Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  In contrast, there is Amalia X., the comic actress who has had everything: happiness, sorrow, men, women. She affects no masculinity at all. “What is more ridiculous, what is sadder than a woman pretending to be a man?”44 It is not only not necessary but a serious mistake. “You see, when a woman remains a woman, she is a complete human being. She lacks nothing, even insofar as her amie is concerned. But if she ever gets it into her head to try to be a man, then she’s grotesque.” She tells Colette stories of the notorious Lucienne, who dressed as a man and attracted numbers of women, most of whom she did not want. She broke up marriages, inspired suicides, but LouLou, the woman she did want, chose to go back to her husband because, though Lucienne looked like a man, LouLou would be mortified to go out with a man who could not “peepee” against a wall. Colette finds this story funny. Amalia does not, for to her it is symbolic of the error of attempting to be a man. Colette asks Amalia if she has ever been faithful. The easy reply of a woman who has spent her life on tour is that one is not faithful to someone who isn’t there. Amalia’s gaiety somehow forgives her in Colette’s eyes, but her general judgment is that “Sapphic libertinage is the only unacceptable one.”45 Why, she does not say. It may be that such easy pleasure gets in the way of the right to be unhappy.

  The portrait of Renée Vivien, the very gifted poet who died at the age of thirty of acute alcoholism and starvation, is longer and more complex since it deals not only with the character of the woman but with the friendship between Renée Vivien and Colette. In keeping with Colette’s reticence to discuss her writing was her approval of Renée Vivien’s secrecy about her own work. She never referred to it. There was no sign of a working corner in her apartment, and once, surprised at a moment of scribbling something on a piece of paper, she shoved it away, protesting that it was nothing. When she sent one of her books to Colette, it was always disguised in a basket of fruit or a bolt of silk. Colette very well understood hiding work as a way of maintaining a feminine identity. Renée Vivien was beautiful and gay, but she was also at times, for Colette, shockingly vulgar. Once, when Renée dropped her guard with Colette and told her the sexual details of her relationship with another woman, comparing them unfavorably with an earlier affair, Colette was offended by her crudity and said so. At another time, when Renée was obviously ill, she confessed to a fear that her present lover would murder her. How, Colette wanted to know, with poison, with a gun? Colette would not repeat Renée’s reply, but Renee had obviously been blunt in saying that she would be fucked to death. No one ever met Renée’s lover. Colette even speculates that she may not have existed because Colette is skeptical about the existence of such vampires as Renée described; but several times, when Colette was present, Renée was sent for by her lover and left obediently and abruptly in tears. Colette found Renée Vivien childishly cynical and she was angry with her for the way she abused herself, burned herself out, but Colette also genuinely cared for her and pitied her.

  None of these women exemplifies the lesbian experience which fascinated Colette and from which she drew most of her general views about lesbians. She is reluctant to attempt a description of something so delicate as a lifelong relationship between two women, but she feels she had both the emotional experience and the detachment to present a “delicate point of view.”46 “Yes, I want to speak with dignity, that is, with warmth, of what I call the noble season of feminine passion.”47 Only after reading a good deal of Colette does a reader automatically brace for an inevitable collision of tones after such an attitude is professed, for Colette is never emotionally unaffected or impartial, and nothing in her world stays noble for long. In this case, “the noble season” lasts no longer than a sentence in which she compares it to the season of betrothals. “It is the period when a monstrous life is established … a life whose regularity would stifle normal love.”48

  That monstrous life is specifically the fifty years, from 1778, when the two famous ladies of Llangollen, Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, lived together in what they chose to call idyllic seclusion. Colette retells their life from the diary Eleanor Butler kept, from its melodramatic beginning to its serene end. Eleanor and Sarah fell in love and planned to escape from their respective homes in Ireland. It took several attempts before their families gave up solutions of domestic imprisonment and allowed them to leave the country to live out their love in Wales. There, with only poverty as a burden, they seem to have lived in joyful contentment, cherished by the villagers, honored occasionally by visits from the great and famous. Nothing in the diary, except the continual reference to Sarah as “My Beloved,” alludes to their sexual life, except perhaps the one mention of their bed, but in contemplating their relationship, Colette makes a number of general assertions about the nature of love between women. It is never passion but kinship which inspires devotion between women, a sexual narcissism which fosters the love and pity they feel for each other, “Miracles of weakness and timid attainments.”49 According to Colette, women share a trust so subtle that others cannot understand but only envy it. Since none of her other lesbian portraits really demonstrates these general characteristics and since there is simply no sexual information about the ladies of Llangollen, Colette is either drawing on confidences of people she is not writing about or drawing on her own relationship with Missy both to romanticize and belittle such a relationship.

  The ladies do not seem to have been either weak or timid, and, if they pitied each other, there is no evidence of that either. Their trust in and devotion to each other was obvious. Though Colette grants that to them, she is horrified at what she thinks must have been its price, not so much for the older Eleanor but for the silent Sarah, robbed even of her name in Eleanor’s diary, reduced to “My Beloved.” Colette tries to introduce an element of drama. “The most ordinary irruption can mortally change the steady hothouse warmth in which two women devote themselves to the cultivation of a delusion.”50 Nothing of the sort happened because, Colette assumes, Eleanor did not allow it. She was jailor of a Sarah, Colette imagines, silently weeping of loneliness and deprivation in her lover’s arms. The only explanation Colette gives for this interpretation of their lives is that women make homes and gardens out of a nesting instinct, not out of love for each other and desire to live together. The hostility she feels toward Eleanor cannot be directly expressed, for Colette has made too much of a quaint romance of them both, locked in the past, but she does speculate that, if they had lived in 1930, “Eleanor Butler would curse as she jacked up the car, and would have her breasts amputated.”51 So much for Colette’s “dispassionate handling,” for her “delicate point of view.”

  The Pure and the Impure ends with a brief sketch of two women brought together by a man for his own sexual pleasure; they become drawn to each other and indifferent to him. It is a relationship that cannot be characterized as that between a mother and a daughter because there is always some shade of hostility in maternal feeling. They cannot be called lovers because they are so accepting of each other that they have forgotten each other’s beauty. They recall an earlier description of women gathered in a small nightclub: For women, communication is intensified because men have been banished. But Colette does not really believe that women can sustain this isolation from men. In her experience even those in masculine dress are bitterly preoccupied with men, needing them both as whipping boys and models. Only men seem capable of ignoring the existence of women. The male homosexuals Colette knew rarely talked about women at all, and then with detached condescension. Perhaps it was from them that the young and unhappy Colette learned herself to condescend to women. From them also—she called them her “monsters”—with the help of her first two husbands, she learned to be cynical about men, to portray them all as she might have been portrayed herself, “restless ghosts unrecovered from wounds sustained in the past when they crashed headlong or sidelong against that barrier reef, mysterious and incomprehensible, the human body …”52 until in old age, bedridden with arthritis, a master craftswom
an with a husband who had become a devoted servant, she wrote the hugely successful Gigi, the story of a young girl raised by courtesans to be a courtesan, who marries the rich man instead. A true story apparently, told in the manner of an erotic fairy tale, it leaves that taste of rancid maple sugar, too sweet and too bitter. The marriage bed, though more respectable than the bed of a mistress, is not less claustrophobic unless one is, like Gigi, “completely and stupidly female.”

  The only bed really big enough for Colette was her own, the raft of her old age, on which she went on denying the value of her own great gift in favor of being a woman. It is a conflict shared by a great many women burdened with similar gifts.

  Violette Leduc 1907–1972

  LA BTARDE, THE BOOK which finally gave Violette Leduc the success she craved, is a condensation of all her earlier novels, translated back into autobiography. Mad in Pursuit, which followed it, is simply a second volume of that autobiography in which she declares, “To write is to inform against others,”1 “To write is to prostitute oneself.”2 Her terrible candor in both these books is true to those definitions while at the same time going far beyond them, for, if her work were nothing but a betrayal of others and a prostitution of herself, her books might attract sensational but not serious attention. She asks herself, “Will you sell your sex for the sake of your pen?” She answers, “I would sell everything for greater exactness.”3 The cost is outrageous, but she has produced the most exact, sensual, emotional, and psychological record there is of a woman defined and diminished by her sexuality. By means of it, she can, even in the extremes of her degradation, reflect in fact what is perhaps true only in the horrified and secret imagination of most of us. We perceive in her life our own prostituted selves, frightened, confessional, self-justifying, obsessive against the revelation that we are women.

  Born the bastard of an orphan serving girl, Violette Leduc was the evidence of the crime against her mother’s sexuality as well as the punishment for her mother’s sexuality, and therefore Violette was taught not only that men were untrustworthy and heartless but also that she was, in her mother’s eyes, identified with that enemy. In the poverty and isolation of their lives, Violette Leduc focused on her mother with a courtly possessiveness which was to last, along with her critical anger at her mother, all her life. The mother who had taught her to fear men betrayed her for one, marrying and sending Violette away to boarding school. In Therese and Isabella, which is also admittedly autobiographical, Therese responds to the news of her mother’s coming marriage with “I told her that I was engaged to her myself.”4 Her mother tries to reassure her. “There’s no one on earth but you, there’s no one on earth I love but you, she told me, but she had someone else.”5 Therese’s solution to her mother’s desertion of her is swift. “I had met Isabelle, and now I have someone else.” “I was Isabelle’s. I didn’t belong to my mother any more.”6

  This explanation of Therese’s willingness to be seduced by her schoolmate Isabelle is not really what absorbs Violette Leduc’s attention in Therese and Isabelle. Her own description of the book is given later in Mad in Pursuit with unbecoming accuracy. “A load of sticky jam with two adolescent girls embalmed in it.”7 Her method of writing is far from a psychological analysis of the lesbian experience of schoolgirls. “I wrote with one hand, and with the other … I loved myself to love them.”8 Violette Leduc sexually rediscovers her adolescent experience in the process of writing about it and records moment by moment all its erotic urgency, just as she rediscovers herself as a middle-aged woman masturbating as she writes about her adolescence.

  Therese and Isabelle are not beloved friends so much as young, sexual animals, so entirely absorbed in the experience that they care about nothing else. They keep each other awake all night in Isabelle’s cubicle, each new erotic discovery more wonderful and exhausting than the one before until they learn to identify with each other’s bodies so thoroughly that they hardly distinguish between the toucher and the touched. “To give oneself, one must annihilate oneself,”9 Therese explains, and this discovery, though it comes from sexual ecstasy, is not limited to that sphere. Therese is nothing but a used and yearning body, sleeping through classes, sleepwalking through the day unless Isabelle is with her, snatching at, touching, taunting in lavatory, hallway, empty classroom. Therese’s only awareness of the world beyond their love-making is the fear of discovery either at the school or in the room in town they rent for an hour. Isabelle is too abandoned to care even about that, taking her pants off in an empty classroom at noon in order to instruct Therese in the art of using her tongue. Isabelle’s only terror is the loss of Therese, their inevitable separation because they are children, not in charge of their own fates. They do not talk together except as a way of making love. They don’t have much understanding of, or sympathy for, each other’s fears.

  Because the book is written from Therese’s point of view, her own sexual discoveries are more important. And, since Therese is the young Violette Leduc in the intensity of her first prolonged sexual experience, what Therese discovers is linked with the person Violette will become. Licking on command and direction from Isabelle, feeling aroused herself in the act, she interprets her experience under the obviously later influence of Freud. “The pearl wanted what I wanted. I was discovering the little male organ we all of us have. A eunuch taking heart again.”10

  The book ends with the removal of Therese from school by her mother, but Violette Leduc continues the story with herself as protagonist in Therese’s place in La Bâtarde. Once Violette and Isabelle are separated, in fact by Isabelle’s leaving school, Violette gives little thought to her and concentrates instead on a young music teacher. The one night they spend together in Hermine’s room does leave Violette missing Isabelle because the sexual experience doesn’t live up to her high expectations. As a result of that night Hermine is sent away from the school, but they exchange secret letters and finally meet outside the school. Violette wants to make love in an open field. Hermine is reluctant, and now she is scornfully compared with Isabelle, who made no confessions, who had no inhibitions in pleasure. Violette’s correspondence with Hermine is discovered, and she is expelled from school. “Morals, as they say in the newspapers.”11 “Everything made rotten, everything poisoned.”12 She goes to live with her mother and stepfather in Paris; they neither discuss the expulsion with her nor interfere with her continued correspondence and occasional visits from Hermine. In school in Paris, feeling stupid because she has never bothered to learn anything and ugly because of her large nose, she has to keep her one power hidden, the superiority of her experience, which comes through her senses. I had to hide that fact from everyone.” That sense of superiority, of morality as something in the newspaper or in the head mistress’s office having nothing to do with experience, is not something Violette Leduc was able to maintain. Later, involved in writing about this period of her life, she worries about what her neighbors will think of her, and she tells her mother she would be ashamed to have her read what Violette is writing. “Why upset people?” “Why shock people?”13 “I was and I always shall be hampered by what I think other people will say.”14 “What repelled and will always repel them: homosexuality.”15

  Perhaps the sexual detail in her books does shock some readers, but even at the time she was writing, the explicit scenes would not have been as upsetting to many as the quality of the relationships she involved herself in. Violette and Isabelle as fifteen-year-olds used each other for sexual discovery without other concern, more surprising between two girls than between two boys or a girl and a boy but ordinary enough even so, given the needy and lonely egotism of adolescence. Violette’s relationship with Hermine is far more difficult to deal with, not because they are lovers but because of the greedy and guiltless abuse Violette makes of Hermine’s love.

  Before Hermine is able to join Violette in Paris, Violette involves herself in an ambiguous relationship with a young man named Gabriel. Though she does not tell Hermine about Gabrie
l, she does tell Gabriel about both Isabelle and Hermine. Gabriel understands. He is apparently willing to spend his time with, and his little money on, Violette without involving her sexually. When her mother warns her against him, as against all men, Violette reassures her that Gabriel isn’t like other men. He calls her “little fellow,” encourages her in masculine dress and behavior and never urges her sexually. When Hermine comes to town, he follows them, flaunting his presence to Violette, as if it were giving him some real pleasure to watch them together. In this secrecy, Violette does feel guilt. Throughout her life, she feels guilty about caring for more than one person, as if each of her concerns were a betrayal of another, but sexual involvement has nothing to do with that guilt. It is as if her model for love stayed that between herself, an only child, and her mother before her mother’s marriage.

  Once Hermine comes to Paris and she and Violette are living together, Hermine does become aware of Gabriel and seems to accept his presence, even occasionally to seek comfort from him in her trials with Violette, but Violette sees them as rivals not only for her attention but for her identity. While Gabriel encourages her in her masculine role, Hermine does not. She tells Violette that she doesn’t look like a man even when she imitates men. “Hermine was turning me into a woman, and that infuriated him.”16 “I was his man, he was my woman in our friendship.”17 But Hermine’s influence is stronger, partly because Violette has given up a job with a publishing house because of ill health and is now entirely dependent on Hermine, who teaches at a school and also takes extra pupils to make enough money for them both.