Similarly, a boarding school38 for girls is the setting for the unequivocally hostile Regiment of Women (1917), the best-selling first novel by “Clemence Dane” (Winifred Ashton) that established the stereotype of the predatory lesbian teacher. The coldly glamorous Clare Hartill has a surname that suggests the sickness of her heart, and her preference for candles over electricity gives her more than a touch of the vampire. Taking up a new colleague (the boisterous eighteen-year-old Alwynne Durand), Clare draws her into a close partnership. Her secret agenda is not sex—Clare never goes beyond a rare, rough kiss on the lips—but domination. Becoming “a very real tyrant,”39 she binds Alwynne “ever more closely to her,” planning to “master” and break this sunny spirit: as Dane puts it sardonically, “She had acquired a lover with a sense of humour and she felt that she had her hands full. Her imperious will would, in time, she knew, eliminate either the lover or the humour.” First Clare tackles the maiden aunt Elsbeth, whom Alwynne lives with; she takes her on over such tiny but significant points as where the girl will spend Christmas Day. “Alwynne, by fair means or foul, should be detached…should become Clare’s property…should be given up to no living woman or man.”
The tension of this tightening bond, and worry over the suicide of Clare’s thirteen-year-old pet, Louise, sends the young teacher into a decline: “The changing Alwynne,40 whitened, quieted, submissive, the sparkle gone from her eyes and the snap from her tongue.” Aunt Elsbeth steps in to rescue her niece, sending her to convalesce with relations, where she will meet a nice gardener called Roger. Here Clemence Dane piles on the agricultural—in fact, borderline eugenicist—metaphors. Roger makes Alwynne realize that her school is “a rabbit warren” and “a tray of unthinned seedlings.” He persuades her without much difficulty that “she must show him all the weeds that were choking her before he could set about uprooting them and planting good seed.”
As is traditional in the rivalry plots discussed in chapter 3, Roger is comically obtuse about the “sorcery”41 by which the older teacher holds Alwynne in thrall. He is shaken when Alwynne turns down his proposal in faltering, borrowed phrases.
You see, she [Clare] thinks—we both think, that if you’ve got a—a really real woman friend, it’s just as good as falling in love and getting married and all that—and far less commonplace. Besides the trouble—smoking, you know—and children.
(This is the only example I have found of men’s tobacco habits being a reason to prefer women!) Alwynne immediately undermines this rather faltering coming-out speech of hers when she admits to hankering for children, but she continues to insist that she is committed: “There can never be anyone but Clare…I’ve let her be sure she can have me always.” (Privately, Clare is prepared for the day Alwynne gets broody: “A brat to play with? Let her adopt one, and I’ll house it. I’ll give her anything she wants.”) However, one last bit of nastiness from Clare—a curt refusal of a nightgown that Alwynne has painstakingly hand-sewn—shakes the scales from the girl’s eyes and frees her to run off to Roger. It is Aunt Elsbeth, the knowing observer, who denounces Clare for her “vampirism”: “Who will your next victim be?…What will you do when your glamour’s gone? I tell you, Clare Hartill, you’ll die of hunger in the end.”
But Clemence Dane’s take on her villainess is rather subtler than this. Clare ends the novel sitting at her desk all night during a storm, looking at Alwynne’s telegram telling her she is going to marry Roger. She cries briefly, she writes to the headmistress accepting a partnership in the school, and she resigns herself to a future of “loneliness and work”…perhaps enlivened by “other fish in the sea,” including “that child in the Fourth.” This is no lurid death, but a credible plan for survival.
Even if some of the English fiends manage to cheat death, they are—like their French sisters—a frail breed. By the late nineteenth42 century, sex between women was generally assumed to produce a fraying of the nerves (due to all that unsatisfied arousal) and exhaustion. Cora Linn Daniels’s Sardia: A Story of Love (1891), Naomi Royde-Smith’s The Island (1929), and Helen Anderson’s Pity for Women (1937) end with sudden mental breakdowns. Madness often proves fatal, as in Diderot’s La Religieuse (1796), though the mechanism is obscure. Many characters show awareness of the conventions of their story: “Ah!”43 sighs Hélène in Adrienne Saint-Agen’s L’Affolante illusion (1906; in English, The Terrifying Illusion), “I am only too sure of the denouement of my utopian passion: a madhouse or the…grave!” Having watched her lover expire in delirium brought on by sexual exhaustion, Aline in Charles Montfort’s Le Journal d’une Saphiste (1902) draws the obvious moral:
I have seen44 to her last resting place the dear victim of my sapphic love and now I shall not rest until I find in solitude or in death the supreme expiation for this tragedy. My last plea will be: Women seek only the Unique and Powerful Love that sways all mankind: the Wholesome and Honest Love, Comforting and Sublime because it is Procreative, that of Man.
That last sentence shows curious capitalization; it is as if Montfort (or his translator) is trying to give his conclusion the weight of some ancient scripture.
If desire between women has difficulty directly killing its victims, it pulls off the trick with the help of prostitution, in, for instance, Emile Zola’s scandalously successful Nana (1880), which includes the first dyke bar scene in literature. Drugs help too: opium and eau de cologne in Algernon Swinburne’s unsubtly titled Lesbia Brandon (written 1864–67); aphrodisiacs in Jean-Louis Dubut de Laforest’s 1884 novella, Mademoiselle de Tantale; some poison which brings ecstatic oblivion in Adrienne Saint-Agen’s Amants féminins (1902; in English, Women Lovers).
Destruction must come down one way or another: it is as if desire between women is a land mine, harming innocent and guilty alike. For instance, when the husband of the bisexually promiscuous heroine of Ernest Feydeau’s La Comtesse de Chalis (1868) commits her to a sanatorium, it is not she but he and their two children who promptly drop dead. In an Italian novel, Enrico Butti’s L’automa (1882; in English, The Robot), an androgynous aristocrat drives her husband to suicide by taking a variety of lovers, including an even more mannish female singer. Another story of marital breakdown, August Strindberg’s Le Plaidoyer d’un fou (1895; in English, A Madman’s Manifesto), is an extended suicide note by a frail writer who only gradually realizes that his cross-dressing suffragist actress wife is cheating on him with every woman in sight. (Despite these last examples,45 the lesbian fiend is only rarely described as cross-dressing; in the benign tradition of the female bridegroom, a woman in breeches may be comical, romantic, or tragic, but she is almost never evil.)
By the beginning of the twentieth century, violent death is even more popular than a slow decline. Fiends can commit46 or incite suicide, or wind up a relationship of mutual misery with a murder-suicide (as in Gamiani), for instance by gas oven in the backstory to Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (1945). My own favorite scene of fusion in death is the climax of Jane de la Vaudère’s Les Demi-sexes (1897), when Madame Saurel turns up in Camille’s drawing room to try to force her to leave her beloved husband, and Camille embraces her, pulling them both into the fire: afterward, “their bodies47 were so strangely shrunken and twisted that it was impossible to distinguish one from the other.” This is desire between women as the melting of identity boundaries, the ultimate narcissism.
SECRET ENEMIES
So the lesbian monster can be placed in various narrative frames: the pornographic novel, the school story, the anticlerical exposé, the tragic bildungsroman. But the most popular is a variant on the rivals plot, in which a male point-of-view character has a secret competitor who turns out to be not a man but…a lesbian. This storyline offers mystery, narrative suspense, titillation, and moralism all wrapped up in one appealing package.
We have seen writers such as Isaac de Benserade, Honoré D’Urfé, and Denis Diderot struggle to preserve a narrator’s innocence even as she is being drawn into an affair with another woman. Honoré d
e Balzac’s48 clever innovation in La Fille aux yeux d’or (1835, one of his History of the Thirteen trilogy; in English, The Girl with Golden Eyes) was to keep up the tension without sacrificing as much plausibility, by telling the story from the point of view of a figure who still shows up in lesbian-themed literature and films today: the oblivious boyfriend. (Roger in Regiment of Women at least grasps that Clare is a bad influence on his beloved, even if he is foggy on the specifics, but the man in secret-enemy storylines does not even realize that his unknown rival is a woman.) Balzac’s narrator Henri is the opposite of innocent—a decadent Parisian rake, in fact—but it does not occur to him that the one who has preceded him in the affections of the golden-eyed (Spanish and African-American) Paquita could be other than male. He knows the girl is guarded by the large staff of a mansion belonging to the absent Marquis de San-Réal, so he decides—with a certain logic—that the aged marquis must be his rival, and that they are enacting “that eternally old49 but ever new comedy featuring the stock characters of an old man, a young girl, and a lover.”
“Your strength will wear out against my will and you will exhaust yourself in useless struggles,” in Adolphe Belot, Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife (1891).
This image from Belot’s adultery story with a twist is by the illustrator and groundbreaking photojournalist Ernest Clair-Guyot; it first appeared in a French edition of 1889 and was included in the Chicago translation
To give her credit, his beloved Paquita does offer many heavy hints that her captivity is psychological as well as literal: “Listen, I’m chained50 like a poor animal to its post; I’m amazed I’ve been able to throw a bridge across the abyss that divides us. Make me drunk, then kill me.” She is careful to use gender-neutral terms for the person who has kept her as a sex slave since the age of twelve, “the monster who will devour me,” the one who sends Paquita mysterious letters written (as a concession to the girl’s illiteracy) in hieroglyphs. Henri is hilariously slow to put the pieces together, even when, having deflowered his beloved, he deduces that she was technically a virgin but “certainly not innocent.” As if trying to tell him her secret, she dresses him up in a red velvet frock, and later tells him, “You’re forgetting the power of the feminine.” But this oblivious boyfriend remains so until, in the throes of sex, Paquita screams out the nickname not of the marquis but of his beautiful young wife. Mortified by his sudden realization, Henri makes a bathetic attempt to strangle Paquita with his cravat.
The marquise returns later that night, like some female Bluebeard with a nose for betrayal, and she avenges the infidelity as Henri failed to do, by stabbing her captive over and over. Though we never see the two women having sex, blood acts as its sign; by the time Henri bursts in, the room is covered in red prints, and the half-naked, magnificent marquise is marked by the girl’s bites: “She was too intoxicated51 by warm blood, too stimulated by the struggle, in too great a state of exaltation to have noticed had all Paris formed a circle around her.” The fact that this is the marquise’s way of outdoing Henri at defloration is suggested by her send-off to Paquita: “For the blood you’ve given him, you owe me all of yours!” In a final twist, Paquita’s “execution” allows the rivals to reconcile. Almost comically, the Sadeian bloodbath is turned into a sentimental recognition scene as the two alter egos, seeing their features reflected in each other, discover that they have the same father. (So was it her female lover’s face in her male lover that Paquita chose? Although at the level of plot this story opposes man to woman and heterosexuality to homosexuality, in the details Balzac clearly relishes blurring such lines.) In a rather unconvincing nod to Diderot, the marquise announces that for love of God she will retire to a Spanish convent. Where, presumably, she will seduce young nuns and go insane? One bizarre indication of the popularity of Balzac’s nasty, clever novella is that his description of the boudoir was reprinted in a women’s magazine article on decorating tips.
Thirty-five years later, serialized in Le Figaro, Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme (1870; in English, Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife) was a huge success for Adolphe Belot, a divorced lawyer from Guadeloupe whose potboilers financed his travels and his gambling; the novel was reprinted thirty times in the following decade. Belot’s title hints at the paradox of Adrien Giraud’s wife, Paule, being still a “mademoiselle,” fundamentally unmarriageable, still unwon.
The novel’s real innovation is in the characterization of the secret enemy. The stylish, witty young Countess de Blangy—a separated wife who jokes about being “allergic to all men”52—exhibits none of the lurid traits or twitching neuroses of a lesbian monster. All she does53 is continue, under cover of friendship, her school-days affair with Paule. It is Adrien’s profound obtuseness—even when the two inseparables come out flushed from long conversations in locked bedrooms—that makes him so easy to cuckold. Unknowingly, he confides in his rival, repeatedly asking her for help with the marriage he has not yet managed to persuade his wife to consummate. Even when he finally forbids Paule to see the countess, it is only an attempt to provoke his serene, enigmatic wife. The punch line of the joke comes when Adrien tracks Paule to a secret apartment—draped decadently with black satin, bookshelves crammed with such sapphic classics as La Religieuse, La Fille aux yeux d’or, and Mademoiselle Maupin—and though he finds the countess there, the penny still fails to drop. Throughout this novel, the countess’s brilliant technique is to tell the literal truth, but flippantly, letting Adrien continue to believe women’s friendship harmless:
If you forgive us for loving each other since our days in the convent and for not being able to live apart from each other, drop that forbidding expression that reminds me of Bluebeard, and take this cigarette.
Only a chance meeting on his travels with the worldly and melancholy Count de Blangy enlightens Adrien about their wives’ long-term affair. Unable to use the legal system—because to raise lesbian possibilities in court would bring them nothing but ridicule—the husbands drag their wives apart by force. At this point Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme goes through one of those lurching changes of gear common in lesbian-themed literature: Belot halts his saucy comedy of adultery and tacks on a stern ending. Paule, laid low by a brain disease caused by sexual exhaustion, repents in the arms of her husband (who has still not managed to consummate the marriage), before choking to death on a piece of food: this makes literal her morbid appetites. The Countess de Blangy, as the active seductress, gets a more deliberate dispatch: Adrien, fortuitously happening across her in difficulties out swimming with her new girlfriend, drowns her under cover of lending aid. Her husband writes to thank him for ridding the world of this “reptile.”54 The novel, narrated by Adrien to a male friend, restores the bond of men against the unnerving trickery of women.
The sapphic fictions of Balzac, Gautier, Zola, and Belot all began appearing in widely available U.S. translations in the 1890s. It was on a Memphis street in 1892 that the notion of the lesbian monster moved into the spotlight of popular culture, when Alice Mitchell took a razor to the throat of Freda Ward, the girlfriend who had backed out on a promise to elope with her. (Ward died on the spot; Mitchell was presumed to be insane and sent to an asylum, where she died, probably by her own hand.) Mitchell was not the first woman to kill a girlfriend rather than lose her; the fact that her case became an international phenomenon suggests that—prompted by the medical interest in homosexuality as either an innate or an acquired perversion—the time was right for stories of evil lesbian killers. Interestingly, it was to Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme that most commentators turned (even though, in Belot’s novel, the lesbian is in fact the murder victim, not the killer). As the New York World marveled:
In the Criminal Court55 of Memphis, Shelby County, Adolphe Belot’s Mlle. Giraud Ma Femme will be the only textbook at hand. Judge DuBose, of Tennessee, will have cited to him, as bearing on the case of an American girl, the creations of French writers whom he and all his associates have looked upon as perverted creatures, dealing with matters ou
tside of real life, or at least outside of American life.
Here genre and nationality are conflated; real life moves uncannily close to fiction, and American women’s sexuality is revealed as horribly similar to the foreign kind.
In Mademoiselle Giraud, the rival is seen but not recognized; in La Fille aux yeux d’or, she is unseen until the last moment. In his 1925 play La Prisonnière (in English, The Captive), Edouard Bourdet went one better and kept his predator offstage throughout: Madame d’Aiguines—the older married woman holding Irene in her thrall—is represented only by the bunches of violets she sends her. (Sales of the flower56 in both France and America were said to have plummeted as a result of this play.) This invisibility of the fiend was clearly the secret of the play’s success with audiences; one reviewer, Pierre Brisson, chose not to name its “bold and strangely57 embarrassing subject,” since “by spelling it out one is likely to give it that brutal appearance that M. Bourdet has managed to avoid with such fine skill.”
But unlike many other devices for evading censorship, the unseen quality of Madame d’Aiguines makes her all the more fascinating and the play more profound in its effects: she is a bogey, a blank screen on which we project all our fantasies and fears. Though La Prisonnière is clearly indebted to Mademoiselle Giraud, it comes to a very different conclusion. The invalid, world-weary Monsieur d’Aiguines warns Irene’s naïve suitor Jacques to give up and leave these lesbians “to dwell among58 themselves in the kingdom of shadows”:
It’s mysterious, terrible! Under cover of friendship a woman can enter any household, whenever and however she pleases—at any hour of the day—she can poison and pillage everything before a man whose home she destroys is even aware what’s happening to him…A secret alliance of two beings who understand one another because they’re alike, because they’re of the same sex, because they’re of a different planet than he, the stranger, the enemy!
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