Part II, “The Boyhood of Lilly Travers,” recounts the hilarious and

Sex Variant Women in Literature

A Historical and Quantitative Survey

by

JEANNETTE H. FOSTER, PH.D.

VANTAGE PRESS · NEW YORK

WASHINGTON · HOLLYWOOD · TORONTO

FIRST EDITION

_All rights reserved, including the right of

reproduction in whole or in part in any form._

Copyright, 1956, by Jeannette Howard Foster.

Published by Vantage Press, Inc. 120 West 31st

Street, New York 1, N.Y. Manufactured in the

United States of America

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 56-9038

FOREWORD

The germ from which this book has grown was implanted nearly forty years

ago when a student council voted one spring afternoon to dismiss two

girls from a college dormitory unless they altered their habits. To one

junior council member several features of the council session made it

memorable. It was an unscheduled meeting and was convened quietly so as

to render it secret. The absence of freshman and sophomore members

indicated a “morals case,” for in those days the younger students were

thus sheltered from evil intelligence. Most striking of all was the

utter incomprehensibility of the issue at stake.

The bewildered junior was herself younger than her peers, and outside

the realm of books was ignorant to a degree incredible today. She had

understood the earlier expulsion of a girl who stayed out all night, for

after all one had simply accepted from childhood that such conduct was

disreputable. But why should locking themselves into their room together

lay two students open to rigorous discipline? To her private

humiliation, everyone else appeared to know. The business was dispatched

with embarrassed speed and by blind allusion rather than open statement.

Her relief was great when opinion favored probation for the brief

remainder of the year. For she could not have cast her vote for

expulsion without understanding the cause.

She left the meeting with her mortifying ignorance undisclosed; but it

rankled. She had never before been the most stupid in any group. And her

curiosity was aroused. The two culprits were to her among the least

attractive girls in college both physically and temperamentally. How

could they be so obsessed with one another as to lock themselves in

their room together at every opportunity? She was determined to learn.

She went to the college library where day after day she had passed the

row of worn tan volumes labeled _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_

without once having the impulse to look inside. Now she explored tables

of contents with the same slight nausea that had accompanied initial

zoology laboratory dissection. Thus she met Havelock Ellis.[1]

Within her subsequent twenty-one years in women’s dormitories as student

or faculty member she had reason many times to be glad of all the study

she was moved to undertake then and later, for it enabled her to help in

averting more than one minor tragedy and to conduct her own life with

some measure of wisdom. At first her study was confined to scientific

and factual works; but as these sometimes cited pertinent belles lettres

its scope gradually widened to include the latter. And, finally, because

science and fact were so well listed in the bibliographic tools for

specialists, and literature so sporadically or not at all, her

investigation came to focus in the area of imaginative writing. The

once-perplexed junior is the present writer, and what follows is a

product of her extended search.

J. H. F.

PREFACE

For more than a century there has been a tendency to worship science as

a key to knowledge and understanding. This preoccupation has served to

determine the limits of potential knowledge. Science has created new

problems almost as rapidly as it has solved old ones.

History records the phenomena of human life. It depends upon

biographical data which are notoriously biased. Virtue or viciousness of

character varies with the prejudice of the biographer. Most of what is

told us in the realm of sexual behavior has been colored by, or has been

a reaction to, social, moral, and religious convention.

Science proceeds by dissecting reality into its component parts. It has

become so preoccupied with the study of these parts that it has failed

to grasp the whole. Moreover, it is dependent upon knowledge which can

be verified only through the use of the senses, with the result that its

adherents have grown sceptical of philosophical and literary

evaluations. Its study of elements and forces has led to abstractions,

to a greater knowledge of unrealities.

In the realm of the sex variant, popular prejudice has reached and

maintained its maximum height. The sex variant has always been with us

and probably always will be. He has been thus classified, partly because

of the arbitrary designations _male_ and _female_. As I have shown in

_All the Sexes_, there are any number of possible gradations of human

behavior—from that of a theoretical masculine to that of a theoretical

feminine being.

A particular person is always a complex of masculinity and femininity.

Sex variants commonly are conspicuous through the exhibition of

characteristics usually associated with the opposite sex. But science

continues to recognize the fiction of male and female and has thrown

little light on the problem.

The present work, SEX VARIANT WOMEN IN LITERATURE, is a unique

undertaking. The author was troubled in her student days by her lack of

knowledge regarding female homosexuality. The need for understanding has

resulted in a long search for evidence in literature, a field with which

she was familiar. She has come to believe that imaginative as well as

scientific writing is a mirror of human sexual behavior which should be

given serious attention.

Some readers may question the propriety or the motives in associating

the personal lives of authors with their writings. Poetry loses some of

its charm through the suggestion that it might be an expression of the

writer’s sexual maladjustment. But as a matter of fact it is beginning

to seem that all imaginative writings are attempts to find libidinous

satisfaction in fantasy. Science may never be able to support this

impression by its laborious methods of securing evidence, but the

author’s review of the literature of twenty centuries leaves little

doubt of its validity.

In SEX VARIANT WOMEN IN LITERATURE the author has called attention to

lesbian tendencies wherever she has found them. She has made no attempt

to estimate what proportion of imaginative writing may be the work of

lesbians. She has not confined herself to literary classics but has

accepted the fact that human beings reveal themselves in whatever they

read and write. Sexual variance shows itself in so many different ways

that all types of imaginative writings have to be studied if we are to

understand human motivations and behavior.

GEORGE W. HENRY, M.D.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For help in pursuing this study the author owes many debts of gratitude,

first to friends who added chance-read titles to the bibliography;

especially to those who had no basic interest in the subject. An even

heavier debt is due all the librarians who made available rare or

restricted material, negotiated interlibrary loans, or merely rendered

much ordinary service. Staffs of the following institutions deserve

special thanks: the Union Catalogs of the Library of Congress and the

Philadelphia Bibliographic Center; the libraries of Bryn Mawr College,

the University of Chicago, Emory University, Indiana University, the

University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Swarthmore College,

and Yale University; the medical libraries of Emory University Hospital,

the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Philadelphia College of

Physicians; the public libraries of Chicago, New York City, and

Philadelphia; and the Library of Congress.

Particular mention is due the special library of the Institute for Sex

Research at Indiana University, of which the author was librarian for

four years (1948-1952). It should be made clear that the present study

is unrelated to that of the Institute, does not reflect its views, and

has not been approved by members of its staff. The librarian’s function

was cataloguing, not sex research, and almost all of the material

considered here was seen elsewhere. Nevertheless, acquaintance with what

may be the largest extant library related to sex served to reassure the

author that she had overlooked no important area of the field she wished

to study. Gratitude is thus due also to the Institute and its Director,

the late Dr. A. C. Kinsey.

CONTENTS

Foreword iii

Preface v

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 11

I. The Ancient Record

Sappho and Ruth 17

Mythology in Classical Authors 24

Later Classical Literature 27

II. From the Dark Ages to the Age of Reason

Introduction 30

Medieval and Renaissance Fiction 33

The Borderline of Reality 39

Neo-Classical Aridity 43

III. From the Romantics to the Moderns

Introduction 51

Precursors of Modern Fiction 54

The Novel Before 1870 60

Evidence from Poets 72

IV. Later Nineteenth Century

Fertility in France 81

Shadow of Feminism 91

Fin de Siècle 99

Summary 114

V. Conjectural Retrospect 116

Louise Labé 117

Charlotte Charke 120

“The Ladies of Llangollen” 122

Karoline von Günderode 124

George Sand 127

Emily Brontë 129

George Eliot 135

Margaret Fuller 136

Adah Isaacs Menken 138

“Michael Field” 141

Emily Dickinson 145

VI. Twentieth Century

Introduction 149

Poetry—French 154

—German 174

—English 177

VII. Fiction in France

Before 1914 193

Post-War Trends 204

VIII. Fiction in Germany

Before 1914 218

Post-War Gleanings 229

IX. Fiction in English

Introduction 240

The Age of Innocence 243

Sophistication and Dispute 255

Post-War Crescendo 269

First Peak: 1928 279

X. Fiction in English (continued)

Sequel to Censorship 288

The Worm’s Turning 307

Above Reproach 314

Another War’s Shadow 324

Second Crescendo 328

Conclusion 342

Notes 355

Bibliographies 362

Index 396

INTRODUCTION

This study is concerned with certain types of emotional reaction among

women as these appear in literature. Its primary aim is neither

psychiatric nor critical; that is, it does not pretend to solve the

problems described nor to pass conventional judgment on the literature

examined, though rudiments of aesthetic and psychological evaluation

will inevitably be included. Its purpose is to trace historically the

quantity and temper of imaginative writing on its chosen subject from

earliest times to the present day, on the assumption that what has been

written and read for pleasure is a fair index of popular interest and

social attitude from one century to another.

Since new viewpoints and methods of study are constantly altering our

sex vocabulary, some preliminary definitions seem advisable. First, what

is meant by _sex variant_? The term was selected because it is not as

yet rigidly defined nor charged with controversial overtones.

Intrinsically, _variant_ means no more than differing from a chosen

standard, and in the field of sex experience the standard generally

accepted is adequate heterosexual adjustment. But even this phrase lacks

precision. Lawyer, clergyman, physician, psychoanalyst, biologist,

sociologist, each will interpret it from his particular viewpoint. The

meaning a layman meets oftenest in the literature of our western

Christian culture is happy marriage and parenthood, but this is nearer

to the churchman’s and sociologist’s ideal than to the working

compromise by which average citizens worry along. Perhaps the highest

practical common denominator is a heterosexual union agreeable to both

its parties and not detrimental to them, to the society in which they

live, or to the continuance of the race.

Possible deviations from this standard are many, but the present study

will stay within the limits set by a work of 1941 entitled _Sex

Variants_,[1] which was devoted to persons having emotional experience

with others of their own sex. Under this head the author included

homosexuals, a term which he confined to those having only such

experience; bisexuals, capable of enjoying relations with both sexes;

and narcissists, attracted to both but able to achieve satisfaction with

neither. The author of this work, Dr. G. W. Henry, was, as his

terminology indicates, a psychiatrist. His case histories provided very

complete personal data, his volumes dealt with both men and women, and

he included only those who had engaged in overt sexual activity. By

contrast, the present study is not strictly oriented to any professional

school of thought. It is limited to relations between women, and

“relations” is substituted for “experience” by intent. Because of the

comparative sex reticence prevailing in our culture, few details of

sexual action are reported in nonscientific writing, and in the

peculiarly discredited field of sex variance authors often avoid even

implying action. For this reason scientists tend to disparage studies

based on literature, but where women are concerned a lack of specific

detail is not too serious. Current scientific work, notably that of Dr.

A. C. Kinsey,[2] has established the fact that women as a whole engage

in much less sex activity than men. But in spite of, or perhaps because

of, this relative infrequency of “outlet,” passionate emotion more often

plays a dominant role in their lives.

Not all women recognize a sexual factor in their subjective emotional

relations, particularly in the intrasexual field so heavily shadowed by

social disapproval. Still they often exhibit indirect responses which

have all the intensity of physical passion and which quite as basically

affect the pattern of their lives. Hence this study includes not only

women who are conscious of passion for their own sex, with or without

overt expression, but also those who are merely obsessively attached to

other women over a longer period or at a more mature age than is

commonly expected. If “commonly expected” is another nebulous phrase, a

species of pooled judgment is available to clarify it. During the past

few decades—that is, since Freudian concepts have become a part of the

common background—most works on sex guidance have taken some account of

homosexuality. These agree in general that passionate attachments during

puberty and early adolescence may lie within the norm, but if occurring

later they constitute variance. Without here debating the absolute

validity of this opinion, one may borrow it as a working criterion.

As to women who habitually wear men’s clothing or even for a part of

their lives pass for men, such transvestism is not in itself variant. To

be sure, many psychoanalysts consider it indicative of latent

homosexuality, but to bring a woman properly within the scope of this

study her transvestism must be accompanied by some evidence of fondness

for her own sex. And, of course, mere sex disguise arising from pressure

of circumstance, a favorite device for plot-complication from ballads to

modern films, has no significance here.

With the meaning of _variance_ clarified, the more familiar terms

_homosexual_ and _lesbian_ need attention. In popular usage the latter

implies overt sexual expression and so it will be used only where such

implication is intended. _Homosexual_ is more ambiguous. Still in good

scientific standing, it ordinarily has not Dr. Henry’s restricted

meaning, but is more nearly synonymous with his _variant_. For this

reason and also because as a noun it is most often applied to men, it

will be employed here only when needed to relieve verbal monotony.

To conclude the business of definition, the word _literature_ has, of

course, two common meanings: belles-lettres, and factual material

relative to a given subject. Here it is used in the former, or, more

accurately, not in the latter sense; that is, the impressive bulk of

scientific writing on sex variance will receive only cursory attention,

to provide background for the matter of primary interest. This latter

comprises mainly fiction, drama and poetry, and might best be termed

simply _imaginative writing_, since many works to be discussed can boast

but little belletristic worth. Even such inferior items, however, are

important in reflecting attitudes and providing quantitative evidence of

interest.

Only a few excursions into the field of biography and memoirs will be

undertaken. Though such works are frequently classed as belles-lettres,

they suffer from too many limitations to provide a profitable hunting

ground. Those claiming factual accuracy are seldom frank enough about

sexual matters to be useful, a condition which applies to virtually all

reputable efforts since the development of scholarly historical method

in the early nineteenth century. As to items written largely for

sensational appeal, months of research would be required in each

separate case to winnow the sparse truth from chaff which might prove

explosive if offered as seriously related to fact. Biographies will be

examined, then, only if their subjects produced ambiguous or enigmatic

literary works possible of clarification by reference to their lives; or

if they were the subject of fictional works which represented them as

variants; or even (very rarely) if persistent rumor or circumstantial

evidence strongly suggests variance. Most of these will be treated in a

separate section specifically labeled conjectural.

For each variant woman considered, as many as possible of the following

points will be noted: physical appearance and temperament, with

particular regard to “masculine” attributes; emotional history,

including any suggestion of etiology for variance; social reactions to

the variant expressed or implied within her milieu; and the author’s

personal attitude. Only occasionally are all these data found together

in any single work, but from the aggregate written within a given period

enough can be gleaned to reflect trends in sentiment from one generation

to another.

* * * * *

The ideal scope of any study pretending to offer a quantitative picture

would be complete coverage of its chosen field, but realistic

considerations limit such an undertaking. Oriental literature, for

example, though cited by a number of scientific writers on variance, is

too unavailable in translation to receive more than passing mention. The

same is true of certain areas in western European belles-lettres, for

only such as have appeared in English, French and German, or have been

adequately reviewed in these languages, are of avail to the present

writer. Even within such limits, of course, completeness is a goal as

elusive as the rainbow’s end. First there is the difficulty of learning

about pertinent items. Scientific material on sex variance has been

recorded adequately in bibliographies, indexes and abstracts in the

fields of psychology and medicine. Imaginative writing has not been

similarly covered. Almost the only systematic listing was that attempted

early in this century in a journal of varying title and

frequency published in Berlin and edited by Magnus Hirschfeld:

_Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen_ (etc.), sponsored by the

Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, 1899-1921. There, under the

heading “Bibliographie der homosexuellen Belletristik,” European titles

were assembled for the years 1899-1917, with a scattering of

retrospective items; however, even for current German material the list

was not exhaustive.

As to the nonscientific bibliographies and indexes, the material listed

under such sexual headings as appear in them is largely factual or

controversial, not imaginative writing. Book reviews sometimes offer

helpful leads, but variant works are all too often ignored altogether,

or are treated with such squeamishness or caution as to obscure their

sexual significance. And, though extensive discussions or notes of

pertinent material occasionally appear in factual works, beginning

roughly with Krafft-Ebing’s _Psychopathia Sexualis_ (1886) and coming

down to Donald Corey’s _The Homosexual in America_ (1952), such

windfalls are sporadic and disconnected. In short, however thoroughly a

student may comb bibliographic sources, he will still happen by pure

chance upon enough items not mentioned there to end with the certainty

of others still undiscovered. He can only hope, then, that better

informed readers will hasten to attack his shortcomings and fill his

lacunae.

Another difficulty is gaining access to titles of which record has been

found. No class of printed matter except outright pornography has

suffered more critical neglect, exclusion from libraries, or omission

from collected works than variant belles-lettres. Even items by

recognized masters, such as Henry James’s _The Bostonians_ and

Maupassant’s “Paul’s Mistress,” have been omitted from inclusive

editions issued by reputable publishers. When owned by libraries such

titles are often catalogued obscurely, or impounded in special

collections almost inaccessible to the public, or they have been

“lost”—most probably stolen—and not replaced. Of Catulle Mendès’s

_Méphistophéla_, for example, which ran to half a dozen printings in

French and as many in English between 1890 and 1910, only four copies

are recorded in the United States among the nearly fifteen million

entries in the Library of Congress Union Catalog.

Despite such handicaps, however, persistent search eventually reaches a

point where the majority of new references prove duplicates of older

discoveries, and the jealous pursuit of new volumes produces diminishing

returns in that the items when located prove of only trifling

significance. Thus, while the degree of completeness attained is not

that of the statistician, it is believed sufficient to provide a

reliable historical overview.

Along with completeness another ideal in work of this sort is to include

nothing which has not been seen at first hand, but because of the

difficulties just outlined some inaccessible works have been admitted

when reviews or other records clearly indicate their importance and

offer an adequate account of their content. For works well known and

easily available in English, such as the poetry of Sappho or Gautier’s

_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, a minimum of résumé will ordinarily be given,

but in the case of scarce items, even when inferior, a fuller account

will be necessary to render any discussion of them intelligible.

A final note on punctuation should be included here. Direct quotation

from original texts in any language, or from published translations of

foreign works, will be indicated by the customary signs. The present

writer’s own translations of foreign material will be enclosed in

_single_ quotation marks.

CHAPTER I.

THE ANCIENT RECORD

Sappho and Ruth

It is natural to begin a study of sex variant women with Sappho, Greek

lyric poet of the early sixth century B.C., whose name and that of her

native island, Lesbos, have supplied our popular vocabulary with its

terms for female homosexuality. Plato, who lived only two centuries

later and probably knew her work almost completely, pronounced her the

Tenth Muse, and, happily, the high quality of her verse led classical

writers to quote it freely. For what with the hazards of time and later

prejudice, the twelve thousand lines she is believed to have written are

now lost save for these quoted excerpts and some fragments on papyri

salvaged during modern excavations in Egypt. The few hundred surviving

lines consist largely of lyrics addressed to girls, among them the

famous “Ode” which has been pronounced the most economical description

of passion to be found in literature. These verses will be considered

presently.

An amazing quantity has been written about Sappho, translating and

re-translating her poetry, eulogizing her poetic genius, and arguing

hotly about her emotional life. An exhaustive bibliography would fill

yet another volume. The ultimate source upon which all the rest is based

may be consulted in the Loeb Classical Library’s _Lyra Graeca_,[1] where

J. M. Edmonds gives (with translations) the text of all that is known of

her poems, taking into account the latest archaeological findings, as

well as every significant allusion to Sappho in classical literature

from Plato to Suidas—some seventy references by more than forty authors.

A more popular volume is that from the Peter Pauper Press (1948)[2] in

which an anonymous compiler has assembled for each of Sappho’s poems and

fragments the two or three soundest prose translations along with

metrical versions by well-known English poets.

As is universally the case with persons so far removed in time, few

details of the poet’s life are established beyond question. The most

comprehensive biographical effort to date is Arthur Weigall’s _Sappho of

Lesbos, Her Life and Times_ (1932),[3] to which its author brings a wide

knowledge of classical languages, history and geography. Although

perhaps too conjectural in parts to satisfy the rigid scholar, this can

be recommended for its careful documentation and its impartiality with

regard to Sappho’s emotional temperament.

The best-authenticated facts seem to be that the poet was a small dark

woman sometimes referred to as “ill-favored,” but endowed with

sufficient grace and personal charm to inspire in several fellow

countrymen and poets a passion which she did not reciprocate. She was of

distinguished family and lived in a time of acute political strife. She

suffered exile twice during her early years: once from Mitylene to the

interior of the island of Lesbos, the second time to Sicily. Weigall

believes she was already well-known as a poet before her Sicilian

sojourn, and suggests that she may have spent her several years on the

island in Sybaris, where she acquired something of that city’s brilliant

sophistication. He places in this period also her marriage, probably of

short duration, and the birth of her daughter Kleis to whom she was

devoted throughout her life. After her return to Mitylene in her middle

twenties she seems to have had constantly about her an ever-changing

circle of younger women to whom she taught the verse-writing, music, and

dancing which constituted a well-born girl’s preparation for marriage.

Some of these pupils or protégées may have lived in her house; it is

known they came from neighboring islands and mainland to be taught by

her.

The incident most often connected with her name is her leap to death

from the cliffs of Leucadia for unrequited love of a young ferryman,

Phaon. Certain references in her work and that of others, however,

indicate that she died peacefully at home at a relatively advanced age.

In fact, modern scholars are inclined to pronounce the whole Phaon

anecdote legendary; but since it persisted for a couple of millennia,

Weigall attempts to demonstrate at least its possible truth. The

tenacity with which the story has survived is undoubtedly due to Ovid’s

incorporating it in his _Heroides_ or Epistles of Heroines (15: “Sappho

to Phaon”),[4] since, thanks to his romantic qualities, he was the most

popular of all classical authors for several centuries after the Revival

of Learning. Ovid’s epistle, though sympathetically written, represents

Sappho as an aging and heartbroken woman deserted by her handsome young

lover and still consumed by passion for him “as by a grass fire.”

Ridiculed by friends, reproached by her brother for such despondency

while she still has a living daughter, desperate over her waning charms,

she can think only of suicide; and all this plaint she pours out in a

letter to the man who has left her without even a farewell. The lament

shows less restraint than any of Sappho’s known verse, for fervent

though that often is, it never lacks dignity. There is always the

chance, of course, that Ovid had access to poems now wholly lost and

never mentioned elsewhere; it is certain that during the centuries

immediately following her death Sappho was the subject of some dramatic

works (possibly satiric) of which we now know only the author’s names,

but which Ovid may have known.

Wherever responsibility lies, there was certainly a legend subsequent to

Ovid’s day that two Sapphos had flourished in Lesbos, one the great poet

and the other a courtesan of undisciplined habits. Weigall believes this

tale was motivated by rumors of heterosexual irregularities, and was

invented by her well-wishers to clear her name of their shadow. But one

must consider also that during the period of this myth’s crystallization

homosexuality in either sex was no longer tolerated as it had been

(within limits) in the earlier Greek period. In Rome its practice among

women was associated only with courtesans; thus it may equally well have

been rumors of lesbian irregularity which gave rise to the conviction

that she must have been a courtesan.

When one turns from personal conjecture about Sappho to the text of her

work, one is left with no possible doubt about her variant tastes.

Consider, for instance, the “Ode” mentioned above:

It is to be a god, methinks, to sit before you and listen close by to

the sweet accents and winning laughter which have made the heart in

my breast beat fast, I warrant you. When I look on you, Brocheo, my

speech comes short or fails me quite, I am tongue-tied; in a moment a

delicate fire has overrun my flesh, my eyes grow dim and my ears

ring, the sweat runs down me and a trembling takes me altogether,

till I am as green and pale as grass, and death itself seems not very

far away ...[5]

Few of her other poems equal this in intensity, and the textual

evidences that its object was a woman (the gender of the name Brocheo

being for a time in doubt) are meager enough so that during the years

when homosexuality was a heinous offense scholars could translate it as

addressed to a man without too great a strain on intellectual integrity.

Discovery of the Oxyrinchus papyri, however, (so called from the

Egyptian town where they were disinterred), added so much variant

material to that already preserved in quotations that it rendered honest

doubt of her variance impossible. In the many poems and fragments

addressed to girls her ardor is evoked oftenest by maidenhood, its

moving aspect not virginity so much as physical grace and delicacy and a

certain light freedom of spirit. In one fragment, indeed, she describes

herself as “eternally maiden” at heart.

There is no comparable evidence with regard to her feeling for men.

Once, to be sure, in attempting to hearten a girl on the eve of her

wedding, she says: “That night was sweet enough to me, neither have you,

dear maid, anything to fear ...”[6] Again she writes to a man: “But if

you love me, choose yourself a younger wife; for I cannot submit to live

with one that is younger than I.”[7] And finally: “If my paps could

still give suck and my womb were able to bear children, then would I

come to another marriage bed with unfaltering feet; but nay, age now

maketh a thousand wrinkles to go upon my flesh, and Love is in no haste

to fly to me with his gift of pain ...”[8] (The complaint: “Sweet

mother, I truly cannot weave my web; for I am overwhelmed through

Aphrodite with love of a slender youth,” cannot be counted as

significant, for it was rendered by one translator even before the

Oxyrinchus discoveries as ending: “a slender maiden.”)[9] These are the

total count of verses referring to heterosexual love, and there is

nothing in them to match the “delicate fire” of the “Hymn to Aphrodite”

imploring the goddess to soften the heart of a girl; or of the “Ode”

quoted above; of the verses to Anactoria and Gongyla and the five poems

to Atthis; or of the numerous fragments that glow with vivid delight in

the beauty and love of girls. Significant too is the poem addressed to

these girls in her old age. She laments her fading charms more bitterly

even than in Ovid’s fictitious epistle, and ends:

But I, be it known, love soft living, and for me brightness and

beauty belong to the desire of the sunlight [are as necessary to me

as light] and therefore I shall not crawl away to my lair till needs

must be, but shall continue loved and loving with you. And now it is

enough that I have your love, nor would I pray for more.[10]

Thus on internal evidence it appears that despite marriage and

motherhood, opportunities for a second match, and much writing of

conventional hymeneal verses, her lifelong preference was for women. Nor

does the meager quantity of surviving verse disqualify such an

assumption. A great part of it consists of quotations chosen by forty

classical authorities on poetic style, who can scarcely be suspected of

mass preference for variant subject matter. The remainder (barring one

seventh century manuscript) comes from papyri which had been used to

reinforce mummy-casings.[11] Altogether, no sounder random sampling

could well be devised.

We have seen that during the later classical period Sappho was suspected

of having been a courtesan, which in those times may also have implied

lesbian activity. Just when lesbianism became the main charge against

her has not been determined. To be sure, a heavy weight of disrepute

fell upon her with the establishment of the Christian church, and led to

the burning of her work more than once. This was ordered first about 380

A.D. by Gregory Nazianzen as the result of an earlier church father

having pronounced her a _gynaion pornikon erotomanes_—lewd

nymphomaniac—but the phrase does not necessarily imply lesbian excess.

Subsequently Scaliger states that her books were burned in 1073 at both

Rome and Constantinople, without specifying the reason.[12] As this date

falls shortly after that on which the church had reimposed strict

celibacy upon its clergy, it may be that society had been made sensitive

to homosexual activity among celibates and turned its suspicion upon her

also. But this last surmise defies proof.

The lesbian controversy became bitter only in the nineteenth century

when homosexuality was a heated issue both in the English-speaking

countries and on the continent, and Sappho’s champions felt impelled to

prove her innocence. The sole outcome of the voluminous quarrel is

certainty that the issue can never be finally resolved without the

unearthing of fresh evidence. There is no specific mention of active

lesbianism in her verse. By way of implication there are two or three

references to her girls as her own or each other’s _hetaerae_, which,

since it was the common term for _courtesan_, might be taken to connote

physical intimacy. She also mentions more than once the “pure and

beautiful things” they all did together, an emphasis which Weigall feels

may imply that in her day rumor ran otherwise. But her defenders judge

these and a few more tenuous allusions insufficient to support the

charge against her. More definite is Maximus of Tyre’s statement, made

without animus, that three girls (whom he names) were to Sappho what

Alcibiades and others were to Socrates;[13] then there is the epithet

_mascula Sappho_ used by Horace,[14] and last, a reference in Ovid’s

“Epistle” to “a hundred others [feminine] whom I have loved not without

evil imputation.” Certain translators of Ovid, however, omit the _not_,

thus completely reversing the sense of the phrase; thus neither reading

carries any real weight.[15]

It was not until 1909 that so considerable an author as Rainer Maria

Rilke ventured to exalt Sappho’s loves (without discussing their nature)

as nearer the ‘divine intention’ than heterosexual passion, which he

pronounced a ‘temporal interruption’ in the evolution of ideal human

relations. Taking Ovid’s “Epistle” as a virtual translation from some

vanished poem of Sappho’s, Rilke suggests that the original was a lament

not for some actual lover, but for the nonexistent man who could satisfy

her after her less sensual experience with girls.[16]

With this century’s increasing tolerance of all sorts of sexual freedom,

prejudice has softened to a relatively untroubled acceptance of Sappho’s

probable lesbianism, and to an effort to understand, rather than defend,

such behavior. Weigall suggests that one description of her “tiny little

body” implies underdevelopment and unfitness for easy childbearing,

circumstances which psychiatrists consider likely to induce avoidance of

heterosexual relations and motherhood. And Freudians might stress her

devotion to her eldest brother, Charaxus. In two surviving poems she

attacks him so harshly for marrying a beautiful Alexandrian courtesan,

whose freedom he had purchased at great cost, that her vitriolic lines

to him and the epithet “black she-dog” for his wife suggest acute

jealousy as well as contempt.[17]

All this conjecture, like last century’s battles, proves little save the

impossibility of objective judgment until new evidence appears. In

accordance with the temper of our own time, we may leave it that Sappho

was certainly variant, and, quite probably, what modern authorities term

bisexual. She experienced marriage and motherhood, and may even have

enjoyed other heterosexual relationships, but passion for her own sex

inspired most of her poems, to judge from the surviving fragments.

Furthermore these poems have been called by some critics the greatest

love lyrics ever penned.

* * * * *

Though the work of Sappho provides a natural introduction, chronological

precedence must be granted to the biblical Book of Ruth, written perhaps

a few centuries earlier and describing events that antedated King David

by three generations. This great short story, long acclaimed as a

masterpiece of narrative art, is the first of a thin line of delicate

portrayals, by authors seemingly blind to their full significance, of an

attachment which, however innocent, is nevertheless still basically

variant.

Certainly as an “anonymous but exact description of love” there are few

passages in literature to rival Ruth’s appeal to Naomi beginning

“Entreat me not to leave thee ...” To quote it is surely unnecessary,

but let anyone who learned it in childhood, who has never subsequently

considered it in the light of primitive tribal custom, reread it for the

force of Ruth’s willingness to abandon not only her native soil and her

own family but even her God and her hope of burial with her ancestors.

The emotional significance of this passage is reinforced by three others

in the story. Ruth and Orpah had been married “about ten years” at the

time of their widowhood and of Naomi’s decision to return to Israel, so

that Ruth was then at least in her twenties, and her devotion cannot be

counted the clinging of a bereaved adolescent to her bridegroom’s

mother. Orpah, moreover, remained in Moab without more than formal

protest, and with apparently every prospect of finding a second husband

there.

Then when Boaz welcomed Ruth among his gleaners because “it hath fully

been shewed me, all that thou hast done unto thy mother-in-law,” the

girl replied, “Let me find grace in thy sight, my lord, for that thou

... hast spoken to the heart of thy handmaiden.”[18] And, finally, when

by carrying out implicitly Naomi’s clever scheme Ruth was taken as a

wife and bore Boaz a son, “The women said to Naomi ... he shall be unto

thee a restorer of life and a nourisher of thine old age; for thy

daughter-in-law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven

sons, hath borne him.”[19]

Viewed without prejudice, this is a masterly portrait of a somewhat

passive young woman, twice playing the heterosexual role with success,

but dominated by another love at least as compelling as that for the men

she successively married. H. M. and Nora K. Chadwick in their _Growth of

Literature_ point out that “it gives the impression of being written

primarily for feminine circles,”[20] and by comparison with many

treatments of the variant theme it might well also have been written

_by_ a woman.

* * * * *

After Sappho’s poetry and this one Hebrew prose masterpiece, little that

is pertinent to our subject remains from the half dozen centuries

preceding the Christian era. That male homosexuality was, within limits,

an approved pattern in Greek life, and that it occurred in Rome whether

approved or not, especially under the later emperors, are now accepted

facts. About its prevalence among women less is known. From Plato and

Euripides to Ovid, women as individual personalities did not often

figure in well-known classical writing, and of women writers, though

Mary Beard enumerates references to an impressive number,[21] most

traces have vanished. A few fragments, however, and a few allusions to

works never recovered, indicate that female variance existed.

Plutarch, for instance, tells us that Spartan girls under Lycurgan law

received the same athletic training as boys and were encouraged in the

same emotional expression.[22] Havelock Ellis (without citing his

source) mentions Miletus along with Lesbos as favorable to female

homosexuality.[23] The _Greek Anthology_ includes some variant epigrams

of Nossis from the lower Italian town of Locris, an imitator of Sappho,

“one dear to the muses and equal to her.” From the same source we have

Asclepiades’ epigram on the beautiful Dorcion who wore boy’s garments

and “with the chlamys clearly revealing her naked thigh would flash the

fire of love from her eyes,”[24] but this may have been merely a device

to attract male attention since the costume described here was that of

the _ephebi_—male homosexuals. Elsewhere both Ovid and Appolodorus

recount that Caenis of Thessaly, having given herself to Poseidon,

begged that in return she be changed into a man.[25] These last two,

indicating nothing more specific than transvestism and dissatisfaction

with a female role, are not too significant. Equally outside our scope

because in the category of erotica, but written and illustrated by

women, are lost manuals on erotic techniques of all sorts written

respectively by Elephantis and Philaenis. The illustrations from the

latter’s work are said to have been widely copied in the bedroom art of

contemporary sophisticates.[26]

Weigall suggests that two of Sappho’s protégées, like her, celebrated

love for women in their verses.[27] One is the Gyrinno to whom she was

particularly attached, who died at nineteen. Weigall identifies her

fairly plausibly with Erinna, a known poet from the island of Telos near

Rhodes, whose work was highly regarded in her day, although only one

poem of hers is known by name and all but a few lines are lost. These

lines, however, lament the death of a loved girl, Baucis. The other

poet, more certainly identified, is Damophyla of Pamphilia, who is known

to have stayed with Sappho and to have written love poems and hymns to

Artemis in imitation of her great model’s verse.

Mythology in Classical Authors

Secondary evidence that interest in female variance continued through

the period is found in the myths as recounted by Greek and Latin writers

at the beginning of the Christian era, though details of these stories

are probably more characteristic of the writers’ own times than of

earlier centuries. One finds as much variety in different authors’

treatment as is found between Malory’s and Tennyson’s versions of the

Arthurian legends. From any great compilation such as the _Mythology of

All Nations_ or Fraser’s _Golden Bough_ one learns that in all the

interrelated Mediterranean mythologies there was at least one goddess

among whose attributes were one or more of the following: virginity,

aversion to male sexual approach, some masculinity in dress or interests

(such as warfare or the hunt), intense fondness for maiden devotees, and

a strict requirement of maidenhood in the latter. One finds also

persistent legends of Amazons, exclusively female groups who suffered

men only for procreative ends and made active war against the other

sex[28] (cf. a random news note, April 1951, of a precisely similar

legend from an island off the coast of Japan).[29] It is impossible to

date the origin of these myths or to secure historical substantiation of

the mores they reflect. But anthropologists assure us that female

homosexuality is known in most primitive societies (e.g., there is a

North American Indian legend of physical intimacy between two women

which resulted in an amorphous birth),[30] and it seems likely that

variant detail was current in early oral tradition but was omitted by

writers to whom such phenomena was antipathetic, or eliminated by later

censorship.

A comparison of the later classical writers supports this view. In Book

XI of Vergil’s _Aeneid_ one of the vivid personalities is Camilla,

leader of a cavalry troop which figures brilliantly in the military

action and of whose members many, if not at all, were women. Of her

favorite comrade-in-arms, Camilla says only that she was like a sister

to her. The goddess Diana is described as loving Camilla long and

intensely, and, when the latter is slain by a sly and unheroic man,

Diana lends her own bow and arrows to another protégé, Opis, so that

this demigoddess may avenge the favorite’s death. But there is no

mention of intimacy between the goddess and either Opis or Camilla.

Similarly the conscientious chronicler Apollodorus reports between

Artemis and her nymph, Callisto, a great fondness terminated by the

girl’s lapse from virginity;[31] and Iphigenia, whom Artemis rescued

from the altar upon which her father was about to sacrifice her, was

equally cherished.[32] Of Athene and her boon companion, Pallas, he

tells us that in their girlhood they were so equally matched in the

practice of arms that Zeus felt obliged one day to interpose his aegis

between them lest his daughter be slain. As a result, Athene’s thrust

killed Pallas, whereupon, overcome by grief, Athene herself fashioned a

wooden statue of her friend, wrapped it in the aegis, set it up beside

that of Zeus, and honored it as she did his image. Hence her later

epithet, Pallas-Athene.[33] Apollodorus later illustrates Athene’s

antipathy to the male by the Hephaestus story.[34] But with all these

suggestive incidents he never mentions active variance in the goddess.

Ovid, on the other hand, offers two reports of variance. That it was not

a personal obsession with him is proved by his treatment of those

devotees of Diana, Atalanta and Daphne. Though the latter was so averse

to the male that she prayed to be free of the beauty which made gods and

men pursue her and was transmuted into a laurel tree,[35] no woman

enters her story. The same is true of Atalanta,[36] “maidenly for a boy,

boyish for a maiden,” her plainly dressed hair “caught up in one knot,”

and a bow and quiver part of her usual costume. The story is well-known

of her evading marriage by challenging all suitors to a footrace in

which defeat meant death, but in the end she finally succumbed to the

youth who secured Venus’s aid against her.

Concerning Callisto, however, of whom Apollodorus’s account is so bare,

Ovid is much more specific.[37] Jove, smitten with the charms of the

young huntress, knows that the sure means of approaching her is to

assume his daughter Diana’s form. Thus disguised he says, “Dear maid,

best loved of all my followers, where hast thou been hunting today?” and

then “he kissed her lips, not modestly nor as a maiden kisses.” With

neither protest nor surprise Callisto begins to recount her doings, and

not until “he broke in upon her story with an embrace and by this

outrage betrayed himself” does she recognize that her lover is not the

goddess. When the results of Jove’s attentions become evident—amusingly

enough Diana, the virgin, is the last to recognize the signs—the girl,

though blameless, is expelled forever from the goddess’s train.

Then there is Ovid’s idyl of Iphis and Ianthe.[38] Iphis’s mother, while

carrying her child, is warned by the father that if she bears a girl it

will be subjected to death by exposure. Consequently she manages to

conceal the child’s sex and raise it as a boy, giving it the name Iphis

“which was of common gender.” From infancy, Iphis is the inseparable

companion of a neighbor’s child, Ianthe, and by the time the two reach

marriageable age, a little over thirteen, they are passionately in love.

The two fathers have long since arranged a marriage. Iphis and her

mother exhaust every pretext for delaying the ceremony, to the sorrow

and anger of everyone else, for even Ianthe does not know her beloved’s

true sex. Iphis spends long days lamenting the cruelty of Nature, which

“surely never before has cursed a living creature with a love so

monstrous.” Conscience bids her “do only what is lawful” and confine her

love strictly “within a woman’s right.” She and her mother pray

frantically to Isis for aid, to the end that when the wedding day can

finally no longer be postponed Iphis is transformed at the altar into a

boy, her voice deepening, her color darkening, and her body growing in

muscular firmness. (As treated later by Antonius Liberalis[39] the

heroine of this same plot is the mother, and the suspense centers wholly

about her escaping her husband’s wrath, the daughter being of only

incidental interest.)

In yet another of the _Metamorphoses_ Ovid describes the birth of

Hermaphroditus,[40] thus indicating that he was much interested in all

variant phenomena, but from the quoted passage concerning Iphis’s pangs

of conscience about expressing her love, it would seem that his approval

of overt lesbianism was not unqualified.

Later Classical Literature

All the remaining variant tales in Latin literature deal with

courtesans. Probably the best known is Juvenal’s scathing sixth

_Satire_,[41] generally thought to have been directed against the

empress Messalina, who figures in the text as Saufeia. It describes

orgiastic rites in honor of the Bona Dea during which women of the

highest social rank vie with prostitutes in erotic skill and endurance,

with Saufeia bearing off the palm. The performance ends with a frantic

search for men, since lesbianism alone cannot satisfy the participants.

With a much lighter touch Martial in the course of his _Epigrams_

describes unflatteringly two women who on his evidence would modernly be

classed as hermaphrodites. One, Bassa,[42] has gained an irreproachable

reputation by admitting no men to her house as either lovers or

servants, but the initiated know that with her feminine domestic staff

she practices every license. The other, Philaenis, the erotic writer

mentioned earlier, exceeds men in her prowess with women, and also takes

the active part in sodomy with boys.[43] Although Dioscorides has denied

in his epitaph in the _Greek Anthology_[44] that she wrote the “obscene

book” attributed to her, Martial’s repeated references throughout the

_Epigrams_ suggest that enough smoke hung over her in his day to justify

the suspicion of fire. The specific sexual exercise implied by both

Juvenal and Martial is tribadism, and there is mention in Juvenal as

elsewhere of the _olisbos_ employed by women less well equipped for a

male role than Bassa and Philaenis. Both authors purported to describe

actual persons and conditions immediately preceding the Christian era.

A couple of centuries later we find fictional contributions from the

minor Greek authors, Lucian and Alciphron, both of whom claimed to be

writing about a period nearer that of Plato. Though doubtless they had

at hand more literature from the century in question than has been

available since, a glance at historical fiction from medieval romance to

modern novel will remind us that the life pictured is probably much

nearer to that of their own time.

Lucian, in his _Dialogues of Hetaerae_,[45] presents a tale told to her

lover by a flute-girl hired as entertainer by two wealthy lesbians, one

a Corinthian. After the banquet the hostesses persuade Leana to stay and

share their bed, sleeping between them. The Corinthian removes a

feminine wig to display close-cropped hair, and vaunts her ability to

give amatory satisfaction. Physically she is entirely feminine, but she

protests that “in my feelings and passions I am altogether a man.” Leana

admits to have received proof of this, but when pressed for detail by

her lover she says, “Now you want to know too much. It was rather nasty

business. No, by the Goddess! I won’t tell you any more.” She has

already gone far enough, however, to imply tribadism and to hint at

cunnilingus.

In a later _Dialogue_, a lover accuses his mistress of having slept the

previous night with another man. He says that stealing to her chamber to

surprise her, he hoped the companion he found there was only her maid,

but his exploring hand discovered a cropped head. She replies that it

was her girl friend whose hair has been cut because of illness and who

hides her disfigurement by day with a wig. The gentleman apparently

takes no exception to this explanation, though whether the lover was

maid or girl friend, the implication is obvious. Lucian’s own attitude

may or may not be that of the male lover of women in his _Amores_.[46]

In the course of a long debate with a pederast on the relative merits of

the two modes of sexual experience, the champion of heterosexual love

says: “If it is becoming for men to have intercourse with men, then for

the future let women have it with women ... girding themselves with

their infamous instruments of lust ... in a word, let our wanton

tribades reign unchecked.”

As to Alciphron, in his _Letters from Town and Country_ (2:12)[47] he

describes a day-long picnic to which a courtesan has invited her friends

at her lover’s villa. After a meal of oysters and lettuce, “the sort

Aphrodite is said to love,” the guests pair off, a few with their male

lovers, the rest with women partners “of random choice,” and drift away

into surrounding thickets. Whether the feminine coupling is from

preference or _faute de mieux_ is not made exactly clear. The author

neither expresses nor implies any judgment on the activity portrayed.

That gleanings should be so comparatively meager from a full millennium

is scarcely surprising in the light of later history. After the collapse

of Roman power, repeated waves of barbarian invasion, famine, and plague

reduced both social organization and literature to only what could be

salvaged in the growing Christian monasteries. As the spoken language

drifted into dialects of unlettered vernacular, churchmen clung to Latin

as the medium of communication, but they withheld classical

belles-lettres from laymen for many centuries and undoubtedly winnowed

and expurgated it. Deeply ingrained in Christian morality were several

factors making for obliteration of anything sympathetic to female

variance. One was general asceticism, a natural reaction from Roman

excesses during the later Empire. Another was the animus against all

homosexuality which Christianity inherited from Hebrew mores. A third

was the intolerance toward women in any sexual role, largely chargeable

to the strong anti-feminine bias of St. Paul.

From the surviving classical records of variance the policy of later

censors is easy to deduce. Ovid’s tales stop short of objectionable

detail and in any event include only mythical characters. Juvenal and

Martial are vitriolic or contemptuous, Lucian and Alciphron are talking

of courtesans. Sappho survives only in such fragments as were embedded

in otherwise valued treatises. Any sympathetic treatments of lesbian

love have been eradicated.

Even in the few scattering survivals, however, we find a great variety

of persons: goddess, empress, great literary artist, wealthy

sophisticate, courtesan, and bucolic adolescent. Their experience ranges

from depraved exhibitionism through proud assumption of masculinity or

unashamed feminine passion, to naïve and troubled innocence (or in the

case of Ruth to devotion unconscious of its own deeper significance.)

All of these types of personality and experience recur often in later

literature, in such guises that it is sometimes difficult to be sure

whether they are grounded in observation of universal human behavior, or

in admiring imitation of ancient models.

CHAPTER II.

FROM THE DARK AGES TO THE AGE OF REASON

Introduction

That no variant material remains from the ten centuries following

Alciphron is hardly surprising, since so little record of any sort has

survived. An oral literature of heroic tales and folk humor must have

flourished throughout the Middle Ages; narratives in the earliest

vernacular manuscripts bear many marks of such ancestry. But if anything

was written down before the eleventh century it doubtless shared the

fate of Charlemagne’s collection of Frankish tales, which were destroyed

by his son, Louis the Pious, because of their pagan character.

By the twelfth century written literature was increasing rapidly, and

early in the thirteenth we find incorporated in a medieval romance the

first known variant episode since Alciphron’s light-hearted and bawdy

tale. Its appearance did not, however, herald any sustained use of

variance as a literary theme, and to appreciate its significance and

that of the few subsequent examples prior to the eighteenth century, one

needs for background some over-all view of the status of woman in

medieval society. To put it briefly, woman was regarded in two

antithetical lights: as angel and as devil. We have already noted that

from the outset Christian theology saw her as responsible for the fall

of man and, therefore, as the root of all sexual evil. This derogatory

opinion was reinforced after the third century by infiltrations from the

dualistic religion of Persia. Manicheism divided the universe into God’s

divine and incorporeal kingdom of light and the souls of men, and a

realm of darkness comprising the material world and men’s bodies, the

province of the Devil. Since woman’s reproductive function bound her

closer to the flesh than man was bound, her burden of original sin was

so much the greater. In the later Middle Ages serious philosophical

debate arose as to whether she was a complete human being possessed of a

soul, or merely a breeder for the superior race of men.

If today such views seem incredible, they gain reality when one

remembers the outbreaks of witchcraft from the fourteenth to seventeenth

centuries and the dreadful measures taken to suppress witches as

followers of Satan. Modern psychologists tend to diagnose those

epidemics as hysteria on the part of the bewitched and of the culprits

themselves, who frequently confessed to intimacy with the Devil. Certain

historians of the occult, however, offer convincing evidence that

organized witchcraft was a survival from ancient fertility cults

widespread in Europe, of Druidic or even earlier origin; cults which had

worshipped a god in the semblance of an animal—most often a goat—and

whose rites, as in all known fertility cults, were sexual.[1]

Records of witches’ trials show that leaders of covens and more

especially of the great orgiastic sabbaths appeared as “black men,”

usually equipped with horns, tails and hooves, and that their followers

credited them with supernatural powers and literally worshipped them as

legates of a god or as the god himself. The animal disguise so exactly

fitted the medieval concepts of Satan that Christian heretic-hunters

quite naturally equated witchcraft with devil worship, recorded it as

such, and reacted accordingly. No apologia for witchcraft is intended by

this suggestion. If one grants “wise women” a knowledge of poisonous

herbs and of rudimentary hypnosis, and also, as midwives, the

opportunity to procure the bodies of stillborn infants for their horrid

magic-working concoctions, the ugliest charges against them become

plausible. Then, too, there is little doubt that sexual licence of all

sorts was common at the quarterly sabbaths if not at all smaller

gatherings. It is particularly noteworthy that the male leaders of these

festivals had female partners, supposedly for the benefit of the few

attending warlocks; but the record of at least one trial states that the

celebrants “usually” consorted with leaders of the opposite sex,[2] an

indication that at times they must have consorted with their own. And

from secondary sources one learns that witches generally were credited

with “masculine” sexual tastes and habits. Thus, homosexual practices,

in themselves anathema, were associated also with witchcraft, the

blackest of all possible heresies.

In sharp contrast to this negative view of woman there existed at the

same time a cult of woman-worship first articulated by the Provençal

troubadours and later immortalized by Dante. It celebrated the ennobling

and exalting influence of love for a pure woman, who, since she had

transcended both common human frailty and the special aptitude of her

sex for evil, deserved a twofold reverence. In its religious aspect this

worship centered about the Virgin Mary and found expression in the

naïvely human legends which grew up about her.[3] As her invariable

championship of the underdog, man or woman, innocent or guilty, appears

to be merely an apotheosis of the maternal instinct, these legends do

not concern us here.

On the secular side, adoration of woman flowered in the convention of

courtly love, that concept of passionate devotion without overt reward

which seems more often to have been celebrated in the breach than in the

observance. From this idealistic code of sexual relations stemmed the

copious literature of medieval romance, and indeed of subsequent

romantic fiction, in all of which the parallel worship of purity and of

overwhelming passion provides the basic conflict. And until the

eighteenth century, romantic fiction was the almost exclusive vehicle—at

least on the reputable level—for variant incident, which therefore

remained technically beyond reproach.

Taken together, then, the two contradictory views of woman just outlined

provide, as it were, a philosophical portrait of her as she appeared to

the later Middle Ages. There is also a practical picture more difficult

to delineate because less was written about it at the time. Its early

background in particular is obscure, since so very little is known about

women during the Dark Ages. Some anthropologists hold that among

Germanic peoples women were highly regarded; monogamy was the universal

practice even before the advent of Christianity; women fought beside men

in emergency; and certainly the Teutonic Valkyrie are a match for the

Amazons of ancient Greece. Other social historians point out that the

earliest epics, sagas, and _chansons de geste_ celebrate only the valor

of men whose deeds insured the survival of their folk-groups, and in

these tales women play negligible roles. It is known, too, that under

feudalism in some parts of Europe women were treated as little more than

adjuncts to the land holdings they inherited, and were promised in

marriage by male relatives, sometimes when scarcely out of the cradle,

with the sole end of cementing politically profitable jointures of

territory.[4] Whatever the truth may be—and it is certain that no single

truth can hold for so heterogeneous a geographic and temporal span as

Europe in the Dark Ages—we come to relatively stable ground only with

the crusades and the transition from feudalism to chivalry.

For perhaps a dozen generations from the eleventh through the thirteenth

centuries many men of all classes were drawn off on ever-widening

military campaigns, civil or religious. Thus, the management of affairs

at home devolved to some extent upon women. Of the effect on lower-class

women we know little that is specific, though the hysteria of witchcraft

suggests one result of numerical imbalance between the sexes on that

level. On the upper social levels history tells us that many women

managed their lords’ estates, dispensed justice, marshalled armed forces

when necessary, and sometimes even led those forces against rival

lords—a circumstance commoner in Italy and southern France than in

regions farther north. Consequently, these women acquired considerable

learning. Hitherto even literacy had not been too common among laymen

aside from those destined for very high positions, but it is probable

that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries women were better

educated than men of the same class, the latter being engaged in more

strenuous pursuits. It is known that women were in charge of hospitals

during this period, and a few rose to the status of lecturers in Italian

universities.[5]

The long period of men’s absences and women’s widening responsibility

resulted, as always under such circumstances, in a certain feminization

of social outlook, evident in the burgeoning of courtly love. Today

statistical reading studies show that sex is a prime factor in

determining reading interests and that romantic fiction is predominantly

a feminine taste.[6] Historic evidence of these facts can be seen in the

rapid spread of chivalric romance between the twelfth and fourteenth

centuries.

The earliest romances written down in the twelfth century were

comparatively simple and direct, showing close relation to the epics and

_chansons de geste_ which preceded them. Subsequently, partly because

crusaders brought home oriental tales of intricacy and sophistication

exceeding any style current in Europe, plots incorporated magical and

fantastic elements and developed greater elaboration. Still later, after

the revival of classical learning in the early renaissance, pastorals

developed in rough imitation of Latin models, but with plot structure

nearer that of their medieval narrative sources.

Medieval and Renaissance Fiction

The first romance mentioned by students of this genre as containing

anything relevant to sex variance is _Huon of Bordeaux_, which appeared

in French about 1220. (It has been consulted by the present writer only

in the English translation of Lord Berners, first printed in 1543.) The

tale was basically a derivative from the Charlemagne cycle or “Matter of

France,” and the first part, though incorporating fantasy in the person

of Oberon, King of the Fairies, runs fairly true to its source. But like

many popular stories it acquired sequels, and when the action reaches

the third generation we find Huon’s granddaughter, Ide, serving among

the Holy Roman Emperor’s forces in the guise of a knight, a feministic

touch alien to the original epic.

In recognition of her prowess Ide is given the Emperor’s daughter in

marriage, and cannot refuse the honor without dangerous offense to her

overlord. The princess Olive is in love with her fiancé. Ide’s own

emotions are not described—one of the author’s subtle devices for

exploiting a piquant situation without involving his heroine in moral

obliquity. Another is his weaving of an inescapable net of circumstance

in preliminary chapters to prevent Ide’s either fleeing as a lone knight

errant or returning to her father’s domains in her feminine role—the one

course meant disgraceful death, the other involvement in incest. So the

reader is free to follow with good conscience Ide’s submission to the

marriage ceremony, her pretence of illness as excuse for inadequacy on

the bridal night, and the unelaborated account of her attempt to satisfy

her bride with “clyppynge and kyssynge” throughout the eight days of the

wedding feast. When this technique is pursued for another week, however,

the bride’s bitter grief forces Ide to confess her sex, and the

confession, carried to the Emperor by an eavesdropping page, results in

his decreeing that Ide be burned, “for he sayd he wold not suffre suche

boggery to be used.” The fire is actually kindled before Ide’s frantic

prayers to God and the Virgin save her (as Ovid’s Iphis was saved at the

altar) by miraculous transformation into a man. Beyond a doubt

considerable physical intimacy is implied here, though none so specific

as in Martial or Lucian. And it appears that death was not an excessive

penalty for such intimacy if wilfully indulged in, though again the

mores reflected must be taken as a hybrid between those of the tenth

century, in which the story was laid, and the thirteenth, in which it

was written down.

It is possible that this sequel to _Huon_ owed something to a collection

of oriental tales which doubtless entered Europe during the period of

the crusades, though they were not published until the sixteenth century

and are believed to have been rewritten at that time (as _La Fleur

Lascive Orientale_).[7] One of these, “The Princess Amany,” recounts the

adventure of a daughter of the “emperor” of Tartary. Converted to Islam

by a highly educated nurse, Amany avoids marriage to a “pagan” by flight

in male clothing. During her wanderings, she has a liaison with a

“farmer’s” wife, and then rescues the Indian princess, Dorrat, from

violation by slaying her abductor. For half a year she supports herself

and the lady, who does not know her sex, by her prowess in hunting and

marauding. Having arrived in India, the two marry at the emperor’s

decree. Up to this point, only Dorrat has been emotionally involved,

Amany being still half in love with the Tartar prince from whom she fled

on religious grounds. But when Dorrat, disillusioned on her bridal

night, attempts suicide, Amany becomes physically excited in the course

of the struggle to save her, and the two live in complete marital

intimacy for a month. Then the Tartar prince, now converted, appears and

marries them both (happy Islam!), whereupon both ladies discover that

they prefer the embraces of a man to each other’s. Even an elementary

acquaintance with oriental literature will suggest that this tale is a

hybrid well cross-fertilized with Christian chivalry, upon which it may

have left its reciprocal traces.

* * * * *

An Italian renaissance example of female sex variance appears in

Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_ (1531). Ariosto’s predecessor, Boiardo, in

treating the same Roland material, cast as heroine the completely

feminine Angelica, but Ariosto gave the lead to Bradamante, a young

Amazon in full armor whose exploits equalled and sometimes exceeded

those of the male knights. Indeed, Ariosto’s version has been cited as

feministic because of her prominence in the plot.[8] We need consider

only Canto 25, which tells how Bradamante while suffering from a head

wound is shorn of her hair, and thereafter is universally mistaken for

her twin brother. Sleeping one day in the forest she is discovered by

“young Flordespine of Spain,” whose instant infatuation is so violent

that Bradamante is wakened by a passionate kiss. Since in the chivalric

code “cravenhood it were, befitting man of straw” not to respond, she at

once confesses her sex. The disclosure has no effect upon the young

princess’ ardor. Taking Bradamante home, Flordespine showers her with

rich woman’s apparel and gifts, and laments all day—in almost the very

words of Ovid’s Iphis—that she should be cursed with a love the like of

which she has never met “mid mankind or herd.” Bradamante feels no

answering attraction, but nothing indicates that either girl considers

this love to be sinful. It is merely “unnatural.”

The ladies had one common bed that night,

Their bed the same but different their repose.

One sleeps, one moans and weeps in piteous plight

Because her wild desire more fiercely glows.

And on her wearied lids should slumber light,

All is deceitful that brief dreaming shows:

To her it seems as if relenting heaven

A better sex to Bradamante has given.[9]

In the morning Bradamante quickly departs, to relieve a misery she

cannot assuage.

And now follows an interesting inversion of the theme. When Bradamante

recounts her adventure at home, her twin brother, recognizing in

Flordespine a beauty whom he has long admired but has had no chance to

approach, makes off in secret in his sister’s knightly trappings and

seeks the Spanish castle in her place. The princess welcomes him with

rapture, again supplies woman’s dress, and only at night discovers his

sex, which the boy, still posing as his sister, attributes to a timely

bit of magic. The two live together for several weeks before the truth

is learned by anyone else.

Comparison of this treatment with that in _Huon of Bordeaux_ points up

the literary and social changes which have intervened. Nothing could

testify more clearly to the altered role of religion than the absence of

moral judgment and the sex change through benevolent magic instead of

divine intervention. This and the verbal echo of Ovid throughout

Flordespine’s long lament (only partially quoted above) show to what

extent the Revival of Learning had bred familiarity with classical word

and temper. There is also here a greater psychological subtlety, natural

to growing humanism. Though Flordespine’s passion is roused by her

mistaking Bradamante for a man and satisfied only by sex-reversal, her

initial emotion is unaltered by her enlightenment, and the brother whom

she accepts is so feminine in both appearance and action that an entire

household is deceived for weeks. Thus the Spanish princess exhibits

definite psychological variance. It is interesting that the knightly

Bradamante remains unmoved throughout and that Flordespine, the petite,

impulsive, eminently feminine member of the pair, takes the initiative

in the whole business.

Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral _Arcadia_, circulated among friends in 1580

though not published till a decade later, shows a similar relation to

both medieval and classical sources. Here, as in the second part of

Ariosto’s episode, the hero masquerades as an Amazon, in order to gain

access to a princess whose family is living in pastoral seclusion for

political reasons. The heroine’s father is completely taken in and

himself conceives a passion for the handsome stranger. His wife, several

decades his junior, is only briefly deceived but holds her peace because

she is similarly smitten. Thanks to the separate jealous machinations of

these two, all the hero’s efforts to reveal his secret to his love are

balked, but within a few weeks his passion has communicated itself to

the girl. And now we have the moral scruples which regularly distinguish

English from continental literature. They are given vividly in Sidney’s

own words:

O me, unfortunate wretch (sayd she) what poysonous heates be these,

which thus torment me?... O you Stars judge rightly of me, & if I

have with wicked intent made myself a pray to fancie, or if by any

idle lustes I framed my harte fit for such an impression, then let

this plague dayly increase in me, till my name bee odious to

womankind ... No, no, you cannot help me: Sinne must be the mother,

and shame the daughter of my affection. And yet these be but childish

objections ... it is the impossibilitie that dooth torment me: for,

unlawfull desires are punished after the effect of enjoying, but

impossible desires are punished by the desire itself ... And yet ...

what do I, sillie wench, knowe what Love hath prepared for me? Doo I

not see my mother, as well, at least as furiouslie as my selfe, love

Zelmane? And should I be wiser than my mother? Either she sees a

possibilitie in that which I think impossible, or else impossible

loves neede not misbecome me. And doo I not see Zelmane (who dothe

not thinke a thought which is not first wayed by wisdom and virtue)

doth not she vouchsafe to love me with like ardor? I see it, her eyes

depose it to be true; what then? And if she can love poore me, shall

I thinke scorne to love such a woman as Zelmane? Away then all vaine

examinations of why and how. Thou lovest me, excellent Zelmane, and I

love thee: And with that, embrasing the very grounde whereon she lay,

she said to her selfe (for even to her selfe she was ashamed to

speake it out in words) O my Zelmane, governe and direct me: for I am

wholy given over to thee.[10]

There could scarcely be a more economical record of how girls were

taught to regard homosexual passion in sixteenth century England; of the

heroine’s ignorance that any satisfaction of the desire was possible;

and of her blameless rectitude, for she has both her mother and her idol

as examples, and the reader knows that she is under the spell of

legitimate sex attraction. That Sidney’s own moral attitude was not

necessarily his heroine’s is suggested only in his wording of an

oracle’s prophecy to her father earlier: “Thy youngest shall with

nature’s bliss embrace An _uncouth_ love, which _nature_ hateth most”

[author’s italics.] Still, he was careful that Zelmane’s secret should

become known to the princess before the pair had opportunity for so much

as a kiss.

The _Arcadia_ is cited in Iwan Bloch’s _Sex Life in England_ as the

first instance of lesbian love in English literature, but Bloch bases

his claim on a night the princess and her sister spent together. He does

not mention that they were sisters; however, it is not the kinship which

invalidates his statement. It is true that the text reads: “... there

cherishing one another with deere, though chaste embracements, with

sweet, though cold kisses; it might seem that Love was come to play him

there without darte; or that weerie of his owne fires, he was there to

refresh himselfe betweene their sweete-breathing lippes.” But the reason

for their embrace was that both were suffering from hopeless loves, and,

too shy to share confidences even by candlelight, had agreed that “they

might talke better as they lay together.” Bloch, however, makes his

point from the statement that “they impoverished their cloathes to

inriche their bed, which for that night might well scorne the shrine of

Venus,” interpreting this to mean that they made elaborate preparation

for a night of love, however cold and chaste Sidney claimed it to

be.[11] The proper sense of the elaborate Elizabethan conceit is, of

course, simply that they released their own loveliness from their

garments and laid themselves on the bed which was thus more “inriched”

than a shrine bearing an image of Venus herself.

A French pastoral making use of the same theme is d’Urfé’s _Astrée_,

published serially between 1607 and 1620. This vast work, running to

some 5500 pages, has not been examined, but Maurice Magendie’s _L’Astrée

d’Honoré D’Urfé_ gives an adequate notion of its significant points.

Laid in Merovingian times, it is bound anachronistically by the

strictest rules of courtly love, which made a lady’s lightest word law

for her lover. Thus, once banished by his offended lady’s decree, the

hero Céladon may not re-enter her presence without specific summons.

After a volume of misadventure he contrives to return by impersonating

Alexis, daughter of a Druid priest whose casuistry reconciles him to

this evasion of Astrée’s orders. Since Astrée has long mourned him as

dead she is unlikely to summon him, but until she does, “Alexis” cannot

reveal his identity. Her new friend’s phenomenal resemblance to her lost

lover provokes in Astrée an infatuation which, however well accounted

for, is our first example since classical times of a woman’s passion

without scruple for one believed from the outset to be of her own sex.

For a time the Druid manages to prevent too great an intimacy between

his “daughter” and Astrée, but when the two are guests at the same

castle and share a room, the hero cannot resist taking some advantage of

his opportunity, his only concern being dread of his lady’s reaction to

these liberties when she is finally enlightened. This eventuality is

postponed by enemy attack and a long embroilment during which “Alexis”

fights as a heroic Amazon, saves Astrée’s life, is wounded, and is

finally spirited away by the Druid to recover without danger of

disclosure. When the revelation finally occurs, Astrée is indeed

outraged—but note the reason: people will believe she merely pretended

to be duped in order to excuse her own complaisances, and ‘in Forez a

woman does not trifle thus with her honor.’ She bids Céladon die in

expiation for his crime. “‘De quelle mort vous plait-il que je perisse?’

gémit Céladon écrasé. ‘N’importe, pourvu que tu meures!’ Et il s’enfuit

pour la satisfaire.”[12] The Druid intervenes by proposing a pilgrimage

to a shrine of Diana whose lions and unicorns slay the guilty but spare

the pure. These heraldic guardians are transmitted into statues as the

pair approach, thus testifying to the young lovers’ technical chastity.

As everything short of the ultimate intimacy has pretty clearly

occurred, it would appear that in France of the early seventeenth

century, as in sixteenth century Italy, such relations between women

were not regarded too harshly. Nevertheless, both this pastoral and

Sidney’s portray the “far away and long ago,” not the authors’ own

period, and d’Urfé’s tale is obviously more than a little satiric.

Evidence will appear later that with regard to contemporary phenomena

judgment is generally less lenient.

The Borderline of Reality

The five examples described above are all from the field of romance, in

which no further variant flora have been detected until the early

nineteenth century. Indeed, the whole field of fiction was largely

fallow during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the

renaissance on, thanks to a growing classical influence and the

weakening of churchly prejudice, drama of actable length gradually

supplanted long formless narrative. But the drama, too, yields a thin

harvest during these centuries. In romantic plays sex disguise was

fairly common, but it produced no variant situations comparable to those

cited from romance and pastoral. Action on the public stage, of course,

cannot go as far as in the printed volume; furthermore, theatre

audiences included lower class spectators more apt to be shocked by

homosexual implication than educated readers with classical literary

background.

Let us look, for example, at the two most significant masquerading women

in Shakespeare’s plays. Viola in _Twelfth Night_ is an unconvincing man,

afraid of the sight of her own sword, and her scenes with Olivia never

even skirt the anomalous, their interest centering on her verbal

agility. In _As You Like It_ Rosalind is much more boyish in appearance

and temperament, and Celia’s devotion to her is marked. Following her

cousin headlong into banishment, Celia reminds her harsh parent that:

... we still have slept together,

Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, sat together,

And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans,

Still we went coupled and inseparable.

Also LeBeau tells Orlando that Rosalind has been “detained by her

usurping uncle To keep his daughter company; whose loves Are dearer than

the natural bond of sisters.” These passages suggest an intensity in

Celia’s attachment which the effeminate Frenchman is quick to notice,

but no further word or action in the play reinforces them. Celia’s

infatuation at sight for Oliver, though it does not, like Rosalind’s for

Orlando, blossom before the spectator’s eyes, is no less whole-hearted,

and if passion is implied at all between the girls it is that early

adolescent sort readily supplanted by the first heterosexual attraction.

The other women of Shakespeare frequently cited as unfeminine, Beatrice

and Katherine, express antipathy to men, marriage, and male domination

but exhibit no interest whatever in women.

Two realistic plays of the early seventeenth century which have as their

heroines real persons, one a known lesbian and the other suspected, are

of special interest because no hint of variance appears in either drama.

Middleton and Dekker’s _Roaring Girl_ (1611) was built around Mary

Frith, a transvestist of the London underworld commonly called “Moll

Cutpurse,” who was about twenty-five when the play was written. She is

portrayed as hearty, fearless and clever, a walking lexicon of thieves’

cant and free tavern songs, but of blameless character—the sworn enemy

of injustice, oppression and double-dealing in underworld and gentry

alike. She befriends honest lovers of any class but makes short work of

men who approach her; she would like to see all women “manned but never

pandered,” and she burns to right women’s wrongs in general. Asked when

she will marry, her impudent rhymed answer adds up to “Never!” In short,

she is a kind of sexless and feministic Robin Hood.

In their epilogue the authors say that some will:

Wonder that a creature of her being

Should be the subject of a poet, seeing

In the world’s eye none weighs so light: others look

For all those base tricks published in a book

Foul as the brains they flowed from, of cutpurses,

Of nips and foists, nasty obscene discourses

As full of lies as empty of worth and wit,

For any honest ear and eye unfit.

Their reference is undoubtedly to _A Booke called the Madde Prancks of

Merry Moll of the Bankside, with her Walks in Man’s Apparel and to what

Purpose. Written by John Day_, which was entered in the Stationers’

Register for August 1610. All copies of this document were so thoroughly

eliminated by her friends that scholars have even questioned whether it

was ever printed, and a _Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith_ surviving

from 1662, the year after her death, is somewhat less harsh. An

editorial note to the 1885 edition of the play,[13] drawing on this

biography and other sources, tells us that she was a shoemaker’s

daughter who from childhood would run only with boys, “taking many a

bang and blow,” and that she had a lifelong aversion to women’s

occupations and to children. Against family opposition she educated

herself far above her station, but in the end apparently found no outlet

for her capacities except in the underworld, where even her bitterest

detractors admit her masculine daring and success as “highwayman,”

forger, and fence. Havelock Ellis, in his introduction to another

edition of the play and in his Studies in the _Psychology of Sex_,[14]

quotes the 1662 biography as saying that “No man can say or affirm that

she ever had a sweetheart or any such fond thing to dally with her,” a

mastiff being the only living thing she cared for. Ellis adds that

though nothing is said of homosexual practices, “we see clearly here

what may be termed the homosexual diathesis.”

The second play is _La Monja Alférez_ (1626) by Juan Pérez de Montalban,

a literary disciple of Lope de Vega, and is included in a volume by

Fitz-Maurice Kelly entitled _The Nun Ensign_. It gives a partial picture

of the known life of Catalina de Erauso, a Basque woman who was alive at

the time of its publication, and like _The Roaring Girl_, it was

probably written to whitewash the heroine’s reputation. Here also the

heroine is a transvestist, but one who actually passes for a military

man, the mainspring of the plot being her exposure by her brother, a

fellow officer. One Doña Ana is represented as being infatuated to the

point of presenting her beloved with her girdle, but the gesture is

symbolic only. “Guzlan” evades the issue by pleading a vow of

_castidad_, a term less exclusively feminine than its English

equivalent, and the two are never alone together or involved in more

than acceptable verbal exchange. The play can scarcely have been a

dramatic success, consisting as it does largely of long retrospective

speeches by other characters which review Catalina’s past adventures and

constitute her apologia. It is not known to have been produced more than

once, at a critical period in her fortunes when it must have been badly

needed.

Erauso’s full history as given in Kelly’s volume is compiled from an

autobiography included _in toto_, certain “Relaciones” fairly well

established as originating with Erauso herself, and references in the

_De’ Viaggi ..._ of Pietro della Valle. Relegated by her family to the

life of a nun, which she found intolerable, though three of her sisters

took their vows, the girl escaped from her convent in 1607 at the age of

about fifteen by contriving men’s garments from the stuff of her

religious habit. Subsequently she shipped to South America, where for

some time she lived by her wits and her sword. Later, to escape a prison

sentence she joined the army, was promoted for bravery to the rank of

ensign, and was entrusted with at least one special mission. For some

ten to fifteen years she went unexposed and unrecognized even by her

brother, under whom she served for a time in Peru. In 1622, however, he

became suspicious, and assigned her to perilous duty, as a result of

which wounds brought her so near death that she confessed her sex to a

bishop, and her military career was naturally at an end. The alternative

life as a nun was now more distasteful to her than ever, and within a

year she sailed for Spain to obtain proof that she had never taken the

final vows, and, if possible, to secure a pension from Philip III on the

strength of her military service.

It was at this time that _La Monja Alférez_ was written and presented,

and perhaps partly through its sympathetic influence she had success in

both her undertakings and was furthermore granted permission by Pope

Urban VIII to continue wearing men’s clothes, though not to practice

further deception about her true sex. Her European visit was thus

somewhat in the nature of a triumph, though her family still refused to

recognize her. Accordingly she returned to South America, became a

wealthy owner of horses and mules, and was still thriving in the

business of carrier when she died in her late fifties.

Of her love life not too much is given, but it is all significant. At

one point she tells of taking refuge, when wounded, with a halfbreed

Indian woman, a widow, who wished to keep her on as son-in-law. The

daughter, however, “was very black and ugly as the devil, the very

opposite of my taste, which has always been for pretty faces.”[15] From

this situation she quite simply ran away, as from a number of similar

ones; but where the ladies were agreeable to her she postponed flight

till the ultimate moment. While serving under her brother she even

sometimes accompanied him to his mistress’ house, but when she took to

going there on her own he became so jealous—believing her a man, of

course—that he had her transferred to a distant post.

Before joining the army she worked for a time as bookkeeper to a wealthy

merchant in Lima, in whose house she also boarded, and she was dismissed

in less than a year for “sporting and frolicking” with his wife’s two

unmarried sisters, “one especially whom I preferred.” One day while she

was “in the parlour, combing my hair, lolling my head in her lap and

tickling her ankles,” the employer observed the play “through a grating”

and sent her packing.[16] The inferred activities are fairly

unmistakable, but since she was believed to be a man, we can deduce

nothing from the incident about local attitudes towards homosexuality.

A well-documented passage in the “Relaciones” tells us that after her

return from Europe she was entrusted, by a couple in Vera Cruz who knew

her to be a woman, with the responsibility of escorting their daughter

to Mexico where the girl was to be married. Thus it is clear that her

earlier emotional adventures had been well concealed. But during the

journey “she became jealously attached to her charge, resented her young

friend’s subsequent marriage, and in a letter of incomparable arrogance

challenged the girl’s husband to a duel” because he forbade her the

house. Friends managed to prevent the meeting, and it was after this

that she “sheathed her rapier and set about earning an unromantic living

as a carrier.” She must have been in her late forties at the time of

this episode.

Neo-Classical Aridity

Because so little variant material appears in reputable imaginative

writing between 1650 and 1800 we must turn elsewhere for evidence that

variance nevertheless flourished. For reasons mentioned earlier,

biography and memoirs are not generally within our scope, but in the

sixteenth to eighteenth centuries the chief aim of such writing was

narrative interest, and certainly Brantôme, Casanova and the rest are

read and enjoyed now in somewhat the same way as is Proust’s

autobiographical fiction of the present century. As has been said, even

historians grant that a very fair general impression of the writers’

periods can be gained from these spontaneous records.

The wide and colorful canvas of Brantôme testifies that court morals

under the later Valois were free in every respect. At several points in

the _Lives of Gallant Ladies_ (1665) he implies that lesbian attachments

were taken for granted in his time, and in Section 15 of his first

Discourse he raises the question whether husbands are cuckolded when

their wives engage in “the love that is called _donna con donna._”[17]

He also doubts whether the point has ever been raised before, living as

he did three centuries before divorce was commonplace and lesbian

activity actionable as one form of alienation of affection. The cases he

cites are almost all bisexual, for though he has heard of women who

would have nothing to do with men, these do not seem to have been

celebrated for variance either. He says it was useless to seek one young

girl in marriage because her “friend” would never let her go; but the

friend, who was providing bed and board, was a married woman. Indeed, he

maintains that husbands regarded such affairs lightly, since these could

not lead to embarrassing questions about the paternity of offspring.

With characteristic wit he manages to include among his anecdotes every

possible means of satisfaction between women, impermissible of

translation today outside a medical treatise. He maintains throughout

that women come in the end to acknowledge the inadequacy of all such

means, “for after all nothing is the equal of a man.”

Anthony Hamilton in his _Memoirs of the Comte de Grammont_ (1713) gives

an amusing account of the rivalry between the Earl of Rochester and Miss

Hobart, a maid of honor to the Duchess of York, for the affections of

the rather stupid young court beauty, Miss Anne Temple. However, at the

English court even under Charles II such affairs were not taken so

lightly. When, after a long siege, the patient Hobart attempted to

embrace her favorite, the girl screamed, other waiting women came

running, and “this was sufficient to disgrace Miss Hobart at court and

totally ruin her reputation in London.”[18]

These affairs occurred in high society, but Montaigne—or perhaps his

secretary, who is said to have written the _Voyage in Italy_

(1581)—writing in the same period as Brantôme, describes the case of a

young weaver, one of a group of six or seven transvestists engaged in

that trade, who courted several women in towns near her own and was

finally hanged for effecting a marriage with one of them. The union

endured happily for half a year, however, before the offender was

recognized and exposed by someone from her own village. This is

interesting evidence of contrast in sexual mores at different social

levels, for the country in this case was Italy, and Brantôme and others

claim that homosexuality was rife there, particularly in the courts of

Naples and Sicily.

What may be called a middle-class allusion appears in the memoirs of the

Comte de Tilly (1800) when he tells of being drawn in as second in a

duel by two young men in an inn at Chartres who wished to settle a

quarrel at once. The matter involves a girl whom both had known

intimately and one had promised by signed agreement to marry within the

year, come what might. The prospective bridegroom learned that “the

treacherous Julie was acquainted with a lady of this town who was

suspected of having habits once much in vogue in Lesbos and which to the

shame of our time have made alarming progress even in the provinces,”

and accused the other man of having known this when he foisted Julie off

on him. Without denying the charge, the accused says to de Tilly: “I

confess this sort of rivalry gives me no ill humor, on the contrary it

amuses me, and I am so lacking in morals as to laugh at it.”[19] Several

other examples of lesbian activity, some of them involving nuns, are to

be found _passim_ in Casanova’s memoirs.

* * * * *

From the viewpoint of mere numerical count the richest field for the

gleaner of variant incident would be that literature—not quite reputable

from the English reader’s viewpoint—which is farthest removed from the

romantic. In romance, sexual attraction is an experience so personal and

subjective that true lovers can be satisfied only with one another, and

separation or an extraneous attraction on the part of either constitutes

tragedy. Woman’s role often transcends that of man because any lapse on

her part entrains personal and social consequences of extreme gravity.

That is, the romantic viewpoint is relatively feminine.

In the other type of narrative, sometimes erroneously classed with

realism, the sexual act is all-important, enjoyable with any adequate

partner since sensual pleasure eclipses all subjective factors. Here a

woman may be an enthusiastic and carefree playmate, a coy jade to be

taken by trickery, or an aggressive, even sadistic, snarer of the

hapless male. Her one requisite is a sexual appetite to equal her

partner’s, and she is apparently immune to physical, and indifferent to

social, consequences. In short, the outlook here is masculine. If the

percentage of women authors is low in all areas of literature, in this

one it reaches the vanishing point. Not even Margaret of Navarre nor

Aphra Behn, famed as they are for a free approach, go all the way with

their brother writers.

The ultimate limit of male-oriented literature is pornography, with

which this study will not be concerned beyond defining it as writing of

which the primary intent is sexual arousal. The category is difficult of

sharp delineation for an English-reading audience, since relatively

unseasoned readers may attribute pornographic intent to works which the

more “sophisticated” continental takes in his stride and admits to the

realm of legitimate belles-lettres. This is particularly true of that

early French and Italian material which was written with wit, style, and

care to avoid coarse terminology, and which is more properly termed

erotic or _galant_. To account adequately for such racial or national

inconsistencies in sexual tolerance is impossible here. Undoubtedly an

earlier familiarity with classical literature in Italy and southern

France, as well as a readier exposure there to oriental influences, had

something to do with continental lenience.

Historians of erotic literature trace the genre ultimately to two

hypothetical sources. One is a group of Greek tales called Milesian

which originated about the sixth or seventh century B.C., satirizing

religion as well as sex. They were particularly scurrilous in their

portrayal of women. The other source is oriental literature, since in

both Hindu and Islamic philosophy the inferior status of woman tends to

depersonalize sexual relations. Whatever its origin, erotic literature

has flourished steadily in modern Europe from the earliest renaissance

to the present day, and has been produced by authors of literary

repute—Boccaccio, Poggio, Aretino in Italy; and, in France, LaSalle,

Rabelais, Venette, not to mention a score of lesser names in both

countries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it developed in

France into the style called _galant_, somewhat less lusty and more

verbally subtle than earlier works but nonetheless very free. In this

class the names most familiar to English readers are probably Restif de

la Bretonne and Casanova.

Naturally all erotic works concentrate mainly upon heterosexual

activity, but intrasexual episodes, particularly among women, are not

uncommon. The women involved are never wholly, or even primarily,

homosexual. An innocent girl may be initiated by one more experienced

into the mysteries of giving pleasure to men. Ladies of quality may

experiment with one another to alleviate boredom, or prostitutes amuse

themselves in idle intervals. Nuns may console each other for lack of

opportunity with priests, though the latter are usually also available.

All these contacts are the fruit of propinquity rather than personal

devotion, and the sexual play often involves more than two participants.

In short, even these lesbian anecdotes are presented from the male

viewpoint.

Erotic works involving religious celibates have been much more a

continental than an English product. Such works always had as their

secondary and sometimes as their primary aim, the discrediting of the

Roman church, and may have begun in the Middle Ages after Gregory VII

(1015-1085) first stringently imposed celibacy on the clergy. (It will

be recalled that Sappho’s works were burned by the Church in 1073.) With

the growth of rationalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

anti-clerical erotic writing increased in volume, and once the French

Revolution had broken the hold of Catholicism in France, tales about the

cloistered orders degenerated there into almost unalloyed pornography.

In England, where Roman church and monasticism had been crushed by Henry

VIII, the anti-clerical category of erotica did not flourish; in the

Puritan-influenced American colonies it seems never to have taken root

at all. Perhaps as a corollary of this religious conservatism,

homosexual works were equally rare. Of the continental writers named

above only Boccaccio and Rabelais are generally acceptable to English

readers, possibly because of the absence of homosexuality from their

works.

Even after the Restoration in England the natural anti-Puritan outburst

of risqué drama and picaresque novel went no farther than heterosexual

freedom. The only variant literary traces of the court’s sojourn in

France are Anthony Hamilton’s lesbian anecdote cited above, and a

vicious poetic satire written anonymously in 1732. It was actually

penned by Sir William King, principal of St. Mary’s Hall at Oxford, and

was directed against a female relative who had done him out of a

fortune. He describes the lady as one endowed with some of the

attributes of a witch and addicted to indecencies with a titled woman

friend who figured as her “familiar.” The occult details Sir William

seems to have incorporated not only to render his picture more

repulsive, but to supply etiology for his subject’s homosexual bent,

which apparently he did not care to import gratuitously. England has

little else to contribute to the early variant record save an incident

or two included in stereotyped histories of prostitutes, and some rather

juvenile whipping stories laid in boarding schools or in households

dominated by sadistic step-mothers or governesses, and even in these

lesbian activity is infrequent.

French literature, meanwhile, moved in quite the other direction,

undoubtedly following tendencies at court. At the end of the sixteenth

century Henry III was widely reputed to be homosexual. A generation

later Louis XIII, ailing and neurotic, vacillated between a few feminine

and several masculine favorites, and is said, by some French

biographers, to have made little distinction among them. The house of

Orléans was also generally credited with homosexual proclivities in both

the male and the female lines. On the feminine side, too, we have

Christina of Sweden’s lengthy visit in France during the emotionally

disturbed period of her life (1670-1680) following her abdication. It

has been suggested that she brought about Monaldeschi’s murder at

Versailles because the “thick packet of letters” in his possession

contained damning evidence of her now almost unquestioned lesbian

habits. A century later Marie Antoinette’s relations with Lamballe,

Polignac and others of her court ladies were the subject of numerous

scurrilous pamphlets, and although the details must be largely

discounted as political mudslinging, any wide reading of serious

biographical studies shows the underlying charges to be quite plausible.

For whatever reason, as the Bourbon dynasty grew in power and

extravagance and under Louis XV the great courtesans enjoyed high social

standing, freedom among women even loosely connected with court circles

became quite fashionable. By the middle of the eighteenth century

several houses of pleasure were elite institutions. Private theatres

were maintained by certain noblemen for the presentation of highly

censorable drama, and the best-known actresses and courtesans—often

synonymous—were credited with constant lesbian activity in memoirs of

the gossip-column type. From better authenticated sources we know that

numerous frivolous private societies sprang up, and at least one of them

was composed of “Anandrynes” or lesbian women. The _galant_ narratives,

of which the eighteenth century produced a rich crop, included frequent

lesbian episodes, and for the first time in many decades the variant

interest sometimes predominated over the heterosexual.

As one example of such writing, let us glance at a comparatively

inoffensive survival from the period just before the Revolution. It is

taken from _L’Espion Anglais_ (1777-1778), eleven rambling volumes

probably from several pens. In imitation of the more reputable

journalistic correspondence of the time, this work is cast in the form

of letters from “Milord All’eye” in Paris to his friend “Milord All’ear”

in London. Mayeur de Saint-Paul is credited with the authorship of three

very long letters[20] recording the career of a young girl from the

provinces who runs away to Paris, finds a place in the most elite

_maison_ of the day, and is there groomed for the service of a prominent

lesbian actress. The latter’s luxurious maisonette, which is secluded in

a wooded park, is described in detail, as are the stages of the girl’s

initiation into the erotic services of her mistress and into a large

lesbian cult whose temple is located within the grounds. Action and

setting are portrayed with some art and the narrative seldom becomes

indelicately specific. Unhappily for the lesbian, the girl’s personal

maid, who lives outside the grounds, gives her male lover an eloquent

account of her young mistress’s charms. By masquerading as a delivery

girl from a modiste’s shop the boy insinuates himself into the actress’s

paradise, converts the lavishly-kept prisoner to the superior delights

of _jouissance_ with him, and brings about her expulsion by her outraged

lesbian lover. This rococo gem was said to be based upon actual persons

and circumstances of the decade in which it was written.

As a kind of last gasp of the _galant_ school’s attempt to conform to

later standards of acceptability one may cite the work of Felicité de

Choiseul-Meuse, an author of uncertain identity who produced a number of

racy novels just after 1800. Her _Julie, ou J’ai Sauvé ma Rose_ (1807)

is a lushly romantic tale in which, as its title suggests, a

professional flirt contrives to be all but seduced by every type of

lover from timorous stripling to middle-aged man-about-town, and in

every sort of setting from her own boudoir to a Gothic cavern where she

is held by a kidnaper. Throughout the story she is attracted by lovely

women, but she becomes involved with one only in the final chapter. A

woman of boyish type seems to have captivated the man Julie really

loves, and, by way of revenge on both, Julie seduces her rival, who

proves to be an already active lesbian. She finds this dalliance

pleasanter than anything thus far experienced with men, and as it does

not constitute defloration, she ends by marrying happily the original

lover who advised her in adolescence that women’s power over men

consists in never sacrificing their technical virginity.

Erotic writing did not, of course, cease with the end of the eighteenth

century. But what may be called the _galant_ way of life suffered a

sharp check with the French Revolution. Not only the divine right of

kings but the allied privilege of court circles to be a law unto

themselves was eclipsed for a number of decades. In all countries and at

all times the possessors of enormous wealth have enjoyed considerable

independence of public opinion, but literature celebrating such

independence in the sexual sphere tended to bifurcate after 1800 into

problem novels whose tone was condemnatory, and an underground stream of

pornography unacceptable for open publication. However unavailable the

latter material may have been to the growing number of middle-class

readers, rumors of its existence doubtless filtered into the general

consciousness. Bisexual pornography continued to be written throughout

the nineteenth century, some of it fairly high in quality and attributed

to authors of renown, and the recurrence of lesbian activity in this

subterranean stream may well have contributed to the disrepute of

variance of all sorts during that century and the first years of the

present one.

CHAPTER III.

FROM THE ROMANTICS TO THE MODERNS

Introduction

Imaginative works featuring variant women have thus far been few, widely

separated in time, and for the most part written with literary intent

only. Thus, it has sufficed to present them with slight orientation in

literary history. During the nineteenth century such items averaged

better than three per decade and the majority were novels, a form

particularly apt to reflect drifts of contemporary thought and even to

be written for ulterior ends. If even tenuous patterns are to be traced

in this mass of material it will be necessary to sketch as background

the general trends of interest from which the novels grew.

Probably the most significant feature of the decades just following the

French Revolution was the rapid spread of democratic efforts toward

political, economic and educational betterment of the common man. This

was reflected slowly in variant literature, and then only indirectly as

it multiplied readers, writers, and subjects of relatively modest social

status. Outside the field of social reform the same revolutionary

sentiment appeared under such different guises as the Romantic Movement

in literature and a scientific rather than a philosophic attack upon the

problems of human personality.

Most closely allied to practical politics was the Woman’s Movement. The

eighteenth-century French rationalists who championed the rights of man

included women in their thesis; however, for various historical and

psychological reasons their own countrywomen never as a whole embraced

the feminist cause. In England and America, on the other hand, where the

property rights of women or their inability to vote on such humanitarian

issues as abolition of slavery were sore points, feminists embarked upon

a battle for legal equality which ran on into the present century.

The Romantic Movement in literature represented a swing away from

eighteenth century rationalism toward the glorifying of emotional

experience. Whereas the sexual licence in pre-Revolutionary France had

reflected a _galant_ indifference to moral standards, the new and more

general claim to emotional freedom was a matter of philosophic

principle. However unsatisfactory from a pragmatic viewpoint the lives

of such men as Rousseau and Shelley may have been, these “mad idealists”

were acting upon conviction. The keynote of romanticism was, as always,

the exaltation of Love and of every individual’s right to follow its

dictates, a theme which figured prominently in nineteenth century

literature and which still persists in popular fiction and films. While

this philosophic tolerance did not extend to homosexual love, it enabled

the subject to be treated seriously in other than underground erotic

literature.

Yet another aspect of the rebellion against hitherto revered authority

was the extension of scientific method to the study of human

consciousness. Ever since the renaissance, science had been advancing

steadily in physical fields. Its practical applications had produced the

Industrial Revolution, and its unfettered intellectual attitude had

helped, via the French Encyclopedists, to sow the seeds of political

revolution. During the late eighteenth century students of geology,

biology, and human anatomy were accumulating the evolutionary data so

dramatically systematized in 1859 by Darwin. At the same time scientific

travelers, observing primitive societies, assembled the raw materials of

what later became anthropology. Finally at the beginning of the

nineteenth century a few pioneers, defying heavy odds of religious and

popular prejudice, began to explore the relation of mind to body. In

Germany laboratory experiment was concentrated on the neurological bases

of sensory experience. In France medical aspects of the problem took

precedence, focussing on mental aberration, and by the 1860s Charcot,

best known for his therapeutic use of hypnotism, had founded the first

great neurological clinic.

As to the objective study of homosexuality, nothing which could be

called scientific by modern standards was attempted until the last third

of the century, but the phenomenon was noted extensively in the

pre-anthropological records mentioned above, and a considerable group of

studies on human hermaphrodites antedated 1850.[1] A single descriptive

article on homosexuality appeared as early as 1791, when a German

periodical, _Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde_, published the

biographies of two men who “manifested an enthusiastic love for persons

of their own sex,” and one of whom attributed his predilection to

childhood experiences at home and at school. For the next fifty years

the only pertinent contributions seem to have been some articles on “the

Scythian madness” (male homosexuality) in the ancient Greeks. Then, in

1852, a Dr. Casper published in his _Vierteljahrsschrift_ a number of

comments on contemporaneous pederasty,[2] and a few years later he

brought out a volume of male case histories under the title _Klinische

Novellen_. During the following two decades Karl Ulrichs (writing under

the pseudonym Numa Numantius) produced upward of a dozen pamphlets,

controversial rather than scientific, which defended male homosexuality

as hereditary and therefore not justly subject to legal penalty. All

these studies, it should be noted, dealt exclusively with men.

What is considered the first essentially scientific publication,

however, was a clinical report in 1870 on a female homosexual patient by

a German physician, Westphal, after which similar descriptive case

studies multiplied rapidly. In 1886 Krafft-Ebing brought out his lengthy

_Psychopathia Sexualis_, a large section of which was devoted to

“contrary sexual feeling,” and before the end of the century Albert

Moll, Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld produced even more extensive

treatises.[3] Although all these later studies included female cases,

women still did not receive much emphasis. A Spaniard, Casán, was

apparently the only writer to treat women exclusively. (His volume,

listed in the U.S. Surgeon General’s Catalog as _El Amor Lesbio_, 1896,

has not been available for examination.)

The mounting stress upon an objective approach to psychological

phenomena had its effect on alert literary minds. (It was not

restricted, of course, to sex or variance). Balzac was the first to

embark deliberately upon a “naturalistic” study of human experience, and

although literary critics observe that his plots are often based on more

or less abstract concepts, none deny that his individual characters show

the fruit of minute observation. By 1857 Flaubert also was maintaining

that “it is time to give it (literary art) the precision of the sciences

by means of a pitiless method,”[4] and later in the century Zola pointed

out that his own practice, as well as his theories set forth in _Le

Roman Experimental_, were “based upon the application of experimental

science to physiology as developed in the writings of Dr. Claude

Bernard.”[5] Each of these three major novelists contributed to the

understanding of female variance, and the same spirit can be detected in

the fiction of several lesser writers who attacked the subject.

Even in the many cases where direct connection cannot be demonstrated

between scientific thought and the imaginative writing under

consideration, there is a perceptible correlation from decade to decade

between quantitative developments in both fields.

Precursors of Modern Fiction

The transition from _galant_ writing of the eighteenth century to modern

fiction with its psychological preoccupation and its elevation of

women’s roles to a position of romantic importance could hardly be

better exemplified than by Diderot’s _La Religieuse_. Superficially,

this novel appears to be a typical pre-revolutionary anti-clerical

effort. As it was undertaken in 1760, only a year after the second

suppression of its author’s major project, _L’Encyclopédie_, it is

tempting to imagine that the Jesuits’ share in that act of censorship

may have been the immediate spur to its inception. Actually _La

Religieuse_ broke new ground, for Diderot’s preoccupation was not so

much the religious shortcomings of the convents depicted, as the morbid

physical and psychological effects of celibacy upon women, especially

when this way of life was not freely elected but enforced by church and

family.

The tale was first conceived as a practical joke on an impressionable

philanthropist, the Marquis de Croismare, who in 1757 had exercised his

influence in behalf of a nun seeking release from her vows. Not even

personally acquainted with the young woman, he engaged legal aid for her

but had no success, and she was forced to remain in her convent. A few

years later, when she was unobtrusively transferred to another religious

house, Diderot, Grimm, and other friends of de Croismare’s conceived the

idea of pretending that she had escaped, and Diderot forged a series of

letters in which she appealed to her former benefactor for some means of

support in a place where her religious “persecutors” could not find her.

The victim of the hoax was so moved by it that he offered her (by mail)

a position as companion to his daughter, and the perpetrators were

forced to fabricate an account of her sudden death. It was not till

eight years later that the marquis learned the truth, and “was able to

laugh at the incident over which he had earlier wept.”[6]

In the meantime Diderot had invented a complete autobiography supposedly

written by the girl during her last illness, and though this was not

completed in time to become a part of the deception, it so engaged its

author’s interest that he continued to work on the whole story

intermittently for a couple of decades. It was pretty certainly finished

by 1780, but was not published until 1796, when it appeared in its

present form, along with the account of its composition. Written as her

own artless journal, it gives the story of an illegitimate girl forced

into convent life by a guilt-ridden mother and her suspicious husband.

The victim resists her fate with extraordinary intelligence and

ingenuity, but her struggles are futile, and she is merely transferred

from one religious house to another, each exemplifying some pathological

aspect of conventual sex-repression. Under the best abbess she meets

nothing worse than a rather hysterical exaggeration of piety with slight

variant overtones; in the second institution she encounters outright

sadism, and in the third rampant homosexuality.

The Superior in this last house is an overt lesbian, and her efforts to

seduce the girl occupy nearly a third of Diderot’s whole volume. The

young nun, steadfast in her desire for freedom—and marriage, though she

has not yet known love—remains almost wholly blind to the meaning of the

other’s blandishments and of her own partial response to them. The

Superior is described as vain, frivolous, flighty, and wholly without

religious feeling. The scenes in her quarters where her favorites

gossip, fawn on her, and compete for her favors are more in the spirit

of _galant_ eighteenth century canvases than that of a religious house.

Ellis says that for the Superior “Diderot found a model in the Abbess of

Chelles, a daughter of the Regent (Philippe of Orleans, brother of Louis

XIV) and thus a member of a family which for several generations showed

a marked tendency to inversion.”[7] Wherever Diderot gathered his

material, his picture of fevered intrigue, jealousy, skilled seduction,

and finally of the frustrated Superior’s decline into acute neurosis, is

unparalleled in fiction before the present century. Indeed, for clinical

accuracy of detail it had no equal until Westphal’s scientific case

study of a homosexual woman was published in 1870. Thus it stands as a

landmark in the literature of female sex variance.

Equally a landmark, though of a very different sort, is Mary

Wollstonecraft’s _Mary, a Fiction_, which since it appeared in 1788,

actually antedated Diderot’s from the viewpoint of open publication. It

is the first novel on female variance to be written by a woman, and its

significance is augmented by its being an English work, written before

its author’s lengthy sojourn in France at the beginning of the

Revolution. The writer of this now forgotten volume (only a handful of

copies are extant here or abroad) is more generally remembered for her

_Vindication of the Rights of Women_ (1798), for her liaison in Paris

during the Revolution with Gilbert Imlay, an American soldier of

fortune, and for her later and comparatively unromantic marriage to

William Godwin. In their recent _Modern Woman, the Lost Sex_.[8]

Lundberg and Farnham devote much space to establishing the _Vindication_

as the germ of all subsequent rebellion of women against their normal

social and biological roles. But though Wollstonecraft strongly defended

the right of women to the individual liberty which was being generally

claimed for all men, an impartial review of feminism hardly appears to

justify so complete an assignment of responsibility to this single work.

The authors of _Modern Woman_ have done an excellent job of analyzing

the unhappy home environment and early experiences that made

Wollstonecraft a champion of her sex and a mordant critic of male

dominance. They pass over, as not germane to their theme, one major

factor in her life, her consuming attachment to Fanny Blood, a young

woman slightly Mary’s senior, which began when the latter was about

fifteen and continued until Fanny’s death twelve years later. Of this

attachment William Godwin in his _Memoirs_ says that it was “so fervent

as ... to have constituted the ruling passion in her mind.”[9]

This friendship is the theme of _Mary_, though the fictional version is

less moving and significant than the known facts on which it was based.

As biographers and critics are agreed that Wollstonecraft had little

creative imagination and drew for all her fiction with almost

embarrassing literalness upon her own experience, a parallel analysis of

the tale and its source incidents will be enlightening. The fictional

“Mary” is the child of wealth, with a single brother and an ailing

mother sentimentally addicted to novel reading. In reality, Mary was the

second of six children of a violent drunken father and a masochistically

submissive mother. The family was so impoverished that from childhood

Mary was acquainted with the bitterest contriving, and in late

adolescence faced earning her own living, a problem not easily solved in

her time for a woman above the servant class.

The father in the novel, dangerous when in his cups and given freely to

wenching, is the only accurate family portrait aside from the heroine

herself. That “tenderness and compassion” for the ill-treated mother

became “the governing propensity in her heart through life” was as true

of the real as of the fictional Mary. As a mere child Wollstonecraft had

often slept on the landing outside her mother’s door so that her father

should not misuse his wife when drunk. Ann, the beloved friend in the

novel, lives, as did Fanny Blood, in wretched poverty and suffers from

unrequited love for a man who has trifled with her affections. Thus

“Mary’s” passionate devotion to Ann is not returned in kind, and she is

“often hurt by involuntary indifference.” Rushing to Ann with glowing

delight and seeing no answering emotion in her friend’s face, “Mary

would check her warm greeting and seem of chilling insensibility.” Then,

perceiving her friend’s hurt surprise, she forces a contrite and

disciplined warmth.

Upon the death of both mother and brother, “Mary” submits to her

mother’s dying wish and to pressure from her father, and marries a boy

who is joint heir to the family property. Her only thought is of

providing a stable home for Ann. Without the marriage’s being

consummated—the mere approach of the husband sickens “Mary”—the weak and

egocentric boy embarks on the conventional Grand Tour of the continent

to complete his education, and Ann moves in as “Mary’s” companion.

“Before she enjoyed Ann’s constant society she imagined it would have

made her completely happy; she was disappointed, and yet knew not what

to complain of.”[10] At her father’s death her husband proposes to

return, but the thought of him still makes her ill. “There was no

previous attachment to give rise to her revulsion. Her friendship with

Ann had occupied her whole heart and resembled a passion.”[11]

This husband, so pallid a figment, was extraneous to the real Mary’s

experience. Actually she and a sister had launched a school for young

girls, for which she had had superficial preparation as a governess, in

order to provide a home for Fanny. The latter had once expressed a wish

to live with Mary, but after much procrastination and one brief trial of

life with the two struggling sisters, she returned to her own wretched

home. Presently she married her vacillating suitor, whom in fact Mary

had brought to terms with a few privately delivered home truths—quite

simply that Fanny’s incipient tuberculosis was due to his long

indecision. After achieving this selfless end Mary fell ill, for the

second time in her life, the first having followed her mother’s death

five years earlier.

In the novel Ann, unmarried and ailing, is taken to Lisbon by “Mary,”

and dies there despite the beneficial change of climate. In reality it

was her husband’s business which took Fanny there, and pregnancy which

aggravated her pulmonary weakness. Gravely ill, she sent a desperate

appeal to Mary, who threw over her teaching, borrowed ruinously to

finance the journey, and even so, arrived in Lisbon only a few hours

before Fanny’s confinement and a few days before her death.

The _Fiction_ was written subsequent not only to that loss but to Mary’s

first efforts at journalism and her resulting encounter with the artist

Henry Fuseli. Almost at once she loved Fuseli passionately. He, however,

was married, and his wife quite naturally vetoed Mary’s incredibly naïve

proposal to become one of the household. The girl, now twenty-six,

believed her own passion to be purely “platonic.” One biographer of

Fuseli reports her as saying to him, “If I thought my passion criminal I

would conquer it or die in the attempt, for immodesty in my eyes is

ugliness.”[12] In the _Fiction_ “Henry” figures as an ailing violinist

met in Lisbon during Ann’s last illness and loved later in maternal

fashion, but made inaccessible by Mary’s own married state.

He told her that the tenderest father could not more anxiously

interest himself in the fate of a darling child than he did in hers

... He had called her “My child!” ... His child, what an association

of ideas. If I had had such a father! She could not dwell on the

thoughts, the wishes which obtruded themselves. Her mind was

unhinged, and passion unperceived filled her whole soul.[13]

Another speech of “Henry’s” is significant in the Ann-“Mary”

relationship: “I would give the world for a picture with the expression

I have seen in your face when you have been supporting your friend [in

your arms].”[14] As to the final relation of “Mary” to her husband,

after her return to England she faints at the sight of him, and finally,

demanding her freedom, retires to the country where she devotes herself

to good works and waits for death, in which she will be reunited with

Ann, and “where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.”[15]

This whole cathartic outpouring raises interesting questions as to the

author’s own understanding of its emotional significance. It was

published anonymously, but her own name and that of Henry appear

unchanged, their relations in the tale, as in life, being beyond

question blameless. So were “Mary’s” with Ann on the surface, though the

author states openly that “Mary always slept with Ann, who was subject

to terrifying dreams.” Yet she substituted “Ann” for Fanny, even though

the latter had passed beyond the possible reach of slander. Was she

perhaps aware of criticism directed against their relationship? Mary

had, at twenty, been governess to the children of Lady Kingsborough in

Ireland, and was dismissed because the children grew too fond of

her.[16] The fourteen-year-old daughter in particular was so attached as

to become ill during a brief separation from Mary. In a letter preserved

in Godwin’s _Memoirs_, Mary refers to the pleasure she derived from the

girl’s “innocent caresses,” an odd adjective had Mary not been aware of

possible caresses between women that were otherwise.

The answer seems to lie in two passages, one from the _Rights of Women_

in which she refers to physical love as “perhaps the most evanescent of

all passions,” and the other in a letter to Imlay written after it was

all too plain that his infatuation had burned out:

Ah, my friend! You do not know the ineffable delight, the exquisite

pleasure, which arises from the unison of affection and desire, when

the whole soul and senses are abandoned to a lively imagination that

renders every emotion delicate and rapturous. Yes; these are emotions

over which satiety has no power and the recollection of which even

disappointment cannot disenchant, but they do not exist without

self-denial. These emotions, more or less strong, appear to me to be

the distinctive characteristics of genius, the foundation of taste,

and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of which the

common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begetters certainly have

no idea. You will smile at an observation that has just occurred to

me: I consider those minds as the most strong and original whose

imagination acts as the stimulus to their senses.[17]

Here is a summing up of the wisdom gained from three love affairs, two

physically unfulfilled, the third disillusioning. The passage also

foreshadows her relations with Godwin, whose own description of their

courtship runs as follows:

The partiality which we conceive for each other ... grew with equal

advances in the mind of each.... One sex did not take the priority

which long established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep

that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that

either party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the

toil spreader or the prey, in the affair.... It was friendship

melting into love.[18]

In Mary’s eyes, Fuseli, Fanny, and she herself evidently bore some of

the stigmata of genius. Imlay, business man, extrovert, casual

adventurer, impetuous lover, was of “the common herd of

child-begetters.” Hers is definitely the feminine romantic ideal of the

subjective aspects of Love outweighing the physical to a point where the

sex of the partner is less important than his personality.

Thus, we have in the last dozen years of the eighteenth century two

novels which sounded the keynotes of much that has followed. Diderot

analyzed an overtly homosexual woman and pronounced her wholly

pathological and destructive, even though he assigned much of the

responsibility for her divagations to the environment in which her

entire life was spent. Wollstonecraft’s novel idealized an innocent

variant relationship as the highest form of emotional experience.

Numerous variations on both these themes appear in the succeeding

century and a half.

The Novel Before 1870

For the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century variant fiction

was so nearly an exclusive product of France that traces appearing

elsewhere may be left for separate consideration. The first pertinent

French item was a typical Romantic Period novel of indifferent literary

quality, Philip Cuisin’s _Clémentine, Orpheline et Androgyne_ (1819). As

its title indicates, intersexual anatomy is responsible for the

heroine’s variant personality, which is used merely as mainspring for a

plot of the wildest extravagance. _Clémentine_ is a beautiful child of

unknown antecedents cast ashore near Carcassone as sole survivor of a

shipwreck. With the approach of puberty her ambiguous sex makes her the

object of so much superstitious hostility among the peasants of the

neighborhood that she is sent by her wealthy protector to a physician in

Cadiz who is glad of the chance to observe such an anomaly.

A child’s unawareness of her own peculiarity had betrayed her to the

peasants of Carcassone. Shocked into neurotic prudery she manages in

Cadiz to avoid suspicion though not curiosity on the part of the

physician’s daughter, who becomes strongly attached to her and is hurt

by her refusal of the easy intimacy common among growing girls.

Clémentine canalizes her waxing male eroticism into strenuous physical

exercise and becomes a proficient fencer. This unfeminine skill and her

habit of going about occasionally in men’s clothing produce violent

infatuation in a bold young woman of the neighborhood who believes her

to be a man, and who plays thereafter the role of villain in the piece.

Because of this woman’s advances, Clémentine is forced to leave her

second home in Cadiz and is subsequently involved in a series of stormy

adventures. She is too feminine to live out her life disguised as a man,

too relentlessly pursued by her evil adorer to settle down as an

independent woman and win a man she has come to love. An interim in a

convent, where she takes refuge from the law after killing a man in a

duel, naturally only produces fresh complications. Here she, herself, is

passionately drawn to the urbane Superior who cherishes her, and a

novice is similarly attracted to her; but she resists all temptations

(and they are many) to give way to her feelings. At last obstacles are

overcome according to the best romantic pattern—she marries her male

beloved, who understands and accepts her anomaly, encourages her to

fence and hunt with him, and enjoys her love, which has “la force réuni

des deux sexes.” The author must have read the contemporary literature

on hermaphroditism, but was evidently shy of attributing his heroine’s

passionate intensity to her anomaly after once he had her settled as a

married woman, and so lays it in part to prenatal influence. Her mother,

we are told, had during pregnancy been very friendly with a Persian

ambassador to the French court, and had been “saturated” with his

oriental tales. Thus, the daughter was predestined to love “avec

l’exaltation d’une Persane.”

The second and slightly more artistic French narrative is a two-volume

novel by Henri de Latouche entitled _Fragoletta_ (1829), which is

concerned primarily with the Napoleonic wars and anti-British

propaganda. Emotional interest centers about the hero’s love for the

title figure, whom he first meets as a boyish girl of fourteen, daring,

brilliant, and free of coquetry. Her Sicilian guardian, knowing himself

pursued by political assassins, implores d’Hauteville to marry and care

for Fragoletta, but d’Hauteville feels that his love for her has roused

no response save lively friendship and so waits for her emotions to

mature. On the guardian’s death he becomes her protector until the

misfortunes of war separate them. Later he hears she has returned to her

native Austria from which she was removed as an infant.

She writes him of discovering there a twin brother, Adriani, who

eventually visits d’Hauteville in his Paris home and falls in love with

his sister, an untouched innocent a year Adriani’s senior. Sent as a spy

to Naples, d’Hauteville sees Fragoletta there at a court ball given by

Queen Caroline, at which Lady Hamilton is a guest. He hears that Adriani

is a spy on the English-Neapolitan side, but because of the need for

concealing his own identity he can neither reveal himself to Fragoletta

nor penetrate the mystery of her presence among the English and her

brother’s treasonous activity.

He then learns from a frantic letter from his sister that Adriani has

seduced her and that she no longer wishes to live. Her mother also has

fallen gravely ill of the shock. D’Hauteville pursues the boy to Paris

only to find him gone again and his sister on her deathbed.

Subsequently, he tracks the traitor-seducer back to Naples and

challenges him to a duel. Fragoletta, still in Naples, begs him not to

expose himself to certain capture by the enemy merely in order to avenge

“un tort exagéré ou peut-être imaginaire,” implying that only his

sister’s naïvete led her to believe herself ravished. D’Hauteville

persists in duelling, however, and overcomes his opponent without

effort. Adriani retreats almost without resistance over the edge of a

cliff and falls to death in the sea below with a feminine cry which

reveals to d’Hauteville that Fragoletta and her twin are one. The reader

is left in doubt whether Fragoletta was, like Clémentine, a

hermaphrodite, or (as seems more probable) was simply an exclusively

lesbian woman. (Similarly the Chevalier d’Eon moved in international

diplomatic circles alternately as man and woman, his true sex being

known only upon his death in 1810.) In the course of the story the

author incorporates a scene between Queen Caroline and Emma Hamilton

which takes place in the former’s sunken marble bath. The queen first

plays the part of lady’s maid in disrobing her beautiful friend, and

later indulges in erotic play until the two drowse off in one another’s

arms in the warm pool. Latouche may have intended this lax court

background to account for Fragoletta’s transformation from a rather

engaging tomboy into an active lesbian.

Far superior from a literary viewpoint to either of these novels was

Balzac’s first venture in the intersexual field, _Seraphitus-Seraphita_

(1834). The heroine of this tale has been mentioned by Natalie Clifford

Barney, a twentieth century writer of lesbian verse, as one of those

androgynes who lend rarity to the Human Comedy.[19] But Seraphita was

not, like Clémentine, a physical anomaly. The novel of which she is the

title figure is a lengthy excursion into Swedenborgian philosophy, and

the girl is raised in an undiluted atmosphere of that particular

mysticism. The result is a sexless and wholly ascetic personality. To

the man who loves her she seems the perfect woman. To a younger girl

whom she leads in fearless ascents of rocky heights above the fjords and

who loves her equally, she seems the perfect man, although there is

never any mystery about her true sex. With neither man nor girl does she

exchange even the most innocent of physical caresses. After her early

death the girl and the man marry one another, their common half-mystical

worship of her constituting a stronger bond than exists between ordinary

lovers.

In the following year Balzac published his much better-known novel, _The

Girl with the Golden Eyes_, a romantic tale involving an overt lesbian,

though the latter enters the story only at the end, the main theme being

her effect upon her passive victim. The story describes the conquest, by

the very flower of Byronic heroes, of a mysterious beauty sequestered in

a Paris mansion with all the vigilance surrounding a caliph’s harem.

Once reached by the hero, the golden-eyed girl proves a paradox of

virginity and voluptuous sophistication until a _lapsus linguae_ betrays

that it is a lesbian of enormous wealth who has initiated her sexually

and kept her hidden from the world of men. This woman, returning from an

absence which made the adventure possible, at once detects the girl’s

infidelity and, in a jealous and sadistic frenzy, kills her. She then

discovers that her rival is her own half-brother and almost physical

twin (they were both illegitimate, their father but one step removed

from royalty), and, consequently, it was his resemblance to her that

made his fatal conquest of the girl so easy.

In the extravagance of the plot and the description of the hero, which

occupies a good quarter of the tale, one might suspect satire upon the

Byronism which was sweeping Europe, except for the romantic seriousness

of the whole. Another long interpolated essay is an arraignment, mordant

in brilliance, of the cruelty, stupidity, and license of Parisian life,

in which one detects echoes from Rousseau: in such an “unnatural” milieu

excesses of evil are only to be expected. Such romantic social

philosophy concerned Balzac here more than the psychology of either

woman. That the golden-eyed girl, sold by her mother at the age of

twelve and a passive partner throughout, should first learn complete

love from the hero, is barely credible. That after a decade in which she

has suffered neither physical nor nervous ill-health she should be so

instantly changed as to prefer death to her former life might be

questioned by the modern psychologist. The lesbian Marquise is hardly

better accounted for. Her cool purchase and long imprisonment of the

girl, whose physical beauty is the only tie suggested between them, make

poor preparation for her heartbreak and sudden desire for convent life

because she has lost “that which seemed the infinite.” Possibly her

half-Spanish, half-royal blood are intended to account for both her

lesbianism and her vagaries of temperament, for gossip credited the

Spanish ruling dynasty as well as the house of Orléans with tendencies

toward homosexuality.

In _Cousin Bette_ (1846), Balzac, with a realism in sharp contrast to

both his earlier tales and in keeping with literary trends of the

intervening dozen years, presents rather casually the half-realized

infatuation of the thwarted spinster, Bette, for Madame Marneffe, the

human instrument she employs to satisfy her much stronger passion for

revenge upon the family who have humiliated her. Valérie Marneffe, who

“spent her days upon a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit

on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments and intrigues ... had

discovered the true nature of this ardent creature burning with wasted

passion, and meant to attach her to herself.”[20] Both women have had

lovers, Bette having striven in vain to hold a Polish artist several

years her junior. But “in this new affection she had found food ... far

more satisfying than her insane passion for Wenceslas, who had always

been cold to her.”[21] Little of physical intimacy is implied between

the two women beyond frequent kisses, and since Balzac is not

particularly reticent about such details, it is not safe to assume any

such relation as existed in _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_. But later

in the book he speaks of such attachments as “the strongest emotion

known, that of a woman for a woman.”[22]

Thus, the faithful observer of the Human Comedy presented three

contrasting types of emotional variance and offered three distinct

explanations of it. In the first, intellectual conditioning was the

causal factor; in the second, a possible inheritance of temperament plus

the certain freedom for self-indulgence provided by limitless wealth;

and in the third, poverty of both circumstance and emotional

opportunity. The resulting experiences also show the writer’s

imaginative range. The first seraphic heroine is as innocent and

passionless as the biblical Ruth. The Spanish Marquise is violent to the

point of melodrama. The warped spinster is confused and groping in

expression as well as feeling.

In the same year that _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_ appeared, Gautier

published _Mlle de Maupin_. The former enjoyed a few months’ priority,

but Gautier’s volume had been promised to the publisher a year before

its appearance, and as the two men’s long friendship began only with

Balzac’s reading of the younger man’s story,[23] there is no question of

influence in either direction.

From the standpoint of modern psychology Gautier’s is the more careful

and complete study. Indeed, having humor, vitality, and a tolerant

bisexual attitude, it is probably the most generally popular of all

variant “classics.” In it an orphaned heiress dons men’s clothes and

sets out to discover how men live when uninhibited by the presence of

ladies. In the course of her adventures Maupin is loved by a young man

of poetic temperament who has had mistresses but found them physically

satisfying only, and by a young woman of good social standing who has

been one of those mistresses. Maupin also has with her for a time a

young girl disguised as a page whom she has rescued from exploitation by

an old rake and on whom she lavishes a devotion both erotic and

maternal. The young man suffers from believing his passion abnormal

until he learns Maupin’s true sex, but then recognizes that for the

first time he has found complete love because he has so many more tastes

in common with this girl than with his previous feminine paramours.

As to the young woman, her passion survives the revelation of Maupin’s

sex, her persistent caresses prove as exciting as the man’s, and Maupin

finishes by spending half the final night depicted with each of them and

by riding off in the morning with markedly unfeminine detachment.

Physically, we have for the first time in modern fiction the explicit

description of a type which has since become associated with homosexual

tendencies in women—the tall, wide shouldered, slim hipped figure

endowed with perfect grace and with great skill in riding and fencing.

Temperamentally we have Maupin’s own description of herself as “of a

third sex, one that has as yet no name above or below.” As a girl she

was “six months older but six years less romantic” than her bosom

friend, for whom her friendship had “all the characteristics of a

passion,” but for years she “burned in her little skin like a chestnut

on the stove” to satisfy what is described as an intellectual curiosity

about the lives of men away from women and their real attitude toward

women.[24] It is this unemotional detachment which Gautier emphasizes as

peculiarly masculine.

Scattered through the story is a quantity of very canny analysis of

intersexual characteristics, and though the tale is supposedly based

upon the life of a seventeenth-century actress, it departs so far from

the known facts about her that it must stand as a monument to the

author’s psychological acumen alone. Since he wrote it at the age of

twenty-four, one cannot escape the suspicion that it was drawn from

personal or at least close secondhand acquaintance with George Sand, so

newly come to Paris in her male costume and so prominent in literary

circles at that moment. It certainly marks a long step forward in the

serious study of a variant personality. (The actual history of Madeleine

Maupin d’Aubigny,[25] late seventeenth-century singer and actress, is

perhaps worth attention because of its contrast to Gautier’s artistic

modification. As a young woman Maupin came to Paris from the provinces

determined upon a stage career, and married her vocal teacher,

d’Aubigny, who was connected with the Opera and who got her the position

upon which she was set. The marriage was apparently a mere strategic

move on her part and was short-lived. A tall woman, and a fencer of

extraordinary ability, Mme. d’Aubigny frequently played young men’s

parts, and soon took to wearing men’s costume off as well as on the

stage. One of her diversions was roaming the streets at night and

provoking men to cross swords with her for the pleasure of worsting

them. She inspired passion in many young women, one of whom, a girl of

good family, ran away with her when her repeated embroilments forced her

to leave Paris. The girl’s parents overtook the eloping couple and put

their daughter into a convent at Avignon.

Being apparently infatuated herself, Maupin resumed woman’s dress and

gained entry to the convent as a novice for the purpose of manoeuvering

her friend’s escape. The means which presented themselves were macabre

enough. A nun died and was buried within the convent enclosure; Maupin

exhumed the body, put it in her friend’s bed, and set fire to the cell;

during the resulting confusion the two young women escaped. But their

subsequent precarious vagabondage apparently cured the girl of her taste

for bohemian freedom and for Maupin; she returned to her parents.

Maupin’s later career was comparatively seamy and unromantic.)

* * * * *

In 1851 Lamartine included in _Nouvelles Confidences_[26] an innocent

infatuation between two adolescent girls which is reminiscent of

Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Balzac’s _Seraphita_. (Though a reference in

Havelock Ellis seems to place Regina among Lamartine’s poetic works, it

is actually prose. His statement that here the theme is treated with

“more or less boldness”[27] also appears unjustified.) Although the

initial attachment between the heroine, Regina, and her school friend,

Clothilde, might be considered “normal,” since it occurs between the

ages of fourteen and seventeen, its later effects compel attention. The

two girls, thrown together in a declining Roman convent school where

supervision is lax, contrive regularly to spend their nights together.

Lamartine describes their hours of long talk and tenderness with such

skill and delicacy that one can doubt neither the basic innocence of

both girls nor the ultimate passion in their embraces.

During their years together Clothilde talks so much of a twin brother

Saluse that Regina falls half in love with him vicariously, but at

seventeen she is married unwillingly to a titled dotard. In the same

year Clothilde’s mother dies, and Clothilde does not long survive this

double loss of her only parent and beloved friend. At Clothilde’s grave

Regina and Saluse meet and fall in love at sight. Their passion runs a

stormy but blameless course, which leads eventually to Regina’s seeking

formal release from her marriage. While she is away from Rome her

petition is granted by the church, but only on condition of Saluse’s

permanent exile from the city. Saluse decides in her absence on exile

for her sake rather than on elopement and public scandal. On learning of

his decision the girl cries out that he who would sacrifice love to

conscience cannot be the brother of Clothilde. ‘At Clothilde’s tomb it

was not she I found again, it was a phantom.... He had her features but

not her heart.’[28]

Lamartine’s effort to explain the girls’ passionate friendship is

interesting if seemingly somewhat confused. Primarily, like Diderot, he

lays responsibility upon the convent environment, where not only are

women segregated but every aspect of their life—music, incense,

pageantry, solitude and idleness—inflames the ‘imagination,’ while the

feeble pretense at education includes nothing to stimulate or discipline

the intellect. Such life produces ‘veritable orientals, fit only for the

harem.’ The specific occasion of their emotional involvement, however,

he says, is Regina’s identification of Clothilde with the unknown

brother of whom the latter talks so eloquently. ‘I should never have

believed in this phenomenon, which reflects and thus redoubles the

beloved object, I should have taken it for the imaginative creation of

poets, had I not seen it with my own eyes in the spirit of Regina.’[29]

This seems a rather feeble attempt to gloss over any homosexual

implication, for Clothilde, though more intellectual and less passionate

than Regina, is in no way masculine. And, in the end, it was precisely

the masculine element in Saluse’s sacrifice of their love which repelled

Regina. It was a man’s decision and not a woman’s, ‘of the head and not

the heart.’ Lamartine’s treatment here of the variant theme gains added

interest from the fact that earlier, in _Jocelyn_, he had sailed

perilously close to the implication of male variance. In this story,

popular enough to supply the libretto for Godard’s opera, a hermit

priest becomes so attached to the “boy” left in his charge that he

suffers agonies of conscience before discovering that his ward is a

disguised girl. Evidently the whole matter of possible intrasexual

attraction held a kind of fascination for Lamartine, though he treated

it with a reserve more Victorian than French.

Toward the end of this decade (1858) a novel appeared, _La Sapho_, cited

by Lewandowski in _Das Sexualproblem ..._[30] as definitely lesbian, and

of added interest in that it was written by a woman, Céleste Venard

comtesse de Chabrillan; but unhappily this has not been available for

examination.

At the beginning of the following decade (1862) Flaubert published

_Salammbo_, of which Krafft-Ebing says that the author made his heroine

homosexual.[31] If this is true at all by modern standards the condition

is latent and of short duration, but because of the expressed judgment

of so prominent an early authority on sex variance the story will be

examined in some detail. It will also be interesting to see with what

“pitiless method” Flaubert dissects the emotional economy of an

inhibited girl. To be sure Salammbo’s adolescent devotion to the virgin

moon-goddess Tanit (comparable to the Greek Astarte and the Roman Diana,

and allied also to the Roman Bona Dea) verges upon passion, but it is so

described as to suggest the sexual overtones in any ecstatic religious

experience rather than to imply a variant element.

Daughter of Hamilcar of Carthage, Salammbo grows up in a time of such

peril that she is raised in solitary seclusion; her only companions are

an aged nurse and the eunuch who is chief priest in the temple of Tanit.

She would like to become a “devotee,” but Hamilcar designs a politically

profitable marriage for her, and forbids her initiation into the inner

mysteries of the cult (which would involve ritual defloration, though

Flaubert does not mention this fact).

She had grown up in abstinence, in fastings and purifications, always

surrounded by exquisite and solemn things, her body saturated with

perfumes and her soul with prayers.... Of obscene symbols she knew

nothing ... (she) worshipped the Goddess in her sidereal aspect.

She says to the priest:

It is a spirit that drives me to this love of mine.... [The other

gods] are all too far away, too high, too insensible; while She—I

feel her as a part of my life, she fills my soul.... I am devoured

with eagerness to see her body.

This may seem suggestive, but she denies physical interest when under

the fires of spring and the full moon, she cries out to her nurse:

Sometimes gusts of heat seem to rise from the depths of my being....

Voices call me ... fire rises in my breast; it stifles me, I feel

that I am dying ... it is a caress folding about me and I feel

crushed.... Oh! that I might lose myself in the night mists ... that

I could _leave my body_ [author’s italics] and be but a breath, a

ray, then float up to thee, O Mother [Tanit].[32]

Her nurse, wise in the signs of physical ripening, does not take this

for religious ecstasy.

“‘You must choose a husband from the sons of the Elders, since it was

[your father’s] wish,’ she says. ‘Your sorrow will vanish in the arms

of a man.’ ‘Why?’ asked the young girl. All the men she had seen had

horrified her with their wild bestial laughter and their coarse

limbs.”[33]

These men are her father’s barbarian mercenaries, and Flaubert’s picture

of their drunken orgy after victory would revolt a stronger spirit than

that of a sheltered girl. Her first direct encounter is with Matho the

Libyan, “his great mouth agape, his necklet of silver moons tangled in

the hairs on his chest.” Crazed with passion for her, he steals the

Zaimph [sacred veil of Tanit] from the temple as a love charm, breaks

into Salammbo’s chambers at midnight, and attempts to ravish and abduct

her. Naturally terrified, she summons aid in time to save herself, but

she does not understand what it is he wants of her. Later she tells him:

“Your words I did not understand, but I knew you wished to drag me

toward something horrible, to the bottom of some abyss....”[34]

The story then centers around her personal conflict between her desire

to retrieve the Zaimph and her horror of the barbarian who has fled the

city without returning it. Finally, under religious compulsion to save

Carthage by regaining its sacred talisman, she makes her way to the

Libyan’s tent. She has been instructed by the high priest to resist

Matho in no way, and consequently she submits to his embrace.

Salammbo, who was accustomed to eunuchs, yielded to amazement at the

strength of this man.... A feeling of lassitude overpowered her ...

all the time she felt that she was in the grip of some doom, that she

had reached a supreme and irrevocable moment.... Some power from

within and at the same time above her, a command from the gods,

forced her to yield to it; she was borne up as on clouds, and fell

back swooning.[35]

But on being questioned subsequently by her father as to what occurred,

she is evasive.

Salammbo told no more, perhaps through shame, or else because in her

extreme ingenuousness she attached but little importance to the

soldier’s embraces.... Then she examined the Zaimph and when she had

well considered it, she was surprised to find that she did not

experience that ecstasy which she had once pictured to herself. Her

dream was accomplished; yet she was melancholy.[36]

Although she does not see Matho again and feels only hatred for him “...

the anguish from which she formerly suffered had left her, and a strange

calm possessed her. Her eyes were not so restless, and shone with limpid

fire.... She did not keep such long or such rigid fasts now.... In spite

of her hatred of him, she would have liked to see Matho again.”[37]

This is a master’s account of the effect of physical release on an

unawakened girl.

Considerably later Salammbo is married, according to her father’s plan,

to the effete prince, Narr’ Havas.

He wore a flower-painted robe fringed with gold at the hem; his

braided hair was caught up at his ears by two arrows of silver.... As

she watched him, she was wrapped about with a host of vague thoughts.

This young man with his gentle voice and woman’s figure charmed her

by the grace of his person and seemed like an elder sister sent by

the Baalim to protect her. She did not understand how this young man

could ever become her master. The thought of Matho came to her and

she could not resist the desire to learn what had become of him....

Although she prayed every day to Tanit for Matho’s death, her horror

of the Libyan was growing less. She was confusedly aware that there

was something almost like religion in the hatred [sic] with which he

had persecuted her, and she wished to see in Narr’ Havas a

reflection, as it were, of a violence which still bemused her.[38]

These two passages indicate quite the opposite of homosexual emotion.

When, after months of carnage, Matho is taken captive and literally torn

to pieces by the people of Carthage, Salammbo is witness to his terrible

death. Instead of sharing in the shrieking triumph of the populace, she

“could once more see him in his tent, clasping his arms about her waist,

stammering gentle words. She thirsted to feel and hear those things

again and was at the point of screaming aloud.” And when Matho “fell

back and moved no more,” Salammbo also collapsed into unconsciousness

from which she never recovered. The concluding words of the book are:

“So died Hamilcar’s daughter, because she had touched the mantle of

Tanit.” Flaubert’s novel carries symbolic overtones not apparent in

brief summary, and since Tanit was allied to the Roman Bona Dea, goddess

of sexual fulfillment and fertility, her Zaimph doubtless represents

heterosexual passion. Salammbo, conditioned to asceticism throughout her

early life, dies of the unresolved conflict between these two dominating

drives.

* * * * *

A minor novel which Krafft-Ebing mentions as also “mainly lesbian in

theme”[39] may shed some light on what he intended by the term. It is

Ernest Feydeau’s _La Comtesse de Chalis_ (1867), in which a dashing

Parisian beauty neglects her children and tubercular husband for a

spectacular career in _le haut monde_. An idealistic and infatuated

professor of the new _Ecole Normale_, who is keenly aware of belonging

to a lower social class, ruins himself financially in his attempt to

maintain a place in the countess’s world. The story, told by him, is

chiefly concerned with his efforts to save her from the frivolous and

corrupt life of her circle. Her evil genius is a fabulously wealthy

Prince Titiane, diseased and depraved at twenty-one, whom she repeatedly

promises to dismiss from her life but to whose influence she

continuously succumbs. She goes gradually from bad to worse, and ends by

consorting _à trois_ with him and one of the city’s celebrated

courtesans, his long-time mistress; however, this situation develops

only in the last pages of a lengthy volume. The Prince is described

throughout as so effeminate in appearance, dress, and appurtenances that

it would be easy to imagine him a woman in disguise, but there is no

textual support for such an inference. Late in the story it develops

that it is solely his use of the whip which binds the countess to him,

and that this flagellation is without sexual sequel, since Titiane is

impotent.

Aside from being unusually tall and arrogant, the countess has no

masculine attributes whatever, either physical or psychological, and it

is never she who wields the lash. Her dominant motive is an egotistic

compulsion to be the most dazzling figure in Paris. Since the fantastic

young Croesus, Titiane, is the arbiter of social destinies in her

particular world, she is slavishly submissive to him. Her interest in

the courtesan, though it is charged with emotion throughout, appears to

be the obsession of an ambitious woman with the techniques of a serious

rival, and the emotion is predominantly jealousy. Her final indulgence

in sexual promiscuity results from her determination to be outdone by

that rival in no field whatsoever. Analyzed by a modern psychiatrist,

the countess would be diagnosed as a complete narcissist, unable to care

the slightest for anyone but herself.

Consideration of these two novels suggests that to Krafft-Ebing any

failure of feminine heterosexual adjustment was included in that

“contrary sexual feeling” which was equated throughout his later study

with active homosexuality. As we have seen, modern psychoanalysts

consider narcissism and homosexuality as closely related in etiology;

yet it is confusing to have the more specific term applied to

experiences which, like Salammbo’s and the countess’s, include relations

with men and none with their own sex. “Mainly lesbian in theme” _La

Comtesse de Chalis_ certainly is not.

The fact that in a contemporary novel considered later, Feydeau’s _La

Comtesse_ was bracketed with Gautier’s _Mlle Maupin_ and Balzac’s _Girl

with the Golden Eyes_ may also have contributed to Krafft-Ebing’s

thinking it more “lesbian” than it is. Indeed, the modern investigator

sometimes suspects that scientific writers had not read all of the

belletristic titles they referred to but were satisfied to rely on the

word of others with respect to them. Another detail which might have

strengthened an impression of similarity to Balzac is Feydeau’s

denunciation of _le haut monde_ in imitation of Balzac’s earlier

indictment of metropolitan life in general. The new element in Feydeau

is acute class consciousness in his condemnation of the “idle rich.”

However second-rate from an artistic standpoint _La Comtesse de Chalis_

may be, it is a remarkably exact contemporary record of “the mixture of

splendor and misery ... the sense of uneasy satiety, of restless torpor,

of indefinable dread” described by the modern Albert Guérard as

prevailing in the late Second Empire.[40]

Evidence from Poets

Although fiction made up so preponderant a part of variant writing in

the nineteenth century, poetry also made a sizable contribution. In

1816, Coleridge, who with Wordsworth is generally thought of as

initiating the Romantic Period in England, published two parts of a

narrative poem, _Christabel_, which was never finished. All college

students of literature know that eerie fragment of medieval romance with

its occult overtones.

Christabel, the innocent heroine whose betrothed is “far away” on a

knightly quest, steals out from her father’s castle at midnight to pray

for her lover beneath a giant oak hung with mistletoe—a test of maidenly

courage in the face of both natural and occult darkness, for oak and

mistletoe still retain pre-Christian connotations. In the moonlit wood

she finds a distressed lady, Geraldine, who tells a story of kidnaping

and violence designed to win her sympathy. As she helps the fainting

lady into the castle certain signs forebode evil to a reader acquainted

with demonic lore: Geraldine’s eyes gleam in the dark like an animal’s,

she is so faint that she requires Christabel’s aid in crossing the sill,

and once she is inside a mastiff moans in its sleep and embers on the

hearth shoot out tongues of flame.

In Christabel’s maiden chamber while the two are disrobing Geraldine

(and she alone) sees the “spectre” of Christabel’s dead mother come to

guard her child, and bids the hovering spirit be off. Though she has

shown fear at sight of a carven angel in the room and has made poor work

of feigning prayer, Geraldine still has power to prevent Christabel’s

seeing the vision or being warned, and presently the two lie down

together “in appropriate medieval nudity.”[41] With fascinated loathing

Christabel notes that Geraldine’s “breast and side” are those of a

withered hag; still she is powerless to resist the other’s spell, and in

Geraldine’s arms she falls into a trance.

With open eyes (ah woe is me!)

Asleep and dreaming fearfully,

Fearfully dreaming, yet, I wis,

Dreaming that alone, which is—

O sorrow and shame! Can this be she

The lady [Christabel] who knelt at the old oak tree?

Afterward “Her limbs relax, her countenance Grows sad and soft,” and in

her sleep she both smiles and weeps, while Geraldine “Seems to slumber

still and mild As a mother with her child.”

In the morning Christabel wakes to find her guest already clothed, but

“fairer yet and yet more fair!” for now her shriveled bosom has the

fullness of a young woman’s, a subtle allusion to the widespread folk

superstition that sexual contact with innocent youth heals sickness and

restores old age. Christabel is troubled by “such perplexity of mind As

dreams too lively leave behind,” and delivers her morning greeting in

“low faltering tones.” “Sure I have sinned!” she feels, but is uncertain

precisely how, and prays merely that “He who on the cross did groan

Might wash away her sins unknown.”[42]

Roy Basler, in his _Sex, Symbolism and Psychology in Literature_,

devotes a long chapter[41] to the poem which is recommended to the

reader for its minute analysis of Coleridge’s skill in handling the

whole episode. As he points out, it is “too realistic psychologically

... for one to avoid an erotic implication.” The remainder of the poem

contains nothing further of variant significance. The spell of

Geraldine’s touch has made it impossible for Christabel to give her

father anything beyond the simplest objective account of how the woman

came there, and the action merely prepares for later events never

written.

Of the content of these three projected “books” we have only a brief

account by Dr. James Gilman, with whom Coleridge lived later while

undergoing treatment for his addiction to opium. The relevant points

follow: Complications force Geraldine to abandon her feminine form and

to assume that of Christabel’s absent lover. In this guise she woos the

girl and gains the father’s consent to a marriage, even though

Christabel is filled with inexplicable loathing for her at the altar.

Had Coleridge carried through this outlined narrative, he could

scarcely, as Basler says, “have avoided even more harrowing suggestions

of a sexual nature” in Geraldine’s disguised courtship. Significant of

her sexual duality are repeated references to her height and her

arrogant bearing.

Basler points out that after 1801, Coleridge’s moral reputation was

precarious because of his opium habit, and that “no man ever feared

calumny more keenly.” Although the poet began _Christabel_ and had the

entire plot worked out at that time, he published none of it for fifteen

years. When it finally appeared, the _Edinburgh Review_ attacked it with

“charges of obscenity” and “implications of personal turpitude,” while

“parodies and vulgar continuations of the poem made the most of leering

improbabilities.” The dread of further personal attack discouraged

Coleridge from completing the work, and no other English poet seems to

have approached the subject of variance for nearly a half century.

The next poem that appeared in England, however—Christina Rossetti’s

_Goblin Market_, written in 1859—is so akin to _Christabel_ in its

overtones of folk magic and so alien to the temporally intervening

French poetry on variant themes that it is best to examine it here. It

is generally regarded as variant or even lesbian, but the vivid

narrative is too symbolic for precise sexual interpretation. On the

surface it recounts that two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, as they stroll

at dusk are daily tempted by “goblin men” to buy the most luscious of

ripe fruits. Though knowing the fruits to be forbidden, Laura succumbs,

pays with a curl of her golden hair (having no money), and partakes

alone, Lizzie having fled. “She sucked their fruit globes fair or red

... sucked and sucked and sucked ... until her tongue was sore....”

After this indulgence she can no longer see or hear the goblins, and

wastes away with pining for their delicacies.

When she seems “knocking at Death’s door,” Lizzie, aware that another

girl in like case has recently died, goes to purchase fruit for her

sister with honest coin. The goblins refuse her money and use every

means to force their wares between her own lips, but she resists and

returns so dripping with crushed fruit that she is hopeful of bringing

some satisfaction to her sister. Laura kisses her hungrily, but more in

gratitude for the dreadful risk she has run than in greed for what

lingers “in dimples of her chin.” Indeed, the fruit now scorches Laura’s

lips and is wormwood on her tongue, so that from loathing she is seized

with violent convulsion and falls unconscious. In the morning she awakes

cured, and Lizzie suffers no ill effects at all.

As a translation of voluptuous experience into decorous terms the poem

cannot be equaled, but any attempt at literal reconstruction of the

experience bogs down in the symbolic details. Certain points however are

implicit in the text: Laura’s experience is a complete sexual release

which it needs no acquaintance with Freud to recognize as oral-erotic.

All the goblins are male, but they are grotesque, repulsive, more animal

than human save for their ability to hawk their wares, and these

irresistible wares take the shapes of ripe cherries, peaches, plums,

melons, “figs that fill the mouth”—in short, the whole catalog of

age-old symbols for female charms. Although the sisters are described as

“Sleeping in their curtained bed Cheek to cheek and breast to breast,”

there is no more incestuous lesbian implication here than in Sidney’s

_Arcadia_. These embraces are plainly symbols of the innocence from

which Laura lapses and to which she returns by virtue of Lizzie’s

steadfast purity. Perhaps the only safe inference is that Laura’s “fall”

is solitary, even subjectively induced (psychiatric records prove

fantasy to be an adequate agent). Her subsequent neurotic inhibition is

the product of guilt, and ends in a releasing hysteric convulsion

somehow brought about by Lizzie’s ministrations.

This mundane analysis of an exquisite work of art does reveal its

author’s emotional pattern. It is known that Miss Rossetti had a

somewhat cloistered life, largely spent in the company of a mother to

whom she was intensely devoted and a sister who later became an Anglican

nun, all three women being almost fanatically devout. She was twice

passionately in love with men, but refused them both on the grounds of

religious incompatibility. The first of these episodes occurred when she

was barely seventeen. The man, a recent convert to Catholicism, returned

to the Church of England when he discovered that Christina would not

marry a papist, but later reverted to Rome, and the whole affair seems

to have constituted a two-year span of acute emotional disturbance in

the girl’s life. (She subsequently fainted upon meeting him unexpectedly

in the street.) It may well have been that any man’s ability to switch

religious camps so readily under the stress of passion produced a

reaction to the whole business of sex such as we find in _Goblin

Market_, which was written when its author was nearing thirty.

Tragically enough, her lifelong ascetic repression broke during her last

illness in a protracted delirium which revealed at what cost it had been

maintained.

* * * * *

France was as always more tolerant of sexual latitude in literature than

England, but even there the open-mindedness which made _Mlle de Maupin_

acceptable in 1835 was not constant. Since it is impossible to give in

short compass any account of the alternating waves of liberalism and

conservative reaction that swayed public opinion there during the middle

decades of the century, it must suffice to note that Charles Baudelaire

published his _Fleurs du Mal_ during an interim of clerical dominance,

and in consequence the volume was condemned by the _Tribunal

Correctionnel_ in August 1857. As early as 1846 the publisher Levy had

announced on advertising pages of other works a forthcoming title by

Baudelaire, _Les Lesbiennes_,[43] which never appeared as such, probably

because the title was too daring. Only three poems in the _Fleurs_ touch

upon lesbianism, but the longest of these was one of the six which were

ordered removed from the volume and which were not publicly printed

again until 1911.

This poem, “Femmes Damnées, I,” some twenty-six quatrains in length,

describes rather explicitly the conquest of a feminine and passive young

girl, half reluctant because still dreaming of heterosexual love, by a

more aggressive feminine partner who decries the physical brutality and

spiritual incompatibility of any male lover. In “Femmes Damnées, II” the

poet watches a band of lesbians at a shore resort behaving much as any

uninhibited heterosexual group might do, and accords them more than even

his customary despairing compassion. Such love as theirs is doomed to go

unsated, and they themselves, he says, will pass progressively to drink

and drugs and “loveless loves that know no pity.” And yet in “Lesbos” he

holds Sappho guilty of a “crime of the spirit” when, faithless to her

own earlier teaching and practice, she “flung the dark roses of her love

sublime To a vain churl (Phaon.)”[44] (Note: “Lesbos” had appeared in

1850 in an anthology, _Les Poètes de l’Amour_, published by Lemerre. It

was omitted from the 1858 edition of that volume, but reappeared in the

edition of 1865.)[45] The Catholic Baudelaire was essentially a mystic,

not a romantic with that faith in Love which had been the gospel of the

preceding decades. Obsessed as he was by the failure of all passion to

satisfy the human craving for perfection, it is natural that homosexual

passion, inevitably “unassuageable, sterile and outcast,” should seem to

him the essence of pitiable futility. This negative judgment, however,

is not given in terms of conventional morality.

Within a decade the wave of conservatism had so far receded that Paul

Verlaine’s _Les Amies, Scènes d’Amour Sapphique_ (1867), though

published in Brussels for safety, apparently encountered in France no

harsher judgment than a comment in the _Bulletin Trimestriel_ that they

were by a poet of the school of M. Leconte de Lisle, and were “fort

singuliers.”[46] The slim sheaf of sixteen pages contained six poems,

subsequently included in his volume _Parallèlement_, which described

lesbian love and its overt expression more explicitly than Baudelaire’s

condemned verses, or indeed than any other non-erotic work up to that

time. The “Pensionnaires” are sisters in the middle teens, the younger

of whom still ‘smiles with innocence’ despite the elder’s far from

innocent ministrations. The pair in “Sur le Balcon,” dreaming only of

the love between women, are ‘a strange couple, pitied by other

heterosexual couples.’ “Printemps” and “Eté” reproduce the situation in

Baudelaire’s “Femmes Damnées, I” except that here the younger and more

innocent girl is neither reluctant nor apprehensive. In “Per Amica

Silentia” the poet applies for the first time the adjective

“esseulées”—solitary, left alone—to those who ‘in these unhappy times’

are set apart by “le glorieux stigmate,” thus foreshadowing the social

isolation lamented sixty years later in the _Well of Loneliness_, but

indicating by the adjective “glorieux” that his sentiment, unlike

Baudelaire’s, is one of championship. In the final “Sappho” he describes

the poet, hollow-eyed, pacing a cold shore, restless as a she-wolf,

weeping and tearing her hair over Phaon’s indifference until finally she

plunges into the sea in despair at the contrast between her present

state and the ‘young glory of her early loves.’[47] It is more than

likely that it was from this poem that Rilke derived his interpretation

of Sappho’s “Lament” heretofore mentioned.

During the preceding year (1866) there had appeared in England

Swinburne’s _Poems and Ballads: First Series_, which raised an outcry on

several counts—its general “paganism,” its evidence of French influence

(particularly that of Baudelaire), and its scattering of poems with a

homosexual tinge. Swinburne had, in his youth, been intimate with the

much older Sir Richard Burton, famous translator of the _Arabian Nights_

and author of an appendix on that “sotadic zone” in the Mediterranean

region which in his opinion favored the development of homosexual

tendencies. Later Swinburne fell under the influence of Richard

Monckton-Milnes, famous for a library of variant erotica. As both of

these friendships were matters of common knowledge, when _Poems and

Ballads_ appeared, attention focussed naturally on such poems as

“Erotion,” “Hermaphroditus,” “Fragoletta,” “Hesperia,” and the fairly

numerous group with a lesbian coloring, though none of these were

explicit or described a realistic contemporary situation in the manner

of Verlaine.

“Anactoria” is a ten-page plaint from Sappho to a girl who no longer

reciprocates her love, but it differs little from Swinburne’s many

laments celebrating all love as pain. The “Sapphics” describe life on

Mitylene, “place whence all gods fled ... full of fruitless women and

music only.” A half dozen stanzas scattered through other poems—notably

“Dolores,” “Faustine,” and “Masque of Queen Bersabe”—echo the same note.

Swinburne’s attitude is unsympathetic, colder even than Baudelaire’s and

more scornful, with emphasis always upon the barrenness of lesbian love,

as might be expected from a poet who occasionally made almost a fetish

of baby-worship.

All of the longer biographies of Swinburne give some account of a

projected narrative in mixed prose and verse upon which he worked

intermittently between 1864 and 1867 but never finished. What remains of

manuscript and galley proof is now in the British Museum, after a

half-century in the possession of the notorious rare-book dealer and

literary forger, Thomas Wise. It was finally edited and given private

publication in 1952 by Langdon Hughes, an idolatrous admirer of

Swinburne, for whom it held the promise of becoming, if completed, one

of the greater English novels. Unhappily, neither the scant surviving

text nor Mr. Hughes’s overwhelming volume of annotation and championship

convey to the reader much of that promise or of the author’s projected

intent. As Swinburne himself gave it no title it is generally known by

the suggestive name of its central figure: _Lesbia Brandon_. Georges

Lafourcade, in his scholarly two-volume study of Swinburne, suggests

that this character was drawn from Jane Faulkner,[48] daughter of one of

the poet’s friends, who also inspired “The Triumph of Time” (fifteen

pages of bitter reproach for failure to love him and save him from other

fateful loves). For this dark, spirited young girl he seems to have

nursed briefly his only “normal” passion; she responded to his

half-hysterical romantic proposal with a helpless burst of laughter, and

it needed but the one touch of ridicule to snuff out the hardly lighted

spark.[49] Lafourcade believes that Jane herself “avait quelque chose

d’anormal,” and certainly the description of Lesbia is suggestive: dark,

heavy-lidded, taciturn, Byronically proud, with a pathological hatred of

men. When, on her deathbed, she is tenderly embraced by the man who

adores her she shows only “mad repugnance, blind absolute horror.” In

her youth she had loved a governess and threatened suicide when the

woman talked of marrying. Later she was an enthusiastic student of

Sappho and wrote many love poems from the masculine viewpoint.

The emotional life of the hero, Hubert, up to the time of his meeting

with Lesbia is said to be a quite frank parallel of Swinburne’s own. The

critical first encounter occurs while Hubert is dressed as a girl, and

this disguise is responsible for Lesbia’s immediate interest. Their

subsequent relations are not developed in the portions of the story that

Swinburne committed to paper, nor is much of Lesbia’s experience save

her eventual slow suicide by opium, in an atmosphere heavily fragrant

with flowers and eau de cologne. Among the disconnected residual

fragments are two: “Turris Iburnea” and “La Bohème Dédorée,” in which

the poet presents Leonora Harley, a beautiful but vulgar and stupid

demi-mondaine. This character was said to be drawn directly from Adah

Isaacs Menken, who was also the original of his “Dolores”—a fifteen page

description of an insatiable nymphomaniac. There is reason, as will

appear later, to believe that Menken’s temperament included a variant

strain. That Swinburne intended to make use of this in his plot is

strongly suggested by the following:

Over their evening Leonora Harley guided with the due graces of her

professional art [that of courtesan]. It was not her fault if she

could not help asking her young friend [Hubert] when he had last met

a dark beauty: she had seen him once with Lesbia.[50]

Further evidence that he planned to incorporate a lesbian element in the

story is found in his correspondence of 1866, where he boasted that

having won an undeservedly scandalous reputation because of that element

in _Poems and Ballads_, he meant to live up to it in his current effort,

which would give his countrymen real cause for Philistine horror.[51]

It is known that Swinburne was still at work on the manuscript in 1867

when his meeting with Mazzini deflected his interests into new channels.

After the years of political discipleship which produced _Songs Before

Sunrise_, he returned to the interrupted narrative. Following that, its

history becomes confused. Certain passages in the hands of his

publishers reached the stage of galley proof but became mixed with

proofs of other incomplete work. Sections of manuscript entrusted to his

good friend, Watts-Dunton, were “mislaid,” and the poet’s repeated pleas

and complaints never stimulated him to find them. Though Langdon Hughes

finds Watts-Dunton guilty of criminal rascality,[52] one cannot

help wondering whether all this apparent carelessness may not have been

well-meant discretion.

The text as it now stands is almost wholly in prose, and the few songs

it contains have, like “The Triumph of Time” and “Dolores,” been

published among Swinburne’s other poems. Nothing in it is at all daring;

there is nothing to account for Lesbia’s variance, nor any indication of

how far the relations between her and Leonora would have gone. But it is

clear that Swinburne, like his hero, worshipped the repressed, intense

and melancholy Lesbia, and despised Leonora, the bisexual wanton. A

reasonable conjecture is that Lesbia’s early passions had been innocent;

that even though despising Leonora she was unable to resist the other’s

seduction; and that self-contempt motivated her suicide—a plot allowing

plenty of latitude for the author’s intent to shock the British reading

public.

CHAPTER IV.

THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY

Fertility in France

The sultry uneasiness in French society recorded by Feydeau in 1867 soon

broke in the storm of the Franco-Prussian war, which ended monarchy in

France. As is usual in time of war, all fiction concerned with emotional

subtleties dwindled, and the years from 1870 to 1880 produced

comparatively few variant items. One, however, was significant in being

the first novel to attack lesbianism as a moral and medical problem. It

was Adolphe Belot’s _Mlle Giraud, Ma Femme_, and it began in 1870 as a

serial in the newspaper _Le Figaro_. Westphal’s clinical report on a

lesbian woman had appeared in Germany early in the year, and it seems

probable that Belot capitalized at once on the interest it aroused in

medical circles, turning out instalments with journalistic facility, for

he produced popular novels by the dozen. Westphal had concluded that his

patient’s compulsive homosexuality was not an isolated pathological

streak in an otherwise sound nature, but a general state related to

manic-depressive insanity (“_sogenannte folie circulaire_”), and Belot

mentions early in his novel the sad difference between the French

casualness with regard to lesbianism and the serious concern prevalent

in Germany, although he does not enlarge upon the latter.

The serial was stopped “in the interests of morality,” but it soon

appeared in book form and ran to several editions (printings) before

1880.[1] All Belot’s novels exploited sex, the boldest requiring

anonymous private printing, so that he was experienced in skirting the

limits of acceptability. When the serial version was censored he had

only to delete or alter condemned passages, amplify the virtuous tone of

the unpublished portion (there is a moral harangue interpolated baldly

in the middle of the book) and profit by the publicity which censorship

always provides.

_Mlle Giraud_ follows the course of a man’s marriage to a girl who

stubbornly refuses to consummate the union. Adrien has been warned

against marrying Paule by a young matron of his acquaintance, but since

Mme. Blangy will give him no reason for her warning, he ignores it.

After several months he suspects this woman, still his wife’s

inseparable companion, of being a blind for some illicit affair of

Paule’s. He tracks the two to an apartment which he examines in their

absence and finds to be a lush love-nest, with some details reminiscent

of the boudoir of the _Girl with the Golden Eyes_. Among other things,

he finds there that volume, along with Diderot’s _La Religieuse_,

Gautier’s _Maupin_, and “Feydeau’s latest, _La Comtesse de Chalis_.”

Adrien’s life as a civil engineer has kept him out of Paris for some

years and left him so unaware of homosexuality among respectable women

that none of these suggestive details arouses his suspicion. It is only

upon his meeting M. Blangy, separated for several years from his wife,

that Adrien learns of the lesbian relationship between the two women.

The two husbands institute a joint campaign to separate their wives, but

it is too late. For the few months Adrien has spent in travel to escape

insupportable domestic tension, Paule has been free for the first time

in her life to indulge her tastes as freely as she likes, and her health

has been gravely affected. During the collapse which follows upon

Adrien’s taking her to North Africa, Paule cries out one day against the

wickedness of segregation in boarding schools where loneliness drives

girls to emotional dependence upon their own sex. ‘I believe it is not

so often men who ruin women,’ she says. ‘It is women who ruin each

other.’[2]

At this her husband begins to regard her as morally ill rather than

depraved, and his new sympathy brings her to the verge of normal passion

for him. But at this crucial moment, Paule’s recapture by Mme. Blangy

destroys all possibility of subsequent adjustment. The conflict ends

with Paule’s complete subjection by her lesbian friend and her death

from meningitis, supposedly the direct result of sexual excess. Adrien,

learning later that Mme. Blangy has begun the conquest of another girl,

manages under the guise of accident to drown the seductress. M. Blangy,

who guesses the truth, tells him he has done the world a service in

removing “cette reptile,” and the author leaves little doubt that he

himself agrees.

Neither girl shows any sign of masculinity except that Paule’s voice is

unusually low and penetrating. Mme. Blangy, the aggressor, is the

essence of flighty femininity. But Paule shows a ripeness of figure

unusual in an unmarried girl, which Adrien naïvely takes for promise of

unawakened _volupté_, and both exhibit a cool and intelligent competence

in dealing with practical details of their secret liaison which is

overmature for their years. The cause of both girls’ abnormality is the

time-worn segregation in boarding school, Mme. Blangy’s having begun

earlier in her life than Paule’s.

Heterosexual frigidity as a direct result, however, makes its pioneer

literary appearance in this novel. To the majority of variant women thus

far encountered, heterosexual experience was also attributed, and of the

handful to which it was not, only five—Mary Frith, Wollstonecraft’s

Mary, Lesbia Brandon, and one each in the poems of Baudelaire and

Verlaine—have expressed antipathy to the male. Even in these cases

revulsion was presented as a part of what Ellis calls the “homosexual

diathesis,” not as the result of previous lesbian activity. Although the

present writer has not encountered earlier scientific authority for

Belot’s claim, his was not a mind likely to originate such an idea. His

attributing meningitis to sexual excess was derived from contemporary

medical theory, and it is probable that his holding homosexuality

responsible for heterosexual failure was similarly grounded. Certainly

the thesis was too popular with moralists and educators of the next half

century to have stemmed from the passing comment of a minor novelist.

During the decade in which _Mlle Giraud_ was the outstanding variant

title, Barbey d’Aurevilly, nearing the end of a long career, published

_Les Diaboliques_, and in one of these short stories, “The Crimson

Curtain” there is a rather boyish girl, the pink of propriety when under

the eye of her guardians, but unfemininely bold and aggressive with a

male boarder in their house. Since none of her hidden sophistication is

attributed to homosexual experience, and as the macabre end of the tale

is her death from heart failure during a night of unrestrained

heterosexual activity, the only implication seems to be that women with

masculine traits are also “masculine” in the intensity of their sexual

endowment, an idea previously hinted in Cuisin’s _Clémentine_. The

notion has reappeared more modernly in ordinary as well as variant

fiction, but in the 1870’s it would have run counter to growing

scientific opinion that male secondary characteristics in women implied

homosexuality.

In the course of the same years Zola’s literary torrent was beginning to

flow, and it is known that many of his novels, notably those treating of

metropolitan life in Rome, London and Paris, include incidental sketches

of variant women. No pretense can be made here to having read or even

skimmed his entire output, but _La Curée_ (1874) may be cited as a

sample appearing during the decade in question. The significant figures

are a pair of wealthy young married women who appear intermittently

among the numerous background figures who are regularly referred to as

“the inseparables” by their friends, and by the author, and who are

strongly reminiscent in both appearance and behavior of Mlle Giraud and

Mme. Blangy. As with the latter pair, their friendship is said to have

begun in boarding school and to have continued uninterrupted by their

respective marriages, but it has no dramatic outcome nor any important

significance to the plot.

As was said in introducing the nineteenth century, the last two decades

saw a sharp increase in all sorts of writing on variance. In the

scientific field the great names were Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Ellis, and

Hirschfeld, the last three being crusaders for official leniency and

general tolerance on the grounds that homosexuality is inborn and

therefore should not be penalized. There was much talk of an

“intermediate sex,” whose condition was referred to as “inversion”

(Ellis’s term). The term _perversion_ was confined to those who were

able to find heterosexual satisfaction and whose homosexual activities

were therefore judged to be willful and unjustified. This hereditary

view did not gain popular currency until late in the century, but as it

spread, the controversy it engendered began to be reflected in fiction.

* * * * *

With 1880 the steady stream of variant fiction began to flow, starting

with Zola’s _Nana_. In this well-known life history of a courtesan the

reader will recall the gradual progress of the robustly heterosexual

heroine from revulsion against an affair between her friend, Satin, and

Mme. Robert and against the lesbian society of the fat Laure’s cafe,

through indifferent tolerance of such activity, to her own final active

relations with Satin which end only at the latter’s death. (This

premature death carries a faint implication that Satin’s long sustained

lesbianism was less healthy than Nana’s predominantly heterosexual

life). All the stages of Nana’s habituation to homosexuality are

presented with the same naturalism which marks Zola’s portrayal of her

other affairs, and there can be little doubt that his material was drawn

from direct observation of the Paris underworld.

The physical types described at Laure’s cafe are noteworthy. The

majority are women in their forties or over, obese and repulsive, whose

outcropping of masculine tendencies might thus seem to be a biological

result of menopause. A few hoydenish younger women appear, but only one

of them is a transvestist. None of their relationships is distinguished

by love or constancy. Even Mme. Robert’s superficially generous attempts

to hold Satin by supporting her seem motivated largely by jealousy.

While Zola’s attitude is not one of approval, the lesbian episodes are

presented with less harshness than several of the heterosexual affairs

in Nana’s career, and they entrain no tragic consequences to compare

with the suicides and utter demoralization resulting from the latter. In

the particular segment of Paris society portrayed, that of the high

grade prostitute or courtesan, lesbianism is not only tolerated—Nana’s

titled lovers are well aware of her relations with Satin—but taken for

granted. Evidently those cafés already flourished which were to be

celebrated later on the canvases of Toulouse-Lautrec and in occasional

cynical verses by Donnay.

In _Pot-bouille_ (1883) Zola included two minor lesbian episodes at a

respectable middle-class level. One involves the adolescent daughter of

a mother so “particular” that the child is tutored at home for fear of

evil influences at school. No account is taken, however, of the family

servant, from whom the girl undertakes to learn ‘what happens when you

are married.’[3] The lessons are given in the daughter’s room after the

family has retired, and are apparently adequate. The second episode

occurs between two young wives, each of whom has been drawn into a

liaison with the same irresistible bachelor living in their apartment

building. One of them, on the point of being caught by her husband

before regaining her own apartment, takes refuge with the woman who has

been her predecessor in the young rake’s affections. Strangers till now,

though curious about one another, the two women become much excited by

their mutual exchange of unhappy confidences. It is three in the

morning, and neither is fully clothed. They conclude by giving one

another what comfort they can.[4]

In 1881 “Paul’s Mistress” was published in de Maupassant’s volume

entitled _La Maison Tellier_ and has appeared subsequently in only three

editions in either French or English. (The English translations are very

poor.) One of his lengthier short stories, it presents the tragedy of a

boy of very good family, intelligent and sensitive, lost in infatuation

for “a small thin brunette with a stride like a grasshopper’s.” At a

riverside amusement park the couple encounters four women (two in men’s

clothes) who are hailed by the holiday crowd with enthusiastic shouts of

“Lesbos! Lesbos!” That Paul is revolted infuriates his companion, and in

the course of the ensuing quarrel the boy faces the hitherto

unacknowledged fact that he and Madeleine have nothing in common but

their passion. Over his protests they return in the evening to dance in

the pavilion, and his partner soon slips off with one of the

transvestists. After an hour of fevered search the boy comes upon the

two in a thicket, and in a frenzy of revulsion escapes unnoticed and

throws himself into the river. When some hours later his body is

recovered Madeleine weeps copiously, but then goes home with the

lesbian, “her head on Pauline’s shoulder, as though it had found refuge

there in a closer and more intimate affection.”

Here, as in _Nana_, homosexuality is pictured at the prostitute’s level,

but an additional causal factor is suggested in Madeleine’s boyish build

and gait. (One of the women in trousers, however, is described with

corrosive accuracy as fat-hipped.) De Maupassant’s judgment is quite

clear. The exquisite beauty of the countryside, evoked with all his

genius for description, is presented as the symbol of Paul’s spirit, the

strident vulgarity of the dance hall as that of Madeleine’s. Every

phrase of this sustained contrast points up the tragedy of fineness

destroyed by depravity. Socially significant again is the comparative

tolerance of lesbianism and transvestism among the respectable resort

population. The two lesbian couples, living in a riverside cottage and

entertaining so noisily that their neighbors protest to the police, are

“investigated” with stupid solemnity. However, there is no more serious

result than “a voluminous report of their innocence.” This caricature of

official action produces only hearty laughter among the other cottagers.

(Bernard Talmey, however, quotes a less complaisant report by Fiaux to

the Municipal Council of Paris in 1887 on lesbian prostitution.)[5]

Another short story in which lesbian action plays some part is Dubut de

Laforest’s “Mlle Tantale” (1884),[6] one of a group of psychological

novelettes comparable to Casper’s _Klinische Novellen_ of thirty years

earlier in that the author gleaned his material from his friend

Charcot’s clinic. Mary Folkestone, the “Mlle Tantale” of the title, and

the illegitimate daughter of a dancer, has, throughout childhood, been

the witness of too many intimate scenes between her mother and the

latter’s lovers to feel anything but loathing for sex. As an adolescent

she is revolted even when her friend Camilla opens her blouse on a hot

day; at the same time she is so aroused by the sight of the other girl’s

breasts that she falls ill. The story outlines her lifelong struggle to

overcome her inhibitions. Following a first experiment with her maid’s

lover, which disgusts her, she tries a second with an artist who is her

social equal. Although this is less repellent, she finds no complete

satisfaction. She then enters upon a liaison with Camilla who, after

experience with men as disillusioning as her own, has become a lesbian.

This effort, too, is a failure. Finally, neurotic from lack of emotional

outlet she resorts to aphrodisiacs and dies of their excessive use; not,

however, until the first scorned lover has found her in time to receive

a contrite dying kiss. This ending indicates a belief in heterosexual

passion, however unromantic, as the remedy for sex-engendered neurosis,

and reminds one that Freud began as a pupil of Charcot.

Paul Bourget’s _Crime d’Amour_ (1886) will be touched on in passing only

because Havelock Ellis mentions it as “dealing with the (lesbian)

theme,” but actually it offers only half a dozen lines on the subject.

The night before becoming the lover of a good friend’s wife, the hero

reviews his very full amatory past. This reminiscence occurs early in

the book and the cynicism about women which it reflects is an important

factor in the story. The following quotation, however, gives the entire

lesbian passage:

On the mantlepiece between the likenesses of two dead friends he kept

an enigmatic portrait representing two women, the head of one resting

on the shoulder of the other. It was the constant living reminder of

a terrible story—the bitterest faithlessness he had ever endured. He

had been cynical or artificial enough to laugh over it earlier with

the two heroines, but he had laughed with death in his heart.[7]

No further reference is made to the women, nor is there the slightest

implication that this affair is more responsible for his disillusionment

than his many others, some of which are recounted at length.

* * * * *

In contrast to the comparative realism of the last five authors stand

such imaginative flights as those which follow. The first was the

_Monsieur Vénus_ of Rachilde (Marguérite Eymery Vallette), published in

Brussels in 1884. According to André David,[8] the book was condemned,

all available copies confiscated and the author heavily fined. Living in

Paris, however, she was happily outside Belgian jurisdiction—the chief

reason why so many daring French titles of the late century bore

Brussels imprints. A year later the novel was brought out in Paris with

some deletions and a preface by Maurice Barrès, and only this second

version has been accessible for study.

It is the story of a wealthy orphaned girl, ward of an ascetic aunt who

but for the necessity of raising her niece would have taken the veil. At

the age of twenty-five Raoule encounters an effeminate man of the

working class a year her junior to whom she is hopelessly attracted. Her

pride is stung by her weakness, and to avoid accepting Jacques as an

equal she virtually buys him and subsequently maintains him in luxury.

By degrees she forces him to wear feminine clothing and play the woman’s

part, to which he proves readily adaptable after an initial rebellion.

She herself assumes the masculine costume and role. Jacques’ avaricious

older sister is at first agreeable to his being kept, but when she

discovers the real nature of the relationship she uses the threat of

exposure to force a marriage which appears to her even more

advantageous. This plebeian match estranges the aunt and most of

Raoule’s own world, leaving a handsome military man, a former suitor of

the girl’s, as the couple’s only frequent visitor. But so completely has

the husband become effeminized that presently he makes advances to the

officer. A duel ensues which the jealous Raoule urges the latter to

carry through to the death. After the loss of her faithless love she has

a wax figure of him enshrined in the room that had been their “temple of

delight,” and she continues to visit it in secret.

In a significant early conversation with her military suitor, Raoule

tells him that she is at last in love. “Sapho!” he cries. “Continue,

Monsieur Vénérande, mon cher ami!” But she hotly denies the charge. Her

intelligence and pride preclude that amusement of boarding-school girls

and prostitutes. In Sappho such love may have had dignity because it was

her invention, a new thing, but mere imitation is shameful weakness. She

herself will also splendidly create a new vice. She then tells of

meeting Jacques, with whom she fell in love as with Beauty. “She said

‘Beauty’ because she was unable to say ‘_Woman_.’”[9]

Jacques is described elsewhere as a dazzling Titian blonde, well-fleshed

in breast and hips, only his voice, hands, and coarse hair betraying his

sex. Raoule herself is taller than he, a handsome brunette with level

brows and a boyish figure. On the occasions when she ventures out in

men’s clothes her own sex is never suspected. That the method of

satisfaction employed between the two is the kiss, and that only in its

usual manifestation, is made unequivocally clear. Late in the story

Jacques discovers that impotence has resulted.

Rachilde accounts with care for her heroine’s behavior pattern.

Throughout Raoule’s childhood the aunt had harped upon the vileness of

physical passion. At the same time the girl’s emotional endowment was

such that the mere reading of an erotic book threw her into a violent

fever. Hence, both the compulsive experimenting with many lovers and the

frigidity which prevented satisfaction. Raoule herself lays the blame

for the latter squarely upon her lovers, whom she has taken as she has

read books, in order to learn what passion is. But men, she says,

offer a woman either brutality or weakness, never the one

aphrodisiac—Love—which might teach her real passion. And to become the

slave of mere sensation is unthinkable. If one is merely to indulge

one’s senses, then to preserve self-respect one must remain, like a man,

indifferent to the experience and master of oneself.

Barrès, in his preface, says that Rachilde was only twenty when she

wrote the tale, a well-bred and innocent girl with nothing but wishful

dreaming from which to spin her fantastic plot. He singles out pride as

the chief handicap of both heroine and author, pride which cannot endure

domination of any sort by a man.

To what mysterious cult are they pledged, these men and women whom

love of self draws one to another [of their own sex]?... One sees

with alarm men losing their taste for women, as Monsieur Vénus

displays hatred of male traits.... It is _la maladie du siècle_ ...

it smells of death.[10]

What he naturally dared not say more plainly is that the tale gives

clear evidence of severely repressed homosexual inclinations on the

author’s part.

Additional, though less marked, evidence of her bias appears in

Rachilde’s second novel, _Madame Adonis_, which came out in Paris in

1886 without serious moralistic repercussions. From a literary viewpoint

it shows some advance in maturity, being fairly free of florid

description, vague philosophy, and erotic purple patches. There is even

a touch of satire in the delineation of a miserly provincial woman

lumber-dealer and her despotic persecution of her son and his Parisian

wife, as well as in the Dickensian portrait of the girl’s alcoholic

father. But although comparative realism makes it more convincing, the

plot is hardly less bizarre than that of _Monsieur Vénus_. It details

the havoc wrought upon the young couple by a picturesque individual who

first in the guise of a romantic artist woos the wife, and later as a

_galante_ and domineering woman captivates the man. Continuing to pose

alternately as twin brother or sister, this person convinces each of the

young people that the other is unfaithful, and so manages to consummate

affairs with both. Only when, goaded too far, the jealous husband

surprises and kills his wife’s lover, do they learn that only one person

is involved—a woman. She has deceived the wife as to her sex by

artificial means. No etiology is suggested for the woman’s sexual

dualism beyond her rebellion, like that of Raoule de Vénérande, against

a feminine role. Light is shed upon the author by the tingling vitality

of her descriptions of the central figure in the male role as compared

with her parallel pictures of the same character as a woman, and also by

the love scenes between the woman and the young wife. These are more

convincing than the conquest of the man which is motivated largely by

vindictive arrogance.

Seasoned readers of biography will not be surprised to learn that beyond

her marriage in 1899 to Alfred Vallette, then editor of the _Mercure de

France_, few facts about Rachilde’s own emotional life are available.

André David compares her personality to that of the Chevalier d’Eon,

famous diplomat and transvestist of the eighteenth century, whose sex

was an enigma to all Europe not finally solved until his death; Ernest

Boyd refers to her assumption of men’s clothing in her teens when she

came to Paris and was befriended by Sarah Bernhardt;[11] but neither

alludes to homosexuality. David does mention, however, her long and

close friendship with Verlaine, whose homosexual connection with Arthur

Rimbaud was a scandal in the late nineteenth century.

Rachilde continued for several decades to produce novels, in some of

which lesbian women made brief appearances too slight to consider here.

Her one later sustained treatment of homosexuality, (which ran serially

in the _Mercure de France_ as _Les Factices_ and was published in book

form as _Les Hors Natures_) dealt with men. In the reviews of fiction

which she contributed to her husband’s periodical from 1896 to the

1930s, she maintained the same attitude of superiority to female

variance expressed by her own Raoule de Vénérande, but she regularly

included lesbian novels in her review list and seldom failed to indicate

their theme. Thus she provided an index of sorts to such fiction over a

period of nearly forty years. When, during the 1890s, criticism was

leveled at the _Mercure_ for its consistent noting of fictional

“decadence,” Vallette replied in a sharp editorial that theirs was the

only periodical whose reviews gave anything resembling an honest picture

of contemporary writing.[12]

The Shadow of Feminism

In Rachilde’s two novels just considered, women’s deliberate adoption of

male attire and outlook figures for the first time in half a century;

that is, since the appearance of _Fragoletta_ and _Mademoiselle de

Maupin_. No significant rebellion against the feminine role is evident

in Zola’s or even Maupassant’s references to transvestism among

prostitutes nor in other variant French fiction before 1890. In other

countries, however, what is now termed the masculine protest was

receiving considerable attention. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James

in America, Olive Schreiner in South Africa, and August Strindberg in

Sweden all contributed observations, even though the phenomenon appears

in their work under widely differing guises and sometimes is only

tenuously related to variance.

Dr. Holmes, versatile contributor to both medicine and letters, would

today undoubtedly have been a psychiatrist. Throughout his life he was

preoccupied with intersexual personality in women, and he explored it at

least tentatively in each of his three novels: _Elsie Venner_ (1859),

_The Guardian Angel_ (1867), and _A Mortal Antipathy_ (1885). Of these a

modern psychiatrist, Dr. Clarence Oberndorf, has observed:

The theory of bisexuality and the importance of bisexual components

in influencing the character of individuals is more than implied in

each one of his abnormal personalities. The masculine traits in

childhood of both Elsie Venner and Myrtle Hazard [in _The Guardian

Angel_], something of a tomboy, are unmistakable. The bisexual theme

becomes even clearer in _A Mortal Antipathy_, where Holmes repeatedly

contrasts the femininity of Euthemia Tower with the masculinity of

Lurida Vincent, and it is apparent that he has but little sympathy

with the latter.[13]

Strictly speaking, Elsie Venner alone deserves the adjective “abnormal.”

Her eccentricity is due to her mother’s having suffered a rattlesnake

bite during late pregnancy of which she died shortly after giving birth

to her child. The girl grows up unafraid of rattlers if not immune to

their poison (there is no account of her being bitten), and possessing

something of the reptile’s power to hypnotize a sensitive individual

with her steady ophidian gaze. As a result she is shunned by her mates,

and develops a solitary and arrogant personality. She is a fearless

mountain climber and not infrequently spends the night on dangerous and

snake-infested rocky slopes above her home. During adolescence she

exhibits for a teacher in the select female academy she attends “a

special fancy” so intense it frightens the woman. On the girl’s side the

obsession seems more a desire to test her power than love. The reaction

of the overworked and half-hysterical teacher is one of terrified

revulsion until Elsie in her last illness calls upon her to act as nurse

and companion. Elsie’s only feeling of normal warmth is directed toward

a young male instructor to whom she virtually offers herself, but he,

too, is unable to respond as she desires, and she dies as an apparent

result of subduing the innate drive to overpower those she loves.

Myrtle Hazard in _The Guardian Angel_ was born in the tropics and lived

her early years amid a luxury not only of natural beauty but of parental

love and adulation from native servants. The strength and self-assurance

thus bred enable her when orphaned to survive the efforts of a couple of

puritanic aunts to break her spirit. At fifteen, precociously mature in

both mind and body, she crops her hair, dons boy’s clothes, and runs off

to return to India where she spent the few remembered years of happy

childhood. The accident which foils her plan wins her new friends, among

them a young man whom she eventually marries. Although in appearance and

behavior she is the most masculine of Holmes’s heroines, variance plays

the least part in her history. Her “best friend,” the only person for

whom she leaves any word upon running away, is merely the bosom

companion natural to an adolescent, and there is no hint of passion in

Myrtle’s feeling for the girl.

As for Lurida Vincent in _A Mortal Antipathy_, despite Dr. Oberndorf’s

emphasis on her masculinity, she is physically fragile, underdeveloped,

and anything but boyish. We see her only in boarding school and learn

nothing of her antecedents or early history. The factors conditioning

her against a feminine role are that she is plain and unappealing to men

and abnormally brilliant. Her only masculinity consists in a resolute

ambition to best her male acquaintances in intellectual achievement.

Envious of her schoolmates’ charm and athletic prowess, she reacts by

becoming the school prodigy and an ardent feminist. Jealously, and with

unconscious passion, she adores Euthemia Tower, who returns her fondness

with marked moderation and common sense. Euthemia is obviously more

Holmes’s ideal of womanhood than a convincing individual. She is

beautiful with the wholesome beauty of youth, modest, warm-hearted, and

admirably well-balanced. She is also the school’s champion athlete,

strong enough to carry an unconscious young man, whom she later marries,

from a burning house without assistance.

From these novels one gathers that the good doctor was partial to women

who were physically not much inferior to men, but he firmly believed

that such equality did not breed masculine emotions. His scientific

acumen had made him aware of passionate attachments between women[14] (a

secondary character in _The Guardian Angel_ is so devoted to her mother

that the latter says, “I should think you were in love with me, my

darling, if you were not my daughter”), but such attachments appear to

concern him so little that one wonders if he was even aware of their

ultimate potentialities.

The same question arises in reading Thomas Hardy’s earliest novel,

_Desperate Remedies_ (1871), even though some early chapters give more

details of a variant episode than anything in Holmes. Circumstances

force the well-born Cytherea at eighteen into service as a lady’s maid,

and Miss Aldclyffe, a spinster of forty-six, employs her despite her

frank admission of inexperience wholly from infatuation with her beauty

and physical grace. Since both women are headstrong and mercurial,

Cytherea’s term as servant lasts a matter of mere hours, but its stormy

ending promotes her to the status of companion and (ultimately) partial

heiress of her mistress’s fortune. This transition occurs during their

single night together, in the course of which the older woman learns

that the girl is already in love with a man and does her best to turn

her adored against him and all of his sex. Miss Aldclyffe is a “tall ...

finely built woman of spare though not angular proportions,”[14a] but

her aversion to men is the result of early seduction and desertion and

not innate, and her passion for Cytherea, half-maternal, stems from

years of emotional starvation. The girl, though also strong-willed and

independent, is wholly feminine and quite unable to satisfy her

mistress’s pleas for some warmth of response to her caresses.

Although _Desperate Remedies_ shows some immaturity in its Victorian

elaboration of plot, its grasp of character foreshadows the mastery

Hardy was later to attain, and an already developed ironic detachment

saves the night incident from being either mawkish or offensive to

British readers. Nothing in it betrays the least awareness of lesbian

possibilities on the part of either Miss Aldclyffe or her author, nor is

there any conscious feminism in her disparagement of men. Actually, she

at once sets about contriving to marry Cytherea to a man of her own

choice—her unacknowledged illegitimate son. The variant episode is thus

brief and incidental, but it is significant in having no known

antecedent in British fiction save Wollstonecraft’s _Mary_ published

nearly a century earlier.[15]

The feminist theme so uncongenial to Holmes’s taste had been presented

with passionate sympathy two years earlier in Olive Schreiner’s _Story

of an African Farm_. This novel is reminiscent of _Mary, a Fiction_,

both in its championship of women and its naïvely autobiographical

pattern. The similarity is due, however, only to the authors’ comparable

life circumstances and not to any possible influence, for by 1880 when

Schreiner was writing, Wollstonecraft’s volume was rare even in England,

and Schreiner had not then left the Transvaal. She brought her

manuscript to London in 1882 and it was published in 1883. _The Story of

an African Farm_ is a sensitive girl’s outcry against the masculine

violence and brutality of a frontier society, and its heroine is

obviously a self-portrait of the author. Lyndall (Schreiner _mère’s_

maiden name) has been turned against men by the villainy or contemptible

weakness of the only specimens of the sex in her lonely milieu, and

equally turned against passion in women by her coarse and callous aunt’s

susceptibility to it. Snared later by her own emotions, she revolts

against her lover’s domination, refuses marriage, bears his child

secretly and alone, and falls fatally ill in consequence. An effeminate

boy, long in love with her, traces her to her hiding place, disguises

himself as a woman, and without revealing his identity nurses her until

her death.

All her life, at least on the conscious level, Lyndall has sought

“something nobler, stronger than I, before which I can kneel down.”

Religion, the obvious answer to her need, has been spoiled for her by

the pitiable weakness of the one man she has known who professed it. Her

lover is stronger than she but signally lacking in the nobility she

craves. Her only help, and subconsciously her only real love, is her own

fearless strength. At one point she is reduced to crying: “Why am I so

alone, so hard, so cold? Will nothing free me from myself?” But on two

other occasions, notably the deathbed scene where she communes with her

own image in a mirror,[16] her naïve and passionate narcissism reveals

itself so clearly and is so lovingly transcribed as to betray it as the

author’s own. (One cannot help wondering whether Barrès had read the

_African Farm_ before writing his preface to _Monsieur Vénus_ in 1885.)

Schreiner’s heroine is drawn to no individual woman save herself, but

she is an impassioned champion of the whole female sex as well as a

hater-of-men. The novel is filled with revolt against the subjugation of

women and their limited opportunities for individual development.

Henry James’s early novel, _The Bostonians_, published in 1885, stands

in sharp contrast. This story ran as a serial in _Century Magazine_.

Before it was finished Richard Watson Gilder, the editor, wrote James

that “he had never published anything so unpopular.” The novel came out

as a book a year later but met with no warmer reception, and was not

subsequently reissued until 1945, being omitted even from the

twenty-nine volume Scribner edition of James’ _Novels and Tales_ in

1923. Philip Rahv in the preface of the 1945 edition of _The Bostonians_

indicates several reasons for its unpopularity, but says that

undoubtedly the “most disquieting” was its keen analysis of “the

emotional economy of the Lesbian woman.”[17]

Because of James’s subtlety his work suffers more than most from

condensation, but as the text of the novel is now readily available, its

nearly four hundred pages can be reduced here to the barest skeleton. In

essence, the plot is the eternal triangle. At its apex is Verena

Tarrant, ultra-feminine, passive and suggestible, whose antecedents bear

witness to James’s interest in recently published theories of heredity.

The rivals for possession of her are Olive Chancellor, Boston

intellectual and feminist spinster a decade her senior, and the latter’s

cousin from Mississippi, a young man who has come out of the Civil War

on the losing side with something of the present day’s critical

pessimism toward modern society. Olive sees in the girl, who has

inherited a spell-binding oratorical gift, a powerful potential ally for

the Woman’s Movement to which she herself is devoted. Subconsciously,

however, her motivation is a love-at-first-sight quite as passionate as

that of her male cousin. Olive manages virtually to adopt Verena and by

degrees to estrange her from her family and her previous suitors.

Olive’s cousin, Basil Ransom, is not so easily disposed of, so she must

finally resort to exacting a promise from the girl that she will not

marry. For several years the two women are wholly absorbed in their

feminist efforts, traveling in Europe where they meet the prominent

leaders of the movement, and studying intensively. Olive’s emphasis is

always upon the wrongs women have suffered at the hands of men.

Olive is increasingly obsessed by her love for Verena. Of Verena, James

says: “Her share in the union, ... was no longer passive, purely

appreciative; it was passionate too, and it put forth a beautiful

energy.”[18] At last Verena is ready for public appearance, and invites

Basil to her first lecture, since he has been forbidden his cousin’s

house in Boston. He takes the opportunity to talk long and seriously to

her about herself, Olive’s influence, and his own love for her. He tells

her that what the times need is not more feminization but less, that

“it’s a ... hysterical, chattering ... age of false delicacy and

exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities.... The masculine

character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear

reality ... is what I want to preserve.”[19] He tells her, too, that she

has allowed Olive to imprison her in “a false thin shell” of devotion to

feminism, when actually she has a genius for giving herself, not to a

cause, but to normal life with a man. The girl is so moved that she

dares not see him again and cannot hide her disturbance from Olive. The

story then records a rapidly accelerating struggle between the man and

the older woman for possession of the girl. The climax comes on the

night of Verena’s great Boston debut, when, just before speaking before

an audience of thousands, she falls ill in the dressing room from inner

emotional conflict. Basil attempts to reach her; Olive, beside herself,

tries to keep him out; but Verena is aware of his presence and of her

own accord chooses him in preference to public triumph and a potentially

brilliant career.

As to the precise nature of the relationship between the two women, no

more is specified than a good deal of quiet kissing and holding of

hands, more symbolic than passionate except for a general

“tremulousness.” At one point the following appears: “It was a very

peculiar thing, their friendship: it had elements which made it probably

as complete as any (between women) that had ever existed.”[20] This is

included as part of a mental soliloquy of Verena’s, and so Rahv, who

comments on the “prescience with which [James] analyzed ... the lesbian

woman,” may possibly be justified in adding that “one cannot be sure

that James understood her precisely as such.”[21] Had Verena’s

rumination above been presented as James’s own, there could be no doubt

of its significance, for he had spent a year in Paris during the 1870’s,

had known Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola, and could not have escaped

awareness of all emotional potentialities between women. It is

interesting that he was careful not to speak in the role of author, nor

to venture recording any comparable fragment of the strongly variant

Olive’s stream of consciousness.

The last novel dealing with feminism, violent in its condemnation of the

Movement and also of female variance, is Strindberg’s _Confession of a

Fool_. This story is now known to be a thinly veiled report of the

author’s relations with his first wife, Siri von Essen, Baroness

Wrangel, whom he married in 1877. It was written in 1887-1888 as an

_apologia pro vita sua_ intended for publication after his projected

suicide. When he decided instead to live and divorce his wife, he kept

the manuscript sealed for five years, until public sentiment aroused by

the circumstances of the divorce led him to publish it “in self

defense.” In view of the fact that his second marriage in 1893 was

followed a year later by his second divorce and a third matrimonial

venture in 1901 came to a similar end in 1904, the _Confession_ provides

a valuable document on the psychology of the unhappy misogynist, but

scarcely an unbiased portrait of the wife.

The hero of the story, Axel, is a bookish introvert with what today

would be termed an obvious mother fixation. He falls in love with the

wife of an officer, his friend, partly from pity because her husband is

involved in a flirtation with her sophisticated young cousin; the

Baroness Marie, however, is rather less concerned about the affair than

Axel. “I’m in love with the little cat myself,” she says early in their

acquaintance. Like Belot’s Adrien, Axel is not warned. In the idealism

of first love he searches the art books in his library for a likeness of

his beloved. She is a goddess—not Venus, definitely not Juno, not even

Minerva, but Diana, “more boy than girl,” who never forgave Actaeon for

seeing her nude. Axel is naïvely enraptured by this seeming evidence of

his love’s purity.

Presently Marie leaves her husband for a stage career, living with Axel

rather incidentally and marrying him only upon discovery that she is

pregnant. It appears later, however, that the child is the Baron’s,

conceived after their formal divorce. After a masquerade for which she

has dressed as a man, Marie is caught fondling a servant girl. To Axel’s

reproaches she retorts that his suspicions are groundless and vile, as

are police reports and medical treatises which term “vicious” all

caresses of any warmth. The birth of a second child—Axel’s, this

time—briefly relaxes domestic tension; however, Marie soon farms the

child out to a nurse, installs an actress friend in a neighboring

apartment, and creates a scandal by caressing her new love in public,

though still protesting innocence.

The lengthy plot continues to oscillate between brief periods of marital

peace during Marie’s pregnancies, and tempests over her increasingly

scandalous connections with women. Most of these are with Marie’s

countrywomen, artists, and other bohemians who dress and act as much

like men as possible, make love openly to one another, and “wallow in

the lowest depths.” Many are militant suffragists, and all are devoted

to the cause. Once Axel reaches the point of wanting to drown his wife,

but he spares her for the sake of their children. Most of the action

thus far has occurred in Paris or in Swiss resorts. There follows an

interlude in Germany, “land of militarism where the patriarchate is

still in full force.” There no one will listen to talk of women’s

rights, and, for the first time, Marie is out of public life;

consequently, Axel flourishes. Even his voice, “which had grown thin

from everlastingly speaking in soothing tones to a woman, regained its

former volume.”[22] When his wife rages against his new dominance he

reflects that he has always known it was the weakling in him, “the page,

the lap-dog, her child” that she loved. He now makes an effort to leave

her, but is helplessly bound by his masochistic passion. This sign of

dependence softens her for a few months. Then Marie is caught caressing

the adolescent daughters of guests, and the rupture is final.

Axel, intellectually concerned as to the cause of her aberration, tries

to discover whether Marie had been a prostitute before her first

marriage, but all evidence is negative. He does learn, however, that her

lesbian habits and those of the Paris circle with whom she had most

conspicuously misbehaved were common knowledge to everyone else. He

finally decides to leave her and “to write the story of this woman, the

true representative of this age of the unsexed.” The novel was published

in Berlin in 1893, two years after his divorce from Siri von Essen, but

“in a corrupt and mutilated text, so crude in its language that it was

suppressed.”[23] The first authorized edition appeared in Sweden in 1912

after the author’s death.

Before leaving Strindberg it will be interesting to return

parenthetically for a moment to _Mlle Tantale_, since the modern analyst

Dr. Clarence Offenbacher has suggested that it may have given Strindberg

the plot of a much better known work, his drama _Miss Julie_.[24] To be

sure the two have in common the unrewarding liaison of a girl with a man

who is her social inferior, in Julie’s case a groom. But in personality

and in conditioning circumstances Julie differs sharply from Mary

Folkestone. Julie is the daughter of a domineering feminist who, in her

effort to equalize the sexes, assigns the labor on her estate to men or

women with complete disregard of its customary division between them.

Quite unlike Mary’s parent, the sensual courtesan, Julie’s mother scorns

passion. She gives her senses rein as rarely as possible and then merely

for the purpose of nervous catharsis. Julie also is wilfully

self-contained, taking the groom in a callous spirit like her mother’s.

Offenbacher points out that Strindberg was in Paris in the 1880s and

probably knew of both Dubut de Laforest and Charcot. It is even more

likely that he was aware of women like Rachilde and the more notorious

Mme. Jeanne Dieulafoy, lifelong transvestist and author who was made a

member of the Legion of Honor about 1890. At the beginning of the

Franco-Prussian war, Dieulafoy was a girl of nineteen, convent bred, who

had just married and who fought beside her husband during the siege of

Paris wearing men’s clothes, “to which she was long accustomed.”[25]

Subsequently, she accompanied him on archeological expeditions to Egypt,

Morocco and Persia. To her grief she was unable to have children, but

she devoted herself to those of her friends, and she and her husband for

a time conducted a private school in which they educated the girls to be

independent and fearless, the boys to show gentleness and consideration.

This training they believed, doubtless from their own experience, would

lead to better adjustment in marriage.

Since at the time of writing _Miss Julie_ Strindberg was deep in the

stormiest phase of his quarrel with Siri von Essen, he would have been

more sensitive to masculine women than to clinical literature. No model

for Julie’s mother could have been readier to hand than this virile

ex-soldier, archeologist, and “progressive” educator. _Miss Julie_ may

well be Strindberg’s dark prediction as to the results of child-training

by such a woman. The fact that there is no trace of variance in _Miss

Julie_ seems another reason for questioning whether it derived from

_Mlle Tantale_. Strindberg was so exercised over that issue at the

moment that he would not have missed a chance to attack it openly unless

his models were actual persons and might conceivably be recognized.

The central figures of the more or less feministic novels considered

above are not marked by unanimous sexual antipathy to the male. A number

of them had husbands or lovers and bore children. Their common feature

is rebellion against the domestic role imposed upon them in

nineteenth-century society, and often their variance is merely one

aspect of that rebellion. In contrast, the novels that follow have

variance per se as their predominant theme, and the authors’ attitudes

toward variance are equally disapproving.

Fin de Siècle

Dubut de Laforest’s second approach to the subject appeared in _La Femme

d’Affaires_ (1890), a vertical section of Paris life as sensational as

was _Mlle Tantale_ in the field of individual psychology. The title

figure is a grasping Jewess, and her contrast to her Catholic

daughter-in-law (almost the only irreproachable character in the book)

would reward a student of religious and racial prejudice; however,

neither of these women is directly concerned in the variant action. The

latter involves a self-centered musical comedy star, bisexually

promiscuous, and a lesbian amazon, Faustine, who supports her when

necessary. Faustine, we learn, was expelled from a school at fifteen for

corrupting its dormitory, and her subsequent excesses with a governess

contributed to the latter’s early death from tuberculosis (cf. _Mlle

Giraud_). She then tried a couple of husbands, and at the time of this

tale’s action she still experiments with men—which is inexplicable since

she never ceases to loathe heterosexual experience. She is violently

jealous of her actress friend, especially of the latter’s connection

with a fantastic titled Englishman who has turned circus clown. During

an ether ‘drunk,’ Faustine surprises the two together and cuts out the

woman’s tongue, thus destroying “the instrument of love.” No etiology is

suggested for her variance except her amazonian build. The unsavory trio

are apparently incorporated in the novel to illustrate the types to whom

the Business Woman will rent apartments at sufficient profit, but the

author devotes more space to them than such reason requires. It was more

probably his own literary profits due to sensationalism that he had an

eye on. His is the most specific reference thus far to the techniques of

lesbian activity, a detail doubtless reflecting his clinical

connections, and one seldom repeated in openly published literature.

More concentrated upon variance is Catulle Mendès’ _Méphistophéla_

(1890), mentioned earlier for its long popularity and its present

rarity. It is also notable for the immense detail of the lesbian life

history presented in its more than five hundred pages. It must have

escaped the censor in its day because of its heavily moralistic tone and

its literary style. Mendès, like Flaubert and Maupassant—though

artistically far from their equal—was more subtle than naturalistic, and

veiled his lurid facts in generalities that might glitter or smoulder

but were unlikely to put specific notions in a reader’s head.

Its prologue gives a sinister sketch of a drug addict in the act of a

self-injection of morphine—a reassuring indication that no matter how

she may appear to flourish in the course of the tale, she will come to

no good end. Wealthy and proud as the heroine of _Monsieur Vénus_,

modish as the Comtesse de Chalis, she has the debauched remnants of

beauty; however, her lack of natural brows and lashes implies syphilis.

She takes morphine to blot out some abysmal horror which has left its

scar upon her. The author then unfolds the heredity and the erotic

career which have brought her to her present pass.

Sophie is the child of a bisexually promiscuous dancer by a Russian

nobleman who laments his mistress’s pregnancy because his ‘rotten and

accursed line’ should never be perpetuated. He dies almost immediately

and the dancer, now fabulously wealthy, takes a house in Fontainebleau

and raises Sophie in strict respectability. But even in childhood Sophie

becomes so attached to a neighbor’s daughter, Emmaline, that a temporary

separation brings on hysterical convulsions, dangerous fever and

somnambulism. The two children have ‘played at marriage,’ a game of

innocent embraces which brought vague shame to the other child, but

seemed natural and acceptable to Sophie. With the approach of puberty

the game is discontinued. During adolescence Sophie’s powerful but still

unconscious sex drive leads her into emotional excesses, first in

connection with confirmation, and later in the study of music and

poetry. Through all these storms she sweeps the passive Emmaline along

with hypnotic intensity, and the two girls are sometimes brought to the

verge of fainting through unrelieved excitement. Recognizing the danger

signals, Sophie’s mother arranges her daughter’s early marriage to

Emmaline’s brother. Sophie, still physically ignorant, is so delighted

at not losing her friend that she accepts the arrangement without

question.

The disillusionment of her wedding night drives her to an attempt to

leap out the window, which her husband prevents. However, as soon as he

is asleep she flees to Emmaline. Awakened by marital initiation to the

significance of her feelings for her friend, she kisses the sleeping

girl’s breast. The husband who has been searching for her, surprises her

in the act, reviles her, and beats her senseless.

Her brother’s brutality moves Emmaline to run away with Sophie, but in a

cottage where they spend an idyllic week she is unwilling to accept the

caresses the other girl now consciously burns to bestow. When

circumstances finally overcome Emmaline’s reluctance, she does not share

Sophie’s transports. Somewhat repelled, and afraid for her reputation,

she slips away and returns home. Sophie is left broken-hearted by her

desertion. She realizes that she has failed Emmaline exactly as her own

husband has failed with her, and she determines to find out how one

woman can satisfy another.

Hiding in Paris from her husband, she allows herself to be initiated by

a lesbian show girl, Magalo, with whom she lives for some time,

physically captivated but hating herself for inconstancy to Emmaline.

The discovery that she is pregnant as a result of her wedding night

brings her to the verge of suicide. She loathes the very thought of

maternity; when her child is born, she consigns it to an orphanage

without a qualm. Her partner, Magalo, is shocked and hurt, being

genuinely in love with her and having envisioned a life _en famille_ for

them and the child. Sophie turns against Magalo in distaste because of

the girl’s interest in motherhood. Upon her mother’s death, Sophie, left

enormously wealthy, makes plans to recapture Emmaline. She is confident

that she can now both support her and adequately fill the role of

husband. In Fontainebleau, however, she learns that Emmaline has

married, her family has dispersed, and her whereabouts are unknown. Once

again, heartbroken, she returns to Paris.

Now she establishes a smart ménage and acquires an enormous lesbian

following. Under her spell, actresses, artists and women of title

neglect careers, male lovers, and husbands. She is known as ‘a giver of

incomparable joys, violent and sophisticated, deliciously and

frightfully inventive.’[26] Into this spectacular brilliance breaks

Magalo, destitute, broken, and ill. In a scene of deathbed repentance

the girl, claiming guidance from Heaven, implores Sophie to give up her

empty and miserable life and return to her husband and child. There can

be no other happiness on earth. ‘We both have had a demon in us,’ she

says, ‘but for you it is not too late.’

Sophie’s response is to go directly from Magalo’s funeral to an

orgiastic lesbian banquet where she glories in her role of presiding

goddess (or demon). With this defiance, a third stage in her

disintegration begins. Her liaisons, always loveless, now fail to give

even sensual satisfaction, and she knows only boredom, relieved less and

less frequently by flashes of desire. Haunted by memories of her only

real love, she ferrets out Emmaline’s whereabouts in the hope that even

a brief encounter may rekindle her own jaded emotions.

In seeking to discover how she can reach Emmaline alone, she finds

herself one evening spying through an open window upon a family scene

centering about Emmaline’s four children. The two men, father and uncle

(the latter her own husband) are fatuously devoted to them. Emmaline has

become wholly maternal, plump and placid. The climax occurs when

Emmaline offers the youngest, an infant of six months, her breast.

Revolted to nausea, Sophie plunges away through the darkness with

demonic laughter.

‘Now Emmaline was no longer worthy of her passion. Was her own life

wrong? Must one be like such clods to be happy? Should she have had

four children? ... No! She repudiated such spineless notions. She was

what she was. She thrust from her her old dream of Emmaline’s breast,

she jeered at Emmaline’s bovine happiness.’[27]

This further repudiation of maternity heralds the final stage of her

degeneration, a round of infamous adventures stimulated by drink and

drugs. ‘Unwilling to believe there could be so little pleasure in vice,

she chose to think she simply had not learned enough,’ and she frequents

the most debauched Paris haunts, no longer bothering to select her

partners, but seizing indifferently on servants and waitresses, to whom

she becomes an object of terror. At last, suffering from hallucinations,

largely of sexual odors, she consults a physician. His first advice is

marriage; however, when he learns that she has already tried that and

even borne a child, he advocates as a last therapeutic experiment the

actual practice of motherhood.

Accordingly she fetches her sixteen-year-old daughter from the convent

orphanage. The girl is graceless and unappealing and on sight awakens no

sentiment but boredom. But while watching her asleep and half-clothed,

Sophie is stirred by violent desire. And now in real horror of herself

she leads the girl to the gate of Emmaline’s house where she can find

her father and a true home, and entreats her to enter it and stay there.

The book closes with an epilogue almost the literal duplicate of the

prologue, for now the reader knows from what nightmare the doomed woman

was seeking to escape when she plied her hypodermic needle.

Marred though it is by excess in length, incident and style, this novel

holds interest because of its effort to present a complete life history

and to account for its lesbian element. The chief trouble is excess in

this respect also. While the “morne demon” possessing “Méphistophéla”

seems at the outset an hereditary syphilitic taint, the author says at

one point:

‘Why, if a scientist today diagnoses hysteria from the same symptoms

that for Bodin [Attorney to Henri III and author of _Démonomanie des

Sorciers_, 1580] proved demonic possession, should not current

neuroses be, under other names, simply the old spells used by

sorcerers? If divine grace is present in the bread and wine [of the

sacrament], why not diabolic malice in opium, hashish, morphine? He

who takes alcohol imbibes Satan. An emetic is an exorcist.’[28]

This could be sailing close to a biochemical explanation of

psychopathology, or, employed by Mendès who was at least a nominal

Catholic, it could indicate a half-serious suspicion of supernatural

influence.

At another point he distinguishes between relatively harmless and

“serious” homosexual activity.

‘Rejected lovers, deceived wives, may console one another and forget

to mention it to their confessors. Brilliant young belles dizzy with

champagne and dancing may fall into each others’ arms as they undress

at dawn. Prostitutes may seek the tender love they have never known,

or consolation for men’s brutality. Only the conscious, cool,

deliberate players of man’s role are courting damnation.’[29]

There is no indication of heredity bearing the burden here. Indeed,

Mendès seems to absolve his heroine from responsibility for her actions

up to the time of her desertion by Emmaline and her escape to Paris;

that is, so long as she is physically innocent and motivated by love.

But from that point on, each step in her downward course results from a

deliberate refusal of motherhood, the final one involving repudiation of

even her early love for Emmaline. Interesting to a modern analyst would

be her obsession with Emmaline’s breast, which had a parallel in Mlle

Tantale’s reaction to her friend Camilla.

Josephin Peladan, author of _La Gynandre_ (1891) states differently the

same thesis: there is no such thing as lesbian Love, it is simply one of

the sexual vices. This novel is one in a long series designed to expose

all these vices under the heading _La Décadence Latine_, which unless

checked, he says, forebodes the end of French civilization. (He also

proclaims the volume to be in part a satire on current lesbian fiction.)

The hero of the tale, a young intellectual known merely as Tammuz, is,

like his author, both Catholic and Rosicrucian, his mission the

conversion of Lesbos to a constructive worship of Eros. The only other

male protagonist is a novelist, Nergal. These names are derived from

Assyrian-Babylonian mythology and represent sun gods and the generative

principle, in opposition to all the female lunar divinities.

A prologue incorporates the two men’s rapid survey of previous

literature on female variance, from classical references through

Catholic confessors’ manuals to Balzac, Gautier, and Baudelaire.

Sappho’s influence, Tammuz decides, operated in so segregated a

community of girls as to engender the cathartic intrasexual play common

in such environments. In short, ‘Lesbos is the story of a pagan

convent.’ The Catholic literature, of course, supports the thesis that

lesbianism is merely ‘female sodomy.’ So also do belletristic works from

Brantôme to Diderot. _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_ is pronounced

Balzac’s weakest effort because it represents lesbian passion as a

motivating force for murder. Gautier gives them momentary pause, because

_Mlle de Maupin_ records lesbian activity between two women of high

social status; however, it is the Catholic Baudelaire who offers them

the most convincing evidence that the lesbian experience may approach

real passion. Tammuz claims that such error merely foreshadowed

Baudelaire’s mental collapse. After this formidable spearhead of

symbolism and avowed moral purpose, the novel presents, with only faint

satire, a cross-section of contemporary female variance. Interestingly

enough, it claims that the vice had become general in Parisian society

only within the previous decade, but it does not attempt to account for

that sudden burgeoning.

Tammuz, an impoverished nobleman enabled by a windfall to spend a year

studying life and love in Paris, is first introduced to the Orchids.

This group is no more than a salon, its hostess a woman architect

nearing forty. Her circle comprises a dozen idle young women, some

married, ranging from a wide-eyed orphan of seventeen who has been

“taken” in her lonely innocence by the first man who showed her any

attention, to a beauty who worships her own dazzling skin far too much

to risk its damage by male caresses. The presiding spirit, Aril, is

sufficiently the diplomat to make each of her protégées feel valued and

to avoid tension by playing no favorites. Tammuz is unable to discern

much real passion among the group for either Aril or one another, and no

lesbian activity save as outsiders stimulate it. A seductive

actress-courtesan may strike a momentary spark, or curious provincial

women in Paris for a brief fling may provoke some of the girls to

exhibitionistic petting, but all soon lapse again into emotional

indolence. Their common need is mainly companionship and freedom from

the male aggression from which all have suffered in one fashion or

another. Aril’s need is scope for her powers of domination.

That the whole business is rather a pose is apparent in the women’s

adoption of picturesque nicknames—not masculine—and is further attested

to by the confession of a senior member. While protesting her own and

the group’s willingness to die for Aril, she makes clear to the young

man that all of them are more thrilled by his masculine interest than by

anything happening among themselves.

Tammuz’s next field for study is the Royal Maupins, a fencing club

housed and headed by a deserter from the Orchids too masculine to submit

to Aril’s dominance. Whereas the Orchids were all passive-feminine, even

though one or two were tall, small-breasted and narrow-hipped, the

Maupins consciously affect masculinity, in their nicknames, and in

wearing fencing hose and men’s silk shirts exclusively in the privacy of

their quarters. Here the prime favorite is not the hostess and nominal

leader but “the Chevalier,” a woman who has avoided overt expression of

all emotion, variant or normal, and whose “purity” Orchids and Maupins

alike hold in such reverence that they forbear trying to win her from

it. She shows an immediate predilection for the young man whose

self-mastery in the pursuit of an ideal equals her own, and this

semi-defection from the lesbian cause wakes violent jealousy among the

pettier Maupins. A trio of them provokes Tammuz to a match with their

most skilled fencer, fitting his opponent with a plastron beneath her

tunic and substituting untipped blades for regulation foils. Their

apparent plot is to kill him in the guise of accident. But the young man

divines the trick, makes the sign of the cross with his blade, and

contrives to break off the tip of it in his opponent’s concealed guard,

escaping with a superficial wound. The exposure of the trick results in

the expulsion of the offending trio and in the Chevalier’s betrayal of

an overmastering love for him. Although he feels an equal attraction, he

goes his way. He diagnoses the Maupins as poseurs whose prototype is the

swashbuckling male adolescent, still encumbered by feminine weaknesses

while lacking the male virtues of intelligence and impersonality.

His further “studies” in Paris lead him to a bathing club where the

sexual play of “socialites” is indistinguishable from that of

courtesans, and to the dressing rooms and studios of actresses and

artists where similar behavior is even more brazenly manifested. Along

the way he accumulates male gossip in the best clubs and sensational

stories from the yellow journals, all of which he holds heavily

responsible for nurturing the legend and cult of Lesbos.

There remains a famous lesbian group secluded in a chateau on the coast

of Normandy to which he makes an unannounced visit. Here the leader is a

Russian princess, whose name has become a byword for lesbian

excess—possibly a satiric imitation of Méphistophéla. Tammuz finds the

Princess Simzerla a proud but pathetic stripling of thirty whose

excursions into vice have been, like Méphistophéla’s, a sterile quest

for some satisfying love. Knowing all the gossip about her before

leaving Paris, he offers his sympathetic and seemingly clairvoyant

analysis of it to the princess while she is disguised as her own brother

and unaware that he knows her identity. This kindly understanding, the

first she has ever met, leads her—with time out for a quick change into

feminine costume—straight into his arms. Tammuz, as always, has

sufficient control to treat her as a sister, for he has decided that the

way to ‘save Lesbos’ is not by converting any single individual to

heterosexual passion, not even the notorious archetype, Simzerla, but by

completely foregoing that physical victory against which most of them

have rebelled. If he gives himself to one, his imaginative hold on all

the rest is lost.

He finds Simzerla’s group more mature and diversified than those

previously encountered, most of them near thirty and fugitives from

Parisian notoriety. He spends some weeks studying them individually and

collectively, leading them into such literary and philosophical

discussion as they are capable of, and spying for passionate

attachments. He is unable to discover that more than one couple indulges

in any physical expression, and that is rather anemic. Furthermore, in

the course of their group effort to write a lesbian drama he obtains

final evidence to support what he has felt throughout his study (and,

one might add, before he began): women have no powers of impersonal or

abstract thought nor any creative intellectual capacity. It is he who

contributes as much of the drama as is written.

His final observation is made aboard the yacht of a Swedish-American

transvestist known as the Phantom Princess, though she has acquired the

actual name of Limerick from a British [sic!] peer, her deserted

husband. Rumor has credited her with maintaining a floating ‘Lesbos’ to

equal Simzerla’s, but Tammuz finds it no more than a luxury craft of

masculine simplicity manned by a hard-bitten male crew. “La Fantôme” has

experimented with both men and women more lustily than Simzerla, and is

completely disillusioned about the existence of Love. Weary of sensual

indulgence, she now permits herself no more than occasional voyeurism,

having her crew bring aboard waterfront women for orgies which she

observes from the captain’s bridge.

Because she is the most masculine of all the women he has encountered,

Tammuz enjoys more intellectual companionship with her than with the

others. He finds her capable of understanding his concept of woman’s

proper role in the scheme of things—that of Frea, goddess of fertility.

She is quite in accord with his refusal to deify Love aside from its

procreative aspect, and shares his unreadiness to sacrifice an

impersonal quest or even personal liberty on the altar of Romance.

Informed early by one of the Maupins that many women’s inability to

respond to men is due to the ugliness of modern male garb, Tammuz has

assumed on occasion a more graceful costume—modified Directoire—and with

the Princesse Fantôme he dresses in gray silk fencer’s hose and a jacket

of violet velvet. She reciprocates by appearing at dinner in an evening

gown of ivory moiré, above which her white shoulders, deeply tanned face

and cropped hair create a ludicrous effect. Tammuz, however, is touched

by this effort at refeminization, and before long the two are enjoying a

passionate interlude against that grandest of all settings, the open

sea.

The inevitable sequel is La Fantôme’s holding him captive aboard the

yacht in obedience to a newborn feminine hunger for permanence, and only

a providential near-shipwreck frees him. Her desire is that they die in

each other’s arms; his, that he be spared to pursue his mission against

Lesbos, and their escape from death can be attributed only to

supernatural intervention in his behalf.

He now returns to Paris, and in completing his study of Lesbos he

accumulates as it were the dregs of naturalistic data—lesbian sadism,

gross exhibitionism, the gift to his mistress by an infatuated nobleman

of his fifteen-year-old daughter, an excursion into lesbian prostitution

on the part of a countess in order to earn a fortune for her beloved who

is a “regular” prostitute. As his money and his time run out, Tammuz, as

was foreseen, is convinced that his findings prove his initial thesis:

lesbianism is not a distinct psychological entity but merely one of the

sins of the flesh. Its causes are numerous—comparative frigidity,

feministic rebellion, defiance of undeserved social opprobrium, cynicism

about all love. And productive of, or augmenting, all these is the

brutality or carelessness of men, their indifference to individual

personality in their approach to women. Tammuz knows that by virtue of

his sexless sympathy he could have had any one of the scores of lesbians

he has studied. Believing, then, that he has achieved a far-reaching

psychological victory, he risks clinching it by a ruse which, as he

himself observes, ‘would make the angels of orthodoxy hide their eyes

with their snowy wings.’ In short, he stages a celebration of the rites

of Eros, on the grounds that the proper cure for emotional aberration is

not orthodox denial of the flesh but pragmatic trial of the normal.

With the aid of Nergal, who knows his Paris, Tammuz invites an

attractive (and eligible!) male partner for each of his lesbian

semi-converts, and amid a classical decor complete with Roman dining

couches and phallic decorations, he treats the company to a banquet

accompanied by aphrodisiac wines and incense. Then extinguishing the

lights he leaves nature to take its course. Peladan fails to record the

percentage of error in this quantitative experiment. (But at least one

sadistic lesbian survives to figure in _La Vertu Suprême_.)

Easy as it is to ridicule Peladan’s second-rate symbolism and although

his _reportage_ may not be dependable, there is much psychological

soundness in his analysis of lesbian types, however melodramatic the

personal histories he fabricates to account for them (and perhaps also

to forestall attempts to identify their originals). The composite

personality of Tammuz and Nergal is sound—the idealistic, somewhat

effeminate man such as variant women are often drawn to. And in

_L’Androgyne_,[30] the complementary study, in his “épopée,” of

homosexual tendencies during male adolescence, he shows sympathy with

the very type he scorned the Maupins for imitating, so long as it is a

passing stage in male development. Just as evolutionary ideas were in

the air long before Darwin systematized them, so the theory of emotional

maturing now attributed to Freud was antedated in literature.

Even after discounting Peladan’s and Mendès’ Catholic bias and their

romantic extravagance, their canvases give evidence to widespread

lesbianism in _fin de siècle_ Paris, and echoes of it and of the crop of

fiction it bred must have been far reaching. Amusing proof of this fact

is at hand in a light-hearted farce written in 1892 by two Americans,

Archibald Gunter and Fergus Redmond, entitled _A Florida Enchantment_. A

transvestist tale, it involves no real intrasexual experience (in this

respect harking back to medieval and renaissance romances), but its

intent must have been unmistakable burlesque of such novels as

Rachilde’s and Peladan’s. In Part I, “The Metamorphosis of Miss Lillian

Travers,” the heroine discovers that her fiancé is dallying with a ripe

widow, and at about the same time she acquires four seeds from an

African “tree of sexual change.” Since the casket containing these is a

relic from a slave-trading grandfather long dead, there is no chance of

replenishing the supply. Embittered by her lover’s faithlessness,

Lillian decides to move from the category of deceived woman into the

obviously happier one of philandering man. To gain an ally in the

venture she persuades her negro maid to join her in swallowing a seed,

and both become sexually male, though to all ordinary appearances they

are still women.

Part II, “The Boyhood of Lilly Travers,” recounts the hilarious and

salacious adventures of the two ‘trans-sexists,’ to coin the only

appropriate term. Lilly’s young cousin Bessie falls in love with her, as

does also the widow hitherto involved with her fiancé. Lilly

wholeheartedly reciprocates Bessie’s love, but the cousins’ bedroom

scenes are kept at the level of farce and never go the implied lengths

of Ariosto’s or d’Urfé’s in similar circumstances. At one point Lilly

attends a ball where she dances exclusively with women, apparently

without incurring social criticism—a detail which, if as realistically

accurate as the rest of the winter resort setting, gives evidence of

American naïveté in the 1890s. The negro maid’s adventures are naturally

somewhat more rabelaisian than those of her mistress but stop short of

being censorable.