Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  Thinking she has no more to do now than live quietly evaluating her life, she is suddenly confronted with FitzGeorge, an elderly miserly millionaire who has been distantly in love with her for years. He gets a confession from her that she would really have liked to be a painter, and he judges her, “When you chose that life you sinned against the light.”44 Lady Slane wants no criticism of her husband. FitzGeorge agrees. “According to his lights, he gave you all you could desire. He merely killed you, that’s all. Men do kill women. Most women enjoy being killed; so I’m told.”45 When FitzGeorge dies, he leaves Lady Slane his fortune, and all her children recognize the sudden possibility of greater status that money would provide them at their mother’s death. She, however, is not interested in it or in them. She gives the inheritance away, only vaguely troubled at her children’s disappointment, perhaps even a little amused. A great-granddaughter, recently engaged to a title and fortune, calls on Lady Slane, who braces herself for reproof. Instead the great-granddaughter thanks her for giving the money away, an act that has made it much easier for the girl to break her engagement and risk a career in music, which is what she really wants. When Vita Sackville-West did not identify with the male character in a book, she was clearly for women’s liberation.

  Lord Slane’s career was very much like Harold Nicolson’s, but Vita never agreed to serve as the charming wife of a diplomat. When Harold was assigned posts outside the country, Vita stayed behind, and he never reproached her for it. As the long separations got more painful for them both, it was Harold who made the decision to give up his career for journalism and politics, neither of which ever really suited him, and, though he often regretted his choice for himself, he never blamed Vita for it. There was nothing of the lordly master in Harold Nicolson. Vita knew accurately, by default, what Lady Slane’s life had been.

  Vita Sackville-West seems to have written often out of her own experience by posing a series of “what if” questions. For The Edwardians, what if she had been the male heir of Knole? For All Passion Spent, what if she had been a conventional wife for Harold? Her short stories often deal with inheritance of great houses, rebellious women who dream of escaping into male identities. She wrote biography in somewhat the same way, trying to find an identity in her subject. “What if Anne-Marie Louise d’Orléans had been someone like me?”

  She was obviously drawn to the character of Mademoiselle, Anne-Marie Louise d’Orléans’ official title as niece of Louis XIII, because of her ambivalent sexuality and because of the homosexual tenor of the court at that time, both Louis XIII and his brother preferring men. Vita Sackville-West raises the issue with some hesitation. “It may be noticed also, without wishing to press the point too far, that her friendships were always with women rather than with men, and that those friendships were apt to be deeper and more violent than is customary.”46 Though Mademoiselle was, in some ways, a colorful character, involving herself in political escapades and making something of a comic heroine of herself during the Fronde of the Princes at the Bastille and at Orléans, she never really understood the political circumstance. “She had not been born with a masculine mind, which is, perhaps, the deepest failure of her life if only she had known it.”47 Mademoiselle is not the stuff of which great biographies are made, and choosing her, Vita Sackville-West had to content herself with rather plodding explanations of the time, spiced with speculations about the meetings between Mademoiselle and Christina of Sweden. “One wonders whether Christina would have met with better luck, had she attempted to seduce the virginal Mademoiselle”48 instead of merely extending her the masculine courtesies which are historically recorded. Mademoiselle’s attendants may have been lesbian. One of them wouldn’t sleep with her rarely present husband. They didn’t sleep with Mademoiselle, for she found them as tiresome as they found her. “She was very ugly, uncouth, hoydenish and without charm.”49 To such a woman, Vita Sackville-West brought more private curiosity than historical insight.

  Vita wrote to Harold after discussions with Virginia Woolf, who was a gentle but astute critic. “There is something muted. What is it, Hadji? Something doesn’t come alive. I brood and brood, feel I am groping in a dark tunnel. It makes everything I write a little unreal, gives the effect of having been done from the outside.”50

  The Dark Island is a good example of this muting, this viewing from the outside, for, though it has drama and melodrama enough for several books, the “what if” principle is again operating, sometimes making a curiosity and puzzle instead of a hard-come-by insight. This time it is “What if someone rather like Violet (or maybe Victoria) married a man who was the inheritor of a magnificent and romantic island because she wanted the island and what if someone like me loved her not the way I loved her but the way I loved Virginia and what if the husband loved Violet the way I loved Violet and then discovered she had married me for that island?” Well, everyone would die of it, and they do, for something in Vita Sackville-West wished that passions were grand enough to die of instead of live through, and she fulfilled that wish in fiction rather than in life. For her life, one is grateful. For her fiction, one is not.

  Shirin, the main character in The Dark Island, comes from a middle-class family in Dulwich who holiday each year at Port Breton, off which is the island, Storn, owned by Lord and Lady le Breton. Shirin spends her summers dreaming and brooding about the island until she is taken there by the orphaned grandson, whom she has met out fishing. The grandmother and the day on the island stay in her memory far more than the boy, Venn. Her encounter with him has been unpleasantly sexual, something she wants to forget after its meaning is explained to her by the innkeeper, Mrs. Jolly, an ex-prostitute who is obviously fond of rubbing Shirin’s back and telling her the facts of life. Shirin grows up into a remarkably beautiful and provocative woman, marries very well, has four children, one of whom is psychopathic and has to be institutionalized.

  She is divorced from her husband for her numerous infidelities and then meets Venn again, now Lord le Breton in his turn. He proposes marriage at once. She accepts, quite honestly admitting that she is not in love with him and is not easy to love, perhaps impossible since no man has ever meant anything to her sexually. Once they arrive on the island, she is so in love with the place that she is suddenly hopeful she may learn to love her husband as well; but he, even more jealous of his island than of her past lovers and children, makes it clear to her that the island is his and his alone. From that moment, Shirin resolves to be an exemplary wife in every respect but one: she will bear her husband’s children, run his house, involve herself in island affairs only as it pleases him, but she will not love him.

  Always an entirely private person, unwilling to share her inner self with anyone, Shirin has made only one friend, Cristina, a sculptor, whose finest quality for Shirin is that she never asks personal questions. When Venn’s secretary dies, Shirin proposes that Cristina be hired. The day Cristina arrives, she is involved in a family game of tag, which the two children adore because when their mother is “it,” no one can catch her, and it amuses them that their father tries hardest and never succeeds. It is Cristina who catches Shirin and later reflects, “We became our real selves, for the first time, when I caught her into my arms beside the sea.”51

  The intimacy between the two women grows very slowly because Shirin is reticent and Cristina careful. “I want the whole of Shirin, greedily, yet not for anything in the world would I steal her, unless she asked to be stolen.”52 Had Venn not been increasingly jealous of their intimacy, he would have enjoyed Cristina’s company, for though she was “all rather heroic and over life-size, all on a big scale; no feminine charm at all,”53 he could feel “a sudden comradeship with Cristina, rather as though she were a man.”54 And Cristina often likes Venn, who can be charming and simple in his love of the sea and his love of his children, but his brutality to Shirin is hard for her to endure. Occasionally Shirin is called to London to deal with the children of her first marriage, particularly the institutionalized
boy, over whom she secretly grieves. Anything that distracts her from Venn puts him in a rage. His cruelty is not limited to humiliating her before other people with vicious accusations. He has beaten her, even chained her to a wall and lashed her with a whip, all of which she endures without complaint. She explains to Cristina that she feels responsible for having brought out that side of his nature, which is, anyway, how he is made, something he can’t help. She apparently forgives him everything but his withholding of the island from her. Cristina often begs to be allowed to leave since she knows Venn’s jealousy of her makes him far more brutal to his wife, but Shirin cannot bear the thought of losing Cristina, the love between them the only thing that keeps Shirin alive. It is never given in sexual terms. Cristina “desired her love for Shirin above all things to remain pure, clear-sighted, useful.”55 Shirin says to Cristina, “You know I love you more than anything in the world, you know you’re the only person on whom I have ever allowed myself to depend.”56 There is a “mystical current”57 between them.

  Venn, increasingly unwell, is finally persuaded to see a doctor. He has consumption and will surely die more quickly if he stays on the island or is exposed to any kind of disease. Terrified and enraged, he shrieks out his horror not only of losing his life but of leaving Shirin and Cristina behind, in possession of the island. Shirin, always willing to serve any need except his need of her love, persuades him to go with her away from the island for the winter. Though he agrees, he is more and more broodingly restless, often insisting on Cristina’s company on long walks and sailing. Though she is afraid of him, she is also sorry for him. One day he returns from sailing without her, explaining that they had gone in two boats, but it is clear that he has killed her, though he is easily cleared at the inquest. Shirin goes on preparing for their winter trip, stunned in her rage and grief. Venn grows afraid of her. Just before they are to go, she becomes ill, and, knowing something about medicine, she suspects that she has diphtheria. Long habit has made her automatically protective of Venn, but at his sudden appearance in her room she kisses him and by that means kills him. Shirin lives only for a short time, long enough to know that her son is the image of his father, possessive of the island, wanting to share it with no one. Indifferent, Shirin dies.

  It is as if Vita Sackville-West often used fiction both to glorify passion and to punish it, a process that may have been therapeutic for her but prevented her often from coming to terms with much that she did know. She could admit to all that is ugly in lust, to selfishness, sadism, and murder. Those all had a kind of grandeur that could move them beyond moral consideration and into tragic fate. What she could not deal with were the silly humiliations, the absurdities and childishness which often reduce lust in real life to the ridiculous, about which she knew so much. She and Harold spoke of the necessity, in a relationship between a man and woman, for a man to develop his feminine qualities, a woman her masculine qualities. Practically for them, only Harold’s side of the equation worked, for Vita loved in him his charm, gentleness, and compassion. What she called masculine in herself was cruel and vicious, a side of herself she never inflicted on Harold and apparently outgrew even in her relationships with other women if her motherly protection of Virginia Woolf is an example. Only in her writing did she stay obsessed with the destructive glory of passion which is often accurate in its sexual politics, but, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, doesn’t quite come alive, does often seem unreal. Vita Sackville-West is herself the finest character of her creation, and, if she never resolved her own conflicts, she endured them with more humanity, courage, and even happiness than she permitted anyone in her fiction, books which lie behind her like shed skins and were, perhaps, what allowed her to grow.

  Ivy Compton-Burnett 1892–1969

  IVY COMPTON-BURNETT, SATIRIST RATHER than melodramatist, limited her life as fiercely as Vita Sackville-West complicated hers and stands at the asexual extreme of lesbian sensibility, a not uncommon position for women who have no taste for heterosexual politics and are limited by morality or convention or lack of experience to relationships of deep emotional commitment to other women which do not involve sexual expression. The plot of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s own life was complex and troubled enough for its first thirty years to suggest why she established herself in a flat in London with Margaret Jourdain, a woman older than Ivy Compton-Burnett whose reputation as a scholar and expert in eighteenth-century furniture was already established. They lived together until Margaret Jourdain’s death in 1951, a desertion Ivy Compton-Burnett never completely recovered from and never forgave. She spoke of that grief openly, admitting that she still talked to her lost friend. “I say ‘What do you think? Do you like it? Would you advise me? What shall I do?’” 1 Of her childhood and young womanhood she has almost nothing to say, and yet all her novels are set in that period, a choice she explains in an interview with Margaret Jourdain. “I do not feel that I have any real or organic knowledge of life later than about 1910. I should not write of later times with enough grasp or confidence. I think this is why many writers tend to write of the past. When an age is ended you see it as it is.”2 Her novels are limited not only in period but in class. She wrote always of those living lives of leisure in the country, preoccupied with the family, its tyrannies, rivalries, revelations, and reconciliations. Edwin Muir, while acknowledging the limits of her fictional world, suggests a relationship between her vision and the wars she lived through without fictional comment. “The passions which bring distress to her country houses have recently devastated continents.”3 In her serene and relatively protected adult life, she re-created the psychological warfare of the family from which she had withdrawn, and what she exposed makes the larger history of nations more disturbingly clear.

  She herself did not take the grim view of her books expressed by many of her reviewers, however admiring. “Life makes great demand on people’s characters, and gives them great opportunity to serve their own ends by the sacrifice of other people. Such ill doing may meet with little retribution, may indeed be hardly recognized, and I cannot feel so surprised if people yield to it.”4 Her plots are rarely moral in the way, for instance, Dickens is moral, not so much because she condones tyranny and betrayal as because she has seen too much of both not only go unpunished but rewarded. She admits that life is too poor in plot, that therefore her books are inventions as are her characters. “And people in life hardly seem to be definite enough to appear in print. They are not good or bad enough, or clever or stupid enough or comic or pitiful enough.”5 But if more actually happens in her books than happens in life, if her characters are better and worse, wiser and more foolish than real people, those exaggerations don’t serve to distort so much as to amplify the politics of the real family, in which the head of the household takes his responsibility seriously but no more seriously than he takes himself and his own needs.

  Herward, in A God and His Gifts, makes a fortune as a novelist to maintain an impoverished inheritance for his parents, his sister, his wife, their children, and he also happily provides for his illegitimate daughter by his wife’s sister, his illegitimate son by his son’s wife, and a mistress on the estate. Since other people aren’t aware of the real relationships between them, the embarrassing question of marriage between siblings arises, and in the crisis Herward is willing for all these secrets to be revealed for the sake of the family, but, if he admits to the truth, he admits only to his outsized needs, being the great man that he is. His cuckolded son observes with proper irony, “How father’s failings add to him! I join in respectful admission of their scale. I am ashamed of my petty faults.”6

  In A Family and a Fortune, Edgar, the head of a large house and family, loses his wife and thinks nothing of taking the woman his younger and devoted brother Dudley wants to marry. Though Dudley nearly dies of it, he is finally reunited with the family because he sees his own goodness as a product of his powerless position. He is the better of the two because he is the lesser of the two.

  Miles M
owbray, in A Father and His Fate, also loses his wife, or thinks that he has, and so takes the fiancée of his nephew and heir. When Miles’s wife is discovered to be alive, he returns the young woman, pregnant, to his nephew, expecting the young couple to live under his roof in harmony with the old restored order. That solution is not a happy one; therefore Miles takes the infant daughter, really his own, and arranges for his nephew to divorce, then marry Miles’s oldest daughter, and raise the child for him. As in the other books, women either suffer in silence or protest in vain.