In particular, the supernatural lesbian moved to center stage, as heroine and narrator. In her fascinating study78 Lesbian Gothic (1999), Paulina Palmer analyzes how writers since the 1970s have reworked the conventions of the Gothic (including vampires, witches, ghosts, and other spectral visitors), using them not to hide or denigrate eroticism between women but to celebrate its transgressive physicality.
It is the lesbian vampire, already popularized in cinema, who has appealed to the widest range of writers in the past few decades. She is at the center of such contrasting texts as Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger (1981), Jody Scott’s I, Vampire (1984), Anna Livia’s Minimax (1991), and Charles Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (1985)—the five-year run of which made it the longest off-Broadway production ever. Katherine V. Forrest’s novella O Captain, My Captain (1987) is a particularly clever genre-blender: a lesbian romance between the naïve lieutenant of a spaceship and the reclusive, androgynous Captain Drake, who turns out to be a vampire with a craving for…vaginal juices. “Your body is not my food,”79 she reassures the lieutenant charmingly. “Your pleasure is.”
But the most thorough and original reworking of the motif is Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991), which takes on race and sexuality by way of history and fantasy. Its picaresque heroine “the Girl” journeys from 1850s slavery into twenty-first-century environmental wars as one of a multiracial, underground “family” of male and female vampires. Not lonely killers but scrupulous, politicized telepaths, they give ideas, dreams, and healing in exchange for blood. When Gilda first invites the Girl to join them, her stern speech makes the lesbian/vampire analogy clear: “There are only80 inadequate words to speak for who we are. The language is crude, the history is false. You must look to me and know who I am and if the life I offer is the life you choose.”
It is Gomez’s emphasis on ethics, on the tough, moment-by-moment choices entailed by all relationships, that makes The Gilda Stories really stand out from its literary tradition. Because from the start, solipsism has been the lesbian monster’s hallmark. The monster’s attraction to her own sex is presented as a dreadful narcissism; love of the similar is read as love of the self. In Dickens’s Little Dorrit, for instance, Tattycoram describes her beloved as a warped reflection: “I have had Miss Wade81 before me all this time, as if it was my own self grown ripe—turning everything the wrong way, and twisting all good into evil.” Narcissus starves to death gazing at his own reflection, and similarly the lesbian monster is the instrument of her own punishment, most literally in the case of that popular ending, suicide. Miss Wade “writhes under her life,” and titles her memoir “History of a Self-Tormentor.” Similarly, in Diderot’s La Religieuse, the superior is described as “fighting a losing battle against herself,” and the heroine of Musset’s Gamiani claims that “my diseased imagination82 is slowly killing me.” These ringing phrases are probably meant to prevent the reader from wondering whether it might not be other people who in fact are punishing, tormenting, and killing the lesbian, because they cannot see her as anything but a monster.
CHAPTER FIVE
Detection
IT’S A CRIME—OR IS IT?
Although lesbian sex has rarely been criminalized in law, it has often been presented as at least borderline: vaguely, murkily criminal. And in literature it is often associated with murder. Lesbians kill1 their male rivals, their own husbands or suitors, even their own mothers. Often they murder2 their women lovers. And they can be victims3 just as easily: done to death by their male rivals, their own husbands, brothers, or simply male strangers. Not to mention the various frauds, kidnaps, rapes, druggings, impersonations, thefts, and blackmailings in which they get involved.
But what I want to explore in this chapter is not lesbian crime so much as lesbian detection: narratives shaped by the double helix of homoeroticism and the discovery of a crime. Desire, like crime, lurks beneath a respectable surface, and only a knowing eye can spot its clues, break its codes. How suitable, then, that detective fiction in English, from the genre’s beginnings in the mid–nineteenth century—whether in the most sedate mystery or the most adrenaline-fueled thriller—has so often relied on plots about attraction between women.
Irving Politzer, jacket of Gladys Mitchell, Speedy Death [1929] (1932).
For the New York (Mason Publishing Co.) edition of Speedy Death, the popular illustrator Politzer produced a stylized image of the victim in “his” bath that managed to hint at sexual ambiguity without giving away the plot. Gladys Mitchell used bathtubs for murder in several of her novels, and on one occasion even made do with a small hand basin.
NOW YOU SEE IT…
Some crime stories are puzzles about the protagonist’s gender, riddles that readers—along with the other characters and especially detectives—must shed their own blinkers in order to solve. Perhaps the earliest4 is Speedy Death (1929), the first novel by schoolmistress Gladys Mitchell, featuring her witty psychoanalyst sleuth Mrs. Adela Lestrange Bradley. It begins with the drowning in his bath of the famous explorer Sir Everard Mountjoy (his surname implying the “joy” he takes in “mounting” to unknown places, and his first name possibly suggesting that he is “ever hard”). It is a ridiculous end for such a brave traveler—especially when the naked body is discovered to be female. Now, most of the other characters consider that the real crime was Sir Everard’s, against his fiancée, Eleanor; how could this cross-dressing freak have taken such advantage of an innocent girl? But in a witty undermining of the conventions of the female bridegroom story, the unshockable Mrs. Bradley discovers that in fact it was Eleanor who forced the engagement, and Eleanor—appalled to discover her nervous husband-to-be was female—who committed the murder. Having unmasked the ladylike victim as a villain, the decisive Mrs. Bradley dispatches her by poison, and is acquitted, to go on to star in sixty-five other mysteries.
Similarly, in later titles such as John Evans’s Halo in Brass (1950) and Pamela Frankau’s Colonel Blessington (1968), it is not until the detective solves the puzzle of the cross-dressed woman’s secret identity—developing considerable sympathy for her along the way—that he can figure out who killed whom, and why. Marjorie Garber has shown that cross-dressing in detective fiction often concerns itself with language, using a word or phrase (whether spoken or written) as “a hieroglyph5 of transvestic impersonation.” She offers a fascinating example from Ruth Rendell’s A Sleeping Life (1978): while investigating the death of a woman who will turn out to have had a part-time, hidden “sleeping life” as a man, Inspector Wexford6 mishears the word eonism (cross-dressing, from the eighteenth-century Chevalier D’Eon) as aeonism, which he thinks must have something to do with transcending time; as Garber points out, the “telltale diphthong” ae here becomes “the orthographic mark of cross-dressing: two-in-one, two-as-one, inaudible as difference—passing.”
Inspector Wexford should have consulted his files, because he made the same mistake back in Rendell’s first novel, From Doon with Death (1964). This plot is not about sartorial cross-dressing but a textual equivalent. “Doon” is the prime suspect, the name on a series of frustrated letters sent to a woman called Margaret who has ended up dead. There are no male pronouns in the letters—but the police still believe Doon to be a man because these are love letters; it is not the writer of the letters (a woman called Fabia) who disguises her sex, then, but the readers who misread it. This false assumption makes the police miss comically obvious clues, such as the fact that Doon’s gifts to Margaret included luxuriously bound classics of same-sex love such as Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and the Poems of Christina Rossetti. Here the police are the forensic equivalent of the obtuse husband in “secret enemy” stories such as Belot’s Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme (1870). From Doon with Death, for which Rendell was paid only seventy-five dollars, was considered thrillingly modern in its theme, and won her international critical attention.
In gender puzzles, everything can be a trick
; even the crime may not have really happened. In To Love and Be Wise (1950), a mystery about the disappearance and possible murder of a witty, attractive young man called Leslie Searle, “Josephine Tey” (Scottish schoolteacher Elizabeth MacKintosh) drops many hints that Searle is not what he seems; she calls him a demon, a fallen angel, “the creature,”7 and his name is both androgynous and a pun on lesbian. Interestingly, unlike the cross-dressing women in Speedy Death and A Sleeping Life, Leslie does not have to die to be understood. The detective Alan Grant acts as a sort of therapist, discovering not only that “Leslie” is the part-time male persona of a woman photographer called Lee, but that Lee staged the disappearance as an attempt to frame Walter, a male rival, for the murder of the fictional “Leslie.” Walter’s crime was to take up and then abandon Lee’s beloved cousin Marguerite, a glamorous actress who then committed suicide: it is significant that the only actual death in this psychologically probing novel is self-inflicted. Lee presents her passion for Marguerite as having been fervently sisterly, but Alan Grant sees past that to its queerness: “You were so devoted that you couldn’t think quite straight about her.” However, no one in To Love and Be Wise condemns or sneers at Lee’s cross-dressing or her feelings for Marguerite, and the detective is not interested in arresting her, only in helping her find self-knowledge and get “cured” of being “green.” He brings Lee to the point of realizing that the cousin she idealized was actually a selfish heartbreaker. She concludes ruefully, “It is very growing-up to find that someone you loved all your life never existed at all.” In this extremely unusual crime novel without a crime in it, Josephine Tey casts both the lover and the beloved as figmentary: erotic performances rather than solid selves. And she suggests that if, as the proverb of the title puts it, it is impossible “to love and be wise,” then on the other side of love a certain wisdom, and a maturity that comes of blending one’s masculine and feminine qualities, may be possible.
Cynthia Asquith, in a remarkable short fiction from 1947, “The Lovely Voice,” plays the opposite trick on her readers: an apparently same-sex story masks one that is about desire between the sexes. The narrator remembers being a thirteen-year-old girl at a French country hotel and forming an overwhelming crush on a sweet-voiced, black-haired fellow guest—the more beautiful of a pair of ladies visiting from Paris. Hearing them exchange such endearments as “chérie”8 and “ange,” the girl cannot work out what the bond can be that keeps such two contrasting characters traveling together, and decides that family is the only plausible connection: “They must be related.”
Readers by now will be congratulating themselves on having solved the simple puzzle, detected the lesbian relationship that the obsessed child does not understand even when, eavesdropping on the couple at night, she hears them exchange “repeated kisses.”9 But wait. The girl also hears that her beloved recently dyed her red-gold hair black in preparation for going to a costume ball as Medea—an extreme measure, one might think, but the lovely woman insists that wigs never look fully natural. The girl is thrilled by this secret information, this foretaste of her beloved’s authentic self: “I longed to see her as nature had designed her.” She gets her wish the next day in a way that disconcerts her: when the beautiful lady holds her hand walking through the forest, and a tree branch knocks her hat sideways, her black hair moves too, revealing red underneath: the black was a wig after all. But later, when the beautiful woman leaves the hotel in a carriage, kissing her hand to the girl, “my damped devotion flared up. Let her wear as many wigs as she chose and make any sort of fool of her dull friend, what cared I?” Several days later, when the body of the “dull friend” is finally discovered in the forest—murdered with a hat pin—the girl says nothing, out of a mixture of terror and guilt. Adoring the killer, she feels complicit—but she also identifies with the dead woman, because the beautiful redhead had treated them both with the same casual flirtatiousness, and abandoned them both.
Only gradually does the narrator piece together the whole story, from gossip and newspapers. What she discovers is that the dead woman was the wife of a famous, handsome young poet. At fifteen, the girl is strolling through another forest, this time in Paris, when she sees the red-haired beauty lying beside the poet, reading to him in blissful intimacy: she is his new wife. The narrator finally figures out the full plot: in league with the poet, his red-haired mistress sought out, befriended, lived in some unspecified intimacy with, and then killed his wife. So all along there has been a perverse heterosexual story hiding inside the lesbian one, like the red hair inside the black wig. The girl makes no attempt to bring her beloved to justice: it is enough to have seen her truly with “her own wonderful colouring,”10 to have finally figured out this bewitching Medea who can play any sexual role she likes.
CRIMES OF PASSION
I would like to nominate, as the most glamorous lesbian killer in literature, the heroine of an undeservedly forgotten novel-in-stories, The Sorceress of the Strand (1903). The inexhaustible “L. T. Meade” (Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith), an Irish author of more than three hundred popular novels, co-wrote it with Robert Eustace and published its six distinct episodes in the Strand magazine; she was probably inspired by Madame Rachel, a notorious con artist of the 1860s and ’70s. This Edwardian Nip/Tuck features a beautician and cosmetic surgeon (and, it is darkly hinted, abortionist), Madame Sara, who—a touch of the vampire, here—though past fifty, looks radiantly twenty-five, “a young, fresh11 and natural girl.” To make matters worse, she is obscurely foreign (an Italian-Indian mix), and has many loyal Brazilian and Arab male assistants. Unlike the typical villain of turn-of-the-century detective fiction, who is the detective’s suave alter ego, Madame Sara is an unknown quantity. She repeatedly foils the private eye and his doctor friend; they soon realize what an evil thief, blackmailer, and killer she is, but they cannot prove anything. Nor can they break her hold on the ladies of London, who remain fanatically devoted to her and refuse to credit any evidence of her crimes; women’s intimacy gives Madame Sara access to social circles that the men hunting her13 lack. She is a “magician” who has “cast a spell” over girls. In this outstanding potboiler, femininity, and all its dark arts of beautification, is a mask for desire between women.
Gordon Frederick Browne, “‘The great Madame Sara is dead,’ she said,” in L. T. Meade, The Sorceress of the Strand (1903).
The son of Dickens’s illustrator “Phiz,” Browne was a popular illustrator of children’s books in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here he presents with the utmost glamour both Meade’s beautician antiheroine and the animal tamer who finally brings her down.
Madame Sara’s crimes are highly original. Agnes Dallas, a spinster of twenty-nine who feels a fearful “idolatry” for her, dies of poison that Madame has inserted in Agnes’s tooth during a dentistry session. “I love her12 very much,” insists another girl, Antonia, in the next story, giving the beautician “the fascinated look of a bird when a snake attracts it,” but Madame repays her in a fiendish act of blackmail, during an operation to remove a mole, by writing the awful truth of Antonia’s parentage in silver nitrate on the girl’s neck, so it will show up under the bright lights of a party. Here women’s bodies betray them, literally spelling out their shameful secrets. On the one occasion when the intended victim of Madame Sara’s complex plots is a man, she still works by means of her hold over girls: she has the lovely young Donna Marta literally “mesmerized,” put in a trance, as a lure to tempt Professor Piozzi into marriage, so that Madame Sara can steal his scientific formulas and then murder him by means of a fake potted plant that puffs carbon monoxide during his lecture.
“Hunting her as a recreation is as good as hunting a man-eating tiger,” the detective and the doctor agree ruefully toward the end of the book; unable to bring the invincible Madame Sara to justice, they seem doomed to do nothing but bear witness to her triumphs and watch her disappear at the end of each of the first five episodes. But if she is a wild beast
, she makes a fatal mistake when she allies with a woman who is a match for her: the six-foot, mannish, widowed animal tamer Mrs. Bensasen, who wears a fearsome set of false teeth and keeps her own daughter tied up in a cellar. In a bloody climax that outdoes Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or, the sleuths turn up to find that Mrs. Bensasen’s pet wolf has ripped Madame Sara’s throat out, and the dying beautician has shot Mrs. Bensasen through the heart. As Jennifer A. Halloran points out in one of the only articles about The Sorceress of the Strand, Meade breaks with crime-fiction convention by having the detectives completely fail to bring this uniquely slippery villainess to justice, and the bloody dénouement is none of their doing.
Lesbian killers are not rare in crime fiction, but interestingly, they are almost never presented as simply evil by nature. The causality of lesbian murder is usually a matter of narrative rather than characterisation: the crime is prompted by the peculiar, strained circumstances of a closeted relationship. For instance, in Ruth Rendell’s From Doon with Death (1964, discussed above), by the time we learn that Fabia (aka Doon) strangled her beloved Margaret for refusing to consummate their passion after Margaret strung her along through long years of secret, fervid correspondence…we are rather inclined to forgive her. In such stories, the detective, working backward from an apparently motiveless crime, has to “solve” the mystery of the women’s relationship.
Sometimes, like a clue hiding in plain sight, the sexual passion is masked by a highly respectable friendship or domestic arrangement. This is the case14 in what seems to be the earliest detective story to hinge on a lesbian relationship, “The Long Arm” (1895), which won Mary E. Wilkins (later Freeman) a prize of two thousand dollars from a newspaper syndicate.
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