Inseparable

by Emma Donoghue

  45. All these changes: Similarly, in Thomas Burke’s story “The Pash,” a girl’s “muggy friendship” with her forty-year-old female welfare officer is vanquished and “cleansed” by the love of a good man, and the loser is burned to death in a factory fire; see East of Mansion House (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 37–64 (47, 49, 57–58, 64). Reprinted in The Literature of Lesbianism, ed. Castle, 791–800.

  46. “a hundred years”: Thomas Dickinson, Winter Bound, quoted in a review in the New York Times, November 13, 1929, excerpted in Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 464.

  47. “Nothing in Phillida’s history”: Quoted in Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac, 464.

  48. Janet is a PhD student: Plagiarism here suggests that Pauline is fraudulent in her usurping of a traditionally male professorial as well as sexual role.

  49. “below-stairs liaison”: Dorothy Dodds Baker, Trio (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 57, 83, 117, 129–33, 156, 162, 197, 204, 213, 227. The novel ends with Pauline’s suicide, as does the 1944 stage version (which did not prevent protests so furious they shut down the production; see Curtin, “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians,” 266–80). But Dodds Baker also published a psychologically subtler story called “Romance” (Harper’s Bazaar, 1941)—clearly a first draft of Trio, but one in which the girl ends up going sadly home to the older woman. For another failed attempt at escape from a female couple, see Henry Handel Richardson’s “Two Hanged Women” (1934), in Castle, The Literature of Lesbianism, 926–29.

  50. “Go on, then”: Ernest Hemingway, “The Sea Change” (1933), in The Literature of Lesbianism, ed. Castle, 906–10 (910).

  51. Marjorie Garber: Garber, Vice Versa, 467–71.

  52. The triangle: See Honoré de Balzac, La Fille aux yeux d’or (1835; in English, The Girl with the Golden Eyes); Geraldine Dix, The Girl from the Farm (1895); Gabrielle Reuter, Aus Guter Familie (1895; in English, A Girl from a Nice Family); Charles Rivière, Sous le manteau de Fourvière (1926; in English, Under Fourviere’s Mantle); Lucie Marchal, The Mesh (1948); Françoise Mallet-Joris, Le Rempart des beguines (1951; in English The Illusionist); Claire Vallier Hatvany, Solitude à trois (1961; in English, Three Alone); Marijane Meaker, Shockproof Sydney Skate (1972); Ann Patchett, The Magician’s Assistant (1997).

  53. “She loved them”: Constance Fenimore Woolson, “Felipa” (1876), reprinted in The Literature of Lesbianism, ed. Castle, 508–20 (520). Other examples of a woman involved with a male-female couple include Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden (written 1946–61, published 1986) and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001).

  54. “a restful diversion”: Colette, Claudine en ménage (Paris: Ollendorf, 1902), 122. A similar dénouement is found in later texts: Harry Gribble, March Hares (1921); Jean Binet-Valner, Sur les sables couchées (1929; in English, Lying on the Sand); H.D., HERmione (written 1927, published 1981); Brigid Brophy, The King of a Rainy Country (1956); Jess Draper, One Step More (1963).

  55. The rivalry motif: Consider the fact that four novels by Jeanette Winterson—The Passion (1987), Written on the Body (1992), Gut Symmetries (1997), and The PowerBook (2000)—hinge on a female or gender-unspecified narrator’s affair with a married woman.

  Chapter Four: Monsters

  1. “I sole am found”: Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso [1516–32], trans. John Harrington [1591], ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 280 (Canto 29, v.27–31), 283 (Canto 29, v.54).

  2. What is new: I am using “monster” here to mean both freakish and immoral, not the way Terry Castle uses it to encapsulate the classic “first response” to homosexuality as a surprise or wonder; see her introduction to The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 19–20.

  3. Drawing on references: Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550–1714 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 28.

  4. “No more”: Ovid, “Sapho to Phaon” [trans. Alexander Pope, 1707], in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), 29–35 (29). “Guilty love” is a Christianized phrase; Ovid’s word is “crimine,” which suggests being accused of something.

  5. “From 1796”: Jennifer Waelti-Walters, Damned Women: Lesbians in French Novels, 1796–1996 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000), 6. Sharon Marcus argues that in British literature love between women was generally cast as helpful to marriage, whereas the French portrayed it as antagonistic; see Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 15.

  6. The bogey in these texts: Similarly, Denise Walen finds that in Renaissance drama, “playwrights use female homoerotics to address issues of social, religious, or political disorder and address all manner of moral, emotional and intellectual deficiency such as greed, arrogance, lust, infidelity, religious apostasy, and various forms of political discord”; see Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 4.

  7. In the late eighteenth century: Two slightly earlier analogues—though hardly in the same league—are Madame Furiel and her sex slave Sapho, members of a tribades’ orgy club or “anandrine [man-free] sect” in Confessions d’une jeune fille (1777–78; in English, Confessions of a Young Girl, part of L’Espion anglois, which has been attributed to Mathieu François Pidansat de Mairobert). In a nod to the legend of Callisto, this Sapho is seduced by a man in female disguise, gets pregnant, and is cast out by the furious Madame Furiel. See Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 244–48.

  8. “Frig me”: Marquis de Sade, Juliette [1797–1801], trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 300.

  9. The libertine authors: See James Turner, Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France and England, 1534–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 104, 195.

  10. “foolery from woman”: John Cleland, Fanny Hill or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [1749] (London: Penguin, 1985), 71.

  11. “You simply have no idea”: Sade, Juliette, 9.

  12. “We girded on”: Sade, Juliette, 715, 12. Bardash or bardache is a sixteenth-century English word for a man who lets himself be penetrated by another man.

  13. “Mistresses of all”: Sade, Juliette, 1027–36 (1034). On the uneven treatment of women’s friendship in Juliette, see Janet Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 168–90.

  14. “a moment of consolation”: Denis Diderot, The Nun [1796], trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1974), 129, 126, 133, 57, 85–86, 134, 137–38, 142, 140.

  15. Suzanne fits: See Peter Cryle, The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 324–26, 332–34.

  16. And like their heroines: David M. Robinson, “The Abominable Madame de Murat,” in Homosexuality in French History and Culture, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis (Binghamton, N.Y.: Harrington Park Press, 2001), 53–67 (55). For good readings of this kind of “mock-unknowing” about a lesbian “Cabal” in Delarivier Manley’s satire The New Atalantis (1709), see Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England, 91–94, and Wahl, Invisible Relations, 121–29.

  17. “‘We’ as men”: Christopher Rivers, “Inintelligibles pour une femme honnête: Sexuality, Textuality and Knowledge in Diderot’s ‘La Religieuse’ and Gautier’s ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin,’” The Romanic Review 86:1 (January 1995): 1–29 (18–21).

  18. “She wriggles”: Diderot, The Nun, 122, 147–48.

  19. “I only have to”: Diderot, The Nun, 164–65, 167, 170.

  20. “trample me underfoot”: Diderot, The Nun, 167, 172, 174, 176, 182–86.

  21. “wild beast”: Alfred de Musset,
Gamiani [1833] (London: 1908), 46, 73, 76, 81, 88.

  22. “philosapphic”: Turner, Schooling Sex, 104, 195.

  23. “The (supposed) inability”: Cryle, The Telling of the Act, 316–19.

  24. “martyrdom”: Musset, Gamiani, 133–34.

  25. No doubt Dickens: In a fascinating analysis of how Miss Wade’s “female perversity” has come to be read as lesbianism, Annamarie Jagose pays close attention to this question of the order of narration; see Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 37–56.

  26. “History of a Self-Tormentor”: Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit [1857] (London: Collins, 1958), 35–36, 506, 618–19.

  27. “a singular likeness”: Dickens, Little Dorrit, 30–31, 619–25, 38, 625, 39.

  28. “composure”: Dickens, Little Dorrit, 309, 313–16.

  29. “fidelity”: Dickens, Little Dorrit, 624, 506, 616. Tattycoram reappears as the heroine of Audrey Thomas’s clever metafiction Tattycoram (2004), in which Dickens’s own maid relates her story and fiercely resents being fictionalized in Little Dorrit; the lesbian angle is not addressed directly, but seems included in Dickens’s misrepresentation.

  30. “She murmured”: Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies [1871] (London: Macmillan, 1912), 61. Terry Castle points out that hair brushing stands in for sex between women in this and other texts; see her introduction to The Literature of Lesbianism, 44. Compare Vasco Pratolini’s Cronache dei poveri amanti (1947; in English, A Tale of Poor Lovers), in which fascism is personified by the bedridden, disfigured Signora, who forces her young female attendants to submit to her caresses.

  31. “her dependence”: Hardy, Desperate Remedies, 71, 87, 90, 93–96.

  32. Some of the awkwardness: Deborah T. Meem argues that it was in the 1870s that the theme of “amour saphique” crossed the Channel; see “Eliza Lynn Linton and the Rise of Lesbian Consciousness,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7:4 (April 1997): 537–60.

  33. When the Spectator: See Geoffrey Harvey, The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy (London: Routledge, 2003), 19.

  34. “too rank”: See Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies, ed. Mary Rimmer (London: Penguin, 1998), 419.

  35. “a creature of flame”: Edith Johnstone, A Sunless Heart [1894], ed. Constance D. Harsh (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2008), 90, 101, 107, 145, 178, 134–35, 150.

  36. “be as others are”: Johnstone, A Sunless Heart, 178, 193–97.

  37. “But why”: Reviews excerpted in Johnstone, A Sunless Heart, 199–206.

  38. Similarly, a boarding school: There were some earlier examples, such as Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), charged by the crown prosecutor for “immoral representations of sexuality” in its depiction of a girl-teacher affair. But it was Regiment of Women that gave lasting form to the stereotype as seen in Harvey O’Higgins, Julie Cane (1924); Carol Denny Hill, Wild (1927); Warner Fabian, Unforbidden Fruit (1928); Ivy Compton-Burnett, More Women Than Men (1933); Francis Young, White Ladies (1935); Hugh Wheeler, The Crippled Muse (1952); and Violette Leduc’s Ravages (1955).

  39. “a very real tyrant”: “Clemence Dane” [Winifred Ashton], Regiment of Women [1917] (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), 92, 30, 66, 24, 71.

  40. “The changing Alwynne”: Dane, Regiment of Women, 198, 211, 221, 248, 254.

  41. “sorcery”: Dane, Regiment of Women, 287, 290, 296, 315, 329, 334–38, 344–45.

  42. By the late nineteenth: Cryle, The Telling of the Act, 337–40.

  43. “Ah!”: Adrienne Saint-Agen, L’Affolante Illusion (aka Charmeuses des Femmes) (Paris: Offenstedt, 1906), 26–27.

  44. “I have seen”: Charles Montfort, Le Journal d’une Saphiste (1902), quotation translated in Catherine von Casselaer, Lot’s Wife: Lesbian Paris, 1890–1914 (Liverpool: Janus Press, 1986), 76.

  45. Despite these last examples: The exceptions are a very mixed bag. Henry Fielding’s fictionalized criminal biography The Female Husband (1746) is about a woman who passes as a man and fraudulently marries three different women “to satisfy her most monstrous and unnatural desires”; reprinted in The Literature of Lesbianism, ed. Castle, 272–85. In Henri de Latouche’s 1829 novel, Fragoletta, Rachilde’s Madame Adonis (1888), and Mary Hatch’s The Strange Disappearance of Eugene Comstock (1895), women seduce other women in disguise and die for it, but they are by no means described as fiends. Fragoletta is technically a hermaphrodite, as are the protagonists of J. Pierre Cuisin’s Clémentin orpheline et androgyne (1819) and Honoré de Balzac’s Seraphitus-Seraphita (1835), who are treated as fascinating and sympathetic figures, not as monsters in the moral sense.

  46. Fiends can commit: Examples include Liane de Pougy’s Idylle Saphique (1901); Adrienne Saint-Agen, Amants féminins (1902; in English, Women Lovers); Sinclair Lewis, Ann Vickers (1933); Angela Du Maurier, The Little Less (1941); Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour (1934, discussed in chapter 6); Jack Woodford, Male and Female (1935); Dorothy Dodd Baker, Trio (1943); and Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Zeitl and Rickel” (1968).

  47. “their bodies”: Jane de la Vaudère, Les Demi-sexes (1897), quotation translated in Casselaer, Lot’s Wife, 55.

  48. Honoré de Balzac’s: Jennifer Waelti-Walters in Damned Women (27, 89) makes the interesting point that La Fille aux yeux d’or and Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (both published in 1835) are both really about “the struggle which takes place within a male ego when it is faced with a desired and unpossessible woman.” The same argument could apply to other stories of men who are slow to understand the lesbian threat, by, for instance, Belot, Strindberg, Proust, and Bourdet.

  49. “that eternally old”: Honoré de Balzac, The Girl with Golden Eyes, trans. Carol Cosman (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), 51, 54, 73.

  50. “Listen, I’m chained”: Balzac, The Girl, 86–89, 101–3, 107.

  51. “she was too intoxicated”: Balzac, The Girl, 114–18.

  52. “allergic to all men”: Adolphe Belot, Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife [1870], trans. Christopher Rivers (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002), 25–27, 30, 36, 51–53, 83–85, 87–91, 109, 115.

  53. All she does: In this novel and Charles Montfort’s Le Journal d’une Saphiste (1902), to name but two, a girls’ school is ground zero for lesbian contagion. But other French writers treat school more blithely, as a place of undefined, flirty, or quarrelsome eroticism among girls and women; see Colette’s Claudine à l’école (1900; in English, Claudine at School) and Claudine en ménage (1902; in English, Claudine Married); Suzanne Roland-Manuel, Le Trille du diable (1946; in English, The Devil’s Trill); Nicole Louvier, Qui qu’en grogne (1954; in English, Who Grumbles About It); Jeanne Galzy, Jeunes Filles en serre chaude (1934; in English, Girls in a Hothouse) and La Surprise de vivre (1969–76, in English, The Surprise of Living).

  54. “reptile”: Belot, Mademoiselle Giraud, 147, 149–50, 160, 169, 178–79, 203–6. A milder Italian equivalent is Alfredo Oriani’s second novel, Al di là (1889; in English, Beyond), in which an unhappy wife is seduced by an androgynous, female-supremacist marchesa who sneers at marital affection as “a tamed tigress licking the hand of the man who kept her cage” and insists that “a tigress can only love another tigress.” That the marchesa’s vocabulary of captivity is not merely symbolic is suggested by the fact that she is waited on by naked, shackled black and Arab slave girls. Alfredo Oriani, Aldi là, in Tutte le opere, 2 vols., ed. Benito Mussolini (Bologna: Capppelli, 1926–34), 1: 97, 103–106. See Daniela Danna, “Beauty and the Beast: Lesbians in Literature and Sexual Science from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” in Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, ed. Gary P. Cestaro (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 117–32 (120–22).

  55. “In the Criminal Court”: Quoted in Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 24. Duggan analyzes the citing of these French authors in the Mitchell case, and the
case’s influence on later fictions by John Wesley Carhart and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (181–86).

  56. Sales of the flower: Kaier Curtin, “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians”: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Men on the American Stage (Boston: Alyson, 1987), 51.

  57. “bold and strangely”: Quoted in Florence Tamagne, A History of Homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919–1939 (New York: Algora Publishing, 2006), 213.

  58. “to dwell among”: Edouard Bourdet, The Captive, trans. Arthur Hornblow (New York: Brentano’s, 1926), 148–49, 169–70, 178.

  59. Everywoman: See also a German play, Hans Kaltneker’s Die Schwester (1922; in English, The Sister). Sherrie Inness makes a convincing argument that the femme lesbian in texts such as The Captive was far more threatening to audiences/readers than the mannish invert of, say, The Well of Loneliness (1928), because she was not detectable at first sight—with the result that the femme type was less popular with authors and had far less literary influence; see The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity and the Representation of Lesbian Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 25–32.

  60. Here the monster: The Galatea story is echoed in Belot’s Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme (1870), Catulle Mendès’s Méphistophéla (1890), and Alfredo Oriani’s Al di là (1889; in English, Beyond), when bridegrooms fail to arouse their stony—and secretly lesbian—wives. See Cryle, The Telling of the Act, 78–80.

  61. Bourdet claimed: Curtin, “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians,” 56–57, 100; New York Times, March 9, 1927; Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 426–28.

  62. “She felt in her heart”: Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 1996), 687–88.

  63. “We cannot say”: Marcel Proust, “Before Dark” [1896], in The Literature of Lesbianism, ed. Castle, 581–84 (583).