Inseparable

by Emma Donoghue

  FIRST LOVE

  Ever since Ovid wrote about Diana’s band of nymphs in his Metamorphoses, writers have been fascinated by the idea of a private world of girls, ruled by one charismatic woman. As Terry Castle42 has observed, narratives about same-sex desire often start with the “islanding” of women or girls: their physical and social isolation in institutions such as convents, schools, and colleges. School can be a paradise for same-sex love, or a hell, or a memorable combination of the two, as in the founding text of the tradition, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Against the nightmarish background of Lowood’s burned porridge and whistling drafts, young Jane’s emotional education takes the form of a dual passion for an older girl (the sternly saintly, dying Helen) and their headmistress (the compassionate Miss Temple). It is here that one of English literature’s most famous romantic heroines learns “the love of human beings,”43 as Brontë has Helen put it in a carefully gender-neutral phrase.

  In schoolgirl fiction44—a popular genre of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, devoured by women as well as girls—the crush (also known as pash, smash, and Schwarm) on a teacher or schoolmate is ubiquitous, and often central to the plot. Some critics dismiss45 the phenomenon by arguing that the girls only choose girls for lack of opportunity—which seems like lamenting the fact that Juliet had to make do with Romeo because her social circle was limited to the men of Verona.

  Elsie Anna Wood, “To the music of Karen’s fiddle, they danced on the turf,” in Elsie J. Oxenham, The Abbey Girls Go Back to School (1922).

  This bucolic image in the fourth of Oxenham’s widely loved Abbey Girls series (1914–59), by a famous English Bible illustrator, captures the context of all-female intimacy from which stories of schoolgirl love arise.

  These school stories are not about a coming-out process, but when the coming-out story did begin to appear at the end of the nineteenth century, it grafted itself onto some established forms such as the school story, with its atmosphere of emotional intensity and its intricate web of connections among girls and women. Generally the girl who falls in love at school is a blank slate: her lack of emotional history gives her a clean, shining quality, and a lack of self-consciousness (at least at first) about the gender of her beloved. In Regiment of Women (1917) by Clemence Dane, discussed in chapter 4—a brilliant thirteen-year-old, Louise, declares that she will never marry because “I could never love46 anybody as much as I do Miss Hartill.” When told that her little crush is not the real thing, she argues that love is love: “Where’s the difference?” Though Louise speaks in the same terms as Mona in A Sunless Heart, her confidence has none of that character’s sinister overtones. Louise thinks of herself as the protagonist in her own serious romance, but in fact her function in Regiment of Women is to be the victim of that mythic villainess, the lesbian teacher. Clare Hartill relishes having girls in her thrall; she wrecks Louise’s health by encouraging her to study too hard, and blows hot and cold as her whims take her. Rejected by her beloved, Louise finally jumps out an attic window.

  Interestingly, this minor character turns up almost twenty years later, transformed into the heroine of a German novel. Christa Winsloe’s47 tale of a turn-of-the-century Prussian boarding school appeared in several stage and fictional forms, under a variety of different titles; the version I am looking at here is her novel, The Child Manuela (1933). All the schoolgirls hate the ogreish Head and adore the beautiful, kind, twenty-eight-year-old Fräulein Elizabeth von Bernburg. Strict and scrupulous, this teacher “makes no favourites,”48 which means that just about the entire school kneels trembling for her good-night kiss, and at least one girl has scratched E v B into her arm. What rocks this precarious balance is the arrival of Manuela, a motherless fourteen-year-old tomboy, who is not so much more passionate than the other girls as braver and blunter. “I don’t want to be a woman—I want to be a man, and to be with you,” she tells Bernburg. (Unlike Louise in Regiment of Women, she has noticed that desiring a woman is not a traditionally feminine thing to do.) The teacher gently rebukes her—then softens her words by handing over one of her own chemises on the pretext of Manuela’s needing new underclothes. From private confession, Manuela makes the leap to public declaration. Drunk on punch after starring as a knight in the school play, she proposes a toast “to her we all love”—outing, as it were, the whole school—and boasts that her own passion for Fräulein von Bernburg must be reciprocated, because the gift of the chemise means “she loves me.”

  Fräulein von Bernburg, already dogged by unspecified “shocking”49 rumors about why she failed to marry her fiancé, has all the self-conscious unease that Manuela lacks.

  She dared not let one single child usurp her heart. And now that she had done so in spite of everything, from the very first moment that her eyes had encountered Manuela’s, she dared not contemplate anything but self-discipline and renunciation.

  The Headmistress, warning her that Manuela is “sexually abnormal,” adds with audible threat, “and perhaps you know what the world thinks of such women—our world, Fräulein von Bernburg?” The change from “the world” to “our world” offers the intriguing possibility that the Head is not hinting merely at Bernburg’s same-sex tastes but at her own. Bullied into promising never to be with Manuela in private again, Bernburg says goodbye to the girl, hovering on the verge of a confession of her own: “You must not love me so much, Manuela, that is not right. That’s what one has to fight, what one has to conquer, what one has to kill…” The word anticipates the ending: Manuela, just like Louise in Regiment of Women, jumps out a high window to her death. The novel ends with the girls respectfully withdrawing to leave Bernburg to mourn alone over the body.

  At thirteen and fourteen, Louise and Manuela are pure-hearted innocents: to them, love is simply love. But Swiss author Eveline Mahyère’s Je Jure de m’éblouir (1958; English title, I Will Not Serve) is about a well-read seventeen-year-old, so it is a coming-of-age novel, tragic romance, and coming-out story in one. It begins (unusually) after the expulsion from Paradise: Sylvie has been thrown out of school because of her passion for her teacher (a student nun), Julienne. Sylvie has the clear conscience of Christa Winsloe’s Manuela, but she writes to Julienne as a downright cocky, grown-up lover.

  There is something50 that you have never told me, something that I have been able to read in your look when, twenty times in a single lesson, our eyes used to meet over the little plaster statues. It is because of that look that I have left the convent, and the thought of leaving you there behind me is literally intolerable to me. If you do not come to me, I shall carry you off by force with a silken ladder.

  Here she strikes a pose as the prince to Julienne’s captive Rapunzel, with the nuns as the witch who pushes him down from the tower: “They have hurled me into the void, uprooted me from life, thrown me to the wild beasts.”

  Sister Julienne keeps trying to pretend that the girl is simply being silly, and has had a breakdown: she writes back, “I hope that you will51 very quickly recover and be a healthy young rebel again.” But Sylvie will not stop pushing her to take their relationship seriously. Julienne feels obliged to offer her headmistress her resignation for being “too much attached” to the girl; the pragmatic older nun refuses it, telling her “the best way to conquer sin is to surmount it, not to run away from it.” Panicking, Julienne complains to Sylvie that these declarations “embarrass me like delirious raving.” (Shades of Suzanne in the most famous of convent novels, Diderot’s La Religieuse.) She insists she “saw nothing murky in my affection for you. Why have you had to distort everything so that now I am frightened of thinking of you and yet never stop thinking of you?” This reluctant admission fills Sylvie with joy; she writes back, “I love you. (And, contrary to what you suggest, this love is not in the least murky but as bright and blinding as a great fire.)” Like some medieval troubadour, she insists that her feelings are simultaneously erotic and high-minded; she declares her passion while shrugging off the “murky”
meaning her culture ascribes to it. However, when Sylvie gets her chance to see her beloved in the flesh again, she messes it up: she kneels at Julienne’s feet worshipfully instead of taking her in her arms. Afterward she realizes that she has missed her chance: “Because I didn’t dare make her step down from her pedestal, I have lost Julienne.” Sylvie goes on to drink, starve herself, and wind up in a hospital after a semiaccidental overdose. Because the author committed suicide before the novel was published, it is always assumed that Sylvie’s faint on the last page is death, but it seems to me that Mahyère leaves it open, granting her eloquent, grandiose heroine at least a possibility of survival that Mahyère could not see for herself.

  Like Sister Julienne, many critics have preferred not to take Sylvie at her word: because of the novel’s existential debates, they often read the love story as a sort of allegory of the soul’s relationship with God. Granting Mahyère’s novel the rare honor of a full-page review in Le Figaro Littéraire, Jean Blanzart wrote loftily that “the biggest mistake52 would be to think that what we have here is a banal lesbian affair. It is something far more unusual, far purer and far greater.” As we have seen before, it is traditional to insist that a lesbian-themed story one likes is not about lesbianism at all.

  But perhaps the best fiction of schoolgirl love is Dorothy Strachey Bussy’s faux memoir Olivia—yet another text that borrows the name of the heroine of Twelfth Night. Bussy wrote it53 in French in 1933, but when her beloved friend André Gide responded without enthusiasm, she put it aside till 1949, when it was published in English by Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, to great acclaim. In this loose fictionalization of Bussy’s experiences at a French finishing school in the 1880s, the two headmistresses—Mlle Julie, the vivacious intellectual, and Mlle Cara, the kindly invalid—are a turbulent couple, and also rivals for the loyalties of the other teachers and girls, who are divided into “Julie-ites”54 and “Cara-ites.” The sixteen-year-old Olivia, whose older self narrates the novel in yearning retrospect, falls for Mlle Julie all at once when watching her read Racine.

  Unlike many schools in fiction, this one is charming. The power-hungry but lovable Mlle Julie visits Olivia at night for moments of tantalizing intimacy, teases her and sits her at her right hand at dinner, letting the girl drink in her witty and erudite conversation: “She communicated55 a Promethean fire.” Less naïve than Manuela in The Child Manuela, and less brave than Sylvie in Je Jure de m’éblouir, the thoughtful Olivia gradually figures out that, even in this homoerotic atmosphere, the serious intensity of her feelings for her teacher is “something to be ashamed of, something to hide desperately,” even though—perhaps all the more because—Mlle Julie loves Olivia “differently” from all the other girls in return. Realizing this brings Olivia “joy and terror,” especially when she gradually deduces that the headmistresses’ partnership is on the brink of collapse.

  Everyone plays multiple roles (confidante, enemy, suitor) in this complex, all-female microcosm. But it is Olivia who brings on the crisis by finally declaring her passion. The tantalizing Mlle Julie laughs it off, but promises to visit her after dark and then fails to show up, leaving Olivia to lie awake in agonizing, aroused vigil for several nights in a row. The girl perceives herself as Eve after the Fall:

  Mystery was all56 about me, murky suspicions, and at the bottom of my heart lay jealousy such as I had never known before, and a dreadful curiosity and a dreadful longing for wickedness. In so short a time to be cast from the glories of Paradise into this direful region!

  It is Mlle Julie who breaks this terrible deadlock, by deciding to retire to Canada—whereupon the bereft Cara dies of an overdose. In her last interview with Olivia, Mlle Julie says obscurely,

  “It has been a struggle all my life—but I have always been victorious—I was proud of my victory.” And then her voice changed, broke, deepened, softened, became a murmur: “I wonder now whether defeat wouldn’t have been better for us all—as well as sweeter.” Another long pause. She turned now and looked at me, and smiled. “You, Olivia, will never be victorious, but if you are defeated—” how she looked at me! “when you are defeated—” she looked at me in a way that made my heart stand still and the blood rush to my face, to my forehead, till I seemed to be wrapped in flame—then she suddenly broke off and brushed her hand across her eyes, as if brushing away an importunate vision.

  Here, just as in the farewell scene in The Child Manuela, a teacher renounces not only the girl she loves but her own braver, more demanding self. “It has been a struggle all my life,” says Mlle Julie (echoing Bernburg’s “That’s what one has to fight, what one has to conquer, what one has to kill”). The difference here is that Dorothy Strachey Bussy allows Mlle Julie a “change” of voice at this point, a brief surrender to the “sweeter” possibilities that could follow from “defeat” in the struggle to repress desire. The teacher moves from considering Olivia’s life “if” she gives in to desire, to predicting what it will be “when” she does; Mlle Julie, at this moment of heightened romance, seems to be practically ordering Olivia—as a medieval lady might send out her knight—to go forth and explore all the erotic possibilities that Julie herself has renounced. So a story that in the hands of a more conventional author would probably have ended with a shuddering denunciation of girls’ schools here becomes a profound drama of awakening.

  Jacket, Marlene Longman [Robert Silverberg], Sin Girls (1960).

  Published by William Lawrence Hamling, Nightstand Books was a best-selling series of paperback originals, often by noted young novelists. Sin Girls was written by famous science-fiction author Robert Silverberg, four years after his first Hugo Award, during a crash in the science-fiction market; his work for Nightstand under various names bought him a twenty-room mansion. The unsigned art for this title stands out from other brooding lesbian pulp-fiction covers for its mood of jubilation.

  DEVIL MAY CARE

  Colonna,57 by all the laws of literature, ought to have been plain, heavy, humourlessly passionate and misunderstood, pursuing in recurrent torments of jealousy the reluctant, the inexperienced and the young. She ought to have behaved like someone with a guilty secret.

  The narrator’s witty observation, in Mary Renault’s Purposes of Love (1939), is hardly fair to the long tradition of writing about desire between women; it suggests that Renault was unfamiliar with the many novels and plays, over the centuries, that have broken those “laws of literature” by presenting women who desire women as noble, funny, or triumphantly wicked. It also oversimplifies the type—the saturnine (but I would say rarely dull) girl-pursuer in, say, Little Dorrit, The Bostonians, Regiment of Women, Marie Bonifas, or The Well of Loneliness. Yet we all know what she means: in the first few decades of the twentieth century, a composite stereotype of the dogged, jealous, guilt-wracked lesbian took hold, and it has not been entirely banished in the twenty-first.

  But it is often forgotten that Stephen is not the only prototype Radclyffe Hall presents in The Well of Loneliness. Stephen’s Paris friend58 Valerie Seymour (based on the charismatic salon hostess Natalie Barney, who inspired characters in at least eight other novels) is a confident free spirit. Womanly, but exclusively and permanently lesbian, Valerie does not explain herself in terms of gender inversion, or any of the other available discourses, whether old (sin, tragedy) or fashionable (genetics, arrested development). And she calls Stephen’s grand gesture of renouncing Mary for Mary’s own good absurd: “For God’s sake59 keep the girl, and get what happiness you can out of life.”

  We might construct a lineage for Valerie Seymour through much older texts such as the anonymous Travels and Adventures of Mlle de Richelieu (1744). But unlike those premodern heroines, what I call the devil-may-care lesbian is a creature of the twentieth century—first hitting the page in the 1920s—who knows exactly what people say about her and finds it funny. She is a sexy, fearless sister to the gloomy stereotype. She appears first, significantly, in some short stories. (It may well be that writers felt
freer to let lesbians escape unscathed in a short piece, whereas a novel—more substantial, asking more commitment of its readers, and much more likely to be reviewed in detail—demanded a more orthodox apportioning of judgment.)

  The title of Thomas Beer’s startlingly relaxed story “Hallowe’en” (1927), for instance, suggests a time of riot and masquerade. It is through the calm eyes of a fat grandmother called Mrs. Egg that we see Sybil, nicknamed Bill, who is visiting the small town she left for San Francisco. Sybil/Bill mixes all her signals;60 she is a glamorous, chain-smoking, ex-army woman with a deep contralto voice, an Italian car, and several ex-husbands. Despite her exotic look (a long black dress, “a necklace of silver claws”), she has an unpretentious, slangy manner, so the local men call her “swell” and say things like “She’s a gentleman.” Mrs. Egg, deeply fond of Sybil in a motherly way, calls her the “only girl I ever saw look swell in pants.”

  On her brief visit, Sybil manages to stir up her hometown completely. Her dear old friend Janie has recently married a nice man called Tom but cannot seem to relax into being married. Finally Janie tells Mrs. Egg she is running away, not because of anything poor Tom has done but because “I love someone else more—more than anything. I’m running away. We can’t help it.” Only very slowly does Mrs. Egg realize that the dashing Sybil is the one who has won the girl. But when she does figure it out, not only does she not stop the two women from driving off to San Francisco, but she packs them a dozen sandwiches for the trip. Janie’s husband is sad, but just as understanding; he even gets the suitcases down from the attic. So without spelling anything out very explicitly, this story manages to evoke a very modern world of love and tolerance. As a character tells Mrs. Egg, “There’s stuff goes on you don’t know nothin’ like. Crazy stuff!”