Freud envisions13 both story and sexuality as a single strong stream gushing gleefully into the wide sea of human generation. This oceanic finale exalts both healthy heterosexuality and the satisfying story. Any impediments to an unobstructed flow force the current away from its appointed end into tiny, doomed side-streams, their deviance spawning a degenerate or perverted story.
There is a certain logic, then, to the fact that many of the most interesting stories of desire between women lurk in the “side-streams” of novels and plays, not the main orgasmic “flow” of the narrative. Also, novelists and playwrights often seem14 to have suffered from a failure of nerve—beginning a story of passion between women and then veiling or disavowing it, breaking it off, or hastily bringing on a man to erase the significance of what is happening between the women. Thomas Hardy in Desperate Remedies (1871) offers what may be a sly commentary on his novel’s evasive presentation of an older woman’s attempt to seduce her maid:
It was perceived by the servants15 of the House that some secret bond of connection existed between Miss Aldclyffe and her companion. But they were woman and woman, not woman and man, the facts were ethereal and refined, and so they could not be worked up into a taking story.
Writers—and not just pre-twentieth-century ones—have sometimes resisted any attempt by a critic to “work up” the lesbian implications of their text into a “taking story” (meaning one that takes the fancy or seizes the imagination). Shirley Jackson, enraged by Jeannette Foster’s lesbian reading of her horror story Hangsaman (1951), wrote to her biographer to insist, “Damnit,16 it is about what I say it is about.” (She does have my sympathy: when I publish my fiction, I sometimes wish I had a veto over interpretations of my work, but as a reader, I am glad that is not the case.) However, writers’ descriptions of the themes of their work should not always be taken at face value. For instance, it was during a legal battle that would ultimately shut down their play, at a huge financial loss, that Dorothy and Howard Baker released the following statement to the press in 1944:
The booking troubles17 that Trio has run into have started the misleading and damaging rumour that Trio is a drama about Lesbianism. This report falls short of the truth. We, the authors, would have had no interest in dramatizing anything so special, so chaotic, so finally uninteresting as Lesbianism, and the attachment between the two women in our play is a very small part of a much larger pattern of psychological domination.
That this explanation is intended to cover the Bakers’ backs, legally, is obvious. But it is peculiarly phrased too: how can the dreaded subject be simultaneously too “special” and too “uninteresting” to tackle? How can lesbian relationships be simultaneously “chaotic” and controlling, and besides, why is the “chaotic” bad to write about and “psychological domination” good? To say that the perilously attractive “attachment” between Pauline and Janet (which I will discuss in chapter 3) is only a “small part” of “a much larger pattern” could in fact suggest that this lesbian relationship is peculiarly interesting because it exemplifies an entire society’s neurosis. The Bakers’ statement seems worded in a way that deliberately calls attention to its contradictions, and may be tongue-in-cheek, since a reader of Trio will conclude that there has rarely been a play so clearly about lesbianism.
Not that readers always notice what writers choose to leave implicit, or even what they present calmly, without emphasis. When I was a child, for instance, I read a classic 1906 story by O. Henry called “The Last Leaf.” It stuck in my mind as a charming tale of a gravely ill young woman who, convinced she will die when the last leaf falls from the ivy outside her window, is tricked into living by a neighbor who paints a leaf on the wall. Coming across “The Last Leaf” again decades later, I was startled to find that it is a story about a female couple: Sue and the butchly nicknamed Johnsy are starving-artist roommates in New York who dream of painting the Bay of Naples together. When Johnsy is on the verge of death by pneumonia, their slangy dialogue takes on a tenderer tone: “‘Dear, dear!’18 said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow; ‘think of me, if you won’t think of yourself. What would I do?’” The obtuse doctor remarks to Sue that her friend will recover only if she has someone to live for, and asks if there is a man in Johnsy’s life; Sue reacts with scorn. Something else I had forgotten about this rather magical story is that the neighbor—an old drunken Jewish painter who stays out one wet night, painting the leaf—is the one who dies of pneumonia: he sacrifices himself so the pair of women he is so fond of can survive. Is it stretching a point to wonder whether the unreal (painted) leaf which substitutes so successfully for the real one may be O. Henry’s symbol for a same-sex partnership which gives just as much meaning to life as the “real” (heterosexual) kind? Short of calling Sue and Johnsy lovers, he could hardly have spelled it out more clearly. But because he takes their choice of each other for granted, and because the story’s spotlight falls on Johnsy’s illness, I did not notice the relationship until I read it again, as a lover of women, on the lookout for such stories.
Like the servants in Hardy’s Desperate Remedies, literary historians—even today—often fail to read a narrative of desire between women as a “taking story.” The problem may be simple phallocentrism, that is, the notion that nothing really counts unless it involves a penis or the owner of a penis. Even literary historians who are not phallocentric may define sex in the traditionally clear-cut way, as a matter of genital contact—with the consequence that they interpret all the erotic confusion in Renaissance plays as mere fun, and all the throbbing embraces between the heroines of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels as mere sisterliness.
Sometimes critics do notice the theme, but prefer not to comment at length. Their vocabulary often reveals their squeamishness, but generally they hide their distaste behind a show of scruple—fearing, they explain, that to explore desire between women in a beloved classic by, say, Dickens or James, would narrow that work’s meaning rather than add to it. Jean-Pierre Jacques,19 in his 1981 study Les Malheurs de Sapho, draws a useful distinction between critics who prudishly avoid mentioning a work’s lesbian theme, and those who raise smokescreens around that theme by insisting that the work is really, primarily, about something else.
Often such critics protest that it would be anachronistic for us to find lesbian themes in a text whose writers and first readers would have seen none. But this is a false assumption; as Denise Walen asks after studying more than seventy English plays written between 1570 and 1660 that include eroticism between women, “Why would playwrights20 construct so many homoerotic scenarios in dramatic form if they had no expectation that their audience would understand them?” If even the nonliterate in the pit were getting the point of these scenes, then there must have been a “tacit, if not fully articulated, public cultural discourse” about desire between women. Walen’s argument is supported by the plethora of references to lesbian possibilities in other Renaissance genres such as medical and travel writing and pornography.
Most commonly, nowadays, literary historians use the “not the same thing at all” argument to divide (and therefore conquer) this literary tradition. They sort by costume, for instance, keeping texts in which some of the women wear breeches (see chapter 1) at arm’s length from texts in which they all wear skirts.
A critic may acknowledge the theme in the rare fictions which refer to genital sex, such as Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse (1797; discussed in chapter 4)—but refuse to grant that such stories might benefit from being read alongside more romantic stories of devotion between women such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48; see chapter 3) or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761; see chapter 2).
Others misuse the theory of romantic friendship (a high-status social institution from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century), as Bonnie Zimmerman puts it, “with an audible sigh of relief,21 to explain away love between women” as customary and therefore needing no comment.
What I h
ope to show22 is not that it is “all the same thing,” but that, in studying the full spectrum of passionate relationships between women in literature, it is a pointless exercise to erect a fence down the middle, dividing the lesbians from the just-really-good-friends.
Remember Chaucer’s Dame Hermengyld, so pious and so passionate, with a husband as well as a woman she sleeps with and treasures “as hyr lyf”: how can we be sure which parts of her story count as erotic? Or listen to one woman speak of herself to another, in a Latin lyric from a century or two before Chaucer, as a “hungry little bird”23 who “loves you, as you yourself know, / With her soul and body.” Like all the great stories of male-female love, this poem assumes that passion can be a matter of “soul and body” at the same time.
The literary tradition of passion between women, then, has many contrasting strands, but they are—to use a word which has often been applied to pairs of women, from the sixteenth century on—inseparable. So my chapters focus on different storylines, not different kinds of relationships; we will encounter the lustful and the affectionate, the selfish and the saintly, the shallow and the deep all the way through this book.
Just as I am not interested in dividing this literature of love into “friendship” vs. “lesbianism,” so I do not sort it according to its “positive” or “negative” attitude. When I began my career around 1990, those of us in the fledgling discipline of lesbian literary history felt understandably embattled, and we tended to approach the past by way of identity politics, assigning points for “sympathy” or “authenticity” (especially if the author herself just might have been a woman who loved women), taking them away for “stereotyping” or “voyeurism” (especially if—you guessed it—the author was a straight man). These days, it seems high time to let readers of all stripes hear about and enjoy the whole range of literature about desire between women, whether romantic or smutty, thrilling or funny, and with bloody-fanged fiends included too.
Nor do I think it particularly helpful24 to sort these stories according to whether love between two women is granted a happy ending. Endings are overrated; they are often the point when the writer bows to convention, and there is a lot more to a story than who gets the girl, or who dies. When I write fiction or drama, I know that my liking for a character is shown by my giving her a lot of page time and vivid scenes, however I may dispose of her by the end.
Finally, reader beware: no conclusions about real life should be drawn from all this storytelling. (I recently saw an essay by a literal-minded undergraduate that claimed, “In the nineteenth century, most lesbians were vampires.”) The social history of relationships between women is a distinct and fascinating subject that I cannot tackle here. Fiction, poetry, and drama are not reliable guides even to attitudes the people of that era held toward same-sex desire; after all, cross-dressers were adored on the stage of the Globe and stoned in the stocks outside. A society’s literature is its dream: immensely suggestive, yes, but not a simple reflection of its daily reality.
Of course there are times when a book or play can only be illuminated by a consideration of when and under what circumstances it was written. But having read scores of studies that attempt to fix the historical moment when something changed in the way women’s love was experienced and interpreted, whether in life or literature or both—I remain dubious. There seem to be just two points of consensus.
The first is that it was in the sixteenth century25 that British authors began to write about such love with increasing interest. Contributing factors may have included the translation of classical texts, the rise in theaters and publishing, and a growth in female literacy.
The second is that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a new idea spread from medicine into popular culture: the woman-desiring woman as a clearly defined type. (As Peter Cryle comments26 perceptively of Guy de Maupassant’s 1881 story “La Femme de Paul” [in English, “Paul’s Mistress”], in which a riverside crowd derisively greets a boatload of female couples with a roar of “V’là Lesbos” [“There’s Lesbos”], no crowd before Maupassant’s day would have been able to shout out that or any equivalent phrase with the same “hearty confidence.”) Factors in the spread27 of this idea may have included women’s admission to universities and entry into the workforce in numbers, especially in World War One. The debate was lively—sexologists saw this type of woman as a case of congenital gender inversion; psychoanalysts blamed arrested development—but it seems clear that by the 1930s, in Europe and the United States, a broad sense of erotic possibilities between women had given way to the more stereotyped notion of “the lesbian.”
Apart from those two clear changes, “differing depictions28 of desire were always more or less acceptable,” Denise Walen concludes from her study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama—and I would go further and say that inconsistency has always been the norm. Once we give up what Eve Sedgwick has dubbed “the historical search29 for a Great Paradigm Shift,” what stands out is an unexpected continuity over the last millennium. Authors, imaginative but also self-conscious about the tradition in which they write, have kept on ringing the changes on the half dozen plots of passion between women which appeal to readers most.
Over the dozen-odd years I have been working on Inseparable, I have read many good books. Three memories stand out. Spending an entire fortnight stretched out on my moldy grad-school futon, living—almost in real time—through the longest novel in the English language, Richardson’s Clarissa. Finding in the British Library Rare Books Room, at the end of a long, sore-eyed day, an utterly obscure and brilliant short story by Cynthia Asquith, “The Lovely Voice.” Scaring myself stiff as I read Sarah Waters’s ghostly Affinity cover to cover on the redeye from Toronto to London.
I have had moments of boredom, too, huddled over a microfilm reader in the dark, cranking at speed through yet another dreary three-volume novel to see if what the female characters felt for each other had even a flicker of interest to it. And I’ve felt revulsion, particularly when suffering through the Marquis de Sade’s Juliette. But among the bad books I have found some great bad ones—outrageous in their insinuations and eye-popping in their plot twists—and one of the real pleasures of this project has been juxtaposing the best of schlock with Shakespeare or Brontë such that each illuminates the other, and together they add up to more than the sum of their parts: a literary tradition the best part of a thousand years long.
CHAPTER ONE
Travesties
WESTERN LITERATURE IS FULL of characters who disguise their sex, going “en travesti” (a pseudo-French phrase), or playing a travesty role (as it is called in opera), and effortlessly fooling everyone they meet. As Marjorie Garber puts it, “transvestite theatre1 is the norm, not the aberration.” Since all the roles2 on European stages were played by males until the sixteenth century (England holding out until the mid-seventeenth), it is hardly a coincidence that so many playwrights put the spotlight on cross-dressing in their plots too: a boy playing a woman disguised as a man, or playing a man disguised as a woman, must have given the audience a wonderfully complex frisson. But interestingly, the same goes for nontheatrical genres: medieval and Renaissance romance (in both verse and prose) and fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constantly resort to gender disguise for the sake of suspense, entertainment, poignancy, and a surprisingly polymorphous eroticism.
Winfried Schleiner finds that such storylines celebrate “an ideal in which the erotic charge3 does not derive, as it were, from the genders being apart or diametrically opposed but from their similarity.” Disguise plots have allowed writers to explore, as if between quotation marks or parentheses, all sorts of possibilities. By far the most popular has been the idea of accidental desire between women.
There are two main scenarios. For the heroines of plays and romances, the motives for male disguise are many and varied, as are the consequences. But one thing is sure: girls in breeches turn women’s heads. This is often known as the fem
ale bridegroom motif, because many authors ratchet up the tension by using an imminent wedding as a ticking time bomb for the cross-dresser, who may experience just as much erotic confusion as she causes in others.
Less commonly, but fairly often in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a male character puts on skirts, winning access to women-only space and, under cover of friendship, wooing a woman—who may fear she is falling for one of her own sex. Since the hero generally chooses the persona of a female knight or Amazon, I call this the male amazon motif. (A helpful mnemonic4 is to think of the female bridegroom and male amazon motifs, in 1980s film terms, as the Yentl and the Tootsie.)
The traditional scholarly line is that neither of these scenarios is really about same-sex attraction. The woman who falls for a woman-in-breeches is mistaken, this argument goes, and so not really wanting her but the “man” the breeches make her seem to be. On the other hand, the woman who falls for a man-in-skirts is mistaken, and so not really wanting “her,” just liking “her” very much, or perhaps (without knowing it) desiring the real man behind the skirts. To deny the lesbian implications of these two scenarios, this paradoxical argument has to define desire as conscious but illusory in the first, unconscious but authentic in the second.
Another problem is that such interpretations rely on reading the cross-dresser as just one thing or another—a male or a female, whether defined by clothes or physiology. Marjorie Garber has argued5 influentially that we should look not through but at the cross-dresser, whom she calls a third term—a figure who can break the binary code of gender. As I see it, to keep insisting that a cross-dressed character is really male or female is to reduce that character’s interest and power, and similarly to ask what these works are really about is rather beside the point. They celebrate desires fleeting or ambiguous, but no less powerful for that; they are fantasies, games, speculations, outrageous travesties of the real and the natural.
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