Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  Simon, in A Heritage and Its History, is heir rather than master. He makes the mistake of impregnating his aging uncle’s young wife and therefore providing his uncle with a son who will inherit what Simon has thought of as his own. He marries and raises his own children in bitterness until his daughter and his uncle’s legal son fall in love so that again incest is threatened and the facts must be made known to amazed and shocked children. The boy, bitter in his disappointment that he cannot marry and uninterested in the inheritance unless he can give it to the woman he loves, finally restores it to Simon, his natural father. One of Simon’s legitimate sons asks, “Is Father a noble man? Or is he a deceiver of himself and others? Or what is he?” Naomi, Simon’s disappointed daughter, replies, “A mixture of them all, as we all are.”7

  The complexity of relationship and the intricacies of plot may be exaggerated inventions to satirize family life, but they are not as far from Ivy Compton-Burnett’s own family life as she might like to have indicated. Ivy Compton-Burnett’s father was a successful doctor with twelve children, five by a first wife who died, seven by a second wife who outlived him. Ivy was the first child of the second family, a political position of some importance since her mother considered herself socially much superior to the first Mrs. Compton-Burnett and never accorded her five stepchildren the same social position in the household reserved for her own. Rivalry for both parents’ attention was a never-ending game, the weapons not only claim of birth but also intelligence, emotional support, and charm. Mrs. Compton-Burnett obviously enjoyed the manipulation of her children for her own benefit, choosing first one and then another as the obvious favorite. Ivy’s own observation about her mother was, “She loved us, but she did not like us very much.”8 They depended for real mothering on devoted servants instead. Ivy’s two brothers were near in age to her, and the three were educated together. Having had a boy’s education was a source of pride to Ivy Compton-Burnett. She went on to read classics at Royal Holloway College and was awarded a second-class degree, apparently only because her handwriting was so dreadful. She had very little to do with her four younger sisters, all of whom were interested in music, which Ivy Compton-Burnett could not tolerate. After her father died, when Ivy Compton-Burnett was seventeen, the hostility between the two sets of children naturally increased. Though he had asked his wife to be fair in her final settlement of finances, she favored her own children in her will. At her death, Ivy Compton-Burnett, then twenty-seven years old, became head of the household. One brother had died of illness. The other was not much at home. The four younger sisters were left in Ivy’s care.

  As early as in her college days, Ivy Compton-Burnett was attracted to power. She wrote to a friend, “I am looking forward to next term, when I shall be a second-year, and have about fifty whole first-years to sit on.”9 Given authority over her younger sisters, sit on them is exactly what she did. There must have been quarrels about nearly everything, but one of the fiercest involved her sisters’ devotion to music. Ivy finally put a stop to any performance of music in the house. Rebelling against her tyranny, the sisters moved out, forcing Ivy to sell the family house. When she announced that she was coming for an indefinite visit to their new establishment in London, they forbade her entrance. She did not want to live alone. Her brother, sorry for her and concerned about a young wife he must leave to serve in the war, arranged that they live together, which they did for a time.

  The year 1916 must have been the most hideous in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s life. Her brother was killed, and his wife, at the news, tried to commit suicide. Her two younger sisters, one nineteen and the other in her early twenties, both took overdoses of Veronal and were found together, dead. Children of the other family, so shocked by the scandal of the double suicide, considered for a time changing their name. The two surviving sisters, neither of whom ever married, had very little to do with Ivy Compton-Burnett. At her funeral in 1969, they knew few of the other mourners, and there was no one really to take the role of chief mourner in an afternoon so bizarre that one friend said Ivy Compton-Burnett herself might well have written the script.

  Ivy Compton-Burnett’s comment on her own life, so often quoted in the Penguin edition of her books, takes on some irony, given the details of her family. “I have had such an uneventful life that there is little to say.”10

  A singular failure as a figure of authority, Ivy Compton-Burnett chose, or was required to play, a very different role in her relationship with Margaret Jourdain. Older, already established in her career, Margaret Jourdain was the dominant partner. Her tastes dictated. Her friends made up their social world. She spoke and Ivy listened. She was sometimes even referred to as “Margaret Jourdain’s Boswell.”11 But Roger Kidd’s student memory gives another dimension to Ivy Compton-Burnett’s place with Margaret Jourdain. “Her consideration for Ivy was remarkable; tender, self-denying and dignified. When Ivy was demanding, Margaret would say, ‘She’s like a child.’”12 Ivy Compton-Burnett’s increasing success as a novelist sometimes threatened her position as a treasured child and admiring listener. For years Margaret took little notice of Ivy’s writing and only irritated notice of the number of friends who were now drawn to the flat by their interest in Ivy’s work. The published conversation between them about Ivy’s work opens with an exchange that might have come out of one of the novels. Margaret Jourdain: “We are both what our country landladies call ‘great readers’, and have often talked over other people’s books during this long quarter of a century between two wars, but never your books.” Ivy Compton-Burnett: “It seems an omission, as I am sure we have talked of yours. So let us remedy it.”13 Such a silence over twenty-five years would give a nearly surreal quality of privacy to Ivy Compton-Burnett’s work if she had not had other friends with whom she shared it, and she did not lack praise from good critics and other writers. She was always taken seriously in public. Having failed so badly at dominance, perhaps she was glad to avoid rivalry as well, to let Margaret’s career and books take pride of place in their personal life together.

  There was no sexual life between them. Margaret Jourdain “told her friend Hester Pinney that she had never in her life experienced the slightest sexual feeling, and said that she wondered if this was due to subconscious fear of the disease which haunted her family,”14 in which a number were born badly crippled. Obviously she associated sexual feeling only with men. Ivy Compton-Burnett talked about homosexuality “freely and academically with some of her friends to whom she described herself and Margaret as ‘neuters,’”15 a designation she also gives to a couple of women characters in the only novel she wrote that concerned itself with homosexuality.

  More Women than Men, first published in 1933, just five years after The Well of Loneliness, has none of Radclyffe Hall’s preoccupation with cause and justification. In this book, as in her others, Ivy Compton-Burnett brings no religious scruples to the world she creates since for her religion “became man’s most extraordinary aberration and an irresistible temptation to mockery.”16 Nor did she have any interest in theories of psychology, though Adler, in his preoccupation with power, would have interested her more than the others. Most motives in Ivy Compton-Burnett are conscious, if secret, and those which are unconscious will, along with the secret ones, finally come to be revealed not only to those who possess them but to those who suffer or profit from them. In this she owes something to her classical background and her devotion to Jane Austen, as well as to her own experience. The “good” people in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s world are usually the people without power, wives, younger brothers, children, and, since their goodness is seen as a by-product of their powerlessness to do evil, the tyrants are really only people very similar who happen to have power, which they use and abuse as it suits their needs.

  Josephine Napier, the main character in More Women than Men, is the head mistress of a school she has built up over the years to support a husband and nephew. To the teachers in the school, she is remarkably benevolent, lightening their
responsibilities wherever she can even without being requested to, stressing teaching as a higher calling than administration, being a friend who does not presume upon her position to occupy their quarters without invitation. They admire and praise and love her for it, and she accepts their tributes with ironic pleasure. She is generous and indulgent with her nephew Gabriel as well, who has completed his education and is in no hurry to find himself a teaching post, enjoying his leisure with his aunt and uncle.

  The death of Josephine’s husband followed shortly by the marriage of her nephew, against Josephine’s wishes, are events which challenge both her benevolence and her authority. While she appears to accept and forgive, when she has the opportunity, she takes her revenge, letting Gabriel’s dangerously ill and delirious young wife get up out of bed, an act which contributes to her death.

  Maria Rosetti, a much-valued teacher in the school who has for some time wanted to become Josephine’s partner, happens upon the scene and knows that Josephine is responsible for the death. Josephine’s brother, Jonathan, soon afterward confesses that Maria is Gabriel’s mother, who all those years ago rejected both the idea of marriage and motherhood, leaving Jonathan with the infant Gabriel, whom he gave to Josephine to raise, claiming the mother was dead.

  The affair between Jonathan and Maria was obviously a brief sidetracking for them both. Jonathan has been living for years with a younger man, Felix Bacon, once his student, whose rich father has been supporting them both with growing irritation. Their relationship is accepted by everyone else and treated with comic lightness. Maria’s sexual tastes are similarly presented. She is at first the acknowledged special friend of another teacher, Miss Luke, but Miss Luke knows Maria will court Miss Keats, a new arrival on the faculty, and she is also aware that Maria is drawn to Josephine. “Ah, you have come to the end of us. But Miss Keats is fresh ground for you to plough, until you can approach your ultimate goal. I believe you have an unconscious affection for our head.”17

  Josephine’s decision to offer a partnership to Maria has the under flavor of both bribe and blackmail, the cementing of a negative bond of knowledge between them. Maria acknowledges it when she says, “You and I have looked at each other’s hidden side, and looked away; and that is much.”18 The motive for Maria is, however, far more positive than that. In speaking about her rejection of both Jonathan and Gabriel, she explains to Josephine that she never wanted to marry. “I have cared in my way for the women whom one by one I have tried to care for; and I have come without trying and almost without knowing to care the most for you.”19 Josephine is, in her turn, moved by Maria’s frank expression of emotion and says, “We will live our partnership in our lives, observing it in thought and word and deed.”20 The sexual potential of their relationship is clarified when Josephine is about to send Maria to help one of the younger teachers. “‘I make no claim to your gifts with young women.’ Josephine’s tones seemed to fail through some lack of feeling behind them. She caught the eyes of her companion, and, starting forward, fell into her arms, and the two women stood locked in their first embrace.”21

  Resolutions for the men are not so positive. Felix, with a good deal of brittle optimism, marries to please his father. Jonathan is not as downcast as Felix wishes he were. On the other hand, Jonathan does not relish the thought that, without resources, he will have to live with his sister and the mother of his son in their new relationship. Gabriel, now a young widower, offers his father a home with him.

  Josephine goes to her staff to explain all these changed arrangements. Of her brother’s not living with her, she says, “My brother is, if you will not misunderstand me, very much a man.” “We will not misunderstand you,”22 is the reply. About her own loneliness in losing first a husband, then a nephew, and finally the possibility of a brother to take their place, Miss Luke says, “Now we shall resent your stealing Miss Rosetti, if she does not cure those feelings.” “Do you know, I believe she may cure them? I have even felt myself that she may.”23

  Part of her staff’s admiration for Josephine has been what they considered her “masculine nature,” a concept of her Maria has never accepted. Her own appraisal of Josephine has been “I see a great many qualities in Mrs. Napier, some of them good, and very few of them ordinary.”24 If one woman is to be more assertive than the other, Maria will be, but it is the assertive quality in them both which produces their active sexuality, more fulfilled in each other than in the rather passive men in their lives or in more passive women. Miss Luke seems to judge herself and others on the staff rather than Josephine and Maria. “Miss Munday and I can only claim to be neuter.”25 Since that is Ivy Compton-Burnett’s term for her own relationship, she may feel a limited sadness about herself. Josephine and Maria are not “good” characters. Maria has been a totally indifferent and irresponsible mother. Josephine, if not in criminal fact quite certainly in criminal intent, is a murderer, but everyone in the book has failings as remarkable as the size of his or her character will allow, and their virtues are of the same proportions.

  Ivy Compton-Burnett did not understand why her novels sold less well than others which had less critical attention. She did not waste time with exposition and description, always constructed a complicated plot, and included all varieties of sexuality. What more could readers want? She observed, ruefully, “Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it hard not to put it down.”26 The answer may be that too many readers want very much less than a vision of what a hierarchical world does to the people in it, offered not with judgment so much as with sharp ironic and often amused insight, which was so accurate that Ivy Compton-Burnett chose very much less herself. She lived in a world of friends and was on their testimony a very good one, neither tyrant nor victim, having so deeply experienced and understood both.

  If the age she wrote about is over, most of us are still struggling with the politics of relationship she exposed, wanting, as she did, much less and much better. Ivy Compton-Burnett escaped the family, grew beyond her own failure at power, but did not in her own life risk more than an emotional attachment and domestic commitment with Margaret Jourdain. Her celibate relationship was dictated by the temperaments of both women and should be labeled lesbian if one calls relationships like that between Leonard and Virginia Woolf heterosexual. The suppression of overt sexuality in many deeply committed relationships is not uncommon, and it is an obvious choice between women in a society in which “romantic friendships” are tolerated if sexuality is denied.

  Elizabeth Bowen 1899–1973

  ELIZABETH BOWEN’S WORK MANIFESTS a pattern she seems to see in life, lesbian experience bracketing the heterosexual experience of marriage and children. In her first novel, The Hotel, published in 1928 (the same year The Well of Loneliness came out), the chief relationship is between a girl in her twenties and a middle-aged widow. Though the novels to follow also concentrate on the emotional life of women, it was not until late in her career, after the death of her husband, that Elizabeth Bowen returned to a concern for relationships between women. Decorous but clear about sexual relationships between men and women, she is more reticent about love between women, presenting it always as an emotional need rather than a physical attraction. Only in The Little Girls, published in 1963, is there any indication of overt sexual tension between women, but the primacy of their need for each other in adolescence and early womanhood and again in widowed middle age is candidly explored. Marriage is both the unlikely and inevitable center at either edge of which is the more likely and less destined involvement of women with their own kind.

  Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Pym, a pair of minor characters in The Hotel, exemplify the natural, if narrow, contentment there can be between women. The book opens on a quarrel between them and ends with their reconciliation. “It was wonderful to have somebody, always there, with whom one could discuss the most difficult phases of one’s relationship (afterwards) simply and frankly. …Hand in hand, reunited, in perfect security they sat and remembered that day.”1 It was a
day very different for the main characters, Sidney Warren and Mrs. Kerr, at the happy height of their friendship, which has developed quickly in the quiet atmosphere of those wintering in a French hotel. Sidney has come with an older cousin to recover from overwork. Mrs. Kerr, a widow whose only son is grown, is simply enjoying her lack of responsibility. The intensity of Sidney’s feeling is made immediately clear when her tennis game falls apart the moment Mrs. Kerr comes to watch her play. Mrs. Kerr is presented as self-possessed, attractive, flattered, and entertained by Sidney’s attention rather than much involved. Other guests at the hotel have noted and comment on the closeness of the two women. To Veronica, a young woman Sidney’s own age, Sidney is simply incomprehensible, “A queer girl this … well turned-out, clever presumably … to sit brooding cheerlessly on a parapet because a middle-aged woman hadn’t asked her to go for a drive.”2 To the ladies over tea, the relationship is reprehensible. “I have known other cases of these very violent friendships. One didn’t feel those others were quite healthy.”3 Still, they understand how it happens. “And how few men there are out here—can one wonder the girls are eccentric?”4 At a hotel dance, the social problem is underlined. “The sexes were unequally represented, several couples of girls were dancing together. Some of the older ladies had also taken to the floor and were spinning round at a high velocity in the arms of their usual bridge partners.”5 Nothing so undignified occurs between Mrs. Kerr and Sidney. Mrs. Kerr doesn’t go to the dance, and Sidney never lacks attention from the men who are there. Under this social explanation lies a truth clear not only to Sidney but even to the ladies at tea. Sadly one remarks, “But if one does make a home for anybody one is still very much alone. The best type of man is no companion.”6 For Sidney, viewing the silent couples day after day in the dining room, “It seemed odder than ever … that men and women should be expected to pair off for life.”7 Simply, Mrs. Kerr is more interesting to Sidney than anyone else, a more natural companion. Bewildered by the attention and the proposal of a lately arrived minister, Sidney says to Mrs. Kerr, “You and I are supposed to assume, or to seem everywhere to assume, that that man down in the garden could be more to either of us than the other.”8 The difficulty is that Mrs. Kerr’s feeling is in no way as intense as Sidney’s. Absently caressing Sidney’s hair, she says, “Well, won’t you be generous enough to take me for granted?”9 For Sidney, in love, it is obviously no directive. Though she asserts that the importance of personal relationships is very much overestimated, though she tries to map out “for herself a deep-down life in which emotions ceased their clashing together and friends appeared only as painted along the edge of one’s quietude,”10 she can be immune to everyone but Mrs. Kerr.