The novel’s cadences are often biblical. Here is Patience on the boat:
I held Sarah’s hand83 and felt the ancient sea and the new wheels carry us to a life we had no pattern for, that no one we knew of had ever lived, that we must invent for ourselves on a razor’s edge, and I tipped my head back and sang three hallelujahs.
Their dreams get modified; instead of going out west, which is both expensive and dangerous, they settle for the much nearer Greene County, only ninety miles from New York City—and it is indeed a “green country” to them, in the sense of the green world of Shakespearean comedy. Their real hunger is not for land but for autonomy and privacy; ultimately it is in the emotional rather than the literal sense that this is a pioneer story. Isabel Miller intended84 a sequel, to be called A Time for Us, which would have shown the women’s “slow, ardent, exalted life” in detail—but writer’s block got in the way. This is unsurprising, and perhaps even fortunate—because once the “place for us” is found and secured, the dramatic story is over.
Patience and Sarah was enormously influential, both on lesbian-feminist fiction in general and historical titles in particular. Many authors have followed Miller’s pattern of a butch and a femme finding themselves through finding each other, and going on a quest for a place where they can settle. Interestingly, it is usually the womanly woman who is more aware and accepting of her desire, and takes the initiative in seducing the masculine one; this keeps a balance of power. One example85 that reached a wide mainstream audience is Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café (1987), which presents itself disarmingly as the tale of a wonderful café, a haven from southern racism, but the real story is that of its founders in 1920s Alabama: a battered wife and the tomboy she has always loved, who go into business and raise their son with the full support of the tomboy’s family. (And when the husband turns up, incidentally, they kill him and serve him as BBQ.)
The butch-femme romance is not necessarily realistic, since there is little evidence in the historical record of visibly gender-polarized lesbian couples before the late nineteenth century, and they do not seem to have been the norm except in the 1950s and ’60s. Perhaps this pairing should be read as an allegory of the whole business of discovering a lesbian past; as a symbolic marriage between the femme (imagined as discreetly seeking freedom within women’s roles and women’s inseparable friendship) and the butch (imagined as playing the female bridegroom, or usurping male privilege in any other way she can).
These fictions, though usually conventional enough in their writing, are often highly self-conscious about their intervention in lesbian history-making. Byrony Lavery’s pastiche play Her Aching Heart (1991), for instance, hilariously intercuts between two lovers and their nineteenth-century equivalents (booted lady of the manor and peasant girl) in a melodramatic romance the modern pair are reading. Sometimes the research86 process itself becomes the most thrilling plotline, as historical fiction comments on its own creation. In several novels,87 women are contacted by the urgent ghosts of their lesbian ancestors. One of the smartest such stories is Paula Martinac’s Out of Time (1990), in which Harriet, a dead actress, picks Susan to help her come out posthumously, by editing and publishing a memoir of Harriet’s lively, quarrelsome, early-twentieth-century “Gang.” When the ghost turns seductive, Susan is reluctant to cheat on her girfriend, but Harriet gives her a tongue-in-cheek excuse: “It’s for your education.88 Tell yourself it’s for history!” The fact that Susan’s girlfriend is a graduate student in women’s history, who rather disapproves of Susan’s amateurish interest in the Gang, may be Martinac’s sly nod to the tensions between orthodox scholarship and the resurrections of fiction.
A similar self-consciousness marks Sarah Waters’s 1998 first novel, Tipping the Velvet (named for Victorian slang for cunnilingus). While working on her PhD on lesbian and gay historical fiction, Waters decided to write a story that would reimagine the lesbian past, free from the limitations of how it probably was. Here there is no rural haven, but a range of vivid, crowded settings (from an oyster shop to music halls to the world of rent boys) through which the picaresque, sometimes cross-dressing heroine moves, finding different ways to live out her desires. Inspired more by her readings in nineteenth-century porn than by the Patience and Sarah mold of earnest, isolated romance, Waters presents identity as performative, and invents plausible communities ranging from a decadent Sapphist club to a network of working-class “toms.”
Ultimately the quest for “a place for us” is not about geography but about cultural space: it is an attempt to make more visible the thread of desire between women that winds right through Western history, and Western literature.
Not every reader, or writer, wants that thread to stand out from the cloth. Sometimes it seems as if to identify an erotic preference is to stigmatize it, to consign it to the bargain bin of fetishes. This explains what we might call the antilabel strain in lesbian fiction. Having one’s orientation identified in words is almost inevitably presented as traumatic. In Sybille Bedford’s A Compass Error (1968), for instance, an older woman throws the “terms”89 at the seventeen-year-old heroine like knives.
“Is your mother aware of your…deviationist tastes? Don’t frown. I can use other terms, there is quite a choice, classical, medical, contemporary. Let’s try if you’ve heard of any of them.” She did. “You don’t like that one? Does your mother know that it applies to you? Answer me!”
“I don’t think I knew myself.”
Here, the words are all the more potent because Bedford does not write them down: readers will insert the labels they dread the most.
The defiant lesbian hero90 rarely wants to be called that…or anything, in fact. Molly Bolt in Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) is typical in being honest about her feelings for women, while itching to rip off “this label91 ‘Queer’ emblazoned across my chest.” Her complaint is echoed in many lesbian novels, as well as in queer culture more generally, where the slogan “Closets Are for Clothes, Not for People” was soon followed by “Labels Are for Clothes, Not for People.” In Ali Smith’s clever contemporary version of Ovid’s Iphis story, Girl Meets Boy (2007), when asked what “the proper word”92 for her is, Robin corrects the question: “The proper name for me…is me.”
A similar note is often heard, too, in protests against the absurdity of dividing relationships into same-sex and opposite-sex camps. “Love is love,” protests the teenage Louise in Regiment of Women (1917); Either Is Love insists the title of Elizabeth Craigin’s fictionalized memoir of 1937. “What does it matter93 who you love?” laments the schoolteacher heroine of a Norwegian novel, Ebba Haslund’s Det hendte ingenting (1948; in English, Nothing Happened), regretting how ashamed she felt of being in love with a woman who has since died. Many novelists seem to feel torn, wishing that it did not “matter” whether their protagonists fall for men or women, but trying to write truthfully about a world in which it does.
The coming-out novel is alive and well after more than a century, but it only really works in settings where coming out is still an alarming business. Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s crafty Working Parts (1997; winner of the Stonewall Award), for instance, is about a lesbian bike mechanic in San Francisco slowly and painfully coming out as…illiterate. Times change, and so do stories.
But in considering the long tradition of Western literature, we can hardly escape the conclusion that whether or not it should matter whether you love a man or a woman, it has mattered very much, which is why I have written Inseparable.
Julie Abraham in Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories (1996) pours scorn on twentieth-century lesbian novels as mere “formula fictions94 based on the heterosexual plot,” since they always represent a relationship between two women as either an imitation of or a deviation from a male-female relationship. At best she sees this tradition as “a history of refinements, extensions and challenges to a formula.” But how else do ideas grow except by refining, extending, or challenging the
old ones?
Yes, like all writing and even more than most, writing about desire between women is derivative (or, put more positively, intertextual). It reworks ancient motifs of quest, obstacle, rivalry, disguise, and fall, using and combining such genres as comedy, tragedy, romance, the crime story, the coming-of-age novel. The literature of love between women overlaps with the literature of the family, the nation, the school, the brothel, the factory, the library, the farm, the city, the car, and so on. And, of course, it overlaps with the literature of desire between men and women. If in some stories same-sex relationships stand in furious resistance to opposite-sex ones, in other works they are parallel or entwined with them, and in all these cases the connection is a tight one. The “lesbian idea” is not necessarily non- or antiheterosexual; in Western literature, these forms of love are all inseparable.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my UK agent, Caroline Davidson, and my editor, Victoria Wilson, for their incalculable contributions to this project over the years.
NOTES
Introduction
1. “a minor subsidiary”: “Angela DuMaurier’s The Little Less,” New York Times, August 17, 1941.
2. Although I occasionally say “lesbian”: For brevity, I mostly use “same-sex” or “between women.” The field of GLBTQ (gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans/queer) studies has been bedeviled by bickering over terminology. Some critics prefer terms that they see as more careful than “lesbian” (lesbian-like, proto-lesbian, lesbian continuum, an early modern analogue to lesbianism as we know it) or broader (female intimacy, female homoeroticism, female same-sex eroticism or sexuality, female erotic friendship, practices that transgress heteronormativity, non-normative female same-sex erotics, same-sex sexual transgression, same-sex erotic affectivity, queer). Others prefer those that seem more specific to a time and literary model (hermaphrodite, tribade, amity/amitié, romantic friendhip, Sapphist, tommy, invert, female homosexual, lesbian-feminist, and, again, queer). In the ongoing controversy known as essentialism vs. social constructionism, both extremes seem to me to verge on silliness (“Joan of Arc was a dyke” vs. “lesbianism was invented in the late nineteenth century”). In that I have found it interesting to juxtapose writings about desire between women from a period of about eight hundred years, I probably count as an essentialist, but I hope not a silly one.
3. Dating from 1977: Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber, 2001), 199.
4. In writing Inseparable: My focus on plot means I leave out some prose classics such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) or Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1937), as well as most poetry and almost all erotica. Nor do I include such nonfiction genres as life writing or medical or travel literature. Outside of English and French I have only been able to read what I have found in translation.
5. A hint or a glimpse: Of course, what is known as symptomatic reading or subtexting can produce some intriguing results, expecially in the case of works such as Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), in which eroticism between women is a matter of innuendo rather than plot. But like Terry Castle—see her introduction to The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 47–48—I find the still-dominant emphasis on the absence/invisibility/silence/erasure of desire between women more than a little absurd, considering the abundance of literature on the subject.
6. “Hermengyld loved hire”: Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Man of Law’s Tale” [1400], in The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 62–75 (lines 535, 625–26). This popular late medieval story is known as the Constance saga; Chaucer seems to have borrowed it from a translation of Nicholas Trivet’s Anglo-Norman Chronicle (c. 1335), but it also shows up in the Vita Offae Primi (1100s), the Gesta Romanorum (c. 1350), the Middle English romance Emaré, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1386–90), and in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Persian, and Latin texts.
7. Because of the time frame: After Sappho, the first female author I deal with is Marie de France in the twelfth century; women did not enter the writing profession in large numbers until the eighteenth. The first American text I discuss is Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Ormond (1799).
8. For the purposes of this book: Writing by lesbians is a whole other subject. Because I am focusing on the origin and development of plot motifs, I spend a lot more ink on, say, Renaissance plays than on the explosion of writing by diverse lesbian authors since the 1970s. Lesbian writing is sometimes defined more broadly as woman-centered writing by women, or even work by any writer (male or female) that disrupts the linear, patriarchal conventions of a form such as the novel—but to my mind, calling James Joyce a lesbian writer renders the term rather meaningless. Marilyn R. Farwell offers a useful analysis of this debate in Heterosexual Narratives and Lesbian Plots (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 4–19.
9. “On the one hand, there were Lakey-and-Maria”: Mary McCarthy, The Group [1963] (New York: Avon, 1980), 392.
10. In 1921: Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), Criminal Law Amendment Bill, August 4, 1921, para. 1799–1806.
11. If all writing is intertextual: Elaine Marks seems to have been the first to name the phenomenon in her groundbreaking essay on literary modes; see “Lesbian Intertextuality,” in Homosexuality and French Literature, ed. Elaine Marks and George Stambolian (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 353–77 (356).
12. “virtually every author”: Castle, introduction to The Literature of Lesbianism, 7.
13. “Freud envisions”: Judith Roof, Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xiv.
14. Also, novelists and playwrights often seem: Lesbianism is “ghosted” or “spectralized” and banished from the world of many fictions, but lingers to haunt them, Terry Castle argues in The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 28–65.
15. “It was perceived by the servants”: Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies [1871] (London: Macmillan, 1912), 129.
16. “Damnit”: Shirley Jackson, quoted in Judy Oppenheimer, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (New York: Fawcett, 1988), 232–33.
17. “The booking troubles”: Quoted in Kaier Curtin, “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians”: The Emergence of Lesbians and Gay Men on the American Stage (Boston: Alyson, 1987), 272.
18. “Dear, dear!”: “O. Henry” (William Sydney Porter), “The Last Leaf” [1906], in The World of O. Henry: The Furnished Room and Other Stories (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974), 490–96 (495).
19. Jean-Pierre Jacques: Jean-Pierre Jacques, Les Malheurs de Sapho (1981), quoted by Christopher Rivers in “Inintelligibles pour une femme honnête: Sexuality, Textuality and Knowledge in Diderot’s ‘La Religieuse’ and Gautier’s ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin,’” The Romanic Review 86:1 (January 1995): 1–29 (1).
20. “Why would playwrights”: Denise Walen, Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3.
21. “with an audible sigh of relief”: Bonnie Zimmerman, “Is ‘Chloe Likes Olivia’ a Lesian Plot?,” Women’s Studies International Forum 6 (1983): 171.
22. What I hope to show: Sharon Marcus in Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007) breaks new ground in the fine distinctions—as well as connections—she draws between various forms of Victorian voyeurism, friendship, flirtation, dominance, and unreciprocated and marital-style love between women.
23. “hungry little bird”: Anon., “To C.,” in Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 101–2.
24. Nor do I think it particularly helpful: In an influential 1981 essay on twentieth-century fictions, Catharine R. Stimpson contrasts the “dying fall” narrative of lesbian damnation with the “ennabling escape
” which brings self-acceptance; see “Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Winter 1981): 363–80. Similarly, see Terry Castle on the “euphoric” vs. the “dysphoric” plot in The Apparitional Lesbian, 85–86. In her introduction to The Literature of Lesbianism (20–27), Castle draws a more interesting distinction between what she calls the Sapphic or sublime mode of writing about desire between women, and the Roman or satiric mode.
25. The first is that it was in the sixteenth century: Castle, introduction to The Literature of Lesbianism, 11–13; Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550–1714 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 15; and Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
26. As Peter Cryle comments: Peter Cryle, The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 311.
27. Factors in the spread: Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present [1981] (London: Women’s Press, 1985), 297–99; Marcus, Between Women, 261; Sherrie Inness, The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity and the Representation of Lesbian Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 66.
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