But by far the most famous22 coming-out novel is The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928 by Radclyffe Hall (born Marguerite, but she preferred “John”), and banned in Britain and the United States as obscene. Hall drew on her personal experience, but also on other fiction (probably including Hungerheart, and possibly La Bonifas), as well as the medical literature on homosexuality (primarily inversion, but also prenatal conditioning and family dynamics, including the Oedipal complex). Her protagonist, Stephen,23 not only discovers what she is in the pages of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, but is similar in many ways (a writer, well-born, raised more or less as a boy) to “Sandor,” the subject of one of Krafft-Ebing’s vivid case histories. In fact, the novel is so preoccupied with Stephen’s gender troubles—rather than merely desire for women—that it is often read nowadays as a transgender narrative rather than a lesbian one.
Even before she falls madly for a housemaid at the age of seven, Stephen has a nature that everyone but she seems able to diagnose. Her governess, Puddle, held back by “that wilfully selfish24 tyranny of silence evolved by a crafty old ostrich of a world,” longs to tell the child:
You’re neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you’re as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you’re unexplained as yet—you’ve not got your niche in creation. But some day that will come, and meanwhile don’t shrink from yourself, but just face yourself calmly and bravely.
There is the book’s moral (and political agenda) in a nutshell—but of course Stephen has to figure all this out for herself, by leaving home, becoming a novelist, driving an ambulance in France in World War One, and surviving a series of painful affairs with feminine women. They range from the double-crossing dabbler Angela Crossby to the devoted, underwear-darning Mary Llewellen, whom Stephen—in the novel’s sacrificial climax—finally drives into the arms of a man so he can give her children and an ordinary life. Radclyffe Hall was not the first and would not be the last author to purchase the reader’s sympathy for her protagonist by means of a noble renunciation. In such novels as Ethel Arnold’s Platonics: A Study (1894), Gale Wilhelm’s We Too Are Drifting (1935), Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies (1944), and Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour (1958), the man conquers by default because his female rival is so generous—or, one might say, a sucker.
Many novelists followed Hall in drawing on medical literature for the language—and structure—of their coming-out narratives. The psychological sciences, in particular, could offer novelists a language for the coming-out process. Debby, in Wasteland (1946), the first novel of “Jo Sinclair” (Ruth Seid), has an easier time of it than Hall’s Stephen, because she is guided by a refreshingly pragmatic psychiatrist. Debby is not so much the novel’s protagonist—that role belongs to her brother Jake—as its guiding light. An androgynous writer just like Radclyffe Hall’s heroine, but a Jewish American one, she is troubled by the sense that her “difference”25 (by which she seems to mean her butchness, as much as her intimacy with a Jewish poet called Fran) makes her “isolated, as part of a tiny minority of people who did not dare lift their eyes to the level of the rest of the world. No matter how clean I kept myself. No matter if I loved beautiful music and beautiful words.” Despite her psychiatrist’s theory that it was her weak father who turned her into a “lesbian,” he encourages her to accept herself anyway and “get her hands on what she wants.” Debby relaxes into a sense of solidarity not only with fellow same-sexers but with black people and the disabled: “all the odd ones, the queer and different ones.” (This sounds a startlingly 1970s note in a 1940s text.) Jake loves his sister, but feels ashamed of her oddity; she sends him to talk to her psychiatrist, who cures him of that, as well as his shame about being a Jew. There is a moving moment when Jake asks to take a photo of Debby; she volunteers to change out of her slacks into a skirt—but no, he prefers to record her “just the way you are.” Wasteland won26 the Harper Prize; it was reprinted many times and translated into six languages; readers of all stripes wrote to Jo Sinclair to say how touched they were by Debby. If in A Drama in Muslin (1886) George Moore doubted whether “we who are normal, straight and strong” could ever understand a lesbian, a mere sixty years later the world had changed enough that troubled readers all over North America were hoping a lesbian might understand them.
ON TRIAL
“My love for Marie27 is as natural to me as your love for me is natural to you.”
“I know, I know!” said Frank with evident embarrassment, “I meant abnormal, as people generally view such things.”
“Yes,” said Norma, “it is abnormal in the eyes of the community.”
“That was all that I meant,” said Frank.
Take a guess at the date of this calm little exchange about the relativism of the “natural” and the “normal”: 1960? 1980? Guess again: 1895. The remarkable Norma Trist; or, Pure Carbon: A Story of the Inversion of the Sexes is a “dime novel” by John Wesley Carhart, a Texas minister, physician, and inventor of a forerunner of the automobile. Despite the subtitle’s mention of the fashionable concept of inversion, Norma is not your tormented, mannish invert at all. In fact, this heiress is an all-rounder whose traditionally masculine strengths (gymnastics, mathematics, carriage driving) are matched with feminine ones (beauty and sensitivity). Elected valedictorian, she gives such a great speech that it wins her immediate job offers in journalism. She is also having a blissful affair with her “inseparable” music tutor, Mrs. LaMoreaux. Carhart describes his heroine’s nature as a “beautiful blending of the sensuous—not to say sensual—and the truly, sublimely, religious and poetic.” Her preference seems innate (she has desired girls and only girls since the age of twelve), but not inherited (given the lack of anything of the kind in her family history), and not marked by either masculinity or neurosis. In one of the very few essays on this little-known novel, Kim Emery argues that although Carhart often echoes the literature of the sexologists, and shares their zeal to shift homosexuality from the moral/legal to the medical arena, he also offers a profound challenge to that discourse. He presents his heroine as so profoundly healthy and successful that, according to the medical literature of the 1890s, “the existence of an individual28 like Norma Trist was impossible.”
Jacket, John Wesley Carhart, Norma Trist; or, Pure Carbon: A Story of the Inversion of the Sexes (1895).
The anonymous cover art of this novel defies readers’ expectations about “inversion” by presenting Norma as an icon of charming femininity. The photograph is said to be of Gertrude Haynes, who set up an all-women theater company in 1905.
Carhart uses familiar elements of the school story, the rivals plot (casting Norma’s farmer neighbor, Frank Artman, in the role of oblivious suitor), and the case history (inserting, almost verbatim, excerpts from Krafft-Ebing’s case history of “Sandor” in the love letters of Norma’s that the school authorities confiscate). He is careful to distinguish between guilt and mere self-consciousness: as Norma puts it, “I feel no condemnation29 for aught I have done or for aught that I feel. But oh! I dread the criticisms and scoffs of society.”
The storyline briefly dips into the French fiend tradition when the faithless Mrs. LaMoreaux gets engaged to a Mexican army officer, and Norma stabs her, but—unlike Alice Mitchell, whose 1892 conviction clearly inspired this novel—not fatally. At this point Norma Trist also mixes in the thrills of another genre—the courtroom drama—as Norma’s coming out moves from private process to public debate. The first verdict is (like Mitchell’s) criminal insanity, but when she is retried, her lawyer argues that her preference for women is merely “psychopathia-sexualis,”30 an “abnormality” (whether congenital or acquired, he says, hedging his bets). The asylum director testifies that Norma is a freak of nature perhaps, but no more culpable than any man who committed the same kind of jealous crime passionel. A doctor claims, on the other hand, that she could be cured by hypnosis. Taking the stand, Norma shows guilt only about the stabbing; she s
peaks with eloquent pride about her relationship with Mrs. LaMoreaux, which she describes as “according to my nature; therefore, God-given and right”—just as worthy as any male-female relationship, “and I may modestly say, as intelligent.” In answer to a question about sex, she explains that her “love for and relations with Marie afforded the highest and profoundest satisfaction.”
The bewildering discussions in the courtroom lead to a hung jury, and Norma Trist has a similarly confused ending. Having spent much of the novel arguing for a sympathetic acceptance of homosexuality, and amassing evidence for its being permanent in the case of his heroine, Carhart suddenly changes tack and resorts to a deus ex machina. As a favor to the devoted Frank, who has bailed her out, Norma allows the hypnotist Dr. Jasper to assess her (he decides that it was all her doting father’s fault for educating her like a son), and treat her three times a week, implanting in her the following heavy-handed suggestion: “I abhor the love31 of my own sex, and shall never again think women handsome. I shall and will become well again, fall in love with Frank Artman, be happy and make him happy.” Abracadabra—Norma is normalized as fast as any Stepford wife—and she and Frank (like poster children for what a century later would be called the ex-gay movement) have a blissful and fertile marriage. As Kim Emery points out, her married name—Norma Artman—may imply “that all this normalcy32 is artifice.” Carhart may have hoped this eleventh-hour swerve would make his radical story acceptable to the authorities, but in fact it did not prevent his being arrested on obscenity charges.
Although sex between women has very rarely been forbidden by law, courtrooms play an important role in many coming-out stories—but often an offstage one. This might seem like a paradox; perhaps it is that having a protagonist interrogated about her tastes in the dock would read like a debate, whereas showing the complex ripple effects on her whole life of even a threatened exposure on the stand makes for a better narrative.
In Lillian Hellman’s critical and commercial hit play The Children’s Hour (1934)—loosely based, like John Wesley Carhart’s novel, on a real case, this time from early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh—two headmistresses fail to convict a pupil’s grandmother of libel for destroying their school by spreading a rumor that they are lovers. (In a neat nod to literary tradition, their child accuser has been made aware of such possibilities by Gautier’s 1835 novel Mademoiselle de Maupin.) But just as the accusation is only whispered, never spoken aloud onstage, the trial is not shown; it is the terrible gap between two acts of the play. When we see the teachers again in the trial’s aftermath, living as recluses in the empty school, one of them has gone through an unwilling metamorphosis. Here a play about the evils of gossip suddenly changes course.
MARTHA I love you that way33—maybe the way they said I loved you. I don’t know. (Waits, gets no answer, kneels down next to Karen.) Listen to me!
KAREN What?
MARTHA I have loved you the way they said.
KAREN You’re crazy.
MARTHA There’s always been something wrong. Always—as long as I can remember. But I never knew it until all this happened.
The New York Times34 reviewer saw this shift as a fundamental flaw in The Children’s Hour, and advised the producers to bring down the curtain before the confession scene. But I believe35 this is what keeps the play interesting today: that Hellman takes a tale of persecuted innocence and—by digging more deeply—turns it into a complex parable about scapegoating and identity formation. We can also place The Children’s Hour in the context of “fork in the road” plots about two friends who both win the audience’s sympathy before one of them is gradually revealed—to herself as much as anyone—as a lesbian. Because the fact is,36 if Martha were a declared lesbian in the first scene, The Children’s Hour would not have worked the same way on its 1934 audience—in the highly unlikely event that the censors had let the curtain come up in the first place. As it is, she has to bow to tradition and shoot herself—offstage, of course.
Sometimes a relationship between women does not even have to result in a court case; the mere threat of having one’s sexuality named in a public forum casts a paralyzing shadow. For instance, in Anna Elisabet Weirauch’s groundbreaking, grim trilogy Der Skorpion (1919–21; in English, The Scorpion and The Outcast, and many pulp editions under various titles), young Myra’s family tries to break up her affair with the older Olga by a variety of means. The first kind of authority they invoke is medical: they put pressure on Myra to let a sexologist check her for “physical abnormalities,”37 and call in a psychiatrist to convince her that lesbianism leads to death. Once the relationship has been consummated, Olga guesses that their next attack with be legal: “You’re going to incriminate me,” she tells her lover, who will not come of age for another six months. Sure enough, Myra’s family burst into Olga’s house, then have her shadowed by a detective and threaten her with jail, until—having heard that Myra has given in and got engaged—she puts a bullet in her head.
But in fiction the main way for a relationship between women to be put on trial is indirectly, through a child-custody battle. The first example is The Price of Salt (also known as Carol), a classy romance published under the pseudonym of “Claire Morgan” by Patricia Highsmith in 1952. Carol is already separated, living with her small daughter, when she falls in love with a young shop assistant called Therese. This is not her first relationship with a woman, but the first for which she risks rocking the delicate balance of her life. Carol’s husband, plotting to gain full custody, sends a private eye to follow the couple on a road trip and record their conversations and lovemaking. Again, the legal battle takes place behind the scenes, and we only catch glimpses of it. Carol writes to Therese to confess that she has surrendered, letting her husband take full custody: “It would be useless38 to try to face a court with this. I should be ashamed, not for myself oddly enough, but for my own child, to say nothing of not wanting you to have to appear.” Notice that she tries to recast her shame about being a lesbian as a form of morality, compunction for her lover and daughter. Although Carol has avoided going into court, her backroom negotiation with the lawyers—hers as well as her husband’s, merged in one disapproving, euphemistic brigade—is staged as a nightmarish courtroom scene:
The question was would I stop seeing you (and others like you, they said!). It was not so clearly put. There were a dozen faces that opened their mouths and spoke like the judges of doomsday—reminding me of my duties, my position, and my future.
By sacrificing her relationship with Therese, she has dearly bought a few weeks’ access to her child every year. In her next letter Carol changes tack, arguing that the women’s relationship was too new, not yet substantial enough to fight for.
I say I love you always, the person you are and the person you will become. I would say it in a court if it would mean anything to those people or possibly change anything, because those are not the words I am afraid of.
She is not afraid to say “I love you,” that is—but what scares her is the idea of saying it and being misunderstood and crudely labeled as a lesbian by “those people” (the same lawyers, presumably, but gloves off this time). She goes on to tell Therese what it is that she thought she could not express to the lawyers, “the most important point I did not mention and was not thought of by anyone,” that some people simply prefer their own sex, just as some prefer “a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa.” The lawyers imply that Carol is heading toward “the depths of human vice and degeneration,” but in the calm and privacy of this letter she is able to make a powerful rebuttal:
It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial thing—that is degeneration. Or to live against one’s grain, that is degeneration by definition.
The letter is eloquent and confused at the same time, unconvincing in its logic but moving nonetheless. In her rhetorical flourishes and her profound unease, Carol is a memora
ble portrait of a woman uncertain of how to be a lesbian, a mother, and a person of dignity all at the same time.
Although it reads like a final statement, the letter turns out to be the opposite: it records Carol’s last attempt to be respectable. When the two women meet again after some time, it emerges that the negotiations finally broke down: faced with elaborate lists of “silly promises”39 demanded by her husband, the family, and the lawyers, Carol “didn’t promise very much” at all in court (which “wasn’t a court, you know, just a round-table discussion”)—and has been punished by having her access to her daughter reduced to “a couple of afternoons a year.” After receiving the letter discussed above, Therese had concluded that “Carol loved her child more than her,” and now, she revises that: “Carol loved her more than she loved her child.” But the way Highsmith writes this story—despite its famous happy ending—does not support either statement. As if refusing to make a Hollywood movie of this tug-of-love story, she keeps the legal process out of the spotlight and murky in its details (whose lawyers? which promises? in court or out?). Readers are left with a painful, complicated sense of what it means to have one’s private sense of self exposed to scrutiny (whether personal and professional, sympathetic or hostile). Carol charts a difficult middle course, ultimately holding neither to girlfriend nor to child but to the truth of her own nature, the salt of it. The “price of salt” to which the novel’s title alludes is almost—but not quite—unbearably high.
In Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s surreal feminist comedy Faultline (1982), Arden is a wonderful mother of six who leaves her husband for his best friend’s wife; her husband claims the phrase “lesbian mother”40 is “oxymoronic” because the two words contradict each other. In works about41 this apparent contradiction between the 1970s and the 1990s, the custody battle would remain a popular way of making the coming-out story concrete and dramatic, and testing the heroine’s strengths and affiliations.
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