By obliging her heart to wear the mask of nobility, by forcing love to go by the name of sisterhood, Olive has found herself unable to hold on tight to Verena:
Olive put forward32 no claim of her own, breathed, at first at least, not a word of remonstrance in the name of her personal loss, of their blighted union; she only dwelt upon the unspeakable tragedy of a defection from their standard.
From this false position, all she can do is try to hide Verena away from Basil, and when he tracks them down, before a public lecture, he leads Verena away in tears (leaving Olive, a brave martyr, to force herself to give the speech in Verena’s place). In case any readers might see this as a fairy-tale ending, a triumph of the prince over the witch who has been holding Rapunzel captive, Henry James ends the book with a famously dry sentence about those tears: “It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed.” The Bostonians, then, is a darkly realistic story of the battle between two flawed, uneven kinds of “union.”
I have given a play-by-play analysis of Olive Chancellor’s game because she is the archetypal lesbian loser. Her gloomy shadow33 falls not only on later characters whose debt to her is obvious—such as the stylishly mannish feminist Kate Chancellor in Sherwood Anderson’s Poor White (1920)—but on every woman who gives up her beloved to a man rather than fighting no-holds-barred.
But patriarchal fiat was not the only way the duel could end. One interesting example of a woman quietly triumphing over her male rival is a novel by Florence Converse. (One of Converse’s professors at Wellesley College in 1887 was Vida Scudder; more than thirty years later the friends set up home together—along with their two mothers—and the partnership lasted until Scudder’s death in 1954.) Converse’s Diana Victrix (1897) is an unusual “New Woman” novel in which women’s love does not have to surrender nobly to the claims of legal marriage. Enid and Sylvia, a lecturer and a novelist, are New England feminists who have lived together for twelve years.
We are a partnership,34 Sylvia and I. I am the man about town, the planner, the promulgator. Sylvia sits in the counting-room and cashes the checks, and she is to keep the record of events, and lay the affairs of the firm before the public in good literary form.
But behind the flippancy there is tenderness: Enid is described as putting “her arms around [Sylvia], and…saying a great many things very softly in the dark.” When a man called Jacques proposes to Enid, she turns him down:
“I share with her thoughts that I have no wish to share with you. I give to her a love surpassing any affection I could teach myself to have for you. She comes first. She is my friend as you can never be, and I could not marry you unless you were a nearer friend than she. You would have to come first. And you could not, for she is first.”
“And this is all that separates us,” said Jacques, in a tone of entire amazement. “Only a woman?”
Enid spells it out as clearly as she can: “I have chosen my life and I love it.”
She is not crass enough to boast to Sylvia of having made this great decision for her sake. Sylvia, rather less committed, starts to fall in love with a man called Jocelyn. Interestingly, it is Jacques who enlightens his rival, more than a year later, warning Sylvia in biblical cadences:
Do you also be loyal!35 For I say that the time is not far off—look in her eyes and see!—when she shall need, not you, not you, the woman friend alone, but husband and little children. See that you be all these to her then! If you can!
Despite his scornful tone, despite the way the invoking of “little children” throws more weight on the marriage side of the scales, the effect on Sylvia is to make her fully realize, at last, “how dearly I do love her”—so she turns down Jocelyn. At the end of Diana Victrix, as the title makes clear, the goddess of virginity, Diana, has won. And there is an interesting moment of authorial self-consciousness: after all Enid’s patient encouragement, Sylvia manages to publish a novel, and plans a second one which features a heroine based on Enid but whom Sylvia will marry off because “the public are more used to it.” Enid quips: “But sometimes, Sylvia, I don’t marry, even in novels.”
THE BEAUTIFUL HOUSE
One reason the female couple in The Bostonians seems so insecure is that they are constantly traveling, like criminals on the run; despite owning her own house, Olive keeps decamping in order to yank Verena out of Basil’s reach. Although Enid and Sylvia in Diana Victrix have achieved a bare-bones domesticity in rented lodgings, in other rivalry stories the impermanent nature of the female couple’s housing signals to the reader that the bond is all too breakable. It is a laundry36 business in a rented basement that a man successfully invades to break up two women in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), a boardinghouse in J. D. Beresford’s House-Mates (1917), a women’s residential club in Naomi Royde-Smith’s The Tortoise-Shell Cat (1925), an institution for troubled youth in Klaus Mann’s 1925 play, Ania and Esther, and a houseboat on the Thames in Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies (1944; U.S. title The Middle Mist).
Frank Walter Taylor, “‘You’re an unutterably philistine person,’ said Sylvia,” in Catherine Wells, “The Beautiful House,” in Harper’s Monthly Magazine (March 1912).
Taylor was a major American illustrator during the first two decades of the twentieth century, based in Philadelphia. Note the way the introduction of Sylvia’s cousin/suitor literally pushes Mary into the background, where her hat makes her almost faceless.
The irony is that in many novels and plays, the female couple is fervently domestic: they may not possess a home, but they long for one. In Catherine Wells’s extremely sympathetic story from Harper’s Monthly Magazine, “The Beautiful House” (1912), Mary, an artist of thirty-five, “in a manner fell37 in love” with a younger student, Sylvia. They find the country house of their dreams, which just so happens to be named “Love o’ Women.” Listen to the palpable excitement in this passage about real estate:
Mary looked at her, aflush with sudden daring. “Shall we take it, then?” She tried to throw a note of facetiousness into her voice.
“We could, you know,” said Sylvia. Her voice dropped. “Our hearts have taken it,” she said. “We could come here together,” she went on. “Just whenever we wanted to. Just you and I. Mary beloved,” she almost whispered, “wouldn’t you like it?”
Her slender hands lay out along the table, palms turned up. Mary gathered them in her own hands and kissed them. “I should—like it!” she said, whimsically insistent on the moderate word.
Here the house is not only a refuge but a metaphor for the urgent feelings the women try to hide behind “moderate words.” But they never get to actually move in, because Sylvia casually transfers her affections to a young cousin and announces she will marry him. Mary capitulates at once: “Something far stronger than she had claimed her beloved for its own.” (Not “someone” and “he,” we notice, but “something” and “it”: the primal, sacred force of a man’s desire for a woman.) At which point the house called “Love o’ Women” fortuitously burns to the ground.
Catherine Wells,38 incidentally, was H. G. Wells’s student and second wife (full name Amy Catherine Robbins Wells, nicknamed Jane); their thirty-three-year bohemian marriage included not only many house moves but his affairs with (and fathering of two children by) other women. Which suggests that perhaps “The Beautiful House” is not a simple fable of the triumph of heterosexuality, but a meditation on the instability of any shared domestic life, and the pain of having to make do with whatever is left of one’s beloved after other people’s “claims.”
When a female couple does find a home, destruction is rarely far behind: it is as if the hubris of claiming a permanent site for love brings on nemesis. This setting-up-house-together plot, though it shows up from the late nineteenth century, becomes more common after World War One decimated the male population, when there was widespread concern about how “surplus” women migh
t live without husbands. Because of the newly widespread awareness of lesbianism as a lifestyle, the emphasis in these stories is not just on the individual man’s victory but on the reassertion of heterosexuality itself. (Not that this conversion39 narrative is entirely new; after all, pornography from the late eighteenth to the twentieth centuries had endlessly replayed the scenario of the unsatisfying sex scene between two women interrupted—and brought to a glorious finish—by a man.)
In The Rainbow (1915), D. H. Lawrence wrote about a brief girl-teacher affair in a chapter heavily titled “Shame”; to avoid having the book formally banned for what the crown prosecutor called “immoral representations of sexuality,” his publisher (Methuen) had to apologize and surrender all remaining copies. Undaunted, Lawrence returned to this dangerous subject in The Fox, a short story drafted in 1918 and published in a truncated form in 1920 before he expanded it to a “novelette” three times its original length, which came out in 1922.
Perhaps because women’s relationships had become more culturally visible even in the few years since The Rainbow, Lawrence did not need to describe in explicit terms the bond between two women who run a farm together. The rather exploitative teacher-pupil relationship of The Rainbow (similar to the pederastic model of man-boy seduction) has been replaced in The Fox with what a few decades later would be called a butch-femme pairing. March is the androgynous “man about the place,” and the wealthier Banford, “a creature of odd whims and unsatisfied tendencies,” is described as the frail and feminine one. (As Terry Castle points out,40 “odd” has been a code word for desire between women since at least the end of the seventeenth century.) But the difference between the women’s personal styles should not obscure their basic similarity as two spinsters in their late twenties, rebelling against the expectation that they will sit around waiting for husbands: in setting up their farm, they are staking out their territory both literally and culturally. Soon, however, the project becomes arduous. They start feeling “tired of one another,”41 and Lawrence drops heavy hints about what they need: March is shown “carrying the eggs on her breast as if they were some heavy child.” Their hens stop laying, and a masterful fox keeps carrying them off; this is the whole story of The Fox in miniature. “Don’t talk to me about Nature,” says Banford disgustedly of the hens, but Lawrence constantly invokes the seemingly irresistible laws of the animal kingdom.
Since it is 1918, the surviving men start coming home, and Henry, grandson of the farm’s last owner, turns up and promptly woos March in order to get the property back. If it seems surprising at first that he should choose the androgynous one, this makes more sense if we consider that to Lawrence, March represents not just a woman to win, but a gender problem to be solved. When she announces that she is engaged to Henry, “Banford looked at her42 like a bird that has been shot; a poor, little sick bird.” This glide from injury to illness manages to make it seem as if it is no one’s fault that the bird got shot; her weakness was internal. As for March, at first she thrives on being the object of a duel: “She seemed to sit between the two antagonists with a little wicked smile on her face.” But as Banford descends into misery, March dithers: “She wanted the boy to save her,” yet when he is away for a few days she writes to break it off yet again: “When I think of Jill [Banford], she is ten times more real to me. I know her and I’m awfully fond of her, and I hate myself for a beast43 if I ever hurt her little finger. We have a life together.”
This appeal to the rational is in vain; March may hate herself “for a beast,” but that is what she is, what everyone is in Lawrence’s world. Henry is described as a maddened animal who must get “the thorn of Banford” out of his foot; here Lawrence presents aggression as self-defense. Finally, in a particularly crude bit of phallic symbolism, Henry manages to crush Banford under a huge falling tree. But this ending is no less ambivalent than that of The Bostonians; Lawrence undercuts heterosexuality even as it appears to triumph. “He had won her. And he knew it and was glad,” he tells us, echoing the rhythms of the book of Genesis—but Henry is soon feeling tormented by March’s inability to relax into passive feminine acquiescence. As a last resort, he takes his wife off to settle in Canada, in the faint hope of restoring her to her natural role of Eve to his Adam.
A comparison between the two versions of The Fox is highly revealing. In the short story in Hutchinson’s Story Magazine in November 1920, Lawrence winds up the conflict with a rapid proposal and marriage; March is left dreamily happy, Banford angry but alive. Paradoxically, the magazine’s caption justified the publication by emphasizing both the up-to-date realism of this triangle, and its timelessness as a narrative pattern: “a fine story44 of a post-war partnership between two modern young women—and the intervention of the inevitable man.” But in Lawrence’s rewrite, the engagement is longer and more complex—with March struggling to break it off, and hold on to her relationship with Banford—and Henry not only has to kill his rival before the wedding can take place, but finds himself struggling to really possess his melancholy, rebellious wife afterward. All these changes45 have the effect of making readers take the women’s love more seriously, and lifting The Fox from a conventional man-wins-woman-from-woman story into an almost allegorical duel between different forms of sexuality.
The Fox had an enormous influence. In Thomas Dickinson’s play Winter Bound (1929), Tony the mannish lady sculptor glumly donates the farmhouse to the happy couple, and exits wailing that she is “a hundred years46 ahead of my time.” By contrast, in Geoffrey Moss’s That Other Love (1930), the woman who gets married decides to leave the Normandy cottage as a booby prize for her cast-off beloved. The New York Times complained:
Nothing in Phillida’s history47 accounts for the fact that she loves women more than men; and her subsequent decision to forsake Vera and marry in order to have children is also poorly motivated. Granted that in life people drift in and out of such relationships with little apparent reason, it is the duty of an author to create reasons for everything.
The reviewer’s irritation is revealing; it suggests that by 1930 the rivals storyline was so well established that readers had a right to expect it to be strongly characterized, dramatically played out, and illustrative of a clear divide between two sexual preferences. (Interestingly, elsewhere in this review seems to be the first time the New York Times ever offered homosexual and heterosexual as a pair of opposite terms.)
Housing is the territory on which the whole battle is played out in Dorothy Dodds Baker’s fascinating melodrama Trio (1943)—decried by critics, but winner of the Commonwealth Club of California medal for literature. Janet is a PhD student48 recovering from a nervous breakdown in the glossy penthouse of her professor and lover of three years, Pauline—the plagiarist author of a brilliant book on the decadent movement. By constrast, Ray, a part-time theater student, lives in a shabby but honest apartment. For three months Janet sneaks out at night to slum it with her boyfriend, until Pauline stalks in to sneer at this “below-stairs liaison”49 and “take her home where she belongs.” Janet finds the courage to stay—but the complication is that when she finally spells out to the obtuse Ray that she has been a prisoner in the “Alcatraz” of lesbianism, he throws her out. She can only think to flee to the neutral third zone of her parents’ house. Pauline makes a desperate suggestion that she and Janet should swap their life of luxurious domesticity for one of exotic travel: the tropics or the frozen north. But our hero Ray turns up at the eleventh hour to denounce lesbianism, whatever its setting, as “no place to go…a dead-end and a blind alley and a bottleneck of a way of life.” (Not the vagina dentata, then, but the hermetically sealed womb.)
The motif of the man breaking up the beautiful/hideous “home” of love between women clearly owes a debt to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Jove penetrates the enclosed female world of Diana’s woods to seduce the nymph Callisto. In Ovid’s version, it is the nymph who pays for her divided loyalties: pregnant, banished by Diana, Callisto is ultimately turned i
nto a bear. Whereas in these twentieth-century stories, it is the Diana figure who is left bereft, punished for trying to possess a girl, while the Callisto figure goes off with her godlike lover to discover the joys of normality. This is a great example of how plot motifs repeat over thousands of years, even though the ideological message attached to them may have completely changed.
“Go on, then,”50 the man tells his girlfriend sourly in Ernest Hemingway’s 1933 story “The Sea Change,” releasing her to try a lesbian affair. But this acquiescence is most untypical of fictions and plays in which a man and a woman compete for a woman’s heart. Very often somebody has to die. Pauline in Baker’s Trio shoots herself in the head; the spurned man drowns himself in Guy de Maupassant’s satirical story “La Femme de Paul” (1881; in English, “Paul’s Mistress”). In The Dark Island (1934), Vita Sackville-West winds up her tormented triangle Hamlet-style by having the husband drown the woman who loves his wife, whereupon his wife kisses him in order to pass on her diphtheria so they will both die of it. Whether in sparkling social comedy or bloody tragedy, the stakes are high, the weapons are various, and the archetypal forces of masculinity and femininity are unleashed.
Marjorie Garber51 argues persuasively that in narratives such as The Fox the triangle52 is not an interruption of an erotic relationship but the source of that eroticism. Jealousy generates desire, and therefore plot; it takes a static situation and turns up the heat.
The triangle gets a further layer of tension when family members compete sexually for a woman: father against daughter, mother against son, brother against sister. Sometimes the narrative is heated even more by having all three sides of the triangle involve desire as well as competition: the man and the woman both want and compete with each other. For instance, in a remarkable story published in 1876, Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Felipa,” an eleven-year-old cross-dressing Minor-can girl forms a passionate attachment to a couple, and ultimately stabs the man. The narrator insists, “She loved them53 both alike. It is nothing; she does not know,” but the girl’s grandfather corrects her: “It was two loves, and the stronger thrust the knife.”
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