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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/77276-0.txt b/77276-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a61defb --- /dev/null +++ b/77276-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,20259 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77276 *** + + + + + 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.) + + + A. PRIMARY MATERIAL + +1. ADAMS, FAY. Appointment in Paris. N. Y., Fawcett, 1952. + +2. ALCIPHRON. Letters from town and country. (tr. F. A. Wright) Lond., +Routledge, n.d. + +3. ALDINGTON, RICHARD. The loves of Myrrhine and Konallis. Chic., Pascal +Covici, 1926. + +4. ANDERSON, HELEN. Pity for women. N. Y., Doubleday, 1937. + +5. ANDERSON, SHERWOOD. Dark laughter. N. Y., Boni & Liveright, 1925. + +6. ——. Poor white. N. Y., B. W. Huebsch, 1920. + +7. ANTHOLOGIA GRAECA. (tr. R. W. Paton) N. Y., Putnam, 1915-26. 5v. + +8. APOLLODORUS. The library. (tr. J. G. Fraser) Cambridge, Mass., +Harvard Univ. Press, 1946, 2v. + +9. ARIOSTO, LUDOVICO. Orlando furioso. (tr. W. S. Rose) Lond., Bell, +1907. v. 2. + +10. ARNIM, ELISABETH VON. Goethe’s correspondence with a child. Bost., +Ticknor & Fields, 1859. + +11. ——. Die Günderode. (Sämmtliche Werke, bd. 2) Berlin, +Propylaenverlag, 1920. + +12. BAKER, DOROTHY. Trio. Bost., Houghton, 1943. + +13. ——. Young man with a horn. N. Y., New American Library, 1953. + +14. BALZAC, HONORÉ DE. Cousin Betty. (tr. James Waring) Bost., Dana +Estes, 1901. + +15. ——. Seraphita. Lond., Dent, 1897. + +16. ——. The girl with the golden eyes. (tr. Ernest Dowson) [N. Y.], +DeLuxe Editions, 1931. + +17. BARBEY D’AUREVILLY, JULES. Les diaboliques. Paris, Dentu, 1874. + +18. BARNES, DJUNA. Nightwood. N. Y., Harcourt, 1937. + +19. BARNEY, NATALIE CLIFFORD. Actes et entr’actes. Paris, Sensot, 1909. + +20. ——. Aventures de l’esprit. Paris, Emile-Paul, 1929. + +21. BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES. Prose and poetry. (tr. Arthur Symons). N. Y., +Boni, 1926. + +22. ——. Les fleurs du mal. (tr. George Dillon and Edna St. Vincent +Millay) N. Y., Harper, 1936. + +23. BEER, THOMAS. Mrs. Egg and other barbarians. N. Y., Knopf, 1933. + +24. BELL, MRS. G. H., ed. The Hamwood papers of the ladies of Llangollen +and Caroline Hamilton. Lond., Macmillan, 1930. + +25. BELOT, ADOLPHE. Mlle Giraud, ma femme. Paris, Dentu, 1870. + +26. BENNETT, ARNOLD. Elsie and the child. N. Y., Doran, 1924. + +27. ——. The pretty lady. N. Y., Doran, 1918. + +28. BIBLE. Revised version. Oxford, University Press, 1891. + +28a. ——. American standard version. N. Y., Nelson, 1901. + +29. BOLTON, ISABEL. Ruth and Irma. New Yorker 23:21-24. Jan. 26, 1947. + +30. *BORYS, DANIEL. Carlotta Noll. Paris, Albin Michel, 1905. + +31. BOURDET, EDWARD. The captive. (tr. Arthur Hornblow, jr.) N. Y., +Brentano, 1927. + +32. BOURGET, PAUL C. J. Un crime d’amour. Paris, Lemerre, 1886. + +32a. ——. A love crime. Paris, Société des Beaux Arts, 1905. + +33. BOWEN, ELIZABETH. The hotel. N. Y., MacVeigh, 1928. + +34. BOWLES, JANE. Two serious ladies. N. Y., Knopf, 1943. + +35. BOYLE, KAY. The bridegroom’s body. (In: The crazy hunter. N. Y., +Harcourt, 1940) + +36. ——. Monday night. N. Y., Harcourt, 1938. + +37. BRANTÔME, P. DE B. DE. Lives of fair and gallant ladies. (tr. A. R. +Allinson) N. Y., Liveright, 1933. + +38. BROCK, LILYAN. Queer patterns. N. Y., Greenberg, 1935. + +39. BRONTË, EMILY. Complete poems. (edited from manuscripts by C. W. +Hatfield) N. Y., Columbia University Press, 1941. + +40. ——. Gondal poems. (ed. Helen Brown and Jean Mott) Oxford, Blackwell, +1938. + +41. BROWNRIGG, GAWEN. Star against star. N. Y., Macaulay, 1936. + +42. BURT, STRUTHERS. Entertaining the islanders. N. Y., Scribner, 1933. + +43. CALDWELL, ERSKINE. Tragic ground. N. Y., Duell, 1944. + +44. CASANOVA DE SEINGALT, G. G. Memoirs. (tr. Arthur Machen) N. Y., +Regency House, 1938. 8v. + +45. CHARKE, CHARLOTTE. Narrative of the life of ... written by herself. +Lond., W. Reeve, 1755. + +46. CHARLES-ETIENNE. La bouche fardée. Paris, Editions Curio, 1926. + +47. ——. Les désexuées. Paris. Editions Curio, 1924. + +48. —— & NORTAL, ALBERT. Inassouvie. Paris, Editions Curio, 1927. + +49. [CHOISEUL-MEUSE, FÉLICITÉ DE]. Julie, ou j’ai sauvé ma rose. Priv. +print., 1882. + +50. Coleridge, S. T. Christabel. (In: Page, C. H. British poets of the +nineteenth century. N. Y., Sanborn, 1917) + +51. COLETTE, SIDONIE GABRIELLE. Ces plaisirs. Paris, Ferenczi, 1932. + +52. ——. Claudine à l’école. Paris, Ollendorff, 1903. + +52a. ——. Claudine at school. N. Y., Boni, 1930. + +53. ——. Claudine à Paris. Paris, Ollendorff, 1903. + +53a. ——. Young lady of Paris. N. Y., Boni, 1931. + +54. ——. Claudine en ménage. Paris, Mercure de France, 1902. + +54a. ——. The indulgent husband. (In: Short novels of Colette. Glenway +Wescott, ed. N. Y., Dial, 1951). + +55. ——. Claudine s’en va. Paris, Ollendorff, 1903. + +55a. ——. The innocent wife. N. Y., Farrar, 1934. + +56. ——. La retraite sentimentale. Paris, Mercure de France, 1947. + +57. COUPERUS, LOUIS. The comedians. N. Y., Doran, 1926. + +58. COWLIN, DOROTHY. Winter solstice. N. Y., Macmillan, 1943. + +59. CRAIGIN, ELIZABETH. Either is love. N. Y., Harcourt, 1937. + +60. CUISIN, P. Clémentine, orpheline et androgyne. Bruxelles, J. J. Gay, +1883. + +61. DANE, CLEMENCE. Regiment of women. N. Y., Macmillan, 1917. + +62. DASCOM [BACON], JOSEPHINE. Smith College stories. N. Y., Scribner, +1916. + +63. *DAUTHENDEY, ELISABETH. Vom neuen Weib und seiner Liebe. ed. 3. +Berlin, Schuster & Löffler, 1903. + +64. DAVENPORT, MARCIA. Of Lena Geyer. N. Y., Scribner, 1936. + +65. DAVIES, RHYS. The trip to London. N. Y., Howell Soskin, 1946. + +66. *DEHMEL, RICHARD. Weib und Welt. (In: Gesammelte Werke, bd. 2. +Berlin, Fischer, 1913). + +67. DESVIGNONS, MAX. Plaisirs troublants. Paris, Librairie Artistique, +n.d. + +68. DEVAL, JACQUES. Club de femmes [film]. Review: Time v. 30 pt. 2, +Oct. 25, 1937. + +69. DICKINSON, EMILY. Bolts of melody; new poems. N. Y., Harper, 1945. + +70. ——. Letters of ... (Mabel Loomis Todd, ed.) Cleveland, World Publ. +Co., 1951. + +71. ——. Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland. Cambridge, +Mass., Harvard University Press, 1951. + +72. ——. Life and letters of ... by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianci. +Bost., Houghton, 1924. + +73. ——. Poems. (Martha Dickinson Bianci and Alfred L. Hampson, ed.) +Bost., Little Brown, 1937. + +74. DIDEROT, DENIS. La religieuse. Paris, Editions de Cluny, 1938. + +75. DINESEN, ISAK. Seven Gothic tales. N. Y., Smith and Haas, 1934. + +76. DONISTHORPE, SHEILA. Loveliest of friends. [N. Y.], Claude Kendall, +1931. + +77. DOSTOEVSKY, FEODOR. The friend of the family. Lond., Heinemann, +1920. + +78. DRESSER, DAVIS. Mardigras madness. N. Y., Godwin, 1934. + +78a. ——. Peter Shelley. One reckless night. N. Y., Godwin, 1938. + +79. DRUON, MAURICE. The rise of Simon Lachaume. (tr. Edward Fitzgerald) +N. Y., Dutton, 1952. + +80. DUBUT DE LAFOREST, J. J. La femme d’affaires. Paris, Dentu, 1890. + +81. *——. Mlle Tantale. Paris, Dupont, 1897. + +82. *DUC, AIMÉE. Sind es Frauen? Berlin, Echstein, 1903. + +83. DUMAURIER, ANGELA. The little less. N. Y., Doubleday, 1941. + +84. *EICHHORN, MARIA. Fräulein Don Juan. + +85. EICHRODT, JOHN. Nadia Devereux. (In: Sextet. Whit and Hallie +Burnett, ed. N. Y., McKay, 1951.) + +86. EISNER, SIMON. Naked storm. N. Y., Lion Books, 1952. + +87. ELLIS, JOHN BRECKENRIDGE. The Holland wolves. Chic., McClurg, 1902. + +88. EULENBERG, HERBERT. Der Maler Rayski. (In: Casanovas letztes +Abenteuer. Dresden, Reissner, 1928.) + +89. FEYDEAU, ERNEST. La comtesse de Chalis. Paris, Michel Levy, 1871. + +90. FIELD, MICHAEL. Long ago. Portland, Me., Mosher, 1897. + +91. ——. Underneath the bough. ibid. 1898. + +92. ——. Works and days. From the journal of Michael Field. (T. and D. C. +Sturge Moore ed.) Lond., Murray, 1933. + +93. FIRBANK, RONALD. Five novels. Norfolk, Conn., New Directions, 1949. + +94. FIRMINGER, MARJORIE. Jam today. Paris, n. publ., 1931. + +95. FISHER [PARRISH], MARY. F. K. Not now but NOW. N. Y., Viking, 1947. + +96. FITZMAURICE-KELLY, JAMES. The nun ensign. Lond., Fisher Unwin, 1908. + +97. FITZROY, [SCOTT] A. T. Despised and rejected. Lond., Daniel, 1918. + +98. FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE. Salammbo. N. Y., Rarity Press, 1932. + +99. FLORA, FLETCHER. Strange sisters. N. Y., Lion Books, 1954. + +100. FORREST, FELIX. Carola. N. Y., Duell, 1948. + +101. FOSTER, GERALD. Strange marriage. N. Y., Godwin, 1934. + +102. FOWLER, ELLEN T. The Farringdons. N. Y., Appleton, 1900. + +103. *FRAUMAN, LUZ. Weiberbeute. Budapest, Schneider, 1906. + +104. FREDERICS, DIANA. Diana; a strange autobiography. N. Y., Dial, +1939. + +105. FULLER [OSSOLI], MARGARET. Günderode. Boston, Peabody, 1942. + +106. ——. Memoirs. Bost., Phillips, Sampson, 1852. 2v. + +107. GAUTIER, THÉOPHILE. Mlle de Maupin. Chic., Franklin, n.d. + +108. GEORGIE, LEYLA. The establishment of Madame Antonia. N. Y., +Liveright, 1932. + +109. GIDE, ANDRÉ. The school for wives; Robert; Genevieve ... (tr. +Dorothy Bussy) N. Y., Knopf, 1950. + +110. GOURMONT, REMY DE. Le songe d’une femme. Paris, Mercure de France, +1899. + +111. *GRAMONT, LOUIS DE. Astarte; opéra en quatre actes ... (Académie +Nationale de Musique, Feb. ?, 1901). + +112. GREENE, GRAHAM. Orient express. N. Y., Doubleday, 1933. + +113. GÜNDERODE, KAROLINE. Gesammelte Werke. Berlin, +Goldschmidt-Gabrielli, 1920-22. 2v. + +114. GUNTER, A. C. A Florida enchantment. N. Y., Home Publ. Co., 1892. + +115. HALL, RADCLYFFE. The unlit lamp. N. Y., Jonathan Cape, 1924. + +116. ——. The well of loneliness. N. Y., Covici, Friede, 1929. + +117. HAMILTON, ANTHONY. Count de Grammont. Lond., Grolier Society, n.d. + +118. HARDY, THOMAS. Desperate remedies. N. Y., Harper, 1896. + +119. HARRIS, SARA. The wayward ones. N. Y., Crown, 1952. + +120. HELLMAN, LILLIAN. The children’s hour. (In: Plays. N. Y., Random, +1942.) + +121. HEMINGWAY, ERNEST. The fifth column and the first forty-nine +stories. N. Y., Collier, 1938. + +122. HILLE, PETER. Gesammelte Werke. Berlin, Schuster & Löffler, 1904. +2v. + +123. HENRY, JOAN. Women in prison. N. Y., Permabooks, 1953. + +124. *HOECHSTETTER, SOPHIE. Selbstanzeige. Die letzte Flamme. Jena, +Landhausverlag, 1917. + +125. HOLMES, O. W. Elsie Venner. N. Y., Burt, n.d. + +126. ——. The guardian angel. Bost., Houghton, 1890. + +127. ——. A mortal antipathy. Bost., Houghton, 1892. + +128. HULL, HELEN R. The fire. _Century Magazine_ 95:105-114, Nov. 1917. + +129. ——. Labyrinth. N. Y., Macmillan, 1923. + +130. ——. Quest. N. Y., Macmillan, 1922. + +131. HUNEKER, J. G. Painted veils. N. Y., Modern Library, n.d. + +132. HUON OF BORDEAUX. (tr. Lord Berners) Lond., Trubner & Co., 1884. + +133. *HURLBUT, THOMAS. Hymn to Venus. Review: New York Times, Nov. 7, +1926; VIII:10. + +134. HURST, FANNIE. Lonely parade. N. Y., Harper, 1942. + +135. IRA, IRIS. Lesbos: Gedichte. Priv. print., 1930. + +136. JACKSON, SHIRLEY. Hangsaman. N. Y., Farrar, 1951. + +137. JAMES, HENRY. The Bostonians. N. Y., Dial, 1945. + +138. ——. The turn of the screw. (In: Novels and tales. N. Y., Scribner, +1922. v. 12.) + +139. *JANITSCHEK, MARIA. Neue Erziehung und alte Moral. (In: Die neue +Eva. Leipzig, Seeman, 1903.) + +140. JUVENAL. Satires ... (tr. Lewis Evans) Lond., Bell, 1895. + +141. KALTNEKER, HANS. Die Schwester: ein Mysterium. Berlin, Zsolnay, +1924. + +142. KEOGH, THEODORA. Meg. N. Y., New American Library, 1952. + +143. [KING, WILLIAM]. The toast ... Written in Latin by Frederick +Scheffer. Done into English by Peregrine O’Donald, Esq. Dublin, 1732. + +144. KOESTLER, ARTHUR. Arrival and departure. N. Y., Macmillan, 1943. + +145. LABÉ, LOUISE. The debate between Folly and Cupid. (tr. E. M. Cox) +Lond., Williams & Norgate, 1925. + +146. ——. Oeuvres, publiées par Charles Boy. Paris, Lemerre, 1887. 2v. +(v. 2: Recherches sur la vie et les oeuvres de Louise Labé.) + +146a. ——. Oeuvres complètes ... (P. C. Boutens, ed.) Maestricht, Stols, +1928. + +147. ——. Love sonnets. (tr. Frederic Prokosch) N. Y., New Directions, +1947. + +148. LACRETELLE, JACQUES DE. Marie Bonifas. Lond., Putnam, 1927. + +149. LAFARGE, CHRISTOPHER. The sudden guest. N. Y., Coward-McCann, 1946. + +150. LAMARTINE, A. M. L. Regina. (In: Nouvelles confidences. Paris, +Levy, 1855.) + +151. LANDON, MARGARET. Never dies the dream. N. Y., Doubleday, 1949. + +152. LAPSLEY [GUEST], MARY. Parable of the virgins. N. Y., R. R. Smith, +1931. + +153. LATOUCHE, HENRI DE. Fragoletta. Paris, Lavasseur, 1829. 2v. + +154. *LAVAUDÈRE, JANE. Les demi-sexes. (In: Le Figaro) 1896. + +155. LAWRENCE, D. H. The rainbow. N. Y., Modern Library, n.d. + +156. LEE, JENNETTE. The cat and the king. _Ladies Home Journal_ 36:10, +Oct. 1919. + +157. LEHMANN, ROSAMOND. Dusty Answer. N. Y., Holt, 1927. + +158. ——. The weather in the streets. N. Y., Literary Guild, 1936. + +159. LEWIS, SINCLAIR. Ann Vickers. N. Y., Doubleday, 1933. + +160. LEWIS, WYNDHAM. The apes of God. Lond., Arthur Press, 1930. + +161. *LIEBETREU, O. Urningsliebe. Leipzig, Fischer, 1905. + +162. LODGE, LOIS. Love like a shadow. N. Y., Phoenix, 1935. + +163. LOFTS, NORA. Jassy. N. Y., Knopf, 1945. + +164. LOUŸS, PIERRE. Aphrodite. Priv. print., 1925. + +165. ——. Les aventures du roi Pausole. Paris, Fayard, n.d. + +166. ——. The songs of Bilitis. N. Y., Godwin, 1933. + +167. LOWELL, AMY. A dome of many-colored glass. Bost., Houghton, 1912. + +168. ——. Pictures of the floating world. N. Y., Macmillan, 1919. + +169. ——. Sword blades and poppy seeds. Bost., Houghton, 1914. + +170. ——. What’s o’clock. Bost., Houghton, 1925. + +171. LUCIAN. (tr. C. Jacobitz) v. 1, The ass, Dialogues of the +courtesans, and The amores. Athens, Athenian Society, 1895. + +172. MACKENZIE, COMPTON. Extraordinary women. Lond., Secker, 1932. + +173. MACLANE, MARY. I, Mary MacLane. N. Y., Stokes, 1917. + +174. ——. My friend Annabel Lee. Chic., Stone, 1903. + +175. ——. The story of Mary MacLane; by herself. Chic., Stone, 1902. + +176. MADELEINE, MARIE. Auf Kypros. Berlin, Vita, n.d. + +177. MALLET, FRANÇOISE. The illusionist. (tr. Herma Briffault) N. Y., +Farrar, 1952. + +178. MANN, HEINRICH. Die Göttinnen: _Venus_. Berlin, Zsolnay, 1925. + +179. MANSFIELD, KATHERINE. The scrapbook ... N. Y., Knopf, 1940. + +180. ——. Journal. N. Y., Knopf, 1928. + +181. MARCHAL, LUCIE. The mesh. (tr. Virgilia Peterson) N. Y., Appleton, +1949. + +182. MARGUERITTE, VICTOR. La garçonne. Paris, Flammarion, 1922. + +182a. ——. The bachelor girl. Lond., A. M. Philpot, 1924. + +183. MARTIAL. Epigrams. (tr. W. C. Aker) Lond., Heinemann, 1930, 2v. + +184. MASEFIELD, JOHN. Multitude and solitude. N. Y., Macmillan, 1925. + +185. MASTERS, EDGAR LEE. Domesday book. N. Y., Macmillan, 1929. + +186. MAUPASSANT, GUY DE. La femme de Paul. (In: La maison Tellier. +Paris, Ollendorff, 1899.) + +186a. ——. Paul’s mistress. (In: Works of ... Aldus de luxe ed. N. Y., +National Library, 1909. v. 4.) + +187. [MAYEUR DE ST. PAUL?] Confessions d’une jeune fille; Suite; Suite +et fin. (In: [Mairobert, M. F. P. de? et al.] L’espion anglais. Lond., +n. publ., 1784. t. 10.) + +188. *MEEBOLD, ALFRED. Dr. Erna Redens Thorheit und Erkenntnis. (In: +Allerhand Volk. Berlin, Vita, 1900.) + +189. MENDES, CATULLE. Méphistophéla. Paris, Dentu, 1890. + +190. MENKEN, ADA ISAACS. Infelicia. Phila., Lippincott, 1875. + +191. MIDDLETON, THOMAS AND DEKKER, THOMAS. The roaring girl. Lond., +Vizetelly, 1890. + +191a. ——. Ibid. (In: Works. A. H. Bullen, ed. Lond., Nimmo, 1885-86. v. +4.) + +192. MILLAY, EDNA ST. VINCENT. Fatal interview. N. Y., Harper, 1931. + +193. ——. A few figs from thistles. N. Y., Harper, 1922. + +194. ——. The harp-weaver and other poems. N. Y., Harper, 1923. + +195. ——. The lamp and the bell. N. Y., Harper, 1921. + +196. ——. Letters. (Alan Ross Macdougall, ed.) N. Y., Harper, 1952. + +197. ——. Renascence. N. Y., Kennerly, 1924. + +198. ——. Second April. N. Y., Kennerly, 1924. + +199. MILLAY, KATHLEEN. Against the wall. N. Y., Macaulay, 1929. + +200. MITCHISON, NAOMI. The delicate fire. N. Y., Harcourt, 1932. + +201. *MØLLER, O. W. Wer kann dafür? (tr. from Danish, Richard Meienreis) +Leipzig, Spohr, 1901. + +202. MONTFORT, CHARLES. Le journal d’une saphiste. Paris, Offenstadt, +1902. + +203. MORGAN, CLAIRE. The price of salt. N. Y., Coward-McCann, 1952. + +204. MOSS, GEOFFREY. That other love. N. Y., Doubleday, 1930. + +205. *MÜHSAM, ERICH. Die Psychologie der Erbtante. Zurich, Schmidt, +1905. + +206. NATHAN, GEORGE JEAN. Design for loving. American Spectator 1:2-3, +April 1933. + +207. NEFF, WANDA FRAIKEN. We sing Diana. Bost., Houghton, 1928. + +208. *NIEMANN, AUGUST. Zwei Frauen. Dresden, Pierson, 1901. + +209. NIN, ANAÏS. Ladders to fire. N. Y., Dutton, 1924. + +210. O’HIGGINS, HARVEY. Julie Cane. N. Y., Harper, 1924. + +211. OLIVIA. [Dorothy Bussy] Olivia. N. Y., William Sloane, 1949. + +211x. Oriental stories. (La fleur lascive orientale) ... trans. from +Arabian ... (etc.) Athens, priv. print., 1893. + +212. O’NEILL, ROSE. The master-mistress. N. Y., Knopf, 1922. + +213. OVID. Heroides and Amores. (tr. Grant Showerman) Lond., Heinemann, +1931. + +214. ——. Metamorphoses. (tr. Frank Justus Miller) Lond., Heinemann, +1946. 2v. + +215. Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. (A. T. Quiller-Couch, ed.) Oxford, +University Press, 1912. + +216. PACKER, VIN. Spring fire. N. Y., Fawcett, 1952. + +217. PARKER, DOROTHY. After such pleasures. N. Y., Viking, 1934. + +218. PATTON [WALDRON], MARION. Dance on the tortoise. N. Y., Dial, 1930. + +219. PELADAN, JOSEPHIN. La gynandre. Paris, Dentu, 1891. + +220. ——. La vertu suprême. Paris, Flammarion, 1900. + +221. *POUGY, LIANE DE. Idylle saphique. Paris, Librairie de la Plume, +1901. + +222. PROUST, MARCEL. The captive. (tr. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff) N. Y., +Modern Library, 1929. + +223. ——. Cities of the plain (tr. ibid.) N. Y., Modern Library, 1930. + +224. ——. The Guermantes way. (tr. ibid.) N. Y., Modern Library, 1925. + +225. ——. The past recaptured. (tr. F. A. Blossom) N. Y., Boni, 1932. + +226. ——. Swann’s way. (tr. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff) N. Y., Modern Library, +1928. + +227. ——. The sweet cheat gone. (tr. ibid.) N. Y., Boni, 1930. + +228. ——. Within a budding grove. (tr. ibid.) N. Y., Modern Library, +1924. + +229. RACHILDE. [Marguérite Eymery Vallette]. Madame Adonis. Paris, +Ferenczi, 1929. + +230. ——. Monsieur Vénus. (Maurice Barrès, ed.) Paris, Felix Brossier, +1889. + +230a. ——. Monsieur Vénus. (tr. Madeleine Boyd, Maurice Barrès, pref.) N. +Y., Covici, Friede, 1929. + +231. REMARQUE, ERICH. Arch of triumph. N. Y., Appleton, 1945. + +232. RENAULT, MARY. The middle mist. N. Y., Morrow, 1945. + +233. ——. Promise of love. N. Y., Morrow, 1939. + +234. *REUSS, PAULE. Le génie de l’amour. Paris, Oeuvres Représentatives, +1935. + +235. *REUTER, GABRIELE. Aus guter Familie. Berlin, 1897. + +236. RICE, CRAIG. Having wonderful crime. N. Y., Simon & Schuster, 1943. + +237. RICHARDSON, DOROTHY. Dawn’s left hand. N. Y., Knopf, n.d. (In: +Pilgrimage, v. 4). + +238. RICHARDSON, HENRY HANDEL. The end of a childhood ... Lond., +Heinemann, 1934. + +239. ——. The getting of wisdom. N. Y., Duffield, 1910. + +240. *RIGAL, HENRY. Sur le mode saphique. Paris, Mercure de France, +1902. + +241. ROLAND-MANUEL, SUZANNE. Le trille du diable. Paris, Deux Rives, +1946. + +242. ROLLAND, ROMAIN. Annette and Sylvie. (tr. B. R. Redman) N. Y., +Holt, 1935. + +243. RONALD, JAMES. The angry woman. N. Y., Bantam, 1950. + +243x. ROSSETTI, CHRISTINA. Goblin Market (In: Stephens, James, et al., +ed. Victorian and later English poets. N. Y., American Book Co., 1937.) + +244. ROYDE-SMITH, NAOMI. The island. N. Y., Harper, 1930. + +245. ——. The tortoiseshell cat. N. Y., Boni, 1925. + +246. *RÜLING, THEODOR. Rätselhaft. (In: Welcher unter Euch ohne Sünde +ist. Leipzig, Spohr, 1906.) + +247. SACKVILLE-WEST, VICTORIA. The dark island. N. Y., Doubleday, 1934. + +248. ——. King’s daughter. N. Y., Doubleday, 1930. + +249. SAND, GEORGE. Gabriel-Gabrielle. (In: Oeuvres complètes. Paris, +Perrotin, 1843. v. 13). + +250. SAPPHO. (tr. and ed. J. M. Edmonds) (In: Lyra Graeca. Cambridge, +Mass., Harvard Univ. Press, 1934, v. 1). + +251. ——. The songs of Sappho, in English translation by many poets. Mt. +Vernon, N. Y., Peter Pauper Press, n.d. + +252. ——. Songs; including the recent Egyptian discoveries. (tr. Marion +Mills Miller, into rimed verse; [ed. &] tr. into prose by D. M. +Robinson) N. Y., Macon, 1925. + +253. SARTON, MARY. 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Psychiat. Q. 18:626-41, 1944. + +141. JONES, ERNEST. Early development of female sexuality. Int. J. +Psychoan. 8:459-72, 1927. + +142. JONES, WILLIAM. Fox texts. Amer. Ethnol. Soc. Publications 1:51-52, +1907. + +143. JOUX, OTTO DE. Die hellenische Liebe in der Gegenwart. Leipzig, +Spohr, 1897. + +144. JUNG, C. G. Psychology of the unconscious. N. Y., Dodd, Mead, 1925. + +145. KAHN, SAMUEL. Mentality and homosexuality. Bost., Meador, 1937. + +146. KALLMANN, FRANZ J. Heredity and health in mental disorder ... N. +Y., Norton, 1953. + +147. ——. Modern concepts of genetics in relation to mental health and +abnormal personality development. Psychiat. Q. 21:535-53, 1947. + +148. KARDINER, ABRAM. Sex and morality. N. Y., Bobbs Merrill, 1954. + +149. KARSCH, F. Uranismus oder Päderastie und Tribadie bei den +Naturvölkern. Jahrb. sex. Zwisch. 3:72-201, 1901. + +150. *KEISER, SYLVAN and SCHAFFER, DORA. Environmental factors in +homosexuality in adolescent girls. Psychoan. Rev. 36:383-95, 1949. + +151. KIERNAN, J. G. Sexology [current notes]. Urol. & Cutan. Rev. +18:550, 1914. + +152. KINSEY, A. C. Homosexuality: criteria for hormonal explanation of +the homosexual. J. Clin. Endocrinol. 1:424-28, 1941. + +153. ——. Sexual behavior in the human female. Phila., Saunders, 1953. + +154. ——. Sexual behavior in the human male. Phila., Saunders, 1948. + +155. KNIGHT, R. P. Relationship of latent homosexuality to the mechanism +of paranoid delusions. Bull. Menninger Clin. 4:149-59, 1940. + +156. KNOPF, OLGA. The art of being a woman. Bost., Little, 1932. + +157. *KOUVER, B. J. Die sociale waardering van die sexuele inversie. +Nederl. Tjdschr. Psychol. 7:364-78, 1952. + +158. KRAFFT-EBING, RICHARD VON. Psychopathia sexualis. Brooklyn, N. Y., +Physicians & Surgeons Publishing Co., 1935. + +159. KRETSCHMER, ERNST. Physique and character. New York, Harcourt, +1925. + +160. KRICH, A. M., ed. Women; the variety and meaning of their sexual +experience. N. Y., Dell, 1953. + +161. LAIDLAW, R. N. A clinical approach to homosexuality. Marr. & Fam. +Living 14:39-45, 1952. + +162. LANDES, RUTH. Cult matriarchate and male homosexuality. J. Abnorm. +& Soc. Psych. 35:386-397, 1940. + +163. LANDIS, CARNEY, et al. Sex in development: a study ... of 153 +normal women and 142 female psychiatric patients. N. Y., Hoeber, 1940. + +164. *LANG, THEODOR. [Genetic factors in homosexuality] Ztschr. Ges. +Neurol. & Psychiat. 155:702-13, 1936. + +165. *——. [... further studies] ibid. 157:557-74, 1937. + +166. *——. [Short methodological remarks on my work on genetic theory] +ibid. 160:804-09, 1938. + +167. *——. [Genetic factors in homosexuality] Dritter Beitrag. ibid. +162:627-45, 1938. + +168. *——. Ergebnisse neuer Untersuchungen zum Problem der +Homosexualität. Monatsschr. Krim. Biol 30:401-13, 1939. + +169. *——. [Hereditary conditioning of homosexuality and basic +significance of research on intersexuality for human genetics] Allgem. +Ztschr. Psychiat. 112:237-54, 1939. + +170. *——. Vierter Beitrag zur Frage nach der genetische Bedingheit der +Homosexualität. Zeitschr. Ges. Neurol. & Psychiat. 166:255-70, 1939. + +171. *——. Weitere methodologische Bemerkung zu meinen Arbeiten über die +genetische Bedingheit der Homosexualität. ibid. 169:567-75, 1940. + +172. *——. Fünfter Beitrag zur Frage nach der genetischen Bedingheit der +Homosexualität. ibid. 170:663-71, 1940. + +173. ——. Studies in the genetic determination of homosexuality. J. Nerv. +& Ment. Disease 92:55-64, 1940. + +174. *——. Erbbiologische Untersuchungen über die Entstehung der +Homosexualität. Med. Wochenschr. 88:961-65, 1941. + +175. *——. Untersuchungen an männlichen Homosexuellen und deren +Sippschaften mit besondere Berücksichtung der Frage des Zusammenhangs +zwischen Homosexualität und Psychose. ibid. 171:651-79, 1941. + +176. *LAYCOCK, S. R. Homosexuality: a mental hygiene problem. Canad. +Med. Assoc. J. 63:245-50, 1950. + +177. LELAND, C. G. 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Verschämte “lesbische” Liebe als Brandstiftmotiv. +Krim. Monatsch. 7:112-113, 1933. + + + + + 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. ... + + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77276 *** diff --git a/77276-h/77276-h.htm b/77276-h/77276-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..06a378e --- /dev/null +++ b/77276-h/77276-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,29566 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html lang="en"> +<head> +<meta charset="UTF-8"> +<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> +<title>Sex Variant Women in Literature | Project Gutenberg</title> + <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover"> + <!-- TITLE="Sex Variant Women in Literature" --> + <!-- AUTHOR="Jeannette H. Foster" --> + <!-- LANGUAGE="en" --> + <!-- PUBLISHER="Vantage Press, New York" --> + <!-- DATE="1956" --> + <!-- COVER="images/cover.jpg" --> + +<style> + +body { margin-left:15%; margin-right:15%; } + +div.frontmatter { } +div.frontmatter h1.title { text-indent:0; text-align:center; margin-top:1em; + margin-bottom:1em; } +div.frontmatter .subt { text-indent:0; text-align:center; margin-bottom:1em; + font-variant:small-caps; } +div.frontmatter .aut { text-indent:0; text-align:center; margin-bottom:4em; } +div.frontmatter .aut .line1{ font-style:italic; } +div.frontmatter .pub { text-indent:0; text-align:center; } +div.frontmatter .pub .line2{ font-size:0.8em; } +div.frontmatter .impressum { margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; max-width:18em; } +div.frontmatter .run { text-indent:0; padding-top:4em; margin-bottom:2em; + font-size:0.8em; } +div.frontmatter .cop { text-indent:0; text-align:left; margin-bottom:1em; + font-size:0.8em; } + +div.chapter{ page-break-before:always; } +h2 { text-indent:0; 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} +a:hover { text-decoration: underline; } +a:active { text-decoration: underline; } + +/* Transcriber's note */ +.trnote { font-size:0.8em; line-height:1.2em; background-color: #ccc; + color: #000; border: black 1px dotted; margin: 2em; padding: 1em; + page-break-before:always; margin-top:3em; } +.trnote p { text-indent:0; margin-bottom:1em; } +.trnote ul { margin-left: 0; padding-left: 0; } +.trnote li { text-align: left; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 1em; } +.trnote ul li { list-style-type: square; } +.trnote .transnote { text-indent:0; text-align:center; font-weight:bold; } + +/* page numbers */ +a[title].pagenum { position: absolute; right: 1%; } +a[title].pagenum:after { content: attr(title); color: gray; background-color: inherit; + letter-spacing: 0; text-indent: 0; text-align: right; font-style: normal; + font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: x-small; + border: 1px solid silver; padding: 1px 4px 1px 4px; + display: inline; } + +body.x-ebookmaker { margin-left:0; margin-right:0; } + .x-ebookmaker div.poem-container div.poem { display:block; margin-left:2em; } + .x-ebookmaker a.pagenum { display:none; } + .x-ebookmaker a.pagenum:after { display:none; } + .x-ebookmaker .trnote { margin:0; } + +</style> +</head> + +<body> +<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77276 ***</div> + +<div class="frontmatter chapter"> +<h1 class="title"> +Sex Variant Women +in Literature +</h1> + +<p class="subt"> +A Historical and Quantitative Survey +</p> + +<p class="aut"> +<span class="line1">by</span><br> +<span class="line2">JEANNETTE H. FOSTER, <span class="smallcaps">Ph.D.</span></span> +</p> + +<p class="pub"> +<span class="line1">VANTAGE PRESS · NEW YORK</span><br> +<span class="line2">WASHINGTON · HOLLYWOOD · TORONTO</span> +</p> + +</div> + +<div class="frontmatter chapter"> + <div class="impressum"> +<p class="run"> +FIRST EDITION +</p> + +<p class="cop"> +<em>All rights reserved, including the right of +reproduction in whole or in part in any form.</em> +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 +</p> + +<p class="cop"> +Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 56-9038 +</p> + + </div> +</div> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="intro" id="chapter-0-1"> +<a id="page-iii" class="pagenum" title="iii"></a> +FOREWORD +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Studies in +the Psychology of Sex</em> 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#F-1">1</a>] +</p> + +<p> +Within her subsequent twenty-one years in women’s dormitories +as student or faculty member she had reason many times to be glad of +<a id="page-iv" class="pagenum" title="iv"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p class="sign"> +J. H. F. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="intro" id="chapter-0-2"> +<a id="page-v" class="pagenum" title="v"></a> +PREFACE +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>male</em> and <em>female</em>. As I have +shown in <em>All the Sexes</em>, there are any number of possible gradations +of human behavior—from that of a theoretical masculine to that of a +theoretical feminine being. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The present work, <span class="smallcaps">Sex Variant Women in Literature</span>, 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 +<a id="page-vi" class="pagenum" title="vi"></a> +as well as scientific writing is a mirror of human sexual +behavior which should be given serious attention. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In <span class="smallcaps">Sex Variant Women in Literature</span> 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. +</p> + +<p class="sign"> +<span class="smallcaps">George W. Henry</span>, M.D. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="intro" id="chapter-0-3"> +<a id="page-vii" class="pagenum" title="vii"></a> +ACKNOWLEDGMENTS +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="toc" id="chapter-0-4"> +<a id="page-ix" class="pagenum" title="ix"></a> +CONTENTS +</h2> + +</div> + +<div class="table"> +<table class="toc"> +<tbody> + <tr class="m"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2">Foreword</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-iii">iii</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="m"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2">Preface</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-v">v</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="m"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2">Acknowledgments</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-vii">vii</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="m"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2">Introduction</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-11">11</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="h"> + <td class="col1">I.</td> + <td class="col2">The Ancient Record</td> + <td class="col_page"> </td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Sappho and Ruth</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-17">17</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Mythology in Classical Authors</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-24">24</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Later Classical Literature</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-27">27</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="h"> + <td class="col1">II.</td> + <td class="col2">From the Dark Ages to the Age of Reason</td> + <td class="col_page"> </td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Introduction</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-30">30</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Medieval and Renaissance Fiction</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-33">33</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">The Borderline of Reality</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-39">39</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Neo-Classical Aridity</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-43">43</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="h"> + <td class="col1">III.</td> + <td class="col2">From the Romantics to the Moderns</td> + <td class="col_page"> </td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Introduction</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-51">51</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Precursors of Modern Fiction</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-54">54</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">The Novel Before 1870</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-60">60</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Evidence from Poets</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-72">72</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="h"> + <td class="col1">IV.</td> + <td class="col2">Later Nineteenth Century</td> + <td class="col_page"> </td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Fertility in France</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-81">81</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Shadow of Feminism</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-91">91</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Fin de Siècle</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-99">99</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Summary</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-114">114</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="h"> + <td class="col1"><a id="page-x" class="pagenum" title="x"></a>V.</td> + <td class="col2">Conjectural Retrospect</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-116">116</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Louise Labé</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-117">117</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Charlotte Charke</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-120">120</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">“The Ladies of Llangollen”</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-122">122</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Karoline von Günderode</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-124">124</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">George Sand</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-127">127</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Emily Brontë</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-129">129</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">George Eliot</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-135">135</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Margaret Fuller</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-136">136</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Adah Isaacs Menken</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-138">138</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">“Michael Field”</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-141">141</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Emily Dickinson</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-145">145</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="h"> + <td class="col1">VI.</td> + <td class="col2">Twentieth Century</td> + <td class="col_page"> </td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Introduction</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-149">149</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Poetry—French</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-154">154</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">—German</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-174">174</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="i"> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">—English</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-177">177</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="h"> + <td class="col1">VII.</td> + <td class="col2">Fiction in France</td> + <td class="col_page"> </td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Before 1914</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-193">193</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Post-War Trends</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-204">204</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="h"> + <td class="col1">VIII.</td> + <td class="col2">Fiction in Germany</td> + <td class="col_page"> </td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Before 1914</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-218">218</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Post-War Gleanings</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-229">229</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="h"> + <td class="col1">IX.</td> + <td class="col2">Fiction in English</td> + <td class="col_page"> </td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Introduction</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-240">240</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">The Age of Innocence</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-243">243</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Sophistication and Dispute</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-255">255</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Post-War Crescendo</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-269">269</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">First Peak: 1928</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-279">279</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="h"> + <td class="col1">X.</td> + <td class="col2">Fiction in English (continued)</td> + <td class="col_page"> </td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Sequel to Censorship</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-288">288</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">The Worm’s Turning</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-307">307</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Above Reproach</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-314">314</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Another War’s Shadow</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-324">324</a></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="col1"> </td> + <td class="col2">Second Crescendo</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-328">328</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="m"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2">Conclusion</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-342">342</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="m"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2">Notes</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-355">355</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="m"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2">Bibliographies</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-362">362</a></td> + </tr> + <tr class="m"> + <td class="col1" colspan="2">Index</td> + <td class="col_page"><a href="#page-396">396</a></td> + </tr> +</tbody> +</table> +</div> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="intro" id="chapter-0-5"> +<a id="page-11" class="pagenum" title="11"></a> +INTRODUCTION +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Since new viewpoints and methods of study are constantly altering +our sex vocabulary, some preliminary definitions seem advisable. +First, what is meant by <em>sex variant</em>? The term was selected because +it is not as yet rigidly defined nor charged with controversial +overtones. Intrinsically, <em>variant</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +Possible deviations from this standard are many, but the present +study will stay within the limits set by a work of 1941 entitled +<em>Sex Variants</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#I-1">1</a>] which was devoted to persons having emotional experience +with others of their own sex. Under this head the author included +<a id="page-12" class="pagenum" title="12"></a> +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,[<a class="footnote" href="#I-2">2</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-13" class="pagenum" title="13"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +With the meaning of <em>variance</em> clarified, the more familiar terms +<em>homosexual</em> and <em>lesbian</em> need attention. In popular usage the latter +implies overt sexual expression and so it will be used only where +such implication is intended. <em>Homosexual</em> is more ambiguous. Still in +good scientific standing, it ordinarily has not Dr. Henry’s restricted +meaning, but is more nearly synonymous with his <em>variant</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +To conclude the business of definition, the word <em>literature</em> 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 <em>imaginative writing</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-14" class="pagenum" title="14"></a> +persistent rumor or circumstantial evidence strongly suggests variance. +Most of these will be treated in a separate section specifically labeled +conjectural. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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: +<em>Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen</em> (etc.), sponsored by the +<a id="corr-2"></a>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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-15" class="pagenum" title="15"></a> +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 <em>Psychopathia Sexualis</em> (1886) +and coming down to Donald Corey’s <em>The Homosexual in America</em> +(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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>The Bostonians</em> 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 <em>Méphistophéla</em>, +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Mademoiselle de Maupin</em>, a minimum of résumé +<a id="page-16" class="pagenum" title="16"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>single</em> quotation marks. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-6"> +<a id="page-17" class="pagenum" title="17"></a> +<span class="line1">CHAPTER I.</span><br> +<span class="line2">THE ANCIENT RECORD</span> +</h2> + +</div> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-6-1"> +Sappho and Ruth +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +It is natural to begin a study of sex variant women with Sappho, +Greek lyric poet of the early sixth century <span class="smallcaps">B.C.</span>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<em>Lyra Graeca</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#1-1">1</a>] 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)[<a class="footnote" href="#1-2">2</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-18" class="pagenum" title="18"></a> +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 <em>Sappho +of Lesbos, Her Life and Times</em> (1932),[<a class="footnote" href="#1-3">3</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Heroides</em> or Epistles +of Heroines (15: “Sappho to Phaon”),[<a class="footnote" href="#1-4">4</a>] 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 +<a id="page-19" class="pagenum" title="19"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 ...[<a class="footnote" href="#1-5">5</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-20" class="pagenum" title="20"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <a id="corr-3"></a>of +her wedding, she says: “That night was sweet enough to me, neither +have you, dear maid, anything to fear ...”[<a class="footnote" href="#1-6">6</a>] 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#1-7">7</a>] 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 ...”[<a class="footnote" href="#1-8">8</a>] (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.”)[<a class="footnote" href="#1-9">9</a>] 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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-10">10</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-21" class="pagenum" title="21"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-11">11</a>] Altogether, +no sounder random sampling could well be devised. +</p> + +<p> +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 <span class="smallcaps">A.D.</span> by Gregory Nazianzen +as the result of an earlier church father having pronounced her a +<em>gynaion pornikon erotomanes</em>—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.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-12">12</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>hetaerae</em>, which, since it was the common term for <em>courtesan</em>, +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;[<a class="footnote" href="#1-13">13</a>] then there is the epithet <em>mascula Sappho</em> used by Horace,[<a class="footnote" href="#1-14">14</a>] +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 <em>not</em>, thus completely reversing +<a id="page-22" class="pagenum" title="22"></a> +the sense of the phrase; thus neither reading carries any real weight.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-15">15</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-16">16</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-17">17</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Certainly as an “anonymous but exact description of love” there +are few passages in literature to rival Ruth’s appeal to Naomi beginning +<a id="page-23" class="pagenum" title="23"></a> +“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. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#1-18">18</a>] 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#1-19">19</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Growth of Literature</em> point out that “it gives the impression +of being written primarily for feminine circles,”[<a class="footnote" href="#1-20">20</a>] and by comparison +with many treatments of the variant theme it might well also have +been written <em>by</em> a woman. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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,[<a class="footnote" href="#1-21">21</a>] most traces have vanished. A few fragments, +<a id="page-24" class="pagenum" title="24"></a> +however, and a few allusions to works never recovered, indicate that +female variance existed. +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-22">22</a>] Havelock Ellis (without citing +his source) mentions Miletus along with Lesbos as favorable to +female homosexuality.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-23">23</a>] The <em>Greek Anthology</em> 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,”[<a class="footnote" href="#1-24">24</a>] but this +may have been merely a device to attract male attention since the +costume described here was that of the <em>ephebi</em>—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.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-25">25</a>] 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-26">26</a>] +</p> + +<p> +Weigall suggests that two of Sappho’s protégées, like her, celebrated +love for women in their verses.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-27">27</a>] 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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-6-2"> +Mythology in Classical Authors +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 +<a id="page-25" class="pagenum" title="25"></a> +different authors’ treatment as is found between Malory’s and +Tennyson’s versions of the Arthurian legends. From any great compilation +such as the <em>Mythology of All Nations</em> or Fraser’s <em>Golden +Bough</em> 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[<a class="footnote" href="#1-28">28</a>] (cf. a +random news note, April 1951, of a precisely similar legend from an +island off the coast of Japan).[<a class="footnote" href="#1-29">29</a>] 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),[<a class="footnote" href="#1-30">30</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +A comparison of the later classical writers supports this view. In +Book XI of Vergil’s <em>Aeneid</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +Similarly the conscientious chronicler Apollodorus reports between +Artemis and her nymph, Callisto, a great fondness terminated by the +girl’s lapse from virginity;[<a class="footnote" href="#1-31">31</a>] and Iphigenia, whom Artemis rescued +from the altar upon which her father was about to sacrifice her, was +equally cherished.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-32">32</a>] 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 +<a id="page-26" class="pagenum" title="26"></a> +later epithet, Pallas-Athene.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-33">33</a>] Apollodorus later illustrates Athene’s +antipathy to the male by the Hephaestus story.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-34">34</a>] But with all these +suggestive incidents he never mentions active variance in the goddess. +</p> + +<p> +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,[<a class="footnote" href="#1-35">35</a>] no woman enters her story. The same is true of Atalanta,[<a class="footnote" href="#1-36">36</a>] +“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. +</p> + +<p> +Concerning Callisto, however, of whom Apollodorus’s account is +so bare, Ovid is much more specific.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-37">37</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +Then there is Ovid’s idyl of Iphis and Ianthe.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-38">38</a>] 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 +<a id="page-27" class="pagenum" title="27"></a> +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[<a class="footnote" href="#1-39">39</a>] 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.) +</p> + +<p> +In yet another of the <em>Metamorphoses</em> Ovid describes the birth +of Hermaphroditus,[<a class="footnote" href="#1-40">40</a>] 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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-6-3"> +Later Classical Literature +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +All the remaining variant tales in Latin literature deal with courtesans. +Probably the best known is Juvenal’s scathing sixth <em>Satire</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#1-41">41</a>] +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. +</p> + +<p> +With a much lighter touch Martial in the course of his <em>Epigrams</em> +describes unflatteringly two women who on his evidence would +modernly be classed as hermaphrodites. One, Bassa,[<a class="footnote" href="#1-42">42</a>] 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-43">43</a>] Although +Dioscorides has denied in his epitaph in the <em>Greek Anthology</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#1-44">44</a>] that +she wrote the “obscene book” attributed to her, +Martial’s repeated references throughout the <em>Epigrams</em> 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 <em>olisbos</em> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-28" class="pagenum" title="28"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Lucian, in his <em>Dialogues of Hetaerae</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#1-45">45</a>] 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 <a id="corr-4"></a>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. +</p> + +<p> +In a later <em>Dialogue</em>, 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 <em>Amores</em>.[<a class="footnote" href="#1-46">46</a>] 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.” +</p> + +<p> +As to Alciphron, in his <em>Letters from Town and Country</em> (2:12)[<a class="footnote" href="#1-47">47</a>] +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 <em>faute de mieux</em> is not made exactly clear. The +author neither expresses nor implies any judgment on the activity +portrayed. +</p> + +<p> +That gleanings should be so comparatively meager from a full +millennium is scarcely surprising in the light of later history. After +<a id="page-29" class="pagenum" title="29"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-7"> +<a id="page-30" class="pagenum" title="30"></a> +<span class="line1">CHAPTER II.</span><br> +<span class="line2">FROM THE DARK AGES TO THE AGE OF REASON</span> +</h2> + +</div> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-7-1"> +Introduction +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-31" class="pagenum" title="31"></a> +she was a complete human being possessed of a soul, or merely a +breeder for the superior race of men. +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#2-1">1</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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,[<a class="footnote" href="#2-2">2</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-32" class="pagenum" title="32"></a> +religious aspect this worship centered about the Virgin Mary and +found expression in the naïvely human legends which grew up about +her.[<a class="footnote" href="#2-3">3</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>chansons de geste</em> 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#2-4">4</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-33" class="pagenum" title="33"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#2-5">5</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#2-6">6</a>] Historic evidence of these facts can +be seen in the rapid spread of chivalric romance between the twelfth +and fourteenth centuries. +</p> + +<p> +The earliest romances written down in the twelfth century were +comparatively simple and direct, showing close relation to the epics +and <em>chansons de geste</em> 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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-7-2"> +Medieval and Renaissance Fiction +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +The first romance mentioned by students of this genre as containing +anything relevant to sex variance is <em>Huon of Bordeaux</em>, 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 +<a id="page-34" class="pagenum" title="34"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +It is possible that this sequel to <em>Huon</em> 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 <em>La Fleur Lascive Orientale</em>).[<a class="footnote" href="#2-7">7</a>] 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 +<a id="page-35" class="pagenum" title="35"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +An Italian renaissance example of female sex variance appears +in Ariosto’s <em>Orlando Furioso</em> (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.[<a class="footnote" href="#2-8">8</a>] 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.” +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">The ladies had one common bed that night,</p> + <p class="verse">Their bed the same but different their repose.</p> + <p class="verse">One sleeps, one moans and weeps in piteous plight</p> + <p class="verse">Because her wild desire more fiercely glows.</p> + <p class="verse">And on her wearied lids should slumber light,</p> + <p class="verse">All is deceitful that brief dreaming shows:</p> + <p class="verse2">To her it seems as if relenting heaven</p> + <p class="verse2">A better sex to Bradamante has given.[<a class="footnote" href="#2-9">9</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +<a id="page-36" class="pagenum" title="36"></a> +In the morning Bradamante quickly departs, to relieve a misery she +cannot assuage. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Comparison of this treatment with that in <em>Huon of Bordeaux</em> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral <em>Arcadia</em>, 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 +<a id="page-37" class="pagenum" title="37"></a> +regularly distinguish English from continental literature. They are +given vividly in Sidney’s own words: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#2-10">10</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>uncouth</em> love, which <em>nature</em> hateth most” +[author’s italics.] Still, he was careful that Zelmane’s secret should become +<a id="page-38" class="pagenum" title="38"></a> +known to the princess before the pair had opportunity for so +much as a kiss. +</p> + +<p> +The <em>Arcadia</em> is cited in Iwan Bloch’s <em>Sex Life in England</em> 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#2-11">11</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +A French pastoral making use of the same theme is d’Urfé’s +<em>Astrée</em>, published serially between 1607 and 1620. This vast work, +running to some 5500 pages, has not been examined, but Maurice +Magendie’s <em>L’Astrée d’Honoré D’Urfé</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +For a time the Druid manages to prevent too great an intimacy +between his “daughter” and Astrée, but when the two are guests at +<a id="page-39" class="pagenum" title="39"></a> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#2-12">12</a>] 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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-7-3"> +The Borderline of Reality +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-40" class="pagenum" title="40"></a> +Let us look, for example, at the two most significant masquerading +women in Shakespeare’s plays. Viola in <em>Twelfth Night</em> 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 <em>As You Like It</em> 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: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">... we still have slept together,</p> + <p class="verse">Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, sat together,</p> + <p class="verse">And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans,</p> + <p class="verse">Still we went coupled and inseparable.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Roaring Girl</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +In their epilogue the authors say that some will: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> +<a id="page-41" class="pagenum" title="41"></a> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Wonder that a creature of her being</p> + <p class="verse">Should be the subject of a poet, seeing</p> + <p class="verse">In the world’s eye none weighs so light: others look</p> + <p class="verse">For all those base tricks published in a book</p> + <p class="verse">Foul as the brains they flowed from, of cutpurses,</p> + <p class="verse">Of nips and foists, nasty obscene discourses</p> + <p class="verse">As full of lies as empty of worth and wit,</p> + <p class="verse">For any honest ear and eye unfit.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Their reference is undoubtedly to <em>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</em>, 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 <em>Life and Death of Mrs. +Mary Frith</em> surviving from 1662, the year after her death, is somewhat +less harsh. An editorial note to the 1885 edition of the play,[<a class="footnote" href="#2-13">13</a>] +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 +<em>Psychology of Sex</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#2-14">14</a>] 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.” +</p> + +<p> +The second play is <em>La Monja Alférez</em> (1626) by Juan Pérez de +Montalban, a literary disciple of Lope de Vega, and is included in +a volume by Fitz-Maurice Kelly entitled <em>The Nun Ensign</em>. 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 <em>The +Roaring Girl</em>, 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 +<a id="page-42" class="pagenum" title="42"></a> +girdle, but the gesture is symbolic only. “Guzlan” evades the issue +by pleading a vow of <em>castidad</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +Erauso’s full history as given in Kelly’s volume is compiled from +an autobiography included <em>in toto</em>, certain “Relaciones” fairly well established +as originating with Erauso herself, and references in the <em>De’ +Viaggi ...</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +It was at this time that <em>La Monja Alférez</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-43" class="pagenum" title="43"></a> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#2-15">15</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#2-16">16</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-7-4"> +Neo-Classical Aridity +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 +<a id="page-44" class="pagenum" title="44"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Lives of Gallant Ladies</em> (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 <em>donna +con donna.</em>”[<a class="footnote" href="#2-17">17</a>] 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.” +</p> + +<p> +Anthony Hamilton in his <em>Memoirs of the Comte de Grammont</em> +(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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#2-18">18</a>] +</p> + +<p> +These affairs occurred in high society, but Montaigne—or perhaps +his secretary, who is said to have written the <em>Voyage in Italy</em> (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 +<a id="page-45" class="pagenum" title="45"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#2-19">19</a>] Several other examples of lesbian +activity, some of them involving nuns, are to be found <em>passim</em> in +Casanova’s memoirs. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-46" class="pagenum" title="46"></a> +Aphra Behn, famed as they are for a free approach, go all the way +with their brother writers. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>galant</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>galant</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-47" class="pagenum" title="47"></a> +than two participants. In short, even these lesbian anecdotes are +presented from the male viewpoint. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 id="page-48" class="pagenum" title="48"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>galant</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>L’Espion Anglais</em> (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[<a class="footnote" href="#2-20">20</a>] recording the career of a young girl from +the provinces who runs away to Paris, finds a place in the most elite +<em>maison</em> 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 +<a id="page-49" class="pagenum" title="49"></a> +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 <em>jouissance</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +As a kind of last gasp of the <em>galant</em> 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 <em>Julie, ou J’ai Sauvé ma +Rose</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +Erotic writing did not, of course, cease with the end of the +eighteenth century. But what may be called the <em>galant</em> 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 +<a id="page-50" class="pagenum" title="50"></a> +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. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-8"> +<a id="page-51" class="pagenum" title="51"></a> +<span class="line1">CHAPTER III.</span><br> +<span class="line2">FROM THE ROMANTICS TO THE MODERNS</span> +</h2> + +</div> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-8-1"> +Introduction +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-52" class="pagenum" title="52"></a> +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 <em>galant</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-1">1</a>] A single +descriptive article on homosexuality appeared as early as 1791, when +a German periodical, <em>Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde</em>, published +the biographies of two men who “manifested an enthusiastic love for +persons of their own sex,” and one of whom attributed his predilection +<a id="page-53" class="pagenum" title="53"></a> +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 +<em>Vierteljahrsschrift</em> a number of comments on contemporaneous pederasty,[<a class="footnote" href="#3-2">2</a>] +and a few years later he brought out a volume of male case +histories under the title <em>Klinische Novellen</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Psychopathia Sexualis</em>, 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-3">3</a>] 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 <em>El Amor +Lesbio</em>, 1896, has not been available for examination.) +</p> + +<p> +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,”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-4">4</a>] and later in the century +Zola pointed out that his own practice, as well as his theories set +forth in <em>Le Roman Experimental</em>, were “based upon the application +of experimental science to physiology as developed in the writings +of Dr. Claude Bernard.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-5">5</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +Even in the many cases where direct connection cannot be demonstrated +<a id="page-54" class="pagenum" title="54"></a> +between scientific thought and the imaginative writing +under consideration, there is a perceptible correlation from decade +to decade between quantitative developments in both fields. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-8-2"> +Precursors of Modern Fiction +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +The transition from <em>galant</em> 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 <em>La Religieuse</em>. 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, <em>L’Encyclopédie</em>, it is tempting to imagine +that the Jesuits’ share in that act of censorship may have been the +immediate spur to its inception. Actually <em>La Religieuse</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-6">6</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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. +<a id="page-55" class="pagenum" title="55"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>galant</em> 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-7">7</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +Equally a landmark, though of a very different sort, is Mary +Wollstonecraft’s <em>Mary, a Fiction</em>, 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 <em>Vindication of the Rights of Women</em> (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 <em>Modern +<a id="page-56" class="pagenum" title="56"></a> +Woman, the Lost Sex</em>.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-8">8</a>] Lundberg and Farnham devote much space +to establishing the <em>Vindication</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +The authors of <em>Modern Woman</em> 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 <em>Memoirs</em> +says that it was “so fervent as ... to have constituted the ruling +passion in her mind.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-9">9</a>] +</p> + +<p> +This friendship is the theme of <em>Mary</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-57" class="pagenum" title="57"></a> +“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. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-10">10</a>] +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-11">11</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The <em>Fiction</em> 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 +<a id="page-58" class="pagenum" title="58"></a> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-12">12</a>] In the <em>Fiction</em> +“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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-13">13</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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].”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-14">14</a>] 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-15">15</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-16">16</a>] 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 <em>Memoirs</em>, Mary refers +to the pleasure she derived from the girl’s “innocent caresses,” an +<a id="page-59" class="pagenum" title="59"></a> +odd adjective had Mary not been aware of possible caresses between +women that were otherwise. +</p> + +<p> +The answer seems to lie in two passages, one from the <em>Rights +of Women</em> 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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-17">17</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-18">18</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-60" class="pagenum" title="60"></a> +subjective aspects of Love outweighing the physical to a point where +the sex of the partner is less important than his personality. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-8-3"> +The Novel Before 1870 +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 <em>Clémentine, Orpheline et Androgyne</em> +(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. <em>Clémentine</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-61" class="pagenum" title="61"></a> +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.” +</p> + +<p> +The second and slightly more artistic French narrative is a +two-volume novel by Henri de Latouche entitled <em>Fragoletta</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +He then learns from a frantic letter from his sister that Adriani +<a id="page-62" class="pagenum" title="62"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Far superior from a literary viewpoint to either of these novels +was Balzac’s first venture in the intersexual field, <em>Seraphitus-Seraphita</em> +(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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-19">19</a>] +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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-63" class="pagenum" title="63"></a> +In the following year Balzac published his much better-known +novel, <em>The Girl with the Golden Eyes</em>, 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 <em>lapsus linguae</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In <em>Cousin Bette</em> (1846), Balzac, with a realism in sharp contrast +to both his earlier tales and in keeping with literary trends of the +<a id="page-64" class="pagenum" title="64"></a> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-20">20</a>] +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-21">21</a>] 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 <em>The Girl with the +Golden Eyes</em>. But later in the book he speaks of such attachments +as “the strongest emotion known, that of a woman for a woman.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-22">22</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In the same year that <em>The Girl with the Golden Eyes</em> appeared, +Gautier published <em>Mlle de Maupin</em>. 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,[<a class="footnote" href="#3-23">23</a>] there is no question of influence in either direction. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-65" class="pagenum" title="65"></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. +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-24">24</a>] It is this unemotional detachment which Gautier emphasizes +as peculiarly masculine. +</p> + +<p> +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,[<a class="footnote" href="#3-25">25</a>] 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 +<a id="page-66" class="pagenum" title="66"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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.) +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +In 1851 Lamartine included in <em>Nouvelles Confidences</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#3-26">26</a>] an innocent +infatuation between two adolescent girls which is reminiscent +of Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Balzac’s <em>Seraphita</em>. (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”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-27">27</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-67" class="pagenum" title="67"></a> +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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#3-28">28</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#3-29">29</a>] 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 <em>Jocelyn</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +Toward the end of this decade (1858) a novel appeared, <em>La Sapho</em>, +cited by Lewandowski in <em>Das Sexualproblem ...</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#3-30">30</a>] as definitely +lesbian, and of added interest in that it was written by a woman, +<a id="page-68" class="pagenum" title="68"></a> +Céleste Venard comtesse de Chabrillan; but unhappily this has not +been available for examination. +</p> + +<p> +At the beginning of the following decade (1862) Flaubert published +<em>Salammbo</em>, of which Krafft-Ebing says that the author made +his heroine homosexual.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-31">31</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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). +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +She says to the priest: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +Sometimes gusts of heat seem to rise from the depths of +my being.... Voices call me ... fire rises in my breast; +<a id="page-69" class="pagenum" title="69"></a> +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 <em>leave my body</em> +[author’s italics] and be but a breath, a ray, then float up +to thee, O Mother [Tanit].[<a class="footnote" href="#3-32">32</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Her nurse, wise in the signs of physical ripening, does not take +this for religious ecstasy. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +“‘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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-33">33</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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....”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-34">34</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-35">35</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +<a id="page-70" class="pagenum" title="70"></a> +But on being questioned subsequently by her father as to what +occurred, she is evasive. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-36">36</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-37">37</a>] +</p> + +<p> +This is a master’s account of the effect of physical release on an unawakened +girl. +</p> + +<p> +Considerably later Salammbo is married, according to her father’s +plan, to the effete prince, Narr’ Havas. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-38">38</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +These two passages indicate quite the opposite of homosexual emotion. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-71" class="pagenum" title="71"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +A minor novel which Krafft-Ebing mentions as also “mainly +lesbian in theme”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-39">39</a>] may shed some light on what he intended by +the term. It is Ernest Feydeau’s <em>La Comtesse de Chalis</em> (1867), in +which a dashing Parisian beauty neglects her children and tubercular +husband for a spectacular career in <em>le haut monde</em>. An idealistic +and infatuated professor of the new <em>Ecole Normale</em>, 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 <em>à trois</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-72" class="pagenum" title="72"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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” <em>La Comtesse de Chalis</em> certainly is not. +</p> + +<p> +The fact that in a contemporary novel considered later, Feydeau’s +<em>La Comtesse</em> was bracketed with Gautier’s <em>Mlle Maupin</em> and Balzac’s +<em>Girl with the Golden Eyes</em> 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 <em>le haut monde</em> 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 <em>La +Comtesse de Chalis</em> 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-40">40</a>] +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-8-4"> +Evidence from Poets +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +Although fiction made up so preponderant a part of variant writing +in the nineteenth century, poetry also made a sizable contribution. +<a id="page-73" class="pagenum" title="73"></a> +In 1816, Coleridge, who with Wordsworth is generally thought of as +initiating the Romantic Period in England, published two parts +of a narrative poem, <em>Christabel</em>, which was never finished. All college +students of literature know that eerie fragment of medieval romance +with its occult overtones. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-41">41</a>] 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. +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">With open eyes (ah woe is me!)</p> + <p class="verse">Asleep and dreaming fearfully,</p> + <p class="verse">Fearfully dreaming, yet, I wis,</p> + <p class="verse">Dreaming that alone, which is—</p> + <p class="verse">O sorrow and shame! Can this be she</p> + <p class="verse">The lady [Christabel] who knelt at the old oak tree?</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.” +</p> + +<p> +In the morning Christabel wakes to find her guest already +clothed, but “fairer yet and yet more fair!” for now her shriveled +<a id="page-74" class="pagenum" title="74"></a> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-42">42</a>] +</p> + +<p> +Roy Basler, in his <em>Sex, Symbolism and Psychology in Literature</em>, +devotes a long chapter[<a class="footnote" href="#3-41">41</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Christabel</em> +and had the entire plot worked out at that time, he published +none of it for fifteen years. When it finally appeared, the <em>Edinburgh +Review</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +The next poem that appeared in England, however—Christina +<a id="page-75" class="pagenum" title="75"></a> +Rossetti’s <em>Goblin Market</em>, written in 1859—is so akin to <em>Christabel</em> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Arcadia</em>. 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 +<a id="page-76" class="pagenum" title="76"></a> +(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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Goblin +Market</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +France was as always more tolerant of sexual latitude in literature +than England, but even there the open-mindedness which made <em>Mlle +de Maupin</em> 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 <em>Fleurs du Mal</em> during an +interim of clerical dominance, and in consequence the volume was +condemned by the <em>Tribunal Correctionnel</em> in August 1857. As early +as 1846 the publisher Levy had announced on advertising pages of +other works a forthcoming title by Baudelaire, <em>Les Lesbiennes</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#3-43">43</a>] +which never appeared as such, probably because the title was too +daring. Only three poems in the <em>Fleurs</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +This poem, “Femmes Damnées, I,” some twenty-six quatrains in +<a id="page-77" class="pagenum" title="77"></a> +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.)”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-44">44</a>] (Note: “Lesbos” had appeared +in 1850 in an anthology, <em>Les Poètes de l’Amour</em>, published by +Lemerre. It was omitted from the 1858 edition of that volume, but +reappeared in the edition of 1865.)[<a class="footnote" href="#3-45">45</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +Within a decade the wave of conservatism had so far receded +that Paul Verlaine’s <em>Les Amies, Scènes d’Amour Sapphique</em> (1867), +though published in Brussels for safety, apparently encountered in +France no harsher judgment than a comment in the <em>Bulletin +Trimestriel</em> that they were by a poet of the school of M. Leconte +de Lisle, and were “fort singuliers.”[<a class="footnote" href="#3-46">46</a>] The slim sheaf of sixteen pages +contained six poems, subsequently included in his volume <em>Parallèlement</em>, +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 +<a id="page-78" class="pagenum" title="78"></a> +by “le glorieux stigmate,” thus foreshadowing the social isolation +lamented sixty years later in the <em>Well of Loneliness</em>, 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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#3-47">47</a>] It is more than likely +that it was from this poem that Rilke derived his interpretation of +Sappho’s “Lament” heretofore mentioned. +</p> + +<p> +During the preceding year (1866) there had appeared in England +Swinburne’s <em>Poems and Ballads: First Series</em>, 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 <em>Arabian Nights</em> 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 <em>Poems and Ballads</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +“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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-79" class="pagenum" title="79"></a> +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: <em>Lesbia Brandon</em>. Georges +Lafourcade, in his scholarly two-volume study of Swinburne, suggests +that this character was drawn from Jane Faulkner,[<a class="footnote" href="#3-48">48</a>] 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-49">49</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<a id="page-80" class="pagenum" title="80"></a> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-50">50</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>Poems and Ballads</em>, he meant to live up to it in his +current effort, which would give his countrymen real cause for Philistine +horror.[<a class="footnote" href="#3-51">51</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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 +<em>Songs Before Sunrise</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-9"> +<a id="page-81" class="pagenum" title="81"></a> +<span class="line1">CHAPTER IV.</span><br> +<span class="line2">THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY</span> +</h2> + +</div> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-9-1"> +Fertility in France +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 <em>Mlle Giraud, +Ma Femme</em>, and it began in 1870 as a serial in the newspaper +<em>Le Figaro</em>. 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 (“<em>sogenannte folie circulaire</em>”), +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. +</p> + +<p> +The serial was stopped “in the interests of morality,” but it +soon appeared in book form and ran to several editions (printings) +before 1880.[<a class="footnote" href="#4-1">1</a>] 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 +<a id="page-82" class="pagenum" title="82"></a> +baldly in the middle of the book) and profit by the publicity +which censorship always provides. +</p> + +<p> +<em>Mlle Giraud</em> 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 <em>Girl with the Golden Eyes</em>. Among +other things, he finds there that volume, along with Diderot’s +<em>La Religieuse</em>, Gautier’s <em>Maupin</em>, and “Feydeau’s latest, <em>La Comtesse +de Chalis</em>.” +</p> + +<p> +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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#4-2">2</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Neither girl shows any sign of masculinity except that Paule’s +<a id="page-83" class="pagenum" title="83"></a> +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 <em>volupté</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +During the decade in which <em>Mlle Giraud</em> was the outstanding +variant title, Barbey d’Aurevilly, nearing the end of a long career, +published <em>Les Diaboliques</em>, 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 <em>Clémentine</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-84" class="pagenum" title="84"></a> +incidental sketches of variant women. No pretense can be made +here to having read or even skimmed his entire output, but <em>La Curée</em> +(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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>perversion</em> 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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +With 1880 the steady stream of variant fiction began to flow, +starting with Zola’s <em>Nana</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +The physical types described at Laure’s cafe are noteworthy. The +majority are women in their forties or over, obese and repulsive, +<a id="page-85" class="pagenum" title="85"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In <em>Pot-bouille</em> (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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#4-3">3</a>] 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#4-4">4</a>] +</p> + +<p> +In 1881 “Paul’s Mistress” was published in de Maupassant’s +volume entitled <em>La Maison Tellier</em> 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 +<a id="page-86" class="pagenum" title="86"></a> +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.” +</p> + +<p> +Here, as in <em>Nana</em>, 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.)[<a class="footnote" href="#4-5">5</a>] +</p> + +<p> +Another short story in which lesbian action plays some part is +Dubut de Laforest’s “Mlle Tantale” (1884),[<a class="footnote" href="#4-6">6</a>] one of a group of +psychological novelettes comparable to Casper’s <em>Klinische Novellen</em> +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 id="page-87" class="pagenum" title="87"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Paul Bourget’s <em>Crime d’Amour</em> (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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#4-7">7</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +In contrast to the comparative realism of the last five authors +stand such imaginative flights as those which follow. The first +was the <em>Monsieur Vénus</em> of Rachilde (Marguérite Eymery Vallette), +published in Brussels in 1884. According to André David,[<a class="footnote" href="#4-8">8</a>] 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 +<a id="page-88" class="pagenum" title="88"></a> +by Maurice Barrès, and only this second version has been accessible +for study. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 ‘<em>Woman</em>.’”[<a class="footnote" href="#4-9">9</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-89" class="pagenum" title="89"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>la maladie du siècle</em> ... it smells of death.[<a class="footnote" href="#4-10">10</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Additional, though less marked, evidence of her bias appears in +Rachilde’s second novel, <em>Madame Adonis</em>, 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 <em>Monsieur Vénus</em>. +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 <em>galante</em> and domineering woman captivates the man. +<a id="page-90" class="pagenum" title="90"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Seasoned readers of biography will not be surprised to learn that +beyond her marriage in 1899 to Alfred Vallette, then editor of +the <em>Mercure de France</em>, 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;[<a class="footnote" href="#4-11">11</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Mercure de France</em> as <em>Les Factices</em> and was +published in book form as <em>Les Hors Natures</em><a id="corr-23"></a>) dealt with men.<a id="corr-24"></a> 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 <em>Mercure</em> 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#4-12">12</a>] +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-9-2"> +<a id="page-91" class="pagenum" title="91"></a> +The Shadow of Feminism +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 <em>Fragoletta</em> and <em>Mademoiselle +de Maupin</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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: <em>Elsie +Venner</em> (1859), <em>The Guardian Angel</em> (1867), and <em>A Mortal Antipathy</em> +(1885). Of these a modern psychiatrist, Dr. Clarence Oberndorf, +has observed: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>The Guardian Angel</em>], something of a tomboy, are +unmistakable. The bisexual theme becomes even clearer in +<em>A Mortal Antipathy</em>, 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#4-13">13</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-92" class="pagenum" title="92"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Myrtle Hazard in <em>The Guardian Angel</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +As for Lurida Vincent in <em>A Mortal Antipathy</em>, 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, +<a id="page-93" class="pagenum" title="93"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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[<a class="footnote" href="#4-14">14</a>] (a secondary character in <em>The Guardian Angel</em> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The same question arises in reading Thomas Hardy’s earliest +novel, <em>Desperate Remedies</em> (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,”[<a class="footnote" href="#4-14a">14a</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +Although <em>Desperate Remedies</em> 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. +<a id="page-94" class="pagenum" title="94"></a> +The variant episode is thus brief and incidental, but it is significant +in having no known antecedent in British fiction save Wollstonecraft’s +<em>Mary</em> published nearly a century earlier.[<a class="footnote" href="#4-15">15</a>] +</p> + +<p> +The feminist theme so uncongenial to Holmes’s taste had been +presented with passionate sympathy two years earlier in Olive +Schreiner’s <em>Story of an African Farm</em>. This novel is reminiscent of +<em>Mary, a Fiction</em>, 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. <em>The Story of an African Farm</em> 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 <em>mère’s</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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,[<a class="footnote" href="#4-16">16</a>] 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 <em>African Farm</em> before writing his +preface to <em>Monsieur Vénus</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-95" class="pagenum" title="95"></a> +Henry James’s early novel, <em>The Bostonians</em>, published in 1885, +stands in sharp contrast. This story ran as a serial in <em>Century Magazine</em>. +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’ <em>Novels and +Tales</em> in 1923. Philip Rahv in the preface of the 1945 edition of <em>The +Bostonians</em> 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#4-17">17</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#4-18">18</a>] 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, +<a id="page-96" class="pagenum" title="96"></a> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#4-19">19</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#4-20">20</a>] 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#4-21">21</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +The last novel dealing with feminism, violent in its condemnation +of the Movement and also of female variance, is Strindberg’s <em>Confession +of a Fool</em>. 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 <em>apologia pro vita sua</em> 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 +<a id="page-97" class="pagenum" title="97"></a> +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 <em>Confession</em> provides +a valuable document on the psychology of the unhappy misogynist, +but scarcely an unbiased portrait of the wife. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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, +<a id="page-98" class="pagenum" title="98"></a> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#4-22">22</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#4-23">23</a>] The first authorized edition appeared +in Sweden in 1912 after the author’s death. +</p> + +<p> +Before leaving Strindberg it will be interesting to return parenthetically +for a moment to <em>Mlle Tantale</em>, 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 <em>Miss +Julie</em>.[<a class="footnote" href="#4-24">24</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-99" class="pagenum" title="99"></a> +husband during the siege of Paris wearing men’s clothes, “to which +she was long accustomed.”[<a class="footnote" href="#4-25">25</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +Since at the time of writing <em>Miss Julie</em> 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. <em>Miss Julie</em> +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 <em>Miss Julie</em> seems another reason for questioning whether it derived +from <em>Mlle Tantale</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-9-3"> +Fin de Siècle +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +Dubut de Laforest’s second approach to the subject appeared in +<em>La Femme d’Affaires</em> (1890), a vertical section of Paris life as sensational +as was <em>Mlle Tantale</em> 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 +<a id="page-100" class="pagenum" title="100"></a> +fifteen for corrupting its dormitory, and her subsequent excesses with +a governess contributed to the latter’s early death from tuberculosis +(cf. <em>Mlle Giraud</em>). 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. +</p> + +<p> +More concentrated upon variance is Catulle Mendès’ <em>Méphistophéla</em> +(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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Monsieur +Vénus</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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, +<a id="page-101" class="pagenum" title="101"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<em>en famille</em> 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, +<a id="page-102" class="pagenum" title="102"></a> +she learns that Emmaline has married, her family has dispersed, +and her whereabouts are unknown. Once again, heartbroken, she +returns to Paris. +</p> + +<p> +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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#4-26">26</a>] 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.’ +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +‘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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#4-27">27</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-103" class="pagenum" title="103"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +‘Why, if a scientist today diagnoses hysteria from the same +symptoms that for Bodin [Attorney to Henri III and author of +<em>Démonomanie des Sorciers</em>, 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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#4-28">28</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +At another point he distinguishes between relatively harmless and +“serious” homosexual activity. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +‘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 +<a id="page-104" class="pagenum" title="104"></a> +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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#4-29">29</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Josephin Peladan, author of <em>La Gynandre</em> (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 <em>La Décadence Latine</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. <em>The Girl with the Golden Eyes</em> is pronounced Balzac’s +weakest effort because it represents lesbian passion as a motivating +force for murder. Gautier gives them momentary pause, because <em>Mlle +de Maupin</em> 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 +<a id="page-105" class="pagenum" title="105"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-106" class="pagenum" title="106"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +He finds Simzerla’s group more mature and diversified than those +<a id="page-107" class="pagenum" title="107"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The inevitable sequel is La Fantôme’s holding him captive aboard +<a id="page-108" class="pagenum" title="108"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <a id="corr-28"></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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>La Vertu Suprême</em>.) +</p> + +<p> +Easy as it is to ridicule Peladan’s second-rate symbolism and +although his <em>reportage</em> 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 <em>L’Androgyne</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#4-30">30</a>] the complementary study, in his “épopée,” +<a id="page-109" class="pagenum" title="109"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Even after discounting Peladan’s and Mendès’ Catholic bias +and their romantic extravagance, their canvases give evidence to +widespread lesbianism in <em>fin de siècle</em> 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 <em>A +Florida Enchantment</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Part III, “The Wonderful Adventures of Mr. Lawrence Talbot,” +presents Lilly’s life after she has managed to assume male garb and +<a id="page-110" class="pagenum" title="110"></a> +name. The former fiancé suspects Lawrence of having murdered his +cousin Lilly for her fortune, and challenges him to <a id="corr-29"></a>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. +</p> + +<p> +To return once more to France, during 1896 the <em>Mercure de +France</em> carried serially Remy de Gourmont’s <em>Le Songe d’une Femme</em>, +a work of higher quality than any since James’s <em>The Bostonians</em>. 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 +<a id="page-111" class="pagenum" title="111"></a> +Gourmont’s title pronounces such an ideal typically feminine: a +woman’s dream. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#4-31">31</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-112" class="pagenum" title="112"></a> +least twice in the subsequent half-century. James’s aversion can be +explained on a number of counts. Where in <em>The Bostonians</em> 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 <em>The Turn of the Screw</em>. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Chansons de +Bilitis</em> (1894) and <em>Aphrodite</em> (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 <em>Songs of Bilitis</em>, 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 +<em>Chansons</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +In <em>Aphrodite</em> 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 +<a id="page-113" class="pagenum" title="113"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Louÿs’s <em>Adventures of King Pausole</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Mercure de France</em> and a little later the first bibliography +of belles-lettres in Hirschfeld’s <em>Jahrbuch</em> 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 <em>Mlle Wladimir</em>, +<em>Mon Mari</em> and <em>Satana</em> indicate close imitation of such earlier successes +as <em>Mlle Giraud</em> and <em>Méphistophéla</em>. The majority seem to have +<a id="page-114" class="pagenum" title="114"></a> +made at least a pretense of condemning lesbianism, but Rachilde +remarked acidly in reviewing one of them (Jane de La Vaudère’s +<em>Les Demi-Sexes</em>, 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#4-32">32</a>] The cheery insouciance of <em>King +Pausole</em> 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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-9-4"> +Summary +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 <em>The Girl with the Golden Eyes</em>, +Rossetti, Swinburne in <em>Lesbia Brandon</em>, Maupassant, Rachilde in +<em>Mme. Adonis</em>, and James in <em>The Turn of the Screw</em>—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 <em>King Pausole</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +Of the four novelists who used variance as a major theme but +avoided or denied lesbian implications, James in <em>The Bostonians</em> +considered it a menace to society, Lamartine showed it as contributing +to failure in heterosexual adjustment, Balzac in <em>Seraphitus-Seraphita</em> +<a id="page-115" class="pagenum" title="115"></a> +made it a mystic apprenticeship for marriage, and only Wollstonecraft +exalted it above experience with men. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-10"> +<a id="page-116" class="pagenum" title="116"></a> +<span class="line1">CHAPTER V.</span><br> +<span class="line2">CONJECTURAL RETROSPECT</span> +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-117" class="pagenum" title="117"></a> +need for caution when to be suspect incurred moral opprobrium and +complete social ostracism? +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section blank" id="subchap-0-10-1" title="Louise Labé"> +<span class="keep-nu-html-checker-happy"> </span> +</h3> + +<p class="isection"> +<b>Louise Labé.</b> 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-1-1">1</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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? +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-118" class="pagenum" title="118"></a> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-1-2">2</a>] +</p> + +<p> +Until the time of her marriage Labé was certainly skilled and +active in all the arts of an <em>homme de guerre</em>. 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.)[<a class="footnote" href="#5-1-3">3</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#5-1-4">4</a>] 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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#5-1-5">5</a>] +</p> + +<p> +Apparently no one has suggested that she may have been homosexual. +But in her “Elégie I,” we find the following: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Encor Phébus, ami des Lauriers vers ...</p> + <p class="verse">Chanter me fait ...</p> + <p class="verse">Il m’a donné la lyre, qui les vers</p> + <p class="verse">Souloit chanter de l’amour Lesbienne ...[<a class="footnote" href="#5-1-6">6</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>Sturm und Drang</em>, 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 +<a id="page-119" class="pagenum" title="119"></a> +“erreur de ma folle jeunesse—Si c’est erreur....”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-1-7">7</a>] This confession has +disturbed some critics profoundly because it seems to imply that she +must have been a courtesan. +</p> + +<p> +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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#5-1-8">8</a>] +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. +</p> + +<p> +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,”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-1-9">9</a>] 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;[<a class="footnote" href="#5-1-10">10</a>] however, +nothing plausible has replaced it. +</p> + +<p> +Let us consider the case if that rare union <em>was</em> 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 +<a id="page-120" class="pagenum" title="120"></a> +the girl and the devoted friend who seemed so little in favor +of her marrying. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section blank" id="subchap-0-10-2" title="Charlotte Charke"> +<span class="keep-nu-html-checker-happy"> </span> +</h3> + +<p class="isection"> +<b>Charlotte Charke.</b> 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,[<a class="footnote" href="#5-2-1">1</a>] 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 +<a id="page-121" class="pagenum" title="121"></a> +and her family, and also to all her personal relations except her early +and unhappy marriage. +</p> + +<p> +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,”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-2-2">2</a>] 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-2-3">3</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>The Careless Husband</em>. 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 +<a id="page-122" class="pagenum" title="122"></a> +were pleased to stile me.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-2-4">4</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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,[<a class="footnote" href="#5-2-5">5</a>] as well as her family’s relentless disowning of her, they +make a picture which seems to justify her inclusion in a conjectural +record. +</p> + +<h3 class="section blank" id="subchap-0-10-3" title="“The Ladies of Llangollen”"> +<span class="keep-nu-html-checker-happy"> </span> +</h3> + +<p class="isection"> +<b>“The Ladies of Llangollen.”</b> 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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-123" class="pagenum" title="123"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-3-1">1</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-3-2">2</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +This cousin also attempted to keep Sarah from receiving Eleanor’s +long letters, which she said only aggravated the girl’s illness. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-124" class="pagenum" title="124"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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,”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-3-3">3</a>] 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.” +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Ces Plaisirs</em>, +and epitomizes neatly the distinguishing feature of all such attachments. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +‘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 <em>volupté</em>. The lover takes courage in her certainty +of caressing a body whose secrets she knows, whose preferences +her own body has taught her.’[<a class="footnote" href="#5-3-4">4</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +‘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 <em>woman</em>.’[<a class="footnote" href="#5-3-5">5</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<h3 class="section blank" id="subchap-0-10-4" title="Karoline von Günderode"> +<span class="keep-nu-html-checker-happy"> </span> +</h3> + +<p class="isection"> +<b>Karoline von Günderode.</b> During the same years that saw these +willing exiles living out their rapturous idyll, a very different life was +<a id="page-125" class="pagenum" title="125"></a> +swept along on the tide of romantic <em>Sturm und Drang</em> 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 <em>Goethe’s +Briefwechsel mit einem Kind</em>. 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 +<em>post facto</em> interpolation in her letter to Goethe’s mother describing +Günderode’s death and the two girls’ previous relationship.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-4-1">1</a>] +</p> + +<p> +Equally copious expansion is evident in the correspondence with +Günderode,[<a class="footnote" href="#5-4-2">2</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Seven Gothic Tales</em>). She was, by all accounts, an interesting mixture +of emotional mysticism and sceptical “masculine” intellect, and +both are reflected in her poems.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-4-3">3</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-126" class="pagenum" title="126"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The sixty-page biography of Günderode in Ersch and Gruber’s +<em>Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#5-4-4">4</a>] 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.’ +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-4-5">5</a>] 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 “<a id="corr-36"></a>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.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-4-6">6</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-127" class="pagenum" title="127"></a> +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 <em>she</em> +“had a right to her love.” +</p> + +<p> +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,[<a class="footnote" href="#5-4-7">7</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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, <em>The Children’s Hour</em>, and their story will receive +further attention when that drama is considered under twentieth-century +literature. +</p> + +<h3 class="section blank" id="subchap-0-10-5" title="George Sand"> +<span class="keep-nu-html-checker-happy"> </span> +</h3> + +<p class="isection"> +<b>George Sand.</b> 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 <em>Gabriel-Gabrielle</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#5-5-1">1</a>] +the title an obvious echo of Balzac’s <em>Seraphitus-Seraphita</em>, +which antedated it by only five years. Sand’s title-character is definitely +<a id="page-128" class="pagenum" title="128"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +“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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-5-2">2</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.” +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-129" class="pagenum" title="129"></a> +men she loved,[<a class="footnote" href="#5-5-3">3</a>] and there are a number of suggestive incidents which +crop up in one after another of her biographies. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-5-4">4</a>] (André Maurois quotes a letter in which Vigny refers +to Sand viciously as “that Lesbian.”)[<a class="footnote" href="#5-5-5">5</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>not</em> 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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section blank" id="subchap-0-10-6" title="Emily Brontë"> +<span class="keep-nu-html-checker-happy"> </span> +</h3> + +<p class="isection"> +<b>Emily Brontë.</b> 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 +<a id="page-130" class="pagenum" title="130"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +And again in the next year: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-6-1">1</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-131" class="pagenum" title="131"></a> +<em>All Alone</em> and in Virginia Moore’s <em>The Life and Eager Death of +Emily Brontë</em>. 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 <em>Wuthering Heights</em> 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-6-2">2</a>] In Emily’s own +day, of course, <em>Wuthering Heights</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-6-3">3</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +One day Charlotte was ill and unable to entertain her guest. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +But to their surprise, Emily, whose dislike of strangers +<a id="page-132" class="pagenum" title="132"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-6-3">3</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.” +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<em>Jane Eyre</em>] she had remained hale and strong from the age +of five to the age of fifteen.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-6-4">4</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-6-5">5</a>] The critic +is Fannie Ratchford, whose separate volume, <em>The Brontës’ Web of +Childhood</em>, 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 +<a id="page-133" class="pagenum" title="133"></a> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-6-6">6</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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 +<em>Wuthering Heights</em>.) 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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-6-7">7</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +It is certain that many poems, along with many letters, were sacrificed +to Emily’s passion for privacy. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Wuthering Heights</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-134" class="pagenum" title="134"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-135" class="pagenum" title="135"></a> +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 <em>she</em> was about +to enter love’s <em>real</em> 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 <em>Schwarm</em> +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<a id="corr-42"></a> (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] +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section blank" id="subchap-0-10-7" title="George Eliot"> +<span class="keep-nu-html-checker-happy"> </span> +</h3> + +<p class="isection"> +<b>George Eliot.</b> 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 +<a id="page-136" class="pagenum" title="136"></a> +of father and brother so vividly reflected in <em>Mill on the Floss</em>, 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:[<a class="footnote" href="#5-7-1">1</a>] +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section blank" id="subchap-0-10-8" title="Margaret Fuller"> +<span class="keep-nu-html-checker-happy"> </span> +</h3> + +<p class="isection"> +<b>Margaret Fuller.</b> 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 <em>Woman in the Nineteenth Century</em>, which +played a part in this country comparable to Wollstonecraft’s <em>Vindication</em> +in England; for her editing of the short-lived <em>Dial</em>, and for her +work at home and abroad on the staff of Horace Greeley’s <em>New York +Tribune</em>. 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 <em>Blythedale Romance</em>. Catherine Anthony, in +one of the first “psychoanalytic” biographies of this century,[<a class="footnote" href="#5-8-1">1</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +It was not until the age of thirty-four that she experienced her +<a id="page-137" class="pagenum" title="137"></a> +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 <em>Memoirs</em>, +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-8-2">2</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Memoirs</em>.) +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-138" class="pagenum" title="138"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>goodness</em>, 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-8-3">3</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section blank" id="subchap-0-10-9" title="Adah Isaacs Menken"> +<span class="keep-nu-html-checker-happy"> </span> +</h3> + +<p class="isection"> +<b>Adah Isaacs Menken.</b> 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. +<a id="page-139" class="pagenum" title="139"></a> +Various other sources, among them the preface to an 1890 edition +of her poems,[<a class="footnote" href="#5-9-1">1</a>] 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-9-2">2</a>] Thus some of the following +picturesque details offered by Clement Wood should doubtless be +liberally salted, but many are demonstrably true. +</p> + +<p> +Although, like Margaret Fuller, Menken was precocious enough +to be translating the <em>Iliad</em> 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 <em>Leaves of Grass</em> she brought out a volume, +<em>Memoirs</em> (or <em>Memories</em> [?] now lost) which is said to have “received +the placid fervor it deserved.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-9-3">3</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Cincinnati +Israelite</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <a id="corr-44"></a>mane, head +<a id="page-140" class="pagenum" title="140"></a> +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, <em>Infelicia</em>.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-9-4">4</a>] Within a few months of its publication +she fell ill and died at the age of thirty-three. +</p> + +<p> +Menken’s place in the present study is due to James Gibbons +Huneker’s comment in <em>Steeplejack</em>: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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....[<a class="footnote" href="#5-9-5">5</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Upon examination, the volume <em>Infelicia</em> 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: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Too late we met. The burning brain,</p> + <p class="verse">The aching heart alone can tell</p> + <p class="verse">How filled our souls with death and pain</p> + <p class="verse">When came the last sad word, Farewell![<a class="footnote" href="#5-9-6">6</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +<a id="page-141" class="pagenum" title="141"></a> +In “The Release,” a subjective autobiographical fragment, she says: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Wherefore was that poor soul of all the host so wounded?</p> + <p class="verse">It struggled bravely ...</p> + <p class="verse">Can it be this captive soul was a changeling, and battled ... in a body not its own?[<a class="footnote" href="#5-9-7">7</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-9-8">8</a>] +</p> + +<p> +As to the Hattie Tyng Griswold mentioned by Huneker, she is +listed in Frances Willard’s <em>Woman of the Century</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#5-9-9">9</a>] 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-9-10">10</a>] The volume alluded to, <em>Memoirs</em>, has not been seen +by the present writer, but honest critical judgment compels some +qualification of Wood’s praise in view of the known <em>Infelicia</em>, though +there are many pages in the latter which are not “bad” poetry. +</p> + +<h3 class="section blank" id="subchap-0-10-10" title="“Michael Field”"> +<span class="keep-nu-html-checker-happy"> </span> +</h3> + +<p class="isection"> +<b>“Michael Field.”</b> 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 +<a id="page-142" class="pagenum" title="142"></a> +is no indication of any other heterosexual interest on either woman’s +part throughout their lives. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Callirrhoë and Fair +Rosamund</em> 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, <em>Works and Days</em>: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +“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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-10-1">1</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-143" class="pagenum" title="143"></a> +indirectly in several of the entries in <em>Works and Days</em>. 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-10-2">2</a>] +And in connection with one of their volumes of verse, <em>Long Ago</em> +(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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">It was deep April, and the morn</p> + <p class="verse1">Shakespeare was born.</p> + <p class="verse">My love and I took hands and swore</p> + <p class="verse1">Against the world, to be</p> + <p class="verse">Poets and lovers evermore.</p> + <p class="verse">To laugh and dream on Lethe’s shore,</p> + <p class="verse">To sing to Charon in his boat,</p> + <p class="verse">Heartening the timid souls afloat;</p> + <p class="verse">Of judgment never to take heed,</p> + <p class="verse">But to those fast-locked souls to speed</p> + <p class="verse">Who never from Apollo fled,</p> + <p class="verse">Who spent no hours with the dead;</p> + <p class="verse1">Continually</p> + <p class="verse">With them to dwell,</p> + <p class="verse">Indifferent to heaven and hell.[<a class="footnote" href="#5-10-3">3</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +This, along with certain other poems (notably the “Third Book +of Songs” in <em>Underneath the Bough</em>), 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 <em>Works and +Days</em>, 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 +<a id="page-144" class="pagenum" title="144"></a> +of ideas.”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-10-4">4</a>] 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; <em>we are closer married</em> [italics +hers].”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-10-5">5</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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”[<a class="footnote" href="#5-10-6">6</a>] +(the nurse who kept her in bed). Yet when another nurse, middle-aged, +becomes infatuated and annoys her with constant caresses, +she says: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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?[<a class="footnote" href="#5-10-7">7</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-145" class="pagenum" title="145"></a> +that the two had achieved some sort of limitation upon expressing +their love which satisfied their stringent Victorian consciences. +</p> + +<p> +Probably the complete manuscript of <em>Works and Days</em> 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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section blank" id="subchap-0-10-11" title="Emily Dickinson"> +<span class="keep-nu-html-checker-happy"> </span> +</h3> + +<p class="isection"> +<b>Emily Dickinson.</b> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +As the quantity of poetry and correspondence in print has increased, +<a id="page-146" class="pagenum" title="146"></a> +however, the different editors’ versions of some duplicate +material have invited comparison, and from this and much peripheral +research Rebecca Patterson has suggested in <em>The Riddle of Emily +Dickinson</em> (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.) +</p> + +<p> +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, +<a id="page-147" class="pagenum" title="147"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +All this, it must be admitted, is a fairly detailed reconstruction +<a id="page-148" class="pagenum" title="148"></a> +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 <em>Bolts of Melody</em> 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. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-11"> +<a id="page-149" class="pagenum" title="149"></a> +<span class="line1">CHAPTER VI.</span><br> +<span class="line2">TWENTIETH CENTURY</span> +</h2> + +</div> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-11-1"> +Introduction +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 id="page-150" class="pagenum" title="150"></a> +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 <em>inversion</em>—Ellis’s term, as noted earlier. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-1">1</a>] Even so, the effects of the Eulenberg +affair were not so sweeping as those of the Oscar Wilde case +in England a decade earlier. +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-2">2</a>] 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 <em>Studies in the Psychology of Sex</em> came out in +America a decade before England would permit their publication. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-151" class="pagenum" title="151"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-152" class="pagenum" title="152"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Explorations in Personality—a clinical ... +study of fifty men of college age</em> (only a partial publication of their +findings), and G. W. Henry in his <em>Sex Variants</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +A statistical study limited to genetics was made in Germany +during World War II by Theodor Lang.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-3">3</a>] 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, <em>Heredity in Health and Mental Disorder</em> +(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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-4">4</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-153" class="pagenum" title="153"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-5">5</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-154" class="pagenum" title="154"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-11-2"> +Poetry—French +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Songs of Bilitis</em>, 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 “<em>jeux latins et +voluptés grecques</em>” than the “exaggerated preoccupations” of <em>femmes +damnées</em> whose sense of sin he suspected of giving an edge to their +passions. He pronounced Barney’s novel, <em>Lettres à Une Connue</em>, +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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#6-6">6</a>] The implication of some +previous emotional connection between the two is supported by +evidence in the poetry of both. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-155" class="pagenum" title="155"></a> +from later articles by her fellow authors “Aurel” and Lucie +Delarue-Mardrus, quoted by Barney herself in her <em>Aventures de +l’Esprit</em>.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-7">7</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +<em>Quelques Sonnets et Portraits de Femmes</em> (1900), described by critics +as sensuous poems of restrained passion; <em>The Woman who Lives with +Me</em>—possibly a version in English of the novel Louÿs criticized—listed +without date as a “roman abrégé, hors commerce”; <em>Cinq Petits +Dialogues Grecs</em>, printed in the periodical <em>La Plume</em>, 1901; <em>The City +of the Flowers</em>, “poème avec enlumières, à un seul exemplaire”; +<em>Actes et Entr’actes</em>, 1910; <em>Poèmes—Autres Alliances</em>, 1920; <em>Pensées +d’une Amazone</em>, and <em>Aventures de l’Esprit</em>, 1929, both in prose. +</p> + +<p> +She is probably best remembered in French letters for having +inspired two volumes by Remy de Gourmont, <em>Lettres à l’Amazone</em>, +essays which first ran serially in the <em>Mercure de France</em> and were +translated into English by Richard Aldington (1931), and <em>Lettres +Intimes à l’Amazone</em>, 1927.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-8">8</a>] 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-9">9</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +Despite Gourmont’s analytic clarity, in the <em>Lettres Intimes</em> we +<a id="page-156" class="pagenum" title="156"></a> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-10">10</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Un Songe de Femme</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +Barney’s <em>Aventures de l’Esprit</em> 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. <em>Actes +et Entr’actes</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +Two of the lyrics, “Virelai Nouveau” and “Filles,” represent the +poet as following young <em>filles de joie</em> on their twilight strolls and +taking a man’s sensual pleasure in their consciously seductive beauty, +but the enjoyment is detached, that of the <em>voyeur</em> only. “Couple,” +<a id="page-157" class="pagenum" title="157"></a> +however, explicitly champions variance in its description of a loving +pair: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Se tenant par la taille—ainsi que deux bouleaux</p> + <p class="verse">Reliés par leurs branches—</p> + <p class="verse">Elles vont, ondulant leurs têtes et leurs hanches ...</p> + <p class="verse">Elles tachent de fuir l’été, son corps doré</p> + <p class="verse">Versant, comme une essence ...</p> + <p class="verse">Sa mâle adolescence.</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +(Compare Peladan’s Tammuz the sun god.) +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Il leur fait peur ...</p> + <p class="verse">Et la brune qui parle á sa blonde compagne ...</p> + <p class="verse">Est-elle la dryade au long corps maigrelet</p> + <p class="verse">Qu’emprisonnant l’écorce</p> + <p class="verse">Et qui garde d’instinct la crainte de la force,</p> + <p class="verse">De la brutale force?</p> + <p class="verse">Elles sont dans la nuit ainsi qu’au seuil d’un temple,</p> + <p class="verse">D’un mystérieux temple ...</p> + <p class="verse">Si quelque homme, épiant ce couple insidieux,</p> + <p class="verse">De son mépris le couvre ...</p> + <p class="verse">Qu’il sache que tout don de beauté plaît aux dieux;</p> + <p class="verse">Que les lois ordinaires</p> + <p class="verse">Ne peuvent s’appliquer á ces noces lunaires ...</p> + <p class="verse">Elles ont, d’un élan plus divin qu’animal</p> + <p class="verse">Dans les vastes silences</p> + <p class="verse">Joint avec des baisers leurs ressemblances,</p> + <p class="verse">Toutes leur ressemblances.</p> + <p class="verse">Et par delà la terre, et le bien, et le mal,</p> + <p class="verse">Elles vont, diaphanes</p> + <p class="verse">Et troublantes, et ceux qui les jugent profanes</p> + <p class="verse">Sont eux-mêmes profanes.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-11">11</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.” +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Je ne regrette rien, ni son bien ni son mal.</p> +<a id="page-158" class="pagenum" title="158"></a> + <p class="verse">Sa douleur m’est utile et son mal nécessaire ...</p> + <p class="verse11">... Je n’ai peur</p> + <p class="verse">Que de ne plus souffrir ...[<a class="footnote" href="#6-12">12</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +“Te Deum” expresses the same satisfaction: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Tes yeus cernés de noir</p> + <p class="verse">Et ta face plus pâle</p> + <p class="verse">Que n’est pâle le soir,</p> + <p class="verse">Et ma bouche—pétale</p> + <p class="verse">Entr’ouvert, frais piment</p> + <p class="verse">Trop rouge—un peu brutale,</p> + <p class="verse">Disent étrangement</p> + <p class="verse">A la bonne Déesse</p> + <p class="verse">Des féminins amants</p> + <p class="verse">Et des males maîtresses</p> + <p class="verse">Une long remerciement.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-13">13</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +A “Quatrain” sums up the debit side of her resolute assumption +of masculinity: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Je ressemble à ces rois qui vivent séparés</p> + <p class="verse">De la vie, et malgré leurs plaisirs, misérables</p> + <p class="verse">Et seuls, tendant en vain leurs bras lourds et parés</p> + <p class="verse">Vers quelque pauvre joie humaine et désirable.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-14">14</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +There remain a group of poems addressed to Renée Vivien, published +after the latter’s death, which will be mentioned later. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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: <em>Études et Préludes</em>, 1901; <em>Cendres et Poussières</em>, 1902; +<em>Evocations</em>, <em>Sappho</em>, and <em>La Vénus des Aveugles</em>, 1903; <em>Kitharèdes</em>, +<a id="page-159" class="pagenum" title="159"></a> +1904; <em>A l’Heure des Mains Joints</em>, 1906; <em>Sillages</em> and <em>Flambeaux +Éteints</em>, 1908; and posthumously in 1910, <em>Dans un Coin de Violettes</em>, +<em>Le Vent des Vaisseaux</em>, and <em>Haillons</em>. Prose-poems: <em>Brumes de Fjords</em>, +1902, and <em>Du Vert au Violet</em>, 1903; <em>La Dame à la Louve</em> (a collection +of short stories), <em>Le Christ</em>, <em>Aphrodite et M. Pépin</em> (satire), and +<em>Une Femme M’Apparut</em>, (novel), 1904. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>hôtel</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-15">15</a>] 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 +<a id="page-160" class="pagenum" title="160"></a> +an uproar of which Germain says that her later poem, “Sous la +Rafale,” is not an exaggerated picture: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">De la nuit chaotique un cri d’horreur s’exhale.</p> + <p class="verse">Venez, nous errerons tous trois sous la rafale ...</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">L’éclair nous épouvante et la nuit nous désole ...</p> + <p class="verse">O vieux Lear, comme toi je suis errant et folle,</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Et ceux de ma famille et ceux de mes amis</p> + <p class="verse">M’ont repoussée avec les outrages vomis.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Comme toi, Dante, épris d’une douleur hautaine,</p> + <p class="verse">Je suis une exilée au coeur gonflé de haine ...[<a class="footnote" href="#6-16">16</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Pendant longtemps, je fus clouée au pilori,</p> + <p class="verse">Et les femmes, voyant que je souffrais, ont ri.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Puis, des hommes ont pris dans leurs mains une boue</p> + <p class="verse">Qui vint éclabousser mes tempes et ma joue ...</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">J’ai senti la colère et l’horreur m’envahir.</p> + <p class="verse">Silencieusement, j’appris à les haïr.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Les insultes cinglaient comme fouets d’ortie,</p> + <p class="verse">Lorsqu’ils m’ont détachée enfin, je suis partie.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Je suis partie au gré des vents. Et depuis lors</p> + <p class="verse">Mon visage est pareil à la face des morts.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-17">17</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-161" class="pagenum" title="161"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>jeune fille</em>, ‘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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-18">18</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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:” +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Si le Seigneur penchait son front sur mon trépas</p> + <p class="verse">Je lui dirais: O Christ, je ne te connais pas.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Seigneur, ta stricte loi ne fut jamais la mienne,</p> + <p class="verse">Et je vécus ainsi qu’un simple païenne ...</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Le monde était autour de moi, tel un jardin.</p> + <p class="verse">Je buvais l’aube claire et le soir cristallin.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Le soleil me ceignait de ses plus vives flammes,</p> + <p class="verse">Et l’amour m’incline vers la beauté des femmes ...</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> +<a id="page-162" class="pagenum" title="162"></a> + <p class="verse">Pardonne-moi, qui fus une simple païenne!</p> + <p class="verse">Laisse-moi retourner vers la splendeur ancienne</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Et, puisque enfin l’instant éternel est venu,</p> + <p class="verse">Rejoindre celles-là qui t’ont point connu.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-19">19</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Celles que nous aimons ont méprisé les hommes ...</p> + <p class="verse">Et nous pouvons ...</p> + <p class="verse">Être tout à la fois des amants et des soeurs.</p> + <p class="verse">Le désir est en nous moins fort que la tendresse ...</p> + <p class="verse">Et nos maîtresses ne sauraient nous décevoir,</p> + <p class="verse">Puisque c’est l’infini que nous aimons en elles ...</p> + <p class="verse">Nos jours sans impudeur, sans crainte ni remords</p> + <p class="verse">Se déroulent, ainsi que de larges accords,</p> + <p class="verse">Et nous aimons, comme on aimait à Mitylène.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-20">20</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Of this faith from then on she was the dedicated priestess. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> +<h4 class="hdr"> +Nocturne +</h4> + + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">J’adore la langueur de ta lèvre charnelle</p> + <p class="verse">Où persiste le pli des baisers d’autrefois.</p> + <p class="verse1">Ta démarche ensorcelle,</p> + <p class="verse">Et la perversité calme de ta prunelle</p> + <p class="verse">A pris au ciel du nord ses bleus traîtres et froids ...</p> + <p class="verse">Sous ta robe, qui glisse en un frôlement d’aile</p> + <p class="verse">Je devine <a id="corr-55"></a>ton corps—les lys ardents des seins,</p> + <p class="verse1">L’or blême de l’aisselle,</p> + <p class="verse">Les flancs doux et fleuris, les jambes d’Immortelle,</p> + <p class="verse">Le velouté du ventre et la rondeur des reins ...[<a class="footnote" href="#6-21">21</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +<h4 class="hdr"> +<a id="page-163" class="pagenum" title="163"></a> +Sonnet +</h4> + + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">... Tes lèvres ont pleuré leurs rythmiques douleurs</p> + <p class="verse">Dans un refrain mêlé de sanglots et de pauses.</p> + <p class="verse">Et la langueur des lits, la paix des portes closes,</p> + <p class="verse">Entourent nos désirs et nos âpres pâleurs ...</p> + <p class="verse">Tes yeux bleus aigus d’acier et de cristal</p> + <p class="verse">S’entr’ouvrent froidement, ternis comme un métal ...[<a class="footnote" href="#6-22">22</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +<h4 class="hdr"> +La Fleur du Sorbier +</h4> + + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">... Le couchant qui blêmit et rougit tour à tour,</p> + <p class="verse">La campagne morbide et l’heure de tristesse</p> + <p class="verse">Semblant nous reprocher d’avoir, o ma Maîtresse,</p> + <p class="verse">Accompli sans désir les gestes de l’amour ...</p> + <p class="verse">Ton regard sans lueurs paraît agoniser ...</p> + <p class="verse">Une phalène, errant dans le jardin, se pose</p> + <p class="verse">Sur la fleur du sorbier, d’un or pâlement rose</p> + <p class="verse">Comme la fleur secrète où j’ai mis mon baiser ...[<a class="footnote" href="#6-23">23</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-164" class="pagenum" title="164"></a> +urgent summons, it was too late—her friend was dead before Vivien +reached her. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Cendres et Poussières</em> (1902) we find “Devant la +Mort d’une Amie Véritablement Aimée”: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Ils me disent, tandis que je sanglote encore:</p> + <p class="verse">“Dans l’ombre du sépulcre où sa grace pâlit</p> + <p class="verse">Elle goûte la paix passagère du lit,</p> + <p class="verse">Les ténèbres au front, et dans les yeux l’aurore ...</p> + <p class="verse">Dans une aube d’avril qui vient avec lenteur</p> + <p class="verse">Elle refleurira, violette mystique.”</p> + <p class="verse">Moi, j’écoute parmi les temples de la mort ...</p> + <p class="verse">J’écoute, mais le vent des espaces emporte</p> + <p class="verse">L’audacieux espoir des infinis sereins.</p> + <p class="verse">Je sais qu’elle n’est plus dans l’heure que j’étreins,</p> + <p class="verse">L’heure unique et certaine, et moi, je la crois morte.</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +And in <em>Études et Préludes</em> (1901): +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">J’attends, o Bien-Aimée! o vierge dont le front</p> + <p class="verse">Illumine le soir de pompe et d’allégresse ...</p> + <p class="verse">Notre lit sera plein de fleurs qui frémiront ...</p> + <p class="verse">Et la paix des autels se remplira de flammes;</p> + <p class="verse">Les larmes, les parfums et les épithalames,</p> + <p class="verse">Les prières et l’encens monteront jusqu’à nous.</p> + <p class="verse">Malgré le jour levé, nous dormirons encore</p> + <p class="verse">Du sommeil léthargique où gisent les époux,</p> + <p class="verse">Et notre longue nuit ne craindra plus l’aurore.</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +In <em>Evocations</em> (1903) she is proclaiming a “Victoire Funèbre:” +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Dans le mystique soir d’avril j’ai triomphé.</p> + <p class="verse">J’ai crié d’une voix de victoire: Elle est morte ...</p> +<a id="page-165" class="pagenum" title="165"></a> + <p class="verse">—Quel sourire de paix sur tes lèvres muettes,</p> + <p class="verse1">O soeur des violettes!</p> + <p class="verse">J’ai brûlé de baisers des pieds blancs de la Mort</p> + <p class="verse">Car elle t’épargna la souillure et l’empreinte,</p> + <p class="verse">L’angoisse de désir, les affres de l’étreinte,</p> + <p class="verse">Les ardeurs de vouloir, l’âpreté de l’effort.</p> + <p class="verse">—L’amour s’est éloigné de tes lèvres muettes,</p> + <p class="verse1">O soeur des violettes![<a class="footnote" href="#6-24">24</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +The contrast between these devoted elegies and the poems to her +second love is striking, and one is aware of a revolt against passion +<em>per se</em>. For the first time the poet voices a longing for death which +recurred with increasing frequency in her later work. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Kitharèdes</em> (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). +</p> + +<p> +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 +<em>Evocations</em> (1902) of encounter with a new personality: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> +<h4 class="hdr"> +Sonnet +</h4> + + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Ta royale jeunesse a la mélancolie</p> + <p class="verse">Du Nord où le brouillard efface les couleurs.</p> + <p class="verse">Tu mêles la discorde et le désir aux pleurs,</p> + <p class="verse">Grave comme Hamlet, pâle comme Ophélie ...</p> + <p class="verse">Mon coeur déconcerté se trouble quand je vois</p> +<a id="page-166" class="pagenum" title="166"></a> + <p class="verse">Ton front pensif de prince et tes yeux bleus de vierge,</p> + <p class="verse">Tantôt l’Un tantôt l’Autre, et les Deux à la fois.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-25">25</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +<h4 class="hdr"> +Twilight +</h4> + + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Les clartés de la nuit, les ténèbres du jour</p> + <p class="verse">Out la complexité de mon étrange amour ...</p> + <p class="verse">L’ambigu de ton corps s’alambique et s’affine</p> + <p class="verse">Dans son ardeur stérile et sa grace androgyne ...</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +In <em>La Vénus des Aveugles</em> (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 <em>Brumes de Fjords</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>La Vénus des Aveugles</em> reflects the +<a id="page-167" class="pagenum" title="167"></a> +bitter and poisoned entrancement. To her tormentor Vivien writes, +among much in the same key: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> +<h4 class="hdr"> +Sonnet +</h4> + + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Tes cheveux irréels, aux reflets clairs et froids</p> + <p class="verse">Out de pâles lueurs des matités blondes;</p> + <p class="verse">Tes regards ont l’azur des éthers et des ondes.</p> + <p class="verse">Pourtant je ne sais plus, au sein des nuits profondes</p> + <p class="verse">Te contempler avec l’extase d’autrefois ...</p> + <p class="verse">Je vis—comme l’on voit une fleur qui se fane—</p> + <p class="verse">Sur ta bouche, pareille aux aurores d’été,</p> + <p class="verse">Un sourire flétri de vieille courtisane.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-24">24</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +<h4 class="hdr"> +Cri +</h4> + + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">... Vers l’heure où follement dansent les lucioles,</p> + <p class="verse">L’heure où brilla à nos yeux le désir du moment,</p> + <p class="verse">Tu me redis en vain les flatteuses paroles—</p> + <p class="verse">Je te hais et je t’aime, abominablement.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-25">25</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Full reaction came with return to Paris and to Violet’s grave: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> +<h4 class="hdr"> +La Nuit Latente +</h4> + + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">La luxure unique et multiple</p> + <p class="verse1">Se mire à mon miroir ...</p> + <p class="verse">Ma visage de clown me navre.</p> + <p class="verse">Je cherche ton lit de cadavre</p> + <p class="verse">Ainsi que le calme d’un havre,</p> + <p class="verse1">O mon beau Désespoir! ...</p> + <p class="verse">Mon âme, que l’angoisse exalte,</p> + <p class="verse">Vient, en pleurant, faire une halte</p> + <p class="verse">Devant des parois de basalte</p> + <p class="verse1">Aux bleus de viaduc ...</p> + <p class="verse">Et, lasse de la beauté fourbe,</p> + <p class="verse">De la joie où l’esprit s’embourbe,</p> + <p class="verse">Je me détourne et je me courbe</p> + <p class="verse1">Sur ton vitreux néant.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-26">26</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-168" class="pagenum" title="168"></a> +By 1904 she had apparently freed herself of the old entanglement +and yielded to the inevitable ripening of the new. <em>A L’Heure des +Mains Jointes</em>, published in 1906 but reflecting this emotional period, +opens with the idealistic title poem: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">J’ai puérilisé mon coeur dans l’innocence</p> + <p class="verse">De notre amour, éveil de calice enchantée ...</p> + <p class="verse">Ma douce! je t’adore avec simplicité ...</p> + <p class="verse">Tes cheveux et ta voix et tes bras m’ont guérie.</p> + <p class="verse">J’ai dépouillé la crainte et le furtif soupçon</p> + <p class="verse">Et l’artificiel et la bizarrerie.</p> + <p class="verse">J’ai abrité ainsi mon coeur de malade guérie</p> + <p class="verse">Sous le toit amical de la bonne maison ...</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +But the collaborative prose-poems, narratives, and verses were not +well received. Of “Riversdale’s” <em>Echos et Reflets</em> the reviewer of +poetry for the <em>Mercure de France</em> said merely, ‘Renée Vivien is no +longer alone in evoking the glorious and tragic shade of Sappho.’ On +<em>L’Etre Double</em>, one pseudonymous narrative, Rachilde’s total comment +was: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt " lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> +<p class="noindent noindent"> +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![<a class="footnote" href="#6-27">27</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent noindent"> +Vivien’s own autobiographical tale, <em>Une Femme M’Apparut</em>, fared +thus: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt " lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> +<p class="noindent noindent"> +... Le texte est du même ordre avec ... le vieux style dit +<a id="page-169" class="pagenum" title="169"></a> +décadent, mort hier, déjà horriblement pourri, et la pluie des +androgynes, y compris la Saint-Jean-de Vinci. Tout cela sent +l’héroïne de <em>La Passade</em> de Willy, qui se tenterait de se faire +prendre au sérieux.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-28">28</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent noindent"> +The last comment is particularly interesting inasmuch as Willy (the +novelist Henri Gauthier-Villars, of whom more later) had called the +heroine of <em>La Passade</em> “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 <em>gamine</em> +given to roaming the streets of Montmartre at night and tossing +pebbles through fanlights for sheer deviltry—altogether, far from innocent. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Sillages</em> and <em>Flambeaux Éteints</em> 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 +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Garde-moi, parfumée ainsi qu’une momie</p> + <p class="verse">Ta robe des beaux jours passées, o mon amie!</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +“Amata” voices that ultimate plea of the desperate woman which +tougher spirits always take for hypocrisy: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Dis, que veux-tu de moi qui t’aime, o mon souci!</p> + <p class="verse">Et comment retenir ton caprice de femme?</p> + <p class="verse">... Ton vouloir est mon voeu, ton désir est ma loi,</p> + <p class="verse">Et si quelque étrangère apparaît plus aimable</p> + <p class="verse">A tes regards changeants, prends-la, réjouis-toi!</p> + <p class="verse">Moi même dresserai le lit doux et la table ...</p> + <p class="verse">Je mets entre tes doigts insouciants mon sort,</p> + <p class="verse">O toi, douceur finale, o toi, douleur suprême.</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-170" class="pagenum" title="170"></a> +Was this lie perhaps responsible for the gender of “prends-<em>la</em>” +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[<a class="footnote" href="#6-29">29</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">L’amour dont je subis l’abominable loi</p> + <p class="verse">M’attire vers ce que je crains le plus, vers toi![<a class="footnote" href="#6-30">30</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +or: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Les êtres de la nuit et les êtres du jour</p> + <p class="verse">Ont longtemps partagé mon âme, tour à tour ...</p> + <p class="verse">Les êtres de la nuit sont faibles et charmantes ...</p> + <p class="verse">On ne boit qu’un baiser décevant sur leur bouche...</p> + <p class="verse">Et leur amour n’est qu’un mensonge de la nuit ...[<a class="footnote" href="#6-31">31</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +or: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Le monde inhospitable est pareil à l’auberge</p> + <p class="verse">Où l’on vit mal, tout est mal, on dort mal.</p> + <p class="verse">Et pendant que le cri des femmes se prolonge,</p> + <p class="verse">Je cherche le Palais Impossible du Songe.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-32">32</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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, +<em>Haillons</em>, is filled with cries of pain and horror, of foreseeing the +end and wanting it to come swiftly. +</p> + +<p> +The known facts of her last year are gleaned from Colette’s <em>Ces +Plaisirs</em> 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 +<a id="page-171" class="pagenum" title="171"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-33">33</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Et pourtant ils ont pris ton âme splénétique</p> + <p class="verse">Aux décevants espoirs du dogme catholique,</p> + <p class="verse">Voulant ouvrir tes yeux avides de repos</p> + <p class="verse">A leur éternité—mais tes yeux se clos ...</p> + <p class="verse">Tes esprits affaiblis, ils purent te changer,</p> + <p class="verse">Mais l’oeuvre de ta vie est là pour te venger ...[<a class="footnote" href="#6-34">34</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +But the consensus of popular opinion was that this was a deathbed +repentance inspired by sheer panic. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-172" class="pagenum" title="172"></a> +extravagances. There are even one or two tenuous religious allusions +in late poems—“Chapelle,” “Chapelle de Marine,” “Dura Lex Sed +Lex,” and there is <em>Le Christ, Aphrodite et M. Pépin</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Ils ont caché ton corps sous une pierre</p> + <p class="verse">Chrétienne, ton squelette émiette sa poussière</p> + <p class="verse">Très respectablement dans un tombeau banal,</p> + <p class="verse">Anonyme, et couvert du bloc familiale.</p> + <p class="verse">Et craignant pour leur nom ce scandale: la Gloire,</p> + <p class="verse">Ils offrent leur dernière insulte à ta mémoire ...</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +“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.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-35">35</a>] It will, therefore, rest +with another generation to compile the definitive record of her +work and her essentially tragic life. +</p> + +<p> +Some years later in <em>Notes and Queries</em> Reinach wrote the following +informal tribute in response to an inquiry: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +I could quote from those volumes at least two hundred +verses which rank among the finest specimens of French poetry. +<a id="page-173" class="pagenum" title="173"></a> +... 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-36">36</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<em>Mercure de France</em> reported in 1902 Henry Rigal’s <em>Sur le Mode +Sapphique</em>, 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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#6-37">37</a>] 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 <em>Songs of +Bilitis</em>, 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 <em>éphèbe</em>—an effeminate man. +</p> + +<p> +The only other woman poet sufficiently variant to attract critical +comment was Paule Reuss, noted by Clarissa Cooper in her <em>Women +Poets of the Twentieth Century in France</em>. Reuss’s volume <em>Le Génie +de L’Amour</em> (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: +</p> + +<div lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Vous demandez d’aller vous voir!</p> + <p class="verse">Mais serait-ce quitter ce soir</p> + <p class="verse">Vos mains jointes dans la mienne?</p> + <p class="verse">Sera-ce vous quitter au matin?</p> + <p class="verse">J’ôterai ma robe blanche;</p> + <p class="verse">Au clair de lune de la lampe,</p> +<a id="page-174" class="pagenum" title="174"></a> + <p class="verse">Sera-ce toi vers moi qui te penches?</p> + <p class="verse">Je passerai dans les sentiers</p> + <p class="verse">Déjà connus ou oubliés</p> + <p class="verse">Et je dirai: Madame! alors</p> + <p class="verse">Que j’avais dit mon trésor![<a class="footnote" href="#6-38">38</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +This suggests a proud and ironic restraint to equal Natalie Clifford +Barney’s. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-11-3"> +Poetry—German +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +The first contemporary variant poetry in German was probably an +item cited in Hirschfeld’s <em>Jahrbuch</em> simply as: Plehn. <em>Lesbiacorum +Liber</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +In 1898 considerable notoriety attended the publication of <em>Auf +Kypros</em> 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-39">39</a>] The volume was later privately +reissued in a de luxe edition with color plates by nine or ten established +contemporary artists.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-40">40</a>] Though most of the poems in <em>Auf +Kypros</em> 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’ <em>Songs of Bilitis</em> 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!’ +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-175" class="pagenum" title="175"></a> +The remaining three lesbian poems express tragic regret for +initiating a younger girl. “Vagabunden” is a prophetic warning: +</p> + +<div lang="de" xml:lang="de"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Verlassen wirst du Haus und Herd</p> + <p class="verse1">um meiner <a id="corr-74"></a>Augen dunklen Schein.</p> + <p class="verse">Du wirst verachtet und entehrt</p> + <p class="verse1">und wie ein Bettler wirst du sein ...</p> + <p class="verse">Und um uns <a id="corr-75"></a>her ist Hass und Hohn,</p> + <p class="verse1">und alle werden uns verdammen,</p> + <p class="verse1">und alle Pfaffen werden droh’n</p> + <p class="verse1">mit Strafen und mit Höllenflammen.</p> + <p class="verse">Wir sind verflucht für alle Zeit!</p> + <p class="verse1">und wirst doch Haus und Herd verlassen</p> + <p class="verse1">um meiner Augen Müdigkeit.</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +“Crucifixa” pictures the innocence of a young girl before her initiation +and her plight afterward: +</p> + +<div lang="de" xml:lang="de"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Ich sah an einem hohen Marterpfahle</p> + <p class="verse">an einem dunklen Kreuz dich festgebunden.</p> + <p class="verse">Es glänzten meiner Küsse Sündenmale</p> + <p class="verse">auf deinem weissen Leib wie Purpurwunden ...</p> + <p class="verse">Ich gab dir von dem Gift das in mir ist;</p> + <p class="verse">ich gab dir meiner Leidenschaften Stärke,</p> + <p class="verse">und nun, da du so ganz <a id="corr-78"></a>entlodert bist,</p> + <p class="verse">graut meiner Seele vor dem eignen Werke.</p> + <p class="verse">Ich möchte knie’n vor einem der Altäre</p> + <p class="verse">die ich zerschlug in frevelhaftem Wagen—</p> + <p class="verse">Madonna mit dem Augen der Hetäre,</p> + <p class="verse">ich selber habe dich ans Kreuz geschlagen!</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +And a later untitled poem goes even farther, in wishing the beloved +dead rather than as she has become: +</p> + +<div lang="de" xml:lang="de"> + <div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Ich wollte, es läge kühl und blass</p> + <p class="verse">dein geschändeter Leib unterm Kirchhofsgras,</p> + <p class="verse">erlöst von Schmerzen und Sünd’,</p> + <p class="verse">und fleckenlos wärst du auf’s Neue—</p> + <p class="verse">ein Lilie im Morgenwind.</p> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +One cannot help wondering whether Vivien, who knew German well +<a id="page-176" class="pagenum" title="176"></a> +and doubtless read these poems at about the time she was writing her +own impassioned elegies to Violet, may not have felt their influence. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Collected Works</em>. Of these, the first volume is made up of poems, +among them a long rhapsodic biography of Sappho,[<a class="footnote" href="#6-41">41</a>] 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,[<a class="footnote" href="#6-42">42</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +In the same year that Hille’s work appeared in print a lesser +lyrist, Ernst Stadler, then only twenty, published in <em>Das Magazin für +Literatur</em> a poetic drama, “Freundinnen.”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-43">43</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +A second woman poet, more restrained than Madeleine, is Toni +Schwabe, whose <em>Komm kühle Nacht</em> 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 <em>Cynara</em>, written in the +nineties, “I have ... gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses, riotously +with the throng Dancing ...” comes inevitably to mind.) +</p> + +<p> +A later group of sonnets are like Louise Labé’s in concealing the +<a id="page-177" class="pagenum" title="177"></a> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +‘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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#6-44">44</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +This is exactly the mood of Rachilde’s and Schreiner’s heroines and +of Barney’s poems. +</p> + +<p> +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, <em>Lesbos</em> (1930), consists of free renderings of Sappho’s +and Anacreon’s surviving fragments, and a similar rendering of the +<em>Songs of Bilitis</em>, 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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-11-4"> +Poetry—English +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +Poets in English offer nothing as explicitly lesbian as the work of +Vivien or Madeleine, and they seldom equal Barney or <a id="corr-82"></a>Schwabe in +frankness of implication. Indeed, last century’s “thick veil of ellipse +and metaphor”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-45">45</a>] 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 +<a id="page-178" class="pagenum" title="178"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Miss Lowell published nothing until 1912, when she was nearly +thirty, but then in <em>A Dome of Many-Colored Glass</em> she included a +number of variant verses. “Hora Stellatrix,” for instance, contains +the following lines: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">’Tis night and spring, Sweetheart, and spring!</p> + <p class="verse">Starfire lights your heart’s blossoming.</p> + <p class="verse">In the intimate dark there’s never an ear ...</p> + <p class="verse">So give; ripe fruit must shrivel and fall.</p> + <p class="verse">As you are mine, Sweetheart, give all!</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +The poem entitled “Dipsa” is virtually an epithalamium fifty lines in +length, among them: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">I wonder can it really be that you</p> + <p class="verse">And I are here alone, and that the night</p> + <p class="verse">Is full of hours, and all the world asleep,</p> + <p class="verse">And none to call to you to come away;</p> +<a id="page-179" class="pagenum" title="179"></a> + <p class="verse">For you have given all yourself to me,</p> + <p class="verse">Making me gentle by your willingness.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +There is also a sequence of nine sonnets in slightly less specific vein,[<a class="footnote" href="#6-46">46</a>] +as plainly written to a woman, and as plainly spoken by the +poet herself. +</p> + +<p> +In <em>Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds</em> (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 +<em>Pictures of the Floating World</em> (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: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against</p> + <p class="verse">The want of you;</p> + <p class="verse">Of squeezing it into little ink drops</p> + <p class="verse">And posting it.</p> + <p class="verse">And I scald alone here under the fire</p> + <p class="verse">Of the great moon.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +In her final volume, <em>What’s O’Clock</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-47">47</a>] 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 +<em>Dictionary of National Biography</em> 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 +<a id="page-180" class="pagenum" title="180"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>Poets of America</em>: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-48">48</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Its title, taken from Shakespeare’s most debated sonnet, is <em>The +Master Mistress</em>, 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: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">The sonnet begs me like a bridegroom,</p> + <p class="verse1">“Come within.”</p> + <p class="verse">“This palace! Not for me, the desert-born!”</p> + <p class="verse">I turn me, as from some too lordly sin,</p> + <p class="verse">And like a singing Hagar, pause and pass—</p> + <p class="verse">To lift for night’s sweet thieves my restless horn</p> + <p class="verse">In broken rhythms of the windy grass.</p> + <p class="verse">I will not be the measure-pacing bride,</p> + <p class="verse">But where the flutes come faintly,</p> +<a id="page-181" class="pagenum" title="181"></a> + <p class="verse1">Sing outside.</p> + <p class="verse">Like drifting sand my love doth drift and change—</p> + <p class="verse">I strangely sing because my love is strange.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Mimic, dancer, cavalier,</p> + <p class="verse">Silky hand the proud horse loves to fear;</p> + <p class="verse">Sailor and adventurer ...</p> + <p class="verse">She who lingers, loves, and goes alone.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-49">49</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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[<a class="footnote" href="#6-50">50</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +The humorous magazine <em>Puck</em> soon became her chief outlet. She +joined its staff, and in 1902 married its editor, Harry Leon Wilson, +later famous as author of <em>Ruggles of Red Gap</em> and <em>Merton of the +<a id="page-182" class="pagenum" title="182"></a> +Movies</em>. In 1904 O’Neill published <em>The Loves of Edwy</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>The +Man From Home</em>. 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, <em>The Goblin Woman</em> and +<em>Garda</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>The Master Mistress</em>. +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>St. Nicholas Magazine</em>, and four years later her farewell poem—seventeen +was the age limit for the “League”—won the year’s +<a id="page-183" class="pagenum" title="183"></a> +cash prize. Entitled “Friends,”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-51">51</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +From her debut in <em>St. Nicholas</em> 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[<a class="footnote" href="#6-52">52</a>] 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: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse2">... That day you picked the first sweet pea—</p> + <p class="verse">I know, you held it up for me to see</p> + <p class="verse">And flushed because I looked not at the flower</p> + <p class="verse">But at your face; and when behind my look</p> + <p class="verse">You saw such unmistakable intent</p> + <p class="verse">You laughed and brushed your flower against my lips</p> + <p class="verse">(You were the fairest thing God ever made</p> + <p class="verse">I think). And then your hands above my heart</p> + <p class="verse">Drew down its stem into a fastening</p> + <p class="verse">And while your head was bent I kissed your hair.</p> + <p class="verse">I wonder if you knew ...</p> + <p class="verse2">... If only God</p> + <p class="verse">Had let us love—and show the world the way!</p> + <p class="verse">Strange cancellings must ink th’eternal books</p> + <p class="verse">When love-crossed-out will bring the answer right![<a class="footnote" href="#6-53">53</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.” +</p> + +<p> +When Millay submitted this poem along with “Renascence” for +<a id="page-184" class="pagenum" title="184"></a> +inclusion in <em>The Lyric Year</em> she herself so much preferred “Interim” +that she ventured to plead by mail for its inclusion.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-54">54</a>] 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 <em>Against the Wall</em>. 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 (<em>Renascence</em>, +1917) shows that save for “God’s World” and “Afternoon on a +Hill,” the whole collection sounds a note of personal loss and +melancholy. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Second April</em>. 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 <em>The Harp Weaver</em>: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Love is not blind. I see with single eye</p> + <p class="verse">Your ugliness and other women’s grace.</p> + <p class="verse">I know the imperfections of your face—</p> + <p class="verse">The eyes too wide apart, the brow too high</p> + <p class="verse">For beauty. Learned from earliest youth am I</p> + <p class="verse">In loveliness, and cannot so erase</p> + <p class="verse">Its letters from my mind, that I may trace</p> + <p class="verse">You faultless, I must love until I die....[<a class="footnote" href="#6-55">55</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-185" class="pagenum" title="185"></a> +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, <em>The Lamp and The Bell</em>, 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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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....[<a class="footnote" href="#6-56">56</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-186" class="pagenum" title="186"></a> +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,”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-57">57</a>] “What lips my +lips have kissed ... I have forgotten,” and “I being born a woman....”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-58">58</a>] +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 +<em>St. Nicholas</em> entry Millay wrote at fourteen, confessed uncertainty +whether the poem was written by a boy or a girl.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-59">59</a>] 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-60">60</a>] The same viewpoint marks her libretto +for Deems Taylor’s opera, <em>The King’s Henchman</em>. +</p> + +<p> +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[<a class="footnote" href="#6-61">61</a>] 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 <em>Fatal Interview</em> (1930), of which Atkins said in 1936 +that she, herself, +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-62">62</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-187" class="pagenum" title="187"></a> +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: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Gone in good sooth you are: not even in dream</p> + <p class="verse">You come. As if the strictures of the light,</p> + <p class="verse">Laid on our glances to their disesteem,</p> + <p class="verse">Extended even to shadows and the night;</p> + <p class="verse">Extended even beyond that drowsy sill</p> + <p class="verse">Along whose galleries, open to the skies</p> + <p class="verse">All maskers move unchallenged and at will,</p> + <p class="verse">Visor in hand and hooded to the eyes.</p> + <p class="verse">To that pavilion the green sea in flood</p> + <p class="verse">Curves in, and the slow dancers dance in foam;</p> + <p class="verse">I find again the pink camellia-bud</p> + <p class="verse">On the wide step, beside a silver comb—</p> + <p class="verse">But it is scentless; up the marble stair</p> + <p class="verse">I mount with pain, knowing you are not there.</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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? +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>The Buck in the Snow</em>. 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 +<a id="page-188" class="pagenum" title="188"></a> +emotional deformity—one has supplementary explanation +of her creative paralysis. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>Domesday Book</em> (1929) follows Browning’s <em>Ring and the +Book</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse2">... the flesh’s explanation</p> + <p class="verse">Is not important, nor to tell whence comes</p> + <p class="verse">A love in the heart—the thing is love at last ...</p> + <p class="verse">My love for Elenor Murray never had</p> + <p class="verse">Other expression than the look of eyes,</p> + <p class="verse">The spiritual thrill of listening to her voice,</p> + <p class="verse">A hand to clasp, kiss upon the lips at best,</p> + <p class="verse">Better to find her soul, as Plato says.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-63">63</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Despite this conscientious restraint the town became aware of the +intimacy, and Alma Bell was forced to resign her position and leave +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse2">... under a cloud</p> + <p class="verse">Because of love for Elenor Murray, yet</p> + <p class="verse">Not lawless love, I write now to make clear.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-64">64</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-189" class="pagenum" title="189"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The single protesting voice in American poetry is that of George +Stirling, whose <em>Strange Waters</em> 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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +From England the variant contribution is even thinner and more +evasive than from America. Richard Aldington’s <em>Loves of Myrrhine +and Konallis</em> (1926) is yet another derivative from Louÿs’s <em>Songs of +Bilitis</em>. 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-65">65</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +Victoria Sackville-West’s <em>King’s Daughter</em> (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 +<a id="page-190" class="pagenum" title="190"></a> +frost, conjure up the spirit—seldom the physical presence—of an +elusive coquette and of the proud speaker, who +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Although the blackness of her heart torment</p> + <p class="verse">Me and her whiteness make me turbulent,[<a class="footnote" href="#6-66">66</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Estranged from all, and rapt, I only ask</p> + <p class="verse">To be alone when I am not with you.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-67">67</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +It is not until reaching the final poem, “Envoi,” that the poet +indicates that anything has actually occurred outside of her haunted +imagination. +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">The catkin from the hazel swung</p> + <p class="verse">When you and I and March were young ...</p> + <p class="verse">The harvest moon rose round and red</p> + <p class="verse">When habit came and wonder fled ...</p> + <p class="verse">Snow lay on hedgerows of December</p> + <p class="verse">Then, when we could no more remember.</p> + <p class="verse">But the green flush was on the larch</p> + <p class="verse">When other loves we found in March.[<a class="footnote" href="#6-68">68</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Cygnet and barnacle goose</p> + <p class="verse">Follow her when she passes</p> + <p class="verse">Barefoot through daisied grasses.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Briars blown straying and loose</p> + <p class="verse">Catch at her as she goes</p> + <p class="verse">Down the path between woodbine and rose.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Seeking to follow and hold her,</p> + <p class="verse">The silly birds and the thorn.</p> + <p class="verse">But her laughter is merry with scorn.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> +<a id="page-191" class="pagenum" title="191"></a> + <p class="verse">What would she say if I told her</p> + <p class="verse">That the goose, and the swan,</p> + <p class="verse">And the thorn, and my spirit, were one?[<a class="footnote" href="#6-69">69</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +A negative note, barely audible, is sounded in the <em>Scrapbook</em> 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.” +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">When we were charming Backfisch</p> + <p class="verse1">With curls and velvet bows</p> + <p class="verse">We shared a charming kitten</p> + <p class="verse1">With tiny velvet toes.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">It was so gay and playful;</p> + <p class="verse1">It flew like a woolly ball</p> + <p class="verse">From my lap to your shoulder—</p> + <p class="verse1">And oh, it was so small,</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">So warm and so obedient,</p> + <p class="verse1">If we cried: “That’s enough!”</p> + <p class="verse">It lay and slept between us,</p> + <p class="verse1">A purring ball of fluff.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">But now that I am thirty</p> + <p class="verse1">And she is thirty-one,</p> + <p class="verse">I shudder to discover</p> + <p class="verse1">How wild our cat has run.</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">It’s bigger than a tiger,</p> + <p class="verse1">Its eyes are jets of flame,</p> + <p class="verse">Its claws are gleaming daggers;</p> + <p class="verse1">Could it have once been tame?</p> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">Take it away; I’m frightened!</p> + <p class="verse1">But she, with placid brow,</p> + <p class="verse">Cries: “This is our Kitty-witty!</p> + <p class="verse1">Why don’t you love her now?”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-70">70</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>Scrapbook</em> and the more +reticent <em>Journal</em> (1928) reveal a compulsive and abject devotion in +<a id="page-192" class="pagenum" title="192"></a> +the lifelong friend alluded to in the poem above. (See, for example, +“Toothache Sunday” in the <em>Scrapbook</em>.) 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#6-71">71</a>] 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). +</p> + +<p> +(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 <em>Daughter of Time</em>, 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?) +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-12"> +<a id="page-193" class="pagenum" title="193"></a> +<span class="line1">CHAPTER VII.</span><br> +<span class="line2">FICTION IN FRANCE</span> +</h2> + +</div> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-12-1"> +Before 1914 +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Aphrodite</em> and <em>Bilitis</em> pictured courtesans +of the classical era, and the adventures of his three girls in <em>King +Pausole</em> were set in a zany fantasy well removed from reality. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-194" class="pagenum" title="194"></a> +personality who, a decade earlier, at seventeen, had come to Paris +from the provinces and married Gauthier-Villars. Consequently, when +<em>Claudine à L’Ecole</em> 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, <em>Claudine à Paris</em> +(1901), <em>Claudine en Ménage</em> (1902) and <em>Claudine s’en Va</em> (1903) +were less his than Colette’s own, and the fifth volume, <em>La Retraite +Sentimentale</em> (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 <em>Claudine at School</em>, <em>Young +Lady of Paris</em>, <em>The Indulgent Husband</em>, and <em>Innocent Wife</em>, and +are fairly well-known. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>départements</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-195" class="pagenum" title="195"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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?[<a class="footnote" href="#7-1">1</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +This précis of the feminine ideal marks the beginning of Colette’s +since-famous dissection of women’s emotional psychology. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>en garçonne</em>, a style eminently suited to her +both physically and psychologically. +</p> + +<p> +During her illness Claudine has heard from Luce that her situation +at the school has become intolerable and she is ready for desperate +<a id="page-196" class="pagenum" title="196"></a> +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 <em>grue</em> 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.” +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The first section of <em>Claudine en Ménage</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-197" class="pagenum" title="197"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#7-2">2</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +In <em>Claudine s’en Va</em> 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 +<a id="page-198" class="pagenum" title="198"></a> +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——”[<a class="footnote" href="#7-3">3</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<em>La Retraite Sentimentale</em>, 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 <em>Wanderjahr</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +The concluding portion of <em>La Retraite Sentimentale</em> 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 +<a id="page-199" class="pagenum" title="199"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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, <em>Ces Plaisirs</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#7-4">4</a>] 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,[<a class="footnote" href="#7-5">5</a>] 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 <em>Ces Plaisirs</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-200" class="pagenum" title="200"></a> +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 <em>Claudine en Ménage</em>, +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 +<em>Claudine s’en Va</em>, 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 <em>Claudine à Paris</em> 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 <em>Sémiramis</em> had just been presented, +figures in <em>Claudine s’en Va</em> in a letter from the music critic Maugis.)[<a class="footnote" href="#7-6">6</a>] +</p> + +<p> +Taken together, the five <em>Claudine</em> 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 “<em>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</em>.”[<a class="footnote" href="#7-7">7</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-201" class="pagenum" title="201"></a> +The <em>Claudine</em> 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, +<em>Astarte</em>, 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 <em>Book of Operas</em> as <em>Omphale</em>, 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 +<em>Mercure de France</em> for April 1901, and the summary in Hirschfeld’s +<em>Jahrbuch</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#7-8">8</a>] of an article in <em>Le Temps</em> 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 <em>amours animales</em> of which Verlaine speaks as to the +harmonious disposition of groups and colors,’ its erotic climax being +veiled in ‘suddenly imposed shadows.’ +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Breville, who finds Leroux’s score worthy of serious attention, is +<a id="page-202" class="pagenum" title="202"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In the same year a popular star of music hall and demi-monde, +Liane de Pougy, published a novel, <em>Idylle Saphique</em>. Rachilde in the +<em>Mercure</em> 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 (<em>honnête</em>), ‘and what is worse, a bluestocking.’[<a class="footnote" href="#7-9">9</a>] +The <em>Jahrbuch</em>, 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 <em>Idylle</em> psychologically sound, and gave an extensive +résumé of the plot,[<a class="footnote" href="#7-10">10</a>] which seems representative enough of the +sensational variant novels of the time to merit review here. Annhine +de Lys, famous Parisian <em>courtisane</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-203" class="pagenum" title="203"></a> +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 +<em>Jahrbuch</em> finds the suitor a wholly incredible character, and believes +only an American could be so casually tolerant. Yet the review +of <em>Claudine en Ménage</em> follows immediately in the same number of +the journal, with no editorial comment on the parallel situations +in the two. +</p> + +<p> +In the following year (1902) a novel of less artistry voiced +strong disapproval of lesbianism. Charles Montfont’s <em>Journal d’une +Saphiste</em> 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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>Sapho de Lesbos</em> and Fauré’s <em>La Derniere +Journée de Sapho</em>, both of which whitewashed their classical heroine; +through Willy’s <em>La Môme Picrate</em>, in which the lesbian motif is +incidental, and de Régnier’s <em>L’Amour et le Plaisir</em>, a clever imitation +<a id="page-204" class="pagenum" title="204"></a> +of eighteenth century farce; to LePage’s <em>Les Fausse Vierges</em> and +Hoche’s <em>Le Vice Mortel</em>, melodramas holding lesbianism responsible +for murder and suicide in improbable circumstances.[<a class="footnote" href="#7-11">11</a>] The only +novel to rate serious consideration in both the <em>Mercure</em> and the +<em>Jahrbuch</em> was Daniel Borys’s <em>Carlotta Noll, Amoureuse et Femme de +Lettres</em> (1905).[<a class="footnote" href="#7-12">12</a>] 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 <em>Claudine +s’en Va</em> had a similar fondness for chloroform. <em>Sic transeunt</em> 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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-12-2"> +Post-War Trends +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 <em>À La Recherche du Temps Perdu</em>, which emerged intermittently +from 1918 to 1926. (<em>Swann’s Way</em> had appeared in 1913, but it and +<em>The Guermantes Way</em> 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 <em>Within a Budding Grove</em>; its development provides +much of the narrative suspense in <em>The Captive</em>, and it reaches a +climax in <em>The Sweet Cheat Gone</em>. 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 <em>Swann’s Way</em>), but this ties into the later +pattern when Marcel learns that Albertine had, during adolescence, +been associated with this pair of women.[<a class="footnote" href="#7-13">13</a>] 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;[<a class="footnote" href="#7-14">14</a>] 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,[<a class="footnote" href="#7-15">15</a>] whom he later ironically discovers to have +been her lover;[<a class="footnote" href="#7-16">16</a>] and his final awareness that even his first love, +<a id="page-205" class="pagenum" title="205"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#7-17">17</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Ces Plaisirs</em> pronounced his +lesbians unconvincing little monsters, and Natalie Clifford Barney +in <em>Aventures de L’Esprit</em> writes of warning him when his early +volumes appeared of the difficulty of translating the experience of +one sex into terms of the other.[<a class="footnote" href="#7-18">18</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +In 1922 Romain Rolland, already famous for his greatest novel, +<em>Jean Christophe</em>, published <em>Annette and Sylvie</em>, the first volume of +his second series, <em>A Soul Enchanted</em>. As <em>Jean Christophe</em> 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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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....[<a class="footnote" href="#7-19">19</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +The two are drawn to one another with an intensity which Annette +<a id="page-206" class="pagenum" title="206"></a> +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, +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +... 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#7-20">20</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#7-21">21</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Their passion fights its way successfully through the phase of their +desiring to dominate and possess one another: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#7-22">22</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-207" class="pagenum" title="207"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Written in the same year and treating the same theme more +obliquely was Victor Margueritte’s <em>La Garçonne</em> (issued in a considerably +expurgated English translation in 1923 as <em>The Bachelor Girl</em>).[<a class="footnote" href="#7-23">23</a>] +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. +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#7-24">24</a>] 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 +<a id="page-208" class="pagenum" title="208"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#7-25">25</a>] +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +As in pre-war years, during this third decade variant novels of +all qualities swarmed from the presses: Proust’s <em>Sodome et Gomorrhe</em> +(1921-22), <em>La Prisonnière</em> (1924), and <em>Albertine Disparue</em> (1925); +in 1925 also, Jacques Lacretelle’s <em>La Bonifas</em> and Edward Bourdet’s +<em>La Prisonnière</em>; 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. +</p> + +<p> +Lacretelle’s novel, translated into English as <em>Marie Bonifas</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-209" class="pagenum" title="209"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-210" class="pagenum" title="210"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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....[<a class="footnote" href="#7-26">26</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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” +<a id="page-211" class="pagenum" title="211"></a> +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 <em>Orpheus</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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, <em>La Bonifas</em> has scarcely been bettered in any language. +</p> + +<p> +Nothing could offer a sharper contrast than Bourdet’s drama, +<em>La Prisonnière</em> (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,[<a class="footnote" href="#7-27">27</a>] 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 +<a id="page-212" class="pagenum" title="212"></a> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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!... <em>Get out</em> while +you still have strength to do it![<a class="footnote" href="#7-28">28</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>woman</em>!” +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-213" class="pagenum" title="213"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +A very few words will do justice to the inferior novels referred +to above. Charles-Etienne’s <em>Les Désexuées</em> 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, +<em>Notre Dame de Lesbos</em> and <em>Léon dit Léonie</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#7-29">29</a>] 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. <em>La Bouche +Fardée</em> 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 <em>Inassouvie</em> 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 +<a id="page-214" class="pagenum" title="214"></a> +heroines, and even more closely to the central figure of James Gibbons +Huneker’s <em>Painted Veils</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +The nadir of quality was touched in Des Vignon’s <em>Plaisirs +Troublants</em>, which like <em>Le Journal d’une Saphiste</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +This wave of homosexual fiction during the Twenties was heavy +enough that a new periodical, <em>Marges</em>, 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![<a class="footnote" href="#7-30">30</a>] +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-215" class="pagenum" title="215"></a> +While chance and not the <em>Marges’</em> 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 <em>Mercure de France</em> and Hirschfeld’s <em>Jahrbuch</em> 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 <em>Le Trille du Diable</em>, has not been translated, and +the other, André Gide’s <em>Geneviève</em>, though published in France in +1936, did not come out in English until 1950. +</p> + +<p> +In 1929 Gide’s <em>School for Wives</em> 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, <em>Robert</em> +(1930), presented the husband’s view of the marriage and of his +own undeserved suffering. The second, <em>Geneviève</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +<a id="page-216" class="pagenum" title="216"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Roland-Manuel’s <em>Le Trille du Diable</em> (1946) is reminiscent of +Lacretelle’s <em>La Bonifas</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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, <em>Le Trille du Diable</em>. +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-217" class="pagenum" title="217"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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, <em>faute de mieux</em>, one of the +town’s eccentrics at whom she had laughed as a girl. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-13"> +<a id="page-218" class="pagenum" title="218"></a> +<span class="line1">CHAPTER VIII.</span><br> +<span class="line2">FICTION IN GERMANY</span> +</h2> + +</div> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-13-1"> +Before 1914 +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 <em>Das Sexualproblem in der modernen Literatur und +Kunst ... seit 1800</em> lists Johannes Flach’s <em>Sappho: Griechische Novelle</em> +(1886) under the heading of homosexual literature without further +comment. The <em>Jahrbuch</em> during 1907 cited a passage from a romantic +novel of the 1820’s, Ernst Wagner’s <em>Isidora</em>, 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#8-1">1</a>] 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 <em>Seraphitus-Seraphita</em> +or <em>Cousine Bette</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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, <em>Aus guter Familie</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#8-2">2</a>] +which included among its heroine’s early experiences a variant, +<a id="page-219" class="pagenum" title="219"></a> +possibly lesbian, attachment—the <em>Jahrbuch’s</em> note does not specify. +In 1900 Elisabeth Dauthendey produced <em>Vom neuen Weib und seiner +Sittlichkeit</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#8-3">3</a>] semi-narrative sketches like Colette’s in <em>Ces Plaisirs</em>. +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 <em>Klinische Novellen</em>—as +the basis for <em>Pierre’s Ehe: Psychologische Probleme</em>.[<a class="footnote" href="#8-4">4</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +In 1900 also, Alfred Meebold included a tragic variant novelette, +“Dr. Erna Redens Thorheit und Erkenntnis,”[<a class="footnote" href="#8-5">5</a>] in the volume <em>Allerhand +Volk</em>. 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 <em>Carlotta Noll</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +In 1901 a Danish novel by O. W. Møller was translated under +the German title <em>Wer kann dafür?</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#8-6">6</a>] 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 +<a id="page-220" class="pagenum" title="220"></a> +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 <em>Aus guter Familie</em>. In contrast, August +Niemann’s <em>Zwei Frauen</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#8-7">7</a>] 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 +<em>Mlle Giraud</em> which is hardly a credit to German letters.’ +</p> + +<p> +Much more interesting, in view of its author’s subsequent reputation, +was Jacob Wassermann’s <em>Geschichte der jungen Renate Fuchs</em> +(1900), and it is a matter of regret that this volume, though it ran +to several editions, has proved inaccessible. The <em>Jahrbuch’s</em> 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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#8-8">8</a>] A puritanic critic later describes the heroine +herself as “wading through all manner of filth,”[<a class="footnote" href="#8-9">9</a>] but makes no reference +to homosexual experience either on her part or anyone’s else. +</p> + +<p> +The year 1903 saw the publication of three lesbian titles. In Maria +Eichhorn’s <em>Fräulein Don Juan</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#8-10">10</a>] 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”[<a class="footnote" href="#8-11">11</a>] in <em>Die neue +Eva</em> 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!’ +</p> + +<p> +An inferior <em>Sind es Frauen?</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#8-12">12</a>] 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 +<a id="page-221" class="pagenum" title="221"></a> +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 <em>Jahrbuch’s</em> +reviewer was most enthusiastic from a psychological viewpoint. +</p> + +<p> +In 1901 <em>Weiberbeute</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#8-13">13</a>] 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 <em>Die Transvestiten</em>. +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 <em>Monsieur Vénus</em>, 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.’ +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-222" class="pagenum" title="222"></a> +‘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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The remaining handful of minor novels before 1910 are of the +sort which invariably appear upon a theme already proved profitable. +<em>Urningsliebe</em>, by “O. Liebetreu”[<a class="footnote" href="#8-14">14</a>] 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 <em>Psychologie der Erbtante</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#8-15">15</a>] 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 +<a id="page-223" class="pagenum" title="223"></a> +with whom she had no luck. ‘Theodor’ (probably Anna) Rüling’s +“Rätselhaft,”[<a class="footnote" href="#8-16">16</a>] one of three novelettes in her <em>Welcher unter Euch +ohne Sünde ist</em>, 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. <em>Dreiunddreissig Scheusale</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#8-17">17</a>] 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 <em>Girl with the Golden Eyes</em>, 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 <em>Anna Karenina</em> +with the brief emotional flame lit in Kitty by Varenka, and Dostoievsky +came a step closer in <em>A Friend of the Family</em>, with the mutual +attraction between Nyelochka and her friend. Both of these incidents +occurred in late adolescence.) +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Monsieur Vénus</em>, <em>Méphistophéla</em>, +or <em>La Gynandre</em> as distantly related to symbolism, but these two men +included the theme in spreading canvases of definitely symbolic +style. +</p> + +<p> +The first is the work of Heinrich Mann, older brother of the more +famous Thomas. His <em>Die Göttinnen</em> (1902-03) is <a id="corr-98"></a>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.’ +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-224" class="pagenum" title="224"></a> +She fills her house with beautiful young people in lieu of canvases +and statues. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +‘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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#8-18">18</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +‘“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.”’[<a class="footnote" href="#8-19">19</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The second major German author is Frank Wedekind, who, +like Balzac, presents three sharply contrasting pictures of female +variance. Comparable in innocence to <em>Seraphitus-Seraphita</em> is the +devotion in <em>Mine-ha-ha</em> (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 +<a id="page-225" class="pagenum" title="225"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Wedekind’s second variant woman is the tailored and monocled +English countess slavishly bound to Lulu, central figure of his +symbolic dramas, <em>Earth Spirit</em> and <em>Pandora’s Box</em>. 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 +<a id="page-226" class="pagenum" title="226"></a> +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 <em>Urningsliebe</em> 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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +‘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.’[<a class="footnote" href="#8-20">20</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>Ewigweibliche</em>. +It is at this point that the apache’s knife ends her +unhappy existence. +</p> + +<p> +In 1911 Wedekind published the satiric and still more symbolic +drama, <em>Franziska: A Modern Mystery</em>, 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 +<a id="page-227" class="pagenum" title="227"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>pater familias</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-228" class="pagenum" title="228"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Franziska</em> possible +in 1911. By 1914 Dr. Kurt Heller was asking in the <em>Jahrbuch</em>: “Wo +bleibt der homoerotische Roman?”[<a class="footnote" href="#8-21">21</a>] He was referring to male homosexuality, +and he deprecated the moralistic tone of Thomas Mann’s +<em>Death in Venice</em>, considering it disappointing from the author of +<em>Buddenbrooks</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +Until the post-war change in government no such freedom prevailed. +In 1917 Sophie Hoechstetter’s <em>Selbstanzeige: Die letzte Flamme</em>[<a class="footnote" href="#8-22">22</a>] +had to be printed privately. When it was attacked by a reviewer in +<em>Der Tag</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +With Hitler’s ascendancy these titles were so soon obliterated +that it is difficult now to find more than the mere record in German +<a id="page-229" class="pagenum" title="229"></a> +trade bibliographies of their original publication. This is especially +true because in 1921 Hirschfeld’s <em>Jahrbuch</em> (by then a <em>Vierteljahrsschrift</em>) +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., <em>Die Freundin</em>, <em>Die Freundschaft</em>, <em>Freundschaft +und Freiheit</em>—later <em>Eros</em>—<em>Junggesellen: mit den Beiblättern +“Frauenliebe,”</em> and <em>Transvestit</em>.) These are now almost completely +lost, so that even descriptive notes on the literature in question are +not accessible today. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-13-2"> +Post-War Gleanings +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +Of the few lesbian novels to reach the United States one of the +best was Anna Elisabet Weirauch’s three-volume <em>Scorpion</em>, which +appeared in Germany between 1919 and 1921. It was translated a +dozen years later in an abridged edition as two separate titles, <em>The +Scorpion</em> (1932) and <em>The Outcast</em> (1933). Though slightly inferior +in literary quality to <em>Marie Bonifas</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 id="page-230" class="pagenum" title="230"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-231" class="pagenum" title="231"></a> +by chance. In the modest hamlet so discovered they spend a few +ecstatic days of veritable honeymoon. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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, <a id="corr-107"></a> 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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-232" class="pagenum" title="232"></a> +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 <em>Scorpion</em> of which it forms the second +part, but is not seriously expurgated in the latter. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 id="page-233" class="pagenum" title="233"></a> +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 <em>à trois</em>. +Utterly revolted, she makes a clean break with this life also, and +searches further for some emotional stability and peace. +</p> + +<p> +The third German volume (of which <em>The Outcast</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-234" class="pagenum" title="234"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Comparison of this novel with <em>La Bonifas</em> 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 <em>La Bonifas</em>, the physical violence +of suicide enacted before the child’s very eyes; in <em>The Scorpion</em>, +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. +</p> + +<p> +A second German lesbian item, <em>Die Schwester</em>, 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 +<a id="page-235" class="pagenum" title="235"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In 1927 Frank Theiss, in <em>Interlude</em>, 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#8-23">23</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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”[<a class="footnote" href="#8-24">24</a>] 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#8-25">25</a>] While the +handling of the episode is somewhat hasty and superficial, the +argument it presents against pre-marital lesbian experience is more +<a id="page-236" class="pagenum" title="236"></a> +subtle and rather more convincing than many one meets in anti-variant +fiction. +</p> + +<p> +A sterner condemnation of lesbianism came from Herbert Eulenberg +in “Der Maler Rayski,” a novelette in the volume <em>Casanova’s +Letzte Abenteuer</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +Since the film <em>Mädchen in Uniform</em> had fairly wide circulation +in this country, Christa Winsloe’s corresponding novel <em>The Child +Manuela</em> 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 id="page-237" class="pagenum" title="237"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-238" class="pagenum" title="238"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In a second novel, translated in 1936 as <em>Girl Alone</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-239" class="pagenum" title="239"></a> +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. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-14"> +<a id="page-240" class="pagenum" title="240"></a> +<span class="line1">CHAPTER IX.</span><br> +<span class="line2">FICTION IN ENGLISH</span> +</h2> + +</div> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-14-1"> +Introduction +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-241" class="pagenum" title="241"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In that year Radclyffe Hall’s <em>Well of Loneliness</em> incurred legal +prosecution for its explicit defense of a lesbian woman.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-1">1</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-242" class="pagenum" title="242"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-2">2</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-243" class="pagenum" title="243"></a> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-14-2"> +The Age of Innocence +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +The last mentioned variant narrative in English was Henry +James’s novelette <em>The Turn of the Screw</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +Within the first quarter of <em>The Farringdons</em> 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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-3">3</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +All the romance of Elisabeth’s nature—and there was a +great deal of it—was lavished upon Anne Farringdon.... +<a id="page-244" class="pagenum" title="244"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-4">4</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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).” +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-5">5</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-6">6</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Two years later (1902) a Canadian-American girl of twenty-one +published <em>The Story of Mary MacLane</em>, 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 +<a id="page-245" class="pagenum" title="245"></a> +authentic by the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +Conspicuous in its self-revelation is undying hatred of the father +whom Mary lost at the age of eight. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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....[<a class="footnote" href="#9-7">7</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Of her mother she says later, +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-8">8</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>before</em> the era when parents could do no right, it +was fairly strong meat. +</p> + +<p> +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.” +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +My shy and sensitive soul would be irretrievably poisoned +and polluted. The defilement of so sacred and beautiful a thing +<a id="page-246" class="pagenum" title="246"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-9">9</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>enfant terrible</em>. +</p> + +<p> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#9-10">10</a>] +Nevertheless, caresses went no farther than “your hand in mine,” +and the association seems to have lasted but a year. Still Mary says: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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?[<a class="footnote" href="#9-11">11</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +This pseudo-naïveté wakes a suspicion of literary influence which +is strengthened by her second volume, <em>My Friend Annabel Lee</em> (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 <em>Oxford Book of Victorian Verse</em> +includes a sonnet of hers, “A Valentine: The Pansy and the Prayer +Book,” ending with the following sestet: +</p> + +<div class="poem-container"> + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="verse">The while I knelt, I let a pansy glide</p> + <p class="verse">Between her grave sweet face and open book</p> + <p class="verse">And whispered as she turned with chiding look—</p> +<a id="page-247" class="pagenum" title="247"></a> + <p class="verse">“Heaven has not willed, dear heart, that aught divide</p> + <p class="verse">Love pure as ours, nor blames if thought of me</p> + <p class="verse">Come like this flower between thy God and thee.”[<a class="footnote" href="#9-12">12</a>]</p> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +This MacLane would have loved, as she would have hated the +farcical treatment of variance in <em>A Florida Enchantment</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>persona</em>, 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, <em>I, Mary +MacLane</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +The next variant item was an historical novel by John Breckenridge +Ellis (1902), but precedence will be given to the recently +published <em>Things As They Are</em> (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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-13">13</a>] It records +the emotional entanglements among three young American women +<a id="page-248" class="pagenum" title="248"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The three girls are characterized at length. Helen is +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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,[<a class="footnote" href="#9-14">14</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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,”[<a class="footnote" href="#9-15">15</a>]—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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-16">16</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +At one point Helen charges her with “middle-class morality,” to +which Adele retorts: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +I simply contend that the middle class ideal which demands +that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, +<a id="page-249" class="pagenum" title="249"></a> +that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal +that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family +life.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-17">17</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +But that (says Helen) means cutting passion quite out of your +scheme of things. Adele replies: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-18">18</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-250" class="pagenum" title="250"></a> +affection for Helen became the more irritable became her +discontent.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-19">19</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-20">20</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +This sentence concludes the book, to which Miss Stein originally +gave the title <em>Quod Erat Demonstrandum</em>, 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, +<a id="page-251" class="pagenum" title="251"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-20">20</a>] +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +John Breckenridge Ellis’s <em>The Holland Wolves</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Sylvia Scarlett</em> of a +few decades later will make the difference apparent.) +</p> + +<p> +The first of the century’s openly published titles by a major writer +was John Masefield’s <em>Multitude and Solitude</em> (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 +<a id="page-252" class="pagenum" title="252"></a> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +a red-haired fierce little poet who sat close by reading and +eating cake. The yellow back of <em>Les Fleurs du Mal</em> was +propped against his teapot. Something of the fierceness and +passion of the Femmes Damnées ... was wreaked upon the +cake.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-21">21</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +“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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-22">22</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>The Getting of Wisdom</em> +<a id="page-253" class="pagenum" title="253"></a> +(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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-23">23</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Another novel with rather stronger variant overtones appeared in +England in 1914, Ethel Sidgwick’s <em>A Lady of Leisure</em>. 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 +<a id="page-254" class="pagenum" title="254"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +When Violet works herself into a collapse and is sent to the +country for the summer, +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-24">24</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.” +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-25">25</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-255" class="pagenum" title="255"></a> +by an established physician. It is, of course, quite innocent +of lesbian implications. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Smith College Stories</em> (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 <em>Ladies’ Home +Journal</em> 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, +<em>The Lass of the Silver Sword</em> by Mary Constance Du Bois, ran in +<em>St. Nicolas Magazine</em> during 1909 and was published in book form +later.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-26">26</a>] 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” (<em>Harper’s Magazine</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-14-3"> +Sophistication and Dispute +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +In 1915 D. H. Lawrence, with <em>The Rainbow</em>, hit the first ringing +blow upon the anvil of controversy. As the messiah of robust heterosexual +<a id="page-256" class="pagenum" title="256"></a> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-27">27</a>] [The last +touch is a highly original bit of anthropometry.] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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,[<a class="footnote" href="#9-28">28</a>] +this act of censorship raised few echoes in comparison with some +cases to be noted later. It did, however, postpone general circulation +<a id="page-257" class="pagenum" title="257"></a> +of the novel, and undoubtedly focussed some attention on lesbianism. +</p> + +<p> +A year later the American Henry Kitchell Webster touched briefly +but scathingly on the subject of variance in <em>The Great Adventure</em> +(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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-29">29</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.” +</p> + +<p> +In January 1917 the first British novel appeared which was devoted +wholly to variance, and the first in English since James’s +<em>The Bostonians</em> of 1855—Clemence Dane’s <em>Regiment of Women</em>. Its +attitude is as bitter as Lawrence’s in <em>The Rainbow</em>, 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 +<a id="page-258" class="pagenum" title="258"></a> +by her alternation of warm praise and stinging raillery, +the praise intensified by “sudden brilliant smiles” and the discreet +laying on of hands. +</p> + +<p> +Clare is a woman of feverish friendships and sudden ruptures, +“unmaternal” to the core +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-30">30</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +... 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. +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#9-31">31</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>King John</em> has +already driven Louise past the limits of stability, and after this +<a id="page-259" class="pagenum" title="259"></a> +double humiliation at the hands of her idolized persecutor, she leaps +to death from an attic window. (This antedated by fifteen years +Winsloe’s <em>Mädchen in Uniform</em>, of which the denouement and certain +other details are so similar that some influence seems beyond +question.) +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-32">32</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-260" class="pagenum" title="260"></a> +can do without marriage.” The reply is: “Poor Clare! Are the grapes +very sour?” +</p> + +<p> +Surprisingly, this “final triumphant insult” touches the quick. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-33">33</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Later in 1917 <em>I, Mary MacLane</em> 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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-261" class="pagenum" title="261"></a> +I knew to it, from a distance, and I lost.... All was broken +without so much as a clasp of hands.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-34">34</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#9-35">35</a>] Elsewhere, she mentions translating Sappho, +and says: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-36">36</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.) +</p> + +<p> +She has now returned to cultivate in solitude the <em>Me</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +Such pointed attacks as those of Lawrence and Miss Dane were +bound to stimulate counterattack. The first appeared in A. T. +Fitzroy’s <em>Despised and Rejected</em> (1918), though women’s variance +was of secondary importance in a novel whose main issue was the +tragic wartime persecution of Conscientious Objectors; particularly +<a id="page-262" class="pagenum" title="262"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-37">37</a>] The author, wife of the composer +Cyril Scott, apparently weathered the storm without major +consequences, though she wrote nothing more under the same +name. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Songe d’une +Femme</em>). At the end she complains: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<a id="page-263" class="pagenum" title="263"></a> +<p class="noindent"> +Everybody seems to think you’re abnormal because you +<em>like</em> 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#9-38">38</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +This is a fair enough statement of a variant argument which will +be encountered again later. +</p> + +<p> +A more oblique and much more artistic species of defense is +incorporated in Arnold Bennett’s <em>The Pretty Lady</em> (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 <a id="corr-113"></a>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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-264" class="pagenum" title="264"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Poor White</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +For a moment they stood thus close together, and a +strange gentle and yet hungry look came into Kate’s eyes. +<a id="page-265" class="pagenum" title="265"></a> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#9-39">39</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.” +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-40">40</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The year’s total balance of sentiment was evened by James Gibbons +Huneker’s <em>Painted Veils</em>. 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.” +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-266" class="pagenum" title="266"></a> +walking stick. Her stride and bearing intrigued [Easter], +who had never seen that sort before.... Allie was always +hugging her when alone.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-41">41</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>Le Soir</em> 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.) +</p> + +<p> +Upon Easter’s return to New York she says to Ulick, who is +jealous of Allie: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>Mlle Maupin</em>. Also about that +perverse puss Satin in <em>Nana</em>. She reminds me of Allie and her +pranks—simply adorable, I tell you! Toujours fidèle.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-42">42</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-43">43</a>] [A <em>queer go</em> +is a bit of <em>double entendre</em> worthy of Spanish comedy.] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Century Magazine</em> a +short-story (“The Fire”) of a small-town girl’s love for the middle-aged +<a id="page-267" class="pagenum" title="267"></a> +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 <em>Regiment of Women</em>. 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 <em>Quest</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +In <em>Labyrinth</em> (1923) Miss Hull attacked from a feminine angle +the problem posed in <em>The Great Adventure</em>: 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. +</p> + +<p> +The ménage of a professor whose wife is nothing but a <em>Hausfrau</em> 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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-268" class="pagenum" title="268"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-44">44</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Vainglory</em> 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 <a id="corr-117"></a>than are a dancer’s veils to hide the form +beneath. Probably the most significant in our field is <em>The Flower +Beneath the Foot</em> (1923).[<a class="footnote" href="#9-45">45</a>] 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 <em>grandes dames</em> +about the court.”[<a class="footnote" href="#9-46">46</a>] Her companion is a ripe and languishing widow. +<a id="page-269" class="pagenum" title="269"></a> +The exiled count upon whom they intended to call catches sight +of their motionless craft and trains his telescope upon it. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>sooner</em>?” he murmured distractedly +aloud.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-47">47</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-14-4"> +Post-War Crescendo +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 <em>Recherche du Temps Perdu</em> 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 <em>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</em> (1915), +the other with <em>Pointed Roofs</em> (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 +<em>La Garçonne</em> was translated in 1923. +</p> + +<p> +A second increasingly important influence was that of Freud, +already discernible in <em>Regiment of Women</em> (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 +<a id="page-270" class="pagenum" title="270"></a> +example was Harvey O’Higgins’ “Story of Julie Cane,” which ran +serially in <em>Harper’s Magazine</em> 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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-48">48</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Few passages have been so explicit since Sappho’s famous Ode, +which was less extended. +</p> + +<p> +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 id="page-271" class="pagenum" title="271"></a> +a physician encourages the intimacy of Julie and Martha, as did +Violet Ashwin’s father in <em>Lady of Leisure</em>, though, of course, without +advocating lesbian activity. In the situation as presented by O’Higgins, +however, some physical release would have been inevitable. +</p> + +<p> +In the same year there appeared in England a much subtler +treatment of variance in Radclyffe Hall’s early novel <em>The Unlit Lamp</em>. +Unlike her better known <em>Well of Loneliness</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Well of Loneliness</em>. But they are only +implicit. +</p> + +<p> +Also in 1924 Arnold Bennett contributed a short draught of his +cool common sense in <em>Elsie and the Child</em>. With customary realism +<a id="page-272" class="pagenum" title="272"></a> +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 <em>The Scorpion</em>) 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-273" class="pagenum" title="273"></a> +In 1925 four novels dealing with variance reached the English +reading public—the translation of Rolland’s <em>Annette and Sylvie</em> and +Virginia Woolf’s <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em>, both treating it briefly and with +sympathy, Sherwood Anderson’s <em>Dark Laughter</em>, touching upon it +even more casually and with disfavor, and Naomi Royde-Smith’s +<em>Tortoiseshell Cat</em>, 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 <em>Poor White</em> and of +little weight in its chief actor’s life. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>that</em> 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-49">49</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Her first experience of this sort came to her in her late teens or +early twenties in connection with the delightful madcap Sally Seton. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<a id="page-274" class="pagenum" title="274"></a> +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>that</em>?” 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! +</p> + +<p> +[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![<a class="footnote" href="#9-50">50</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +When the men of the party (one of them in love with her) return +and make casual, half-teasing conversation, +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-51">51</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-275" class="pagenum" title="275"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +It is a radical step from <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em> to the forthright <em>Tortoiseshell +Cat</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-276" class="pagenum" title="276"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-52">52</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Gillian falls gravely ill from shock, but finally, safe in her sister’s +comfortable home, regains her balance. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-277" class="pagenum" title="277"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-53">53</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +However marred it is by such expository passages and by its sudden +melodramatic suicide, the story carries more conviction than <em>Regiment +of Women</em> through coming to grips with the physical issue +and through its more sympathetic presentation of the lesbian woman. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>The Comedians</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +As to the theatre, the international success of Bourdet’s <em>La Prisonnière</em> +has already been cited. Its New York run as <em>The Captive</em> 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 <em>Hymn to Venus</em> 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 +<em>New York Times</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#9-54">54</a>] chilly and vague, saying of the play only that +its theme was that of <em>The Captive</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +The second effort, <em>The Drag</em> 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 <em>The Captive</em> after a successful run of five months,[<a class="footnote" href="#9-55">55</a>] 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 <em>La Bonifas</em>, or of Rosamund Lehmann’s +<a id="page-278" class="pagenum" title="278"></a> +<em>Dusty Answer</em>, in which the middle section is a study of variance. +There were also oblique variant allusions in Mrs. Woolf’s <em>To the +Lighthouse</em> (1927). +</p> + +<p> +Lacretelle’s stout championship of Marie Bonifas needs no further +comment. <em>To the Lighthouse</em> 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#9-56">56</a>] +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#9-57">57</a>] +</p> + +<p> +Miss Lehmann’s <em>Dusty Answer</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-279" class="pagenum" title="279"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-14-5"> +First Peak: 1928 +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 +<em>Well of Loneliness</em>, Compton Mackenzie’s <em>Extraordinary Women</em>, +Elizabeth Bowen’s <em>The Hotel</em>, and Virginia Woolf’s <em>Orlando</em>. Not +foremost in literary rank but certainly best known is <em>The Well of +Loneliness</em>, for its censorship became a <em>cause célèbre</em> 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, <em>The +Express</em>, with the result that it was banned in England and its +<a id="page-280" class="pagenum" title="280"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-58">58</a>] The reason for its condemnation +while so many other variant novels were passed without action was +its explicit defense of lesbian experience. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>The Rainbow</em>, but, of course, presented with complete sympathy. +Now united, the two girls attempt to make a life for themselves in +Paris, but neither <a id="corr-120"></a>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 +<a id="page-281" class="pagenum" title="281"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The story is more engrossing than <em>The Unlit Lamp</em> 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 <em>Marie Bonifas</em>, +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, +<em>The Well of Loneliness</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +Compton Mackenzie entered the variant lists armed with gentle +satire. <em>Extraordinary Women</em>, like Norman Douglas’s <em>South Wind</em> +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 <em>La Gynandre</em> 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 <em>boxeuses</em> 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 +<a id="page-282" class="pagenum" title="282"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Among these outspoken narratives Miss Bowen’s quiet social +comedy, <em>The Hotel</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +When the son arrives on holiday it is clear that he is held captive +on a similar emotional leash, and Sydney’s intelligence recognizes +<a id="page-283" class="pagenum" title="283"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +This study of heartless egotism may owe something to <em>Regiment +of Women</em>, 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 <em>The Hotel</em> is among the year’s more positive +canvases, its quiet statement carries authority. +</p> + +<p> +Any cursory treatment of Mrs. Woolf’s <em>Orlando</em> 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 <em>Orlando</em> 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 id="page-284" class="pagenum" title="284"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-59">59</a>]) +</p> + +<p> +In the sixteenth century Orlando is a budding poetic dramatist +(as was Thomas Sackville, of the family living even <a id="corr-123"></a>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. +</p> + +<p> +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....”[<a class="footnote" href="#9-60">60</a>] +</p> + +<p> +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, +<a id="page-285" class="pagenum" title="285"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-61">61</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>bête noire</em>, 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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-286" class="pagenum" title="286"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-62">62</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +The neatness with which fantasy here dodges any scandalous implications +may well account for the difficult <em>tour de force</em> which +the whole volume is. +</p> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +There was something definite and distinct about the age, +which reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that +there was a distinction, a desperation....[<a class="footnote" href="#9-63">63</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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!” +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#9-64">64</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-287" class="pagenum" title="287"></a> +<em>Lebensraum</em> for the creative artist. Nevertheless, the total sum +of Orlando’s experience is, beyond question, bisexual. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Well of Loneliness</em> +restrained British publishers only from issuing lesbian propaganda. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-15"> +<a id="page-288" class="pagenum" title="288"></a> +<span class="line1">CHAPTER X.</span><br> +<span class="line2">FICTION IN ENGLISH (continued)</span> +</h2> + +</div> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-15-1"> +Sequel to Censorship +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 <em>Monsieur Vénus</em> and Colette’s <em>Claudine at School</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +Among this six-years’ crop a handful of more or less negative +contributions, all by American women, probably stemmed from +Miss Lehmann’s <em>Dusty Answer</em>, 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 <em>We Sing +Diana</em>, the variant passages would seem a deliberate counterattack +upon <em>Well of Loneliness</em> 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 +<a id="page-289" class="pagenum" title="289"></a> +college. There, during her freshman year, Nora is an inadvertent +witness of an emotional scene between two brilliant and respected +upperclassmen. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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....[<a class="footnote" href="#10-1">1</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +And of a girl who suddenly embraces Nora, the author says: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-2">2</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +(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. +</p> + +<p> +A milder reaction is registered in <em>Against the Wall</em> (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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<a id="page-290" class="pagenum" title="290"></a> +<p class="noindent"> +“Is anything that doesn’t end in—babies—abnormal, perverted?” +</p> + +<p> +“I suppose so, if you come right down to it.” +</p> + +<p> +“If there’s so much of it I don’t see why it’s abnormal.” +</p> + +<p> +“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?”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-3">3</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +To this Socratic question there is a chorus of affirmatives from everyone +save a member of the suspect group who chances to be present. +</p> + +<p> +Marion Patton-Waldron’s <em>Dance on the Tortoise</em> (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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +“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!”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-4">4</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In the same year Elisabeth Wilkins Thomas, in <em>Ella</em>, touched on +variance so gingerly as to be almost ambiguous. Ella knows but two +<a id="page-291" class="pagenum" title="291"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Mary Lapsley’s <em>Parable of the Virgins</em> (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 +<a id="page-292" class="pagenum" title="292"></a> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-5">5</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +Turning to items outside the college category, the briefest of +1929’s comments on variance was the bitter passage in Theiss’s translated +<em>Interlude</em>, in which lesbianism is excoriated and held responsible +for the failure of its victim’s first marriage. Equally hostile was +Wyndham Lewis’s <em>Apes of God</em> (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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-6">6</a>] +</p> + +<p> +In the single novel of these two years wholly devoted to variance, +Naomi Royde-Smith’s <em>The Island</em> (1929), implicit censure is more +impersonal but equally harsh, and the influence of Freud is obvious. +<a id="page-293" class="pagenum" title="293"></a> +In the same author’s <em>Tortoiseshell Cat</em>, 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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-7">7</a>] [The +classic refusal to compete.] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>à deux</em> 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 +<a id="page-294" class="pagenum" title="294"></a> +or, years later, an independent daughter. Goosey’s life is spent in +waiting. +</p> + +<p> +Early in this intermittent association the two women became +intimate. For Goosey at first, +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +Here were no reluctances, no shame, no abashment. This +was love without conditions, maternal in tenderness, marital +in strength, but equal and unfettering.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-8">8</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-9">9</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In <em>The Tortoiseshell Cat</em> the lesbian aggressor was somewhat masculine, +and had herself been seduced when young. In <em>The Island</em> 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 +<a id="page-295" class="pagenum" title="295"></a> +earlier novel created the illusion of being drawn from life, this one +smacks too strongly of a case history to come off well artistically. +</p> + +<p> +A milder but scarcely happy picture is painted in <em>That Other +Love</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +In addition to the translation of Colette’s second Claudine volume +as <em>Young Lady of Paris</em> (and Mrs. Lapsley’s college story), 1931 +produced an interesting contrast: one novel of highest quality, Dorothy +Richardson’s <em>Dawn’s Left Hand</em>, and one, the first of its kind +in our immediate field, which was cheaply sensational. This last, +Sheila Donisthorpe’s <em>Loveliest of Friends</em>, may be left for discussion +with others of its ilk. Miss Richardson’s title was tenth in the dozen +comprising <em>Pilgrimage</em>, 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 +<a id="page-296" class="pagenum" title="296"></a> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +... 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-10">10</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-11">11</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-12">12</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +The climax of this affair occurs while Miriam is house guest of Hypo +<a id="page-297" class="pagenum" title="297"></a> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-13">13</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +At another time +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.... +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +He was incapable of homage.... It was his constricted, +biological way of seeing sex that kept him blind.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-14">14</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-298" class="pagenum" title="298"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +This was the year in which the German motion picture <em>Mädchen +in Uniform</em> was released and Weirauch’s <em>Scorpion</em> translated. (The +latter’s sequel, <em>The Outcast</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +The most nearly sympathetic was Thomas Beer, whose volume of +short stories, <em>Mrs. Egg and Other Barbarians</em>, 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 +<a id="page-299" class="pagenum" title="299"></a> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +“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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-15">15</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +“They’re human beings, Dammy. [But] if they’d stayed a minute +longer I’d ha’ screamed. Oh, Dammy, ain’t things +peculiar!”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-16">16</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The next episode, narrowly skirting the sensational level, was included +in <em>Orient Express</em> by the British Graham Greene,[<a class="footnote" href="#10-17">17</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +In <em>Entertaining the Islanders</em>, Struthers Burt’s most sophisticated +effort, he treats the modish theme less gently. After a three-year liaison +<a id="page-300" class="pagenum" title="300"></a> +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, +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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?[<a class="footnote" href="#10-18">18</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +He wonders how husbands put up with “childlike little ghosts.... +Children making childlike little substitutions for reality ... and +always so proud of their substitutions.”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-19">19</a>] This, of course, is close to +quotation from Freud. +</p> + +<p> +Sinclair Lewis hit even harder in <em>Ann Vickers</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +The final blow of the year was struck by George Jean Nathan, +dramatic critic for the <em>American Statesman</em>, 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-20">20</a>] In this skit, +“Design for Loving,” (the title a jibe at Noel Coward’s <em>Design for +Living</em>), the cast includes: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +Lord Derek, a hermaphrodite; his father, an onanist; his +mother, a lesbian; his sister, a flagellant; Lady Vi Twining, +<a id="page-301" class="pagenum" title="301"></a> +his sister’s friend, an auto-erotist with tribade tendencies; his +servant, a homosexual and transvestist;[<a class="footnote" href="#10-21">21</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +If Nathan hoped to purge the current theatre by ridicule, he was +doomed to prompt disappointment. In 1934 a translation of <em>Mädchen +in Uniform</em> 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 +<em>The Children’s Hour</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Mlle +Maupin</em>, 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 +<a id="page-302" class="pagenum" title="302"></a> +Mendès, distinguish between light and darkness here on the strength +of technicalities alone? The text provides no answer. +</p> + +<p> +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, <em>The End of a Childhood</em>, which +Miss Richardson gave to the public in 1934, were written earlier. The +title group consists of fragments related to her <em>Richard Mahoney</em> +novels (1917-1929) which seem rather discards than sequels (as were +those in Galsworthy’s <em>On Forsyte ’Change</em>). Another group entitled +“Growing Pains” is more reminiscent of her <em>Getting of Wisdom</em> 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 <em>The Getting of Wisdom</em>, is the absence of a +father and the relative insignificance or incompatibility of the mother. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>mind</em>.” “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. +</p> + +<p> +“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, +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +Oh the shame of it!... not to have “taken,” to have failed +<a id="page-303" class="pagenum" title="303"></a> +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 <em>fault</em>!” ... 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-22">22</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>double +entendre</em>. 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 <em>stick</em> being laughed +at!”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-23">23</a>] 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-24">24</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +In Victoria Sackville-West’s <em>Dark Island</em> (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 +<a id="page-304" class="pagenum" title="304"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Dawn’s Left +Hand</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-305" class="pagenum" title="305"></a> +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 <em>tour de force</em> as Mrs. Woolf’s <em>Orlando</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +As distinguished as the work of these two British women was +<em>Seven Gothic Tales</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-306" class="pagenum" title="306"></a> +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. <em>Marie Bonifas</em>). +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. +</p> + +<p> +Another contribution from the continent was the translation of +Colette’s <em>Claudine s’en Va</em> as <em>The Innocent Wife</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +The remainder of the year’s crop were also American, two of +good quality. One was Anthony Thorne’s heartening idyll, <em>Delay in +the Sun</em>, 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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<em>barrera</em>. 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-25">25</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +<a id="page-307" class="pagenum" title="307"></a> +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: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-26">26</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In <em>After Such Pleasures</em>, 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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-15-2"> +The Worm’s Turning +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 +<a id="page-308" class="pagenum" title="308"></a> +was a fairly obvious rebuttal of <em>Well of Loneliness</em>, it deserves more +attention than some others. It was <em>Loveliest of Friends</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Well of Loneliness</em>, just as a vivid +phrase applied to Kim—“a head so fiercely alive it seemed delicately +to light the air around it”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-27">27</a>]—is lifted verbatim from the description +of Jennifer in Miss Lehmann’s <em>Dusty Answer</em>. +</p> + +<p> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-309" class="pagenum" title="309"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-28">28</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +This effusion is an obvious retort to Miss Hall’s relatively controlled +plea for tolerance at the end of <em>Well of Loneliness</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +The next exhibit was from the pen of the American Tiffany +Thayer, writer of near-erotica, and comprises one chapter in his +<em>Thirteen Women</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +Of the same calibre was <em>The Establishment of Madame Antonia</em> +(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. +</p> + +<p> +The title of Idabel Williams’s <em>Hellcat</em> (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 +<a id="page-310" class="pagenum" title="310"></a> +which sees in lesbians only fit subjects for police court or madhouse. +</p> + +<p> +Gerald Foster’s <em>Strange Marriage</em> (1934) deserves an extra word +because here transvestism basically affects the plot for the first time +since the fantastic German <em>Weiberbeute</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +As Lilyan Brock’s <em>Queer Patterns</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +Quite the most melodramatic of the lot was <em>Male and Female</em> +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 +<a id="page-311" class="pagenum" title="311"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Virtually the last item of this sort from the point of date was +Gawen Brownrigg’s <em>Star Against Star</em> (1936), pretending to British +authorship, but, like <em>Loveliest of Friends</em>, written in American +idiom. It apes <em>Well of Loneliness</em> 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 <em>rive gauche</em>. +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 <em>That Other Love</em>: 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Love Like a Shadow</em>, which, although written +under the name of Lois Lodge, exhibits many of the characteristics of +<a id="page-312" class="pagenum" title="312"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Cut from the same cloth was <em>Mardigras Madness</em> (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 +<em>something</em> which set them apart from anyone she had ever known.”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-29">29</a>] +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 +<a id="page-313" class="pagenum" title="313"></a> +under Frankie’s soothing touch.”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-30">30</a>] The whole incident occupies +a half-dozen pages. +</p> + +<p> +This title had a significant publishing history. In 1938 the same +firm issued <em>One Reckless Night</em> 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.”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-31">31</a>] 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 <em>Love Like a Shadow</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Naked Escape</em>, +<em>Innocent Adulteress</em>, and <em>Born to be Bad</em>. Male homosexuality, as +well, was represented in a handful of dubious volumes culminating in +<em>Scarlet Pansy</em>. 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 +<a id="page-314" class="pagenum" title="314"></a> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-15-3"> +Above Reproach +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 <em>Girl Alone</em> and Colette’s +<em>The Indulgent Husband</em>, and also of Gale Wilhelm’s <em>We Too Are +Drifting</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<em>Hermaphroditus</em>, 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 +<a id="page-315" class="pagenum" title="315"></a> +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 <em>The Bostonians</em>. 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 <em>Star Against Star</em>, the older and +well-established woman is the one to suffer from a consuming intimacy. +</p> + +<p> +The British contribution of the year was a brief section of +Francis Brett Young’s <em>White Ladies</em>, in which the now familiar pattern +of <em>Regiment of Women</em> 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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-32">32</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-316" class="pagenum" title="316"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In 1936 Rosamond Lehmann skimmed variance fleetingly in +<em>Weather in the Streets</em> 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;[<a class="footnote" href="#10-33">33</a>] the suspicions are, however, +unfounded. Marcia Davenport gave her prima donna in <em>Of +Lena Geyer</em> just such a faithful adorer as Allie Wentworth in Huneker’s +satiric <em>Painted Veils</em>, but she is careful to specify that though +gossip attributed a lesbian color to the relationship it was actually +blameless.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-34">34</a>] (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.) +</p> + +<p> +The year’s most important item was the British edition (the +American followed in 1937) of <em>Nightwood</em> 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 <em>Nightwood</em> 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 <em>Nightwood</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-317" class="pagenum" title="317"></a> +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 <em>in toto</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +Perceptibly related in style, although far inferior in artistry, is +Helen Anderson’s <em>Pity for Women</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Book of Ruth</em>. 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 +<a id="page-318" class="pagenum" title="318"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +After these two studies, ultra-modern in manner and somewhat +morbid in substance, to read Elisabeth Craigin’s <em>Either is Love</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-319" class="pagenum" title="319"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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, <em>Either is Love</em>. The author’s final comment upon variance +is well-considered enough to warrant quotation: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-35">35</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Nevertheless, in the same year the imported French film <em>Club de +Femmes</em>, its story by Jacques Deval, was drastically cut for New York +showing. The review in <em>Time</em> said: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-36">36</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>The Censor Marches On</em>, 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 +<a id="page-320" class="pagenum" title="320"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In 1938 the important contributions came from Gale Wilhelm and +Kay Boyle. To be sure, Dorothy Baker in <em>Young Man with a Horn</em> +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 <em>The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine +Stories</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +Miss Wilhelm’s second novelette, <em>Torchlight to Valhalla</em>, 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 <em>The Tortoiseshell Cat</em>. 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 <em>We +Too Are Drifting</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Gentlemen, +I Address You Privately</em> there had been hints of male homosexuality. +Incorporated in <em>Monday Night</em> 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 <em>soi-disant</em> Russian princess, fugitive from +the Revolution of 1917. This Baya, world-vagabond, automobile racer +<a id="page-321" class="pagenum" title="321"></a> +and aviator, even masquerades on occasion in the father’s World +War I uniform, +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-37">37</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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.” +</p> + +<p> +Miss Boyle’s second narrative, “The Bridegroom’s Body,” did +not appear in book form until 1940 when it was included in the +volume <em>The Crazy Hunter</em>, but the <em>Southern Quarterly</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-322" class="pagenum" title="322"></a> +because she too hates their predatory cruelty. Her long walks she has +taken +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +“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 ...”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-38">38</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Lady Glourie quiets her, +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-39">39</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>Delay in the Sun</em>, +the reader must supply for himself the ultimate outcome. +</p> + +<p> +Nineteen-thirty-nine saw the publication of two dissimilar novels, +the American and anonymous <em>Diana</em>,[<a class="footnote" href="#10-40">40</a>] and <em>Promise of Love</em> 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 +<a id="page-323" class="pagenum" title="323"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +<em>Diana</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>We Too Are +Drifting</em>. 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 +<a id="page-324" class="pagenum" title="324"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-41">41</a>] 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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-15-4"> +Another War’s Shadow +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 <em>The Little Less</em> (1941) reports +effects as devastating as those in <em>The Island</em> 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 <em>Lonely Parade</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +The inexplicable burst of five titles in 1943 was largely damning, +the minority report being Dorothy Cowlin’s in <em>Winter Solstice</em>, 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 <em>Having a Wonderful Crime</em>, +in which the heiress is the victim. In Jane Bowles’s <em>Two Serious +Ladies</em>, an inhibited Brooklyn housewife finds her first experience outside +<a id="page-325" class="pagenum" title="325"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +On a level to be taken seriously, Arthur Koestler in <em>Arrival and +Departure</em> 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, +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-42">42</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +Certainly best-known of the year’s titles is Dorothy Baker’s <em>Trio</em>, +on which a play was based, since its stage history virtually duplicated +that of <em>The Captive</em> 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 <em>New Yorker</em> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>fin de +siècle</em> 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 +<a id="page-326" class="pagenum" title="326"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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—<em>The Captive</em>, +<em>Mädchen in Uniform</em>, <em>The Children’s Hour</em>, and <em>Trio</em>—only the +German film succeeded in being good theatre without blurring in +some way the variant theme. +</p> + +<p> +Two passing references in 1944 were Erskine Caldwell’s single +flippant paragraph in <em>Tragic Ground</em>: a bartender’s account of +discovering his wife at play in the back room of her beauty salon +with two of her young patrons,[<a class="footnote" href="#10-43">43</a>] and Jean Stafford’s vignette in +<em>Boston Adventure</em> 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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-44">44</a>] +</p> + +<p> +In 1945 Nora Lofts inserted in her historical novel <em>Jassy</em> 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 +<a id="page-327" class="pagenum" title="327"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In the same year Mary Renault in <em>The Middle Mist</em> provided a +tonic relief with a variant portrait as piquant as any since <em>Mlle de +Maupin</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>The Middle Mist</em> 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 +<a id="page-328" class="pagenum" title="328"></a> +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. +</p> + +<h3 class="section" id="subchap-0-15-5"> +Second Crescendo +</h3> + +<p class="first"> +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 +<em>Arch of Triumph</em> (1945 in English), Edmund Wilson’s +<em>Memoirs of Hecate County</em> (1946), Felix Forrest’s <em>Carola</em> (1948), +Philip Wylie’s <em>Opus 21</em> (1949) and <em>Disappearance</em> (1951), Theodora +Keogh’s <em>Meg</em> (1950), Robert Wilder’s <em>Wait for Tomorrow</em> (1952), +Joan Henry’s <em>Women in Prison</em> (1952) and Maurice Druon’s <em>Rise of +Simon Lachaume</em> (1951; in English, 1952). Characters varied from +prostitutes to socialites; action, from sentimental philandering to +a jealous knifing. +</p> + +<p> +Longer derogatory treatments were presented by an equal number +of authors. In 1946 Jean Paul Sartre’s <em>No Exit</em> (a translation of <em>Huis +Clos</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +Christopher LaFarge’s <em>The Sudden Guest</em> (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, +<a id="page-329" class="pagenum" title="329"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Three comparatively mediocre works of 1947 were equally severe. +George Willis’s <em>Little Boy Blues</em> 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 <em>Hetty Dorval</em> 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 +<em>Not Now but NOW</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +The title figure in James Ronald’s <em>The Angry Woman</em> (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 <em>Méphistophéla</em>), +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. +</p> + +<p> +A more complex case appears in Margaret Landon’s <em>Never Dies +the Dream</em> (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 <em>Book of Ruth</em>. Like its author’s now famous <em>Anna and the +King of Siam</em>, 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 +<a id="page-330" class="pagenum" title="330"></a> +“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. +</p> + +<p> +Hugh Wheeler’s <em>The Crippled Muse</em> (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 <em>Regiment +of Women</em>, 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 <em>Goblin Market</em> in her original capture of Loretta +by stressing their parallelism—unconvincing—to Lizzie and Laura). +</p> + +<p> +Less tolerance of lesbianism marks Sara Harris’s <em>The Wayward +Ones</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +<a id="page-331" class="pagenum" title="331"></a> +Perhaps the most virulent attack was launched by Simon Eisner in +<em>Naked Storm</em>, 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 <em>deus ex machina</em>. +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. +</p> + +<p> +The latest condemnation is incorporated in <em>Strange Sisters</em> (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 <em>Star Against Star</em>). +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>A Trip to London</em> +(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 <em>The Mesh</em>, a Freudian study of a domineering +<a id="page-332" class="pagenum" title="332"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +Another paper-backed original was <em>Women’s Barracks</em> (1950) by +Toreska Torres (according to <em>Publishers Weekly</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +Easily the eeriest of all references to variance is Shirley Jackson’s +in her remarkable study of late adolescence, <em>Hangsaman</em> (1951). +Here a girl, as precariously balanced as Ann in <em>Pity for Women</em>, 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 <em>Hangsaman</em> is that of an abnormally +sensitive girl’s narrow escape from schizophrenia. +</p> + +<p> +In the same year Whit and Hallie Burnett included in <em>Sextet: +Six Story Discoveries</em> John Eichrodt’s “Nadia Devereux,” which +its author describes as a feminine “parody” of Thomas Mann’s <em>Death +in Venice</em>. 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 +<a id="page-333" class="pagenum" title="333"></a> +follows the older woman’s gradual disintegration and death from +the violence of her inhibited yet undisciplined passion. +</p> + +<p> +Appearing also in 1951 was a sensational trifle reminiscent of the +worst of the 1930s, <em>Strange Fires</em> by Jack Woodford. This is a sexual +riot with lesbian action prominent, in which, as in <em>Love Like a +Shadow</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +A sympathetic treatment which bows to orthodox standards +by ending tragically is presented in <em>Spring Fire</em> (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. +</p> + +<p> +Two much happier episodes were featured in novels of 1952. In +Fay Adams’s paper-backed original, <em>Appointment in Paris</em>, 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, <em>A Shower of Summer Days</em>, 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 +<a id="page-334" class="pagenum" title="334"></a> +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 <em>To the Lighthouse</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Ladders to Fire</em> (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, +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-45">45</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 +<a id="page-335" class="pagenum" title="335"></a> +any woman Djuna looks at that the friendship perishes of its own +intensity. At one point Djuna sees that +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-46">46</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-47">47</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Miss Pym +Disposes</em> (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 +<a id="page-336" class="pagenum" title="336"></a> +seniors who lead their class, of whom an older foreign classmate +says: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +That David and Jonathan relationship—it is a very happy +one, no doubt, but it <em>excludes</em> so much. <em>Nice</em>, of course, quite +irreproachable. But normal, no.[<a class="footnote" href="#10-48">48</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +“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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The same author’s <em>To Love and Be Wise</em> (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 +<a id="page-337" class="pagenum" title="337"></a> +ancient Greece.”[<a class="footnote" href="#10-49">49</a>] His presence breeds complications in both household +and community. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +In the year between Miss Tey’s two volumes an anonymous <em>Olivia</em> +(1949) was so reminiscent in style of <em>Either Is Love</em> 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 +<a id="page-338" class="pagenum" title="338"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +A less innocent adolescent record written by Françoise Mallet, +a married woman of twenty, was published in Paris (1951) as <em>Le +Rempart des Béguines</em>, in New York (1952) as <em>The Illusionist</em>, and +in paper-covers (1953) as <em>The Loving and Daring</em>. 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 <em>in toto</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +A last sensational and ill-written item of the penny-dreadful type +was Carol Hales’s <em>Wind Woman</em> (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 +<a id="page-339" class="pagenum" title="339"></a> +volume she comes as near to open proposal of intimacy as an author +could risk without being sued by the psychiatric profession. +</p> + +<p> +The final tale to be considered, Claire Morgan’s <em>The Price of +Salt</em> (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 <em>Tortoiseshell Cat</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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.” +</p> + +<p> +In reaction to the shock, Therese feels not only abandoned but +betrayed, as though Carol’s picking her up and dropping her had +<a id="page-340" class="pagenum" title="340"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Diana</em>. In a letter to Therese +after a legal session, Carol summarizes the essence of the argument: +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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....[<a class="footnote" href="#10-50">50</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +<a id="page-341" class="pagenum" title="341"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>The Mesh</em> and <em>The Illusionist</em> have not been +heavily attacked; neither have condemnatory treatments even of such +low calibre as <em>Naked Storm</em> and the reprint of <em>Queer Patterns</em>. But +blacklists have lumped <em>Spring Fire</em>, <em>Appointment in Paris</em>, and +<em>Women’s Barracks</em> 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. +</p> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="conclusion" id="chapter-0-16"> +<a id="page-342" class="pagenum" title="342"></a> +CONCLUSION +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="first"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-343" class="pagenum" title="343"></a> +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 <em>mauvais sujets</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +If not heredity, what explanation does literature offer for these +variants? Sometimes none. <a id="corr-133"></a>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 +<a id="page-344" class="pagenum" title="344"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-345" class="pagenum" title="345"></a> +maternal tenderness and understanding bulks large among influences +leading to variant behavior. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>The Scorpion</em>, 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-346" class="pagenum" title="346"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-347" class="pagenum" title="347"></a> +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 <em>Queer Patterns</em>; the schoolmistresses +in <em>The Children’s Hour</em>; a college instructor in <em>Diana</em>; and it constituted +a serious risk for nurses in <em>Promise of Love</em> and government +employees in <em>Either is Love</em>. 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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-348" class="pagenum" title="348"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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? +</p> + +<p> +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 +<a id="page-349" class="pagenum" title="349"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 <em>Mme. Adonis</em> +and <em>Die Schwester</em> the relatively sympathetic title figures meet +violent death; in <em>Méphistophéla</em>, <em>The Island</em>, <em>The Captive</em>, and <em>Pity +for Women</em>, they end in madness or severe neurosis. In minor French +tales of the last century, variant couples destroy one another by excessive +<a id="page-350" class="pagenum" title="350"></a> +physical indulgence, and in virtually all censorious novels they +bring much harm or suffering to those with whom they are associated. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>Diana</em> and <em>Either is Love</em>, 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 +<em>Dark Island</em> or Masefield in <em>Multitude and Solitude</em>. +</p> + +<p> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#Co-1">1</a>] The personality inventories constructed by +psychologists and derived from probably even more numerous observations +show that sex also determines many other interests and attitudes.[<a class="footnote" href="#Co-2">2</a>] +Thus men and women live to a certain extent in different +subjective worlds—a fact recently dramatized by Philip Wylie in +<em>Disappearance</em>. +</p> + +<p> +With regard to variant literature, this means that men, who pass +some nine-tenths of the judgments upon it, are attempting to +<a id="page-351" class="pagenum" title="351"></a> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#Co-3">3</a>] 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 <em>are</em> 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 <em>are</em> 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. +</p> + +<p> +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[<a class="footnote" href="#Co-4">4</a>] 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 +<a id="page-352" class="pagenum" title="352"></a> +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 +</p> + +<div class="excerpt"> +<p class="noindent"> +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.[<a class="footnote" href="#Co-5">5</a>] +</p> + +</div> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</p> + +<p> +The women who began in the mid-nineteenth century to write +like women were writing also largely <em>for</em> 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 +<a id="page-353" class="pagenum" title="353"></a> +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. +</p> + +<p> +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. +</p> + +<p class="tb"> +* * * +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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, +<a id="page-354" class="pagenum" title="354"></a> +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. +</p> + +<div class="notes"> +<a id="page-355" class="pagenum" title="355"></a> +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="appendix" id="chapter-0-17"> +NOTES +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="note"> +Notes refer to items in the bibliography by letter and number only. +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +Foreword +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="F-1"> +1. An earlier edition of <a class="biblio" href="#C-72">C 72</a> +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +Introduction +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="I-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#C-111">C 111</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="I-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#C-153">C 153</a>, <a class="biblio" href="#C-154">C 154</a> +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +I. Ancient Record +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#A-250">A 250</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#A-251">A 251</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#B-199">B 199</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-4"> +4. <a class="biblio" href="#A-213">A 213</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-5"> +5. <a class="biblio" href="#A-251">A 251</a>:15 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-6"> +6. <a class="biblio" href="#A-250">A 250</a> & <a class="biblio" href="#B-199">B 199</a>, notes +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-7"> +7. <a class="biblio" href="#A-251">A 251</a>:67 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-8"> +8. <em>ibid.</em>:39 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-9"> +9. <em>ibid.</em>:97, 3 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-10"> +10. <em>ibid.</em>:90 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-11"> +11. <a class="biblio" href="#A-250">A 250</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-12"> +12. <a class="biblio" href="#B-174">B 174</a>:134; <a class="biblio" href="#B-199">B 199</a>:319 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-13"> +13. <a class="biblio" href="#A-250">A 250</a>:155 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-14"> +14. <em>ibid.</em>:166 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-15"> +15. <em>ibid.</em>:155 & note +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-16"> +16. <a class="biblio" href="#B-173">B 173</a>:209 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-17"> +17. <a class="biblio" href="#A-251">A 251</a>:30 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-18"> +18. <a class="biblio" href="#A-28">A 28</a>:209, note 2; <a class="biblio" href="#A-28a">A 28a</a>:235, note 1 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-19"> +19. <a class="biblio" href="#A-28">A 28</a>:210; <a class="biblio" href="#A-28a">A 28a</a>:236 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-20"> +20. <a class="biblio" href="#B-39">B 39</a> v.2:665 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-21"> +21. <a class="biblio" href="#B-18">B 18</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-22"> +22. <a class="biblio" href="#B-162">B 162</a> v.1:101 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-23"> +23. <a class="biblio" href="#C-72">C 72</a> v.1 pt.4:197 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-24"> +24. <a class="biblio" href="#A-7">A 7</a> v.2 (VII):718; v.4 (XII):365 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-25"> +25. <a class="biblio" href="#A-8">A 8</a> v.2:151; <a class="biblio" href="#C-72">C 72</a> v.2 pt.2:41 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-26"> +26. <a class="biblio" href="#B-69">B 69</a> v.2 Chap. 6 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-27"> +27. <a class="biblio" href="#B-199">B 199</a>:108, 109 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-28"> +28. <a class="biblio" href="#A-8">A 8</a> v.1:203 & <a class="biblio" href="#B-65">B 65</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-29"> +29. Bloomington, Ind., newspaper +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-30"> +30. <a class="biblio" href="#C-192">C 192</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-31"> +31. <a class="biblio" href="#A-8">A 8</a> v.1:395 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-32"> +32. <em>ibid.</em> v.2:191-93 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-33"> +33. <em>ibid.</em> v.2:41 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-34"> +34. <em>ibid.</em> v.2:89 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-35"> +35. <a class="biblio" href="#A-214">A 214</a> v.l:35-41 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-36"> +36. <em>ibid.</em> v.2:107-13 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-37"> +37. <em>ibid.</em> v.1:91-92 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-38"> +38. <em>ibid.</em> v.2:51-60 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-39"> +39. <em>ibid.</em> v.2:60, note +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-40"> +40. <em>ibid.</em> v.1:199-205 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-41"> +41. <a class="biblio" href="#A-140">A 140</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-42"> +42. <a class="biblio" href="#A-183">A 183</a>: I. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-43"> +43. <em>ibid.</em>:VII +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-44"> +44. <a class="biblio" href="#A-7">A 7</a> v.2:11, 345, 450 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-45"> +45. <a class="biblio" href="#A-171">A 171</a> v.1 (V): 100-05 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-46"> +46. <em>ibid.</em> (XII): 130-42 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="1-47"> +47. <a class="biblio" href="#A-2">A 2</a>:192 +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +II. Dark ages to Age of Reason +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#B-148">B 148</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-2"> +2. <em>ibid.</em> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-3"> +<a id="page-356" class="pagenum" title="356"></a> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#B-97">B 97</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-4"> +4. <a class="biblio" href="#B-119">B 119</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-5"> +5. <a class="biblio" href="#B-18">B 18</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-6"> +6. <a class="biblio" href="#B-71">B 71</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-7"> +7. <a class="biblio" href="#A-211x">A 211x</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-8"> +8. <a class="biblio" href="#B-76">B 76</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-9"> +9. <a class="biblio" href="#A-9">A 9</a> v.2:9 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-10"> +10. <a class="biblio" href="#A-261">A 261</a>:174-75 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-11"> +11. <a class="biblio" href="#B-27">B 27</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-12"> +12. <a class="biblio" href="#A-280">A 280</a>:35 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-13"> +13. <a class="biblio" href="#A-191a">A 191a</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-14"> +14. <a class="biblio" href="#A-191">A 191</a>; <a class="biblio" href="#C-72">C 72</a> v.1 pt.4:245 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-15"> +15. <a class="biblio" href="#A-96">A 96</a>:47 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-16"> +16. <em>ibid.</em>:29 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-17"> +17. <a class="biblio" href="#A-37">A 37</a>:128 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-18"> +18. <a class="biblio" href="#A-117">A 117</a> v.2:89 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-19"> +19. <a class="biblio" href="#A-277">A 277</a>:145 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="2-20"> +20. <a class="biblio" href="#A-187">A 187</a> +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +III. Romantic to modern +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#C-220">C 220</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#C-72">C 72</a> v.1 pt.4:66-67 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#C-213">C 213</a>; <a class="biblio" href="#C-72">C 72</a> v.l pt.4 1896 ed.; <a class="biblio" href="#C-119">C 119</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-4"> +4. <a class="biblio" href="#B-74">B 74</a>:21 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-5"> +5. <em>ibid.</em>:16 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-6"> +6. <a class="biblio" href="#A-74">A 74</a> pref. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-7"> +7. <a class="biblio" href="#C-72">C 72</a> v.1 pt.4:199 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-8"> +8. <a class="biblio" href="#B-134">B 134</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-9"> +9. <a class="biblio" href="#B-82">B 82</a>:18 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-10"> +10. <a class="biblio" href="#A-310">A 310</a>:44 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-11"> +11. <em>ibid.</em>; 51 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-12"> +12. <a class="biblio" href="#B-192">B 192</a>:120 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-13"> +13. <a class="biblio" href="#A-310">A 310</a>:97 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-14"> +14. <em>ibid.</em>:76 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-15"> +15. <em>ibid.</em>:187 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-16"> +16. <a class="biblio" href="#B-160">B 160</a>:82, 88 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-17"> +17. <em>ibid.</em>:232 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-18"> +18. <em>ibid.</em>:313 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-19"> +19. <a class="biblio" href="#A-20">A 20</a>:23 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-20"> +20. <a class="biblio" href="#A-14">A 14</a>:110 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-21"> +21. <em>ibid.</em>:164 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-22"> +22. <em>ibid.</em>:425 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-23"> +23. <a class="biblio" href="#B-185">B 185</a>:11 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-24"> +24. <a class="biblio" href="#A-107">A 107</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-25"> +25. <a class="biblio" href="#B-47">B 47</a> v.1:52-61 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-26"> +26. <a class="biblio" href="#A-150">A 150</a> v.2 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-27"> +27. <a class="biblio" href="#C-72">C 72</a> v.1 pt.4:200 p. 415, notes 28-51 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-28"> +28. <a class="biblio" href="#A-150">A 150</a> v.2:223 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-29"> +29. <em>ibid.</em>:166 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-30"> +30. <a class="biblio" href="#B-127">B 127</a> Chap. 6 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-31"> +31. <a class="biblio" href="#C-158">C 158</a>:396 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-32"> +32. <a class="biblio" href="#A-98">A 98</a>:46-47 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-33"> +33. <em>ibid.</em>:47 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-34"> +34. <em>ibid.</em>:204 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-35"> +35. <em>ibid.</em>: 205 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-36"> +36. <em>ibid.</em>:209 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-37"> +37. <em>ibid.</em>:244 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-38"> +38. <em>ibid.</em>:273 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-39"> +39. <a class="biblio" href="#C-158">C 158</a>:396 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-40"> +40. <a class="biblio" href="#B-90">B 90</a>:147 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-41"> +41. <a class="biblio" href="#B-16">B 16</a>:24-51 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-42"> +42. <a class="biblio" href="#A-50">A 50</a>:85-86 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-43"> +43. <a class="biblio" href="#B-185">B 185</a>:249-303 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-44"> +44. <a class="biblio" href="#A-22">A 22</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-45"> +45. <a class="biblio" href="#B-185">B 185</a> loc. cit. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-46"> +46. <a class="biblio" href="#B-8">B 8</a>:42 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-47"> +47. <a class="biblio" href="#A-281">A 281</a>:121-22 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-48"> +48. <a class="biblio" href="#B-120">B 120</a> v.1:307 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-49"> +49. <a class="biblio" href="#B-210">B 210</a>:238 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-50"> +50. <a class="biblio" href="#A-269">A 269</a>:115 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="3-51"> +51. <em>ibid.</em>:164 +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +IV. Later 19 Century +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#B-78">B 78</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#A-25">A 25</a>:242 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#A-319">A 319</a>:356 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-4"> +4. <em>ibid.</em>:376 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-5"> +5. <a class="biblio" href="#C-269">C 269</a>:285 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-6"> +6. See <a class="biblio" href="#B-155">B 155</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-7"> +7. <a class="biblio" href="#A-32a">A 32a</a>:37 (nothing further in French language edition) +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-8"> +8. <a class="biblio" href="#B-56">B 56</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-9"> +<a id="page-357" class="pagenum" title="357"></a> +9. <a class="biblio" href="#A-230a">A 230a</a>:91 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-10"> +10. <a class="biblio" href="#A-230">A 230</a>:xvi +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-11"> +11. <a class="biblio" href="#A-230a">A 230a</a>:9 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-12"> +12. <a class="biblio" href="#B-141">B 141</a> v.5, 1892 mai +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-13"> +13. <a class="biblio" href="#B-153">B 153</a>:221ff. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-14"> +14. <em>ibid.</em>: footnotes on pp. 42, 84, 145-46, 170, 217 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-14a"> +14a. <a class="biblio" href="#A-118">A 118</a>:58 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-15"> +15. <a class="biblio" href="#B-160">B 160</a>:128 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-16"> +16. <a class="biblio" href="#A-256">A 256</a>:351-52; see also <a class="biblio" href="#A-256x">A 256x</a>:202 for a young married woman’s reverie of being a man. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-17"> +17. <a class="biblio" href="#A-137">A 137</a>:vi, ix +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-18"> +18. <em>ibid.</em>:144 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-19"> +19. <em>ibid.</em>:283 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-20"> +20. <em>ibid.</em>:325 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-21"> +21. <em>ibid.</em>:ix +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-22"> +22. <a class="biblio" href="#A-267">A 267</a>:301 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-23"> +23. <em>ibid.</em>: pref. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-24"> +24. <a class="biblio" href="#B-155">B 155</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-25"> +25. <a class="biblio" href="#B-165">B 165</a>:v-ix +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-26"> +26. <a class="biblio" href="#A-189">A 189</a>:348 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-27"> +27. <em>ibid.</em>:488 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-28"> +28. <em>ibid.</em>:12 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-29"> +29. <em>ibid.</em>:6-9 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-30"> +30. Paris, E. Dentu, 1890 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-31"> +31. <a class="biblio" href="#B-34">B 34</a>:150; <a class="biblio" href="#B-108">B 108</a> v.1:301 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="4-32"> +32. <a class="biblio" href="#B-141">B 141</a> v.23:523, 1897 +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +V. Conjectural interlude +</p> + +<p class="shdr"> +Labé +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-1-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#B-64">B 64</a> v.41:72; <a class="biblio" href="#B-152">B 152</a> v.28:347-49 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-1-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#B-152">B 152</a> loc. cit. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-1-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#A-37">A 37</a>:205 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-1-4"> +4. <a class="biblio" href="#A-146a">A 146a</a>: dedication +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-1-5"> +5. See note 1. above +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-1-6"> +6. <a class="biblio" href="#A-146a">A 146a</a>: 78 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-1-7"> +7. <em>ibid.</em>:87 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-1-8"> +8. <em>ibid.</em>: introd. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-1-9"> +9. <a class="biblio" href="#B-152">B 152</a> v.7:82-83 (<em>Bourges</em>) +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-1-10"> +10. <a class="biblio" href="#A-146">A 146</a> v.2 +</p> + +<p class="shdr"> +Charke +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-2-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#C-72">C 72</a> v.1 pt.4:245 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-2-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#A-45">A 45</a>:77 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-2-3"> +3. <em>ibid.</em>:52 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-2-4"> +4. <em>ibid.</em>:90 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-2-5"> +5. <em>ibid.</em>:80-89, 139 +</p> + +<p class="shdr"> +Llangollen +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-3-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#B-95">B 95</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-3-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#A-24">A 24</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-3-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#B-145">B 145</a>:22-27 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-3-4"> +4. <a class="biblio" href="#A-51">A 51</a>:155, 161 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-3-5"> +5. <em>ibid.</em>:177 +</p> + +<p class="shdr"> +Günderode +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-4-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#A-10">A 10</a>:1-67 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-4-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#A-11">A 11</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-4-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#A-113">A 113</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-4-4"> +4. <a class="biblio" href="#B-64">B 64</a> v.97:167-231 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-4-5"> +5. See note 1. above +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-4-6"> +6. <a class="biblio" href="#A-11">A 11</a>; <a class="biblio" href="#A-113">A 113</a>, biog. introd. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-4-7"> +7. <a class="biblio" href="#A-298">A 298</a> v.1.; <a class="biblio" href="#A-298a">A 298a</a>. +</p> + +<p class="shdr"> +Sand +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-5-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#A-249">A 249</a> v.13:187-373 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-5-2"> +2. <em>ibid.</em>:267-68 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-5-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#B-196">B 196</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-5-4"> +4. <a class="biblio" href="#B-181">B 181</a>:244 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-5-5"> +5. <a class="biblio" href="#B-138">B 138</a>:163 +</p> + +<p class="shdr"> +Brontë +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-6-1"> +1. B 20x:42 (both quotations) +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-6-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#B-144">B 144</a> Chap. 20 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-6-3"> +3. <em>ibid.</em>:84 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-6-4"> +4. <em>ibid.</em>:86 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-6-5"> +5. <em>ibid.</em>:89 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-6-6"> +6. <a class="biblio" href="#B-168">B 168</a>: pref. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-6-7"> +7. <em>ibid.</em>:255-56 +</p> + +<p class="shdr"> +Eliot +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-7-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#B-94">B 94</a> +</p> + +<p class="shdr"> +Fuller +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-8-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#B-3">B 3</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-8-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#B-197">B 197</a>:xv +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-8-3"> +3. <em>ibid.</em>:196 +</p> + +<p class="shdr"> +<a id="page-358" class="pagenum" title="358"></a> +Menken +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-9-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#B-212">B 212</a> Chap. 4 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-9-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#B-115">B 115</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-9-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#B-212">B 212</a>:57 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-9-4"> +4. <em>ibid.</em>:58 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-9-5"> +5. <a class="biblio" href="#B-107">B 107</a> v.1:278 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-9-6"> +6. <a class="biblio" href="#A-190">A 190</a>:75-76 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-9-7"> +7. <em>ibid.</em>:28 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-9-8"> +8. <em>ibid.</em>:13 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-9-9"> +9. <a class="biblio" href="#B-203">B 203</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-9-10"> +10. <a class="biblio" href="#B-212">B 212</a>:65 +</p> + +<p class="shdr"> +Field +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-10-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#A-92">A 92</a>:xvi +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-10-2"> +2. <em>ibid.</em>:27 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-10-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#A-91">A 91</a>:50 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-10-4"> +4. <a class="biblio" href="#A-92">A 92</a>:ix +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-10-5"> +5. <em>ibid.</em>:16 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-10-6"> +6. <em>ibid.</em>:57 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="5-10-7"> +7. <em>ibid.</em>:63 +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +VI. 20 Century. Int. & Poetry +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#C-123">C 123</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#B-74">B 74</a>:16 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#C-164">C 164</a> - <a class="biblio" href="#C-175">C 175</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-4"> +4. <a class="biblio" href="#C-146">C 146</a>:119 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-5"> +5. See especially <a class="biblio" href="#C-276">C 276</a>, the best available brief résumé of the current psychoanalytic opinion on homosexuality +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-6"> +6. <a class="biblio" href="#A-20">A 20</a>:22-26 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-7"> +7. <em>ibid.</em>:176ff. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-8"> +8. <a class="biblio" href="#B-86">B 86</a> no. 4 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-9"> +9. <em>ibid.</em> no. 8 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-10"> +10. <a class="biblio" href="#B-85">B 85</a> Dec. 12 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-11"> +11. <a class="biblio" href="#A-19">A 19</a>:10ff: In these quotations and some later ones from poetry, line indentations and stanza divisions have been disregarded for economy. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-12"> +12. <em>ibid.</em>:108 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-13"> +13. <em>ibid.</em>:19 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-14"> +14. <em>ibid.</em>:111 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-15"> +15. <a class="biblio" href="#B-79">B 79</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-16"> +16. <a class="biblio" href="#A-283">A 283</a> v.2:78-80 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-17"> +17. <em>ibid.</em>:112 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-18"> +18. <a class="biblio" href="#B-48">B 48</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-19"> +19. <a class="biblio" href="#A-283">A 283</a> v.2:52-55 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-20"> +20. <em>ibid.</em>:50 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-21"> +21. <em>ibid.</em> v.1:38-39 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-22"> +22. <em>ibid.</em>:36 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-23"> +23. <em>ibid.</em>:87-88 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-24"> +24. <em>ibid.</em>:31 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-25"> +25. <em>ibid.</em>:32 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-26"> +26. <em>ibid.</em>:195 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-27"> +27. <a class="biblio" href="#B-141">B 141</a> v.49, mars. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-28"> +28. <em>ibid.</em> v.50, avril. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-29"> +29. <em>ibid.</em> v.89:181-82 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-30"> +30. <a class="biblio" href="#A-283">A 283</a> v.2:219 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-31"> +31. <em>ibid.</em>:189 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-32"> +32. <em>ibid.</em>:230 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-33"> +33. <a class="biblio" href="#B-141">B 141</a> v.89:181-82 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-34"> +34. <a class="biblio" href="#A-19">A 19</a>:235 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-35"> +35. <a class="biblio" href="#A-20">A 20</a>; <a class="biblio" href="#B-49">B 49</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-36"> +36. B 151x v.9:488 (Je.20, 1914) +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-37"> +37. <a class="biblio" href="#A-240">A 240</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-38"> +38. <a class="biblio" href="#B-49">B 49</a>:249 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-39"> +39. <a class="biblio" href="#B-25">B 25</a> Chap. 13 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-40"> +40. <a class="biblio" href="#A-176">A 176</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-41"> +41. <a class="biblio" href="#A-122">A 122</a> v. 1:7-27 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-42"> +42. <em>ibid.</em> v.2:176-80 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-43"> +43. <a class="biblio" href="#A-263">A 263</a>, from <a class="biblio" href="#B-101">B 101</a> v.5 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-44"> +44. <a class="biblio" href="#A-257">A 257</a>:53 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-45"> +45. <a class="biblio" href="#B-74">B 74</a>:46; from W. L. George, Literary chapters, 1918, p. 127 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-46"> +46. <a class="biblio" href="#A-167">A 167</a>:97-105 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-47"> +47. <a class="biblio" href="#B-144">B 144</a>:189-90 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-48"> +48. <a class="biblio" href="#B-212">B 212</a>:288 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-49"> +49. <a class="biblio" href="#A-212">A 212</a>:114 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-50"> +50. The Loves of Edwy +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-51"> +51. <a class="biblio" href="#B-217">B 217</a>:60 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-52"> +52. Harold Cook (<a class="biblio" href="#B-217">B 217</a> introd.) and Elizabeth Atkins (<a class="biblio" href="#B-10">B 10</a>:34 footnote & 242) +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-53"> +<a id="page-359" class="pagenum" title="359"></a> +53. <a class="biblio" href="#A-197">A 197</a>:20-21 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-54"> +54. <a class="biblio" href="#A-196">A 196</a>:17 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-55"> +55. <a class="biblio" href="#A-194">A 194</a>:55 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-56"> +56. <a class="biblio" href="#B-10">B 10</a>:37-38 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-57"> +57. <a class="biblio" href="#A-193">A 193</a>:38, 39; <a class="biblio" href="#A-194">A 194</a>:70, 71 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-58"> +58. <a class="biblio" href="#A-194">A 194</a>:70, 71 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-59"> +59. <a class="biblio" href="#A-196">A 196</a>:20 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-60"> +60. <em>ibid.</em>:42 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-61"> +61. Djuna Barnes & Natalie C. Barney. See <a class="biblio" href="#A-196">A 196</a>:index +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-62"> +62. <a class="biblio" href="#B-10">B 10</a>:200 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-63"> +63. <a class="biblio" href="#A-185">A 185</a>:52-53 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-64"> +64. <em>ibid.</em>:54 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-65"> +65. <a class="biblio" href="#A-3">A 3</a>:21 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-66"> +66. <a class="biblio" href="#A-248">A 248</a>:24 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-67"> +67. <em>ibid.</em>:9 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-68"> +68. <em>ibid.</em>:29 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-69"> +69. <em>ibid.</em>:5 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-70"> +70. <a class="biblio" href="#A-179">A 179</a>:142-43 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="6-71"> +71. <em>ibid.</em>: 17-18 +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +VII. Fiction in France +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#A-52a">A 52a</a>:289 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#A-54">A 54</a>:220 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#A-55">A 55</a> Chap. 18, end. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-4"> +4. <a class="biblio" href="#A-51">A 51</a>:185-218 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-5"> +5. <a class="biblio" href="#B-35">B 35</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-6"> +6. <a class="biblio" href="#A-55a">A 55a</a>:244-50 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-7"> +7. <a class="biblio" href="#A-56">A 56</a>:117 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-8"> +8. <a class="biblio" href="#B-141">B 141</a> v.38:229-34; <a class="biblio" href="#B-101">B 101</a> v.3:439 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-9"> +9. <a class="biblio" href="#B-141">B 141</a> v.40:781-82 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-10"> +10. <a class="biblio" href="#B-101">B 101</a> v.5:1120 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-11"> +11. <a class="biblio" href="#B-141">B 141</a> v.45-50, var. pag. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-12"> +12. <a class="biblio" href="#B-141">B 141</a> v.55:254; <a class="biblio" href="#B-101">B 101</a> v.9:584 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-13"> +13. <a class="biblio" href="#A-227">A 227</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-14"> +14. <a class="biblio" href="#A-228">A 228</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-15"> +15. <a class="biblio" href="#A-222">A 222</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-16"> +16. <a class="biblio" href="#A-227">A 227</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-17"> +17. <a class="biblio" href="#A-225">A 225</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-18"> +18. <a class="biblio" href="#A-20">A 20</a>:74; <a class="biblio" href="#A-51">A 51</a>:186 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-19"> +19. <a class="biblio" href="#A-242">A 242</a>:155 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-20"> +20. <em>ibid.</em>:102 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-21"> +21. <em>ibid.</em>:153 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-22"> +22. <em>ibid.</em>:164-65 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-23"> +23. <a class="biblio" href="#A-182">A 182</a>:22-23 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-24"> +24. <em>ibid.</em>:191-97 passim +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-25"> +25. <em>ibid.</em>:128-144 passim +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-26"> +26. <a class="biblio" href="#A-148">A 148</a>:201 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-27"> +27. <a class="biblio" href="#A-31">A 31</a>:x +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-28"> +28. <em>ibid.</em>:149-50 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-29"> +29. Seen only via advertising résumés in C.-E.’s other novels, back pages. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="7-30"> +30. <a class="biblio" href="#B-136">B 136</a> v.35:176-213 +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +VIII. Fiction in Germany +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#A-292">A 292</a> v.5:285-87 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#B-101">B 101</a> v.2:41ff +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-3"> +3. <em>ibid.</em> v.3:431 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-4"> +4. <em>ibid.</em> v.3:462 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-5"> +5. <em>ibid.</em> v.3:449 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-6"> +6. <em>ibid.</em> v.5:1115 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-7"> +7. <em>ibid.</em> v.3:453? +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-8"> +8. <em>ibid.</em> v.3:489 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-9"> +9. <a class="biblio" href="#B-25">B 25</a> Chap. 13 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-10"> +10. <a class="biblio" href="#B-101">B 101</a> v.5:1080 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-11"> +11. <em>ibid.</em> v.5:1106 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-12"> +12. <em>ibid.</em> v.5:1070 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-13"> +13. <a class="biblio" href="#C-121">C 121</a>:171-79 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-14"> +14. <a class="biblio" href="#B-101">B 101</a> v.7:885 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-15"> +15. <em>ibid.</em> v.9:606 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-16"> +16. <em>ibid.</em> v.9:613 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-17"> +17. <a class="biblio" href="#B-144x">B 144x</a>:317 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-18"> +18. <a class="biblio" href="#A-178">A 178</a>:222 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-19"> +19. <em>ibid.</em>:229 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-20"> +20. <a class="biblio" href="#A-295">A 295</a>:188 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-21"> +21. <a class="biblio" href="#B-98">B 98</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-22"> +22. <a class="biblio" href="#B-101">B 101</a> v.17:129 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-23"> +23. <a class="biblio" href="#A-274">A 274</a>:10 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-24"> +24. <em>ibid.</em>:11 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="8-25"> +<a id="page-360" class="pagenum" title="360"></a> +25. <em>ibid.</em>:11-12 +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +IX. Fiction in English (1) +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#A-116">A 116</a>:pref. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-2"> +2. <a class="biblio" href="#C-153">C 153</a>, 154 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#A-102">A 102</a>:12 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-4"> +4. <em>ibid.</em>:13 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-5"> +5. <em>ibid.</em>:14 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-6"> +6. <em>ibid.</em>:56-57 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-7"> +7. <a class="biblio" href="#A-175">A 175</a>:6 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-8"> +8. <em>ibid.</em>:288 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-9"> +9. <em>ibid.</em>:269-70 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-10"> +10. <em>ibid.</em>:135 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-11"> +11. <em>ibid.</em>:182 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-12"> +12. <a class="biblio" href="#A-215">A 215</a>:833 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-13"> +13. <a class="biblio" href="#B-204">B 204</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-14"> +14. <a class="biblio" href="#A-256">A 256</a>:4 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-15"> +15. <em>ibid.</em>:7 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-16"> +16. <em>ibid.</em>:13 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-17"> +17. <em>ibid.</em>:8 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-18"> +18. <em>ibid.</em>:9 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-19"> +19. <em>ibid.</em>:57 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-20"> +20. <em>ibid.</em>:88 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-21"> +21. <a class="biblio" href="#A-184">A 184</a>:79 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-22"> +22. <em>ibid.</em>:108 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-23"> +23. <a class="biblio" href="#A-239">A 239</a>:271 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-24"> +24. <a class="biblio" href="#A-260">A 260</a>:262 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-25"> +25. <em>ibid.</em>:390 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-26"> +26. Publ. in book form by Century +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-27"> +27. <a class="biblio" href="#A-155">A 155</a>:324 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-28"> +28. <a class="biblio" href="#B-143">B 143</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-29"> +29. <a class="biblio" href="#A-294">A 294</a>:334 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-30"> +30. <a class="biblio" href="#A-61">A 61</a>:37-38 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-31"> +31. <em>ibid.</em>:37 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-32"> +32. <em>ibid.</em>:402-03 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-33"> +33. <em>ibid.</em>:407 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-34"> +34. <a class="biblio" href="#A-173">A 173</a>:267-68 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-35"> +35. <em>ibid.</em>:37 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-36"> +36. <em>ibid.</em>:276-81 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-37"> +37. <a class="biblio" href="#A-97">A 97</a>:22, footnote +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-38"> +38. <em>ibid.</em>:348 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-39"> +39. <a class="biblio" href="#A-6">A 6</a>:304 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-40"> +40. <em>ibid.</em>:305 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-41"> +41. <a class="biblio" href="#A-131">A 131</a>:69-70 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-42"> +42. <em>ibid.</em>:268 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-43"> +43. <em>ibid.</em>:290-91 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-44"> +44. <a class="biblio" href="#A-129">A 129</a>:320-21, 149 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-45"> +45. <a class="biblio" href="#A-98">A 98</a>:125-256 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-46"> +46. <em>ibid.</em>:148 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-47"> +47. <em>ibid.</em>:222 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-48"> +48. <a class="biblio" href="#A-210">A 210</a>:198 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-49"> +49. <a class="biblio" href="#A-311">A 311</a>:46-47 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-50"> +50. <em>ibid.</em>:48, 50-52 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-51"> +51. <em>ibid.</em>:53 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-52"> +52. <a class="biblio" href="#A-245">A 245</a>:139-40 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-53"> +53. <em>ibid.</em>:287 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-54"> +54. <a class="biblio" href="#B-63">B 63</a>:64 and New York Times, Sun. Nov. 7, 1926, VIII:10, col. 1 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-55"> +55. New York Times Feb. 1, 1927, p. 3, col. 6 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-56"> +56. <a class="biblio" href="#A-313">A 313</a>:29 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-57"> +57. <em>ibid.</em>:300 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-58"> +58. <a class="biblio" href="#A-116">A 116</a>:pref. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-59"> +59. <a class="biblio" href="#B-54">B 54</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-60"> +60. <a class="biblio" href="#A-312">A 312</a>:117-18 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-61"> +61. <em>ibid.</em>:138 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-62"> +62. <em>ibid.</em>:221-22 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-63"> +63. <em>ibid.</em>:298 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="9-64"> +64. <em>ibid.</em>:258 +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +X. Fiction in English (2) +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-1"> +1. <a class="biblio" href="#A-207">A 207</a>:63 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-2"> +2. <em>ibid.</em>:64 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-3"> +3. <a class="biblio" href="#A-199">A 199</a>:348-44 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-4"> +4. <a class="biblio" href="#A-218">A 218</a>:266 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-5"> +5. <a class="biblio" href="#A-152">A 152</a>:333 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-6"> +6. <a class="biblio" href="#A-160">A 160</a>:221-36 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-7"> +7. <a class="biblio" href="#A-244">A 244</a>:24 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-8"> +8. <em>ibid.</em>:158 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-9"> +9. <em>ibid.</em>:167 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-10"> +10. <a class="biblio" href="#A-237">A 237</a>:243 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-11"> +11. <em>ibid.</em>:245 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-12"> +<a id="page-361" class="pagenum" title="361"></a> +12. <em>ibid.</em>:231-32 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-13"> +13. <em>ibid.</em>:257 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-14"> +14. <em>ibid.</em>:230-31 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-15"> +15. <a class="biblio" href="#A-23">A 23</a>:49 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-16"> +16. <em>ibid.</em>:58 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-17"> +17. British edition: Stamboul Train, late 1932 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-18"> +18. <a class="biblio" href="#A-42">A 42</a>:382 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-19"> +19. <em>ibid.</em>:380-81 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-20"> +20. Nov. 1932 p. 2 col. 4. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-21"> +21. <a class="biblio" href="#A-206">A 206</a>:2 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-22"> +22. <a class="biblio" href="#A-238">A 238</a>:132-33 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-23"> +23. <em>ibid.</em>:137 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-24"> +24. <em>ibid.</em>:138 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-25"> +25. <a class="biblio" href="#A-276">A 276</a>:162 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-26"> +26. <em>ibid.</em>:230 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-27"> +27. <a class="biblio" href="#A-76">A 76</a>:32; <a class="biblio" href="#A-157">A 157</a>:125 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-28"> +28. <a class="biblio" href="#A-76">A 76</a>:234 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-29"> +29. <a class="biblio" href="#A-78">A 78</a>:74 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-30"> +30. <em>ibid.</em>:82-83 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-31"> +31. <a class="biblio" href="#A-78a">A 78a</a>:72; cf. also p. 79-80 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-32"> +32. <a class="biblio" href="#A-316">A 316</a>:107 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-33"> +33. <a class="biblio" href="#A-158">A 158</a>:112-14; cf. also p. 38 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-34"> +34. <a class="biblio" href="#A-64">A 64</a>:208, 219 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-35"> +35. <a class="biblio" href="#A-59">A 59</a>:147 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-36"> +36. Time Mag. Oct. 25, 1937:26-28 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-37"> +37. <a class="biblio" href="#A-36">A 36</a>:203, 205 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-38"> +38. <a class="biblio" href="#A-35">A 35</a>:203 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-39"> +39. <em>ibid.</em>:204 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-40"> +40. <a class="biblio" href="#A-104">A 104</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-41"> +41. e.g. <em>ibid.</em>:196-97 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-42"> +42. <a class="biblio" href="#A-144">A 144</a>:156 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-43"> +43. <a class="biblio" href="#A-43">A 43</a>:92 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-44"> +44. <a class="biblio" href="#A-264">A 264</a>:320, 396 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-45"> +45. <a class="biblio" href="#A-209">A 209</a>:[7] +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-46"> +46. <em>ibid.</em>:107 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-47"> +47. <em>ibid.</em>:136 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-48"> +48. <a class="biblio" href="#A-271">A 271</a>:24 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-49"> +49. <a class="biblio" href="#A-272">A 272</a>:23 +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="10-50"> +50. <a class="biblio" href="#A-203">A 203</a>:246 +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +Conclusion +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="Co-1"> +1. e.g. <a class="biblio" href="#B-71">B 71</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="Co-2"> +2. See <a class="biblio" href="#C-105">C 105</a>, <a class="biblio" href="#C-139">C 139</a>, <a class="biblio" href="#C-207">C 207</a>, <a class="biblio" href="#C-254">C 254</a>, <a class="biblio" href="#C-255">C 255</a>, <a class="biblio" href="#C-257">C 257</a>, <a class="biblio" href="#C-273">C 273</a>, <a class="biblio" href="#C-287">C 287</a>, <a class="biblio" href="#C-300">C 300</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="Co-3"> +3. Cf. excerpts in Book Review Digest for any title in <em>A</em> list. +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="Co-4"> +4. <a class="biblio" href="#C-284">C 284</a> +</p> + +<p class="footnote" id="Co-5"> +5. <a class="biblio" href="#B-158">B 158</a>:111 +</p> + +</div> + +<div class="biblio"> +<a id="page-362" class="pagenum" title="362"></a> +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="appendix" id="chapter-0-18"> +BIBLIOGRAPHIES +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="first"> +* An asterisk indicates titles of which only a review, an abstract, or a +précis was seen. +</p> + +<p> +<em>List A</em>: 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. +</p> + +<p> +<em>List B</em>: Bibliographic, biographical, critical and historical references, +including psychiatric studies of specific authors or titles. +</p> + +<p> +<em>List C</em>: Medical, psychological, psychiatric and psychoanalytic background +reading, with special reference to etiology (e.g., in studies of +exclusively male subjects.) +</p> + +<p class="hdr"> +A. PRIMARY MATERIAL +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-1"> +1. <span class="smallcaps">Adams, Fay.</span> Appointment in Paris. N. Y., Fawcett, 1952. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-2"> +2. <span class="smallcaps">Alciphron.</span> Letters from town and country. (tr. F. A. Wright) +Lond., Routledge, n.d. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-3"> +3. <span class="smallcaps">Aldington, Richard.</span> The loves of Myrrhine and Konallis. Chic., +Pascal Covici, 1926. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-4"> +4. <span class="smallcaps">Anderson, Helen.</span> Pity for women. N. Y., Doubleday, 1937. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-5"> +5. <span class="smallcaps">Anderson, Sherwood.</span> Dark laughter. N. Y., Boni & Liveright, +1925. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-6"> +6. ——. Poor white. N. Y., B. W. <a id="corr-139"></a>Huebsch, 1920. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-7"> +7. <span class="smallcaps">Anthologia graeca.</span> (tr. R. W. Paton) N. Y., Putnam, 1915-26. +5v. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-8"> +8. <span class="smallcaps">Apollodorus.</span> The library. (tr. J. G. Fraser) Cambridge, Mass., +Harvard Univ. Press, 1946, 2v. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-9"> +9. <span class="smallcaps">Ariosto, Ludovico.</span> Orlando furioso. (tr. W. S. Rose) Lond., +Bell, 1907. v. 2. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-10"> +10. <span class="smallcaps">Arnim, Elisabeth von.</span> Goethe’s correspondence with a child. +Bost., Ticknor & Fields, 1859. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-11"> +11. ——. Die Günderode. (Sämmtliche Werke, bd. 2) Berlin, +Propylaenverlag, 1920. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-12"> +12. <span class="smallcaps">Baker, Dorothy.</span> Trio. Bost., Houghton, 1943. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-13"> +13. ——. Young man with a horn. N. Y., New American Library, +1953. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-14"> +14. <span class="smallcaps">Balzac, Honoré de.</span> Cousin Betty. (tr. James Waring) Bost., +Dana Estes, 1901. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-15"> +<a id="page-363" class="pagenum" title="363"></a> +15. ——. Seraphita. Lond., Dent, 1897. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-16"> +16. ——. The girl with the golden eyes. (tr. Ernest Dowson) [N. Y.], +DeLuxe Editions, 1931. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-17"> +17. <span class="smallcaps">Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules.</span> Les diaboliques. Paris, Dentu, 1874. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-18"> +18. <span class="smallcaps">Barnes, Djuna.</span> Nightwood. N. Y., Harcourt, 1937. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-19"> +19. <span class="smallcaps">Barney, Natalie Clifford.</span> Actes et entr’actes. Paris, Sensot, +1909. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-20"> +20. ——. Aventures de l’esprit. Paris, Emile-Paul, 1929. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-21"> +21. <span class="smallcaps">Baudelaire, Charles.</span> Prose and poetry. (tr. Arthur Symons). +N. Y., Boni, 1926. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-22"> +22. ——. Les fleurs du mal. (tr. George Dillon and Edna St. Vincent +Millay) N. Y., Harper, 1936. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-23"> +23. <span class="smallcaps">Beer, Thomas.</span> Mrs. Egg and other barbarians. N. Y., Knopf, +1933. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-24"> +24. <span class="smallcaps">Bell, Mrs. G. H.</span>, ed. The Hamwood papers of the ladies of +Llangollen and Caroline Hamilton. Lond., Macmillan, 1930. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-25"> +25. <span class="smallcaps">Belot, Adolphe.</span> Mlle Giraud, ma femme. Paris, Dentu, 1870. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-26"> +26. <span class="smallcaps">Bennett, Arnold.</span> Elsie and the child. N. Y., Doran, 1924. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-27"> +27. ——. The pretty lady. N. Y., Doran, 1918. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-28"> +28. <span class="smallcaps">Bible.</span> Revised version. Oxford, University Press, 1891. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-28a"> +28a. ——. American standard version. N. Y., Nelson, 1901. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-29"> +29. <span class="smallcaps">Bolton, Isabel.</span> Ruth and Irma. New Yorker 23:21-24. Jan. 26, +1947. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-30"> +30. *<span class="smallcaps">Borys, Daniel.</span> Carlotta Noll. Paris, Albin Michel, 1905. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-31"> +31. <span class="smallcaps">Bourdet, Edward.</span> The captive. (tr. Arthur Hornblow, jr.) +N. Y., Brentano, 1927. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-32"> +32. <span class="smallcaps">Bourget, Paul C. J.</span> Un crime d’amour. Paris, Lemerre, 1886. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-32a"> +32a. ——. A love crime. Paris, Société des Beaux Arts, 1905. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-33"> +33. <span class="smallcaps">Bowen, Elizabeth.</span> The hotel. N. Y., MacVeigh, 1928. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-34"> +34. <span class="smallcaps">Bowles, Jane.</span> Two serious ladies. N. Y., Knopf, 1943. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-35"> +35. <span class="smallcaps">Boyle, Kay.</span> The bridegroom’s body. (In: The crazy hunter. +N. Y., Harcourt, 1940) +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-36"> +36. ——. 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Y., Macmillan, 1919. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-169"> +169. ——. Sword blades and poppy seeds. Bost., Houghton, 1914. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-170"> +170. ——. What’s o’clock. Bost., Houghton, 1925. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-171"> +171. <span class="smallcaps">Lucian.</span> (tr. C. Jacobitz) v. 1, The ass, Dialogues of the courtesans, +and The amores. Athens, Athenian Society, 1895. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-172"> +172. <span class="smallcaps">Mackenzie, Compton.</span> Extraordinary women. Lond., Secker, +1932. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-173"> +173. <span class="smallcaps">MacLane, Mary.</span> I, Mary MacLane. N. Y., Stokes, 1917. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-174"> +174. ——. My friend Annabel Lee. Chic., Stone, 1903. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-175"> +175. ——. The story of Mary MacLane; by herself. Chic., Stone, 1902. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-176"> +176. <span class="smallcaps">Madeleine, Marie.</span> Auf Kypros. Berlin, Vita, n.d. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-177"> +177. <span class="smallcaps">Mallet, Françoise.</span> The illusionist. (tr. Herma Briffault) N. Y., +Farrar, 1952. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-178"> +178. <span class="smallcaps">Mann, Heinrich.</span> Die Göttinnen: <em>Venus</em>. Berlin, Zsolnay, 1925. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-179"> +179. <span class="smallcaps">Mansfield, Katherine.</span> The scrapbook ... N. Y., Knopf, 1940. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-180"> +180. ——. Journal. N. Y., Knopf, 1928. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-181"> +181. <span class="smallcaps">Marchal, Lucie.</span> The mesh. (tr. Virgilia Peterson) N. Y., Appleton, +1949. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-182"> +182. <span class="smallcaps">Margueritte, Victor.</span> La garçonne. Paris, Flammarion, 1922. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-182a"> +182a. ——. The bachelor girl. Lond., A. M. Philpot, 1924. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-183"> +183. <span class="smallcaps">Martial.</span> Epigrams. (tr. W. C. Aker) Lond., Heinemann, 1930, +2v. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-184"> +184. <span class="smallcaps">Masefield, John.</span> Multitude and solitude. N. Y., Macmillan, +1925. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-185"> +185. <span class="smallcaps">Masters, Edgar Lee.</span> Domesday book. N. Y., Macmillan, 1929. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-186"> +186. <span class="smallcaps">Maupassant, Guy de.</span> La femme de Paul. (In: La maison Tellier. +Paris, Ollendorff, 1899.) +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-186a"> +186a. ——. Paul’s mistress. (In: Works of ... Aldus de luxe ed. +N. Y., National Library, 1909. v. 4.) +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-187"> +187. [<span class="smallcaps">Mayeur de St. Paul</span>?] Confessions d’une jeune fille; Suite; +Suite et fin. (In: [Mairobert, M. F. P. de? et al.] L’espion +anglais. Lond., n. publ., 1784. t. 10.) +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-188"> +188. *<span class="smallcaps">Meebold, Alfred.</span> Dr. Erna Redens Thorheit und Erkenntnis. +(In: Allerhand Volk. Berlin, Vita, 1900.) +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-189"> +189. <span class="smallcaps">Mendes, Catulle.</span> Méphistophéla. Paris, Dentu, 1890. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-190"> +190. <span class="smallcaps">Menken, Ada Isaacs.</span> Infelicia. Phila., Lippincott, 1875. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-191"> +191. <span class="smallcaps">Middleton, Thomas and Dekker, Thomas.</span> The roaring girl. +Lond., Vizetelly, 1890. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-191a"> +191a. ——. Ibid. (In: Works. A. H. Bullen, ed. Lond., Nimmo, 1885-86. +v. 4.) +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-192"> +192. <span class="smallcaps">Millay, Edna St. Vincent.</span> Fatal interview. N. Y., Harper, 1931. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-193"> +<a id="page-369" class="pagenum" title="369"></a> +193. ——. A few figs from thistles. N. Y., Harper, 1922. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-194"> +194. ——. The harp-weaver and other poems. N. Y., Harper, 1923. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-195"> +195. ——. The lamp and the bell. N. Y., Harper, 1921. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-196"> +196. ——. Letters. (Alan Ross Macdougall, ed.) N. Y., Harper, 1952. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-197"> +197. ——. Renascence. N. Y., Kennerly, 1924. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-198"> +198. ——. Second April. N. Y., Kennerly, 1924. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-199"> +199. <span class="smallcaps">Millay, Kathleen.</span> Against the wall. N. Y., Macaulay, 1929. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-200"> +200. <span class="smallcaps">Mitchison, Naomi.</span> The delicate fire. N. Y., Harcourt, 1932. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-201"> +201. *<span class="smallcaps">Møller, O. W.</span> Wer kann dafür? (tr. from Danish, Richard +Meienreis) Leipzig, Spohr, 1901. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-202"> +202. <span class="smallcaps">Montfort, Charles.</span> Le journal d’une saphiste. Paris, Offenstadt, +1902. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-203"> +203. <span class="smallcaps">Morgan, Claire.</span> The price of salt. N. Y., Coward-McCann, +1952. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-204"> +204. <span class="smallcaps">Moss, Geoffrey.</span> That other love. N. Y., Doubleday, 1930. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-205"> +205. *<span class="smallcaps">Mühsam, Erich.</span> Die Psychologie der Erbtante. Zurich, Schmidt, +1905. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-206"> +206. <span class="smallcaps">Nathan, George Jean.</span> Design for loving. American Spectator +1:2-3, April 1933. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-207"> +207. <span class="smallcaps">Neff, Wanda Fraiken.</span> We sing Diana. Bost., Houghton, 1928. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-208"> +208. *<span class="smallcaps">Niemann, August.</span> Zwei Frauen. Dresden, Pierson, 1901. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-209"> +209. <span class="smallcaps">Nin, Anaïs.</span> Ladders to fire. N. Y., Dutton, 1924. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-210"> +210. <span class="smallcaps">O’Higgins, Harvey.</span> Julie Cane. N. Y., Harper, 1924. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-211"> +211. <span class="smallcaps">Olivia.</span> [Dorothy Bussy] Olivia. N. Y., William Sloane, 1949. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-211x"> +211x. Oriental stories. (La fleur lascive orientale) ... trans. from +Arabian ... (etc.) Athens, priv. print., 1893. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-212"> +212. <span class="smallcaps">O’Neill, Rose.</span> The master-mistress. N. Y., Knopf, 1922. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-213"> +213. <span class="smallcaps">Ovid.</span> Heroides and Amores. (tr. Grant Showerman) Lond., +Heinemann, 1931. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-214"> +214. ——. Metamorphoses. (tr. Frank Justus Miller) Lond., Heinemann, +1946. 2v. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-215"> +215. Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. (A. T. Quiller-Couch, ed.) +Oxford, University Press, 1912. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-216"> +216. <span class="smallcaps">Packer, Vin.</span> Spring fire. N. Y., Fawcett, 1952. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-217"> +217. <span class="smallcaps">Parker, Dorothy.</span> After such pleasures. N. Y., Viking, 1934. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-218"> +218. <span class="smallcaps">Patton [Waldron], Marion.</span> Dance on the tortoise. N. Y., Dial, +1930. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-219"> +219. <span class="smallcaps">Peladan, Josephin.</span> La gynandre. Paris, Dentu, 1891. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-220"> +220. ——. La vertu suprême. Paris, Flammarion, 1900. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-221"> +221. *<span class="smallcaps">Pougy, Liane de.</span> Idylle saphique. Paris, Librairie de la Plume, +1901. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-222"> +222. <span class="smallcaps">Proust, Marcel.</span> The captive. (tr. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff) N. Y., +Modern Library, 1929. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-223"> +223. ——. Cities of the plain (tr. ibid.) N. Y., Modern Library, 1930. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-224"> +224. ——. The Guermantes way. (tr. ibid.) N. Y., Modern Library, +1925. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-225"> +<a id="page-370" class="pagenum" title="370"></a> +225. ——. The past recaptured. (tr. F. A. Blossom) N. Y., +Boni, 1932. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-226"> +226. ——. Swann’s way. (tr. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff) N. Y., Modern +Library, 1928. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-227"> +227. ——. The sweet cheat gone. (tr. ibid.) N. Y., Boni, 1930. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-228"> +228. ——. Within a budding grove. (tr. ibid.) N. Y., Modern Library, +1924. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-229"> +229. <span class="smallcaps">Rachilde.</span> [Marguérite Eymery Vallette]. Madame Adonis. Paris, +Ferenczi, 1929. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-230"> +230. ——. Monsieur Vénus. (Maurice Barrès, ed.) Paris, Felix Brossier, +1889. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-230a"> +230a. ——. Monsieur Vénus. (tr. Madeleine Boyd, Maurice Barrès, +pref.) N. Y., Covici, Friede, 1929. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-231"> +231. <span class="smallcaps">Remarque, Erich.</span> Arch of triumph. N. Y., Appleton, 1945. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-232"> +232. <span class="smallcaps">Renault, Mary.</span> The middle mist. N. Y., Morrow, 1945. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-233"> +233. ——. Promise of love. N. Y., Morrow, 1939. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-234"> +234. *<span class="smallcaps">Reuss, Paule.</span> Le génie de l’amour. Paris, Oeuvres Représentatives, +1935. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-235"> +235. *<span class="smallcaps">Reuter, Gabriele.</span> Aus guter Familie. Berlin, 1897. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-236"> +236. <span class="smallcaps">Rice, Craig.</span> Having wonderful crime. N. Y., Simon & Schuster, +1943. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-237"> +237. <span class="smallcaps">Richardson, Dorothy.</span> Dawn’s left hand. N. Y., Knopf, n.d. +(In: Pilgrimage, v. 4). +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-238"> +238. <span class="smallcaps">Richardson, Henry Handel.</span> The end of a childhood ... Lond., +Heinemann, 1934. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-239"> +239. ——. The getting of wisdom. N. Y., Duffield, 1910. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-240"> +240. *<span class="smallcaps">Rigal, Henry.</span> Sur le mode saphique. Paris, Mercure de France, +1902. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-241"> +241. <span class="smallcaps">Roland-Manuel, Suzanne.</span> Le trille du diable. Paris, Deux +Rives, 1946. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-242"> +242. <span class="smallcaps">Rolland, Romain.</span> Annette and Sylvie. (tr. B. R. Redman) +N. Y., Holt, 1935. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-243"> +243. <span class="smallcaps">Ronald, James.</span> The angry woman. N. Y., Bantam, 1950. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-243x"> +243x. <span class="smallcaps">Rossetti, Christina.</span> Goblin Market (In: Stephens, James, et +al., ed. Victorian and later English poets. N. Y., American +Book Co., 1937.) +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-244"> +244. <span class="smallcaps">Royde-Smith, Naomi.</span> The island. N. Y., Harper, 1930. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-245"> +245. ——. The tortoiseshell cat. N. Y., Boni, 1925. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="A-246"> +246. *<span class="smallcaps">Rüling, Theodor.</span> Rätselhaft. (In: Welcher unter Euch ohne +Sünde ist. 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SCIENTIFIC AND PSYCHIATRIC MATERIAL +</p> + +<p> +(Exclusively male studies included for references to etiology) +</p> + +<p> +*—seen only in abstract. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-1"> +1. <span class="smallcaps">Adler, Alfred.</span> Das Problem der Homosexualität. Leipzig, +Hirzel, 1930. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-2"> +2. ——. Zum Thema: sexuelle Perversionen. Int. Ztschr. individ. +Psychol. 10:401-409, 1932. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-3"> +3. <span class="smallcaps">Allen, Clifford.</span> The sexual perversions and abnormalities. +Lond., Oxford, 1940. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-4"> +4. <span class="smallcaps">Allen, F. H.</span> Homosexuality in relation to the problem of +human differences. Amer. J. Orthopsychiat. 10:129-36, 1940. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-5"> +5. <span class="smallcaps">Allport, Gordon.</span> Personality: a psychological interpretation. +N. Y., Holt, 1937. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-6"> +6. “Anomaly.” The invert and his social adjustment. Balto., Williams +& Wilkins, 1929. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-7"> +7. <span class="smallcaps">Back, Georg.</span> Sexuelle Verirrungen des Menschen und der +Natur. Berlin, Standard, 1910. 2v. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-8"> +8. <span class="smallcaps">Barahal, H. S.</span> Constitutional factors in male homosexuals. +Psychiat. Q. 13:391-400, 1939. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-9"> +9. *——. Testosterone in psychotic male homosexuals. Psychiat. +Q. 14:319-29, 1940. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-10"> +<a id="page-383" class="pagenum" title="383"></a> +10. <span class="smallcaps">Baur, Julius.</span> Homosexuality as an endocrinological, psychological +and genetic problem. J. Crim. Psychopathol. 2:188-97, +1940. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-11"> +11. <span class="smallcaps">Bender, Lauretta & Paster, Samuel.</span> Homosexual trends in +children. Amer. J. Orthopsychiat. 10:730-44, 1941. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-12"> +12. <span class="smallcaps">Benedek, Therese.</span> Psychosexual functions in women. N. Y., +Ronald, 1952. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-13"> +13. —— <span class="smallcaps">& Rubenstein, Boris.</span> The sexual cycle in women ... +National Research Council, 1942. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-14"> +14. <span class="smallcaps">Bergler, Edmund.</span> The basic neurosis ... N. Y., Grune & Stratton, +1949. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-15"> +15. ——. Eight prerequisites for psychoanalytic treatment of homosexuality. +Psychoan. Rev. 31:353-86, 1944. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-16"> +16. ——. Lesbianism, facts and fiction. Marr.... Hyg. 1:197-202, +1948. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-17"> +17. ——. Neurotic counterfeit sex ... N. Y., Grune & Stratton, +1951. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-18"> +18. ——. The present situation in genetic investigation of homosexuality. +Marr. Hyg. 4:16-29, 1937. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-19"> +19. ——. The respective importance of reality and fantasy in the +genesis of female homosexuality. J. Crim. Psychopathol. 5:27-48, +1943. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-20"> +20. ——. The writer and psychoanalysis. N. Y., Doubleday, 1950. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-21"> +21. *——. Kinsey’s myth of female sexuality. N. Y., Grune & Stratton, +1954. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-22"> +22. <span class="smallcaps">Besterman, Theodore.</span> Men versus women: a study of sexual +relations. Lond., Methuen, 1934. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-23"> +23. <span class="smallcaps">Blanchard, Phyllis & Manasses, Carolyn.</span> New girls for old. +N. Y., Macaulay, 1930. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-24"> +24. <span class="smallcaps">Bloch, Iwan.</span> Anthropological studies in the strange sexual +practices of all races in all ages ... N. Y., Anthropological +Press, 1933. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-25"> +25. <span class="smallcaps">Bloch, Iwan.</span> Der Ursprung der Syphilis. Jena, G. Fischer, 1911. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-26"> +26. <span class="smallcaps">Bonaparte, Marie.</span> Female sexuality. N. Y., International Universities +Press, 1953. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-27"> +27. <span class="smallcaps">Bourget, Paul.</span> Physiologie de l’amour moderne. Paris, Crès, +1918. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-28"> +28. <span class="smallcaps">Brachfeld, Oliver.</span> Sexuelle Lebensschwerigkeiten. Int. Ztschr. +individ. Psychol. 8:142-151, 1930. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-29"> +29. <span class="smallcaps">Brierley, Marjorie.</span> Specific determinants in feminine development. +Int. J. Psychoanal. 17:163-80, 1936. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-30"> +30. <span class="smallcaps">Brill, A. A.</span> Homoerotism and paranoia. Amer. J. Psychiat. +13:957-74, 1934. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-31"> +31. ——. Sexual manifestations in neurotic and psychotic symptoms. +Psychiat. Q. 14:9-16, 1940. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-32"> +<a id="page-384" class="pagenum" title="384"></a> +32. <span class="smallcaps">Brody, M. W.</span> Analysis of the psychosexual development of the +female, with special reference to homosexuality. Psychoan. +Rev. 30:47-58, 1943. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-33"> +33. <span class="smallcaps">Bromley, Dorothy D. & Britten, Florence E.</span> Youth and sex: +a study of 1300 college students. N. Y., Harper, 1938. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-34"> +34. <span class="smallcaps">Broster, L. H.</span> et al. The adrenal cortex and intersexuality. +Lond., Chapman, 1938. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-35"> +35. <span class="smallcaps">Browne, F. W. Stella.</span> Studies in feminine inversion. J. 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Intermediate types among primitive folk. N. Y., Kennerly, +1914. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-43"> +43. ——. Love’s coming of age. N. Y., Kennerly, 1911. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-44"> +44. *<span class="smallcaps">Casan, V. S.</span> El amor lesbio. ed. 8. Barcelona, 1896. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-45"> +45. <span class="smallcaps">Case, Irene & Sherman, Mandel.</span> The factor of personal attachment +in homosexuality. Psychoan. Rev. 13:32-37, 1925. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-46"> +46. <span class="smallcaps">Cawadias, A. P.</span> Hermaphroditos: the human intersex. Lond., +Heinemann, 1943. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-47"> +47. <span class="smallcaps">Chesser, Eustace.</span> Sexual behavior, normal and abnormal. +N. Y., Roy, 1949. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-48"> +48. <span class="smallcaps">Chideckel, Maurice.</span> Female sex perversions ... N. 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Practitioner 141:280-87, 1938. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-55"> +55. <span class="smallcaps">Dauthendey, Elisabeth.</span> Die urnische Frage und die Frau. +Jahrb. sex. Zwisch. 8:285-99, 1906. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-56"> +<a id="page-385" class="pagenum" title="385"></a> +56. <span class="smallcaps">Davis, Katherine B.</span> Factors in the sex life of 2,200 women. +N. Y., Harper, 1929. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-57"> +57. ——. The periodicity of sex desire. Amer. J. Obstet. & Gyn. +14:345-60, 1927. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-58"> +58. <span class="smallcaps">Deutsch, Helene.</span> Homosexuality in women. Psychoan. Q. +1:484-510, 1932. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-59"> +59. ——. Psychology of women. v. 1. N. Y., Grune & Stratton, 1944. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-60"> +60. <span class="smallcaps">Devereux, George.</span> Institutionalized homosexuality of the Mojave +Indians. Human Biol. 9:498-527, 1937. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-61"> +61. —— <span class="smallcaps">& Moos, M. C.</span> Social structure of prisons and the organic +tensions. J. Crim. Psychopathol. 4:306-24, 1942. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-62"> +62. <span class="smallcaps">Dickinson, R. L. & Beam, Lura.</span> One thousand marriages: a +study of sex adjustment. Balto., Williams & Wilkins, 1931. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-63"> +63. ——. The single woman: a medical study in sex education. +Balto., Williams & Wilkins, 1934. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-64"> +64. <span class="smallcaps">Dicks, G. H. & Childers, A. T.</span> Social transformation of a boy +who lived his first fourteen years as a girl. J. Psychol. 18:125-30, +1944. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-65"> +65. <span class="smallcaps">Dunbar, Flanders.</span> Emotions and bodily changes. N. Y., Columbia +Univ. Press, 1938. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-66"> +66. ——. Mind and body: psychosomatic medicine. N. Y., Random, +1947. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-67"> +67. <span class="smallcaps">East, W. N.</span> Sexual offenders. (In: Mental abnormality and +crime. Lond., Macmillan, 1944. Ch. 9.) +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-68"> +68. <span class="smallcaps">Eliasberg, W.</span> The closeup of psychosexual gratification. J. +Nerv. & Ment. Disease. 99:179-196, 1944. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-69"> +69. <span class="smallcaps">Ellis, Albert.</span> Sexual psychology of the human hermaphrodite. +Psychosom. Med. 7:108-25, 1945. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-70"> +70. ——. The folklore of sex. N. Y., Boni, 1951. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-71"> +71. <span class="smallcaps">Ellis, Havelock.</span> Sexual inversion in women. Alienist & Neurologist +16:141-58, 1895. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-72"> +72. ——. Studies in the psychology of sex. N. Y., Random, 7v. in +2, 1940. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-73"> +73. <span class="smallcaps">Fenichel, Otto.</span> Outline of clinical psychology. N. Y., Norton, +1934. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-74"> +74. ——. The psychology of transvestism. Int. J. Psychoan. 11:211-27, +1930. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-75"> +75. <span class="smallcaps">Féré, C. S.</span> Social and esoteric studies of sexual degeneration in +mankind and in animals. N. Y., Anthropological Press, 1932. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-76"> +76. <span class="smallcaps">Fielding, William J.</span> Sex and the love life. N. Y., Dodd, 1927. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-77"> +77. <span class="smallcaps">Finesinger, J. E.</span> et al. Clinical, psychiatric and psychoanalytic +study of a case of male pseudohermaphroditism. Amer. J. Obstet. +& Gynec. 44:310-17, 1942. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-78"> +78. <span class="smallcaps">Flugel, J. C.</span> A hundred years of psychology. N. Y., Macmillan, +1933. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-79"> +<a id="page-386" class="pagenum" title="386"></a> +79. <span class="smallcaps">Ford, C. A.</span> Homosexual practices of institutionalized females. +J. Abnorm. Psych. 23:442-48, 1929. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-80"> +80. <span class="smallcaps">Ford, C. S. & Beach, Frank A.</span> Patterns of sexual behavior. N. Y., +Harper, 1951. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-81"> +81. <span class="smallcaps">Forel, A. H.</span> The sexual question. N. Y., Medical Art Agency, +1922. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-82"> +82. <span class="smallcaps">Freud, Sigmund.</span> The basic writings of.... N. Y., Modern +Library, 1938. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-83"> +83. ——. Certain neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia, and +homosexuality. Int. J. Psychoan. 4:1-10, 1923. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-84"> +84. ——. Psychogenesis of a case of female homosexuality. Int. J. +Psychoan. 1:125, 1920. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-85"> +85. <span class="smallcaps">Friedmann, A.</span> Beitrag zur pädagogischen Menschenkenntnis. Int. +Ztschr. individ. Psychol. 7:129-43, 1929. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-86"> +86. *<span class="smallcaps">Fromm, Erika & Elonen, Anna.</span> Projective techniques in the +study of a case of female homosexuality. J. Project. Tech. +15:185-230, 1951. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-87"> +87. <span class="smallcaps">Gallichan, Walter.</span> The great unmarried. N. Y., Stokes, 1916. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-88"> +88. ——. The poison of prudery; an historical survey. Bost., Stratford, +1929. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-89"> +89. <span class="smallcaps">Gates, R. R.</span> Human genetics. N. Y., Macmillan, 1946. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-90"> +90. *<span class="smallcaps">Geise, Hans.</span> Zur Psychopathologie der homosexuellen Partnerwahl. +Jahrb. Psychol. Psychother. 1:223-25, 1953. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-91"> +91. <span class="smallcaps">Gilbert, J. A.</span> Homosexuality and its treatment. J. Nerv. & +Ment. Dis. 52:297-322, 1920. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-92"> +92. <span class="smallcaps">Goldschmidt, R.</span> Intersexualität und menschliches Zwittertum. +Deutsch. med. Woch. 30:1288-92, 1931. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-93"> +93. <span class="smallcaps">Grant, V. W.</span> A major problem of human sexuality. J. Soc. +Psychol. 28:79-101, 1948. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-94"> +94. ——. Preface to a psychology of sexual attachment. J. Soc. +Psychol. 33:187-208, 1951. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-95"> +95. <span class="smallcaps">Greenspan, Herbert & Campbell, J. D.</span> The homosexual as a +personality. Amer. J. Psychiat. 101:682-89, 1945. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-96"> +96. <span class="smallcaps">Groves, Ernest.</span> Marriage. N. 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Masculine and feminine: biological and cultural aspects. +Psychiatry 7:257-296, 1944. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-303"> +303. ——. Mind, medicine and man. N. Y., Harcourt, 1943. +</p> + +<p class="biblio" id="C-304"> +304. *<span class="smallcaps">Zimmerlein, K.</span> Verschämte “lesbische” Liebe als Brandstiftmotiv. +Krim. Monatsch. 7:112-113, 1933. +</p> + +</div> + +<div class="index"> +<a id="page-396" class="pagenum" title="396"></a> +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2 class="appendix" id="chapter-0-19"> +INDEX +</h2> + +</div> + +<p class="index"> +<em>A l’Heure des Mains Jointes</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-168">168</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Abercrombie, Lascelles, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Actes et Entr’actes</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-156">156</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Adams, Fay, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Adler, Alfred, <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Aeneid</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>After Such Pleasures</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-307">307</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Against the Wall</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-184">184</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-289">289</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-290">290</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Albertine Disparue</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Alciphron, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-28">28</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-29">29</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-38">38</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Aldington, Richard, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-189">189</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Alighieri, Dante<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Dante Alighieri +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>All Alone; the Life of Emily Brontë</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-131">131</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Allerhand Volk</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Alpers, Anthony, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +amazons, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-32">32</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-36">36</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-39">39</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Les Amies</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-77">77</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>El Amor Lesbio</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Amores</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-28">28</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>L’Amour et le Plaisir</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Anna and the King of Siam</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Anderson, Helen, <a class="index" href="#page-317">317</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Anderson, Sherwood, <a class="index" href="#page-264">264</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-265">265</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-273">273</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>L’Androgyne</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Angry Woman</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Ann Vickers</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-300">300</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Anna Karenina</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Annette and Sylvie</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-205">205</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-207">207</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-273">273</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Anthon, Kate Scott, <a class="index" href="#page-146">146</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-148">148</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Anthony, Catherine, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +anthropology, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-52">52</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-347">347</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +anti-feminism, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-93">93</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-95">95</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-256">256</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +antipathy to men, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-76">76</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-79">79</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-89">89</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-93">93</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-210">210</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-236">236</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-244">244</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-246">246</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-253">253</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-297">297</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-305">305</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-321">321</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-323">323</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Apes of God</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Aphrodite</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-193">193</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Apollodorus, <a class="index" href="#page-24">24</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Appointment in Paris</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-341">341</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Arcadia, The Countess of Pembroke’s</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-36">36</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-38">38</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Arch of Triumph</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Aretino, Pietro, <a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Ariosto, Ludovico, <a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-36">36</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-109">109</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-117">117</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Arnim, Elisabeth von, <a class="index" href="#page-125">125</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Arrival and Departure</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>As You Like It</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Astarte</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Astrée</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-38">38</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-39">39</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Atalanta</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Athene, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Atkins, Elizabeth, <a class="index" href="#page-185">185</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-186">186</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Aubigny, Madeleine de Maupin d’, <a class="index" href="#page-65">65</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Auf Kypros</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Aurel,” <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Aus guter Familie</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +author’s disapproval<br> +explicit, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-73">73</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-77">77</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-80">80</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-191">191</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-226">226</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-235">235</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-249">249</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-276">276</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-300">300</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-308">308</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a><br> +implied, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-63">63</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-75">75</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-80">80</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-95">95</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-111">111</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-189">189</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-224">224</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-227">227</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-235">235</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-236">236</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-241">241</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-256">256</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-260">260</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-266">266</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-282">282</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-291">291</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-293">293</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-294">294</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-301">301</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-307">307</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-397" class="pagenum" title="397"></a> +author’s tolerance<br> +explicit, <a class="index" href="#page-56">56</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-59">59</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-193">193</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-200">200</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-210">210</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-254">254</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-263">263</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-286">286</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a><br> +implied, <a class="index" href="#page-21">21</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-34">34</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-39">39</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-49">49</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-50">50</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-65">65</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-67">67</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-89">89</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-178">178</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-188">188</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-190">190</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-202">202</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-249">249</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-250">250</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-263">263</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-265">265</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-267">267</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-270">270</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-272">272</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-273">273</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-274">274</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-282">282</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-283">283</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-291">291</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-302">302</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-303">303</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-304">304</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-307">307</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-321">321</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-323">323</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-334">334</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-339">339</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-340">340</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Aventures de l’Esprit</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-156">156</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-205">205</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Les Aventures du Roi Pausole</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-193">193</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +<em>The Bachelor Girl</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-207">207</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Bacon, Josephine Dascom<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Dascom (Bacon), Josephine Dodge +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Baker, Dorothy, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Baker, Ida, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Balzac, Honoré de, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-72">72</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-224">224</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-345">345</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Barnes, Djuna, (<a class="index" href="#page-186">186</a>, note 61), <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-317">317</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Barbey, d’Aurevilly, Jules, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Barney, Natalie Clifford, <a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-154">154</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-158">158</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-161">161</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-163">163</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-164">164</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-166">166</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-171">171</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-178">178</a>, (<a class="index" href="#page-186">186</a>, note 61), <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-205">205</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Barrès, Maurice, <a class="index" href="#page-88">88</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-89">89</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Basler, Roy, <a class="index" href="#page-74">74</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Baudelaire, Charles, <a class="index" href="#page-76">76</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-77">77</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-105">105</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Beard, Mary, <a class="index" href="#page-23">23</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“The Beautiful House,” <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Beer, Thomas, <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-299">299</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Belot, Adolphe, <a class="index" href="#page-81">81</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-97">97</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Bennett, Arnold, <a class="index" href="#page-263">263</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-264">264</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-271">271</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-272">272</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Benson, E. F., <a class="index" href="#page-130">130</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Bernard, Dr. Claude, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Betham, Edwards, Mathilda, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-246">246</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +bisexuality<br> +defined, <a class="index" href="#page-11">11</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a><br> +men preferred, <a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-36">36</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-44">44</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-49">49</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-106">106</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-227">227</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-256">256</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a><br> +no preference, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-28">28</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-45">45</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-49">49</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-84">84</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-85">85</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-151">151</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-153">153</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-180">180</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-224">224</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-235">235</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-282">282</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-286">286</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-296">296</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a><br> +women preferred, <a class="index" href="#page-19">19</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-21">21</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-122">122</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-212">212</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-216">216</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-299">299</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-339">339</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Blixen, Baroness Karen<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Dinesen, Isak +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Bloch, Iwan, <a class="index" href="#page-38">38</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Blood, Fanny, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-59">59</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>A Blythedale Romance</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Boccaccio, Giovanni, <a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Bodin, Charles, <a class="index" href="#page-103">103</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Boiardo, Matteo, <a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Bolton, Isabel, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Bolts of Melody</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-148">148</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Bona Dea, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-71">71</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Bonifas</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-211">211</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-216">216</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Book Review Digest</em>, (<a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a>, note 3) +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Borys, Daniel, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Boston Adventure</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Bostonians</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-15">15</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-95">95</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Bouche Fardée</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Bourdet, Edouard, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-211">211</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Bourges, Clémence de, <a class="index" href="#page-117">117</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-118">118</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-119">119</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-120">120</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-126">126</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-398" class="pagenum" title="398"></a> +Bourget, Paul, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Bowen, Elizabeth, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-282">282</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-283">283</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-287">287</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Bowles, Jane, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Boyd, Ernest, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Boy, Charles, <a class="index" href="#page-119">119</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-120">120</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Boyle, Kay, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Bradley, Katherine, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-145">145</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille de, <a class="index" href="#page-43">43</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-44">44</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-118">118</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Brentano, Bettina<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Arnim, Elisabeth von +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Breuer, J., <a class="index" href="#page-151">151</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Breville, Pierre de, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“The Bridegroom’s Body,” <a class="index" href="#page-321">321</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Brock, Lilyan, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Brontë, Anne, <a class="index" href="#page-132">132</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-134">134</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Brontë, Branwell, <a class="index" href="#page-130">130</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-132">132</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-134">134</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Brontë, Charlotte, <a class="index" href="#page-129">129</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-130">130</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-131">131</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-132">132</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-133">133</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-134">134</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-135">135</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Brontë, Emily, <a class="index" href="#page-129">129</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-135">135</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-178">178</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-179">179</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-245">245</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-353">353</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Brontës’ Web of Childhood</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-132">132</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-133">133</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-188">188</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Browne, Stella, <a class="index" href="#page-199">199</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Browning, Robert, <a class="index" href="#page-142">142</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-143">143</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-144">144</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-188">188</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Brownrigg, Gawen, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Brumes de Fjords</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-166">166</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Brun, Charles, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Buck in the Snow</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-187">187</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Burnett, Hallie and Whit, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Burt, Struthers, <a class="index" href="#page-299">299</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-300">300</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Burton, Sir Richard, <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Butler, Lady Eleanor, <a class="index" href="#page-123">123</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-124">124</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +Caldwell, Erskine, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Callisto, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Camilla, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Cape, Jonathan, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Capri, <a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-282">282</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Captive</em> (Bourdet), <a class="index" href="#page-211">211</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-349">349</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Captive</em> (Proust), <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Careless Husband</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-121">121</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Carlotta, Noll</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Carola</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Carpenter, Edward, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Caryll, Mary, <a class="index" href="#page-123">123</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Casan, V. S., <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Casanova de Seingalt, Giacomo, <a class="index" href="#page-43">43</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-45">45</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Casanovas letztes Abenteuer</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-236">236</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Casper, J. L., <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“The Cat and the King,” <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Catholic League for Decency, <a class="index" href="#page-241">241</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Cendres et Poussières</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-158">158</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-164">164</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Censor Marches On</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +censorship, <a class="index" href="#page-15">15</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-21">21</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-29">29</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-76">76</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-81">81</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-150">150</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-186">186</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-241">241</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-243">243</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-256">256</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-262">262</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-265">265</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-313">313</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-341">341</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Century Magazine</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-266">266</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Ces Plaisirs</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-124">124</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-170">170</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-199">199</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-205">205</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Chabrillan, Célèste Venard de, <a class="index" href="#page-68">68</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Chadwick, H. M. and Nora K., <a class="index" href="#page-23">23</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Channing, W. H., <a class="index" href="#page-137">137</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Charcot, Jean, <a class="index" href="#page-52">52</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-151">151</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Charke, Charlotte, <a class="index" href="#page-120">120</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-122">122</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Charlemagne, <a class="index" href="#page-30">30</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-33">33</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Charles, Emile, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Charles-Etienne, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Child Manuela</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-236">236</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-238">238</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Children’s Hour</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-301">301</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-302">302</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-347">347</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Choiseul-Meuse, Félicité de, <a class="index" href="#page-49">49</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Le Christ, Aphrodite et M. Pépin</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Christabel,” <a class="index" href="#page-73">73</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-74">74</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-75">75</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Christina, Queen of Sweden, <a class="index" href="#page-48">48</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Cibber, Colley, <a class="index" href="#page-120">120</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-121">121</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The City of Flowers</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Clarke, James Freeman, <a class="index" href="#page-137">137</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Claudine à l’Ecole</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-195">195</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Claudine à Paris</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-195">195</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-196">196</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Claudine at School</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-195">195</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Claudine en Ménage</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-196">196</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-197">197</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-200">200</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-399" class="pagenum" title="399"></a> +<em>Claudine S’en Va</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-197">197</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-198">198</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-200">200</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Clémentine, Orpheline et Androgyne</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Club de Femmes</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, <a class="index" href="#page-73">73</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle, <a class="index" href="#page-124">124</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-143">143</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-170">170</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-171">171</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-193">193</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-200">200</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-205">205</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-239">239</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Comedians</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Comtesse de Chalis</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-71">71</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-72">72</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Confession of a Fool</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Cooper, Clarissa, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Cooper, Edith, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-145">145</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Corey, Donald W., <a class="index" href="#page-14">14</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Couperus, Louis, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +courtesans and prostitutes, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-28">28</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-84">84</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-202">202</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-245">245</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +courtly love, <a class="index" href="#page-31">31</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-32">32</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Cousin Betty</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-63">63</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Coward, Noel, <a class="index" href="#page-300">300</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Cowlin, Dorothy, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Craigin, Elisabeth, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Crazy Hunter</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-321">321</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Un Crime d’Amour</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“The Crimson Curtain,” <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Crippled Muse</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Cuisin, P., <a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Curée</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-84">84</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Cynara,” <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +<em>La Dame à la Louve</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Damophyla, <a class="index" href="#page-24">24</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Dance on the Tortoise</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-290">290</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dane, Clemence, <a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-260">260</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Dans un Coin de Violettes</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dante Alighieri, <a class="index" href="#page-31">31</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Dark Island</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-303">303</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-305">305</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-350">350</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Dark Laughter</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-273">273</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Darwin, Charles, <a class="index" href="#page-52">52</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-109">109</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dascom (Bacon), Josephine Dodge, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Daughter of Time</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dauthendey, Elisabeth, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Davenport, Marcia, <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +David, André, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Davies, Rhys, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Dawn’s Left Hand</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-297">297</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-304">304</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +death<br> +of variant, <a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-171">171</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-349">349</a><br> +of others, <a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-89">89</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-164">164</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-252">252</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-336">336</a><br> +from sexual excess, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Death in Venice</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dehmel, Richard, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dekker, Thomas, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-41">41</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Delarue-Mardrus, Lucie, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Delay in the Sun</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-307">307</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Delicate Fire</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Les Demi-Sexes</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Dernière Journée de Sapho</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Les Désexuées</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Design for Living</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-300">300</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Design for Loving,” <a class="index" href="#page-300">300</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-301">301</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Desperate Remedies</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-93">93</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Despised and Rejected</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-263">263</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +DesVignons, Max, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Deval, Jacques, <a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Les Diaboliques</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Dialogues of the Courtesans</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-28">28</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Diana, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-97">97</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-244">244</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Diana</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-323">323</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-340">340</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-347">347</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-349">349</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-350">350</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Diane de Poitiers, <a class="index" href="#page-118">118</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dickens, Charles, <a class="index" href="#page-140">140</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dickinson, Emily, <a class="index" href="#page-145">145</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-148">148</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-179">179</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-353">353</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Diderot, Denis, <a class="index" href="#page-54">54</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dieulafoy, Mme. Jeanne, <a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-200">200</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dinesen, Isak, <a class="index" href="#page-125">125</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-305">305</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dioscorides, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Disappearance</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-350">350</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>A Dome of Many-Colored Glass</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-178">178</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Domesday Book</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-188">188</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-189">189</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-400" class="pagenum" title="400"></a> +Donisthorpe, Sheila, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-308">308</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +dormitory segregation, <a class="index" href="#page-54">54</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-67">67</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-92">92</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-197">197</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-200">200</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-225">225</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-237">237</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-238">238</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-251">251</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-253">253</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-262">262</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-275">275</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-317">317</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dorval, Marie, <a class="index" href="#page-129">129</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dostoevsky, Feodor, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Douglas, Norman, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dowson, Ernest, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Drag</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +dramas, <a class="index" href="#page-39">39</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-42">42</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-48">48</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-156">156</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-185">185</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-225">225</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-237">237</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-301">301</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Dreiunddreissig Scheusale</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dresser, Davis, <a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-313">313</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Droin, Alfred, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +drugs, <a class="index" href="#page-77">77</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-79">79</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-102">102</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Druon, Maurice, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Du Vert au Violet</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Du Bois, Mary Constance, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dubut de Laforest, J. J., <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-270">270</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Duc, Aimée, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Dudevant, Aurore<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Sand, George +</p> + +<p class="index"> +DuMaurier, Angela, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Dusty Answer</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-308">308</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +<em>Earth Spirit (Erdgeist)</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-225">225</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Echos et Reflets</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-168">168</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Edmonds, J. M., <a class="index" href="#page-17">17</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +egotism, <a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-216">216</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-260">260</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-282">282</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-283">283</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-294">294</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Eichhorn, Maria, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Eichrodt, John, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Eisner, Simon, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Either is Love</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-337">337</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-347">347</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-350">350</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Eliot, George, <a class="index" href="#page-135">135</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Eliot, T. S., <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Ella</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-290">290</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-291">291</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Ellis, Havelock, <a class="index" href="#page-24">24</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-41">41</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-84">84</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-116">116</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-120">120</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-150">150</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-153">153</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-323">323</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Ellis, John Breckenridge, <a class="index" href="#page-247">247</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-251">251</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Elsie and the Child</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-271">271</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-272">272</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Elsie Venner</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-92">92</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Emerson, R. W., <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-137">137</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +emotional aggression, <a class="index" href="#page-36">36</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-43">43</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-92">92</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-95">95</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-103">103</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-158">158</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-200">200</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-206">206</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-216">216</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-226">226</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-227">227</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-236">236</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-296">296</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-343">343</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The End of a Childhood</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-302">302</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-303">303</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +endocrinology, <a class="index" href="#page-151">151</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-178">178</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-343">343</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Entertaining the Islanders</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-299">299</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-300">300</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Eon, Chevalier d’, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Epigrams</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Erauso, Catalina, <a class="index" href="#page-41">41</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-43">43</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-120">120</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Erdgeist</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-225">225</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Erinna, <a class="index" href="#page-24">24</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Dr. Erna Redens Thorheit und Erkentnis,” <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Ernst, Morris, <a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +erotica, <a class="index" href="#page-24">24</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-44">44</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-49">49</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-54">54</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>L’Espion Anglais</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-48">48</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-49">49</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Essen, Siri von, <a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Establishment of Madame Antonia</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +etiology (explicit), <a class="index" href="#page-22">22</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-56">56</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-67">67</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-84">84</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-89">89</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-93">93</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-121">121</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-128">128</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-205">205</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-211">211</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-216">216</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-226">226</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-229">229</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-230">230</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-237">237</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-238">238</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-260">260</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-262">262</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-264">264</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-267">267</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-282">282</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-294">294</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-299">299</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-339">339</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-343">343</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-346">346</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>L’Être Double</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-168">168</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Études et Préludes</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-158">158</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-164">164</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Eulenberg, Herbert, <a class="index" href="#page-236">236</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Eulenberg, Philip von, <a class="index" href="#page-150">150</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Evans, Mary Ann<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Eliot, George +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Evocations</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-158">158</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-164">164</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-165">165</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Explorations in Personality</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Extraordinary Women</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-282">282</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-283">283</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +<a id="page-401" class="pagenum" title="401"></a> +<em>Les Factices</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +family tension, <a class="index" href="#page-22">22</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-42">42</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-56">56</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-92">92</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-97">97</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-101">101</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-120">120</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-123">123</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-128">128</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-137">137</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-146">146</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-160">160</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-207">207</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-216">216</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-227">227</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-229">229</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-231">231</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-245">245</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-267">267</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-271">271</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-303">303</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-304">304</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-321">321</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-339">339</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Farnham, Marynia, <a class="index" href="#page-56">56</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Farringdons</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-243">243</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-244">244</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Fatal Interview</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-186">186</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-187">187</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +father<br> +lacking, <a class="index" href="#page-18">18</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-125">125</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-253">253</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-302">302</a><br> +loved, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-254">254</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-275">275</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-323">323</a><br> +unsympathetic, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-34">34</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-68">68</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-121">121</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-207">207</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-211">211</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-227">227</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-229">229</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-235">235</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-245">245</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Fauré, Gabriel, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Les Fausses Vierges</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +feminism, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-240">240</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Femme d’Affaires</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“La Femme de Paul,” <a class="index" href="#page-85">85</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Une Femme M’Apparut</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-168">168</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Femmes Damnées,” <a class="index" href="#page-76">76</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-77">77</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-252">252</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Feydeau, Ernest, <a class="index" href="#page-71">71</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-72">72</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-81">81</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Field, Michael,” <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-145">145</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Le Figaro</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-81">81</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Firbank, Ronald, <a class="index" href="#page-268">268</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“The Fire,” <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-266">266</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-267">267</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Fisher, Mary F. Kennedy, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Fiske, Minnie Maddern, <a class="index" href="#page-247">247</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Fitz-Maurice Kelly, James, <a class="index" href="#page-41">41</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-43">43</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Fitzroy (Scott), A. T., <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-263">263</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Flach, Johannes, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Flambeaux, Éteints</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-169">169</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Flaubert, Gustave, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-68">68</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-71">71</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Fleur Lascive Orientale</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-34">34</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Les Fleurs du Mal</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-76">76</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-77">77</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-252">252</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Flora, Fletcher, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>A Florida Enchantment</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-109">109</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-111">111</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-247">247</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“The Flower Beneath the Foot,” <a class="index" href="#page-268">268</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Forrest, Felix, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Foster, Gerald, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Fowler, Ellen Thorneycroft, <a class="index" href="#page-243">243</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-244">244</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Fragoletta</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Franziska</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-226">226</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Fräulein Don Juan</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Frauman, Luz, <a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Fraser, Sir James, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Frederics, Diana, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Freud, Sigmund, <a class="index" href="#page-12">12</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-22">22</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-109">109</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-151">151</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-153">153</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-200">200</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-227">227</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-233">233</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-240">240</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-241">241</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-270">270</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-341">341</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-344">344</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Die Freundin</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-229">229</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Freundinnen: Lyrisches Spiel,” <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>A Friend of the Family</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +frigidity, <a class="index" href="#page-57">57</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-81">81</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-212">212</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-262">262</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-297">297</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Frith, Mary, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-41">41</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-120">120</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Fuller, Margaret, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-138">138</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-139">139</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Fuseli, Henry, <a class="index" href="#page-57">57</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-58">58</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-59">59</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +<em>Gabriel-Gabrielle</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-128">128</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Galton, Sir Francis, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Garcia, Pauline, <a class="index" href="#page-129">129</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Garçonne</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-207">207</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Garda</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Garden, Mary, <a class="index" href="#page-266">266</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Gauthier-Villars, Henri, <a class="index" href="#page-169">169</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-193">193</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-198">198</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-199">199</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Gautier, Théophile, <a class="index" href="#page-15">15</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-65">65</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-72">72</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-140">140</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Geneviève</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-216">216</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Le Génie de l’Amour</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Gentlemen, I Address You Privately</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Georgie, Leyla, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Germain, André, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-160">160</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-161">161</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-165">165</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-166">166</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Geschichte der jungen Renate Fuchs</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Getting of Wisdom</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-252">252</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-253">253</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-302">302</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-402" class="pagenum" title="402"></a> +Gide, André, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-216">216</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Gilbert (Dickinson), Sue, <a class="index" href="#page-146">146</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-147">147</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Gilder, Richard Watson, <a class="index" href="#page-95">95</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Gilman, Dr. James, <a class="index" href="#page-74">74</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Girl Alone</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-238">238</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Girl with the Golden Eyes</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-63">63</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-72">72</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Glory in the Daytime,” <a class="index" href="#page-307">307</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Goblin Market</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-75">75</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-76">76</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Goblin Woman</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Godwin, William, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-56">56</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-58">58</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-59">59</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-137">137</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kind</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-125">125</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Golden Bough</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Gondal Poems</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-133">133</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Gordon, Dame Helen Cumming, <a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Die Göttinnen: Diana; Minerva</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Die Göttinnen: Venus</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-224">224</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Gourmont, Rémy de, <a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-111">111</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-156">156</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-161">161</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-262">262</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Grammont, Memoirs of the Count de</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-44">44</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Gramont, Louis de, <a class="index" href="#page-202">202</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-212">212</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Great Adventure</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-267">267</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Greek Anthology</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-24">24</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Greene, Graham, <a class="index" href="#page-299">299</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Gregory VII, Pope, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Gregory, Nazianzen, <a class="index" href="#page-21">21</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Griswold, Hattie Tyng, <a class="index" href="#page-140">140</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Guardian Angel</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-92">92</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-93">93</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Guérard, Albert, <a class="index" href="#page-72">72</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Guérmantes Way</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Günderode, Karoline von, <a class="index" href="#page-124">124</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-138">138</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-230">230</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Gunter, Archibald Clavering, <a class="index" href="#page-109">109</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-246">246</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Gynandre</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +<em>Haillons</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-170">170</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hales, Carol, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hall, G. Stanley, <a class="index" href="#page-151">151</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hall, Radclyffe, <a class="index" href="#page-116">116</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-241">241</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-271">271</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-287">287</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-308">308</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Hallowe’en,” <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-299">299</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hamilton, Anthony, <a class="index" href="#page-44">44</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-268">268</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hamilton, Emma, <a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Hangsaman</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hanson, Elizabeth and Lawrence, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hardy, Blanche C., <a class="index" href="#page-122">122</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hardy, Thomas, <a class="index" href="#page-93">93</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-252">252</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Harp Weaver and Other Poems</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-184">184</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Harper’s Magazine</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-270">270</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Harris, Sara, <a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Harvard Psychological Clinic, <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hatfield, C. W., <a class="index" href="#page-133">133</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-134">134</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Having Wonderful Crime</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hawthorne, Nathaniel, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-352">352</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Hellcat</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Heller, Kurt, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hellman, Lillian, <a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-301">301</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-302">302</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hemingway, Ernest, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Henry III of France, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Henry, G. W., <a class="index" href="#page-12">12</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Henry, Joan, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +heredity, <a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-36">36</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-189">189</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-209">209</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-211">211</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-239">239</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-282">282</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-343">343</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Heredity in Health and Mental Disorder</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +hermaphroditism, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-52">52</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Heroides</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-18">18</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Hetty Dorval</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hille, Peter, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-183">183</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hirschfeld, Magnus, <a class="index" href="#page-14">14</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-84">84</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-153">153</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hitler, Adolf, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hoche, Jules, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hoechstetter, Sophie, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Holland Wolves</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-251">251</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Holmes, Dr. Oliver Wendell, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-93">93</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“homoerotische Roman, Wo bleibt der ...?”, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Homosexual in America</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-14">14</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +homosexual “marriage,” <a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-44">44</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-122">122</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-123">123</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-202">202</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-317">317</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-403" class="pagenum" title="403"></a> +homosexuality (only), <a class="index" href="#page-41">41</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-43">43</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-154">154</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-158">158</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-169">169</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-211">211</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-224">224</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-235">235</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-239">239</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-245">245</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-246">246</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-248">248</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-250">250</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-263">263</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-293">293</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-294">294</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Horace, <a class="index" href="#page-21">21</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Horney, Dr. Karen, <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Les Hors Nature</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Hotel</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-282">282</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-283">283</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hughes, Langdon, <a class="index" href="#page-79">79</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Huis Clos</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hull, Helen R., <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-266">266</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-268">268</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Huneker, James Gibbons, <a class="index" href="#page-140">140</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-265">265</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-266">266</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-268">268</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Huon of Bordeaux</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-34">34</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-36">36</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-337">337</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hurlbut, Thomas, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Hurst, Fannie, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Hymn to Venus</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +hypnotism, <a class="index" href="#page-52">52</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +<em>I, Mary MacLane</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-247">247</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-260">260</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Idylle Saphique</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-202">202</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Illusionist</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-341">341</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Imlay, Gilbert, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-59">59</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Inassouvie</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Indulgent Husband</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-196">196</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-197">197</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Infelicia</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-140">140</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Innocent Wife</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-197">197</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-198">198</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Interim,” <a class="index" href="#page-183">183</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-184">184</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-186">186</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Interlude</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-235">235</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Iphis and Ianthe,” <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Ira, Iris, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Isidora</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Island</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-294">294</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-349">349</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +Jackson, Shirley, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-353">353</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-14">14</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-202">202</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-229">229</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +James, Henry, <a class="index" href="#page-15">15</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-95">95</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-111">111</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-243">243</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Janitschek, Maria, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Jassy</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Jean Christophe</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-205">205</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Jocelyn</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-67">67</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Le Journal d’une Saphiste</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Jouvenel, Henry de, <a class="index" href="#page-199">199</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Joyce, James, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Julie Cane, The Story of,” <a class="index" href="#page-270">270</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Julie, ou J’ai Sauvé ma Rose</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-49">49</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Jung, Karl, <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Juvenal, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-29">29</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +Kallman, I. F., <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Kaltneker, Hans, <a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-235">235</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Kelly, James Fitz-Maurice<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Fitz-Maurice Kelly, James +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Keogh, Theodora, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +King, Sir William, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>King’s Daughter</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-189">189</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-191">191</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The King’s Henchman</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-186">186</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Kinsey, A. C., <a class="index" href="#page-12">12</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-153">153</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-242">242</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-347">347</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Les Kitharèdes</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-158">158</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-165">165</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Klinische Novellen</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Koestler, Arthur, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Komm kühle Nacht</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, <a class="index" href="#page-14">14</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-71">71</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-72">72</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-84">84</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-313">313</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +Labé, Louise, <a class="index" href="#page-117">117</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-120">120</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-126">126</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-181">181</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Labyrinth</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-267">267</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-268">268</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lacretelle, Jacques, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-216">216</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-239">239</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Ladders to Fire</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-334">334</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-335">335</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Ladies’ Home Journal</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>A Lady of Leisure</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-253">253</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-271">271</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +LaFarge, Christopher, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lafourcade, Georges, <a class="index" href="#page-79">79</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lalo, Pierre, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lamartine, A. M. L. de, <a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-67">67</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-160">160</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lamballe, Louise, Princesse de, <a class="index" href="#page-48">48</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-122">122</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Lamp and the Bell</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-185">185</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Landon, Margaret, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lang, Theodor, <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-404" class="pagenum" title="404"></a> +Lapsley (Guest), Mary, <a class="index" href="#page-291">291</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +LaSalle, Antoine de, <a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Lass of the Silver Sword</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Latouche, Henri de, <a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +La Vaudère, Jane de, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-193">193</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lawrence, D. H., <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Leaves of Grass</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-139">139</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +LeDantec, Yves, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Ledrain, Eugene, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lee, Jennette, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lee, Vernon, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lehmann, Rosamond, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-308">308</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Leigh, Arrand and Isla<br> +<em>see</em><br> +“Michael Field” +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Lena Geyer, Of</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Léon dit Léonie</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +LePage, Francis, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Leroux, Xavier, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Lesbia Brandon</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-79">79</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-80">80</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Lesbiacorum Liber</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lesbianism<br> +defined, <a class="index" href="#page-13">13</a><br> +explicit, in author’s milieu, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-49">49</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-63">63</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-65">65</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-77">77</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-85">85</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-101">101</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-103">103</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-196">196</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-202">202</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-207">207</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-217">217</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-235">235</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-238">238</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-241">241</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-249">249</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-250">250</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-256">256</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-265">265</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-266">266</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-282">282</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-299">299</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-300">300</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-308">308</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-313">313</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a><br> +explicit, elsewhere, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-28">28</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-73">73</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-268">268</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-285">285</a><br> +implied, <a class="index" href="#page-17">17</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-22">22</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-38">38</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-42">42</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-43">43</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-75">75</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-79">79</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-95">95</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-97">97</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-111">111</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-122">122</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-125">125</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-126">126</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-129">129</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-140">140</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-157">157</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-178">178</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-179">179</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-212">212</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-263">263</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-268">268</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-270">270</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-276">276</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-286">286</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-293">293</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-294">294</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-296">296</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-300">300</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-305">305</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Lesbos,” <a class="index" href="#page-77">77</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Lesbos: Gedichte</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Letters from Town and Country</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-28">28</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Lettres à l’Amazone</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Lettres à une Connue</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-154">154</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Lettres Intimes à l’Amazone</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lewandowski, Herbert, <a class="index" href="#page-67">67</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lewis, Sinclair, <a class="index" href="#page-300">300</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lewis, Wyndham, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Liebetreu, O., <a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Life and Eager Death of Emily Brontë</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-181">181</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lindey, Alexander, <a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Little Boy Blues</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Little Less</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-44">44</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Llangollen, The Ladies of,” <a class="index" href="#page-122">122</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-124">124</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-125">125</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lodge, Lois, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lofts, Nora, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Lonely Parade</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Long Ago</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-143">143</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Louis XIII of France, <a class="index" href="#page-48">48</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Louis XV of France, <a class="index" href="#page-48">48</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Louÿs, Pierre, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-154">154</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-189">189</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-193">193</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>A Love Crime</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Love Like a Shadow</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-313">313</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Loveliest of Friends</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-308">308</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Loves of Edwy</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Loves of Myrrhine and Konallis</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-189">189</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Loving and Daring</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lowell, Amy, <a class="index" href="#page-178">178</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-179">179</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-180">180</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-181">181</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lucian, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-28">28</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-29">29</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-34">34</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Lundberg, Ferdinand, <a class="index" href="#page-56">56</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Lyra Graeca</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-17">17</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Lyric Year</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-184">184</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +McIntosh, Elizabeth<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Tey, Josephine +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-405" class="pagenum" title="405"></a> +Mackenzie, Compton, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +MacLane, Mary, <a class="index" href="#page-244">244</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-247">247</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-260">260</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Madame Adonis</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-89">89</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-349">349</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Mädchen in Uniform</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-236">236</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-237">237</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-259">259</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-301">301</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Madeleine, Marie, <a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Mademoiselle de Maupin</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-15">15</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-72">72</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-76">76</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-266">266</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-301">301</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-323">323</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-337">337</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-346">346</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Mlle Giraud, Ma Femme</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-81">81</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Mademoiselle Tantale,” <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Mlle Vladimir, Mon Mari</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-52">52</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Magendie, Maurice, <a class="index" href="#page-38">38</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Magnan, Valentin, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Magny, Olivier de, <a class="index" href="#page-117">117</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-118">118</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Maison Tellier</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-85">85</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Male and Female</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +male homosexuality, <a class="index" href="#page-23">23</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-24">24</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-28">28</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-52">52</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-109">109</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-195">195</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-199">199</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-205">205</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-242">242</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-262">262</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-275">275</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +male sexual attitudes, <a class="index" href="#page-45">45</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-105">105</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-156">156</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-297">297</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-335">335</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-350">350</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-353">353</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Der Maler Rayski,” <a class="index" href="#page-236">236</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Mallet, Françoise, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Manicheism, <a class="index" href="#page-30">30</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Mann, Heinrich, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-224">224</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-239">239</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Mann, Thomas, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Mansfield, Katherine, <a class="index" href="#page-191">191</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-352">352</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Marchal, Lucie, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Mardigras Madness</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-313">313</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Marges</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Marguerite, Victor, <a class="index" href="#page-207">207</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Marie Antoinette, <a class="index" href="#page-48">48</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Marie Bonifas</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-211">211</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-229">229</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Martial, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-29">29</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-34">34</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Mary; a Fiction</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Mary, The Virgin, <a class="index" href="#page-32">32</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-34">34</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +masculine attributes<br> +somatic, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-65">65</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-88">88</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-92">92</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-105">105</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-131">131</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-154">154</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-166">166</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-178">178</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-199">199</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-227">227</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-268">268</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-336">336</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-337">337</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-342">342</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-343">343</a><br> +other, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-92">92</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-105">105</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-131">131</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-154">154</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-156">156</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-227">227</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-263">263</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-336">336</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-337">337</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-342">342</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-343">343</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +masculine habits, tastes, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-28">28</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-31">31</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-65">65</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-88">88</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-105">105</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-117">117</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-118">118</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-139">139</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-210">210</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-246">246</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-271">271</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-337">337</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“masculine protest,” <a class="index" href="#page-24">24</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-43">43</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-118">118</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-242">242</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Masefield, John, <a class="index" href="#page-251">251</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-252">252</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Mast, Jane, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Master Mistress</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-180">180</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Masters, Edgar Lee, <a class="index" href="#page-188">188</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-189">189</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Maupassant, Guy de, <a class="index" href="#page-15">15</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-85">85</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Maurois, André, <a class="index" href="#page-129">129</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Maximus of Tyre, <a class="index" href="#page-21">21</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Mayeur de St. Paul, <a class="index" href="#page-48">48</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-49">49</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Mazeppa</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-139">139</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Meebold, Alfred, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Meg</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Memoirs of Hecate County</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Mendel, Gregor, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Mendès, Catulle, <a class="index" href="#page-15">15</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-109">109</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-302">302</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Menken, Adah Isaacs, <a class="index" href="#page-79">79</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-138">138</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Méphistophéla</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-15">15</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-349">349</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Mercure de France</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-168">168</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-202">202</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Mesh</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-341">341</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Messalina, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Metamorphoses</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Mew, Charlotte, <a class="index" href="#page-179">179</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Middle Mist</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Middleton, Thomas, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-41">41</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Milesian Tales,” <a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Millay, Edna St. Vincent, <a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-188">188</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-190">190</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-191">191</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-406" class="pagenum" title="406"></a> +Millay, Kathleen, <a class="index" href="#page-184">184</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-289">289</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-290">290</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Miller, Marion Mills, <a class="index" href="#page-165">165</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Mine-ha-ha</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-224">224</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-225">225</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Miss Julie</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Miss Pym Disposes</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-335">335</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-336">336</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Mrs. Dalloway</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-273">273</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-275">275</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-305">305</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Mrs. Egg and Other Barbarians</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Mitchison, Naomi, <a class="index" href="#page-297">297</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Modern Woman, the Lost Sex</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-56">56</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Moll, Albert, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-84">84</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Møller, O., <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Molly the Bruiser,” <a class="index" href="#page-123">123</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Môme Picrate</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Monckton-Miles, Richard, <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Monday Night</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-321">321</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Monja Alférez</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-41">41</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-42">42</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Monsieur Vénus</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-89">89</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Montaigne, Michel de, <a class="index" href="#page-44">44</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Montfort, Charles, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Moore, Virginia, <a class="index" href="#page-121">121</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-132">132</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-135">135</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-178">178</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-179">179</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Morel, Maurice, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Moréno, Marguérite, <a class="index" href="#page-156">156</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-199">199</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Morgan, Claire, <a class="index" href="#page-339">339</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-341">341</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>A Mortal Antipathy</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-92">92</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-93">93</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Moss, Geoffrey, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +mother<br> +lacking, <a class="index" href="#page-68">68</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-73">73</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-130">130</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-211">211</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-229">229</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-258">258</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-264">264</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-275">275</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-317">317</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a><br> +loved, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-37">37</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-121">121</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-130">130</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-184">184</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-237">237</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-271">271</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a><br> +unsympathetic, <a class="index" href="#page-63">63</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-85">85</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-89">89</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-245">245</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-253">253</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-254">254</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-267">267</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-272">272</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-299">299</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-302">302</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-323">323</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-339">339</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Mühsam, Erich, <a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Multitude and Solitude</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-251">251</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-252">252</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-350">350</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +murder<br> +by variant, <a class="index" href="#page-63">63</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-336">336</a> (planned)<br> +of variant, <a class="index" href="#page-63">63</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a> (attempted), <a class="index" href="#page-226">226</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Murry, John Middleton, <a class="index" href="#page-191">191</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>My Friend Annabel Lee</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-246">246</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-247">247</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +mythology, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-29">29</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-244">244</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Mythology of All Nations</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +“Nadia Devereux,” <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Naked Storm</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-341">341</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Nana</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-84">84</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-85">85</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-266">266</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +narcissism, <a class="index" href="#page-11">11</a> (defined), <a class="index" href="#page-72">72</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-89">89</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-207">207</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-253">253</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-262">262</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Nathan, George Jean, <a class="index" href="#page-300">300</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-301">301</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Nathan, James, <a class="index" href="#page-137">137</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Neff, Wanda Fraiken, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-289">289</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-291">291</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Neue Erziehung und alte Moral,” <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Die neue Eva</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +neurosis, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-103">103</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-111">111</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-259">259</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-308">308</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-317">317</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-349">349</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Never Dies the Dream</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>New York Times</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The New Yorker</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Niemann, August, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Nievelt, Hélène de Zuylen de, <a class="index" href="#page-166">166</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Nightwood</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-317">317</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Nin, Anaïs, <a class="index" href="#page-334">334</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-335">335</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>No Exit</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Noailles, Anna de, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Not Now but NOW</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Notes and Queries</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Notre Dame de Lesbos</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Nouvelles Confidences</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Nun-Ensign</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-41">41</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-43">43</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Nussey, Ellen, <a class="index" href="#page-130">130</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-131">131</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-132">132</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-135">135</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +Oberndorf, Dr. Clarence, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-92">92</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Of Lena Geyer</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +O’Higgins, Harvey, <a class="index" href="#page-270">270</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-271">271</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Olivia</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-337">337</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Omphale</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>One Reckless Night</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-313">313</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +O’Neill, Rose, <a class="index" href="#page-180">180</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-353">353</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Opus <a class="index" href="#page-21">21</a></em>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Orestes,” <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-407" class="pagenum" title="407"></a> +<em>Orient Express</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-299">299</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +oriental literature, <a class="index" href="#page-12">12</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-33">33</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-34">34</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Orlando</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-283">283</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-287">287</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-305">305</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Orlando Furioso</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-36">36</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Orleans, House of, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +orphan, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-49">49</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-88">88</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-92">92</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-93">93</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-111">111</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-205">205</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-224">224</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-270">270</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-293">293</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Ossoli, Marchesa d’<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Fuller, Margaret +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Outcast</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-233">233</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Ovid, <a class="index" href="#page-18">18</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-19">19</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-20">20</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-21">21</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-23">23</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-24">24</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-34">34</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Oxyrinchus papyri, <a class="index" href="#page-19">19</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-20">20</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +Packer, Vin, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Paget, Violet<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Lee, Vernon +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Painted Veils</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-265">265</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-266">266</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Pandora’s Box</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-225">225</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“The Pansy and the Prayer Book,” <a class="index" href="#page-246">246</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-247">247</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Parable of the Virgins</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-291">291</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Parallèlement</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-77">77</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Parker, Dorothy, <a class="index" href="#page-307">307</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Parrish, Mary F. K.<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Fisher, M. F. K. +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Passade</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-169">169</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Past Recaptured</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Patchett, Elizabeth, <a class="index" href="#page-135">135</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Patterson, Rebecca, <a class="index" href="#page-146">146</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-148">148</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Patton (Waldron), Marion, <a class="index" href="#page-290">290</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Paul’s Mistress,” <a class="index" href="#page-15">15</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-85">85</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Peladan, Josephin, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-109">109</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-157">157</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-239">239</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Pensées d’une Amazone</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Pérez de Montalban, Juan</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-41">41</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Perrin, Ennemond, <a class="index" href="#page-117">117</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-118">118</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +personal attitudes<br> +ascetic, <a class="index" href="#page-88">88</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-252">252</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-297">297</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a><br> +puritanic, <a class="index" href="#page-137">137</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-238">238</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-293">293</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-299">299</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-334">334</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Philaenis, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Pictures of the Floating World</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-179">179</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Pilgrimage</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Pierre’s Ehe</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Pirie, Jane, <a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Pity for Women</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-317">317</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-349">349</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Plaisirs Troublants</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Plato, <a class="index" href="#page-17">17</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-23">23</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Plehn, Marianne, <a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Plutarch, <a class="index" href="#page-24">24</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Poèmes—Autres Alliances</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Poems and Ballads, I.</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-80">80</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Poets of America</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-180">180</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Poggio, G. F., <a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Pointed Roofs</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Polaire, <a class="index" href="#page-200">200</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Polignac, Princesse de, <a class="index" href="#page-48">48</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Ponsonby, Sarah, <a class="index" href="#page-123">123</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-124">124</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Poor White</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-264">264</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-265">265</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-273">273</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +pornography, <a class="index" href="#page-15">15</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-50">50</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Pot-Bouille</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-85">85</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Pougy, Liane de, <a class="index" href="#page-202">202</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Pretty Lady</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-263">263</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-264">264</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Price of Salt</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-339">339</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-341">341</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“The Princess Amany,” <a class="index" href="#page-34">34</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Prisonnière</em> (Bourdet), <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-211">211</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Prisonnière</em> (Proust), <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Promise of Love</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-323">323</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-347">347</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Proust, Marcel, <a class="index" href="#page-43">43</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-156">156</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-205">205</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-211">211</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-239">239</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-250">250</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-345">345</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +psychiatric theory (except Freud), <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-153">153</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-230">230</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-259">259</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-346">346</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Die Psychologie der Erbtante</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Psychopathia Sexualis</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-14">14</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +psychosis (insanity), <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-294">294</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-349">349</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-408" class="pagenum" title="408"></a> +psychosomatic theory, <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Publishers’ Weekly</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Puck</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-181">181</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Puttkamer, Baroness von<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Madeleine, Marie +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Puvis de Chavannes, <a class="index" href="#page-247">247</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +<em>Queer Patterns</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-341">341</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-347">347</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Quelques Sonnets et Portraits de Femmes</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Quest</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-267">267</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Quillard, Pierre, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +Rabelais, François, <a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Rachilde, <a class="index" href="#page-87">87</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-109">109</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-115">115</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-168">168</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-193">193</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-199">199</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-202">202</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Rahv, Philip, <a class="index" href="#page-95">95</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Rainbow</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Ratchford, Fannie, <a class="index" href="#page-132">132</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-133">133</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Rätselhaft,” <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Reade, Charles, <a class="index" href="#page-140">140</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Real Adventure</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Recherche de Temps Perdu</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Redmond, Fergus, <a class="index" href="#page-109">109</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Regiment of Women</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-260">260</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-267">267</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-283">283</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Regina,” <a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-67">67</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-160">160</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Régnier, Henri de, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Reinach, Saloman, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-186">186</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +religious attitudes, <a class="index" href="#page-29">29</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-30">30</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-36">36</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-105">105</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-241">241</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-349">349</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Religieuse</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-54">54</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Remarque, Erich, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Le Rempart des Béguines</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Renascence</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-183">183</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-184">184</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-186">186</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Renault, Mary, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-323">323</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Rétif de la Bretonne, <a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Retraite Sentimentale</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-198">198</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-199">199</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Reuss, Paule, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Reuter, Gabriele, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Rice, Craig, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Richardson, Dorothy, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-297">297</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-352">352</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Richardson, Henry Handel, <a class="index" href="#page-252">252</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-253">253</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-302">302</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-303">303</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Ricketts, Charles, <a class="index" href="#page-142">142</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-143">143</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Riddle of Emily Dickinson</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-146">146</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-148">148</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Rigal, Henry, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Rilke, Rainer Maria, <a class="index" href="#page-22">22</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-183">183</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Rimbaud, Arthur, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Ring and the Book</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-188">188</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Rise of Simon Lachaume</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Riversdale, Paule, <a class="index" href="#page-158">158</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-166">166</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-168">168</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“The Roads Around Pisa,” <a class="index" href="#page-305">305</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Roaring Girl</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-41">41</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Robert</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Robinson, Dr. Victor, <a class="index" href="#page-323">323</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Roland-Manuel, Suzanne, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-216">216</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-217">217</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Rolland, Romain, <a class="index" href="#page-205">205</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-207">207</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-239">239</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-273">273</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Le Roman Expérimental</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +romantic attitudes, <a class="index" href="#page-33">33</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-45">45</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-52">52</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-59">59</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-106">106</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-122">122</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-125">125</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-162">162</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-163">163</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-195">195</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-198">198</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-212">212</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-216">216</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-236">236</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-251">251</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-275">275</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-305">305</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-322">322</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-339">339</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Ronald, James, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Rossetti, Christina, <a class="index" href="#page-75">75</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-76">76</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-115">115</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Rothenstein, Sir William, <a class="index" href="#page-143">143</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Rousseau, J. J., <a class="index" href="#page-52">52</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Royde-Smith, Naomi, <a class="index" href="#page-273">273</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-275">275</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-294">294</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Rüling, Theodor, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Ruth, The Book of</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-22">22</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-23">23</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-29">29</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-317">317</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“Ruth and Irma,” <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +Sackville, Thomas, <a class="index" href="#page-284">284</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Sackville-West, Victoria, <a class="index" href="#page-189">189</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-191">191</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-284">284</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-302">302</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-303">303</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-305">305</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-409" class="pagenum" title="409"></a> +<em>St. Nicholas Magazine</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-183">183</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-186">186</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sálammbô</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-68">68</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-71">71</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Sand, George, <a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-129">129</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-138">138</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Sansot, Edward, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Sapho</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-67">67</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sapho de Lesbos</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Sappho, <a class="index" href="#page-15">15</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-17">17</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-22">22</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-23">23</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-29">29</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-79">79</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-116">116</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-156">156</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-165">165</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-242">242</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-270">270</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sappho</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-158">158</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sappho: Greichische Novelle</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sappho of Lesbos: Her Life and Times</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-18">18</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-19">19</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Sarton, May, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-334">334</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Sartre, Jean Paul, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Satana</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-113">113</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Scaliger, <a class="index" href="#page-21">21</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The School for Wives</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Schreiner, Olive, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-115">115</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-318">318</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Schwabe, Toni, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Die Schwester</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-235">235</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-349">349</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +scientific attitudes, <a class="index" href="#page-51">51</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-54">54</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-84">84</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-153">153</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-241">241</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-242">242</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-347">347</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Scorpion</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-229">229</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-233">233</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-272">272</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-345">345</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Scott, Mrs. Cyril<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Fitzroy (Scott), A. T. +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Scrapbook</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-191">191</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Second April</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-184">184</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Selbstanzeige</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Seraphitus-Seraphita</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-224">224</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Seven Gothic Tales</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-125">125</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-305">305</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +sex-change, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-34">34</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-74">74</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-109">109</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-284">284</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-286">286</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +sex disguise, <a class="index" href="#page-36">36</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sex Life in England</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-38">38</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +sex manuals, <a class="index" href="#page-12">12</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-200">200</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sex, Symbolism and Psychology in Literature</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-74">74</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sex variants</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-11">11</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-12">12</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-152">152</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sextet</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +sexual excesses, <a class="index" href="#page-27">27</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-31">31</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-102">102</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-103">103</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-224">224</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-308">308</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-350">350</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Das Sexualproblem in der modernen Literatur ... seit 1800</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-67">67</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +sexual trauma<br> +physical, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-105">105</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-297">297</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-312">312</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a><br> +subjective, <a class="index" href="#page-123">123</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-207">207</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-262">262</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Seydlitz, R. von, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Shakespeare, William, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-180">180</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Shannon, Charles, <a class="index" href="#page-142">142</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-143">143</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Shelley, Peter, <a class="index" href="#page-313">313</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Shilleto, Violet, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-165">165</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-167">167</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-171">171</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>A Shower of Summer Days</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-334">334</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Sidgwick, Ethel, <a class="index" href="#page-253">253</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Sidney, Sir Philip, <a class="index" href="#page-36">36</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-38">38</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-39">39</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sillages</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-169">169</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sind Es Frauen?</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Sinowjewa, Annibal, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Der Skorpion</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-229">229</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Smith College Stories</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +social disapproval<br> +explicit, <a class="index" href="#page-19">19</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-28">28</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-37">37</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-44">44</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-74">74</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-76">76</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-81">81</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-89">89</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-123">123</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-129">129</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-150">150</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-175">175</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-188">188</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-202">202</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-209">209</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-210">210</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-225">225</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-230">230</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-235">235</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-237">237</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-241">241</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-256">256</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-339">339</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-340">340</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-346">346</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-347">347</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-348">348</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-349">349</a><br> +implied, <a class="index" href="#page-80">80</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-82">82</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-85">85</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-117">117</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-135">135</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-137">137</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-142">142</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-143">143</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-160">160</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-161">161</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-183">183</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-211">211</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-212">212</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-251">251</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-273">273</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-274">274</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-282">282</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-301">301</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-302">302</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-303">303</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +social tolerance<br> +explicit, <a class="index" href="#page-44">44</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-77">77</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-84">84</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-104">104</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-124">124</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-172">172</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-193">193</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-200">200</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-214">214</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-242">242</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-252">252</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-253">253</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a><br> +implied, <a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-39">39</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-45">45</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-65">65</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-77">77</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-207">207</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-213">213</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-224">224</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-238">238</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-242">242</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-243">243</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-266">266</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-270">270</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-290">290</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-334">334</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-410" class="pagenum" title="410"></a> +<em>Sodome et Gomorrhe</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-208">208</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Le Songe d’une Femme</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-110">110</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-111">111</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-156">156</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-262">262</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Songs of Bilitis</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-189">189</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-193">193</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>A Soul Enchanted</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-205">205</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>South Wind</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Southern Quarterly</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-321">321</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Spring Fire</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-341">341</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Stadler, Ernst, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Stafford, Jean, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-353">353</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Star Against Star</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Steeplejack</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-140">140</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Stein, Gertrude</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-247">247</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-251">251</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-334">334</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Steinach, Eugen, <a class="index" href="#page-151">151</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Stern, Daniel, <a class="index" href="#page-129">129</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Stirling, George, <a class="index" href="#page-189">189</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Story of an African Farm</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“The Story of Julie Cane,” <a class="index" href="#page-270">270</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Story of Mary MacLane</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-244">244</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-247">247</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“The Story of Opal,” <a class="index" href="#page-244">244</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Strange Fires</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Strange Marriage</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Strange Sisters</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Strange Waters</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-189">189</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Strindberg, August, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-99">99</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Studies in the Psychology of Sex</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-41">41</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-150">150</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Sturge Moore, D. C. and T., <a class="index" href="#page-142">142</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-145">145</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Sudden Guest</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +suicide<br> +of variant, <a class="index" href="#page-79">79</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-115">115</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-179">179</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-203">203</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-230">230</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-237">237</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-259">259</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-300">300</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a><br> +attempted, <a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-101">101</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-170">170</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-226">226</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-308">308</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-317">317</a><br> +of another, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-227">227</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-276">276</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-317">317</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sur le Mode Saphique</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Swann’s Way</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Sweet Cheat Gone</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Swinburne, A. C., <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-80">80</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-140">140</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-179">179</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Sylvia Scarlett</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-251">251</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Symonds, John Addington, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +<em>Der Tag</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Talmey, Bernard, <a class="index" href="#page-86">86</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Tarkington, Booth, <a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Tarn, Pauline<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Vivien, Renée +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Taylor, Deems, <a class="index" href="#page-186">186</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Le Temps</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Tey, Josephine, <a class="index" href="#page-335">335</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-337">337</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>That Other Love</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Thayer, Tiffany, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Theiss, Frank, <a class="index" href="#page-235">235</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Things As They Are</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-247">247</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-251">251</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Thirteen Women</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Thomas, Elisabeth W., <a class="index" href="#page-290">290</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-291">291</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Thompson, Dr. Clara, (<a class="index" href="#page-153">153</a>, note 5) +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Thorne, Anthony, <a class="index" href="#page-306">306</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-307">307</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Tilly, Alexandre de, <a class="index" href="#page-45">45</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Time Magazine</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>To Love and Be Wise</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-336">336</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-337">337</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>To the Lighthouse</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-334">334</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Toast</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Tolstoi, L. N., <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Torchlight to Valhalla</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Torres, Toreska, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Tortoiseshell Cat</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-273">273</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-275">275</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-277">277</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-293">293</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-294">294</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-339">339</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Tragic Ground</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +transvestism<br> +defined, <a class="index" href="#page-12">12</a><br> +no deception, <a class="index" href="#page-24">24</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-85">85</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-88">88</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-105">105</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-117">117</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-118">118</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-128">128</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a><br> +sex deception, <a class="index" href="#page-26">26</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-34">34</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-37">37</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-42">42</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-44">44</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-64">64</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-65">65</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-92">92</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-120">120</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-122">122</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-251">251</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-336">336</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-337">337</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Die Transvestiten</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-411" class="pagenum" title="411"></a> +<em>Le Trille du Diable</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-216">216</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-217">217</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Trio</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-326">326</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>A Trip to London</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-331">331</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Trowbridge, J. T., <a class="index" href="#page-246">246</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Turn of the Screw</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-111">111</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-243">243</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Twelfth Night</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Two Serious Ladies</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +Ulrichs, Karl, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-149">149</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Underneath the Bough</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-143">143</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Unlit Lamp</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-271">271</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Urfé, Honoré d’, <a class="index" href="#page-38">38</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-39">39</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-109">109</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Urningsliebe</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-226">226</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +<em>Vainglory</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-268">268</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Valkyrie, <a class="index" href="#page-32">32</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Valle, Pietro della, <a class="index" href="#page-42">42</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Vallette, Alfred, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Vallette, Marguérite Eymery<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Rachilde +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Vanderbilt, Mrs. Gertrude, <a class="index" href="#page-147">147</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Van Doren, Mark, <a class="index" href="#page-148">148</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +variance (not lesbianism)<br> +defined, <a class="index" href="#page-12">12</a><br> +explicit, <a class="index" href="#page-35">35</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-37">37</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-56">56</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-61">61</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-92">92</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-93">93</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-95">95</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-100">100</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-101">101</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-122">122</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-124">124</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-128">128</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-129">129</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-130">130</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-140">140</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-145">145</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-176">176</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-183">183</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-185">185</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-188">188</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-215">215</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-225">225</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-226">226</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-237">237</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-238">238</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-243">243</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-244">244</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-246">246</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-252">252</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-253">253</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-254">254</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-261">261</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-262">262</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-263">263</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-264">264</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-267">267</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-271">271</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-272">272</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-273">273</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-274">274</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-276">276</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-302">302</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-303">303</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-319">319</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-336">336</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-337">337</a><br> +implied, <a class="index" href="#page-40">40</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-117">117</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-120">120</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-125">125</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-133">133</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-135">135</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-137">137</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-138">138</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-146">146</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-147">147</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-180">180</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-181">181</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-187">187</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-191">191</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-283">283</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-304">304</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-305">305</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-321">321</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-327">327</a><br> +unrealized<br> +by variant, <a class="index" href="#page-22">22</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-23">23</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-56">56</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-59">59</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-62">62</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-93">93</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-132">132</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-321">321</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a><br> +by author, <a class="index" href="#page-22">22</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-23">23</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Vassar College, <a class="index" href="#page-184">184</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-186">186</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-292">292</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Vedder, Elihu, <a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Venette, Nicolas de, <a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Le Vent des Vaisseaux</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-159">159</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Vénus des Aveugles</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-158">158</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-166">166</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Vergil, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Verlaine, Paul, <a class="index" href="#page-77">77</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-90">90</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-114">114</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-201">201</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-325">325</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>La Vertu Suprême</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-108">108</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Le Vice Mortel</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Vigny, Alfred de, <a class="index" href="#page-129">129</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>A Vindication of the Rights of Women</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-56">56</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-59">59</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +The Virgin Mary<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Mary, Virgin +</p> + +<p class="index"> +virginity, <a class="index" href="#page-25">25</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-39">39</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-44">44</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Vivien, Renée, <a class="index" href="#page-154">154</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-158">158</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-174">174</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-175">175</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-177">177</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-178">178</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Vizetelly, H. R., <a class="index" href="#page-150">150</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Vom Neuen Weib</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Voronoff, Serge, <a class="index" href="#page-151">151</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +Wade, Mason, <a class="index" href="#page-137">137</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wagner, Ernst, <a class="index" href="#page-218">218</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Wait for Tomorrow</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wassermann, Jacob, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Watts-Dunton, Theodore, <a class="index" href="#page-80">80</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Wayward Ones</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>We Sing Diana</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-289">289</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>We Too Are Drifting</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-323">323</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Weather in the Streets</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Weber, Joseph and Fields, Lew, <a class="index" href="#page-245">245</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-246">246</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Webster, H. K., <a class="index" href="#page-257">257</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wedekind, Frank, <a class="index" href="#page-224">224</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-235">235</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-239">239</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Weiberbeute</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-221">221</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-222">222</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Weigall, Arthur, <a class="index" href="#page-18">18</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-19">19</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-21">21</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-22">22</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-24">24</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Weininger, Otto, <a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Weirauch, Anna Elisabet, <a class="index" href="#page-229">229</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-234">234</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-298">298</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Welcher unter Euch ohne Sünde Ist</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-223">223</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<a id="page-412" class="pagenum" title="412"></a> +<em>The Well of Loneliness</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-241">241</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-271">271</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-281">281</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-287">287</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-288">288</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-308">308</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wells, Catherine, <a class="index" href="#page-255">255</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wells, H. G., <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Wer Kann Dafür?</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-219">219</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Westphal, C. von, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-81">81</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>What’s O’Clock?</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-179">179</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wheeler, Hugh C., <a class="index" href="#page-330">330</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +White, Nelia Gardner, <a class="index" href="#page-192">192</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>White Ladies</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Whitman, Walt, <a class="index" href="#page-139">139</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wilde, Oscar, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-150">150</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-160">160</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wilder, Robert, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wilhelm, Gale, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-351">351</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Willard, Frances, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Williams, Idabel, <a class="index" href="#page-309">309</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Willis, George, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Willy<br> +<em>see</em><br> +Gauthier-Villars, Henri +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wilson, Edmund, <a class="index" href="#page-247">247</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-248">248</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-250">250</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-269">269</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wilson, Ethel Davis, <a class="index" href="#page-329">329</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wilson, Harry Leon, <a class="index" href="#page-181">181</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wilson, Romer, <a class="index" href="#page-130">130</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-131">131</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-178">178</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-245">245</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Wind Woman</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-338">338</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Winsloe, Christa, <a class="index" href="#page-236">236</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-238">238</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-259">259</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-314">314</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Winter Solstice</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-324">324</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wise, Thomas, <a class="index" href="#page-78">78</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, <a class="index" href="#page-14">14</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-229">229</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +witchcraft, <a class="index" href="#page-31">31</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-33">33</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-47">47</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-73">73</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-74">74</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Within a Budding Grove</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-204">204</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +“<em>Wo bleibt der homoerotische Roman?”</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-228">228</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wollstonecraft, Mary, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-60">60</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-66">66</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-115">115</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-116">116</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-137">137</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Woman in the Nineteenth Century</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-136">136</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Woman of the Century</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>The Woman who Lives with Me</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-155">155</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +women, attitudes toward, <a class="index" href="#page-23">23</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-30">30</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-32">32</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-45">45</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-46">46</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-153">153</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-154">154</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-350">350</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-352">352</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Women’s Movement</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-51">51</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-55">55</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-56">56</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-94">94</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-95">95</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-98">98</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-153">153</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-239">239</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-253">253</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Women in Prison</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Women Poets of the Twentieth Century in France</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Women’s Barracks</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-332">332</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-341">341</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wood, Clement, <a class="index" href="#page-139">139</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-141">141</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-178">178</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-180">180</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-181">181</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Woodford, Jack, <a class="index" href="#page-310">310</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-311">311</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-333">333</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Woods, Marianne, <a class="index" href="#page-127">127</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Woolf, Leonard, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Woolf, Virginia, <a class="index" href="#page-273">273</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-275">275</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-278">278</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-279">279</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-280">280</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-283">283</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-287">287</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-297">297</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-305">305</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Works and Days</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-142">142</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-143">143</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-145">145</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Wuthering Heights</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-131">131</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-133">133</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wylie, Elinor, <a class="index" href="#page-182">182</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Wylie, Philip, <a class="index" href="#page-328">328</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-350">350</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +Yost, Karl, <a class="index" href="#page-183">183</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Young, Francis Brett, <a class="index" href="#page-315">315</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-316">316</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Young Ladies of Paris</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-194">194</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-295">295</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Young Man with a Horn</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-320">320</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +Yourcenar, Marguérite, <a class="index" href="#page-173">173</a> +</p> + +<p class="newletter index"> +Zola, Emile, <a class="index" href="#page-53">53</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-83">83</a>-<a class="index" href="#page-85">85</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-91">91</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-96">96</a>, <a class="index" href="#page-112">112</a> +</p> + +<p class="index"> +<em>Zwei Frauen</em>, <a class="index" href="#page-220">220</a> +</p> + +</div> + +<div class="trnote chapter"> +<p class="transnote"> +Transcriber’s Notes +</p> + +<p> +Two footnotes cannot be found in the NOTES section: [52] in <em>Chapter III</em> and +[8] in <em>Chapter V, Emily Brontë</em>. Likewise, two literature references are not +in the BIBLIOGRAPHIES section: <em>B 151x</em> and <em>B 20x</em>. +</p> + +<p> +The original spelling was mostly preserved. +A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. +All other changes are shown here (before/after): +</p> + + + +<ul> + +<li> + (multiple cases)<br> +... <span class="underline">Humanitären Wissenschaftliche Komittee</span>, 1899-1921. There, under ...<br> +... <a href="#corr-2"><span class="underline">Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee</span></a>, 1899-1921. There, under ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... men. Once, to be sure, in attempting to hearten a girl on the eve <span class="underline">of of</span> ...<br> +... men. Once, to be sure, in attempting to hearten a girl on the eve <a href="#corr-3"><span class="underline">of</span></a> ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... altogether a man.” Leana admits have received proof of this, but ...<br> +... altogether a man.” Leana admits <a href="#corr-4"><span class="underline">to</span></a> have received proof of this, but ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... published in book form as Les Hors Natures dealt with men.<span class="underline">)</span> In the ...<br> +... published in book form as Les Hors Natures<a href="#corr-23"><span class="underline">)</span></a> dealt with men.<a href="#corr-24"></a> In the ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... achieved a <span class="underline">fear-reaching</span> psychological victory, he risks clinching it by ...<br> +... achieved a <a href="#corr-28"><span class="underline">far-reaching</span></a> psychological victory, he risks clinching it by ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... cousin Lilly for her fortune, and challenges him to duel intended to ...<br> +... cousin Lilly for her fortune, and challenges him to <a href="#corr-29"><span class="underline">a</span></a> duel intended to ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... deeply in love, the wife, with “<span class="underline">sterbende Gute</span>,” agreed to release ...<br> +... deeply in love, the wife, with “<a href="#corr-36"><span class="underline">sterbender Güte</span></a>,” agreed to release ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... nervously ill and perhaps left the school<span class="underline">,</span> (inexplicable in the middle ...<br> +... nervously ill and perhaps left the school<a href="#corr-42"> </a> (inexplicable in the middle ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... bound to the back of a fiery Arab steed, feet in his <span class="underline">name</span>, head ...<br> +... bound to the back of a fiery Arab steed, feet in his <a href="#corr-44"><span class="underline">mane</span></a>, head ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... Je devine <span class="underline">tons</span> corps—les lys ardents des seins, ...<br> +... Je devine <a href="#corr-55"><span class="underline">ton</span></a> corps—les lys ardents des seins, ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... um meiner dunklen Schein. ...<br> +... um meiner <a href="#corr-74"><span class="underline">Augen</span></a> dunklen Schein. ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... Und um uns <span class="underline">hier</span> ist Hass und Hohn, ...<br> +... Und um uns <a href="#corr-75"><span class="underline">her</span></a> ist Hass und Hohn, ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... und nun, da du so ganz <span class="underline">erlodert</span> bist, ...<br> +... und nun, da du so ganz <a href="#corr-78"><span class="underline">entlodert</span></a> bist, ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... Vivien or Madeleine, and they seldom equal Barney or <span class="underline">Schwäbe</span> in ...<br> +... Vivien or Madeleine, and they seldom equal Barney or <a href="#corr-82"><span class="underline">Schwabe</span></a> in ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... famous Thomas. His Die Göttinnen (1902-03) is trilogy within whose ...<br> +... famous Thomas. His Die Göttinnen (1902-03) is <a href="#corr-98"><span class="underline">a</span></a> trilogy within whose ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... of course, <a href="#corr-107"><span class="underline">had</span></a> none of her letters, but had received many scurrilous ...<br> +... of course, none of her letters, but had received many scurrilous ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... mood of the Englishwomen with whom Hoape is thrown . One of ...<br> +... mood of the Englishwomen with whom Hoape is thrown <a href="#corr-113"><span class="underline">together</span></a>. One of ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... more designed to conceal <span class="underline">that</span> are a dancer’s veils to hide the form ...<br> +... more designed to conceal <a href="#corr-117"><span class="underline">than</span></a> are a dancer’s veils to hide the form ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... Paris, but neither <span class="underline">find</span> tolerable the bohemian existence which is ...<br> +... Paris, but neither <a href="#corr-120"><span class="underline">finds</span></a> tolerable the bohemian existence which is ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... (as was Thomas Sackville, of the family living even <span class="underline">than</span> at Knole). ...<br> +... (as was Thomas Sackville, of the family living even <a href="#corr-123"><span class="underline">then</span></a> at Knole). ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... variants? Sometimes none. <span class="underline">Lyrics</span> poets in particular simply register ...<br> +... variants? Sometimes none. <a href="#corr-133"><span class="underline">Lyric</span></a> poets in particular simply register ...<br> +</li> + +<li> +... 6. ——. Poor white. N. Y., B. W. <span class="underline">Heubsch</span>, 1920. ...<br> +... 6. ——. Poor white. N. Y., B. W. <a href="#corr-139"><span class="underline">Huebsch</span></a>, 1920. ...<br> +</li> +</ul> +</div> + + +<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77276 ***</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/77276-h/images/cover.jpg b/77276-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..fe16fb2 --- /dev/null +++ b/77276-h/images/cover.jpg diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6c72794 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..af64977 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #77276 +(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77276) |
