Inseparable

by Emma Donoghue

  Perhaps the earliest novel to take the discovery of a lesbian identity as its central theme, Méphistophéla (1890) by Catulle Mendès, grafts the salaciousness of French sex-fiend literature onto the structure and analysis of a coming-of-age novel. Like George Moore, Mendès offers a bewildering range of origins for his brooding heroine’s perversion but does not describe her as an invert. He presents Sophie at some points as genetically warped (descended from a long line of evildoers), at others as simply holding to the truth of her own nature (forced into an engagement to her beloved Emmeline’s brother, she fears that marriage will feel like a bird trying to live underwater), at others as a traumatized victim (raped on her wedding night). Fleeing to Emmeline, Sophie stands watching her friend sleep, and suddenly recognizes her feelings as sexual: “The monster which had always8 been inside her wanted to come out and satisfy itself.” The rape has awoken Sophie to the dreadful knowledge of male lust, and—paradoxically—to her own, not unsimilar desire to be her friend’s husband/rapist.

  That night, Sophie persuades Emmeline to run away with her. But this romantic interlude leads to a frustrating stalemate, as they cannot figure out how to get past arousal to satisfaction. Sophie, very sensibly, does not assume that lesbian sex is an amor impossibilis but that she needs some technical advice, being a “stupid creature,9 incomplete, crippled, loving without knowing how to love, coveting without knowing how to possess,” ignorant of “the mysterious rites of the cult in which she was an instinctive oblate.” Again, in phrases like this, Mendès hedges his bets: is lesbianism an inborn trait or a subcultural institution—or a bit of both? When Emmeline creeps back to her family, Sophie accepts her destiny and joins the “cult,” by finding a network of Parisian lesbians whom she reluctantly recognizes as her sisters.

  Her first girlfriend, the lower-class, kindly Magalo, renames her Sophor, as if to mark her new identity. Guessing that Sophor is pregnant as a result of her wedding night, Magalo looks forward to bringing the child up with her; here the novel gestures toward possibilities that would not be fulfilled in fiction until the second half of the twentieth century. But Sophor, already hardened by her experiences, has the child fostered far away. Over the years of promiscuity, quarrels, wealth (she becomes a baroness), social stigma, and a morphine habit, she grows increasingly “sullen in her terrible joys,”10 “ever more proud” of being “detestable.” Relishing the paradox of an unwanted craving, a reluctant drive, Mendès claims that his heroine’s vice “repels her, even, but she must do it, she submits to it as if to a unbreakable law.” Here is the old idea of the lesbian trapped in a vicious circle, as in Musset’s Gamiani (1833). But as Peter Cryle notes,11 Méphistophéla does something new with it. Sophor has no difficulty in getting or giving sexual satisfaction—and in this she is typical of lesbians in late-nineteenth-century literature—but she does have Gamiani’s restless, tortured libido, what Sophor calls “forever unsated desire.” So she sets out to seduce every young woman she can, turning lust into, as Cryle puts it, “a whole life’s project…making the problem of desire into its own (final) solution, producing damnation not as poetic stasis but as a powerful narrative dynamic.”

  On one level Méphistophéla is trashy fiction, the last gasp of the tradition of lesbian monstrosity: Mendès promises readers at the start that Sophie will plunge “straight to her damnation,12 without pause, like a falling stone.” But in fact the journey is more circuitous than that, and his method anticipates twentieth-century narratives of diagnosing lesbianism, mulling it over, gradually dragging it into the light. This is a complex portrait of a woman who lives as a loner within a community of the like-minded, who chooses and acts but thinks of herself as a slave. It is hardly surprising that Mendès finally shuts down on these paradoxes in the way that Diderot made so popular a century before: when Sophor finally tracks down her long-lost daughter, now a teenager, she is so appalled to find herself lusting after the girl that she goes barking mad.

  As if to distinguish themselves sharply from this tradition of lurid sexuality, many British writers emphasized the idealistic in their coming-out stories. Sylvia Stevenson’s Surplus (1924) is a “fork in the road” story of two friends; its title refers to the population imbalance after the war killed so many men, and more broadly to unmarried women as cultural ballast or waste product. At the beginning, Sally Wraith—an intense, nervous woman in a man’s job (taxi driving)—knows only that she is “not a marrying woman,”13 although sophisticated readers would have marked the various symptoms of inversion. When she moves in with Averil, she thinks of the two of them as “partners,” but Averil calls them “pals” and shrugs off all Sally’s romantic or possessive actions as “little eccentricities.” Both women are equally slow to register the profound difference between their perceptions, and between their natures.

  All that changes when Sally loses her beloved to a doctor, the unsubtly surnamed Barry Hope. Dr. Hope casually diagnoses his rival as “abnormal,”14 one of many cases of what in the fashionable, pseudo-Freudian terms he describes as repressed sex instinct, “people who aren’t running straight on nature’s lines.” (In 1920s gay slang, “straight” was already beginning to mean heterosexual, several decades before “bent” took on the opposite meaning.) But if the man gets the girl, Sally gets the key to her own heart. It takes her some time, and a lot of reading. She has to wade through grim sexological texts, such as “a harrowing description of an ‘unmated’ woman who thought she was perfectly happy with a girlfriend, but later found what she had missed and, in despair, ended her career in an asylum.” However, Sally finally comes to the conclusion that this is who she is, and it is not her fault. “I love a woman with all the strength of my heart, and I’m sneered at, laughed at, condemned to solitude as if I’d committed a crime!” She concludes, “I may be queer, but I’m not quite mad yet.” (Just as “straight” was coming to signify heterosexual, “queer” was taking on same-sex overtones by the 1920s.) Here knowledge of homosexuality reveals itself as a consolation prize. After a last-ditch grasping at normality in which she gets engaged to a nice man, Sally chooses to accept her destiny: she will break off the wedding, buy into a motor business, and wait for the right woman to come along. By committing to a traditionally masculine career, as much as by staying a spinster, she is accepting her tendencies as they are. Where once she felt like a “pariah” and a “pitiable freak,” now she counts herself among the company of “dreamers” and “rebels.”

  Notice that although this is a coming-out story, by any definition, it is a private one. Sylvia Stevenson presents her heroine’s sea change as psychologically healthy, but a personal matter; Sally feels no urge to tell anyone, or seek out a community organizing itself for political emancipation. It is not as a lesbian, invert, or Sapphist (just three of the possible labels) that she names herself, but as one of a mixed bag of “dreamers.” If she is a “rebel,” she is not the banner-waving kind but one who chooses a highly modern lifestyle in discretion and silence. I think Stevenson is not being timid here—as there is nothing euphemistic about the “I love a woman” passage quoted above—but is making a broader point about resistance to cultural norms. And, of course, trying to appeal to all the readers who may in their different ways count themselves as “rebels” or at least “dreamers” too.

  On publication in 1924, Surplus received reviews that varied according to the critics’ attitude to its theme: the small-town Daily News in Greensboro, North Carolina, sneered that the author was “mistaken in thinking15 that the mere characterization of a more or less perverted woman is sufficient content for a good novel,” whereas the New York Evening Post heralded Stevenson’s “skill,” “sanity,” “insight,” and “courage” for tackling an emotion “that, although not common, is doubtless commoner than we believe.” Surplus struck the New York Times as utterly contemporary: “Fifty years ago such a novel…would have been impossible, for girls fashioned of such emotional timbre as Sally Wraith simply did not exist.” But in the next se
ntence the reviewer falters, conceding that women may have desired each other before now: “Or if they did exist they never dared to express themselves. It is only in modern times and since Dr. Freud flung the gates open to many a chafing inhibition that the Sally Wraiths began seriously ‘expressing’ themselves.” The point is highly debatable: it could be argued that the newly publicized notion of the lesbian, based on sexology as well as popularizations of Freudian theory, scared as many women away from a same-sex partnership as it attracted. But what is important is that the reviewer offers the coming-out story as not merely modern, but constitutive of modernity.

  It is no accident16 that the fiancé in Surplus is a doctor, as he is in H. E. Bates’s story “Breeze Anstey” (1937, a less cruel rewrite of Lawrence’s The Fox from the point of view of the loser) and in Aimee and Philip Stuart’s 1937 play, Love of Women. The doctor, as guardian of modern knowledge about what is “abnormal” as opposed to “healthy” and “straight,” parts the straight woman from her friend, but does his rival a sort of backhanded favor by enlightening her about her sexuality. No longer innocent, cast out of Eden, the lesbian is freed to go off in search of an alternative paradise.

  In an Irish novel set in Spain, Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle (1936), it is—appropriately enough—a priest who plays the doctor’s role, forcing the androgynous, “nunnish,”17 and “queer” Agatha to realize that her love for Mary, a younger au pair, is the “very ancient and terrible vice” of lesbianism. Interestingly, after Agatha tells Mary the truth, the two friends experience “a certain relaxation.” Mary comes to see Agatha’s desire as equivalent to her own passion for a married man: “You take one kind of impossible fancy, I take another,” she tells Agatha. By the time Mary is leaving for Ireland, Agatha is confident enough to ask for a photo of her, and refuses to wish herself cured: ruefully, she jokes that she is going to age into “the sort of muttering hag children throw stones at!”

  But for most authors, medicine remained the pole around which the coming-out story revolved. Austrian author Aimée Duc’s Sind es Frauen? Roman über das dritte Geschlecht (1903; in English, Are These Women? A Novel of the Third Sex) uses both the sexological model of inversion and the very different insights of feminism to make sense of the careerist, woman-loving lives of some unapologetic “inverted women”18 who meet as students in Geneva. This novel is a peculiar mix of political debate and lesbian romance, with far more space devoted to the former. The Russian-French protagonist, Minotchka, is an ambitious scholar who has switched to art from medicine because she cannot stand the way most doctors (sexologists aside) maintain a conspiracy of silence about homosexuality. Described as both tomboyish and coquettishly feminine, Minotchka is a passionate cyclist despite her weak left ankle (a hint of hereditary taint?). At one of her parties, Minotchka—despite the fact that she once made a rash and brief marriage herself—reacts badly to news that a fellow third-sexer, Elise, has just got engaged: this “turns everything into a lie and slaps all our faces.” Her friend Dr. Tatjana is more blasé about marriages of convenience, arguing that if Elise really loves her fiancé, that proves that “she is a normal being and was mistaken up till then,” just as Minotchka and Tatjana were mistaken about being heterosexual. But Minotchka, a feminist who believes all marriage is oppressive, argues that in a patriarchal culture desire is never a matter of unconstrained self-discovery. For her it is “the sacred duty of each one of us who belongs to the third sex to warn our undecided wavering sisters against marriage, those whose conditions we easily recognize with knowing eyes and the feeling of solidarity.”

  The Countess Marta, an older Polish aristocrat studying music for pleasure, who has followed Minotchka to Geneva for love, seems to be an even more out-and-proud third-sexer. She speaks up in stronger terms about the political obligation to come out.

  We have to try to fight our way into the public, to be acknowledged and not to be ignored!…We have to speak up at all times, we have to assert ourselves and we must not let ourselves be intimidated into believing we are sick.

  But the punch line is that Marta, too, will turn out to be one of those “undecided wavering sisters.” While Marta is away looking after her dying father and then sorting out his estate, Minotchka buries herself in work in traditionally masculine fashion, and despite being aware that Marta’s letters are getting rarer and shorter, and that there is a young officer hovering around her, Minotchka makes no effort to fight for her. News of Marta’s sudden wedding to the officer sends Minotchka into a nervous breakdown. Marta has married not for love but “for the sake of outward appearances” and companionship with a fellow music lover who knows she is a lesbian, but she comes to the conclusion that even such a marriage is “a fetter, a rape, an outrage.” Duc grants her troubled heroines a second chance: when Marta’s husband dies after a couple of years, the women meet again coincidentally in a Paris graveyard and Marta begs her beloved’s forgiveness. Marta describes them as like a married couple, who “separate for long times out of some terrible error, only to stick together ever closer afterwards.” She proposes that they split their time, spending six months a year in each of their home places: “Do you want to set out on this new venture with me, will you trust your life to me?” Minotchka—amusingly, put in the position of the bride in this proposal scene—says yes. By holding firm to her nature, she has won not only the argument but the girl.

  Like Aimée Duc, “Christopher St. John” (an Englishwoman, Christabel Marshal) and “Renée Vivien” (Pauline Tarn, another Englishwoman, living in France) linked desire for women to gender nonconformity, but they rejected the language of inversion. Vivien’s Une Femme m’apparut (1904; in English, A Woman Appeared to Me) casts her as the androgyne San Giovanni, poet and prophet, votary of Sappho and “the cause” (feminism); she is presented as brave enough to live the kind of woman-loving life that all women would prefer if only they could resist the pressure to marry. In this very odd, fragmentary work, Vivien anticipates many of the ideas of what would be called lesbian feminism six decades later, but her tone is often Wildean. When a man predicts that San Giovanni will end up with one of the opposite sex, her lover Vally (based on salon hostess Natalie Barney) quips, very deadpan, “That would be a crime19 against nature, sir. I have too much respect for our friend to believe her capable of an abnormal passion.”

  Like Une Femme m’apparut, Christopher St. John’s Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul (written from about 1896, while she was working as secretary to Winston Churchill and his mother, and published anonymously in 1915) is a roman à clef and an apologia, if a more cautious, British one. Joanna, aka John, aka John-Baptist, reasons that because she has spurned the “merely female”20 destiny of marriage and children, and always loved women, she must have the soul of a man. She knows there must be others like her: “Brotherly minds of mine, neglected in the study of womanhood, this was written for you!” But, interestingly, this masculine woman scorns the idea that two women together will play “husband” and “wife,” and she also rejects the doctors’ focus on lust. John’s relationships with a series of contrasting women, whether fiery infatuations or domestic ménages, are above all that. “It was to love I yearned more than to be loved, and I was entirely free from sexual instincts.” But the lack of sex should not be mistaken for a lack of passion; when her companion Sally is tempted by the prospect of marrying a man, John describes it as “a bomb hurtling through the serene air of my paradise, exploding with a noise of devil’s laughter, tearing up immemorial trees by the roots, laying waste the greenery of hope and faith—then filth, stench, corruption.” Fleeing to Rome, where she converts to Catholicism, John finally directs her feelings into worship of the Virgin Mary and a pure-minded friendship with a nun. Although Hungerheart has much in common with the case-history-style fictions we have been looking at, this “story of a soul” insists on being read as a spiritual autobiography.

  In Jacques de Lacretelle’s fascinating La Bonifas (1925; in English, Marie Bonifas), Marie’s p
roblem has multiple roots. She is a robust, ugly, masculine woman—but she has also been turned off men by her brutish father. While the lesbian’s intensity caused only “conjecturing” in A Drama in Muslin, these French villagers are knowing enough to assume (incorrectly) that Marie’s infatuations are full-blown affairs. People make up satirical doggerel about her, and one man kills her kitten and tries to push Marie into a canal. It is persecution, rather than love, that opens Marie’s eyes and moves the plot along. In public she rides astride, smokes, and defies her tormentors, but in private, she is busy poring over medical histories.

  Exaggerating her actions,21 recalling insignificant details, mere trifles, she discovered deep down in her being all manner of signs which she considered criminal…No, no, she denied it no longer, they were right. The whole of her past revealed to her a certain inclination, immanent, an integral part of her very being…Bending over the fire as if she could read her destiny in its flames, she admitted to herself that the one ray of romance in her life came from the attractiveness of women.

  Marie considers having sex with a woman for the first time, maybe a prostitute: “‘Why should I not?’ she repeated. ‘Since it is so, since they say it is, since I feel it.’” But (like the heroine of Hungerheart) she steps back from temptation. A lonely pariah, she finally wins back the respect of her neighbors in middle age, when she chases off the Germans. (Paradoxically, World War One almost always represents a golden period in lesbian storylines, a moment when unfeminine behavior becomes briefly acceptable.) Lacretelle ends his novel on a wistful note, with Marie weeping during a visit to her old school: there is at least a hint that she may have been foolish to choose dignity over happiness.