Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  I was reluctant to write it when Judith Finlayson, then an editor with Doubleday Canada, proposed the project. I had only recently been able to give up full-time teaching to devote more of my time to fiction. Such a book would be more like teaching on paper than writing. Also it would, in a way that fiction does not, put me into the category of a crusader for a cause, and I am not in any way comfortable as a public person. Finally it would take away the last refuge of people who could deal with my being lesbian only by pretending they didn’t know. “That,” said my mother when I was expressing my doubts about the project, “is their problem, not yours.” “It would be awfully difficult to write, wouldn’t it?” my father asked. “Trying to describe love is like trying to describe any other emotion. Isn’t it better done in a work of art?” He nodded to a gentle explosion of light, the John Korner painting hanging on the wall. Yes, of course, but this book would be written to make that point and underline it as other books about lesbians have not. If the word “lesbian” really did mean to everyone no more than one of the faces of love—and why should it mean anything else?—writing a book like this would not be necessary. My father’s insight is still rare, as rare as my mother’s understanding that people’s fears are their own responsibilities.

  For me, the difficulty of being identified as a lesbian writer has not come in the forms one might expect: rejection by family, loss of job, ostracism from the community, or even always discredit as a writer. It came from other homosexuals who, living frightened and self-protective lives, were threatened by the quiet but growing candor of our own. Some of them saw it as a judgment on their own lack of courage and resented it. Others were fearful that associating with us would implicate them. In a long letter about my second book before I submitted it for publication, someone predicted that I could get away with such a book once but not twice. If I thought nothing of myself, how could I destroy Helen’s career? These reactions came more often from men than from women, perhaps because it has always been easier for women to live together without suspicion.

  With the advent of Women’s Liberation, a very different set of problems has emerged, for, while at first the lesbian was considered a discrediting threat, gradually the independence of lesbians became a symbol of a new political identity for women. For the radical woman, free of the dominance of men, whether or not she was emotionally and sexually involved with another woman, could and should proudly call herself a lesbian.

  My reluctance to be identified with Women’s Liberation at first was my concern that it be protected from the label of “lesbian,” which my presence would encourage; but the issues mattered so much to me that I could not stay away. When the subject came up, raised by a newspaper article some of the women found offensive, I suggested that we deal with the topic as we had with every other, not talking about “them” but about ourselves, saying either “you” or “I.” The discussion itself was like all consciousness-raising discussions: comic, terrible, and useful. But later that night, a group of young women came to call on me, all of them in one way or another trying to sort out their own lesbian feelings but none of them able to speak at the meeting. They felt either that they had deserted me or that I had tried to expose them. Neither was the case. One young woman said, “I won’t speak as a lesbian because everything I say after that will be tagged with that label.” Another said, “I’m not a lesbian really. I’m living with a woman now, but I might be living with a man next year. Why should I be labeled?” “Do you think everything I say is labeled and discredited?” I asked. “No, but you’re different.” Yes, ten or fifteen years older, having lived in public a lot longer. And I remembered the anger I once felt at being labeled a lesbian writer because, though I have no intention of “outgrowing” my interest in relationships between women, I hold and express a good many other concerns as well. Since I carried the tag whether I liked it or not, I found that it was not such a discrediting stigma, hardly worse than being a woman writer or a Canadian writer or a lady academic.

  Those uncertain young women have now been replaced by militant lesbians who find me a political sell-out of the worst sort, living behind money and class protection, writing books which don’t suggest that the lesbian way of life is the best way of life for everyone in all circumstances always, male-identified because I teach at the university and am published by “the man.”

  I have been remarkably lucky in birth, in circumstance, in work, in the never really earned wonder of a relationship that has gone on now for nearly twenty years. If I am sometimes tempted to represent my life as exemplary for the purposes of propaganda, Helen makes short work of that pose, resolutely refusing to be one half of an ideal couple, with no taste for false simplicity or public images.

  I have also often been afraid and angry, for the authorities of law and custom still enforce the grotesque image of the lesbian as a sick and depraved person. My life has not been a disaster. I am not a moral suicide. Yet in those failures of conscience, of insight, of love which each of us suffers, a failure of courage to believe in myself could be mortal. I have lost very much loved friends. I am an angry mourner.

  Neither my life nor my work can be simple propaganda. To say that no one need suffer fear or pain or self-doubt is to lie. I can uncover the irrational sources of guilt in religious and psychological doctrines. I can expose the negative morality that is not only imposed from without but expressed from within a number of the brilliantly articulate women I am about to discuss, all of whom by the acts of living and writing have taken their lives into their own hands, lives which are not always either sacred or safe there. Nor is my own, but I am proud to be in such company, to share such a risk and such a heritage.

  Myth and Morality, Sources of Law and Prejudice

  THERE IS A STORY about a young woman who always cut a generous slice off a ham before cooking it. When asked why she did it, she said, “My mother always did it.” Piqued for a better reason, she asked her mother why she had done it. “My mother always did it.” The grandmother, fortunately still alive, was finally able to explain, “I never had a pan big enough.”

  In turning to history to find out why love between women has been forbidden, I had hoped at the end to hear that grand-parental voice offer some such reasonable if outdated explanation. But the voice of that ancestor is not recorded, and, though it has been longingly imagined and invented by gifted women since,1 there are no authentic sources to explain what might have been the practical necessity of cutting off a whole chunk of erotic and emotional nourishment. The mythologies we build on rumors of prehistoric matriarchies, Amazons, and Furies may be comforting and inspiring, but they are not real weapons of argument. Even if records had been kept, even if the church had not destroyed what evidence there was, I am not certain that rational explanation would be really persuasive.

  Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering. Those who have no experience of a language other than their own rarely question or judge it as an adequate means of expression. Though the finer points of grammar may escape their understanding, they are less likely to label the rules arbitrary than they are to accept blame for their own ignorance. Generations of schoolchildren have been subjected to the rule against the use of the double negative, the taste of one eighteenth-century grammarian in a position to impose his will, and for those who dared to ask why, the answer was out of mathematics: “Two negatives make a positive.” To the hungry child who says, “I ain’t got no lunch,” the teacher may respond, “Therefore you have some lunch,” a hard lesson in communication which, left unlearned, could lead to starvation. Even for those of us who know the history of some of the sillier rules, the penalty for not observing them can be high, for it is our conformity and not our intelligence which is being judged. No historical understanding of language will change it quickly. I am afraid no historical understanding of morality would change it quickly either, for morality also is a
test of our conformity rather than our integrity.

  The patchwork of conjecture and facts which follows is essentially a description of attitudes and practices, among which moralists and lawmakers have chosen at random to support their beliefs. If love between men were also being considered, much more information could be used, but it would be a distortion of history to suggest that laws clearly made for men also applied to women. Women have lived not outside the law so much as beneath it. Men invented structures of justice for themselves while reserving rights of ownership over women and children, which varied from place to place much as property rights do. Since disciplining of women was left to the individual men who owned them, there is no clear record of what offenses were punishable by death or divorce, though adultery and barrenness seem to have been the greatest irritants. At those times when women have been specifically included in public law, often the penalties have been less severe than those for men, a distinction which may reflect men’s protective sympathy for women or their low opinion of women’s moral nature or the lesser seriousness of women’s behavior.

  Though there has been concerted effort over the centuries to suppress the knowledge of sexual practices in ancient Greece, there is abundant evidence that homosexuality among men was accepted and often revered as the purest sort of love involving no ulterior motive of reproduction. This attitude was diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Christian church, which maintained that the only justification for sexual expression was the resulting offspring. Greek men also considered it their duty to marry and sire children for the continuation of the state, while Christian teaching put celibacy above marriage as the holiest way of life. What the Greeks felt about lesbian practice is not as well documented, except from what can be pieced together of Sappho’s life and work. She set up a school for young women and wrote poetry in praise of her erotic attachments to her students. She was honored in the century after she lived, likened to Socrates in his relationships with students, called “the tenth Muse.” Her sexuality could not have been considered either peculiar or reprehensible, but her innovations in the education of women do not seem to have been continued outside Lesbos.

  In Athens citizen women were restricted to housekeeping and child-rearing. Only foreign women were allowed to be the companions and courtesans of men, and, though one or two of them felt strongly about increasing women’s rights, their efforts were not to provide more education for women but simply to include them in the company of men. In Sparta, an exclusive and militaristic city, women were trained in physical strength and skill because they were to breed strong warrior sons. The sexes were segregated early, and, though marriage was required, men and women lived often apart. The women stayed home to take care of the land while the men went off to war. Again, there is much evidence of male homosexuality, only conjecture about women. With such emphasis on marriage and childbearing, coupled with the social segregation of the sexes and the celebration of armies of lovers, ancient Greece was obviously a bisexual culture for men and probably, given Sappho’s example, for women as well. Certainly their gods and goddesses were bisexual, though Artemis and Athena seem to have shunned men.

  In a culture where the highest human pursuits were beauty and pleasure and knowledge, gods and goddesses were given the same desires. They were different from human beings only in immortality and control over nature. Their morality was often dubious, and they suffered as well as enjoyed their emotions, perhaps on a grander scale but basically no differently from their worshipers. They could be villainous or merciful, awesome or silly, and their behavior was understood as human behavior was, motivated by lust, jealousy, tenderness, sorrow. They were sometimes seen as righteously indignant, concerned with justice, moved by compassion, but they were to be no more counted on for purity of motive than individual people were. In times of stress, they were bribed and flattered as much as trusted in supplication.

  With such a vision of deity, the Greeks were realists about the perfectability of human nature. Sexual passion was seen as an illness during which people and deities behaved peculiarly and must be indulged as they would be in any other high fever. If even a wife could sometimes be forgiven adultery, which threatened the purity of inheritance, it is unlikely that a Greek husband would take lesbian passion more seriously. His own idealizing of the love of boys, if not actually transferred to the affairs of women, would make him indulgent or indifferent. “Great is the glory of that woman who is least talked of among men, either in the way of praise or blame.”2

  Scholars like Allen Edwardes in The Jewel in the Lotus have shown that in most cultures of the Middle East homosexuality was a matter of taste and custom, but while he devotes fifty pages to documenting male homosexuality, he offers only two pages of assertions about women. “Sapphism was just as rampant among certain classes of women as sodomy was among all classes of men.”3 But he claims that “most Arabs were of the opinion that women corrupt women more than men do; thus the prudent Arab was always more jealous of his sweetheart’s lady friends than any suspected male admirers.”4 Yet he also says that “lesbian passion in women was in nearly all cases acquired to supplant heterosexual needs”5 among the neglected women of the harems. Without more evidence, the assumption that Arab men naturally prefer men while Arab women accept women lovers only in the absence of men seems to be based on male arrogance alone. But that assumption in all cultures may be one of the reasons why women have been less often persecuted than men for attachments to their own sex.

  Lesbian and homosexual practices along with heterosexual prostitution have also been associated with religious ritual. There is a great deal of speculation, very little fact. The Eleusinian mysteries, harvest festival of Demeter, the corn goddess, and later Dionysus, the god of the vine, not only have their origins lost in time but also their practices kept entirely secret. The bearded Venus of Cyprus, along with other androgynous deities, was worshiped by men dressed as women and women dressed as men.

  Not only in legends of the Amazons but in Brazil, Zanzibar, and eastern Eskimo, there have been women who dressed and lived as men.6 Of their overt sexuality little is known, but in Greece and the countries which surrounded it, as well as in many primitive cultures, sexual roles and practices were obviously far less rigid than in our own.

  Unhappily, we did not inherit Greek thought directly, and though we consider Greek thinkers our intellectual ancestors, it is important to remember that the works of Plato and Aristotle re-entered our tradition only after a dozen centuries of loss or suppression, and then they arrived in inaccurate translations, further modified by the church fathers to suit their own moral vision and purpose. Sappho’s poems were systematically destroyed. Our moral ancestors are not the Greeks but the Jews.

  Unlike the Greeks, the Israelites were much longer a nomadic people. Many of their laws and customs are reflections of the hard and beleaguered life they led, tribes small in number surrounded by hostile and stronger people. To preserve their life and their identity, even during periods of subjugation, they codified “laws for maintaining spiritual, ritual, and ceremonial purity and separation from other peoples”7 in the Levitical Holiness Code. It was important to keep their manner of dress, of eating, of washing, as well as of worshiping, distinct. Understood in that light, some of the arbitrary ritual commands about how to make cloth and how to sow seed become meaningful protections against a conqueror’s desire to absorb or destroy the Israelites. When problems of survival are a chief preoccupation, custom is rigid and ruthless. In Leviticus anyone who cursed a father or mother was to be put to death, for in such cursing was a betrayal of the whole tribe and its traditions. Worshiping of a conqueror’s gods was as fiercely forbidden.

  The Jews’ attitude toward male homosexuality was uncompromising. “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.”8 In context, such acts are equated with child sacrifice, incest, adultery, and bestiality. Obviously a peop
le continually threatened with extinction must be concerned with producing as many strong and healthy children as possible; any waste of fertility could threaten survival. Any strong pleasure which could distract people from vigilance would be condemned. The Jews did not have the leisure for Greek pursuits of beauty, pleasure, and knowledge. Homosexual practice was not only wasteful and dangerous, it was also associated with the social and perhaps religious customs of enemy cultures.

  There is no similar pronouncement for women. Were husbands and fathers left to discipline women at their own discretion? Was affection expressed among women not seen in the same light? In a monotheistic patriarchy, the male rather than the female principle is worshiped. It is the male seed which is responsible for fertility. The woman, like the field, is only nurturing ground. She has no seed to waste. Her sins are the sins of the field, remaining barren or accepting seed foreign to her designated crop. Jewish women did not have to bear the sacred obligations of the law, nor were they allowed to take part in ritualistic observations of their religion.9 In later rabbinical law, male homosexuals were still stoned to death while lesbians were simply disqualified from marriage with a priest,10 which may legally reflect the Jews’ traditional attitude toward the behavior of women, inferior and unimportant.

  The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, for centuries cited as the chief example of God’s wrath against the sin of homosexuality, again concerns men rather than women, but understanding what happened may help clarify later medieval attitudes which included punishment of women as well as men. The story was originally an admonition against all sins of excess and idolatry as well as a moral explanation of the disaster of cities actually destroyed by earthquake and fire. The Jewish God, unlike the deities of the Greeks, was morally righteous as well as all powerful; therefore violence in nature could not be attributed to immortal whim or pique but only to God’s punishment of man for mortal sin. The Jews saw in the cities rich people who ate too well, indulged in too much pleasure, and worshiped gods other than their own. Their God’s intention was, therefore, to destroy those cities, but Abraham, aware that his nephew Lot lived in Sodom, a foreigner without the rights of citizenship and a righteous Jew, persuaded God that He might find as many as ten such righteous men in the city and therefore change His plan. Accordingly, God sent two angels to visit Lot and search for enough righteousness among the people to save the city. But all the men of Sodom gathered outside Lot’s house and demanded that he surrender the angels to them, “that we may know them.”11 Lot refused, offering his daughters instead. The men became angry and tried to storm the house, but they were blinded by the angels. Lot and his family escaped, and God destroyed the city. Nowhere in the Old Testament was the story interpreted explicitly as punishment for homosexuality. Rather Sodom was a symbol of general corruption. “Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, surfeit of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did abominable things before me.”12