Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  Judith’s view of Cassandra and her attempted suicide “because she couldn’t bring herself to try anything else” is obviously incomplete. And her evaluation of Cassandra’s life, though it may be more realistic than Cassandra’s own dismissing of her behavior as her “Rimbaud period,” is not accurate either: “She couldn’t believe she belonged anywhere but on a psychiatrist’s couch, or with companions, call them that, girl-buddies who were so inferior to her that they didn’t count as human beings at all, just occupational therapy of no therapeutic value. She wastes herself, she drifts, all she wants to do with her life is lose it somewhere.”13

  When Cassandra makes an unsuccessful bid for erotic attention from her psychiatrist, she is told, “Everyone has impulses. I have all kinds. Just about like yours. But I always hoped I could bring you to understand that there is such a thing as a whole life—a way of life—and a reason for being that is strong enough to protect you from every little whistling call of the wild.”14 This woman, unlike Pauline Maury in Trio, knows the rules. Cassandra’s response to that refusal to break professional trust is “Same thing everywhere I’d looked. Large amounts of safety, very few risks. Let nothing endanger the proper marriage, the fashionable career, the non-irritating thesis that says nothing new and nothing true.”15 Oh, the others are right. Judith will be happier giving up her musical career to marry her doctor, far from the imprisoning fantasies of her sister. The psychiatrist would have been quite silly and irresponsible to give in, no matter what her own impulse, to Cassandra’s emotional blackmail. Yet somehow, at the end of the book, that young woman, dropping her sock into the Pacific, is the person of the book, never reduced by sister or psychiatrist to their vision of her. She has begun to write and write very well. She is probably free of her ideal, chaste fantasy with an identical twin and perhaps also of self-destructive random impulse. She is not promised anything more.

  Dorothy Baker leaves the lesbian episodes of Cassandra’s life without analysis, as if they might be side symptoms of her central and chaste love for her sister rather than clues to her central identity. The point for Dorothy Baker is to see Cassandra through to freedom to be her single self, willing to live.

  There is no question that Dorothy Baker’s shift from a moral to a psychological mode has deepened and humanized her vision. The righteous indignation at Pauline Maury’s behavior which turned her into a stock villain is replaced by the dispassionate portrait of a psychiatrist who, though she makes the right decision, is a little cold in her professional integrity. More important, Cassandra’s dependencies must be resolved not by marriage to a better protector but by her taking of life into her own hands, and that decision is offered as as good as and more appealing than Judith’s escape into marriage. The triumph of Cassandra at the Wedding is that it is not simply a translation from moral into psychiatric language, the judgment left unchanged. The book resists being made into a tract about incest or lesbianism. Dorothy Baker has transformed her vision not from morality tale into scientific propaganda but into literature, that particular and true image of experience.

  May Sarton 1912–

  “MINE IS NOT, I feel sure, the best human solution. Nor have I ever thought it was,” coming “at a high price in emotional maturity and in happiness,”1 May Sarton confesses in her Journal of a Solitude, written in part to disabuse her readers of a myth she may have created herself in earlier books, May Sarton as a happy, serene solitary. Through Mrs. Stevens, the main character in Mrs. Stevens hears the mermaids singing who is also a writer, May Sarton makes even firmer assertions. “After all, admit it, a woman is meant to create children not works of art. …The woman who does is aberrant.”2 “We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.”3 “I think I would have liked to be a woman, simple and fruitful, a woman with many children, a great husband … and no talent.”4 Though this is the confession at the end of the book, it is not really effective in silencing Mrs. Stevens’ assertive cry much earlier on: “But I regret nothing.”5 Nor does May Sarton intend it to.

  Her claim here and elsewhere that the gifted woman, whether intellectual or artist, is a monster is not entirely a ruse, for the problems are real enough, and the suffering is genuine, but so is the glory of being that sort of monster, and May Sarton knows it. To present the creative woman as a genetic freak is both romantic and self-protective, for it is an explanation which may forgive her for all those indulgences in temperament, self-absorption, pride, and lust which in this culture are even more exclusively masculine territory than the stock market. Women, and only women, are supposed to grow up, which means women must set aside a sense of themselves as unique persons, dreams of personal greatness, of self-fulfillment, and get on with creating that sort of space for men and children. Talent, disguised (thinly) as something of a clubfoot, may be more palatable and pitiable than the self-assertive arrogance which is part of the make-up of any person who chooses to develop her own gift rather than foster it in others, who wants to be recognized rather than recognizing.

  In complaining about a young woman who is bombarding her with letters and poems, May Sarton admits, “My faults too have been those of excess; I too have made emotional demands without being aware of what I was asking; I too have imagined that I was giving when I was battering at someone for attention.”6 Still, she cannot cope with the responsibility. “Is it a flaw in me that attracts passionate attachments that I cannot handle and do not want?”7 “The strange effect of all these ‘lovers’ is to make me feel not richer, but impoverished and mean.”8 It is a double guilt, for not only does she want to be left alone to get on with her own writing but she would also like to cast another in the role of listener which she so passionately rejects, and therefore she knows in herself the pain of that rejection. “That self tells me that I was meant to live alone, meant to write poems for others—poems that seldom in my life have reached the one person for whom they were intended.”9

  To claim that her talent is a genetic mistake gives May Sarton some sexual protection as well. The Muse is irrevocably female; therefore a poet really has no choice but to seek inspiration in women. If that poet happens to be a woman, lesbian attachments are essential to her art. Presented in this way, May Sarton’s love of other women is a by-product of her “unnatural” gift, part of its high price, rather than itself an emotional immaturity or illness or maladjustment. It’s an odd and charming defense, probably not strong against the antiromantic prejudices of our time but image enough for May Sarton to express passionate feeling in terms which transcend current psychological jargon.

  She still suffers a fear shared by other writers. “The danger is that if you are placed in a sexual context people will read your work from a distorting angle of vision.”10 Every writer is placed in a sexual context. The “distortion” May Sarton fears is a social judgment. It is hard enough to be diminished as an artist because she is a woman. To be a lesbian as well is to be written off entirely.

  “The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens hears the mermaids singing, to write a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality; and to face the truth that such a life is rarely happy, a life where art must become the primary motivation, for love is never going to fulfill in the usual sense.”11 She does not think she could have “leveled” if her parents had still been alive or if she had not written a number of other novels first so that she would not automatically be labeled. But she also is aware of a changing climate. “We all do make some attempt to bring together the private and the public person through the work of art. It is possible now in a way that it was not before.”12 Willa Cather had to be intensely private. W. H. Auden, May Sarton thinks, “has been rarely honest, and being honest is harder than it looks if the self admits to being homosexual.”13 The need of the Muse is not her only expl
anation. She subscribes to Freud’s vision of androgyny. “I would predicate that in all great works of genius masculine and feminine elements in the personality find expression, whether this androgynous nature is played out sexually or not.”14

  May Sarton’s understanding of psychology and the use she makes of it are more simply seen in an earlier novel, The Small Room, set in a small women’s college in New England, to which Lucy Winter has gone for her first teaching job after she has broken her engagement to a young doctor. The strongest character in the book is Carryl Cope, an internationally known scholar who has chosen to stay at the college because “teaching women is a special kind of challenge. Most of the cards are stacked against one.”15 The college was founded as an act of revenge by a woman whose father has not allowed her higher education, and that spirit is still very much alive in the community. Carryl Cope is the most extreme in her educational views, but she is admired for them. “We are not interested especially in producing marriageable young ladies.”16 “The college was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the contrary.”17 Carryl Cope is interested in excellence and willing to accept what she sees as the price: “eccentricity, maladjustment, narrowness. Excellence cost a great deal. It is high time some of us faced that.”18 This argument persuades the faculty to allow a brilliant mathematics student to lose herself in a single problem and neglect her other courses. It also delays the appointment of a resident psychiatrist for the college, for in Carryl Cope’s vision, psychiatry would cure exactly what she is fostering. She is strongly supported in her resistance against a psychiatric appointment by Olive Hunt, a trustee who is going to leave her millions to the college only if no psychiatrist is appointed. Carryl Cope and Olive Hunt have been lovers for twenty years.

  Though young Lucy Winter is drawn to Carryl Cope, admiring her as a scholar and teacher, attracted by the forcefulness of her character, she does not entirely accept the values Carryl expresses. Lucy does not want to be directly involved in the personal problems of her students. She likes the feeling in class that she can give “something of herself that she would never be able to give to an individual human being,”19 but students do make personal demands of her, and, if she is not to involve herself, someone else has to. Jane Seaman, a brilliant student and protégée of Carryl Cope’s, is also in Lucy’s class, and it is Lucy who discovers that Jane has plagiarized an important paper assigned by Carryl Cope. Because Jane would be expelled if it came to the attention of the authorities, Carryl Cope decides to cover it up, for her own sake as well as Jane’s. Though she tries to solve the practical problem in this way, she is incapable of dealing with the basic problem Jane presents, for Jane has been in love with Carryl and now hates her for the intellectual pressure she has inflicted as a substitute for human concern. It is Lucy who talks with Jane and takes her to New York to see a psychiatrist. Meanwhile rumor and protest make it necessary for Carryl to admit that she hasn’t solved the problem at all. The issue of what to do with Jane has split the students and faculty, brought one marriage to a breaking point, and exposed the deep limitation of intellectual training which ignores human need. Jane is sent off to a sanatorium, and the college decides to employ a psychiatrist. Though Carryl is still not convinced of the value of the decision, she cannot agree with Olive Hunt’s decision to change her will, and their long and long-weakening relationship comes to an end. Lucy explains to Carryl what Jane is learning from psychiatric help, that she has transferred her grief and anger at an indifferent father to Carryl. Carryl can understand that. “I have certainly tried to be my own father.”20 “Wanted to be a boy, of course.”21 She admits that she didn’t offer love to Jane because she was afraid, because she hadn’t achieved the detachment necessary to give love.

  Lucy, it seems, has the answer, rejecting passionate love as she has learned it from her young doctor and from observing those around her because it seems always to bring with it strain, if not hatred. She is still able to acknowledge feelings and needs. She loves Carryl, “astonished at the intensity of the emotion,”22 but she is detached enough to be able to kiss Carryl like an old friend before she goes off for the summer, willing to admit only that she may have fallen in love with a profession. Her model will not be Carryl but those quiet teachers who do not have Carryl’s genius but who have learned to sublimate passion and live with human concern and self-doubt. Freud’s puritan solution for women has won the day, and May Sarton seems to have no quarrel with the victory. Even Olive Hunt, too stubborn to change her mind about her money, may be off salting her wounds by reading Freud.

  In Mrs. Stevens hears the mermaids singing neither the problems nor their solutions are as simple perhaps because, though May Sarton is not trying to write an autobiography, she is more nearly dealing with the kinds of choices she herself has made. Mrs. Stevens is an old woman who has been a writer all her life but only at this very late date is she enjoying the fame which eluded her for years. When the book opens, she is waiting for a pair of young interviewers who will ask her to review her life as an artist. Before they arrive and while they are there, her job is to come to terms with who she is. Framing this experience is her relationship with Mar, a young man who has left college to spend some time with his grandfather in order to sort out his personal problem, which, he confesses to Mrs. Stevens, is the love affair he has had with a young male instructor who has rejected him. Mar has begun to write poetry in order to come to terms with who he is, and their exchange of poems and their conversation give Mrs. Stevens another dimension in which to comment about the nature of art and of love, for “she recognized at once her own kind, conflicted, nervous, driven, affectionate. …”23 Her attitude toward Mar from the opening of the book is a gentle preparation for the attitude she will take toward herself and her own experience. She tells Mar, “It’s people that matter, Mar, not sexes or ages.”24 She sympathizes, “It’s hard to be growing up in this climate where sex at its most crude and cold is O.K. but feeling is somehow indecent. The monsters are those who go rutting around like monkeys, not those who choose to be human whatever it costs.”25 She understands that he could have got no help at college. “It was usually mishandled by people in authority, as if they were not dealing with loyalty and love!”26 But she can be impatient with his self-pity and self-hatred. “One has to endure a little more than the jeers of college boys before one is through.”27

  Mrs. Stevens’ own first experience with the attention of the world was not so negative. She had written a first novel that enjoyed the success of a scandal. As one of the young interviewers puts it, “But I suppose people were shocked because you talked about things like women falling in love with each other, took this for granted, set it in its place; and the love affair with the young man is awfully good.”28 Though she enjoyed the attention, she felt uncertain about what she had done, already suspecting what would be her later judgment of the book, that it was superficial. “I never looked Medusa in the face.”29 She escaped into marriage with a young Englishman, Adrian, which is given as happy in its own way, sexually perfectly satisfying, but they were living through the hard-drinking, high-living time after the First World War, and Adrian had no real interest outside riding horses. His young wife began to miss writing, “but what she had in mind was ironic, and it would surely hurt Adrian. She was caged, caged by being in love with, and married to, a man whose life pattern seemed to her both trivial and confining. …”30 Her mother-in-law recognized the problem marriage was for her. “I settled for being a woman. I wonder if you can.”31 Adrian’s death in a riding accident did away with the question. Her breakdown as a result was gradually overcome by writing poems.

  Because the young interviewers are interested in talking about each of her books, Mrs. Stevens’ life is revealed as the background for them. She does not tell the interviewers a great deal of the detail. “May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best—out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is
relevant; that is what matters.”32 To them she talks more theoretically about the nature of the Muse. “Graves calls her, if you remember, ‘sister of mirage and echo.’”33 “When I said that all poems are love poems, I meant that the motor power, the electric current is love of one kind or another.”34 To be sexually clear, she speaks her mind about women writers. “The women who have tried to be men have always lacked something; we have to rest on Sappho, Jane Austen, Colette … we have to be our selves,”35 that is, predominantly feminine. “The fundamental point is diffusion of sensuality.”36 Women should not write novels or poems of ideas. Their work is “never to categorize, never to separate one thing from another—intellect, the senses, the imagination. …Some total gathering together where the most realistic and the most mystical can be joined in celebration of life itself. Women’s work is always toward wholeness.”37 Fortunately she grows impatient with her insights as they move toward platitudes, and, while she doesn’t share much of the lively memory taking place inside her head with the interviewers, it is there for the reader.

  There is young Hilary, long before she is even young Mrs. Stevens, on a hillside in Wales with her tutor, protesting, “Why wasn’t I born a boy, Miss Munn? It’s so unfair.” “If I were a boy, I would be great—a great poet.”38 And she begins to write passionate love poetry to this bewildered first Muse. Back further still is the child, Hilary, held off by a mother suspicious of all emotion. “She drove me into the arms of governesses, teachers, strangers. …”39 Trapped in a sanatorium after her husband’s death, Hilary falls in love with a nurse. Told by the doctor to learn from the enforced quietness a way to control her emotions, she replies, “The Lord is not my shepherd. I shall want.”40