Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  Louey finally sends Paddy to relatives in London, where she will have a better chance to finish school and go on to the university. Soon after Paddy leaves, Louey dies in the street of a hemorrhage of her lungs. “For a long time I even thought I’d killed her because I wasn’t there to look after her …I wasn’t there to have a laugh and ease things along and show her it was all worthwhile …But what I really want to know is, what do I do now, what the hell do I do now? I love her but I can’t go on loving her, yet what else can I do?”23 The intense love, jealousy, protectiveness, and guilt in this book are as real as the rooms and streets and school buildings and hospitals that the sturdy, stubborn child and the determined, dying woman inhabit. Only later in Maureen Duffy’s work does this model of love become a psychological symptom, tainted with guilt, so that in Microcosm a character can report to another, “And the funny thing is she says she was in love with her mother, really believes it.”24

  In Love Child, the precocious only daughter, Kit, is not a slum child but the pampered darling of a pair of well-to-do intellectuals whose sexual irregularities are not clear to her until after a short stint in a boarding school where Kit learns that parents neither love each other nor their children but deliver them up to such institutions to learn violence and seduction. After an older girl fingers Kit to orgasm, telling her the while that this is not love, Kit asks her parents to let her come home. From then on, she is allowed to ignore school and study at home, where she can observe the affairs her father has with people of both sexes and finally the affair her mother has with Ajax, one of her father’s assistants. The self-consciousness of the child reporting these discoveries is underlined. “You will be wondering, putative reader, why I have reported all this. The answer is quite simple: it interests me and you, forgive me, don’t. I am not trying to tell you anything; I am at my childlike, priestlike task of creation.”25

  Elaborately Kit involves herself in her mother’s affair so that she can observe the actual love-making, then afterwards in the same bed “I lay there as naked as either of them, playing first one and then the other as I’d seen them.”26 Minorly distracted by sexual experiments of her own with a boy and a girl, Kit says, “I think basically I just think I want everyone and don’t really want anybody.”27 She is more interested in manipulating her mother and Ajax by making Ajax jealous. She succeeds beyond all her expectations, for Ajax is driven to suicide. The book ends with Kit’s confession: “She will have no more lovers except me … I am my mother’s lover now. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”28 The book is sexually, socially, and intellectually pretentious, both innocence and guilt literary constructs serving psychological formulas.

  Maureen Duffy’s turning to psychology and sociology for perceptions about her world, to the history of literature and drama for forms and styles to imitate, is not, of course, odd behavior for a serious writer, but, since she is a lesbian, the solutions she finds in those traditions seem to threaten more than illuminate her experience. A number of younger women writers today, lesbian or not, have begun to refuse to offer up their emotions to Freud or their voices to tradition. The danger for them may be a thinness in such an entirely personal solution. The weight of education which has imposed such a burden on Maureen Duffy’s experience and style need not finally obliterate the original authenticity of her vision and voice. Even now, when she turns away from the problem of homosexual relationships, as she does, for instance, in The Paradox Players, her characters have the unlabeled reality of those in her first novel, come upon love and guilt and need and hope that derive from living instead of from textbooks, and represent nothing more or less than their own unique experience. There is the weary suspicion that “human feelings were trivial and repetitious, art a fruitless turning of exhausted ground.”29 Against it stands the assertion of the main character: “he was brought up against his own limitation and his strength that nothing had meaning for him until it was translated into words.”30 If some of Maureen Duffy’s translations are melodramas of learned guilt, she has and will again translate truly.

  Four Decades of Fiction

  DISCUSSION OF A DOZEN women’s lives and books emphasizes the individuality and variety of lesbian experience. But isolating each of these women in her own life and work can be misleading, too, and comparisons among them have only limited value. What is useful instead is to look at a number of other books written in the last four decades which have been important in reflecting and changing lesbian images. Though there is certainly evidence that many lesbians are changing their views of themselves and the world they live in, the dominant heterosexual culture not only shows little response but is still, mainly, in control of what can be published. What little comes through that monitoring has often been changed to suit it. New feminist publishing houses, such as Daughters Inc., have not been in existence long enough to produce a body of work free of that long censorship, and their own political bias and zeal will, to begin with anyway, encourage mostly propagandistic literature which, however useful, is a narrow and sometimes distorted insight.

  Alma Routsong’s experience with her novel A Place For Us illustrates how publishing censorship works. Though she had already established herself as a professional writer, this novel was refused. Not until she had the book printed herself in 1969 under the name Isobel Miller and proved by sales that there was a market for it did a commercial publisher finally accept it and bring it out under the title Patience and Sarah. A historical novel based on the lives of two women, Miss Willson and Miss Brudidge, who lived on a farm together in the early nineteenth century, it could not have been, in these times, the book’s erotic content or its preoccupation with lesbian relationship which inspired opposition. What is wrong with A Place For Us is implicit in its original title, for there was a place for Patience and Sarah, one a gifted painter, the other raised as a boy to do the farming in a family of girls. They had to fight for it. Once Sarah’s father understood the sexual nature of the relationship between the two women, he beat Sarah brutally every time she tried to see Patience. Patience, frightened by the violence and by the hostility of the community, finally renounced Sarah, who then left home alone to make a life for herself. When she returned a year later, less confident that she could ever homestead for herself, it was Patience’s turn to show courage. She persuaded her brother to buy out her share of their farm, and with the money she and Sarah set out together to find land for themselves. Their difficulties as two women traveling without male protection are not minimized, nor are their problems about the roles they should assume with each other, the isolation they feel knowing no others of their kind, the uncertainty about the meaning of their sexual experience, but the book is basically a celebration of their courage and their love, which finally rewards them with a life of their own together. Apparently a romantic novel with a happy ending is an obscenity nearly beyond tolerance in a culture otherwise liberated to read about child molesting, gang rape, and all other varieties of sadistic sexuality. No woman should be allowed, as Patience was, to “wonder if what makes men walk lordlike and speak so masterfully is having the love of women. If that was it, Sarah and I would make lords of each other.”1

  There is no way of knowing how many such gentle novels, giving testimony to the power and sweetness of love between women, have been suppressed over the years, some of them not even committed to paper for the futility of the act. Yet even against such a strong taboo, a few have emerged in each decade, nearly always because they have some “redeeming” feature, an admission of psychological twisting, as in Maureen Duffy’s novels, the rescue of at least one of the women by a man, the device by which Radclyffe Hall mistakenly hoped to win sympathy for her main character.

  We Too Are Drifting by Gale Wilhelm, published in 1935, is a novel of resignation, beautifully and economically written. Jan Morale, an artist unable to go on with her work for angry grief about a dead twin brother, is sexually tied to Madeline, attractive, demanding, and shallow. It is a destructive relationship for
them both which Jan does not have the positive energy to break until she meets and falls in love with Victoria, a young woman who understands and admires Jan’s work and loves Jan. Victoria, however, comes from a close family and is engaged to Dan, a man she has known and cared about for years. Just as Victoria accepts the artist in Jan, Jan accepts Victoria’s commitments to her family and to Dan. When Victoria is faced with a choice between a planned holiday with Jan and a suddenly proposed trip with her family and Dan, she feels she must go with them. She confesses, “Jan, we know it isn’t just that I’m going away for two weeks, that doesn’t matter, Jan, it’s that I’m doing a weak thing; it’s because I’m not strong enough to do the thing I really want to do.”2 Jan tries to reassure her. “I’m going to turn on the light and we’ll be two people in a room looking at each other and wondering why on earth they were afraid of the dark. I love you. I love you more than anything in the world and I want you to love me that way.”3 But the last scene of the novel focuses on Jan, part of the anonymous crowd, watching Victoria’s departure. Victoria isn’t the sort of woman who could give up her family and marriage for Jan, nor could Jan ask her to.

  In a later novel, Torchlight to Valhalla, published in 1938, Gale Wilhelm plots more positively for her women lovers, but the major part of the novel is an exploration into the relationship between Morgan, a young woman who has just lost her beloved father, and Royal, the young man who is in love with her, patient with her reluctance to love him, which he reads as grief for her father. When Toni, a girl who used to live in the neighborhood, returns, she and Morgan immediately fall in love, and Royal must face the real reason that Morgan has never been attracted to him. The love between the two young women is both too sudden and too misty to be convincing. The book is remarkable only in the fact of its publication since it stands virtually alone in its unambiguous resolution.

  The classic of that period is Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, published in 1937. There is no mystery about why it should have found acceptance, for its decadent elegance removes it from ordinary experience. The main character, a transvestite doctor who collects the tragic tales and confessions of the people around him, is a marvelously overblown monologuist who is given to statements such as, “No man needs curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.”4 “No, I am not a neurasthenic; I haven’t that much respect for people—the basis, by the way, of all neurasthenia.”5 “Pray to the good God; she will keep you. Personally I call her ‘she’ because of the way she made me; it somehow balances the mistake.”6 His ironic cynicism and self-pity set the tone of the book, heavy with religious symbols and melodrama. What saves him is both his wit and his silliness.

  Unfortunately the women characters are not so redeemed. Nora is tragically in love with Robin, a vague sort who has wandered into marriage and motherhood, wandered out again, wandered into Nora’s life and out again because Nora wants to hold her and she will not be held. Robin wants to drift through the night, picking up women and making love to them so that the whole world will be happy. When Nora objects, Robin rages, “You are the devil! You make me feel dirty and tired and old.”7 She goes off with Jenny, who has no more luck at keeping her home than Nora did. Nora meanwhile tries to understand her love, first by talking about Robin, then by trying to lead the same life Robin did. Encountering a young whore sitting before a statue of the Virgin, “looking from her to the Madonna behind the candles, I knew that image to her was what I had been to Robin, not a saint at all, but a fixed dismay.”8 Fixed dismay she remains for Robin, who finally returns to Nora’s neighborhood and camps in a deserted chapel. There Nora’s dog tracks Robin down, and they grovel, snarl, and bark at each other and finally lie down together as Nora stands stunned in the doorway. It is really too bad that a book, so often beautiful and insightful, finally becomes pretentious and embarrassing. But just that failure allows T. S. Eliot his admiring introduction, in which he can moralize, “all of us, in so far as we attach ourselves to created objects and surrender our wills to temporal ends, are eaten by the same worm.”9 We can all be sinners together. The chapel is the doghouse for us all.

  A novel of the same period which denounces religious guilt and insists on the purity of love between women does so by a device even more offensive to people struggling against the politics of heterosexual relationship. In Either Is Love the lesbian love story has a heterosexual frame. The main character is a widow who compares her marvelous marriage with her different but also marvelous love for Rachel. Rachel was her first love. “I concealed it passionately, in a kind of maternal anxiety to keep it from harm, from the defilement of false interpretation. I felt it would have killed me if my love had suffered mishandling in the minds of others.”10 Carefully this love is later explained to the man who will become her husband so that he will understand it for what it really is. “I was in terror of liking her for any tendency to mastership that might be in her. The possibility of the false male was a thing I was in arms against.”11 “It was the little masculine touches in her that I liked least, not most. …She was pathetically grateful to me in her turn for cultivating the feminine in her.”12 When Rachel asks, “Do you belong to me?” the answer is “No! No! I belong to myself.”13 One might applaud that refusal to be dominated and possessed if it were not explained in this way: “She might not pretend to the rights either of a man or a child. As my woman-mate she could take all that crossed neither of the other anticipations.”14 Actually that “all” isn’t much. Rachel and she are separated, and during that time Rachel involves herself with other women in affairs which make her guilty enough to turn to the church and therefore to rejection of love between women, a solution her first lover cannot accept and one which Rachel herself much later repents of. Never does the narrator admit any flaw in her relationship with Rachel. When Rachel went away, she “longed for Rachel as the saints crave for God,”15 but “to this day I am glad to remember that I never wrote to her—never—a word of reproach nor a syllable of claim.”16 What must distinguish love between women is put in terms of freedom and generosity. “A so-called Lesbian alliance can be of the most rarefied purity, and those who do not believe it are merely judging in ignorance of the facts.”17

  The relationship between a man and a woman is given in very different terms. Everything withheld from Rachel is naturally offered to the man if he is strong enough to win her, for he must take possession of her; she is “to be robbed of my will and have it kept safe for me.”18 She is to be “stalked,” to be “prey,” for this man is her “loving enemy.” The mystery of heterosexual love is “the strange battle in which the woman always fiercely thirsts to lose.”19 Because the narrator does “lose,” that is marry, her celebration of her love for Rachel becomes part of the larger understanding and masterful love of her husband. Either may be love, but the first exists in a freedom that becomes limbo if for the other the rights and privileges of ownership have been reserved.

  Elisabeth Craigin’s insistence on the difference between homosexual and heterosexual love is reminiscent of Colette, who could also idealize love between women in a way to make it too rare and too pure against the greater reality of hetero-sexuality. Anaïs Nin, too, makes the distinction, even more decisively and negatively than Colette. In Ladders to Fire, in which she explores erotic connections between women, she explains, “This novel deals with the negative pole, the pole of confused and twisted nature,”20 and her characters are trapped in standard psychological images. “Their bodies touched and then fell away, as if both of them had touched a mirror, their own image upon the mirror. They had felt the cold wall, they had felt the mirror that never appeared when they were taken by man.”21

  Self-sacrifice, moral guilt, a twisted psychology, and heterosexual salvation are still the preoccupations of many novels published today, but a new theme is emerging, the struggle of women to overcome prejudice and persecution, to overcome the attendant fear and guilt as well in order to be free to love. In Han Suyin’s novel Winter L
ove, first published in 1962, Betina fails, for she is too defensive, too in need of approval, too dependent on the security of family money, to risk loving Mara, and Mara, though she would walk out on a husband and the comfortable security he provides to be with Betina, cannot fight Betina’s own ambivalence. Betina tells the story in retrospect, still trying to find a way to blame Mara for their failure, but she sees herself too clearly not to carry her share of the blame. “I wanted to be approved of, in an unremarkable, unnoticed way. But that could not be with Mara.”22 Married to the man she turned to when Mara’s husband was threatening scandal and Betina’s aunt was arranging to disown her, Betina now “belonged to that dread company that fills the world, in whom body and mind have been sundered to rage at each other.”23 Of women she says, “We’re so unsure of ourselves, we’ve always been so dependent on their [men’s] approval, we feel guilty if we’re not happy as they tell us we ought to be. How few of us really try to find out what we’re like, really, inside?”24 There is no suggestion in this novel of heterosexual salvation, only retreat and regret.