Inseparable

by Emma Donoghue

  The preference she means is her liking for one nun above all the others, but she may be hinting at lesbianism as her “natural preference” too. It is an interesting moment: we half expect the superior to launch into a Sadeian dissection of the arbitrariness of moral codes. But a few days later, unable to persuade Suzanne to accept her obsessive and self-abasing love, she starts going into a decline, passing “from melancholy to piety and from piety to frenzy.”

  One suspects that the superior behaves erratically because Diderot’s sympathies are erratic: he is not sure what to make of, or do with, his own monstrous creation. Her guilt is oddly unconvincing, because belated; we know that she never used to mention her “natural preference” in confession because she did not consider it a sin, but now she fasts, scourges and mortifies herself, begging Suzanne to “trample me underfoot.”20 The new confessor, Dom Morel, is acute enough to see through all this psychic smoke and mirrors to the impossible task of repression: he predicts that the superior will either “soon go back to her first inclinations or go out of her mind.” Though he blames the unnatural nature of monastic life for having turned her into a “maniac” with “monstrous affections,” he offers gender segregation as a contributing factor, not an excuse. During months of delirious fever the superior is terrorized by visions of devils coming to get her, and yet longs for it all to be over: “If only I could lose my memory!…If I could go back into the void, or be born again!” Her death is soon followed by that of poor Sister Thérèse. Even the technically innocent Suzanne cannot escape; after running away from the convent she ends up a miserable laundress. As in the book of Genesis, forbidden knowledge leads to exile; all who have as much as tasted the lesbian fruit must be punished.

  The pattern Diderot established, of the evil lesbian who lures a younger woman into a relationship which can only end in disaster or death (perhaps with a deathbed repentance), was to be lastingly popular in fiction and drama. Unlike Sade’s Juliette, it offered the best of both worlds—titillation, plus a morally satisfactory ending.

  We find Diderot’s grim plot even in pornography, which might be expected to operate outside the parameters of respectability. The perfect example is Gamiani (1833), a slim fiction attributed to Alfred de Musset, published with frank illustrations and reprinted forty times by 1928. It was said to have been the result of Musset’s accepting a bet that he could not write an erotic novel without obscene words; it took him just three days, so the story goes, and he based the character of his Countess Gamiani on his lover George Sand. But it seems more likely that he really borrowed her from Sade, since this aristocratic “wild beast”21 has a repertoire that includes nuns, monks, whips, dogs, and dildos that ejaculate hot milk (a popular eighteenth-century notion, though unfortunately no examples survive in museums). But what is new is Musset’s emphasis on the inherently terrible nature of lesbian sex. Before Sade, it is generally a tantalizing, unfinished business; in Sade, it is one act among many; in Gamiani it becomes a dark and almost supernatural force. If Musset’s tribade antiheroine is an “unconquerable harpie” (a vengeful monster from classical myth, half bird, half woman), she is also prey: “a female Prometheus, having her heart torn out by a hundred vultures at once.” Having no religious context, she cannot proclaim herself (like Diderot’s antiheroine) to be damned, but she expresses the secular equivalent: she feels “divorced from nature,” and this brings her not Sadeian triumph but psychological torment.

  Nothing that is not extravagant, unnatural, can appeal to me now; I am ever seeking the unattainable. Oh, I assure you it is dreadful to feel as I do! To spoil one’s inmost feelings, to be consumed with a desire that is not to be appeased.

  Musset describes her as “half-satisfied” and therefore “always tormented.” But interestingly, Gamiani turns this technical problem into an asset, boasting that her girlfriend Fanny will keep returning to her because, unlike a man who comes and then collapses, a tribade is always hard, always ready to give more pleasure. This is reminiscent of what James Grantham Turner identifies in libertine literature of the seventeenth century as the “philosapphic”22 mode, in which lesbian sex is celebrated for the fact that it never quite ends. But what is new, in Gamiani, is the existential fury associated with it. Peter Cryle calls this the moment when the Lesbos theme and the Messalina theme (female insatiability) overlap for the first time, and he shows how the notion of fearsome lesbian hyperstamina emerges from the older, more wistful notion of amor impossibilis: “The (supposed) inability23 of women to achieve climax and denouement without male help is thus bound up with their (supposed) capacity to maintain endless desire in exclusively female company.” Gamiani’s superpower is also her damnation; as in the poems of Baudelaire, the tribade’s punishment is a temporal one, a narrative loop in which she is trapped without hope of reaching a dénouement.

  But Gamiani does finally bring her story to a resounding climax, by dosing herself and Fanny with a poisonous aphrodisiac so they can die together in the act. Musset probably killed off his monster to make the story more acceptable to his readers, but the effect is oddly glorifying. Unlike Sade’s steely Juliette, who slaughters and moves on, Gamiani is a Byronic hero who stakes her life on the meaning of this perverse “martyrdom.”24 “Don’t you understand. I only wanted to know, if I could not do more in the rage of agony!” Rather ludicrously—but thrillingly—the lesbian has here become a symbol of the defiance of nature that the decadent movement would champion half a century later.

  Gamiani was a best seller in France. But Musset’s peers in the British Isles had a problem: their readers would never stand for this kind of explicitness, particularly about goings-on between women. When Maria Edgeworth wrote about a lesbian fiend in 1801, for instance, she did so in a subplot to a courtship novel (Belinda), and left the sex out: all that remains are scattered, indirect hints about the unsubtly named Mrs. Harriot Freke, a brash, crass feminist and occasional cross-dresser, who flirts with every girl in sight and persuades one to run away with her.

  Charles Dickens used the same strategies in Little Dorrit (1857), but he approached his lesbian seriously rather than satirically, and the result is a fascinating portrait of a woman intelligent enough to analyze her own unhappiness and cruelty: a sort of homoerotic Frankenstein’s monster. (This sober novel, judged to be Dickens’s worst by many nineteenth-century critics, found its first real champion in George Bernard Shaw, and is now considered a masterpiece for its critique of corrupt institutions, prison being only one among them.) Miss Wade is a minor character in Little Dorrit, appearing in only eight of the novel’s seventy chapters, but disproportionally memorable. Her story is told nonchronologically, in jigsaw pieces that only fit together late in the book. No doubt Dickens25 used this structure to increase suspense around the mysterious Miss Wade, but it also had the convenient effect of avoiding setting off early warning bells about this erotically perverse character.

  Introduced as a handsome, fierce young loner, Miss Wade does not speak for herself until the fifty-seventh chapter (book 2, chapter 21)—a memoir she writes on the pretext of justifying herself to the novel’s disapproving hero, Arthur Clennam—entitled “History of a Self-Tormentor,”26 a curiously memorable coinage which is probably meant to hint at “self-abuse.” Raised on sufferance by an adoptive grandmother, Miss Wade is furiously possessive from the time of her very first crush on a schoolmate:

  She would cry and cry and say I was cruel, and then I would hold her in my arms till morning: loving her as much as ever, and often feeling as if, rather than suffer so, I could so hold her in my arms and plunge to the bottom of a river—where I would still hold her after we were both dead.

  Jealousy here segues into murderous death wish; Miss Wade’s passion sounds impossible to satisfy, intrinsically morbid.

  In the sentence quoted above, “hold” is repeated three times, but Miss Wade never manages to hold on to her love objects (male or female) for long, because her real sexual preference is for emotional abuse. As soon
as she gets to know a young maid, Harriet (fondly nicknamed Tattycoram by her employers, the Meagles), the two are drawn together by a sense of “a singular likeness.”27 Tattycoram is more than ready to hear Miss Wade’s trenchant analysis of Tattycoram’s humiliating position as a rescued foundling, expected to be perpetually grateful to the Meagles—an analysis which readers will find convincing even if they sense the older woman’s hidden agenda. But Tattycoram fears her new friend’s sympathy is bad for her: “You seem to come like my own anger, my own malice, my own—whatever it is.” Miss Wade here sounds like the return of the repressed: unfeminine feelings made flesh. She watches the girl “as one afflicted with a diseased part might curiously watch the dissection and exposition of an analogous case.” This is a variation on the idea of desire between women as disease: Miss Wade plays the helpless patient and the cerebral medical student at the same time.

  There are many references to the women looking at each other intensely, but few to them touching; if Dickens means to imply a sexual relationship, he chooses to preserve the decencies. But there is an interesting scene, after Tattycoram runs away with Miss Wade, when Clennam and Meagle track down the couple in a stuffy little London flat. Miss Wade’s “composure”28 suggests to the visitors “(as a veil will suggest the form it covers), the unquenchable passion of her own nature.” The image of the veil implies that the calm outside of the relationship—domestic companions in an equal, feminist, and mutually beneficial arrangement—hides a much murkier dynamic. Meagle warns his prodigal maid:

  That lady’s influence over you—astonishing to us, and I should hardly go too far in saying terrible to us to see—is founded in passion fiercer than yours, and temper more violent than yours. What can you two be together? What can come of it?

  He asks Miss Wade whether she is “a woman, who, from whatever cause, has a perverted delight in making a sister-woman as wretched as she is (I am old enough to have heard of such).” While the first half of the sentence could be interpreted to refer to pimping, his claim to be “old enough to have heard of such” hints at a more rare and murky way of being “perverted.” Answering this euphemistic charge with a gesture rather than words, Miss Wade “put her arm about her [Tattycoram’s] waist as if she took possession of her for evermore. And there was a visible triumph in her face when she turned to dismiss the visitors.”

  So what can these two be together? Only unhappy, Dickens seems to say. Though Miss Wade’s memoir insists on the language of romantic friendship—“fidelity,”29 “common cause,” “confidence”—the relationship is fundamentally unequal, because Tattycoram is financially dependent and comes to realize that she has swapped the confinement of service for a new jail. Ironically, the only form of rebellion she can imagine is to renounce the relationship as “madness” and run back to her old employers. Unlike Diderot, however, Dickens feels no need to show the rejected lesbian beating her breast or falling into delirium: Miss Wade simply disappears from the novel, presumably in search of another love object to torment.

  Thomas Hardy in Desperate Remedies (1871) allowed himself a little more leeway in describing the behavior of Miss Aldclyffe, a handsome, friendless, eccentric spinster of forty-six, who hires the inexperienced Cytherea as a lady’s maid (her seventh that year) on the basis of the girl’s beauty. Her interest in Cytherea is shown from the start to be inextricably bound up with the dominance and submission of service, and the physical intimacies it involves: “She murmured30 to herself, ‘It is almost worth while to be bored with instructing her in order to have a creature who could glide round my luxurious indolent body in that manner, and look at me in that way—I warrant how light her fingers are upon one’s head and neck…’”

  There are several heavily erotic scenes of Cytherea dressing and undressing Miss Aldclyffe that describe the girl looking at and touching her mistress; the desiring gaze goes both ways. She is uncomfortable with her role in this household, however, and resents “her dependence31 on the whims of a strange woman.” But when the two discover that Cytherea is the daughter of the man Miss Aldclyffe loved and lost, they become obsessed with each other, feeling that their histories are even more “romantically intertwined.” Miss Aldclyffe’s passion is described sometimes like a mother’s, sometimes like a male lover’s. She climbs into Cytherea’s bed, asking, “Why can’t you kiss me as I can kiss you?” When Cytherea admits that there is a man she loves, Miss Aldclyffe loses her temper:

  I—an old fool—have been sipping at your mouth as if it were honey, because I fancied no wasting lover knew the spot. But a minute ago, and you seemed to me like a fresh spring meadow—now you seem a dusty highway.

  Nonetheless, the older woman hopes to reclaim Cytherea: “Try to love me more than you love him—do. I love you more sincerely than any man can.” She begs the girl to stay, not as a maid but as a companion. “Now will you promise to live with me always, and always be taken care of, and never deserted?” But the day after this long, frank scene, Miss Aldclyffe apologizes for her “absurd feeling” of possessiveness. Her behavior changes so abruptly, in fact, that one senses Hardy is backing off from the topic, at a high cost to consistency of characterization. For the rest of the novel, Miss Aldclyffe is more an interfering employer than a lover; she promotes Cytherea’s marriage with first one and then another man, before begging the girl’s forgiveness on her deathbed.

  Some of the awkwardness32 of Desperate Remedies can be explained by the fact that it was Hardy’s first novel and very much an experiment, written to cash in on the popular successes of sensation novelists such as Wilkie Collins, and perhaps the French school of lesbian fiend fiction. The first publisher he sent it to (Macmillan) rejected it as too highly charged; Tinsley Brothers agreed to publish it only if Hardy contributed to the printing costs. When the Spectator33 damned the novel for sensationalism, Hardy wished that he were dead, and for the rest of his life he would make attempts to evade this charge. In a new edition of 1896, for instance, he toned down the description of Miss Aldclyffe’s affection from “too rank,34 sensuous and capricious” to “too rank and capricious.” In 1912, he made more substantial alterations to the bedroom scene which provide a fascinating insight into the mechanics of bowdlerization. First he softened some wording: “love and be loved by” became “care for and be cared for by.” He also added explanations which are not entirely convincing: to Miss Aldclyffe’s demand “Now kiss me,” he added, “You seem as if you were my own, own child,” and to justify the line “I can’t help loving you” he preceded it with “I am a lonely woman, and I want the sympathy of a pure girl like you.”

  The French influence is even more obvious in A Sunless Heart (1894), a fascinatingly hybrid work published anonymously by Scottish author Edith Johnstone. This “New Woman” novel is set at a girls’ college where Mona, an eighteen-year-old student, is in love with her lecturer, Miss Lotus Grace. Significantly, Mona is a Creole, technically white but ethnically exotic: “a creature of flame35 and water, genius and strung nerves; a mad, lovable thing; a West Indian heiress, who owned a pitch lake in Trinidad.” Lotus responds impatiently to Mona’s declarations that “we shall always be together—in life and death”; she assures the girl that “in a few years you will find man is the right and legal object of these hysterics.” Interestingly, this does not stop her from kissing Mona and spending the summer traveling with her. Mona is characterized rather unevenly as having both a “tender heart” full of “noble, idealizing love” for Lotus, and a sinister possessiveness. She warns off a rival (another lecturer, called Gasparine) in no uncertain terms: “She is all I have—all I want. If you go between her and me…do you hear? She is mine. She was always mine in the College. A girl tried to take her from me once. That girl’s gone.” Mona’s erotic greed contrasts and competes with Gasparine’s radiant affection: they come across as characters from two different books, representatives of two different traditions, the (mostly French) lesbian fiend tale and the (mostly English) inseparables story. But Lotus
can return neither form of love fully because she is damaged goods, her heart rendered permanently “sunless” by sexual abuse in her teens.

  After a year abroad, Mona marches back in and invites her beloved to travel around the world with her. But a man has come between them—a middle-aged professor with whom Lotus has fallen in love and whom Mona has already turned down. Urging Mona to marry him and “be as others are,”36 the grief-stricken Lotus shares a bed with her one last time, then leaves, to return to Gasparine and live a chastened, quiet life. But fate intervenes; her train crashes into Mona’s, and the girl, in a particularly creepy moment, tracks her down: “In the darkness, she felt a mouth touch hers, and two wet hands groped over her body.” Horribly injured, they cling together in the wreckage, Mona in ecstasies that her fantasy of simultaneous death is coming true. During the long night of agony Lotus’s chilly heart finally melts and she tells Mona, “Because you did not leave me, now I have faith in love!” This is an oddly romantic climax to a bloody scene.

  “But why,37 it may be asked, does the writer deprive us of two interesting personages by such a thing as death in a collision on the railway,” complained the reviewer for the Scotsman. Clearly Edith Johnstone had difficulty imagining any other solution to this “interesting” couple’s stormy relationship: instead of marrying off either of them to the blundering professor, she preserves their fervid romance by letting them die together, which may be a cliché but in this case does suit the material. A Sunless Heart was widely reviewed, and we can deduce that the lesbian theme was what the Academy promised would “inspire exceptional interest” in the reading public, and what the Athenaeum found “nauseating when not ridiculous.” The Glasgow Herald was unusual in spelling it out in excited tones: “Few writers seem to know so thoroughly what one woman may be to another, or to have explained it so completely.”