Inseparable

by Emma Donoghue

  The erotic energies of a triangle can switch direction suddenly and unnervingly. The earliest example I know of the man managing to seduce his female rival is Colette’s Claudine en ménage (1902; in English, Claudine Married), in which Claudine’s husband, Renauld, indulgently rents her and Rézi a love nest, seeing lesbian sex as “a restful diversion”54 for women, and then secretly beds Rézi himself—which shocks Claudine right back into the bonds of monogamy. But equally, two women competing over a man can suspend their hostilities and fall in love, in fictions as different as Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show (1936) and Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man (1969).

  The rivalry motif55 is still thriving today, and it is still not simply a private duel, but a clash of worlds. Because in Western culture passion between women is always a big deal, whether presented as glorious or shameful, angelic or monstrous.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Monsters

  EXCESS, INFRACTION, DEVIANCE. From the very beginnings of literature, women who desire other women tend to rampage across the boundaries of the acceptable.

  Such characters, in classical, medieval, and Renaissance texts, often lament what has happened to them. Fiordispina in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516–32) complains to Cupid, “I sole am found1 in earth, aire, sea, or fire / In whom so strange a wonder thou hast donne.” Notice that it is Cupid she blames, not herself. These characters see their desire—“so strange a wonder”—as the work of fate or the gods, and themselves as random victims. What is new,2 in the majority of fictions from the eighteenth century on, is the implication that a woman who wants women is inherently strange: a monster who has made the bed of vice in which she wallows.

  Why the eighteenth century? Well, the plays and romances produced before that era tend to celebrate the fanciful, the whimsical, the eccentric, which can leave room for quirks of desire. But from the mid-1700s on, and above all in the new popular form of the novel, we find an emphasis on realist narrative, and an endorsement of the moral and the normal. Same-sex desire becomes the scapegoat term: no longer a whimsical anecdote, but a cautionary tale. If love between women cannot be shown to be utterly saintly, it drops into the realm of carnal vice, and is known as (among other terms) tribadism—literally, genital-genital rubbing, but more generally referring to the phenomenon of sexual relationships between women. Paradoxically, it is the very fervor of same-sex love for which such heroines as Rousseau’s Julie are praised (as we saw in chapter 2) that can cause it to tip over, in the very next text, into evil. And although that evil could be conceived of in various ways—in the Christian terms of sin, for instance, or the medical/psychological discourse of madness—perhaps the most common vocabulary was that of monstrosity.

  The lesbian monster’s most important source is Sappho: not her writings, but her image. This may sound odd, since the seventh-century-B.C.E. poet was and is such a revered cultural icon, but the idea of the woman who desires women as a perverse, angst-ridden figure clearly originates in a long Latin poem Ovid wrote about Sappho six centuries after her birth, called “Sappho to Phaon” (Epistle 15 of his Heroides, 5 B.C.E.). Ovid revved up the drama by showing the poet—a rival to men for the love of girls—as going through a change of life, a late conversion to the love of men. Drawing on references3 by earlier Greek dramatists, which in turn may be based on a myth about the goddess Aphrodite’s passion for the ferryman Phaon, Ovid portrays an ugly, middle-aged Sappho turning away from her female lovers when she falls for the handsome young Phaon—who beds her and dumps her. Here is the crucial verse from Alexander Pope’s 1707 translation:

  No more4 the Lesbian dames my passion move,

  Once the dear objects of my guilty love:

  All other loves are lost in only thine,

  Ah, youth ungrateful to a flame like mine!

  Ovid’s poem ends with Sappho going to throw herself into the sea from the Rock of Leucas, which is said to have the power to cure the leaper of love. She hopes to be healed—but it is always assumed (and first spelled out by Addison in 1711) that her leap killed her, so it is recast as a suicide. It could be claimed that Sappho actually died of heterosexuality, then. However, the most lingering elements of her myth are her angst about her “guilty love” for girls, the sense that it is her whole sexual history for which she is being punished, and the leap from the cliff.

  So although Ovid’s Sappho is a tragic heroine rather than a repulsive monster, perhaps the clearest mark of his poem on Western (but particularly French) literature is the seemingly endless line of texts in which lesbians rant, rave, and end up dead by means of illness, accident, murder, or suicide. Jennifer Waelti-Walters, in her study Damned Women: Lesbians in French Novels (2000), puts it bluntly: “From 17965 to 1929 the male-created lesbian was depicted unrelentingly and almost without exception as a monster with no hope of redemption.”

  Of course, to call these characters lesbians does not fully account for them; the queer and the monstrous are overlapping, rather than identical, cultural shadows. The bogey in these texts6 is not simply desire between women but every fault that could plausibly be associated with it (immaturity, deception, abuse of institutional or aristocratic power), every fashionable vice (sadism, pedophilia, drug abuse), every social change (women’s leadership, racial integration). And authors clearly enjoyed creating these memorable villainesses to intrigue and appall their readers. The monster tale is one of the most interesting branches of the literature of desire between women—marked by sympathy as well as indignation, glamour as much as horror.

  SEX FIENDS

  In the late eighteenth century,7 two French authors simultaneously invented the lesbian fiend: the woman whose lust for her own sex is so all-consuming that it leads to destruction. Their two prototypes, the defiant fiend and the guilt-wracked, both hit print in the post-Revolutionary 1790s.

  A woman dressed as a man goes up to a beggar in an alley:

  “Frig me,”8 I ordered, conveying her hand to my cunt, “I am a woman, but one who stiffens for her own sex. Put your fingers in there and rub.”

  “Oh, Lord! Leave me be, leave me be, I shudder at all these horrors. Though poor, I am honest; don’t humiliate me, for pity’s sake!”

  Achille Devéria [attributed], in Alfred de Musset, Gamiani (1833).

  One of a series of twelve colored lithographs, more ebullient in mood than the death-driven pornographic novella they accompany. Unsigned, they are generally attributed to Devéria, the son of a student of Girodet-Trioson’s and a noted watercolor painter, lithographer, and erotic illustrator.

  She endeavours to break away from me, I seize her by the hair, raise a pistol to her temple: “Be off, buggeress,” I say, “off to hell with you, and tell them there that Juliette sent you.”

  And she fell, blood gushing from her head.

  The speaker is the fearless, endlessly orgasmic heroine of the Marquis de Sade’s Juliette, which appeared in ten volumes between 1797 and 1801, and prompted Napoleon to incarcerate the author for the last thirteen years of Sade’s life. A Revolutionary aristocrat, this paradoxical author was both utterly modern and writing in the old libertine tradition.

  The libertine authors9 of the seventeenth century, James Grantham Turner argues, often focused, in a way that is as philosophical as it is bawdy, on the erotic education of a girl: the unflowering of mind and body. It is generally a woman who takes the girl’s education in hand; Turner shows how erotica by authors such as Nicolas Chorier celebrates desire between females as “an aestheticized, voluntary, Epicurean sexuality, an amour philosophe removed as far as possible from mammalian ‘necessity.’” Yes, these seventeenth-century texts present sex between women as a rehearsal for the real thing, but also revere it as a form of physical and mental arousal which can never be quite sated, so never ends; they veer between what Turner names the “phallocentric” and “philosapphic” modes.

  But if in its phallocentric mode libertine literature can trivialize lesbian sex as pointless “foolery from woma
n10 to woman” (in the words of the immortal Fanny Hill), the Marquis de Sade broke with that tradition violently. Same-sex acts (between men as between women) are exalted, in Sade’s works, alongside other illicit, nonprocreative forms of sex: whatever turns the social order upside down. For the same reason, he celebrates the liberation of women from their traditionally passive role.

  The heroines of Juliette are entirely free of the shame that dogs so much of the literature of desire between women. “You simply have no idea,11 my dear one, to what point I am contemptuously indifferent to whatever may be said about me,” Madame Delbène (the abbess of the convent) tells Juliette (the thirteen-year-old pupil she is seducing). And it has clearly never occurred to them that there is anything impossibilis about amor between women; their orgasms are like fireworks displays. Juliette is more an education than a novel: our heroine simply soaks up the lectures (hedonism, atheism, nihilism) and practical demonstrations (scatology, child abuse, torture, cannibalism, mass murder) offered by a series of male and female mentors. The libertine women vary in their tastes—Delbène prefers sodomy with women, Clairwil is a man-hater who gets her real thrills from killing young males, Juliette is equally attracted to both sexes—but these do not amount to sexual identities; these women are all tribades, but in the broadest sense.

  The Sadeian tribade is a woman who seeks out pleasure in all its forms—clitoral, oral, vaginal, anal, but especially the suffering and (much more so) inflicting of pain. She is a beautiful, aristocratic, intellectual serial killer. She is also unnervingly protean: she plays any role she chooses. After all, in the marquis’s equal-opportunity, nightmarish universe, all a woman has to do is pick up a few tools and she can rape and slaughter men, women, children, and animals as easily as a man can. All roles are swappable: “We girded on12 dildoes,” says Juliette of herself and Honorine on their second date, “and fell to dallying now as lover and mistress, now as master and mate, now in the style of bardash and tribade, we coupled in every imaginable manner.” The result is that one character blurs into the next in this endless, exhausting novel: “My libertinage is an epidemic,” Delbène tells Juliette, “whosoever is in my vicinity is bound to be infected by it.”

  In the relationships between women Sade shows us, lust produces enthusiasm, sometimes even romantic attachment, but these feelings soon give way to boredom, revulsion, and a craving to kill. Juliette does develop long-term, devoted bonds with two older women, Clairwil and Durand, but when Durand—a sorceress with a giant clitoris—tricks her into killing Clairwil, Juliette bears no grudge:

  Mistresses of all13 a universe we shall be; through our alliance I feel we shall become the superiors of Nature herself. Oh, dear Durand, the crimes we are going to commit! The infamies we are going to achieve!

  Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Juliette is its happy ending: the circle of surviving libertines, male and female, are left rich and richly satisfied. But although Juliette and Durand have pledged to live in a sort of sexually open partnership, one gets the impression that our heroine would hear of the older woman’s agonizing death—as she did Clairwil’s—with indifference bordering on amusement. The paradox is that, despite the rich bonds between sex fiends, ultimately each stalks alone.

  Precisely because Sade was so extreme—so deeply shocking, even today—his narrative pattern represented rather a dead end for the literature of desire between women. We can see his influence in elements of what was published after him—the grandiose cult of vice, or sex culminating in murder—but later fictions did not so much follow on from Juliette as retreat from it. In particular, his notion that a woman is just as able as a man to seduce, molest, have orgasms with, or torture women proved too radical for later authors, who when depicting desire between women preferred to fall back on the older notions of confusion and amor impossibilis.

  If Sade’s Juliette epitomizes the fiend at her most exuberant, Denis Diderot took the opposite tack in La Religieuse (in English, The Nun) by showing her as broken on the wheel of her own desires. As much erotic thriller as anticlerical exposé, this novel was begun in 1760 but only published posthumously in 1796, when the Revolutionary climate encouraged exposure of all the abuses of the ancien régime.

  The most protracted of our heroine Suzanne’s string of sufferings at the hands of the Church is her relationship with the superior of her third convent—the novel’s only unnamed character, designated in the original as “Mme ***.” Diderot creates an atmosphere of claustrophobic humidity, as for instance when Sister Thérèse, the superior’s discarded favorite, is reduced to begging her in coded terms for “a moment of consolation14 before Vespers.” Suzanne fails to understand what kind of story she is in, even on the first night, when the superior undresses and fondles her. What tempts Suzanne into compliance is the idea of using her powers for good: she buys forgiveness for the other nuns by granting the superior “innocent” favors, such as kisses. Despite her confessor’s warnings, and despite the fact that Suzanne has accused other nuns of “suspicious intimacy” before and been accused of the same thing herself, she remains obtuse—even when the superior presses against her and gives every sign of being on the brink of orgasm. Suzanne will not let herself think of these convulsions as anything but—that omnipresent metaphor in the literature of desire between women—illness: “It was probably an affliction to which she [the superior] was subject, then another thought came, that perhaps the malady was catching, and that Sainte-Thérèse had caught it and I should too.”

  Unlike Sade’s Juliette (unshockable at thirteen), Suzanne is an innocent narrator of a kind often used in eighteenth-century social critique, such as Voltaire’s Candide (1759), but she reminds us more specifically of the heroine of, say, Honoré D’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607–27), who refuses to see any evil in her romantic friendship with a woman. Suzanne fits15 even better into the libertine tradition of the ingénue who claims to have no idea what another woman’s caresses may mean or where they are likely to lead; in literature, this pattern prevailed right through to the end of the nineteenth century, and has lingered in pornography to this day. (And like their heroines,16 the narrators in fiction and other prose genres can display the same faux naïveté, pretending not to understand what could be suspicious about a scene of eroticism between women: David Robinson calls this the convention of “mock-unknowing, a tongue-in-cheek ignorance.”)

  Christopher Rivers, in a brilliant essay on La Religieuse and Mademoiselle de Maupin, probes this more deeply. He points out that such male-authored novels focus on epistemological questions for good reason:

  “We” as men,17 the author seems to say, with a wink, know more about what goes on between women than they do; male dominance is asserted then, not only in the sexual realm, but more importantly in the realm of knowledge from which it is inseparable.

  Like Gautier in Mademoiselle de Maupin, Diderot tries to pull off the trick of keeping homosexuality unspeakable while nonetheless speaking of it: not only do they constantly present lesbianism as inexplicable, but each keeps his heroine faux-innocent till an implausibly late point. The moment the heroine loses her innocence, the joke is over: it is significant that shortly after this point, in both these novels, the narrative breaks off.

  But though he may share this rhetorical strategy with Gautier, Diderot has a sternly moral agenda of his own. The superior is good-looking, intellectual, charismatic, and erotically involved with several of her nuns, just like Madame Delbène in Juliette—but she proves to be unlike her Sadeian equivalent in that behind her apparent confidence lies a profound unease. At the moment she is first introduced in the book, she is described in terms of asymmetry (the size of her eyes, the position of her head, the fit of her clothes) and twitchiness:

  She wriggles18 on her chair as though something were bothering her, forgetting all sense of decorum she lifts her wimple so as to scratch, crosses her legs, asks you questions but does not listen when you answer…she is in turn compassionate and hard, her ever-changing e
xpression indicates the disconnectedness of her mind and all the instability of her character.

  Consumed by manic emotions that go as fast as they come, the superior is a walking bag of nerves. At first her infatuation with young Suzanne lifts her spirits; according to the other nuns, she “seemed to have lost her moody character and they said I had steadied her.” But she does not just want to feel young Suzanne up; she wants to seduce her into knowledge, into a fully conscious affair. So when Suzanne’s innocence proves impermeable, the superior shows signs of being on the verge of a breakdown, “lamenting” and “sighing” in the corridors at night like a ghost.

  Suzanne is so passive that it takes the interference of a man—her confessor Father Lemoine—to bring this plot to a crisis: it is on his orders that she starts to avoid the superior. At first the superior fights back eloquently, sneering at the priest for his paranoid inventions.

  I only have to19 get attached to somebody in an affectionate friendship for him to make a point of driving her out of her mind…I cannot see how this Father Lemoine of yours can see my damnation all signed and sealed in such a natural preference.