several years in the
two eastern cities on friendships (with women) from whose ill effects
she will never recover, having given too much of herself in the
“headlong newness of knowing and owning friendship after long young
loneliness.”[35] Elsewhere, she mentions translating Sappho, and says:
I am some way the Lesbian woman, ... [but] there is no vice in my
Lesbian vein, ... [though] I have lightly kissed and been kissed by
Lesbian lips. I am too personally fastidious, too temperamentally
dishonest ... to walk in direct repellent roads of vice even in
freest moods.[36]
She believes lesbianism to be subjectively induced, as against those who
consider it due to “prenatal influence.” Some women are lesbian because
they are born aggressive, some feel themselves challenged by the
limitations imposed on women, some are merely so lonely that the first
understanding person “wins a passionate adoration the deeper for being
unrealized.” She believes that all women “except two breeds, the stupid
and the narrowly feline,” have a lesbian strain; that is, there is
always some “poignant flair” of sex in their close friendships, though
all “good non-analytic creatures” would deny it with horror. (This last
suggests at least an acquaintance with Freud.)
She has now returned to cultivate in solitude the _Me_ neglected during
her preceding distracted years. There are evidences that she has more
than dabbled in oriental philosophy and believes in reincarnation,
which, she says, gives her many buried selves to delve for—surely
Valhalla for a narcissist. Mild as this volume is in its condemnation by
comparison with the preceding two, its stress upon the suffering and
“waste” in variant friendships, and its reference to lesbianism as
“repellent vice,” align it with them as opposed to variance.
Such pointed attacks as those of Lawrence and Miss Dane were bound to
stimulate counterattack. The first appeared in A. T. Fitzroy’s _Despised
and Rejected_ (1918), though women’s variance was of secondary
importance in a novel whose main issue was the tragic wartime
persecution of Conscientious Objectors; particularly of male homosexuals
who took refuge in that camp. Because both “Conchies” and homosexuals
were anathema in 1918, the publisher was prosecuted and fined some
£160.[37] The author, wife of the composer Cyril Scott, apparently
weathered the storm without major consequences, though she wrote nothing
more under the same name.
The feminine incidents in the novel concern an actress who, at thirteen,
had adored a boarding school teacher; however, she cooled when the
latter responded, because she hated to be caressed. Her teens included
similar attractions, and she had several unpleasant experiences with men
during her years of becoming established in the theatre. These
experiences precede the opening of the story. The action begins with
amateur theatrical activities at a summer hotel, in the course of which
Antoinette falls in love with a taciturn dark woman reminiscent of her
first idol, and, on the other hand, rouses emotional interest in an
effeminate young man in the cast. The summer interlude ends without
resolving either affair. Both amours are continued by letter, a medium
which frees Antoinette of her physical inhibitions. Thus, she learns
that Dennis has previously been much drawn to men; and on her part, she
becomes so attached to the dark Hester that she visits her in
Birmingham. She is as yet unaware of any “abnormality” in her feeling,
knowing only that Hester represents the promise of some imperative
emotional release. When she discovers that Hester has had a liaison with
a man, her love is instantly chilled, although it had reached the verge
of overt expression.
Meanwhile, Dennis, obtaining no response from her, has become involved
with a poet in desperate circumstances for whom he feels a maternal
tenderness. From this point on, the long narrative is concerned chiefly
with its male cast, but it includes Antoinette’s finally considering
herself in love with Dennis. He has now, however, irrevocably elected
the homosexual path; he tells her that he recognized her at first
meeting as another homosexual and that that was the reason for his
instant attraction. Despite his immediate detection of her proclivities,
Antoinette is presented as feminine in both appearance and temperament.
The cause of her narcissistic failure in either normal or variant
adjustment is that throughout adolescence she was always awaiting the
charmed age of eighteen, when the thrilling business of Real Life would
begin. That is, she nursed a romantic ideal impossible of realistic
achievement (cf. Gourmont’s _Songe d’une Femme_). At the end she
complains:
Everybody seems to think you’re abnormal because you _like_ to be....
As if being different from other people weren’t curse enough in
itself.... People judge the fine by the sensual, of whom there are
plenty also among the “normal.”[38]
This is a fair enough statement of a variant argument which will be
encountered again later.
A more oblique and much more artistic species of defense is incorporated
in Arnold Bennett’s _The Pretty Lady_ (1918), of which the main theme is
the relation between a wealthy London bachelor and a Parisian courtesan
war-bound in London. Despite the outcry the book raised among reviewers,
the sexual aspects of this affair are subordinated to the soothing
effect of the French woman’s simple and cosy subjective complaisance, in
contrast to the hectic wartime mood of the Englishwomen with whom Hoape
is thrown together. One of these, Concepçion Smith, is the daughter of a
British financial magnate who operated in Lima, and it is not wholly
clear whether her mother or merely her given name and her upbringing
were Latin-American. Orphaned at eighteen, she returned to London and
kept house for her bachelor uncle, a cabinet minister, earning a
reputation as hostess and wit. Having married for love, and lost her
husband within the first few weeks of World War I, she leaves for
Glasgow early in the story to dull her sorrow through canteen work in a
munitions plant. She is described as having a masculine mentality, being
relatively indifferent to feminine graces, and lacking somewhat in
obvious sex appeal. She is at this time about thirty.
Her closest friend has been Lady Queenie Lechford, perhaps a decade
younger, a spoiled only child, capricious, flippant, the type of hectic
and brittle “flapper” who was to become so common a figure in the
fiction of the 1920s. That the two quarrelled bitterly over Concepçion’s
leaving London one learns only when they are reunited late in 1916,
after Concepçion has broken under the strain of overwork and the shock
of a horrifying accident to a factory girl. The two women’s reunion is
delineated with the subtlest indirect touches, but it is clearly
passionate. Of the two, Concepçion seems the more deeply involved.
Though there are hints that she herself is not uninterested in Hoape,
she tells him Queenie is in love with him and urges him to marry the
girl in spite of the considerable difference in their ages. She would do
anything in the world, she declares, to win even a few weeks’ happiness
for her young friend. Even while Hoape is evading her suggestion, Lady
Queenie, given to reckless watching of air-raids from the roof of her
parents’ town house, is killed by falling anti-aircraft shrapnel.
Concepçion, with nothing now to live for, plans suicide, but is
dissuaded by Hoape’s concern for her, and one foresees that these two
will eventually marry. Bennett thus appears to diagnose variant
(possibly lesbian) connections as one phase of wartime hysteria, induced
mainly by the shortage of eligible men. Though there is a shade of
satire in his picture, there is certainly no disapproval.
The next two novels, both American and both published in 1920, made
relatively brief but quite significant additions to variant literature.
By a count of lines, Kate Chancellor occupies little space in Sherwood
Anderson’s _Poor White_, story of a shanty-town boy’s rise to prosperity
and a good marriage. But she supplies the most vivid thread in the
pattern of his wife’s emotional development. When Clara leaves her
father’s farm for the state university she is wholly uninformed in
matters of sex. From some bungling early experience she is wary of men,
though conscious of a certain power over them. The relatives with whom
she lives while in college play little part in her life save to repeat
her father’s misunderstanding of trivial “petting” incidents which are
unsought and distasteful to her.
Clara finds her college courses no help toward the practical conduct of
life in any field, and her one fruitful contact is with a girl two or
three years her senior who plans to study medicine. Kate Chancellor, as
masculine as her musical brother is effeminate, is quite frank in
admitting her homosexual nature (thus implied to be innate), though she
never mentions lesbianism. For three years the girls are constantly
together. Their avid discussions range through politics, religion, and
philosophy, but center most often on sex differences in temperament, and
the problem facing all women in marriage: how to continue as individuals
and not become mere colorless stereotypes like most housewives of their
acquaintance. Kate is more drawn to Clara than to any other woman she
has met, dreads marriage for the girl, and yearns to take her along as
companion in the free and purposeful life she means to live. But she is
honest enough to admit that her own pattern is not Clara’s, and that to
bind her emotionally would only increase the groping girl’s confusion.
Her closest approach to physical expression occurs during one of their
customary walks together, when to drive some point home she stops and
takes Clara by the shoulders.
For a moment they stood thus close together, and a strange gentle and
yet hungry look came into Kate’s eyes. It lasted only a moment and
when it happened both women were somewhat embarrassed. Kate laughed
and taking hold of Clara’s arm pulled her along the sidewalk. “Let’s
walk like the devil,” she said, “come on, let’s get up some
speed.”[39]
On her return from college Clara becomes involved at once in the
business of getting married. She manages to resist her father’s pressure
toward a match profitable to him, but soon is plunged by circumstance
into marriage with the book’s main character—the union is emotionally a
premature step for both of them. Throughout this troubled period Clara
tests all that happens against her memory of Kate’s honesty and
gentleness, and on her wedding night itself, offended by the crude
“surprise party” sprung by the farm hands, she thinks of Kate, “who had
known how to love in silence.”
Clara put her hands to her eyes as though to shut out the scene in
the room. “If I could have been with Kate this evening I could have
come to a man believing in the possible sweetness of marriage,” she
thought.[40]
In the end, however, her marriage proves no worse than the average in
understanding and happiness. There have been few such sympathetic and
unexaggerated pictures of a variant woman in our literature; and none of
the others was written by a man.
The year’s total balance of sentiment was evened by James Gibbons
Huneker’s _Painted Veils_. This picture of musical and literary New York
was so continental in its cynical frankness that it was first issued
privately, though it soon found regular publication and is now available
in paper covers. As its epilogue states, its hero Ulick is a young man
whose favorite authors are Thomas à Kempis and Petronius, and whose
experience reflects this duality of taste. Heroine of the Petronian
chapters is a dynamic girl, Easter, who rises by her own efforts—in more
fields than one—to the status of world-famed prima donna. Early in her
career she considers sources of revenue for European study. To accept
support from her lover would give the man too much claim upon her. So
her thoughts turn to a fellow student of voice, a dilettante with whom
already “an intimacy had developed.”
She began thinking of Allie Wentworth and her set. Allie was an
heiress ... a masculine creature who affected a mannish cut of
clothes. She wore her hair closely cut and sported a walking stick.
Her stride and bearing intrigued [Easter], who had never seen that
sort before.... Allie was always hugging her when alone.[41]
Although Allie makes relatively few appearances, it is clear that she
financed and accompanied Easter for a number of years. It is also
implied that the cause of Easter’s duel with Mary Garden in Paris was
not, as the newspapers claimed, a man. “When Allie Wentworth, who was
Easter’s second, read this in _Le Soir_ she burst into laughter.” (When
the book appeared, gossip claimed that Mary Garden was the model for
Easter, and that this duel naming her as opposite was inserted for
camouflage.)
Upon Easter’s return to New York she says to Ulick, who is jealous of
Allie:
That girl helped me over some rough places in Europe. I shall never
give her up, never.... I love sumptuous characters. That’s why I love
to read _Mlle Maupin_. Also about that perverse puss Satin in _Nana_.
She reminds me of Allie and her pranks—simply adorable, I tell you!
Toujours fidèle.[42]
Later, Easter, now the pursuer because Ulick has turned cool, follows
him to the apartment of his current mistress, a vulgar little creature
who is transported at
being treated as a social equal by the greatest living lady opera
singer.... Emboldened by her success Dora persuaded Easter to go with
her into the dressing room, from which much later they emerged
wearing night draperies. A queer go, this sudden intimacy, ruminated
the young man.[43] [A _queer go_ is a bit of _double entendre_ worthy
of Spanish comedy.]
Finally, there is a party in Easter’s quarters including a handful of
lesbians, one or two smoking cigars, and Allie Wentworth, whose jealous
rage is so childish that she must be publicly reproved. With this
Zolaesque portrait of a lesbian woman who is unscrupulous, ruthless, and
promiscuous, there is no need for Huneker to articulate his opinion of
variance.
Few contrasts could be sharper than that between the continental
sophistication of Huneker and the midwestern simplicity of Helen R.
Hull. As early as 1918 she had published in _Century Magazine_ a
short-story (“The Fire”) of a small-town girl’s love for the middle-aged
spinster who gives her not only art lessons but her first contact with a
mellow and cultured personality—a benign reverse of the destructive
relationship in _Regiment of Women_. The innocent friendship is broken
off by the girl’s jealous mother on the grounds that “it’s not healthy
or natural for a girl to be hanging around an old maid.” Miss Hull’s
_Quest_ (1922) records the effect upon a growing girl of constant
tension between her parents. As precocious as Miss Dane’s Louise, Jean
falls in love at twelve with a high-school teacher, and simultaneously
forms a feverish alliance with a classmate considerably older and less
naïve who adores the same woman. Because the other girl is so much more
accessible than the teacher, it is the former who draws the mother’s
fire here, and she terminates the connection with a touch of melodrama
which leaves her daughter wary of variant emotion, in the same way that
the family situation has affected her with regard to heterosexual love.
Jean’s subsequent relations with men are inhibited, and her two or three
very warm friendships with girls and women during college and her early
years of teaching never approach the intensity of her first love.
In _Labyrinth_ (1923) Miss Hull attacked from a feminine angle the
problem posed in _The Great Adventure_: the frustration of a versatile
woman cut off from personal and intellectual contacts by housework and
the care of children. After a decade of marriage Catherine returns to a
challenging position which she held during World War I, though her
husband, a professor, disapproves of the venture. A series of domestic
crises plus the professor’s calculated move from New York to a small
midwestern campus finally thwart his wife’s efforts to escape unrelieved
domesticity. No variance complicates Catherine’s problems, but through
minor characters three other emotional adjustments are presented, one
involving two women.
The ménage of a professor whose wife is nothing but a _Hausfrau_ is dull
beyond endurance for all concerned. A woman physician and her husband
appear happy, but the man privately mourns his wife’s sacrifice of
maternity to her professional career. Catherine’s younger sister, a
social worker and unmarried, has broken away from her mother because “I
can’t be babied all my life—all sorts of infantile traits sticking to
me,” and is living with an older fellow-worker. When her sister advises
marriage, she retorts:
Husband! Me? I’m fixed for life right now.... Anybody needs someone
loving ’em, smoothing ’em down, setting ’em up, brushing off the dust
... I know a little thing or two about love. But [this way] you can
do that ... through and around whatever else you’re doing ... I know
lots of women who prefer to set up an establishment with another
woman. Then you go fifty-fifty on everything. Work and feeling and
all the rest, and no King waiting around for his humble servant.[44]
This is Miss Hull’s nearest allusion to physical intimacy, and while not
explicitly implied, neither is it repudiated. Sympathetically as the
variant pair are portrayed, they are no more romanticized than the
heterosexual couples. The older woman has been a fanatic in many causes
and a hunger-striker for suffrage, is moody and violent, and quarrels
with any critical male at sight. The younger is cool, practical, and a
bit hard. But the alliance apparently stands as good a chance of
survival as any in the book, and the author accepts it as a matter of
course. The only dissenting voice is the professor’s; he is bitter in
his animosity and contempt.
Publishing simultaneously with Miss Hull but more nearly in the vein of
Huneker was England’s Ronald Firbank, whose delightful absurdities began
to flower with _Vainglory_ in 1918. Firbank was particularly fascinated
by all aspects of homosexuality, and not one of his brief novels is
without some reference to it. To render these allusions delicate he
cultivated a frivolous obscurity, but it was no more designed to conceal
than are a dancer’s veils to hide the form beneath. Probably the most
significant in our field is _The Flower Beneath the Foot_ (1923).[45]
Its setting is a principality the approximate size and importance of
Monaco, with a court circle madly international. Here, as always, the
lesbian glimpses are oblique, but there are three of them. A visiting
Queen Thleeanouhee of the Land of Dates becomes so openly enamoured of
the blonde and bovine English ambassadress that the whole court fears an
“incident.” A lady in waiting in love with the Prince, after her romance
is shattered by his diplomatic marriage, flees to an adored Sister in
the convent where she was educated, dreaming of a return to earlier
delights. She is a bit chilled at being invited, as an adult now, to
wield a whip. And last, two of the queen’s ladies are becalmed for a
summer afternoon alone in a small sailboat. One (she reminds her
colleagues of Anthony Hamilton’s Miss Hobart) is a girl of “delicate
sexless silhouette, whose exotic attraction had aroused not a few
heart-burnings (and even feuds) among several of the _grandes dames_
about the court.”[46] Her companion is a ripe and languishing widow. The
exiled count upon whom they intended to call catches sight of their
motionless craft and trains his telescope upon it.
Oh poignant moments when the heart stops still! Not since the hours
of his exile had the count’s been so arrested. Caught in the scarlet
radiance of the afterglow the becalmed boat, for one brief and most
memorable second, was his to gaze on. In certain lands with what
diplomacy falls the night.... Those dimmer-and-dimmer twilights of
the North were unknown in Pisuerga. There Night pursues Day as if she
meant it. “Oh, why was I not _sooner_?” he murmured distractedly
aloud.[47]
Needless to say, no judgments are even hinted in Firbank’s tales. If his
paired ladies are rather ridiculous, so are his pretty gentlemen and his
mixed couples young and old, his kings and social climbers and mad old
ladies. Since all life is clearly so absurd, he seems to say, what to do
save sit back (with all possible grace) and titter at the spectacle?
Edmund Wilson’s diagnosis of Gertrude Stein might apply also in some
measure to Firbank, though he did not retreat so far into literary
obscurity.
Post-War Crescendo
These novels of Firbank’s, shot through with allusions to both male and
female homosexuality, remind one that two-thirds of the volumes of
Proust’s _Recherche du Temps Perdu_ had been published in France by
1923, and were, of course, known to many English and American writers
before being translated. It is easy to overrate the influence of Proust,
especially as both James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson had anticipated
him in “stream of consciousness” technique, the one with _Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man_ (1915), the other with _Pointed Roofs_
(1917). But in no one else of Proust’s quality was homosexuality so
integral a part of the narrative fabric. Translations of Proust’s most
significant volumes appeared in English between 1924 and 1930. It might
also be noted that Margueritte’s _La Garçonne_ was translated in 1923.
A second increasingly important influence was that of Freud, already
discernible in _Regiment of Women_ (though a good case could be made
there for Adlerian overtones also), and becoming more and more obvious
in other novels of the same calibre. A striking example was Harvey
O’Higgins’ “Story of Julie Cane,” which ran serially in _Harper’s
Magazine_ during 1924, and was as much a dramatized psychiatric
case-record as the earlier work of Dubut de LaForest in France. Its main
emotional themes are a virtually incestuous devotion between the male
protagonist and his mother, and the passion of a spinster school
mistress for the young heroine, her ward. The author, who delivers a
good many brief lectures along the way, labels this last emotion
thwarted maternity, but by the time Julie has reached late adolescence
he is describing Martha Perrin’s feeling for her as follows:
It had come to this, that Martha put herself to sleep at night
imagining that Julie was in her arms.... She kissed the undergarments
that were to touch the beloved young body; and when she had made a
dress she caressed it and hugged it to her breast so that it might by
proxy be her arms around Julie.... When she had Julie in the sewing
room to try on the clothes she had made, her hands shook, her heart
suffocated, and she turned away and wept while she fumbled over some
pretense of taking up a tuck in the back of the garment.... After
Julie had gone she sat with her face in her hands, her cheeks burning
against her cold fingers, her mouth aching, seeing still the dimples
in Julie’s shoulders, kissing them in her imagination and crying
weakly, starved.[48]
Few passages have been so explicit since Sappho’s famous Ode, which was
less extended.
When Julie is about to leave for college, Martha suffers complete
collapse, one symptom of her illness being that, though starving, she
cannot touch food. A new physician, in the act of taking her pulse as
Julie enters the room, at once prescribes Julie as nurse. During the
period of sickroom intimacy the two fall into each others’ arms and have
some weeks “as happy as a honeymoon,” though O’Higgins is careful to
repeat that the rapture is essentially that of mother and daughter. If
the sensations described above are offered as maternal, one can only say
that the author was convinced of an incestuous element in all
parent-child relationships. One rather remarkable aspect of the whole is
that though patently psychiatric, the book does not express that
condemnation of the emotions described which was common to later
disciples of Freud. Indeed, a physician encourages the intimacy of Julie
and Martha, as did Violet Ashwin’s father in _Lady of Leisure_, though,
of course, without advocating lesbian activity. In the situation as
presented by O’Higgins, however, some physical release would have been
inevitable.
In the same year there appeared in England a much subtler treatment of
variance in Radclyffe Hall’s early novel _The Unlit Lamp_. Unlike her
better known _Well of Loneliness_, this narrative relegates love between
women to secondary importance, its focus being the forced martyrdom of
unmarried daughters in the name of filial duty. Joan Ogden is the one
competent and unselfish member of a neurotic family bent on maintaining
social position in their country village. Elizabeth Rodney, a dozen
years older, has won a degree from Cambridge before coming, under
pressure, to keep house for a bachelor brother in the same community.
Her one interest is tutoring Joan, whom she hopes to see achieve a
college education and some sort of life beyond small-town domesticity.
Mrs. Ogden believes herself bent upon a successful marriage for her
daughter, but her actual purpose is to hold her beloved child at any
cost; her chief weapon is hypochondria. Joan wants to become a doctor,
and Elizabeth offers to provide joint living quarters in Cambridge and
to help finance the medical course, but the two girls’ long struggle
ends with the mother victorious. Elizabeth, unable to endure repeated
frustration, leaves the town, eventually marries, and settles in South
Africa, refusing to return or to communicate with Joan.
Beneath this drama of parental tyranny runs a strong current of variant
emotion. Mrs. Ogden is fragile, jealous, hysterical and
over-demonstrative. Both younger women are unfeminine in appearance,
cool and fearless in temperament, both affect a masculine simplicity in
dress, and Joan crops her hair decades before fashion sanctions that
mode. Elizabeth has a masculine distaste for easy caresses and
meticulously conceals the depth of her feeling, so that Joan’s shy
reciprocal emotion never finds outlet (the “unlit lamp” is the passion
Elizabeth refuses to set alight). The basic situation, then, is a
variant triangle in which the clinging and helpless mother wins against
a rival who will employ none of the tactics of seduction, and the result
is the virtual ruin of both girls’ lives. There are intimations here of
what was to become open championship of lesbian love four years later in
_Well of Loneliness_. But they are only implicit.
Also in 1924 Arnold Bennett contributed a short draught of his cool
common sense in _Elsie and the Child_. With customary realism and irony
he presents a London physician’s household centered about Miss Eva, aged
twelve, an only child. The doctor, busy day and night earning every
advantage for his daughter, sees little of her. His wife is a domestic
perfectionist and strict disciplinarian. The emotional center of the
child’s life is Elsie, the wholesome but rather dull servant who was
hired originally because Eva (like Metta in _The Scorpion_) took an
instant fancy to her. Elsie is all heart, quick only in her intuitions,
humbly devoted to the aristocratic young mistress whose care falls
largely upon her. A crisis is precipitated when the parents, aware of
their daughter’s too-great dependence upon Elsie, attempt to send the
girl to boarding school. She is acquainted with the headmistress, a
hearty tweedy friend of her mother’s, quite the type to captivate some
schoolgirls, but not Eva. Having shot up like a weed to Elsie’s
considerable stature, the child is all nerves, and when crossed by her
mother she breaks out with the hysterical declaration that it is not her
parents but Elsie whom she loves and from whom she will not be parted.
Elsie realizes at once that the outcome will be the dismissal of her and
her husband. The latter, a victim of shell shock in World War I, is a
bemused introvert given to dangerous fits of temper. It is he who turns
upon Eva with the charge that her feeling for his wife is not love,
since she does not care if her stubborn whim brings ruin on Elsie and
himself. Made aware for the first time of the problems of others, the
girl gives in and goes off to school. Bennett contrives with great skill
to imply strong emotional undercurrents in Eva’s childish demands for
personal service and caresses, and in Elsie’s doting ministrations. He
also makes clear that the husband’s violence is actually aroused not by
fear of losing his place but by jealousy, though none of the three
persons involved are aware of this.
Concerning as it does a girl of twelve, this story might not be classed
as variant by psychologists, but one cannot help feeling that Bennett
contributed it to the rapidly swelling count of variant fiction as
testimony to his own stand in the matter. Despite Eva’s unusual height
and her susceptibility to Elsie’s spontaneous warmth, she is not
conceived as a prospective homosexual. Stimulated one summer night by
watching a sophisticated garden party from her window, she slips down to
the servants’ quarters to practice a nascent coquetry on Joe as well as
Elsie. There could hardly be a clearer statement of Bennett’s opinion
that variant emotion is as natural to puberty as growing pains,
particularly where maternal affection is wanting, but that its natural
span runs out with early adolescence.
In 1925 four novels dealing with variance reached the English reading
public—the translation of Rolland’s _Annette and Sylvie_ and Virginia
Woolf’s _Mrs. Dalloway_, both treating it briefly and with sympathy,
Sherwood Anderson’s _Dark Laughter_, touching upon it even more casually
and with disfavor, and Naomi Royde-Smith’s _Tortoiseshell Cat_, devoted
wholly to the theme and wholly condemnatory. Rolland’s lesbian interlude
between the half-sisters Rivière has already been described. Anderson’s
heroine, a married woman on the verge of taking a lover, recalls
privately her first trip abroad under the guidance of a couple whose
sophistication she did not suspect until on shipboard. The woman had
made skillfully veiled lesbian advances which she recognized for what
they were and resisted with equal skill. Anderson clearly condemns this
deliberate attempt at seduction, but no more severely than he condemns
the woman’s ruses to snare wealthy subjects for her portrait-painting
husband. The episode is slighter than the one in _Poor White_ and of
little weight in its chief actor’s life.
Mrs. Woolf’s passages are much more subtle, though most of them, like
Anderson’s, are incorporated in Clarissa Dalloway’s reminiscences of her
girlhood. Even preliminary to these, however, we learn that Mrs.
Dalloway is happy that her husband insists on her sleeping in a separate
room after an illness.
She could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which
clung to her like a sheet; ... through some contraction of this cold
spirit she had failed him again and again. She could see what she
lacked.... It was something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled
the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For _that_
she could dimly perceive. She resented it, had a scruple picked up
Heaven knows where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is
invariably wise); yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the
charm of a woman, not a girl ... like a faint scent or a violin next
door. She did undoubtedly feel then what men felt. It was a sudden
revelation which one tried to check and then yielded to, and felt the
world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some
pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured
with an extraordinary alleviation.[49]
Her first experience of this sort came to her in her late teens or early
twenties in connection with the delightful madcap Sally Seton.
Had that not after all been love?... At some party she had a distinct
recollection of saying to the man she was with, “Who is _that_?” And
all that evening she could not take her eyes off Sally.... The
strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her
feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling for a man. It was
protective on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league
together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them
(they always spoke of marriage as a catastrophe), which led to this
chivalry.... She could remember going cold with excitement, and doing
her hair in a kind of ecstasy ... and dressing and going downstairs,
feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were now to die ’twere now to
be most happy.” That was her feeling—all because she was coming down
to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!
[Sally] stood by the fireplace talking, in that beautiful voice which
made everything she said sound like a caress ... when suddenly she
said, “What a shame to sit indoors!” and they all went out on to the
terrace and walked up and down. She and Sally fell a little behind.
Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone
urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on
the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down![50]
When the men of the party (one of them in love with her) return and make
casual, half-teasing conversation,
It was like running one’s face against a granite wall in the
darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible. Not for herself. She felt
only how Sally was being mauled already, maltreated; she felt his
hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break their
companionship. “Oh this horror!” she said to herself, as if she had
known all along that something would interrupt, would embitter her
moment of happiness.[51]
There is no further reference in the novel to Sally, and Clarissa
Dalloway lives on for us into her mid-fifties, wife and mother, never
again in such intimate touch with life, unless it is in her relation to
her daughter. For although above she has said that the charm of a girl
never moves her, her love for the eighteen-year-old Elizabeth is the
most vital element in her current existence. The girl is undergoing a
spell of inexplicable devotion to a shabby, unkempt, embittered woman
tutor, for whom Mrs. Dalloway finds it difficult to repress a burning
hatred, and one realizes that this hatred is but the obverse of the
emotion she will not recognize for the beautiful daughter so different
from herself and so aloof.
The reader will remember that in the other strand of the dual narrative
Septimus Smith, shell-shock case from World War I, fails to regain his
mental balance or to respond to his devoted wife because he cannot admit
to consciousness the love he felt for a fellow-officer who was killed.
In her preface, the author says that Smith is intended to be Clarissa
Dalloway’s “double,” and that in its first conception the story, lacking
him, ended with Mrs. Dalloway’s death. It would seem that her
contribution here to the problem of variance is the possibility of its
being a happy experience where innocence is easy—as for a woman; but for
a man too scrupulous to accept the almost inevitable outcome in the
male, it may be fatal.
It is a radical step from _Mrs. Dalloway_ to the forthright
_Tortoiseshell Cat_, in which a lesbian woman plays a sinister part. The
central figure, a motherless girl in her late twenties, is still a
pristine innocent, thanks to her exclusive devotion to a scholarly
father lost a short time before. Gillian is baffled by her worldly-wise
younger sister’s hold upon men, and by the quixotic devotion of a girl
who leaves her private school in protest when Gillian (a teacher there)
is dismissed. It is this innocence which cost her her teaching
position—she chose French poetry to read aloud on the basis of its
beauty alone, genuinely unaware of its sexual connotations—and presently
it leads her into even more serious danger.
After her sister’s marriage, left alone in a dreary residence club and
bored with a part-time secretaryship, she meets a fellow resident, half
American and completely bohemian and fascinating. The initial encounter
is significant:
But as V.V. came with a swift steady stride, the free rapid movement
of a woman who had been much with horses, who had ridden from
childhood, Gillian knew, with a thrill of recognition so strange, so
new to her experience that the shock of it took away all sense of
every other consideration, that she beheld in the flesh the very
image of a perfection wrought by her own imaginings in the secret
places of her dreaming mind. This was not a beautiful creature for
all the world to gape at, it was the figure—unique of its kind—for
which the shrine of her spirit had stood empty and waiting until
now.[52]
A definitely masculine figure, as the passage goes on to emphasize, and
a masterly analysis of romantic love-at-first-sight. The woman’s voice
is flat and unlovely, but Gillian, for all her musical ear, is too
enthralled to care. All that she is aware of for some time are the
lavish personal ministrations and caresses with which she is showered.
She learns without grasping the implications that V.V. has lived with a
long succession of women, many of them minor actresses. Early in her
life there was one, mentioned seldom and cryptically, on whose account
she was evidently disowned by her family and incurred debts not yet
paid.
Before long, Gillian’s emotional preoccupation evokes remonstrance from
her sister, the once-adoring student, and the latter’s recently acquired
sculptor-husband; but to her their warnings are absurd. The sculptor
lived before his marriage with a faunlike musician whom he loved and
protected from fortune-hunting women. This elfin Heinrich is as
bewitched as Gillian by V.V.’s physical beauty, and as V.V. has an eye
to the main chance, she inveigles him into an engagement. As soon as he
becomes importunate and “boring,” however, instinct conquers interest
and she shakes him off, clinching the matter one evening by refusing an
invitation because she must bathe Gillian and put her to bed. With a
stolen key, V.V. manages to enter the apartment where Gillian is
actually bathing in a meager British “portable” before an open fire, and
attempts to embrace her. Gillian, though excited by the caresses, fights
her off in sudden horrified realization of what their long ambiguous
dalliance has been leading to. For the first time in her life she
comprehends the passion she has observed in others, and her revulsion is
violent. Heinrich, however, reads quite another meaning into the
shadow-struggle he sees silhouetted on her drawn blind, and goes home to
shoot himself.
Gillian falls gravely ill from shock, but finally, safe in her sister’s
comfortable home, regains her balance.
The only person who had escaped unhurt was V.V. But she was unhurt
because long ago she had been so maimed, her soul had been so warped
and stunted by the influence she could still recall though she was
too vitiated to resent it, that nothing now would make very much
difference. V.V. had gone her own way and Gillian could not follow
her. She had taken the first steps on the road down which V.V. was
disappearing, and had come back to the place where it started. And
now that road was closed.[53]
However marred it is by such expository passages and by its sudden
melodramatic suicide, the story carries more conviction than _Regiment
of Women_ through coming to grips with the physical issue and through
its more sympathetic presentation of the lesbian woman.
* * * * *
In 1926, drama for the first time took precedence over fiction, of which
the year’s sole example was the translation of Louis Couperus’s _The
Comedians_. This historical novel laid in the reign of Domitian includes
a pair of lesbians, the emperor’s cousin and his wife’s niece, who
frequent the inns of Rome disguised respectively as gladiator and street
wench. Life at court is such a nightmare of intrigue and surveillance
that only their mutual passion and their secret adventures make
existence tolerable. The “gladiator” is shortly killed in a street
brawl, and the other girl, though her interests have seemed bisexual,
fades into melancholia.
As to the theatre, the international success of Bourdet’s _La
Prisonnière_ has already been cited. Its New York run as _The Captive_
began in September, and its drawing power very likely led to the
presentation of two related plays later in the season. Thomas Hurlbut’s
lesbian _Hymn to Venus_ opened in Atlantic City in late November and was
scheduled for further trial in Chicago before appearing on Broadway. Its
initial performance rated a single brief review in the _New York
Times_,[54] chilly and vague, saying of the play only that its theme was
that of _The Captive_ and that it ended with a suicide. There was no
indication whether the treatment was sympathetic or otherwise, and the
text of the play has not been available. It was withdrawn after a second
performance and reached neither Chicago nor New York.
The second effort, _The Drag_ by one “Jane Mast,” made its debut in
Boston in February 1927 with Mae West among the cast. Because, as the
title indicates, it dealt with the stringently tabooed subject of male
homosexuality, it was at once suppressed, and sufficient adverse
sentiment was aroused to bring about the closing of _The Captive_ after
a successful run of five months,[55] especially interesting in view of
the strong condemnation of lesbianism in the French play. This official
action seems to have had only local effects, for no difficulties
attended the publication in England of the translation of Lacretelle’s
_La Bonifas_, or of Rosamund Lehmann’s _Dusty Answer_, in which the
middle section is a study of variance. There were also oblique variant
allusions in Mrs. Woolf’s _To the Lighthouse_ (1927).
Lacretelle’s stout championship of Marie Bonifas needs no further
comment. _To the Lighthouse_ was Mrs. Woolf’s most subtle study of the
contrast between masculine and feminine personality. Here Mrs. Ramsey
personifies the selfless unifying influence of woman’s intuition in her
dealings with an intellectual husband, a diverse brood of six children,
and a swarm of family friends of all ages and temperaments. The
individual most devoted to her is an artist of thirty-three, who “with
her little Chinese eyes and puckered up face ... would never marry....
She was an independent little creature.”[56] With masculine honesty Lily
Briscoe recognizes that she is not so much in love with Mrs. Ramsey as
with the mysterious force, intuitive and emotional, which she radiates
and which Lily herself must always lack. And so she masters her own
emotions in moments when Mrs. Ramsey is maternally tender, and quivers
with uncontrollable laughter at the older woman’s failure to understand
the situation when she urges marriage upon her. Still, nearly a decade
after Mrs. Ramsey’s death, she weeps for her loss when she returns to
paint again at the site of their earlier association, “feeling the old
horror come back—to want and want and not to have.”[57]
Miss Lehmann’s _Dusty Answer_, like many first novels written before
their authors are wholly mature, was autobiographical in structure,
following its heroine from childhood to her early twenties. Daughter of
a scholarly father who tutors her at home and a frivolous mother who
lives much abroad, Judith grows up in virtual solitude, her only
acquaintances a group of children who occasionally visit an adjoining
country house. These exotic cousins, four boys and a girl, fascinate the
lonely child, who looks forward to their infrequent appearances and does
her best to achieve some personal relation with one or the other, but
they continually elude her. The object of her secret first love is
Roddy, most elusive of all; at the moment when some mutual spark seems
about to leap between them, his friend Tony comes for a weekend, a
jealous effeminate boy who at once absorbs Roddy completely.
During Judith’s course at Cambridge she and a very beautiful classmate
are mutually attracted and spend two rapturous but innocent years
scarcely out of one another’s sight. When Judith returns after her last
“long vac,” however, she senses a profound change in her friend, who
spent her own free time in residence making up delinquencies. From a
gossiping classmate Judith learns that Jennifer had a guest for much of
the period, and that the two indulged in “wrestling matches” on the lawn
which many of the girls found in doubtful taste. This dark Geraldine, a
deep-voiced older woman of powerful physique and personality, presently
reappears. Though Judith pointedly avoids the pair, Geraldine seeks her
out and commands her to “let Jennifer alone,” since the latter is
“beginning to find herself” and Geraldine plans to take her abroad. This
scene is a triumph of subtlety; presented from the viewpoint of the
innocent Judith, it still conveys the exact nature of Geraldine’s
feeling for and hold upon Jennifer. Judith withdraws completely, leaving
Jennifer so torn between her old love and her new passion that even
after Geraldine’s departure she cannot regain nervous stability, and is
forced to leave college.
After a melancholy last term, Judith goes home to a single passionate
summer night with Roddy, but upon discovering that what to her was a
pledge of lasting love was to him but a casual episode, she breaks with
him forever. In the course of the next year or so she wins from each of
the remaining cousins just such personal responses as she once craved,
but these are now empty. Her only vivid moment comes with a letter from
Jennifer, incoherently half-explaining their broken friendship (which
Judith has long since comprehended) and begging for a meeting in
Cambridge. But when Judith keeps the appointment, Jennifer fails either
to appear or to send a message, and the final flick of irony is a
distant sight of Roddy and his friend Tony strolling past in intimate
absorption. While Miss Lehmann takes artistic pains to point no moral,
first Roddy’s and then Judith’s absorption in a variant friendship seem
deterrents to happy emotional resolution through other channels.
First Peak: 1928
In contrast to the two preceding years, 1928 offered a harvest as rich
and varied as any single season until then: Radclyffe’s Hall’s _Well of
Loneliness_, Compton Mackenzie’s _Extraordinary Women_, Elizabeth
Bowen’s _The Hotel_, and Virginia Woolf’s _Orlando_. Not foremost in
literary rank but certainly best known is _The Well of Loneliness_, for
its censorship became a _cause célèbre_ in the publishing world. Issued
in January by the solidly established firm of Jonathan Cape, with an
introduction by Havelock Ellis, the work was reviewed favorably in
reputable literary periodicals. Shortly, however, it was attacked in the
sensational London newspaper, _The Express_, with the result that it was
banned in England and its publisher sued. Forty-five leading British
authors, from Lascelles Abercrombie and Arnold Bennett to Leonard and
Virginia Woolf, signed a letter of indignant protest, and a half dozen
physicians and legal authorities volunteered to testify at the
publisher’s trial, but their testimony was not allowed.[58] The reason
for its condemnation while so many other variant novels were passed
without action was its explicit defense of lesbian experience.
Although for a decade or so the novel has been freely available in
inexpensive editions, a brief summary may be offered. Stephen Gordon,
only child of solid county parents whose dearest desire is a son,
receives the name and upbringing that would have been his. From infancy
she is the image of her father, masculine in build, mannerisms,
abilities and tastes. At eight she experiences unmistakable passion for
a housemaid; throughout adolescence she despises feminine garments and
amusements; in her late teens she rejects a first suitor, long her good
friend, whose sudden amorousness seems to her unnatural. The death of
her father leaves her without an ally and bitterly solitary. At twenty
she becomes infatuated with a new neighbor’s wife, a former American
chorus girl, who plays the coquette and accepts lavish gifts but evades
caresses by pleading her husband’s jealousy. Stephen’s discovery that a
male rival has been successful drives her to frenzy, and the American,
fearful that the girl may inform her husband of her infidelity,
forestalls the possibility by showing him Stephen’s last letter. This
outpouring of naked passion, at once passed on to her mother, leads to
Stephen’s being turned out of her home and virtually driven from
England. Soon she achieves a literary reputation of sorts, but her lack
of passionate experience proves an artistic handicap. In London and
Paris she meets both male and female homosexuals but shuns them, hating
their immediate interest in her because she hates her own “difference”
and wants only to be accepted as a normal human being.
Then World War I gives her, along with others of her sort, the chance to
do a man’s job in an ambulance unit. She falls deeply in love with a
younger co-worker, innocent and feminine, whom she struggles to protect
from danger. After their release by the armistice, a holiday together
forces both to admit the nature of their love—an interlude less
specifically detailed than Lawrence’s lesbian passage in _The Rainbow_,
but, of course, presented with complete sympathy. Now united, the two
girls attempt to make a life for themselves in Paris, but neither finds
tolerable the bohemian existence which is open to them, and both suffer
under the slights which exclude them from conventional society.
Eventually, Stephen’s early suitor seeks them out and falls in love with
Mary, who responds but will not consider disloyalty to Stephen. The
latter, realizing that Mary can never be happy with her outside the
social pale, makes the dramatic gesture of pretending intimacy with a
distinguished lesbian she has known superficially for years. She
achieves her purpose—Mary accepts the man, and Stephen is left once more
to loneliness.
The story is more engrossing than _The Unlit Lamp_ because of swifter
pace and greater intensity, but inferior in literary art, since it is
often over-emotional and occasionally lapses into bald special pleading.
Moreover, there is a blur in the explanation of Stephen’s variance.
Emphasis on her physical masculinity indicates hereditary causes, as
does her father’s early recognition of her anomaly. But his consequent
indulgence of her proclivities, and the stress laid on both parents’
desire for a male child, hint at belief in prenatal as well as childhood
conditioning. Miss Hall’s evident purpose was to absolve Stephen of the
slightest responsibility for her temperament, and inevitably one is
reminded of Lacretelle’s _Marie Bonifas_, translated in the preceding
year but probably known to Miss Hall in French upon its appearance in
1925. The two differ in that Lacretelle lays Freudian stress on negative
childhood conditioning, while Miss Hall’s comparative hereditary
emphasis marks her a disciple of the older school of Ellis and
Hirschfeld. Despite its shortcomings, _The Well of Loneliness_ made a
heroic gesture for tolerance of lesbian relations among persons of
integrity, and the author had the satisfaction before her death of
seeing it widely accepted.
Compton Mackenzie entered the variant lists armed with gentle satire.
_Extraordinary Women_, like Norman Douglas’s _South Wind_ to which its
foreword pays respect, is laid on the island of Capri, here called
Sirene. It includes almost as many lesbian individuals as Peladan’s _La
Gynandre_ of forty years earlier, and considering its author’s Catholic
affiliation, it may have been written with some similar, though milder,
intent. Every nationality is represented and every age, from Lulu de
Randan, sent vacationing with her governess to break off a flirtation
with a tradesman’s son, to a fading Roman wife given to tearful
sentimentality over the boyish young beauty she adores. Roughly there
are two generations of lesbian women, among the older a poet who poses
as a modern Sappho, a tailored Englishwoman who has bred bulldogs and
supported _boxeuses_ in Paris for a few decades, and Lulu’s Anglo-French
mother. The younger group includes a stormy and self-defeating Greek
concert pianist, an American hypochondriac, millionaire’s daughter, and
the picturesque and irresistible poseuse, Rosalba Donsante, child of the
third of her Swiss mother’s five international marriages. What plot
there is centers about Rosalba and Aurora Freemantle, the Englishwoman,
who finds the girl an incarnation of the boyish ideal she has celebrated
in her lesbian verse for years. “Rory,” dreaming of permanence at last,
remodels a villa halfway up to Anasirene at reckless expense, but her
beloved is of no mind to be caged there, and leads practically every
woman in the cast a hectic chase before the curtain falls upon her
unheralded departure in pursuit of a last inamorata, leaving poor Rory
in tears in her empty paradise.
The tale offers a potpourri of sophisticated intrigue fertilized by
idleness and wealth. Its various types are superficially convincing
enough, but they are largely unaccounted for beyond the influence of
their frivolous environment. Many of the older women have been married
at least once, and even young Lulu has narrowly missed a heterosexual
entanglement before succumbing to Rosalba’s glamorous seduction. Few men
enter upon the scene save hotel servants and one or two twittering
homosexuals and eccentrics. Rory alone (physically as masculine as
Stephen Gordon) is treated with some gentleness as a victim of
hereditary forces, although even she is more ridiculous than appealing,
and the total effect of the novel is one of cool detachment, the report
of a witty and superior observer.
Among these outspoken narratives Miss Bowen’s quiet social comedy, _The
Hotel_, is conspicuous for a sexual reticence as absolute as any before
1915. The hotel of her title, a conservative Riviera establishment
frequented by professors, clergymen, retired officers and their
families, provides a lively background for her understated central
drama. In this, the actors are two: a British girl of twenty and a
cosmopolitan widow twice her age with a son at school in Germany. (The
action antedates World War I.) Sydney is ostensibly recuperating from
overstudy for a recent university degree, and acting as companion to a
married cousin. Actually, as she is wretchedly aware, her relatives have
financed her holiday in the expectation of her capturing a husband. But
Sydney is wholly absorbed in Mrs. Kerr. This exquisite worldling, of
whom the other guests stand a bit in awe, accepts the girl’s small
services and gifts with just enough warmth to keep her enslaved and the
onlookers socially envious. Malicious gossip naturally flourishes over
the bridge tables, and though it stops just short of slander, Sydney
finds the association all in all more wearing than rewarding.
When the son arrives on holiday it is clear that he is held captive on a
similar emotional leash, and Sydney’s intelligence recognizes that their
charmer is playing one against the other and battening on their mutual
jealousy. But not until, piqued at a black mood of Sydney’s, Mrs. Kerr
accuses her of playing for a passionate response, and voices disdain for
“emotions so unbalanced,” is she moved to rebellion. The injustice of
the charge, when she has all but broken under the strain of emotional
control, finally dissolves the spell. On the rebound Sydney tries being
engaged to an estimable but rather colorless clergyman, but Mrs. Kerr’s
brilliant subtlety has spoiled her for finding happiness in a
commonplace association. Her final saddened conclusion is that the whole
Hotel interlude has been a kind of lotus-eater’s dream bred of idleness
in an artificial environment, and her only hope is that all its cloying
preoccupations will fade with return to “reality” in England.
This study of heartless egotism may owe something to _Regiment of
Women_, but it achieves the unity and detachment which Miss Dane’s study
lacked. The problem here is simpler, of course; Mrs. Kerr’s beauty and
assurance lead to conquest without effort, and aside from her vanity her
own emotions are little involved. Of the pair, then, Sydney alone is
variant, a telling example of that protracted adolescence which is
common among the intellectually precocious. Her attaining adult
perspective without benefit of a happy heterosexual romance marks Miss
Bowen’s independence of current Freudian theory, a point of artistry in
her favor. Another is her humorous vignette of a pair of elderly
spinsters whose one-time variant devotion has withered into querulous
possessiveness. All in all, pale aquarelle though _The Hotel_ is among
the year’s more positive canvases, its quiet statement carries
authority.
Any cursory treatment of Mrs. Woolf’s _Orlando_ must do it grave
injustice, but here the emotional thread must be drawn from the rich
fabric and examined as nearly as may be alone. No one yet has analyzed
_Orlando_ fully, and such critics as have not slighted it in discussing
Mrs. Woolf’s work have tended to find it uneven and confusing. Complex
it is indeed, but a part of the critical confusion has come from failure
or refusal to recognize as perhaps its main theme the relation of
intersexual traits to creative ability. It attempts in fact to sustain
four parallel motifs. The most obvious is the biography of a timeless
individual who enters as a boy of sixteen acquainted with Shakespeare
and Queen Elizabeth, and is still living in October 1928 as an English
woman of thirty-six. A second is the changing social roles of the two
sexes from century to century and their consequently shifting relations
to one another. A third is the corresponding fluctuation—perhaps
resultant, perhaps only concomitant—in the emotional “Spirit of the Age”
in English literature. This is least coherently traced and may be
ignored here. The fourth and most cryptic is a parallel between the
history of Orlando and the literary and perhaps personal biography of
Mrs. Woolf’s colleague and friend, Victoria Sackville-West, more than
one of whose photographs illustrate Orlando’s later career, and whose
family estate of Knole is clearly pictured in the descriptions of
Orlando’s ancestral house. (For judicious comment on this last motif and
on Mrs. Woolf’s other variant references, the reader is referred to
David Daiches’s laudatory study of her work published in 1942.[59])
In the sixteenth century Orlando is a budding poetic dramatist (as was
Thomas Sackville, of the family living even then at Knole). As a
debonair boy he lives the sexual life of a lusty age, and is far from
innocent when in his late teens profound passion overtakes him. With a
Russian girl-princess, niece of the ambassador from St. Petersburg, he
lives out a burning romance worthy of the period, which ends tragically
when Sasha sails for home without adieu. The Russian girl is no innocent
either; she is secretive, older than he emotionally, though younger in
years; he suspects her of dalliance with a muscovite sailor and even,
after her desertion, of being the ambassador’s mistress rather than his
niece. Though anything but masculine, she is robust and by spells cruel
in temperament; she wears Russian trousers against the cold, and skates,
rides and loves with the zest and endurance of another boy. But her
desertion has a woman’s cruelty, and it throws Orlando presently into a
state of delayed shock which produces a seven-day trance.
He emerges a melancholy seventeenth-century philosophic poet, ridden by
a passion for fame. Soon he is stalked by a ridiculous and masculine
Roumanian bluestocking who—perhaps because she is six-feet-two—plays the
man’s role in the game of hearts. For a moment “Orlando heard ... far
off the beating of love’s wings.” But at the point of becoming ensnared,
suddenly “it was Lust the vulture, not Love the bird of paradise, that
flopped foully and disgustingly upon his shoulders. Hence he
ran....”[60]
He escapes by accepting a diplomatic post in Constantinople, where he
achieves brilliant success until a local uprising terminates his
mission. He lives in the ornate luxury befitting an emissary of Charles
II to the Sultan, and becomes “the adored of many women and some men,”
but only from a distance. In private he is still melancholy, and escapes
to write poetry in the hills by day, by night to roam the city streets,
where he meets a gypsy dancer, Pepita. With her he contracts a marriage
of sorts and, rumor hints, has a trio of offspring. This episode is
sketched so briefly that one can only guess at its significance. It
cannot well have repeated the early romance with Sasha, since she was a
court lady of brilliant culture and Pepita is a daughter of the streets.
But neither can it have echoed the passage with the Archduchess Harriet.
Honest passion for an illiterate woman does not inspire the
self-loathing bred of an itch for an otherwise hateful social and
intellectual peer. Whatever it meant to Orlando, after the uprising ends
his official services, he bestows a farewell embrace upon the gypsy and
falls into his second seven-day trance. It may be that this one
registered inability to endure an emotional impasse any longer.
From it he awakes a woman, but Mrs. Woolf lays stress on the fact that
the change is merely one of physical sex and not at all of temperament.
The sound of trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No
human being since the world began has ever looked more ravishing. His
form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace.[61]
With the gypsies (not apparently Pepita’s clan) to whom Orlando escapes,
she still lives a man’s life, for among nomads, temperament and daily
duties are much the same in both sexes. After some seasons of successful
adaptation to this barbaric simplicity, nostalgia for England and for
literary pursuits turns Orlando toward home. And now she faces the
difficult business of learning to act the lady. High comedy attends her
efforts, particularly in connection with a renewed pursuit by her former
_bête noire_, the bluestocking, who now through a transformation
corresponding to her own is an absurd and lachrymose Roumanian nobleman.
Amid the relaxed proprieties of the eighteenth century, Orlando often
roams London in man’s dress, more at home in the honest company of
daughters of joy than in the artificial salons of her peers.
There were many stories told at the time, as, that she fought a duel,
served on one of the King’s ships as a captain, was seen to dance
naked on a balcony, and fled with a certain lady to the Low Countries
where the lady’s husband followed them.... She enjoyed the love of
both sexes ... for her sex changed far more frequently than those who
have worn only one set of clothing can conceive.[62]
The neatness with which fantasy here dodges any scandalous implications
may well account for the difficult _tour de force_ which the whole
volume is.
With the advent of Queen Victoria, a depressing social change occurs:
humankind is rigorously divided into Men, whose role is to lead,
protect, support; and Women, who must submit, be timorous, and cling.
The results, both personal and literary, Mrs. Woolf plainly considers
lamentable. Orlando’s history turns emotionally barren and housewifely,
and neither reading nor writing afford her any relief. Though she
suffers from personal loneliness and social disapprobation, she refuses
to consider marriage under such a regime. She waits instead for the
twentieth century:
There was something definite and distinct about the age, which
reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that there was a
distinction, a desperation....[63]
In this century she meets a man with the spirit of a poet—he knows
Shelley by heart—but who has also been “a soldier and a sailor and ...
explored the east.” Mutual love is instantaneous, and complete union
follows swiftly upon the intuitive moment when both cry out together:
“You’re a woman, Shel!” “You’re a man, Orlando!”
For each was so surprised at the quickness of the other’s sympathy,
and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as
tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as
a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.[64]
The natural and happy results are marriage and a son, but not a
Victorian ménage. “Shel” is gone the greater part of the time on his
adventurous voyages, and Orlando is free to “write and write and write”
and win literary prizes.
Clearly Mrs. Woolf felt that to be an integrated, and above all, a
creative personality, one needs freedom from the Procrustes’ bed of sex.
She was not preaching license in the name of some bohemian deity of
Bloomsbury or Greenwich Village. She was begging psychological
_Lebensraum_ for the creative artist. Nevertheless, the total sum of
Orlando’s experience is, beyond question, bisexual.
Among these four novels of 1928, Mackenzie’s satire was mild rather than
sharp; Miss Bowen pictured variance as an unhappy state but treated her
variant girl with entire sympathy; and Mrs. Woolf pled as it were in the
abstract, Miss Hall in passionate particular, for the variant, even the
lesbian woman of personal integrity. The annual balance was, therefore,
on the whole positive, and it is clear that the verdict early in the
year against _Well of Loneliness_ restrained British publishers only
from issuing lesbian propaganda.
CHAPTER X.
FICTION IN ENGLISH (continued)
Sequel to Censorship
Just how specifically the skirmish of censorship and its attendant
publicity affected subsequent work is difficult to say. The next few
years saw in print nothing more outspoken than translations of
Rachilde’s _Monsieur Vénus_ and Colette’s _Claudine at School_. This can
probably be attributed to caution on the part of both publishers and
authors. That antagonistic voices, first largely women’s and then men’s,
swelled into a full chorus by 1933, might similarly seem a protracted
echo of official disapproval. On the other hand, some tolerant
treatments of variance were finding publication, and in 1934 it was
these which constituted eight out of that year’s ten offerings. As to
how much the rapidly augmenting flood—a total of over thirty variant
titles in six years—was attributable to 1928’s focusing of attention on
the controversial subject, how much merely to an inevitably growing
preoccupation with it, no armchair theorizing can safely decide. But
that it owed something to the former seems beyond question.
Among this six-years’ crop a handful of more or less negative
contributions, all by American women, probably stemmed from Miss
Lehmann’s _Dusty Answer_, whatever impetus they gained from later
developments. All were novels of boarding school or women’s college
life, all autobiographical in pattern, and none were confined to variant
experience. In the first, Wanda Fraiken Neff’s _We Sing Diana_, the
variant passages would seem a deliberate counterattack upon _Well of
Loneliness_ except that the two appeared almost simultaneously in 1928.
Mrs. Neff’s heroine, an orphan brought up by a passionless spinster, is
already conditioned against heterosexual romance by her rearing and
adolescent experiences before reaching college. There, during her
freshman year, Nora is an inadvertent witness of an emotional scene
between two brilliant and respected upperclassmen.
She was conscious of the drooping narrowness of Gwendolyn’s
shoulders, the slenderness of her neck, as she threw herself against
Minna’s bulky frame.... Nora had a sick memory of the fungi she had
studied in botany, the rank growth, forms of life springing up in
unhealthy places, feeding on rot....[1]
And of a girl who suddenly embraces Nora, the author says:
There was something about Emily which brought back ... her earliest
childhood terror [a quite irrelevant incident involving a cat]. She
detached herself violently and avoided the sight of Emily’s darkly
flushing face.... Only instinct, like the swift revulsion of a young
animal sniffing a poisonous weed ... held her back.[2]
(In reality the terror here is of her own response, and the whole
picture, if the author faced it honestly, is that of the potential
variant who will suffer infinitely rather than admit her own
inclination.) She, like most of her friends, can achieve no adequate
relations with men in their limited environment, and Nora herself, after
a later somewhat unconvincing fortnight’s liaison terminated by her
lover’s sudden death, drifts back via graduate study abroad to be dean
in just such a college as she left.
A milder reaction is registered in _Against the Wall_ (1929) by Kathleen
Millay, sister of Edna St. Vincent, whose variant publications were by
then several years old. The younger Millay’s theme is mainly protest
against the restricted position of women, including an arraignment of
the women’s college, which should educate its students to be adult, but,
while doing so, treats them as children. Her references to variance are
belittling. The phenomenon seems confined to a handful of girls on the
campus, one of whom is threatened with dismissal by the student
president. But the heroine, Rebecca, has overheard during her freshman
year that same president sob out her love for a boyish upperclassman,
and she now threatens the disciplinarian with exposure unless her
present harsh fiat is rescinded. In the course of an inevitable “bull
session” after this incident, Rebecca expresses her opinion to timidly
questioning fellow students.
“Is anything that doesn’t end in—babies—abnormal, perverted?”
“I suppose so, if you come right down to it.”
“If there’s so much of it I don’t see why it’s abnormal.”
“No,” said Rebecca, “neither do I. Only like a lot of other things,
the word has come to be more important than what it stands for.
Anyway, I think most women would be more happy with a man for a—best
friend—than with a woman. What do you think?”[3]
To this Socratic question there is a chorus of affirmatives from
everyone save a member of the suspect group who chances to be present.
Marion Patton-Waldron’s _Dance on the Tortoise_ (1930) is set in a
boarding school. A girl just out of college, feeling herself emotionally
unready for marriage, seeks greater maturity through a year of teaching,
and inauspicious though the chosen milieu might seem, she achieves her
goal. She is drawn early into emotional friendship with a French
colleague, Helene. A similar bond exists between the headmistress and an
older teacher, a pair unseparated since their college days, and Lydia
learns that they have been seen passionately kissing; however, she
shrinks from similar expression with her friend. Helene becomes involved
in an affair with a countryman which ends with her death from induced
miscarriage. It is only after this tragedy, the precise cause of which
the innocent Lydia only half-guesses, that she wonders whether Helene
might not have resisted seduction had she herself been able to give her
friend the emotional release so badly needed. But she knows she could
never have done so. In her distress she turns to the headmistress, only
to find the latter growing overfond of her. In the end she accepts her
deferred suitor eagerly:
“These bunches of women living together, falling in love with each
other because they haven’t anyone else to fall in love with! It’s
obscene! Oh, take me away!”[4]
Apparently she is alone in feeling so. Students and teachers consider
the relation between the headmistress and her friend admirable and
touching. Like those in Henry Handel Richardson’s Australian school two
decades earlier, they are not only without immediate suspicion, but
ignorant of any discreditable possibilities. This is very nearly the
last work of fiction to claim such innocence for its characters.
In the same year Elisabeth Wilkins Thomas, in _Ella_, touched on
variance so gingerly as to be almost ambiguous. Ella knows but two real
drives throughout—one a love of poetry, the other a compulsion
comparable to Mary MacLane’s “not to give up my me-ness.” In college she
derives an intellectual thrill so keen as to carry strong emotional
overtones in the philosophy classes of a casual, tailored, and sardonic
woman professor. However, their relation is confined to the classroom.
Later as a private-school teacher Ella is closely attached to an older
colleague, and though the two speak frankly of loving one another, no
passion is admitted between them. Madge has, in her youth, been deeply
attached to a younger girl whom she helped and protected when both were
students in Germany. When this ex-protégée, now married and a mother,
pays a visit to the cottage where Madge and Ella are summering together,
Ella finds herself dreading the visit. Her dread grows with Madge’s
minute, feverishly excited preparations for her old love’s advent, and
unconscious jealousy is clearly at its root. But the young mother and
her closeknit little family barely pause for a meal, unaware, in their
happy self-absorption, of the disappointment dealt by their refusal to
accept further hospitality. Madge, long afflicted with a heart
condition, has overexerted herself in preparation, and hidden grief at
its futility brings on a fatal attack. Only the depth of Ella’s
loneliness after her friend’s death brings home to her how much of her
“me-ness” has been jeopardized in this relationship, and she determines
to depend thereafter only upon herself and the solacing beauty of
poetry. Her solitary orphaned childhood is the apparent explanation of
her narcissistic fear of personal involvement.
Mary Lapsley’s _Parable of the Virgins_ (1931) devotes rather more space
to variance than its predecessors. Its theme, like theirs, is the
failure of women’s colleges to deal adequately with the emotional fevers
bred of segregation during late adolescence. Along with a few grave
heterosexual crises—one, an abortion which its subject faces without
remorse because of the wholesome first-hand knowledge of life she has
gained—there are variant entanglements involving half a dozen or more
girls, though none of the relations are admitted to be lesbian. Mary,
antagonistic to men, is obsessed by passion for Jessica, whom she
induces to break a lukewarm engagement. Then Bob, a boarding school
product “like a nice athletic boy,” precipitates tragedy by flirting
with her adored. Mary’s furious jealousy moves an unsympathetic dean
(had the author perhaps known one like Mrs. Neff’s “Nora”?) to separate
her from Jessica by telling Mary that the latter is her victim, fearing
and hating her but unable to break the unwholesome spell without help.
In consequence, Mary hangs herself. Jessica then collapses, and her
state is so aggravated by the harshness of the college’s woman physician
that an understanding faculty member interferes and introduces a
psychiatrist. Like Millay, the author puts her own comment into the
mouth of a brilliant student:
If the college had known more about human nature it would ... have
said to Mary, “Fight out your own salvation, you have as much right
to it as Jessica.” But the college did not believe that, and Mary
herself did not believe it.... Whatever one may think of the
[homosexual] relation ... one thing is worse: to permit a human being
to live in an atmosphere of constant disapproval.... When the moment
to resist [suicide] came she was too weakened, too convinced that she
had sinned.[5]
The second variant constellation centers about Crosby, “the college
poet,” a senior of twenty-four who has already published some volumes of
verse. (As Mrs. Lapsley’s college was Vassar, it is impossible not to
identify Crosby with Edna St. Vincent Millay.) This histrionic aesthete
has had experience with more than one man, but her chief interest is in
cultivating “crushes” to bolster her ego. Her favorite, an idealistic
freshman, is saved from grave harm by overhearing her cruelty to one or
two other victims, and emerges with enough maturity to retain
independence and yet not to hate her fallen idol.
* * * * *
Turning to items outside the college category, the briefest of 1929’s
comments on variance was the bitter passage in Theiss’s translated
_Interlude_, in which lesbianism is excoriated and held responsible for
the failure of its victim’s first marriage. Equally hostile was Wyndham
Lewis’s _Apes of God_ (1930). In substance Lewis’s sophisticated satire
is related to those of Firbank in its concern with male homosexuals, and
his writing about them has something of Firbank’s zany touch. But his
references to a mannish middle-aged spinster are contemptuous, and his
chapter “The Lesbian Ape,” in which an equally mannish sculptress keeps
a male nude model posing until he faints, and then stands above his
prostrate six-feet-two of Greek magnificence and leers asininely with
her silly inamorata, is written with undiluted hate.[6]
In the single novel of these two years wholly devoted to variance, Naomi
Royde-Smith’s _The Island_ (1929), implicit censure is more impersonal
but equally harsh, and the influence of Freud is obvious. In the same
author’s _Tortoiseshell Cat_, it will be remembered, an intellectual
London girl narrowly escapes a lesbian attachment. Here the gauche and
provincial Myfanwy Hughes succumbs, with distressing consequences. An
orphan brought up by a prudish spinster aunt, the girl at nineteen is
sent to a farm in Wales for her health. Because she is timid, awkward,
and painfully shocked by talk of animal breeding, her uncle dubs her
Goosey, a nickname she later tries to shed but never outlives.
Believing herself to be without the power to attract, she substituted
a horror of the physical triumphs of sex for a regret that she could
not hope to take her part in them.[7] [The classic refusal to
compete.]
In the spring a combination of sunshine and physical well-being produces
a momentary emotional release which the author equates explicitly with
mystical religious experience. The transient mood crystallizes upon a
handsome farmer riding by on a stallion, but he is too occupied with his
restive mount to give her a second glance, and this failure to attract
even when aglow with new physical awareness plunges Goosey back into
complete heterosexual frustration.
Now all her thwarted impulses center upon a female summer boarder from
Liverpool, an egomaniac of twenty-four who poses as petite and helpless.
Goosey’s enslavement dates from her chance glimpse of the girl nude to
the waist, but their association stays within an early-teen pattern of
endless confidences and sentimental endearments. After Almond’s
departure Goosey lives only for her letters. The country couple who saw
no harm in the active friendship regards this preoccupation as so
“morbid” that they ship the girl back to her Liverpool aunt to remove
her influence from their daughter. In the city, Almond’s snobbishness
and Goosey’s jealousy of her impending marriage separate the two for a
few years, during which Goosey loses her aunt and is driven by
loneliness to consider the suit of a widower many years her senior. She
covets the prestige of marriage, and one gathers that her physical
distaste for the idea might wane but for her occasional distant glimpses
of Almond. She has reached the point of betrothal when Almond bursts
into her life again, begging sanctuary from a cruel husband, whereupon
Goosey dismisses her suitor and arranges a future _à deux_ with her
adored in the huge ugly house she has inherited. However, at the “cruel”
spouse’s first summons Almond is off again, and there follow decades of
periodic returns made only when she wishes to spite her husband or,
years later, an independent daughter. Goosey’s life is spent in waiting.
Early in this intermittent association the two women became intimate.
For Goosey at first,
Here were no reluctances, no shame, no abashment. This was love
without conditions, maternal in tenderness, marital in strength, but
equal and unfettering.[8]
But as the relation progresses she has misgivings, never more
specifically accounted for than that “now there was something else. They
never spoke to one another about it—even at night. And in the daytime
Goosey pretended it wasn’t true.”[9] Soon tensions and quarrels develop,
and eventually, being left alone for long stretches, Goosey feels
occasional attractions to other women. The strongest attraction is
inspired by a new milliner from London, a charming and competent woman
who, out of pity for her outmoded rival, considers taking Goosey into
partnership. But she is regaled on all sides with well-founded gossip of
Goosey’s long “queerness,” and while her decision is hanging fire,
Almond once more appears and buys a hat in the new shop. Goosey sees
this as not only black disloyalty to herself but as a move to captivate
the new proprietress, and her jealous hysteria alienates both women
permanently.
Now completely solitary, Goosey falls captive to a male evangelist’s
magnetism. This maladjusted celibate labors for social as well as
spiritual reform; his immediate goal is the suburb’s beautification,
which has been hampered by reactionaries. Among them, Goosey had been
one of the most stubborn, but now her religious near-conversion wakes a
sense of guilt concerning her relations with Almond, and she resolves to
give up the hideous house she has kept as a sanctuary for her friend.
She makes an appointment with the revivalist, planning full confession
and the sacrifice of her property, but before this occurs, Almond meets
the man and so ensnares him that he marries her almost at once.
Henceforth, Goosey shuts herself into her dreadful house, willfully
defying love, beauty, and goodness, and ends as a mad old woman.
In _The Tortoiseshell Cat_ the lesbian aggressor was somewhat masculine,
and had herself been seduced when young. In _The Island_ no hereditary
traits are apparent in either woman, nor has either any variant history.
Conditioning is over-labored in Goosey’s case, while Almond is an almost
incredible monster of egotism. Whereas the earlier novel created the
illusion of being drawn from life, this one smacks too strongly of a
case history to come off well artistically.
A milder but scarcely happy picture is painted in _That Other Love_
(1930) by Geoffrey Moss (on internal evidence probably a woman).
Phillida, daughter of a well-born Englishman (who dies while she is an
infant) and a joyously vulgar actress, enjoys ten years of bohemia
before her father’s relatives claim her. The widowed aunt who then
assumes her upbringing is a perfectionist and very possessive. At
sixteen, overprotected, a recluse, and too suddenly launched in the
social life of the Twenties, Phillida is violently revolted by the
advances of a professional seducer. In her panic she clings to a cool
and serene sculptress who rescues her from the drunken party where she
was molested. After some years in art school and an abortive romance
with a man old enough to be her father, she again meets the sculptress
at a seaside resort, is again drawn to her, and wants to paint her
portrait. The older woman will not permit this until they have returned
to the anonymity of London. There they become intimate (though this is
not explicitly admitted), and subsequently live together for four years
in an isolated cottage in Normandy.
Then Phillida becomes convinced of her need for children—“not a man—I
could never love a man as I love you”—and she determines to marry one of
her suitors, all of whom appear either naïve or indifferent to her
variant interlude. The older woman, reluctant from the first to
sacrifice her detached serenity but now as dependent on her young
companion as the girl is on her, stoically accepts the inevitable and
sets about readjusting herself to a life alone.
* * * * *
In addition to the translation of Colette’s second Claudine volume as
_Young Lady of Paris_ (and Mrs. Lapsley’s college story), 1931 produced
an interesting contrast: one novel of highest quality, Dorothy
Richardson’s _Dawn’s Left Hand_, and one, the first of its kind in our
immediate field, which was cheaply sensational. This last, Sheila
Donisthorpe’s _Loveliest of Friends_, may be left for discussion with
others of its ilk. Miss Richardson’s title was tenth in the dozen
comprising _Pilgrimage_, her Proustian chronicle of an English girl’s
development from childhood to maturity. This particular volume contrasts
Miriam’s two simultaneous love affairs, one with a younger woman, one
with a scientific-minded novelist-reformer, Hypo, whom literary gossip
has identified as H. G. Wells. Though chronology is vague in this stream
of consciousness record, Miriam must at this time have reached her
middle or late twenties. By virtue of education and background she moves
among the Bloomsbury literati, but since she supports herself as a
dentist’s receptionist, she must live in an ordinary London boarding
house, and it is against the latter background that the emotional drama
with Amabel unfolds. This charming girl, half-Parisian, half-Irish, is
also involved in a liaison with an Englishman of distinction. A beauty,
and ultra-feminine, it is nevertheless she who takes the initiative in
the rapidly flowering friendship. The quality of the relation is
conveyed in such passages as the following:
... the Sunday following the evening at Mrs. Bellamy’s, where we were
separated and mingling in various groups ... and suddenly met and
were filled with the same longing, to get away and lie side by side
in the darkness ... talking it all over until sleep should come
without any interval of going off into the seclusion of our separate
minds ... [then] waking and seeing with the same eyes at the same
moment ... the wet gray roofs across the way.[10]
There is no suggestion of physical relations, and in another place the
author describes as their most intimate moments the silences in which
they were
suddenly and intensely aware of each other and the flow of their
wordless communion, making the smallest possible movements of the
head now this way now that, like birds in a thicket intensely
watching and listening; but without bird-anxiety.[11]
In recording the affair with Hypo, on the other hand, considerable
physical detail is given, as for example the first time the two saw one
another unclothed:
This mutual nakedness was appeasing rather than stimulating. And
austere. His body was not beautiful. She could find nothing to adore,
no ground for response.... The manly structure, the smooth, satiny
sheen in place of her own velvety glow was interesting as partner and
foil, but not desirable.... It had no power to stir her as often she
had been stirred by the sudden sight of him walking down a garden or
entering a room.[12]
The climax of this affair occurs while Miriam is house guest of Hypo and
his wife, a woman so selfless that she pretends blindness to his
infidelities because they benefit his work. Miriam wakes in the night to
find her host at her bedside, and suffers his possession in
an immense fathomless black darkness through which, after an
instant’s sudden descent into her clenched and rigid form, she was
now traveling alone on and on, without thought or memory or any
emotion save the strangeness of this journeying.[13]
At another time
she demanded of herself whether she cared for him in the slightest
degree or for anyone or anything so much as the certainty of being in
communion with something always there, something in which and through
which people could meet and whose absence, felt with people who did
not acknowledge it, made life at once impossible, made it a death
worse than dying....
There was a woman, not this thinking self who talked with men in
their own language, but one whose words could be spoken only from the
heart’s knowledge, waiting to be born in her.... Men want recognition
of their work to help them believe in themselves.... Unless in some
form they get it, all but the very few are miserable. Women ... want
recognition of themselves ... before they can come fully to birth.
Homage for what they are and represent.
He was incapable of homage.... It was his constricted, biological way
of seeing sex that kept him blind.[14]
So specific a contrast between the psychology of the two sexes suggests
that the whole volume may have been written as a contribution to the
current dispute over the value of variant love. During Miriam’s total
history (recorded in subsequent volumes) she loves two other men, but
without physical intimacy. Neither is conspicuously male in appearance
and both are preoccupied with subjective aspects of personal relations.
Plainly Miss Richardson, like Mrs. Woolf, feels that between the most
sharply differentiated members of the two sexes, the biological act can
be the only bond.
Miss Richardson’s novel was sexually frank but took care to imply the
absence of physical intimacy between its variant women. In the one
acceptable sympathetic study of 1932 Naomi Mitchison employed other
means of avoiding offense. “The Delicate Fire” is the title story in a
collection of short narratives of ancient Greece. Miss Mitchison,
daughter of a schoolmaster, wrote several volumes recapturing the life
of the past, possibly designed for her father’s older students, but on
an adult level with regard to historic mores. This particular tale
covers some months in the late adolescence of Brocheo, daughter of the
favorite of Sappho. Since her widowed mother cannot leave the country
estate which supports them, Brocheo is sent to an aunt in Mitylene to be
prepared for a fitting marriage. Sappho’s open quarrel over her
brother’s alliance with the courtesan, Doricha, has inclined
conservative mothers to entrust their daughters’ training to the
conventional Andromeda, but a passionate friendship between Brocheo’s
young cousin and Sappho’s daughter Kleis draws the older girl into
contact with the famous poet. The precocious Kleis analyzes as the key
to her mother’s temperament a desire to possess utterly anyone she
loves, estranging her from one after another of her beloved friends when
they marry, and making it difficult for Kleis to have either suitors or
close friends. But Brocheo senses genius in Sappho’s intensity as
compared to Andromeda’s polite talent, and becomes the great poet’s
willing pupil. The story ends discreetly with the beginning of Brocheo’s
tutelage, for some given details of a scene between Kleis and her young
friend suggest that had it continued into the relation between Sappho
and Brocheo it would have sailed in dangerous waters.
This was the year in which the German motion picture _Mädchen in
Uniform_ was released and Weirauch’s _Scorpion_ translated. (The
latter’s sequel, _The Outcast_, followed in 1933.) Except for these,
1932 boasted only a pair of titles on a level with Miss Donisthorpe’s
mentioned above, which must wait for later consideration. After this
season in which everything published, no matter what the quality, was
relatively tolerant of variance, the pendulum swung back in 1933, when
but one of five authors had even a moderate word to say for it.
The most nearly sympathetic was Thomas Beer, whose volume of short
stories, _Mrs. Egg and Other Barbarians_, included “Hallowe’en,” written
in 1927 but not, like the others, previously published in magazines. In
this tale the monumental but endearing Mrs. Egg, inveterate eater of
sweets and worshipper of her tall son, Adam, encounters on Hallowe’en
night the striking Bill Sloan, village tomboy, whom she had known before
her marriage and removal to New York some years earlier. Now divorced,
Bill has come back to visit her girlhood chum, wife of a friend of
Adam’s. Mrs. Egg elicits from Adam that Jane’s husband is “out of luck
nights,” and they agree that the fault lies in the girl’s
upbringing—“Jane’s mama was too much of a lady to say drawers in a
King’s Daughters meetin’. I bet the darn truth is Janie’s scared of men
yet.” Anent Bill’s divorce, they recall that
“Dr. Sloan raised Bill peculiar. He believed folks are just—s’perior
kind of animals. No souls or nothin’. I never can get shocked any
about sensible people’s morals.... I just want to say this for Bill.
I bet she don’t do any harm.”[15]
This was written at the height of that psychological season when parents
could do no right; but Beer concedes to the hereditary camp Bill’s
height and absence of hips, and both girls’ tenor speaking voices. Mrs.
Egg is called out from her grandson’s hilarious party for a farewell
from Jane and Bill, who because they admire the wholesome woman
profoundly, want her to be first to know they are leaving—“for good.”
Jane begs Mrs. Egg to look after her husband, against whom she has
nothing save that she cannot endure marriage and “loves someone else
more.” Without protest Mrs. Egg busies herself with lunch for the night
travelers—they are driving—and sends them off, perhaps significantly
just before midnight of the witches’ holiday. But after they have gone
she can say only
“They’re human beings, Dammy. [But] if they’d stayed a minute longer
I’d ha’ screamed. Oh, Dammy, ain’t things peculiar!”[16]
She is consoled by learning that Adam thinks this the only solution for
all concerned and has foreseen tragedy from the moment of Jane’s
marriage.
The next episode, narrowly skirting the sensational level, was included
in _Orient Express_ by the British Graham Greene,[17] who in 1933 was
writing only psychological thrillers. A lesbian journalist, after
supporting for four years a beautiful countrywoman picked up in a
cinema, realizes she is about to lose her love to a man (“How could one
hold her, with only a mouth?”) Philosophically cutting her losses, Mabel
decides to capture Carol, a dancer traveling alone on the Express, and
immediately begins to plan the redecoration of her London apartment in
honor of her new conquest. The plot develops otherwise, however, and
Mabel goes on alone.
In _Entertaining the Islanders_, Struthers Burt’s most sophisticated
effort, he treats the modish theme less gently. After a three-year
liaison with a rather hard woman journalist, the hero falls genuinely in
love during a winter in the Bahamas, and returns to New York to break
with his old flame. Even during their intimacy Marian “had made no
pretense of faithfulness,” but what frees him of any remorse at severing
the connection is his discovery that she is now involved with a married
woman,
a small beautiful bronze young woman with square-cut yellow hair.
Taut, condensed, masterful, engraved.... Her brilliant tawny eyes
looked David up and down without interest. In the jacket of her dark
suit was a white camellia.... Marian was nothing if not up to date,
was she?[18]
He wonders how husbands put up with “childlike little ghosts....
Children making childlike little substitutions for reality ... and
always so proud of their substitutions.”[19] This, of course, is close
to quotation from Freud.
Sinclair Lewis hit even harder in _Ann Vickers_. The chief figure in his
briefly sketched tragedy, Eleanor Crevecoeur, was in an early section of
the novel devoted to the battle for suffrage, and was humorous,
fearless, and intelligent, though “looking all the time like an anemic
Bourbon princess.” Later during World War I she has one serious liaison
with a man and an exhausting list of casual affairs. Then she meets a
sleekly tailored woman executive of a department store with a Ph.D. in
psychology. Dr. Herringdean frightens off the heterogeneous swarm of
males and appropriates Eleanor for herself. But once her prey is caught,
she loses interest, turns pettily cruel, and pursues other women.
Eleanor wastes to a neurotic wraith and finally commits suicide. The
whole episode occupies only ten pages, but is mordant and damning.
The final blow of the year was struck by George Jean Nathan, dramatic
critic for the _American Statesman_, in a slapstick parody offered as a
critique of the current British drama. Nathan had commented earlier
(without special reference to England) on “the increasing number of
women players who are of the sexual disposition of the Aeolian Greek
colonizers,” and on their “freezing” presence on the stage—“all their
emotional scenes are dead.”[20] In this skit, “Design for Loving,” (the
title a jibe at Noel Coward’s _Design for Living_), the cast includes:
Lord Derek, a hermaphrodite; his father, an onanist; his mother, a
lesbian; his sister, a flagellant; Lady Vi Twining, his sister’s
friend, an auto-erotist with tribade tendencies; his servant, a
homosexual and transvestist;[21]
et cetera. Though the dialogue is so caricatured as to mar the wit, it
mentions the many one-sexed couples to be seen in any large hotel or
restaurant, and the negligible action includes “significant” glances and
caresses among the three women. Plays other than Coward’s (if any) that
might have inspired this effort have not been discovered.
If Nathan hoped to purge the current theatre by ridicule, he was doomed
to prompt disappointment. In 1934 a translation of _Mädchen in Uniform_
adapted to the legitimate stage was produced by high-grade amateur
groups in more than one large American city and played to crowded
houses, and late in the year Lillian Hellman’s _The Children’s Hour_
began its successful run on Broadway. This was subsequently taken over
by Hollywood, and readers who saw only the film will wonder at its
inclusion here. The mainspring of the plot was the same in both
versions—the ruin of a thriving boarding school and of the two young
women who own it through vicious slander circulated by a pupil, already
a well-developed paranoiac at the age of twelve. In the film one of the
women is accused of intimacy with her fiancé, the school physician.
In the play as Miss Hellman wrote it the charge is lesbianism between
the two mistresses. This fabrication, fairly sophisticated for a
twelve-year-old, is the fruit in part of surreptitious reading of _Mlle
Maupin_, in part of an overheard quarrel between one of the young women
and an aunt who taunts her with jealousy of her friend’s fiancé. The
dreadful child’s garbled exaggerations galvanize her grandmother into
hasty action. Over-night the school is emptied by horrified parents. The
young women lose their suit for slander through the cowardly flight of
the aunt, their chief witness. The younger woman breaks her engagement
when she sees that her fiancé will never be sure but that a grain of
truth underlay the slander. The other woman is tortured into realizing
for the first time that she has never cared for men, and that unadmitted
passion has in fact underlain her restrained love for her friend.
Feeling irremediably soiled, she shoots herself. As its easy Hollywood
transmutation proves, the core of this tragedy is not the persecution of
variance. It is the destruction of two blameless individuals through
hysterical prejudice, and the lesbian issue is only a super-explosive
detonator of that hysteria. But is the older woman’s suicide a tragic
waste chargeable to the social mores which made her feel so soiled? Or
is it tragic merely because she is physically innocent—that is, does
Miss Hellman, like Mendès, distinguish between light and darkness here
on the strength of technicalities alone? The text provides no answer.
The rest of the year’s offerings were fiction ranging in quality from
that of Henry Handel Richardson, Victoria Sackville-West and Isak
Dinesen to the now frequent sensational penny-catchers. Probably most of
the book of short stories, _The End of a Childhood_, which Miss
Richardson gave to the public in 1934, were written earlier. The title
group consists of fragments related to her _Richard Mahoney_ novels
(1917-1929) which seem rather discards than sequels (as were those in
Galsworthy’s _On Forsyte ’Change_). Another group entitled “Growing
Pains” is more reminiscent of her _Getting of Wisdom_ of 1910. Indeed,
of these eight sketches, six present so integrated an emotional sequence
that although their girls bear different names one wonders whether they
are not bits from a trial flight toward another novel centered about a
woman. A noteworthy feature in all these sketches, as also in _The
Getting of Wisdom_, is the absence of a father and the relative
insignificance or incompatibility of the mother.
In “The Bathe” a beautiful child of six is sickened by the physical
ugliness of two obese middle-aged women who strip and bathe nude, with
self-conscious tittering, on an isolated beach. Until this moment the
child has been eager for adult status, but now “oh never—never—no, not
ever now did she want to grow up.” In “Preliminary Canter” one
twelve-year-old girl adores another and is baffled and furious when the
latter “flirts” with a farm hand. “Conversation in a Pantry” presents
the uneasy efforts of a girl of fourteen to learn from one three years
older what it is one must “take care about” when out with boys. She gets
evasive answers, but they are sufficient to recall her disgust upon
first realizing that married couples sleep in the same bed. On the other
hand, as her informant speaks of her own love, “she had never known
before that Alice was so pretty, with dimples round her mouth and her
eyes all shady. Oh, could it mean that—yes, it must: Alice simply didn’t
_mind_.” “The Wrong Turning” pictures the violent shock to another
fourteen-year-old, invited to go rowing by an interesting new
schoolfellow (male), when the pair blunder on a swimming hole where
naked soldiers are indulging in harmless but rough horseplay, and the
men shout suggestively after the embarrassed youngsters.
“And Women Must Weep” is the aftermath of an eighteen-year-old’s
long-anticipated first ball. She has been a wallflower, and afterwards,
locked in her room,
Oh the shame of it!... not to have “taken,” to have failed to
“attract the gentlemen”—this was a slur that would rest on her all
her life. And yet a small voice that wouldn’t be silenced kept on
saying “It wasn’t my _fault_!” ... She had tried her hardest, done
everything she was told to ... [but] really, truly, right deep down
in her, she hadn’t wanted “the gentlemen” any more than they’d wanted
her: she had only had to pretend to.... She cried till she could cry
no more.[22]
The final and longest sketch, “Two Hanged Women,” gives as it were the
cumulative result of such experiences. The word “hanged,” it should be
noted, is merely a mild and dated Australian expletive equivalent to the
American “darned,” and is applied to a pair of young women by a couple
who find the two in their own favorite spot for petting, but its use in
the title lends a telling _double entendre_. The older girl, nearing
thirty, is tall and thin with straight bobbed hair and a man’s gait. The
other, in her middle twenties, has been urged to marry by a dominating
mother, but is nauseated by physical contact with her beau, Fred. Even
if he sits too close she must “screw herself up” to bear it. On the
other hand, she craves the social status of a regularly courted girl,
and indulges in a brief fantasy of being escorted by the handsome and
devoted man. People are sympathetic to that, she says, and “let us into
the dark corner seats at the pictures as if we’d a right to them. And
they never laugh. Oh, I can’t _stick_ being laughed at!”[23] After the
bitter retort, “Gawd! Why not make a song of it?” her companion claims
that it is the mother who has put these romantic notions into her
daughter’s head. Whenever the two girls are out together the mother is
furious, and “does she need to open her mouth? Not she! She’s only got
to let it hang at the corners and you reek, you drip with guilt.”[24]
The sketch ends with the younger girl shuddering and crying out that she
would “rather die twice over” than submit to Fred’s passion. She clings
to her friend, who holds her in a gentle and maternal embrace. Taken all
together, these half-dozen vignettes present a most convincing etiology
for a homosexual woman.
In Victoria Sackville-West’s _Dark Island_ (1934) the reserved and
elusive Shirin, oldest child in a family best described as philistine,
cultivates defensive reticence. She desires “quietly to remain
unguessed, unknown, and thus to protect oneself from the pain of life.”
During summers on the southwest coast of England she falls in love with
a rocky island a mile offshore, tree-covered and crowned by the romantic
pile of LeBreton castle, because it seems the embodiment of her dreams
of privacy. After a successful decade in London society which includes
marriage and children, she finds her life so pointlessly harried that
she escapes it by a quixotic sacrifice of maternal ties and reputation.
In her thirties she enters upon a second marriage with Sir Venn
LeBreton, owner and virtual overlord of the island of Storn. It is
largely for the sake of his island that she marries him, for to her it
is still the remote and secret sanctuary for which she has hungered all
her life. When, with the intuition of the fiercely proud, Sir Venn
divines her motive, he makes clear at once that the property descends in
the male line, wives are mere consorts and heir-bearers, and Storn is no
more hers than any servant’s. Thus, she has merely involved herself in a
barren and humiliating life imprisonment. Soon she discovers that her
husband is at times a physical as well as a mental sadist, and her
misery reaches desperation unrelieved by the bearing of two children.
Since her teens she has had one constant friend, Cristina, a tall,
powerful and competent woman, but their relation has been so reserved,
so impersonal, that only its persistence has raised it above mere
acquaintance. In her loneliness Shirin turns, though without unburdening
herself, to Cristina; and after his male secretary suddenly dies, she
prevails upon her husband to engage her friend. The latter perceives at
once that Shirin’s life is wretched, but she is vouchsafed no more
explanation than becomes slowly evident to her loving eyes. More and
more as time passes, however, Shirin comes to depend upon her for just
such wordless but complete communion as that between Miriam and Amabel
in _Dawn’s Left Hand_. Sir Venn presently becomes aware of this bond,
and unable to move his wife from her determination that her friend shall
stay with her or she herself will leave, he takes Cristina sailing on a
day of squalls and returns alone with a story of her accidental
drowning. Shirin accepts this story impassively and continues to live
with him, outwardly composed but inwardly in torment. When, some years
later, he taunts her with his having deliberately eliminated Cristina,
she soon contrives his death in return by a long kiss after she is sure
that she is stricken with diphtheria. He dies and she survives, but
since Storn is now his son’s and the son is a replica of the father, she
soon declines to a willful death.
Two points should be noted here: first, the stress laid on the
impersonality of the two women’s relationship until Shirin’s marriage
becomes a torture justifying any human solace; and second, the ingenuity
employed to contrive her ominous situation. Sir Venn and his feudal
domain are the stuff of post-Elizabethan tragedy on gothic romance,
difficult of assimilation into a twentieth-century pattern. But the
island’s isolation sets it apart from the present, just as Shirin’s
withdrawn spirit separates her a little from current reality. Thus the
tenuous variant union can flower without reference to society, and the
triangular drama can be enacted beyond the world’s reach. This latter
portion of the novel is in miniature as much of a _tour de force_ as
Mrs. Woolf’s _Orlando_, and the similarity is particularly interesting
in that the elusive Shirin is hauntingly reminiscent of Clarissa
Dalloway in Mrs. Woolf’s book which her own preface proclaims to be
tinged with autobiography.
As distinguished as the work of these two British women was _Seven
Gothic Tales_ (1934) by the Danish Isak Dinesen (Baroness Karen Blixen),
whose artistry in English is as remarkable as Conrad’s. She is also
adroit in maintaining a continental outlook without offending her
adopted audience, a feat she achieves by setting her tales in a day when
the Romantic Period had the freshness of youth, and recounting them with
a serene detachment which precludes “reader participation.” No more than
discreet hints of male homosexuality lend flavor to “The Monkey,” and in
“The Roads Around Pisa” the two feminine romances contributing to the
involved plot are seen in retrospect, only one member of each pair
actually appearing in the narrative. The younger of these two women,
Agnese, is a transvestist who has traveled for a year as a man. Her
reasons are disclosed gradually. Her beloved friend, like Lamartine’s
Clothilde, was obliged to marry an elderly Croesus though she was in
love with a young cousin. Afterward, when she occasionally slipped out
to meet her love, her bosom friend, Agnese, allayed suspicion by
occupying her bed, a safe enough favor since the husband was impotent
and took his pleasure in toying with his “lovely pet” by day; at night
merely inspecting her room to know she was there. To keep the world from
guessing his humiliating secret he required a child, and sent a
surrogate of his own choosing to effect that end one night when Agnese
had taken his wife’s place. Already indifferent to men, Agnese was
goaded by this violation to abandon the feminine role altogether and
roam the country as a Byronic gentleman.
The very old lady whom a highroad accident leads to unburden herself to
a fellow traveler while expecting death, has, like Agnese, been averse
to men all her life, but social necessity has made her wife, mother, and
now grandmother. The fact that her daughter died in childbirth has
increased her animus against the male sex, and her granddaughter’s
marrying in the face of her prohibition has estranged them. She tells
her confidant, a melancholy Hamlet, that in her long life she has known
but two passions, one for a girlhood friend from Denmark, the other for
her beautiful grandchild. She cannot die without sending her forgiveness
to the girl, and she extracts from the young Danish listener a promise
to deliver her message. Contrary to her expectations, however, she
lives, is happily reunited with her granddaughter, and through love for
the latter’s infant son at last achieves tolerance for the opposite sex
(cf. _Marie Bonifas_). She also discovers that her Danish messenger is
nephew of her first beloved, who died a spinster. Since both these loves
are recounted by one of their actors, they do not appear on the surface
to have been lesbian, but there are certainly no implications to the
contrary. The two women, young and old, appearing in the story are both
somewhat masculine; of each pair of loving women, one never married; and
for three of the four, the early variant love seems to have been the
most vivid of their lives, surviving marriage or other liaisons.
Another contribution from the continent was the translation of Colette’s
_Claudine s’en Va_ as _The Innocent Wife_. Properly it is fourth in its
series, but it lacks the outright lesbian element of the third, which
awaited publication in the following year. All the Claudine novels, it
should be noted, were issued in the United States, while England risked
no sympathetic treatments more overt than those of Geoffrey Moss, the
two Richardsons, and Miss Sackville-West.
The remainder of the year’s crop were also American, two of good
quality. One was Anthony Thorne’s heartening idyll, _Delay in the Sun_,
in which forty-eight hours’ suspension of bus service in Spain resolves
a variety of emotional conflicts in its English passengers’ lives. The
variant couple are mannish Jean Porteous, daughter of a titled British
family and a rebel against the social existence expected of her, and
Betty Sale-Jones, blonde, helpless and fluttering, from “the plastery
gentility of Kensington.” Thus far their common bond has been the
determination to escape family strictures and win personal freedom. They
are merely good companions with some tentative notions of sharing a flat
in London on returning from their trip. Then their visit to an empty
bull ring moves Jean to mimic with startling verisimilitude the Spanish
performers both have seen.
In the hot Spanish sunlight she played at bull fighting for the sake
of a pretty girl in a yellow dress who sat in the _barrera_. Playing
together, they mocked a dangerous game. And dangerously they entered
a secret world in which they had so great a need of each other.[25]
Later in the moonlight they visit the flower-drenched public gardens and
lie on the warm grass, “fingers still linked as they lay looking upwards
into the sparkling sky.” When they come back to lights and crowds they
fall paralyzingly shy and dare not share their common room and bed.
After a restless night apart, each comes to much the same conclusion:
What had happened to them last night was something beyond their
control. Then let this strange force follow its own law—let it part
them forever or join them forever. It was something too big for their
reason, and too delicate.... Of no use to fight, reason, or
wonder.[26]
And it is without further resolution of their problem that they let the
suddenly-restored bus service carry them away from the scene of their
inarticulate romance. The author has cannily left each reader to supply
what sequel best satisfies his own philosophy, but the lingering mood is
distinctly one of warm tolerance and sympathy rather than disapproval.
In _After Such Pleasures_, on the other hand, Dorothy Parker grazes the
surface of variance with flippant malice. The final story, “Glory in the
Daytime,” sketches the tentative advances of a New York sophisticate to
a newly arrived and naïve little wife with a passion for stage
celebrities. Using the long-famed Lily Wynton as bait, the Gothamite
invites the provincial to tea—to the disgust of the latter’s husband,
who always refers to the predatory Hallie as “Hank” and declares that
all “those women” make him sick. Starry-eyed with anticipation, little
Mrs. Murdock finds her hostess alone, clad in trousers and silk shirt.
She is welcomed with a long kiss and the admonition, “Don’t tell Lily!”
But the famous star on arrival proves to be middle-aged, withered, and
brassy-haired. She is already too drunk to follow the conversation,
demands brandy, and soon dozes off. Mrs. Murdock leaves in sad
disillusion, with a new appreciation of her astringent mate, only to
find that he has gone out in a temper for the first time to pursue his
own ends.
The Worm’s Turning
Since the total count of variant titles in 1934, including the
sensational items not yet touched upon, mounted to ten, it is not
surprising that some public reaction should set in. It will be even less
so after a rapid consideration of those omitted trivia, of which within
as many years some half-dozen accumulated. Because the first was a
fairly obvious rebuttal of _Well of Loneliness_, it deserves more
attention than some others. It was _Loveliest of Friends_ (1931) by
Sheila Donisthorpe, who was reputedly an English actress with a number
of other romances to her credit, but its verbal idiom is not British and
it was published only in New York.
Written with intense sentimentality, it pictures the ruin of Audrey,
introduced as the happy wife of a doting but pedestrian husband whose
hobby of gentleman-farming takes him often out of London. The couple’s
intimate life is described in some detail as ideal, yet Audrey is given
to playing Chopin in the dusk to relieve her unspent emotion. Presently
she is assiduously courted by boyish, impudent and exquisitely-tailored
Kim, similarly blessed with a husband who dotes upon her and allows her
every freedom. Kim’s showers of gifts and passionate telephone calls
intoxicate the inexperienced Audrey. Although the first attempted caress
and Kim’s confession that she is a lover of women are profoundly
shocking, Audrey soon succumbs without reservation. Then she discovers
that there is a former beloved for whose daily letters Kim watches
avidly; next, she learns that several of her own London circle have been
loved and discarded by Kim; finally, a current rival is flaunted to
rouse her jealousy. This cheap blonde American flirt is a transparent
copy of the ex-chorus girl in _Well of Loneliness_, just as a vivid
phrase applied to Kim—“a head so fiercely alive it seemed delicately to
light the air around it”[27]—is lifted verbatim from the description of
Jennifer in Miss Lehmann’s _Dusty Answer_.
Audrey spends several delirious weeks at a shore resort with Kim
(described in detail) of an intensity impossible to support for long,
and when immediately afterward the blonde recaptures Kim by the classic
device of parading a rival—a repulsive caricature of the mannish and
profane lesbian—Audrey’s overstrained nerves give way. A period in a
sanatorium restores her temporarily, but, back in London again, she is
helpless against her passion. After melodramatic incidents involving all
four women, Audrey attempts suicide, and failing to achieve her end, she
leaves home and husband to wander, derelict and outcast, for the rest of
her days. Close to the end the author breaks out in vituperation against
those who clamor for recognition of the sinister group who practice
... these sadistic habits ... crooked, twisted freaks of Nature who
stagnate in dark and muddy waters, and are so choked with the weeds
of viciousness and selfish lust that, drained of all pity, they
regard their victims as mere stepping stones to their further
pleasure. With flower-sweet fingertips they crush the grape of evil
till it is exquisite, smooth and luscious to the taste, stirring up
subconscious responsiveness, intensifying all that has been, all that
follows, leaving their prey gibbering, writhing, sex-sodden shadows
of their former selves, conscious of only one desire in mind and
body, which, ever festering, ever destroying, slowly saps them of
health and sanity.[28]
This effusion is an obvious retort to Miss Hall’s relatively controlled
plea for tolerance at the end of _Well of Loneliness_, and the volume
gives every evidence of being written hastily to profit by whatever
conservative reaction there was against the sympathy aroused among the
literati by Miss Hall’s effort.
The next exhibit was from the pen of the American Tiffany Thayer, writer
of near-erotica, and comprises one chapter in his _Thirteen Women_
(1932). A fragile beauty in whom puritanic sex-repression has induced
tuberculosis is quickly cured by an affair with her Denver physician’s
lesbian wife. The two have in common a hatred of men. The younger
believes their love unique and blessedly free of the uncleanness of sex,
and when, back in New York, she is bawdily enlightened by an old
schoolmate who is now a vaudeville performer, she wastes swiftly to the
death her abortive romance postponed.
Of the same calibre was _The Establishment of Madame Antonia_ (1932) by
one Leyla Georgie, comprising life sketches of the inmates of Hamburg’s
most élite bordello, and supposedly recorded by one of the group. Nearly
all the women are titled or from the top level of European society, but
have been reduced by malign chance. The variant pair are a Russian
princess and a new recruit whom she protects and cherishes. Discovering
that though her protégée loves her, she is unable to return her passion,
the princess introduces the girl to a nobleman who marries her. Natacha
then commits suicide. The whole volume is little more than a
romanticizing of earlier foreign erotica which celebrated more fleshly
relations among prostitutes.
The title of Idabel Williams’s _Hellcat_ (1934) accurately describes its
heroine, who expends her efforts only on such persons as she can steal
from someone else or can live upon without sacrifice on her part. One of
the latter is a lesbian whom she scorns as long as men are handy, but
whose hospitality she finally exploits for a long season, keeping her
victim in a constant fever by pretending an innocence which sees in
lesbians only fit subjects for police court or madhouse.
Gerald Foster’s _Strange Marriage_ (1934) deserves an extra word because
here transvestism basically affects the plot for the first time since
the fantastic German _Weiberbeute_ of 1906. A girl, expelled from
college just before graduation, hides out in a lonely beach shack until
she can go home without revealing her disgrace. Shingled and accustomed
to trousers she lives as a boy for safety, but finds that even boys are
not safe from the lifeguard who seeks her out at night. He is, however,
delighted on discovering her real sex. His masterful possession of her,
outrages her pride, but her body registers traitorous complaisance. In a
fury of rebellion against a woman’s double disadvantage, she resolves to
live as a man. By putting the width of the continent between her and her
past life she contrives to get a college degree on the west coast and a
job in a law office, continuing her studies at night. When the senior
partner’s daughter falls in love with her she reciprocates with warmth,
marries the girl (who is innocent to a degree), and lives as her husband
for several years. Then the coincidental reappearance of the beach guard
not only makes her apprehensive of recognition but revives the response
he was the first to stir. A quick disappearance leaves her wife an
apparent widow, and she marries the man. The bisexual experience here
seems more indebted to earlier French trivia than to current
psychological theory, which taxes unwilling defloration with negative
rather than happy heterosexual results.
As Lilyan Brock’s _Queer Patterns_ (1935) has been revived in two
different paperbound editions since 1950 and is thus easily available, a
short description will suffice. A musical-comedy star tries marriage to
one of those perfect husbands so useful in accentuating indelible
variant leanings. She comes fully to life, however, only under the hands
of a dynamic woman director of serious drama, with whom she enjoys two
perfect years before gossip obliges them to part or face professional
ruin. A long illness induced by the separation and by a subsequent
wealthy husband’s drug-crazed violence provides opportunity for a
trained nurse to fall in love with her. The nurse is driven to suicide
from jealousy of the other woman. The drug-addict husband finally
strangles the star. This is offered as an example of ineradicable inborn
variance.
Quite the most melodramatic of the lot was _Male and Female_ by Jack
Woodford (1935), in which a girl about to be married realizes that her
comparative physical coolness to her fiancé stems from a hitherto
unadmitted attraction to a girl friend. The latter, a brooding introvert
afflicted with frequent migraine, is quite aware of her own feelings,
and thrusts herself between the pair, after they marry, with incredible
temerity. The young couple have a stormy year which would have wrecked
their union—since the wife prefers feminine gentleness to masculine
“brutality” in lovemaking—but for their occasional periods of ecstasy
when the interloper is laid low by her chronic ailment. It finally
appears that this “friend” is virtually a witch (a fictional throwback
of a full millennium). In modern terms, she exercises some hypnotic
power over the wife even at great distances. Since, however, she is not
evil at heart, she finally commits suicide in a burning house by way of
ending her own unhappiness and effectively terminating her fateful
influence.
Virtually the last item of this sort from the point of date was Gawen
Brownrigg’s _Star Against Star_ (1936), pretending to British
authorship, but, like _Loveliest of Friends_, written in American idiom.
It apes _Well of Loneliness_ closely in its dependence upon inheritance
and childhood conditioning, but in this case Dorcas resembles a
hot-blooded mother who has had many male lovers and who virtually
seduces her own daughter at the age of nine or ten. A year in a Swiss
boarding school when she is sixteen ends with the expulsion of Dorcas
and her bisexual American roommate for lesbian intimacy. Two efforts at
affairs with men leave Dorcas cold, and from one man she parts because
he speaks with contempt of “Lezzies.” Later, in Paris, she meets a
beautiful novelist already renowned at twenty-six, and within
twenty-four hours the infatuated pair achieve complete intimacy. They
return to live for a time in England; however, they encounter at once
the same social disapprobation they had met among the British contingent
even on the _rive gauche_. A literary critic warns Dorcas, moreover,
that she will be jealous of Consuelo’s work, and that emotional release
may have an adverse effect upon the latter’s creative powers—an
interesting inversion of Miss Hall’s attributing Stephen Gordon’s
sterility to lack of such release. Both predictions prove all too
accurate, and the union goes completely on the rocks within a matter of
months. Worthless as it is artistically, the novel stresses a detail
previously hinted only in _That Other Love_: it is the younger girl who
disrupts an older woman’s well adjusted and successful life. Also evil
fruit from even completely happy physical expression is at odds with the
Freudian theory which the author elsewhere makes show of accepting.
The final pair of tales have been left until last because of their
direct bearing on censorship efforts which got under way during 1934 and
1935. One was _Love Like a Shadow_, which, although written under the
name of Lois Lodge, exhibits many of the characteristics of male
authorship listed earlier in discussing erotic writing. Of the college
in which it begins, it reports “bull sessions” of crass vulgarity, raw
petting parties and assignations after dances, and lesbian alliances
kept only slightly undercover. In a New York residence club a burgeoning
lesbian coterie includes a cigar-smoking physician who spouts variant
biology and philosophy at every chance, a feminist poet with two
girls—children under ten—whom she has already started on the path to
Lesbos, and a variety of free-living artists, entertainers, and Park
Avenue sensation-seekers. The heroine, Jean, is antagonistic towards men
because of her father’s flaunted infidelities; another girl, because she
was raped at twelve by her uncle. Jean is an idealist in search of a
lasting alliance, but her first love (a college roommate) marries to
scotch “queer” gossip in a midwestern home town; and her second proves
compulsively promiscuous to the point of seducing Jean’s teen-age
sister. Jean finally becomes the wife of her millionaire employer “in
name only” because his fifteen-year-old daughter needs a mother, but she
finds her stepdaughter already bisexually experienced, and the two are
soon united in the Great Love of both their lives—approximately the
fourth affair for each. The father conveniently dies (of extra-marital
excesses) and leaves the pair free to roam the world at will and live
happily ever after. This précis suggests but feebly the hundred-proof
distillate of promiscuity, exhibitionism, hard drinking, wild lesbian
propagandizing, and bad poetry which comprises the original.
Cut from the same cloth was _Mardigras Madness_ (1934) by Davis Dresser,
a gentleman revealed by the Library of Congress catalog as writing under
six pseudonyms, one of them feminine. It is a racy tale of Barbara from
the country, whose aunt is a prude and whose “steady” is too puritanic
to satisfy her ardent needs. The Mardigras season, which she spends with
a girl friend in New Orleans, is a salacious riot including a midnight
ritual orgy worthy of Peladan, but the variant episode occurs during the
day when masquers roam the streets at will. She and her friend are
picked up by two women, a tall harlequin, and a shingled pirate who
says, “I’ll take you captive—before some nasty man beats me to it.” The
women call each other Frankie and Johnny, and even before the party
reaches their modest apartment Barbara senses a mystery, “an indefinable
_something_ which set them apart from anyone she had ever known.”[29] In
the apartment alcohol flows freely, and since Barbara has never before
tasted so much as wine, her confused exaltation discreetly blurs her
impressions of first a “sentimentality” which vaguely bothers her, then
a crescendo of caresses until “the world faded into blackness under
Frankie’s soothing touch.”[30] The whole incident occupies a half-dozen
pages.
This title had a significant publishing history. In 1938 the same firm
issued _One Reckless Night_ by Peter Shelley, one of Dresser’s many
tags. Except that in this later volume the heroine and her friend bear
different names, its text is that of the 1934 narrative verbatim, save
for one alteration and a scant two percent deletions. The latter
comprise vivid and specific bits of heterosexual detail. But the
important change is the transmutation of the lesbians into a pair of
men, “a striking couple, both extremely tall, and they carried their
costumes with a swagger.”[31] They pick the girls up in a magnificent
foreign roadster, the scene of the drinking party is a patio of
corresponding grandeur, and as the heroine lapses from consciousness she
dreams that it is her fiancé who possesses her. The obvious purpose of
both versions, as of _Love Like a Shadow_ and the same grade of purely
heterosexual writing, is to convince the callow reader that “everybody’s
doing it, it’s smart in the Big Cities.” No matter how much one may
deplore censorship in principle, one can hardly deny its justice in such
cases as these. Actually, the second version of Dresser’s tale is no
better than the first in moral impact, and the fact that the only change
in plot required to make it acceptable for publication was the
alteration of the lesbian episode, throws light upon the chief target of
the snipers.
To be sure, variant fiction was not alone in its flamboyance, nor was it
alone under attack. The heterosexual frankness in works of high quality
during the twenties had been followed by lesser and lesser efforts, and
finally by pseudonymous volumes such as _Naked Escape_, _Innocent
Adulteress_, and _Born to be Bad_. Male homosexuality, as well, was
represented in a handful of dubious volumes culminating in _Scarlet
Pansy_. Non-fiction also took advantage of the open market with hastily
penned volumes on sexual psychology and perversions, and revivals or new
translations of Krafft-Ebing, Stekel, and lesser lights of the preceding
half-century. A crop of short-lived presses—“Eugenic,” “Anthropological”
and “Physicians”—sprang up to profit by the open season. Reaction was
inevitable. Since earlier battles to prevent publication had, as we have
seen, been lost in this country, censoring groups now trained their guns
upon sales agencies wherever they had sufficient influence. In one city
a single sale of a blacklisted item might lay a bookseller open to
prosecution and seizure of all contraband stock. In another, supplying a
title specifically requested by a patron might be safe, but having the
same volume visible even on inconspicuous shelves within the shop was
penalized. In a third it might be that no restrictions were imposed, as
for example Atlantic City, where the excursionist from Boston or
Philadelphia was apt to find all the books banished from his own city
lavishly displayed in boardwalk windows. This uneven but increasing
restraint was soon sufficient to make the production of sensational
items a gamble instead of a sure profit; the fly-by-night presses
withered as suddenly as they had grown, and what little trash was issued
had to seek vanity publishing.
Above Reproach
Variant fiction of quality, however, suffered no very great check. In
1935, for instance, this country saw the publication of two sympathetic
translations, Christa Winsloe’s _Girl Alone_ and Colette’s _The
Indulgent Husband_, and also of Gale Wilhelm’s _We Too Are Drifting_.
This last was a brief first novel by a young woman pictured frankly on
the dust jacket as shingled and tailored, who was a stylistic disciple
of Ernest Hemingway (by then a major influence). Her prose had a lean
economy worthy of her master, and the grudging acclaim her novel
received would certainly have been warmer and more voluminous except for
her subject.
Her central figure is Jan Morale, an artist of thirty whose woodcuts
have already merited a one-man showing. Jan’s childhood was pinched and
sordid; the brother who always hid behind her skirts ended by being
hanged; and she herself might have starved as a printer’s devil but for
a helping hand from the established sculptor Kletkin. He would like to
marry her, but recognizes that no man can hope to possess her. For she
is the model for his prize-winning _Hermaphroditus_, and is more
convincingly masculine in temperament than even Miss Hall’s Stephen
Gordon. The disgraced brother was her twin, and effeminate, which
implies heredity as the cause of her variance. At the opening of the
story Jan is entangled with a society beauty who has raised marital
deception to a fine art in the interests of her predatory lesbian
habits. Jan has been no more than physically captivated; she is already
restive, and tension increases when she falls romantically in love with
the serene innocence of Victoria, just out of college and living with
her conventional suburban family. Jan’s meticulous restraint in refusing
to sweep the younger girl off her feet, and the slow development of
their complete intimacy, are presented delicately but without evasion.
The relationship survives the married woman’s jealous efforts to destroy
it and persists for a time, but with increasing strain. For Jan holds to
a lifelong rule against intruding her bohemian eccentricity upon
conventional households, and Victoria finds frequent absences hard to
explain at home. Victoria is an only child not only loved but loving,
with all the pliant passivity of Verena Tarrant in _The Bostonians_. In
her placid life the need for evasion or struggle has never before
arisen, and they are alien to her now. Therefore the two girls’
long-nursed plans for a holiday together go down before a suddenly
projected family trip. Jan, furtively hidden, must watch a
transcontinental train pull out bearing her beloved, accompanied by her
parents and the “nice boy” they wish her to marry. Here again, as in
_Star Against Star_, the older and well-established woman is the one to
suffer from a consuming intimacy.
The British contribution of the year was a brief section of Francis
Brett Young’s _White Ladies_, in which the now familiar pattern of
_Regiment of Women_ is discernible. Bella, descended from two
generations of independent and passionate women and virtually orphaned,
is sent to boarding school at sixteen because she is too much the tomboy
to be manageable by her grandparents or the mistresses of her private
day-school. The “first passionate devotion of her life” for a music
mistress she outgrows upon discovering that the woman is a facile
sentimentalist, but she falls at once into “instinctive adoration” of a
crisp and ironic headmistress, who seems the antithesis of her former
love. On closer acquaintance the contained Miss Cash reveals a “protean”
range of mood, from childlike gaiety to “spiritual incandescence,” but
her astringent scorn of admitted love preserves Bella’s illusion of
emotional detachment through five years as pupil, teacher and
secretary-companion. Then Miss Cash offers hysterical opposition to
Bella’s associating with men, and this brings the girl to see her at
last as
a faded middle aged woman of imperious and uncertain temper,
pathetically nursing an illusion of emancipated youth and freedom and
daring in what was really the arid life of a confirmed old maid.[32]
Later, in the company of a man she loves, Bella meets Miss Cash on the
street with another worshipful young girl and recognizes a sinister
element in these consuming attachments. When the man observes that
though the schoolmistress has the face of an old woman she still moves
like a girl, Bella replies that she is ageless because she is a vampire,
living on young blood. Neither of the women here appears at all
masculine, though Miss Cash is a feminist and a man-hater and Bella has
a man’s practical intelligence and drive. Bella’s loves are substitutes
for family ties, and the older woman is again the egotist in need of
constant adulation.
In 1936 Rosamond Lehmann skimmed variance fleetingly in _Weather in the
Streets_ with a dialogue between a divorcee of boyish appearance and her
one-time schoolmate who plainly has suspicions about the cause of her
marital difficulties;[33] the suspicions are, however, unfounded. Marcia
Davenport gave her prima donna in _Of Lena Geyer_ just such a faithful
adorer as Allie Wentworth in Huneker’s satiric _Painted Veils_, but she
is careful to specify that though gossip attributed a lesbian color to
the relationship it was actually blameless.[34] (One suspects that there
may have been living models for both authors’ couples of singer and
satellite in the New York musical world of the early century.)
The year’s most important item was the British edition (the American
followed in 1937) of _Nightwood_ by Djuna Barnes, a young American of
the Paris group of expatriates following more or less in the literary
footsteps of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Fortunately Miss Barnes’s
work is intelligible without a key, her kinship being perhaps closer
with T. S. Eliot, who wrote the preface for this, her first full-length
narrative. On initial reading, the first hundred pages of _Nightwood_
may seem only a crowded canvas of figures romantic in their eccentricity
and linked by little save Left Bank geography. Gradually one perceives
that their dual axis is a pair of young women, one an American. Nora
Flood owns a decaying homestead near enough New York to be crowded,
whenever she is there, with the gifted bohemians her hospitality
welcomes. The scene of _Nightwood_, however, is mainly Paris, where Nora
acts as publicity agent for a small circus. Of the enigmatic Robin Vote,
who moves through the story in a kind of somnambulism, one learns little
save that sometimes she breaks absently into fragments of debased song
in any of a half-dozen languages, and exhibits a compulsive lesbian
promiscuity, the two together suggesting a dubious background. At twenty
she drifts into marriage with a wealthy Jew, but childbirth wakes her
violently to the knowledge that neither marriage nor motherhood is
tolerable to her.
She and Nora are drawn to one another on sight, wander about the
continent happily together, and settle for some years in Paris. But
Robin is increasingly involved in transient contacts, though she suffers
them without volition and is happy only on return to Nora. Then a fading
and greedy widow captures and attempts to hold her, and Robin is so torn
between her two emotional poles that her always precarious stability is
destroyed. The occasion of Nora’s first meeting her was a circus
performance from which the girl fled in inarticulate panic because the
animals were magnetically drawn to her side of their cages, and a
lioness stretched paws through the bars and fixed her “with brimming
eyes of love.” The book ends with Nora’s tracing Robin’s final headlong
flight from Paris to her own American country place, where she finds the
deranged girl engaged in poetically beautiful but spine-chilling play
with Nora’s great dog. The volume _in toto_ is a tragic prose poem of
the lost—all those whose sole métier is instinct and emotion, misfit and
outcast in a culture whose law is social regimentation.
Perceptibly related in style, although far inferior in artistry, is
Helen Anderson’s _Pity for Women_ (1937). In this story, an
over-sensitive motherless girl attempts to make her way alone in New
York, living in a residence club more sinister in its inbred hysteria
than any woman’s college dormitory. The hysterical manifestations are
not only variance but the reckless struggles of older girls to capture
men. The “blind dates” to which Ann submits, the drinking and
promiscuity and aftermaths of abortion and suicide which she sees among
her housemates, so sicken her that when she acquires a roommate to
assuage her loneliness, she clings to the cool and serene Elizabeth as a
savior. The two girls enjoy a period of innocent friendship precious to
both, but it is jeopardized when an older woman galvanizes Elizabeth
into passionate tension. This imperious Judith soon brings Ann also
under her spell. She then drops the more contained Elizabeth, and takes
Ann as her housemate outside the club. This move estranges the two girls
and also terminates a promising acquaintance between Ann and the one man
whose company she has been able to enjoy.
There is at first the usual period of honeymoon ecstasy between the two
housemates but then bit by bit Ann pieces together Judith’s crowded
history, one only to have been expected, but prostrating to the naïve
Ann. She is particularly shaken by the story of Judith’s dearest love, a
girl as young as herself, whose marriage for the sake of a child drove
Judith to attempt suicide. She also suffers from their social isolation,
which is complete save for Judith’s still adoring older friends. No new
contacts on Ann’s part are permitted. From an agony of jealousy Ann
wastes so alarmingly that Judith, to reassure her, goes through a
species of marriage ceremony, using the familiar passage from the _Book
of Ruth_. But this gesture is worse than futile. Ann’s state has been
induced not by need of permanence but by unconscious terror of it, which
warred with her passion. As she feels the fetters closing, her mind
gives way. Of the three women depicted, Judith is an innate homosexual
and the two younger girls are diverted from normal orbits by contact
with her. Elizabeth has stamina enough to regain her balance, although
had she remained Judith’s choice the outcome must have been dubious. The
immature and unstable Ann is wrecked beyond hope of recovery.
After these two studies, ultra-modern in manner and somewhat morbid in
substance, to read Elisabeth Craigin’s _Either is Love_ (1937) is to
step back into another century. The almost expository narrative moves
against a background in which horses still provide the means of
transportation, and there is little to indicate that it is not the
discreetly disguised autobiography which it claims to be. Indeed its
prose style suggests an already established reputation in fields of
non-fiction. It covers a decade in the life of its author, beginning
with her late twenties. An employee of the federal government, she is
singled out by a younger colleague who shows her the small attentions
normally proffered by a man. As the acquaintance develops, its emotional
tone disturbs Elisabeth, who recognizes it as what would ordinarily be
called “falling in love.” (However, as she explains, in the United
States at that time the only available literature on psychology was
written by William James; Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis were barely
heard of, and even the feminism of Olive Schreiner and Ellen Key was
“only for the very emancipated.”) For two years the pair struggle
against circumstance, the need for secrecy, and their own increasing
passion. To the young Rachel, the experience of variant (if not lesbian)
love is not wholly new. Heretofore her friends have been attracted by
her boyishness, but now Elisabeth is averse to any travesty of a
heterosexual relation. Theirs must be an honest love between two women.
Finally some months together abroad give them a typical interlude of
complete and perfect union.
Then family complications separate them, and the brief periods they can
snatch together are fevered by the effort to crowd too much ardor into
too little time. During a long stretch with the width of the Atlantic
between them, Rachel falls back into her youthful pattern of responding
to the dynamic reaction she involuntarily rouses in other women. This
infidelity to what is still her great love induces loss of faith in
herself, and finally she suffers so acute a sense of guilt that she
turns against all physical expression and follows the lead of a new
friend (a mystic enamored of self-abnegation) into the church. Elisabeth
could have foregone intimacy if that was required to preserve their
friendship; but Rachel’s retroactive conviction that their whole
association was wrong seems to her sheer sacrilege. She feels that the
Rachel known to her is dead, and a decade passes before she is able to
enter upon another emotional relationship.
This second love is heterosexual, and the other half of the volume
records its course, terminating in marriage. The two experiences, though
different in detail, are subjectively identical and quite justify the
title, _Either is Love_. The author’s final comment upon variance is
well-considered enough to warrant quotation:
I do not even now understand the expression “sinful” as I hear it in
connection with love between women.... I should think sin was
something that did harm in some form, to other people or, of course,
to oneself.... Lust demoralizes both participants.... Married life
does not preclude it, God knows, and there are great numbers of
extra-marital forms. I can understand how lust might develop between
women, and if that exists it is deplorable enough. But because incest
occurs, is all family life vicious? Because there are brothels, is
all sexual life unclean? A so-called Lesbian alliance can be of the
most rarified purity, and those who do not believe it are merely
judging in ignorance of the facts.[35]
This special pleading, more philosophic than Miss Hall’s, is so much of
a piece with the rest of the text that it is not obtrusive, and the
volume raised no outcry in our press.
Nevertheless, in the same year the imported French film _Club de
Femmes_, its story by Jacques Deval, was drastically cut for New York
showing. The review in _Time_ said:
Manhattan censors promptly spotted Sapphic overtones ... in the
character played by beauteous Else Argall, Deval’s wife. Censorship
deleted her best scene, which shows her successfully fighting the
urge to join the girl of her desire.[36]
This latter is the central figure, who is seduced by a man and bears his
illegitimate child. “Considered fit for Manhattan cinema-goers was the
shot in which [the lesbian] poisons the procuress telephone operator.”
If, as Ernst and Lindey claim in _The Censor Marches On_, the deletion
of the “best” scene left an implication that the lesbian yielded to her
desires, then as revived in 1948 the film must have been still further
cut (as indeed a certain incoherence suggests), for all that it then
showed was the older woman’s maternal solicitude for the naïve newcomer.
In 1938 the important contributions came from Gale Wilhelm and Kay
Boyle. To be sure, Dorothy Baker in _Young Man with a Horn_ hinted, in
passing, at an alliance between a light-skinned Harlem beauty and the
white graduate student who later proves so unsatisfactory a wife to the
hero. Ernest Hemingway also, in “Sea Change,” one of the briefest pieces
in _The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories_, shows a lesbian
interlude breaking in upon a satisfactory heterosexual affair. The man
tells his errant partner, “It’s a vice.” The girl, promising to return
to him, denies the charge. “We’re made up of all sorts of things. You’ve
known that. You’ve used it well enough.” But neither of these treatments
was very important, and there seem not to have been others.
Miss Wilhelm’s second novelette, _Torchlight to Valhalla_, resembles her
first in length and style, but differs in that both its girls are
masculine in little more than attire, and variant largely through
conditioning. The older is even more closely bound to her father than
was Gillian in _The Tortoiseshell Cat_. In her desperate loneliness
after his death, she yields to a young musician (male) who seems an
ideal partner, but finds herself frozen and shamed by the experiment.
The younger girl has been forced since the age of fifteen to assume a
man’s responsibility for herself and her once distinguished aunt, now a
bemused alcoholic. The two girls immediately find in one another the
answer to their needs and achieve a union which promises lasting
happiness. There is nothing here like Jan’s bohemian existence in _We
Too Are Drifting_ or her barren entanglement with the married woman.
Despite these seeming efforts to placate the prejudiced, Miss Wilhelm’s
second title fared no better at the hands of reviewers than her first.
Kay Boyle, then another of the American literary expatriates in France,
was already a writer of established reputation when she entered the
variant field in 1938 with two titles. Earlier, in _Gentlemen, I Address
You Privately_ there had been hints of male homosexuality. Incorporated
in _Monday Night_ there is a much more explicit lesbian episode, seen in
part through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy whose father is serving a
life sentence for a crime of which he is innocent. The rather pathetic
wife and mother enjoys a summer interlude with a _soi-disant_ Russian
princess, fugitive from the Revolution of 1917. This Baya,
world-vagabond, automobile racer and aviator, even masquerades on
occasion in the father’s World War I uniform,
the visored cap ... tipped on the side of her head, even the boots
seeming to fit exactly, and the crop stuck under her armpit, and the
face small, tough and reckless ... “His uniform, his wife, his kid,
the life he can’t live handed me like a present,” she said scarcely
aloud, the casual rakish smile neat as a boy’s.[37]
Then the other woman shows interest in a man, and after some stubborn
haunting of the apartment, Baya slams out, “banging the hall-door behind
her so that the pictures jumped on the walls.”
Miss Boyle’s second narrative, “The Bridegroom’s Body,” did not appear
in book form until 1940 when it was included in the volume _The Crazy
Hunter_, but the _Southern Quarterly_ printed it in 1938. Here Lady
Glourie, thirty-five but emotionally naïve as a child, is mistress of an
isolated manor with a swannery dating from the sixteenth century, and
wife to a man whose only interest is sport. He and his cronies spend
their days with rod and gun and their nights in carousal from which she
is excluded, so that she feels herself isolated in a world of men given
over to nothing but killing. When illness in the swanherd’s family makes
it necessary to import a nurse, Lady Glourie anticipates the company of
another woman with pathetic eagerness. The arrival of a young and
beautiful Irish girl is a blow, the more bitter because Lord Glourie is
instantly smitten. There is also a handsome farmer on the place, reputed
to be irresistible to women; so when Lady Glourie learns that Miss
Cafferty is given to long walks by night as well as by day she infers
the worst. The Irish girl’s shyly professed admiration for herself she
takes as a studied attempt at ingratiation.
It is the swans’ mating season and the perennial battle is on between
old warriors and young cobs. On a night when the nurse is neither in her
room nor with her patient, Lady Glourie is called from her bed to deal
with a battle to the death between a young “bridegroom” and the fiercest
of the old cobs. Thinking she may be in time to save the young swan, she
wades out waist deep to the rescue and narrowly escapes dangerous attack
by the old one. She emerges from the icy water with the dead swan to
find Miss Cafferty there, softly hysterical, pouring out a torrent of
endearment. She learns that from the first the girl has been interested
in her alone, fighting off the men because she too hates their predatory
cruelty. Her long walks she has taken
“to think about you here, alone where there might be something left
of you ... some mark of you on the ground. I couldn’t sleep in the
room, I couldn’t bear closing the door after I’d left you.... I’ve
walked the country alone ... talking out loud to you night and day,
asking you to give me everything I haven’t, peace and strength and
that look in your eyes ... one hint of what it is you have that
nobody else has, just one weapon to fight the others ...”[38]
Lady Glourie quiets her,
but these were things she had heard once or once imagined.... She
stood waiting, scarcely breathing, waiting for the words to start
again. The chill she had not yet felt on her flesh entered her heart
for the instant that the words abandoned this anonymous but exact
description of love.[39]
When the girl does speak again it is to beg Lady Glourie to come away
with her, escape from the manor, continue to “lend me what you can
spare.” The surcharged moment is interrupted by the noisy arrival of
Lord Glourie with a lantern, demanding “What’s up?” and annoyed to find
them both drenched to the skin. “Lady Glourie looked down at her own
strange flesh and suddenly she began shaking with the cold.” Here the
narrative ends, and as in _Delay in the Sun_, the reader must supply for
himself the ultimate outcome.
Nineteen-thirty-nine saw the publication of two dissimilar novels, the
American and anonymous _Diana_,[40] and _Promise of Love_ by a new
English author, Mary Renault. Of the latter, the main theme is the
struggle of a nurse and a laboratory pathologist to work out
satisfactory heterosexual relations against the odds of hospital
discipline and of their individual homosexual interests. Vivian closely
resembles a brother of uncommon charm, irresistible to both sexes but
disinclined to take his relations with either seriously. Thus Mic, who
has enjoyed a transient intimacy with the brother and seen his interest
fade, is wary of allowing Vivian any hold upon him. She, for her part,
is being gracefully courted by a fellow nurse, tall, tailored and
debonair, and there are discreet intimations of her momentarily
succumbing. One of the factors inclining Vivian toward Mic is Colonna’s
sudden and much deeper attachment to a new supervisor of nurses, and the
completeness of this connection and the perilous professional risks it
entails are left in no doubt. Vivian’s growing intimacy with Mic
narrowly escapes disaster when, in a spirit of deviltry, she dresses in
men’s clothes and gets the abrupt and brutal reaction the experiment
invites. In the end, the two weather all storms and marry. The
supervisor also accepts a male suitor, and Colonna is left to face the
fact that as she grows older her Maupin pose will be less becoming and
her conquests fewer.
_Diana_ is an autobiography almost of the “true confession” type, though
it carried a preface by Dr. Victor Robinson endorsing at least its
subjective authenticity. Diana grows up the only girl in a household of
brothers and she is very close to her father until his death. When in
early adolescence she falls in love with a high school chum and
recognizes her feelings as those of a boy, her reaction is one of shame
not alleviated by an older brother’s introducing her to the works of
Havelock Ellis. In college she avoids friendships with women and evades
one girl’s advances by pretending ignorance. Delighted to find the
attentions of a male graduate student acceptable, she is engaged to him
for a couple of years, but an unsuccessful trial of intimacy eliminates
marriage from her future plans.
During a year of study abroad, initiation by another American girl shows
her where her fulfillment lies; this contact, however, is broken at once
by the reappearance of an earlier flame of her new friend. Wounded and
angry, Diana is ripe for a less sophisticated alliance with a girl who
is shocked by lesbianism and refuses to recognize anything of it in
their love. When intimacy finally develops, it is not too satisfactory,
since Jane’s scruples preclude any intelligent effort on her part to
meet Diana’s needs. Nevertheless, the two attempt for a year to live
together after their return to the States. In the women’s college where
Diana teaches, their rooming off-campus stirs so much gossip that for
the next year Diana must choose between Jane and her position.
Diana’s second conscientious effort, in a coeducational college, to
become interested in men is unsuccessful. Somewhat later she finds a
young woman graduate student with whom she achieves happiness after a
period of meticulous restraint reminiscent of _We Too Are Drifting_.
Suspense is supplied by Leslie’s mother’s denouncing the pair and
disowning her daughter, and by the reappearance of Jane, who attempts to
capture Leslie out of wanton spite. Diana and Leslie are so eminently
suited to one another, however, that they finally come through even more
closely united. This narrative is certainly no literary masterpiece, and
perhaps its strongest point is Diana’s honest analysis along the way of
the arguments against, rather than for, her chosen way of life. Since
homosexuals need not fear pregnancy or assume responsibility for a home
and family, they are free to make and break connections lightly.[41]
Only true sympathy, loyalty, and dedication to their unions can restrain
them from snatching at facile satisfaction, and human nature being what
it is, no lesbian alliance has more strength than the weaker of its two
partners. These observations are not particularly original, of course,
having often enough been demonstrated by example in a half century’s
fiction. Even the precepts themselves had appeared by 1939 in a good
many hortatory manuals of sex psychology. Heretofore, however, they were
voiced by strenuous opponents of homosexual intimacy. For a defender to
present them with cool logic, and, in spite of them, to justify the
calculated risk, marks an advance in psychological perspective since
Radclyffe Hall’s wholly emotional plea for tolerance a decade earlier.
Another War’s Shadow
For the next three years the preoccupations of war—plus the paper
shortage—crowded variant fiction almost completely from the market, and
even after readers and publishers once more hit a modified stride, the
bulk of such fiction remained condemnatory for the rest of the decade.
Angela DuMaurier’s _The Little Less_ (1941) reports effects as
devastating as those in _The Island_ from a long variant enslavement,
even though in this case there is no physical intimacy. Toward the end
of the book a spasm of lesbian debauchery marks one woman’s repudiation
of her Catholic faith in defiance of a deity who permitted her child to
die. The orgy is followed by her suicide. In Fanny Hurst’s _Lonely
Parade_ (1942), the picturesque trio of bachelor girls are solaced by
mutual devotion of a variant cast, though never actually lesbian; but
their unwedded lives are not especially happy.
The inexplicable burst of five titles in 1943 was largely damning, the
minority report being Dorothy Cowlin’s in _Winter Solstice_, a thinly
disguised case history of a paralytic whose eight years’ invalidism, of
hysterical origin, is cured by a sudden emotional interest in a woman
aviator. The relationship is brief and innocent, and is followed by
marriage for both women. Craig Rice used the lesbian advances of an
eccentric heiress to a Greenwich Village “poet” as a neat red herring in
her murder mystery _Having a Wonderful Crime_, in which the heiress is
the victim. In Jane Bowles’s _Two Serious Ladies_, an inhibited Brooklyn
housewife finds her first experience outside the States so inebriating
that she defies her husband and lingers in the prostitutes’ quarters of
Colon, determined to “learn all the things she didn’t know,” even though
she realizes they will not make her happy.
On a level to be taken seriously, Arthur Koestler in _Arrival and
Departure_ conveyed, through his hero’s contact with a woman
psychoanalyst, his estimate of both the good and the bad in an
all-tolerant psychiatric viewpoint. Peter, heroic political refugee
shattered by his ordeal in the hands of the enemy, is taken in and cared
for in a neutral European city by his countrywoman, Dr. Bolgar. He falls
in love and has a restoring liaison with a young girl who frequents the
doctor’s apartment, and he plans to follow Odette to the United States
when a passport can be secured. His relapse into neurosis upon her
leaving him without notice or farewell Dr. Bolgar repairs by a swift and
skillful analysis of his lifelong martyr complex. Chance, however,
reveals to Peter that the doctor is Odette’s real love and he but a
passing fancy. So, instead of following the girl, he returns to his
perilous but “real” underground activities. The doctor is described as
tall, full-blown, and masterful; Odette, as childishly slender, with a
“boyish” unpainted mouth. In the end,
Above all he felt a sadness ... and pity for Odette, with her vacant
look, her slimness and vulnerability—Odette the victim, drowned in
the carnivorous flower’s embrace.[42]
Certainly best-known of the year’s titles is Dorothy Baker’s _Trio_, on
which a play was based, since its stage history virtually duplicated
that of _The Captive_ seventeen years earlier. Its opening in
Philadelphia was well attended and reviewed, and the play ran on
Broadway for a little more than a month before being closed through
pressure from a combination of religious interests. One of the _New
Yorker_ staff interviewed various signers of the petition for its
withdrawal, and found that several had neither seen the play nor read
the novel from which it was made before lending their names to the
protest.
The story presents the struggle between a Frenchwoman on an American
university faculty and a young art photographer for possession of a girl
who is departmental assistant to the former. Pauline Maury has just
published a brilliant study of the _fin de siècle_ French decadents,
notably Verlaine and Rimbaud. Like them, she is an advocate of exploring
the limits of sensibility under all possible stimuli from alcohol to
sexual passion, with veiled hints at drugs and flagellation, but
naturally this aspect of her life is well concealed. The girl Janet, at
first a passionate intellectual and emotional devotee, has been reduced
by intimacy with Pauline to the limit of stability when a whirlwind
courtship by Ray Mackenzie and a wholesome heterosexual liaison with him
save her from further exploitation. Though Ray reacts with blind rage
and contempt to her confession of her past relations with Pauline, there
is at least a chance that he will come around enough to marry her when
he has cooled. The defeated and frustrated Frenchwoman shoots herself.
This is the essence of the drama, artistically in need of no
accessories, but probably to avoid elaboration of its morbid emotional
elements Mrs. Baker added an offense more permissible of stress. The
substance of Pauline’s monograph was stolen from the dissertation of a
married friend to whose premature death her own relations with the woman
contributed, and the widowed husband retaliates by exposing her
plagiarism. This disgrace provides adequate motivation for the suicide
which makes so effective a dramatic climax, but it lessens the power of
the whole. Pauline as a self-defeating decadent is an unsavory but
convincing personality. With the added onus of literary theft she too
nearly degenerates into mere villain. Of this century’s four widely
circulated dramas, then—_The Captive_, _Mädchen in Uniform_, _The
Children’s Hour_, and _Trio_—only the German film succeeded in being
good theatre without blurring in some way the variant theme.
Two passing references in 1944 were Erskine Caldwell’s single flippant
paragraph in _Tragic Ground_: a bartender’s account of discovering his
wife at play in the back room of her beauty salon with two of her young
patrons,[43] and Jean Stafford’s vignette in _Boston Adventure_ of a
Back Bay dowager who fawns upon each season’s debutantes without once
suspecting her own motivation. The heroine, however, bearing scars still
unhealed from her childhood under the spell of a neurotic mother now in
a sanatorium, is literally sickened by the woman’s fulsome caresses.[44]
In 1945 Nora Lofts inserted in her historical novel _Jassy_ a
disparaging middle section, “Complaint from Lesbia,” involving a
triangle of two middle-aged school mistresses and the romanticized title
figure, then a kitchen maid of thirteen. From girlhood the now-widowed
Mrs. Twysdale has worshipped her intellectual cousin, Katherine, and in
youth chose as husband the suitor who most resembled her. The two women
have jogged along undramatically enough for twenty years in their joint
school enterprise when the advent of the remarkable Jassy moves
Katherine to unadmitted passion and Mrs. Twysdale to vengeful jealousy.
It is the precocious Jassy herself, now a favored student through
Katherine’s efforts, who at fifteen accepts unjust dismissal without
protest because she recognizes that Katherine will ultimately be better
off keeping her lifelong business partner. Here Mrs. Twysdale, pettily
feminine and feline, is alone identified with “Lesbia,” (semantically
unrelated to Catullus), while the other two exhibit traits implied by
Miss Lofts to be masculine.
In the same year Mary Renault in _The Middle Mist_ provided a tonic
relief with a variant portrait as piquant as any since _Mlle de Maupin_.
Leo (christened Leonora) can, at twenty-five, be mistaken for a teen-age
boy even by her own sister after a long separation. She makes a good
living by writing “westerns,” lives on a houseboat within commuting
distance of London, and avoids situations requiring feminine costume.
For seven years she has maintained a comfortable domestic ménage with a
nurse who once saved her life. Neither girl’s single brief experiment
with a man was happy, and both find their common life wholly satisfying.
Still they do not avoid the company of men, and a good part of the story
is concerned with the growth of Leo’s friendship with a fellow author
into a love which leads finally to marriage. Her difficult choice
between her two very real loves, determined largely by her desire for
children, is movingly presented.
Her initial attempt at masculine independence was occasioned by
intolerable friction between her parents, and her own temperament made
it a success. When her younger sister, kept feminine and helpless by a
doting mother, follows Leo’s pattern of flight, she simply presents
herself on Leo’s doorstep and stays for a long season without realistic
thought of who is paying for her keep. Her own adolescent means of
escape from family tension has been a steady diet of cheap fiction, and
she can see her future only in its sugary terms. When real heartbreak
ends a stupid little romance built on nothing more than wishful
dreaming, she creeps back to the parental nest, where one imagines her
withering into bathetic spinsterhood, haunting rental libraries in
search of more stories with happy endings. The parallel development of
the two sisters’ lives constitutes a strong argument in favor of lesbian
intimacy as against inhibited Victorian romancing. One of the most vivid
features of _The Middle Mist_ is its humor, a quality hitherto
conspicuously lacking in variant fiction. (Gautier, Gunter, Bennett and
Mackenzie are the exceptions.) Leo’s taking a conceited young doctor
down a notch by flirting successfully with the nurse he brings to a
party and then neglects for other women would be hilarious in any
setting. In a variant novel it gleams as an unmatched gem.
Second Crescendo
The end of the war produced no such immediate effect on variant fiction
as did the beginning, but gradually quantity increased with the
accelerating speed of a geometric progression. Consequently, many of the
thirty-odd novels which appeared from 1946 through 1954—all still
relatively accessible—must receive short shrift. Brief and disparaging
variant or lesbian passages were included in Remarque’s _Arch of
Triumph_ (1945 in English), Edmund Wilson’s _Memoirs of Hecate County_
(1946), Felix Forrest’s _Carola_ (1948), Philip Wylie’s _Opus 21_ (1949)
and _Disappearance_ (1951), Theodora Keogh’s _Meg_ (1950), Robert
Wilder’s _Wait for Tomorrow_ (1952), Joan Henry’s _Women in Prison_
(1952) and Maurice Druon’s _Rise of Simon Lachaume_ (1951; in English,
1952). Characters varied from prostitutes to socialites; action, from
sentimental philandering to a jealous knifing.
Longer derogatory treatments were presented by an equal number of
authors. In 1946 Jean Paul Sartre’s _No Exit_ (a translation of _Huis
Clos_, 1945) had a brief but unchallenged run in New York. Its three
characters, impounded in a small room in hell, are: a cowardly political
traitor who has also heaped every humiliation on a devoted wife; a woman
who has broken several men for her own amusement and killed her unwanted
child; and a manhating lesbian who has stolen her cousin’s wife and then
talked her victim into a joint suicide pact. Since the lesbian’s sins
seem less heinous than those of the other two, her emotional anomaly
must be viewed as evening the balance.
Christopher LaFarge’s _The Sudden Guest_ (1946) is concerned with a
colossal egotist who closes her doors against victims of a New England
hurricane. Desperation emboldens them to enter despite her, but she is
untouched by their several stark tragedies. Only one handsome and
cultured woman is welcome, for reasons half snobbish, half emotional.
This Mrs. Cleever has with her an infant son, but is indifferent to his
welfare because of her grief at the drowning of his nursemaid, with whom
she was obviously infatuated. The last waifs to arrive are a low-class
boy and a girl of fifteen whom he has saved from drowning and carries
naked in his arms. Galvanized from her stupor, Mrs. Cleever snatches the
beautiful figure from him and, unassisted, carries the girl off to her
room. Later the spinster-hostess finds the two sleeping nude in each
other’s arms, and this alone has the power to move her—but only to
jealousy and self-pity for her own loneliness.
Three comparatively mediocre works of 1947 were equally severe. George
Willis’s _Little Boy Blues_ recounts the machinations of a lesbian to
achieve marriage and motherhood as a “front” to protect her reputation
and as a means of securing her future. She then deserts her victim and
uses the child as a financial hold upon him while pursuing her own
inclinations, until he is goaded into killing her. Ethel Wilson in
_Hetty Dorval_ pictures the near-capture of a Canadian girl of eighteen
by a courtesan on vacation from her profession and posing as a
respectable woman in Vancouver. In _Not Now but NOW_, Mary F. K.
Fisher’s chief figure is a woman as ageless as Orlando and a ruthless
egomaniac in all eras and settings. It is in a small Ohio town during
the Twenties that she involves a college girl in a lesbian scandal.
The title figure in James Ronald’s _The Angry Woman_ (1948) externally
resembles Sinclair Lewis’s Dr. Herringdean, and, like her, is a
successful business executive. Her hold upon Fern Oliphant dates from a
bedridden year in the latter’s teens and continues till her suicide a
decade later. Lesley uses every means to increase Fern’s dependence upon
her, and tries first to prevent and then to break up a marriage arranged
by the girl’s mother. Unlike Lewis’s unalloyed monster, however, this
woman insists she has never been a lesbian. Her own marriage failed on
its first night (cf. the French _Méphistophéla_), and her passion for
the girl has also gone unfulfilled. She sees her own fondness as the
only truly maternal devotion Fern has ever known. To everyone else it
wears the aspect of subjective cannibalism.
A more complex case appears in Margaret Landon’s _Never Dies the Dream_
(1949). But for its expressed horror of variant passion this novel would
belong among the favorable studies, for its mainspring is a love as
constructive and as delicately presented as that in the _Book of Ruth_.
Like its author’s now famous _Anna and the King of Siam_, it is laid in
Siam, but in this work the heroine is an unmarried American missionary.
India gives sanctuary in her mission school to a countrywoman a decade
her junior, widow of a Siamese of high rank, because the girl is in
danger of violence from her husband’s relatives and of sexual
molestation by a European. When India isolates herself with the girl to
nurse her through an attack of typhoid, she is accused by a rival
mission teacher of being “enamored” of her patient. Agonized
soul-searching forces her to admit she feels Angela to be “bone of her
bone, flesh of her flesh,” but she can find nothing blameworthy in her
love. The maternal element is further stressed when Angela, upon
returning to America, leaves her most treasured possession as a parting
gift to “my mother-in-love.” It should be admitted that passion of any
sort is regarded darkly in the volume—quite justifiably in view of its
uglier recorded manifestations—but one can only regret an astigmatism
which sees so vividly the beauty of a selfless passion (for its
incandescent intensity is undeniably passionate) and is still blind to
its essential nature.
Hugh Wheeler’s _The Crippled Muse_ (1952) does not condemn lesbianism
per se so much as one of the personalities involved. This is another
sparkling comedy of Capri. The three figures significant here are all
Americans. Liz Lewis is a wealthy and domineering shrew of apparently
innate masculinity, whose record as a finishing school teacher was as
technically immaculate as Clare Hartill’s in _Regiment of Women_, until
her dismissal at perhaps thirty. This was occasioned by the conspicuous
infatuation of a student in her late teens after the girl was violently
orphaned. At the time of this story these two have lived together for a
decade and the younger, Loretta, is more than tired of the arrangement;
yet she stays because she feels responsible for their plight. A
sympathetic young professor induces her to break away and marry him. He
is not shocked by her history but is hotly antagonistic to the woman who
has so long exploited her sense of guilt to hold her captive.
(Incidentally, Liz had used Christina Rossetti’s _Goblin
Market_ in her original capture of Loretta by stressing their
parallelism—unconvincing—to Lizzie and Laura).
Less tolerance of lesbianism marks Sara Harris’s _The Wayward Ones_
(1952), a social worker’s study of homosexuality in a reform school.
Termed “the racket” by the adolescent inmates, it at first terrifies and
repels a sixteen-year-old girl committed to the institution for
unmarried motherhood. She sees, however, that the pairing of “moms” and
“pops” brings solace and a sense of belonging to many of the girls
involved, and that the authorities make no effort to check the practice,
to which they remain questionably blind. When at last she “marries” one
of the “pops” to gain protection from an unbalanced housemate who has
attempted to kill her, her assumption of the new status marks the
beginning of rapid deterioration. She becomes a ruthless liar and
schemer, and makes plans to become a “call girl” for both men and women
when she is released from the school.
Perhaps the most virulent attack was launched by Simon Eisner in _Naked
Storm_, another paper-backed original of the same year. A predatory
woman novelist, on the eve of departing for California, first seduces a
young art student whom she leaves ill with self-loathing. On the
transcontinental train she repeats the experiment with an older woman,
who is highly intelligent but emotionally starved. This woman is also
courted by a shy and unhappy man, but his rival’s expert sophistication
rapidly reduces his chances. At this point an ex-war correspondent
decides to play _deus ex machina_. Moved by savage hatred of all
lesbians and this arrogant specimen in particular, he takes advantage of
a sixty-below-zero blizzard which stalls the train for some thirty hours
in the Donner Pass, goads the self-sufficient lesbian into going out
into the night for snow to ice her liquor, and furthermore, manages so
to confuse her that she loses her bearings in the arctic blackness and
freezes to death. The author plainly enjoys this dénouement as much as
Belot enjoyed killing off Mme. Blangy.
The latest condemnation is incorporated in _Strange Sisters_ (1954), a
pot-boiling murder story by a writer who calls himself “Fletcher Flora.”
Opening with the knifing of a man by a girl who has led him to embrace
her but then finds her sexual revulsion unconquerable, it flashes back
to the causes of her inhibition. The earliest was childhood idolatry of
the more or less innocently seductive aunt who raised her (cf. the
mother-daughter relation in _Star Against Star_). The second was
deliberate seduction by a women’s college instructor when the girl was a
lonely and maladjusted freshman; the third a repetition with a
department store personnel manager as agent. Each of these older women,
in increasing degrees, was interested only in her own emotional needs
and not at all in her victim’s welfare. The girl ends with complete
mental breakdown and suicide.
All these condemnatory treatments were balanced by as many mildly or
strongly sympathetic studies. The briefest of these are two short
stories, one “Orestes” in Rhys Davies’s _A Trip to London_ (1946), in
which a lesbian waitress frees a middle-aged bachelor from his
paralyzing mother fixation precisely because her attitude toward him is
so free of feminine seduction. The other is Isabel Bolton’s “Ruth and
Irma” (1947), a reminiscent and gently ironic sketch of an infatuated
pair of girls roaming the Riviera during the Twenties, which lays their
histrionics directly to their saturation with that decade’s fiction. A
more important role is assigned to lesbianism in Lucie Marchal’s
prize-winning French novel of 1948 translated in 1949 as _The Mesh_, a
Freudian study of a domineering woman’s influence on the lives of her
son and daughter. The son’s marriage to a timid widow proves a fruitless
gesture of defiance. The daughter, always jealous of the mother’s
preference for her brother, is gradually liberated from her own fixation
by an increasing interest in the pitiful and helpless young wife. In the
end her protective impulses become passionate and she takes the girl
away to live with her. It is plain, however, that she, like her mother,
will soon tyrannize over her captive as stringently as she herself has
been dominated.
Another paper-backed original was _Women’s Barracks_ (1950) by Toreska
Torres (according to _Publishers Weekly_ the pseudonym of an established
author). This purports to be a description of life in the London
headquarters for women recruits of the Free French forces; however, it
is not a translation. An important thread in the meandering plot is the
love of a shy girl of seventeen for a much older woman, wholesome and
maternal though vulgar, who has consoled herself while married to a
“pansy” by intimacies with both men and women. One or two completely
lesbian couples in the house refuse to recognize Claude as one of
themselves—“She’s a pervert, a curiosity seeker.” Nevertheless her
influence on Ursula is beneficent. Soon the girl turns to men, the
lesbian interlude having cracked the shell of her naïve reserve and
matured her for other experience.
Easily the eeriest of all references to variance is Shirley Jackson’s in
her remarkable study of late adolescence, _Hangsaman_ (1951). Here a
girl, as precariously balanced as Ann in _Pity for Women_, is inhibited
by a father fixation, and driven farther from normal experience by a
cryptically-described incident, perhaps actual assault, but more likely
only heavy petting, by an older man at a cocktail party in her own home.
In a “progressive” college, quite unsupervised, she becomes more and
more solitary and withdrawn until her sudden friendship with an ideally
sympathetic girl companion. This alter ego, whose allure she finally
recognizes as physical and fights off, proves actually to be only the
other half of her own split personality. In other words, the drama in
_Hangsaman_ is that of an abnormally sensitive girl’s narrow escape from
schizophrenia.
In the same year Whit and Hallie Burnett included in _Sextet: Six Story
Discoveries_ John Eichrodt’s “Nadia Devereux,” which its author
describes as a feminine “parody” of Thomas Mann’s _Death in Venice_. It
need not, then, be further discussed than to say that it treats
understandingly the secret infatuation of an internationally-renowned
woman lecturer on international law for an exquisite girl on the
clerical staff of the United Nations. Like its model, it follows the
older woman’s gradual disintegration and death from the violence of her
inhibited yet undisciplined passion.
Appearing also in 1951 was a sensational trifle reminiscent of the worst
of the 1930s, _Strange Fires_ by Jack Woodford. This is a sexual riot
with lesbian action prominent, in which, as in _Love Like a Shadow_, one
girl is essentially “monogamous” in spirit. Rhoda and her
finishing-school roommate, both initiated by their physical education
teacher, “marry” one another and are briefly happy. But the discovery
that her partner and Miss Pat are continuing their relation wounds Rhoda
deeply, and their taking her to an “orgy” in a Park Avenue socialite’s
apartment completes her disillusion. She finally marries a man (implying
that she is still “normal”), and the two other young women continue in a
mutually free alliance.
A sympathetic treatment which bows to orthodox standards by ending
tragically is presented in _Spring Fire_ (1952), paper-backed original
by Vin Packer, admitted pseudonym of an established male author. Here a
lonely boyish co-ed in a midwestern university is willingly seduced by
her sorority-house roommate and finds the lesbian relation a happy one
as long as it remains secret. It is the seducer, neurotic daughter of a
promiscuous widow, who feels guilt and carries on simultaneously an
excessive affair with a man to prove herself normal. The unsophisticated
Mitch is urged to do likewise, but she cannot follow through her two
squeamish efforts, and she reacts with loathing to drunken violation by
a fraternity man. When suspicion of lesbianism falls on the two girls
the neurotic accuses her victim of having been the seducer. Mitch is
expelled from the sorority, and only the understanding dean of girls and
the college physician avert disaster. In his naturalistic picture of
campus sex life in general the author treats the lesbian aspect with
comparative sympathy and attributes its destructive effects to the
neurotic girl’s sense of guilt. This is induced by her mother’s
influence and ripens into a full-blown psychosis. She ends in a mental
institution.
Two much happier episodes were featured in novels of 1952. In Fay
Adams’s paper-backed original, _Appointment in Paris_, an American
orphan in her teens is matured sufficiently to weaken a spinster aunt’s
dominance through her intimacy with a wholesome, if irresponsible,
French courtesan living in a neighboring apartment. She then enjoys a
liaison with a Frenchman and later happily marries an American. Both men
know her history. May Sarton’s infinitely superior novel, _A Shower of
Summer Days_, includes the brief infatuation of an American girl,
half-through college, for her Anglo-Irish aunt. Sent abroad by her
mother to terminate an undesirable romance at home, she at first
truculently resists her aunt’s overtures and her own impulses toward
friendliness. The aunt, once a great beauty, childless, and still bound
to her husband by mutual passion which has survived two decades of
marriage, is an irresistible personality and comes to exert great
influence on the girl. As with Lily Briscoe in _To the Lighthouse_, it
is partly the relation between wife and husband which fascinates the
girl; however, her emotions crystallize upon the woman. Her aunt
recognizes the unmistakable signs of passion, and far from being
shocked, even wishes it were possible for her to respond. By the end of
the summer the girl is cured, not only of her callow heterosexual
obsession, but of the variant love also, and emerges with adult
appreciation of what married love can be.
There remain a half-dozen novels in which variance plays so large a part
that they should not be ticked off too briefly. The first is _Ladders to
Fire_ (1946) by Anaïs Nin, a stylistic disciple (in some measure) of
Gertrude Stein. There is a minimum of action, the work being not so much
a plotted narrative as a series of character analyses in poetic prose.
The author states her theme in a prologue: woman’s struggle to
understand her own nature. Hitherto, she says,
Action and creation, for woman, was ... an imitation of man. In this
imitation ... she lost contact with her nature and her relation to
man. Man appears only partially in this volume, because for the woman
at war with herself he can only appear thus.... Woman at war with
herself has not yet been related to man, only to the child in man,
being capable only of maternity.[45]
Of such “incomplete” women there are five in the novel. One, a cinema
star with heterosexual experience, is still subjectively imprisoned
within herself. A second, Lillian, is successively involved with three
others. This woman drifts on the current of conventional existence into
marriage and motherhood without once finding emotional fulfillment for
her passionate temperament. Her first true outlet is her friendship with
Djuna, whose difficult youth has disciplined and matured her but left no
time or strength for emotional experience. Each personality finds its
complement in the other, and their relationship is fruitful for a time,
but it achieves no expression because in Lillian “sensuality was
paralyzed.... She was impaled on a rigid pole of puritanism.” Soon
Lillian becomes so jealous of any woman Djuna looks at that the
friendship perishes of its own intensity. At one point Djuna sees that
she wants something of me that only a man can give her.... She has
lost her ways of communicating with man. She is doing it through
me.[46]
The association with Djuna so alters Lillian’s perspective that she
separates from her family and finds a man sufficiently immature to call
out her maternal instincts. She humors and bears with him through all
manner of vicissitudes, including his many transient affairs with other
women. Cured now of her fear of sensuality, she plays the man with one
of his flames whose influence she fears may be lasting, in order to
distract her rival’s attention from him. She succeeds only too well, and
must finally terminate the affair to free herself of a second emotional
dependent.
Once again she had worn the man’s costume ... to protect a core of
love. [The man] had not made her woman, but the husband and mother of
his weakness.[47]
To one of his later fancies, a woman who “lived according to her
caprices” and, like a man, refused to be “in bondage to the one,”
Lillian falls captive also, again, as with Djuna, loving in the other
the opposite of all she is herself. This affair reaches physical
completeness; even so, it does not bring the pair the unity both crave.
Instead it makes them aware that they are lovers of the same man, and
their one night together, though more satisfying than either has known
with him, ends in a jealous quarrel. Thus the author diagnoses four
degrees of emotional incompleteness: lowest is the inability to escape
from self; next, the capacity for subjective but not overt abandon;
third, the power only to imitate man’s role, whether with man or woman;
and last, freedom to play the woman but only with another woman. Just
this relative rating of maturity appears original with Miss Nin.
A little later Josephine Tey, who with Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh
raised British psychological mysteries to the level of serious fiction,
made variance the key to two successive plots. In _Miss Pym Disposes_
(1948) the title figure goes as visiting lecturer to a college of
physical education where a formerly worshipped school friend is
principal. Her interest is caught at once by an inseparable pair of
seniors who lead their class, of whom an older foreign classmate says:
That David and Jonathan relationship—it is a very happy one, no
doubt, but it _excludes_ so much. _Nice_, of course, quite
irreproachable. But normal, no.[48]
“Beau,” tall, beautiful and boyish, is the headstrong darling of wealthy
parents. Mary is a reserved and sensitive introvert, only child of a
struggling country physician. She is the logical recipient of the best
position open for the following year, but the principal arbitrarily
assigns the post to a fawning satellite of her own.
While practicing for a gymnastic exhibit, this favored candidate is
fatally injured by the collapse of some heavy apparatus. Police
investigation indicates accidental death, but a bit of circumstantial
evidence discovered by Miss Pym points to Mary as being responsible for
the accident. Her knowledge of Mary precludes such an idea, so she calls
Mary in for an explanation. This interview is a masterpiece of reticent
indirection. However, Miss Pym gets a seeming admission of guilt—though
she is assured that death was never conceived as a possibility—and a
promise that Mary will spend her life in self-sacrificing atonement.
Since a conviction of manslaughter would not only destroy Mary but
shatter her friend, her family, and the school, Miss Pym shoulders the
heavy responsibility for keeping her secret and so becomes an accessory
after the fact.
A bit later she discovers that it was not Mary but “Beau” who had
tampered with the apparatus, and “Beau” is apparently little disturbed
by the dire consequences. Mary has therefore sacrificed her life plans
to save her friend. But she terminates the friendship. Murder or sudden
death resulting from variance is not new in fiction. Miss Pym’s and her
author’s circumventing its melodramatic consequences is distinctly
original.
The same author’s _To Love and Be Wise_ (1950) again connects variant
passion with murder, although this time the crime is unachieved. A
disturbingly beautiful young American, Leslie Searle, inveigles his way
into a literary household near London for the announced purpose of
meeting England’s best-loved radio broadcaster. Almost everyone in the
book—and the cast is large—finds this young man irresistible, but they
also sense that he is, in some way, uncanny. To one, he recalls certain
milder legends of demonology; another is certain that “he must have been
something very wicked in ancient Greece.”[49] His presence breeds
complications in both household and community.
Shortly Searle disappears, and Scotland Yard suspects murder. In the end
it turns out that the young Searle is a woman, who for years has lived
intermittently as a man, and for many of those years nursed an obsessive
passion for her cousin, a British actress whom she saw only
sporadically. The latter, once a fiancée of the broadcaster, committed
suicide after he jilted her, and Leslie has come to England with a
well-laid plan for eliminating him in revenge. In the course of her
association with his friends, however, and in particular with one who
had opportunity to know her cousin better than she did, she discovers
that her adored idol was largely a figment of her own imagination, the
real woman having been ruthless and destructive.
In consequence, Leslie has abandoned her purpose, and merely escaped
into her alternate feminine role. Despite the intuitive questions Leslie
Searle raises in everyone’s mind (somewhat overstressed in aid of the
plot), she is presented as a wholly sympathetic character, and can take
her place with the medieval Ide and Mlle de Maupin as a successful
transvestist and charmer. It is Miss Tey’s engaging Inspector who brings
home to her the basic immaturity of her protracted disguise, and, one
infers, converts her to a more adult pattern of life.
In the year between Miss Tey’s two volumes an anonymous _Olivia_ (1949)
was so reminiscent in style of _Either Is Love_ as almost to suggest
identical authorship. It too is an autobiographical record of experience
long past, that of a Victorian adolescent suddenly transplanted to a
finishing school on the outskirts of Paris. The Gallic freedom and
gaiety of her new life release the girl’s nascent emotions, and she
falls deeply in love with one of the two French headmistresses. The
book’s value lies in the fidelity and vividness with which it pictures
this first innocent passion. Narrative interest is supplied by tension
between the two mistresses, who have lived happily together for fifteen
years until a scheming newcomer on the staff turns one against the other
for her own ends. Mlle Julie, Olivia’s beloved, has always had favorites
among the students whom Mlle Cara has somewhat resented, but only now,
while Olivia is Julie’s chosen, does Cara’s jealousy reach the point of
hysteria. After an accumulation of petty grievances magnified by the
newcomer, Cara dies of a overdose of sedative almost certainly
self-administered. Beside her deathbed Julie cries out, “She is the only
one I have ever loved!”—a cry prostrating to Olivia, who has had reason
to believe herself also cherished. Later Julie provides some comfort by
telling the girl that she has always been “victorious” over the
emotional temptations presented by students, but that now she wishes she
had yielded. This shows her cry to have meant that with Cara alone she
was physically intimate. She predicts that Olivia will not be victorious
under similar circumstances, and as at the outset of the story Olivia
has said, “I don’t pretend that this experience was not succeeded by
others ... but at that time I was innocent,” it is obvious that Mlle
Julie’s understanding of her nature was accurate.
A less innocent adolescent record written by Françoise Mallet, a married
woman of twenty, was published in Paris (1951) as _Le Rempart des
Béguines_, in New York (1952) as _The Illusionist_, and in paper-covers
(1953) as _The Loving and Daring_. This evidence of wide popularity
makes it necessary to say little here save that it describes the
initiation of a French girl of fifteen by her father’s mistress, a
Russian woman twenty years older with a certain masculine hardness
sometimes approaching sadism. The latter is captivated by Helene’s
resemblance to a young English girl whom she once adored and whose
defection left an unhealed wound. As long as Tamara is independent and
masculine, Helene is her slave, cutting school, deceiving her father,
even reluctantly accompanying her adored to a lesbian night club. Then
Tamara becomes Helene’s stepmother, and, relaxing at last under the
influence of security, she becomes much more feminine. Consequently,
Helene ceases to worship and looks forward to taking the dominant role
herself, her weapon the lesbian relationship which her preoccupied
father has believed merely an innocent “good influence.” Though the
experience is hardly constructive _in toto_, both Helene and her author
consider it beneficial inasmuch as it brings the lonely adolescent out
of a phase of erotic reverie into wholesome contact with reality, and so
has a maturing effect.
A last sensational and ill-written item of the penny-dreadful type was
Carol Hales’s _Wind Woman_ (1953). Here a psychoanalyst treats incipient
neurosis induced in a young composer by her passion for a woman who will
permit no caresses, and her resultant frustrated longing for an ideal
lesbian relationship. In Laurel’s history, as revealed to Dr. Frances
Garner, the author heaps Pelion upon Ossa in the matter of anti-male
conditioning, not without purpose. For in the end the beautiful young
analyst proves more than understanding; she makes no effort either to
dispel her patient’s prejudice or to terminate her transference, and on
the final page of the volume she comes as near to open proposal of
intimacy as an author could risk without being sued by the psychiatric
profession.
The final tale to be considered, Claire Morgan’s _The Price of Salt_
(1951), while occasionally understated, still gives a convincing account
of love between a married woman approaching thirty and a girl a decade
younger. At eight Therese was consigned to an orphanage when her widowed
mother remarried; she has since felt more alone than a true orphan.
Ambitious to become a stage designer, she earns her keep in New York by
temporary jobs and studies art at night. When the book opens, she is
involved in a physically complete but unsatisfactory affair with a male
art student whom she will not marry. She has had other male attention,
and refuses a second offer of marriage before the story closes. Carol
Aird is in process of divorcing an incompatible husband (and his
domineering family), and negotiations are dragging over the custody of a
seven-year-old daughter now with his family. The two women meet in a
department store where Therese is employed as a seasonal “extra,” and
across an unromantic toy counter they are smitten with an infatuation as
sudden as Gillian’s in _Tortoiseshell Cat_. The older woman’s reaction
is less obvious, but within a day or two she has taken the girl to lunch
and invited her to spend Christmas in her suburban house. Presently she
suggests a motor trip to her family home on the west coast. Therese
without hesitation closes the doors on her own life and accompanies her.
Intimacy develops perhaps a week after they set out and a month after
their first encounter. Another week of happiness ensues before they
discover a detective trailing them. Through pique at her leaving him,
Carol’s husband is bent on evidence which will give him full custody of
the child. Even so, in their new intoxication the two women find
amusement at first in eluding their shadow, and make a game of searching
each new room for recording devices. When Carol finally attempts to buy
the detective off, she is told that several incriminating records have
already been sent to New York and that she had best get back to protect
her interests. Promising to return in a fortnight, she leaves Therese in
South Dakota to wait for her. But Carol’s return is repeatedly
postponed, and she finally writes that in order to see anything of her
child hereafter she must promise to break with Therese entirely. She
begs the girl to give her up and start afresh. “I would be
underestimating you to think you could not.”
In reaction to the shock, Therese feels not only abandoned but betrayed,
as though Carol’s picking her up and dropping her had been a coldly
deliberate game. Stunned and adrift she stops to work for a time in
Chicago until circumstances necessitate her return to New York. She
means not to see Carol again, and though news that Carol has been ill
moves her, it does not weaken her resolve. Her immediate efforts toward
employment in stage designing now meet with prompt, if modest, success,
for even her brief association with the more cultured woman has
increased her savoir-faire, and the emotional experience has given her
self-confidence such as none of her contacts with men had ever done. She
finally goes to an unavoidable meeting with Carol, dreading the strain
but unafraid of yielding, and even when she learns that Carol has
repudiated her husband’s humiliating list of conditions and thus
forfeited all hold upon her child, Therese still refuses her offer of a
shared apartment.
Therese has placed a design for a stage set and is on her way to a
theatrical cocktail party to celebrate. She meets a British actress
there in whose eyes she sees a swift flash of interest comparable to her
own reaction on meeting Carol. Invited at once by the star to an ensuing
private party she accepts, feeling herself now quite able to handle any
foreseeable developments. But in the moment of its birth this new sense
of adequacy precipitates its own sequel. Knowing herself no longer
helplessly subject to Carol, she feels free to rejoin her at will. She
slips away without a word to her potential conquest and returns to her
early love.
Featuring as it does two women who have both had heterosexual
experience, and ultimately bringing them through many more tensions than
are indicated here, this narrative offers as strong an argument for the
validity of variant love as _Diana_. In a letter to Therese after a
legal session, Carol summarizes the essence of the argument:
The rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect,
as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people
want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing
that happens between men and women. It was implied yesterday that my
present course would bring me to the depths of human vice and
degradation.... It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied
upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that the
knowledge of the person ... [could be more than superficial]—that is
degradation. Or to live against one’s grain, that is
degeneration....[50]
This takes no account of the Freudian charge of immaturity against the
easier unisexual rapport, and its failure to do so cannot be laid in
this day and time to ignorance of Freud. It has rather the sound of
indifference, if not defiance.
The majority of favorable treatments of variance since the beginning of
World War II have been little concerned with avoiding overt lesbianism,
just as other fiction over an even longer period has been tolerant of a
certain amount of heterosexual freedom. This fact, along with the rapid
quantitative increase of variance in current fiction, may point, as has
been suggested, to its gradual acceptance as a legitimate area of human
experience. On the other hand it is precisely toward such casual
acceptance that censoring groups have directed their fire. Prize-winning
or widely acclaimed works with foreign settings such as _The Mesh_ and
_The Illusionist_ have not been heavily attacked; neither have
condemnatory treatments even of such low calibre as _Naked Storm_ and
the reprint of _Queer Patterns_. But blacklists have lumped _Spring
Fire_, _Appointment in Paris_, and _Women’s Barracks_ with the
heterosexual excesses of Mickey Spillane for censure (justified, if at
all, only in the case of the first book), and these titles seem to have
been withdrawn from sales-racks. Even if the pendulum swings back to
greater conservatism, however, as it has done periodically in the course
of literary history, its new position will not be identical with any
earlier one. The overworked metaphor of spiral progress may apply here
as to all other historical trends. To those who have witnessed changing
attitudes toward homosexuality since 1900, it is a matter of regret that
the ultimate swing of the new cycle must extend beyond our ken.
CONCLUSION
Periodic fluctuations in quantity, substance and style of variant
writing have already been summarized in the sections sketching its
history. It is now time to review certain more subjective aspects of the
long record. For example, does variant literature lend support to
hereditary theories of variance? At first glance, one recurrent physical
type seems to do so: the woman fitted by nature to play the man. Tall,
long of limb, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, direct-eyed, this figure
has persisted from the dim era in which the Greeks conceived Artemis to
1950 when an Englishwoman created Leslie Searle. But the figure appears
also in many settings other than variant literature. We meet it in the
pages of romance and on the walls of galleries, on the silver screen and
in élite advertisements. And, of course, many knights-errant, courtiers,
dandies, athletes, matinée idols and swift-shooting cowboys are built on
a similar pattern. Here the militant feminist will observe bitterly that
in this man’s world even our ideal of beauty is male. But the figure is
not so much male as intermediate, and above all youthful. Many of the
attributes catalogued above are those of adolescence just arrived at
adult stature. In combination with adult savoir-faire they are appealing
enough in the young man whose advantage is merely aesthetic. In a young
woman, for whom the statistical norm of height and strength falls short
of her brother’s, they represent also superiority to her own kind in
power and, therefore, in independence.
Because this type so captivates the general imagination, its appearances
in variant literature are impressive out of proportion to their
frequency. A complete count, from the valiant Ide to the undaunted Leo
or Leslie, numbers roughly a score, and when one has subtracted those
like Bradamante and Rosalind to whom lesbianism was never really
attributed, the tally is reduced to a round dozen—hardly three percent
of the variant total. Among the remainder, of whom a good many played a
comparatively positive emotional role, no marked type recurs often
enough to have any significance. A few figures are stocky and strong,
but others may cast “a shadow thin as a blade;” some are voluptuously
feminine. Nor does any one physical trait—except possibly
height—accompany variance with any regularity. In fact, beyond the
skeletal proportions already noted, the only somatic attributes
mentioned in describing boyish women (and these not often) are deep
voices and underdeveloped breasts. Other unfeminine details such as a
striding gait or a brusque address, though they may owe something to hip
articulation or vocal register, are usually mere mannerisms; that is,
they are imitative rather than inborn. Of course these fictional data
will not support conclusions as valid as those based on scientific
observation, since beside the license natural to creative writing one
must allow also for the reluctance of disapproving authors to provide
their _mauvais sujets_ with any hereditary excuses. Still, the long
procession comprises variants individually convincing enough to give
weight to their physical diversity. It is clear that the majority of
variant or lesbian women observed by the writing fraternity are not
masculine in physique.
Does sexual behavior, then, fall into patterns which might argue for
some uniformities in endocrine balance? Again, it is impossible to
classify the majority honestly, even by the simplest divisions into
active and passive, homosexual and bisexual, and feel confident that the
operative factors are innate. One may separate those whose passion is
masculine in violence from the cool, the gentle, the maternally tender;
but among the last may fall such conspicuously masculine figures as
Stephen Gordon and Jan Morale. Or the aggressive Maupins or Leos may
prove bisexual, the gentle Mettas and Miss Caffertys immutably set upon
their own kind, and a petite and delicate Flordespine or Almond may be
bold in her sexual advances. It is, however, possible to detect certain
rough patterns not in physique or in sex behavior but in psychological
attitude. There are masterful spirits who need to prove themselves the
equal of any man, or to dominate rather than follow. There are rebels
and lone wolves who defy authority or public opinion and are usually
jealously possessive of the few they love. There are the more detached
egotists and narcissists who see others only in terms of their own
advantage and abandon themselves to no one. There are the shy and
clinging who crave protection. And there are the maternal types,
forgetful of self and eager to cherish and support.
If not heredity, what explanation does literature offer for these
variants? Sometimes none. Lyric poets in particular simply register
their sentiments and leave readers to search elsewhere for explanations
of the enigma. In a different fashion the same is true in unsympathetic
narratives, and those where interest lies in plot alone. In these cases,
too, variants are presented, as it were, Minerva-born, but are assumed
to be a recognized type sure to generate dramatic tensions. Usually,
however, as in more conventional fiction, authors supply some personal
history for main characters and often directly or implicitly hold it
responsible for their anomalies. This last is, of course, especially
noticeable in recent years since the spread of Freudian psychology. Even
where no notion of causality seems to exist in the author’s mind, the
same sort of background may recur in more than one narrative. Thus it is
possible to identify a number of conditions, some fairly universal, some
characteristic of their period, which appear repeatedly as antecedents
or accompaniments of variance.
Of the universal class the most prevalent factor is some degree of
negative reaction to men. In psychiatric casebooks this is often the
result of sexual violation in childhood or adolescence, or of the
witnessing of intercourse at an early age, which is almost equally
traumatic. But such experiences and their sequelae of neurotic antipathy
are rare in fiction. There a less compulsive aversion may result from
rough or undesired caresses, or from their antithesis, pointed physical
repudiation. Or it may grow from social neglect or slighting by men, or
from deliberate indoctrination by a puritanic guardian. It may also stem
indirectly from conjugal discord at home or elsewhere, through
observation of a hated man’s unfaithfulness or cruelty, a beloved
woman’s frigidity or suffering.
The next most frequent causal factor comprises a large and varied
constellation of troubled family relations. Among our hundreds of
variant women, those who enjoyed the sort of family life that social
psychologists now exhort all parents to provide could be counted on one
hand. Even those living with both parents on any terms would not
multiply the number many times. Most often, the mother is found wanting
in some way; indeed, the percentage of outright motherless girls is
impressive. But, it may well be asked, what about the number in ordinary
fiction? In novels of psychological cast dealing with the vicissitudes
of young unmarried women the count is certainly high. The margin in
favor of variant novels is further narrowed when one considers that few
of these are literary masterpieces, and that minor fiction has, from its
beginnings, capitalized heavily on the orphaned or motherless heroine.
The reasons are obvious: a girl thus deprived can be a sympathetic
character despite unconventional conduct; this conduct affords the
reader escape-through-identification; and the author is guilty of no
profanation of the revered mother image. Nevertheless, after all these
allowances are duly made, a lack of maternal tenderness and
understanding bulks large among influences leading to variant behavior.
The comparable lack of a father is seldom stressed. Paternal harshness
appears rather oftener than the same trait in the mother, and the father
is also sometimes a party to general parental indifference or neglect,
but by and large the variant girl actively mistreated by either or both
parents is fairly rare. A father fixation, on the other hand, though
infrequent, is significant when it does occur, and Balzac’s Seraphita
bears witness that it is not confined to the Freudian twentieth century.
The badgering of a lone girl by a parental surrogate—stepmother,
relative or guardian—is featured now and then, as in _The Scorpion_, but
this sympathy-begging device is less overworked in variant than in other
minor fiction. The influence of siblings in producing either sexual
fixation or aversion is negligible, unless their conspicuous absence is
significant, for a considerable number of variant girls are presented as
actually or virtually “only” children.
All this wide variety of subjective situations apparently contributes to
the equally diverse range of variant experiences; yet none in the two
lists is so consistently paired as to establish certainty of explicit
cause and effect. In fact, more than one family factor and a measure of
sex antagonism often occur simultaneously or successively in the same
narrative.
In addition to subjective influences there remains the category of
external circumstances which encourage variance. And while the
psychological situations remain fairly constant from one period to
another, environmental factors vary considerably with time. The more
strictly convention limits a woman’s activities, the more certain is her
mere overstepping its bounds to produce significant results. From
medieval times through the nineteenth century, to wear men’s clothing
was taboo. Therefore, when Clémentine or Fragoletta assumed man’s dress,
grave emotional consequences were inevitable. Today the donning of
slacks or hunting costume produces little emotional impact. Similarly in
nineteenth-century France or early twentieth-century England, when
modesty forbade revealing the feminine body, a glimpse of uncovered
breasts might stir a woman to passion, or Proust’s Albertine and her
friend might enjoy a half-hour’s dalliance in a beach cabin because they
had undressed together. Today, when beach, pool and gymnasium showers
are communal affairs, their dressing-cubicles are unlikely to be the
scene of tender passages. Furthermore, in days when woman’s sphere was
definitely the home, girls who claimed independence outside it exerted a
strong imaginative appeal. Artists, actresses or mere bachelor girls
attracted one another as strongly as they fascinated more sheltered
women. But how many such “bohemians” have aroused general excitement
since the 1920s? Few, certainly, in fiction.
One objective setting, however, has for decades remained basically
constant as a hotbed of variance—those institutions which restrict young
women to the company of their own sex. Until well into the nineteenth
century, convents or convent schools were the segregating agency. After
1850, secular boarding schools took over the role, without the
occasional compensating outlet of religious emotion. With the spread of
higher education in our own times, women’s colleges joined the list, and
the latest additions have been reform schools, military barracks,
sorority houses and metropolitan residence clubs. The results of a
cloistered existence, then, might seem to argue for environment as a
cause of variance just as strongly as recurrence of the “Maupin” type
argued for heredity. But we have already seen that when many women wear
men’s clothes at one time or another, the effect of even the most boyish
is less pronounced than it used to be. As for environment, excepting
disciplinary and military quarters, twentieth-century cloisters allow
their residents so much more freedom than their predecessors that
variant or lesbian developments within them can no longer be laid wholly
to pressure of circumstance.
Thus, it appears that literary testimony from a score of centuries
confirms the current psychiatric verdict: variance is one possible
solution of pressing emotional problems; but arrival at this particular
solution depends upon so many variables that as yet no certain
predictive formula has been derived.
An aspect of the current scene not yet duly recognized in literature is
the relation of variant experience to gainful employment. In the heyday
of feminism a good deal of concern was voiced by anti-feminists lest
women’s financial and social independence might breed lesbianism on a
grand scale. But a comparison of French fiction from 1870 to 1900, when
women were still dependent, with the English and American record since
World War I suggests that the fear was unjustified. The issue at stake
in our own time is not the influence of earning upon variance but the
reverse effect of variance on a woman’s capacity to hold a paid
position. Before 1900 it was normal for the unmarried girl or the
estranged wife to be supported by her parents or her long-suffering
husband. For the last fifty years more and more women have been obliged
to earn their own livings in ordinary unromantic jobs, and to this trend
fiction has not done full justice. To be sure, creative license has
always allowed the freedom of an independent income to more persons than
are so favored in everyday life. It is true also that in recent variant
novels a good many occupations have at least made an appearance. We have
met actresses, modiste’s assistants, novelists, interior decorators,
social workers, a number of teachers, a trio of nurses, a department
store executive and a minor clerk, and several girls employed in
business offices. But in general these positions have served only as
realistic backdrops for action which did not impinge upon them. In less
than half a dozen cases has variance interfered with earning capacity.
It gravely affected the actresses in _Queer Patterns_; the
schoolmistresses in _The Children’s Hour_; a college instructor in
_Diana_; and it constituted a serious risk for nurses in _Promise of
Love_ and government employees in _Either is Love_. This meagre
proportion, especially at the level of mere risk, does not reflect
“things as they are” according to factual evidence in psychiatric
literature, and the failure of variant fiction to come to grips with
this aspect of reality is a count against it. It is also a waste of one
fertile potential source of dramatic tension.
There remains a final ticklish question which leads straight into
controversial territory, but to which a wide range of possible answers
must be considered: why are variant belles-lettres so generally ignored?
When so much has been written on the theme, why has it been slighted in
library collections, histories of literature, and bibliographic records?
One immediate answer will be that it is generally inferior, which is to
a certain extent true; but it is not inferior to a deal of ordinary
literature which has not been so slighted, notably that by the same
authors who have produced variant titles. According to their generation
or to their more considered convictions, different persons will explain
this comparative neglect by claiming that variance is immoral, or
abnormal, or the concern of an eccentric few and of no importance or
interest to humanity at large. None of these claims can be summarily
dismissed as negligible.
Without going deeply into what the term “abnormal” connotes in different
intellectual fields, it may be stated categorically that many
psychiatrists no longer regard ordinary homosexual experience as
pathological. Nor is the phenomenon too remote even from a statistical
norm. In addition to literary evidence, anthropology and uncensored
history and biography indicate that homosexuality has existed if not
flourished in all times and places; and Dr. Kinsey’s quantitative
studies show that twenty-eight percent of women now living have
experienced “sexual arousal” by their own kind at some time in their
lives. Only rarely in either literature or life are women who have known
this experience distinguishable from their fellows, and many who are
perceptibly masculine in physique and temperament have never known it.
Variants, then, are fairly numerous, not “abnormal” in an alienist’s
sense of the term, and not perceptibly eccentric.
The moral charge is less simply disposed of because it is so generally
and often so unthinkingly advanced. It should be stated at once that in
this discussion the morality of a course of action is referred to its
effect upon the actor and his social group, as social anthropologists
believe it was referred originally in the shaping of moral codes now
regarded in some quarters as absolute. It should also be said, and
underlined, that marriage and motherhood, despite the frequent failure
of the one and the heavy burdens imposed on women by the other, appear
more ultimately satisfying to the majority of women than other emotional
experiences, and are certainly more beneficial to society. They are
therefore the goals toward which personal and social effort should be
directed, and obstacles to their success should be minimized. To what
extent is variance such an obstacle and how pernicious is it in other
respects?
Since human survival depends upon childbearing, if any large number of
women should substitute homosexual relations for marriage and
motherhood, the long range results would be socially deleterious. But
heterosexual and maternal drives seem an effective guarantee against any
such eventuality, and as long as numerous groups are advocating birth
control as a check to overpopulation, this sociological argument against
variance operates only in the realm of pure abstraction. As to
conventional strictures upon all sex activity save legitimate
intercourse, their apparent function is to curtail the social dangers of
heterosexual license. Since even the most active lesbianism cannot be
the cause of illegitimate offspring or of abortion, there is no valid
case against variance on this score. A more practical argument stems
from the now generally admitted psychological bearing of early upon
later sexual experience. A number of marriage counselors, for instance,
maintain that extensive pre-marital petting and homosexual activity are
handicaps to later marital adjustment, and are therefore harmful to the
young. So far as is known this claim has not been unquestionably
validated by quantitative evidence, and certain authorities pronounce it
a rationalization of unadmitted prejudice, but it must be recognized as
the consensus of a good many popular advisors. For married women also,
of course, lesbian relations or merely a consuming variant passion can
prove as detrimental to marital happiness as similar heterosexual
infidelities. On the other hand, for women deterred from marrying by
lack of opportunity, financial or family burdens, inadequate sex appeal,
or invincible disinclination, variant attachments may provide the sole
chance for the experience of passionate love, and some psychiatrists
consider such fulfillment preferable to lifelong deprivation.
Clearly, then, variance is not, like sadism for example, a limited
aberration consistently destructive per se. It seems more nearly a
lesser category of emotional experience parallel to the heterosexual and
capable of as much variety. If governed by the standards of moderation,
integrity, and mutual consideration which should prevail in all
passionate relationships, it should not be harmful oftener than
heterosexual passion. But in actual experience utopian conditions seldom
prevail. We have heard from “Diana” some reasons why variant passion,
unregulated by any legal or social codes of its own, is apt to be
irresponsible and impermanent. Working against it also is the negative
influence of sweeping social condemnation. Most neuroses among variant
women have resulted from the conflict between their impulses and
feelings of anxiety, guilt, or even sin. Thus the forces which would
control variance are often responsible for making it a destructive
experience.
* * * * *
Here actually is an important reason for such inferiority as variant
literature exhibits. The age-long prejudice against variance, deriving
as it does from religious taboo, retains something of the hysteria which
motivated witch-burning and inquisition. For this reason the whole
subject is surrounded by a surcharged atmosphere to which no sensitive
mind is impervious. Even the best authors are scarcely able to free
their work of all controversial overtones, and partisanship in creative
writing has never made for artistry. As we have seen, lesser writers on
both sides of the issue may descend to outright zealotry. Fervent
antagonists choose variants who would be hateful without emotional
irregularity, and who, with it, become monsters, usually the more
dangerous for being picturesque to the eye or otherwise seductive.
Negative writing of better quality presents less-sinister characters,
but manipulates circumstances to the end that variant experience shall
always prove disastrous. In _Mme. Adonis_ and _Die Schwester_ the
relatively sympathetic title figures meet violent death; in
_Méphistophéla_, _The Island_, _The Captive_, and _Pity for Women_, they
end in madness or severe neurosis. In minor French tales of the last
century, variant couples destroy one another by excessive physical
indulgence, and in virtually all censorious novels they bring much harm
or suffering to those with whom they are associated.
Frank champions of variance are guilty of parallel artistic offenses.
Some make society the villain and variants its romanticized victims, and
become shrill in denunciation of the one and defense of the other. Even
_Diana_ and _Either is Love_, temperate as they are in tone, would be
artistically disqualified by their inclusion of outright argument even
were they more excellent than they are. The subtler defenders are also
no better than their opponents. Fearing public opinion too much to
betray unqualified sympathy, they, too, strain circumstance to prevent
their appealing characters from enjoying happiness. Granted that in life
popular prejudice makes the chance of happiness precarious, case studies
and other factual records show no such proportion of suicide and tragedy
as do tolerant variant novels of the minor sort. Even writers of power
sometimes fall into similar tragic exaggeration, as for example Miss
Sackville-West in _Dark Island_ or Masefield in _Multitude and
Solitude_.
There are, however, a fair number of works guilty of no gross
shortcomings, and a few of outstanding excellence. When their authors’
total output merits serious literary study, critics as far as possible
ignore those titles in which variance figures. Where no inclusive
critical appraisals of an author are made, reviewers of individual
variant works are apt to exercise less restraint, praising them
grudgingly for their manner but deprecating their matter with
disapproval, regret, or—what is worse—ironic or patronizing superiority.
It has already been remarked that sympathetic literary treatments of
variance are seldom written by men. Now the parallel circumstance must
be noted—most literary criticism and the majority of book reviews are
masculine work. It is only natural that men should react negatively to
writing so oblivious of their own kind as is much variant literature.
And this reaction must not be viewed as mere prejudice; its roots go
deeper. Statistical studies of the reading done by some 20,000 persons
have established the fact that the prime factor affecting reading
interests, more basic than education, occupation or age, is sex.[1] The
personality inventories constructed by psychologists and derived from
probably even more numerous observations show that sex also determines
many other interests and attitudes.[2] Thus men and women live to a
certain extent in different subjective worlds—a fact recently dramatized
by Philip Wylie in _Disappearance_.
With regard to variant literature, this means that men, who pass some
nine-tenths of the judgments upon it, are attempting to evaluate a realm
of experience in which first-hand knowledge is impossible to them.
Naturally, they do best in rating variant material written by men, and
next best with unsympathetic works by women. Some few project themselves
with comparative success into tolerant studies by women whose mental
idiom and emotional outlook is somewhat masculine. Djuna Barnes, Henry
Handel Richardson, Mary Renault, and even Gail Wilhelm in her first
novel, fared rather well at the hands of reviewers. In contrast,
pertinent titles by Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy
Richardson, Helen Anderson, Anaïs Nin and Kay Boyle, were either
slighted or treated with unjustified harshness considering the admitted
quality of their authors’ other work. “Thin,” “nebulous,”
“unconvincing,” “insignificant,” “futile,” “overwrought,” and
“hysterical” were among the evaluative terms applied to these titles by
male reviewers.[3] Women on the other hand had much to say in their
favor, the most significant and frequent comment being that they were
peculiarly sensitive and accurate in emotional interpretation.
Neither group of critics should be labeled “right” and the other
“wrong.” To most women and to such men as are endowed with unusual
imaginative sensibility, perceptive and well-written variant works will
always seem good literature. And they _are_ good by the established
canons of truth to experience, sound character analysis, artistic
structure, convincing background, vivid objective detail, and beauty of
expression. To most men and—for a different reason—some women, such
works will seem bad in varying degrees from non-essential to
intolerable. They _are_ bad, then, in that they lack universality of
appeal. For the same reason much non-variant fiction written by men—work
predominantly objective in plot and violent in action, full of casual
and unimaginative sex activity—is uninteresting or distasteful to the
majority of women, though it too may fulfill the other requirements of
good literature.
Variant fiction is of course not alone among feminine efforts in being
disparaged by the opposite sex. The battle over the quality of feminine
writing is old; to do it full justice would require a small volume in
itself. But a brief comment is required to conclude this long
discussion. Male critics (who comprise better than nine-tenths of the
whole) can be roughly divided into three schools of opinion. The least
charitable maintain that women lack creative power in all artistic
fields because nature has designated them for biological creation alone.
(Otto Weininger[4] is the extreme example of this school, but he is not
alone in his opinions.) The largest group make the point that women’s
artistic efforts are almost exclusively imitative rather than original,
and, without investigating reasons, they argue that this fact
demonstrates patent creative inferiority. A few—Nathaniel Hawthorne was
among the first—feel that
Generally women write like emasculated men and are only to be
distinguished from men by greater feebleness and folly; but when they
throw off [imitative] restraints ... and come before the public stark
naked as it were—then their books are sure to possess character and
value.[5]
Hawthorne did not, however, live up to his convictions; he gave up
writing fiction in the 1850s and fled the country because it was full of
“damned scribbling females.” The average quality of the scribbling
perhaps justified his flight, but his apostasy was symbolic of his sex.
The women who began in the mid-nineteenth century to write like women
were writing also largely _for_ women, and on a level to be printed in
newspapers and in the newly born “home” magazines. They wrote from the
limited conventional experience that was known to them and their
numerous audience; sentimental religious exaltation and dreams of
romantic love supplied the only emotional color in their lives. The
common lot of marriage brought mainly domestic drudgery and constant
childbearing, with the loss of so many children that even the universal
experience of the death of a child lost its keen edge. Had such lives
been presented with the austere truth to experience demanded of good
literature, the results would have been read no more widely than are
starkly realistic novels at any time. And most of those women authors
needed to earn money. Thus, feminine fiction concentrated upon blameless
romantic passion, took wild liberties with reality, and was altogether
unrelated to art. But it sold in the hundreds of thousands, and it set a
style in popular feminine narrative which has altered in detail from
decade to decade but has not yet gone out. Until well after 1900 few
women authors rose above this level save those who more or less
successfully imitated men, and chiefly such men as Dickens and Trollope.
This sentimental tide has always been completely alien to men, both as
individuals and as critics, and it has done much to solidify the
majority male opinion that women are not creative artists. Even those
men who achieve some intellectual appreciation of the best feminine
writing find that, in general, they, like Hawthorne, cannot accept it
completely. One might say that, beginning with Dorothy Richardson and
Katherine Mansfield, women have attempted to raise essentially feminine
writing to a level of absolute quality. No pretense will be made here to
trace this growing trend, or to separate the more from the less
“feminine” authors. The trend has run to more and more subjective
content, as is evident in such current authors as Shirley Jackson and
Jean Stafford.
Variance is, of course, more than any other subject, exclusively
feminine. Had it not suffered the handicap of taboo, probably more
literature of high quality would have grown up around it. Indeed, had
such inhibited spirits as Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson and Rose
O’Neill, to mention only the most obvious, been less paralyzed
emotionally, they might have had richer experience from which to write
as well as more courage to write about it. This is not a plea for the
cultivation of either homosexual experience or variant literature. It is
simply a suggestion that if those women who are irremediably so
constituted, and who happen also to be artists, were less shackled, the
world’s literature might be by that slight degree the richer. Before
that comes to pass, of course, two changes must occur: public opinion in
general must come closer to the most lenient psychiatric evaluation of
variance. And men must become aware of the unconscious prejudice in
their literary evaluation of all, and particularly of variant, feminine
writing. If they cannot surmount this prejudice, they should leave the
variant field to feminine critics. Also, more women should enter the
field of literary criticism.
* * * * *
To conclude: we have seen that feminine variance has persisted in human
experience since the beginning of literary records. It has repeatedly
aroused sufficient interest to be the subject of literature, some of it
good enough to have survived through many centuries against all odds.
The odds have been of two very different sorts—religious taboo and
masculine distaste. The first operated stringently from the beginning of
the Christian era to the Renaissance, and is not yet dead. The second
was apparent in classical times and has been especially evident whenever
the neo-classical spirit prevailed, for that spirit exalts objective and
intellectual experience, stresses the physical aspects of sex, and is
contemptuous of subjective emotional preoccupation. In Romantic periods
when emotion was glorified—that is, when essentially feminine values
prevailed—variant literature has at least comparatively flourished. In
our own day the ancient religious taboo has weakened and psychiatric
values have to some extent been substituted. Now immaturity rather than
sin is the socio-ethical argument against variance. To each age its own
new wisdom seems a social panacea more cogent than all that have gone
before, but none has ushered in Utopia. Momentarily, however, we have
attained—or at least it seems to us that we have attained—to somewhat
more tolerance than the elder moralists. If variance is to be always
with us, calm acceptance of that fact may become as prevalent as the
recognition of human evolution has come to be. And since variant
literary expression appears equally persistent, it may conceivably
become a narrow but similarly recognized field, permitted to come to
fruition according to its own laws, and to contribute the best of which
it is capable to the total sum of world literature.
NOTES
Notes refer to items in the bibliography by letter and number only.
Foreword
1. An earlier edition of C 72
Introduction
1. C 111
2. C 153, C 154
I. Ancient Record
1. A 250
2. A 251
3. B 199
4. A 213
5. A 251:15
6. A 250 & B 199, notes
7. A 251:67
8. _ibid._:39
9. _ibid._:97, 3
10. _ibid._:90
11. A 250
12. B 174:134; B 199:319
13. A 250:155
14. _ibid._:166
15. _ibid._:155 & note
16. B 173:209
17. A 251:30
18. A 28:209, note 2; A 28a:235, note 1
19. A 28:210; A 28a:236
20. B 39 v.2:665
21. B 18
22. B 162 v.1:101
23. C 72 v.1 pt.4:197
24. A 7 v.2 (VII):718; v.4 (XII):365
25. A 8 v.2:151; C 72 v.2 pt.2:41
26. B 69 v.2 Chap. 6
27. B 199:108, 109
28. A 8 v.1:203 & B 65
29. Bloomington, Ind., newspaper
30. C 192
31. A 8 v.1:395
32. _ibid._ v.2:191-93
33. _ibid._ v.2:41
34. _ibid._ v.2:89
35. A 214 v.l:35-41
36. _ibid._ v.2:107-13
37. _ibid._ v.1:91-92
38. _ibid._ v.2:51-60
39. _ibid._ v.2:60, note
40. _ibid._ v.1:199-205
41. A 140
42. A 183: I.
43. _ibid._:VII
44. A 7 v.2:11, 345, 450
45. A 171 v.1 (V): 100-05
46. _ibid._ (XII): 130-42
47. A 2:192
II. Dark ages to Age of Reason
1. B 148
2. _ibid._
3. B 97
4. B 119
5. B 18
6. B 71
7. A 211x
8. B 76
9. A 9 v.2:9
10. A 261:174-75
11. B 27
12. A 280:35
13. A 191a
14. A 191; C 72 v.1 pt.4:245
15. A 96:47
16. _ibid._:29
17. A 37:128
18. A 117 v.2:89
19. A 277:145
20. A 187
III. Romantic to modern
1. C 220
2. C 72 v.1 pt.4:66-67
3. C 213; C 72 v.l pt.4 1896 ed.; C 119
4. B 74:21
5. _ibid._:16
6. A 74 pref.
7. C 72 v.1 pt.4:199
8. B 134
9. B 82:18
10. A 310:44
11. _ibid._; 51
12. B 192:120
13. A 310:97
14. _ibid._:76
15. _ibid._:187
16. B 160:82, 88
17. _ibid._:232
18. _ibid._:313
19. A 20:23
20. A 14:110
21. _ibid._:164
22. _ibid._:425
23. B 185:11
24. A 107
25. B 47 v.1:52-61
26. A 150 v.2
27. C 72 v.1 pt.4:200 p. 415, notes 28-51
28. A 150 v.2:223
29. _ibid._:166
30. B 127 Chap. 6
31. C 158:396
32. A 98:46-47
33. _ibid._:47
34. _ibid._:204
35. _ibid._: 205
36. _ibid._:209
37. _ibid._:244
38. _ibid._:273
39. C 158:396
40. B 90:147
41. B 16:24-51
42. A 50:85-86
43. B 185:249-303
44. A 22
45. B 185 loc. cit.
46. B 8:42
47. A 281:121-22
48. B 120 v.1:307
49. B 210:238
50. A 269:115
51. _ibid._:164
IV. Later 19 Century
1. B 78
2. A 25:242
3. A 319:356
4. _ibid._:376
5. C 269:285
6. See B 155
7. A 32a:37 (nothing further in French language edition)
8. B 56
9. A 230a:91
10. A 230:xvi
11. A 230a:9
12. B 141 v.5, 1892 mai
13. B 153:221ff.
14. _ibid._: footnotes on pp. 42, 84, 145-46, 170, 217
14a. A 118:58
15. B 160:128
16. A 256:351-52; see also A 256x:202 for a young married woman’s
reverie of being a man.
17. A 137:vi, ix
18. _ibid._:144
19. _ibid._:283
20. _ibid._:325
21. _ibid._:ix
22. A 267:301
23. _ibid._: pref.
24. B 155
25. B 165:v-ix
26. A 189:348
27. _ibid._:488
28. _ibid._:12
29. _ibid._:6-9
30. Paris, E. Dentu, 1890
31. B 34:150; B 108 v.1:301
32. B 141 v.23:523, 1897
V. Conjectural interlude
Labé
1. B 64 v.41:72; B 152 v.28:347-49
2. B 152 loc. cit.
3. A 37:205
4. A 146a: dedication
5. See note 1. above
6. A 146a: 78
7. _ibid._:87
8. _ibid._: introd.
9. B 152 v.7:82-83 (_Bourges_)
10. A 146 v.2
Charke
1. C 72 v.1 pt.4:245
2. A 45:77
3. _ibid._:52
4. _ibid._:90
5. _ibid._:80-89, 139
Llangollen
1. B 95
2. A 24
3. B 145:22-27
4. A 51:155, 161
5. _ibid._:177
Günderode
1. A 10:1-67
2. A 11
3. A 113
4. B 64 v.97:167-231
5. See note 1. above
6. A 11; A 113, biog. introd.
7. A 298 v.1.; A 298a.
Sand
1. A 249 v.13:187-373
2. _ibid._:267-68
3. B 196
4. B 181:244
5. B 138:163
Brontë
1. B 20x:42 (both quotations)
2. B 144 Chap. 20
3. _ibid._:84
4. _ibid._:86
5. _ibid._:89
6. B 168: pref.
7. _ibid._:255-56
Eliot
1. B 94
Fuller
1. B 3
2. B 197:xv
3. _ibid._:196
Menken
1. B 212 Chap. 4
2. B 115
3. B 212:57
4. _ibid._:58
5. B 107 v.1:278
6. A 190:75-76
7. _ibid._:28
8. _ibid._:13
9. B 203
10. B 212:65
Field
1. A 92:xvi
2. _ibid._:27
3. A 91:50
4. A 92:ix
5. _ibid._:16
6. _ibid._:57
7. _ibid._:63
VI. 20 Century. Int. & Poetry
1. C 123
2. B 74:16
3. C 164 - C 175
4. C 146:119
5. See especially C 276, the best available brief résumé of the current
psychoanalytic opinion on homosexuality
6. A 20:22-26
7. _ibid._:176ff.
8. B 86 no. 4
9. _ibid._ no. 8
10. B 85 Dec. 12
11. A 19:10ff: In these quotations and some later ones from poetry, line
indentations and stanza divisions have been disregarded for economy.
12. _ibid._:108
13. _ibid._:19
14. _ibid._:111
15. B 79
16. A 283 v.2:78-80
17. _ibid._:112
18. B 48
19. A 283 v.2:52-55
20. _ibid._:50
21. _ibid._ v.1:38-39
22. _ibid._:36
23. _ibid._:87-88
24. _ibid._:31
25. _ibid._:32
26. _ibid._:195
27. B 141 v.49, mars.
28. _ibid._ v.50, avril.
29. _ibid._ v.89:181-82
30. A 283 v.2:219
31. _ibid._:189
32. _ibid._:230
33. B 141 v.89:181-82
34. A 19:235
35. A 20; B 49
36. B 151x v.9:488 (Je.20, 1914)
37. A 240
38. B 49:249
39. B 25 Chap. 13
40. A 176
41. A 122 v. 1:7-27
42. _ibid._ v.2:176-80
43. A 263, from B 101 v.5
44. A 257:53
45. B 74:46; from W. L. George, Literary chapters, 1918, p. 127
46. A 167:97-105
47. B 144:189-90
48. B 212:288
49. A 212:114
50. The Loves of Edwy
51. B 217:60
52. Harold Cook (B 217 introd.) and Elizabeth Atkins (B 10:34 footnote &
242)
53. A 197:20-21
54. A 196:17
55. A 194:55
56. B 10:37-38
57. A 193:38, 39; A 194:70, 71
58. A 194:70, 71
59. A 196:20
60. _ibid._:42
61. Djuna Barnes & Natalie C. Barney. See A 196:index
62. B 10:200
63. A 185:52-53
64. _ibid._:54
65. A 3:21
66. A 248:24
67. _ibid._:9
68. _ibid._:29
69. _ibid._:5
70. A 179:142-43
71. _ibid._: 17-18
VII. Fiction in France
1. A 52a:289
2. A 54:220
3. A 55 Chap. 18, end.
4. A 51:185-218
5. B 35
6. A 55a:244-50
7. A 56:117
8. B 141 v.38:229-34; B 101 v.3:439
9. B 141 v.40:781-82
10. B 101 v.5:1120
11. B 141 v.45-50, var. pag.
12. B 141 v.55:254; B 101 v.9:584
13. A 227
14. A 228
15. A 222
16. A 227
17. A 225
18. A 20:74; A 51:186
19. A 242:155
20. _ibid._:102
21. _ibid._:153
22. _ibid._:164-65
23. A 182:22-23
24. _ibid._:191-97 passim
25. _ibid._:128-144 passim
26. A 148:201
27. A 31:x
28. _ibid._:149-50
29. Seen only via advertising résumés in C.-E.’s other novels, back
pages.
30. B 136 v.35:176-213
VIII. Fiction in Germany
1. A 292 v.5:285-87
2. B 101 v.2:41ff
3. _ibid._ v.3:431
4. _ibid._ v.3:462
5. _ibid._ v.3:449
6. _ibid._ v.5:1115
7. _ibid._ v.3:453?
8. _ibid._ v.3:489
9. B 25 Chap. 13
10. B 101 v.5:1080
11. _ibid._ v.5:1106
12. _ibid._ v.5:1070
13. C 121:171-79
14. B 101 v.7:885
15. _ibid._ v.9:606
16. _ibid._ v.9:613
17. B 144x:317
18. A 178:222
19. _ibid._:229
20. A 295:188
21. B 98
22. B 101 v.17:129
23. A 274:10
24. _ibid._:11
25. _ibid._:11-12
IX. Fiction in English (1)
1. A 116:pref.
2. C 153, 154
3. A 102:12
4. _ibid._:13
5. _ibid._:14
6. _ibid._:56-57
7. A 175:6
8. _ibid._:288
9. _ibid._:269-70
10. _ibid._:135
11. _ibid._:182
12. A 215:833
13. B 204
14. A 256:4
15. _ibid._:7
16. _ibid._:13
17. _ibid._:8
18. _ibid._:9
19. _ibid._:57
20. _ibid._:88
21. A 184:79
22. _ibid._:108
23. A 239:271
24. A 260:262
25. _ibid._:390
26. Publ. in book form by Century
27. A 155:324
28. B 143
29. A 294:334
30. A 61:37-38
31. _ibid._:37
32. _ibid._:402-03
33. _ibid._:407
34. A 173:267-68
35. _ibid._:37
36. _ibid._:276-81
37. A 97:22, footnote
38. _ibid._:348
39. A 6:304
40. _ibid._:305
41. A 131:69-70
42. _ibid._:268
43. _ibid._:290-91
44. A 129:320-21, 149
45. A 98:125-256
46. _ibid._:148
47. _ibid._:222
48. A 210:198
49. A 311:46-47
50. _ibid._:48, 50-52
51. _ibid._:53
52. A 245:139-40
53. _ibid._:287
54. B 63:64 and New York Times, Sun. Nov. 7, 1926, VIII:10, col. 1
55. New York Times Feb. 1, 1927, p. 3, col. 6
56. A 313:29
57. _ibid._:300
58. A 116:pref.
59. B 54
60. A 312:117-18
61. _ibid._:138
62. _ibid._:221-22
63. _ibid._:298
64. _ibid._:258
X. Fiction in English (2)
1. A 207:63
2. _ibid._:64
3. A 199:348-44
4. A 218:266
5. A 152:333
6. A 160:221-36
7. A 244:24
8. _ibid._:158
9. _ibid._:167
10. A 237:243
11. _ibid._:245
12. _ibid._:231-32
13. _ibid._:257
14. _ibid._:230-31
15. A 23:49
16. _ibid._:58
17. British edition: Stamboul Train, late 1932
18. A 42:382
19. _ibid._:380-81
20. Nov. 1932 p. 2 col. 4.
21. A 206:2
22. A 238:132-33
23. _ibid._:137
24. _ibid._:138
25. A 276:162
26. _ibid._:230
27. A 76:32; A 157:125
28. A 76:234
29. A 78:74
30. _ibid._:82-83
31. A 78a:72; cf. also p. 79-80
32. A 316:107
33. A 158:112-14; cf. also p. 38
34. A 64:208, 219
35. A 59:147
36. Time Mag. Oct. 25, 1937:26-28
37. A 36:203, 205
38. A 35:203
39. _ibid._:204
40. A 104
41. e.g. _ibid._:196-97
42. A 144:156
43. A 43:92
44. A 264:320, 396
45. A 209:[7]
46. _ibid._:107
47. _ibid._:136
48. A 271:24
49. A 272:23
50. A 203:246
Conclusion
1. e.g. B 71
2. See C 105, C 139, C 207, C 254, C 255, C 257, C 273, C 287, C 300
3. Cf. excerpts in Book Review Digest for any title in _A_ list.
4. C 284
5. B 158:111
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
* An asterisk indicates titles of which only a review, an abstract, or a
précis was seen.
_List A_: Primary belletristic titles, in some cases including
biographical or critical material. The editions listed are those used in
the study. Original dates of publication or composition appear in the
text.
_List B_: Bibliographic, biographical, critical and historical
references, including psychiatric studies of specific authors or titles.
_List C_: Medical, psychological, psychiatric and psychoanalytic
background reading, with special reference to etiology (e.g., in studies
of exclusively male subjects.)
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54. ——. Claudine en ménage. Paris, Mercure de France, 1902.
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196. ——. Letters. (Alan Ross Macdougall, ed.) N. Y., Harper, 1952.
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198. ——. Second April. N. Y., Kennerly, 1924.
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203. MORGAN, CLAIRE. The price of salt. N. Y., Coward-McCann, 1952.
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207. NEFF, WANDA FRAIKEN. We sing Diana. Bost., Houghton, 1928.
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238. RICHARDSON, HENRY HANDEL. The end of a childhood ... Lond.,
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C. SCIENTIFIC AND PSYCHIATRIC MATERIAL
(Exclusively male studies included for references to etiology)
*—seen only in abstract.
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INDEX
_A l’Heure des Mains Jointes_, 159, 168
Abercrombie, Lascelles, 280
_Actes et Entr’actes_, 155, 156
Adams, Fay, 333
Adler, Alfred, 152, 269
_Aeneid_, 25
_After Such Pleasures_, 307
_Against the Wall_, 184, 289-290
_Albertine Disparue_, 208
Alciphron, 27, 28, 29, 38
Aldington, Richard, 155, 189
Alighieri, Dante
_see_
Dante Alighieri
_All Alone; the Life of Emily Brontë_, 131
_Allerhand Volk_, 219
Alpers, Anthony, 192
amazons, 25, 32, 36, 39, 99, 155
_Les Amies_, 77
_El Amor Lesbio_, 53
_Amores_, 28
_L’Amour et le Plaisir_, 203
_Anna and the King of Siam_, 329
Anderson, Helen, 317-318, 351
Anderson, Sherwood, 264-265, 273
_L’Androgyne_, 108
_The Angry Woman_, 329
_Ann Vickers_, 300
_Anna Karenina_, 223
_Annette and Sylvie_, 205-207, 273
Anthon, Kate Scott, 146, 148
Anthony, Catherine, 136
anthropology, 25, 52, 347
anti-feminism, 91-93, 95-99, 256, 351
antipathy to men, 25, 26, 40, 76, 79, 89, 93, 94, 100, 159, 208-210,
219, 236, 244-246, 253, 261, 278, 279-280, 297, 305, 309, 312,
314, 315, 320, 321, 323, 328, 331, 338
_The Apes of God_, 292
_Aphrodite_, 112-113, 193
Apollodorus, 24, 25, 26
_Appointment in Paris_, 333, 341
_Arcadia, The Countess of Pembroke’s_, 36-38
_Arch of Triumph_, 328
Aretino, Pietro, 46
Ariosto, Ludovico, 35-36, 109, 117
Arnim, Elisabeth von, 125-127
_Arrival and Departure_, 325
_As You Like It_, 40
_Astarte_, 201
_Astrée_, 38-39
_Atalanta_, 26
Athene, 25, 26
Atkins, Elizabeth, 185, 186
Aubigny, Madeleine de Maupin d’, 65-66
_Auf Kypros_, 174
“Aurel,” 155
_Aus guter Familie_, 218, 220
author’s disapproval
explicit, 27, 73, 77, 80-82, 96-98, 104-108, 176, 191, 203, 226, 235,
249, 261, 276, 292, 300, 308-309
implied, 26, 55, 63, 75, 80, 86, 95-96, 110, 111, 189, 201, 204, 224,
227, 235, 236, 241, 256, 257-260, 266, 281-282, 288-291, 292,
293-294, 301, 307, 314, 315, 320, 325-326, 328-331
author’s tolerance
explicit, 56-59, 60, 159-173, 193-200, 204-210, 213, 219, 254, 263,
279-281, 286, 309, 319, 324
implied, 21, 34-35, 39, 49, 50, 60-61, 64, 65, 66-67, 89-90, 112-113,
178, 188, 190, 202, 249-250, 255, 263, 265, 267-269, 270, 272,
273-274, 282-283, 291-292, 298, 302-303, 304-307, 320, 321,
322-323, 324, 327, 331-334, 338, 339-340
_Aventures de l’Esprit_, 155, 156, 205
_Les Aventures du Roi Pausole_, 113, 114, 193
_The Bachelor Girl_, 207
Bacon, Josephine Dascom
_see_
Dascom (Bacon), Josephine Dodge
Baker, Dorothy, 320, 325-326
Baker, Ida, 192
Balzac, Honoré de, 53, 62-64, 66, 72, 104, 114, 127, 218, 224, 345
Barnes, Djuna, (186, note 61), 316-317, 351
Barbey, d’Aurevilly, Jules, 83
Barney, Natalie Clifford, 62, 154-158, 161, 163, 164, 166, 171, 172,
174, 177, 178, (186, note 61), 192, 205
Barrès, Maurice, 88, 89, 94
Basler, Roy, 74
Baudelaire, Charles, 76-77, 78, 104, 105, 110, 114
Beard, Mary, 23
“The Beautiful House,” 255
Beer, Thomas, 298-299
Belot, Adolphe, 81-83, 97, 114, 220, 331
Bennett, Arnold, 263-264, 271-272, 280, 327
Benson, E. F., 130
Bernard, Dr. Claude, 53
Betham, Edwards, Mathilda, 192, 246
bisexuality
defined, 11, 91
men preferred, 35, 36, 44, 49, 96, 106-108, 113, 220, 221, 223, 227,
256, 281, 309, 310, 311, 322, 333
no preference, 27, 28, 45, 46, 49, 84, 85, 87, 90, 96-98, 99, 110,
112-113, 151, 153, 174-177, 180-192, 204-208, 224, 235, 279,
282, 286, 296, 318-319, 326, 327
women preferred, 19-21, 82-83, 86, 100-104, 113, 122, 176, 201, 204,
212, 213, 214, 216, 220, 221, 295, 299, 310, 311, 312, 316,
328, 339
Blixen, Baroness Karen
_see_
Dinesen, Isak
Bloch, Iwan, 38
Blood, Fanny, 55-59
_A Blythedale Romance_, 136
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 46, 47
Bodin, Charles, 103
Boiardo, Matteo, 35
Bolton, Isabel, 331
_Bolts of Melody_, 148
Bona Dea, 27, 71
_La Bonifas_, 208, 211, 216, 222, 234, 277, 278
_Book Review Digest_, (351, note 3)
Borys, Daniel, 204, 219
_Boston Adventure_, 326
_The Bostonians_, 15, 95-96, 110, 112, 114, 257, 315
_La Bouche Fardée_, 213
Bourdet, Edouard, 208, 211-213, 277
Bourges, Clémence de, 117, 118, 119, 120, 126
Bourget, Paul, 87
Bowen, Elizabeth, 279, 282-283, 287, 351
Bowles, Jane, 324
Boyd, Ernest, 90
Boy, Charles, 119, 120
Boyle, Kay, 320-322, 351
Bradley, Katherine, 141-145
Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille de, 43-44, 104, 118
Brentano, Bettina
_see_
Arnim, Elisabeth von
Breuer, J., 151
Breville, Pierre de, 201
“The Bridegroom’s Body,” 321-322
Brock, Lilyan, 311
Brontë, Anne, 132, 134
Brontë, Branwell, 130, 132, 134
Brontë, Charlotte, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135
Brontë, Emily, 129-135, 136, 178, 179, 245, 353
_The Brontës’ Web of Childhood_, 132, 133, 188
Browne, Stella, 199
Browning, Robert, 142, 143, 144, 188
Brownrigg, Gawen, 311
_Brumes de Fjords_, 159, 166
Brun, Charles, 172
_The Buck in the Snow_, 187
Burnett, Hallie and Whit, 332
Burt, Struthers, 299-300
Burton, Sir Richard, 78
Butler, Lady Eleanor, 123-124
Caldwell, Erskine, 326
Callisto, 25, 26
Camilla, 25
Cape, Jonathan, 279
Capri, 182, 281-282, 330
_The Captive_ (Bourdet), 211-213, 277, 325, 326, 349
_The Captive_ (Proust), 204
_The Careless Husband_, 121
_Carlotta, Noll_, 204, 219
_Carola_, 328
Carpenter, Edward, 149
Caryll, Mary, 123
Casan, V. S., 53
Casanova de Seingalt, Giacomo, 43, 45, 46
_Casanovas letztes Abenteuer_, 236
Casper, J. L., 53, 86
“The Cat and the King,” 255
Catholic League for Decency, 241
_Cendres et Poussières_, 158, 164
_The Censor Marches On_, 319
censorship, 15, 21, 29, 76, 78, 81, 87, 150, 186, 228, 241, 243,
256, 262, 265, 277, 279-280, 311, 313-314, 319, 325, 341
_Century Magazine_, 266
_Ces Plaisirs_, 124, 170, 199, 205, 219
Chabrillan, Célèste Venard de, 68
Chadwick, H. M. and Nora K., 23
Channing, W. H., 137
Charcot, Jean, 52, 86, 98, 149, 151
Charke, Charlotte, 120-122
Charlemagne, 30, 33
Charles, Emile, 172
Charles-Etienne, 208, 213-214
_The Child Manuela_, 236-238
_The Children’s Hour_, 127, 301-302, 326, 347
Choiseul-Meuse, Félicité de, 49
_Le Christ, Aphrodite et M. Pépin_, 159, 172
“Christabel,” 73-74, 75
Christina, Queen of Sweden, 48
Cibber, Colley, 120, 121
_Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs_, 155
_The City of Flowers_, 155
Clarke, James Freeman, 137
_Claudine à l’Ecole_, 194-195
_Claudine à Paris_, 194, 195-196
_Claudine at School_, 194-195, 288
_Claudine en Ménage_, 194, 196-197, 200, 203
_Claudine S’en Va_, 194, 197-198, 200, 204
_Clémentine, Orpheline et Androgyne_, 60-61, 83
_Club de Femmes_, 319
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 73, 114
Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle, 124, 143, 170, 171, 193-200, 205, 214,
219, 239, 288, 295, 306, 314
_The Comedians_, 277
_La Comtesse de Chalis_, 71-72, 82, 100
_The Confession of a Fool_, 96-98
Cooper, Clarissa, 173
Cooper, Edith, 141-145
Corey, Donald W., 14
Couperus, Louis, 277
courtesans and prostitutes, 27, 28, 84, 86, 98, 108, 112-113, 202,
245, 309, 325, 328, 333
courtly love, 31, 32
_Cousin Betty_, 63-64, 218
Coward, Noel, 300
Cowlin, Dorothy, 324
Craigin, Elisabeth, 318-319
_The Crazy Hunter_, 321
_Un Crime d’Amour_, 87
“The Crimson Curtain,” 83
_The Crippled Muse_, 330
Cuisin, P., 60-61, 83
_La Curée_, 84
“Cynara,” 176
_La Dame à la Louve_, 159
Damophyla, 24
_Dance on the Tortoise_, 290
Dane, Clemence, 257-260, 261
_Dans un Coin de Violettes_, 159
Dante Alighieri, 31
_The Dark Island_, 303-305, 350
_Dark Laughter_, 273
Darwin, Charles, 52, 109, 149
Dascom (Bacon), Josephine Dodge, 255
_Daughter of Time_, 192
Dauthendey, Elisabeth, 219
Davenport, Marcia, 316
David, André, 87, 90
Davies, Rhys, 331
_Dawn’s Left Hand_, 295-297, 304
death
of variant, 62, 66, 87, 171, 203, 214, 309, 324, 331, 333, 349
of others, 61, 89, 100, 164, 201, 214, 252, 336
from sexual excess, 82, 203, 213, 326
_Death in Venice_, 332
Dehmel, Richard, 112, 177
Dekker, Thomas, 40-41
Delarue-Mardrus, Lucie, 155
_Delay in the Sun_, 306-307, 322
_The Delicate Fire_, 298
_Les Demi-Sexes_, 114
_La Dernière Journée de Sapho_, 203
_Les Désexuées_, 213
_Design for Living_, 300
“Design for Loving,” 300-301
_Desperate Remedies_, 93-94
_Despised and Rejected_, 261-263
DesVignons, Max, 208, 214
Deval, Jacques, 319
_Les Diaboliques_, 83
_Dialogues of the Courtesans_, 28
Diana, 25, 26, 97, 244
_Diana_, 322, 323-324, 340, 347, 349, 350
Diane de Poitiers, 118
Dickens, Charles, 140
Dickinson, Emily, 145-148, 179, 353
Diderot, Denis, 54-55, 60, 82, 104
Dieulafoy, Mme. Jeanne, 98-99, 200
Dinesen, Isak, 125, 305-306
Dioscorides, 27
_Disappearance_, 328, 350
_A Dome of Many-Colored Glass_, 178
_Domesday Book_, 188-189
Donisthorpe, Sheila, 295, 298, 308-309
dormitory segregation, 54, 66-67, 82-83, 92, 100, 197, 200, 203,
225, 237-238, 251, 253, 255, 262, 275, 278-279, 288-292, 317,
322, 330, 332, 333
Dorval, Marie, 129
Dostoevsky, Feodor, 223
Douglas, Norman, 281
Dowson, Ernest, 176
_The Drag_, 277
dramas, 39-42, 48, 156, 176, 185, 201, 225, 234-237, 277, 301, 325,
328
_Dreiunddreissig Scheusale_, 223
Dresser, Davis, 312-313
Droin, Alfred, 172
drugs, 77, 79, 86, 100, 102, 204
Druon, Maurice, 328
_Du Vert au Violet_, 159
Du Bois, Mary Constance, 255
Dubut de Laforest, J. J., 86-87, 98, 99-100, 270
Duc, Aimée, 220-221
Dudevant, Aurore
_see_
Sand, George
DuMaurier, Angela, 324
_Dusty Answer_, 278-279, 288, 308
_Earth Spirit (Erdgeist)_, 225
_Echos et Reflets_, 168
Edmonds, J. M., 17
egotism, 99, 216, 234, 257-260, 282-283, 292-294, 328, 329, 331
Eichhorn, Maria, 220
Eichrodt, John, 332
Eisner, Simon, 331
_Either is Love_, 318-319, 337, 347, 350
Eliot, George, 135-136
Eliot, T. S., 316
_Ella_, 290-291
Ellis, Havelock, 24, 41, 53, 55, 66, 83, 84, 87, 116, 120, 149, 150,
153, 279, 281, 318, 323
Ellis, John Breckenridge, 247, 251, 255
_Elsie and the Child_, 271-272
_Elsie Venner_, 91-92
Emerson, R. W., 136, 137
emotional aggression, 36, 43, 83, 87-90, 92, 95, 100-103, 155-158,
177, 200, 206, 213, 216, 220-222, 226-227, 234, 236, 261, 296,
325, 330, 343
_The End of a Childhood_, 302-303
endocrinology, 151-152, 178, 222, 343
_Entertaining the Islanders_, 299-300
Eon, Chevalier d’, 90
_Epigrams_, 27
Erauso, Catalina, 41-43, 120
_Erdgeist_, 225
Erinna, 24
“Dr. Erna Redens Thorheit und Erkentnis,” 219
Ernst, Morris, 319
erotica, 24, 44-49, 54
_L’Espion Anglais_, 48-49
Essen, Siri von, 96, 99
_The Establishment of Madame Antonia_, 309
etiology (explicit), 22, 56, 60, 62, 64, 66-67, 82, 84, 89, 91, 93,
100-108, 121, 128, 194, 205, 208-211, 216, 220, 226, 229, 230,
234, 237-238, 260, 261, 262, 264, 267, 280-281, 282, 294, 299,
311, 312, 314, 318, 331, 338, 339, 343-346
_L’Être Double_, 168
_Études et Préludes_, 158, 164
Eulenberg, Herbert, 236
Eulenberg, Philip von, 150, 228
Evans, Mary Ann
_see_
Eliot, George
_Evocations_, 158, 164, 165
_Explorations in Personality_, 152
_Extraordinary Women_, 279, 282-283
_Les Factices_, 90
family tension, 22, 42, 47, 55, 56, 64, 92, 94, 97-98, 101, 120,
123, 128, 137, 146, 160, 207, 215, 216, 223, 227, 229-231, 245,
267, 271, 277, 303-304, 306, 312, 318, 321, 322, 327, 339
Farnham, Marynia, 56
_The Farringdons_, 243-244
_Fatal Interview_, 186-187
father
lacking, 18, 86, 125, 253, 298, 302
loved, 136, 254, 275, 278, 280, 320, 323
unsympathetic, 26, 34, 68, 113, 121, 207, 208, 211, 215, 227, 229, 235,
245, 312
Fauré, Gabriel, 203
_Les Fausses Vierges_, 204
feminism, 40, 91-99, 215, 240, 312, 315
_La Femme d’Affaires_, 99-100
“La Femme de Paul,” 85-86
_Une Femme M’Apparut_, 159, 168
“Femmes Damnées,” 76-77, 252
Feydeau, Ernest, 71-72, 81, 82
“Field, Michael,” 141-145, 192
_The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories_, 320
_Le Figaro_, 81
Firbank, Ronald, 268-269, 292
“The Fire,” 255, 266-267
Fisher, Mary F. Kennedy, 329
Fiske, Minnie Maddern, 247
Fitz-Maurice Kelly, James, 41-43
Fitzroy (Scott), A. T., 261-263
Flach, Johannes, 218
_Flambeaux, Éteints_, 159, 169
Flaubert, Gustave, 53, 68-71, 96, 100
_La Fleur Lascive Orientale_, 34
_Les Fleurs du Mal_, 76-77, 252
Flora, Fletcher, 331
_A Florida Enchantment_, 109-111, 247
“The Flower Beneath the Foot,” 268-269
Forrest, Felix, 328
Foster, Gerald, 310
Fowler, Ellen Thorneycroft, 243-244
_Fragoletta_, 61-62, 91
_Franziska_, 226-228
_Fräulein Don Juan_, 220
Frauman, Luz, 221-222
Fraser, Sir James, 25
Frederics, Diana, 322
Freud, Sigmund, 12, 22, 109, 151, 152, 153, 200, 214, 227, 233, 240,
241, 261, 269, 270, 281, 292, 311, 331, 341, 344
_Die Freundin_, 229
“Freundinnen: Lyrisches Spiel,” 176
_A Friend of the Family_, 223
frigidity, 57, 81-83, 100-104, 203, 212, 219, 220, 262, 292-297
Frith, Mary, 40-41, 83, 120
Fuller, Margaret, 136-138, 139
Fuseli, Henry, 57, 58, 59
_Gabriel-Gabrielle_, 127-128
Galton, Sir Francis, 149
Garcia, Pauline, 129
_La Garçonne_, 207-208, 269
_Garda_, 182
Garden, Mary, 266
Gauthier-Villars, Henri, 169, 172, 193, 194, 198, 199, 203, 214
Gautier, Théophile, 15, 64-65, 72, 82, 104, 112, 114, 140, 327
_Geneviève_, 215-216
_Le Génie de l’Amour_, 173
_Gentlemen, I Address You Privately_, 320
Georgie, Leyla, 309
Germain, André, 159, 160, 161, 165, 166, 172
_Geschichte der jungen Renate Fuchs_, 220
_The Getting of Wisdom_, 252-253, 302
Gide, André, 215-216
Gilbert (Dickinson), Sue, 146-147
Gilder, Richard Watson, 95
Gilman, Dr. James, 74
_Girl Alone_, 238, 314
_The Girl with the Golden Eyes_, 63, 64, 72, 82, 114, 223
“Glory in the Daytime,” 307
_Goblin Market_, 75-76, 330
_The Goblin Woman_, 182
Godwin, William, 55, 56, 58, 59, 137
_Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kind_, 125
_The Golden Bough_, 25
_Gondal Poems_, 133
Gordon, Dame Helen Cumming, 127
_Die Göttinnen: Diana; Minerva_, 223
_Die Göttinnen: Venus_, 223-224
Gourmont, Rémy de, 110-111, 114, 155, 156, 161, 262
_Grammont, Memoirs of the Count de_, 44
Gramont, Louis de, 202, 212
_The Great Adventure_, 257, 267
_The Greek Anthology_, 24, 27
Greene, Graham, 299
Gregory VII, Pope, 47
Gregory, Nazianzen, 21
Griswold, Hattie Tyng, 140, 141
_The Guardian Angel_, 91, 92, 93
Guérard, Albert, 72
_The Guérmantes Way_, 204
Günderode, Karoline von, 124-127, 138, 230
Gunter, Archibald Clavering, 109-110, 246, 327
_La Gynandre_, 104-108, 223, 281
_Haillons_, 159, 170
Hales, Carol, 338
Hall, G. Stanley, 151
Hall, Radclyffe, 116, 241, 271, 279-281, 287, 308, 309, 314, 319
“Hallowe’en,” 298-299
Hamilton, Anthony, 44, 47, 268
Hamilton, Emma, 61, 62
_Hangsaman_, 332
Hanson, Elizabeth and Lawrence, 136
Hardy, Blanche C., 122
Hardy, Thomas, 93, 252
_The Harp Weaver and Other Poems_, 184
_Harper’s Magazine_, 255, 270
Harris, Sara, 330
Harvard Psychological Clinic, 152
Hatfield, C. W., 133, 134
_Having Wonderful Crime_, 324
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 136, 352
_Hellcat_, 309
Heller, Kurt, 228
Hellman, Lillian, 127, 301-302
Hemingway, Ernest, 320
Henry III of France, 47
Henry, G. W., 12, 152
Henry, Joan, 328
heredity, 35-36, 61, 100, 149-152, 189, 209-211, 222, 239, 280-281,
282, 311, 314, 315, 343
_Heredity in Health and Mental Disorder_, 152
hermaphroditism, 27, 52, 60-61, 62, 173, 314
_Heroides_, 18
_Hetty Dorval_, 329
Hille, Peter, 176, 183
Hirschfeld, Magnus, 14, 53, 84, 113, 149, 153, 174, 215, 218, 221,
222, 281
Hitler, Adolf, 228
Hoche, Jules, 204
Hoechstetter, Sophie, 228
_The Holland Wolves_, 251
Holmes, Dr. Oliver Wendell, 91-93, 94, 136
“homoerotische Roman, Wo bleibt der ...?”, 228
_The Homosexual in America_, 14
homosexual “marriage,” 35, 44, 112, 122, 123, 202, 221, 310, 317,
330, 333
homosexuality (only), 41-43, 53, 61-62, 154-158, 159-169, 208-211,
219, 224-235, 239, 245-246, 248-250, 263, 279-280, 293-294, 314
Horace, 21
Horney, Dr. Karen, 152
_Les Hors Nature_, 90
_The Hotel_, 279, 282-283
Hughes, Langdon, 79
_Huis Clos_, 328
Hull, Helen R., 255, 266-268
Huneker, James Gibbons, 140, 141, 214, 265-266, 268, 316
_Huon of Bordeaux_, 34, 36, 337
Hurlbut, Thomas, 277
Hurst, Fannie, 324
_Hymn to Venus_, 277
hypnotism, 52, 221-222, 311
_I, Mary MacLane_, 247, 260-261
_Idylle Saphique_, 202-203
_The Illusionist_, 338, 341
Imlay, Gilbert, 55, 59
_Inassouvie_, 213
_The Indulgent Husband_, 194, 196-197, 314
_Infelicia_, 140-141
_The Innocent Wife_, 194, 197-198, 306
“Interim,” 183, 184, 186
_Interlude_, 235, 292
“Iphis and Ianthe,” 26-27
Ira, Iris, 177
_Isidora_, 218
_The Island_, 292-294, 324, 349
Jackson, Shirley, 332, 353
_Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, 14, 113, 174, 201, 202, 203,
204, 215, 218, 219, 220, 228, 229
James, Henry, 15, 91, 95-96, 110, 111-112, 114, 159, 243, 257
Janitschek, Maria, 220
_Jassy_, 326-327
_Jean Christophe_, 205
_Jocelyn_, 67
_Le Journal d’une Saphiste_, 203, 214
Jouvenel, Henry de, 199
Joyce, James, 269
“Julie Cane, The Story of,” 270
_Julie, ou J’ai Sauvé ma Rose_, 49
Jung, Karl, 152
Juvenal, 27, 29
Kallman, I. F., 152
Kaltneker, Hans, 234-235
Kelly, James Fitz-Maurice
_see_
Fitz-Maurice Kelly, James
Keogh, Theodora, 328
King, Sir William, 47
_King’s Daughter_, 189-191
_The King’s Henchman_, 186
Kinsey, A. C., 12, 153, 242, 347
_Les Kitharèdes_, 158, 165
_Klinische Novellen_, 53, 86
Koestler, Arthur, 325
_Komm kühle Nacht_, 176-177
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 14, 53, 71, 72, 84, 149, 313, 318
Labé, Louise, 117-120, 126, 176, 181
_Labyrinth_, 267-268
Lacretelle, Jacques, 208, 213, 216, 234, 239, 277, 278, 281
_Ladders to Fire_, 334-335
_Ladies’ Home Journal_, 255
_A Lady of Leisure_, 253-255, 271
LaFarge, Christopher, 328
Lafourcade, Georges, 79
Lalo, Pierre, 201
Lamartine, A. M. L. de, 66-67, 114, 160, 218
Lamballe, Louise, Princesse de, 48, 122
_The Lamp and the Bell_, 185
Landon, Margaret, 329-330
Lang, Theodor, 152
Lapsley (Guest), Mary, 291-292, 295
LaSalle, Antoine de, 46
_The Lass of the Silver Sword_, 255
Latouche, Henri de, 61, 114
La Vaudère, Jane de, 114, 193, 208
Lawrence, D. H., 255-257, 261, 280
_Leaves of Grass_, 139
LeDantec, Yves, 172
Ledrain, Eugene, 172
Lee, Jennette, 255
Lee, Vernon, 141
Lehmann, Rosamond, 277, 278-279, 288, 308, 316, 351
Leigh, Arrand and Isla
_see_
“Michael Field”
_Lena Geyer, Of_, 316
_Léon dit Léonie_, 213
LePage, Francis, 204
Leroux, Xavier, 201
_Lesbia Brandon_, 79-80, 83, 114
_Lesbiacorum Liber_, 174
Lesbianism
defined, 13
explicit, in author’s milieu, 27, 47, 49, 55, 62, 63, 64-65, 77, 78,
82-83, 85-86, 90, 96-98, 101-103, 104-108, 159-173, 174, 194,
196, 202, 203, 204-207, 213, 217, 220, 222, 235, 238, 241,
249-250, 256, 265-266, 280-282, 299, 300, 308, 309, 310, 311,
312-313, 316, 318, 320, 322, 325, 328-331, 338
explicit, elsewhere, 25, 26, 28, 73, 78, 112-113, 173, 177, 201, 218,
268, 285
implied, 17-22, 38, 42, 43, 64, 75, 79, 87, 95, 97-99, 111, 122,
125-126, 129, 140, 157-159, 173-174, 177, 178-179, 212, 234,
263, 268, 270, 276, 279, 286, 292, 293-294, 295, 296, 300,
305-306, 319, 338
“Lesbos,” 77
_Lesbos: Gedichte_, 177
_Letters from Town and Country_, 28
_Lettres à l’Amazone_, 155
_Lettres à une Connue_, 154
_Lettres Intimes à l’Amazone_, 155
Lewandowski, Herbert, 67, 218
Lewis, Sinclair, 300, 329
Lewis, Wyndham, 292
Liebetreu, O., 222
_The Life and Eager Death of Emily Brontë_, 181
Lindey, Alexander, 319
_Little Boy Blues_, 329
_The Little Less_, 324
_Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies_, 44
“Llangollen, The Ladies of,” 122-124, 125
Lodge, Lois, 311-312
Lofts, Nora, 326-327
_Lonely Parade_, 324
_Long Ago_, 143
Louis XIII of France, 48
Louis XV of France, 48
Louÿs, Pierre, 112-113, 114, 154, 173, 174, 177, 189, 193
_A Love Crime_, 87
_Love Like a Shadow_, 311-312, 313, 333
_Loveliest of Friends_, 295, 308-309, 311
_The Loves of Edwy_, 182
_The Loves of Myrrhine and Konallis_, 189
_The Loving and Daring_, 338
Lowell, Amy, 178-179, 180, 181, 192
Lucian, 27, 28, 29, 34
Lundberg, Ferdinand, 56
_Lyra Graeca_, 17
_The Lyric Year_, 184
McIntosh, Elizabeth
_see_
Tey, Josephine
Mackenzie, Compton, 279, 327
MacLane, Mary, 244-247, 255, 260-261
_Madame Adonis_, 89-90, 114, 349
_Mädchen in Uniform_, 236-237, 259, 298, 301, 326
Madeleine, Marie, 174, 177, 192
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, 15, 64-66, 72, 76, 82, 91, 104, 266, 301,
323, 327, 337, 346
_Mlle Giraud, Ma Femme_, 81-83, 100, 113, 203, 220
“Mademoiselle Tantale,” 86-87, 98, 99, 104, 110
_Mlle Vladimir, Mon Mari_, 113
_Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde_, 52
Magendie, Maurice, 38
Magnan, Valentin, 149
Magny, Olivier de, 117, 118
_La Maison Tellier_, 85
_Male and Female_, 310-311
male homosexuality, 23, 24, 28, 47, 52-53, 78, 90, 109, 195, 199,
204-205, 213, 228, 242, 262, 269, 275, 278-279, 292, 322, 332
male sexual attitudes, 45-47, 105, 108, 155-156, 177, 297, 312, 335,
350-353
“Der Maler Rayski,” 236
Mallet, Françoise, 338
Manicheism, 30
Mann, Heinrich, 223-224, 239
Mann, Thomas, 223, 228, 332
Mansfield, Katherine, 191-192, 352
Marchal, Lucie, 331-332
_Mardigras Madness_, 312-313
_Marges_, 214, 215
Marguerite, Victor, 207-208, 269
Marie Antoinette, 48
_Marie Bonifas_, 208-211, 229, 281, 306
Martial, 27, 29, 34
_Mary; a Fiction_, 55-60, 66, 83, 94
Mary, The Virgin, 32, 34, 172
masculine attributes
somatic, 26, 61, 65, 86, 88-90, 92, 100, 105-108, 112, 131, 154, 166,
178, 199, 219, 222, 227, 268, 280-281, 292, 314, 316, 322,
327, 336-337, 342-343
other, 25, 26, 83, 92, 105-108, 131, 154-156, 219, 221, 227, 263,
280-281, 314, 322, 327, 336-337, 342-343
masculine habits, tastes, 25, 28, 31, 65, 88-90, 105-108, 117-118,
139, 208-210, 221, 246, 271, 315, 318, 327, 337
“masculine protest,” 24, 27, 40-43, 64-66, 90, 91, 94, 118, 141,
242, 261
Masefield, John, 251-252, 255
Mast, Jane, 277
_The Master Mistress_, 180, 182
Masters, Edgar Lee, 188-189
Maupassant, Guy de, 15, 85-86, 91, 96, 100, 114
Maurois, André, 129
Maximus of Tyre, 21
Mayeur de St. Paul, 48-49
_Mazeppa_, 139
Meebold, Alfred, 219
_Meg_, 328
_Memoirs of Hecate County_, 328
Mendel, Gregor, 149
Mendès, Catulle, 15, 100-104, 109, 114, 302
Menken, Adah Isaacs, 79, 138-141
_Méphistophéla_, 15, 100-104, 113, 223, 329, 349
_Mercure de France_, 90, 110, 113, 168, 173, 201, 202, 204, 215
_The Mesh_, 331-332, 341
Messalina, 27
_Metamorphoses_, 26, 27
Mew, Charlotte, 179
_The Middle Mist_, 327-328
Middleton, Thomas, 40-41
“Milesian Tales,” 46
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 182-188, 190, 191, 192, 292
Millay, Kathleen, 184, 289-290, 292
Miller, Marion Mills, 165
_Mine-ha-ha_, 224-225
_Miss Julie_, 98
_Miss Pym Disposes_, 335-336
_Mrs. Dalloway_, 273-275, 305
_Mrs. Egg and Other Barbarians_, 298
Mitchison, Naomi, 297-298
_Modern Woman, the Lost Sex_, 55-56
Moll, Albert, 53, 84, 149
Møller, O., 219-220
“Molly the Bruiser,” 123
_La Môme Picrate_, 203
Monckton-Miles, Richard, 78
_Monday Night_, 320-321
_La Monja Alférez_, 41, 42
_Monsieur Vénus_, 87-89, 94, 100, 223, 288
Montaigne, Michel de, 44
Montfort, Charles, 203, 208, 214
Moore, Virginia, 121, 132, 135, 178, 179
Morel, Maurice, 203
Moréno, Marguérite, 156, 199
Morgan, Claire, 339-341
_A Mortal Antipathy_, 91, 92-93
Moss, Geoffrey, 295, 306
mother
lacking, 68, 73, 113, 130, 194, 203, 208, 211, 229, 258, 264, 275, 317,
320, 338
loved, 26, 37, 121, 130, 184, 215, 237, 271, 311, 332
unsympathetic, 63, 85, 86, 89, 245, 253, 254, 267, 272, 278, 280, 281,
299, 302, 323, 326, 332, 333, 339
Mühsam, Erich, 222
_Multitude and Solitude_, 251-252, 350
murder
by variant, 63, 204, 319, 331, 336 (planned)
of variant, 63, 82, 90, 219 (attempted), 226, 310, 329
Murry, John Middleton, 191, 192
_My Friend Annabel Lee_, 246-247
mythology, 25, 26, 29, 96, 244
_Mythology of All Nations_, 25
“Nadia Devereux,” 332
_Naked Storm_, 331, 341
_Nana_, 84-85, 86, 266
narcissism, 11 (defined), 72, 87, 89, 94, 110, 207, 228, 234, 253,
261, 262
Nathan, George Jean, 300-301
Nathan, James, 137
Neff, Wanda Fraiken, 288-289, 291
“Neue Erziehung und alte Moral,” 220
_Die neue Eva_, 220
neurosis, 87, 103, 111, 204, 259, 308, 317, 326, 332, 338, 349
_Never Dies the Dream_, 329-330
_New York Times_, 277
_The New Yorker_, 325
Niemann, August, 220
Nievelt, Hélène de Zuylen de, 166
_Nightwood_, 316-317
Nin, Anaïs, 334-335, 351
_No Exit_, 328
Noailles, Anna de, 173
_Not Now but NOW_, 329
_Notes and Queries_, 172
_Notre Dame de Lesbos_, 213
_Nouvelles Confidences_, 66
_The Nun-Ensign_, 41-43
Nussey, Ellen, 130, 131, 132, 135
Oberndorf, Dr. Clarence, 91, 92
_Of Lena Geyer_, 316
O’Higgins, Harvey, 270-271
_Olivia_, 337
_Omphale_, 201
_One Reckless Night_, 313
O’Neill, Rose, 180-182, 192, 353
_Opus 21_, 328
“Orestes,” 331
_Orient Express_, 299
oriental literature, 12, 33, 34-35, 46
_Orlando_, 279, 283-287, 305, 329
_Orlando Furioso_, 35-36
Orleans, House of, 55
orphan, 40, 49, 60, 61, 64, 83, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 111, 203, 205,
213, 224, 234, 270, 288, 293, 310, 314, 315, 330, 331, 333
Ossoli, Marchesa d’
_see_
Fuller, Margaret
_The Outcast_, 233-234, 298
Ovid, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 34, 35
Oxyrinchus papyri, 19, 20
Packer, Vin, 333
Paget, Violet
_see_
Lee, Vernon
_Painted Veils_, 214, 265-266, 316
_Pandora’s Box_, 225
“The Pansy and the Prayer Book,” 246-247
_Parable of the Virgins_, 291-292
_Parallèlement_, 77
Parker, Dorothy, 307
Parrish, Mary F. K.
_see_
Fisher, M. F. K.
_La Passade_, 169
_The Past Recaptured_, 204, 269
Patchett, Elizabeth, 135
Patterson, Rebecca, 146-148
Patton (Waldron), Marion, 290
“Paul’s Mistress,” 15, 85-86
Peladan, Josephin, 104-108, 109, 114, 157, 214, 239, 281
_Pensées d’une Amazone_, 155
_Pérez de Montalban, Juan_, 41
Perrin, Ennemond, 117, 118
personal attitudes
ascetic, 88, 176, 252, 288, 297, 315, 318, 329
puritanic, 137, 238, 261, 293, 299, 309, 312, 329, 334
Philaenis, 27
_Pictures of the Floating World_, 179
_Pilgrimage_, 295
_Pierre’s Ehe_, 219
Pirie, Jane, 127
_Pity for Women_, 317-318, 332, 349
_Plaisirs Troublants_, 214
Plato, 17, 23
Plehn, Marianne, 174
Plutarch, 24
_Poèmes—Autres Alliances_, 155
_Poems and Ballads, I._, 78, 80
_Poets of America_, 180
Poggio, G. F., 46
_Pointed Roofs_, 269
Polaire, 200
Polignac, Princesse de, 48
Ponsonby, Sarah, 123-124
_Poor White_, 264-265, 273
pornography, 15, 46, 50
_Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, 269
_Pot-Bouille_, 85
Pougy, Liane de, 202-203
_The Pretty Lady_, 263-264
_The Price of Salt_, 339-341
“The Princess Amany,” 34
_La Prisonnière_ (Bourdet), 208, 211-213, 277
_La Prisonnière_ (Proust), 208
_Promise of Love_, 322-323, 347
Proust, Marcel, 43, 156, 194, 204-205, 208, 211, 214, 239, 250, 269,
295, 345
psychiatric theory (except Freud), 91, 152-153, 230, 259, 325, 338,
346
_Die Psychologie der Erbtante_, 222
_Psychopathia Sexualis_, 14, 53
psychosis (insanity), 204, 294, 318, 331, 333, 349
psychosomatic theory, 152
_Publishers’ Weekly_, 332
_Puck_, 181
Puttkamer, Baroness von
_see_
Madeleine, Marie
Puvis de Chavannes, 247
_Queer Patterns_, 310, 341, 347
_Quelques Sonnets et Portraits de Femmes_, 155
_Quest_, 267
Quillard, Pierre, 173
Rabelais, François, 46, 47
Rachilde, 87-91, 98, 109, 113, 114, 115, 168, 177, 193, 199, 202,
213, 214, 215, 288
Rahv, Philip, 95, 96
_The Rainbow_, 255-257, 280
Ratchford, Fannie, 132, 133
“Rätselhaft,” 223
Reade, Charles, 140
_The Real Adventure_, 257
_La Recherche de Temps Perdu_, 204, 269
Redmond, Fergus, 109-110
_Regiment of Women_, 257-260, 267, 269, 277, 283, 315, 330
“Regina,” 66-67, 160, 218
Régnier, Henri de, 203
Reinach, Saloman, 172, 186
religious attitudes, 29, 30, 36, 47, 99, 104-105, 136, 182, 214,
241, 281, 325, 349
_La Religieuse_, 54, 82
Remarque, Erich, 328
_Le Rempart des Béguines_, 338
_Renascence_, 183, 184, 186
Renault, Mary, 322-323, 327-328, 351
Rétif de la Bretonne, 46
_La Retraite Sentimentale_, 194, 198-199
Reuss, Paule, 173
Reuter, Gabriele, 218, 220
Rice, Craig, 324
Richardson, Dorothy, 269, 295-297, 306, 351, 352
Richardson, Henry Handel, 252-253, 255, 302-303, 306, 351
Ricketts, Charles, 142, 143
_The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_, 146-148
Rigal, Henry, 173
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 22, 78, 176, 183
Rimbaud, Arthur, 90, 325
_The Ring and the Book_, 188
_The Rise of Simon Lachaume_, 328
Riversdale, Paule, 158, 166, 168
“The Roads Around Pisa,” 305-306
_The Roaring Girl_, 40-41
_Robert_, 215
Robinson, Dr. Victor, 323
Roland-Manuel, Suzanne, 215, 216-217
Rolland, Romain, 205-207, 213, 214, 239, 273
_Le Roman Expérimental_, 53
romantic attitudes, 33, 45, 52, 59-60, 106, 110, 122, 125, 162, 163,
173, 195, 198, 212, 216, 236, 251, 257, 261, 275, 278, 295, 305,
314, 318, 322, 324, 339
Ronald, James, 329
Rossetti, Christina, 75-76, 114, 115, 330
Rothenstein, Sir William, 143
Rousseau, J. J., 52
Royde-Smith, Naomi, 273, 275-277, 292-294
Rüling, Theodor, 223
_Ruth, The Book of_, 22-23, 29, 64, 317, 329
“Ruth and Irma,” 331
Sackville, Thomas, 284
Sackville-West, Victoria, 189-191, 192, 284, 302, 303-305, 306
_St. Nicholas Magazine_, 182, 183, 186, 255
_Sálammbô_, 68-71, 113
Sand, George, 127-129, 136, 138, 141
Sansot, Edward, 159, 172
_La Sapho_, 67
_Sapho de Lesbos_, 203
Sappho, 15, 17-22, 23, 29, 47, 79, 104, 116, 156, 165, 176, 177,
192, 242, 270
_Sappho_, 158
_Sappho: Greichische Novelle_, 218
_Sappho of Lesbos: Her Life and Times_, 18-19
Sarton, May, 333-334
Sartre, Jean Paul, 328
_Satana_, 113
Scaliger, 21
_The School for Wives_, 215
Schreiner, Olive, 91, 94, 115, 177, 318
Schwabe, Toni, 176-177, 192
_Die Schwester_, 234-235, 349
scientific attitudes, 51-54, 84, 149-153, 241, 242, 347
_The Scorpion_, 229-233, 234, 272, 298, 345
Scott, Mrs. Cyril
_see_
Fitzroy (Scott), A. T.
_Scrapbook_, 191, 192
_Second April_, 184
_Selbstanzeige_, 228
_Seraphitus-Seraphita_, 62, 66, 114, 127, 218, 224
_Seven Gothic Tales_, 125, 305-306
sex-change, 27, 34, 74, 109-110, 284-286
sex disguise, 36, 40
_Sex Life in England_, 38
sex manuals, 12, 200, 324
_Sex, Symbolism and Psychology in Literature_, 74
_Sex variants_, 11-12, 152
_Sextet_, 332
sexual excesses, 27, 31, 82, 100, 102-103, 213, 224, 308, 324, 350
_Das Sexualproblem in der modernen Literatur ... seit 1800_, 67, 218
sexual trauma
physical, 26, 105, 297, 312, 333, 338
subjective, 123, 207, 262, 295, 332, 338
Seydlitz, R. von, 219
Shakespeare, William, 40, 180
Shannon, Charles, 142, 143
Shelley, Peter, 313
Shilleto, Violet, 159-165, 167, 171
_A Shower of Summer Days_, 333-334
Sidgwick, Ethel, 253-255
Sidney, Sir Philip, 36-38, 39
_Sillages_, 159, 169
_Sind Es Frauen?_, 220-221
Sinowjewa, Annibal, 223
_Der Skorpion_, 229-234, 298
_Smith College Stories_, 255
social disapproval
explicit, 19, 28, 37, 44, 74, 76, 78, 81, 89, 123, 129, 150, 175, 188,
202, 209-210, 214, 220, 225, 228, 230-234, 235, 237, 241, 256,
280, 309, 333, 339-340, 346-347, 348-349
implied, 80, 82, 85, 117, 135, 137, 142-143, 160-161, 173, 183, 211-212,
223, 251, 273-274, 282, 301, 302-303, 328
social tolerance
explicit, 44, 77, 84-86, 104-108, 124, 172, 193-200, 208, 214, 242, 252,
253, 280
implied, 35, 39, 45, 62, 64-65, 77, 100-108, 204-207, 213, 224, 238,
242, 243-255, 266, 270, 290, 295, 333, 334
_Sodome et Gomorrhe_, 208
_Le Songe d’une Femme_, 110-111, 156, 262
_The Songs of Bilitis_, 112, 173, 174, 177, 189, 193
_A Soul Enchanted_, 205
_South Wind_, 281
_The Southern Quarterly_, 321
_Spring Fire_, 333, 341
Stadler, Ernst, 176
Stafford, Jean, 326, 353
_Star Against Star_, 311, 315, 331
_Steeplejack_, 140
_Stein, Gertrude_, 247-251, 255, 269, 334
Steinach, Eugen, 151
Stern, Daniel, 129
Stirling, George, 189
_The Story of an African Farm_, 94
“The Story of Julie Cane,” 270
_The Story of Mary MacLane_, 244-247
“The Story of Opal,” 244
_Strange Fires_, 333
_Strange Marriage_, 310
_Strange Sisters_, 331
_Strange Waters_, 189
Strindberg, August, 91, 96-99, 114
_Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, 41, 150
Sturge Moore, D. C. and T., 142, 145
_The Sudden Guest_, 328
suicide
of variant, 79, 115, 127, 179, 203, 204, 219, 222, 223, 230, 237, 259,
277, 300, 309, 310, 311, 324, 326, 328, 329, 331
attempted, 35, 101, 170, 226, 308, 317
of another, 86, 227, 276, 317
_Sur le Mode Saphique_, 173
_Swann’s Way_, 204
_The Sweet Cheat Gone_, 204
Swinburne, A. C., 78-80, 114, 140
_Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds_, 179
_Sylvia Scarlett_, 251
Symonds, John Addington, 149
_Der Tag_, 228
Talmey, Bernard, 86
Tarkington, Booth, 182
Tarn, Pauline
_see_
Vivien, Renée
Taylor, Deems, 186
_Le Temps_, 201
Tey, Josephine, 335-337
_That Other Love_, 295, 311
Thayer, Tiffany, 309
Theiss, Frank, 235, 292
_Things As They Are_, 247-251
_Thirteen Women_, 309
Thomas, Elisabeth W., 290-291
Thompson, Dr. Clara, (153, note 5)
Thorne, Anthony, 306-307
Tilly, Alexandre de, 45
_Time Magazine_, 319
_To Love and Be Wise_, 336-337
_To the Lighthouse_, 278, 334
_The Toast_, 47
Tolstoi, L. N., 223
_Torchlight to Valhalla_, 320
Torres, Toreska, 332
_The Tortoiseshell Cat_, 273, 275-277, 293, 294, 320, 339
_Tragic Ground_, 326
transvestism
defined, 12
no deception, 24, 40, 85, 88, 90, 98, 105-108, 117-118, 128, 310, 320
sex deception, 26, 34-35, 37, 42, 44, 60, 61-62, 64-65, 90, 92, 120-122,
219, 221-222, 251, 310, 336-337
_Die Transvestiten_, 221
_Le Trille du Diable_, 215, 216-217
_Trio_, 325-326
_A Trip to London_, 331
Trowbridge, J. T., 246
_The Turn of the Screw_, 111-112, 114, 243
_Twelfth Night_, 40
_Two Serious Ladies_, 324
Ulrichs, Karl, 53, 149
_Underneath the Bough_, 143
_The Unlit Lamp_, 271, 281
Urfé, Honoré d’, 38-39, 109
_Urningsliebe_, 222, 226
_Vainglory_, 268
Valkyrie, 32
Valle, Pietro della, 42
Vallette, Alfred, 90
Vallette, Marguérite Eymery
_see_
Rachilde
Vanderbilt, Mrs. Gertrude, 147
Van Doren, Mark, 148
variance (not lesbianism)
defined, 12
explicit, 35, 37, 56-60, 61, 92, 93, 95-96, 100-101, 122-124, 128-129,
130, 140, 141-145, 176, 183-185, 188, 215, 225-226, 237-238,
243-244, 246, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257-261, 262, 263, 264, 267,
271, 272, 273-274, 276, 278, 288-292, 298, 302-303, 309, 316,
319, 329, 332, 333, 336, 337
implied, 40, 117-120, 125-127, 133-135, 137-138, 146-147, 173, 180-181,
187, 191, 223, 278, 283, 304-305, 321, 327
unrealized
by variant, 22-23, 56-59, 62, 93, 132, 255, 278-279, 315, 321, 329-330
by author, 22-23, 329-330
Vassar College, 184, 186, 292
Vedder, Elihu, 182
Venette, Nicolas de, 46
_Le Vent des Vaisseaux_, 159
_La Vénus des Aveugles_, 158, 166
Vergil, 25
Verlaine, Paul, 77-78, 83, 90, 112, 114, 201, 325
_La Vertu Suprême_, 108
_Le Vice Mortel_, 204
Vigny, Alfred de, 129
_A Vindication of the Rights of Women_, 55, 56, 59, 136
The Virgin Mary
_see_
Mary, Virgin
virginity, 25, 39, 44
Vivien, Renée, 154, 155, 158-173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 192
Vizetelly, H. R., 150
_Vom Neuen Weib_, 219
Voronoff, Serge, 151
Wade, Mason, 137
Wagner, Ernst, 218
_Wait for Tomorrow_, 328
Wassermann, Jacob, 220
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 80
_The Wayward Ones_, 330
_We Sing Diana_, 288-289
_We Too Are Drifting_, 314-315, 320, 323
_The Weather in the Streets_, 316
Weber, Joseph and Fields, Lew, 245, 246
Webster, H. K., 257
Wedekind, Frank, 224-228, 235, 239
_Weiberbeute_, 221-222, 310
Weigall, Arthur, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24
Weininger, Otto, 351
Weirauch, Anna Elisabet, 229-234, 298
_Welcher unter Euch ohne Sünde Ist_, 223
_The Well of Loneliness_, 78, 241, 271, 279-281, 287, 288, 308, 309,
311
Wells, Catherine, 255
Wells, H. G., 295
_Wer Kann Dafür?_, 219-220
Westphal, C. von, 53, 81
_What’s O’Clock?_, 179
Wheeler, Hugh C., 330
White, Nelia Gardner, 192
_White Ladies_, 315-316
Whitman, Walt, 139, 141
Wilde, Oscar, 112, 150, 160
Wilder, Robert, 328
Wilhelm, Gale, 314-315, 320, 351
Willard, Frances, 141
Williams, Idabel, 309
Willis, George, 329
Willy
_see_
Gauthier-Villars, Henri
Wilson, Edmund, 247, 248, 250, 269, 328
Wilson, Ethel Davis, 329
Wilson, Harry Leon, 181, 182
Wilson, Romer, 130, 131, 178, 245
_Wind Woman_, 338
Winsloe, Christa, 236-238, 259, 314
_Winter Solstice_, 324
Wise, Thomas, 78
Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, 14, 229
witchcraft, 31, 33, 47, 73-74, 311
_Within a Budding Grove_, 204
“_Wo bleibt der homoerotische Roman?”_, 228
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 55-60, 66, 94, 115, 116, 136, 137, 141
_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_, 136
_Woman of the Century_, 141
_The Woman who Lives with Me_, 155
women, attitudes toward, 23, 30-32, 45-46, 153-154, 350-352
_Women’s Movement_, 51, 55-56, 91, 94, 95-98, 153, 239, 253
_Women in Prison_, 328
_Women Poets of the Twentieth Century in France_, 173
_Women’s Barracks_, 332, 341
Wood, Clement, 139, 141, 178, 180, 181
Woodford, Jack, 310-311, 333
Woods, Marianne, 127
Woolf, Leonard, 280
Woolf, Virginia, 273-275, 278, 279, 280, 283-287, 297, 305
_Works and Days_, 142, 143, 145
_Wuthering Heights_, 131, 133
Wylie, Elinor, 182
Wylie, Philip, 328, 350
Yost, Karl, 183
Young, Francis Brett, 315-316
_Young Ladies of Paris_, 194, 295
_Young Man with a Horn_, 320
Yourcenar, Marguérite, 173
Zola, Emile, 53, 83-85, 91, 96, 112
_Zwei Frauen_, 220
Transcriber’s Notes
Two footnotes cannot be found in the NOTES section: [52] in
_Chapter III_ and [8] in _Chapter V, Emily Brontë_. Likewise,
two literature references are not in the BIBLIOGRAPHIES section: _B
151x_ and _B 20x_.
The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here
(before/after):
[p. 14]: (multiple cases)
... Humanitären Wissenschaftliche Komittee, 1899-1921. There,
under ...
... Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, 1899-1921. There,
under ...
[p. 20]:
... men. Once, to be sure, in attempting to hearten a girl on the
eve of of ...
... men. Once, to be sure, in attempting to hearten a girl on the
eve of ...
[p. 28]:
... altogether a man.” Leana admits have received proof of
this, but ...
... altogether a man.” Leana admits to have received proof of
this, but ...
[p. 90]:
... published in book form as Les Hors Natures dealt with men.)
In the ...
... published in book form as Les Hors Natures) dealt with men.
In the ...
[p. 108]:
... achieved a fear-reaching psychological victory, he risks
clinching it by ...
... achieved a far-reaching psychological victory, he risks
clinching it by ...
[p. 110]:
... cousin Lilly for her fortune, and challenges him to duel
intended to ...
... cousin Lilly for her fortune, and challenges him to a duel
intended to ...
[p. 126]:
... deeply in love, the wife, with “sterbende Gute,” agreed
to release ...
... deeply in love, the wife, with “sterbender Güte,” agreed
to release ...
[p. 135]:
... nervously ill and perhaps left the school, (inexplicable in
the middle ...
... nervously ill and perhaps left the school (inexplicable in
the middle ...
[p. 139]:
... bound to the back of a fiery Arab steed, feet in his name,
head ...
... bound to the back of a fiery Arab steed, feet in his mane,
head ...
[p. 162]:
... Je devine tons corps—les lys ardents des seins, ...
... Je devine ton corps—les lys ardents des seins, ...
[p. 175]:
... um meiner dunklen Schein. ...
... um meiner Augen dunklen Schein. ...
[p. 175]:
... Und um uns hier ist Hass und Hohn, ...
... Und um uns her ist Hass und Hohn, ...
[p. 175]:
... und nun, da du so ganz erlodert bist, ...
... und nun, da du so ganz entlodert bist, ...
[p. 177]:
... Vivien or Madeleine, and they seldom equal Barney or Schwäbe
in ...
... Vivien or Madeleine, and they seldom equal Barney or Schwabe
in ...
[p. 223]:
... famous Thomas. His Die Göttinnen (1902-03) is trilogy within
whose ...
... famous Thomas. His Die Göttinnen (1902-03) is a trilogy
within whose ...
[p. 231]:
... of course, had none of her letters, but had received many
scurrilous ...
... of course, none of her letters, but had received many
scurrilous ...
[p. 263]:
... mood of the Englishwomen with whom Hoape is thrown . One of ...
... mood of the Englishwomen with whom Hoape is thrown together.
One of ...
[p. 268]:
... more designed to conceal that are a dancer’s veils to hide
the form ...
... more designed to conceal than are a dancer’s veils to hide
the form ...
[p. 280]:
... Paris, but neither find tolerable the bohemian existence
which is ...
... Paris, but neither finds tolerable the bohemian existence
which is ...
[p. 284]:
... (as was Thomas Sackville, of the family living even than at
Knole). ...
... (as was Thomas Sackville, of the family living even then at
Knole). ...
[p. 343]:
... variants? Sometimes none. Lyrics poets in particular simply
register ...
... variants? Sometimes none. Lyric poets in particular simply
register ...
[p. 362]:
... 6. ——. Poor white. N. Y., B. W. Heubsch, 1920. ...
... 6. ——. Poor white. N. Y., B. W. Huebsch, 1920. ...
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