Sex variant women in literature

Introduction

Imaginative works featuring variant women have thus far been few, widely separated in time, and for the most part written with literary intent only. Thus, it has sufficed to present them with slight orientation in literary history. During the nineteenth century such items averaged better than three per decade and the majority were novels, a form particularly apt to reflect drifts of contemporary thought and even to be written for ulterior ends. If even tenuous patterns are to be traced in this mass of material it will be necessary to sketch as background the general trends of interest from which the novels grew.

Probably the most significant feature of the decades just following the French Revolution was the rapid spread of democratic efforts toward political, economic and educational betterment of the common man. This was reflected slowly in variant literature, and then only indirectly as it multiplied readers, writers, and subjects of relatively modest social status. Outside the field of social reform the same revolutionary sentiment appeared under such different guises as the Romantic Movement in literature and a scientific rather than a philosophic attack upon the problems of human personality.

Most closely allied to practical politics was the Woman’s Movement. The eighteenth-century French rationalists who championed the rights of man included women in their thesis; however, for various historical and psychological reasons their own countrywomen never as a whole embraced the feminist cause. In England and America, on the other hand, where the property rights of women or their inability to vote on such humanitarian issues as abolition of slavery were sore points, feminists embarked upon a battle for legal equality which ran on into the present century.

The Romantic Movement in literature represented a swing away from eighteenth century rationalism toward the glorifying of emotional experience. Whereas the sexual licence in pre-Revolutionary France had reflected a galant indifference to moral standards, the new and more general claim to emotional freedom was a matter of philosophic principle. However unsatisfactory from a pragmatic viewpoint the lives of such men as Rousseau and Shelley may have been, these “mad idealists” were acting upon conviction. The keynote of romanticism was, as always, the exaltation of Love and of every individual’s right to follow its dictates, a theme which figured prominently in nineteenth century literature and which still persists in popular fiction and films. While this philosophic tolerance did not extend to homosexual love, it enabled the subject to be treated seriously in other than underground erotic literature.

Yet another aspect of the rebellion against hitherto revered authority was the extension of scientific method to the study of human consciousness. Ever since the renaissance, science had been advancing steadily in physical fields. Its practical applications had produced the Industrial Revolution, and its unfettered intellectual attitude had helped, via the French Encyclopedists, to sow the seeds of political revolution. During the late eighteenth century students of geology, biology, and human anatomy were accumulating the evolutionary data so dramatically systematized in 1859 by Darwin. At the same time scientific travelers, observing primitive societies, assembled the raw materials of what later became anthropology. Finally at the beginning of the nineteenth century a few pioneers, defying heavy odds of religious and popular prejudice, began to explore the relation of mind to body. In Germany laboratory experiment was concentrated on the neurological bases of sensory experience. In France medical aspects of the problem took precedence, focussing on mental aberration, and by the 1860s Charcot, best known for his therapeutic use of hypnotism, had founded the first great neurological clinic.

As to the objective study of homosexuality, nothing which could be called scientific by modern standards was attempted until the last third of the century, but the phenomenon was noted extensively in the pre-anthropological records mentioned above, and a considerable group of studies on human hermaphrodites antedated 1850.[1] A single descriptive article on homosexuality appeared as early as 1791, when a German periodical, Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde, published the biographies of two men who “manifested an enthusiastic love for persons of their own sex,” and one of whom attributed his predilection to childhood experiences at home and at school. For the next fifty years the only pertinent contributions seem to have been some articles on “the Scythian madness” (male homosexuality) in the ancient Greeks. Then, in 1852, a Dr. Casper published in his Vierteljahrsschrift a number of comments on contemporaneous pederasty,[2] and a few years later he brought out a volume of male case histories under the title Klinische Novellen. During the following two decades Karl Ulrichs (writing under the pseudonym Numa Numantius) produced upward of a dozen pamphlets, controversial rather than scientific, which defended male homosexuality as hereditary and therefore not justly subject to legal penalty. All these studies, it should be noted, dealt exclusively with men.

What is considered the first essentially scientific publication, however, was a clinical report in 1870 on a female homosexual patient by a German physician, Westphal, after which similar descriptive case studies multiplied rapidly. In 1886 Krafft-Ebing brought out his lengthy Psychopathia Sexualis, a large section of which was devoted to “contrary sexual feeling,” and before the end of the century Albert Moll, Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld produced even more extensive treatises.[3] Although all these later studies included female cases, women still did not receive much emphasis. A Spaniard, Casán, was apparently the only writer to treat women exclusively. (His volume, listed in the U.S. Surgeon General’s Catalog as El Amor Lesbio, 1896, has not been available for examination.)

The mounting stress upon an objective approach to psychological phenomena had its effect on alert literary minds. (It was not restricted, of course, to sex or variance). Balzac was the first to embark deliberately upon a “naturalistic” study of human experience, and although literary critics observe that his plots are often based on more or less abstract concepts, none deny that his individual characters show the fruit of minute observation. By 1857 Flaubert also was maintaining that “it is time to give it (literary art) the precision of the sciences by means of a pitiless method,”[4] and later in the century Zola pointed out that his own practice, as well as his theories set forth in Le Roman Experimental, were “based upon the application of experimental science to physiology as developed in the writings of Dr. Claude Bernard.”[5] Each of these three major novelists contributed to the understanding of female variance, and the same spirit can be detected in the fiction of several lesser writers who attacked the subject.

Even in the many cases where direct connection cannot be demonstrated between scientific thought and the imaginative writing under consideration, there is a perceptible correlation from decade to decade between quantitative developments in both fields.

Precursors of Modern Fiction

The transition from galant writing of the eighteenth century to modern fiction with its psychological preoccupation and its elevation of women’s roles to a position of romantic importance could hardly be better exemplified than by Diderot’s La Religieuse. Superficially, this novel appears to be a typical pre-revolutionary anti-clerical effort. As it was undertaken in 1760, only a year after the second suppression of its author’s major project, L’Encyclopédie, it is tempting to imagine that the Jesuits’ share in that act of censorship may have been the immediate spur to its inception. Actually La Religieuse broke new ground, for Diderot’s preoccupation was not so much the religious shortcomings of the convents depicted, as the morbid physical and psychological effects of celibacy upon women, especially when this way of life was not freely elected but enforced by church and family.

The tale was first conceived as a practical joke on an impressionable philanthropist, the Marquis de Croismare, who in 1757 had exercised his influence in behalf of a nun seeking release from her vows. Not even personally acquainted with the young woman, he engaged legal aid for her but had no success, and she was forced to remain in her convent. A few years later, when she was unobtrusively transferred to another religious house, Diderot, Grimm, and other friends of de Croismare’s conceived the idea of pretending that she had escaped, and Diderot forged a series of letters in which she appealed to her former benefactor for some means of support in a place where her religious “persecutors” could not find her. The victim of the hoax was so moved by it that he offered her (by mail) a position as companion to his daughter, and the perpetrators were forced to fabricate an account of her sudden death. It was not till eight years later that the marquis learned the truth, and “was able to laugh at the incident over which he had earlier wept.”[6]

In the meantime Diderot had invented a complete autobiography supposedly written by the girl during her last illness, and though this was not completed in time to become a part of the deception, it so engaged its author’s interest that he continued to work on the whole story intermittently for a couple of decades. It was pretty certainly finished by 1780, but was not published until 1796, when it appeared in its present form, along with the account of its composition. Written as her own artless journal, it gives the story of an illegitimate girl forced into convent life by a guilt-ridden mother and her suspicious husband. The victim resists her fate with extraordinary intelligence and ingenuity, but her struggles are futile, and she is merely transferred from one religious house to another, each exemplifying some pathological aspect of conventual sex-repression. Under the best abbess she meets nothing worse than a rather hysterical exaggeration of piety with slight variant overtones; in the second institution she encounters outright sadism, and in the third rampant homosexuality.

The Superior in this last house is an overt lesbian, and her efforts to seduce the girl occupy nearly a third of Diderot’s whole volume. The young nun, steadfast in her desire for freedom—and marriage, though she has not yet known love—remains almost wholly blind to the meaning of the other’s blandishments and of her own partial response to them. The Superior is described as vain, frivolous, flighty, and wholly without religious feeling. The scenes in her quarters where her favorites gossip, fawn on her, and compete for her favors are more in the spirit of galant eighteenth century canvases than that of a religious house. Ellis says that for the Superior “Diderot found a model in the Abbess of Chelles, a daughter of the Regent (Philippe of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV) and thus a member of a family which for several generations showed a marked tendency to inversion.”[7] Wherever Diderot gathered his material, his picture of fevered intrigue, jealousy, skilled seduction, and finally of the frustrated Superior’s decline into acute neurosis, is unparalleled in fiction before the present century. Indeed, for clinical accuracy of detail it had no equal until Westphal’s scientific case study of a homosexual woman was published in 1870. Thus it stands as a landmark in the literature of female sex variance.

Equally a landmark, though of a very different sort, is Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary, a Fiction, which since it appeared in 1788, actually antedated Diderot’s from the viewpoint of open publication. It is the first novel on female variance to be written by a woman, and its significance is augmented by its being an English work, written before its author’s lengthy sojourn in France at the beginning of the Revolution. The writer of this now forgotten volume (only a handful of copies are extant here or abroad) is more generally remembered for her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1798), for her liaison in Paris during the Revolution with Gilbert Imlay, an American soldier of fortune, and for her later and comparatively unromantic marriage to William Godwin. In their recent Modern Woman, the Lost Sex.[8] Lundberg and Farnham devote much space to establishing the Vindication as the germ of all subsequent rebellion of women against their normal social and biological roles. But though Wollstonecraft strongly defended the right of women to the individual liberty which was being generally claimed for all men, an impartial review of feminism hardly appears to justify so complete an assignment of responsibility to this single work.

The authors of Modern Woman have done an excellent job of analyzing the unhappy home environment and early experiences that made Wollstonecraft a champion of her sex and a mordant critic of male dominance. They pass over, as not germane to their theme, one major factor in her life, her consuming attachment to Fanny Blood, a young woman slightly Mary’s senior, which began when the latter was about fifteen and continued until Fanny’s death twelve years later. Of this attachment William Godwin in his Memoirs says that it was “so fervent as ... to have constituted the ruling passion in her mind.”[9]

This friendship is the theme of Mary, though the fictional version is less moving and significant than the known facts on which it was based. As biographers and critics are agreed that Wollstonecraft had little creative imagination and drew for all her fiction with almost embarrassing literalness upon her own experience, a parallel analysis of the tale and its source incidents will be enlightening. The fictional “Mary” is the child of wealth, with a single brother and an ailing mother sentimentally addicted to novel reading. In reality, Mary was the second of six children of a violent drunken father and a masochistically submissive mother. The family was so impoverished that from childhood Mary was acquainted with the bitterest contriving, and in late adolescence faced earning her own living, a problem not easily solved in her time for a woman above the servant class.

The father in the novel, dangerous when in his cups and given freely to wenching, is the only accurate family portrait aside from the heroine herself. That “tenderness and compassion” for the ill-treated mother became “the governing propensity in her heart through life” was as true of the real as of the fictional Mary. As a mere child Wollstonecraft had often slept on the landing outside her mother’s door so that her father should not misuse his wife when drunk. Ann, the beloved friend in the novel, lives, as did Fanny Blood, in wretched poverty and suffers from unrequited love for a man who has trifled with her affections. Thus “Mary’s” passionate devotion to Ann is not returned in kind, and she is “often hurt by involuntary indifference.” Rushing to Ann with glowing delight and seeing no answering emotion in her friend’s face, “Mary would check her warm greeting and seem of chilling insensibility.” Then, perceiving her friend’s hurt surprise, she forces a contrite and disciplined warmth.

Upon the death of both mother and brother, “Mary” submits to her mother’s dying wish and to pressure from her father, and marries a boy who is joint heir to the family property. Her only thought is of providing a stable home for Ann. Without the marriage’s being consummated—the mere approach of the husband sickens “Mary”—the weak and egocentric boy embarks on the conventional Grand Tour of the continent to complete his education, and Ann moves in as “Mary’s” companion. “Before she enjoyed Ann’s constant society she imagined it would have made her completely happy; she was disappointed, and yet knew not what to complain of.”[10] At her father’s death her husband proposes to return, but the thought of him still makes her ill. “There was no previous attachment to give rise to her revulsion. Her friendship with Ann had occupied her whole heart and resembled a passion.”[11]

This husband, so pallid a figment, was extraneous to the real Mary’s experience. Actually she and a sister had launched a school for young girls, for which she had had superficial preparation as a governess, in order to provide a home for Fanny. The latter had once expressed a wish to live with Mary, but after much procrastination and one brief trial of life with the two struggling sisters, she returned to her own wretched home. Presently she married her vacillating suitor, whom in fact Mary had brought to terms with a few privately delivered home truths—quite simply that Fanny’s incipient tuberculosis was due to his long indecision. After achieving this selfless end Mary fell ill, for the second time in her life, the first having followed her mother’s death five years earlier.

In the novel Ann, unmarried and ailing, is taken to Lisbon by “Mary,” and dies there despite the beneficial change of climate. In reality it was her husband’s business which took Fanny there, and pregnancy which aggravated her pulmonary weakness. Gravely ill, she sent a desperate appeal to Mary, who threw over her teaching, borrowed ruinously to finance the journey, and even so, arrived in Lisbon only a few hours before Fanny’s confinement and a few days before her death.

The Fiction was written subsequent not only to that loss but to Mary’s first efforts at journalism and her resulting encounter with the artist Henry Fuseli. Almost at once she loved Fuseli passionately. He, however, was married, and his wife quite naturally vetoed Mary’s incredibly naïve proposal to become one of the household. The girl, now twenty-six, believed her own passion to be purely “platonic.” One biographer of Fuseli reports her as saying to him, “If I thought my passion criminal I would conquer it or die in the attempt, for immodesty in my eyes is ugliness.”[12] In the Fiction “Henry” figures as an ailing violinist met in Lisbon during Ann’s last illness and loved later in maternal fashion, but made inaccessible by Mary’s own married state.

Another speech of “Henry’s” is significant in the Ann-“Mary” relationship: “I would give the world for a picture with the expression I have seen in your face when you have been supporting your friend [in your arms].”[14] As to the final relation of “Mary” to her husband, after her return to England she faints at the sight of him, and finally, demanding her freedom, retires to the country where she devotes herself to good works and waits for death, in which she will be reunited with Ann, and “where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.”[15]

This whole cathartic outpouring raises interesting questions as to the author’s own understanding of its emotional significance. It was published anonymously, but her own name and that of Henry appear unchanged, their relations in the tale, as in life, being beyond question blameless. So were “Mary’s” with Ann on the surface, though the author states openly that “Mary always slept with Ann, who was subject to terrifying dreams.” Yet she substituted “Ann” for Fanny, even though the latter had passed beyond the possible reach of slander. Was she perhaps aware of criticism directed against their relationship? Mary had, at twenty, been governess to the children of Lady Kingsborough in Ireland, and was dismissed because the children grew too fond of her.[16] The fourteen-year-old daughter in particular was so attached as to become ill during a brief separation from Mary. In a letter preserved in Godwin’s Memoirs, Mary refers to the pleasure she derived from the girl’s “innocent caresses,” an odd adjective had Mary not been aware of possible caresses between women that were otherwise.

The answer seems to lie in two passages, one from the Rights of Women in which she refers to physical love as “perhaps the most evanescent of all passions,” and the other in a letter to Imlay written after it was all too plain that his infatuation had burned out:

Here is a summing up of the wisdom gained from three love affairs, two physically unfulfilled, the third disillusioning. The passage also foreshadows her relations with Godwin, whose own description of their courtship runs as follows:

In Mary’s eyes, Fuseli, Fanny, and she herself evidently bore some of the stigmata of genius. Imlay, business man, extrovert, casual adventurer, impetuous lover, was of “the common herd of child-begetters.” Hers is definitely the feminine romantic ideal of the subjective aspects of Love outweighing the physical to a point where the sex of the partner is less important than his personality.

Thus, we have in the last dozen years of the eighteenth century two novels which sounded the keynotes of much that has followed. Diderot analyzed an overtly homosexual woman and pronounced her wholly pathological and destructive, even though he assigned much of the responsibility for her divagations to the environment in which her entire life was spent. Wollstonecraft’s novel idealized an innocent variant relationship as the highest form of emotional experience. Numerous variations on both these themes appear in the succeeding century and a half.

The Novel Before 1870

For the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century variant fiction was so nearly an exclusive product of France that traces appearing elsewhere may be left for separate consideration. The first pertinent French item was a typical Romantic Period novel of indifferent literary quality, Philip Cuisin’s Clémentine, Orpheline et Androgyne (1819). As its title indicates, intersexual anatomy is responsible for the heroine’s variant personality, which is used merely as mainspring for a plot of the wildest extravagance. Clémentine is a beautiful child of unknown antecedents cast ashore near Carcassone as sole survivor of a shipwreck. With the approach of puberty her ambiguous sex makes her the object of so much superstitious hostility among the peasants of the neighborhood that she is sent by her wealthy protector to a physician in Cadiz who is glad of the chance to observe such an anomaly.

A child’s unawareness of her own peculiarity had betrayed her to the peasants of Carcassone. Shocked into neurotic prudery she manages in Cadiz to avoid suspicion though not curiosity on the part of the physician’s daughter, who becomes strongly attached to her and is hurt by her refusal of the easy intimacy common among growing girls. Clémentine canalizes her waxing male eroticism into strenuous physical exercise and becomes a proficient fencer. This unfeminine skill and her habit of going about occasionally in men’s clothing produce violent infatuation in a bold young woman of the neighborhood who believes her to be a man, and who plays thereafter the role of villain in the piece. Because of this woman’s advances, Clémentine is forced to leave her second home in Cadiz and is subsequently involved in a series of stormy adventures. She is too feminine to live out her life disguised as a man, too relentlessly pursued by her evil adorer to settle down as an independent woman and win a man she has come to love. An interim in a convent, where she takes refuge from the law after killing a man in a duel, naturally only produces fresh complications. Here she, herself, is passionately drawn to the urbane Superior who cherishes her, and a novice is similarly attracted to her; but she resists all temptations (and they are many) to give way to her feelings. At last obstacles are overcome according to the best romantic pattern—she marries her male beloved, who understands and accepts her anomaly, encourages her to fence and hunt with him, and enjoys her love, which has “la force réuni des deux sexes.” The author must have read the contemporary literature on hermaphroditism, but was evidently shy of attributing his heroine’s passionate intensity to her anomaly after once he had her settled as a married woman, and so lays it in part to prenatal influence. Her mother, we are told, had during pregnancy been very friendly with a Persian ambassador to the French court, and had been “saturated” with his oriental tales. Thus, the daughter was predestined to love “avec l’exaltation d’une Persane.”

The second and slightly more artistic French narrative is a two-volume novel by Henri de Latouche entitled Fragoletta (1829), which is concerned primarily with the Napoleonic wars and anti-British propaganda. Emotional interest centers about the hero’s love for the title figure, whom he first meets as a boyish girl of fourteen, daring, brilliant, and free of coquetry. Her Sicilian guardian, knowing himself pursued by political assassins, implores d’Hauteville to marry and care for Fragoletta, but d’Hauteville feels that his love for her has roused no response save lively friendship and so waits for her emotions to mature. On the guardian’s death he becomes her protector until the misfortunes of war separate them. Later he hears she has returned to her native Austria from which she was removed as an infant.

She writes him of discovering there a twin brother, Adriani, who eventually visits d’Hauteville in his Paris home and falls in love with his sister, an untouched innocent a year Adriani’s senior. Sent as a spy to Naples, d’Hauteville sees Fragoletta there at a court ball given by Queen Caroline, at which Lady Hamilton is a guest. He hears that Adriani is a spy on the English-Neapolitan side, but because of the need for concealing his own identity he can neither reveal himself to Fragoletta nor penetrate the mystery of her presence among the English and her brother’s treasonous activity.

He then learns from a frantic letter from his sister that Adriani has seduced her and that she no longer wishes to live. Her mother also has fallen gravely ill of the shock. D’Hauteville pursues the boy to Paris only to find him gone again and his sister on her deathbed. Subsequently, he tracks the traitor-seducer back to Naples and challenges him to a duel. Fragoletta, still in Naples, begs him not to expose himself to certain capture by the enemy merely in order to avenge “un tort exagéré ou peut-être imaginaire,” implying that only his sister’s naïvete led her to believe herself ravished. D’Hauteville persists in duelling, however, and overcomes his opponent without effort. Adriani retreats almost without resistance over the edge of a cliff and falls to death in the sea below with a feminine cry which reveals to d’Hauteville that Fragoletta and her twin are one. The reader is left in doubt whether Fragoletta was, like Clémentine, a hermaphrodite, or (as seems more probable) was simply an exclusively lesbian woman. (Similarly the Chevalier d’Eon moved in international diplomatic circles alternately as man and woman, his true sex being known only upon his death in 1810.) In the course of the story the author incorporates a scene between Queen Caroline and Emma Hamilton which takes place in the former’s sunken marble bath. The queen first plays the part of lady’s maid in disrobing her beautiful friend, and later indulges in erotic play until the two drowse off in one another’s arms in the warm pool. Latouche may have intended this lax court background to account for Fragoletta’s transformation from a rather engaging tomboy into an active lesbian.

Far superior from a literary viewpoint to either of these novels was Balzac’s first venture in the intersexual field, Seraphitus-Seraphita (1834). The heroine of this tale has been mentioned by Natalie Clifford Barney, a twentieth century writer of lesbian verse, as one of those androgynes who lend rarity to the Human Comedy.[19] But Seraphita was not, like Clémentine, a physical anomaly. The novel of which she is the title figure is a lengthy excursion into Swedenborgian philosophy, and the girl is raised in an undiluted atmosphere of that particular mysticism. The result is a sexless and wholly ascetic personality. To the man who loves her she seems the perfect woman. To a younger girl whom she leads in fearless ascents of rocky heights above the fjords and who loves her equally, she seems the perfect man, although there is never any mystery about her true sex. With neither man nor girl does she exchange even the most innocent of physical caresses. After her early death the girl and the man marry one another, their common half-mystical worship of her constituting a stronger bond than exists between ordinary lovers.

In the following year Balzac published his much better-known novel, The Girl with the Golden Eyes, a romantic tale involving an overt lesbian, though the latter enters the story only at the end, the main theme being her effect upon her passive victim. The story describes the conquest, by the very flower of Byronic heroes, of a mysterious beauty sequestered in a Paris mansion with all the vigilance surrounding a caliph’s harem. Once reached by the hero, the golden-eyed girl proves a paradox of virginity and voluptuous sophistication until a lapsus linguae betrays that it is a lesbian of enormous wealth who has initiated her sexually and kept her hidden from the world of men. This woman, returning from an absence which made the adventure possible, at once detects the girl’s infidelity and, in a jealous and sadistic frenzy, kills her. She then discovers that her rival is her own half-brother and almost physical twin (they were both illegitimate, their father but one step removed from royalty), and, consequently, it was his resemblance to her that made his fatal conquest of the girl so easy.

In the extravagance of the plot and the description of the hero, which occupies a good quarter of the tale, one might suspect satire upon the Byronism which was sweeping Europe, except for the romantic seriousness of the whole. Another long interpolated essay is an arraignment, mordant in brilliance, of the cruelty, stupidity, and license of Parisian life, in which one detects echoes from Rousseau: in such an “unnatural” milieu excesses of evil are only to be expected. Such romantic social philosophy concerned Balzac here more than the psychology of either woman. That the golden-eyed girl, sold by her mother at the age of twelve and a passive partner throughout, should first learn complete love from the hero, is barely credible. That after a decade in which she has suffered neither physical nor nervous ill-health she should be so instantly changed as to prefer death to her former life might be questioned by the modern psychologist. The lesbian Marquise is hardly better accounted for. Her cool purchase and long imprisonment of the girl, whose physical beauty is the only tie suggested between them, make poor preparation for her heartbreak and sudden desire for convent life because she has lost “that which seemed the infinite.” Possibly her half-Spanish, half-royal blood are intended to account for both her lesbianism and her vagaries of temperament, for gossip credited the Spanish ruling dynasty as well as the house of Orléans with tendencies toward homosexuality.

In Cousin Bette (1846), Balzac, with a realism in sharp contrast to both his earlier tales and in keeping with literary trends of the intervening dozen years, presents rather casually the half-realized infatuation of the thwarted spinster, Bette, for Madame Marneffe, the human instrument she employs to satisfy her much stronger passion for revenge upon the family who have humiliated her. Valérie Marneffe, who “spent her days upon a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments and intrigues ... had discovered the true nature of this ardent creature burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself.”[20] Both women have had lovers, Bette having striven in vain to hold a Polish artist several years her junior. But “in this new affection she had found food ... far more satisfying than her insane passion for Wenceslas, who had always been cold to her.”[21] Little of physical intimacy is implied between the two women beyond frequent kisses, and since Balzac is not particularly reticent about such details, it is not safe to assume any such relation as existed in The Girl with the Golden Eyes. But later in the book he speaks of such attachments as “the strongest emotion known, that of a woman for a woman.”[22]

Thus, the faithful observer of the Human Comedy presented three contrasting types of emotional variance and offered three distinct explanations of it. In the first, intellectual conditioning was the causal factor; in the second, a possible inheritance of temperament plus the certain freedom for self-indulgence provided by limitless wealth; and in the third, poverty of both circumstance and emotional opportunity. The resulting experiences also show the writer’s imaginative range. The first seraphic heroine is as innocent and passionless as the biblical Ruth. The Spanish Marquise is violent to the point of melodrama. The warped spinster is confused and groping in expression as well as feeling.

In the same year that The Girl with the Golden Eyes appeared, Gautier published Mlle de Maupin. The former enjoyed a few months’ priority, but Gautier’s volume had been promised to the publisher a year before its appearance, and as the two men’s long friendship began only with Balzac’s reading of the younger man’s story,[23] there is no question of influence in either direction.

From the standpoint of modern psychology Gautier’s is the more careful and complete study. Indeed, having humor, vitality, and a tolerant bisexual attitude, it is probably the most generally popular of all variant “classics.” In it an orphaned heiress dons men’s clothes and sets out to discover how men live when uninhibited by the presence of ladies. In the course of her adventures Maupin is loved by a young man of poetic temperament who has had mistresses but found them physically satisfying only, and by a young woman of good social standing who has been one of those mistresses. Maupin also has with her for a time a young girl disguised as a page whom she has rescued from exploitation by an old rake and on whom she lavishes a devotion both erotic and maternal. The young man suffers from believing his passion abnormal until he learns Maupin’s true sex, but then recognizes that for the first time he has found complete love because he has so many more tastes in common with this girl than with his previous feminine paramours.

As to the young woman, her passion survives the revelation of Maupin’s sex, her persistent caresses prove as exciting as the man’s, and Maupin finishes by spending half the final night depicted with each of them and by riding off in the morning with markedly unfeminine detachment. Physically, we have for the first time in modern fiction the explicit description of a type which has since become associated with homosexual tendencies in women—the tall, wide shouldered, slim hipped figure endowed with perfect grace and with great skill in riding and fencing. Temperamentally we have Maupin’s own description of herself as “of a third sex, one that has as yet no name above or below.” As a girl she was “six months older but six years less romantic” than her bosom friend, for whom her friendship had “all the characteristics of a passion,” but for years she “burned in her little skin like a chestnut on the stove” to satisfy what is described as an intellectual curiosity about the lives of men away from women and their real attitude toward women.[24] It is this unemotional detachment which Gautier emphasizes as peculiarly masculine.

Scattered through the story is a quantity of very canny analysis of intersexual characteristics, and though the tale is supposedly based upon the life of a seventeenth-century actress, it departs so far from the known facts about her that it must stand as a monument to the author’s psychological acumen alone. Since he wrote it at the age of twenty-four, one cannot escape the suspicion that it was drawn from personal or at least close secondhand acquaintance with George Sand, so newly come to Paris in her male costume and so prominent in literary circles at that moment. It certainly marks a long step forward in the serious study of a variant personality. (The actual history of Madeleine Maupin d’Aubigny,[25] late seventeenth-century singer and actress, is perhaps worth attention because of its contrast to Gautier’s artistic modification. As a young woman Maupin came to Paris from the provinces determined upon a stage career, and married her vocal teacher, d’Aubigny, who was connected with the Opera and who got her the position upon which she was set. The marriage was apparently a mere strategic move on her part and was short-lived. A tall woman, and a fencer of extraordinary ability, Mme. d’Aubigny frequently played young men’s parts, and soon took to wearing men’s costume off as well as on the stage. One of her diversions was roaming the streets at night and provoking men to cross swords with her for the pleasure of worsting them. She inspired passion in many young women, one of whom, a girl of good family, ran away with her when her repeated embroilments forced her to leave Paris. The girl’s parents overtook the eloping couple and put their daughter into a convent at Avignon.

Being apparently infatuated herself, Maupin resumed woman’s dress and gained entry to the convent as a novice for the purpose of manoeuvering her friend’s escape. The means which presented themselves were macabre enough. A nun died and was buried within the convent enclosure; Maupin exhumed the body, put it in her friend’s bed, and set fire to the cell; during the resulting confusion the two young women escaped. But their subsequent precarious vagabondage apparently cured the girl of her taste for bohemian freedom and for Maupin; she returned to her parents. Maupin’s later career was comparatively seamy and unromantic.)

* * *

In 1851 Lamartine included in Nouvelles Confidences[26] an innocent infatuation between two adolescent girls which is reminiscent of Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Balzac’s Seraphita. (Though a reference in Havelock Ellis seems to place Regina among Lamartine’s poetic works, it is actually prose. His statement that here the theme is treated with “more or less boldness”[27] also appears unjustified.) Although the initial attachment between the heroine, Regina, and her school friend, Clothilde, might be considered “normal,” since it occurs between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, its later effects compel attention. The two girls, thrown together in a declining Roman convent school where supervision is lax, contrive regularly to spend their nights together. Lamartine describes their hours of long talk and tenderness with such skill and delicacy that one can doubt neither the basic innocence of both girls nor the ultimate passion in their embraces.

During their years together Clothilde talks so much of a twin brother Saluse that Regina falls half in love with him vicariously, but at seventeen she is married unwillingly to a titled dotard. In the same year Clothilde’s mother dies, and Clothilde does not long survive this double loss of her only parent and beloved friend. At Clothilde’s grave Regina and Saluse meet and fall in love at sight. Their passion runs a stormy but blameless course, which leads eventually to Regina’s seeking formal release from her marriage. While she is away from Rome her petition is granted by the church, but only on condition of Saluse’s permanent exile from the city. Saluse decides in her absence on exile for her sake rather than on elopement and public scandal. On learning of his decision the girl cries out that he who would sacrifice love to conscience cannot be the brother of Clothilde. ‘At Clothilde’s tomb it was not she I found again, it was a phantom.... He had her features but not her heart.’[28]

Lamartine’s effort to explain the girls’ passionate friendship is interesting if seemingly somewhat confused. Primarily, like Diderot, he lays responsibility upon the convent environment, where not only are women segregated but every aspect of their life—music, incense, pageantry, solitude and idleness—inflames the ‘imagination,’ while the feeble pretense at education includes nothing to stimulate or discipline the intellect. Such life produces ‘veritable orientals, fit only for the harem.’ The specific occasion of their emotional involvement, however, he says, is Regina’s identification of Clothilde with the unknown brother of whom the latter talks so eloquently. ‘I should never have believed in this phenomenon, which reflects and thus redoubles the beloved object, I should have taken it for the imaginative creation of poets, had I not seen it with my own eyes in the spirit of Regina.’[29] This seems a rather feeble attempt to gloss over any homosexual implication, for Clothilde, though more intellectual and less passionate than Regina, is in no way masculine. And, in the end, it was precisely the masculine element in Saluse’s sacrifice of their love which repelled Regina. It was a man’s decision and not a woman’s, ‘of the head and not the heart.’ Lamartine’s treatment here of the variant theme gains added interest from the fact that earlier, in Jocelyn, he had sailed perilously close to the implication of male variance. In this story, popular enough to supply the libretto for Godard’s opera, a hermit priest becomes so attached to the “boy” left in his charge that he suffers agonies of conscience before discovering that his ward is a disguised girl. Evidently the whole matter of possible intrasexual attraction held a kind of fascination for Lamartine, though he treated it with a reserve more Victorian than French.

Toward the end of this decade (1858) a novel appeared, La Sapho, cited by Lewandowski in Das Sexualproblem ...[30] as definitely lesbian, and of added interest in that it was written by a woman, Céleste Venard comtesse de Chabrillan; but unhappily this has not been available for examination.

At the beginning of the following decade (1862) Flaubert published Salammbo, of which Krafft-Ebing says that the author made his heroine homosexual.[31] If this is true at all by modern standards the condition is latent and of short duration, but because of the expressed judgment of so prominent an early authority on sex variance the story will be examined in some detail. It will also be interesting to see with what “pitiless method” Flaubert dissects the emotional economy of an inhibited girl. To be sure Salammbo’s adolescent devotion to the virgin moon-goddess Tanit (comparable to the Greek Astarte and the Roman Diana, and allied also to the Roman Bona Dea) verges upon passion, but it is so described as to suggest the sexual overtones in any ecstatic religious experience rather than to imply a variant element.

Daughter of Hamilcar of Carthage, Salammbo grows up in a time of such peril that she is raised in solitary seclusion; her only companions are an aged nurse and the eunuch who is chief priest in the temple of Tanit. She would like to become a “devotee,” but Hamilcar designs a politically profitable marriage for her, and forbids her initiation into the inner mysteries of the cult (which would involve ritual defloration, though Flaubert does not mention this fact).