Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  The Muse for each of her books is a woman, but “perhaps once … for a brief time the Muse was a person who could understand, as rare an event as a conjunction of two planets who cross each other once in a thousand years.”41 Was that Willa who cared very much about the poems but said, “I simply am not one of those ambidextrous people who can love women as well as men. You’ll have to accept me as I am.”42 When Hilary did not, when she took advantage of a moment after months of waiting, “within those passionate kisses sexuality hardly existed, or was totally diffused in the fire of tenderness,”43 as a result of which Willa fell ill and never really recovered. Certainly it was not the horror of an opera singer who inspired another book, but inspire it she did with her magnificent voice. Oh, Mrs. Stevens perfectly well sees “there is something ludicrous about women writing these supplicating poems.”44 “We are all monsters, if it comes to that, we women who have chosen to be something more and something less than women.”45

  Most demanding of them all was Dorothea. “In her outward appearance there was nothing masculine, but the mind was masculine, and the mind towered.”46 She was a sociologist, suspicious of poetry, of subjectivity, very successful in her field, a match for Hilary at last, but not as mate so much as antagonist. “What is the matter?” Dorothea asked. “The matter is that I want to kill you because you are the enemy. The matter is that I’m in love, damn it!”47 Dorothea’s success threatens Hilary, makes her envious, fills her with self-doubt. The “boy” in her, whom she sees as the source of her poetry, is being defeated. “Hilary had felt the boy in herself backing away, almost disappearing like an apparition, like a ghost who would not perhaps come back again, and the woman buried so long, taking possession.”48 To the interviewers she generalizes, “Powerful women may be driven to seek the masculine in each other. The men have been frightened off.”49 But she and Dorothea have sought the “masculine” in each other only to try to defeat it. Dorothea’s victory is a deep threat to Hilary’s art. “The boy in me was dead. I had to go on as a woman.”50

  As she is easy with Mar, all her relationships with men are similarly without the violent tension of her relationships with women. She has always found good friends among them. “Women have moved and shaken me, but I have been nourished by men.”51 But she has never considered marriage again. When Judy, one of the young interviewers, protests the concept of the Muse as always female and speaks of her own wish to write and to marry, not to sacrifice love for craft, Mrs. Stevens replies, “Love as the waker of the dead, love as conflict, love as the mirage. Not love as peace or fulfillment, or lasting, faithful giving. No, that fidelity, that giving is what the art demands, the art itself at the expense of every human being.”52

  The last brief section of the book again concerns Mar, who has gone off, picked up a sailor, spent the night with him, and found himself robbed in the morning. He wants to use this experience to repudiate feeling, to be free of it, to indulge in simple lust. Hilary is angry with him, but she is uncertain also now about the similarity of their experience. He is male; she is female. Lust for her cannot be simple, but, when he demands to know what lust has to do with poetry (and therefore with feeling), she says, “Maybe quite a lot. More than we know. More than most of us are willing to admit.”53 She does insist, “True feeling justifies, whatever it may cost.”54 But Mar, as a man, perhaps does not need to keep the boy in him alive, as Hilary tried to keep the “boy” in her alive to write. He has the choice of becoming a man, a husband and father. She could have become only a woman, a choice she would make only if she could choose as well to have no talent. It isn’t really a choice at all. She is a woman, a gifted woman, who has faced the Medusa squarely enough to know that the meeting with the Muse is really a meeting with the self, an opening of intense speculation which is the discipline and wonder of art, even when the Muse takes no interest at all.

  What restricts and confuses May Sarton’s insight is a cultural inheritance from Freud which makes her call a great many needs and strengths which are simply human either masculine or feminine instead. Sometimes she sees through the cultural difficulty. “Why is it that women writers cannot deal with sex and get away with it?” “Colette, of course, but she’s untranslatable into English. …The language of sex is masculine. Women would have to invent a new language.”55 But then Colette is explained as “not trapped in her senses. Most women are. There she showed the masculine side of her genius.”56 There May Sarton shows she’s caught in the same cliché which forced Colette to dislike in herself what she should naturally have admired.

  May Sarton has not turned herself into a pseudo-man to solve the problem as Radclyffe Hall and Gertrude Stein did, and, though she sometimes seems mired in biological argument, she has too much real respect for women to set herself so much apart from them. She understands the professional woman’s need for a “wife,” but she can too easily see the problem for the wife, for an Alice B. Toklas, and May Sarton cannot herself become emotionally involved with anyone who would be willing to play that role, for, where the Muse is incarnate, there is no candidate for answering the troublesome mail, making the boring bed, or cleaning up the kitchen. For all her indulgence in “masculine” arrogance, that is for taking herself and her work seriously, she has not been able, except in some misguided platitudes, to degrade women, and even in those there is more ironic self-defense than accepted truth. There never was a “boy” in Hilary Stevens. There was a poet. It is just one more grotesque testament against society that an intelligent woman does not know poets come in both sexes, even though she reads and admires Sappho.

  If being a poet is not the best human solution, if it is emotionally expensive, being a wife of a great man and mother of a lot of children, even if one is not otherwise gifted, has a price tag on it, too. May Sarton knows it. She has written warmly and realistically about marriage, its bad and good seasons, in Kinds Of Love. Though Christina Chapman is charming and richly gifted by a life of marriage, children, and grandchildren, she doesn’t offer a model best for every woman. Olivia, her unmarried daughter, involved in social work, is more emulated by the young people in the book. Christina might be a convenient model for one’s mother or grandmother—for whose life is not happier for the cherishing ones in it?—but fiery, wise, doubting old Hilary calls much more deeply to the self. There is no best solution. Both Hilary Stevens and Christina Chapman have found good ones in their own terms. It is a social convention which makes Hilary defensive and Christina a little smug.

  Maureen Duffy 1933–

  MAUREEN DUFFY IS THE youngest of these writers, whose first novel was published in 1962, and, though she has produced a number of novels and plays since then, her most insightful work is probably still ahead of her. Already, however, she has contributed nearly as many portraits of lesbians as Colette did in the whole of her writing life. Colette was a brilliant, intuitive psychologist. Maureen Duffy is more analytical and academic. In an interview she said, “The cause of homosexuality? I’m Freudian. If people think it’s innate, they can say, ‘I’m not guilty, not responsible.’ It’s a way out.”1 Desire, guilt, and responsibility are the preoccupations of all her novels, whether she is dealing with homosexuality or not. Though her terms are psychological, her vision is moral, so that fixation on a mother, penis envy, and fear of childbirth are sins to be confessed, but like Freud, Maureen Duffy does not seem to offer absolution. Her characters remain guilty.

  The Microcosm opens in a lesbian bar, referred to as the House of Shades, each customer a walking case history of conditioning and complaints. Matt, superior and sad, is the barroom philosopher and psychologist who observes, advises, preaches, and comforts. Rae, the woman she lives with, has no need or desire to keep going to the House of Shades, free of both the guilt and reforming zeal which makes Matt say, “We all have to rise in the end, not just one or two who were smart enough, had will enough for their own salvation but all the halt, the maimed and the blind of us which is most of us.”2 Her need to identify herself with
the people in the bar not only creates tension in her relationship with Rae but also keeps her caught in a job as a service-station attendant, unwilling or perhaps unable to go on with her archeological studies. Trying to explain herself, she says, “That’s my trouble, I suppose, a latter-day Victorian believing in progress at heart, an incipient do-gooder, who’d like to see everyone fulfilled and creative. …”3 But while she insists on the bar as a microcosm, from which it does no good for only one or two to escape, she is as much caught there as any of them. Gradually Matt comes to the understanding that the bar is more like a tide pool from which she must escape for her own growth. “I’m just taking up my whole personality and walking quietly out into the world with it,”4 into a job at archeological digs, taking Rae with her.

  Matt is so masculine in her identification that she is referred to throughout the book by masculine pronouns. She is seen by the others as one of the few who may really be innate homosexuals. “You’re lucky, Matt. You’re different from the rest of us. You’re true.”5 In her relationship with Rae, her needs are for manly possession and constant reassurance of her worth. Her uncertainties are expressed in sexual terms. Matt is “thwarted in his struggle to subdue and bind her, to reach in and seize her at the core of her self and feel the full satisfaction of unqualified possession.”6 She does not understand Rae, who is that mystery, the self-possessed woman. Trying to understand herself, Matt questions and explains, “How can you love women like this and not accept yourself as one. But you don’t love yourself unless you’re Judy, you love what you’re looking for, your opposite, your complement. Why should I love me, the mind that can stay detached, ambition, ruthlessness, violence. …”7 Judy is a character presented as an absolute narcissist who saves herself through the week, spends the entire day preparing herself for Saturday night when she’ll choose a new lover, only for the night. All the others are portrayed in roles similar to those of Matt and Rae.

  There is Steve, the gym teacher in a girls’ school, who holds herself aloof in the bar. At school she speculates about her students, the percentage of lesbians among them, the causes, “too simple to put it down to arrested development.”8 She begins a flirtation with the new French teacher, whom she refers to as “the little French piece.”9

  Jonny and Sadie are factory workers. Sadie, in a long reverie to dispel the boredom of work, explores their relationship in terms that could be applied to any young working-class couple, except for the lack of children. Matt has explained to Sadie that she loves Jonny because with Jonny there is no fear of pregnancy. Sadie recalls a scene from her childhood in which she witnessed a frightening and painful birth.

  Not all of the characters are connected with the bar. Marie Pacey is the mother of one of Steve’s pupils as well as a girlhood friend of Matt’s. In love with Matt without understanding it, she is separated from Matt at the end of school. Married, hating intercourse with her husband, she understands only, “somewhere id lost my chance when i hadn’t even known what it was.”10 Her husband agrees, after she is pregnant, never to touch her again as long as she asks no questions about his evenings out. Giving birth to a girl, Marie Pacey sees a “wizened image of your own anger that will look back at you.”11 Her husband’s response is “trust you to have a girl you know i wanted a boy. what use are girls to anyone look at you.”12 Marie Pacey loves her child, lives through her, but she goes on being restless. Finally, after she sees Steve at a parent-teacher meeting, she is so disturbed she tries to kill herself. Recovering in a rest home, she watches a woman gardener work and is reassured without really yet admitting the sexual identity she must come to terms with.

  Bill is that woman gardener who lives an isolated life with an ex-actress named Feathers. Together they breed dogs.

  Stag is a wartime friend and lover of Rae’s, a rich woman who owns hotels. A weekend visiting her makes Matt come to terms with her class jealousy and real ambitions. The relationship between Stag and Matt is a game of competitive power. Against Stag’s money Matt puts her intelligence. Against the past intimacy Stag shares with Rae, Matt courts the woman Stag lives with now. The degree to which each one struggles to control competitive hostility is not a measure of latent femininity but of civilization.

  One of the sections of the book moves not only outside the range of the bar world but back into the eighteenth century, in mock eighteenth-century style, to tell the tale of Charlotte turned Charles and her Mrs. Brown.

  The great variety of styles and characters creates a surface impression of far greater complexity than there actually is in the book, for the world beyond the House of Shades seems no more open to the whole personality of a character like Matt than the bar itself. The reason is that self-pity is not created but simply expressed there. The tragedy of Carl, a close friend of Matt’s killed in a bike accident, occurs whether there is a bar or not. Chris, Carl’s lover, explains to Matt, “And that was the last thing I could do for her, see that they never found out. So I made a pile of her drag clothes, photographs, papers and Sandy took them away. And you know what hurt me most, Matt? I wasn’t allowed to identify her. They sent for one of the family. And it brought it all home to me just how outside we are.”13 The self-scorn and lack of sympathy expressed in the bar—“The silly bitch has cut her wrists in the lavatory. Sometimes I think we’re not worth saving”14—is not produced there but brought in, the psychological mud on the shoes from the outside world.

  In another microcosm Maureen Duffy has created, the male-identified woman fares even worse. Rites is a one-act play set in a public women’s washroom. Run by a prostitute who spends her spare time reading stock market trends and by an admiring, sexless, and aging charwoman who dreams only of her boss’s promotion to an even larger washroom, the space quickly fills up with girls on their way to the office, an old tramp who eats her breakfast locked into one of the cubicles, a pair of widows, and a couple of well-dressed women with a life-sized boy doll, whose presence is challenged by the washroom attendant. The provocative and hostile conversation that has gone on among the women is suddenly focused on the child and then on his penis, a rite interrupted by the attempted suicide in one of the cubicles of a woman who has obviously been jilted. The rage of all these women against men develops into a frenzy, at the height of which a man appears in their midst, and they kill him. Only then is it discovered that the man is really a woman in drag.

  Maureen Duffy offers her own moral judgment in the introduction of the play. “All reduction of people to objects, all imposition of labels and patterns to which they must conform, all segregation can lead only to destruction. In the very moment when the women have got their own back on men for their type-casting in an orgasm of violence they find they have destroyed themselves and in death there is certainly no difference.”15 After the women pitch the body into the incinerator, one of the office girls rationalizes, “She couldn’t have been happy,” to which another responds fiercely, “Why not? She was alive.”16 Maureen Duffy would have us purged of all our own hidden hostilities by watching them acted out on the stage, unable to dissociate ourselves by dismissing the play “as merely shocking goings on in the ladies’ loo and nothing to do with me thank you.”17 But the play itself reduces people to objects, stereotypes of all the ugliness of heterosexual women whose revenge is ultimately self-destruction, but with a difference: the only one actually destroyed is the one trying to escape femininity altogether, to travel in the disguise of what the others worship and hate. It is hard to escape feeling an indictment against women, rather than simply against labels. The House of Shades, compared to the ladies’ washroom, is a place human and humane.

  The ideal, heterosexual love, is offered in Wounds, another kaleidoscopic novel of many loosely associated characters, all in various stages of failure, from the old woman who shouts, “I am old and ugly but once I had red hair and pretty teeth and I have been loved by the most handsome women in the world,”18 to the aging playwright who “should settle for sex and art and leave love to the in
nocent because he would never be old enough to be innocent”19 with the young boys he attracts. Punctuating each of these dramas is the continued love-making of a man and woman, whose physical acts become metaphors for loving relationship. They say things to each other like “The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It’s a perpetual wound,”20 and “Love is the only effective counter to death.”21 But enclosed in a room, cut off from all other life, they seem more like an ironic advertisement than an ideal, an animated billboard of the Freudian fairy tale, to taunt and diminish the little, live failures who move through the book.

  That’s How It Was is Maureen Duffy’s first novel, less sophisticated in technical experiment and less threatened by theories of human behavior than the books she has written since. It is the story of Paddy Mahoney, the illegitimate daughter of Louey, who determines to raise her as best she can on welfare in the various slums of southern England. Louey is tubercular, and, when she is hospitalized, Paddy is sometimes cared for by relatives, sometimes put in a home, sometimes billeted with neighbors. A bright and self-sufficient child, Paddy survives her environment because her mother loves her and encourages her to use her mind. “I was just a girl and life offered only things I despised, houses, children, security, housework. I had to pass. I had to. I had to be different. There must be more to life than this or there wasn’t any point in being born. And there had to be a point for her sake.”22

  Mistakenly hoping to better their life, Louey marries Ted Willerton, whose four children then materialize from another marriage. Seven of them live in a two-room house without plumbing. Ted’s children are illiterate dullards, who fight among themselves, live mostly in the streets, steal, and, though Louey tries to instill in them some of the values of honesty and education she has given Paddy, they are too old and ill equipped to change, only wear down Louey’s very limited physical reserves. Paddy, fiercely resenting them all, but reserving special hatred for her stepfather, is torn between her anger at them and her love for her mother, whom she tries to protect as she can. Paddy has a life at school which in some measure compensates for the grim life at home, but, when she falls in love with one of her teachers and spends time with her, Paddy is always aware of her mother at home, of the dream she has of one day being able to provide for her mother and take her away from Ted.