Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  Veronica, the most popular of three sisters at the hotel, behaves but doesn’t really think very differently from Sidney. For her the relationships she has with men are all pretty much alike and not very meaningful, but one must marry, after all, and it might as well be this one as that one. Her only difficulty, which she shares with her sisters, is that, because she has no real enthusiasm for any man, she can never persuade her father that this is the time to marry. Sidney has no such protection when she suddenly comes to the conclusion that she will, after all, accept the minister, for she does so in anger and despair because Mrs. Kerr has simply dropped her in order to devote her entire attention to her recently arrived son. That the relationship could have so little importance to Mrs. Kerr destroys Sidney’s own sense of what is real and possible. Mrs. Kerr, confronted, apologetically explains, “I begin now to guess you’ve expected much more of me and that I’ve been taking and taking without so much as a glance ahead or a single suspicion of what you would want to have back … I’m fond of you, but …” “I have a horror, I think, of not being, and of my friends not being, quite perfectly balanced.”11 She enthusiastically endorses Sidney’s engagement to Milton, saying to him, “Sidney in love … I envy you.”12

  Sidney makes some real effort to be in love and occasionally half convinces herself that she can become real inside the convention to which she has retreated, but she is becoming as “objective as a young girl in a story told by a man, incapable of a thought or a feeling that was not attributed to her, without a personality of her own outside their three projections upon her: Milton’s fiancée, Tessa’s young cousin, Mrs. Kerr’s protégée, lately her friend.”13

  It takes the shock of a near car accident which would have killed them all, during which Sidney sees death as the only solution, to bring Sidney far enough back to herself to realize that she wants to live and therefore to take responsibility for her own feelings. She breaks her engagement with Milton and frees herself also from Mrs. Kerr, telling her that she has taught Sidney “to be sickened and turned cold by cruelty and unfairness.”14 As at the beginning of the book, this sharp break between the two women stands in contrast to the contented Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Pym, who, though mildly caricatured, offer another possible outcome. The relationship between Sidney and Mrs. Kerr fails not because it is a relationship between two women but because Mrs. Kerr is incapable of loving anyone, content within the conventions of widowhood and detached motherhood, which require little of her.

  The conclusion of The Hotel is bleaker than the conclusion of a later novel, A World of Love, in which a young girl moves from a fantasy love affair with a dead cousin to a moment at the end of the book when she meets a strange young man at the airport, and “they no sooner looked but they loved.”15 But The Hotel is far more believable. Elizabeth Bowen’s suspicion of convention, so deep and obvious in The Hotel, makes her more successful in dealing with unconventional relationships whether heterosexual, like that between a middle-aged divorcée and her somewhat younger lover in Heat of the Day, or homosexual.

  “My writing,” Elizabeth Bowen says, “I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without—a so-called normal relation to society.”16 The “so-called” clearly suggests that Elizabeth Bowen was deeply suspicious of the value and even the reality of “the normal.” In discussing the morality of art, she claims, “There must be … the mind’s disengaged comment on enraged emotion; this is the work’s morality.”17 What she saw as an inborn social detachment, she accepted as an intellectual and moral stance, undoubtedly nourished by an only childhood, the early death of her father, which uprooted her from Ireland and the family home, Bowen Court, which she finally inherited and returned to for a time after her husband’s death. She was raised in a world suspicious of such detached intelligence in a woman. Her mother did not allow her to learn to read until she was seven, believing it “would tire my eyes and brain.”18 In The Hotel, Sidney’s intelligence, her need to learn, seems to wear her out. In The Death of the Heart, a book in which the perceptive innocence of a young girl is explored and destroyed, Elizabeth Bowen generalizes about “a woman’s checked, puzzled life, a life to which the intelligence only gives a further distorted pattern.”19

  Clare, one of the three main characters in The Little Girls, is the only overt lesbian among all the characters Elizabeth Bowen created, and she is referred to as “the freak intellectual child,”20 able to invent a secret language, detached, self-contained. More normal are Sheila, who is as a child a gifted dancer, and Diana, who is more a charmer than a thinker. The curious working out of the relationships among these women shows how far outside convention Elizabeth Bowen stands.

  The book opens on Diana, now a widow with two grown sons, rather oddly involved in a project of collecting from various people a dozen objects from each which they find important and hard to part with. These are all on display in a cave in her garden which she is thinking of sealing up and leaving as a message to some future age. Helping her is Frank, a retired major, who lives in a nearby cottage, a man as handsome and well-preserved as she is beautiful and unaging. The cave serves as an elaborate trigger to her memory; she recalls that she buried a box of significant objects with her two friends, Clare and Sheila, when they were eleven years old. She has not seen them since, has no idea where they are or what their names might now be, but she is determined to find them and does, by the embarrassing means of newspaper advertisements, worded with strange comic-sinister implications. Sheila, importantly married and still living in the same area, is furious and at first only wants Diana stopped, but Clare, who runs a very successful chain of gift shops, is more inclined to see it for the affectionate joke that is intended. Diana, who has always been the charmer, the instigator, succeeds in her desire to gather them together again. Sheila, who has felt the more threatened, is far less affected by the reunion than Clare. On arrival, Clare looks out at a swing in the garden, put there for Diana’s grandchildren, and thinks to herself, “Those were the days before love. These are the days after.”21 But in the presence of Diana’s beauty, tenderness, and madcap schemes, Clare “was lightheaded. Within, she trembled and shook. An electric happiness transformed her.”22 Sheila is simply envious of Diana’s lasting beauty, her children, Frank.

  It is Diana who pursues Clare, searching her out at one of her gift shops where Clare refuses to give her more than fifteen minutes, abrupt and self-defensive, sending a strong, unspoken message: “Don’t rock the boat.” But Diana will not heed. She persuades both Clare and Sheila to dig up the long-ago-buried box where, among other things, each hid a secret object known only to herself. When they do find it, the box is empty. For Diana, it is terrible, for the other two more relief than anticlimax, since both are suspicious of recovering the past. Still Diana is not entirely defeated. She invites Clare to look at some masks made by an artist in her neighborhood which might do for her shops. Over dinner they talk, Diana manifesting the excitement there is at the beginning of an important relationship, Clare more self-protective than ever. She will not be lured. “Your mother told me not to be bad for you.”23 In reverting to the past, they take up their old nicknames and some of their young candor. Diana asks point-blank, “Mumbo, are you a Lesbian?”24 to which Clare does not give a direct reply. Pursuing the topic, Diana says, “I don’t care what you are.” “That’s the worst thing you have said yet,” Clare answers. “But I care for you …”25 Diana insists. Clare accuses Diana of playing the game of enchantress, of being like her mother before her, with whom both Clare and her father were in love. Diana protests, tries to insist that Clare spend the night, to which Clare replies firmly, “No—Circe,”26 and leaves.

  Upset first by the symbol of the empty box and then by Clare’s harsh rejection, Diana falls ill. Her sons are called. Sheila arrives in the role of steadfast old friend to take care of her. Diana tells Sheila that she never wants to see Clare again after her cruel accusation, but Clare is there waiting for an opportu
nity to see Diana. Though Clare dreads the confrontation, she longs for it too. Thinking to Diana as she waits, Clare acknowledges, “There being nothing was what you were frightened of all the time, eh? Yes. Yes, it was terrible looking down into that empty box. I did not comfort you. Never have I comforted you. Forgive me.”27 But then she is in the room with Diana, who wakes and asks, “Who’s there?” “Mumbo.” “Not Mumbo. Clare. Clare, where have you been?”28 That question ends the book with the suggestion that these two will now deal with the relationship the one has longed for, the other longed for but dreaded.

  The Little Girls is a playful, inventive, quirky book with as many dead-end clues as revelations, with comic and grotesque half symbols. What each buried in the box, for instance: Sheila, her sixth toe, which had been saved by her mother after it had been amputated; Clare, her volume of Shelly; and Diana, a gun. Because the book is so elaborately teasing, it diverts the attention from its basic emotional statement while at the same time it creates the climate for it. Diana will finally have everything, including Clare.

  The playfulness and oddity of The Little Girls gives mild warning for Elizabeth Bowen’s final book, Eva Trout, a book in the spirit of the literature of the absurd, terrible and terribly funny, grotesque. Throughout her writing, Elizabeth Bowen was fascinated by strange and singular little girls. In Hotel, eleven-year-old Cordelia Barry gives Sidney long, ardent, sardonic stares and begs to be taken for walks. There is a detached and mildly sinister younger sister in The World of Love. The first full study of the peculiarly innocent is in The Death of the Heart. Only in Eva Trout is such a child allowed into adulthood, and the result is catastrophe.

  Eva Trout is the daughter of an extremely wealthy man who early in his marriage developed an obsession with a handsome man named Constantine. Eva’s mother left and was shortly killed in a plane crash, leaving Eva to be raised by her father and Constantine. When the book opens, Eva is twenty-four years old and under the guardianship of Constantine until at twenty-five she comes into the full inheritance from her father, who has committed suicide. She is obviously in no conventional way prepared to cope with extreme wealth—ill-educated, innocent, mistrustful, and devious. Staying as a paying guest in the home of the Arbles because Iseult Arble was, before her marriage, Eva’s beloved teacher, Eva is increasingly unhappy, aware that Iseult, who at one time devoted herself to teaching the ignorant but wisdom-hungry girl, is now indifferent to her. Iseult, in passionate love with her less-bright and unsuccessful husband, is trying to make herself over without her intelligence and cares for nothing but Eva’s necessary money. Without further help, Eva is caught in that place of half knowledge where instinct and perception can only confuse each other. For comfort and companionship she turns to the Dancy household, a minister’s family whose children find her a bizarre entertainment, an original, a comic giant. Eva stands six feet tall and dashes about the countryside in her Jaguar with immense, undirected energy, until she decides she can’t wait for her inheritance but must escape from the Arbles at once. Involving one of the Dancys, a twelve-year-old boy named Henry, in her plan, she takes what money she has and leases a white elephant of a house by the sea, leaving Henry behind to try to sell her Jaguar to tide her over. Hiding out in her untended mansion, she is discovered first by Iseult’s husband, then by Constantine, but she refuses to return. When Iseult herself arrives and pleads with Eva to consider at least returning for occasional visits, Christmas perhaps, Eva refuses with the explanation that by Christmas she will have a baby, implicating, by accident or design, Iseult’s husband. Eva then disappears, leaving a destroyed marriage behind her.

  When she returns eight years later, she has with her a little boy, Jeremy, illegally purchased years before in the United States, who turns out to be a deaf mute. She has tried to get help for him, but he has resisted, preferring silence. Eva, too, has enjoyed the isolation of her relationship with him. Only when she arrives unannounced at the Arbles to find them gone and then goes to the Dancys does she discover that Iseult has left her husband and disappeared into France. Henry, now a twenty-year-old at the university, tells Eva that she is “ethically perhaps … a Typhoid Mary,”29 inspiring people around her to behave unreasonably, immorally.

  Constantine, made newly moral by his latest love, Father Tony Claverington-Haight, is concerned about Eva’s treatment of her child. In fact, everyone Eva sees suggests that she cannot go on allowing him to live in the isolated and indulgent love she offers him. Iseult, back from France, is curious to see the child, whom she still imagines to be her husband’s son. She “borrows” him from his sculpting lesson, and it is with her that the boy, like Eva before him, first wakens to a longing to communicate. Eva, frightened at his few hours’ disappearance and convinced that they are both in danger from people who want to interfere with them, takes him to France. There she finds two doctors who specialize in cases like Jeremy’s, and at last he is eager to learn. After some time the doctors suggest that Jeremy be left with them, and Eva returns alone to England. As Eva realizes that Jeremy must gradually be separated from her, she turns her attention to Henry. Aware that he probably doesn’t love her, twelve years his senior “with a mighty gait and unfinished handsomeness,”30 she persuades herself that she would be happy if he would agree to a charade of getting on a train with her as if they were off to be married somewhere on the Continent. As audience she wants the Arbles, Constantine and his friend, Jeremy, and relatives she’s never met. Henry, ambitious and bewildered, faces the morality of the proposal with such intensity that he faints dead away in the middle of one of his father’s sermons. When Henry decides to do what Eva wants, he has in fact decided to marry her. The doctors express concern about Jeremy and warn Eva that he may feel offended and deserted, but Eva no longer believes that Jeremy needs her except as a holiday person and guardian. After all have gathered at the station, after Henry has quietly admitted he has no intention of getting off the train, bringing tears to Eva’s eyes for the first time in her life, tears of joy, Jeremy arrives at the station wielding a pistol Iseult left among Eva’s belongings “for safe keeping.” He runs toward his mother, and, when she comes in range, he shoots her.

  Intermittently in Eva Trout’s life, people made minor efforts to understand or at least label her. Her schoolmates in the first dreadful experimental school where she has been sent ask, “Trout, are you a hermaphrodite?” “I don’t know,”31 she answers. She herself is aware that she loves her roommate, Elsinore, who has tried to drown herself and is lying dangerously ill in their room, but Elsinore is taken away only to turn up years later in the United States just as Eva is about to purchase Jeremy. When she says with obvious desperation, “Take me with you, Trout!”32 Eva can only respond, “You came back too late, Elsinore.”33 Her conversation with Father Tony Claverington-Haight, brought in by Constantine to see if he can fathom her, is both comic and terrible. When he asks her about Iseult, Eva simply explains:

  “She abandoned me. She betrayed me.”

  “Had you a sapphic relationship?”

  “What?”

  “Did you exchange embraces of any kind?”

  “No. She was always in a hurry.”34

  Iseult, perhaps in the best position to understand Eva, tries to describe her. “‘Girl’ never fitted Eva. Her so-called sex bored and mortified her.” But Iseult’s asserting that “she did not need women. Their vulnerability antagonized her—as I found out,”35 is suspect, for Iseult did not want to be needed by Eva. When the doctors who are to help Jeremy question her, Eva tries to be frank in her answers. To the suggestion that she wished to be Jeremy’s father as well as mother, “‘Possibly,’ she ceded—not greatly startled.”36 It is in this interview that Eva’s deviousness is most clearly explained, based not on a desire to be untruthful but only on a need to protect herself from the unloving interference of other people.

  Iseult, like Mrs. Kerr, is the chief villain, half awakening first Eva and then Jeremy, and then not taking the responsi
bility for their need because she herself is torn between her intelligence and her passion, her gift as a teacher and her desire to be a woman. In the time she has been separated from her husband, she has obviously turned herself into a prostitute in an effort to kill whatever is left of her intelligence. She is made not only the emotional cause of the tragedy but the provider of the actual weapon. It is as if the gun planted in The Little Girls, which was never allowed to go off, had to be planted again for some real purpose.

  Eva is, of course, doing the same thing to Jeremy that Iseult has done to her. The difference is that Eva does not really perceive her error. She pays for it instead with her life, while Iseult watches on the arm of her recently rediscovered and devoted husband.

  Eva Trout is Elizabeth Bowen’s most sinister comment about the power to destroy and be destroyed in those whose innocence has been neglected and then betrayed. It’s as if there were no bridge for those “originals” across the gulf of ignorance between childhood and maturity, and they are left with only the blundering power of need, which inadvertently causes harm. Eva is, perhaps, the great caricature of woman, denied sources of love and understanding, loose in the world to act out the charades of motherhood and marriage, her own bizarre and grotesque image of the world only underlining the greater distortions of the real world, in which sapphic love is immoral, female intelligence a curse, the lack of it a mortal danger. Diana, the traditional charmer and temptress, may get what she wants, but Eva, with her outsized longing for love and for knowledge, will not.