CHAPTER V.

CONJECTURAL RETROSPECT

Four women among thirty-odd nineteenth-century authors dealing with

variance may seem a meager fraction until one recalls that Mary

Wollstonecraft was the first of her sex to appear in this record since

Sappho. What accounts for this dearth of feminine authorship? Since the

renaissance, many women have been published; factual literature attests

that female variance has always existed to a greater or less extent; and

surely it is a subject in which, if any, one would expect women to show

more interest than men. But thus far, only one literary attitude toward

variance has enjoyed freedom from censure: disapproval, whether it was

conveyed by satire, exhortation, or tragic example.

To such derogatory expression it is natural enough that few women should

contribute. Equally obvious are the factors inhibiting feminine

expressions of sympathy. For one thing, women have suffered too many

critical handicaps on the score of their sex alone to embark lightly

upon a venture which lays men of established repute open to attack. More

important, a man writing tolerantly of female variance can be accused of

nothing worse than tolerance, but a woman is at once suspected of being

variant herself, which to the man-in-the-street is tantamount to being

lesbian in the most damning sense of the term. This is not mere armchair

theorizing. Havelock Ellis in his volume on sexual inversion observes

that women poets of his day who had contributed variant histories to his

record regularly changed the gender of pronouns in love lyrics destined

for publication, in order to conceal the homosexual inspiration of their

verses. And the present writer has amusingly enough been viewed askance

by certain librarians after demanding from their “restricted” cases

novels no more questionable than those of Radclyffe Hall. If this was

the state of affairs well into the twentieth century, a time presently

to be shown more tolerant of variance perhaps than any since the

classical period, how much more stringent must have been the need for

caution when to be suspect incurred moral opprobrium and complete social

ostracism?

It seems certain, then, that there have been women of variant

inclination through the centuries who also possessed literary gifts, and

it is probable that exhaustive research would reveal traces of variance

in a surprising number of feminine authors from the renaissance on. The

purpose of the following chapter is to consider those few whose lives

most readily yield suggestive hints, and to correlate such hints with

corresponding traces, however carefully masked, in their writing.

*Louise Labé.* The first promising subject is Louise Labé, lyric poet of

the early sixteenth century and one of a group of brilliant young women

who brought considerable distinction upon their native city of Lyons.

Until the middle of the last century the best biographical encyclopedias

stated as fact that in 1542 she took active part in the Dauphin’s siege

of Perpignan and acquitted herself so well that she was thereafter

nicknamed “le capitaine Loys.”[1] With advances in historical method,

the authenticity of this episode has been questioned (though never

flatly disproved), the alternate probability being that she took the

part of a knight in a tournament celebrating the same victory. In either

event, her horsemanship and conduct of arms are described as masterly.

Scholars have expended much effort in attempting to identify the persons

to whom her passionate lyrics were addressed. Internal evidence favors

the assumption that she had a number of lovers; yet, even the critics

who find this idea acceptable have not managed to identify more than

one, her fellow poet Olivier de Magny. Several other leading questions

also remain unanswered. Why, in view of Labé’s marked poetic gift, does

so slim a volume of her verse remain, in comparison to her surviving

prose, which is excellent but of lower vitality? And what was the cause

of her quarrel with Clémence de Bourges, a younger woman poet to whom

she dedicated a volume published in 1555, and, in that dedication,

proclaimed as being more gifted and showing brighter promise than

herself?

Her biography, like those of many nonpolitical figures so far removed in

time, is not rich in documented detail. It is known that she was born

about 1520, the daughter of a wealthy cordage merchant. Despite her

middle-class status, as a girl she studied music, Greek, Latin and

Spanish, and seems also to have known Italian well, especially the work

of Ariosto. In 1542—that is, in her twenties, late for those days—she

married Ennemond Perrin, another cordage merchant and a friend of her

father’s. Her husband was twenty years her senior and the marriage was

childless; however, it endured for more than a quarter of a century, and

on his death Perrin left her all his property. Both father and husband

being men of wealth, Labé had a large house with pleasant gardens which

became a rendezvous for poets and artists. Her liaison with de Magny

apparently stirred no scandal, but ‘so brilliant a position naturally

excited envy,’ and she was rather spitefully nicknamed “La Belle

Cordelière.” After her husband’s death in 1565, the noblewoman of Lyons

set upon “la petite bourgeoise” for having eclipsed them intellectually

and socially, and during the brief year before her own death Labé was

accused of being “livrée à toutes sortes de désordres.”[2]

Until the time of her marriage Labé was certainly skilled and active in

all the arts of an _homme de guerre_. Even later (about 1547) when Diane

de Poitiers accompanied Henry II on a visit to Lyons, Louise seems to

have been one of the moving spirits, if not the organizer, of a fête

honoring the favorite, in which young women of the town assumed the

costume of Diana the Huntress and exhibited their skill with bow and

dart. (It is interesting to find Brantôme alluding to this event in

passing, though he mentions no names and no precise date.)[3]

In her thirties Labé rebelled against the limitations of feminine

education, proclaiming that women should study all the “sciences”

pursued by men, and in the letter of dedication to her friend which

prefaced her volume in 1555 she begs them to ‘lift their spirits a

little above their bobbins and distaffs.’[4] Shortly after the

publication of this work she was estranged from Clémence de Bourges by

the aforementioned “éclatante” quarrel of uncertain origin, though until

then ‘their union was cited as one rare between two women.’[5]

Apparently no one has suggested that she may have been homosexual. But

in her “Elégie I,” we find the following:

Encor Phébus, ami des Lauriers vers ...

Chanter me fait ...

Il m’a donné la lyre, qui les vers

Souloit chanter de l’amour Lesbienne ...[6]

If in sixteenth century France the final adjective carried its present

meaning, and there seems no evidence to the contrary, this passage is

certainly suggestive. In “Elégie III,” a kind of apologia for a life of

emotional _Sturm und Drang_, she says she was only sixteen when she

first suffered a devastatingly tragic love, but that she had already

loved deeply twice before. She implores her townswomen as they read of

her ‘amorous pains, regrets and tears’ not to condemn that “erreur de ma

folle jeunesse—Si c’est erreur....”[7] This confession has disturbed

some critics profoundly because it seems to imply that she must have

been a courtesan.

Only a few of her lyrics reveal the sex of the person to whom they were

addressed, an evasion more difficult in an inflected language than in

English, and among those which do not betray it is the group that is

acclaimed by critics as most distinguished by sincerity, frankness, and

‘an amazing freshness compared to her contemporaries.’[8] The

descriptive touches in some of these sonnets, moreover, picture a loved

one of more delicate beauty and a passion of less harsh and painful

violence than the others. The assumption that she was a lesbian would

explain her precocious passions and the number, variety, and anonymity

of these later flames better than the hotly disputed courtesan theory,

although she was undoubtedly bisexual and very ardent—“tous ses gouts

furent des passions,” says one biographer. It would also explain the

many, although comparatively unimpassioned, tributes written to her by

male poets, for artists incline to be more tolerant of sex variance than

the public at large, and they may possibly have gone on record in her

favor because she suffered from social persecution.

And finally, lesbianism would account for her estrangement from her

younger friend, “of noble family and spotless reputation,” as well as

any of the other theories advanced to that end. Until late in the

nineteenth century a legend persisted that in the same year that Labé’s

volume was published Clémence submitted verses of her own to her friend

for criticism, but the latter instead of giving it “enleva a Clémence

son amant,”[9] and it was suggested that Clémence’s death within the

year was chargeable to this blow. This tale was fairly well discredited

in 1877 by the Dutch scholar Boy;[10] however, nothing plausible has

replaced it.

Let us consider the case if that rare union _was_ a passionate one. With

the older woman married and famous, the younger formally engaged (as

Clémence was), their friendship would excite little comment. If the

married woman had also had as lover the most distinguished poet of the

period, and if, as there is reason to believe, Clémence had married at

twenty, and lost a husband, they would be even safer from suspicion.

Then Labé publishes the volume of poems described above. She dedicates

it to Clémence in a letter lauding the girl’s poetic promise to the

skies and deploring a married woman’s humdrum life. If, as commonly

happens, identities were inferred at the time for the subjects of Labé’s

verses, Clémence’s “noble family,” and her fiancé as well, may have

frowned on further intimacy between the girl and the devoted friend who

seemed so little in favor of her marrying.

Clémence might still, however, submit her own work for a more practiced

writer’s criticism. What happened? Despite the fact that scholars have

unhappily been unable to trace de Bourges’ volume, several conjectures

are legitimate. Did it contain impassioned verses to the fiancé which

stirred Labé to reckless jealousy? Were there cryptic love poems to Labé

herself which convinced her that marriage would be unhappy for her

beloved protégée? In either case she might have enlightened the young

man as to the nature of her relation to Clémence. Unhandsome behavior,

but no more so than the legendary stealing of the lover for herself

(which Boy believes did not occur). There is a kindlier alternative: she

merely warned Clémence that certain poems would be identified as written

to her; the less experienced girl, suspecting her of literary jealousy,

published them anyway; Labé’s apprehensions proved correct, and the

result separated the lovers. But such involved psychology belongs more

to the twentieth century than to the sixteenth. All this is conjecture,

to be sure, but no more implausible than the several conflicting

theories already advanced by Labé scholars. Furthermore, it has the

advantage, conclusive with experimental scientists, of providing answers

to more questions than any other single hypothesis.

*Charlotte Charke.* A sadly different life story is recorded in the

autobiography written nearly two centuries later by Charlotte Charke,

daughter of the erratic actor and playwright, Colley Cibber. (An account

of that irresponsible egomaniac’s family life would shed light on his

youngest child’s temperament and fate, but cannot be included here.)

Though Havelock Ellis expresses uncertainty that Charlotte was actually

homosexual,[1] there are elements in her adventures which more than

compare with significant passages in the lives of Mary Frith and

Catalina Erauso. Like these two women, Charke was a transvestist, and at

several points in her story she mentions connections with women which

promise definite significance had they been expanded. But at the time of

writing she was forty-five, unable to get work, and more than

half-starving in a bare single room near a refuse dump in London.

Survival depended on her standing well with her readers—her tale

appeared in weekly installments—and on her hope of reconciliation with

her father, who had long refused aid. Hence her narrative is so full of

discreet elision as to be sometimes incoherent or even contradictory.

This is particularly evident in regard to her “wearing breeches,” one of

the sorest points between her and her family, and also to all her

personal relations except her early and unhappy marriage.

Her history is a veritable psychiatric case study. Born when her mother

(the actress Jane Shore) was forty-five, she was the youngest of a dozen

children and the object of violent jealousy among her elder siblings

because of the mother’s favoritism. Charlotte, on her part, was

intensely devoted to her mother as long as the latter lived.

Precociously brilliant, she was sent to boarding school at eight and

within two or three years was crammed with three languages, music,

dancing, and geography, all of which she later pronounced useless in

aiding a woman to earn her keep. From the age of five she was given to

donning boy’s clothes and engaging in the most daring and original

exploits, sometimes to the point of grave danger. These make enthralling

reading but are not pertinent here. At sixteen she married a worthless

bandleader in her father’s theatre—the Drury Lane—and had a daughter

within the year; but even before the child’s birth her husband was

“running with a plurality of common wretches [women] that were to be had

for half a crown,”[2] and at the end of the year the two separated. Her

trenchant comment on her marital relations is that both she and her

husband “ought rather have been sent to school than to church, in regard

to any qualification on either side towards rendering the marriage state

comfortable to one another.”[3]

She made her debut as an actress shortly before her marriage and

continued on the London stage for perhaps two years after her

separation, taking men’s parts at least half the time. Then apparently

she went on the boards in her father’s favorite role and one he had made

famous, Lord Foppington in _The Careless Husband_. Perhaps this fact led

Cibber to cut off financial support and to spoil her chances with all

London producers. More likely it was her travesty of his acting that

enraged him, for his vanity was morbid and she inherited his wicked and

heartless wit. As long as her mother lived she was sure of some funds,

but death soon closed that channel and she was driven to a variety of

shifts that would have been tragic had she been capable of taking

anything very tragically. These experiences, too, are diverting, but

only the most significant can be touched on here. For a time she ran a

grocer shop in London, living meanwhile with a young widow who lent her

money for her business. Later, when arrested for debt, she was saved by

contributions from women, once from a Mrs. Elizabeth Careless whose name

suggests her profession, and again from “all the ladies who kept coffee

houses in and about Covent Garden ... for the relief of poor Sir

Charles, as they were pleased to stile me.”[4] Twice women lost their

hearts to her and she was forced to reveal her sex, but her mere word

was not sufficient. In the first case we are not told how she managed to

be convincing. In the second, she was working as a waiter, and her

inamorata came to Charlotte’s room to give her the lie, saying she

“could never have made advances to one of her own sect [sic].” When

Charlotte asked if she was sure she “understood what she meant,” it led

to a physical brawl so violent as to cost Charlotte her position.

Intermittently she acted in the provinces with strolling companies of

low calibre and continually bankrupt, and for a long time she and

another actress stayed together through thick and thin, the friend

caring for her during three years of “nervous fever and lowness of

spirits.” At one point she lets slip that this woman passed in a tight

place as “Mrs. Brown,” and since “Mr. Brown” was the name Charlotte took

whenever she needed an alias, it may be that they lived outside the

theatre as man and wife. Finally, they abandoned acting for a time at

Chepstow in Wales because Charlotte “met with many friends,”

particularly another widow who lent her considerable sums of money, and

a younger woman who gave her the use of “a very handsome house with a

large garden, near three quarters acre of ground” which had just been

inherited. The latter also wrote her “very friendly letters” when she

went on short trips. At that time, she attempted to run a bake-shop,

still with her faithful friend the actress, who she says now stayed on

“only out of sincere friendship and an uncommon easiness of temper,” a

suggestion that might well imply a more cogent previous reason. As was

said, none of these passages mentions variance, but taken all together

and in conjunction with the dark mystery she makes of her first

experience in men’s clothes,[5] as well as her family’s relentless

disowning of her, they make a picture which seems to justify her

inclusion in a conjectural record.

*“The Ladies of Llangollen.”* Charke’s history brings us to the late

eighteenth century, a period when the Age of Reason had passed its peak

and the deifying of emotion which characterized the Romantic Period was

beginning to appear. Blanche Hardy, in a biography of the Princess de

Lamballe, says:

It was the age of great friendships: girls and even grown women

carried the miniature of another woman about with them in a locket,

bracelet or other ornament, would draw it out occasionally when in

company, gaze fondly upon it, and press it to their lips; wrote long

and loverlike letters to the beloved object, awaited her coming

ardently, and wept storms of tears at her departure.[1]

One such passionate friendship was born in Ireland, though the parties

to it are universally known as “the Ladies of Llangollen,” the

picturesque valley in Wales where they spent the greater part of their

lives. The journal kept for forty years by the elder of the two is now

all that survives of their writing, though references to them in the

work of friends suggest that both wrote some nature essays and verses.

The younger was something of an artist as well. Both Lady Eleanor Butler

and Sarah Ponsonby came of titled families. They met first at a school

in Kilkenny, probably when Eleanor was nearing twenty and Sarah entering

her teens, for there seems to have been about seven or eight years’

difference in their ages. Their friendship apparently flourished for

nearly a decade before Eleanor’s harsh and prudish mother tried to force

the boyish young woman into either a distasteful marriage or a convent.

Sarah’s mother, a second wife, had died in the girl’s infancy. After a

third wife increased the already large family, Sarah lived with a cousin

whose husband made advances which were disgusting and gravely disturbing

to the adolescent girl. Her older and more independent friend, given to

wearing men’s clothes, proposed an “elopement,” but the two were without

resources, and after spending several nights in a barn they were

apprehended and brought back in disgrace. Sarah at once fell gravely

ill. Eleanor was forbidden to see her, and Sarah’s cousin accused

Eleanor of having

a debauched mind, with no ingredients for friendship which ought to

be founded on virtue, whereas hers every day more and more ... was

acting in direct opposition to it, as well as to the interest,

happiness and reputation of one she professed to love.[2]

This cousin also attempted to keep Sarah from receiving Eleanor’s long

letters, which she said only aggravated the girl’s illness.

The romantic pair had an ally, however, in a servant, Mary Caryll, known

as “Molly the Bruiser” because of her marked masculinity. With this

girl’s help, Eleanor was hidden in Sarah’s bedroom closet for several

days, whereupon the latter promptly recovered, and as soon as she was

well enough the pair staged a rebellion—they simply refused to live any

longer at home or apart from one another. Both families being by now

worn down, the girls were given a small allowance and invited to remove

themselves permanently from the neighborhood. They managed to get as far

as Wales, and, once established, they sent back for Molly, who remained

their servant until her death many years later.

Though “poor as church mice,” the two women were radiantly happy, and

“of a personality so powerful” that they were known as the Platonists.

“Their retreat became a kind of court at which all the great ones of

their time presented themselves. Wordsworth, DeQuincey, Scott, the Duke

of Wellington and Mme. de Genlis were among their guests,”[3] and they

had a half century of idyllic happiness before they died, Eleanor in

1829 and Sarah in 1831. The journal which Eleanor Butler kept from 1788

until her death records the placid course of their mutual existence,

detailing financial stress lightly borne, small village tensions faced

with equanimity, and again and again “a day of sweetly enjoyed

retirement.”

On the precise nature of the relation between them the journal is

naturally reticent. The modern French analyst of all feminine emotions,

Colette, devotes better than twenty pages to it in _Ces Plaisirs_, and

epitomizes neatly the distinguishing feature of all such attachments.

‘It is not sensuality that ensures the fidelity of two women but a

kind of blood kinship.... I have written kinship where I should have

said identity. Their close resemblance guarantees similarity in

_volupté_. The lover takes courage in her certainty of caressing a

body whose secrets she knows, whose preferences her own body has

taught her.’[4]

If English readers of Eleanor’s journal want to see in a single mention

of “our bed” an impure significance, says Colette, then let them.

‘What is purity? Why is it “pure” to stroke a cheek but not a breast?

Yes, yes, the breast responds. But what of it, if above it the lover

merely dreams? “It is the victim who is almost always responsible in

emotional crimes,” says an old magistrate. How one would like to have

the journal of Sarah Ponsonby, the younger girl! Eleanor Butler was

the practical one, the possessor, the male. Sarah Ponsonby was the

_woman_.’[5]

*Karoline von Günderode.* During the same years that saw these willing

exiles living out their rapturous idyll, a very different life was swept

along on the tide of romantic _Sturm und Drang_ in Germany. Karoline von

Günderode was still unborn when the Ladies of Llangollen settled in

their Welsh elysium, and suicide ended her quarter-century of life two

decades before their death. Outside her native land this distinguished

young romantic poet is most likely to be remembered through her brief

connection with Bettina Brentano von Arnim, sister of the poet Clemens

Brentano and the “child” of _Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kind_. The

mercurial and precocious Bettina was undoubtedly a very remarkable young

person, but scholarly research has proved her published correspondence

with Goethe to be largely spurious, and even the superficial reader can

detect signs of _post facto_ interpolation in her letter to Goethe’s

mother describing Günderode’s death and the two girls’ previous

relationship.[1]

Equally copious expansion is evident in the correspondence with

Günderode,[2] a really remarkable volume of philosophy, poetry, and

romantic “sensibility” made human, however, by the small ordinary

preoccupations of the two very busy young women. Nine-tenths of the

volume is occupied by Bettina’s own letters, supposedly written during a

number of brief absences when she was a guest at various country

estates. Had these voluminous outpourings actually been penned under

such circumstances the girl would have had no time for meals or sleep,

let alone the normal social exigencies of house-party life.

Karoline von Günderode was one of several daughters of a moderately

affluent widow, who spent the latter part of her short life in a

“Kloster” (not a religious house but a dignified retreat for well-born

spinsters such as has been charmingly pictured by “Isak Dinesen” in

_Seven Gothic Tales_). She was, by all accounts, an interesting mixture

of emotional mysticism and sceptical “masculine” intellect, and both are

reflected in her poems.[3] At least one of these, “Wandel und Treue,”

suggests that there is no certainty save that all is uncertain, no

ultimate Truth because life and universe alike are in constant flux and

inexpressible in terms of any constant pattern. It might almost have

been written today rather than a century and a half ago.

The context in which the poem is quoted shows that it grew out of

long-sustained discussions between her and Bettina on the nature of

love. It is cast in the form of a dialogue between Violetta, who

embodies Bettina’s championship of romantic constancy, and Narziss, who

represents Günderode’s own viewpoint. The latter holds that love, like

all else, is subject to change; therefore, one should not attempt to fix

it upon a single person or thing, but should love only Love and follow

its dictates wherever it leads. The amount of stress laid upon this

composition by Bettina, who compiled and inflated the correspondence for

publication, suggests an effort to throw upon the other woman all

responsibility for any inconstancy which ensued.

The sixty-page biography of Günderode in Ersch and Gruber’s _Allgemeine

Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste_[4] records several variant

attachments in her life. Previous to her acquaintance with Bettina she

enjoyed a very close friendship with Frau Karoline von Barkhaus, to whom

she wrote oftener than weekly in the warmest terms, and in one of the

quoted letters she mentions that ‘a room is ready where we will sleep

together when you come.’ Another woman, Frau Susanna Maria von Heyden,

mentioned as her most intimate friend, fell heir to Günderode’s portrait

and two paintings of the scene of the unhappy girl’s death. She ‘never

recovered from her grief over her unlucky friend, and lived secluded

from the world in joyless solitude.’

As to the relationship with Bettina, their correspondence shows it to

have been warmly emotional as well as intellectual. Bettina wrote at

length to Madame Goethe of Günderode’s extreme sensitiveness and

intensity, describing the latter’s pallor the first time that Bettina

kissed her on the mouth, and generally betraying awareness of unpleasant

gossip and eagerness to deflect it from herself.[5] The facts of the

case seem to be that, like Labé and Clémence de Bourges, the two girls

had a serious quarrel, and Günderode’s suicide followed closely enough

upon it to create some unpleasantness for the survivor. Here, too, the

cause of the quarrel was a man, and editors of Günderode’s poems and

letters claim that it was the tragic end of this romance with him which

led the poet to take her own life. The man involved had, while fairly

young, married a widow thirteen years his senior, who had several

children. When he and Günderode found themselves deeply in love, the

wife, with “sterbender Güte,” agreed to release him, but under emotional

stress the already tubercular young man suffered a serious hemorrhage,

and since he was not yet free it was the wife who nursed him back to

health. In penitent gratitude he swore that if he lived he would never

leave her, and he kept his vow. This version of Günderode’s tragedy is

offered by the conventional biographies.[6]

In Bettina’s letters and elsewhere, however, the story survives of the

man’s being a fellow guest of hers at one of the house parties which

spacious living and difficult travel fostered in the eighteenth century.

Full of his love for Günderode, he paid much attention to a child in the

house who reminded him of his beloved, and in Bettina’s presence he

called the little girl “his Karoline” (her name was Sophie) and caressed

and kissed her. The fiery Bettina, furious that he ‘used expressions in

speaking of Günderode as if he had a right to her love,’ told him off

roundly, and this contretemps apparently led to some difficulty between

him and Günderode—the only reasonable explanation being that Bettina

must also have talked as if _she_ “had a right to her love.”

The quarrel between the two young women followed, and one summer evening

a few weeks later Günderode strolled unobtrusively to the bank of her

favorite stream and there shot herself. It is not suggested that any

overt scandal occurred, or that the quarrel with Bettina was the

immediate cause of this act. Günderode’s poetry is minor-keyed and full

of a romantic preoccupation with early death. But certainly something in

the relation between the two girls was a contributing factor. And that

variant inferences are not far-fetched is evidenced by a German lesbian

novel of 1919,[7] in which the memory of Günderode is worshipped with

passion by a brilliantly educated lesbian, while Bettina is the object

of jealous hatred. The author of this tale (of which more later) is

known to have had access to much German material not available to the

present writer, which apparently supported the lesbian inference.

* * * * *

Only a few years after Günderode’s death a tragedy in Edinburgh was

directly attributed to homosexual scandal. Two mistresses of a private

school, Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie, were accused of tribadism by Dame

Helen Cumming Gordon on the evidence of a young relative (or ward) who

was a pupil in the school. The young women brought suit for slander and

after a long and bitter battle apparently won their case, but their

reputations were damaged to the extent of ruining their educational

enterprise. It is upon the court record of their trial that Lillian

Hellman based her Broadway success of 1934, _The Children’s Hour_, and

their story will receive further attention when that drama is considered

under twentieth-century literature.

*George Sand.* In France the spectacular figure of George Sand invites

attention, both because of her adoption of male costume in the 1830s,

and because critics are agreed as to the pronounced masculinity of her

always semi-autobiographical heroines. She wrote nothing to be classed

as variant, but special note is due her _Gabriel-Gabrielle_,[1] the

title an obvious echo of Balzac’s _Seraphitus-Seraphita_, which

antedated it by only five years. Sand’s title-character is definitely an

intersexual, but the author avoids variant emotion and concentrates upon

psychological ambiguity. Gabriel, an orphan, is not only raised as a

boy, but by a somewhat strained device is made to believe that she

actually is one until she attains her majority. Learning at this point

that the deception has been contrived by her grandfather, to secure for

his branch of the family a fortune which can be inherited only through

the male line, she sets out to find her defrauded male cousin and make

restitution. The two fall in love, marry secretly, and live abroad in

the hope of avoiding family interference. Their effort is futile, and

after much tragic misunderstanding and dangerous intrigue, Gabrielle is

finally set upon and killed by her grandfather’s hirelings during one of

the periods when she is again, as during her youth, posing as a man.

The most pertinent passage describes a masked ball which Gabrielle

attends dressed for the first time as a woman. The cousin, who still

believes her a man, speaks recklessly of how easily he could love “her.”

Her reply is:

“This sort of entertainment should be morally frowned upon. It all

goes to excite impure ideas, the whole purpose is to shake our

composure. The joke has gone too far. I am going to take off this

costume and never put it on again.”[2]

Later she implores him not to duel with a fellow-reveller who has

insulted her, as when it is known that she is “really a man it would be

ridiculous. And who knows? Wicked minds could even find in it matter for

odious interpretation.” Her cousin replies: “That’s true. May my honor

and reputation for courage perish, rather than that flower of innocence

which graces your name. I will turn it all off as a jest.”

As it is common knowledge that, though never a compulsive transvestist,

George Sand wore men’s clothes as frequently as women’s from her

girlhood in Nohant until she approached middle age, her treatment of

this incident is rather surprising. But this, and her careful avoidance

of so much as the mention of female homosexuality, carry a suggestion of

the caution observed by all potentially suspected variants. The

circumstances of Aurore Dudevant’s childhood and puberty were enough, in

all conscience, to produce any or all of the aberrations in a

psychoanalyst’s manual. Her heterosexual affairs were so numerous, open,

and dramatic that few students have looked for other emotional incidents

in her life. By her own statement, however, she never achieved complete

satisfaction with any of the men she loved,[3] and there are a number of

suggestive incidents which crop up in one after another of her

biographies.

During her last year in a convent school in Paris—at about seventeen,

that is—she suffered what in modern parlance would be called a violent

“crush” on an Irish schoolmate. In the 1830s she was “for a long time

... fascinated by the great romantic actress of the day, Dorval....

Dumas and Vigny loved her (Dorval), and she had been Musset’s last

mistress. George had seen much of her in those years, so much that Vigny

had become jealous of their intimacy.”[4] (André Maurois quotes a letter

in which Vigny refers to Sand viciously as “that Lesbian.”)[5] Many

years later, after Dorval’s death, Sand took over the responsibility for

her children. During Sand’s sojourn in Switzerland in the middle 1830s

she met Mme. d’Agoult—known to literature as Daniel Stern—and was so

strongly attracted that she entertained her new friend at Nohant for

several months after their return to France. Subsequently the two lived

but a few doors apart in Paris and for some time held a joint salon.

Still later she experienced a friendship of similar intensity with

Pauline Garcia, Malibran’s sister and a noted singer. Even after Garcia

had married Viardot, Sand continued to see so much of her that Mme.

Viardot was generally referred to as “Mme. Sand’s friend” first, “the

great singer” second.

Given Sand’s passionate temperament and her lack of restraint, it seems

reasonable to assume that she had several variant experiences, which

were overshadowed in the public eye by her more dramatic heterosexual

ones, and about which she preserved discreet silence in her writing. It

may be argued that such silence is out of character with her fictional

volubility about her other affairs. But the noted men of her day with

whom she became involved had little to fear from her advertising their

relations with her. For her own reputation she was apparently not much

concerned, being a true and courageous child of the period; however, she

may well have felt consideration for women whom she loved and who had

more to lose. Possibly her variant attachments were _not_ physical

liaisons; nevertheless, if she had presented them fictionally in their

true intensity, because of her other notorious experiences it is

unlikely that they would be credited with innocence.

*Emily Brontë.* In England an even more complete discretion was guarded

by the enigmatic Emily Brontë. All four of the Brontës wrote with talent

which in Charlotte and Emily approached genius; yet their lives as

children of a poor clergyman in a remote country village were almost

empty of outward event. Emily’s was barren even of a love affair, a

paradox to critics in view of the emotional power in her writing. In the

century since their deaths, some hundred critical and biographical

studies have attempted to solve the Brontës’ riddle. In Charlotte’s case

the task is relatively simple, since her letters reveal without much

reticence two passionate attachments, one to Ellen Nussey, an early

school friend, and the second to Constantin Héger, master of the school

in Brussels where she twice stayed briefly, as student and as teacher.

The first love was of such intensity that E. F. Benson, in his biography

of Charlotte, frankly pronounces it homosexual, though he is quick to

add that considering the frequency of such experience among adolescents

of both sexes, it should be regarded as more normal than otherwise.

It is true that this friendship began in the years between fourteen and

sixteen when Charlotte and Ellen were together in boarding school, but

it seemed to grow rather than diminish over the subsequent decade, until

Charlotte was writing to Ellen in her twenties of “trembling all over

with excitement after reading your note.” In 1836, when she was

twenty-one, Charlotte wrote:

Ellen, I wish I could live with you always, I begin to cling to you

more fondly than I ever did. If we had a cottage and a competency of

our own I do think we might love until Death without being dependent

on any third person for happiness.

And again in the next year:

Why are we so divided? Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of

loving each other too well—because of losing sight of the Creator in

idolatry of the creature.[1]

From the very openness of these transports it must be obvious that the

relationship was an innocent one, and indeed that she herself was

ignorant of any other possibility. Moreover, all the fire went out of it

as soon as she had met and fallen in love with M. Héger.

Emily’s case is more complex; consequently, all manner of solutions have

been advanced for the puzzle she presents, from a most secretly hidden

liaison of the ordinary sort to an incestuous relation with her brother

Branwell. The most illuminating suggestions from the viewpoint of the

present study are found in Romer Wilson’s _All Alone_ and in Virginia

Moore’s _The Life and Eager Death of Emily Brontë_. Miss Wilson analyzes

in Emily what she terms the “Dark Hero ideal,” a male alter ego which

she very plausibly claims to be the most significant feature of Emily’s

personality, and of which she shows Heathcliff in _Wuthering Heights_ to

be a projection. Employing a different approach, Miss Moore assembles

objective testimony that from earliest childhood Emily was boyish in

appearance, temperament and behavior, and suggests that many of her

lyrics were inspired by a person of her own sex.[2] In Emily’s own day,

of course, _Wuthering Heights_ was the one novel published by the

pseudonymous “Bells” whose feminine authorship critics longest refused

to credit, and Moore’s chapter advancing the theory of Emily’s variance

is very convincing. Adverse critics have attacked Moore’s soundness on

the score of her misreading the title of a poem in the British Museum

Brontë manuscript; however, all the Brontë handwriting is virtually

illegible, and Moore was the first to study the document. In her zeal to

consider all conceivable evidence for a man in Emily’s life, she read as

“Louis Parensell” a title shown later to be inserted in Charlotte’s hand

and deciphered as “Love’s Farewell,” but at least her exhaustive search

for records of Mr. Parensell has reduced the likelihood of any

subsequent scholar’s unearthing evidence of a lover.

Surprisingly enough, Moore failed to capitalize on one important episode

in Emily’s life—the girl’s reaction at fifteen to her first meeting with

Charlotte’s bosom friend, Ellen Nussey. At the time of Ellen’s first

house-visit to the Brontë’s she was, on the evidence of a surviving

portrait, a bewitchingly pretty and very feminine young woman. Thus the

adolescent Emily, who had had opportunity of meeting virtually no one

outside her family, was thrown into contact with an older girl of great

physical appeal and one patently capable of variant emotion. The house

was small, and sleeping arrangements involved Emily’s sharing a bedroom

with Charlotte and her guest.

But Emily had sensibilities too delicate to intrude on bosom friends.

While Charlotte and Ellen whispered far into the night, she bundled

up and went and slept in the little cubby over the peat room with

Tabby the servant.[3]

One day Charlotte was ill and unable to entertain her guest.

But to their surprise, Emily, whose dislike of strangers had always

been violent, volunteered for that office. On their return from the

moors Charlotte was nervous. “How did Emily behave?” she asked

eagerly as soon as she could get Ellen aside. “Why, Emily had been

very, very nice,” said Ellen in surprise.[3]

Later in her life Ellen described Emily as maddeningly unsociable, but

as having “a brilliant and very appealing sudden gaze when she allowed

her eyes to be seen.”

Immediately upon Ellen’s departure, Emily suffered an attack

of erysipelas so severe that her arm had to be lanced,

“accompanied—unromantically—by liver complaint.” The indication that her

general health was not good Moore considers puzzling.

Though living next to the pollution of an ancient graveyard and

exposed to the unhealthy environment of Cowan’s Bridge [the original

of the dreadful boarding school in Charlotte’s _Jane Eyre_] she had

remained hale and strong from the age of five to the age of

fifteen.[4]

In view of modern psychosomatic theory, this illness is highly

revealing, for skin and gall bladder complaints are recognized symptoms

of emotional tension or disturbance. It seems fairly evident that Emily

was strongly (even if perhaps unconsciously) drawn to Ellen Nussey.

Under the circumstances the latter’s visit would have been a period of

intense stimulation and strain. At the withdrawal of the exciting

presence the nervous reaction was equally intense, and her body

registered a deprivation which her proud and independent spirit would

not willingly have admitted to consciousness.

There is also internal evidence of variance to be gleaned from Emily’s

poetry, despite the angry insistence of one critic that “Emily Brontë’s

own voice turns to nonsense the hundreds of pages of biography based on

[such] subjective interpretation.”[5] The critic is Fannie Ratchford,

whose separate volume, _The Brontës’ Web of Childhood_, skillfully

reconstructs the two sequences of remarkable legend composed during

adolescence by Charlotte and Branwell, and Emily and Anne respectively.

But in her impatience with subjectivity Mrs. Ratchford goes to the other

extreme of regarding these creations as spontaneously generated and

quite unrelated to the lives of their creators. Thus, her discovery that

cryptic initials heading Emily’s most “masculine” poems stand for male

characters in the Gondal epic leads her to the outburst quoted above.

Yet she herself points out that the poems in question were composed over

a period of twelve years, and that “lack of agreement between chronology

of composition and story sequence shows that they were not written as

progressive plot incidents but were merely the poetic expression of

scenes ... and emotions familiar to her inner vision....” Ratchford also

admits that “only a small percent of the poems carry headings, and

[these] ... raise as many problems as they solve. Varying sets of

initials appear for the same character ... G. S. in one poem is a boy,

in another a woman.”[6]

Thus it seems probable that Emily’s lyrics sprang from her own

experience, and that the confused initials represent an effort to

incorporate them into some whole which would not betray their intimacy.

(In the end she achieved her catharsis in prose through _Wuthering

Heights_.) For lyric poetry is the most personal of all modes of

expression, and Emily was morbidly reticent. All Brontë scholars know

the story of Charlotte’s “accidental” reading in 1845 of her sister’s

jealously guarded manuscript, and of the violent quarrel which followed.

In Charlotte’s own moderate words:

My sister Emily was not a person ... on the recesses of whose mind

and feelings even those nearest and dearest to her could with

impunity intrude. It took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I

had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited

publication.[7]

It is certain that many poems, along with many letters, were sacrificed

to Emily’s passion for privacy.

The most enigmatic chapter in Emily’s history covers the years from 1835

through 1838. All critics agree on the evidence of her poetry that

during this time she underwent the major emotional experience of her

life, one which gave rise to poems of nightmare, guilt, tragic

separation and desire for death, and one which also contained the seeds

of the mutually destructive love of Catherine and Heathcliff in

_Wuthering Heights_, written nearly a decade later. Emily’s

correspondence from this period has been lost or destroyed, Charlotte’s

few surviving letters have undergone cutting on her part which leaves

them barren, and one must infer pointed expurgation. The precise dating

of Emily’s poems written before 1839 might help solve the mystery, but

for such precision scholars have striven in vain. The latest and best

established chronology, that of Hatfield, will be accepted here.

It is known that for three months in late 1835 Emily was a pupil at Roe

Head, a boarding school where Charlotte was engaged as teacher. Her

speedy withdrawal was laid to Charlotte’s concern for her health; and as

her poems before that date indicate that she could not be happy away

from the moors and could not endure any sort of constraint, she may well

have been literally sick for the freedom of home. Upon her return there,

Anne went to Roe Head in her place, and Emily was left in Haworth with

Branwell, who must have been sad enough company. He had just failed

neurotically in his intention to study at the Royal Academy and was

spending his time as a drunken idler at the village tavern. It is

because so few poems and so few letters to or from her absent sisters

remain from this interim that the hypothesis of a questionable

relationship between brother and sister has grown up, and of course,

Emily’s rapid decline and death within a year of Branwell’s in 1847

lends some support to the theory. But her poetry bearing the date of

1836 is emotionally thin and immature, and critics are agreed that the

major change in it dates from the following year.

The single external event in her life at that time was a teaching

engagement at Law Hill, of which all that is known certainly is that it

continued for at least six months during 1837. Some scholars hold that

it began in the fall of 1836, others that it continued well into 1838.

There are traces of evidence to support both contentions, but whether it

lasted six months or sixteen, it was, beyond question, Emily’s longest

absence from Haworth till then. Following Hatfield’s dating of her

poems, one can trace first the impact of new scenes (February 1837),

nostalgia for the moors, and a wish to “be healthful still and turn away

from passion’s call.” Then in sequence (how rapid one cannot say) come

abysmal self-distrust; nightmare; melancholy; the agony of separation

(November, 1837); more desperate melancholy (through 1838); and finally

in late October and early November, 1838, two poems of passionate and

bitter reproach to a faithless feminine love: “I knew not ’twas so dire

a crime To say the word adieu,” and “Light up thy halls—and think not of

me!” Whatever experience produced these intense, immediate and certainly

autobiographical outcries must have occurred during a period when, as a

letter to Charlotte testifies, her boarding-school responsibilities

absorbed her from six in the morning until sometimes eleven at night,

and where supervision would have made association with a man impossible.

In view of her earlier quick withdrawal from Roe Head, the fact that she

endured such conditions for even six months is remarkable.

It is reasonable to imagine that at Law Hill she met and fell ardently

in love with another woman—whether teaching colleague or senior

student—and that the emotion was sufficiently mutual for Emily to

envision some such lasting companionship as Charlotte dreamed of with

Ellen Nussey. (Indeed, Moore’s emphasis upon the beauty, intellectual

and social capacities, and personal charm of Miss Elizabeth Patchett,

the school’s forty-four-year-old headmistress, suggests the possibility

of Emily’s superior having lit the flame reflected in her verse.) The

pattern of such dormitory dramas, whoever the actors, is fairly

constant. One young woman is aglow with excitement and an often illusory

sense of complete rapport; the other is flattered and genuinely

responsive until the emotional voltage runs too high. Then withdrawal

follows on the one side, hurt and misunderstanding on the other. Whether

Emily encountered Victorian admonition from a colleague, or the news

from some charming young creature (as she toyed with her new ring) that

_she_ was about to enter love’s _real_ province, it is certain that

Emily felt herself “betrayed.” Actually, this proud woman of twenty or

twenty-one, in the grip of authentic passion, must have been brought to

see her feeling through other eyes as something between a juvenile

_Schwarm_ and that horror the very name of which Saint Paul forbade to

be uttered. It is probable that she became at once either physically or

nervously ill and perhaps left the school (inexplicable in the middle of

a term), hiding jealously the reason for her going, and blotting it from

all records. (Interestingly enough Moore tells us that Miss Patchett

married a local vicar “shortly after Emily’s departure from Law Hill.”

Was it her halls that were lit, and for her wedding, in November

1838?)[8]

A blow like this—the realization that the only love of which she seemed

capable was regarded by the world as either frivolous or sinful—would

explain her subsequent melancholy and her stubborn refusal to enter

again into any personal relationship. It also colored her memories of

Law Hill so that a decade later she used details of the buildings and

environs to describe Wuthering Heights farm, the setting in which, as

the dark-spirited Heathcliff, she finally wrought vicarious revenge upon

a vain and inconstant Cathy.

*George Eliot.* The eye in search of variance inevitably turns next to

the George in England who had not yet assumed her masculine

cognomen—Mary Ann Evans. This novelist was undoubtedly masculine in many

ways, both physically and psychologically; which of these traits were

inborn and which bred of the childhood adoration of father and brother

so vividly reflected in _Mill on the Floss_, it is impossible to say.

But George Eliot’s masculinity does not seem to have affected her

emotional life. There are, to be sure, a handful of very close women

friends cited in the Hansons’ recent biography:[1] Sara Hennell, near

her own age and, like her, rather masculine; Mary Sibree, the first

young girl she tutored; and later Bessie Parkes and Barbara Leigh

Taylor, young feminists a half dozen years or more her junior. All of

these are mentioned as parties to friendships which were briefly more or

less emotional on one side or both. But even so, two considerations

exclude their subject from a list of variant women until more evidence

is at hand. The concern felt by two of the girls’ families about Mary

Ann Evans’s influence was caused not at all by her emotional temperament

but by her religious unorthodoxy. Furthermore, nothing in George Eliot’s

work reflects any interest in emotional connections between women or

even an awareness of them. Her life, as soon as she was freed from

enslavement to her invalid father, was a succession of excitements

involving men, men who captivated her emotions regardless of whether

they were married or (like Herbert Spencer) incapable of passion. She

was that case so disheartening to the hereditary theorist—an extremely

mannish woman not obsessed with women but with men.

*Margaret Fuller.* The life of an American contemporary of George Sand

and Emily Brontë offers similar suggestions of variance, while her

surviving work is almost equally empty of it. Margaret Fuller, New

England transcendentalist, feminist, and journalist, is remembered for

her _Woman in the Nineteenth Century_, which played a part in this

country comparable to Wollstonecraft’s _Vindication_ in England; for her

editing of the short-lived _Dial_, and for her work at home and abroad

on the staff of Horace Greeley’s _New York Tribune_. She is also

remembered for her friendships with Emerson and Carlyle and her efforts

to familiarize her countrymen with Italian and German literature,

especially the work of Goethe. She is thought to have been the model for

Holmes’ Lurida Vincent and for the Zenobia of Hawthorne’s _Blythedale

Romance_. Catherine Anthony, in one of the first “psychoanalytic”

biographies of this century,[1] reveals the rigorous asceticism and

intellectual forcing imposed upon her during childhood by that puritan

idealist, Timothy Fuller, and argues for a father fixation as the key to

her later emotional life.

It was not until the age of thirty-four that she experienced her first

romantic love for a man, the German Jew James Nathan, whom she met

during her first year in New York. When he expressed passion for her,

she was deeply disturbed, even shocked, and he soon returned to Europe,

partly, it is thought, to escape from her stubbornly “platonic” hold

upon him. Four years later in Italy she lived for a season with the

Marchesa d’Ossoli, whom she married secretly after discovering that she

was pregnant, as Wollstonecraft had done in the case of Godwin. Versions

of both these heterosexual experiences were permitted to survive by

Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, who edited

her _Memoirs_, but, says Mason Wade in a later biography, “These friends

of Margaret, in their regard for her memory, inked out, scissored or

pasted over a third of the never-to-be-duplicated mass of material they

had before them.”[2]

The first thirty-four of her fifty years were not, however, emotionally

empty. At the age of thirteen she fell deeply in love with an

Englishwoman visiting in Cambridge, the first member of a more

cosmopolitan society than she had before encountered. When after a few

months her adored departed she fell into melancholy, was unable to eat,

and declined so much in health that her father packed her off to a

boarding school to find companionship of her own age. She was far too

precocious and self-absorbed to be popular with the girls, and her chief

interest was in a sympathetic teacher with whom, as with her English

idol, she afterwards corresponded for years. Family cares and financial

stress after her father’s death apparently filled her late teens and

early twenties to the exclusion of personal contacts, and no emotional

record survives from the year when she taught in Bronson Alcott’s

school. At the end of a succeeding period as headmistress of a school in

Providence, however, she parted from the boys without emotion, but the

girls, whose adoration had been precious to her, all wept at losing her

and she wept with them. (Most of these incidents were not expurgated

from her _Memoirs_.)

Her next five years, between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-four,

were devoted to her famous “Conversations,” hybrids between a French

salon and a modern seminar. For a course of these two-hour sessions held

in the homes of the participants her fee was twenty dollars, in a day

when tickets to as many lyceum lectures cost only two; still her group

never numbered less than thirty. Her intellectual brilliance and the

magnetism she exerted upon her exclusively feminine audiences have

become legendary, and it is quite evident from the various accounts of

them that a strong emotional rapport with women contributed to her

success. It is notable that the evening course given one winter to a

mixed group which included many distinguished intellectual men was a

comparative failure.

Considering her emotional inhibitions as shown in her affair with

Nathan, and, more particularly, in view of the rigorous prudery of

Boston at the time, it is unlikely that any of her numerous feminine

attachments reached the point of overt expression. But the student of

variance must forever regret the loss of those confessional passages

obliterated by the three moral vigilantes who edited them.

The only other episode of possible variant significance in her life

(aside from her translating a part of the work of Günderode) was the

effort she made to meet George Sand when she reached Europe in 1846. The

famous woman was for a month or so away from Paris, and after her return

she failed to answer Margaret’s note begging an interview. After a week

of silence Margaret “took her courage into her hands” and risked a call.

A servant’s error in reporting her name might even then have sent her

away disappointed, but she persisted, and finally reached Sand in

person. Writing to a friend about the encounter, she says:

Our eyes met. I shall never forget her look at that moment.... Her

face is very little like the portraits, but much finer; the upper

part of the forehead and eyes are beautiful, the lower strong and

masculine, expressive of a hardy temperament and strong passions, but

not in the least coarse.... What fixed my attention was the

expression of _goodness_, nobleness, and power that pervaded the

whole.... As our eyes met she said, “C’est vous,” and held out her

hand. I took it and went into her little study.... I loved, shall

always love her.[3]

Though pressed for time, Sand kept her for the greater part of the day

and talked freely to her. Afterwards Margaret decided that despite her

hostess’s constant smoking, and the fact that she had undoubtedly had

“something of the bacchante in her life,” she had never liked any woman

better than she liked George Sand.

*Adah Isaacs Menken.* The difference in emotional climate between

puritan Boston and exotic New Orleans could not be better illustrated

than by setting against Margaret Fuller’s life that of the actress,

dancer, poet and adventuress who attained fame as Adah Isaacs Menken.

Encyclopedias are monotonously insistent that she was born Dolores Adios

Fuertes, daughter of a Spanish Jew. Various other sources, among them

the preface to an 1890 edition of her poems,[1] claim that she was

Adelaide McCord, daughter of a storekeeper in a small Louisiana town.

The truth is perhaps obscured forever by what another authority

describes as “her own habit of romancing about herself and her

origin.”[2] Thus some of the following picturesque details offered by

Clement Wood should doubtless be liberally salted, but many are

demonstrably true.

Although, like Margaret Fuller, Menken was precocious enough to be

translating the _Iliad_ at twelve, she was also dancing in the New

Orleans Opera House, and by the age of fourteen “she was a woman, whose

sensitive beauty was the pride of the town.” By the time she was twenty

she had the following adventures to her credit: marriage at sixteen to

“a nobody whose very name has vanished,” who abused and abandoned her; a

season of dancing which made her the darling of the Tacón Theatre in

Havana; a tour with an amateur theatrical company in Texas, followed by

her founding a newspaper in the town of Liberty; being captured by

Indians, and rescued by white rangers. A year after the first

publication of Walt Whitman’s _Leaves of Grass_ she brought out a

volume, _Memoirs_ (or _Memories_ [?] now lost) which is said to have

“received the placid fervor it deserved.”[3]

A few months before she was twenty-one she married a musician in

Galveston, Alexander Isaacs Menken, adopted his faith and his name, and

retained both to the end of her short but crowded career, though this

included several later marriages. She subsequently returned to the stage

and toured the south, part of the time in Edwin Booth’s company. In

Cincinnati she paused long enough to study sculpture, and became the

leading contributor to the _Cincinnati Israelite_. Her article on Baron

Rothschild’s admission to parliament won her his epithet of “inspired

Deborah of her adopted race.” Moving north to Dayton, she took up

military drill and was elected captain in the Life Guards. Here she met

a pugilist, John Heenan, known as the Benicia Boy, whom she married a

year later in New York, but, like her first unlucky choice, he was

brutal, and she subsequently tried matrimony with the humorist known as

Orpheus C. Kerr, and again with “one John Barclay.” Menken died, Kerr

she divorced, but in what manner she freed herself of her other mates is

uncertain.

Her success as an actress seems to have been moderate until in New York

in 1861 she accepted the part of Mazeppa in a dramatization of Byron’s

melodramatic poem. This male part involved being bound to the back of a

fiery Arab steed, feet in his mane, head hanging from his crupper, and

“she glittered in this role from Albany to London, Paris and Vienna.” In

Europe she enjoyed social and literary, as well as dramatic, success.

“Nobility and royalty paid court to her; the aristocracy of art thronged

to her salon.” She was the intimate friend of Gautier, Dumas, Charles

Reade, Swinburne, and Dickens, and in 1868 dedicated to the last of

these her second volume of poems, _Infelicia_.[4] Within a few months of

its publication she fell ill and died at the age of thirty-three.

Menken’s place in the present study is due to James Gibbons Huneker’s

comment in _Steeplejack_:

The grave of Ida [sic] Isaacs Menken, poet, actress ... greatest of

Mazeppas, is there [Père La Chaise cemetery in Paris].... Her letters

to Hattie Tyng Griswold, published after the death of the notorious

and unhappy woman, revealed another side of her temperament. Extracts

were printed in the newspapers. She was a Mazeppa doubled by a

Sappho. Her slender volume of verse entitled “Infelice” was credited

to Swinburne, but that is nonsense. The poet of Anactoria, while he

sympathized with Lesbian ladies, never wrote bad poetry.... A

strikingly handsome woman according to the report of her day, her

figure being the “envy of sculptors.” ... A tormented, morbid soul, a

virile soul in a feminine body....[5]

Upon examination, the volume _Infelicia_ reveals no more obvious

lesbianism than do the poems of Brontë or Labé. Its impersonal poems,

pleas for the Jews or for industrially exploited women, explain the

interest of Dickens and Reade, champions of social reform. The tragic

desperation in most of the love lyrics suggests, along with her twice

marrying sadistic men and her success as the victimized Mazeppa, a

strain of masochism which may account for her appeal for Swinburne (who

was not, craving Huneker’s pardon, too sympathetic to lesbian ladies,

but who was obsessed by pain). Three poems, however, are obviously

addressed to women. “Dying” and “Answer Me” allude to soft and tender

hands, warm bosoms. “A Memory; To a Dead Woman” says:

Too late we met. The burning brain,

The aching heart alone can tell

How filled our souls with death and pain

When came the last sad word, Farewell![6]

In “The Release,” a subjective autobiographical fragment, she says:

Wherefore was that poor soul of all the host so wounded?

It struggled bravely ...

Can it be this captive soul was a changeling, and battled ... in a body

not its own?[7]

These poems to, or about, women come nearest to serenity and peace of

any in the volume. The rest reproach men for their cruelty to the women

who bear their children, or, like “Resurgam,” they represent the author

as dead though still beautiful, crowned with flowers, and fêted—her

spirit murdered by the man she loved.[8]

As to the Hattie Tyng Griswold mentioned by Huneker, she is listed in

Frances Willard’s _Woman of the Century_[9] as a successful Wisconsin

journalist and a friend of Violet Paget, the British art critic and

philosopher, who wrote under the name Vernon Lee. No record seems to

exist of her connection with Menken outside the newspaper articles

mentioned by Huneker, which have not been consulted here. As in the case

of Sand and Wollstonecraft, interest in Menken’s spectacular career has

diverted attention from possible variant experience, but it appears to

be precisely such stormy and passionate spirits who turn to women for

the happiness they are unable to find with any number of men. It is

interesting that Clement Wood should say, in contradiction to Huneker,

that she deserved as much poetic acclaim as Whitman, but “was a woman,

with a softer voice.”[10] The volume alluded to, _Memoirs_, has not been

seen by the present writer, but honest critical judgment compels some

qualification of Wood’s praise in view of the known _Infelicia_, though

there are many pages in the latter which are not “bad” poetry.

*“Michael Field.”* Another “poet” in the present group is Michael Field,

pseudonym of two late-Victorian Englishwomen, Katherine Bradley and

Edith Cooper. They were aunt and niece, but actually they were much

closer than this relationship indicates, for when Edith’s mother was

left an invalid after the birth of a second child, Katherine and her

mother moved in to care for the family, and Katherine assumed complete

responsibility for the three-year-old Edith. Katherine was then

seventeen and had studied at Newnham and in Paris, where she had been in

love with the older brother of a French friend. This man died, and the

loss is reflected faintly in her first published poetry a decade later.

There is no indication of any other heterosexual interest on either

woman’s part throughout their lives.

By the time Edith had reached late adolescence and Katherine was

approaching thirty, their relation had become one of adult equality, and

they were active together in university life in Bristol, though

apparently more in debating, woman’s suffrage, and anti-vivesection

societies than in formal university courses. In 1881, when one was

thirty-three and the other nineteen, they published jointly a first book

of verse, “by Arrand and Isla Leigh,” which received little critical

comment. It was two years later that they hit upon the pseudonym of

Michael Field, and when _Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund_ appeared in 1883

it was hailed as the work of a new and promising talent. They published,

in all, eleven volumes of verse and nineteen or twenty poetic dramas,

mostly on classical or historical themes; but, as Sturge Moore says in

the introduction to their joint memoirs, _Works and Days_:

“After the first flush of acclamation their work was treated with

ever-increasing coldness by the literary world, and there is no doubt

that the discovery that Michael Field was no avatar ... but two

women, was partly responsible.”[1]

The handful of volumes which have been available for inspection seem far

from works of genius; nevertheless, the poems have as much freshness and

lyric charm as those of many other minor writers who are repeatedly

included in anthologies. The plays, though they exhibit careful

historical scholarship, are weighted with moral or feministic message

and seem artificial and heavy. The one that reached the stage in their

own day was an immediate failure.

There is evidence in the luxurious format of their privately printed

volumes, and in the description of the house in Richmond where they

lived after Mr. Cooper’s death, that they were blessed with ample means,

and beyond doubt their thirty-five years of adult life together were

happier than the lives of most Victorian spinsters. They cultivated the

acquaintance of all the surviving nineteenth-century poets, and derived

much excitement from moderate friendships with the aging Browning and

Meredith. But the Victorian era as a whole was disinclined to honor two

“Platonists” as the previous century had done, and their closest friends

were a pair of Royal Academy artists, Charles Ricketts and Charles

Shannon, who lived together near them in a relationship evidently

comparable to their own. That they did not escape disapprobation is

indicated indirectly in several of the entries in _Works and Days_. When

they first recognized Ricketts and Shannon at an art exhibition they

hesitated long before speaking, uncertain how such a gesture might be

received, even though Ricketts had designed the cover for one of their

recent volumes. After attending another “private view” one Sunday

afternoon in 1889, Katherine made much in their journal of being greeted

by Fairfax Murray. “We recognized that he was proud to manifest to the

world that we were his friends.”[2] And in connection with one of their

volumes of verse, _Long Ago_ (1889), based on fragments from Sappho,

Katherine told Browning that “we meant to do no more harm than George

Herbert, when he took a text from Holy Writ and wrote a hymn thereon.”

The harm they were accused of having done is not mentioned.

The relation between the two women is more difficult to analyze than any

so far encountered. Some time before the publication of their first

volume of poems they were moved to a step best described in a later poem

of Katherine’s:

It was deep April, and the morn

Shakespeare was born.

My love and I took hands and swore

Against the world, to be

Poets and lovers evermore.

To laugh and dream on Lethe’s shore,

To sing to Charon in his boat,

Heartening the timid souls afloat;

Of judgment never to take heed,

But to those fast-locked souls to speed

Who never from Apollo fled,

Who spent no hours with the dead;

Continually

With them to dwell,

Indifferent to heaven and hell.[3]

This, along with certain other poems (notably the “Third Book of Songs”

in _Underneath the Bough_), leaves no possible doubt about the intensity

or the variance of their mutual emotion. Not even Colette, however,

could assign a masculine or a feminine role to one or the other. Sir

William Rothenstein, in his preface to _Works and Days_, describes

“Michael” (Katherine) as “stout, emphatic, splendid and adventurous in

talk;” “Field” (Edith) as “wan and wistful, gentler in manner, but

equally eminent in the quick give and take of ideas.”[4] A good

photograph of the two women shows Edith’s features to be of a decidedly

boyish cast and her hair short. In the memoirs the two use a wealth of

nicknames, masculine, feminine or neuter, and either may refer to the

other by the male pronoun. It seems as though they tried to think of

themselves as a single bisexual personality, and in one place Katherine

says of the Brownings: “These two poets, man and wife, wrote alone; each

wrote, but did not bless and quicken one another at their work; _we are

closer married_ [italics hers].”[5]

They exhibit consciousness of the physical possibilities between women

more frankly than any other writers except for the portrayal of

fictional characters. This is particularly striking in Edith’s account

of an attack of scarlet fever she suffered while they were travelling in

Germany. Katherine fought an entire hospital staff in order to occupy a

room with her, and Edith writes later: “I have my love close to me....

Looking across at Sim’s little bed I realize she is a goddess, hidden in

her hair—Venus. Yet I cannot reach her.... I grow wilder for pleasure

and madder against the ugly Mädchen”[6] (the nurse who kept her in bed).

Yet when another nurse, middle-aged, becomes infatuated and annoys her

with constant caresses, she says:

My experiences with Nurse are painful—she is under the possession of

terrible fleshly love she does not conceive as such, and as such I

will not receive it. Oh, why will Anteros make one cynical by always

peering over the beauty of every love—why must his fatality haunt

us?[7]

Much later in their lives, Edith, whose health was never robust, failed

steadily, learned she had cancer, and turned to the Church of Rome.

Katherine followed her into that church more slowly and, one infers,

partly to reassure the younger convert that they would never be

separated here or hereafter, just as she concealed the fact that she

also was suffering from the same dread ailment as long as Edith lived,

in order to spare her added vicarious pain. This religious move resulted

from the influence of a brilliant Jesuit, who had made their

acquaintance through enthusiasm for the mystic exaltation of their

verse. There is no hint of struggle, change of habit or attitude, or

anything resembling “repentance” in either woman, and this fact, along

with the “Anteros” allusion above, suggests that the two had achieved

some sort of limitation upon expressing their love which satisfied their

stringent Victorian consciences.

Probably the complete manuscript of _Works and Days_ included other

psychological and philosophical discussion of such relationships, and

perhaps also more details of the poets themselves, for Sturge Moore

mentions having reduced the text considerably in the interests of good

taste, and of omitting matter likely to be of little interest to later

students of literature. Unfortunately, biographers and literary

historians often prune material of foremost interest to students of

emotional psychology.

*Emily Dickinson.* If Emily Brontë was for a century a British enigma,

Emily Dickinson has for almost as long been New England’s “little

sphinx.” Many who do not know her poems will have heard of her

self-cloistration at thirty in the family house in Amherst, her wearing

only white thereafter, and her habit of communicating even with old

friends through the open door of a room in which she remained stubbornly

invisible. Favoring the growth of such legends are a life as empty of

outward event as the earlier Emily’s, poems with a higher emotional

charge and no fictional disguises, and a history of publication

mysteriously complicated by family feud. Some critics have observed that

in nineteenth century New England recluses and eccentrics were not

uncommon, particularly among old maids and old bachelors who sometimes

worked at becoming “characters.” Some have elucidated in detail the

family quarrel between surviving sister and sister-in-law which blocked

publication. But none have dared to pretend that Emily’s life was

absolutely normal.

A tragic love affair has been the natural hypothesis, and search for

clues has produced an embarrassment of possible candidates. All Emily’s

letters resemble her poems enough in economy and intensity so that

despite her own elision and the subsequent editing many still approach

love letters in effect. On their internal and some external evidence,

she seems to have felt real warmth for a number of men with whom she

enjoyed intellectual communion, from her near-contemporary George Gould

in the late 1840s to Judge Otis Lord, her father’s friend, eighteen

years her senior, in her later life. To each of a half-dozen potential

candidates, one biographer or another has assigned responsibility for

the heartbreak in her poetry and her willful seclusion. But in every

case, objective support is meager, and the necessary assumptions have

reflected the theorist’s predilections quite as much as his subject’s.

As the quantity of poetry and correspondence in print has increased,

however, the different editors’ versions of some duplicate material have

invited comparison, and from this and much peripheral research Rebecca

Patterson has suggested in _The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_ (1951) a

pattern of departure from the norm which brings its subject within the

range of the present study. Mrs. Patterson presents the integrated

results of three separate investigations. First, she has studied Emily’s

life story exhaustively: the puritan background in Amherst; emotional

tensions in the family circle (Emily’s father, whom she both loved and

inwardly defied, forbade at least one marriage and tried to prevent her

writing); Emily’s feelings, convincingly diagnosed as ambivalent, toward

the men who captured her interest; and her sometimes more absorbing

attachments to certain women. Second, Mrs. Patterson has compiled the

objective and emotional biography of Kate Scott Anthon of Cooperstown,

New York. This tall, striking, and passionate woman she shows to have

been the product of a relatively cosmopolitan milieu, to have been

emotionally attracted to women from adolescence in boarding school to

ripe old age on the continent (despite a couple of satisfying if

short-lived marriages), and to have met and violently loved Emily

Dickinson when both young women were about twenty-nine. Third, she has

collated all available versions of Emily’s poems and letters (in some of

which the sex and number of pronouns were altered or lines omitted by

the poet herself or censoring editors), and has re-established

chronology which was either deliberately falsified or wishfully confused

by the editors to support the legend of a male lover. However unpopular

Mrs. Patterson’s hypothesis of a variant passion for Kate Anthon may be,

it partly explains the erratic behavior of both the poet herself and her

surviving relatives as motivated by fear of scandal. (Sue Gilbert

Dickinson in particular, whom Emily’s sister Lavinia branded a

procrastinator and obstructionist in the matter of publication, had her

reasons.)

From minutely assembled external evidence as well as careful

interpretation of poems and letters, Mrs. Patterson reconstructs the

following emotional history. During late adolescence Emily was

passionately attached to Sue Gilbert, afterward her sister-in-law, a

girl who had similarly attracted Kate Scott during their boarding school

days. But Sue herself was cold in both relationships, and left Emily

wholly unaware of the true nature of her emotion. A decade later, Kate

Scott Anthon appeared, the widow of a loved first husband who had died

after only two years of married life. Kate was beautiful, socially and

emotionally mature, hungry for love, and much taken with Emily at sight.

The two women’s association was not protracted, probably amounting in

all to less than two months; however, it was highly concentrated during

Kate’s semi-annual visits over a period of two years to Sue Gilbert

Dickinson who lived next door to Emily.

The contact begun in March 1859 flowered then and during August of that

year into an intense mutual absorption. Emily even showed Kate the

poetry of which her own family still knew nothing. This flowering

included some demonstrativeness, apparently Emily’s first congenial

experience of caresses, and therefore an electrifying revelation. In

March 1860, during Kate’s third visit to Sue, Emily’s sister Lavinia was

absent from home, and the two young women spent a night together. This

experience enlightened Emily as to at least the nature of passion (a

lesson of which many Victorian spinsters died ignorant), but to Kate’s

desire for complete intimacy, Emily reacted with shock and withdrawal.

Kate knew herself well enough to be aware that she could not continue a

close association on Emily’s puritanic terms, and she avoided visiting

Sue again for more than a year, though for a time she continued to

correspond with Emily. The latter was too inexperienced to understand

quite what had happened, and for six months she continued to be—as she

had been since first meeting Kate—happier and more out-going in her

personal relationships and correspondence than ever before or after.

Then, at the beginning of 1861, Kate ceased to reply to Emily’s letters,

of which only three have been published and probably few more survived.

Kate was not silent from indifference; Mrs. Patterson assembles sound

evidence that she too suffered bitterly. But she was apparently

convinced that their relation had reached an impasse, and by April 1861

Emily’s pain and veiled reproach so troubled her that she wrote

terminating their connection. This month marked the beginning of Emily’s

withdrawal from social contacts. She refused particularly to see anyone

who might mention Kate’s name, for fear of her own reaction if she heard

it spoken. Meanwhile, Kate had turned for comfort to her friend,

Gertrude Vanderbilt, wife of a New York judge and some six years her

senior, on whom she evidently could depend for complete understanding.

Mrs. Vanderbilt seems to have offered sane advice—which may even have

preceded Kate’s final letter to Emily—and some religious consolation.

When in the fall of 1861 Kate felt constrained to visit Sue Dickinson,

knowing that to sever the connection without reason would arouse awkward

conjecture, she played safe by bringing Mrs. Vanderbilt with her. To the

still uncomprehending Emily, this effective preclusion of private

interviews was a bitter final blow.

All this, it must be admitted, is a fairly detailed reconstruction of

events for which proof positive can never be produced. But it did not

deserve the wholesale damnation which critics accorded Mrs. Patterson’s

volume when it appeared. Other biographers had noted the meticulous

omission of any descriptive detail in Emily’s love poems which could

give a clue to the beloved’s identity or personality. The present

writer, still little acquainted with Dickinson (to her shame be it said)

when _Bolts of Melody_ appeared in 1945, was assured by several lovers

of Emily’s poetry, on the internal evidence in that volume, that the

poet belonged in this study. Let us grant, then, that Emily may in her

early life have felt “idealistically amorous” (as one critic phrases it)

toward certain young men, notably Gould and Newton, with whom her

associations came to nothing. (Both died quite young, which might

partially account for Emily’s concern with death.) She also probably

fell in love with the Reverend Charles Wadsworth whom she met in

Philadelphia in 1854. (This has the vote of Mark Van Doren, specialist

in historical research.) But she saw Wadsworth no more than three times

again, probably only twice, and then only for a few hours. In her late

twenties—a dangerous age for emotional spinsters—she met the first woman

whose mind matched her own. She was off guard precisely because her new

friend was a woman; but Kate Anthon had virtually a man’s emotional

approach. An explosive result was almost inevitable. Mrs. Patterson’s

demonstration of how closely a new out-going happiness in poems and

letters paralleled Emily’s meeting with Kate Anthon, how exactly the

beginning of her period of “agony” coincided with Kate’s withdrawal, is

too apt to be dismissed as absurdly biased special pleading.