CHAPTER IX.

FICTION IN ENGLISH

Introduction

The variant novels still to be surveyed in English number well over a

hundred. In part this surprising count reflects the general growth of

interest in sexual psychology and the increase in the number of feminine

authors, both of which trends developed slightly later in the

English-speaking countries than elsewhere. But beyond doubt it is also

due in some measure simply to the greater accessibility of material in

our own language. Book reviews in English and the indexes locating them

have multiplied enormously since 1900, and, non-committal though reviews

may be with regard to variance, a practiced reader grows sensitive to

significant evasion. Even more fruitful, of course, is the wide, if

superficial, skimming of each year’s output, a habit which nets not only

unreviewed trivia but minor variant incidents in better novels as well.

Had titles in French and German been equally ready to hand, the score

here would certainly be more equitable.

In rapid survey of this century’s English fiction certain rough

divisions emerge. The first fifteen years might be called the age of

innocence, in that no published work referred to overt lesbianism,

variance was not a subject of dispute, and no particular school of

psychological thought had come to the fore. After 1915 more

sophistication was apparent and variance became a controversial issue,

particularly in England where the struggle for suffrage exacerbated any

reference to women’s departure from the feminine and domestic role.

Thereafter, for a decade or so partisan shots echoed intermittently back

and forth as they had in France a quarter-century earlier, with the

difference, however, that now the attack frequently employed the

batteries of Freud. During the first of these decades World War I

exerted a perceptible influence, quickening cross-fertilization between

continental and Anglo-American attitudes in general, and, in particular,

leading to the translation after 1920 of enough French fiction so that

occasionally specific influences could be detected in our own novels.

Another aftermath of war was that relaxing of all sexual strictures

which characterized the Twenties, and, in line with the growing freedom,

literary treatments of variance multiplied rapidly, reaching a first

peak in 1928.

In that year Radclyffe Hall’s _Well of Loneliness_ incurred legal

prosecution for its explicit defense of a lesbian woman.[1] The

restrictive effect of this action was no more than local and temporary,

and as usual in cases of censorship the long range result was wide

publicity for the banned title and for others on related themes.

Consequently, the number of novels giving attention to variance swelled

to a second peak in the middle Thirties, but the general tone was

altered. Authors were now more self-conscious. The best, if at all

sympathetic, dealt more gingerly with the delicate subject than before

the attack. The majority, of intermediate popular quality, were careful

to sound a disparaging note. And there sprang up also for the first time

in English the wave of mediocre work which always follows profitable

publication of better material in any field. Some of these inferior

tales were censorious, some defensive, but all were so unrestrained that

in this country, at least, certain pressure groups, notably the Catholic

League for Decency, were roused to crusade for wholesale suppression.

A less obvious influence was also at work. The “flaming youth” of the

Twenties, product of war and of general rebellion against Victorian

inhibitions, had reached a point of disillusionment with sexual freedom,

and now, as the “lost generation”, were groping toward emotional

stability. This quest for adjustment called forth a quantity of popular

psychology and sociology, stemming largely from Freud, which deprecated

irregular attachments, especially the homosexual, and exalted marriage

and family life. Thus, some decline in variant fiction was evident

before the end of the Thirties. Then, in 1939 the second World War

exerted initial pressure in the same direction, for, as always, the

younger generation’s urge to perpetuate itself before too late threw

added emphasis upon heterosexual relations and parenthood. And finally,

in the publishing business, to usual wartime handicaps was added the new

military requisition of cellulose for explosives, which resulted in an

unprecedented shortage of paper and stringent selectivity in published

fiction. Altogether it was inevitable that during the early Forties the

variant literary stream should run low.

It did not, however, cease entirely, and since the end of World War II,

trends in fiction suggest that variance is on its way to becoming a

recognized if not accepted segment of human experience. The probable

underlying reasons for this change are varied. One is the usual

aftermath of war. Besides regularly producing a bumper crop of infants,

war has, since the days of Sappho, swelled the number of variants by

segregating the young to some extent during just those years when sexual

interest is at its height. More conscious effort was made to combat this

tendency during World War II than ever before, both in the armed forces

and on the home front. Preventive measures this time were as much

educational as disciplinary, so that the war generation emerged with

some grounding in “psychiatry at the fox-hole level.” One result is that

among women there was no such deliberate post-war affectation of

masculinity as occurred in the Twenties. Another is that many incipient

authors were prepared to write of variance with some balance and

perspective.

A further possible reason for the relaxing of at least the American

attitude toward variance is the publication of the Kinsey reports on

sexual behavior.[2] The appearance of the male volume in 1948 encouraged

the production of several serious novels featuring male homosexuality, a

subject hitherto stringently banned from English fiction. It is not safe

to say that this lifting of taboo significantly affected the feminine

picture, since female variance was never so rigorously outlawed, and the

count of pertinent titles was as large in 1943 and 1944, for instance,

as in 1949 and 1950. For this same reason Kinsey’s second volume on the

female (1953) seems unlikely to produce an effect comparable to his

first. But one fact is certain—the inclusion of incidental variant and

even lesbian episodes and characters is on the increase in popular

current fiction.

This statement leads to consideration of a third and purely practical

reason for the increase—post-war innovations in the publishing business.

Before 1941 experiments in producing books of high readability and low

cost had not achieved financial success, but four years of government

subsidy to the end of providing the armed forces with reading matter put

the venture on a paying basis. At present, fiction available at magazine

cost and from all magazine outlets has become a commonplace of daily

life. While these paper-covered novels were at first reprints of titles

notably successful in other editions, since 1950 a number of companies

have issued originals in the same format. Quite naturally one sure-fire

selling feature on the newsstands is frankness with regard to sex, and

the multiplication of both reprints and originals dealing with female

variance provides objective evidence of interest in that subject.

Another requisite for fast sales is a not-too-exalted literary level,

and the combination of sex latitude and popular quality has alerted

would-be censors. For some years these self-appointed groups have sought

to control the paper-backed market and have here and there succeeded.

Variant titles have been conspicuous in all lists under fire from moral

vigilantes, and the current question is whether censoring agencies will

succeed in once again checking quantity circulation of such material.

The Age of Innocence

The last mentioned variant narrative in English was Henry James’s

novelette _The Turn of the Screw_ (1898). Treating as it did the

seduction of a girl of eight by a depraved governess, it was considered

along with French titles of its decade which it resembled more closely

than did any of the novels soon to appear in English. Of these last,

none offered more contrast to French sophistication or could more

fittingly have ushered in twentieth-century fiction in our own tongue

than the innocuous tale published in 1900 by a now-forgotten British

novelist, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.

Within the first quarter of _The Farringdons_ Mrs. Fowler includes a

series of three passionate attachments experienced by the motherless

heroine. These occur before Elisabeth is twenty, but they are noteworthy

because of the author’s peculiar stress upon them.

There are two things which are absolutely necessary to the well-being

of the normal feminine mind—namely, one romantic attachment and one

comfortable friendship. Elisabeth was perfectly normal and extremely

feminine, and consequently she provided herself early with these two

aids to happiness.[3]

Despite this insistence on normal femininity, the object of the girl’s

comfortable friendship is a boy neighbor; that of her passionate

attachment a tall, handsome and witty Cousin Anne, a decade older than

she is.

All the romance of Elisabeth’s nature—and there was a great deal of

it—was lavished upon Anne Farringdon.... The mere sound of Anne’s

voice vibrated through the child’s whole being, and every little

trifle connected with her cousin became a sacred relic.[4]

Deep in the reading of mythology, Elisabeth sees her cousin as Diana,

builds a shrine to her in the garden, and practices a ritual of burnt

offerings before it. She also takes great interest in the Book of Ruth,

sensing “a parallelism to herself and Cousin Anne (in feeling at

least).”

People sometimes smile at the adoration of a young girl for a woman,

and there is no doubt but that the feeling savours slightly of school

days and bread and butter. But there is also no doubt that a girl who

has once felt it has learned what real love is, and that is no small

lesson in the book of life.[5]

This devotion occupies Elisabeth from twelve to sixteen, when the

cousin’s death plunges her into melancholy which threatens her health.

She is accordingly hurried off to boarding school, where during the next

four years she experiences a case of passionate hero-worship for the

headmistress, and a “devoted friendship” with a schoolmate who became

for a time “the very mainspring of Elisabeth’s life. She was a beautiful

girl ... and Elisabeth adored her with the adoration ... freely given to

the girl who has beauty by the girl who has not.” Upon this girl

Elisabeth lavishes

that passionate and thrilling friendship ... so satisfying to the

immature female soul, but which is never again experienced by the

woman who has once been taught by a man the nature of real love.[6]

The latter experience she meets at twenty. All these careful statements

indicate the author’s full awareness of the nature of variance and her

taking a deliberate stand with regard to it. Equally definite is the

implication that none of these early adorations involved physical

intimacy.

Two years later (1902) a Canadian-American girl of twenty-one published

_The Story of Mary MacLane_, written as a journal covering three months

during her nineteenth year and purporting to be literal autobiography.

Like the comparable “Story of Opal,” printed as authentic by the

_Atlantic Monthly_ in 1920, but partially “debunked” by discerning

critics, it was probably laced with more than a dash of fiction. In its

day it created sufficient sensation to be burlesqued in Weber and

Field’s revue of that year, and sold well enough to allow its author a

half-dozen years in Boston and New York.

Conspicuous in its self-revelation is undying hatred of the father whom

Mary lost at the age of eight.

Apart from feeding and clothing me ... and sending me to school—which

was no more than was due me—I cannot see that he ever gave me a

single thought. Certainly he did not love me, for he was quite

incapable of loving anyone but himself....[7]

Of her mother she says later,

How can one bring a child into the world and not wrap it round with a

certain wondrous tenderness that will stay with it always!... My

mother has some fondness for me—for my body because it came out of

hers. That is nothing—nothing. A hen loves its egg.[8]

Mary feels herself unloved also by the rest of her family—older sister,

older and younger brothers, and stepfather—all of whom are “strictly

practical and material, seeing close human relations as the stuff of

literature, not real life....” She is herself a genius, infinitely apart

from the crude barrenness of Butte, Montana, though she owns to keen

sympathy for women there who are “outside the moral pale.” All this, of

course, is once again the “dark hero complex,” that sense of being

outcast but superior, which has since been so well analyzed by Romer

Wilson in Emily Brontë and others. For 1902, three decades _before_ the

era when parents could do no right, it was fairly strong meat.

As for men, MacLane is certain none can ever rouse or possess her except

the Devil. “He will be incarnate, but he will not be a man.” He will

hurt her, and passion for him will free her from herself, but it will

last only three days, and “there must be no falling in love about it.”

My shy and sensitive soul would be irretrievably poisoned and

polluted. The defilement of so sacred and beautiful a thing as

marriage is surely the darkest evil that can come to a life. And so

everything in me that had turned toward that too bright light would

then drink deep of the lees of death.[9]

It was this devil fantasy upon which Weber and Fields seized, and on the

stage the Dark Gentleman, played by William Collier, fled in terror

before the _enfant terrible_.

The pertinent point to which all the foregoing leads is an attachment to

a high school teacher of literature first encountered when Mary was

eighteen, “the first person on earth who ever looked at me tenderly,” to

whom she refers with adolescent sentimentality as the “Anemone Lady.”

About this woman she spins passionate reveries, wishing they might live

together high on a mountainside away from the world. With the beginning

of this friendship “I felt a snapping of tense-drawn cords, a breaking

away of flood gates—and a strange new pain ... a convulsion and a

melting within.”[10] Nevertheless, caresses went no farther than “your

hand in mine,” and the association seems to have lasted but a year.

Still Mary says:

Sometimes I am seized with nearer, vivider sensations for my friend

the Anemone Lady ... I feel a strange attraction of sex. There is in

me a masculine element that when I am thinking of her arises and

overshadows all the others.... So then it is not the woman-love but

the man-love set in the mysterious sensibilities of my woman-nature.

It brings me pain and pleasure mixed.... Do you think a man is the

only creature with whom one may fall in love?[11]

This pseudo-naïveté wakes a suspicion of literary influence which is

strengthened by her second volume, _My Friend Annabel Lee_ (1903). Here

she proclaims her few early literary loves to have been Poe, the

juvenile books for boys of J. T. Trowbridge, and “‘Three Grains of

Corn,’ by a woman named Edwards,” and she voices acute loathing for

Archibald Clavering Gunter without citing reasons. Mathilda

Betham-Edwards was an Englishwoman who lived in France during the late

nineteenth century, and the _Oxford Book of Victorian Verse_ includes a

sonnet of hers, “A Valentine: The Pansy and the Prayer Book,” ending

with the following sestet:

The while I knelt, I let a pansy glide

Between her grave sweet face and open book

And whispered as she turned with chiding look—

“Heaven has not willed, dear heart, that aught divide

Love pure as ours, nor blames if thought of me

Come like this flower between thy God and thee.”[12]

This MacLane would have loved, as she would have hated the farcical

treatment of variance in _A Florida Enchantment_, and to assume her

acquaintance with both would explain her otherwise unaccountable

singling out of these two authors alone for special mention. Both of

MacLane’s volumes betray a disingenuous effort to present herself as a

child genius springing as it were by parthenogenesis from the

intellectual wasteland of Montana. It is probable that her reading had

been more extensive and had influenced her more than she admitted.

As to the volume of 1903, it is not only less startling than the first

but seems more youthful. The “friend” of the title is a Japanese

statuette in which her fantasy sees “a woman of fourteen” who has known

love for a week, after which “the strong stranger went away,” leaving

life drab. Here is the Devil again, and “Annabel” is obviously no more

than Mary’s own _persona_, hard, experienced and self-contained even

before adolescence. One wonders whether MacLane may have suffered some

early traumatic experience with a man which produced this recurrent

fantasy and prompted her sympathy for the déclassées of Butte. As for

women, “Annabel” is her only admitted friend. The volume records nothing

beyond Mary’s roaming alone in Boston, falling in love momentarily with

Minnie Maddern Fiske as the Magdalen, and adoring the Puvis de Chavannes

murals in the Public Library—those delicate wraiths so remote from

reality. Of human contacts there is no mention; she is solitary and

bitterly nostalgic for the Anemone Lady, or, rather, for their

mountainside eyrie of her own imagining. Passages in her third volume,

_I, Mary MacLane_ (1917) shed some light on her actual experiences at

this time, but must await discussion in proper order because the later

volume reflects the comparative emotional sophistication which had

permeated this country in the intervening years.

The next variant item was an historical novel by John Breckenridge Ellis

(1902), but precedence will be given to the recently published _Things

As They Are_ (1951), written in 1903 by Gertrude Stein, because of its

closer similarity to MacLane’s autobiographical volumes. This earliest

effort of Miss Stein’s, written when she was twenty-nine, is recognized

as very near to her own experience by Edmund Wilson, a long-time student

of her total work.[13] It records the emotional entanglements among

three young American women over a period of two years, and opens on a

transatlantic liner carrying them to Europe. Adele, the central figure

from whose viewpoint the whole story is written, is oppressed by

exhaustion and “the disillusion of recent failures” in Baltimore, and as

Mr. Wilson points out, Miss Stein herself went abroad in the summer of

1902 after having abandoned hope of a degree from Johns Hopkins where

she had pursued the medical course for five years.

The three girls are characterized at length. Helen is

the American version of the English handsome girl. In her ideal

completeness she would have been unaggressively determined, a trifle

brutal and entirely impersonal; a woman of passions but not of

emotions, ... incapable of regrets,[14]

that is, definitely a masculine personality; but actually she is no more

than “a brave bluff.” Sophie is a New Englander with “the angular body

of a spinster but ... a face that would have belonged to the decadent

days of Italian greatness,” and with “the unobtrusive good manners of a

gentleman.” Events prove her, however, to be both feminine and feline.

Adele has “the freedom of movement and the simple instinct for comfort

that suggests a land of laziness and sunshine.” Very early in the

narrative she exclaims, “I always did thank God I wasn’t born a

woman,”[15]—this surprising statement is neither then nor later

elaborated in any way—but everything about her save her intellect is

passive to the point of inertia, and she struggles against being drawn

into the “turgid and complex world” of passionate intimacy.

She finds it impossible, however, to remain indifferent to Helen’s

subtle courtship, which includes “fluttering” caresses as the three lie

on the deck under the stars. Her familiarity with attraction between

women is evident from some early self-searching:

As for me is it another little indulgence of my superficial emotions

or is there any possibility of my really learning to realize stronger

feelings. If it’s the first I will call a halt promptly.[16]

At one point Helen charges her with “middle-class morality,” to which

Adele retorts:

I simply contend that the middle class ideal which demands that

people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they

avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to

me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life.[17]

But that (says Helen) means cutting passion quite out of your scheme of

things. Adele replies:

Not simple moral passions, they are distinctly of it but really my

chief point is a protest against this tendency ... to go in for

things simply for the sake of experience.... [That] is to me both

trivial and immoral. As for passion, it has no reality for me except

as two varieties, affectionate comradeship ... and physical passion

in greater or less complexity ... and against the cultivation of the

latter I have an almost puritanic horror and that includes an

objection to it in any of its many disguised forms.[18]

In accordance with these principles Adele spends her summer in Spain,

happy in the mere “family” comradeship of a cousin. But during the

subsequent winter she plays a divided game. She cannot resist going

repeatedly from Baltimore to New York to see Helen, though once there

she is not only passive but resistant to the other girl’s wooing. She

even says explicitly that they have few interests in common, but still

it is she who does all the traveling to make their growing intimacy

possible, for Helen’s resources are sharply curtailed by unsympathetic

parents.

Thus far, the third girl, Sophie, has remained surprisingly passive in

view of her long-established intimacy with Helen, but in the course of

this winter she enlightens Adele as to the precise nature of that

intimacy. Adele is so shocked that it is implied clearly that the

relation is physical and, up until then, wholly outside her own

acquaintance. Not even this revelation, however, can detach her from

Helen, although she deliberately elects a second summer abroad alone and

suffers when Helen’s letters are stopped by a visit from Sophie. During

the subsequent winter her own relations with Helen reach the stage of

physical expression, but the change is not a happy one.

Their pulses were differently timed. She could not go so fast and

Helen’s exhausted nerves could no longer wait. Adele found herself

constantly forced on by Helen’s pain. It was a false position ... her

attitude was misunderstood and Helen interpreted her slowness as

deficiency ... and the greater her affection for Helen became the

more irritable became her discontent.[19]

This is trite enough to readers of modern sexual psychology as set forth

in marriage manuals. It was not trite coming from an unmarried American

girl in 1903.

At this juncture Sophie invites Helen to accompany her on another

European trip. (As Mr. Wilson drily remarks, for the more prosperous

American college graduate, Europe was then an imperative.) Helen

accepts, and although Adele is certain that Sophie is financing the trip

she dares not put the question directly. Or perhaps she does not want

to, for Helen has urged her to spend the summer abroad also, not with

them, but within easy reach.

And so the lover of serenity travels for her third summer as a kind of

semi-detached appendage to the other pair, and the remainder of the

action is almost as tedious and confusing to the reader as to Adele

herself. Because of the physical incompatibility so well described

above, Helen has now cooled considerably in that respect, but her

emotional dependence upon Adele increases with Sophie’s balking of

private communication between them—one more testimonial to the soundness

of “Proust’s law”: the inverse proportion between “love” and

accessibility. Because Adele, on the other hand, is now rather more than

less physically attracted, her health and peace of mind suffer

noticeably during her frustrating periods with the other two. But she is

bound not only by her genuine love for Helen but by her confidence that

the other girl really loves her. When she reads Helen’s final desperate

letter promising that she will never again allow such a situation to

develop, Adele exclaims with impatience:

Hasn’t she learned yet that things do happen and she isn’t big enough

to stave them off? Can’t she see things as they are and not as she

would make them if she were strong enough...? I am afraid it comes

very near to being a dead-lock.[20]

This sentence concludes the book, to which Miss Stein originally gave

the title _Quod Erat Demonstrandum_, the implied proposition being that

such an emotional game could never be worth the candle. The current

title, chosen by the editor, throws the emphasis upon Helen’s inability

to be honest with herself or others, in contrast to Adele’s ruthless

clarity. If Adele acted against her own middle-class convictions, it was

at least without self-deception at any stage of the game. Mr. Wilson

suggests that continued preoccupation with women, and her unwillingness

to abandon herself again or to write openly about it, was responsible

for the increasing obscurity of Miss Stein’s work and the lofty

emotional detachment of her viewpoint.[20]

* * * * *

John Breckenridge Ellis’s _The Holland Wolves_, published late in 1902,

was largely in the cape-and-sword tradition of the time, but he inserted

a variant touch by making its central figure a transvestist and treating

the emotional consequences seriously. Rosamunda, daughter of a Spanish

leader in the war with the Netherlands, has been bred in a convent where

flagellation was a common practice. When, at nineteen, she must choose

between becoming a nun there or accompanying her father to the Low

Countries, she elects the latter course. Disguised as her father’s

squire, she engages in espionage and from expediency pays court to Anna,

a Dutch girl in her teens. The latter falls deeply in love with her and

abandons family and reputation to follow her. But Rosamunda’s fancy has

been caught by an officer in the Dutch forces, to whom she confesses

that she is a woman. When he pronounces Anna no better than a camp

follower, Rosamunda challenges him to a duel, worsts him, and

consequently is cured of her passion for him. Thereafter she becomes one

of the most cruel of the inquisitionary soldiers.

Since she has never been in love with Anna, and the latter throughout

much of the story believes her to be a man, the variant issue is as

confused as always in a romance of sex disguise. Like Gunter’s farce,

however, the tale bears witness to interest in intersexual types even

among superficial American readers, for Rosamunda has no feminine

characteristics. It also indicates the author’s belief that such types

result from environment rather than heredity. Rosamunda, despite her

Spanish coloring, is revealed at the end as Anna’s sister (stolen from

Holland in infancy), and not related at all to the Spaniards upon whom

she has modeled herself. The blood kinship between the two girls,

moreover, is evidently meant to account for Anna’s spontaneous

attraction, which after the revelation of Rosamunda’s sex becomes a

profound sisterly devotion. Readers were thus provided with a spicy

morsel but spared the slightest moral indigestion. (If this account

makes the tale seem one of mere sex disguise, comparison with Compton

Mackenzie’s _Sylvia Scarlett_ of a few decades later will make the

difference apparent.)

The first of the century’s openly published titles by a major writer was

John Masefield’s _Multitude and Solitude_ (1909), its author’s

least-esteemed novel to judge from the neglect accorded it by literary

historians, libraries, and secondhand catalogs. It is true that from the

standpoint of artistry it falls into two almost unrelated halves; but it

is, nevertheless, a convincing study of a young dramatist in search of

his soul—that is, of the “high and austere” character he feels essential

to a great artist. He does achieve his end via some gruelling years with

a medical unit in South Africa, but he is driven to this heroic measure

by a series of major and minor frustrations reminiscent of the tricks of

Fate in Thomas Hardy’s work. Among the major tragedies is the death of

the woman he has long loved, and this calamity is the end of a chain of

trivial mischances in which the detonating factor is jealousy on the

part of his beloved’s woman friend. There is an artistic preliminary

sounding of the variant note early in the book when, depressed at

failing to find Ottalie in her London apartment, he stops at a café

where he sees

a red-haired fierce little poet who sat close by reading and eating

cake. The yellow back of _Les Fleurs du Mal_ was propped against his

teapot. Something of the fierceness and passion of the Femmes Damnées

... was wreaked upon the cake.[21]

After Ottalie is drowned while crossing to Ireland, her friend Agatha

tells the lover what he had already guessed: Ottalie’s visit to her

Irish relatives was partially the result of his not having definitely

proposed marriage. And his failure to do so was (again in part) due to

Agatha’s jealously interrupting a tête-à-tête between the lovers, and

later delaying a letter from Ottalie to him. Agatha confesses all this

during her prostration after her friend’s death.

“I was jealous. I was wicked. I think the devil was in me.” ... He

would have asked to look upon Ottalie; but he refrained in the

presence of that passion. Agatha had enough to bear. He would not

flick her jealousies.[22]

There is no suggestion that Ottalie reciprocated Agatha’s love, nor any

implication of lesbian intimacy. Ottalie’s brother, however, tells the

hero that although she loved him she thought him “too ready to surrender

to immediate and perhaps wayward emotion”—an obvious hint at the

heroine’s physical coldness or Victorian repression in the heterosexual

field.

Two years later and half a world away the Australian woman known to

letters as Henry Handel Richardson recorded the emotional development of

an adolescent girl in _The Getting of Wisdom_ (1910). At fourteen Laura

is already too hard and independent to feel close to her emotional

widowed mother, and at boarding school she is subjected to refined

cruelty by her mates because she is so “different”—partly in her

precocious literary interests but most of all in her dislike of boys. To

gain face among them she invents a romance with a curate; the exposure

of this fiction brings more ridicule which hardens her further. Her

inner withdrawal becomes complete after the expulsion of an adoring

younger girl who stole in order to buy her a keepsake.

In the midst of her bitter isolation she is chosen as roommate by a

popular girl a few years her senior, and at once succumbs emotionally to

the first kindness and championship she has ever known. It is clear,

however, that no physical intimacy ensues—Laura kisses Evelyn only once,

and then impulsively when the latter, in a fit of pique, remarks that

all men are fools. The friendship is slowly blighted by Laura’s

passionate jealousy if the older girl goes out with men or shows

attention to other girls, a “tyranny” to which the senior will not

submit. The school gossips about this conspicuous attachment, but

without censure or apparent awareness of questionable possibilities even

on the part of the mistresses. After a brief and abortive religious

“conversion” Laura sets herself to cultivate her literary talent by way

of emotional outlet, for there are hints that she will never feel

attracted to men. The wisdom gained during this difficult adolescence is

summarized at the end by the author, who says that though the girl

returned home feeling that she “fitted no hole,” she could not yet know

that

just those mortals who feel cramped and unsure in the conduct of

everyday life will find themselves ... in that freer world where no

practical considerations hamper, and where the creatures that inhabit

dance to their tune.[23]

That is, in the somewhat narcissistic world which they, as writers,

create. This is a penetrating recognition of authorship as sublimation,

written as it was several decades before psychiatrists began to take the

writing fraternity apart.

Another novel with rather stronger variant overtones appeared in England

in 1914, Ethel Sidgwick’s _A Lady of Leisure_. This pleasant social

romance had for its main theme a muted echo from the Women’s Movement:

the wealthy and idle girl’s need of a routine occupation. Violet Ashwin,

daughter of a frivolous social belle and a Harley Street physician, is

driven by a sense of utter futility to fly in the face of convention—and

her mother’s prejudices—and apprentice herself to a modiste. Her

co-worker, Alice Eccles, is an enterprising cockney who supports a

neurotic mother, preferring this burden to marriage with a suitor whom

she suspects of engaging in illegal enterprises. Alice is tall,

handsome, high-spirited, and infinitely more self-reliant than the

sheltered upper-class girl, whom at first she assists and patronizes

with a kind of affectionate raillery. Soon, however, the two are close

personal friends, to the horror of Violet’s snobbish mother. Between

Violet and her father, though, a close alliance has always existed, and

he applauds both her job and her new friendship, seeing at once the

solid quality beneath Alice’s unpolished surface.

When Violet works herself into a collapse and is sent to the country for

the summer,

Alice longed to have news of her—but she was not going to ask for

it.... Her adoration for Violet, violently repressed, since its

torrential force made her almost ashamed, was a thing unique, unheard

of, as Miss Eccles believed, in the world before. The revelation of

woman to woman is often just as remarkable, for all the truisms on

the subject, as the revelation of woman to man.[24]

Somewhat later, Mrs. Eccles’ mental condition having become a danger to

her daughter, Dr. Ashwin copes with the mother and engages Alice as

lady’s maid to his wife, hoping that her companionship may restore his

still convalescent daughter’s interest in living. When he tells Violet

that Alice is in the house she colors visibly and runs upstairs, “her

face still pink and her heart thumping.”

Alice dropped her hands and coloured gloriously, far more gloriously

than Violet at her best could have accomplished. Her work slipped

from her knees and she spread her splendid arms.... [Violet] went

straight to her and fell upon her breast.[25]

The only further detail mentioned is Alice’s kissing the other girl’s

hands. The friendship survives Alice’s marriage and the birth of her

first child, and she is the only person save Violet’s parents to attend

the latter’s subsequent wedding. Here, then, is an unmistakably

passionate relationship between adults—both girls are in their middle

twenties—presented with complete sympathy and approval, and encouraged

by an established physician. It is, of course, quite innocent of lesbian

implications.

Since Miss Stein’s novelette remained unpublished for half a century,

MacLane and Ellis would be America’s only representatives in this early

period but for short stories which appeared sporadically. One of

Josephine Dodge Dascom’s _Smith College Stories_ (1900), “A Case of

Interference,” just skirted the variant field. A junior, prominent

because of her literary ability, enters the despised arena of campus

politics to save an unpopular gifted freshman who worships her from

leaving college. A little later the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ published a

slighter college story, “The Cat and the King,” by Jennette Lee, in

which a freshman shams illness in order to join her senior idol in the

infirmary, and is extricated from ensuing complications by a wholly

sympathetic woman physician. These were both written on an adult level.

The only known variant juvenile, _The Lass of the Silver Sword_ by Mary

Constance Du Bois, ran in _St. Nicolas Magazine_ during 1909 and was

published in book form later.[26] Centered about the adoration of a

fourteen-year-old girl for a senior of nineteen in her boarding school,

it was sympathetic but so circumspect as to lack full vitality.

Catherine Wells’s “The Beautiful House” (_Harper’s Magazine_, 1912)

pictures an idyllic relation between two adult artists, for the older

and less feminine of whom the connection ends tragically with the

marriage of the younger woman. Helen R. Hull’s “The Fire” (1918) will be

discussed later with its author’s longer narratives.

It is noteworthy that none of this early fiction records disapproval of

variant experience on the part of either the authors or society. It is

seen as educative and beneficial during the teens, or even in the

following decade for the single woman, and it provides the only

happiness during adolescence for several girls more gifted than their

peers. If in Masefield’s novel its sequel is tragic, jealousy rather

than variance per se is responsible, and Miss Stein condemns the

experience she describes, not as lesbian, but as generally spineless and

unintelligent. In the cases (Miss Stein’s and Miss Richardson’s) where

antipathy or indifference to men is noted, women’s attraction to their

own sex is not responsible, but is rather a concomitant product of

unspecified factors.

Sophistication and Dispute

In 1915 D. H. Lawrence, with _The Rainbow_, hit the first ringing blow

upon the anvil of controversy. As the messiah of robust heterosexual

passion, Lawrence needs no introduction, and in this early novel he

attacked right and left all factors which militate against it in modern

society—unhealthy urban and industrial life, sterile intellectuality

(especially among women), and lesbianism. It is in the final portion of

his three-generation panorama that the current representative of the

Brangwyn clan, sixteen-year-old Ursula, contracts a passion for a

schoolmistress. She has just had a brief but complete heterosexual

experience, and Lawrence implies that the tide of emotion which

overflows toward Winifred Inger is little more than an aftermath of that

physical awakening. A ten-page chapter significantly entitled “Shame”

gives the history of their affair, which reaches its first climax at

Winifred’s river cottage when the two bathe nude at night. Immediately

after this episode the girl’s one desire is to get away. Over a period

of months, however, “the two women became intimate. Their lives seemed

suddenly to fuse into one.” During the long vacation, Ursula, as always

when away from the older woman, is desolate and afire for her, but with

their reunion

a heavy clogged sense of deadness began to gather upon her, from the

other woman’s contact. Her female hips seemed big and earthy, her

ankles and her arms too thick.[27] [The last touch is a highly

original bit of anthropometry.]

Winifred, deeply in love with the younger girl, wishes to leave the

school and live with Ursula in London where they can mingle in literary

circles and participate in the Women’s Movement. Ursula repudiates the

suggestion and goes on to other heterosexual adventures, but—possibly as

a result of her lesbian experience?—she is always too much concerned

with her own emotions to become a satisfactory partner for men. Her

leaving a lover and going out to steep herself in the light of a full

moon is offered as symbolic of her narcissistic self-absorption.

This novel was published by the solid firm of Methuen, but was withdrawn

after a police court verdict of indecency which was based on attacks by

three or four reviewers. The charge was general, only one (Robert Lynd)

making an oblique allusion to its lesbian aspect. Lawrence was not

notified directly of the court order, and since he had neither funds nor

influence to launch a legal protest,[28] this act of censorship raised

few echoes in comparison with some cases to be noted later. It did,

however, postpone general circulation of the novel, and undoubtedly

focussed some attention on lesbianism.

A year later the American Henry Kitchell Webster touched briefly but

scathingly on the subject of variance in _The Great Adventure_ (1916).

In this history of a marriage the girl who has looked forward to

motherhood is frustrated by the birth of twins, the implication being

that she desired merely an object upon which to project her own

personality, and the self-abnegation demanded by two young entities, boy

and girl, is beyond her. Accordingly while the children can still be

cared for by nurses, Rose leaves her home and seeks self-realization on

the stage. In the course of her first year she takes an artist’s

interest in a beautiful but inferior colleague in the chorus of a revue,

whom she coaches in diction and for whom, among others, she designs

flattering costumes. But when her Galatea becomes infatuated with her

she is disgusted.

Rose understood this better than Olga did, having had to evade one or

two “crushes” while at the University. It was a sort of thing that

went utterly against her instincts.[29]

Olga’s efforts to persuade and caress her into intimacy are worse than

futile, and in retaliation for Rose’s contempt Olga spreads gossip of an

affair with the director which does Rose grave professional injury.

After some further experiment, Rose returns to her family a more mature

and humble woman. Olga is presented as a strongly antipathetic

personality, and Rose’s quest for self-expression proves sterile and

unrewarding for all concerned. Learning unselfish adjustment in marriage

is “The Great Adventure.”

In January 1917 the first British novel appeared which was devoted

wholly to variance, and the first in English since James’s _The

Bostonians_ of 1855—Clemence Dane’s _Regiment of Women_. Its attitude is

as bitter as Lawrence’s in _The Rainbow_, but any question of influence

is excluded by the author’s indication that it was written before the

latter was published. Title and initial quotation announce the theme as

“the monstrous empire of a cruel woman,” and its four-hundred-page plot

revolves about a subtle sadist, outstanding mistress in a girls’ day

school. Clare Hartill (the surname is surely symbolic), brilliant,

sardonic, and never attractive to men, has colleagues and pupils alike

well under her domination. The other mistresses stand in awe of her

superior intellect, her uncanny success as a teacher, and her mordant

tongue. The girls—she is really interested only in the higher secondary

classes—are emotionally subjugated by her alternation of warm praise and

stinging raillery, the praise intensified by “sudden brilliant smiles”

and the discreet laying on of hands.

Clare is a woman of feverish friendships and sudden ruptures,

“unmaternal” to the core

and pitiless after victory: not till then did she examine the nature

thus enslaved, seldom did she find it worth the trouble of the

skirmish.... To the few that pleased her fastidious taste she gave of

her best, lavishly ... to them she was inspiration incarnate.[30]

But her interest even in these favorites “required their physical

nearness” and died with their departure from school. Just as Clare has

reached the “dangerous age” of thirty-five a new teacher of nineteen

enters upon the scene:

... vehement Alwynne—no schoolgirl—yet more youthful and ingenuous

than any mistress had right to be, loving with all the discrimination

of a fine mind and all the ardour of an affectionate child. Here was

no ... fleeting devotion that must end as the schooldays ended. Here

was love for Clare at last, a widow’s cruse to last her for all time.

Clare ... relaxing all effort, settled herself to enjoy to the full

the cushioning sense of security.

But even so, Alwynne was “too obviously subject through her own free

impulse to entirely satisfy. Clare’s love of power had its morbid

moments, when a struggling victim pleased her.”[31]

So great is the older woman’s magnetism that Alwynne, wholesome and

spirited enough to hold her own at first, does not detect the other’s

egotistical cruelty until it is exercised upon a student. This

hypersensitive child of thirteen, Louise, whose precocity approaches

genius, Clare has forced intellectually beyond her strength and reduced

emotionally to half-hysterical subservience. Alwynne’s strong maternal

instinct moves her to intervene on Louise’s behalf, and a dangerous

triangle develops. When, ill from tension, Louise fails in an important

interscholastic competition, Clare turns suddenly hostile and excoriates

her, not only for the failure, but for her interpretation of a dramatic

role rehearsed in addition to her school-room load. Playing the tragic

child Prince Arthur in _King John_ has already driven Louise past the

limits of stability, and after this double humiliation at the hands of

her idolized persecutor, she leaps to death from an attic window. (This

antedated by fifteen years Winsloe’s _Mädchen in Uniform_, of which the

denouement and certain other details are so similar that some influence

seems beyond question.)

The tragedy and its aftermath—Clare, crowding her own guilt below the

threshold of consciousness, persuades herself and Alwynne that the

latter is in part to blame—brings Alwynne to the verge of breakdown, and

so she goes on leave to relatives in the country. A sympathetic cousin

who is something of an amateur psychiatrist gradually probes to the root

of her trouble and offers an impersonal estimate of Clare, whom he has

never met and has reconstructed solely from the girl’s still loyal

accounts. His opinion gives her pause, and subsequent encounters with

Clare, so shaken by the suicide and by Alwynne’s long absence that she

lacks her usual finesse, complete the girl’s disillusionment. She

finally marries the cousin.

This overlong narrative carries psychological conviction but suffers

from blurred focus. Clare’s heartlessness once her victims are

enthralled supports the initial claim that sadism is its thesis, but the

spell she casts is variant passion no less intense for being

subjectively induced and never allowed expression (the one real caress

in four-hundred pages figures early in her conquest of Alwynne). This

passionate element assumes primary importance during her final struggle

against a male rival. Close to the end a woman who has known Clare all

her life tells her:

When you allow [a girl] to attach herself passionately to you, you

are feeding and at the same time deflecting from its natural channel

the strongest impulse of her life.... Alwynne needs a good concrete

husband to love, not a fantastic ideal that she calls friendship and

clothes in your face and figure. You are doing her a deep injury....

I tell you, it’s vampirism. And when she is squeezed dry and flung

aside, who will the next victim be? One day you’ll grow old. What

will you do when your glamour’s gone? I tell you, Clare Hartill,

you’ll die of hunger in the end.[32]

Egotism is implied here, but the main issue is variant seduction, and

Clare’s retort is a long boast as to her prowess in that line amply

justified by earlier incidents. She concludes defiantly that she and

Alwynne “suffice each other. Thank God there are some women who can do

without marriage.” The reply is: “Poor Clare! Are the grapes very sour?”

Surprisingly, this “final triumphant insult” touches the quick.

The insult could cut through her defenses and strike at her very

self, because it was true. Her pride agonized. She had thought

herself shrouded, invulnerable.... She sat and shuddered at the wound

dealt; ... at the arrow-tip rankling in it still.[33]

Clare’s reaction is not prepared for in advance. Moreover, this episode

is so placed and treated as to make it the supreme climax of the plot,

and the implication is clear: it is the sex starvation of spinsterhood

which produces variance, a barren substitute for married love. If the

spinster is brilliant and proud, a sadistic egotism constantly requiring

fresh victims will be a concomitant. Clare’s spinsterhood is

involuntary; she is, then, a potentially tragic figure, and the novel

would have gained in power had she been so presented throughout. But she

is shown only as momentarily pathetic, and after such moments her

recoveries are too ready and her retaliations too mean to permit of

sustained sympathy. One is left with a sense that the author had known a

Clare Hartill all too well, had emerged hating her, and had not yet

achieved the detachment necessary for producing artistic unity.

Later in 1917 _I, Mary MacLane_ provided an autobiographical sequel to

the author’s volumes of fifteen years earlier. Like her first book, it

is an impressionistic journal of the preceding year which includes

considerable retrospective information. Once more Mary is in Butte,

convalescing from a grave illness induced by a half-dozen hectic years

in Boston and New York. She still hates men, who have never stirred any

emotion in her, and with whom in their “crude sex-rapacity” she has been

careless as no “regular woman” would dare to be. One gathers, then, that

the heartbreak from which she has suffered for a year is not the work of

a man.

It is one thing I do not dwell upon in this book of Me. Much of Me

had nothing to do with my heart when it broke: though I loved with

all of Me ... one who lives in New York—and I lost and lost, all the

way. There was mere human ordinariness, about which I built up a

strangely sincere temple of grace which I looked to see shed light on

my life like the eternal beauty of a Daybreak. I gave the best I knew

to it, from a distance, and I lost.... All was broken without so much

as a clasp of hands.[34]

That Mary is now well aware of all potentialities between women is clear

from other comments; for example, that she “wasted” several years in the

two eastern cities on friendships (with women) from whose ill effects

she will never recover, having given too much of herself in the

“headlong newness of knowing and owning friendship after long young

loneliness.”[35] Elsewhere, she mentions translating Sappho, and says:

I am some way the Lesbian woman, ... [but] there is no vice in my

Lesbian vein, ... [though] I have lightly kissed and been kissed by

Lesbian lips. I am too personally fastidious, too temperamentally

dishonest ... to walk in direct repellent roads of vice even in

freest moods.[36]

She believes lesbianism to be subjectively induced, as against those who

consider it due to “prenatal influence.” Some women are lesbian because

they are born aggressive, some feel themselves challenged by the

limitations imposed on women, some are merely so lonely that the first

understanding person “wins a passionate adoration the deeper for being

unrealized.” She believes that all women “except two breeds, the stupid

and the narrowly feline,” have a lesbian strain; that is, there is

always some “poignant flair” of sex in their close friendships, though

all “good non-analytic creatures” would deny it with horror. (This last

suggests at least an acquaintance with Freud.)

She has now returned to cultivate in solitude the _Me_ neglected during

her preceding distracted years. There are evidences that she has more

than dabbled in oriental philosophy and believes in reincarnation,

which, she says, gives her many buried selves to delve for—surely

Valhalla for a narcissist. Mild as this volume is in its condemnation by

comparison with the preceding two, its stress upon the suffering and

“waste” in variant friendships, and its reference to lesbianism as

“repellent vice,” align it with them as opposed to variance.

Such pointed attacks as those of Lawrence and Miss Dane were bound to

stimulate counterattack. The first appeared in A. T. Fitzroy’s _Despised

and Rejected_ (1918), though women’s variance was of secondary

importance in a novel whose main issue was the tragic wartime

persecution of Conscientious Objectors; particularly of male homosexuals

who took refuge in that camp. Because both “Conchies” and homosexuals

were anathema in 1918, the publisher was prosecuted and fined some

£160.[37] The author, wife of the composer Cyril Scott, apparently

weathered the storm without major consequences, though she wrote nothing

more under the same name.

The feminine incidents in the novel concern an actress who, at thirteen,

had adored a boarding school teacher; however, she cooled when the

latter responded, because she hated to be caressed. Her teens included

similar attractions, and she had several unpleasant experiences with men

during her years of becoming established in the theatre. These

experiences precede the opening of the story. The action begins with

amateur theatrical activities at a summer hotel, in the course of which

Antoinette falls in love with a taciturn dark woman reminiscent of her

first idol, and, on the other hand, rouses emotional interest in an

effeminate young man in the cast. The summer interlude ends without

resolving either affair. Both amours are continued by letter, a medium

which frees Antoinette of her physical inhibitions. Thus, she learns

that Dennis has previously been much drawn to men; and on her part, she

becomes so attached to the dark Hester that she visits her in

Birmingham. She is as yet unaware of any “abnormality” in her feeling,

knowing only that Hester represents the promise of some imperative

emotional release. When she discovers that Hester has had a liaison with

a man, her love is instantly chilled, although it had reached the verge

of overt expression.

Meanwhile, Dennis, obtaining no response from her, has become involved

with a poet in desperate circumstances for whom he feels a maternal

tenderness. From this point on, the long narrative is concerned chiefly

with its male cast, but it includes Antoinette’s finally considering

herself in love with Dennis. He has now, however, irrevocably elected

the homosexual path; he tells her that he recognized her at first

meeting as another homosexual and that that was the reason for his

instant attraction. Despite his immediate detection of her proclivities,

Antoinette is presented as feminine in both appearance and temperament.

The cause of her narcissistic failure in either normal or variant

adjustment is that throughout adolescence she was always awaiting the

charmed age of eighteen, when the thrilling business of Real Life would

begin. That is, she nursed a romantic ideal impossible of realistic

achievement (cf. Gourmont’s _Songe d’une Femme_). At the end she

complains:

Everybody seems to think you’re abnormal because you _like_ to be....

As if being different from other people weren’t curse enough in

itself.... People judge the fine by the sensual, of whom there are

plenty also among the “normal.”[38]

This is a fair enough statement of a variant argument which will be

encountered again later.

A more oblique and much more artistic species of defense is incorporated

in Arnold Bennett’s _The Pretty Lady_ (1918), of which the main theme is

the relation between a wealthy London bachelor and a Parisian courtesan

war-bound in London. Despite the outcry the book raised among reviewers,

the sexual aspects of this affair are subordinated to the soothing

effect of the French woman’s simple and cosy subjective complaisance, in

contrast to the hectic wartime mood of the Englishwomen with whom Hoape

is thrown together. One of these, Concepçion Smith, is the daughter of a

British financial magnate who operated in Lima, and it is not wholly

clear whether her mother or merely her given name and her upbringing

were Latin-American. Orphaned at eighteen, she returned to London and

kept house for her bachelor uncle, a cabinet minister, earning a

reputation as hostess and wit. Having married for love, and lost her

husband within the first few weeks of World War I, she leaves for

Glasgow early in the story to dull her sorrow through canteen work in a

munitions plant. She is described as having a masculine mentality, being

relatively indifferent to feminine graces, and lacking somewhat in

obvious sex appeal. She is at this time about thirty.

Her closest friend has been Lady Queenie Lechford, perhaps a decade

younger, a spoiled only child, capricious, flippant, the type of hectic

and brittle “flapper” who was to become so common a figure in the

fiction of the 1920s. That the two quarrelled bitterly over Concepçion’s

leaving London one learns only when they are reunited late in 1916,

after Concepçion has broken under the strain of overwork and the shock

of a horrifying accident to a factory girl. The two women’s reunion is

delineated with the subtlest indirect touches, but it is clearly

passionate. Of the two, Concepçion seems the more deeply involved.

Though there are hints that she herself is not uninterested in Hoape,

she tells him Queenie is in love with him and urges him to marry the

girl in spite of the considerable difference in their ages. She would do

anything in the world, she declares, to win even a few weeks’ happiness

for her young friend. Even while Hoape is evading her suggestion, Lady

Queenie, given to reckless watching of air-raids from the roof of her

parents’ town house, is killed by falling anti-aircraft shrapnel.

Concepçion, with nothing now to live for, plans suicide, but is

dissuaded by Hoape’s concern for her, and one foresees that these two

will eventually marry. Bennett thus appears to diagnose variant

(possibly lesbian) connections as one phase of wartime hysteria, induced

mainly by the shortage of eligible men. Though there is a shade of

satire in his picture, there is certainly no disapproval.

The next two novels, both American and both published in 1920, made

relatively brief but quite significant additions to variant literature.

By a count of lines, Kate Chancellor occupies little space in Sherwood

Anderson’s _Poor White_, story of a shanty-town boy’s rise to prosperity

and a good marriage. But she supplies the most vivid thread in the

pattern of his wife’s emotional development. When Clara leaves her

father’s farm for the state university she is wholly uninformed in

matters of sex. From some bungling early experience she is wary of men,

though conscious of a certain power over them. The relatives with whom

she lives while in college play little part in her life save to repeat

her father’s misunderstanding of trivial “petting” incidents which are

unsought and distasteful to her.

Clara finds her college courses no help toward the practical conduct of

life in any field, and her one fruitful contact is with a girl two or

three years her senior who plans to study medicine. Kate Chancellor, as

masculine as her musical brother is effeminate, is quite frank in

admitting her homosexual nature (thus implied to be innate), though she

never mentions lesbianism. For three years the girls are constantly

together. Their avid discussions range through politics, religion, and

philosophy, but center most often on sex differences in temperament, and

the problem facing all women in marriage: how to continue as individuals

and not become mere colorless stereotypes like most housewives of their

acquaintance. Kate is more drawn to Clara than to any other woman she

has met, dreads marriage for the girl, and yearns to take her along as

companion in the free and purposeful life she means to live. But she is

honest enough to admit that her own pattern is not Clara’s, and that to

bind her emotionally would only increase the groping girl’s confusion.

Her closest approach to physical expression occurs during one of their

customary walks together, when to drive some point home she stops and

takes Clara by the shoulders.

For a moment they stood thus close together, and a strange gentle and

yet hungry look came into Kate’s eyes. It lasted only a moment and

when it happened both women were somewhat embarrassed. Kate laughed

and taking hold of Clara’s arm pulled her along the sidewalk. “Let’s

walk like the devil,” she said, “come on, let’s get up some

speed.”[39]

On her return from college Clara becomes involved at once in the

business of getting married. She manages to resist her father’s pressure

toward a match profitable to him, but soon is plunged by circumstance

into marriage with the book’s main character—the union is emotionally a

premature step for both of them. Throughout this troubled period Clara

tests all that happens against her memory of Kate’s honesty and

gentleness, and on her wedding night itself, offended by the crude

“surprise party” sprung by the farm hands, she thinks of Kate, “who had

known how to love in silence.”

Clara put her hands to her eyes as though to shut out the scene in

the room. “If I could have been with Kate this evening I could have

come to a man believing in the possible sweetness of marriage,” she

thought.[40]

In the end, however, her marriage proves no worse than the average in

understanding and happiness. There have been few such sympathetic and

unexaggerated pictures of a variant woman in our literature; and none of

the others was written by a man.

The year’s total balance of sentiment was evened by James Gibbons

Huneker’s _Painted Veils_. This picture of musical and literary New York

was so continental in its cynical frankness that it was first issued

privately, though it soon found regular publication and is now available

in paper covers. As its epilogue states, its hero Ulick is a young man

whose favorite authors are Thomas à Kempis and Petronius, and whose

experience reflects this duality of taste. Heroine of the Petronian

chapters is a dynamic girl, Easter, who rises by her own efforts—in more

fields than one—to the status of world-famed prima donna. Early in her

career she considers sources of revenue for European study. To accept

support from her lover would give the man too much claim upon her. So

her thoughts turn to a fellow student of voice, a dilettante with whom

already “an intimacy had developed.”

She began thinking of Allie Wentworth and her set. Allie was an

heiress ... a masculine creature who affected a mannish cut of

clothes. She wore her hair closely cut and sported a walking stick.

Her stride and bearing intrigued [Easter], who had never seen that

sort before.... Allie was always hugging her when alone.[41]

Although Allie makes relatively few appearances, it is clear that she

financed and accompanied Easter for a number of years. It is also

implied that the cause of Easter’s duel with Mary Garden in Paris was

not, as the newspapers claimed, a man. “When Allie Wentworth, who was

Easter’s second, read this in _Le Soir_ she burst into laughter.” (When

the book appeared, gossip claimed that Mary Garden was the model for

Easter, and that this duel naming her as opposite was inserted for

camouflage.)

Upon Easter’s return to New York she says to Ulick, who is jealous of

Allie:

That girl helped me over some rough places in Europe. I shall never

give her up, never.... I love sumptuous characters. That’s why I love

to read _Mlle Maupin_. Also about that perverse puss Satin in _Nana_.

She reminds me of Allie and her pranks—simply adorable, I tell you!

Toujours fidèle.[42]

Later, Easter, now the pursuer because Ulick has turned cool, follows

him to the apartment of his current mistress, a vulgar little creature

who is transported at

being treated as a social equal by the greatest living lady opera

singer.... Emboldened by her success Dora persuaded Easter to go with

her into the dressing room, from which much later they emerged

wearing night draperies. A queer go, this sudden intimacy, ruminated

the young man.[43] [A _queer go_ is a bit of _double entendre_ worthy

of Spanish comedy.]

Finally, there is a party in Easter’s quarters including a handful of

lesbians, one or two smoking cigars, and Allie Wentworth, whose jealous

rage is so childish that she must be publicly reproved. With this

Zolaesque portrait of a lesbian woman who is unscrupulous, ruthless, and

promiscuous, there is no need for Huneker to articulate his opinion of

variance.

Few contrasts could be sharper than that between the continental

sophistication of Huneker and the midwestern simplicity of Helen R.

Hull. As early as 1918 she had published in _Century Magazine_ a

short-story (“The Fire”) of a small-town girl’s love for the middle-aged

spinster who gives her not only art lessons but her first contact with a

mellow and cultured personality—a benign reverse of the destructive

relationship in _Regiment of Women_. The innocent friendship is broken

off by the girl’s jealous mother on the grounds that “it’s not healthy

or natural for a girl to be hanging around an old maid.” Miss Hull’s

_Quest_ (1922) records the effect upon a growing girl of constant

tension between her parents. As precocious as Miss Dane’s Louise, Jean

falls in love at twelve with a high-school teacher, and simultaneously

forms a feverish alliance with a classmate considerably older and less

naïve who adores the same woman. Because the other girl is so much more

accessible than the teacher, it is the former who draws the mother’s

fire here, and she terminates the connection with a touch of melodrama

which leaves her daughter wary of variant emotion, in the same way that

the family situation has affected her with regard to heterosexual love.

Jean’s subsequent relations with men are inhibited, and her two or three

very warm friendships with girls and women during college and her early

years of teaching never approach the intensity of her first love.

In _Labyrinth_ (1923) Miss Hull attacked from a feminine angle the

problem posed in _The Great Adventure_: the frustration of a versatile

woman cut off from personal and intellectual contacts by housework and

the care of children. After a decade of marriage Catherine returns to a

challenging position which she held during World War I, though her

husband, a professor, disapproves of the venture. A series of domestic

crises plus the professor’s calculated move from New York to a small

midwestern campus finally thwart his wife’s efforts to escape unrelieved

domesticity. No variance complicates Catherine’s problems, but through

minor characters three other emotional adjustments are presented, one

involving two women.

The ménage of a professor whose wife is nothing but a _Hausfrau_ is dull

beyond endurance for all concerned. A woman physician and her husband

appear happy, but the man privately mourns his wife’s sacrifice of

maternity to her professional career. Catherine’s younger sister, a

social worker and unmarried, has broken away from her mother because “I

can’t be babied all my life—all sorts of infantile traits sticking to

me,” and is living with an older fellow-worker. When her sister advises

marriage, she retorts:

Husband! Me? I’m fixed for life right now.... Anybody needs someone

loving ’em, smoothing ’em down, setting ’em up, brushing off the dust

... I know a little thing or two about love. But [this way] you can

do that ... through and around whatever else you’re doing ... I know

lots of women who prefer to set up an establishment with another

woman. Then you go fifty-fifty on everything. Work and feeling and

all the rest, and no King waiting around for his humble servant.[44]

This is Miss Hull’s nearest allusion to physical intimacy, and while not

explicitly implied, neither is it repudiated. Sympathetically as the

variant pair are portrayed, they are no more romanticized than the

heterosexual couples. The older woman has been a fanatic in many causes

and a hunger-striker for suffrage, is moody and violent, and quarrels

with any critical male at sight. The younger is cool, practical, and a

bit hard. But the alliance apparently stands as good a chance of

survival as any in the book, and the author accepts it as a matter of

course. The only dissenting voice is the professor’s; he is bitter in

his animosity and contempt.

Publishing simultaneously with Miss Hull but more nearly in the vein of

Huneker was England’s Ronald Firbank, whose delightful absurdities began

to flower with _Vainglory_ in 1918. Firbank was particularly fascinated

by all aspects of homosexuality, and not one of his brief novels is

without some reference to it. To render these allusions delicate he

cultivated a frivolous obscurity, but it was no more designed to conceal

than are a dancer’s veils to hide the form beneath. Probably the most

significant in our field is _The Flower Beneath the Foot_ (1923).[45]

Its setting is a principality the approximate size and importance of

Monaco, with a court circle madly international. Here, as always, the

lesbian glimpses are oblique, but there are three of them. A visiting

Queen Thleeanouhee of the Land of Dates becomes so openly enamoured of

the blonde and bovine English ambassadress that the whole court fears an

“incident.” A lady in waiting in love with the Prince, after her romance

is shattered by his diplomatic marriage, flees to an adored Sister in

the convent where she was educated, dreaming of a return to earlier

delights. She is a bit chilled at being invited, as an adult now, to

wield a whip. And last, two of the queen’s ladies are becalmed for a

summer afternoon alone in a small sailboat. One (she reminds her

colleagues of Anthony Hamilton’s Miss Hobart) is a girl of “delicate

sexless silhouette, whose exotic attraction had aroused not a few

heart-burnings (and even feuds) among several of the _grandes dames_

about the court.”[46] Her companion is a ripe and languishing widow. The

exiled count upon whom they intended to call catches sight of their

motionless craft and trains his telescope upon it.

Oh poignant moments when the heart stops still! Not since the hours

of his exile had the count’s been so arrested. Caught in the scarlet

radiance of the afterglow the becalmed boat, for one brief and most

memorable second, was his to gaze on. In certain lands with what

diplomacy falls the night.... Those dimmer-and-dimmer twilights of

the North were unknown in Pisuerga. There Night pursues Day as if she

meant it. “Oh, why was I not _sooner_?” he murmured distractedly

aloud.[47]

Needless to say, no judgments are even hinted in Firbank’s tales. If his

paired ladies are rather ridiculous, so are his pretty gentlemen and his

mixed couples young and old, his kings and social climbers and mad old

ladies. Since all life is clearly so absurd, he seems to say, what to do

save sit back (with all possible grace) and titter at the spectacle?

Edmund Wilson’s diagnosis of Gertrude Stein might apply also in some

measure to Firbank, though he did not retreat so far into literary

obscurity.

Post-War Crescendo

These novels of Firbank’s, shot through with allusions to both male and

female homosexuality, remind one that two-thirds of the volumes of

Proust’s _Recherche du Temps Perdu_ had been published in France by

1923, and were, of course, known to many English and American writers

before being translated. It is easy to overrate the influence of Proust,

especially as both James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson had anticipated

him in “stream of consciousness” technique, the one with _Portrait of

the Artist as a Young Man_ (1915), the other with _Pointed Roofs_

(1917). But in no one else of Proust’s quality was homosexuality so

integral a part of the narrative fabric. Translations of Proust’s most

significant volumes appeared in English between 1924 and 1930. It might

also be noted that Margueritte’s _La Garçonne_ was translated in 1923.

A second increasingly important influence was that of Freud, already

discernible in _Regiment of Women_ (though a good case could be made

there for Adlerian overtones also), and becoming more and more obvious

in other novels of the same calibre. A striking example was Harvey

O’Higgins’ “Story of Julie Cane,” which ran serially in _Harper’s

Magazine_ during 1924, and was as much a dramatized psychiatric

case-record as the earlier work of Dubut de LaForest in France. Its main

emotional themes are a virtually incestuous devotion between the male

protagonist and his mother, and the passion of a spinster school

mistress for the young heroine, her ward. The author, who delivers a

good many brief lectures along the way, labels this last emotion

thwarted maternity, but by the time Julie has reached late adolescence

he is describing Martha Perrin’s feeling for her as follows:

It had come to this, that Martha put herself to sleep at night

imagining that Julie was in her arms.... She kissed the undergarments

that were to touch the beloved young body; and when she had made a

dress she caressed it and hugged it to her breast so that it might by

proxy be her arms around Julie.... When she had Julie in the sewing

room to try on the clothes she had made, her hands shook, her heart

suffocated, and she turned away and wept while she fumbled over some

pretense of taking up a tuck in the back of the garment.... After

Julie had gone she sat with her face in her hands, her cheeks burning

against her cold fingers, her mouth aching, seeing still the dimples

in Julie’s shoulders, kissing them in her imagination and crying

weakly, starved.[48]

Few passages have been so explicit since Sappho’s famous Ode, which was

less extended.

When Julie is about to leave for college, Martha suffers complete

collapse, one symptom of her illness being that, though starving, she

cannot touch food. A new physician, in the act of taking her pulse as

Julie enters the room, at once prescribes Julie as nurse. During the

period of sickroom intimacy the two fall into each others’ arms and have

some weeks “as happy as a honeymoon,” though O’Higgins is careful to

repeat that the rapture is essentially that of mother and daughter. If

the sensations described above are offered as maternal, one can only say

that the author was convinced of an incestuous element in all

parent-child relationships. One rather remarkable aspect of the whole is

that though patently psychiatric, the book does not express that

condemnation of the emotions described which was common to later

disciples of Freud. Indeed, a physician encourages the intimacy of Julie

and Martha, as did Violet Ashwin’s father in _Lady of Leisure_, though,

of course, without advocating lesbian activity. In the situation as

presented by O’Higgins, however, some physical release would have been

inevitable.

In the same year there appeared in England a much subtler treatment of

variance in Radclyffe Hall’s early novel _The Unlit Lamp_. Unlike her

better known _Well of Loneliness_, this narrative relegates love between

women to secondary importance, its focus being the forced martyrdom of

unmarried daughters in the name of filial duty. Joan Ogden is the one

competent and unselfish member of a neurotic family bent on maintaining

social position in their country village. Elizabeth Rodney, a dozen

years older, has won a degree from Cambridge before coming, under

pressure, to keep house for a bachelor brother in the same community.

Her one interest is tutoring Joan, whom she hopes to see achieve a

college education and some sort of life beyond small-town domesticity.

Mrs. Ogden believes herself bent upon a successful marriage for her

daughter, but her actual purpose is to hold her beloved child at any

cost; her chief weapon is hypochondria. Joan wants to become a doctor,

and Elizabeth offers to provide joint living quarters in Cambridge and

to help finance the medical course, but the two girls’ long struggle

ends with the mother victorious. Elizabeth, unable to endure repeated

frustration, leaves the town, eventually marries, and settles in South

Africa, refusing to return or to communicate with Joan.

Beneath this drama of parental tyranny runs a strong current of variant

emotion. Mrs. Ogden is fragile, jealous, hysterical and

over-demonstrative. Both younger women are unfeminine in appearance,

cool and fearless in temperament, both affect a masculine simplicity in

dress, and Joan crops her hair decades before fashion sanctions that

mode. Elizabeth has a masculine distaste for easy caresses and

meticulously conceals the depth of her feeling, so that Joan’s shy

reciprocal emotion never finds outlet (the “unlit lamp” is the passion

Elizabeth refuses to set alight). The basic situation, then, is a

variant triangle in which the clinging and helpless mother wins against

a rival who will employ none of the tactics of seduction, and the result

is the virtual ruin of both girls’ lives. There are intimations here of

what was to become open championship of lesbian love four years later in

_Well of Loneliness_. But they are only implicit.

Also in 1924 Arnold Bennett contributed a short draught of his cool

common sense in _Elsie and the Child_. With customary realism and irony

he presents a London physician’s household centered about Miss Eva, aged

twelve, an only child. The doctor, busy day and night earning every

advantage for his daughter, sees little of her. His wife is a domestic

perfectionist and strict disciplinarian. The emotional center of the

child’s life is Elsie, the wholesome but rather dull servant who was

hired originally because Eva (like Metta in _The Scorpion_) took an

instant fancy to her. Elsie is all heart, quick only in her intuitions,

humbly devoted to the aristocratic young mistress whose care falls

largely upon her. A crisis is precipitated when the parents, aware of

their daughter’s too-great dependence upon Elsie, attempt to send the

girl to boarding school. She is acquainted with the headmistress, a

hearty tweedy friend of her mother’s, quite the type to captivate some

schoolgirls, but not Eva. Having shot up like a weed to Elsie’s

considerable stature, the child is all nerves, and when crossed by her

mother she breaks out with the hysterical declaration that it is not her

parents but Elsie whom she loves and from whom she will not be parted.

Elsie realizes at once that the outcome will be the dismissal of her and

her husband. The latter, a victim of shell shock in World War I, is a

bemused introvert given to dangerous fits of temper. It is he who turns

upon Eva with the charge that her feeling for his wife is not love,

since she does not care if her stubborn whim brings ruin on Elsie and

himself. Made aware for the first time of the problems of others, the

girl gives in and goes off to school. Bennett contrives with great skill

to imply strong emotional undercurrents in Eva’s childish demands for

personal service and caresses, and in Elsie’s doting ministrations. He

also makes clear that the husband’s violence is actually aroused not by

fear of losing his place but by jealousy, though none of the three

persons involved are aware of this.

Concerning as it does a girl of twelve, this story might not be classed

as variant by psychologists, but one cannot help feeling that Bennett

contributed it to the rapidly swelling count of variant fiction as

testimony to his own stand in the matter. Despite Eva’s unusual height

and her susceptibility to Elsie’s spontaneous warmth, she is not

conceived as a prospective homosexual. Stimulated one summer night by

watching a sophisticated garden party from her window, she slips down to

the servants’ quarters to practice a nascent coquetry on Joe as well as

Elsie. There could hardly be a clearer statement of Bennett’s opinion

that variant emotion is as natural to puberty as growing pains,

particularly where maternal affection is wanting, but that its natural

span runs out with early adolescence.

In 1925 four novels dealing with variance reached the English reading

public—the translation of Rolland’s _Annette and Sylvie_ and Virginia

Woolf’s _Mrs. Dalloway_, both treating it briefly and with sympathy,

Sherwood Anderson’s _Dark Laughter_, touching upon it even more casually

and with disfavor, and Naomi Royde-Smith’s _Tortoiseshell Cat_, devoted

wholly to the theme and wholly condemnatory. Rolland’s lesbian interlude

between the half-sisters Rivière has already been described. Anderson’s

heroine, a married woman on the verge of taking a lover, recalls

privately her first trip abroad under the guidance of a couple whose

sophistication she did not suspect until on shipboard. The woman had

made skillfully veiled lesbian advances which she recognized for what

they were and resisted with equal skill. Anderson clearly condemns this

deliberate attempt at seduction, but no more severely than he condemns

the woman’s ruses to snare wealthy subjects for her portrait-painting

husband. The episode is slighter than the one in _Poor White_ and of

little weight in its chief actor’s life.

Mrs. Woolf’s passages are much more subtle, though most of them, like

Anderson’s, are incorporated in Clarissa Dalloway’s reminiscences of her

girlhood. Even preliminary to these, however, we learn that Mrs.

Dalloway is happy that her husband insists on her sleeping in a separate

room after an illness.

She could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which

clung to her like a sheet; ... through some contraction of this cold

spirit she had failed him again and again. She could see what she

lacked.... It was something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled

the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For _that_

she could dimly perceive. She resented it, had a scruple picked up

Heaven knows where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is

invariably wise); yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the

charm of a woman, not a girl ... like a faint scent or a violin next

door. She did undoubtedly feel then what men felt. It was a sudden

revelation which one tried to check and then yielded to, and felt the

world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some

pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured

with an extraordinary alleviation.[49]

Her first experience of this sort came to her in her late teens or early

twenties in connection with the delightful madcap Sally Seton.

Had that not after all been love?... At some party she had a distinct

recollection of saying to the man she was with, “Who is _that_?” And

all that evening she could not take her eyes off Sally.... The

strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her

feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling for a man. It was

protective on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league

together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them

(they always spoke of marriage as a catastrophe), which led to this

chivalry.... She could remember going cold with excitement, and doing

her hair in a kind of ecstasy ... and dressing and going downstairs,

feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were now to die ’twere now to

be most happy.” That was her feeling—all because she was coming down

to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!

[Sally] stood by the fireplace talking, in that beautiful voice which

made everything she said sound like a caress ... when suddenly she

said, “What a shame to sit indoors!” and they all went out on to the

terrace and walked up and down. She and Sally fell a little behind.

Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone

urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on

the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down![50]

When the men of the party (one of them in love with her) return and make

casual, half-teasing conversation,

It was like running one’s face against a granite wall in the

darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible. Not for herself. She felt

only how Sally was being mauled already, maltreated; she felt his

hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break their

companionship. “Oh this horror!” she said to herself, as if she had

known all along that something would interrupt, would embitter her

moment of happiness.[51]

There is no further reference in the novel to Sally, and Clarissa

Dalloway lives on for us into her mid-fifties, wife and mother, never

again in such intimate touch with life, unless it is in her relation to

her daughter. For although above she has said that the charm of a girl

never moves her, her love for the eighteen-year-old Elizabeth is the

most vital element in her current existence. The girl is undergoing a

spell of inexplicable devotion to a shabby, unkempt, embittered woman

tutor, for whom Mrs. Dalloway finds it difficult to repress a burning

hatred, and one realizes that this hatred is but the obverse of the

emotion she will not recognize for the beautiful daughter so different

from herself and so aloof.

The reader will remember that in the other strand of the dual narrative

Septimus Smith, shell-shock case from World War I, fails to regain his

mental balance or to respond to his devoted wife because he cannot admit

to consciousness the love he felt for a fellow-officer who was killed.

In her preface, the author says that Smith is intended to be Clarissa

Dalloway’s “double,” and that in its first conception the story, lacking

him, ended with Mrs. Dalloway’s death. It would seem that her

contribution here to the problem of variance is the possibility of its

being a happy experience where innocence is easy—as for a woman; but for

a man too scrupulous to accept the almost inevitable outcome in the

male, it may be fatal.

It is a radical step from _Mrs. Dalloway_ to the forthright

_Tortoiseshell Cat_, in which a lesbian woman plays a sinister part. The

central figure, a motherless girl in her late twenties, is still a

pristine innocent, thanks to her exclusive devotion to a scholarly

father lost a short time before. Gillian is baffled by her worldly-wise

younger sister’s hold upon men, and by the quixotic devotion of a girl

who leaves her private school in protest when Gillian (a teacher there)

is dismissed. It is this innocence which cost her her teaching

position—she chose French poetry to read aloud on the basis of its

beauty alone, genuinely unaware of its sexual connotations—and presently

it leads her into even more serious danger.

After her sister’s marriage, left alone in a dreary residence club and

bored with a part-time secretaryship, she meets a fellow resident, half

American and completely bohemian and fascinating. The initial encounter

is significant:

But as V.V. came with a swift steady stride, the free rapid movement

of a woman who had been much with horses, who had ridden from

childhood, Gillian knew, with a thrill of recognition so strange, so

new to her experience that the shock of it took away all sense of

every other consideration, that she beheld in the flesh the very

image of a perfection wrought by her own imaginings in the secret

places of her dreaming mind. This was not a beautiful creature for

all the world to gape at, it was the figure—unique of its kind—for

which the shrine of her spirit had stood empty and waiting until

now.[52]

A definitely masculine figure, as the passage goes on to emphasize, and

a masterly analysis of romantic love-at-first-sight. The woman’s voice

is flat and unlovely, but Gillian, for all her musical ear, is too

enthralled to care. All that she is aware of for some time are the

lavish personal ministrations and caresses with which she is showered.

She learns without grasping the implications that V.V. has lived with a

long succession of women, many of them minor actresses. Early in her

life there was one, mentioned seldom and cryptically, on whose account

she was evidently disowned by her family and incurred debts not yet

paid.

Before long, Gillian’s emotional preoccupation evokes remonstrance from

her sister, the once-adoring student, and the latter’s recently acquired

sculptor-husband; but to her their warnings are absurd. The sculptor

lived before his marriage with a faunlike musician whom he loved and

protected from fortune-hunting women. This elfin Heinrich is as

bewitched as Gillian by V.V.’s physical beauty, and as V.V. has an eye

to the main chance, she inveigles him into an engagement. As soon as he

becomes importunate and “boring,” however, instinct conquers interest

and she shakes him off, clinching the matter one evening by refusing an

invitation because she must bathe Gillian and put her to bed. With a

stolen key, V.V. manages to enter the apartment where Gillian is

actually bathing in a meager British “portable” before an open fire, and

attempts to embrace her. Gillian, though excited by the caresses, fights

her off in sudden horrified realization of what their long ambiguous

dalliance has been leading to. For the first time in her life she

comprehends the passion she has observed in others, and her revulsion is

violent. Heinrich, however, reads quite another meaning into the

shadow-struggle he sees silhouetted on her drawn blind, and goes home to

shoot himself.

Gillian falls gravely ill from shock, but finally, safe in her sister’s

comfortable home, regains her balance.

The only person who had escaped unhurt was V.V. But she was unhurt

because long ago she had been so maimed, her soul had been so warped

and stunted by the influence she could still recall though she was

too vitiated to resent it, that nothing now would make very much

difference. V.V. had gone her own way and Gillian could not follow

her. She had taken the first steps on the road down which V.V. was

disappearing, and had come back to the place where it started. And

now that road was closed.[53]

However marred it is by such expository passages and by its sudden

melodramatic suicide, the story carries more conviction than _Regiment

of Women_ through coming to grips with the physical issue and through

its more sympathetic presentation of the lesbian woman.

* * * * *

In 1926, drama for the first time took precedence over fiction, of which

the year’s sole example was the translation of Louis Couperus’s _The

Comedians_. This historical novel laid in the reign of Domitian includes

a pair of lesbians, the emperor’s cousin and his wife’s niece, who

frequent the inns of Rome disguised respectively as gladiator and street

wench. Life at court is such a nightmare of intrigue and surveillance

that only their mutual passion and their secret adventures make

existence tolerable. The “gladiator” is shortly killed in a street

brawl, and the other girl, though her interests have seemed bisexual,

fades into melancholia.

As to the theatre, the international success of Bourdet’s _La

Prisonnière_ has already been cited. Its New York run as _The Captive_

began in September, and its drawing power very likely led to the

presentation of two related plays later in the season. Thomas Hurlbut’s

lesbian _Hymn to Venus_ opened in Atlantic City in late November and was

scheduled for further trial in Chicago before appearing on Broadway. Its

initial performance rated a single brief review in the _New York

Times_,[54] chilly and vague, saying of the play only that its theme was

that of _The Captive_ and that it ended with a suicide. There was no

indication whether the treatment was sympathetic or otherwise, and the

text of the play has not been available. It was withdrawn after a second

performance and reached neither Chicago nor New York.

The second effort, _The Drag_ by one “Jane Mast,” made its debut in

Boston in February 1927 with Mae West among the cast. Because, as the

title indicates, it dealt with the stringently tabooed subject of male

homosexuality, it was at once suppressed, and sufficient adverse

sentiment was aroused to bring about the closing of _The Captive_ after

a successful run of five months,[55] especially interesting in view of

the strong condemnation of lesbianism in the French play. This official

action seems to have had only local effects, for no difficulties

attended the publication in England of the translation of Lacretelle’s

_La Bonifas_, or of Rosamund Lehmann’s _Dusty Answer_, in which the

middle section is a study of variance. There were also oblique variant

allusions in Mrs. Woolf’s _To the Lighthouse_ (1927).

Lacretelle’s stout championship of Marie Bonifas needs no further

comment. _To the Lighthouse_ was Mrs. Woolf’s most subtle study of the

contrast between masculine and feminine personality. Here Mrs. Ramsey

personifies the selfless unifying influence of woman’s intuition in her

dealings with an intellectual husband, a diverse brood of six children,

and a swarm of family friends of all ages and temperaments. The

individual most devoted to her is an artist of thirty-three, who “with

her little Chinese eyes and puckered up face ... would never marry....

She was an independent little creature.”[56] With masculine honesty Lily

Briscoe recognizes that she is not so much in love with Mrs. Ramsey as

with the mysterious force, intuitive and emotional, which she radiates

and which Lily herself must always lack. And so she masters her own

emotions in moments when Mrs. Ramsey is maternally tender, and quivers

with uncontrollable laughter at the older woman’s failure to understand

the situation when she urges marriage upon her. Still, nearly a decade

after Mrs. Ramsey’s death, she weeps for her loss when she returns to

paint again at the site of their earlier association, “feeling the old

horror come back—to want and want and not to have.”[57]

Miss Lehmann’s _Dusty Answer_, like many first novels written before

their authors are wholly mature, was autobiographical in structure,

following its heroine from childhood to her early twenties. Daughter of

a scholarly father who tutors her at home and a frivolous mother who

lives much abroad, Judith grows up in virtual solitude, her only

acquaintances a group of children who occasionally visit an adjoining

country house. These exotic cousins, four boys and a girl, fascinate the

lonely child, who looks forward to their infrequent appearances and does

her best to achieve some personal relation with one or the other, but

they continually elude her. The object of her secret first love is

Roddy, most elusive of all; at the moment when some mutual spark seems

about to leap between them, his friend Tony comes for a weekend, a

jealous effeminate boy who at once absorbs Roddy completely.

During Judith’s course at Cambridge she and a very beautiful classmate

are mutually attracted and spend two rapturous but innocent years

scarcely out of one another’s sight. When Judith returns after her last

“long vac,” however, she senses a profound change in her friend, who

spent her own free time in residence making up delinquencies. From a

gossiping classmate Judith learns that Jennifer had a guest for much of

the period, and that the two indulged in “wrestling matches” on the lawn

which many of the girls found in doubtful taste. This dark Geraldine, a

deep-voiced older woman of powerful physique and personality, presently

reappears. Though Judith pointedly avoids the pair, Geraldine seeks her

out and commands her to “let Jennifer alone,” since the latter is

“beginning to find herself” and Geraldine plans to take her abroad. This

scene is a triumph of subtlety; presented from the viewpoint of the

innocent Judith, it still conveys the exact nature of Geraldine’s

feeling for and hold upon Jennifer. Judith withdraws completely, leaving

Jennifer so torn between her old love and her new passion that even

after Geraldine’s departure she cannot regain nervous stability, and is

forced to leave college.

After a melancholy last term, Judith goes home to a single passionate

summer night with Roddy, but upon discovering that what to her was a

pledge of lasting love was to him but a casual episode, she breaks with

him forever. In the course of the next year or so she wins from each of

the remaining cousins just such personal responses as she once craved,

but these are now empty. Her only vivid moment comes with a letter from

Jennifer, incoherently half-explaining their broken friendship (which

Judith has long since comprehended) and begging for a meeting in

Cambridge. But when Judith keeps the appointment, Jennifer fails either

to appear or to send a message, and the final flick of irony is a

distant sight of Roddy and his friend Tony strolling past in intimate

absorption. While Miss Lehmann takes artistic pains to point no moral,

first Roddy’s and then Judith’s absorption in a variant friendship seem

deterrents to happy emotional resolution through other channels.

First Peak: 1928

In contrast to the two preceding years, 1928 offered a harvest as rich

and varied as any single season until then: Radclyffe’s Hall’s _Well of

Loneliness_, Compton Mackenzie’s _Extraordinary Women_, Elizabeth

Bowen’s _The Hotel_, and Virginia Woolf’s _Orlando_. Not foremost in

literary rank but certainly best known is _The Well of Loneliness_, for

its censorship became a _cause célèbre_ in the publishing world. Issued

in January by the solidly established firm of Jonathan Cape, with an

introduction by Havelock Ellis, the work was reviewed favorably in

reputable literary periodicals. Shortly, however, it was attacked in the

sensational London newspaper, _The Express_, with the result that it was

banned in England and its publisher sued. Forty-five leading British

authors, from Lascelles Abercrombie and Arnold Bennett to Leonard and

Virginia Woolf, signed a letter of indignant protest, and a half dozen

physicians and legal authorities volunteered to testify at the

publisher’s trial, but their testimony was not allowed.[58] The reason

for its condemnation while so many other variant novels were passed

without action was its explicit defense of lesbian experience.

Although for a decade or so the novel has been freely available in

inexpensive editions, a brief summary may be offered. Stephen Gordon,

only child of solid county parents whose dearest desire is a son,

receives the name and upbringing that would have been his. From infancy

she is the image of her father, masculine in build, mannerisms,

abilities and tastes. At eight she experiences unmistakable passion for

a housemaid; throughout adolescence she despises feminine garments and

amusements; in her late teens she rejects a first suitor, long her good

friend, whose sudden amorousness seems to her unnatural. The death of

her father leaves her without an ally and bitterly solitary. At twenty

she becomes infatuated with a new neighbor’s wife, a former American

chorus girl, who plays the coquette and accepts lavish gifts but evades

caresses by pleading her husband’s jealousy. Stephen’s discovery that a

male rival has been successful drives her to frenzy, and the American,

fearful that the girl may inform her husband of her infidelity,

forestalls the possibility by showing him Stephen’s last letter. This

outpouring of naked passion, at once passed on to her mother, leads to

Stephen’s being turned out of her home and virtually driven from

England. Soon she achieves a literary reputation of sorts, but her lack

of passionate experience proves an artistic handicap. In London and

Paris she meets both male and female homosexuals but shuns them, hating

their immediate interest in her because she hates her own “difference”

and wants only to be accepted as a normal human being.

Then World War I gives her, along with others of her sort, the chance to

do a man’s job in an ambulance unit. She falls deeply in love with a

younger co-worker, innocent and feminine, whom she struggles to protect

from danger. After their release by the armistice, a holiday together

forces both to admit the nature of their love—an interlude less

specifically detailed than Lawrence’s lesbian passage in _The Rainbow_,

but, of course, presented with complete sympathy. Now united, the two

girls attempt to make a life for themselves in Paris, but neither finds

tolerable the bohemian existence which is open to them, and both suffer

under the slights which exclude them from conventional society.

Eventually, Stephen’s early suitor seeks them out and falls in love with

Mary, who responds but will not consider disloyalty to Stephen. The

latter, realizing that Mary can never be happy with her outside the

social pale, makes the dramatic gesture of pretending intimacy with a

distinguished lesbian she has known superficially for years. She

achieves her purpose—Mary accepts the man, and Stephen is left once more

to loneliness.

The story is more engrossing than _The Unlit Lamp_ because of swifter

pace and greater intensity, but inferior in literary art, since it is

often over-emotional and occasionally lapses into bald special pleading.

Moreover, there is a blur in the explanation of Stephen’s variance.

Emphasis on her physical masculinity indicates hereditary causes, as

does her father’s early recognition of her anomaly. But his consequent

indulgence of her proclivities, and the stress laid on both parents’

desire for a male child, hint at belief in prenatal as well as childhood

conditioning. Miss Hall’s evident purpose was to absolve Stephen of the

slightest responsibility for her temperament, and inevitably one is

reminded of Lacretelle’s _Marie Bonifas_, translated in the preceding

year but probably known to Miss Hall in French upon its appearance in

1925. The two differ in that Lacretelle lays Freudian stress on negative

childhood conditioning, while Miss Hall’s comparative hereditary

emphasis marks her a disciple of the older school of Ellis and

Hirschfeld. Despite its shortcomings, _The Well of Loneliness_ made a

heroic gesture for tolerance of lesbian relations among persons of

integrity, and the author had the satisfaction before her death of

seeing it widely accepted.

Compton Mackenzie entered the variant lists armed with gentle satire.

_Extraordinary Women_, like Norman Douglas’s _South Wind_ to which its

foreword pays respect, is laid on the island of Capri, here called

Sirene. It includes almost as many lesbian individuals as Peladan’s _La

Gynandre_ of forty years earlier, and considering its author’s Catholic

affiliation, it may have been written with some similar, though milder,

intent. Every nationality is represented and every age, from Lulu de

Randan, sent vacationing with her governess to break off a flirtation

with a tradesman’s son, to a fading Roman wife given to tearful

sentimentality over the boyish young beauty she adores. Roughly there

are two generations of lesbian women, among the older a poet who poses

as a modern Sappho, a tailored Englishwoman who has bred bulldogs and

supported _boxeuses_ in Paris for a few decades, and Lulu’s Anglo-French

mother. The younger group includes a stormy and self-defeating Greek

concert pianist, an American hypochondriac, millionaire’s daughter, and

the picturesque and irresistible poseuse, Rosalba Donsante, child of the

third of her Swiss mother’s five international marriages. What plot

there is centers about Rosalba and Aurora Freemantle, the Englishwoman,

who finds the girl an incarnation of the boyish ideal she has celebrated

in her lesbian verse for years. “Rory,” dreaming of permanence at last,

remodels a villa halfway up to Anasirene at reckless expense, but her

beloved is of no mind to be caged there, and leads practically every

woman in the cast a hectic chase before the curtain falls upon her

unheralded departure in pursuit of a last inamorata, leaving poor Rory

in tears in her empty paradise.

The tale offers a potpourri of sophisticated intrigue fertilized by

idleness and wealth. Its various types are superficially convincing

enough, but they are largely unaccounted for beyond the influence of

their frivolous environment. Many of the older women have been married

at least once, and even young Lulu has narrowly missed a heterosexual

entanglement before succumbing to Rosalba’s glamorous seduction. Few men

enter upon the scene save hotel servants and one or two twittering

homosexuals and eccentrics. Rory alone (physically as masculine as

Stephen Gordon) is treated with some gentleness as a victim of

hereditary forces, although even she is more ridiculous than appealing,

and the total effect of the novel is one of cool detachment, the report

of a witty and superior observer.

Among these outspoken narratives Miss Bowen’s quiet social comedy, _The

Hotel_, is conspicuous for a sexual reticence as absolute as any before

1915. The hotel of her title, a conservative Riviera establishment

frequented by professors, clergymen, retired officers and their

families, provides a lively background for her understated central

drama. In this, the actors are two: a British girl of twenty and a

cosmopolitan widow twice her age with a son at school in Germany. (The

action antedates World War I.) Sydney is ostensibly recuperating from

overstudy for a recent university degree, and acting as companion to a

married cousin. Actually, as she is wretchedly aware, her relatives have

financed her holiday in the expectation of her capturing a husband. But

Sydney is wholly absorbed in Mrs. Kerr. This exquisite worldling, of

whom the other guests stand a bit in awe, accepts the girl’s small

services and gifts with just enough warmth to keep her enslaved and the

onlookers socially envious. Malicious gossip naturally flourishes over

the bridge tables, and though it stops just short of slander, Sydney

finds the association all in all more wearing than rewarding.

When the son arrives on holiday it is clear that he is held captive on a

similar emotional leash, and Sydney’s intelligence recognizes that their

charmer is playing one against the other and battening on their mutual

jealousy. But not until, piqued at a black mood of Sydney’s, Mrs. Kerr

accuses her of playing for a passionate response, and voices disdain for

“emotions so unbalanced,” is she moved to rebellion. The injustice of

the charge, when she has all but broken under the strain of emotional

control, finally dissolves the spell. On the rebound Sydney tries being

engaged to an estimable but rather colorless clergyman, but Mrs. Kerr’s

brilliant subtlety has spoiled her for finding happiness in a

commonplace association. Her final saddened conclusion is that the whole

Hotel interlude has been a kind of lotus-eater’s dream bred of idleness

in an artificial environment, and her only hope is that all its cloying

preoccupations will fade with return to “reality” in England.

This study of heartless egotism may owe something to _Regiment of

Women_, but it achieves the unity and detachment which Miss Dane’s study

lacked. The problem here is simpler, of course; Mrs. Kerr’s beauty and

assurance lead to conquest without effort, and aside from her vanity her

own emotions are little involved. Of the pair, then, Sydney alone is

variant, a telling example of that protracted adolescence which is

common among the intellectually precocious. Her attaining adult

perspective without benefit of a happy heterosexual romance marks Miss

Bowen’s independence of current Freudian theory, a point of artistry in

her favor. Another is her humorous vignette of a pair of elderly

spinsters whose one-time variant devotion has withered into querulous

possessiveness. All in all, pale aquarelle though _The Hotel_ is among

the year’s more positive canvases, its quiet statement carries

authority.

Any cursory treatment of Mrs. Woolf’s _Orlando_ must do it grave

injustice, but here the emotional thread must be drawn from the rich

fabric and examined as nearly as may be alone. No one yet has analyzed

_Orlando_ fully, and such critics as have not slighted it in discussing

Mrs. Woolf’s work have tended to find it uneven and confusing. Complex

it is indeed, but a part of the critical confusion has come from failure

or refusal to recognize as perhaps its main theme the relation of

intersexual traits to creative ability. It attempts in fact to sustain

four parallel motifs. The most obvious is the biography of a timeless

individual who enters as a boy of sixteen acquainted with Shakespeare

and Queen Elizabeth, and is still living in October 1928 as an English

woman of thirty-six. A second is the changing social roles of the two

sexes from century to century and their consequently shifting relations

to one another. A third is the corresponding fluctuation—perhaps

resultant, perhaps only concomitant—in the emotional “Spirit of the Age”

in English literature. This is least coherently traced and may be

ignored here. The fourth and most cryptic is a parallel between the

history of Orlando and the literary and perhaps personal biography of

Mrs. Woolf’s colleague and friend, Victoria Sackville-West, more than

one of whose photographs illustrate Orlando’s later career, and whose

family estate of Knole is clearly pictured in the descriptions of

Orlando’s ancestral house. (For judicious comment on this last motif and

on Mrs. Woolf’s other variant references, the reader is referred to

David Daiches’s laudatory study of her work published in 1942.[59])

In the sixteenth century Orlando is a budding poetic dramatist (as was

Thomas Sackville, of the family living even then at Knole). As a

debonair boy he lives the sexual life of a lusty age, and is far from

innocent when in his late teens profound passion overtakes him. With a

Russian girl-princess, niece of the ambassador from St. Petersburg, he

lives out a burning romance worthy of the period, which ends tragically

when Sasha sails for home without adieu. The Russian girl is no innocent

either; she is secretive, older than he emotionally, though younger in

years; he suspects her of dalliance with a muscovite sailor and even,

after her desertion, of being the ambassador’s mistress rather than his

niece. Though anything but masculine, she is robust and by spells cruel

in temperament; she wears Russian trousers against the cold, and skates,

rides and loves with the zest and endurance of another boy. But her

desertion has a woman’s cruelty, and it throws Orlando presently into a

state of delayed shock which produces a seven-day trance.

He emerges a melancholy seventeenth-century philosophic poet, ridden by

a passion for fame. Soon he is stalked by a ridiculous and masculine

Roumanian bluestocking who—perhaps because she is six-feet-two—plays the

man’s role in the game of hearts. For a moment “Orlando heard ... far

off the beating of love’s wings.” But at the point of becoming ensnared,

suddenly “it was Lust the vulture, not Love the bird of paradise, that

flopped foully and disgustingly upon his shoulders. Hence he

ran....”[60]

He escapes by accepting a diplomatic post in Constantinople, where he

achieves brilliant success until a local uprising terminates his

mission. He lives in the ornate luxury befitting an emissary of Charles

II to the Sultan, and becomes “the adored of many women and some men,”

but only from a distance. In private he is still melancholy, and escapes

to write poetry in the hills by day, by night to roam the city streets,

where he meets a gypsy dancer, Pepita. With her he contracts a marriage

of sorts and, rumor hints, has a trio of offspring. This episode is

sketched so briefly that one can only guess at its significance. It

cannot well have repeated the early romance with Sasha, since she was a

court lady of brilliant culture and Pepita is a daughter of the streets.

But neither can it have echoed the passage with the Archduchess Harriet.

Honest passion for an illiterate woman does not inspire the

self-loathing bred of an itch for an otherwise hateful social and

intellectual peer. Whatever it meant to Orlando, after the uprising ends

his official services, he bestows a farewell embrace upon the gypsy and

falls into his second seven-day trance. It may be that this one

registered inability to endure an emotional impasse any longer.

From it he awakes a woman, but Mrs. Woolf lays stress on the fact that

the change is merely one of physical sex and not at all of temperament.

The sound of trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No

human being since the world began has ever looked more ravishing. His

form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace.[61]

With the gypsies (not apparently Pepita’s clan) to whom Orlando escapes,

she still lives a man’s life, for among nomads, temperament and daily

duties are much the same in both sexes. After some seasons of successful

adaptation to this barbaric simplicity, nostalgia for England and for

literary pursuits turns Orlando toward home. And now she faces the

difficult business of learning to act the lady. High comedy attends her

efforts, particularly in connection with a renewed pursuit by her former

_bête noire_, the bluestocking, who now through a transformation

corresponding to her own is an absurd and lachrymose Roumanian nobleman.

Amid the relaxed proprieties of the eighteenth century, Orlando often

roams London in man’s dress, more at home in the honest company of

daughters of joy than in the artificial salons of her peers.

There were many stories told at the time, as, that she fought a duel,

served on one of the King’s ships as a captain, was seen to dance

naked on a balcony, and fled with a certain lady to the Low Countries

where the lady’s husband followed them.... She enjoyed the love of

both sexes ... for her sex changed far more frequently than those who

have worn only one set of clothing can conceive.[62]

The neatness with which fantasy here dodges any scandalous implications

may well account for the difficult _tour de force_ which the whole

volume is.

With the advent of Queen Victoria, a depressing social change occurs:

humankind is rigorously divided into Men, whose role is to lead,

protect, support; and Women, who must submit, be timorous, and cling.

The results, both personal and literary, Mrs. Woolf plainly considers

lamentable. Orlando’s history turns emotionally barren and housewifely,

and neither reading nor writing afford her any relief. Though she

suffers from personal loneliness and social disapprobation, she refuses

to consider marriage under such a regime. She waits instead for the

twentieth century:

There was something definite and distinct about the age, which

reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that there was a

distinction, a desperation....[63]

In this century she meets a man with the spirit of a poet—he knows

Shelley by heart—but who has also been “a soldier and a sailor and ...

explored the east.” Mutual love is instantaneous, and complete union

follows swiftly upon the intuitive moment when both cry out together:

“You’re a woman, Shel!” “You’re a man, Orlando!”

For each was so surprised at the quickness of the other’s sympathy,

and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as

tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as

a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.[64]

The natural and happy results are marriage and a son, but not a

Victorian ménage. “Shel” is gone the greater part of the time on his

adventurous voyages, and Orlando is free to “write and write and write”

and win literary prizes.

Clearly Mrs. Woolf felt that to be an integrated, and above all, a

creative personality, one needs freedom from the Procrustes’ bed of sex.

She was not preaching license in the name of some bohemian deity of

Bloomsbury or Greenwich Village. She was begging psychological

_Lebensraum_ for the creative artist. Nevertheless, the total sum of

Orlando’s experience is, beyond question, bisexual.

Among these four novels of 1928, Mackenzie’s satire was mild rather than

sharp; Miss Bowen pictured variance as an unhappy state but treated her

variant girl with entire sympathy; and Mrs. Woolf pled as it were in the

abstract, Miss Hall in passionate particular, for the variant, even the

lesbian woman of personal integrity. The annual balance was, therefore,

on the whole positive, and it is clear that the verdict early in the

year against _Well of Loneliness_ restrained British publishers only

from issuing lesbian propaganda.