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+*** 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.
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+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,
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+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.
+
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+
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+
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+
+194. ——. The harp-weaver and other poems. N. Y., Harper, 1923.
+
+195. ——. The lamp and the bell. N. Y., Harper, 1921.
+
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+
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+
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+
+201. *MØLLER, O. W. Wer kann dafür? (tr. from Danish, Richard Meienreis)
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+205. *MÜHSAM, ERICH. Die Psychologie der Erbtante. Zurich, Schmidt,
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+206. NATHAN, GEORGE JEAN. Design for loving. American Spectator 1:2-3,
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+208. *NIEMANN, AUGUST. Zwei Frauen. Dresden, Pierson, 1901.
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+209. NIN, ANAÏS. Ladders to fire. N. Y., Dutton, 1924.
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+                                Addenda
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+320. FLORA, FLETCHER. Strange sisters. N. Y., Lion Books, 1954.
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+322. SHAW, WILENE. The fear and the guilt. N. Y., Ace Books, 1954.
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+323. WOOD, CLEMENT. Strange fires. N. Y., Woodford Press, 1951.
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+324. WOODFORD, JACK. Male and female. N. Y., Woodford Press, 1935.
+
+
+    B. BIBLIOGRAPHIC, BIOGRAPHICAL, HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL MATERIAL
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+66. FLAT, PAUL. Figures et questions de ce temps. Paris, Sansot, n.d.
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+67. ——. Nos femmes de lettres. Paris, Perrin, n.d.
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+79. GERMAIN, ANDRÉ. Renée Vivien. Paris, Crès, 1917.
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+80. GILBERT, O. P. Women in men’s guise. Lond., John Lane, 1932.
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+81. GIRAUD, VICTOR. Les maîtres de l’heure. Paris, Hachette, 1914.
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+82. GODWIN, WILLIAM. Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft. N. Y., Richard
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+83. GOLDSMITH, MARGARET. Christina of Sweden: a psychological biography.
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+84. GOURMONT, JEAN DE. Muses d’aujourd’hui ... Paris, Mercure de France,
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+85. GOURMONT, REMY DE. Lettres intimes à l’Amazone. Paris, Mercure de
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+86. ——. Letters to the Amazon. (tr. R. Aldington) Lond., Chatto, 1931.
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+
+270. TARNOVSKI, V. M. L’instinct sexuel et ses manifestations morbides.
+Paris, Carrington, 1904.
+
+271. ——. Anthropological, legal and medical studies of pederasty in
+Europe. N. Y., Falstaff Press, 1933.
+
+272. TENNENBAUM, JOSEPH. The riddle of woman: a study in the social
+psychology of sex. N. Y., Lee Furman, 1936.
+
+273. TERMAN, L. M. & MILES, CATHERINE C. Sex and personality: studies in
+masculinity and femininity. N. Y., McGraw Hill, 1936.
+
+274. THOM, D. A. Normal youth and its everyday problems. N. Y.,
+Appleton, 1932.
+
+275. THOMPSON, C. J. S. Mysteries of sex: women who posed as men and men
+who impersonated women. Lond., Hutchinson, 1938.
+
+276. THOMPSON, CLARA. Changing aspects of homosexuality in
+psychoanalysis. Psychiatry 10:183-89, 1947.
+
+277. THORPE, L. P. Psychological foundations of personality. N. Y.,
+McGraw Hill, 1938.
+
+278. [ULRICHS, KARL]. Numa Numantius. Vindex; Inclusa, 1864; Vindicta;
+Formatrix; Ara spei, 1865; Gladius furens, 1867; Memnon I, II, 1868;
+Incubus; Argonauticus, 1869; Prometheus; Araxis, 1870. [All privately
+printed.]
+
+279. VELIKOWSKY, I. Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and unconscious
+homosexuality. Psychoanal. Rev. 24:18-25, 1937.
+
+280. VORONOFF, SERGE. Rejuvenation by grafting. Lond., Allen, Unwin,
+1925.
+
+281. ——. The study of old age and my method of rejuvenation. Lond.,
+Gill, 1928.
+
+282. WATSON, JOHN. Psychological care of infant and child. N. Y.,
+Norton, 1928.
+
+283. WEINDEL, HENRI DE. L’homosexualité en Allemagne. Paris, C. Juven,
+1908.
+
+284. WEININGER, OTTO. Sex and character. N. Y., Putnam, 1906.
+
+285. WESTERMARCK, E. Homosexualität. Sex-Probleme 4:248-80, 1908.
+
+286. WESTPHAL, C. VON. Die conträre Sexualempfindung. Archiv. f.
+Psychiat. & Nervenkrankh. 2(1):73-108, 1869.
+
+287. WHITE, LYNN. Educating our daughters. N. Y., Harper, 1950.
+
+288. WHITE, W. A. Twentieth century psychiatry: its contribution to
+man’s knowledge of himself. N. Y., Norton, 1936.
+
+289. WILE, I. S. Sex life of the unmarried adult.... N. Y., Vanguard,
+1934.
+
+290. *WINNER, ALBERTINE L. Homosexuality in women. Med. Praxis.
+217:219-220, 1947.
+
+291. WITSCHI, E. & MENGERT, W. F. Endocrine studies on human
+hermaphrodites and their bearing on the interpretation of homosexuality.
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+
+292. WITTELS, FRITZ. Mona Lisa and feminine beauty. Int. J. Psychoanal.
+15:25-40, 1934.
+
+293. ——. Motherhood and bisexuality. Psychoanal. Rev. 21:180-93, 1934.
+
+294. ——. The position of the psychopath in the psychoanalytic system.
+Int. J. Psychoanal. 19:471-88, 1938.
+
+295. WORTIS, JOSEPH. Intersexuality and effeminacy in the male
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+
+296. WRIGHT, C. A. Endocrine aspects of homosexuality; further studies.
+Med. Record 147:449-52, 1938.
+
+297. WULFFEN, ERICH. Woman as a sexual criminal. N. Y., American
+Ethnological Press, 1934.
+
+298. YARROS, RACHELLE S. Modern woman and sex: a feminist physician
+speaks. N. Y., Vanguard, 1933.
+
+299. YAWGER, N. S. Transvestism and other cross-sex manifestations. J.
+Nerv. & Ment. Disease 42:41-48, 1940.
+
+300. YOUNG, KIMBALL. Personality and problems of adjustment. N. Y.,
+Crofts, 1940.
+
+301. ZILBOORG, GREGORY. A history of psychiatric medicine. N. Y.,
+Norton, 1941.
+
+302. ——. Masculine and feminine: biological and cultural aspects.
+Psychiatry 7:257-296, 1944.
+
+303. ——. Mind, medicine and man. N. Y., Harcourt, 1943.
+
+304. *ZIMMERLEIN, K. 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 ***