Sex variant women in literature

Fertility in France

The sultry uneasiness in French society recorded by Feydeau in 1867 soon broke in the storm of the Franco-Prussian war, which ended monarchy in France. As is usual in time of war, all fiction concerned with emotional subtleties dwindled, and the years from 1870 to 1880 produced comparatively few variant items. One, however, was significant in being the first novel to attack lesbianism as a moral and medical problem. It was Adolphe Belot’s Mlle Giraud, Ma Femme, and it began in 1870 as a serial in the newspaper Le Figaro. Westphal’s clinical report on a lesbian woman had appeared in Germany early in the year, and it seems probable that Belot capitalized at once on the interest it aroused in medical circles, turning out instalments with journalistic facility, for he produced popular novels by the dozen. Westphal had concluded that his patient’s compulsive homosexuality was not an isolated pathological streak in an otherwise sound nature, but a general state related to manic-depressive insanity (“sogenannte folie circulaire”), and Belot mentions early in his novel the sad difference between the French casualness with regard to lesbianism and the serious concern prevalent in Germany, although he does not enlarge upon the latter.

The serial was stopped “in the interests of morality,” but it soon appeared in book form and ran to several editions (printings) before 1880.[1] All Belot’s novels exploited sex, the boldest requiring anonymous private printing, so that he was experienced in skirting the limits of acceptability. When the serial version was censored he had only to delete or alter condemned passages, amplify the virtuous tone of the unpublished portion (there is a moral harangue interpolated baldly in the middle of the book) and profit by the publicity which censorship always provides.

Mlle Giraud follows the course of a man’s marriage to a girl who stubbornly refuses to consummate the union. Adrien has been warned against marrying Paule by a young matron of his acquaintance, but since Mme. Blangy will give him no reason for her warning, he ignores it. After several months he suspects this woman, still his wife’s inseparable companion, of being a blind for some illicit affair of Paule’s. He tracks the two to an apartment which he examines in their absence and finds to be a lush love-nest, with some details reminiscent of the boudoir of the Girl with the Golden Eyes. Among other things, he finds there that volume, along with Diderot’s La Religieuse, Gautier’s Maupin, and “Feydeau’s latest, La Comtesse de Chalis.”

Adrien’s life as a civil engineer has kept him out of Paris for some years and left him so unaware of homosexuality among respectable women that none of these suggestive details arouses his suspicion. It is only upon his meeting M. Blangy, separated for several years from his wife, that Adrien learns of the lesbian relationship between the two women. The two husbands institute a joint campaign to separate their wives, but it is too late. For the few months Adrien has spent in travel to escape insupportable domestic tension, Paule has been free for the first time in her life to indulge her tastes as freely as she likes, and her health has been gravely affected. During the collapse which follows upon Adrien’s taking her to North Africa, Paule cries out one day against the wickedness of segregation in boarding schools where loneliness drives girls to emotional dependence upon their own sex. ‘I believe it is not so often men who ruin women,’ she says. ‘It is women who ruin each other.’[2]

At this her husband begins to regard her as morally ill rather than depraved, and his new sympathy brings her to the verge of normal passion for him. But at this crucial moment, Paule’s recapture by Mme. Blangy destroys all possibility of subsequent adjustment. The conflict ends with Paule’s complete subjection by her lesbian friend and her death from meningitis, supposedly the direct result of sexual excess. Adrien, learning later that Mme. Blangy has begun the conquest of another girl, manages under the guise of accident to drown the seductress. M. Blangy, who guesses the truth, tells him he has done the world a service in removing “cette reptile,” and the author leaves little doubt that he himself agrees.

Neither girl shows any sign of masculinity except that Paule’s voice is unusually low and penetrating. Mme. Blangy, the aggressor, is the essence of flighty femininity. But Paule shows a ripeness of figure unusual in an unmarried girl, which Adrien naïvely takes for promise of unawakened volupté, and both exhibit a cool and intelligent competence in dealing with practical details of their secret liaison which is overmature for their years. The cause of both girls’ abnormality is the time-worn segregation in boarding school, Mme. Blangy’s having begun earlier in her life than Paule’s.

Heterosexual frigidity as a direct result, however, makes its pioneer literary appearance in this novel. To the majority of variant women thus far encountered, heterosexual experience was also attributed, and of the handful to which it was not, only five—Mary Frith, Wollstonecraft’s Mary, Lesbia Brandon, and one each in the poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine—have expressed antipathy to the male. Even in these cases revulsion was presented as a part of what Ellis calls the “homosexual diathesis,” not as the result of previous lesbian activity. Although the present writer has not encountered earlier scientific authority for Belot’s claim, his was not a mind likely to originate such an idea. His attributing meningitis to sexual excess was derived from contemporary medical theory, and it is probable that his holding homosexuality responsible for heterosexual failure was similarly grounded. Certainly the thesis was too popular with moralists and educators of the next half century to have stemmed from the passing comment of a minor novelist.

During the decade in which Mlle Giraud was the outstanding variant title, Barbey d’Aurevilly, nearing the end of a long career, published Les Diaboliques, and in one of these short stories, “The Crimson Curtain” there is a rather boyish girl, the pink of propriety when under the eye of her guardians, but unfemininely bold and aggressive with a male boarder in their house. Since none of her hidden sophistication is attributed to homosexual experience, and as the macabre end of the tale is her death from heart failure during a night of unrestrained heterosexual activity, the only implication seems to be that women with masculine traits are also “masculine” in the intensity of their sexual endowment, an idea previously hinted in Cuisin’s Clémentine. The notion has reappeared more modernly in ordinary as well as variant fiction, but in the 1870’s it would have run counter to growing scientific opinion that male secondary characteristics in women implied homosexuality.

In the course of the same years Zola’s literary torrent was beginning to flow, and it is known that many of his novels, notably those treating of metropolitan life in Rome, London and Paris, include incidental sketches of variant women. No pretense can be made here to having read or even skimmed his entire output, but La Curée (1874) may be cited as a sample appearing during the decade in question. The significant figures are a pair of wealthy young married women who appear intermittently among the numerous background figures who are regularly referred to as “the inseparables” by their friends, and by the author, and who are strongly reminiscent in both appearance and behavior of Mlle Giraud and Mme. Blangy. As with the latter pair, their friendship is said to have begun in boarding school and to have continued uninterrupted by their respective marriages, but it has no dramatic outcome nor any important significance to the plot.

As was said in introducing the nineteenth century, the last two decades saw a sharp increase in all sorts of writing on variance. In the scientific field the great names were Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Ellis, and Hirschfeld, the last three being crusaders for official leniency and general tolerance on the grounds that homosexuality is inborn and therefore should not be penalized. There was much talk of an “intermediate sex,” whose condition was referred to as “inversion” (Ellis’s term). The term perversion was confined to those who were able to find heterosexual satisfaction and whose homosexual activities were therefore judged to be willful and unjustified. This hereditary view did not gain popular currency until late in the century, but as it spread, the controversy it engendered began to be reflected in fiction.

* * *

With 1880 the steady stream of variant fiction began to flow, starting with Zola’s Nana. In this well-known life history of a courtesan the reader will recall the gradual progress of the robustly heterosexual heroine from revulsion against an affair between her friend, Satin, and Mme. Robert and against the lesbian society of the fat Laure’s cafe, through indifferent tolerance of such activity, to her own final active relations with Satin which end only at the latter’s death. (This premature death carries a faint implication that Satin’s long sustained lesbianism was less healthy than Nana’s predominantly heterosexual life). All the stages of Nana’s habituation to homosexuality are presented with the same naturalism which marks Zola’s portrayal of her other affairs, and there can be little doubt that his material was drawn from direct observation of the Paris underworld.

The physical types described at Laure’s cafe are noteworthy. The majority are women in their forties or over, obese and repulsive, whose outcropping of masculine tendencies might thus seem to be a biological result of menopause. A few hoydenish younger women appear, but only one of them is a transvestist. None of their relationships is distinguished by love or constancy. Even Mme. Robert’s superficially generous attempts to hold Satin by supporting her seem motivated largely by jealousy. While Zola’s attitude is not one of approval, the lesbian episodes are presented with less harshness than several of the heterosexual affairs in Nana’s career, and they entrain no tragic consequences to compare with the suicides and utter demoralization resulting from the latter. In the particular segment of Paris society portrayed, that of the high grade prostitute or courtesan, lesbianism is not only tolerated—Nana’s titled lovers are well aware of her relations with Satin—but taken for granted. Evidently those cafés already flourished which were to be celebrated later on the canvases of Toulouse-Lautrec and in occasional cynical verses by Donnay.

In Pot-bouille (1883) Zola included two minor lesbian episodes at a respectable middle-class level. One involves the adolescent daughter of a mother so “particular” that the child is tutored at home for fear of evil influences at school. No account is taken, however, of the family servant, from whom the girl undertakes to learn ‘what happens when you are married.’[3] The lessons are given in the daughter’s room after the family has retired, and are apparently adequate. The second episode occurs between two young wives, each of whom has been drawn into a liaison with the same irresistible bachelor living in their apartment building. One of them, on the point of being caught by her husband before regaining her own apartment, takes refuge with the woman who has been her predecessor in the young rake’s affections. Strangers till now, though curious about one another, the two women become much excited by their mutual exchange of unhappy confidences. It is three in the morning, and neither is fully clothed. They conclude by giving one another what comfort they can.[4]

In 1881 “Paul’s Mistress” was published in de Maupassant’s volume entitled La Maison Tellier and has appeared subsequently in only three editions in either French or English. (The English translations are very poor.) One of his lengthier short stories, it presents the tragedy of a boy of very good family, intelligent and sensitive, lost in infatuation for “a small thin brunette with a stride like a grasshopper’s.” At a riverside amusement park the couple encounters four women (two in men’s clothes) who are hailed by the holiday crowd with enthusiastic shouts of “Lesbos! Lesbos!” That Paul is revolted infuriates his companion, and in the course of the ensuing quarrel the boy faces the hitherto unacknowledged fact that he and Madeleine have nothing in common but their passion. Over his protests they return in the evening to dance in the pavilion, and his partner soon slips off with one of the transvestists. After an hour of fevered search the boy comes upon the two in a thicket, and in a frenzy of revulsion escapes unnoticed and throws himself into the river. When some hours later his body is recovered Madeleine weeps copiously, but then goes home with the lesbian, “her head on Pauline’s shoulder, as though it had found refuge there in a closer and more intimate affection.”

Here, as in Nana, homosexuality is pictured at the prostitute’s level, but an additional causal factor is suggested in Madeleine’s boyish build and gait. (One of the women in trousers, however, is described with corrosive accuracy as fat-hipped.) De Maupassant’s judgment is quite clear. The exquisite beauty of the countryside, evoked with all his genius for description, is presented as the symbol of Paul’s spirit, the strident vulgarity of the dance hall as that of Madeleine’s. Every phrase of this sustained contrast points up the tragedy of fineness destroyed by depravity. Socially significant again is the comparative tolerance of lesbianism and transvestism among the respectable resort population. The two lesbian couples, living in a riverside cottage and entertaining so noisily that their neighbors protest to the police, are “investigated” with stupid solemnity. However, there is no more serious result than “a voluminous report of their innocence.” This caricature of official action produces only hearty laughter among the other cottagers. (Bernard Talmey, however, quotes a less complaisant report by Fiaux to the Municipal Council of Paris in 1887 on lesbian prostitution.)[5]

Another short story in which lesbian action plays some part is Dubut de Laforest’s “Mlle Tantale” (1884),[6] one of a group of psychological novelettes comparable to Casper’s Klinische Novellen of thirty years earlier in that the author gleaned his material from his friend Charcot’s clinic. Mary Folkestone, the “Mlle Tantale” of the title, and the illegitimate daughter of a dancer, has, throughout childhood, been the witness of too many intimate scenes between her mother and the latter’s lovers to feel anything but loathing for sex. As an adolescent she is revolted even when her friend Camilla opens her blouse on a hot day; at the same time she is so aroused by the sight of the other girl’s breasts that she falls ill. The story outlines her lifelong struggle to overcome her inhibitions. Following a first experiment with her maid’s lover, which disgusts her, she tries a second with an artist who is her social equal. Although this is less repellent, she finds no complete satisfaction. She then enters upon a liaison with Camilla who, after experience with men as disillusioning as her own, has become a lesbian. This effort, too, is a failure. Finally, neurotic from lack of emotional outlet she resorts to aphrodisiacs and dies of their excessive use; not, however, until the first scorned lover has found her in time to receive a contrite dying kiss. This ending indicates a belief in heterosexual passion, however unromantic, as the remedy for sex-engendered neurosis, and reminds one that Freud began as a pupil of Charcot.

Paul Bourget’s Crime d’Amour (1886) will be touched on in passing only because Havelock Ellis mentions it as “dealing with the (lesbian) theme,” but actually it offers only half a dozen lines on the subject. The night before becoming the lover of a good friend’s wife, the hero reviews his very full amatory past. This reminiscence occurs early in the book and the cynicism about women which it reflects is an important factor in the story. The following quotation, however, gives the entire lesbian passage:

No further reference is made to the women, nor is there the slightest implication that this affair is more responsible for his disillusionment than his many others, some of which are recounted at length.

* * *

In contrast to the comparative realism of the last five authors stand such imaginative flights as those which follow. The first was the Monsieur Vénus of Rachilde (Marguérite Eymery Vallette), published in Brussels in 1884. According to André David,[8] the book was condemned, all available copies confiscated and the author heavily fined. Living in Paris, however, she was happily outside Belgian jurisdiction—the chief reason why so many daring French titles of the late century bore Brussels imprints. A year later the novel was brought out in Paris with some deletions and a preface by Maurice Barrès, and only this second version has been accessible for study.

It is the story of a wealthy orphaned girl, ward of an ascetic aunt who but for the necessity of raising her niece would have taken the veil. At the age of twenty-five Raoule encounters an effeminate man of the working class a year her junior to whom she is hopelessly attracted. Her pride is stung by her weakness, and to avoid accepting Jacques as an equal she virtually buys him and subsequently maintains him in luxury. By degrees she forces him to wear feminine clothing and play the woman’s part, to which he proves readily adaptable after an initial rebellion. She herself assumes the masculine costume and role. Jacques’ avaricious older sister is at first agreeable to his being kept, but when she discovers the real nature of the relationship she uses the threat of exposure to force a marriage which appears to her even more advantageous. This plebeian match estranges the aunt and most of Raoule’s own world, leaving a handsome military man, a former suitor of the girl’s, as the couple’s only frequent visitor. But so completely has the husband become effeminized that presently he makes advances to the officer. A duel ensues which the jealous Raoule urges the latter to carry through to the death. After the loss of her faithless love she has a wax figure of him enshrined in the room that had been their “temple of delight,” and she continues to visit it in secret.

In a significant early conversation with her military suitor, Raoule tells him that she is at last in love. “Sapho!” he cries. “Continue, Monsieur Vénérande, mon cher ami!” But she hotly denies the charge. Her intelligence and pride preclude that amusement of boarding-school girls and prostitutes. In Sappho such love may have had dignity because it was her invention, a new thing, but mere imitation is shameful weakness. She herself will also splendidly create a new vice. She then tells of meeting Jacques, with whom she fell in love as with Beauty. “She said ‘Beauty’ because she was unable to say ‘Woman.’”[9]

Jacques is described elsewhere as a dazzling Titian blonde, well-fleshed in breast and hips, only his voice, hands, and coarse hair betraying his sex. Raoule herself is taller than he, a handsome brunette with level brows and a boyish figure. On the occasions when she ventures out in men’s clothes her own sex is never suspected. That the method of satisfaction employed between the two is the kiss, and that only in its usual manifestation, is made unequivocally clear. Late in the story Jacques discovers that impotence has resulted.

Rachilde accounts with care for her heroine’s behavior pattern. Throughout Raoule’s childhood the aunt had harped upon the vileness of physical passion. At the same time the girl’s emotional endowment was such that the mere reading of an erotic book threw her into a violent fever. Hence, both the compulsive experimenting with many lovers and the frigidity which prevented satisfaction. Raoule herself lays the blame for the latter squarely upon her lovers, whom she has taken as she has read books, in order to learn what passion is. But men, she says, offer a woman either brutality or weakness, never the one aphrodisiac—Love—which might teach her real passion. And to become the slave of mere sensation is unthinkable. If one is merely to indulge one’s senses, then to preserve self-respect one must remain, like a man, indifferent to the experience and master of oneself.

Barrès, in his preface, says that Rachilde was only twenty when she wrote the tale, a well-bred and innocent girl with nothing but wishful dreaming from which to spin her fantastic plot. He singles out pride as the chief handicap of both heroine and author, pride which cannot endure domination of any sort by a man.

What he naturally dared not say more plainly is that the tale gives clear evidence of severely repressed homosexual inclinations on the author’s part.

Additional, though less marked, evidence of her bias appears in Rachilde’s second novel, Madame Adonis, which came out in Paris in 1886 without serious moralistic repercussions. From a literary viewpoint it shows some advance in maturity, being fairly free of florid description, vague philosophy, and erotic purple patches. There is even a touch of satire in the delineation of a miserly provincial woman lumber-dealer and her despotic persecution of her son and his Parisian wife, as well as in the Dickensian portrait of the girl’s alcoholic father. But although comparative realism makes it more convincing, the plot is hardly less bizarre than that of Monsieur Vénus. It details the havoc wrought upon the young couple by a picturesque individual who first in the guise of a romantic artist woos the wife, and later as a galante and domineering woman captivates the man. Continuing to pose alternately as twin brother or sister, this person convinces each of the young people that the other is unfaithful, and so manages to consummate affairs with both. Only when, goaded too far, the jealous husband surprises and kills his wife’s lover, do they learn that only one person is involved—a woman. She has deceived the wife as to her sex by artificial means. No etiology is suggested for the woman’s sexual dualism beyond her rebellion, like that of Raoule de Vénérande, against a feminine role. Light is shed upon the author by the tingling vitality of her descriptions of the central figure in the male role as compared with her parallel pictures of the same character as a woman, and also by the love scenes between the woman and the young wife. These are more convincing than the conquest of the man which is motivated largely by vindictive arrogance.

Seasoned readers of biography will not be surprised to learn that beyond her marriage in 1899 to Alfred Vallette, then editor of the Mercure de France, few facts about Rachilde’s own emotional life are available. André David compares her personality to that of the Chevalier d’Eon, famous diplomat and transvestist of the eighteenth century, whose sex was an enigma to all Europe not finally solved until his death; Ernest Boyd refers to her assumption of men’s clothing in her teens when she came to Paris and was befriended by Sarah Bernhardt;[11] but neither alludes to homosexuality. David does mention, however, her long and close friendship with Verlaine, whose homosexual connection with Arthur Rimbaud was a scandal in the late nineteenth century.

Rachilde continued for several decades to produce novels, in some of which lesbian women made brief appearances too slight to consider here. Her one later sustained treatment of homosexuality, (which ran serially in the Mercure de France as Les Factices and was published in book form as Les Hors Natures) dealt with men. In the reviews of fiction which she contributed to her husband’s periodical from 1896 to the 1930s, she maintained the same attitude of superiority to female variance expressed by her own Raoule de Vénérande, but she regularly included lesbian novels in her review list and seldom failed to indicate their theme. Thus she provided an index of sorts to such fiction over a period of nearly forty years. When, during the 1890s, criticism was leveled at the Mercure for its consistent noting of fictional “decadence,” Vallette replied in a sharp editorial that theirs was the only periodical whose reviews gave anything resembling an honest picture of contemporary writing.[12]

The Shadow of Feminism

In Rachilde’s two novels just considered, women’s deliberate adoption of male attire and outlook figures for the first time in half a century; that is, since the appearance of Fragoletta and Mademoiselle de Maupin. No significant rebellion against the feminine role is evident in Zola’s or even Maupassant’s references to transvestism among prostitutes nor in other variant French fiction before 1890. In other countries, however, what is now termed the masculine protest was receiving considerable attention. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James in America, Olive Schreiner in South Africa, and August Strindberg in Sweden all contributed observations, even though the phenomenon appears in their work under widely differing guises and sometimes is only tenuously related to variance.

Dr. Holmes, versatile contributor to both medicine and letters, would today undoubtedly have been a psychiatrist. Throughout his life he was preoccupied with intersexual personality in women, and he explored it at least tentatively in each of his three novels: Elsie Venner (1859), The Guardian Angel (1867), and A Mortal Antipathy (1885). Of these a modern psychiatrist, Dr. Clarence Oberndorf, has observed:

Strictly speaking, Elsie Venner alone deserves the adjective “abnormal.” Her eccentricity is due to her mother’s having suffered a rattlesnake bite during late pregnancy of which she died shortly after giving birth to her child. The girl grows up unafraid of rattlers if not immune to their poison (there is no account of her being bitten), and possessing something of the reptile’s power to hypnotize a sensitive individual with her steady ophidian gaze. As a result she is shunned by her mates, and develops a solitary and arrogant personality. She is a fearless mountain climber and not infrequently spends the night on dangerous and snake-infested rocky slopes above her home. During adolescence she exhibits for a teacher in the select female academy she attends “a special fancy” so intense it frightens the woman. On the girl’s side the obsession seems more a desire to test her power than love. The reaction of the overworked and half-hysterical teacher is one of terrified revulsion until Elsie in her last illness calls upon her to act as nurse and companion. Elsie’s only feeling of normal warmth is directed toward a young male instructor to whom she virtually offers herself, but he, too, is unable to respond as she desires, and she dies as an apparent result of subduing the innate drive to overpower those she loves.

Myrtle Hazard in The Guardian Angel was born in the tropics and lived her early years amid a luxury not only of natural beauty but of parental love and adulation from native servants. The strength and self-assurance thus bred enable her when orphaned to survive the efforts of a couple of puritanic aunts to break her spirit. At fifteen, precociously mature in both mind and body, she crops her hair, dons boy’s clothes, and runs off to return to India where she spent the few remembered years of happy childhood. The accident which foils her plan wins her new friends, among them a young man whom she eventually marries. Although in appearance and behavior she is the most masculine of Holmes’s heroines, variance plays the least part in her history. Her “best friend,” the only person for whom she leaves any word upon running away, is merely the bosom companion natural to an adolescent, and there is no hint of passion in Myrtle’s feeling for the girl.

As for Lurida Vincent in A Mortal Antipathy, despite Dr. Oberndorf’s emphasis on her masculinity, she is physically fragile, underdeveloped, and anything but boyish. We see her only in boarding school and learn nothing of her antecedents or early history. The factors conditioning her against a feminine role are that she is plain and unappealing to men and abnormally brilliant. Her only masculinity consists in a resolute ambition to best her male acquaintances in intellectual achievement. Envious of her schoolmates’ charm and athletic prowess, she reacts by becoming the school prodigy and an ardent feminist. Jealously, and with unconscious passion, she adores Euthemia Tower, who returns her fondness with marked moderation and common sense. Euthemia is obviously more Holmes’s ideal of womanhood than a convincing individual. She is beautiful with the wholesome beauty of youth, modest, warm-hearted, and admirably well-balanced. She is also the school’s champion athlete, strong enough to carry an unconscious young man, whom she later marries, from a burning house without assistance.

From these novels one gathers that the good doctor was partial to women who were physically not much inferior to men, but he firmly believed that such equality did not breed masculine emotions. His scientific acumen had made him aware of passionate attachments between women[14] (a secondary character in The Guardian Angel is so devoted to her mother that the latter says, “I should think you were in love with me, my darling, if you were not my daughter”), but such attachments appear to concern him so little that one wonders if he was even aware of their ultimate potentialities.

The same question arises in reading Thomas Hardy’s earliest novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), even though some early chapters give more details of a variant episode than anything in Holmes. Circumstances force the well-born Cytherea at eighteen into service as a lady’s maid, and Miss Aldclyffe, a spinster of forty-six, employs her despite her frank admission of inexperience wholly from infatuation with her beauty and physical grace. Since both women are headstrong and mercurial, Cytherea’s term as servant lasts a matter of mere hours, but its stormy ending promotes her to the status of companion and (ultimately) partial heiress of her mistress’s fortune. This transition occurs during their single night together, in the course of which the older woman learns that the girl is already in love with a man and does her best to turn her adored against him and all of his sex. Miss Aldclyffe is a “tall ... finely built woman of spare though not angular proportions,”[14a] but her aversion to men is the result of early seduction and desertion and not innate, and her passion for Cytherea, half-maternal, stems from years of emotional starvation. The girl, though also strong-willed and independent, is wholly feminine and quite unable to satisfy her mistress’s pleas for some warmth of response to her caresses.

Although Desperate Remedies shows some immaturity in its Victorian elaboration of plot, its grasp of character foreshadows the mastery Hardy was later to attain, and an already developed ironic detachment saves the night incident from being either mawkish or offensive to British readers. Nothing in it betrays the least awareness of lesbian possibilities on the part of either Miss Aldclyffe or her author, nor is there any conscious feminism in her disparagement of men. Actually, she at once sets about contriving to marry Cytherea to a man of her own choice—her unacknowledged illegitimate son. The variant episode is thus brief and incidental, but it is significant in having no known antecedent in British fiction save Wollstonecraft’s Mary published nearly a century earlier.[15]

The feminist theme so uncongenial to Holmes’s taste had been presented with passionate sympathy two years earlier in Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm. This novel is reminiscent of Mary, a Fiction, both in its championship of women and its naïvely autobiographical pattern. The similarity is due, however, only to the authors’ comparable life circumstances and not to any possible influence, for by 1880 when Schreiner was writing, Wollstonecraft’s volume was rare even in England, and Schreiner had not then left the Transvaal. She brought her manuscript to London in 1882 and it was published in 1883. The Story of an African Farm is a sensitive girl’s outcry against the masculine violence and brutality of a frontier society, and its heroine is obviously a self-portrait of the author. Lyndall (Schreiner mère’s maiden name) has been turned against men by the villainy or contemptible weakness of the only specimens of the sex in her lonely milieu, and equally turned against passion in women by her coarse and callous aunt’s susceptibility to it. Snared later by her own emotions, she revolts against her lover’s domination, refuses marriage, bears his child secretly and alone, and falls fatally ill in consequence. An effeminate boy, long in love with her, traces her to her hiding place, disguises himself as a woman, and without revealing his identity nurses her until her death.

All her life, at least on the conscious level, Lyndall has sought “something nobler, stronger than I, before which I can kneel down.” Religion, the obvious answer to her need, has been spoiled for her by the pitiable weakness of the one man she has known who professed it. Her lover is stronger than she but signally lacking in the nobility she craves. Her only help, and subconsciously her only real love, is her own fearless strength. At one point she is reduced to crying: “Why am I so alone, so hard, so cold? Will nothing free me from myself?” But on two other occasions, notably the deathbed scene where she communes with her own image in a mirror,[16] her naïve and passionate narcissism reveals itself so clearly and is so lovingly transcribed as to betray it as the author’s own. (One cannot help wondering whether Barrès had read the African Farm before writing his preface to Monsieur Vénus in 1885.) Schreiner’s heroine is drawn to no individual woman save herself, but she is an impassioned champion of the whole female sex as well as a hater-of-men. The novel is filled with revolt against the subjugation of women and their limited opportunities for individual development.

Henry James’s early novel, The Bostonians, published in 1885, stands in sharp contrast. This story ran as a serial in Century Magazine. Before it was finished Richard Watson Gilder, the editor, wrote James that “he had never published anything so unpopular.” The novel came out as a book a year later but met with no warmer reception, and was not subsequently reissued until 1945, being omitted even from the twenty-nine volume Scribner edition of James’ Novels and Tales in 1923. Philip Rahv in the preface of the 1945 edition of The Bostonians indicates several reasons for its unpopularity, but says that undoubtedly the “most disquieting” was its keen analysis of “the emotional economy of the Lesbian woman.”[17]

Because of James’s subtlety his work suffers more than most from condensation, but as the text of the novel is now readily available, its nearly four hundred pages can be reduced here to the barest skeleton. In essence, the plot is the eternal triangle. At its apex is Verena Tarrant, ultra-feminine, passive and suggestible, whose antecedents bear witness to James’s interest in recently published theories of heredity. The rivals for possession of her are Olive Chancellor, Boston intellectual and feminist spinster a decade her senior, and the latter’s cousin from Mississippi, a young man who has come out of the Civil War on the losing side with something of the present day’s critical pessimism toward modern society. Olive sees in the girl, who has inherited a spell-binding oratorical gift, a powerful potential ally for the Woman’s Movement to which she herself is devoted. Subconsciously, however, her motivation is a love-at-first-sight quite as passionate as that of her male cousin. Olive manages virtually to adopt Verena and by degrees to estrange her from her family and her previous suitors. Olive’s cousin, Basil Ransom, is not so easily disposed of, so she must finally resort to exacting a promise from the girl that she will not marry. For several years the two women are wholly absorbed in their feminist efforts, traveling in Europe where they meet the prominent leaders of the movement, and studying intensively. Olive’s emphasis is always upon the wrongs women have suffered at the hands of men.

Olive is increasingly obsessed by her love for Verena. Of Verena, James says: “Her share in the union, ... was no longer passive, purely appreciative; it was passionate too, and it put forth a beautiful energy.”[18] At last Verena is ready for public appearance, and invites Basil to her first lecture, since he has been forbidden his cousin’s house in Boston. He takes the opportunity to talk long and seriously to her about herself, Olive’s influence, and his own love for her. He tells her that what the times need is not more feminization but less, that “it’s a ... hysterical, chattering ... age of false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities.... The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality ... is what I want to preserve.”[19] He tells her, too, that she has allowed Olive to imprison her in “a false thin shell” of devotion to feminism, when actually she has a genius for giving herself, not to a cause, but to normal life with a man. The girl is so moved that she dares not see him again and cannot hide her disturbance from Olive. The story then records a rapidly accelerating struggle between the man and the older woman for possession of the girl. The climax comes on the night of Verena’s great Boston debut, when, just before speaking before an audience of thousands, she falls ill in the dressing room from inner emotional conflict. Basil attempts to reach her; Olive, beside herself, tries to keep him out; but Verena is aware of his presence and of her own accord chooses him in preference to public triumph and a potentially brilliant career.

As to the precise nature of the relationship between the two women, no more is specified than a good deal of quiet kissing and holding of hands, more symbolic than passionate except for a general “tremulousness.” At one point the following appears: “It was a very peculiar thing, their friendship: it had elements which made it probably as complete as any (between women) that had ever existed.”[20] This is included as part of a mental soliloquy of Verena’s, and so Rahv, who comments on the “prescience with which [James] analyzed ... the lesbian woman,” may possibly be justified in adding that “one cannot be sure that James understood her precisely as such.”[21] Had Verena’s rumination above been presented as James’s own, there could be no doubt of its significance, for he had spent a year in Paris during the 1870’s, had known Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola, and could not have escaped awareness of all emotional potentialities between women. It is interesting that he was careful not to speak in the role of author, nor to venture recording any comparable fragment of the strongly variant Olive’s stream of consciousness.

The last novel dealing with feminism, violent in its condemnation of the Movement and also of female variance, is Strindberg’s Confession of a Fool. This story is now known to be a thinly veiled report of the author’s relations with his first wife, Siri von Essen, Baroness Wrangel, whom he married in 1877. It was written in 1887-1888 as an apologia pro vita sua intended for publication after his projected suicide. When he decided instead to live and divorce his wife, he kept the manuscript sealed for five years, until public sentiment aroused by the circumstances of the divorce led him to publish it “in self defense.” In view of the fact that his second marriage in 1893 was followed a year later by his second divorce and a third matrimonial venture in 1901 came to a similar end in 1904, the Confession provides a valuable document on the psychology of the unhappy misogynist, but scarcely an unbiased portrait of the wife.

The hero of the story, Axel, is a bookish introvert with what today would be termed an obvious mother fixation. He falls in love with the wife of an officer, his friend, partly from pity because her husband is involved in a flirtation with her sophisticated young cousin; the Baroness Marie, however, is rather less concerned about the affair than Axel. “I’m in love with the little cat myself,” she says early in their acquaintance. Like Belot’s Adrien, Axel is not warned. In the idealism of first love he searches the art books in his library for a likeness of his beloved. She is a goddess—not Venus, definitely not Juno, not even Minerva, but Diana, “more boy than girl,” who never forgave Actaeon for seeing her nude. Axel is naïvely enraptured by this seeming evidence of his love’s purity.

Presently Marie leaves her husband for a stage career, living with Axel rather incidentally and marrying him only upon discovery that she is pregnant. It appears later, however, that the child is the Baron’s, conceived after their formal divorce. After a masquerade for which she has dressed as a man, Marie is caught fondling a servant girl. To Axel’s reproaches she retorts that his suspicions are groundless and vile, as are police reports and medical treatises which term “vicious” all caresses of any warmth. The birth of a second child—Axel’s, this time—briefly relaxes domestic tension; however, Marie soon farms the child out to a nurse, installs an actress friend in a neighboring apartment, and creates a scandal by caressing her new love in public, though still protesting innocence.

The lengthy plot continues to oscillate between brief periods of marital peace during Marie’s pregnancies, and tempests over her increasingly scandalous connections with women. Most of these are with Marie’s countrywomen, artists, and other bohemians who dress and act as much like men as possible, make love openly to one another, and “wallow in the lowest depths.” Many are militant suffragists, and all are devoted to the cause. Once Axel reaches the point of wanting to drown his wife, but he spares her for the sake of their children. Most of the action thus far has occurred in Paris or in Swiss resorts. There follows an interlude in Germany, “land of militarism where the patriarchate is still in full force.” There no one will listen to talk of women’s rights, and, for the first time, Marie is out of public life; consequently, Axel flourishes. Even his voice, “which had grown thin from everlastingly speaking in soothing tones to a woman, regained its former volume.”[22] When his wife rages against his new dominance he reflects that he has always known it was the weakling in him, “the page, the lap-dog, her child” that she loved. He now makes an effort to leave her, but is helplessly bound by his masochistic passion. This sign of dependence softens her for a few months. Then Marie is caught caressing the adolescent daughters of guests, and the rupture is final.

Axel, intellectually concerned as to the cause of her aberration, tries to discover whether Marie had been a prostitute before her first marriage, but all evidence is negative. He does learn, however, that her lesbian habits and those of the Paris circle with whom she had most conspicuously misbehaved were common knowledge to everyone else. He finally decides to leave her and “to write the story of this woman, the true representative of this age of the unsexed.” The novel was published in Berlin in 1893, two years after his divorce from Siri von Essen, but “in a corrupt and mutilated text, so crude in its language that it was suppressed.”[23] The first authorized edition appeared in Sweden in 1912 after the author’s death.

Before leaving Strindberg it will be interesting to return parenthetically for a moment to Mlle Tantale, since the modern analyst Dr. Clarence Offenbacher has suggested that it may have given Strindberg the plot of a much better known work, his drama Miss Julie.[24] To be sure the two have in common the unrewarding liaison of a girl with a man who is her social inferior, in Julie’s case a groom. But in personality and in conditioning circumstances Julie differs sharply from Mary Folkestone. Julie is the daughter of a domineering feminist who, in her effort to equalize the sexes, assigns the labor on her estate to men or women with complete disregard of its customary division between them. Quite unlike Mary’s parent, the sensual courtesan, Julie’s mother scorns passion. She gives her senses rein as rarely as possible and then merely for the purpose of nervous catharsis. Julie also is wilfully self-contained, taking the groom in a callous spirit like her mother’s.

Offenbacher points out that Strindberg was in Paris in the 1880s and probably knew of both Dubut de Laforest and Charcot. It is even more likely that he was aware of women like Rachilde and the more notorious Mme. Jeanne Dieulafoy, lifelong transvestist and author who was made a member of the Legion of Honor about 1890. At the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war, Dieulafoy was a girl of nineteen, convent bred, who had just married and who fought beside her husband during the siege of Paris wearing men’s clothes, “to which she was long accustomed.”[25] Subsequently, she accompanied him on archeological expeditions to Egypt, Morocco and Persia. To her grief she was unable to have children, but she devoted herself to those of her friends, and she and her husband for a time conducted a private school in which they educated the girls to be independent and fearless, the boys to show gentleness and consideration. This training they believed, doubtless from their own experience, would lead to better adjustment in marriage.

Since at the time of writing Miss Julie Strindberg was deep in the stormiest phase of his quarrel with Siri von Essen, he would have been more sensitive to masculine women than to clinical literature. No model for Julie’s mother could have been readier to hand than this virile ex-soldier, archeologist, and “progressive” educator. Miss Julie may well be Strindberg’s dark prediction as to the results of child-training by such a woman. The fact that there is no trace of variance in Miss Julie seems another reason for questioning whether it derived from Mlle Tantale. Strindberg was so exercised over that issue at the moment that he would not have missed a chance to attack it openly unless his models were actual persons and might conceivably be recognized.

The central figures of the more or less feministic novels considered above are not marked by unanimous sexual antipathy to the male. A number of them had husbands or lovers and bore children. Their common feature is rebellion against the domestic role imposed upon them in nineteenth-century society, and often their variance is merely one aspect of that rebellion. In contrast, the novels that follow have variance per se as their predominant theme, and the authors’ attitudes toward variance are equally disapproving.

Fin de Siècle

Dubut de Laforest’s second approach to the subject appeared in La Femme d’Affaires (1890), a vertical section of Paris life as sensational as was Mlle Tantale in the field of individual psychology. The title figure is a grasping Jewess, and her contrast to her Catholic daughter-in-law (almost the only irreproachable character in the book) would reward a student of religious and racial prejudice; however, neither of these women is directly concerned in the variant action. The latter involves a self-centered musical comedy star, bisexually promiscuous, and a lesbian amazon, Faustine, who supports her when necessary. Faustine, we learn, was expelled from a school at fifteen for corrupting its dormitory, and her subsequent excesses with a governess contributed to the latter’s early death from tuberculosis (cf. Mlle Giraud). She then tried a couple of husbands, and at the time of this tale’s action she still experiments with men—which is inexplicable since she never ceases to loathe heterosexual experience. She is violently jealous of her actress friend, especially of the latter’s connection with a fantastic titled Englishman who has turned circus clown. During an ether ‘drunk,’ Faustine surprises the two together and cuts out the woman’s tongue, thus destroying “the instrument of love.” No etiology is suggested for her variance except her amazonian build. The unsavory trio are apparently incorporated in the novel to illustrate the types to whom the Business Woman will rent apartments at sufficient profit, but the author devotes more space to them than such reason requires. It was more probably his own literary profits due to sensationalism that he had an eye on. His is the most specific reference thus far to the techniques of lesbian activity, a detail doubtless reflecting his clinical connections, and one seldom repeated in openly published literature.

More concentrated upon variance is Catulle Mendès’ Méphistophéla (1890), mentioned earlier for its long popularity and its present rarity. It is also notable for the immense detail of the lesbian life history presented in its more than five hundred pages. It must have escaped the censor in its day because of its heavily moralistic tone and its literary style. Mendès, like Flaubert and Maupassant—though artistically far from their equal—was more subtle than naturalistic, and veiled his lurid facts in generalities that might glitter or smoulder but were unlikely to put specific notions in a reader’s head.

Its prologue gives a sinister sketch of a drug addict in the act of a self-injection of morphine—a reassuring indication that no matter how she may appear to flourish in the course of the tale, she will come to no good end. Wealthy and proud as the heroine of Monsieur Vénus, modish as the Comtesse de Chalis, she has the debauched remnants of beauty; however, her lack of natural brows and lashes implies syphilis. She takes morphine to blot out some abysmal horror which has left its scar upon her. The author then unfolds the heredity and the erotic career which have brought her to her present pass.

Sophie is the child of a bisexually promiscuous dancer by a Russian nobleman who laments his mistress’s pregnancy because his ‘rotten and accursed line’ should never be perpetuated. He dies almost immediately and the dancer, now fabulously wealthy, takes a house in Fontainebleau and raises Sophie in strict respectability. But even in childhood Sophie becomes so attached to a neighbor’s daughter, Emmaline, that a temporary separation brings on hysterical convulsions, dangerous fever and somnambulism. The two children have ‘played at marriage,’ a game of innocent embraces which brought vague shame to the other child, but seemed natural and acceptable to Sophie. With the approach of puberty the game is discontinued. During adolescence Sophie’s powerful but still unconscious sex drive leads her into emotional excesses, first in connection with confirmation, and later in the study of music and poetry. Through all these storms she sweeps the passive Emmaline along with hypnotic intensity, and the two girls are sometimes brought to the verge of fainting through unrelieved excitement. Recognizing the danger signals, Sophie’s mother arranges her daughter’s early marriage to Emmaline’s brother. Sophie, still physically ignorant, is so delighted at not losing her friend that she accepts the arrangement without question.

The disillusionment of her wedding night drives her to an attempt to leap out the window, which her husband prevents. However, as soon as he is asleep she flees to Emmaline. Awakened by marital initiation to the significance of her feelings for her friend, she kisses the sleeping girl’s breast. The husband who has been searching for her, surprises her in the act, reviles her, and beats her senseless.

Her brother’s brutality moves Emmaline to run away with Sophie, but in a cottage where they spend an idyllic week she is unwilling to accept the caresses the other girl now consciously burns to bestow. When circumstances finally overcome Emmaline’s reluctance, she does not share Sophie’s transports. Somewhat repelled, and afraid for her reputation, she slips away and returns home. Sophie is left broken-hearted by her desertion. She realizes that she has failed Emmaline exactly as her own husband has failed with her, and she determines to find out how one woman can satisfy another.

Hiding in Paris from her husband, she allows herself to be initiated by a lesbian show girl, Magalo, with whom she lives for some time, physically captivated but hating herself for inconstancy to Emmaline. The discovery that she is pregnant as a result of her wedding night brings her to the verge of suicide. She loathes the very thought of maternity; when her child is born, she consigns it to an orphanage without a qualm. Her partner, Magalo, is shocked and hurt, being genuinely in love with her and having envisioned a life en famille for them and the child. Sophie turns against Magalo in distaste because of the girl’s interest in motherhood. Upon her mother’s death, Sophie, left enormously wealthy, makes plans to recapture Emmaline. She is confident that she can now both support her and adequately fill the role of husband. In Fontainebleau, however, she learns that Emmaline has married, her family has dispersed, and her whereabouts are unknown. Once again, heartbroken, she returns to Paris.

Now she establishes a smart ménage and acquires an enormous lesbian following. Under her spell, actresses, artists and women of title neglect careers, male lovers, and husbands. She is known as ‘a giver of incomparable joys, violent and sophisticated, deliciously and frightfully inventive.’[26] Into this spectacular brilliance breaks Magalo, destitute, broken, and ill. In a scene of deathbed repentance the girl, claiming guidance from Heaven, implores Sophie to give up her empty and miserable life and return to her husband and child. There can be no other happiness on earth. ‘We both have had a demon in us,’ she says, ‘but for you it is not too late.’

Sophie’s response is to go directly from Magalo’s funeral to an orgiastic lesbian banquet where she glories in her role of presiding goddess (or demon). With this defiance, a third stage in her disintegration begins. Her liaisons, always loveless, now fail to give even sensual satisfaction, and she knows only boredom, relieved less and less frequently by flashes of desire. Haunted by memories of her only real love, she ferrets out Emmaline’s whereabouts in the hope that even a brief encounter may rekindle her own jaded emotions.

In seeking to discover how she can reach Emmaline alone, she finds herself one evening spying through an open window upon a family scene centering about Emmaline’s four children. The two men, father and uncle (the latter her own husband) are fatuously devoted to them. Emmaline has become wholly maternal, plump and placid. The climax occurs when Emmaline offers the youngest, an infant of six months, her breast. Revolted to nausea, Sophie plunges away through the darkness with demonic laughter.