The Mask of Sanity

by Hervey Cleckley

  Soon her friend’s husband had to go elsewhere for several months of work on a research project. She welcomed the opportunity to give up her own quarters and stay in the house of this wonderful and inspiring guide and benefactress. Despite the complications and interruptions of her hostess’s two small children (whom the patient seemed to enjoy playing with and to love), there were greater opportunities for listening together to symphonies, for reading aloud Shakespearean plays, and for discussion over a few highballs until long past midnight.

  She shared her friend’s room and soon was sleeping in the same twin bed with her, both finding the nearness and the contact delightful. Lying together in the dark, thrilled with evidences of being understood and loved, she liked to talk and to listen and to have close physical contact with her idol. Both women made lively and articulate by highballs and by delight, found it easy to murmur to each other all sorts of things concerning admiration and love and what each meant to the other.

  From close embraces, to kisses, to mutual masturbation, things proceeded without our patient’s giving very distinct thought to whether or not there was anything homosexual, anything perverse or queer about such practices. The older and more sophisticated of the two was the other’s symbol of the ideal. What she approved and considered natural and delightful was almost automatically accepted by the other.

  Furthermore, she got the strangest new delights from what happened while they were in bed together. She had, as a matter of fact, not only erotically exciting sensations but distinct orgasms from the digital caresses and stimulations of the other. She did not think of herself and the other woman as something equivalent to husband and wife or as one pretending to be a man and the other acting the part of a woman under such circumstances. Both were women, in the patient’s feelings, but there were wonderful and unforeseen revelations, sensual as well as intellectual and otherwise, in all this prized experience.

  She was not preoccupied with resentment toward the absent husband. Without quite knowing why, she would not have wanted him to know every detail about what she and his wife did. But he did not loom in her concepts as a distinct rival, nor did their mutual masturbation seem to intrude distinctly into the areas supposedly reserved for husbands and wives. She was more concerned about the fact that her main source of happiness would be curtailed, that she could not be so often with this wonderful person after the husband returned and she went back to her regular quarters.

  The sensuous feelings and the startlingly delightful and new experience of orgasm were all tied in with her affection and love and unstinted admiration for the wonderful person who had brought so much to her. She had learned something about homosexuality not only from books but from her efforts several years earlier as president of a students’ honorary society at college to help a freshman who had shown what seemed to her serious and regrettable tendencies of this sort. It sometimes occurred to her that what she and the totally wise friend did might be regarded as perverse or like the misdeeds of that girl at college, but such thoughts had little more force in her evaluation of the acts than some farfetched philosophic abstraction which might be literally true in syllogisms but without relation to actualities of experience. These sexual activities were a private and secret delight, one part of the many things they shared and into which no one else entered.

  As she discussed this matter, freely and without hedging or apparent shame, she seemed to have little or no fear that she might be homosexual and felt that she was probably not what this term indicates in its reference to full and fixed lesbian women. Her physically erotic relations with the other woman had been in some respects a substitutive practice, though what it might stand for was not well formulated among her goals. Her reaction, in certain aspects, seemed akin to what a normal, adolescent boy might experience in masturbating while immersed in vivid fantasies of intercourse with the image of the girl he has chosen as a sweetheart and wants someday to marry.

  There was, however, an important difference. She had no definite referential imagery in which a male figure could be located as the personally and fully embraced partner in the world of delightful feelings that were evoked. There was no channellized structure, as in the example of the romantically masturbating boy, to conduct her aspirations toward a real and well-defined goal. Although there were resemblances, her experience apparently lacked features essential to the persistent pattern of true homosexuality. In the first rewarding intimacy she had experienced with another human being, this delightful and exciting physical contact seemed wonderful, and she found it in no way disturbing or objectionable.

  Such a situation could scarcely have arisen for a man under similar circumstances without vastly more pathologic actualities and consequences, for in the virgin male genital aims are nearly always clearer and less ambiguously merged in general and nonsexual personal relations.

  After some months of what had been the most delightful time in this patient’s life, her beloved friend and idol announced that their relations must be terminated. The young girl could not conceive of any valid reason for such a decision. The articulateness of her preceptor failed at the task of making clear or acceptable what was, nevertheless, made final. Soon afterward this indescribably wise and wonderful being moved away, her husband having been given a position much to his advantage at a university in another section of the country.

  The young lady we are concerned with was puzzled, sad, and hurt beyond anything that she could express or explain. After having for the first time in her life exposed and offered her intimacy, love, adoration, longings, and everything else that she had heretofore automatically and fearfully guarded, she found herself rejected. Her emotional commitment had led to loneliness and frustration and to the shame and hurt of being discarded.

  It was not difficult for this intelligent girl to begin discovering that without knowing it she had for some time been deliberately and actively engaged in the process of throwing herself away. She had been thrown away by the only person to whom she had offered and fully given herself. Unable to make verbal comment on her hurt and betrayal, she formulated and, in another way, expressed comment in behavior that spoke with more authority than any language. She began to understand that by so damaging herself she was, not in the mere light symbols of language but in terms more concrete, trying to explain to the one who had rejected her how much this rejection hurt. This could not be adequately conveyed without pain also to the one her desperate message must reach. The banishment inflicted by this other, she had already found, constituted a wall that could be penetrated, if at all, only by an emotional projectile of great traumatic force.

  Going back a little farther, let us consider the situation of this girl prior to her meeting with the older woman. Since she could first remember, it had seemed obvious to her that civilization was devised in such a way as to give the human male many undeserved advantages over the human female. Little boys could wander off on tree-climbing, hiking, or other adventures, but little girls were more restricted. Boys became airplane pilots, surgeons, generals, whereas nearly all women, as she saw it, became wives who day after day performed routine household tasks, washed dishes, nursed babies, and seldom got out to have any fun, even at night.

  Furthermore, husbands did not seem to find them attractive. Even the funny papers joked about how dull a wife was as compared to the stenographer and showed husbands on every possible occasion gleefully slipping away from prosaic and dowdy figures at home to get “a night out with the boys.” As her life progressed, she had steadily encountered facts to corroborate the implications of an old saying fairly common in her childhood, “Why you can’t get any more lift out of that than out of kissing your own wife.”

  When she had wanted to be a general or a cowboy leader in those early games in the park, the others laughed at her and said she was only a girl. Facts such as her being able to run faster and climb better than some of the boys did not matter. No, the decisions were all determined by the irrelevant point about her being a
girl.

  She had to stay at home sometimes and help her mother with the dishes or other tasks. Daddy, after reading the morning paper, went off and stayed the whole day among all the excitements of town. There is no need to give much from the thousands of incidents, real and familiar to anyone, which she encountered and from which she logically derived her distorted convictions that active and exciting lives are open to men whereas wives are expected to live in the circumscribed orbit of a house, carrying out repetitious tasks and dull, petty, routines and often becoming creatures of convention, careless of their looks, shapeless, and uninspiring.

  In her reactions to these formulations she did not derive envy and admiration for man as compared with woman. It was not through any real virtue or superiority that these males had all the interesting work and freedom and fun. It was because of conventions and rules, based not on facts but on tradition, that men had this advantage.

  They were often smug enough and biased enough to think they deserved such a break. Women, not taking the trouble to think things through, placidly accepted such an arrangement. She did not want to be a man or more like a man, but she was determined to evade as much as possible these artificial impediments. Instead of throwing her life away in a meek gesture to empty conventions, she would go after the interesting things. The success and independence she might achieve, the fun she might have, would, aside from their intrinsic value, be a comment on the fallacies she had detected and would oppose.

  Under hypnosis and narcosis as well as in unaltered awareness, she gave much detail that filled in a convincing picture of her childhood environment. Hundreds of memory items emerged to disclose her father not as cruel but as an arbitrary and moody disciplinarian in small matters. Her parents did not (to her) seem to find intimacy, fulfillment, or very much real fun together in their marriage.

  The mother (in her eyes) lived in trivial activities and was bored, boring, and fretful but unaware of the reasons. The patient’s outlook and aims had slowly taken form in reaction to the model of marriage she found, or thought she found, in her home. As she grew, she discovered in her general surroundings thousands of items which seemed to support and which further shaped opinion and inclination.

  It should not be assumed that the marriage of these parents was all that it appeared to the little girl. Details of it which she encountered at susceptible moments might be accurate without being representative of the whole. So, too, as she grew and observed the world about her, she found facts which continued to confirm her early evaluations.

  Anyone can find dull housewives and distant, bored husbands. Everyone knows that the immature male may take advantage of the “double-standard” and see how far he can get with girls under the pretense of love, only to react with the precise and unflattering opposite of love in degree proportionate to their acquiescence. During an early discussion of the disadvantages of marriage for girls, the patient cited as evidence two young couples who often went together on automobile trips, the two husbands sitting together in front, the wives ignored on the rear seat. All the observations given as evidence by the patient seemed to be true and accurate. Her interpretations also seemed, for the specific instances she cited, correct.

  If a man and a woman value so much the opportunity to be together on dates, why should they almost immediately after marriage so change as to choose even a person of the same sex to sit by in preference to the mate? Custom or courtesy might suggest that, as in seating arrangements at dinner parties, husbands and wives, in this limited sense, be swapped about. But can anything except the absence of basic sexual and personal interest make men turn regularly to men and women to women on occasions when married couples gather? The patient found in scores of incidents she had observed indications that these couples were not particularly close to each other or having much fun together.

  Among other examples she pointed out how often at parties the husbands drifted or sometimes almost raced for the kitchen, where, in purely male company, they spent much of the evening, frankly oblivious of the wives stranded together in the living room.

  I could not but agree with her that such behavior was consistent with and might indicate serious attrition, if not indeed the unhappy and untimely death, of what it is natural to seek in heterosexual love relations. Her basic concept can, perhaps, be conveyed by a joke she told. It is an old joke, but expressive:

  A husband who habitually paid little attention to his wife did not even look up from his paper when she came down one day in a new and breathtaking dress. She tried in vain to make him notice and admire it. She was a good-looking and voluptuous woman and resented being ignored. Not succeeding in getting the husband to raise his eyes even momentarily to regard her, she ran back upstairs. Resolved to shake him from his lethargy, she stripped and came down again, completely naked. Announcing she was on her way downtown to shop, she paused for his appraisal. Finally she succeeded in getting him to glance up from the paper. Before returning to peruse it, he indifferently remarked, “Umph! Need a shave, don’t you.”

  Among her married friends she had observed many wives who received strict allowances dealt out to them as if they were children or servants by husbands who would not even divulge to their mates and reputed equals any fundamental information about the family’s finances. Everything concerning their business affairs, to which these husbands seemed to devote most of their lives and interest, was withheld from wives who were, the patient felt, appraised as too inconsequential or undeserving to share in these matters sacred to the male world.

  Many of her conclusions might apply correctly to the specific cases from which she drew them. She had, apparently, with precocious accuracy, sensed and ferreted out negative points in specific husbands and specific wives that others, accepting more optimistic generalizations, would have overlooked. Her ideologies and the general shaping of her aims and actions had been strongly conditioned by the implicit assumption that all marriage was necessarily what she had seen it to be in many instances. Argument with her about this overgeneralization would scarcely have altered her fundamental outlook.

  In the course of time, however, as she brought up the concrete details of experience with increasing amounts of affect, she became aware of distortions and evasions formerly screened by her dogmatic ideologies. Eventually she could see (and feel) that it was her mother (or the image she had made of her mother as a child) which she had rejected and that this did not demand rejection of the feminine role itself. She could see also that while she had determined not to accept all the limitations she believed inherent in woman’s status sociologically, this distortion had not extended into deeper biologic levels. She had not, in turning from the mother, identified herself with her father and determined to be a man. Had this occurred, far more serious problems might have arisen for this girl.

  Marriage was very strongly rejected as an ambition. Reactions to her mother and to her father apparently combined in this negative force and contributed to a distorted response to this major feminine role. She examined again and felt again the effects upon her of her older brother. It was he for whom money had to be saved so that he could go to medical school. She recalled that at first she had been very fond of him and proud of him. As she continued to reorient herself to what had appeared to be preference on the parents’ part for his ambitions, while deprivations were demanded of her so that he could attain the independence of being a physician, she became better able to see these things in the general context of her life.

  Incidents scorned at the time and since then neglected, when now recalled and reappraised, indicated parental pride in her also. It became possible for her to see that this had not been sufficiently valued by her because it was pride in her as a girl and for qualities unlike those she specifically needed for competition with her brother.

  It is impossible to set down here all the myriad events that came up for this girl’s reappraisal or the affective reactions and shaping of attitudes that, seen as a whole, seemed to account for her rej
ection of marriage and fear to give herself in any deep, personal intimacy with men. Nothing that is said as a generalization about her life pattern can convey what emerged as she reproduced it in the concrete form of innumerable incidents. Nor would any explanation in general terms have been useful in her efforts to reorient herself as were the explanations she herself gradually arrived at.

  The sexual relations with men, begun several months after the break with her lesbian partner, soon convinced her of something she had not wanted to admit at the time—that the sexual organs of man and woman are appropriately designed for contact and work together in such a way as to get better sensual results than anything possible with two female bodies, which are not anatomically equipped for such a feat. She was forced to admit this although she continued to deny all possibility of other genuine and happy relations between man and woman.

  This at first was a blow to her, for she sought to preserve in idealized perfection her concept of the relation with the other woman as being in every respect superior to anything possible between woman and man. She had jealously guarded those feelings and impulses which, in being bestowed, constitute falling in love. In her sexual activities with the series of men she went to unusual lengths in trying to keep all relations and contacts of any importance to herself and to let her sensations remain confined, localized, and impersonal. Capacities to love another, to give genuine intimacy (herself) to another, drawn out initially by the homosexual partner, were less deeply buried than heretofore and hence demanded more vigilant protection from arousal by man.

  In having intercourse with men she continued also her old competition with the other sex, rejecting them as lovers or needed complements to herself in personal matters, but seeking to outwit them or to find some basis, however farfetched and flimsy, on which she could mock them in their sexual tactics.