This is the lesbian monster as an alien, wielding unlimited Terminator-style powers that appear to include invisibility—but also, curiously, the lesbian as any woman, Everywoman.59 Jacques himself uses an interesting image when finally conceding the battle after a year of marriage to the emotionally numb Irene:
You’re breathless—your eyes are dazed—your hands are trembling—because you’ve seen her again, that’s why! For a year I’ve been living with a statue, and that woman had only to reappear for the statue to come to life.
Here the monster60 is elevated to a deity: Aphrodite, who turned the statue Galatea into a real woman. Popular opinion credits the sculptor Pygmalion with this miracle, but he only shaped the statue and prayed to the goddess: in the myth, the power to give life is female. Here, hostility toward the monstrous lesbian tips over the edge into a kind of rapturous fascination.
Bourdet claimed61 he had been inspired by a comrade of his in World War One, a soldier who wanted to die rather than return to his sham marriage. But Paris gossip said La Prisonnière was really about war hero Denys Trefusis, who married Violet Keppel in peacetime in 1919 and endured her affairs with both Vita Sackville-West and the Princesse Edmond de Polignac before his death ten years later. La Prisonnière, despite simultaneous hit productions in half a dozen European cities, was banned in Britain. The 1926 Broadway production of The Captive attracted enormous crowds, and a firestorm of publicity. American reviewers, whether they approved of the play or not, followed Bourdet in their avoidance of such unambiguous words as lesbian or homosexual: instead they offered sterner terms (sex perversion, abnormality, aberration, psychopathic relationships, warped infatuation) or euphemisms (adult subjects, advanced subjects, an indecent theme, a revolting theme). Many of them suggested, with more than a hint of self-congratulation, that the “man in the street” would be unlikely to understand what the play was about even after sitting through it. Perhaps what was shocking, finally, was the ending: Irene bangs the door behind her as she runs off to join her lover, in an obvious echo of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). A New York State Supreme Court justice pronounced against the play, but with audible regret:
Justice Mahoney gave the opinion that the drama had excellent literary quality and that it might not harm a mature and intelligent audience. On the other hand, he held that it might have dangerous effects on some persons in an indiscriminate, cosmopolitan audience.
Meaning that the “mature and intelligent” would deduce the true horror that awaited Irene, but the young and the uncultured might be misled into cheering her on? In the end, the production—along with Mae West’s show Sex—provoked a law that would ban “sex perversion” on the New York stage from 1927 to 1967.
Bourdet borrowed more than his title from Marcel Proust’s posthumous novel of 1923, La Prisonnière. In that and other volumes of his In Search of Lost Time, Proust broods over the perverse position of the man who suspects, denies, but finally cannot help knowing that his beloved’s most erotic feelings are reserved for other women. His narrator, Marcel, makes mistakes that remind us of his oblivious predecessors in Balzac and Belot: at one point, for instance, he denies Albertine access to all her female friends except Andrée—who turns out to be her lover. Proust’s women, for all their prettiness and playfulness, are straight out of the French tradition of lesbian decadence. After Albertine’s death, Andrée speculates to Marcel that Albertine had vainly hoped Marcel would guess that she needed Marcel to save her by marrying her:
She felt in her heart62 that her obsession was a kind of criminal lunacy, and I have often wondered whether it wasn’t after an incident of that sort, having caused a suicide in a family, that she had committed suicide herself.
Similarly, in a story called “Before Dark” published much earlier, in 1896, Proust squeezes dark comedy from the obtuseness of a man (unfortunately called Leslie) whose beloved Françoise, dying from a gunshot wound, is trying to make him face the fact that she is a lesbian. (The surprise ending is that it turns out to be she who fired the gun.) One of the ironies is that she was encouraged, in her first stirrings of curiosity, by Leslie’s own tolerant statements on lesbianism, such as “We cannot say63 that because most people see things we call red as red that those who see them as violet are mistaken.” Might this line have suggested the bunches of violets that stand in for the woman lover in Bourdet’s play? Violet, lavender, and purple—as in the title of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, The Color Purple—are traditionally associated with desire between women.
NOT QUITE HUMAN
The woman who desires women is not just metaphorically monstrous; there is a long tradition of characterizing her as nonhuman.
Sometimes she is subhuman, for instance in H. Rider Haggard’s Allan’s Wife (1889)—one of his fifty-eight adventure novels, and so eagerly awaited by fans that two pirated editions appeared before publication. Hendrika is a black ape-woman, but endowed with more dignity than such a crass premise would suggest. Raised by baboons in South Africa, then rescued by a white family, Hendrika has ended up as evolution’s missing link, a “devil-woman”64 in the eyes of the natives. “Mistress” or “Star” is how she addresses her beautiful white foster sister Stella, with a worship which manages to be abased and domineering at the same time, and she is determined to thwart Stella’s marriage to Allan Quatermain, the small, wiry, and unattractive adventurer nicknamed “Macumazahn” (Watcher-by-Night). Our revolted hero claims that Hendrika speaks in “grunts” and “clicks,” but on the page she comes across like a Shakespearean tragic hero.
She drew herself up till her teeth gleamed in the moonlight. “Have I not watched her these many years, Macumazahn? Shall I cease to watch because a wandering white man comes to steal her? Why were you kissing her in the garden, Macumazahn? How dare you kiss her who is a star?…They say in the Kraals that men love women better than women love women. But it is a lie, though this is true—that if a woman loves a man she forgets all other love.”
This rivals story signals its ending: Hendrika must lose. If Hendrika owes much to Othello, Stella is a Desdemona figure, for instance when she pleads for Hendrika’s life after the ape-woman’s knife attack on Allan: “I have been very fond65 of her, and bad as she is, she has loved me. Do not have her killed on my marriage day.” Once banished to the jungle, and denied Stella’s civilizing influence, Hendrika goes wild and goes mad. (As usual, the lesbian’s doom is overdetermined.) Rounding up a huge troop of her baboon relatives, she returns to kidnap the newlywed, pregnant Stella, and holds her captive in a highly womblike cave. Readers hoping for at least a hint of a lesbian ape rape scene must have been disappointed; all the gallant Hendrika does is cook Stella tasty meals. Even after her husband has rescued her, Stella dies in childbirth, as if unable to bear the internal conflict of her two loves. Restored to sanity and the correct use of English, Hendrika stabs herself on Stella’s grave. The magnanimous victor, Allan, plans to give her a Christian burial, but the natives throw her body to the vultures instead.
Of course, Allan’s Wife is a racist, homophobic parable. It is never quite clear whether Hendrika’s unnatural desire drags her down to the bestial level, or is the consequence of her bestial upbringing, but either way the connection is clear: as Allan observes thoughtfully, “the lower one66 gets in the scale of humanity the more readily this passion thrives.” However, Hendrika is by far the strongest character, and every statement about her savagery is contradicted by a demonstration of her nobility—which suggests that Haggard could not quite make up his mind whether he was writing about a disgusting passion or a glorious one.
It was more usual for writers to write about lesbians as nonhuman in the sense of the supernatural: an eerie turning away from nature’s law. The link goes back67 at least as far as Samuel Coleridge’s Christabel (started in 1798, published in 1816), in which a beautiful stranger, Geraldine, tricks her way into Christabel’s bed and works some appalling spell on her. The poem gains its power partly from the fact that—left unfi
nished—it never clarifies what is going on or whether Christabel escapes.
Later writers preferred to spell it out. Ghosts, for instance, are handy devices, because they can be wistful or stern, comforting or horrifying, or an unnerving mixture of them all. The specter keeps an author’s options open, since she can be read (by those who believe in that sort of thing) as a real spirit, and (by those who do not) as a personification of the longing, sorrow, desire, or guilt of the one being haunted. Ghost stories68 can put the culturally semi-visible—desire between women, for instance—briefly in the spotlight.
Victorian ghost stories sometimes stage a weird, passionate encounter between a living woman and her dead friend: examples include Ada Trevanion’s “A Ghost Story” (1858), Rose Terry’s “My Visitation” (1858), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s “Since I Died” (1873), and Alice Brown’s “There and Here” (1897). Often what makes the ghost walk is unfinished business to do with a close friendship.
In a notable twentieth-century example, Elizabeth Bowen’s 1934 story “The Apple Tree,” Mrs. Myra Wing’s newly wedded life is rendered intolerable by the nightly apparition of an apple tree which paralyzes her and terrifies anyone who comes near it. The tree is eventually revealed as standing for the intense bond she had at school with a “queer-looking”69 spectacled girl called Doria. Both she and twelve-year-old Myra were unpopular and they formed a pact, becoming “quite proud of ourselves, of being different.” They used to hide high up in the branches of an old apple tree where no one could find them, and tell stories. But as soon as Myra managed to make other friends, she dropped Doria and betrayed her by joining in the others’ mockery. One night she followed Doria out to the gardens and found her hanging from the apple tree. In the aftermath, Myra got brain fever and almost died. The young bride now explains her “haunted” state to the kindly, older Mrs. Bettersley; every now and then, she confesses, she dreams that she wakes up in the dormitory and sees Doria tying the cord around her waist and going out. “I have to go after her; there is always the apple tree. Its roots are in me. It takes all my strength.” The way a relationship from school days has become a permanently blighting force on the heroine’s adult life and marriage suggests that same-sex attachment, once planted in a girl’s character, cannot be easily uprooted. Interestingly, the cure turns out to be a mysterious interaction between women; Mrs. Bettersley (whose name suggests that she will make Myra better) says, rather mysteriously and romantically, “come away with me.” After some weeks she brings Myra back to her husband, cured, but “by what arts” we do not learn. The Wings live happily ever after in “sublime nonentity,” as Bowen puts it drily; being haunted may be a ghastly business, but it is more exciting than happily married life.
Betrayal between women is the backstory to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), considered by many the best ghost story of the twentieth century. The house’s spinster mistress, we learn, “took a girl70 from the village to live with her, as a kind of companion,” but died neglected while the girl was dallying in the garden with a man. Inheriting the house brought the girl no happiness because of accusations that she had tricked her doting benefactor, so she killed herself. Hill House is already throbbing with lesbian unhappiness, then, by the time an investigator brings along a group of psychic sensitives. It is no surprise that the ensuing psychodrama focuses on the turbulent relationship of two of the sensitives, timid Eleanor and cocky Theo (Theodora). Theo has arrived fresh from a row with the “flatmate” who ripped up “the volume of Alfred de Musset” Theo gave her for her birthday—no doubt a wink-wink reference to the murderous tribade in Musset’s Gamiani (1833). One of the book’s scariest moments comes when Eleanor and Theo are gripping each other’s hands in the dark, listening to ghosts babble outside the door—but when the lights come back on, Eleanor realizes she is alone. “Good God—whose hand was I holding?” Desire and revulsion, the live and the dead, touch here to produce a delicious shudder; what if the true monster is not outside but right beside you, pretending to be your friend?
The ghost is not the only uncanny figure used to suggest the invisibility of women’s romantic relationships. In an oddly domestic fantasy novel from 1927, Edith Olivier’s The Love Child, Agatha is lonely enough, at thirty-two, to summon back her sole childhood friend—an imaginary one, aged eleven, called Clarissa. (The name echoes not only Richardson’s novel of 1748–49, but the heroine of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway [1925], preoccupied with the memory of kissing her best friend.) Defying the convention that girlish things must be put away as a woman matures into heterosexuality, Agatha plunges into a playful but secret relationship with her “love child.” This novel is often read as a parable of mother-child relationships, but Olivier describes the bond in terms more romantic than maternal: “It was as if71 a shaft of light had shot into a darkened room.” It is at night that Agatha is free to focus on Clarissa, and this makes it sound even more like a sexual affair: “She found herself looking forward to bedtime as if something wonderful was going to happen, something which she did not even try to define to herself.”
The problem arises when others gradually start noticing Clarissa. Their love, now visible, needs a cover story—so Agatha calls herself the girl’s mother by adoption. Increasingly obsessed, she cannot take her eyes off Clarissa for a second; she thinks of them as planets bound by cosmic “attraction,”72 or as “musician” and “instrument.” In a nice twist, the girl starts growing up—and the plot morphs into a rivals story in which Agatha has to fight a male suitor for the unaware Clarissa. Young David’s ranting betrays his half-formed knowledge of the nature of the women’s bond: “Clarissa spends half her life shut up in a dark room, mopping that old maniac’s head with a wet rag. It isn’t safe. It isn’t decent. It isn’t healthy.” Ironically, he sees Agatha, not Clarissa, as the supernatural being: a “vampire,” a witch of “uncanny power” who has put a “spell” on his beloved.
In a conventional novel of 1927 David would probably win Clarissa, but in this peculiar fantasy she tells him, “I belong to Agatha,”73 and she means it literally: the moment he presses a kiss on her, she disappears back into nothingness, as if he has cut the psychic umbilical cord between her and her mother/lover. David, clearly well-read in the literature of the lesbian monster, keeps accusing Agatha of having murdered the girl. But once David has gone away, Clarissa appears to come back into Agatha’s life: we are told from a maid’s point of view that Agatha seems to be playing happily with someone invisible in the garden. With this ambiguous ending, Edith Olivier may be asking whether love between women is a mere game of let’s pretend, or more real than obtuse observers think.
David Henry Friston, in J. Sheridan LeFanu, Carmilla, in The Dark Blue (March 1872).
LeFanu’s vampire tale first appeared in installments in this short-lived journal with an impressive roster of contributors. This illustration focuses on the moment when Carmilla looms in a predatory way over a sleeping figure—not our innocent heroine, Laura, interestingly, but a minor character named Bertha, who could be shown bare-breasted without shocking readers as much. An English figure painter, Friston went on to be the very first illustrator of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
The vampire, too,74 has often been used as an allegory for the Other, especially a member of a distrusted, invisible minority such as Jews. Queers fit the vampire profile even better: a hidden identity revealed only by subtle signs, a nocturnal subculture of predators looking for naïve victims to recruit into their lifestyle. And it is hardly a stretch to draw an analogy between same-sex desire and the vampire’s thirst for blood: a secret craving for the exchange of fluids by mouth, a nonreproductive melding of bodies, associated with disease, sterility, and death.
The lesbian vampire first appears in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), but Le Fanu was probably influenced by Coleridge’s Christabel (the mysterious frail beauty begging the young heroine to give her refuge) and Diderot’s La Religieuse (the heroine who maintains her in
nocence through a series of increasingly steamy encounters). In turn, his novella was an important source for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), a quarter of a century later. Laura, Le Fanu’s narrator, finds her new friend Carmilla’s passion for her “unintelligible”:75
It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever.” Then she has thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling.
“Are we related,” I used to ask; “what can you mean by all this?”
But even if Laura’s76 mind stays closed, in the traditionally ever-innocent way, her body is awakening; in her dreams she experiences orgasmic sensations which we guess mean that Carmilla is sucking her blood. This is a lushly romantic novel in which, even after Carmilla has finally been laid to rest with a stake in her heart, Laura is haunted by memories of her seductive friend. Filmed half a dozen times since 1932, Carmilla launched the subgenre of the lesbian vampire movie.
In the 1970s, many lesbian critics lamented the lack of “positive images” of love between women. In a provocative essay, novelist Bertha Harris turned that on its head: complaining about the insipidity of much of the literature, she argued that the lesbian should represent “the Female enraged,”77 and posited that the lesbian equivalent of the literary hero is, in fact, the monster. The last twenty years of the twentieth century saw a wholesale rethinking of lesbian monstrosity along those lines.
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