She is a sleuth in search of a crime, her unused mental energies so pent up that the moment she hears about the mysterious stranger called the woman in white, she declares, “I am all aflame33 with curiosity, and I devote my whole energies to the business of discovery from this moment.” At first Marian values her rationality above her more feminine traits such as intuition, but as the story goes on she learns to use both sides of herself in her “investigations and discoveries.” Having repeatedly failed to “root out” her “prejudice” against Sir Percival, for instance, she gives in to it and starts looking for evidence that he means his wife some harm. Marian’s position in his home is so precarious that she cannot play the hero. When he insults her, for instance, she thinks, “If I had been a man, I would have knocked him down,” but being a dependent woman, tied to the spot by her devotion to Laura, she is forced into the covert role of an eavesdropping sleuth instead.
Sir Percival goes to the lengths of wrenching Laura’s arm, and Marian insists on seeing the bruise, to steel her resolution; she tells Laura in apocalyptic tones, “our endurance must end,34 and our resistance must begin today.” Stripping down to a single petticoat and cloak, Marian crawls along a roof in a rainstorm to listen in on Sir Percival and his coconspirator Count Fosco, reminding herself that “Laura’s honour, Laura’s happiness—Laura’s life itself—might depend on my quick ears and my faithful memory tonight.” From this point in the book, Marian—despite almost dying of fever, as invariably happens to heroines who get caught in the rain—is a full-blown action heroine. Uncovering an elaborate plot of swapped identities and springing her beloved from a madhouse, she works with Laura’s devoted suitor, Walter, but always insists on taking “my share in the risk and the danger.” And even at her most impoverished and frightened, Marian shows every sign of enjoying her “investigations and discoveries” far more than her old ladylike life.
For a modern equivalent35 to Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White, readers would have to wait for the lesbian detective novel, part of the boom in tough-woman-detective fiction which began in the late 1970s and is flourishing today. If two of the strongest conventions of crime fiction are that the villain is the detective’s alter ego, and the femme fatale his object of desire, then lesbian crime fiction can have it all ways: the (female) detective is often linked to the (female) victim and/or criminal and/or prime suspect by longing as well as identification. The detective’s sense of her own sexuality can complicate the matter further. Very often she discovers her preference for women at the same time as her powers of detection; it is by digging up a lesbian plot that she unearths her own secret. We see this pattern from the very beginning of the lesbian detective genre. For instance, in Sheila Radley’s The Chief Inspector’s Daughter (1981), Alison figures out that her employer, Jasmine, was killed by a female lover’s jealous fiancé—and, retrospectively, that Alison’s own feelings for Jasmine went beyond the professional. Similarly, Vicki P. McConnell’s sleuth Nyla Wade in Mrs. Porter’s Letter (1982) discovers that an apparently opposite-sex love affair was really a same-sex one, and in the process decodes her own sexuality.
It is standard protocol36 for the heroine of a lesbian mystery series—such as the two that really launched the genre in 1984, by Barbara Wilson and Katherine V. Forrest—to fall for a woman in the course of her first investigation. In Forrest’s Kate Delafield novels, great tension is wrung from the police detective having to weigh her loyalty to the judicial system against her involvement with an oppressed subculture. Notably, in Murder at the Nightwood Bar (1987), Kate has to investigate the murder of a young hooker called Dory outside a dyke bar. Kate’s being in the closet makes the whole case fraught to the point of absurdity; as the bar owner points out, “You could get killed37 tomorrow doing your job. And you tell me you can’t go to a Gay Pride parade. Doesn’t that strike you as a little weird?” Equally, the community’s resentment of the police is a form of prejudice. “Enjoy being one of the boys?” one of them asks Kate. “Kicking your own sisters around?” When thugs invade the bar to drag off one of the women, Kate bashes the face of one of them against a car. Her unprofessional behavior could potentially wreck the case, but it will prove to be the key to getting the dead woman’s friends to open up to her. Ultimately Murder at the Nightwood Bar reverses readers’ expectations, revealing the underworld of the bar as a homey refuge, and exposing the nuclear family as a site of horror—because it was Dory’s own homophobic mother who battered her to death, to stop her from naming her father as a child abuser. The book ends with Kate on the sidelines of a Pride march looking longingly at parents who carry a sign that says, “We Love Our Gay Daughter.”
Kate Delafield is atypical: many lesbian investigators are private eyes, who occupy an uneasy position on the margins of official investigation. Others are amateur sleuths, completely outside the judicial system. Perhaps the most stylish is Emma Victor, the heroine of Mary Wings’s Chandleresque series, which began in 1986 with the first in a series of double-entendre titles, She Came Too Late. But in any of these roles, the lesbian makes a suitable investigator, because she may be socially invisible or stigmatized, with divided loyalties; she sympathizes with and understands outsiders; she is a subtle reader of behavioral signs, and above all, she has a nose for secrets and lies. The similarities between dyke and private dick are amusingly presented in Penny Sumner’s The End of April (1992):
If people can’t imagine38 what lesbians actually do, they’re even worse about the realities of my second profession. They tend to suspect that you’re going to start unearthing guilty secrets, or maybe steaming open their mail. Sometimes, of course, they’re right.
Lesbian detective fiction is a highly self-conscious genre: just as lesbians can never take their sexuality as a given (having had to disabuse themselves of the myth of universal heterosexuality to discover it), so they tend to be critical of the conventions of the heroic, crime-fighting supersleuth. Self-referential parody is common in such postmodern mysteries as Sarah Schulman’s The Sophie Horowitz Story (1984), Barbara Wilson’s gender-bending Gaudi Afternoon (1990), and Dorothy Porter’s clever verse novel about treacherous poets, The Monkey’s Mask (1995).
But in a way, the literary tradition which began with Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) culminates not with lesbian detective fiction but with the critically acclaimed and best-selling Victorian-era thrillers of Sarah Waters. Her heroines are not sleuths, but they investigate each other. Above all, they are doubles: their identities blur together in a frightening, sexy way that owes much to nineteenth-century popular fiction and Wilkie Collins in particular.
In Affinity (1999), for instance, Margaret, a plain, nervous “lady visitor”39 to Millbank women’s jail, becomes obsessed with the beautiful Selina, who is serving time for being a fraudulent medium. Over the course of this ghost story for those who do not believe in ghosts, the differences between these two women fall away. Selina is as much a lady as her visitor, and Margaret (bullied by her paternalistic family ever since her suicide attempt) is both criminal and prisoner. But Waters goes beyond merely merging the two: winning Margaret’s love lets Selina suck power from her in a vampire-like way, and ultimately run away with Margaret’s whole fortune. With another woman, to add salt to the wound: Margaret’s own maid. Margaret only realizes the truth when she looks into the missing servant’s trunk and finds
a mud-brown gown, from Millbank, and a maid’s black frock, with its apron of white. They lay tangled together like sleeping lovers; and when I tried to pull the prison dress free, it clung to the dark fabric of the other and would not come.
In its combination of class-consciousness and identity confusion, creepiness, and sensuality, this paragraph is vintage Waters.
For Fingersmith (2002)—the only British novel on the Man Booker Prize shortlist that year—Sarah Waters borrows the central motif from The Woman in White: a husband conspires to switch his wife’s identity with another woman’s and incarcerate her in an asylum so he
can steal her fortune. But Waters reworks this lurid plot (meaning both a plan for a crime, and the unfolding narrative of a novel) with a postmodern sophistication, without denying her readers any of the genre’s old-fashioned thrills. The following passage, for instance, comments on—even as it builds up—narrative suspense.
I feel the mounting pressure40 of our plot as I think men must feel the straining of checked machinery, tethered beasts, the gathering of tropical storms. I wake each day and think: Today I will do it! Today I will draw the bolt and let the engine race, unleash the beast, puncture the lowering clouds!
Fingersmith (thieves’ slang for a thief) is a complex machine, perfectly constructed from the interlocking perspectives of a rich girl (Maud) and a poor girl (Sue) who are victims and swindlers, allies and enemies all at the same time. A man (Richard, aka Gentleman), acting as agent for the Machiavellian Mrs. Sucksby, persuades the girls to try to trick each other into a madhouse. Which they do, but not before throwing a wrench in the works by falling in love. What is so fascinating is that this passion is not some unexpected addendum to the crime, but part and parcel of it: by watching each other, by spying and eavesdropping and living cheek by jowl as they plot against each other, Maud and Sue come to want each other. Detection is not just accompanied by desire: it is a form of desire. And the girls’ passion is real enough to cut through the layers of pretense and reshape the narrative. Maud wonders if she and Sue can take Richard’s plot and “make it ours”41 or “give it up entirely.”
“She has made a fiction42 of herself,” comments one of the asylum doctors of the patient he thinks is claiming to be her own maid. Fingersmith is an investigation into the psychology of plotters: the smugness as well as the guilt, the performing and the second-guessing. Like their author, Maud and Sue are hyperconscious at every moment about who possesses what valuable or “counterfeit knowledge.” “When did you know?” Sue finally demands of Maud. “When did you know everything, about us, about—Did you know, at the start?”
A question, in my experience, that women who fall in love with women constantly ask each other, and themselves. Which leads us finally to the quest for self-knowledge, the coming-out story.
CHAPTER SIX
Out
THE TERM1 “COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET” only seems to have reached print in 1963. By the 1990s it had been simplified to “coming out.” But the notion of owning up to a persistent desire for people of the same sex—and of recognizing that as an important fact about oneself—is centuries older. “I love, and only love,2 the fairer sex; my heart revolts from any other love than theirs,” Yorkshirewoman Anne Lister put it, with clarity and finality, in her Regency diary. Not, of course, that the woman aware of her attraction to women might not be interested in men too; not that her preference would necessarily be permanent; not that she would have to see herself as a certain personality type or a member of a social minority; not that her taste would necessarily be central to her sense of self or shape the rest of life. But this storyline3—the discovery, recognition, and acknowledgment (whether private or public) of a same-sex preference—has been part of Western consciousness and Western literature since at least the second half of the nineteenth century.
The fact that the phrase “coming out” is now used, by analogy, to refer to owning up to any hidden trait (“coming out as a smoker/bulimic/Christian,” et cetera) suggests how culturally pervasive the idea has become. Freud may have recommended discovering what one has repressed, in the privacy of a psychoanalyst’s office, but the current pressure to bare all on television may be considered at least partly a legacy of the twentieth-century lesbian and gay movement. Luckily, the coming-out motif has produced literature that is far subtler than the Oprah Winfrey Show.
The discovery of same-sex desires4 can be presented as an awakening (rude or gentle), a splitting off from ordinary womanhood, a puzzle to solve or a grueling quest, a trial (in the broadest sense of the word), a daring escape, a tragic exile, or a homecoming. There are losses as well as kisses, suicides as well as honeymoons. Although a late branch on the family tree of plots about desire between women, the coming-out story has been the dominant one throughout the twentieth century and still lingers in the twenty-first. It seeds itself within many genres (from the school story to tragedy, the coming-of-age novel to pulp romance) and takes many narrative forms, of which this chapter explores half a dozen of the most popular. Despite what you might expect, when considered in order of publication these texts do not form a simple progress narrative: some of the earliest show heroines attaining a surprising ease with themselves, while some of the most recent are marked with painful confusion.
What has made this storyline fruitful for writers for so long is that the acknowledgment of same-sex desires generally starts a fight: a battle against the forces of convention, religion, or law, or simply a battle within the self. Women in these novels, stories, and plays struggle to understand their desires (not just for other women but for certain clothes, jobs, ways of being in the world); they wrestle to suppress or express them; they struggle to understand what difference these desires make to who they are. They fight for love, and for freedoms social or existential. The fact that the coming-out story is generally a heroic one does not mean it cannot also be ambivalent, humiliating, or downright absurd.
The elements vary: the story does not always begin with falling in love, nor end with sharing the news with family or friends, or even getting the girl. Many of the characters I look at in this chapter could not be said to live in “the closet,” nor to step out of it; it is all a lot muddier than that dramatic metaphor would suggest. But what is common to almost all of them is a recognition of same-sex desire, and a movement outward, upward, toward coming to some kind of terms with it.
CASE HISTORIES
The case history is a medical genre: a collection of symptoms in meaningful association and sequence, apparently neutral but always meant to lead to a diagnosis. In the second half of the nineteenth5 century, doctors began offering case histories of female members of the “third sex,” or “inverts” (women born masculine, highly strung, and attracted to women). Interestingly, before World War I very few novelists took up these terms, or presented desire between women as a matter of congenital masculinity. What many of them did borrow was something of the case history’s narrative structure: they started shaping their own treatments of desire between women as probing investigations of troubled individuals.
John Cosmo Clark, in a review of Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, in The American Sketch (March 1929).
Cosmo Clark was a distinguished English artist who spent 1928–29 in New York; at home he designed posters for London Transport and achieved his greatest success with a series of pub paintings during World War II. Here, although he draws these women as rushing in an ungainly and possibly suicidal way toward the “well of loneliness,” he wittily suggests that it is in fact a highly social spot.
One early example is George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin (1886)—a satirical Irish novel about the marriage market, which has rarely been out of print since publication. Writers who want to interest a broad readership in the grueling process of recognizing one’s attraction to one’s own sex typically adopt a softly-softly approach. They begin with a friendship, eliciting our liking for both parties, and only then comes a fork in the road, a parting of ways between the one for whom it is really only friendship…and the one for whom it is revealed as something more. Often, in rivals stories such as Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886), it is not a gentle drifting apart but a forcible parting by a man who comes to separate the innocently homoerotic sheep from the neurotically lesbian goat. This is the case in A Drama in Muslin: our heroine Alice’s dearest friend is Lady Cecilia, a deeply religious, ascetic hunchback, filled with panic on leaving the safe haven of school and nauseous at the very mention of men or marriage. Cecilia feels for Alice “love that was wild6 and visionary, and perhaps scarcely sane. And the intensity of this affection had
given rise to conjecturing.” Cecilia is as aware as anyone that something is wrong with her, and the news that Alice has a male suitor sends her into a hysterical crisis.
Moore is writing in the French tradition of the monstrous lesbian, but with a new sympathy: he sees Cecilia as a victim of bad influences (in fact, a confusing plethora of them). The narrator interrupts the scene here to blame Cecilia’s “misshapen body,”7 plus her father’s age and decrepit sperm when he sired her (bad genes), plus her mother’s revulsion against him (fetal conditioning), plus the bitterness of late-nineteenth-century feminism (social conditioning). Just about the only explanation he does not offer, interestingly enough, is inversion. He lays it on thick, assuring the readers that Cecilia has “the eyes of the deformed, deep, dreamy depths of brown, luminous with a strange weariness, that we who are normal, straight and strong, can neither feel nor understand.” The prose is purple, but the tone is high-minded: the author seems to be trying to help “normal, straight” readers “understand” what they can never “feel.” Alice, lacking this understanding, rebukes Cecilia for her “absurd” feelings, sending her into depression. But at this point Cecilia does some hard thinking: the trauma of losing Alice brings a compensatory breakthrough in self-knowledge. At their next meeting, she confesses to Alice that “I desired to possess you wholly and entirely.” She announces that she plans to suppress her guilty passion by becoming a nun. Moore, well aware of Diderot’s La Religieuse, may be hinting here that Cecilia might find in convent life not so much sublimation as a discreet outlet for her desires. Cecilia—acknowledging her preference for women, and choosing a life that will not subject her to the horrors of marriage—is a subtly different creature from her literary foresisters, and seems less likely to die frothing at the mouth.
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