by Jane Rule
One of the reasons Claire Morgan’s The Price of Salt has held pride of place for so many lesbians is that Therese and Carol are finally more courageous against odds even tougher, for Carol has not only a vengeful husband to contend with but the loss of a much-loved child. On a trip west, Carol and Therese are followed by private detectives until enough evidence is gathered to deprive Carol not only of custody of her daughter but visiting rights as well. Confronted with that danger, Carol cuts the trip short and leaves Therese alone waiting for word that does not come for too long a time. Therese, under the impression that Carol has completely denied her, returns in bitterness to find that Carol has lost her daughter and much of her old confidence. At first Therese cannot accept the change in Carol or overcome her own sense of betrayal, but, loving Carol, she finally chooses to live whatever life they can have together. The price has been very high, not because they have been wicked and need to be punished, but because Carol has genuinely loved her child and been vulnerable to legally sanctioned revenge.
When the emphasis shifts from moral depravity to moral courage, the preoccupation with masculine and feminine roles so evident in nearly all earlier fiction drops away. Some writers have felt required to dismiss it clearly as Claire Morgan does when she has Therese observe, “She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that.”25 In A Place For Us, Patience thinks about Sarah, who has been raised as a boy, “Time enough later to teach her that it’s better to be a real woman than an imitation man, and that when someone chooses a woman to go away with it’s because a woman is what’s preferred.”26
In Daughters of the Moon, by Joan Haggerty, though the minor male characters are still preoccupied with ambivalent sex, the two central characters, Anna and Sarah, are without any self-consciousness, simply women together, abundantly female because they are both pregnant, Anna by a man on the island where they are living, Sarah by a husband grown so indifferent to her that she is taking an extended holiday to decide what to do. Anna is merely surprised when she realizes she is attracted to Sarah. “It was the novelty of the attraction that captivated her as much as the woman herself.”27 Sarah is far less certain at first, reluctant to involve herself with a woman so apparently detached from a daily rhythm of living, from ordinary responsibility or purpose. Sarah is a writer, self-disciplined and tidy, who still holds onto the hope that somehow she and her husband will be reconciled. Even after she and Anna establish a household together and live intimately in love and involved in their changing bodies, she says, “Afterwards, you know, afterwards, I often feel like being fucked by a man too …You tune me, d’you see, and then I want a man to counter me, but we together, we just keep traveling to strung out space. We can’t comfort each other.” Anna replies, “You comfort me. Stop projecting.”28 They run out of money and depend on Anna’s ex-lover to supply them with what food he can find until, close to the time the children are expected, Sarah decides that she must return to England, where she finds her husband simply embarrassed by the fact of her pregnancy. Her long, hard delivery is paralleled by Anna’s, but Sarah is in a hospital with her mother in attendance. Anna is alone, and, once she has delivered herself of her child, she dies. For Sarah, the writer, Anna lives on, requiring her story to be told. Sarah, the woman, confronts her guilt and grief, the betrayal of the person who both loved and needed her.
These are new moral terms, in which old loyalties are challenged, the responsibilities of love no longer clearly limited to heterosexual convention. One of the most thought-provoking novels recently published is Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Odd Girl Out. Anne and Edmund, a childless couple happily married for ten years, agree to have Arabelle, Edmund’s much younger stepsister, for an extended visit. She is a beautiful waif of a girl, wealthy, traveled, about whom no one has really cared at all. A problem to her much-married mother, a sexual toy for her various stepfathers, she has not much sense of herself or what to do with her life. After a brief affair with a married actor, she has an abortion and that evening presents herself to Edmund and Anne without warning, interrupting their plans for a quiet tenth anniversary the following night. Contrite about her thoughtlessness, wanting them to like her, Arabelle gives each of them handsomer and more expensive presents than they have chosen for each other. But Anne and Edmund are both kind and secure people, and, though they are sometimes inconvenienced by Arabelle’s impractical attempts to fit into their lives, they are also charmed by her and sorry for her. Anne is determined to give her a home in which she can finally feel welcomed and loved.
Edmund, on a day in London with Arabelle, takes her out to see a house his real estate firm is handling, and in the garden by a lake he finds himself making love to her. Sexually inexperienced when he married Anne, sexually content with her, he can think only that he has fallen deeply in love with Arabelle. She, on the other hand, says she did it only to make him care for her more; she is not in love. She simply loves them both and wants them to be happy. While Edmund tries to rationalize some way of going on with his relationship with Arabelle without hurting Anne, Arabelle flatly refuses any suggestion of arrangements to deceive Anne. Before Edmund has time to sort out what he can do, he is sent to Greece on business. Anne would have gone with him, but she’s come down with glandular fever; so she stays at home, lovingly nursed by Arabelle.
The pleasure they take in each other’s company deepens. Anne, who has been physically shy around Arabelle, learns to enjoy being tended, and she is surprised and pleased at Arabelle’s admiration of Anne’s large breasts, about which she has always been self-conscious. She is also aware that Edmund would have hated her sickness, struggled to keep from showing his impatience, while Arabelle uses it as an excuse to give Anne expensive presents and concoct delicious drinks and meals. They talk cheerfully about the limitations of men in a relationship, and neither is really disappointed when Edmund has to extend his time in Greece, where he is discovering the pleasures of male privilege. Arabelle, far more worldly than Anne, is perfectly well aware of the attraction that is growing between them, but she hesitates. “I mustn’t spoil things, she thought: Anne—like most people, would think something was wrong with her if I could make her happy as Edmund clearly can.”29 Inevitably, they make love, and by the time Edmund finally returns, not only he but Anne is trying to work out how a new and loving relationship can go on.
At this moment Arabelle confronts them with the fact that she is pregnant with Edmund’s child, a shock which immediately brings both Edmund and Anne to confession-accusation. They are both stunned by a sense of betrayal. Arabelle suggests, too aware of their reaction to feel hopeful, “Perhaps if we really did love one another, you would be glad about it; it would be just another good thing in our lives.”30 Neither one is capable of any such arrangement. Edmund offers to pay for an abortion, a gesture hardly necessary, given Arabelle’s far greater wealth. Arabelle leaves, aware that she has caused misery where she wanted only to be loving.
Edmund and Anne, left alone to confront what has happened, don’t know what to do until Edmund, with an honesty the size he can cope with, confesses his sexual adventures in Greece, and Anne, with a generosity the size she can cope with, forgives him.
In a side plot the wife of the young actor Arabelle briefly lived with kills herself after a long struggle to deal with two small children without money after her husband deserted her, an event which may give readers the moral out the size they are looking for. It is easy to label Arabelle a destructive disaster in a world that might otherwise muddle along at various levels of domestic possibility, for, even if Anne and Edmund seem culpable, in a way, surely the suicide victim of Arabelle’s thoughtless affair is not. Anne and Edmund, after all, couldn’t have coped with so bizarre an arrangement in their basically stable and conventional life. But the moral equation stays uncomfortable. Might not, after all, people really love one another? Well, no, not given the commitment to convention presen
tly subscribed to.
In all ranges of fiction, questions of this moral sort are being raised and sometimes more defiantly answered. Bertha Harris’ first two novels, Catching Saradove and Confessions of Cherubino, have both the brilliant verbal surface and the preoccupation with grotesque sexuality which characterize Djuna Barnes’s work, but emerging from absurdist farce is a new innocence. The childhood female lovers in Confessions of Cherubino, for instance, after having been separated by their coming of sexual age in a series of crude erotic adventures, are reunited at the end with the suggestion that they may now come to their real and joyful senses in love with each other.
A far less ambitious and more popular book, Marijane Meakers’ Shockproof Sydney Skate has been touted The Catcher in the Rye of the seventies. Sydney is the son of a lesbian mother who has tried to protect him from her own and her friends’ sexual involvements by means of various codes, the most obvious of which is the changing of gender in naming lovers. Sydney has been aware for years of the nature of these relationships, but he politely pretends to the innocence his mother wants for him. He is thoroughly and rather tediously heterosexual, bedding a series of girls who delight him chiefly as vehicles for his acting out of pornographic passages from various current novels. The book is often genuinely funny. The relationship between mother and son is shown to be a good deal better than the more conventional parent-child arrangements which surround them. It is light but clear propaganda against Freudian clichés and laws of custody.
Humor has been rare in fiction about lesbians. That is why readers otherwise politically earnest forgive Louise King the stereotyping of her three main characters: Maurice, the effeminate interior decorator, Lillian, the bull dyke, and Miss Moppet, their mutual and childish charge, in The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies. Lillian leaves Moppet for months at a time, sending only postcards of gorgeous nudes to indicate her whereabouts. Maurice wearies of tending Moppet, being able to go nowhere without taking Emma Hamlet Woodhouse, the turtle, along in a cocktail shaker. But true love triumphs with the return of Lillian, who, together with Maurice, faces the problem of Moppet’s birthday present to Lillian: a horse being kept in the laundry room of their apartment building in New York City.
The existence of the women’s movement and of new women’s presses puts pressure on establishment publishers who are forced to become aware of the wide audience there is for fiction which projects positive images of lesbians. Daughters Inc. brought out Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle in 1973. Already well known in the movement for the part she played in forcing the New York chapter of N.O.W. to face their hypocrisy about lesbians, for her article “Take a Lesbian to Lunch” and other position papers, Rita Mae Brown has written a novel which is also a lesbian/feminist manifesto. For those who think fiction is not the place to sermonize, Rubyfruit Jungle is often too blatantly preachy. Molly, the main character, has been a radical lesbian from birth, refusing all the conventional limitations of being a girl. In play she says, “I got to be the doctor because I’m the smart one and being a girl don’t matter.”31 Faced with the requirement to please others, she counters with, “I care if I like me, that’s what I really care about.”32 These assertions are the sort also to be found in the new, right-minded literature for children being published by feminist presses. There is nothing wrong with them. Nor is there anything wrong with Molly’s sermonizing to a friend who feels limited by her background in what she can do with her life. “It’s always hard no matter who you are, where you come from or what sex you got stuck with—it’s the hardest decision every individual has to make in their life, probably.”33 But the earnestness would weigh heavily if the book were not lifted by arrogant humor, never-mind-the-consequences fury, and transcending tenderness. The kid who won’t be put down by being a bastard, poor, and a girl grows into a young woman who would lose her scholarship and be expelled from college rather than deny her joyful sexual pleasure with her roommate, who would work at the lousiest sort of job in order to have money to continue her education, and battle the male chauvinism of the university where she is constantly frustrated in her attempts to get materials and equipment so easily available to men in the film department. She is perhaps even harder in her judgments on other women than she is on men, for she encounters as much hypocrisy among the women she tries to love as she does among the men with whom she is forced to work. The dean who expels her is obviously a lesbian herself, and Molly does not hesitate to confront her with her own self-protective motives. Nor has Molly any patience with the lovers who refuse to call themselves lesbian while giving her that label. She has a fine satirical time with the sexual fantasies required for the middle-aged to free themselves from either guilt or reality in bed. The film Molly makes of her adopted mother as a thesis for her degree is the device by which Molly transcends the bitterness she might otherwise have fixed on, for the film is the real portrait of a woman who did what she could in a narrow, prejudice-ridden world from which she had no way of escape. At the same time, it underlines the remarkable gifts of defiance and intelligence which have marked Molly for freedom. Rubyfruit Jungle is a far shout from the maimed religious and psychological apology of The Well of Loneliness and, as propaganda, healthier, for protest is a more accurate weapon against bigotry than special pleading. Rita Mae Brown is ready to play without a handicap.
The difficulty of generalizing about changes in attitude from the few books which are breaking away from the old realities of guilt and grief is that, set against them, are many more books which not only still support religious and psychological prejudice but also are more virulent in their condemnation out of fearful and angry reaction to threatened moral codes. If lesbians are beginning to find in fiction a mirror that more truly reflects the great variety of their experience, they are also more exposed to the hostility that vision calls up. A great many people were condescendingly sorry for Radclyffe Hall. People who don’t approve of Rita Mae Brown can only be angry with her. For many it would seem the problems have only been turned up in volume. Fiction will reflect that, too. The greatest question is still how free writers will be to express what they know, how much effect the women’s movement will have, insisting that women’s voices finally be heard, parroting old moralities only if they happen to be parrots, not because they have no other choice.
Recent Nonfiction
OVER THE YEARS SOME books have been written about male homosexuality by male homosexuals, and several books about lesbians have also been written by male homosexuals, but as recently as 1955, Ann Aldrich could get only paperback publication for We Walk Alone, a book about lesbians, and its sequel, We, Too, Must Love, published in 1958. A professed lesbian, Ann Aldrich nevertheless accepts nearly every psychological cliché from Freud to Caprio, and her picture of lesbian life is as sad and seedy, if not as sensational, as any God-fearing heterosexual would like to believe. “The lesbian is the little girl who couldn’t grow up,”1 clinging to her clitoris, in search of her mother, daydreaming into her drink. Not only does Ann Aldrich describe numerous types of lesbians, mainly in New York, revealing their jealous and unstable lives, but she also analyzes Sappho from the fragments of her poems which survive to conclude that she was “as ill adjusted to her plight as any female homosexual and at the same time unwilling to change.”2 Ann Aldrich does believe that any lesbian willing to change can succeed with the help of specialists. Both books are better written than many of the accepted texts, well documented, and requesting nothing but understanding for the lesbian who might then be helped, even cured. Yet, because she admitted she was a lesbian, her books appeared only in cheap paperback editions with lurid, dejected nudes to advertise their content.
In 1971, the McCall Publishing Company commissioned a book which was to be by lesbians about lesbians. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, a couple who had in the 1950s founded the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian organization, and published The Ladder, a magazine for lesbians, agreed to write the book. When they submitted it for publication, the manuscript wa
s rejected because Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin “apparently had no doubts about [their] life style, and that’s impossible.”3 Clearly lesbians even now were going to be allowed to speak for themselves only if they said what had already been said about them, that is: they were sick and guilty, an act which would give both the experts and public opinion greater authenticity, just as confessional case histories do in the psychology books. Lesbian/Woman was brought out instead by Glide Publications in San Francisco, and both the book and the publishing house are alive and well. McCall Publishing Company was bought out by Saturday Review Press. Such morality tales are beginning to invade the consciousness of even better-established and more respectable publishers, who can pick and choose among financial risks. If even small houses without the great machinery of advertising or the reviewing support of the press can make money on books like this one, perhaps censorship should at last come to an end. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon had not only been willing to write honestly about themselves and other women, but they also accepted invitations to speak all across the land to eager audiences, who also bought the book.
It is hard for anyone who came to consciousness only after the advent of the Women’s Liberation movement to understand the depth of courage and sanity which made the writing of Lesbian/Woman possible. For some younger women whose lesbian experience has come about as a result of involvement with the movement, Phyllis Lyon’s and Del Martin’s activities in the 1950s might seem comic or pathetic or even reactionary. For the Daughters of Bilitis, with at first a tiny membership, was in no position to demand rights for its members, most of whom joined only if they could avoid using their real names, and even that act was far too courageous for most women in those days of McCarthy purges when every organization was suspect, every subscription list subject to police seizure, in order to weed out communists and homosexuals, melodramatically linked in plots to overthrow the government. In the 1950s for a woman to consider a career as anything other than insurance ran counter to the great postwar movement to get women back out of the work force into domestic service and child-rearing. In such a climate publishing a magazine with the aims of educating both lesbians and the public to greater tolerance and understanding took far more courage than the rashest of gestures of some lesbians today who, though still not accepted by most conservative women in the movement, have the loud support of thousands. What makes Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin even more remarkable is that they have continued to grow and change. If once they were involved in teaching their sisters “a mode of behavior and dress acceptable to society”4 as a way through fear to understanding, if their relationship was modeled on marriage, complete with male and female roles, they are now freer of the need to mollify or play-act than most of their contemporaries or the young. While the New York chapter of N.O.W. (the National Organization for Women) involved itself in a 1950s-style lesbian purge to keep its image pure for the media, Del Martin was working on a resolution which would finally pass in the fall of 1971 at the Los Angeles meeting: