Lilly’s life after she has managed to assume male garb and name. The
former fiancé suspects Lawrence of having murdered his cousin Lilly for
her fortune, and challenges him to a duel intended to be fatal. To
protect himself Lawrence forces the man to swallow the third magic seed,
whereupon he becomes a grotesquely masculine woman, just as Lawrence is
a beautiful and beardless youth. Now Lawrence and Bessie marry and set
out for Europe, but the unhappy ex-fiancé pursues them, threatens
Lawrence with exposure, and points out that Bessie, on learning the
truth, will certainly swallow the fourth seed in order to learn the
delights of being a man, and will thus be lost forever as a wife. The
only solution is to present the villain with the means of regaining his
manhood, so that he can get the widow, who is still infatuated with
Lawrence, out of his way by marrying her. There is no evidence that this
jolly bit of satire (discovered quite accidentally by the present
writer) was reviewed or otherwise noted either at home or abroad, nor
did it deserve to be from a literary viewpoint. It is worthy of mention
here, however, as showing that America was aware of variant fiction
other than that of Henry James.
To return once more to France, during 1896 the _Mercure de France_
carried serially Remy de Gourmont’s _Le Songe d’une Femme_, a work of
higher quality than any since James’s _The Bostonians_. In the form of
correspondence among some dozen persons it presents an exhaustive
analysis of what constitutes a satisfactory sexual relationship. The
central figures are a sensitive intellectual, Paul; a simple, sensuous,
and radiantly happy Annette; and a fascinating but physically inhibited
Claude whose emotional pattern closely resembles that of Mlle Tantale
without being similarly accounted for. Claude is married and has also
experimented sexually with an artist for whom she posed in the nude, but
she has never achieved satisfaction. She exerts an irresistible charm
over women but has found relations with them equally unrewarding. For a
time she falls under the spell of Annette’s open-hearted warmth, but
Annette scorns lesbianism as childish. Claude dreams of a perfect love
which will be more than fleshly, and for a time she is hopeful of
realizing her ideal with Paul. During what might be called a
probationary period she holds him captive by giving him “all her
thoughts,” and permitting generous caresses without complete surrender.
Paul has cherished a similar dream and has found Annette too exclusively
sensual. In the end, however, he abandons Claude for the simple and more
“natural” woman. Claude, he finds, can bring happiness to no one, not
even herself. The implication is that for anyone who seeks romantic
perfection all love must end in failure—a direct echo from Baudelaire.
De Gourmont’s title pronounces such an ideal typically feminine: a
woman’s dream.
The last important negative item before 1900 was Henry James’s “The Turn
of the Screw” (1898). If his delineation in 1885 of the Bostonian Olive
Chancellor was moderate enough to leave critics dubious whether he
intended her as a lesbian, there is nothing ambiguous in his later
story. In one of his letters, James himself says that his intention was
to give “the impression of ... the most infernal imaginable evil and
danger.”[31] In this novelette, an innocent young governess goes to a
remote English country estate to take charge of two orphans, a boy of
ten and a girl of eight. The children’s precocious beauty and charm
strike her at once as more than normal, and apprehension dawns with her
learning that the boy has been expelled from his school for reasons
carefully evaded in the letter of dismissal.
Soon she has glimpses about the grounds of a repellently attractive man
and an equally sinister woman, who prove to be apparitions visible only
to herself. From a reluctant housekeeper she extracts that the man, a
former groom now dead, had “had his way” with any woman in the household
or neighborhood that he chose, and that the female spectre, in life her
predecessor as governess, had departed pregnant by him and died in
London of an abortion. These indelicate facts James characteristically
conveys by indirection, never by the bald word. Both these personalities
had been evilly intimate with the children.
Discovering that her awareness and antagonism can hold the spectres at
bay, the governess devotes herself to protecting the children from them.
She soon learns to her horror, however, that the little girl not only
sees the dark woman but exerts self-control and histrionic talents
beyond the capacity of most adults in order to conceal the fact. The boy
becomes genuinely devoted to the governess and tries to cooperate in
resisting the male ghost, but, always fragile, he succumbs to the
emotional conflict and dies of a heart attack. The little girl, more
completely dominated—might an affectionate man have weakened the spell
for her as a woman did for the boy?—realizes now that only she and the
governess can see the apparitions. With precocious acumen she accuses
the governess of insanity, sensing that a child’s word will stand
against that of a potentially hysterical spinster, and achieves her
enemy’s removal.
This is the first literary appearance of lesbian corruption of a child
by an adult, and is probably attributable to the increasing publication
of clinical case studies, for the theme has recurred at least twice in
the subsequent half-century. James’s aversion can be explained on a
number of counts. Where in _The Bostonians_ he studied well-bred women,
his antagonists here are debauched members of a lower class. Then, too,
it is known that he had abandoned an original plan of taking up
permanent residence in Paris because he found the atmosphere there
morally uncongenial, and he had settled in England, which had been
rocked only three years earlier by the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde
for homosexuality. It is conceivable that a desire to deny unequivocally
any sympathy with that phenomenon helped to motivate _The Turn of the
Screw_.
The final French writer of importance to treat of lesbianism before the
turn of the century was Pierre Louÿs, who wrote more in the spirit
(though not the style) of Gautier, Verlaine or Zola than in that of his
contemporary anti-lesbian crusaders. His _Chansons de Bilitis_ (1894)
and _Aphrodite_ (1896) purported to be the fruit, respectively, of
translation and intensive classical research, and to give accurate
pictures of life in early Greece and Alexandria. Classicists promptly
exploded his claim and accused him of sensational exaggeration;
nevertheless the two works enjoyed enormous popularity at the time and
have since been reissued every few years in English as well as French.
The _Songs of Bilitis_, in free verse reminiscent of the Greek
Anthology, pictures the life of a girl from her bucolic childhood in
Pamphilia, through young womanhood on the isle of Lesbos, to her end as
a prosperous courtesan in Cyprus. In her teens she bears a child but
leaves it behind without a qualm when adventure leads her on. The
emotional highlight of her roving existence is the period in Mitylene,
during which she loves and marries another girl with whom she lives
happily and faithfully for a decade. However spurious their Hellenism,
the poetic quality of the _Chansons_ is high, and they have been
repeatedly imitated and translated in English, German, Swedish, and
Czech. One German translation of twenty-four of the songs was made by
Richard Dehmel, a poet in his own right.
In _Aphrodite_ lesbianism is only incidental, but still it recurs
throughout, including the daily ministrations of a slave girl to a
courtesan mistress who accepts them as she does her bath or food; the
courtesan’s intermittent play with a pair of younger flute-girls; and
the flute-girls’ marriage, like that of Bilitis, in which they find
solace for the depravities they must see and endure as paid
entertainers. That Louÿs was aware of every possible sort of lesbian
activity is evident, but confining his attention as he does to
courtesans, he adds little to an understanding of variant relationships
among other classes of women. It is the taller and stronger of his pairs
who always plays the male role, and the only other suggestion of
etiology is the excessive worship of female beauty, dominant in the
cults of Isis or Aphrodite. It was in this respect particularly that he
was accused of distorting historic fact. As Louÿs pictures this worship,
it is closely related to feminine narcissism.
Louÿs’s _Adventures of King Pausole_ published at the turn of the
century is a rollicking tale, supposedly contemporary, but wholly
fanciful in setting. One of its characters preaches the saving grace of
healthy promiscuity as opposed to the prudish constraints of romantic
love. Wholesome citizens, he says, come from the slums where children
run loose. Strictness in raising the young, breeds maladjustment and
neurasthenia. Voluntary exclusive devotion to one individual leads to
the madness of an Orestes, the tragic end of a Marguerite, or the
suicides of Romeo and Juliet.
The lesbian pattern in his fantastic design is woven about Mirabelle, a
danseuse reminiscent in physique and temperament of Maupin. She easily
captivates the kings’ daughter, Aline, for, although the royal Pausole
himself has a harem of 365 women, he has kept his child as secluded as
Salammbo. Brought to his senses by Aline’s “elopement” with Mirabelle,
and by several adventures he has while searching for the pair, the king
embraces the doctrine of freedom for the young to the extent of smiling
on Aline’s marriage (at fifteen) to a page who speedily converts her to
the joys of heterosexual love. The dancer happily encounters a young
noblewoman who, like herself, has known men but has dreamed of a woman
partner, and their union apparently becomes permanent. Thus, Louÿs
compromises between the promiscuity advocated by his spokesman in the
book and the current romantic ideal.
In the factual literature on homosexuality one finds ambiguous allusions
to more variance in French fiction between 1880 and 1895 than it has
been feasible to pursue, but considering the returns on those verified
it is unlikely that any important lesbian works even of low quality have
gone undetected. In 1896 Rachilde’s signed reviews began in the _Mercure
de France_ and a little later the first bibliography of belles-lettres
in Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_ listed a few retrospective titles along with
current notes. These two systematic sources show that perhaps a dozen
minor French novels appearing during the last half dozen years of the
century (none were available for examination), dealt with variance to
some extent. Such titles as _Mlle Wladimir_, _Mon Mari_ and _Satana_
indicate close imitation of such earlier successes as _Mlle Giraud_ and
_Méphistophéla_. The majority seem to have made at least a pretense of
condemning lesbianism, but Rachilde remarked acidly in reviewing one of
them (Jane de La Vaudère’s _Les Demi-Sexes_, the theme of which was
ovariotomy undergone by women sufficiently eager for masculinity) that
she wished novelists would stop peddling sensationalism under the guise
of medical instruction or moral preachment.[32] The cheery insouciance
of _King Pausole_ was clearly an innovation and marked the beginning of
a new period. As for the few novels published in Germany before 1900,
since they were the first of their kind they will be left for
consideration with twentieth-century material from which they are
indistinguishable.
Summary
Before leaving the nineteenth century a brief summary of its variant
writing will be illuminating. That a preponderance of the material was
in French will not surprise English readers, who have long recognized
the comparative frankness of France in matters of sex, at least until
our own last decade or so. In view of the quantity and variety of
attention devoted to the subject, however, the proportion of sympathetic
treatment is low. Of the more than a dozen authors who took overt
lesbianism as a major theme, seven—Coleridge, Baudelaire, Belot, Mendès,
Peladan, Strindberg, and Gourmont—condemned it explicitly, though with
differing degrees of severity. Seven others—Latouche, Balzac in _The
Girl with the Golden Eyes_, Rossetti, Swinburne in _Lesbia Brandon_,
Maupassant, Rachilde in _Mme. Adonis_, and James in _The Turn of the
Screw_—made lesbian affairs responsible for murder, suicide and ruin,
and so implied equally strong condemnation. Only three were tolerant,
and of these Louÿs, for all his championing of sexual freedom generally,
hurried Aline in _King Pausole_ into a heterosexual match at fifteen,
and depicted Bilitis as promiscuous from puberty to death save for her
lesbian interlude. Gautier was sympathetic to a single lesbian
experience but predicted an unhappy future for Maupin. Verlaine alone,
himself homosexual, let his portraits stand without comment. The several
authors who included minor lesbian episodes pictured them as involving
gravely maladjusted women or as the pastime of prostitutes and other
questionable characters.
Of the four novelists who used variance as a major theme but avoided or
denied lesbian implications, James in _The Bostonians_ considered it a
menace to society, Lamartine showed it as contributing to failure in
heterosexual adjustment, Balzac in _Seraphitus-Seraphita_ made it a
mystic apprenticeship for marriage, and only Wollstonecraft exalted it
above experience with men.
Quite as notable as this limited sympathy for variance is the frequency
of heterosexual action. Some eighty primary and as many or more
secondary characters are involved in the total of variant scenes, and of
these only half a dozen indubitably never knew men. (For a number of the
minor figures definite evidence is lacking, but indications are that
they belonged in the bisexual group.) To be sure, several women had
involuntary and/or distasteful experience with men, but the majority
eventually found such experience preferable to variant relations.
When it is noted in conclusion that the proportion of male to female
authors is even larger than that of French to English, one cannot avoid
inferring some causal relation between the fact and the statistics
above. This impression is confirmed by noting that the four feminine
writers, Wollstonecraft, Schreiner, Rossetti and Rachilde, pictured no
successful heterosexual relations. “Mary” refuses to consummate her
marriage; Lyndall commits slow suicide to escape hers; Raoule achieves a
fantastic evasion, and Mme. Adonis takes the man of the couple she
captivates in a spirit of vindictive sadism. The hypothesis of a very
natural sex bias with regard to feminine variance will be amply
supported in studying twentieth-century authors.