Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  Only individual voices among those responsible are raised against the diversity of theory and practice. Szasz says, “It must be frankly acknowledged that psychiatry is more similar to religion and politics than to science”65 because of mutually exclusive theories and practices. He sees the combined impact of long childhood experience of dependence and the teachings of Christianity as commanding “man to behave childishly, stupidly and irresponsibly.”66 Traditional psychoanalysis supports this conditioning by postulating that regressive goals are primary in man, “precluding valuation, choice and responsibility”67 and “obscuring and disguising moral and political conflicts as mere personal problems.”68 He makes the obvious parallel between the church’s dealing with witches in the Middle Ages and psychiatrists’ dealing with mental patients today. “When people were considered to be possessed by the devil, it was generally not attributed to their free will, but was viewed rather as occurring against their ‘better judgment.’ Accordingly, the witch-hunters were regarded as agents of their unfortunate clients—and executing witches was defined as ‘therapeutic.’ This perverted, antihumanitarian definition of what constitutes ‘therapy’ and of who is a ‘therapist’ has persisted to our day in regard to the so-called treatment of major psychiatric illnesses.”69

  Ernest Van de Haag in “Notes on Homosexuality” challenges any scientific grounds for calling it an illness. “Though retaining its authority derived from scientific usage, ‘sickness’ is actually used here, without reference to scientific data, as a term of disguised moral disapproval, whether the user is a layman or a trained therapist.”70 “I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated ‘all my homosexual patients are quite sick’—to which I finally replied ‘so are all my heterosexual patients.’ As our culture has absorbed analysis, analysts have become culture-bound. It seems a questionable gain.”71

  Some see homosexuality not as an illness but as a “form of rebellion in a repressive society, unsuccessful and ‘curable.’”72 For others, like Simone de Beauvoir, it can be a more positive political act. Many women artists are lesbian. “Not admitting male superiority they do not wish to make the pretense of recognizing it or to weary themselves in contesting it.”73 For Clara Thompson, homosexuality can be a practical but second choice. “People who for reasons external to their own personality find their choice of love object limited to their own sex may be said to be ‘normal’ homosexuals, in the sense that they utilize the best type of interpersonal relationship available to them. These people are not the problem of psychopathology.”74 But she does assume, if there were no restrictions, the “biologically most satisfactory type of sexual gratification”75—union between male and female genitals—would be chosen, even though the Kinsey report indicates that sexual gratification occurs more often between women than between men and women.

  For anyone who would genuinely like to understand the nature of lesbian experience, the field of psychology should probably be off limits since just this brief, incomplete survey exposes the state of conflict and confusion which exists among the “experts.” But the myth that psychology has the answers about human experience is now deeply embedded in our culture, and people do turn there to increase their understanding or relieve their suffering.

  Though most researchers and clinicians, however misguided, misinformed, and morally biased they are, are sincere in their effort to understand the nature of homosexuality and to help those who come to them, there are a growing number who see an opportunity, under guise of sympathetic authority, to popularize prejudice. Frank Caprio fills his book, Female Homosexuality, with an inordinate amount of repetitious sexual detail and bizarre case histories, and, though his conclusions are similar to those of other doctors given more serious attention in this discussion, his whole approach is one of offensive melodrama, from his quoting of love letters of female prisoners in order to “betray the basic need for affection common to female inverts”76 (and not common to anyone else?) to his repeated use of such diction as “predatory lesbian who seduces innocent young girls causing them to give up all thought of marriage and family life for a life of homosexual enslavement,”77 or “an older woman may so dominate her junior partner as to make her a slave or parasite,”78 which is surely an accusation easier to level at some men in their treatment of their economically dependent wives. A much more blatant case is, of course, David Reuben. In Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, he devotes, fortunately, only two pages to lesbians under the general topic of prostitution in which he makes such assertions as “one vagina plus another vagina still equals zero”;79 “the girls betray and deceive each other with monotonous regularity”;80 “Basically all homosexuals are alike—looking for love where there can be no love and looking for sexual satisfaction where there can be no lasting satisfaction.”81

  Left-handed people have for centuries been similarly if not so profoundly abused by prejudice. Their condition has even been linked to homosexuality as one of the indications of perversity. Children discovered to be left-handed have not until very recently been allowed to develop this preference, then probably because of the overwhelming evidence that forced right-handedness often led to stammering, an affliction clearly worse. As recently as 1946 a psychiatrist could still be found writing, “My theory of negativistic sinistrality is that it springs from a contrary emotional attitude to the learning of right handedness. This is based on the presumption that the environment contains all the necessary, normal social cues and traditional pressures for the acquisition of dextrality and that the child has enough mental and physical capacity to acquire it.”82 “Sinistrality is thus nothing more than an expression of infantile negativism and falls into the same category as … contrariety in feeding and elimination, retardation in speech, and general perverseness. …”83

  Left-handedness is “a mishap to the normal development of dextrality.”84 But, since the religious taboos which originally formed this prejudice have never been strongly developed in Western culture and since the dangers of “cure” far outweigh the inconvenience of the preference, nobody troubles much any more about the left-handed, who suffer only from neglect in school. “Tomorrow we’ll teach the left-handers how to do that,” and tomorrow often doesn’t come, given the pressure of the needs of the majority. The difficulty of using tools in a right-handed world has its compensations in developing a certain amount of ambidexterity in the left-handed, who are otherwise set free to write or paint or make love with the hand of their choice.

  We may be coming to a time when homosexuality suffers the same healthy neglect, when the massive efforts of psychology are seen clearly to produce real afflictions in those who have before suffered from nothing but a preference for their own sex, probably about as common as left-handedness and no less a hindrance in performing the tasks and enjoying the pleasures of being human. In that morally really neutral atmosphere, causes for preference might be discovered in biology or in conditioning, but, as with left-handedness, interest will probably not be great, limited to those specialists whose curiosities are also difficult to account for. Clearly, whether one chooses one’s left hand or one’s right, the task remains the same. And whether one chooses a woman or a man, the requirement to love is the same, a responsibility too many psychologists and psychiatrists not only neglect but blatantly abuse.

  The behaviorists, for instance, give no thought to the woman, content in her choice of a person to love. She is never mentioned in the enthusiastic reports of induced vomiting and the first one-night stand with a man picked up at a party or in a bar. Though there is a good deal of attention paid to the lesbian guilt the patient has suffered, there is no concern about the guilt which comes from the betrayal of love, the translation of it into sickness, the damage that it does not only to the patient but to the woman who has been her lover, not only in the relationship about to be destroyed but in any future relationship either of them establishes whether with a man or a woman. Any woman who can be trained to be physically ill at the sight of another w
oman and persuaded that the most casual contact with any willing man is a sign of health is a victim of the grossest sort of manipulation, degraded and degrading of what it means to be human in relationship with other human beings. It is left to other kinds of therapists to deal with the rejected lover, spattered with all that healthy and righteous vomit, shaken by grief and rage. They may try to persuade her first that it was not really love at all but fear of a father, lack of a father, love of a mother, rejection of a mother, penis envy, masochism, narcissism which daily offered itself up only in the disguise of mutual attraction, interests, sympathy, and concern. If these explanations don’t convince her, she may be helped instead to accept her “orientation,” as it is called, not as the best of all possible ways to live but apparently all she is capable of, her love something like a club foot which someone else similarly deformed might learn to tolerate with pity and tenderness. There are still only a very few “professionals” who have listened to that mortal stammer in the heart and recognized that the cures and adjustments are not only worse than the illness but the illness itself. To be cured of love or resigned to its hopeless inadequacy is an intolerable perversion, for which the “health” sciences as well as the church are responsible.

  The recent battle in the American Psychiatric Association over dropping homosexuality from its list of mental disorders has finally resulted in a victory for those who favored the change, but in the polling of the membership, half did not vote at all, and, though 5,854 favored the change, 3,810 voted against it.85 The controversy has inspired some of the most reactionary articles against homosexuality that have appeared in years. Even the change itself, while it may gradually have some effect on the even more slowly moving law, does not include those homosexuals who are disturbed by or in conflict with their “orientation.” Any homosexual who has not at one time or another been disturbed by or in conflict with deeply felt emotions labeled perversions would be a pathologically insensitive human being. Some phrasing has been changed by a narrow vote, but it will take a lot more than that to teach psychiatrists that love is not a polysyllabic word.

  Radclyffe Hall 1886–1943

  THE WELL OF LONELINESS by Radclyffe Hall, published in 1928, remains the lesbian novel, a title familiar to most readers of fiction, either a bible or a horror story for any lesbian who reads at all. There have been other books published since, better written, more accurate according to recent moral and psychological speculation, but none of them has seriously challenged the position of The Well of Loneliness. Often a book finds momentary identity only by negative comparison with that “noble, tragic tract about the love that cannot speak its name.” Along with the teachings of the church and the moral translations of those teachings by psychologists, The Well of Loneliness has influenced millions of readers in their attitudes toward lesbians. Radclyffe Hall’s intention was to write a sympathetic and accurate book about inversion. She was already a novelist and poet of some reputation, and, if she had neither the craft nor the power of insight of her contemporary D. H. Lawrence, she shared his zeal for educating the public. Scientific books were not at that time generally available. Krafft-Ebing’s famous Psychopathia Sexualis was directed at the medical profession, and details of case studies, like the title, were written in Latin lest the book fall into the wrong hands and corrupt the naive reader. Radclyffe Hall had read Krafft-Ebing, as well as the less well-known studies of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, himself a homosexual trying to prove that inversion was as natural an orientation as left-handedness. She obviously read not only with a scholar’s interest but with a desire to understand herself, a congenital invert in her own eyes whose sexual appetites were satisfied exclusively by women. The Well of Loneliness was, therefore, not only a novel intended to give insight into the experience of inverts but also to justify Radclyffe Hall’s own life. She must have been the more pressed to defend the innocence of her nature because she was a Catholic, apparently thoughtfully and deeply committed to most of the doctrines of the Church. She died, after a long struggle with cancer, serene in her belief that she would be only temporarily separated from Una, Lady Troubridge, the woman with whom she had lived for some years. She did not expect that reunion to take place in the appropriate circle of Dante’s hell, for, if there was anyone responsible for her nature, it was God, Who “in a thoughtless moment had created in His turn, those pitiful thousands who must stand forever outside His blessing.”1 Outside His blessing on earth, she must have rationalized. Or in some way she singled herself out, redeemed by the book she had written in which her last plea is “Acknowledge us, o God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence.”2 There is no final evidence for how she reconciled her sexual life with her faith. There is only the testimony of those closest to her that she had resolved the conflict for herself.

  Emotionally and materially neglected in childhood by a father who deserted her and a mother who was by turns brutal and indifferent, Radclyffe Hall made a strength of her isolation, choosing to live only in her own terms, which were, once she was an adult, bizarre to most of her contemporaries. When she was of legal age and finally had control of the money her father and his family had provided for her, she enjoyed all the privilege and freedom of wealth. She loved riding and the hunt, though finally she gave up killing because she came to pity and identify with the fox. She liked fast cars, traveling, women, and before she settled into a serious relationship with Mabel Veronica Batten, twenty-some years her senior, with whom she lived until Mrs. Batten’s death, Radclyffe Hall had probably loved more women than she had read books. Mrs. Batten, not only a great beauty but a very cultivated woman, dedicated herself to civilizing her young lover and encouraging her to write. By the time Una Troubridge met her, Radclyffe Hall was as tamed a creature as she would be, still interested in other passionate involvements but tempered by the self-discipline she had developed to become a writer. She had learned to take herself and her relationships seriously, not as the gentlewoman she was born to be but as the gentleman she had studied to become, through a conventional sowing of wild oats to the settled and convenient double standard of “marriage.” Mabel Batten could not tolerate the love affair between Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall. In a row with her willful and much younger lover, Mabel had a heart attack, which, a few weeks later, killed her. The guilt Radclyffe Hall felt led her into spiritualism for a time with the hope that she might contact Mabel and ask forgiveness for herself and Una. She dedicated all her books “To the three of us.” Radclyffe Hall’s involvement with other women would come to trouble Una, too, but she had either greater patience or a stronger heart and finally survived Radclyffe Hall.

  She was known to everyone as John. She wore men’s jackets and ties, had a short haircut, and in all manners was gallantly masculine. When she was criticized for calling such attention to herself, she explained that dress was simply an expression of nature, which she could not change, one of the honest ways she faced her inversion. This courage, or blatant exhibitionism according to those who did not approve, made it possible for Radclyffe Hall to contemplate writing The Well of Loneliness. Though there were others of her contemporaries who might have written better books on the subject, Radclyffe Hall was the only one to risk the censure she and the book received.

  The Well of Loneliness, with a sympathetic introduction by Havelock Ellis, was published in England and promptly tried for obscenity and banned. In the United States, after a similar decision in the lower courts, an appeal was successful, and the book was available not only there but in France and very soon in other countries as well. Illegal in England, it was nevertheless well known there, too, given so much publicity by the trial. Such important literary figures as Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster had been willing to testify to its merit, and, while their statements were not admitted as evidence, their petitions and public support helped to give dignity as well as notoriety to the book. In private, they were not wholeheartedly enthusiastic. Virginia Woolf called it a meritorious, dull book. H
er own Orlando had just been published and greeted as a delightful historical fantasy, a much more tasteful way of dealing with sexuality otherwise offensive. The sex change of Orlando, his/her appetite for both men and women, the dedication of the book to Vita Sackville-West, and the appearance of photographs of Vita Sackville-West in the book as representations of Orlando caused no scandal. Nor did the happy holiday Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West took soon afterward alone together on the Continent. They were safely married women, who dressed and behaved like women, in public anyway. E. M. Forster, whose own homosexual novel, Maurice, had been written some years earlier but was not published until after his death in 1971, admitted to Virginia Woolf that he found lesbians disgusting. Though he had no interest in women himself, he did not like to think of them living independent of men. Radclyffe Hall could not have been a more offensive model to him.

  The attitudes of these two important members of the Bloomsbury group, whose general liberality and lack of convention were well known, are indications of how brave or foolhardy an act writing The Well of Loneliness was. Sexuality was a subject of intense interest and speculation to the intellectuals of Bloomsbury, the concern of many letters, poems, and plays written for their own entertainment. But even Lytton Strachey, whose buggery was notorious, maintained relationships most important to him with men who would not have him and women in whom he was not sexually interested. He at one time proposed to Virginia Woolf and lived the last years of his life with the adoring Carrington, who was like a daughter to him. Gossip, bawdy jokes, and flights of inventive fantasy were Bloomsbury’s way of dealing with bisexuality or inversion. They were not prepared to deal publicly with sexual tastes nearly universally described as a sign of regression or degeneracy. Virginia and Leonard Woolf were the English publishers of Freud. If they were morally permissive, they were all of them psychologically ambivalent about themselves. They were Radclyffe Hall’s brave allies (the Woolfs would have stood bail, not understanding at first that it was the book and not the author on trial), but they were not her friends, nor could they have been. She was too outlandish, too earnest, and too little gifted. There was nothing ambivalent about her at all.